Will Brown abolish inheritance tax?
Peter Wilby thinks he might in an effort to establish his middle England credentials. Can’t see it myself, though.
The Spectator
Thursday
Wednesday
Is Hillary’s camp in a panic?
If you want to know how much the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has changed since people thought that Hillary just had to turn up to win, read this story about how Team Clinton is contemplating skipping the first contest of the season in Iowa. The strategy actually makes some sense given Hillary’s relative weakness there
Reading aloud
A hot, hot night in a Portobello Road boookshop for a poetry reading (see my earlier post) hosted by the excellent Pass on a Poem and Oxfam, in aid of Darfur and Chad. As I stand up to read “The Day He Died” by Ted Hughes, I notice Saffron Burrows sitting in the back row
Why Rocky rocks
DVD release of the week is Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final instalment of the boxing saga. Yes, I know the idea of the 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone climbing into the ring again is innately absurd, but all of the Rocky movies, including the first which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, have been
Groups of New York?
According to the Youth Justice Board, most teenage “gangs” should be referred to less abrasively as “groups”. Which makes me think how very different Martin Scorsese’s movie would have been if it had been called Groups of New York. I doubt Goodfellas would have made such an impact if it had begun with the line:
Tuesday
Our rotten taste in tomatoes
Some people think that the only tomato worth eating is the one you’ve grown yourself but this isn’t actually true. I can think of loads of tomatoes – eg the cherry ones grown at the foot of Mt Etna and sold at I Camisa in Old Compton Street, Soho – that are much nicer than
Remembering Sheridan Morley
What a wonderful afternoon it was! Who can imagine a theatre jammed full of the most famous thespians in London honouring that despised creature, a theatre critic? But they — Miriam Margolyes, Corin Redgrave, Patricia Hodge, Simon Callow and many others — all came. Actors loved the late Sheridan Morley, for they realised that Sherry
Will he or won’t he?
If you want a quick guide to whether Al Gore will end up running for president or not read this piece by Ben Smith, one of the savviest US political reporters. The thing with Gore, as one politics watcher from his home state of Tennessee told me, is that he’d like to be president but
The fight on the right
The issue that ends up rendering asunder the American right will not be Iraq but the other i-word, immigration. George W. Bush and Karl Rove have long believed that the future of the Republican Party depends on appealing to Hispanics, the fastest growing minority group in the US. They argue that with their strong family
Monday
Hollywood, friend of cheap dates everywhere
Leonardo di-Caprio and Blood Diamond gave men an excuse not to buy their wives and girlfriends diamonds on the grounds that they were ethically tainted. Now Julia Roberts is going to star in a movie that will do the same for flowers, reports New York Magazine. The film, based on the Vanity Fair essay ‘A
The political web
Fascinating piece in today’s Washington Post about Republican’s fears that they are “losing the Web.” What was once a side-show for political geeks is becoming core electoral terrain. Actually the best thing about Gordon Brown’s “listen and learn” campaign is his website.
A good idea from Don Rumsfeld–no really
Few people have a good word to say about Don Rumsfeld right now and there is little doubt that he was an absolute disaster in his second stint at the Pentagon. The Rumsfeld doctrine—just enough troops to lose, as one Washington wag dubbed it—is largely responsible for the Coalition’s inability to bring order to Iraq
Heated debate
If man-made global warming is killing Africans, as the climate change alarmists suggest, shouldn’t we reduce our carbon footprint? Tesco did just that, says Dominic Lawson, and reduced by two-thirds their fruit and veg imports from East Africa. The result: poorer Africans. “All it does is make Tesco look better in North London. I find
Sunday
Brown goes nuclear
Today’s news that Gordon Brown will back the next generation of nuclear power plants is further proof of his desire to put the Tories on the back foot. Nuclear power is one of the issues that divide the opposition with Alan Duncan declaring himself “instinctively opposed” to it while many others see it as the
Saturday
Letters to the Editor | 19 May 2007
More power to Kazakhstan Sir: Elliot Wilson rails against the alleged bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism that he argues are strangling business opportunities for foreign investors in Kazakhstan (Business, 28 April). But his three examples of Western companies who have ‘decided to leave’ are misleading. PetroKazakhstan, which emerged from nowhere as Canadian-based Hurricane Oil, was very
What Brown should say
Frank Luntz, the US polling guru whose Newsnight focus group gave David Cameron a crucial boost in the Tory leadership election, has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian. He argues that Brown is getting it all wrong and that people won’t be persuaded by his protestations that he wants to hear their thoughts. Instead, Luntz thinks
Cameron fails the test
The most perceptive indictment of the Blair era was delivered, in an admirably candid speech last September, by Alan Milburn (interviewed by Fraser Nelson on page 14). Describing his own rise from a council estate to the ranks of the Cabinet, Mr Milburn asked, ‘Do we think that for a child growing up today in
Friday
Those with a past need not apply
“George Bush could never get elected President if he went to Yale now,” according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. His argument is that he’d be caught on mobile phone cameras every time he got out of control; making a political career impossible. Schmidt might be right about Bush, he was after all the scion of
Things got worse
A fact I dropped into my political column has been picked up by Iain Dale and (rightly) questioned. Could unemployment for under-25s really be worse than under the Tories? I accept, it sounds made up. Didn’t Brown piously rail against this youth unemployment and call them “Major’s children”? Hasn’t he delivered millions of new jobs
Where left meets right
Throughout the French presidential campaign Nicolas Sarkozy was lambasted by his critics as an American neo-con with a French passport. This description was excessive, but there’s little doubt that Sarkozy is more pro-American than the average French politician and his acceptance speech on election night sounded some distinctly neo-con notes about the universality of human freedom.