James Forsyth reviews the week in politics The worst thing about this week for Gordon Brown is that no one has bothered to dub it his worst week ever. Normally, a few days which saw a Prime Minister receive the succession of blows that Brown has suffered since Saturday would lead to forests being chopped
You cannot blame Lord Turner, the Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, for defending the bonuses paid to his employees. He is new to the job and must work with his team. But when he said this week, ‘If you are saying we should now cut the bonuses, you are saying we should cut their
Lloyds becomes one more catastrophe for which Brown will never apologise How Lloyds Banking Group chairman Sir Victor Blank must regret not having had a prior engagement on Monday 15 September last year, the night he bumped into Gordon Brown at a City reception and got bounced into the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB.
During the Arctic weather I re-read that finest of winter pastorals, ‘Snowbound’ by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). It gripped me, as it always does, by its combination of intense realism about the present and its imaginative sympathy for the past. Whittier describes heavy snow sealing off a household in the early 19th century, about the
Last week I lost it. I flipped out. Actually if I’m being totally truthful I didn’t just flip: I f***ing flipped. Like Boris Johnson, I had a Vaz-attack of epic, expletive-laden telephone rage. Having recently received the Transport for London form to renew and pre-pay my annual (discounted) congestion charge, I’d managed to get my
