David Cameron’s bold entry into the debate about housing this week reminds one of how strange it is that housing has spent such a long time in the second division of politics. For post-1945 Labour, council housing was the key to getting the right votes in the right places (e.g., Herbert Morrison’s desire to ‘build
A health warning greeted me: ‘LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auberon Waugh have today joined the staff of The Spectator. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel. Gatley’s Libel and Slander (sixth and seventh edition) may be consulted in my office. Nigel Lawson, Editor.’ Times were hard. I had come
By the weekend, the Conservatives had achieved the feat of making their own funding become just as much ‘the issue’ as Labour’s. The papers were full of sharp-looking loans which the Tories, as much as Labour, had received from the capitalist class. The Prime Minister and his allies had succeeded in making any scandal appear
Who keeps Lent now? Lenctentid was the Anglo-Saxon name for March, meaning spring tide, and as the 40-day fast fell almost entirely in March, it was called Lent, though in other Christian countries it had quite different names. The odd thing about Lent is that though it is a period of gloom and sorrow, commemorating
