Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to ‘give it a rest’ and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there.
The Times’s campaign against the billionaire businessman Michael Ashcroft is now largely forgotten. At the time it was a sensation. In the summer and autumn of 1999 the paper ran scores of articles about Lord Ashcroft, then treasurer of the Tory party and its major donor. The Times not only suggested that Lord Ashcroft 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.
Almost everyone dislikes the News of the World, including many of its readers. It is coarse, intrusive, hypocritical and sanctimonious. It frequently puts itself above or outside the law – perhaps most famously when it so whipped up public hysteria over paedophilia that the mobs took to the streets, in one case mistaking a paediatrician
Before I start this piece, which is about the future of the Daily Telegraph, I should make clear that it is written by me. When I last wrote at length about the Telegraph – rather controversially, perhaps – I appear to have caused palpitations in the heart of at least one banker. The Spectator is
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
It was in these pages four weeks ago that the idea of a non-governmental referendum on the new European constitution was first mooted. Paul Robinson explained how, if Tony Blair remained steadfast in his refusal to consult the people, it would be possible to organise a referendum. He could have cited the example of Gibraltar,
Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation’s conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been ‘meeting farmers and communities at
Investors stung by the endowment-policy and pension-plan mis-selling scandals, and in possession of poorly managed unit trusts that have failed miserably to outperform the FT-SE index, can hardly be blamed for coming to the conclusion that they might just as well make their own investment decisions rather than rely on the men in grey suits.
Is the eight-year reign of Piers Morgan at the Daily Mirror drawing to a gentle close? Last October I wrote, ‘My bet is that in six months’ time the Mirror will not belong to Trinity.’ Mmm. More than six months have passed and the newspaper has not been sold – yet. An approach to buy
This column does not often find common cause with American farmers, nor with farmers of the developed world in general. But it has become necessary to do so, thanks to some brazen protectionist policies on the part of China. Last year, China announced it was going to ban the import of all genetically modified crops.
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
In the early hours of last Thursday, armed police arrived at the Belfast house of Liam Clarke, the Sunday Times’s Northern Ireland editor, and his wife, Kathy. They seized four computers, children’s games, old newspapers and written material. Liam’s and Kathy’s eight-year-old daughter was in the house. Police smashed the door to Mr Clarke’s office,
If William Rees-Mogg had a fan club, I would be its president. I would lick envelopes for him and update his website, which would no doubt be full of his latest geopolitical prognostications. I would arrange coach parties of the faithful so that we could travel down to Somerset and glimpse him as he paced
Unesco’s recent Education for All week was outwardly a campaign to boost the educational opportunities for children in the Third World. On closer inspection, however, the campaigning materials betray a political motive involving one issue alone: ‘gender parity’. ‘Educating girls yields the highest return in economic terms,’ asserts Unesco. ‘Countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have
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.
The Daily Telegraph’s story about the Scottish Labour MP George Galloway is undoubtedly a cracker. In some respects it reminds me of the Guardian’s demolition of the Tory MP Neil Hamilton during the Major years. As a cocky, rather slimy Thatcherite of conspicuously ungentlemanly mien, Mr Hamilton represented everything the Guardian loathed. Similarly, though it
This was not a good war for newspapers. I am not so much thinking of the journalism. Much of it was excellent, though newspapers are obviously at a disadvantage to 24-hour rolling news channels, which not only provide breaking stories but also analysis from people who surprisingly often know what they are talking about. Newspapers
One of the paradoxes of this war is that most of us do not have very much idea of what is going on. That is at any rate what I feel. There are hundreds of brave and talented journalists in Iraq who address us every hour of the day and night on television, and fill
Although much overshadowed by the war in Iraq, environmentalists, businessmen and charity workers met at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last week to discuss why 1.2 billion people still have no access to clean water. The United Nations has set a target of reducing this by half by 2015. But Michel Camdessus, the former