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Home Maria Miller resigned as Culture Secretary after a week of being the centre of a game of hunt-the-issue. She had paid back expenses, but only the £5,800 requested by the Commons standards committee, not the £45,000 suggested by the parliamentary commissioner for standards; she had apologised in the Commons, but her apology lasted only
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[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on Maria Miller’s resignation” startat=1057] Listen [/audioplayer]Yet again, the Conservative party has reminded us that it is quite capable of losing the next election. The events leading up to Maria Miller’s resignation are entirely consistent with a party that is so gauche, so accident-prone, so surprised by basic
From our UK edition
From our UK edition
‘We were always an odd couple. I’m a man, she’s a woman — it was never going to work.’
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‘Stop calling us ugly and we’ll stop inflicting emotional child abuse.’
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‘The A stands for appeasement.’
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‘We must do lunch some day.’
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From our UK edition
‘What’s wrong? You’ve hardly touched your phone.’
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From our UK edition
‘I feel it only fair to warn you that from this point on your life will change for ever.’
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‘Sure saves on a wedding photographer.’
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From our UK edition
‘My job title doesn’t really reflect what I do.’
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From our UK edition
‘There’s a copy of Crime and Punishment in the cake.’
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‘Cannabis, actually.’
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Chapter and verse on Islam Sir: Irshad Manji’s generally very sensible article on ‘Reclaiming Islam’ (29 March) suggests using the Qur’an sura 3:7 as a verse to challenge Islamists who claim a fundamentalist reading. She quotes the verse as saying that ‘God and God alone knows the full truth of how the Qu’ran ought to
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François Hollande and Ed Miliband could be political blood brothers. Neither has held down a job outside politics for any serious length of time. Both have been political bag carriers, graduating to apparatchiks. Both have tried to compensate for their essential blandness by adopting radical left-wing policies. Both now pose as socialists, and tout genuinely
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Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made ‘a commitment to fight for full employment in Britain’ and for the country ‘to have the highest employment rate of any of the world’s leading economies’. Wolfgang Schäuble, his counterpart in Germany, agreed that any EU treaty changes should ‘guarantee fairness’ to countries outside the eurozone.