Spike Milligan lives. I encountered him last week among the Australian military contingent at Camp Holland: a Dutch-led base in southern Afghanistan, in the province next to Helmand. Corporal Milligan, to be precise. But everyone calls him Spike. And though I’ve no reason to think he is or could be a fine singer or a
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
Quite possibly the greatest moment of my life so far — better perhaps even than pills in the late 1980s or riding to hounds on Exmoor or getting into Oxford or finding that the huge purple mite I’d discovered clinging to my left testicle during a cold bucket shower in the Western Sudan appeared not
It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds No columnist should read too much into online responses to what he has written. No more than those who call in to radio phone-in programmes are those who post their comments online representative of readers as a whole — let
There was no mistaking the sadistic zeal with which Labour MPs bounded into the lobbies to vote for John Bercow on Monday. The whole election had been an unexpected gift to them: a chance to foist on David Cameron a Speaker who is loathed by the Conservative party. When Mr Bercow promised to serve ‘no
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
A friend who teaches at an old-fashioned Sussex boarding school has a zero-tolerance approach to racism. The moment he hears one of the foreign boys claiming to be a victim of it, that’s them chucked out of the class for the rest of the lesson. ‘Well I’m sorry,’ says my friend Duncan, quite unapologetically. ‘But
George Osborne was in bed when he heard Andrew Lansley on breakfast radio last week discussing health spending. It was an unremarkable story about Labour’s budgets, with no hint of the political bombshell about to drop. The shadow health secretary was saying that the Tories would increase health spending — which is, of course, official
By this weekend most people won’t remember the details of, and some won’t remember at all, the exchange of emails between Lord Mandelson and the former Labour blogger Derek Draper, which took place in 2008 and before Mandelson joined Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, but which was leaked to a Sunday newspaper two weeks ago. What lingers
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
Let’s not get too worked up if Guy Gibson’s dog ends up with a PC name This week’s vexed columnar question: should Guy Gibson’s dog still be called Nigger in The Dam Busters remake? Some of you no doubt think you know already what my line will be. And it’s true that as a second
We call it ‘antiquity’. And yet, in this imperial Roman city, it seemed like yesterday Call to mind London’s Regent Street. Suppose it straight, not curved. Suppose it about the same width but more than twice as long: a mile and a quarter. Picture it lined on each side not with shop fronts but with
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
‘Bugger,’ says my delightful eight-year-old daughter, dancing round my desk. ‘Bugger, Daddy. Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ ‘Don’t say that word darling, it’s really unattractive,’ I say. ‘You use it, Daddy. I learned it from Coward on the Beach,’ says daughter, gleefully looking up the offending word, which isn’t difficult, because it’s the second one in the
Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel Do you believe in ghosts? I wish I did, for were I to entertain the flimsiest hope that some relic of a personality could haunt a place where once they were, then I should not have slept a wink last night,
It is typical of Michael Martin that his laughably short resignation statement contained a fundamental misunderstanding of parliament. ‘This House is at its very best when it is united,’ he said. The precise opposite is true. Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s places are precisely two sword lengths apart because it is intended to be an
The Labour party now has three weeks to save itself from oblivion. The only question facing MPs is whether the open fratricide that would follow a challenge to Gordon Brown would be preferable to the death by a thousand humiliating cuts if the Prime Minister sits tight at Number 10. The European and local council
I don’t bait greens only for fun. I do it because they’re public enemy number one If only you could have seen the gratitude in my guinea pigs’ eyes just now. At least I think it was gratitude. It’s hard to be totally sure with those blank, dead, black staring eyes which, let’s be honest,
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
Some secrets are too vulgar to be disclosed by any political party. Gordon Brown’s radical cuts agenda, encoded in the small print of the Budget, is one such secret. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to admit to it, as it contradicts his pious claim that ‘you can’t cut your way out of recession’. David Cameron