Commentariat

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This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column From tender flower to noisy hoyden, Cherie Blair has come a long, long way. How extraordinary to find that this person, whose privacy was so sacrosanct that it was considered sinful to…

It’s my son Jackson’s fourth birthday today, and we’re having a big party for him. Stacey has booked a huge bouncy castle for the south lawn, and boxes of going-away presents, dinosaur-related plates and other bric-a-brac has been overloading our poor postman. Should it rain, the village hall has also been rented as a fallback – nothing has been left to chance. Jackson is blissfully unaware of all Stacey’s hard work. He is more concerned with the guest list. One moment he wants “no girls”, then he wants “no boys”. Invites change by the second, as someone becomes uninvited because they threw sand in his face or were “mean”. In my experience it’s best never to invite boys, as they are a total nightmare compared to girls at that age. I remember the first time my daughter Parker invited boys to her party – a little feral gang rampaged through our house hitting dogs with swords and shouting … so much shouting.

Three High Court judges debating the sexual allure of man boobs is the stuff of music hall. The Court of Appeal has just overturned the conviction of a homosexual care worker who filmed another man at a swimming pool. He could not have been found guilty of voyeurism under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, because the male chest is not accorded the same privacy as female breasts.

The government can do a lot to make British workers more productive. But nothing is likely to make the 2010s as pleasant for the economy as the ‘nice’ years have been

Born on Hogmanay 1935, Jeff Torrington grew up in Glasgow’s iconic area of
old-time tenement deprivation, the Gorbals, and worked in the Linwood car
manufacturing plant, the home of a symbol of the new era coming into being,
the 1960s Hillman Imp. Torrington contracted tuberculosis at the age of 13
and while recuperating in a Govan sanatorium became a voracious reader
(teaching himself French to read Camus and Sartre), and also became a
humanist.

Here’s one that Hillary did win. Comment Central readers want her on the ticket. Many thousands of you voted for Hillary and she was way ahead of her nearest challenger - General Wesley Clark. It’s these sort of numbers, I…

Have Brown shares been oversold? Have we gone beyond the bottom? The pictures in the paper show a man scarred with weals, welts and facial erosion. But, in person, he looks perfectly all right.

Alan Wolfe: A ground-breaking manifesto, published by leading Protestants, urges US evangelicals to abandon close involvement in partisan politics

The Right Rev Hassan Dehqani-Tafti

Much of John Barraclough’s career was involved with Coastal Command, in which
he participated in some of the important maritime air campaigns of the
Second World War. In the Cold War period, with antisubmarine reconnaissance
continuing to be a high priority, he commanded 19 Group Coastal Command,
before it was subsumed into the new Strike Command in 1968.

Wardman Wire
Natalie Bennett, Philobiblon:
http://philobiblon.co.uk/
Cabalamat, Amused Cynicism:
http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/
Jonathan Calder, Liberal England:
http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/
Chameleon, Redemption Blues:
http://www.redemptionblues.com/
Mr Eugenides:
http://mreugenides.blogspot.com/
Jackart, A Very British Dude:
http://brackenworld.blogspot.com/
Susanne Lamido, Suz Blog:
http://susannelamido.blogspot.com/
Matt Wardman, The Wardman Wire:
http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/

Sandy Nairne: The needs of sport and the arts can often clash, but their worlds have long been intertwined

Morgan Sparks was best known as the inventor of the first working practical
transistor, a device that has revolutionised almost all aspects of modern
life. Without transistors, the electronic devices we rely on, such as
personal computers, mobile phones, DVD players, televisions, radios,
electronic musical instruments and thousands of others, would not be
imaginable. The transistor is thought by many to be the most important
invention of the 20th century.

So we’ve had Gordon’s big idea(s) and there wont be another one before a general election. Today’s announcements will form the basis of the Queen’s Speech (this November) for the Parliament which lasts a year. The Parliament after that (beginning November 2009) will be cut short by an election. So this is it. Some Blairite reforms. Some big ideas. But quite a lot of ‘buts’. On housing, the government is proposing to buy up unsold houses and rent them out to less well off tenants. But they are only stumping up £200 million, which will only buy a few thousand…

Yesterday I had a look at Monitoring the Commentariat for free. Iain Dale has translated that as:

“Matt Wardman thinks he can put Editorial Intelligence out of business.”

Now there’s another challenge. In the spirit of enquiry and to encourage enterprise (!) I thought I’d do a quick minute rundown of Editorial Intelligence’s services and a few of their potential free competitors.

Delighted Labour backbenches may not be too bothered, but there is nothing that exercises the Treasury more than maintaining the two fiscal rules - the golden rule and the sustainable investment rule. So has Alistair Darling done it? Well those…

The Right Rev Hassan Dehqani-Tafti was for 29 years the Anglican bishop in
Iran.

The Labour campaign in Crewe and Nantwich rang a faint bell and I’ve been trying to remember what it was. And then it came to me. Algernon. The boy with the silver spoon in his mouth. In December 1976 the…

The early outbreak of summer made me crack open the hot-weather wardrobe. In the way of these things, it turned out to contain, like Tutankhamun’s tomb, treasures dating back practically to the dawn of time, favourite old T-shirts, ancient cracking pairs of sandals, and, especially, a long run of pairs of shorts. Some were 10 years old; others were from just last year.

When I worked at The Daily Telegraph, our commercial fortunes were built on a fixed front-page advertisement for improving your memory. The firm that paid so highly for the slot knew that the elderly readership regarded memory as sacred, and its loss as a cruel separation from identity. What are we, if not a sum of our past? Yet for Jill Price, a 42-year-old school administrator and widow, memory is a sadistic jailer, imposing the past on the present, without sequence or respite.

This post may well ruin your Saturday breakfast, and it is shocking. The article highlights some of the physical violence used by those working for Mr Mugabe and his friends in their campaign to retain power in Zimbabwe. Not pleasant - but neither is Zanu PF’s campaign.

From ‘The Henly Meltdown Festival’ to ‘The Tate Modern Festival of Sandcastles’,Craig Brown details his top 8 events of the summer.

After last week’s calamitous defeat for the Labour Party in the town hall elections, it was imperative for Gordon Brown to steady the ship of Government and project an image of calm and authoritative leadership. Yet the Prime Minister has failed to provide any of this. Instead, he has stumbled from one imbroglio to another. Tragically, the only image that has been projected from Downing Street is one of haplessnessand desperation.

In October 1989 Ian Brodie, then Washington correspondent of The Daily
Telegraph, was accompanying Vice-President Dan Quayle on a trip to southern
California when an earthquake struck San Francisco. As Quayle’s aides
dithered, Brodie intervened. “I know what Margaret Thatcher would do. She
would fly straight up there,” he said. Quayle took his advice, Brodie went
with him, and he scooped the world with a helicopter tour of the devastated
area.

All of the worst aspects of this Government’s record on law and order were in evidence in the measures outlined by Jacqui Smith yesterday. The Home Secretary is promising to establish an anti-social behaviour “action squad”. Ms Smith envisages this body identifying those guilty of nuisance behaviour and checking whether they have paid their car insurance, TV licence and council tax. The purpose is “to ensure the tables are turned on offenders so that those who harass our communities are themselves harried and harassed”.