Last Monday, Theresa May’s chief of staff talked junior ministers through her Mansion House speech. Gavin Barwell was frank with them. The decision to stay in various EU agencies — and the commitment that UK regulatory standards for goods would remain ‘substantially similar’ to Europe’s — would make it harder to negotiate big trade deals
‘It’s always me who gets the worst of it,’ said the Fawn, surveying the wreckage caused by the burst water pipe. I did not disagree a) because I would have had my head bitten off and b) because it’s true. Though I wouldn’t say I was completely useless: who was the first to spot the
We are becoming a nation of older mothers. The average age at which a woman has her first child is now 30, a fifth reach 45 without having a baby and the usual busybodies are in a flap. The government, which had anyway decided on compulsory relationship classes, thinks the answer lies in more of
Why aren’t children called Roger any more? I wondered this when reading about the sad death of Sir Roger Bannister. Coincidentally, the evening before, my young daughter had been watching The Great Escape and most of the Englishmen in it seemed to be called Roger. The only time you hear the name is in early
Almost eight million people have now watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with Jordan Peterson. This figure must be unique in the history of Channel 4 News online. Only a few minutes were broadcast on the original news programme, but Channel 4 then put out the full half-hour on YouTube, perhaps miscalculating the effects
Theresa May has belatedly taken the advice I offered her here last May and named a supremo to tackle the housing crisis — which has been getting steadily worse since her campaign promise to ‘fix the broken market’. But the supremo isn’t Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary who is, the prime minister says, doing ‘incredible
