The Week
Diary
I have written a play, but a month after it was sent to half a dozen theatres, I have heard…
The rumour mill
Geoffrey Dickens’s ancient dossier of (alleged) paedophiles in high places cannot be found among the 138 miles of government files,…
Barometer
What Germans do worst Some things Germans aren’t very good at: — Making reliable car engines. According to a survey by Warranty Direct…
Letters
No ban on Lawson Sir: You write that the BBC ‘has effectively banned’ Lord Lawson from items on climate change…
Climatic correctness
Listen to ‘Is climate change a factor in the recent extreme weather?’ on Audioboo It is only a matter of…
Portrait of the week
Home Theresa May, the Home Secretary, ordered a review, taking perhaps ten weeks, by Peter Wanless, the head of the…
Diary
Can there be anything more perfect than early July in London, when the sun is shining, the sky a cloudless…
The Ancient way of death
There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the…
Barometer
Public benefit Public sector unions held a strike over pay. How well are public-sector workers paid compared with their counterparts…
Letters
Real help for those in pain Sir: The fickleness of existence is exemplified by the fact that being Tony Blair’s…
Let’s stop slavery – again
Who would have expected to find slavery on the outskirts of Cardiff? Not the locals, who were shocked when police…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, rang Jean-Claude Juncker to congratulate him on being nominated by EU heads of government…
Diary
The former proprietor of this magazine, Conrad Black, is in London at the moment with his gorgeous wife Barbara, and…
Barometer
All must have prizes Paul Pugh, the £104,000-a-year chief executive of the Passport Office, was nominated for ‘leader of the…
Brussels vs Sparta
The EU is a federation of states (Latin foedus, ‘treaty’, from the same root as fides, ‘trust, good faith’). But…
Letters
Beyond the law Sir: In your leading article of 28 June you make the point that the hacking trial demonstrates…
Censors silenced
We have not heard much from Hugh Grant this week. Nor from Max Mosley, Steve Coogan or any of the…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, fought a last-ditch battle against the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the…
Diary
I’m an old conference hand going back to the Tories’ annual get-together of 1958. My headmaster, an Irish Christian Brother…
Fishing with Plutarch
Dr Culum Brown of Macquarie University, Australia, has been doing some research on fish, and concludes that they are intelligent,…
Barometer
Green wings It was revealed that Pascal Husting, Greenpeace’s international programme director, commutes 250 miles by air from his home…
Letters
Sugar added tax Sir: Julia Pickles (Letters, 14 June) suggests a sugar tax to combat the obesity epidemic and discourage…
What the West has lost
It would have been easy enough to imagine the 25th anniversary of the Eastern European revolutions being marked with a…
Portrait of the week
Home With war engulfing Iraq, Britain set about reopening its embassy in Tehran, closed in 2011. William Hague, the Foreign…
Diary
Could there be a more timely advert for the Better Together campaign than on the field of sport? What the…
