The 19th annual Parliamentarian of the Year awards, sponsored by The Spectator and by Zurich Financial Services, were presented by Michael Martin, MP, Speaker of the House of Commons, the guest of honour at the awards presentation luncheon held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, London. The guests were welcomed by Sandy Leitch, chief executive of
I once got bashed up by the late John Smith. It was at one of those charm-offensive lunches in the City, and he had asked why London’s booming financial firms kept all their jobs in the South-east rather than sharing them round the rest of the country. My mistake was to suggest that dispersing jobs
Istanbul I have no doubt that Allah moves in mysterious ways. But if He has chosen Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the instrument of His vengeance on the infidel, He must be given credit for startling originality. Erdogan, whose party won a landslide victory in Turkey’s recent general election, may be feared in some quarters as
Tony Blair tells us continually that the British armed forces are ‘the best in the world’. They are fighting fit, says the government, and straining at the leash to do battle with Saddam Hussein. It is all the more frightening, therefore, that in truth the Prime Minister is about to deploy a British military force
No British prime minister has dominated the landscape so obviously, with so little obvious effort or for so long, as Tony Blair. You can check through the lists fruitlessly as far back as they go to find a comparable example. Maybe Palmerston, who attained power only in ripe old age, enjoyed a comparable period of
