At last an opinion poll has suggested that Mr Blair might not remain prime minister for as long as he likes. By the time this appears, another opinion poll might return to what has long been the normal condition: Mr Blair well in the lead, the Conservatives no danger to him. But Mr Blair must
Weidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: ‘Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was
Last week was the week when plenty of Britons, though not their government, seemed to place themselves on guard against M. Giscard’s constitution. It was appropriate, then, that it was also the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest among the many crises in the career of the first Eurosceptic.
One day last week, the only subject of conversation among those of us employed to observe proceedings from the House of Commons gallery was the blond hair of Mr Michael Fabricant, the Conservative member for Lichfield. It had become luxuriously longer than ever before, tumbling below his rear collar so that it was the most
We shall probably never know what drove someone like Crispin Blunt to carry out a suicide attack on Iain Duncan Smith. The young man was from a respectable, middle-class, and pro-European background. That is, he came from the Tory breeding ground of moderation. But not all respectable, middle-class pro-Europeans try to assassinate their leader. His
America’s numbering of the Saddam regime’s leading members, and issuing this order of precedence in the form of a deck of playing cards to aid American troops searching for them, has surely caused much unnecessary rivalry, jockeying for position and unpleasantness to one another on the part of the war criminals and torturers thus enumerated.
Two weeks ago, I argued here – I hope without any suggestion of great originality – that all crises produce the same people. That is, doves, hawks and a majority which is moderate or opportunistic according to taste. Thus it was possible to compare the present crisis over Iraq with the 1914 crisis over Serbia.
We are either at Munich, 1938, or Suez, 1956. Depending on whether we are for or against this coming war, one or the other is the favoured comparison. President Bush and Mr Blair, even more so Mr Rumsfeld, would have us believe that we are at Munich. Mr Bush, Mr Blair and, again even more
Hugh Trevor-Roper long refused to write his memoirs. Eventually, the firm of Weidenfeld persuaded him, if he was not going to write them, to speak them. The recipient of his reminiscences was to be a tape recorder and I. He agreed to talk to me because – I speculate – I knew him, but not
Female models, responsible for draping themselves over new cars and appearing in their underwear in advertisements to promote this year’s British International Motor Show in Birmingham, would describe as ‘out-of-date’ and ‘pathetic’ the government’s stereotyping of women into becoming politicians. It follows the case of Miss Estelle Morris who was browbeaten into becoming secretary of
It has come down, it seems, to two related but separate issues: there is a ‘should’ issue, and a ‘would’ issue. Should the Americans attack Iraq? Would they win a quick and relatively bloodless victory if they did – the ‘less’ in ‘bloodless’ being concerned with their forces’ blood rather than Iraq’s…. The ‘should’ question
Usually, at this time of the year, I am wandering, or renting, in Western Europe. But, for various reasons too uninteresting to recount here, I am spending this August at home. This removes the one drawback of being on holiday abroad: the search, in la France profonde, or wherever, for the British newspapers; and the