More from The Week

Goodbye to all that

It ends, as it began, with a political conjuring trick. The splicing together of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness must, by any standards, rank as one of the most extraordinary achievements in recent politics, and reflects, among other things, the sleepless kinetic force that was Tony Blair’s greatest asset. It was the same force that

A legacy for us all

It is bleakly symmetrical that Tony Blair’s tenth anniversary as Prime Minister should have fallen in the same week as the Scottish, Welsh and local elections. But it was no less apt that the PM should have passed this milestone the day after the conviction of five British Islamists who plotted to blow up a

Politics is rubbish

An Englishman’s home is his castle, but his wheelie bin is not far behind as a symbol of domestic independence. So it is no surprise that the spread of fortnightly, rather than weekly, rubbish collection has stirred such strong emotions. In the midst of soaring April temperatures, the prospect of stinking piles of black bags,

The cunning of evil

In her book on the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt famously, and controversially, wrote of the ‘banality of evil’. The contemporary variant is the awesome banality of much of the analysis and soul-searching that evil provokes. Since the horrific murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday, there has been a spree of such commentary.

Conduct unbecoming | 14 April 2007

Monday was ‘National Nuclear Day’ in Iran. In Britain, with the paid appearance of Leading Seaman Faye Turney on television, it was national humiliation day. The abduction three weeks ago of 15 British sailors and marines by a hostile regime was, at best, a misfortune; the decision of Ms Turney and Operator Mechanic Arthur Batchelor

The wages of stealth

A stealth tax, by definition, is one in which political pain is deferred in return for immediate gain. The Chancellor who imposes such a tax effectively mortgages his credibility and the public’s trust in him. But, sooner or later, as Gordon Brown is discovering, the day of reckoning arrives — in Mr Brown’s case, at

Labour’s magic circle

In a famous Spectator article of 17 January 1964, Iain Macleod denounced the ‘magic circle’ of senior Conservatives who had engineered the succession of Lord Home as prime minister the year before. The Crown was obliged to follow the advice tendered by Harold Macmillan, Macleod concluded, ‘but the result of the methods used was contradiction

A Budget for Brown

‘A Budget for business’ was how — as usual — it was spun beforehand. ‘A Budget to expand prosperity and fairness for Britain’s families’ was how the speech actually began. But this week’s 11th and final performance from Labour’s longest-serving Chancellor was in reality neither of these things: it was a Budget for Brown. The

How to save the planet

In his film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes Winston Churchill’s famous warning in 1936. Admonishing those who were ‘only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent’, Churchill declared: ‘The era of procrastination, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is

Climate of opinion

The government has declared the scientific debate on global warming ‘closed’. A dwindling minority of scientists still contest that claim, but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that ministers are right. The trap into which they risk falling is to confuse scientific orthodoxy and the inclinations of the liberal elite with mainstream public

Eye-catching inanities

To adapt Macaulay, there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the Labour party in one of its periodic fits of ideology. While the heir-presumptive, Gordon Brown, has remained in old-fashioned purdah about his plans as prime minister, the jostling candidates to be his deputy leader have engaged in a shrill and often juvenile battle to