The Week

Leading article

How to save the BBC? Privatise it

Three years ago, our columnist and former editor Charles Moore was summoned to Hastings Magistrates’ Court to pay £807 for refusing to pay his television licence. He was protesting against the BBC’s ‘gross violation of its charter’ by broadcasting obscene phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the former Fawlty Towers actor

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 12 September 2013

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the British economy was ‘turning a corner’, with ‘tentative signs of a balanced, broad based and sustainable recovery’. Unemployment fell to 7.7 per cent for the quarter May to July from 7.8 in the previous quarter. Jaguar Land Rover is to create 1,700 jobs at

Diary

Ancient and modern

Herodotus in Sochi

As a result of Russian laws against propagating homosexuality, there are calls to boycott the 2013 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 2018 Fifa World Cup due to be held there. The West’s first historian Herodotus (5th century bc) would not have sympathised. Herodotus’ magnificent Histories of the wars fought between the Persians and the Greeks

Barometer

Barometer | 12 September 2013

Trust us The National Trust opened the Big Brother House at Elstree Studios at the weekend. Some other less grand National Trust properties: — 575 Wandsworth Road, Lambeth. 19th-century terraced house that was home to Kenyan-born civil servant Khadambi Asalache who, to keep out the damp, decorated the walls with elaborate panels made from pine

Letters

Letters | 12 September 2013

Tories and Italians Sir: Roger Scruton must be laughing, or more likely crying, to hear his Meaning of Conservatism described as the ‘Bible of the Tories’ (‘Italians for Maggie’, 7 September). Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Farrell, ‘Italians believe that only the state can bring freedom.’ But that’s closer to Scruton’s position