What went wrong Sir: I hope our Prime Minister read your editorial (7 July) on why as a country we have been engulfed in such a profound financial upheaval. Many months into this crisis, we’ve still heard no coherent account from our political leaders as to what went wrong, just a bit of populist banker-bashing
Out of proportion The bill to reform the House of Lords looks like being another failed attempt by Liberal Democrats to bring proportional representation to Westminster. But where did the idea of PR come from? — The first such system was proposed by Louis Antoine Saint-Just, a deputy in France’s National Convention after the revolution.
Over at the Books Blog, Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough, has answered this week’s Bookbencher questionnaire. As the race to the White House heats up, with Mitt Romney making a controversial speech on race to the NAACP earlier this week, Jackson recommends Richard Ben Cramer’s peerless account of the 1988 presidential election, What
This week’s Bookbencher is Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough. He tells us which Chilean communist poet he read recently, which children’s classic has stayed with him since childhood and which three books he would save from a burning British library. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? All Hell
This week’s Shelf Lifer is Richard Bean. The British playwright recently won joint best new play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last year for both One Man, Two Guvnors at the National and The Heretic at The Royal Court. He tells us what he used to read to spite his father, which character in
It is easy to understand Bob Diamond’s miscalculation. In the great pantheon of banking scandals, it was unlikely, he thought, that Libor interest-rate rigging would rank very high. Libor is the average interest rate at which banks lend to each other — or, rather, the rate at which they admit to lending to each other.
Home Bob Diamond resigned as chief executive of Barclays a day after he said he wasn’t resigning. Marcus Agius resigned as chairman of Barclays, and a day later was appointed ‘full-time chairman’ to seek a replacement for Mr Diamond. The imbroglio followed a £290 million fine (£59.5 million by the British Financial Services Authority and
China and Tibet Sir: Clarissa Tan poses the question: ‘What happens to people who do not have the joy of being Chinese?’ (‘China’s civilising mission’, 30 June). China’s handling of Tibet provides the answer. After 60 years of occupation, torture, intimidation and repression continue unabated. Tibetans are now doing the only thing they can to
Lost and found A team from St Andrews University has published its attempts to map the remains of Doggerland, an area of land and later an island in the North Sea which disappeared around 5,500 bc as a result of rising sea levels after the last ice age. Some other possible lost lands: — Atlantis.
After a brief hiatus, the Spectator’s Bookbencher interview returns. First up is Douglas Alexander, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South and shadow foreign secretary. He tells which books he’ll be reading this summer. 1) Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway — the recently published memoir
After a brief hiatus, the Spectator’s Bookbenchers interview recommences this week. Over at the books blog, Douglas Alexander MP, the shadow foreign secretary, tells us what he plans to read his children over the summer, as well what he hopes to read for himself. He says: ‘My mother, who herself was born in China —
Geraint Anderson still has an axe to grind. Filthy lucre is corrupting public life, and the City’s casino banks continue to spoil all who come near them. Their venality is the subject of his latest book, Payback Time – of which he wrote in these pages last week. He is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He
Follow our live coverage of Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday 4 July 2012: <a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=106b0e8835″ >PMQs live – 4th July 2012</a>
Marcus Agius’ resignation this morning as chair of Barclays took few by surprise after being widely trailed over the weekend. But as ever, The Spectator was far ahead of the curve, with columnist Martin Vander Weyer calling on 5 May for Agius to go, nearly two months before the Libor scandal even broke. You can
The NatWest banking disaster is an ominous reminder of the way in which technology has come to control our lives. We now know what a proper IT collapse feels like: a piece of computer code goes wrong and, within days, bank machines shut down and chaos ensues. This week the stories range from unpaid bills
Home A computer failure left millions of customers of RBS and NatWest without access to their money for days; a man was held in jail over the weekend because his bail payment could not be traced, and other customers feared that their credit ratings would suffer because of missed payments for mortgages and regular direct
Hunting for real Tories Sir: It is interesting to note that more than 10 per cent (four) of the 39 Tory MPs who comprise the Free Enterprise Group, which your correspondent James Forsyth assures us is full of young radicals determined to lead a fightback from the Tory right (‘Next right’, 23 June), are committed
Robert and Edward Skidelsky have written a new book for our times, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, which is published today. In their own words: ‘it is the story of… how we came to be ensnared by the dream of progress with purpose, riches without
Journalist and former TV producer, Samantha Brick was recently castigated for her Daily Mail article suggesting that some might be intimidated by her good looks. But since we’re always game at Shelf Life, we invited her to reveal which books she would read during solitary confinement, where she wouldn’t like to find herself with Patrick
Follow our live coverage of Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday 27th June <a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=af4caace23″ >PMQs live – 27th June 2012</a>