Anyone who googled ‘tax avoidance’ this week will have been confronted (between adverts for accountancy firms) with endless stories about Google’s own tax avoidance schemes. If the company’s reputational management team was striving to stem the flood of bad publicity, it was not succeeding. Salvation for -Google arrived only when Apple’s tax avoidance became the
Home A senior figure in the Conservative party with strong social connections to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was reported by the Telegraph and Times to have said that Conservative constituency associations ‘are all mad swivel-eyed loons’. Lord Feldman, the party’s co-chairman, said it was not he. Mr Cameron sent an email to party activists
I was surprised to be told, by the editor of this magazine, that next week will mark the 20th anniversary of my standing down as Chancellor. The anniversary had entirely passed me by. I was asked this week why, if the economy was turning, George Osborne didn’t announce that he had spotted ‘green shoots’, as
So Mr Cameron is offering us the faintest prospect of a referendum on the EU. Ancient Athenians would have laughed him to scorn. Meeting in the Assembly roughly every week, Athenian males over the age of 18 decided all Athenian public policy. But since there were thousands of them, who could hardly just turn up
Gnome territory This year only, garden gnomes are allowed at the Chelsea Flower Show. Some other places to see them: Germany. The home of the gnome, where the first batch were manufactured in 1841, has an estimated 25 million. European Gnome Sanctuary, Barga, Italy. A town whose parks and gardens have become a dumping ground
Stay Conservative Sir: Dr John Hyder-Wilson wrote (Letters, 11 May) of my calls to ‘shift Tory party policy rightward’ to meet a threat from Ukip, which he felt was inconsistent as he could not remember me advocating a leftward shift in response to a threat from the SDP/Alliance in the early 1980s. Of course he
