The start of the tape Business secretary Vince Cable announced another crackdown on red tape. But where did red tape come from? It seems to have been a product of the Holy Roman Empire. — Spanish officials in the reign of Charles V (1516-56) would tie up documents relating to issues which had to be
José Manuel Barroso gave his annual ‘State of the Union’ address in Strasbourg yesterday. If you are a glutton for punishment, you can read the full speech here, but in this week’s Spectator, Quentin Letts offers the president of the European Commission a transcript for the speech he should have given. Here is a snippet
Exactly three years ago, The Spectator devoted its cover to a revolutionary proposal for welfare reform. The proposed Universal Credit seemed, then, to be one of those ideas too sensible actually to be implemented. It proposed replacing the rotten, complex layers of benefits with a single system that paved the way to work rather than
Kate Tempest started out as a 16-year-old rapper in London. Now she performs the spoken word, reading her poetry, rhymes and prose to stage audiences across the world. She has also written a play called ‘Wasted’, which toured Britain earlier this year. She is involved in a spoken word project at the Battersea Arts Centre. You can
All government reshuffles tend to be presented as Greek tragedies; the coverage focuses on the demeanour of sacked and promoted ministers who troop to No. 10. But this week’s reshuffle will come to be remembered less for the personnel changes, and more for the defeat of various bad ideas which characterised David Cameron’s early years
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, shuffled the Cabinet a little, with Sir George Young being replaced as Leader of the House by Andrew Lansley, who was replaced as Health Secretary by Jeremy Hunt, who was replaced as Culture Secretary by Maria Miller. Justine Greening was replaced as Transport Secretary by Patrick McLoughlin, who was
Save our salmon Sir: On a Winston Churchill scholarship to discover what other North Atlantic host countries were doing for beleaguered salmon numbers in the 1990s, I found that the Canadian government considered hydroelectric schemes far less green than wind farms (‘Something’s fishy’, 1 September). The Canadian experience was that hydro units minced fish, interfered with
Patrick Hennessey was a founder member of the Junior Officers’ Reading Club, formed when the Grenadier Guards toured Iraq in 2006. He is the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club — the story of how a ‘wise-arse Thatcherite kid’ became a thoughtful soldier. It is among the best examples of British military witness written
This was a live blog from 4 September 2012. The latest entries at the top and you can scroll down to read the event as it happened. 20:00: That’s all folks – it’s time to close up the blog. Downing Street have released their final list of ministerial appointments today. We hope you have enjoyed our live
Tim Farron is president of the Liberal Democrats and shares his reading list with Spectator readers. Hopefully he is not thinking of the state of his own party when he suggests Lord of the Flies as the book that best sums up ‘now’, but in case he is, the next book he plans to read
Peter Wishart is the SNP Member of Parliament for Perth and North Perthshire, and the party’s Westminster spokesman on culture, media and sport, among other areas. He shares his own books choices with Spectator readers this weekend. 1) Which books are on your bedside table at the moment? On my bedside table (or rather bedside
This week, the GCSE results envelope landed on doormats across the country. The results ought, on any rational basis, to shame the nation. Never mind how well or badly pupils may have done individually, taken as a whole the results point to a chillingly predictable trend for anyone in a comprehensive school. A pupil can
Home After being granted asylum by Ecuador, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, addressed a crowd of supporters from a balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy, to which he had fled in June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over allegations of sexual assault. The Foreign Office had annoyed Ecuador by drawing attention
A place for sport Sir: Many of us in the education world are baffled by the political furore over school sports fields. Harris Federation runs 13 academies, largely in tight urban spaces. All manage to deliver outstanding sports lessons. Why? Because of the skill of our sports teachers and the vision of our sponsor, Lord
David Cameron made separate phone calls to President Obama and President Hollande this evening to discuss the situation in Syria. In his conversation with Hollande, the Prime Minister discussed how to ‘build on the non-lethal support recently announced by the UK and agreed that France and the UK would work more closely to identify how
In celebration of the birthday of Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967) today, here’s a review from the archives of her biography The Late Dorothy Parker by Leslie Frewin. Where be your gibes now?, Victoria Glendinning, 12 Sep 1987 Dorothy Parker was ‘America’s wittiest woman’. Here is an example of her wit. Rising from her chair at
Not only will you be able to catch Freddie Fox this month in the BBC’s mega drama Parade’s End (also starring Rebecca Hall and Benedict Cumberbatch) but you can also see him live at the Hampstead Theatre when he appears in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss with Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde. His current reading shows he’s been
When Sir Mervyn King steps down as Bank of England Governor next June, even his most loyal supporters will struggle to describe his tenure as a success. He failed to spot the massive asset bubble which burst so spectacularly. His job was to keep inflation down, and Britain has instead suffered the worst inflation in
Home The closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, watched by an average of 22.9 million people in Britain, included a mixed choir of deaf and not-deaf children singing: ‘Imagine there’s no heaven/ It’s easy if you try’; Pete Townshend (67) and Roger Daltrey (68) singing ‘My Generation’, omitting the line ‘Hope I die before I