When the letters ‘NHS’ appeared to the world above the dancing nurses at the Olympic opening ceremony, many in Britain will have imagined two darker words hovering alongside: ‘Mid Staffs’. Few of those affected will have been able to forget what now seems to be one of the greatest scandals in the history of British
Home Britain decided to send 40 ‘military advisers’ to Mali, 70 more with an RAF Sentinel surveillance aircraft and 20 with a C17 transport plane, and 200 to neighbouring states in a training role; Britain was ‘keen’, according to Downing Street, to aid France there. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited Algeria. The British economy
It’s a rum go, working in sport professionally. Your business is everybody else’s fun; their frivolity is your seriousness. Still, at least I was able to watch the Australian Open Final in Norfolk this year. Two years ago I watched the semi-final in a landside bar at Terminal Three. When Andy Murray won, I invented
Last week Rod Liddle suggested that on Question Time the Cambridge classicist Professor Mary Beard did not distinguish herself on the subject of immigration, and concluded that the BBC hired her only for her looks. Socrates would have had something to say about that. In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, Socrates opens a discussion with the famous
A desert mystery Insurgents were reported to have burned tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu as French troops surrounded the city. Timbuktu has long been a byword for a distant and unreachable place. But how did it come to be so? — No European is known to have visited Timbuktu until Robert Adams,
Reforming criminal justice Sir: Crime continues to fall under this government and is now at its lowest level since the crime survey began in 1982. But we can’t be complacent. We still see too many of the same faces going round and round the criminal justice system, as Theodore Dalrymple notes in his article ‘The
