Tag Archives: debate

While most people might have spent Boxing Day walking off their Christmas lunch or snoozing through a film, Tim O’Donovan was settling down to do some serious arithmetic, as he always does at this time of year. And there can be no margin of error when your annual sums make …

Recalling the two younger Princes, the Prince of Wales’s housekeeper Wendy Berry found Edward ‘utterly charming and polite’, but Andrew (pictured) boorish and rude, writes CRAIG BROWN On November 28, 2001, Gyles Brandreth attended a reception at Buckingham Palace for bigwigs in the media. The Queen was telling a small …

Kelsey Wells has laid bare the disdain which has greeted her since she wed William Seymour, Earl of Yarmouth — and which now threatens to lead to the courts The Duchess of Sussex has spoken of her struggle to adapt to life as a Royal.  But it can be just as …

Which of us would have imagined gathering round our television sets on a Saturday evening to watch the Queen’s second son squirming and dissembling as he’s grilled about his friendship with a convicted paedophile? We thought Princess Diana’s tearful interview about the state of her marriage to Prince Charles was …

John McDonnell (pictured) took to the radio yesterday sounding for all the world like a friendly uncle Anyone who imagines nationalising a chunk of BT will lead to a golden age of telecommunications clearly can’t remember the Sixties or Seventies. When I was a little girl, my grandparents were one …

She was a princess when she laid her first wreath at the Cenotaph.  As a veteran herself – and, indeed, the only head of state in the world today who served in the Second World War – the Queen knows this ceremony better than anyone. Yet, for her, it remains …

The last time John McDonnell was put in charge of a significant budget was back in the 1980s. It’s fair to say it didn’t end well. McDonnell was, at the time, deputy leader and finance chairman of the Greater London Council (GLC).  Its self-appointed mission was, as McDonnell put it in …

How many of the couples you know met at work? Quite a few, I bet. Westminster is full of political pairings. Journalism is a hotbed, too: when I married my husband, we were both working at the same newspaper (though technically we met on a skiing holiday). And I’ve lost …

So febrile have been the scenes in Parliament in recent weeks that the economic statement by Chancellor Sajid Javid on September 4 has gone almost unnoticed, yet it was scarcely what we have come to expect from Tory governments. Declaring ‘the end of austerity’, Javid unveiled the biggest spending spree …

By now, we all know the Harry and Meghan drill. Their royal mission in life is to ‘shine a light’ on hardship, to raise awareness and funds for good causes, while still being ‘authentic’ in themselves. And truly, they are to be commended for this. If they so wished, the …