‘Nobody would be happier than me if, in 50 years’ time, the Prime Minister, the Archibishop of Canterbury, the Poet Laureate, the Lord Chief Justice, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford and the editor of the Times were all non-white.’ So wrote Stephen Glover last week, just in time to further embarrass James Watson,
The estate agent was hopelessly late — stuck in traffic, she said — so I gave the couple the tour of our home instead. It was clear that they had no intention of buying: they lived nearby and were just being nosy. What’s more, I caught them exchanging superior glances, first at the framed portrait
I had an epiphany at 5.30 a.m. the other day in a Shanghai club packed with gangsters, prostitutes and flat-bellied Thai transsexuals. I watched a little guy, in his forties like me, dancing with two women dressed as schoolgirls. Then he collapsed drunkenly to the floor. White-jacketed attendants appeared. Instead of ejecting the man, they
What are the two words guaranteed to fill any parents of young children with terror? School fees? Chicken Pox? Gina Ford? The answer, I’m afraid, is half term. My daughter, Sasha, only started going to ‘big school’ in September so I wasn’t anticipating too many problems. What I hadn’t factored in is that my wife
The curtain of my upstairs neighbours’ flat has been hanging by a single hook for three weeks, and if something is not done about it soon I am going to call the police. There must be a part of Blair’s legacy, a piece of legislation on a statute book in Westminster somewhere, which includes a
With league fixtures into double figures, the autumn’s general-excuse-me overture has finished and the long winter slog is really underway. The eightsome reel at the top of the Premiership comprises natch the four usual suspects (Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea) and a fresh quartet of determined pretenders girding up to press on from highly
Q. We live in a small flat and when we have visitors for a weekend or a few days we arrange for them to sleep in a spacious bedroom made available by a neighbour, who is also a good friend. She charges only a nominal amount, which so far we have preferred not to mention
Since I wrote in The Spectator a fortnight ago about the ‘Say no to foie gras’ campaign, my email has been flooded with protests. Animal-rights groups have claimed that I am wet, limp, cravenly judicious; I should have said that force-fed geese are a symbol of the evil Man everywhere does to animals. Partisans of
When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’. This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from
