Ikea

The Swedish model: Ikea’s restaurant puts others to shame

Ikea has opened its first high-street restaurant in the UK. There’s not a flat-pack in sight – but a hotdog is 85p and a children’s pasta dish with tomato sauce (plus soft drink and piece of fruit) is 95p. A nine-piece full English will set you back £3.75, while a serving of their famous meatballs (with mash, peas, cream sauce and lingonberry jam) is £5.50. Vegetarians are amply catered for. It’s open 12 hours a day (and that may be extended further to enable dinner). There’s free wifi and somewhere to charge your phone. Even better, there is no music. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t. And in

The strange boycott of GB News

GB News, the UK’s first new news channel in decades, launched on Sunday night with a monologue from the estimable Andrew Neil, setting out the channel’s philosophy.  ‘We will puncture the pomposity of our elites and politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech and democracy that it is’, he said. Just 48 hours later and GB News’s detractors have already proven him right.  Anyone who has bothered to watch GB News’s output in its first couple of days would not have detected anything resembling ‘hate’ Stop Funding Hate, a pearl-clutching campaign group that seeks to deprive news outlets