More from The Week

This time the brothers won’t save Labour

Dave Prentis, your time is nigh. Bob Crow, the country needs you at this hour. Derek Simpson, prepare for the call of history. As trade union leaders gather in Liverpool for the annual Trades Union Congress, their agenda items give no hint of the drama to come. Worthy motions will call forth windy speeches on

Noele Gordon

The news that our former editor, Boris Johnson, is to appear in EastEnders alongside Barbara Windsor may surprise some, but strikes us as entirely sensible. Modern politics, after all, is a soap opera or it is nothing; and although politicians complain bitterly about ‘tittle tattle’ and ‘personality stories’, it is they themselves who do most

Real reform

Few subjects animate the polenta- eating classes more than constitutional reform: tinkering with institutions excites the bien-pensant mind in the way that train sets excite ten-year-old boys. So it is no surprise that the expenses scandal triggered a fresh flurry of demands for wholesale upheaval of the political system and — in particular — proportional representation. It

Politics | 11 July 2009

The debate over the 10p tax controversy on Tuesday was more like a requiem for the Labour party than a rebellion. MPs spoke mournfully about how — yet again — their government would hit the poorest hardest. Gordon Brown had used the 2007 Budget to trick newspapers into reporting that he had lowered the basic rate of

Profumo, Profumas, Profumat

Our guide to the top 50 political scandals concludes in this issue, and seems already to have brought great pleasure and amusement to readers. As David Selbourne observes on page 18, parliament is presently suffering from a terrible dose of swine flu, symptomatic of a much wider malaise in the polity. Revisiting the great scandals

Politics | 1 July 2009

The sun-capturing atrium of Portcullis House is no substitute for the Californian coast but it may at least help Steve Hilton acclimatise. He is now back from his year-long absence — though he is still dressed as if he is heading for the beach. It is a reminder of the inverted sartorial hierarchy of the

The right inquiry

Taking the country to war is one of the most serious decisions a government can make. So it is right and proper that once the troops return home, there is a full investigation. To the greatest extent possible — given intelligence relationships and the need not to reveal information that could compromise national security —

Release Athanasiadis

A journalist who wrote for last week’s Spectator has been detained by the Iranian regime. He should be freed immediately.  Last week’s Spectator carried a fine atmospheric despatch from Tehran by the Greek journalist Iason Athanasiadis, who has also been covering the disputed presidential election for the Washington Times. At some point in the past week —

Honestly, Gordon

Since his brush with political death, Gordon Brown has made ‘candour’ his word for the month. So it was extraordinary to hear how brazenly the Prime Minister distorted the truth in his address on Tuesday to the GMB’s conference in Blackpool: a thunderous campaign speech which sought to draw the sharpest of ‘dividing lines’ between

Peerless

There was something magnificently comic about Lord Rogers of Riverside accusing the Prince of Wales of ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour. The modernist architect is predictably outraged that his hideous design for a development on the site of the old Chelsea Barracks has now been ditched — after Prince Charles wrote to a member of the Qatari royal family,

Whose country is it anyway?

It is an exquisite irony that Gordon Brown, so determined to deny the British people the general election they obviously crave, has made the centrepiece of his (latest) relaunch an investigation into the Westminster voting system. Refusing to play the game, he launches a full-blown inquiry into its rules. It is the most insultingly scarlet

Enough, already

The next few days will serve up plenty of reminders that this country does not have a written constitution. As the plotters decide how best to move against the Prime Minister, they will not be operating within any defined framework of rules to select a head of government. Rather, they will be muddling through. There

Britain’s got talons

Next Thursday, voters in the UK’s 12 European constituencies, 27 shire counties and seven unitary authorities will go to the polls in the most extraordinary circumstances. There is, as Martin Vander Weyer argues on page 25, no shortage of local issues to exercise us in the county council elections, just as the unratified Lisbon Treaty

The respect agenda

If the first rule of success is to follow a failure, then the 157th Speaker of the House of Commons, whoever he or she may be, is off to a good start. Michael Martin was everything a Speaker should not be: partial, too deferential to the executive and an opponent of transparency. His alleged comment

Darwin’s birthday present

The appearance this week of Ida, our lemur-like, 47-million-year-old ancestor, is a bright spot in an otherwise troubled world. Ida is being hailed as the original embryonic primate from which today’s great array of monkeys, apes and ultimately human beings sprang. Ida was six months old when she died and has been perfectly preserved in