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Could Health and Safety kill off home cooking?

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If Health and Safety is (are?) your thing, you must always be dreaming, like Alexander the Great, of new worlds to conquer. The next one, I predict, will be cooking at home. Recently I have noticed talk about the bad effect of ‘particles’ produced by hot food cooked in or on ovens. The sequence will go thus: a study will prove that people who cook at home inhale more particles than others, reducing their life expectancy. A woman seeking divorce will win a higher settlement because, she says, she was forced to spend hours of each day in such dangerous culinary conditions, suffering various ‘harms’. Then it will be shown that children are the innocent victims of passive cooking. Ovens, except for microwaves, will be forbidden in new-build homes.

Why I’m falling in love with Sean Spicer

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Washington, DC I hate to admit it, but I think I’m falling in love with Sean Spicer. No doubt Donald Trump’s stocky, gum-chewing, sartorially challenged press secretary will strike many readers as an unlikely object of passion. But it’s hard not to get red-hot for a man capable of inspiring so much outrage among the most boring, self-important people in America. As press secretary, Spicer’s only real job is to run the President’s daily press briefing, one of those bizarre, quasi-official American institutions — like the State of the Union address or the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn — whose utility no one ever seems to question.

Why is Nicola Sturgeon so cagey about Scotland’s EU future?

From our UK edition

It's important to keep an ear out for the rhetoric of Britain’s remaining Remain parties, because they are changing, too. Having announced plans for a second Scottish referendum entirely because of Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon is now incredibly cagey about whether her independent nation would even be part of the EU, or perhaps more like Norway. The same is true of the Lib Dems. Last weekend, Tim Farron managed to give a whole speech to his party’s spring conference railing against only a ‘hard Brexit’ and thus never quite saying whether a Lib Dem government (humour me) would leave the EU or not. These people need to get off the fence. Mind you, so do I.

How both Britain and the EU might claim victory in the Brexit talks

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Theresa May doesn’t do drama. She regards order as both a political and personal virtue. And this goes a long way towards explaining why she is Prime Minister. After the Brexit vote last June and David Cameron’s resignation, the Tories had had enough excitement. They turned to the leadership contender who was best able to project a reassuring sense of calm. It is in keeping with May’s approach that she has drained the drama from the triggering of Article 50, the start of the two-year process for leaving the EU. Other prime ministers might have been tempted to do it with a flourish — to feel the hand of history on their shoulder. But May has removed any sense of surprise by having her spokesman blandly declare that she’ll be sending the letter on Wednesday.

Europe should follow Britain’s lead on refugees

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When a humanitarian tragedy disappears from our newspapers, there are two possibilities: that the crisis is over and life for survivors is gradually returning to normal — or that the human toll has become so routine as to no longer be considered newsworthy. Sadly, the deaths of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to seek a new life in Europe fall into the latter category. Eighteen months after the photographs of little Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach generated a huge swell of public emotion, entire families are still dying on a regular basis. In the first ten weeks of this year, some 525 people were lost crossing the Mediterranean. Europe is still no closer to ending this outrage.

How Lenin manipulated the Russian Revolution to his own ends

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The centenary of the Russian Revolution has arrived right on time, just as the liberal democratic world is getting a taste of what it’s like to feel political gravity give way. In 2017, Lenin lives. ‘In many ways he was a thoroughly modern phenomenon,’ writes Victor Sebestyen in Lenin the Dictator, the kind of demagogue familiar to us in western democracies, as well as in dictatorships. In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people’. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything….

Liam Fox’s ungentlemanly conduct

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Ever since the 56 SNP MPs descended on Westminster following the 2015 general election, they have been criticised for failing to master Westminster etiquette -- from clapping in the Chamber to taking shortcuts through the Chancellor's office. However, is it really the Conservative MPs that are the ones in need of a lesson in good manners? Mr S only asks after Lord Bell -- the Tory grandee -- let slip, at his Glass Half Full party, what Liam Fox told him Nicola Sturgeon's nickname was when she was a student at the University of Glasgow. The Evening Standard reports that Bell revealed that the International Trade secretary said they called the First Minister 'seaweed'. The reason? 'Not even the tide would take her out.

Jean-Claude Juncker is the worst thing about being a Remainer

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The best thing about being a Remainer is obviously the dinner parties, where we all sit around being incredibly well-heeled in leafy Islington. Bloody love a good heel, I do. And a leaf. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Eddie Izzard and Nick Clegg crack jokes at each other in French, as Lily Allen and Matthew Parris do impressions of old people from Northumberland, while in the background Bob Geldof and Professor Brian Cox duet on the piano. It’s almost literally how I spend almost all of my time. Whereas Leaver dinner parties, so I’m told, are just IDS and a Scotch egg. The worst thing about being a Remainer, though, is Jean-Claude Juncker. Indeed, I’d go further and say that he’s the worst thing about the European Union altogether.

Why didn’t more MPs complain about BBC bias?

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There’s one thing that bothers me a lot about the letter sent by ‘more than 70’ MPs to the director-general of the BBC complaining about bias in its coverage of the Brexit debate. There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons, of whom 330 are Conservative. So does this mean that more than 570 of our elected representatives, including the vast majority of Tories, think the BBC is doing a bloody good job and is an exemplar of impartial reporting? If so, I suspect they have been secretly lobotomised — perhaps by members of the BBC’s impeccably fair and impartial editorial board. In the dead of night. Silently, without remorse. Chloroform, a hacksaw, a scalpel.

Should conservatives fear new working-class support? Some clearly do

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In America, an argument has broken out among journalists, writers and intellectuals in the aftermath of the presidential election about whether Trump’s white working-class voters were decent, upright citizens let down by the supercilious liberal establishment or whether they were, in Hilary Clinton’s words, a racist, sexist, homophobic basket of deplorables. The curious thing about this debate is that the defenders of Trump’s supporters are, for the most part, left--wingers, like the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who spent five years chronicling a depressed blue-collar community in Louisiana, while those who disparage them as ‘in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles’ are conservatives.

Boris Johnson finds himself in a tight spot

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Despite David Cameron's best efforts to keep his party together during the course of the EU referendum campaign, his personal friendships with Brexiteers did suffer. However, while both Michael Gove and Boris Johnson found themselves left out in the cold by the former prime minister, the Foreign Secretary at least is making inroads once more. After Johnson and Cameron buried the hatchet over whisky on a trip to Israel for Shimon Peres's funeral, the pair have been snapped out on the town in New York. The duo enjoyed a night out at the Red Rooster restaurant.

Why do so many right-wingers hate Britain so much?

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One of the curiosities of the past 72 hours has been the manner in which it has become possible to make a clear distinction between those people who like and admire this country and those who only say they love it. There are certain ways in which the latter may be identified. The presence of a Spitfire or a noble lion on their social media profiles is one all but unerring indicator that you're dealing with someone who deplores the realities of modern Britain. These stout-hearted, willy-waving yeomen cannot help wetting themselves. The Mooslims are coming! (From Kent, it seems.) They are the panicky ones, not the ordinary British people who, while horrified by this week's events, have quietly continued to go about their business. London is not under siege; it has not fallen.

Watch: Andrew Neil’s message for the jihadi johnnies out there

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After a testing week which saw four fatalities and 40 injured following a terrorist incident in Westminster, 'PrayForLondon' has been doing the rounds on social media. Happily, the BBC offered its own striking tribute to Keith Palmer -- the police officer murdered in the attack -- last night. https://twitter.com/bbcthisweek/status/845064558548963328 Speaking on This Week, Andrew Neil said Palmer's action had served as a reminder that 'the most important people in this country are not the rich, the powerful, the famous but those who run to confront the enemies of our civilisation while the rest of us are running away': 'I know there are still some jihadi johnniess out there who think they will eventually triumph because their love of death is greater than our love of life.

What the papers say: How can we prevent a repeat of the Westminster attack?

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Theresa May told MPs yesterday that Britain will not waver in the face of terrorism. She is widely praised for her emotional address in the Commons, in which she said simply: 'We are not afraid'. But still the question lingers: what can we do to prevent a repeat of Wednesday’s attack? Theresa May hit precisely the right note in her address to MPs, says the Daily Telegraph, which compares the Prime Minister’s response to that of Margaret Thatcher’s after the Brighton bombing in 1984. Yet while her message is an important one, there are ‘inevitable questions’.

Channel 4’s Seven O’Clock News humiliation

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Oh dear. With Scotland Yard treating today's attack in Westminster this afternoon 'as a terrorist incident', hacks have spent the day trying to establish more details about the situation that has so far claimed four casualties. However, has a thirst for news meant some are a bit too eager to publish before properly checking the facts? Mr S only asks after Channel 4 had to perform a humiliating U-turn this evening live on air. At the beginning of Channel 4's 7 O'clock news bulletin, the broadcaster announced that they had reason to believe Abu Izzadeen, the Islamic hate preacher, was the Westminster terror attacker. However as the show went on, this 'scoop' began to unravel. You see there was a problem...

An independent London would be a Thatcherite dystopia

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Tottenham MP David Lammy has been writing in the Evening Standard about how it makes sense now for London to become a 'city-state', following Brexit: Over the course of the next two years as the reality of Brexit begins to bite, the economic, social and political cleavages between London and other parts of the country will become more pronounced. London’s status as a de facto city-state will become clearer and the arguments for a London city-state to forge a more independent path will become stronger. I've argued before that there is an increasingly strong case for London leaving the union because the aspirations of Londoners and the people of England are diverging so much.

Ken Livingstone does it again

From our UK edition

In an appearance on the Today programme on Monday, Ken Livingstone silenced his critics by managing to refrain from mentioning Hitler once during the course of the interview. Alas, his good behaviour wasn't to last. Speaking on Radio 5 Live this morning, the former Mayor of London -- who is currently suspended from Labour after he argued that Hitler supported Zionism -- managed to say the H-word once again. Speaking to Emma Barnett, Livingstone called for 'right-wing' Labour MPs -- including Wes Streeting and Chuka Umunna -- to be suspended.

What Martin McGuinness’s eulogisers would like to forget

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I never met Martin McGuinness, but I was certainly affected by him from an early age. His decisions, and those of his colleagues on the IRA Army Council, indelibly coloured my childhood. Belfast in the 1970s and ’80s was a grey, fortified city, compelling in many ways, but permanently charged with the unpredictable electricity of violence. Our local news steadily chronicled the shattering of families, in city streets and down winding border lanes that were full of birdsong before the bullets rang out. There were regular, respectful interviews with pallid widows and dazed widowers, and funerals attended by red-eyed, snuffling children tugged into stiff, smart clothes to pay formal respects to the end of family life as they had known it.