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All politicians want some kind of legacy. They seek a footnote in the annuls, just to prove that all those compromises and disappointments were not in vain. Chris Huhne’s legacy is that his name is synonymous with the criminal act of…
Today, in 1960, 69 South African protestors were shot and killed by the police outside the police station in Sharpeville. A crowd of seven thousand had presented themselves to the police station to be arrested for transgressing the…
History is littered with crazy predictions. There was that one by Thomas Malthus that population growth would outstrip food production, and everyone would starve to death. And then someone invented seed drills and bred fatter cows and there…
It’s polling day in Eastleigh. I have no idea who’s going to win. I’d like it to be John O’Farrell, naturally, but that possibility could exist only in the plot-lines of one his excellent novels. Some, including veteran observer Michael…
Things Can Only Get Better is a wonderful book. When it appeared in 1998, it made the name of the young author John O’Farrell, and set him on a course to be a popular novelist and minor celebrity. The book’s success rests on its honest…
With French troops in Mali, and a hostage crisis in Algeria, Paul Richards argues Miliband must support Hollande Tens of thousands of people across the world are cheering the raising of the Tricolor this week, but for the wrong reasons…
‘In a tunnel underground a young Limerick man was found He was built into the new Victoria Line When the pouring gang had past sticking through the concrete cast Was the face of little Charlie Joe Devine.’ Christy Moore’s lines from Paddy…
Freak rainfall caused by global warming. Sixty thousand dead in the Syrian civil war. Open warfare over the welfare state. Teens sleeping in cardboard boxes. The return of rickets and tuberculosis. If you wanted to mount a protest in 2013…
When Eric Pickles was in his mid-30s, in 1988, he became leader of Bradford Council. Cllr Pickles’ rise to the civic leadership of one of the great northern cities was not the result of some great electoral surge in favour of Margaret…
George Osborne comes from one of those families where current events get discussed. His mother Felicity Alexandra Loxton-Peacock was a Labour voter and worked for Amnesty International. His father, the 17th Baronet, wasn’t and didn’t. You…
This week the most important nation on earth chooses its new leadership, and sets the social and economic direction for hundreds of millions of its own people, and the rest of the world. Not America, who also have some kind of election…
Not many days before he was gunned down, John F Kennedy gave a remarkable speech at the all-male liberal arts college at Amhurst, Massachusetts. Modern US politicians run a mile from the tag of intellectualism. Association with the liberal…
