What’s wrong with supporting James Delingpole? Ask the Guardian: it has had a tremendous amount of fun exposing the Tories’ campaign manager for the Corby by-election, Chris Heaton Harris MP, appearing to support The Spectator’s very own James Delingpole. The paper has obtained video recorded by what it describes as an ‘undercover Greenpeace reporter’ of Heaton-Harris telling
George Osborne’s public interventions on issues other than the economy are few and far between, which is why his article in today’s Times merits attention. In it, Osborne analyses some of the causes of Barack Obama’s victory and then applies his findings to the 2015 election in Britain. On the basis of this article, we
It is a busy day on the economic front, with new inflation figures (which are expected to show an increase) to be released at 9.30am and Ed Davey, the energy secretary, to address the House about further allegations (published in the Guardian this time) that the wholesale price of gas has been fixed by traders. The
Theresa May gave a defiant statement to the house on the Special Immigration Appeals Committee’s (SIAC) decision to uphold Abu Qatada’s appeal against deportation to Jordan on grounds that he would not receive a fair trial. She vowed to fight on by ‘appealing the decision’, which prompts the question: how will she do that? It’s
The decision to award George Entwistle a £1.3 million payoff appears, as my colleague Rod Liddle notes, to have misjudged the public mood (and indeed the mood of the majority of hard working and underpaid BBC staff). It is the sort of development about which the government feels it ought to comment, to provide a source
The BBC crisis continues to dominate the airwaves. George Entwistle’s £1.3 million payoff has set outraged tongues wagging. Tim Montgomerie has collected the furious comments made by several Tory MPs. Much of the rest of the press pack has followed suit, saying that the severance deal is yet another self-inflicted wound by BBC management. Meanwhile,
Chris Patten has just appeared on the Andrew Marr Show to discuss the resignation of George Entwistle and to evaluate its fallout. Patten conceded that the BBC is mired in a mess of its own making and that it was inevitably under pressure as a result. He opened a media war while defending the BBC’s
This is an unusual Remembrance Sunday; it is 70 years since the feats of arms which led Churchill to say: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end; but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ It is 70 years to the day since Allied troops were
Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he ought to be a Nobel Laureate – American Pastoral stands as one of the best books written since the war about, among other things, the
Tony Little, the headmaster of Eton College, has given an interview (£) to the Times’ Alice Thompson and Rachel Sylvester. It’s a curiosity. On the one hand, Little is extraordinary: a local boy who won a bursary to Eton in the ‘60s. On the other hand, he is emblematic of how the headmasters of the
‘The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being… This line is not static within us; it sways to and fro over the years. Even in a heart imbued with evil, it allows a small bridgehead of good to remain. And it permits a small niche of evil to survive
David Priestland is worried. Towards the end of his recently published book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, he warns: ‘[The crash of] 2008 has set the world on a course towards potential conflict, and the domestic and international forces that brought us the violence of the 1930s and 1940s are with us today – albeit still in
Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, which seems right because it is the most accomplished book on the list – challenging but fundamentally readable thanks to the execution and, it must be said, the drama of the history of that period, which Mantel handles with the insight of a historian, though thankfully
Brevity does not imply levity. That, at least, is the view of Ian McEwan. The national treasure was speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival over the weekend when he crowned the novella, which he defined as a book of roughly 25,000 words, as the ‘supreme literary form’. He challenged publishers and critics who believe the
George Osborne is a keen observer of American politics, so perhaps it is little surprise to read in the Telegraph that the chancellor is arguing for faster withdrawal from Afghanistan. The American presidential race has confronted national war-weariness. The Obama camp has long held that the 2014 drawdown date is firm; that is when the
The award of the Nobel Prize to the European Union is a tremendous joke; and like all great jokes it has brought people together. Commentators of left and right are united, for the most part, in condemning the Nobel Committee’s revision of history that claims the EU, a body that has only existed since 1993,
‘People begin to feel that… there are bonds of international duty binding all the nations of the earth together.’ This quotation, which resonates so clearly as yet more blood is shed in Syria, belongs to Guiseppe Mazzini, the 19th century Italian nationalist whose vision of a ‘Holy Alliance of peoples’ underscores much of Professor Mark Mazower’s Governing
The papers are unanimous: Andrew Mitchell is a dead man walking, and like most pantomime ghouls he’s become a laughing stock. Fraser’s Telegraph column tells of MPs and cabinet colleagues ridiculing the chief whip. The joke deepens because Mitchell, perhaps due to his insistence that he did not use the word ‘pleb’, apparently does not
There have been some sharp responses to the demise of the proposed BAE EADS merger. My personal favourite is John Redwood’s pithy: ‘Several of you wrote in expressing dismay at the proposed tie up between BAE and the Franco German civil aviation company. I did not write about it, as I assumed it would be an
The Nobel committee have delivered their verdict on the literature prize: Mo Yan is new laureate. Over at the books blog, I explain why this is an important decision politically. Yan is the first Chinese citizen to win the award, a reminder that the country’s culture influence is growing together with its political and economic