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When I was in the navy I became friendly with a group of three former public schoolboys. We were all cricket fanatics, and they managed to turn me into an [...]

If I were still working as a daily newspaper journalist (which thank the Lord I'm not, sir), I would go to considerable lengths to ensure that nothing bearing my by-line [...]

Not having sat an economics exam for a very long time--45 years, to be quite candid--I am clearly in no position to know what kind of questions are set by [...]

The tragedy of British politics since the war is that the most crucial issue of the period has also been popularly regarded as the most boring. It isn't just that [...]

If there is anyone out there who still I feels an instinctive hostility to the working of the capitalist system--and such a person would have to be profoundly indifferent to [...]

Goodness knows what odds Messrs Ladbrokes would offer against any particular reader of NSS also being a reader of the Daily Telegraph, but I would imagine it might be more [...]

One of the more irritating aspects of trendy political journalism in these pre-election days is the multiplication of feature articles about the people surrounding new Labour, mostly of the 'who's [...]

It was Julian Critchley, the disaffected Tory MP for Aldershot, who first coined the expression 'garagistes' to describe the kind of people who had taken over the parliamentary Conservative Party [...]

It is one of the many paradoxes of Irish politics, both past and present, that it was a proposal to hold an election which led to last weekend's monstrous outrage [...]

One of the many depressing things to emerge from the past 17 years of Tory misrule is the discovery that quite a lot of people I like and respect actually [...]

Alas, I have never had much enthusiasm for Harriet Harman as a shadow minister. Her glacial manner does not endear, to say the least. And, by and large, her performance [...]

Not for the first time in politics, it is the comedians and the cartoonists who are getting it right about John Major and his ludicrous government. While opposition politicians are [...]

One of the late Dennis Potter earliest and funniest television plays was a magnificent send-up of a by-election, called Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton! It was found on a [...]

One of last weekend's newspapers quoted some unidentified Tory MP as saying that Emma Nicholson's father, himself a former Tory MP, must have turned in his grave after her defection [...]

I got a severe ticking off last week in my old newspaper--though no personally, I hasten to add. The target of the Guardian's criticism was the kind of Britwho dares [...]

* But perhaps old chaps like me should stop worrying about the future and spend our time arguing about the past. Certainly it is easier to recapture some of the [...]

Sunday night is nostalgia night on our television screens these days. Last weekend, in addition to the scratched old movies that traditionally help us digest the Sunday roast, viewers were [...]

The Irish, God bless them, never really let you down. just when you think they are becoming throughly po-faced about some issue or other, someone says something that cuts through [...]

In the past couple of weeks I have been experiencing that most tedious of nocturnal phenomena, the recurring nightmare. Night after night. I find myself seated in the familiar surroundings [...]

Observing the prolonged death throes of John Major's government is increasingly like tuning in to a sitcom version of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as performed by [...]

Did you feel it--that slight shudder under your feet last Thursday? It may not have registered much on the Richter scale, but it certainly rattled the crockery on the sideboards [...]

Who once threatened to chew the balls off the chief of the general staff? Why are there fingernail scratchmarks on the walls of the Westminster office of Labour's deputy leader? [...]

Lord Beaverbrook, arguably the most mischievous proprietor ever own a British newspaper, had a little ditty that he liked to intone (not even his admirers could have called it singing) [...]

In general, we journalists rather enjoy our public image as hard-boiled, cynical fellows in dirty raincoats. Most of us take it as a special kind of compliment when pollsters list [...]

By the time you read this, you could well have an advantage over this column--you might know what John Major actually said at Blackpool on Friday. You might even have [...]

One of the most depressing features of the current controversy over Tony Blair's reconstruction of the Labour Party is that so many of the yardsticks used to measure his success [...]

You have to admire Tony Blair's courage. There he was last Sunday night, face to face with the terrifying Peter Jay on BBC2's The Money Programme and evidently ready to [...]

You have to admire Tony Blair's courage. There he was last Sunday night, face to face with the terrifying Peter Jay on BBC2's The Money Programme and evidently ready to [...]

One didn't need to be a total wimp to experience just a twinge of sympathy for Paddy Ashdown on Monday morning. There he was in Glasgow, all geared up for [...]

One of the nice things about being a journalist is that, if you are lucky, you get to be a witness at defining moments in history. You know the kind [...]

There is something positively awesome about the determination of Tam Dalyell and Tony Benn to back unpopular causes, to row against the tide and make faces at established opinion, and [...]

Do you remember Bryan Gould? Oh, come on, pull yourself together: he was that pink-faced chap with the endearing bald patch and just a trace of a New Zealand accent [...]

The recent spat between a group of Pacific war veterans and the new Japanese owner of London's County Hall has revived memories not only of the horrors of the Far [...]

For reasons it isn't necessary to explain, I have recently been spending a lot of time ploughing through dusty bundles of old newspaper cuttings from the period shortly before and [...]

Is the Conservative Party dying? Sim ply to tap out that sentence gives me so much malicious pleasure that I am perhaps letting my hopes run away with my expectations. [...]

Kenneth Clarke has declared war on the right, and in the Guardian of all places Something fishy is going on when the City pages of the Sunday Telegraph slag off [...]

Any newspaper editor whose publication is struggling with a falling circulation has always faced a difficult decision. Clearly, something has to be done to reverse the decline. There has to [...]

Of course John Major and Michael Heseltine cut a deal - but it wasn't the one described by the Sunday Times You've got to hand it to the Tories: they [...]

The people of Britain had no say in a contest that only served to underline how right wing the Tory party and the Tory press have become The abiding image [...]

A naive idea seems to have got about lately that the main purpose of Tory backbenchers in their current machinations at Westminster is to settle on the leader who offers [...]

The Tory dream of a property-owning democracy has become a housing nightmare that Labour must dispel A friend remarked recently that the strangest thing about the present government is that [...]

The eight whipless Tory Eurosceptics who were welcomed back into the fold with no conditions imposed have exposed the total powerlessness of the whips Maybe my tastes have been distorted [...]

Why does Gordon Brown want Ken Clarke to bow to the Bank of England? Does he really think interest rates should go up? Michael Heseltine, now emerging as the cabinet's [...]

In all the countless thousands of words written and uttered last weekend about VE Day 1945, there seemed to me to be one very short but cogent word that was [...]

One of the many inconveniences of getting old is the increasing frequency with which one wakes up in the middle of the night. Worse still is the fact that one [...]

A Blair government could fail unless Labour stops behaving like a closed monastic order and starts filling the policy vacuum Last week I went to the funeral of a fine [...]

Reading Peter Hitchens' description of the death by electrocution of Nicholas Ingrain in last weekend's Sunday Express, it was difficult not to be disgusted by one's own ghoulish interest and [...]

The Guardian guru sees constitutional reform as essential for economic improvement - but it could distract a Labour government from bread-and-butter issues This column has already expressed its admiration for [...]

Aitken's 14th Law of Politics may be stated thus: There is no situation in the Conservative Party that cannot be made infinitely worse by the intervention of Sir George Gardiner, [...]

One of the most depressing features of the past 20 years of right-wing supremacy in the Conservative Party has been the abject surrender and subsequent silence of the old-fashioned Tory [...]