These notes are being written on 17 October, the day when, at the invitation of the History Matters campaign, we are all supposed to keep a diary for a day. Like Tom Lehrer on National Brotherhood Week, ‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.’ We are overwhelmed with diaries. The politicians’ ones are the
It was a day to remember: 20 years ago, on 27 October 1986, Big Bang caused a revolution in the securities market which turned the whole financial sector upside down. The early 1980s was a time of change. The Thatcher government’s thirst for deregulation was at its height. Exchange controls had been lifted, capital could
25 October 1986 My friend the stockjobber closed his book, turned his back on his pitch, and walked with me off the Stock Exchange floor, down Throgmorton Street and into Bill Bentley’s fish house. We raised our glasses of Montrachet to the last of the good old days. On Monday he must quit the floor
Amid the growing mutterings over his suitability to be prime minister, Gordon Brown has managed to preserve his reputation in at least one quarter. It has become received wisdom that the Chancellor played a blinder on his first day in the job in 1997 by making the Bank of England independent, giving us perpetually low
‘We men don’t want to wear condoms, we want the West to find a cure.’ This dilemma, faced by HIV counsellors at the Mildmay Centre near Entebbe, mirrors that experienced by those hoping to help Uganda financially. Mukasa, a handler at the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island, 45 minutes from Entebbe by speedboat, gives me
The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. Laughter is the great restorative and rejuvenator. I’m surprised more philosophers have not written about it: only boring Bergson. In recent years the people who have made me laugh most — ‘shriek’, as Nancy Mitford called it — are Carla, Leonie and
