Wherever the civilised English gather to discuss the state we’re in, it is almost axiomatic to allow that we’re getting less refined. Discourse, public and private, is (we tell each other) getting cruder; wit is duller; our culture is dumbing down. A vulgarity and obviousness is gaining ground over the art of delicate suggestion. Nowhere
Few would dispute that, in the last fortnight, Gordon Brown has shown why he has been a fixture for so long at the very apex of British politics. His economic model has imploded and his debt pyramid collapsed. The taxpayer is up to his neck to the tune of half a trillion pounds to clear
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.
Dramatis personae: Joe Citizen (a citizen) Jack and Jill Jones (Joe’s neighbours) Mr Whatam-Ibid (a surveyor) Mr Ballpark-Estimate (a valuer) Ms Dreamhomes (an estate agent) Mr Moneybags (a small banker) Mr Dollarsacks (a global fund manager) Mr Brown
‘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
I find Miliband’s fridge and its contents more interesting than the Foreign Secretary Did you see David Miliband’s fridge? It was massive. I saw it in a photograph in a Times magazine article about the brainy young Foreign Secretary. The pictures were intended to illustrate the would-be Prime Minister’s human side, but the fridge was
After a gripping week of political theatre in Manchester, James Forsyth invites readers to submit nominations for a new category in our Parliamentarian of the Year Awards: the prize for the Readers’ Representative If a week is a long time in politics, then a year is an absolute age. In Manchester, Labour delegates appeared staggered
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
In these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair Darling’s implausible eyebrows, I must be mindful of my position in the camelid world. If I sneeze, the British llama market may catch pneumonia. Not that I am
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics If Labour does dump Gordon Brown before the next election, then each of the three major parties will, this decade, have replaced a leader before he has had a chance to fight a general election. What used to be exceptional has become almost routine. This is a consequence
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
For five years I served on the Broadcasting Standards Council, and there I encountered a riddle whose resolution has eluded me. The BSC has passed into history. Its function was really just to exist, and by existing to provide politicians and broadcasters with a plausible answer to complaints of the kind made by the late
It didn’t occur to Cameron that White Van Man might be trying to pat him on the back Ah, the chaos there must have been on Planet Cameron every time that Dylan Jones was due for another chat. The editor of GQ writing a book about their man. Which anecdotes to tell? Which to leave
If you or your chatmate are looking for a nilogism or mislexis, don’t wait till an earar At the beginning of the year I devoted this column to words that don’t exist. By that I meant things for which there ought to be a word, but there isn’t. This is itself, of course, one of
So it was 2018 and the government was in trouble. Real trouble. In newspapers and magazines, on Dame Emily Maitlis’s Newsnight and Davina McCall’s Today programme, one question was being asked. Would anybody ever vote Conservative again? At this stage, by-election disasters were not unexpected. The loss of Crewe and Nantwich had been on the
Until recently I never realised that triangulation had entered theology as well as politics. But listening to Thought for the Day on BBC radio the other day, it struck me that modern churchmen, too, are triangulating the deepest question of all in religion: the question of faith. Faith is now advanced as the triangulation between
Have you ever noticed how the Islamist terror threat has been ridiculously overplayed by the government? I have. I’ll be standing with my kids on a crowded Tube, looking at the 20-year-old with the beard, the knitted cap and the classic Bin-Laden-style salwar kameez/combat jacket combo and thinking, ‘Well, he’s a lovely devout bloke from
Matthew Parris provides an A to Z of things that at one point scared us rigid but the dangers of which now appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Britain, says the poet Kate Fox, quoted on Radio 4’s Saturday Live last week, is a country ‘eternally poised between a hosepipe ban and a flood’.
As ever, the great disappointment of Jerusalem is the lack of swivel-eyed loons wandering around believing themselves to be Jesus. Or Solomon or David or Mohammed. Or Elvis, even. You come to Jerusalem, you want to see Jerusalem Syndrome. Isn’t that part of the deal? It’s like Amsterdam without the drugs, or London without the
‘How the Guardianistas changed their tune,’ was the heading to a Sunday Times factbox published in the paper last weekend. The intention was to mock those Fleet Street columnists, erstwhile fans of Gordon Brown, who have turned against their former hero. ‘Only five more dreaming days until Gordon Brown’s coronation,’ the famously independent-minded and fiercely