To celebrate 25 years of The Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards, we invite you to nominate the best MP of the past quarter-century The question hangs in the air: what makes a great parliamentarian? And the answer echoes back: many things. A great parliamentarian may be a swashbuckling orator whose rhetoric never fails to draw blood. He
You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert,
The Conservatives are planning to chip away at the lower middle-class voter and release his inner Tory Two inconvenient truths will put the dampeners on what could have been a celebratory Conservative party conference in Birmingham next week. First, there is a champagne ban for the third year running. There are to be no pictures
Baroness Warnock, atheist pillar of the liberal establishment, on the need for Christianity in schools and the folly of human rights Baroness Warnock has had many battles with religion over the course of her long and distinguished career. In 1984, when the Warnock Report recommended allowing in vitro fertilisation and research on embryos, she was
Right-wing Tea Party activists might well reshape the US Congress – but they have already routed the Republican establishment When angry right-wing American voters started taking to the streets to protest against the Obama administration’s policies, leading Republicans were ecstatic. In the group of protesters who became known as the Tea Party, they saw a
Who on earth wants to know about the leaders’ children, pets, kitchens and favourite biscuits? I am sitting in the audience at Labour party conference, watching a tribute video to Gordon Brown. As Brown smiles, walks, talks, scowls and moves his limbs up and down, giving a fairly decent impersonation of a soon-to-be-discontinued toy, I
There is a view, prevalent among a sizeable minority of people in this country, and particularly within the angry, fat and drunk white underclass, that one day very soon the green flag of Islam will fly above Westminster and Britain will have become a Muslim country, by stealth. This is the snarled and yet resigned reaction
