SUNDAY Hideous day of torment fielding non-stop calls from rude reporters asking, ‘What’s Dave got against Catholics?’ and ‘Does he support gay rights, or what?’ (We should go ahead with Gids’s plan to put the press through to a call centre in Delhi at weekends.) Was only just coping when Nigel rang to ask how the holding
There are a few fantasy gigs around, those jobs which we minor celebrities know deep down that we’re never going to be offered, but which we prepare for anyway, just in case. Appearing on Desert Island Discs, hosting Have I Got News For You, playing James Bond in the movies, writing the Spectator Diary. All
Last time we saw how the Athenians always reverted to type when they established large-scale alliances with other Greek states: what started off as a free union of states pursuing mutual interests slowly turned into an empire run by the Athenians pursuing their own interests. The parallels with the EU were all too clear. How,
In a free society, people are at liberty to gamble, much as they are at liberty to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and engage in other practices which, if indulged to excess, can have terrible consequences. Gambling has wrecked lives and enlivened others. The morality of a casino is in the eye of the beholder: one
If nothing else, Lord Levy has at least learnt the etiquette of being investigated by police. When he was first detained last July, he contemptuously accused officers of using ‘totally unnecessary’ tactics. On Tuesday, he emerged from the police station without a word — and said, through friends, that he was feeling ‘on very good
Arrogant, not brave From Jolyon Connell Sir: Michael Gove is heartened by the left-wing writers who have denounced Islamic terrorism rather than seeking to make excuses for it (‘All hail the new anti-Islamist intelligentsia’, 27 January). Fair enough. But he also seems pleased that such a number of them backed the Iraq war. He calls
