Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
The worry is not that the new head of MI6 is on Facebook. It’s that he looked such a berk It’s the Speedos photograph, isn’t it? That’s the real killer on the Facebook page of the wife of Sir John Sawers, ‘C’, the new head of MI6. The one of her and her daughter doing
I remember a colleague’s leaving party a couple of years ago. He slagged off virtually the whole newspaper in his speech, but he didn’t mention me. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, afterwards, taking me fondly by the arm. ‘You were in the first draft. I was going to stick you in the nepotism bit, just
Each time the BNP has to tone down its rhetoric, it’s a victory for everyone else It’s oddly unsettling, watching the media establishment trying to deal with the BNP. On Channel 4 News the other night, Krishnan Guru-Murthy was interviewing Andrew Brons, the thinner of their two toadish, loathsome MEPs, and I’m not sure that
Clearly they should just have a different Speaker every time. Like on Have I Got News For You? since they sacked Angus Deayton. Do you remember the one with Sir Trevor Mcdonald? Brilliant. Because we never saw it coming, did we? We all thought, well, they just need to find the right man, somebody with
All that has really changed is that we’re all angry now. It isn’t just students who are cross I’m worried that we are running out of people to hate. It’s all moving too fast. In the space of just a few months, we’ve had bankers and the BBC and the police and now MPs. What’s
Mandelson’s fixation with bananas repays study: it shows that he has not really changed Bananas on the mind. It’s Mandelson’s fault. There I was at the weekend, reading an interview with him in the Times. This was the new Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, the one who longs to go on Strictly Come Dancing, and only wears
As time moves on, and we forget about their slurs and their malice and their rather telling fantasies about seeing George Osborne dressed up as Marlene Dietrich, perhaps what we should remember about Gordon Brown’s inner circle is their control freakery. They don’t trust hospitals to heal, they don’t trust schools to teach, and they
It’s the little slights that really hurt. The ones where they just don’t seem to have thought about it. Certainly, we’re all thrilled that the great President Obama has deigned to make a visit to this little island vassal state. But why did he have to bring his own car? We have cars. Loads of
Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes, and use the word ‘lobby’ in myriad, self-satisfied ways, as though it were a
I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever
If the bankers start saying sorry, then we’ll have to forgive them. It’s much too soon I’m not sure I can deal with contrition from bankers. I thought it was what I wanted, but I now think I was wrong. ‘The first stage is to fess up,’ said Stephen Hester, the new RBS chief executive,
What are we to make of the disquieting information that Ehud Barak’s favoured pastime, when not waging war, politicking or dressing as a woman, is the dismantling and reassembling of clocks? ‘That’s really creepy,’ I said to the wife, when somebody on Newsnight mentioned it while we were watching it in bed. ‘It makes him
I dread to think why a Liberal Democrat would want to impersonate a traffic warden. It wouldn’t just be to get free parking. Not with them. It would have to be a sex thing. Some kind of NCP-themed bondage dungeon; an underground den kitted out to look like an underground car park. ‘You’ve been a
If there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood running the world, why aren’t I a member? I know that the Iranian regime is famously confused about quite a lot of things, but if they are right about David Miliband being a member of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, I’ll be absolutely livid. That bloody man has
I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg
The real BBC scandal is that John Prescott has been allowed to talk about class Obviously, the senior powers at the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. What a cock-up. What a failure of leadership. What a grubby betrayal of Reithian values. Is our licence fee really well spent on this gibbering nonsense? What
The grimmest assessment of the world economic meltdown that I have seen came not from a banker or a politician or a pundit, but from Kristian, a 53-year-old Icelandic fisherman quoted in the Times. ‘The priorities went askew,’ he sighed. ‘We thought we could have jam on our bread every day of the week.’ God.
‘Would you be interested,’ said the startlingly eager girl at the Birmingham conference centre, ‘in recording a message in the Conservative Video Box?’ God, I was pleased about that. There I was, neither a blond female, nor a read- ily identifiable member of an ethnic minority, and still the flunky reckoned I was the kind
OK. I’ll be honest. It’s been a bad fortnight, and I simply don’t understand any of the things you might expect me to be writing about. I don’t understand the fuss about teaching creationism in schools, because I can’t see that it would take very long. (‘God did it. Don’t go to the Galapagos. Class
If that nice Mr Medvedev is right, and Russia is indeed braced for a new cold war, then the spooks must be on a recruitment drive. Ours, obviously, but theirs too. So spare a thought for the Russian intelligence human resources office, because a career in post-KGB espionage can’t be an easy sell. The modern