Zimbabwe: why Blair changed his mind on Mugabe
NAOMI Campbell’s account of how she was gifted dirty pebbles after flirting with Liberian dictator Charles Taylor was perhaps the biggest story of the 2010 silly season, dominating many media outlets for days on end in early August. Most of the coverage was down to the involvement of a supermodel. Routine tales of African strongmen [...]
Malcolm X and Michael Gove: separated at birth
I SAW the Spike Lee biopic when it came out, of course. But other than that, I have to admit to not knowing a lot about revolutionary icon Malcolm X. That’s pretty remiss for a leftie, so to put matters right, I am reading ‘By any means necessary’, a compilation of the 1960s black nationalist [...]
Welcome back to Britain, Mr Nadir
HERE we are, more than three months into a Tory-led government, and there has yet to be a single sleaze scandal of any genuine seriousness. So bang on cue, one comes along and resurrects itself from the past. Asil Nadir, the bloke what done a runner to Cyprus back in 1993 rather than face the [...]
Fr Chesney and the Claudy bombing: answers, please
UNLIKE the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, at least the police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombing did not cost anything like £195m. And it only took it eight years rather than 12 to establish for the record what everybody knew already anyway, which is positively speedy by comparison. Briefly put, Al Hutchinson found that [...]
Ed Miliband: damn right he’s not a Bennite
HILARY Benn famously fought the Leeds Central by-election campaign that gave him a seat in parliament on the slogan ‘a Benn but not a Bennite’. Given that even Tony Benn’s offspring feels the need to emphasise repudiation of his old man’s politics, it’s safe to pronounce that particular 30 year old brand of leftism completely [...]
David Kelly: when states do [and do not] kill
WHEN a man leaves his home carrying a boxful of powerful painkillers, a bottle of water and a pruning knife, the assumption has to be that he harbours an obvious intention to kill himself. When he is known to be in a depressed frame of mind and when there is a history of suicide in [...]
Sir Philip Green: tax avoider gets job on the side
PUT the firm in the name of the missus, set the old girl up with a nice little gaff down in Monaco, and then pay her a dividend of well over a billion quid. Tell the taxman to go swivel. That’s essentially what Sir Philip Green did in 2005, so ensuring that not a single [...]
Town Hall skiving: worse than the private sector?
COUNCIL staff twiddle their thumbs for two-thirds of their working day, according to a survey by some firm of management consultants I have never heard of, which has predictably been bigged up by the Daily Telegraph. I did google to try to find the original report, so that I could at least run my eye [...]
The case for universal benefits
IT REALLY should be a simple matter for politicians to work out their position on a question as straightforward as universal benefits. After all, the arguments for and against are relatively well known. Logic suggests that ostensibly egalitarian and redistributionist parties will tend to be in favour of them, while parties animated by a more rightwing ethos [...]
What the Blair memoirs are not going to say
RANDOM House has paid Tony Blair a $7.5m advance for his memoirs. Given that the company is the largest English language publisher in the world, one presumes it knows what it is doing. But the truth is that political diaries only rarely sell in sufficient quantity to recoup major outlays. Often such deals are not [...]
