Readers of CapX with either good memories or not enough to worry about will remember my brief campaign against Thought for Day, the religious affairs slot on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. At ten to eight every morning, Monday to Saturday, a vicar, priest, rabbi, imam, humanist or multi-faith commentator is called upon to make […]
Sometimes you really have to hit rock bottom before a recovery can begin. So it may prove with the Labour party and the calamitous leadership of the inept Jeremy Corbyn and his hard left pals. Accidentally, Livingstone took the party to its lowest point, with weird comments about Hitler and anti-Semitism. The outcome of the […]
There’s half an hour of my life I’ll never get back. I watched PMQs again, so that you don’t have to. Goodness, I wish I hadn’t bothered. There is nothing much useful to say beyond the following: 1) Yvette Cooper asked a terrific question about child refugees, in a professional fashion that put the current […]
In a fight between junior doctors and a government minister there is only going to be one winner in the court of public opinion. Doctors train for years and are, we hope, there to help us when we fall ill. Government ministers, on the other hand, are almost as unpopular as journalists and estate agents. […]
This is not a defence of Boris Johnson. He is more than capable of defending himself, although it is curious that his “part-Kenyan” piece in the Sun which got him into such trouble seems to have been read by and infuriated so many people who normally say they do not read the Sun. It cannot […]
Throughout Barack Obama’s trip to the UK I’ve been saying that Brexiteers should just take 24 hours off. Forget what you think of his healthcare policy or inept handling of the middle east; the guy looks great and he’s here being nice to the Queen in the week of her 90th birthday. Most people will just see […]
This is the weekly newsletter from CapX. To receive it by email every Friday, along with a short daily email of our top five stories, please subscribe here. It is hard to believe, with many weeks left until Britain votes in its In-Out EU referendum, but already there is worrying talk of a second plebiscite […]
As Donald Trump finds ever more inventive ways in which to make America grate again, the maddest US political cycle since 1912 is becoming wearing and frightening even for some of us obsessives who find politics on the other side of the Atlantic fascinating. Trundling into London I saw the results from the New York […]
On Saturday afternoon my wife forced me to leave the desk at which I am finishing a book and marched me to see Sunset Boulevard, starring Glenn Close. A break for a few hours would do me good, she insisted (my wife insisted, not Glenn Close, who is blissfully unaware that I was there). What […]
Can you think of anything more likely to fatally damage the cause of the Leave side in the UK’s EU referendum than a court case that delays the vote until October? The British have already had enough of the EU referendum and there are still ten weeks of campaigning left. Indeed, voters have had enough […]
No. This is going to be a very short post. After the last few weeks, in which the Tories have been on the rack over the future of the UK’s steel industry and the Prime Minister’s tax affairs have been all over the media incessantly, one might have thought that the leader of the opposition […]
I’m finishing my next book and something is bothering me. The book will be published in September and it’s about the City. It is an attempt to place the exciting human story of Big Bang and the financial revolution in a wider historical context. Towards the end, I’m wrestling with one question in particular, however. […]
Jeremy knew he had seen it somewhere. “I have seen it somewhere. That is very clear and important,” he told his head of communications, Seumas Milne, who having failed to find the cursed document in the filing cabinet had now started rifling through the leader’s books. “Might you have used it as a bookmark?” said […]
As Dominic Lawson pointed out in the Sunday Times, David Cameron was foolish to ever condemn the tax affairs of others practising avoidance (which is legal and commonplace.) When in 2012 he attacked Jimmy Carr for “immoral” tax avoidance he left himself open to charges of hypocrisy. Cameron realised this, which is why almost unnoticed he later […]
This is the weekly newsletter from Iain Martin, editor of CapX. To receive it by email every Friday, along with a short daily email of our top five stories, please subscribe here. At spin doctor school they will teach the How Not to Defend David Cameron’s Tax Affairs module for years to come. How could […]
I landed back in Britain and absolutely everyone was talking about the Panama Papers. The baggage handlers at Heathrow were clustered around discussing the horrors of off-shore bank accounts and making bets on who will be in Jeremy Corbyn’s cabinet. In the passport queue too no-one was talking about anything other than the tax return […]
If you haven’t read Ian Leslie’s work before, then you are in for a treat if you buy a copy of today’s Guardian (what do you mean you don’t buy the Guardian?). Ian Leslie’s background is in the advertising industry and his latest book is Curious: The Desire to Know & Why Your Future Depends […]
This is not – I repeat not – an endorsement of Boris Johnson ahead of a Conservative leadership contest. There is no vacancy at the top of the Tory party, and there won’t be for weeks. Joking, joking, I’m joking. The leadership contest is years away if Cameron wins the referendum and I suspect that most Tory […]
Whenever President Obama does something endearing or constructive, such as visiting Cuba this week, he has an awful habit of spoiling it several days later. Here I must annoy some of my friends in the US who were livid over his trip to one of the last surviving laboratories of Communist failure. Somehow the President […]
For months, years, what feels like decades, the Nationalist part of the Scottish Left has claimed that if only Scotland had the powers (always the demand for more powers, never the harder work of reforming public services) then the wealthy would pay much higher taxes. In particular, during the UK general election, the case was […]
