John McCain tells ABC’s This Week that – shockingly! – torture is ” a very important issue to me” and consequently that he can’t guarantee that he will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General if the nominee continues to fudge on the question of whether or not he believes waterboarding constitutes torture. McCain,
This Tuesday, Spectator.co.uk broadcasts the latest debate in the Spectator / Intelligence Squared series. From 6:45pm, listen to John Redwood, Nigel Lawson, Tim Harford, David Rieff, Eric Bettellheim and Frances Cairncross discuss whether carbon trading can combat climate change without hurting economic growth. You can listen to previous debates on whether Britain has failed Zimbabwe
Barack Obama is finally going to take the gloves off against Hillary Clinton. Under pressure from donors who are disappointed by the fact that Hillary is maintaining her dominant lead in national polls, the Obama campaign has decided that they have to make their criticisms of the frontrunner clear if they are going to stand
If anyone wants to know how rattled Downing Street is by the hammering that Gordon Brown now regularly receives at Prime Ministers Questions they should read this story in The Sunday Times. It reveals that civil servants are being instructed to spend more time thinking about what topics might come up at PMQs and to find ‘good
Once, Alistair Campbell would have spotted and filled the news vacuum which sucks away at the papers this weekend. Instead it the Tories have scored a spin coup. They have grabbed headlines by re-announcing their longstanding “English votes for English laws” policy which (as Jonathan Freedland said in July) is “not new but in their
One of the benefits of doing Question Time is being taken to task on the blogosphere for days afterwards, and my comments on welfare and immigration have been reproduced and critiqued. Here’s my offending quote: “Right now we don’t really notice that we have 14% of the population on benefits, a huge figure. But if
My friend Spud had an Agusta 109. That’s the best type of helicopter. They’re like super-fancy flying Ferraris, shiny, and all Louis Vuitton and shagpile inside, the closest thing to a magic carpet that you can get. For Spud, the 109 was a skeleton key to everything, as well as a magic carpet to everywhere.
I will never agree with the video referee in England’s World Cup final, even if he produces a certificate signed by every member of the Royal College of Opticians. Though the South Africans deserved their victory, for me Mark Cueto’s effort will always be a try. But officials are not always wrong. The Newmarket stewards
Stolen seats Sir: On what evidence does Stephen Pollard (Politics, 20 October) base his contention that the ‘only possible reading of the past three decades’ is that the voters ‘turn to the Conservatives only when the Labour party presents itself as unelectable’? Since 1977, the Tories have been in power for 18 years (60 per
This week, my family celebrated a century of continuous occupation of the house in Sussex where my sister now lives. The place came into the family in the 19th century, but was let to the Church of England Temperance Society as a home for 38 ‘adult male inebriates’ until my great-grandfather and his second wife
Valhalla: Row H, Seat 9 It’s Wednesday, so it must be Rheingold. In an unlikely logistical triumph, I have managed to build my week around the second cycle of the Ring at the Royal Opera House — and quite something it is, too. As much as I might aspire to be George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Perfect
Q. This summer I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in France. The friend I had been staying with suddenly had rather a lot of people so I volunteered to go to the hotel — quite a good holiday trick if there are a lot of children about. Usually when I check into
A couple of weeks ago I got a request from someone called Amba wanting to be my Facebook friend. Without thinking much about it, I said yes — I usually do when people ask to be friends with me on social networking sites. The upshot is that Amba now has access to my Facebook profile
St Alban, 4–12 Regent Street, London SW1 St Alban is the latest restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who have almost mythic status as restaurateurs, and rightly so. They are, after all, the team that at various times have been behind The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey and The Wolseley but never Garfunkel’s, which
‘Let your little tike show off their little trike with this trendy shirt’, read an advertisement for toddlers’ T-shirts that Veronica showed me. In British English, tyke means ‘bitch, cur’ or ‘Yorkshireman’. In American English it is often used innocently enough for ‘child’. But it was the slogan on the advertised T-shirts that struck me:
Say what one may about the Blair-Brown years but I’m not sure even they would be mad brazen enough to try something like this: The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized yesterday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone
As someone who has, er, fond teenage memories of being barked at by NCOs from the Black Watch during hours of drill on the parade-ground and rather fonder recollections of cricket matches against the regiment, I’ve been looking forward for months to seeing Gregory Burke’s prize-winning play about the regiment’s experiences in Iraq during its
The magic of Pixar films – especially the Toy Story duet and The Incredibles – is that they appeal to adults as well as the children at whom they are primarily aimed. The latest creation of the CGI giant, Ratatouille, is arguably the best so far, and I certainly enjoyed it as much as my
To follow up on Matt’s post, Caroline Glick has a fascinating piece out today on the latest developments in the Iran nuclear saga. She speculates that the purpose of the recent shuttle diplomacy of Olmert and Barak–taking in visits to Moscow, Paris, London and Washington–was to allow them to share new intelligence on Iran’s nuclear
Don’t miss the excellent Toby Harnden’s interview with Norman Podhoretz in today’s Daily Telegraph in which the US conservative guru – an adviser to, amongst many others Rudy Giuliani – calls unequivocally for military action against Iran. This bolsters the case made by James a few weeks back – that Iran is a problem that