What a week this has been! What a great mood I’m in! Why, it’s almost like being in bed… with Georgie Wells. (Details will follow, but don’t let me mislead you. I didn’t even get to first base.) It began the day before those amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties were celebrated, with
I flew from Marseille to Gatwick, rode the Gatwick Express to Victoria, and walked down the thoroughfare of Victoria Street eating a Marks & Spencer egg and tomato sandwich. In Victoria Street, I bought a shirt, pattern of flying ducks, from the House of Fraser selected menswear sale, to replace the sweat-soaked one I was
This was going to be about how a major phone company surprised me by delivering a fantastic service. I was quite excited because secretly I have always wanted to be forced to admit that in spite of my rock bottom expectations, all is right with the world. It began when I went into the Carphone
In happier days when Britain was not on the brink of disintegration, David Davis told me a story about the 19th century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Little did I suspect that soon he would be living it. The Francophiles among you will recall the apocryphal tale of Ledru-Rollin enjoying his lunch at a Parisian
There has been a Remainer coup. Remainers now inhabit virtually all of the highest offices in the land. Overnight, adherents to this minority political viewpoint seized the final levers of political power. This is the one downside — and what a downside it is — to the belated outbreak of principle among the cabinet’s Brexiteers:
Something rather remarkable happened yesterday: Theresa May had a good day. This counts as news and is itself testament to the miserable time she has endured since she became Prime Minister. Some of this – much of it, in fact – was her own fault. Or at least her own responsibility. If she had called
It was only a matter of time. The headteacher of a primary school in Ilfracombe in Devon has banned ‘Flossing’, the dance craze linked to the video game Fortnite, on the grounds that it’s being used to ‘intimidate’ other children. ‘Fortnite is about mass killing of other human beings and being rewarded by a dance
Like most people with any taste, I like the odd vodka, I love Crime and Punishment, I enjoy Turgenev and Chekhov, and who doesn’t like to listen to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov? Their national anthem’s not bad either. In other words, Russia’s quite a place, give or take the odd poisoning or country takeover. And as
Q. A long-standing friend has an admirer of some means. He has invited her to borrow his fully staffed and equipped yacht and entertain a selection of guests, including myself, while we sail around the Med. I’ve become somewhat addicted to luxury and I’ve been so looking forward to this for weeks. I imagined myself
Claridge’s is a toff sanctuary and one of the best hotels on earth. It specialises in its own myth, which is easy when Winston Churchill fell into a suite at the end of the war, and missed Dwight Eisenhower running the other way. Eisenhower was not afraid of the Axis, but the soft furnishings at
I have never lost my admiration for Boris Johnson’s summary of British ambitions over Brexit as ‘having our cake and eating it’. It taught a generation of EU bureaucrats an important English idiom. So it is with renewed admiration, if involuntary distaste, that I regard his success in reintroducing turd into polite conversation. It has
