Mary Dejevsky is a writer, broadcaster, and former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.
Four years ago, the unthinkable, for many Westminster residents, happened. Control of the council was won for the first time ever, and convincingly, by Labour. As a Westminster voter for more than 20 years, I had expected that the council would in time flip to Labour; the leftward trend was clear – but not so
Flats have been getting a bad rap recently. There is the promised leasehold reform being stuck in the legislative and legal process; the many service charges spiralling far beyond inflation; the post-Grenfell Tower cladding issues blighting sales in hundreds of blocks across the country. To all these negatives must now be added an admission that
It is one thing to glimpse the inner workings of government during extraordinary times. But it is another, and many times more telling, to gain a glimpse of the workings of government at – relatively – ordinary moments. This is what the first tranche of released papers relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as HM
If there is anything less edifying than the newly-released emails implicating Lord Mandelson in some very bad behaviour, it is the stream of politicians and others in the UK piling in on the already disgraced peer. Mandelson was never to be trusted, we are told; he should never have been allowed to return to a
What a difference 48 hours can make. On Saturday afternoon, Lord Mandelson, the UK ambassador to the United States, was treading the green and pleasant lawns of Ditchley Park near Oxford, where he was giving the annual lecture to an audience made up for the most part of the great and the good of UK
You won’t find me mounting the barricades in defence of the winter fuel payment, though I’ll miss the pleasant surprise when it landed in my bank account sometime before Christmas. I do, though, have a bit of a bone to pick with those well-heeled and often still lucratively-employed pensioners who dusted off their metaphorical loud-hailers
A few days ago a pedicab (or rickshaw), decked out in luminous pink, collided with a red London bus in the early hours of the morning. Three people were hurt, two seriously. I won’t delve into the rights and wrongs of what happened; you can see a partial video on social media and there are
The golden era of flying is over: rowdy passengers, greedy airlines and miserable airports make travelling nowadays rather grim. The Air India crash in June, which claimed the lives of all but one of the 242 people aboard and 19 others on the ground, has also made many passengers rather jittery, not least because questions
The medics we knew and loved as ‘junior doctors’ were redesignated ‘resident doctors’ as part of their last pay settlement in September. If this was intended to boost their (already considerable) ‘self-esteem’, however, it seems not to have produced any maturing of their professional attitude. Less than a year after ending their last strike, they
‘What? You don’t like chocolate?’ The British Airways attendant almost shouted at me in incomprehension as she was passing out little packets of chocolate digestives. I had had the temerity to ask (in economy, of course) whether there might be any other biscuits on offer. To which she had responded with a concerned enquiry about
As part of its plans to streamline the planning process for much-needed infrastructure, the government has confirmed that it intends to give people a discount on their energy costs if they have new power pylons or other energy infrastructure built near their property. Outlining the plan, the housing and planning minister, Alex Norris, said that
Like most non-renting flat-dwellers, I call myself a home-owner or owner-occupier, but that isn’t quite true. I don’t own my flat; I am a leaseholder. What I bought was the right to occupy it for however many years are left on the lease – and as the lease runs down, the flat is worth less
Well, that didn’t take long, did it? Less than a month after presenting his credentials to President Trump, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador in Washington was being accused by an MP in the House of Commons of ‘freelancing on US TV’. The UK armed forces minister, Luke Pollard, had earlier distanced himself from comments made by
Guten Tag – or, as they more often say in these less formal times, Hallo – from constituency number 061, otherwise known as Potsdam, a city of parks, palaces, film studios and Prussian-ness. For the British, Potsdam will always be the place where the victorious Allies met to carve out the zones of Germany’s occupation – a
Could Lucy Letby, the UK’s most notorious child-murderer, be innocent? The question has rumbled on ever since her convictions for the killing or attempted killing of 14 babies while a neo-natal nurse at Chester Hospital. It is a question that was given more substance this week by a panel of specialists, whose evidence forms the
You would be hard put to find a doughtier defender of British consumerdom than me. I don’t flinch from returning things that don’t work or don’t fit. I have successfully challenged supermarket bills as well as a fine for driving down a poorly signposted low traffic neighbourhood. So I’m no shrinking violet when it comes
Nearly 20 years may have passed, but a good number of people will still recall the exchange between a salt-of-the-earth member of the public, Diana Church, and the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. The year was 2005, the occasion a pre-election edition of BBC Question Time, and the issue at hand? Well, plus ça change –
Is Lord Mandelson being ‘lined up’ as the UK’s next ambassador in Washington? The news that the Labour party’s arch-Blairite and one-time spin-doctor extraordinaire may be in the running for what is seen as the UK’s top diplomatic job has generated an immediate and impassioned reaction, much of it hostile. Some of this is because Mandelson is viewed as
Urban speed limits of 20mph and the traps for unwary drivers known as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) really shouldn’t be elevated to the level of national politics. It may be an exaggeration to describe all politics as local, but such small-scale traffic edicts certainly are, and not just because central government has a myriad of
I belong to a generation of foreign correspondents whose first move, on entering a hotel room, was not to turn down the bed or to check (hopefully) for hot water, but to examine the phone, screwdriver in hand. Could you detach it from its socket? Could you open it up to get at the wiring?
