The Week

Leading article

Airlines must accept the blame for the travel chaos

If you have a flight booked in the next few months, it’s time to worry. A new era of air travel has arrived, in which reliability has been replaced with roulette. Airlines take bookings for flights they know might not take off. If staff shortages mean the flight is cancelled, passengers aren’t told until the

Portrait of the week

Diary

Don’t write off Piers Morgan yet

I wish I could persuade certain cabinet ministers to put their money where their mouths are. Several times last month on Good Morning Britain I exhorted Tory frontbenchers, including Liz Truss, to place cash bets with me. If they’d agreed, I’d be richer than Rishi by now. Well, obviously that’s an exaggeration, but I could

Ancient and modern

The true birth of communism

Nostalgia wars are all the rage at the moment, but an extraordinary example appears to have been missed: a hammer and sickle painted on the newly erected statue of Lady Thatcher. Communism was in fact invented by the Greek comic poet Aristophanes (c. 446-386 bc). For him, it was one long, uproarious joke. His Ecclesiazusae

Barometer

How much do the royals like curry?

Curry in favour The BBC apologised after one of its guests for the Jubilee coverage, Len Goodman, revealed that his grandmother had referred to curry as ‘foreign muck’. The corporation might have used it as a way into a discussion of royal eating tastes. In an interview with Radio 1 in 2017, the Duchess of

Letters

Letters: Becoming a GP is not an ‘easier’ option

Saving general practice Sir: Regarding J. Meirion Thomas’s article (‘Medical emergency’, 4 June), traditional general practice continues to thrive in private medicine. For a 20-minute consultation costing £80, a patient can still get a rapid face-to-face appointment. I believe historians will record that NHS general practice reached its zenith in the mid-1990s when John Major