From the moment I arrived in Bakewell, Derbyshire, as a carpet-bagger politician nearly a quarter of a century ago, I knew I’d never leave. The attractions of the county and its sweet green hills and dales only grew. And in the end, though I had meant the Peaks to be just rungs on my ladder
With this government, it is not ‘crisis, what crisis?’ but ‘crisis, which crisis?’ We now have a coalition emergency prompted by the fact that Lords reform has been dumped in the long grass despite being in the programme for government. We have a Tory party crisis occasioned by the biggest rebellion of David Cameron’s leadership
At the Spectator party this year I met a girl I hadn’t seen since Oxford. We exchanged pleasantries. She was looking good and she’d done really well for herself, which made me very happy for her. But then she mentioned that before her latest plum posting she’d been working in the ‘private sector’ for Shell.
I have been racking my brains to come up with new and imaginative ways of taunting the lower orders about their hilarious lack of wealth recently. Nothing I have come up with, however, quite beats the decision to let Sir Martin Sorrell — one of Britain’s richest people, and a brave and stoic defender of
Painful, barbaric and Victorian are the words I think of when someone says corset, and yet these torturous contraptions are enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Rigby & Peller, Marks & Spencer and eBay all report a huge increase in demand — corset sales on eBay, for instance, have risen nearly 200% over recent months. It
A big reason for opposing these Lords reforms is that they would threaten the power of the Commons. If the Commons passed them, however, it would deserve to be threatened. It would display — like No. 10 Downing Street — an ignorance of the constitution and an arrogance about process which undermines the point of
The biggest mis-selling scandal to break this month was not the one which involved banks forcing small business borrowers to buy expensive interest-rate hedging contracts, under threat of not lending to them at all if they refused. The FSA hasn’t got to the bottom of that one yet: in terms of identifiable victims it could
