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The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 February 2010

At last, the BBC has caught up with me. Readers may remember that I have been keeping and watching my television, but refusing to pay my television licence, for as long as the BBC continues to employ Jonathan Ross. (I sent the sum to Help the Aged instead.) The anti-Ross campaign has had some effect

Any other business

‘Read this and weep’: lessons not learned from Slater Walker

Richard Northedge has unearthed confidential papers that reveal the Bank of England and the Treasury at loggerheads over a banking collapse 35 years ago  In the permanently uneasy truce between Threadneedle Street and Whitehall, Bank of England governor Mervyn King has never been shy of publicly criticising the Treasury. But confidential files on a banking

Mutual satisfaction

I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. Motor insurance, household insurance, pet insurance. Some, like cover for your car, you have to have by law. Other stuff, like cover for your cat or the contents of your house, you don’t.

Billions more mouths to feed

Food security is the new energy security. So says Susan Payne, chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, a Surrey-based company which claims to run the biggest agricultural fund in Africa following the launch of its first fund less than 18 months ago. Payne, a Canadian who cut her teeth as an emerging-markets expert first at

Gallantry is a finite resource

Few individuals better personify the eccentric, combative and rarefied world of medal collecting than Michael Ashcroft, the businessman and controversially deep-pocketed Tory party eminence grise. A self-made man whose fortune is estimated by the Sunday Times at £1.1 billion — more than the entire net worth of Belize, the tiny Central American state he calls