Are people less honest than they used to be? Most would say, bitterly, yes. But it depends on what happens to you. I once carelessly dropped a £10 note in Uxbridge High Street. An urchin ran after me and triumphantly handed it to me. He seemed delighted to do me a service and adamantly refused
Two weeks ago I mentioned here the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez; I think he is the international Left’s best hope at present: anti-American without being bin Laden. He causes trouble for the United States, but in the old-fashioned Cold War way for a Latin American: delivering two-hour speeches about gringo imperialism to various mobs, attributing
Augustus the Strong, the 18th-century king of Saxony and Poland, is an unlikely but fitting metaphor for a rising China. Fitting because Augustus was as weak as he was strong. A bear of a man, he is said to have fathered 356 children, commanded large standing armies and ruled his dominions with uncompromising resolve. But
Simon Nixon says food companies will make money out of the government’s obsession with obesity – and consumers will pay Sometimes life really does imitate art. It’s less than 10 years since the satirist Chris Morris made his infamous episode of Brass Eye in which he persuaded a host of self-important politicians and celebrities to
‘A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination,’ claimed Arthur Wing Pinero in his 1893 play The Second Mrs Tanqueray. ‘A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination,’ claimed Arthur Wing Pinero in his 1893 play The Second Mrs Tanqueray. His work may be rarely seen in the West End these days, but his words are enjoying
Rupert Steiner talks to Britain’s most admired businessman, BP chief executive Lord Browne, about Middle East conflict and management philosophy Click, click, click, but no amount of clicking brings to life the silver and gold lighter in Lord Browne of Madingley’s hand. The chief executive of BP, Europe’s largest oil company, has run out of
I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy in New Delhi in March 1963 when Milton Friedman, champion of laissez-faire, came to lunch
The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story in little more than 48 hours, mutating swiftly from ‘shock closure’ to more measured explanations of inevitability. Though Peugeot is accused of welshing on promises that the plant would
Truly good people have always been rarities, and ours is not an age which nourishes them by attention and respect. When a good person dies, it is not headline news but, rather, a private tragedy for friends, who thereby lose a beacon in their own confused and muddled lives, someone they could regard as a
I was about to write ‘Everyone knows the story of James Lind, the Scottish naval surgeon, who conducted the first controlled trial in the history of medicine to prove the curative value of citrus fruits in scurvy’ when I realised that it would have been a silly and, worse still, a snobbish thing to say.
It is exactly 100 years since F.E. Smith made the most famous maiden speech in history. Do MPs still make maidens? One never hears of them. Indeed one never hears of any speeches in the Commons these days; as a theatre of oratory it is dead. But it was a different matter in 1906. The
Let’s not come over all emotional about the sale of BAE Systems’s one fifth stake in Airbus to EADS, the Franco–German group that already owns the rest of it. For a start, the sale does not portend the death of a once-great industry, because Britain has not had much to be proud of in civil
Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s. As a chronicle of modern City life, the Fildes oeuvre has only one equal and that comes in the weighty form of A
The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on
A health warning greeted me: ‘LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auberon Waugh have today joined the staff of The Spectator. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel. Gatley’s Libel and Slander (sixth and seventh edition) may be consulted in my office. Nigel Lawson, Editor.’ Times were hard. I had come
By the weekend, the Conservatives had achieved the feat of making their own funding become just as much ‘the issue’ as Labour’s. The papers were full of sharp-looking loans which the Tories, as much as Labour, had received from the capitalist class. The Prime Minister and his allies had succeeded in making any scandal appear
Who keeps Lent now? Lenctentid was the Anglo-Saxon name for March, meaning spring tide, and as the 40-day fast fell almost entirely in March, it was called Lent, though in other Christian countries it had quite different names. The odd thing about Lent is that though it is a period of gloom and sorrow, commemorating
This month I spent a weekend in Bruges, travelling most of the way by Eurostar, which for this kind of trip easily beats air travel for speed and is, of course, incomparably more comfortable. I love trains. All my early childhood in north Staffordshire, from four to 12, I travelled every day to school on
‘Pushing money into offshore hedge funds is not the Labour way,’ a left-wing MP commented last week on the savings habits of Tessa Jowell’s estranged husband, David Mills. Since this issue includes an Investment section, readers may be anxious to know whether putting money into hedge funds is or is not the Spectator way. But
The hair colour gene MCI-R has seven European variants, one of them blond. It is rare and becoming rarer. A WHO survey calculates that the last true blond will be born in Finland in 2202. Do you believe this? Nor do I. A different lot of scientists argue that this gene emerged over a comparatively