June 2003

What a morning! The sun was shining, the world not much worse than the day before, and Ian Duncan Smith was flopping about the floor of the Commons like some sort of horrible laboratory mutant fish fallen from its test tank. He made a frantic attempt to trap Blair on European policy, trying to make…

Well, so we won’t be joining the € after all. Hardly a shocker – after the weeks of tiresome spin dickering, perhaps we need a new word for an announcement that declares nothing new. A claptrap, perhaps. The scary bit was this morning’s BBC Radio 5 phone in, riddled with oddsters and the terminally scared.…

The Yorkshire Ranters were a loose group of far-Left troublemakers who went about the country shortly after the Civil War, spreading dangerous ideas about common property, the equality of citizens, the need to destroy the priests’ doctrine of sin, and similar stuff. The movement was centred about Kildwick, not far from where I was brought…