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[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Richard Davenport-Hines discusses the Profumo affair’s enduring appeal”] Listen [/audioplayer]Christine Keeler and Jack Profumo might never have met in the swimming pool at Cliveden if it had not been for a filly called Ambiguity. As children, growing up at Cliveden, we all swam in the Thames. In the summer, the river was cold, dark and full of sludge, but my grandmother Nancy Astor, a devout Christian Scientist, thought it good for us. Then Ambiguity, my father’s filly, won the Oaks and with the prize money a heated swimming pool was built — and the rest, as they say, is history. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical version of history,

The chief executive of The Guardian has delivered a rather grim verdict about the newspaper’s future (or lack thereof). ‘At the moment, I believe we could not survive in the U.K,’ says Andrew Miller, blaming the ‘oversupply’ of newspapers and the omnipresence of the BBC. He has been speaking to the New Yorker magazine which has run one of its brilliant investigations (read it all here) and his verdict is reinforced by the editor, Alan Rusbridger, who (the piece says) ‘can envisage a paperless Guardian in five to ten years’. Rusbridger can also ‘imagine…printing on only certain days’. So the newspaper that came out with the slogan ‘we own the

So it has come to this. The Washington Post, paper of Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein and all the rest, has been sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For $250m. That, apparently, is roughly the daily fluctuation in the value of Bezos’s Amazon shares. For a man worth more than $20bn, buying the Post is a bit like the rest of us buying a new bicycle. That’s how far – and how fast – the once mighty Post has fallen. Even so, it’s startling that the Grahams, who have owned the paper for 80 years, have decided to sell. As I write at Think Scotland today, the Graham family has ‘sunk their own flagship the better to save

Look, we’ve known each other a while, you and I, so I think it’s time for a confession. It’s a big one, this. I haven’t even told my parents yet. But I think I might be a member of the ruling elite. Granted, it doesn’t feel that way of a morning, when I’m using my thumbnail to scratch baby vomit off my shoulder on the bus to Finsbury Park. But then, maybe it never does. Columnist for The Spectator, leader writer for the Times, the public school- and Oxbridge-educated son of a Conservative former Cabinet minister; hmm, hard to fight it. There have been five prime ministers in my lifetime,

I’ve been on Jura on a Wedding Planning Immersion Course* these past few days so, apart from noting that the Pope is retiring (upon which I have no opinion), I’ve not been paying little attention to the outside world. Some things have crept through, however. Among them this splendid obituary in today’s Telegraph. The intro is arresting and in the best tradition of Telegraph obituaries: Jungleyes Love, who has died aged 56, was an Old Harrovian hippie who traded in runic jewellery, dinosaur eggs and fossilised animal excrement, which he sold from his shop on the tourist trail to Kew Gardens in south-west London. Well, you want to know more,

I’m afraid that I can’t help but feel some of the comments left responding to this post go some way towards answering a question Daniel Hannan asked recently: why do right-wing parties struggle to win support from immigrants? After all, and as Mr Hannan notes, emigration is an entrepreneurial act and immigrants tend to be thrifty, hard-working types. This should, all things being equal, be fertile territory for conservatives. Except, as we know, not all things are equal and they’re certainly not equal in this case. The truth of the matter is that the conservative movement – whether in the United Kingdom or the United States – still has a

At the end of the editors’ meeting in 10 Downing St today, there was an awkward moment when someone asked if the past hour had been on or off the record. There was something odd about the idea of a bunch of journalists keeping something secret, and anyway there was anyway not much to reveal: it was just the start of a discussion. But a very important one that could yet decide whether Britain retains its ancient tradition of press freedom. David Cameron restated his position: that he’s instinctively against statutory regulation, but wants to see self-regulation along the lines of the Leveson Report. And could the newspaper industry deliver

Rod Liddle asks a question of the kind one frequently sees raised by media types: [W]hy is [Lord McAlpine] not suing Twitter itself? It is not Philip Schofield who the peer is suing, but ITV. Surely, likewise, Twitter needs to take some responsibility for its output? If, unlike broadcasters, it has no legal responsibility for what is put out through its witless conduit, then surely there is less of a responsibility on the people who use it, too? On the face of it this seems a reasonable question. But it doesn’t take long to appreciate that it really isn’t and that, though doubtless well-intentioned, it doesn’t make a heap of