Margaret Thatcher died this morning following a stroke. Downing Street said this afternoon that the former Conservative Prime Minister’s funeral will have the same status as the Queen Mother and Princess Diana, with full military honours, a service at St Paul’s Cathedral, followed by a private cremation. She will not lie in state, in accordance with
‘Which letters of the law would you like to abide by?’
‘HELP!!’
‘Don’t you think you’re taking a risk, not wearing flight socks?’
‘Twitter’s OK, but I don’t get anything like the satisfaction I used to get from a good old-fashioned poison-pen letter.’
‘How long have you felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body?’
‘Have you noticed how the gap between the poor and the poor is widening?’
‘Dad loves the large print on his Kindle.’
‘In hindsight, I regret curing him of his sex addiction.’
Prison pilates
‘Eeeny meeny miney mo…’
Quantitative ease Sir: Unlike Louise Cooper (‘The great savings robbery’, 30 March), I don’t have a problem with inflation or quantitative easing. It’s the perfect tax: painless, easy to collect and fair. It’s painless because after having been collected you still have the proverbial pound in your pocket. OK, it’s worth less — but as
Googling lessons Delegates at the National Union of Teachers conference complained about Michael Gove’s ‘pub quiz’ curriculum and suggested that children didn’t need to learn facts any more because they could Google them. Some things you can Google about the NUT: — The union was formed on 25 June 1870 as the National Union of
Home Housing benefit for council and housing association tenants was reduced by 14 per cent for those deemed to have one spare bedroom and by 25 per cent for those with two or more spare bedrooms. Council Tax Benefit, claimed by 5.9 million families, was transformed into Council Tax Support, supplied by local authority schemes.
For the past few weeks Ed Miliband has repeated the words ‘bedroom tax’ ad nauseum. The average voter may think that such a thing exists. His obsession makes little sense without historic context. The last time a Labour opposition succeeded in attaching the word ‘tax’ to something which a Conservative government preferred to call something
45 years ago tonight, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was shot and killed as he stood on a motel balcony, aged just 39. Here is the leader from the following week’s Spectator: The agony of America, The Spectator, 12 April 1968 The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King at Memphis, Tennessee, on Thursday 4 April