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His critics called him vain, snobbish, jumped-up and vicious – all true – but Nigel Dempster was also generous (he felt uncomfortable if anyone else paid for lunch); charming (displaying exaggerated and affected old-world manners which made women redden with appreciation) and exceptionally funny (with a theatrical sense of timing when recounting a juicy anecdote).
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The best suggestion by a Coffee Houser for a new author of James Bond stories was Simon Chapman who proposed The Guardian’s in-house funster, Polly Toynbee. A bottle of champagne is on its way to Simon: congratulations! Here is how we think the book might begin: DIAMONDS ARE FOR TAXING by Polly Toynbee Bond walked
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If you want to know how Brand Beckham will be marketed in the States take a look at the storyboards for the ad campaign that is being launched to promote his first game for the LA Galaxy. One of the most intriguing things about Beckham’s arrival in the US, as Sports Illustrated points out, is
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Life is full of little ironies. I am just off to the BBC’s Millbank studios to do some recording for The Week in Westminster. Meanwhile, I have spent much of the afternoon having acrimonious conversations with senior BBC management. The cause? The Corporation has decided to withdraw permission from Emily Maitlis, star Newsnight and News
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I rarely allow myself to be “Outraged of Westminster”, but this scandalous post by Jim Shelley, the Mirror’s TV critic, has forced me to make an exception. Ricky Gervais has not “lost it” or become a “tiresome embarrassment”. Indeed, the miracle of the man is that he has managed to escape the role of David
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The news that Sebastian Faulks has written a Bond novel says a lot about the status 007 has achieved in the culture. On the big screen and through a ruthless process of reinvention, Bond remains a player at the multiplex. Poor Pierce Brosnan thought he was doing just fine, being tortured in Korea to the
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For all my misgivings about the Cameron project, he is in exactly the right place on the family. His speech today was authentic, strong, thought-provoking and laid out clear blue water between him and Gordon Brown. As the rather pitiful performance of Ed Miliband on Today this morning showed us, Brown is uninterested in the
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The former Republican frontrunner has just let his three most senior campaign aides go. These three departures signify the deep trouble that McCain’s campaign is in; he is now third or fourth in the polls and trails the fringe libertarian candidate Ron Paul in the money stakes. But he could still recover. He’s the candidate
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I would like to reach across cyberspace to reassure the great Anne Applebaum. She says in Slate that “the Spectator magazine—the Conservatives’ once-faithful house organ—was ready to throw in the towel” with my cover story a fortnight ago ‘All bets are off.’ Yes, we did indeed declare that Brown is surprising the Conservatives (and us)
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“All of the work that we have done has reinforced the importance of the first three years on a child’s cognitive and emotional development. The emotional brain is largely created in the first 18 months of life and its auditory map is formed even earlier, by 12 months. Furthermore, it has also been shown, alarmingly,
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While the Republicans in America are quietly burying George W. Bush’s legacy in domestic policy, the Tories are embracing it. Iain Duncan Smith’s report on social policy, a labour of love if ever there was one, is animated by the same spirit of compassionate conservatism that underpinned George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign. IDS’s description of the
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A brilliant topic on the Today programme – the scandal of the government science budget. A staggering £3.4bn of our money is spent on science – thus socialising what should be a completely liberalised form of human endeavour. This partly explains why so many scientists are on call to add to the chorus of global
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The Spectator’s thoughts on Boris running for Mayor see Mary Wakefield’s ten point plan and the magazine’s official endorsement. We also have comprehensive coverage of the Alastair Campbell diaries. Anthony Browne, head of the think tank Policy Exchange and the former chief political correspondent of The Times, flags up and explains the key passages below;
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Out of sheer wickedness, this is the moment Michael Howard socked it to Alastair Campbell in a Newsnight discussion the night Blair resigned as Labour leader. Cold and brutal.
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If you can’t be bothered ploughing through the Campbell memoirs, BBC2 has done a superb job filleting it. I’ve just had a preview of the three-part documentary starting on Wednesday – complete with his bleeped-out expletives and thoughts on everything from homicide to suicide. Fittingly, it’s from the same production company that did Grumpy Old
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1) Do you remember in Peter Pan when poor Tinkerbell fades away because no-one believes in fairies, and how miraculously she perks up when the children begin to clap? Well, it’s the same with Boris. I’m not saying that he responds to applause like fairy, just that the first step is faith. Exorcise your doubts
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August 17th, 1998 on how useless Mo Mowlam was in drafting a statement after the Omagh bomb: “We then had the ludicrous situation of TB having to ask Mo for her fax number, and her shouting out ‘Anyone out there who knows the fax number?’ and then saying the officials had disappeared. It was the
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Sunday 21st June 2003, on demands that he should resign over the “dodgy dossier” on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “I hadn’t slept well. I was avoiding answering the phone other than to the office because by now all the broadcasters and half the Sundays were trying to ask me if I was going.
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June 2nd 2003, on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “TB was still in ‘it’s ridiculous’ mode and getting more and more irritated by what was essentially a media-driven thing. The main problem of course was that there were no WMD discoveries beyond the two labs, and no matter how much
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December 19th 1998, on the news breaking that Peter Mandelson had borrowed money from Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house: “I had a long chat with Peter M, who claimed not to see what the problem was re the loan. He said what was wrong with a friend lending money to someone? I said it