Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
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It must be a couple of years since, spooked by the banking crisis and walking past the Savoy hotel on the Strand, I remembered a clever but impetuous Polish friend’s advice to buy bullion — silver or gold — and his mention that there was a respectable dealer in the Savoy arcade. And as I
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Just before Easter, writing for the Times, I talked to 30 of the 40 Conservative MPs with the most marginal constituencies. My aim was to get a sense of how they think their party should position itself. I explored their opinions on a range of vexed policy areas. Finally I asked whether David Cameron’s leadership
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Chesterfield is a medium-sized town just off the M1, near what were once the coalfields of north-eastern Derbyshire. Not without history (and a lovely old market square) and not without character (a church with a splendidly warped spire, positively Van Goghian, is its most famous feature), the town is nevertheless an unassuming, formerly industrial north
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Were you to try to identify the sort of journalist least likely to feel sympathy for Keith O’Brien, I suppose you’d place near the top of your list a columnist who was (a) an atheist, (b) especially allergic to the totalitarian mumbo-jumbo of the Roman Catholic church, (c) gay, and (d) a strong supporter of
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Showering the other day, I noticed a visitor had left his shampoo behind. Going through the familiar ablutions I stared glassily, half-focused on the immediate foreground, in the way you do when your activity requires some but not all of your attention. Vosene. The trade name started running through my mind. I repeated it to
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The Parque Mátires ’71 is pleasant, nothing special, hardly distinguishable from dozens of other little parks in Old Havana. Fairly safe, reasonably clean, shabby, some tatty greenery and a few trees, a bird-limed bronze statue to a forgotten hero, and rickety park benches around a stone-paved terrace. I was perched on the more stable slats
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On the patio of my hotel in Havana… No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground-floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana. Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B&B:
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The end of an old year cast me into a portentous frame of mind as I descended a couple of thousand feet down an ancient path through forest, brush and briar to the Pantà de Susqueda: an immense, deep lake created by a dam, 400 feet high, across the gorge of the River Ter in
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‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia,’ wrote Laura Brady, Second Secretary in our Moscow embassy, ‘it will be a doddle.’ I quote her story in an anthology of diplomatic writing, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, that the BBC’s Andrew Bryson and I have collected for the new book. Miss Brady was
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‘“You will be haunted,” resumed the Ghost, “by Three Spirits, without their visits you cannot hope to shun the path I tread…”’ ‘“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” said the Apparition. “Come with me,” and Scrooge followed.’ The scene was as familiar to Ebenezer Scrooge as to any Spectator reader. Returning to the past,
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Others have already swelled a chorus of rage against Rotherham -council for removing three foster children from the couple caring for them, on the grounds that the couple were members of Ukip; and the rage is justified. But few sane people will need persuading that the -council’s judgment was wrong, and I don’t intend to
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A day or so after writing a column, when the horse has certainly bolted, you read it in print. Now you are hit by l’esprit d’escalier. Ideas you left out stare you in the face. Friends call with arguments you never thought to include — obvious, once mentioned — and again you kick yourself. My
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Let me guess most readers’ reaction to news that Alex Salmond has arm-twisted Westminster into allowing 16- to 18-year-olds in Scotland to vote in the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence. I bet the reaction resembled mine. Annoyance. The very thought! As to the assurance that this concession will be temporary, and pressure will not build
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Few put a political argument better than Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, and his latest column in the Times is no exception. Policies portrayed as priorities of the Tory right, he said, are also shared by the majority of the public. Some 70 per cent of Britons want a referendum on Europe and 80
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On the Sunday just passed I sat alongside Polly Toynbee in Manchester as one of Andrew Marr’s two newspaper reviewers on his morning programme on BBC television. Arriving at dawn, we skimmed the weekend papers for stories we might discuss. Polly chose, among others, the latest reports in the Megan Stammers saga; the schoolgirl and
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It was the last night of the Proms and the first I’ve ever attended. I’ve watched it on TV, of course, and even been to a Last Night of the Proms party, where we all watched the television, swigging sparkling wine and singing along to Rule Britannia. But to be there, actually among the audience
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The despoilation of the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to the French border in north-eastern Spain is well known. To meet the demand for package holiday resorts in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Catalan tourist and construction industries deployed untold quantities of reinforced concrete to dispiriting effect. Vast swaths of the Costa Brava and
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‘Nice people, with nice habits/ they keep rabbits/ but got no money at all,’ sang the popular duo Flanagan and Allen in my father’s day. I can still remember Dad playing it on our gramophone in the early 1950s. My family liked these sentiments; secretly we rather hoped they applied to us. But I write
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Military commanders, announced last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, ‘have warned the Prime Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’. What the newspaper calls ‘senior sources’ have been singing and I don’t doubt the burden of their song is as reported. The same briefing
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I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist. Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming