When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there
In the scheme of things, it may not greatly matter whether fox-hunting survives in England. We live in a world of woe and suffering, of pestilence, poverty and war, where millions die each year from hunger or violence, where a vast crisis in western Asia threatens to erupt catastrophically. A sense of proportion should tell
Even by the grisly standards of ritual killing, it was shocking. On 2 November in Amsterdam the Dutch iconoclast and film-maker Theo van Gogh was dragged from his bicycle in broad daylight and murdered. His killer, a bearded Dutch-born Islamic radical of Moroccan descent, shot him six times and, as he pleaded for his life,
The rebuilt town hall of the ancient Borough of Henley still stands brave over its market place. This was Henley’s forum and seat of government, a one-stop shop of civic welfare. From here Henley’s streets were lit, paved and policed, Henley’s traders regulated, Henley’s children educated and its poor relieved, all under the aegis of
Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got Fallujah Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding
Peter Oborne reveals that the Tories have a secret weapon — the Voter Vault — which has identified the 900,000 swing voters the party needs to capture at the next election According to all objective criteria the Conservative party leadership ought to be very low in the water. The assassination of Iain Duncan Smith almost
