Crack BBC journo Peter Taylor’s film The Secret Peacemaker, about Brendan Duddy, the man who maintained secret communications between the IRA leadership and the British government from the early 70s to 1993, was a cracker; it provided rich detail about the practicalities of ending the war, the missed opportunities of the first ceasefire, and moreover…
Read More What if they staged a coup and nobody came?February 23, 2008: One of things that I find so frustrating about blogging is dealing with people who are either stupid, venal or willfully choose to misrepresent your views. More often than not, these people post anonymously and decide to tar their opponents with the epithet “racist”, “homophobic” or “fascist” in the hope that by…
Read More Donal Blaney: HypocriteJohn Band has some thoughts about Northern Rock. So do I; more precisely, I have some thoughts about the Tories’ performance in the crisis. It’s been appallingly silly, irresponsible, and sometimes plain ignorant. For example, last autumn the Tories seem to have thought that the Bank of England’s loan to the Rock was taxpayers’ money.…
Read More Tories: UnseriousThe consistently superb Bartholomew’s notes on religion has published extensive details about Paul De L’Aire Staines, various old friends, and South Africa. As it seems inevitable that he will fire off a nastygram at any moment, readers are asked to mirror the text in the interests of public enlightenment; I’ve dropped it in the comments.…
Read More Mirrorball: Paul Staines and those “Liberals”Off to WashingtonIain Dale 11:24 AM Just getting on the plane. No comments can be moderated until around 10pm. Have a nice day! Directly beneath this missive is the following HONKING GREAT AD: Mind you, the ability to be in favour of aeroplanes but not runways is pretty much constitutive of post-1979 British Conservatism. Or…
Read More Iain Dale is Frankly RidiculousThe Tory is sure to leap on the news that, as Dr Rant points out, there is little point in doing a “deep clean” of hospitals because hospital-acquired diseases are propagated by the staff. Strange, I remember when Michael Howard floated a whole election campaign on the line “How difficult can it be to keep…
Read More How difficult can it be?John Redwood has a secret plan to solve the pensions crisis and boost the economy; change the fire regulations so you can cram more codgers per square foot into your “care home” (Orwellian of the decade; they don’t and it’s not). Given a brief to banish Teh Curse of Regulation, this is what he comes…
Read More Still crazy after all these yearsClimate-change denier and quack weatherman Piers Corbyn writes to the paper: The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate. Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects. Their theory has no power to predict. It is faith, not science. I challenge them to…
Read More Science!I didn’t grok the significance of “Debi Jones”, a Tory councillor quoted by the Sindy‘s latest WLAN pseudoscience scare piece, until I checked in on this row at the Ministry. In a box-out that doesn’t appear on their website, Jonathan Owen quotes “Debi Jones, Tory councillor for Hightown in Somerset” as saying that: “It seems…
Read More Digital Dave signs up to WLAN psuedoscienceThe Ministry reports on some Tories’ bright idea, a website where people who don’t want to be contacted by canvassers can “sign up” to be taken off their lists. The man behin it, Tory councillor Jeremy Kite, turns up in comments to defend himself. A clue: it seems not to have declared that Tory canvassers…
Read More Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite