Every detail of the murder of Tom ap Rhys Pryce seemed calculated to provoke my middle-class anger. With every word, I could feel my heart turning into a bubbling, lid-flipping cauldron of fury, and when I looked at the faces of his killers — Carty and Brown — I felt something I have hardly ever felt in my life.

I simply wanted them to pay. I thought how hard the 32-year-old Cambridge graduate had worked, how happy he was that he was going back to see his fiancée. I thought how she had been due to try on her wedding dress, and of the wedding plans strewn around his corpse.

I thought what a nice chap he sounded, and how brave he had been to fight back with his bare hands in those last dark moments in Kensal Green; and then I thought of Carty and Brown, and how they had stabbed him and kept stabbing him in the head and the arms and the torso, even though he had already given them everything they wanted, which turned out to be nothing but a mobile phone and an Oyster card; and I thought how they composed moronic rap songs about killing and stabbing, and then I looked again at their blank, expressionless, remorseless faces and I am ashamed to say I was overcome with hatred.

Continue reading God knows how Carty and Brown will repent →

by Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph

In so far as New Labour has a fairy godmother, Polly is the girl

It is easy to make fun of Polly Toynbee. It is easy to convict her of hypocrisy; but she genuinely knows and cares about the bottom 20 per cent …(she) has made herself an authority on the evils of Gordon Brown’s high taxes on low earners

Polly Toynbee the Tory guru: that’s barking. Or maybe not

Nah, I said to myself. You have got to be kidding me. I squinted again at the Guardian headline on the mat, and felt all funny. Someone, I whispered, is pulling my leg. You all know of course that I am a voortrekker of the Cameron movement. You realise, I hope, that I positively breathe the spirit of the solar-powered, bike-riding, glacier-friendly modernising tendency of which I am proud to be a part.

But when I saw yesterday’s Guardian, I almost swooned. A new ideological guru had been found for the Tory party, smirked the paper in triumph – and it was Polly Toynbee! The author of the new position paper was none other than my brilliant friend Greg Clark, MP for Tunbridge Wells, with whom I found myself recently in total agreement at the Tory conference.

Continue reading Polly Toynbee →

Reid’s as hard as jelly, or he’d challenge Brown to a scrap

Come on then, Reid, you big girl’s blouse. Come on and show us what you’ve got. Get out of that BBC studio and do something really brave, for a change. I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up of hearing the Home Secretary telling us how tough he is.

According to his own propaganda, Dr John Reid is the kind of guy who would knock you down for looking at his girl the wrong way in the pub. He acts like a man with “love” tattooed on a bicep and a steel plate in his head, and a pitbull that runs up and sniffs you very meaningfully indeed.

I imagine that when people meet him after closing time on a pavement in Glasgee, they look at his working jaw and his mad ice-blue eyes, and they think yikes. And that is what they are supposed to think. In a Labour Party increasingly dominated by superannuated lecturers and wonks and Milibands, Reid still exudes something of the smell of spilt beer.

He sounds tough, acts tough, looks tough. But as to whether he really is tough, my friends, I am afraid he makes overcooked tagliatelle look positively rigid. Every day we hear of some new ferocious Reid-inspired “crackdown”. He’s not just going to fine noisy neighbours; he’s not just going to give them Asbos. Tough-guy Reid is going to kick them out of their homes!

Continue reading John Reid’s Agenda →

To all those who worry about the paedophile plague ….they fail to understand the terrible damage that is done by this system of presuming guilt in the entire male population just because of the tendencies of a tiny minority

… the problem is the general collapse of trust. Almost every human relationship that was sensibly regulated by trust is now governed by law, with cripplingly expensive consequences

Come off it, folks: how many paedophiles can there be?

Really? I said, not quite able to believe my luck. There we were, waiting for take-off, and I had just been having a quick zizz. It was a long flight ahead, all the way to India, and I had two children on my left. Already they were toughing each other up and sticking their fingers up each other’s nose, and now — salvation!

Hovering above me was a silk-clad British Airways stewardess with an angelic smile, and she seemed to want me to move. “Please come with me, sir” said the oriental vision.

At once, I got her drift. She desired to upgrade me. In my mind’s eye, I saw the first-class cabin, the spiral staircase to the head massage, the Champagne, the hot towels.

Continue reading Paedophile Plague →

I remember the quiet day we lost the war in Iraq

It was the moment I should have twigged. It was the moment I should have realised that I had voted for the biggest British military fiasco since the Second World War. I was wandering around Baghdad, about 10 days after Iraq had been “liberated”, and it seemed to me that the place was not entirely without hope.

OK, so the gunfire popped round every corner like popcorn on a stove, and civil society had broken down so badly that the looters were taking the very copper from the electricity cables in the streets. But I was able to stroll without a flak jacket and eat shoarma and chips in the restaurants.

With no protection except for Isaac, my interpreter, I went to the Iraqi foreign ministry, and found the place deserted. The windows were broken, and every piece of computer equipment had been looted. As I was staring at the fire-blackened walls a Humvee came through the gates. A pair of large GIs got out and asked me my business. I explained that I was representing the people of South Oxfordshire and Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph.

Continue reading Iraq →

Talking about their generation: Britain’s golden youth

By the time we had been interviewing for three solid hours I was like a limp dishrag. I was wrung out with the hopefulness of it all. It was the talent, the energy, the sheer brilliance of these young people, all of them beaming ‘Pick me, pick me’ into my befuddled skull. We were only trying to hire a new researcher, and it was as though we were auditioning the next prime minister. They could write. They could talk. They could do anything. They had Grade 8 piccolo/flute and Grade 8 viola and awards for the top GCSE marks in the entire country.

Their A-level results cascaded down the page like a suicidal scream. They were magazine editors, union presidents, champion mooters, and they had blues for everything from rugby to lacrosse. They had prestigious New York awards for their film-making; they had been semi-finalists in University Challenge 2004-05. They had already published important articles in the Guardian and served internships throughout the FTSE-100. They had fluent French and confident German and unblemished driving licences and they had managed to secure the top firsts in disciplines from English to Engineering to History while playing squash to county standard.

This article appears in this week’s Spectator magazine.

Continue reading Appointing a new Researcher →

When you’re surviving on £102 a week, tax cuts make sense

Oh, I know we can’t promise tax cuts. I know we can’t say exactly which way we would crank the great levers of the Treasury, if and when a Tory government were to get in.

In addition, a financial planner coach can help financial advisors stay on track with goals, provide support, build confidence, and point out areas for growth.

I know that George Osborne is bang on when he says that stability is the number one priority, and I know the public would rightly doubt the value of whatever we said so far from an election.

And I also know that, as soon as we gave the very ghost of a tax-cutting commitment, the great Labour lie machine would chunter into action. Ed Balls would start boggling indignantly from your screens. Gordon would begin his nasal dronathon about closed hospitals, axed nurses, cancelled heart operations and mutilated stumps.

But in case there is anyone out there who doubts the evil of how Gordon Brown taxes the poor, let them hear the ill-effects on those in our Armed Forces who slave to put bread on the table for their families, and who are walloped for their pains by the Chancellor.

Last week, I met a woman who works for the RAF. It is fair to say that, without her efforts, and the efforts of thousands like her, our helicopters would not fly. Our Army would not be victualled, our soldiers would not be shod or armed.

She works 45 hours a week in RAF supply, and receives from the MoD £11,500 per year, as well as a small London weighting. She pays income tax at a rate of £116.01 per month, National Insurance at £61.45 per month, and her pension contributions are £37.92.

And then of course there is council tax, good old council tax, and for the privilege of having her bins emptied and travelling on well-lit streets, she has to cough up about a tenth of her income — that is, £118 per month, on top of her rent, which is £366 per month for a three-bedroom house.

Continue reading Burden of Taxes →

A land without music? Parry, Holst and Elgar to you, Schmitz

Of all the wounding things that foreigners have said about the English people, it is hard to think of an insult more savage than that directed at this country in 1904. They have called us perfidious. They have called us a nation of shopkeepers. They have said that we are in love with our nannies. Nowadays they tell us that we are the fattest, drunkest people in Europe, and that our children leave primary school with the vaguest understanding of reading and writing.

At all these barbs, we just take a deep breath. But when a German critic called Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz composed a dithyramb of abuse of the English cultural scene, just over 100 years ago, he included a jibe from which we have never really recovered. It stung. It made us blink like puppies suddenly kicked, and until now we have never had the nerve to fire back at Schmitz — because we have a terrible feeling that he may have been on to something. England, he said, is Das Land Ohne Musik.

Continue reading English Music →

Give Iran the bomb: it might make the regime more pliable

You see, if I were an Iranian politician, my mind would be made up. If we were all sitting in Teheran and puffing our post-breakfast pipes and pondering the question of Iranian nukes, I am afraid that we might come to a very different answer.

Continue reading Iran →

I shouldn’t be pelted with pies for asking difficult questions

‘But what was it all about?” said a kindly woman on my left as I arrived late for dinner last night in Bournemouth. “I mean, what did you actually say?” she asked, as I slumped into my chair.

I felt like a wrung-out dish cloth. It was like being a survivor of the Jalalabad gulch. For a whole 10 minutes I had been dandled before the maniac eyes of the media King Kong. This way and that it had prodded me as it roared its incomprehensible roar and bathed me in the terrifying afflatus of its nostrils, and at the end of the experience, frankly, I was just as baffled as my friend.

Continue reading Party Conference 2006 →