Finally, the Eurosceptics have been vindicated. But will their dishonest opponents ever be held to account? Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of
Jim Murphy is that rare breed, a genuinely working-class, modern British politician. We meet on the eve of Labour conference in a café in an upmarket shopping centre in his native Glasgow and he begins by talking about his childhood. Labour’s 44-year-old shadow defence secretary was born on a Glasgow housing estate and spent his
‘It’s very easy to be wise with hindsight,’ Nick Clegg this week told a BBC interviewer who had tasked the Deputy Prime Minister with his long-held view that the euro is a wonderful currency which Britain was crazy not to join. A cross-sounding Clegg went on to argue that ‘no one’ had envisaged that the
A new programme to revive Latin and Greek in our schools Some 15 years ago, at the behest of the then editor Charles Moore, I wrote a jovial 20-week QED: Learn Latin column for the Daily Telegraph. It attracted a huge following, and I still have four large box-files full of letters from users. The
Lord Winston must have known he placed a puss among the pigeons when he aired his view, a couple of weeks ago, that nurses from Eastern Europe are putting NHS patients in danger. Citing Romanians in particular, he remarked upon their limited communication skills and told the House of Lords that they had been trained
Last week I headed to Maribor in Slovenia for a music festival featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra under the directorship of maestro Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist. I even briefly performed a couple of Edith Sitwell poems to music by William Walton, but my efforts were at the beginning and end of a long programme
The West has much to learn from Afghanistan’s community courts Kabul, Afghanistan I was invited to take part in a shura this week. One of our masons had been hit around the head with an iron bar by a local mechanic. Shura describes a traditional Islamic approach towards sociopolitical organisation and comes from an Arabic
Do you paint yourself? Or…sing in a choir maybe? John Studzinski looks at me anxiously from the other side of a conference table, in a sleek little office belonging to his firm, Blackstone, the American private equity giant. He’s normally a confident man; outspoken on the subject of leadership, networking and England’s art scene (which
Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph, proposed the motion by taking a blast at his own side. Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph, proposed the motion by taking a blast at his own side. The present Euro crisis had inspired Tory Eurosceptics to talk of “a re-negotiation” and a “repatriation of powers”. This, he said,
