To understand why this week's government proposals to teach children to speak properly matter, think back to the US election
Read full article...You used to be able rely on the upper-class wing of the English Tory party to denounce “the nanny state” at every opportunity — and always to respect private property.
Like a hungry machine, political debate in Britain needs an endless supply of raw material. Just before Easter the arrest of 10 Pakistani “terror suspects” provided the fuel that kept the engines turning
In 25 years as a journalist, I have never come across a scandal like the Metropolitan Police losing £30 million of Londoners' money in the Icelandic banking collapse
Like a juggernaut heading towards a wall, the quangocracy ploughs on. Yesterday the clumsily named Equality and Human Rights Commission put its foot down on the accelerator and declared that fathers should have the right to take four months' parental leave.
It's a brave writer who makes optimistic predictions in this climate, but there is a hint that, unlike the stock and housing markets, the antiques market may not be collapsing
Like an underground newspaper in a repressive state, copies of the New Yorker are being passed around by shocked London sophisticates. At first glance, it is hard to understand why they should be transfixed by the review of Fiamma, a Manhattan restaurant, by one Nick Paumgarten.
While he was writing The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles came up with the line "the middle class is the only true revolutionary class in English history"
To varying degrees we all join a cult when we go to work
I have seen many middle-class manias in my time but none has matched the dangerous frenzy caused by the false accusation that the MMR vaccination causes autism. Normally poor health and low incomes go together. But half the cases in the new measles epidemic are in London, because this is a city not only of great poverty but also with one of the highest concentration of educated parents in the country.
Let’S be honest, and admit the real reason why Gordon Brown’s slogan “British jobs for British workers” has drawn such tutting from the London middle class
About the most wrong-headed book produced in the Brown bubble was Affluenza by Oliver James, an Old Etonian psychologist and media don
I met the chief executive of Islington council just before Christmas and immediately took to him
If Labour is serious about improving social mobility in the professions, I will take its new equality champion, Alan Milburn, up the road from my Islington home to Canonbury Primary School to show him how bad London has got.
New Year's resolutions normally involve a renunciation of pleasure. You may give up smoking, as I have done with an iron will every year since 1986, or boozing or fatty food
The best definition of a bully is of a man who "can give it but can't take it". Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick of the Met can certainly give it - taking it is another matter, however
The Met needs its Barack Obama. It needs a leader who can take it beyond the politics of both racism and racial grievance into the London of the 21st century. In short, it needs someone who can face down Tarique Ghaffur.
After the Baby P case broke, I listened to an audience on television baying for blood, and felt nothing but sympathy for Haringey social workers
My neighbourhood is about to become the strangest red-light district. Instead of housing a brothel or strip club, we are being promised a type of erotic venue the like of which I've never come across before: a sex bistro.
The hash Newsnight made of covering the effects of the recession in suburbia shows more tellingly than the Ross affair the depth of the trouble the BBC is in
Plus Taylors of Harrogate's Decaffè coffee, a cafetière and a coffee scoop.
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