Hugo Rifkind

It’s a remarkable stroke of luck for a columnist, but I have no views whatsoever on the euro. It’s not deliberate, this, just a function of my age. Most columnists seem to have started forming their euro views some time prior to 1992, and I simply wasn’t that sort of 14-year-old. ‘Do you worry about

I suppose we might all be quite wrong about what it’s like to be Pippa Middleton. I suppose that’s perfectly possible. When Hugh Laurie wrote his novel The Gun Seller, I remember being told he submitted it under a pseudonym, so terrified was he that a grasping publisher might be willing to publish any old

For months now, the whole idea of the Leveson inquiry into press standards has been dimly reminding me of something. Only recently did I figure out what it was. You know when anthropologists descend upon some almost-doomed Patagonian tribe, desperate to document their language, costumes and strategies for spear-throwing, nose-boning and rat spit-roasting before the

What I’m lacking, really, is any sense of the parameters. As I understand it, a best-case scenario involves the Greeks doing what they’re told. Everybody else tightens their belts a bit and there’s a bout of quite dispiriting inflation, followed by the ejection of a couple of countries from the euro, the slow retrenchment of

How long do you suppose it takes Chris Huhne to shop for the most competitive energy bill for all seven of his houses? Ages, I reckon. If he had been driving during that infamous speeding incident on the M11 — and everyone knows, of course, that he wasn’t — then this would surely have been

The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else. Oh God, you’re

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘ I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘Where did you get

I’m not expecting sympathy. Really, I’m not. But there was a time, and really not so long ago, when you knew where you were with news. Day one, thing happens. Day two, thing gets in the papers. Then, on day three, the parasites like me weigh in. That’s how it worked back in the distant

The same conversation, over and over again. ‘Well, you can’t write about it, can you?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Duh! Rupert Murdoch? He wouldn’t let you.’ ‘You’re quite right, actually. He called this morning. “There are questions being asked in parliament,” he said. “The BSkyB deal might fall through and Andy Coulson got arrested the other day.