Hugh Massingberd ‘It is difficult’, writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), ‘for me to conceive of a more agreeable life than that of a Victorian country parson.’ Reading his brilliantly panoramic, constantly stimulating and humanely wise portrait of an age and the characters who created it left me longing to have been
If the Institute of Economic Affairs has a branch in the heavens, the surrounding clouds must be disturbed by a loud wailing sound emanating from the soul of Sir Keith Joseph. If any man had a reason to cry out about the unfairness of life, it is he. Pilloried in the early 1980s for daring
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, said that ‘hardly a day goes by without some new piece of intelligence coming via our security services about a threat to UK interests’; ‘This is a new type of war, fought in a different way by different means,’ he said.
Rupert Christiansen How embarrassing. The authors of the four books I have most relished this year – Nicola Shulman’s elegant monograph A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books, £9.99), Virginia Nicholson’s exuberant Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), Giles Waterfield’s brilliant satire The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (Review, £14.99) and Selina Hastings’ fascinating biography of
Turkey has for centuries been a convenient European metaphor for all that is evil, but in truth there is very little that Turkey stands historically accused of which Europe has also not been guilty. Recently, however, M. Giscard d’Estaing – that great and principled defender of democracy, as the people of the Central African Republic
Mr Iain Duncan Smith noted that ‘a small group of my parliamentary colleagues have decided consciously to undermine my leadership’; he concluded: ‘My message is simple and stark, unite or die.’ His statement came the day after eight Tory MPs defied a three-line whip and voted in favour of a government amendment to the Adoption
Besides secret agents themselves, who face assassination should their identities become known, no man can have been more grateful for the existence of the Official Secrets Act than Ian Fleming. Had it been known back in the 1950s that MI5 and MI6 were inhabited not by suave womanisers but by dull paper-shufflers who go home
Miss Estelle Morris resigned as Secretary of State for Education, saying she was not up to running a big department. She was replaced by Mr Charles Clarke, who was replaced as Labour party chairman by Mr John Reid, who was replaced as Northern Ireland Secretary by Mr Paul Murphy, who was replaced as Welsh Secretary
Comment on Village idiots by Amrit Dhillon (26/10/2002) Amrit Dhillon’s article on the village panchayat paints a very horrifying picture of grass roots democracy in India. Indeed, by his account, it looks no better than a macabre and cruel parody of what those who framed the constitution had in mind when they thought about introducing
Of the many New Labour slogans which the government has tried quietly to drop over the past five years, none can have landed with quite such a thump as ‘ethical foreign policy’. The party elected in 1997, it may hazily be remembered, promised to put an end to the practice of making shady deals with
The Fire Brigades Union announced a 48-hour national strike from 29 October, the first of a series of stoppages in pursuit of a 40 per cent pay rise. About 19,000 servicemen were put on alert to fill in for the firemen, with the help of 827 Green Goddess fire engines. Mr Bob Crow, the leader
Any public-sector union contemplating a strike is best advised to start by targeting children’s bookshops. It is remarkable how groups of workers who first impinge on the consciousness through the pages of nursery books manage to command greater public affection and higher wage settlements than those who do not. Nurses and train-drivers have done particularly
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons: ‘Some say that we should fight terrorism alone and that issues to do with WMD [weapons of mass destruction] are a distraction. I reject that entirely.’ The Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended and government of the province was resumed by Westminster a week after
There has been much sniggering in the Western media over Tuesday’s referendum in Iraq on re-electing Saddam Hussein, since it is obvious that the only permissible answer was Yes. But how different are referendums in the European Union? On Saturday the Irish will be voting for the second time on the Nice Treaty, because when
Police raided the offices of Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly building at Stormont and several private addresses before charging Sinn Fein’s head of administration at Stormont with passing on documents that could be ‘useful to terrorists in planning or carrying out acts of violence’; two others were also charged. The action came after
A coalition with Sinn Fein was never likely to be straightforward for more normal, democratic parties. Only someone culpably naive could have expected it to play by a set of rules that is not of its own making. Sinn Fein is a minority group dedicated to dissimulation, conspiracy and infiltration according to the true and
Mrs Edwina Currie, the former Conservative minister, revealed that she had had a four-year affair from 1984 with Mr John Major, the former Conservative prime minister. The Chestnut Grove School in Balham, south-west London, began to offer the morning-after pill to 11-year-olds. After thousands of A-level students’ results were found to have been manipulated, Sir
We are at our best, asserts the Prime Minister, when we are at our boldest. His dictum, however, does not extend to Labour conference delegates, whom he prefers when at their most supine. On Monday, a motion calling for a review of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was carried by 67 per cent to 32 per
The government published its long-awaited dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. It claimed that he has the capability to launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes and could have a nuclear weapon within two years. Parliament was recalled to discuss the Iraq question. The Prime Minister said, ‘Disarmament of all weapons
‘I am in no doubt,’ said the Prime Minister in last Tuesday’s debate in the House of Commons, ‘that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is serious and it is imminent.’ After reading the dossier on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction released in advance of that debate, most people will share his sentiment. The dossier