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One of the most dispiriting experiences currently available is any commercial break during a televised football match. In a Champions League game, within seconds of the half-time whistle you are pitched into a garish carnival of crap which glaringly and proudly condenses Everything Wrong With Modern Britain into three bombastic minutes, beginning with the laughably pompous Champions League choral theme and then going downhill from there. Adverts follow for gambling, drinking, and borrowing money, along with violent computer games and cars. A multi-millionaire actor will exhort recession-hit viewers to bet on the next goal, via a handy app. Glossy couples and sexy croupiers make online cash-fleecing look like a James

I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with strong opinions on everything from sanitation to election candidates, and he did a great deal of good for his parish — so I’m not averse to the idea of churchmen intervening in worldly affairs, and I think Archbishop Justin Welby was right to highlight the parasitical nature of ‘payday lenders’ such as Wonga, even if he was subsequently embarrassed to discover that the Church of England was an indirect investor in it. But by his

When this week began, Newt Gingrich was the clear favourite to win tonight’s Florida primary. He’d just beaten Mitt Romney by 13 points in South Carolina and two new polls put him 8 to 9 points ahead in Florida. Momentum was on his side, Romney was facing criticism over his tax returns, and he’d have two debates – his favourite campaigning medium – to press his advantage home. But – despite securing an endorsement from Herman Cain on Saturday – Gingrich now finds himself well behind Romney, and with just a 3 per cent chance of victory, according to Nate Silver’s model (above). Why the turnaround? Partly it’s down to

The news that for-profit abortion providers are soon to be allowed to advertise on television suggests there is something very wrong with our society. Abortion may well at times be the least worst option. But even those of us who accept this should feel deeply uncomfortable with it being actively promoted on television. The fact that these providers want to advertise on television is revealing of a certain lack of moral seriousness about the work they do. This news is also revealing of how far we have come since the Abortion Act 1967. I doubt that the parliamentarians who voted that legislation through envisaged that 45 years later, what are

It must have been the toughest press release that anyone in the Central Office of Infomation has ever had to draft. A freeze on new campaigns and the abandonment of any regarded as “non-essential” mean staff numbers will drop by 40 percent – a loss of 287 jobs. Compulsory redundancies loom. The same press notice also revealed that the COI’s advertising spend was down by a 52% last month compared to June last year. We are not talking about small sums here. Last year’s COI marketing  spend of an eye-watering £531 million – half of it going on advertising – was about 20 percent more than the next biggest spender,