Commentariat

You are browsing the archives of 2008 April.

I’ve tried to remember if there was some occurrence over the past two or three
years that gave me more intense pleasure than Ronaldo missing that penalty
against Barcelona on Wednesday night.

What have the bastards – the spin doctors, the media management monkeys – done
to Boris? I watched him on BBC’s Question Time London mayoral debate and,
after a while, began to weep.

The law of comparative advantage suggests people should use their talent, but we’re also told ‘do what you love’. Is it worth time and effort pursuing a dream career I’m no good at?

The law of comparative advantage suggests people should use their talent, but we’re also told ‘do what you love’. Is it worth time and effort pursuing a dream career I’m no good at?

Tim Harford looks at two inventive studies trying to gauge how traders respond to news – one analyses sports betting, the other uses information that is over two centuries old

Tim Harford looks at two inventive studies trying to gauge how traders respond to news – one analyses sports betting, the other uses information that is over two centuries old

Reality has outdone any attempt at satire, with the news that people have been found breaking in to prison.

The argument Ken Livingstone made when first seeking office - that prolonged incumbency leads to cronyism and corruption - has been amply vindicated.

About 15 years ago, I was offered an interesting journalistic assignment: spending four days and nights on a fishing trawler off the coast of Cornwall. In February. My editor thought that I was just the man to write a colour story about the experience, but in the end, it became clear to him that I probably wasn’t (manacling myself to railings outside his office screaming “please, please, please don’t send me to sea” might have planted the first seed of doubt in his mind).

A few years ago I wrote a story for this paper about a plaque being placed at Prestwick airport in Scotland to mark the only time that Elvis Presley set foot in Britain. It was a brief stop-over on his way to Germany.

Pictures of Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero surrounded by members of his 90 per cent female cabinet call to mind similar pictures of Tony Blair surrounded by his newly elected female MPs, the so-called Blair Babes.

Spare a tear for the plight of America’s motorists. Something terrible has happened. Not the congestion charge (that was thrown out of New York after an unsuccessful test-drive) but the price of gasoline. From sea to shining sea, the average cost of a gallon has gone up to $3.53. That’s the equivalent of 47p a litre. I can see you’re horrified. In California, gas has risen to a dizzying 51p a litre. Given that British petrol hasn’t cost that little since the 1980s, and currently runs at more than £1 a litre, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Yanks but they’ve been used to cheap fuel for so long that they’re taking it very seriously. Thousands are reportedly changing their holiday plans so that less driving is involved, are booking into cheaper hotels and eating at burger bars rather than restaurants. Fuel hikes – their strongest indication that economic meltdown is imminent.

Though the phrase is blithely tossed about, I cannot fathom out how high-fliers manage to “divide their time” between, say, “an ocean cottage in Malibu and a townhouse in Knightsbridge”. Any attempt to shift between our humble dwellings in south London and North Yorkshire involves a logistical exercise on much the same scale as Operation Overlord. For some reason, we find it impossible to make the 250-mile journey unaccompanied by a scarcely conceivable amount of clothing, books, computers and emergency provisions of bacon and cheese. Since Yorkshire is not short of these comestibles, it is far from unknown for them to make the round trip, in much the same way as Norwegian aquavit is matured by being used as ballast on merchant vessels bound for Australia.

To Broadstairs, not to bathe – it being April, but merely take the air. The Isle of Thanet has always been a little problematic for me; I can’t even say it without recalling Ian Dury’s lines: ‘I rendezvoused with Janet / Quite near the Isle of Thanet / She looked just like a gannet…’ &c. Somehow the great bard of the Kilburn High Road perfectly summed up this, the very coccyx of Britain, with its seafowl and its foul maidens.

If you ask me Oman is in something of a quandary. Should it just become the overspill for those who now find Dubai a little downmarket for their tastes (where did all those tattooed Englishmen come from?) or should it try and turn itself into the Palm Springs of the Middle East? It is a question that upmarket resort companies have been asking themselves for the past five years, prompted by the fact that Dubai has become a rather disastrous victim of its own success.

Composer acclaimed as the father of electronic music whose output ranged from
concert pieces to Doctor Who.

Champion amateur rider and trainer for the Maktoum family who continued to
work with horses until the age of 84.

Motorists in Scotland have started to stock up on fuel in anticipation of a refinery strike that may force the closure of Britain’s biggest oil pipeline.

Boris Johnson has become one of the first senior Conservative Party politicians to advocate the legalisation of cannabis for medicinal use.

Prisons have become so comfortable that some offenders prefer to stay on the inside rather than face life outside, a prisons officers’ leader said yesterday.

The only possible action to stop a 43 per cent car park ticket rise is to start your own party and stand against the council leader, as Kelvin MacKenzie has.

For those of us of a certain generation, the return of Blake’s 7 is the most exciting news since the relaunch of Doctor Who, says Andrew McKie.

The unions should make a list of teachers’ real concerns and show how they want to improve education rather than their bank balances. Then they will deserve to get a sympathetic hearing, writes Alice Thomson.

Unless there is a radical change of policy soon in Tehran, the Iranian programme will suffer a similar fate to the demolished Syrian base, writes Con Coughlin.

There’s a rising tide of anger among an increasingly volatile electorate. That anger needs to be reflected by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, writes Iain Dale.