The Week

Leading article

Wasted lives

Twenty years ago, the Scottish parliament was reconvened after a lapse of almost three centuries. The logic for devolution was clear enough: that Scotland has discrete issues, and ones that were not always solved by London government. Devolution would allow ‘Scottish solutions for Scottish problems’. There was, in Westminster, a feeling that MPs could worry

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week – 18 July 2019

Home In a televised debate between the rivals for election by members of the Conservative party as their new leader (and hence prime minister), Boris Johnson said of the Irish backstop, ‘It needs to come out,’ and Jeremy Hunt said that it was ‘dead’. This was described as ‘significant’ by Dominic Grieve, who said he

Diary

Diary – 18 July 2019

By this time next week the Johnson era will surely have begun. ‘We can, we will, we must now escape the giant hamster wheel of doom,’ our new Dear Leader will have declared in Downing Street. Or something like it. He will be rewarded with headlines such as ‘BoJo gives us back our mojo’. We

Ancient and modern

Rome’s lesson for Labour

Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to take serious action against Labour’s anti-Semitic members is no surprise: Marxists know who their friends are. The Roman plebs showed how to deal with such cabals. In 509 bc, Rome’s last tyrant king was thrown out, and the very nobles who had advised him at once took over the new republic

Barometer

Barometer | 18 July 2019

Mars missions When will there be a manned Mars mission? — As early as 1962, Nasa studied the practicalities of a mission to Mars, as part of its Project EMPIRE (Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions). The initial plan was to put a man on Mars by the early 1970s. However, budgetary restraints meant that the

Letters

Letters | 18 July 2019

Leave we must Sir: It is interesting that as the Brexit process drags, people become more distanced from what was a simple decision made at the referendum. The question was stay or leave, and the decision was leave. In last week’s letters, Mark Pender writes that it is a mystery to him why MPs continue