The Spectator

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor, said that if Britain left the European Union, households would be on average £4,300 a year worse off. He quoted a Treasury analysis that said the British economy would be 6 per cent smaller outside the EU by 2030 than it would have been. ‘Remain’ campaigners were treating voters ‘like children who can be frightened into obedience’, Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, said, and declared that Britain could be part of the European free trade zone but ‘free from EU regulation which costs us billions of pounds a year’. Kenneth Clarke, the former Chancellor, said that David Cameron ‘wouldn’t last 30 seconds if he lost the referendum’.

From ‘The Volunteer Training Corps’, The Spectator, 8 April 1916: If we were the Government, we would state plainly that in the opinion of His Majesty’s advisers no man over military age of good physique will be doing his duty to the nation who does not join a Volunteer battalion… it should be clearly understood that he was not performing his proper duties as a citizen, and that even if the state did not think it worth while to compel him to perform them, he would be a proper object of public censure and contempt.

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, after spending a week parrying questions about his late father’s investment fund Blairmore, suddenly published a summary showing that on his own taxable income of £200,307 in the past year he had paid tax of £75,898. Downing Street said ‘potential prime ministers’ and chancellors should be expected to publish their tax returns in future. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said he had paid £72,210 in tax on earnings or £198,738. Boris Johnson MP said he’d paid £276,505 tax on income of £612,583. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, had not kept a copy of his tax return, but then got hold of one which showed that he’d paid £18,902 tax on £72,645 income.

For weeks, Westminster has been full of rumours about the private life of a certain cabinet member. It was said he had started to visit a dominatrix in Earl’s Court but ended up falling in love with her and taking her to official functions. Like a Westminster remake of the film Pretty Woman, in fact, but with the Culture Secretary, John Whitting-dale, playing the part of Richard Gere. There was much comment in Parliament about this, and jokes about what London is coming to if an MP has to travel all the way to Earl’s Court for such services, when they used to be available a stone’s throw away from the Commons. And on it went. The story did not appear in the press for a simple reason: it was, in most part, an invention.

From ‘Observing: an average day’, The Spectator, 15 April 1916: 5.10 a.m. The signaller on duty at the telephone has just said cheerfully, ‘5.30, Sir.’ I agree, and ask him if the wires are all right. They are! 5.50 a.m. Unroll the mufflers round my head and the blankets and kick off the sandbags. Then get off the bed sideways into the water. 8.30 a.m. They have begun. Four ‘whizz-bangs’ have just burst very prettily over a communication trench to our right. Then silence again. 10.25 a.m. We have just had a little excitement. I suddenly saw a German — a rare thing — through the telescope. 2.15 p.m. They are shelling a trench on our left rather persistently, and the batteries behind have begun to retaliate.