The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Full text: Tony Blair’s speech on why the Middle East matters

From our UK edition

It is unsurprising that public opinion in the UK and elsewhere, resents the notion that we should engage with the politics of the Middle East and beyond. We have been through painful engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq. After 2008, we have had our own domestic anxieties following the financial crisis. And besides if we want to engage, people reasonably ask: where, how and to what purpose? More recently, Ukraine has served to push the Middle East to the inside pages, with the carnage of Syria featuring somewhat, but the chaos of Libya, whose Government we intervened to change, hardly meriting a mention. However the Middle East matters. What is presently happening there, still represents the biggest threat to global security of the early 21st C.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: On wind turbines, Churchill’s only exam success, and the red-trousered mayor of Bristol

From our UK edition

When the wind blows Sir: Clare Oxford’s piece (‘Gone with the wind turbines’, 12 April) is both timely and sad. Those who applaud the use of these infernal machines are prone to eulogise their efficiency by saying (in the same annoying, dumbed-down way in which commentators always compare the size of something with the number of football pitches it equates to — presumably on the basis that a normal person is unable to conceive of anything larger) that the number of machines to be erected ‘could provide power for x thousand homes’.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 April 2014

From our UK edition

Home Nigel Evans, who had resigned as deputy speaker before being cleared of a bundle of rape and sexual assault charges against men, questioned the right of the Crown Prosecution Service to pursue cases that were ‘decades’ old and said that people should not have to spend their life savings defending themselves. Sajid Javid was appointed Culture Secretary, with additional responsibility for equalities, while Nicky Morgan was made women’s minister, with the right to sit in the cabinet when she is sent for.