‘We don’t do God,’ was Alastair Campbell’s put-down when his charge, Tony Blair, was tempted to raise the issue of his faith. Unfortunately, it seems to have become the motto of David Cameron’s government. It is a month now since 276 girls were kidnapped from a school near the town of Chibok in northern Nigeria,
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said on television that he was ‘bullish’ about negotiating change for Britain in the European Union, but that there would be a referendum on membership by the end of 2017 ‘whether or not I have successfully negotiated’. In a telephone poll by Lord Ashcroft the Conservatives were found to
My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States: ‘We are wintering in Worcestershire.’ This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire. It turned out to be a
Nearly half of Britain’s billionaires are foreigners, and government hopes many more will now come in on the government ‘start business — get passport’ scheme. Someone has obviously been reading Xenophon. In the 350s BC Athens was in serious financial trouble. In his Poroi (‘Revenues’), Xenophon, a soldier and essayist, sketched out a plan to
Memory holes The EU wants to introduce a law which would force Google to delete from its searches old information that individuals and organisations would prefer forgotten. Some things that come up when you write ‘EU’ and ‘scandal’ into Google: — A 2009 EU document advising officials to write two minutes of every meeting: a
Trust renewables Sir: Your editorial (‘Green and unpleasant’, 3 May) accused the National Trust of jumping ‘aboard the climate change bandwagon’ and performing a ‘double backflip’ on wind energy and shale gas. Not true. We have long been worried about the impact that climate change is having on our properties. Sixty per cent of
