Rod Liddle — a former editor of the Today programme — says that the Corporation must stop pretending to be democratic if it is to keep the licence fee. Unashamed elitism is the only chance that the Beeb has in the new media world One of the first things to go to hell when the
P.G. Morgan goes in search of the truth about the great director’s flight from the US courts — and uncovers some uncomfortable truths worthy of a scene in Chinatown High above the heat and smog of Los Angeles, a small cardboard box sits on a shelf in LA’s Superior Court building awaiting its Hollywood moment.
The Taverna Agni is one of the more expensive restaurants in Corfu, but one would scarcely expect Peter Mandelson and George Osborne to slum it. As is normal for members of London’s political elite, they found themselves in the same exotic location one August weekend. So they went to chew the kleftiko together and laugh
The statistics were flying like circling jumbos at the Intelligence Squared debate on Heathrow’s proposed expansion. The News 24 anchorman Nik Gowing introduced a panel of experts led by Tom Kelly, once spin doctor to Tony Blair and now BAA’s head of communications. Heathrow’s problems boil down to capacity, he said. Already it works at
Georgia is still on our minds. August’s short nasty descent into violence triggered the first emergency debate of the season. John Kampfner, in the chair, began by observing wryly that the crisis had disproved the notion that ‘two countries that have Macdonalds don’t go to war.’ Oleh Rybachuk, a leading Ukrainian democrat, proposed the motion
There are too few active homosexuals and career women in the Third World. This is because blacks and Asians — from Australasia to Bangalore — have a tendency to put them in a pot, cook them and eat them. Primitive African tribes also eat crippled people — those in a wheelchair, or merely suffering from
It’s possible to get a reservation again at Scott’s. The City boys have well and truly left the building, and can now be found drowning their sorrows elsewhere, in dark corners of the West End and Chelsea, as far away from the prying eyes of the City as possible. ‘“Reduce your risk. Sell. Get flat.”
Swearing and shouting are underrated, says Giles Coren. Four-letter words can be immensely satisfying and extraordinarily effective When I was ever so small and sweet, romper-suited and frilly-booted and really quite an angel to look at, I must have had a gob on me like an angry plasterer, because the only piece of advice I
The Medjugorje story begins early in 1976 when a Franciscan monk in the former Yugoslavia, Father Tomislav Vlasic, starts an affair with a nun who becomes pregnant. Frightened he will be exposed as the child’s father, Father Vlasic persuades her to move away to Germany. She hopes he will honour his promise to leave the
‘Let us be clear: this is a crisis caused on Wall Street,’ insisted Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her consensus-strangling speech on Monday, shortly before her fellow members of the House of Representatives voted to reject the President’s $700 billion bail-out plan. Out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama ventured that the root cause of the
Readers of Anthony Trollope will remember how thoughtless and greedy young men in the Victorian professions can be lured into ruin by accepting ‘accommodation bills’ from their shifty acquaintances. They make themselves liable for the debts of others; and only too late do they discover that they are trapped in a web of financial mechanics
The Treasury will be the engine room of David Cameron’s government. It will have to be, given the ghastly economic inheritance. But the economy will be only one of the incoming Chancellor’s headaches — his department will be in no fit state to do the leading. The Treasury — once the citadel of high-quality policy
The Conservatives last won a general election in 1992. That was also the year when the opinion polls met their Waterloo. The results of 50 nationwide surveys were published during that campaign. All but six showed Labour ahead, and they all suggested that the outcome of the election would be a hung Parliament, with Labour
Rod Liddle is outraged by the Foreign Secretary’s alleged comparison of himself to Michael Heseltine: like comparing a Big Beast to a stumpy little Muntjac deer. Where have all the political giants gone? Apparently, David Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference was deliberately low-key because he did not wish to have a ‘Heseltine Moment’
The sophisticated truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on 20 September, which took dozens of lives, was the latest incident in a campaign to destabilise the entire subcontinent. Most reports have blamed al-Qa’eda militants but the real blame for the crime belongs with the Talebanised sectors of the Pakistani armed forces and intelligence
Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader must not be tempted by a ‘safety first’ strategy at his conference in Birmingham. The global financial crisis has transformed the political context and left an opening for the Conservatives to promise true radicalism and to be proudly bold The Labour party conference already had an apocalyptic aura
In theory, Europeans find American elections vulgar and plutocratic. In practice, they find them utterly gripping. This is partly because the US is wealthy and powerful, but mainly because American campaigns, being more participatory than European ones, are more interesting. All organisations grow according to the DNA encoded at the time of their conception. The
There are two reliable tricks which can fill the room at any Tory speaking event: offer free beer, or put Michael Gove on the panel. His fusion of almost comic politeness and intellectual ruthlessness have given him quite a following, whether he’s defending neoconservatism or David Cameron. In three short years he has been propelled
In at the deep end. That’s how Intelligence Squared likes to kick off, and the first debate of the new season plunged straight into the perilous waters of the Israel–Palestine conflict. David Lindley, the chair, asked each speaker to present ideas for a workable peace. Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, opened
This summer, as a consequence of the credit crunch, rising air fares and a strong euro, more than half of all Britons chose to spend their holidays in this country. Predictably this was also the summer that proved to be one of the dullest and wettest on record. August may have been, according to the