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Columns

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 26 April 2008

My heart bleeds for cold-callers — it must be the most depressing job in the world It’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the wheelbarrow, pick and spade and set to work finishing the construction

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s notes | 26 April 2008

Charles Moore’s reflections on the week Actually, there never was much sense in a ten pence rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot help laughing when you look at

Any other business

Global Warning | 26 April 2008

Death and taxes: these, according to Benjamin Franklin, are the two immovables of human existence. In modern life, however, there is a third: drivel, from which, try as one might, it is now impossible to escape. I concede, of course, that it is possible that it’s my sensitivity to drivel rather than its incidence or

Green wife

‘Hello Barbara,’ Emma says as she hauls the Hoover in through the front door. I can’t disguise my confusion. ‘As in Tom and Barbara. You know, from The Good Life.’ I don’t get it, at first. I still think of myself as this London chick — well, probably old broiler would be more accurate. But

Any Other Business | 26 April 2008

The Chariots of Fire moment that revealed Gordon’s 10p tax timebomb The abolition of the 10p starter rate of income tax in Gordon Brown’s last Budget has a special significance in recent Spectator history: coming only a month after our move from Doughty Street in Bloomsbury to Old Queen Street in Westminster, it was the

Tantamount to financial terrorism

You sport a huge beard and a towel on your head and in the name of Allah you try to bring down the computer infrastructure on which the world depends. You are, in contemporary argot, a ‘cyber-terrorist’. You wear a button-down shirt and chinos, and in the name of turning a profit you deliberately set