Some secrets are too vulgar to be disclosed by any political party. Gordon Brown’s radical cuts agenda, encoded in the small print of the Budget, is one such secret. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to admit to it, as it contradicts his pious claim that ‘you can’t cut your way out of recession’. David Cameron
It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire. Though
Thirty years, almost to the day, after we greeted our first woman Prime Minister, we greet our first woman Poet Laureate. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who was careful not to press the sex point, Carol Ann Duffy describes her own appointment as ‘a historic day for women’. She says she wants 300 years of female poet
My racing correspondent, Captain Threadneedle, thought that banking and racing went together. He wanted Barclays to buy the Tote: perfect synergy, he thought, with matching systems, merged accounts, an overlapping customer base and a marketing slogan that would write itself: ‘You can bet on your overdraft with Barclays.’ He was, as we now know, before
I’m your man for the job, Chancellor HM Treasury has placed an advert in the Economist looking for a new external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, the body that sets UK interest rates, to succeed David Blanchflower. I have decided that it is my duty to apply and have therefore sent
Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘ Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties
