Any other business

The persecution of Mr Gilligan by Mr Campbell has been odious

Many people distrust the BBC. They may like the idea of it, but often deplore the practice. They suspect that journalists who work for it are metropolitan lefties. But such people are apt to be equally wary of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin chief. They sense a bad ‘un. They have read newspaper stories which

Banned Wagon | 28 June 2003

The opportunity to applaud French farmers comes along once a century at most, so an overpriced, oversubsidised champagne must be in order. As I write, France is on the point of scuppering talks on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), thanks to lobbying from its dairy and cereal farmers. This is entirely predictable and

Banned Wagon | 21 June 2003

In China over the past fortnight, the waters have been rising in what will eventually be a 350-mile-long reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam. When finished, the dam’s turbines will generate energy equivalent to 18 nuclear power plants. The dam will also improve navigation on the Yangtze and mitigate the flooding risk which has

Banned Wagon | 14 June 2003

Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to ‘give it a rest’ and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there.

Why was the Times so eager to do the government’s dirty work?

The Times’s campaign against the billionaire businessman Michael Ashcroft is now largely forgotten. At the time it was a sensation. In the summer and autumn of 1999 the paper ran scores of articles about Lord Ashcroft, then treasurer of the Tory party and its major donor. The Times not only suggested that Lord Ashcroft was

Of dyers, drapers, weavers and other trichological Fabrications

One day last week, the only subject of conversation among those of us employed to observe proceedings from the House of Commons gallery was the blond hair of Mr Michael Fabricant, the Conservative member for Lichfield. It had become luxuriously longer than ever before, tumbling below his rear collar so that it was the most

Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 24 May 2003

Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation’s conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been ‘meeting farmers and communities at

Banned Wagon | 17 May 2003

Investors stung by the endowment-policy and pension-plan mis-selling scandals, and in possession of poorly managed unit trusts that have failed miserably to outperform the FT-SE index, can hardly be blamed for coming to the conclusion that they might just as well make their own investment decisions rather than rely on the men in grey suits.

Banned Wagon | 10 May 2003

This column does not often find common cause with American farmers, nor with farmers of the developed world in general. But it has become necessary to do so, thanks to some brazen protectionist policies on the part of China. Last year, China announced it was going to ban the import of all genetically modified crops.

If you want to get ahead in the Tory party, do not become an assassin

We shall probably never know what drove someone like Crispin Blunt to carry out a suicide attack on Iain Duncan Smith. The young man was from a respectable, middle-class, and pro-European background. That is, he came from the Tory breeding ground of moderation. But not all respectable, middle-class pro-Europeans try to assassinate their leader. His

If you embarrass the government, you may end up in police custody

In the early hours of last Thursday, armed police arrived at the Belfast house of Liam Clarke, the Sunday Times’s Northern Ireland editor, and his wife, Kathy. They seized four computers, children’s games, old newspapers and written material. Liam’s and Kathy’s eight-year-old daughter was in the house. Police smashed the door to Mr Clarke’s office,

The day Lord Rees-Mogg made me want to cry out in pain

If William Rees-Mogg had a fan club, I would be its president. I would lick envelopes for him and update his website, which would no doubt be full of his latest geopolitical prognostications. I would arrange coach parties of the faithful so that we could travel down to Somerset and glimpse him as he paced