The Tory party conference this year was a remarkable success, a festival of conservatism with an impressive array of radical ideas on display. But almost all of them could be found in fringe events, and pitifully few in the hall of the conference. Even Cabinet members complained that the main event lacked fizz. Discussion centred
It is a good job that the Crown Nominations Commission chooses its two favoured candidates for Archbishop of Canterbury in secret and without the pageantry involved when the cardinals choose a new Pope. Otherwise, there would be some extremely unhappy reporters stationed on a pavement somewhere, waiting in exasperation for a puff of white smoke.
This week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again attended the United Nations in New York. Again, his visit was laced with controversy. He denounced the state of Israel as a ‘fake regime’, claimed that a threat of an Israeli strike on Iran’s facilities was ‘bluffing’, yet warned of Iranian retaliation should Israel carry out such a strike. Israel
Two weeks ago Justine Greening was demoted for the offence of sticking to the Conservative manifesto on which she was elected and refusing to back down over the proposal for a third runway at Heathrow. This week she has shown that she is far from being demoralised by the experience; in fact, it might turn out
Exactly three years ago, The Spectator devoted its cover to a revolutionary proposal for welfare reform. The proposed Universal Credit seemed, then, to be one of those ideas too sensible actually to be implemented. It proposed replacing the rotten, complex layers of benefits with a single system that paved the way to work rather than
All government reshuffles tend to be presented as Greek tragedies; the coverage focuses on the demeanour of sacked and promoted ministers who troop to No. 10. But this week’s reshuffle will come to be remembered less for the personnel changes, and more for the defeat of various bad ideas which characterised David Cameron’s early years
This week, the GCSE results envelope landed on doormats across the country. The results ought, on any rational basis, to shame the nation. Never mind how well or badly pupils may have done individually, taken as a whole the results point to a chillingly predictable trend for anyone in a comprehensive school. A pupil can
When Sir Mervyn King steps down as Bank of England Governor next June, even his most loyal supporters will struggle to describe his tenure as a success. He failed to spot the massive asset bubble which burst so spectacularly. His job was to keep inflation down, and Britain has instead suffered the worst inflation in
It is a paradox that the nation most committed to free enterprise — the United States — can be one of the most aggressively protectionist countries on earth. The accusations made this week by the New York State Department of Financial Services against Standard Chartered Bank are serious and deserve investigation, as were those made
An outsider viewing the Olympic opening ceremony could easily have gained the impression that Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A week on Sunday we are promised an equally spectacular closing ceremony. For the moment, the cost of staging the Olympics — £9.3 billion for the games, including £80 million for the opening
The ninth of August will mark the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the credit crunch: the day in 2007 that the banks found themselves frozen out of the debt markets, leading to the Northern Rock collapse and on to the more general banking crisis of 2008. By this stage of the Great Depression, western
Scambusters is the name of a government initiative to prevent householders falling victim to rogue traders who use high-pressure sales techniques to flog lousy and vastly overpriced goods and services. It would be more convincing if the government did not so frequently allow itself to be ripped off. At his appearance before the home affairs
This week marks 50 years since Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’, in which he sacked a third of his Cabinet. As if to mark the anniversary, Tory MPs this week sunk the dagger into the Liberal Democrats’ plans for House of Lords reform. So great was the potential defeat — the largest in
It is easy to understand Bob Diamond’s miscalculation. In the great pantheon of banking scandals, it was unlikely, he thought, that Libor interest-rate rigging would rank very high. Libor is the average interest rate at which banks lend to each other — or, rather, the rate at which they admit to lending to each other.
The NatWest banking disaster is an ominous reminder of the way in which technology has come to control our lives. We now know what a proper IT collapse feels like: a piece of computer code goes wrong and, within days, bank machines shut down and chaos ensues. This week the stories range from unpaid bills
The folly of jetting off to an international summit in a pleasant tropical resort during a time of emergency at home was amply demonstrated by Jim Callaghan in 1979 when he arrived, suntanned, back from the Caribbean apparently unaware of the seriousness of growing industrial unrest at home. But at least he never actually uttered
The American political scientist Wallace Sayre said that the bitterness of a political debate was inversely proportional to its importance. This has been true for US politics, where at each election time the issue of gay marriage divides the country — even when the president has no authority to either legalise or ban it. It’s
As Britain prepares for a week of peaceful celebration, Syria will be bracing itself for more bloodshed. The Assad regime, perhaps emboldened by the knowledge that the west has no appetite to intervene in Syria, is becoming ever more brutal in its repression. The massacre in villages around Houla, where 108 were slain, most of
The Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, promised this week to ‘reduce the volatility of energy bills’. Unfortunately, his proposal to eliminate the peaks and troughs in the electricity market involves elevating bills to a much higher level and leaving them there. Besides the pain this will inflict on already stretched households, the result of the
There is one crumb of comfort that Fleet Street can extract from the phone-hacking scandal: its own foibles still create a vastly bigger splash than do those of newer media. This week Facebook investors harangued the company’s chief executive for wearing a hoodie in meetings and Yahoo’s chief executive resigned after a shareholder questioned his