A fascinating story has emerged from a north-western leftie quadrant of the United States: the sacking of British conductor Matthew Halls from his post of artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival, in the college town of Eugene. Mr Halls insists he has not been told why he has been fired. Sponsors and supporters of
Nearly all Tory MPs now agree Theresa May should stay on as Prime Minister. She must get the party through Brexit, they say. A leadership contest now would risk splitting the party over the European issue. One senior Tory who was agitating to depose May back in July has told me that he has now
It is late in the evening. You’re in a bar. You’ve had quite a bit to drink but you are conversing with the fragrant young lady you found hanging around in there. You find her quite attractive and are possibly keen for things to proceed. What should you say to her, to speed things along?
It’s right that some children are taken into care. One case in point is that of Ayeeshia-Jayne Smith, the toddler who was stamped to death by her violent young mother in 2014. She was known to social services for all of her short life, from the point when her pregnant mother was found living in
I first met Theresa May, or met her properly, way back in the last century. I’d been invited to speak at a constituency dinner for Maidenhead Conservatives on a Saturday night, and sat at her table. She was with her husband, Philip; I remember only my suspicion that he didn’t desperately want to be there.
We are approaching an important royal anniversary, which I trust will be marked with a display of the appropriate reverence for the woman involved. It is almost exactly 20 years since Princess Anne was gratuitously rude to Cherie Blair, during a reception at Balmoral. The Princess Royal can sniff out stinking fish from a distance
Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out ‘gender stereotyping’ in TV ads. I’m already looking forward to it because the ASA’s first thoughts on the matter, published in July, were fascinating. An ad for baby milk which showed a girl growing up
So much for Donald J. Trump, ‘America first’ isolationist. Gone is the man who, as a civilian, repeatedly endorsed a speedy withdrawal from America’s longest-running war (2012 tweet: ‘Afghanistan is a complete waste!’), who railed against George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq and advocated leaving Syria to the whims of the Russkies and others. On
I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the clue’s in the name — was waiting to board a flight when he started ‘harmlessly’ talking about 9/11. There is no reason to believe he has any connections with extremists, but he was kicked off
Do you believe Chloe Ayling? She is the 20-year-old glamour model whose dramatic story has been all over the newspapers throughout August. She claims to have been lured to a fake photoshoot in Italy, injected with ketamine, stuffed inside a suitcase and shoved into the boot of a car. So far, so just about credible.
Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green body, it looks far too colourful and exotic to be a native species. But it very much is, as you can tell from the fact that it has a rustic nickname — the yaffle. This,
When a new MP is offered a job as a parliamentary private secretary for a cabinet member, it’s often a test to see if they really would do anything to get into government. It involves running errands, spying on colleagues, ferrying messages around the Commons and planting inane questions for backbenchers to ask in the
All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell them apart. The same wide steps lead up to the same glossy front doors, all with prestigious brass knobs. Each separate house is itself a layered stack of quacks and docs: radiology one floor above
Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with our spring-fed water supply. Hearing their car, I slithered out to greet them, covered in slime like a monster from the deep. It would be natural to say this took them by surprise. It did
People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn. More specifically, they are deficient in oxytocin, a neuropeptide hormone sometimes known as the ‘cuddle drug’ because of its ability to turn normal human beings into simpering halfwits. Psychologists ran a series of studies in
We like to think we have moved on from the age of snobbery. Judging others by birth or status, or at least being seen to, is the height of rudeness, and just not very cool. But English snobbery is in fact as potent as before — and possibly even more insidious. Among my age group
David Cameron was in the news again this week after being paid £1 million a minute to give a speech explaining why Brexit was a terrible mistake at the annual Gay Stranglers’ Guild gala dinner at a brutal dictatorship in central Asia, before spending a week cruising the Baltic on the yacht of Putin’s second-favourite
Some years ago, when Millwall played West Ham United, the Millwall fans sang the following song (to the tune of ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, if you want to hum along): ‘Oh east London, is like Bengal. Oh east London is like Bengal. It’s like the back streets of Delhi. Oh east -London is
As usual for August, I’m in France, where the news in brief is ‘Euro up, Macron down’. The youthful French president, who swept to power with two-thirds of the second round vote in May, has seen his approval rating plunge to 36 per cent — at the time of writing, 2 per cent worse than
Politics is such a fickle game that it’s perfectly acceptable to believe six impossible things before breakfast without ever having to apologise for being so wrong. Remember, for instance, when everyone was predicting that the dead cert increased majority for Theresa May would lead to the creation of a new party? Perhaps, like everyone else
