Gordon Brown
Is Gordon Brown back?
Last week, there was a surprise visitor to the Treasury: Gordon Brown. The former prime minister and chancellor secretly returned…
Who is Gordon Brown to pose as the voice of fiscal sanity?
Gordon Brown is demanding Parliament be recalled for an emergency budget. By October, he says, quoting a study he commissioned…
Battered but unbowed
Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to…
To save the Union, ignore Gordon Brown
As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to…
A principled pragmatist
A headline in the Mail on Sunday, taken up eagerly by the BBC’s Todayprogramme, claimed recently: ‘The SAS is getting…
A spoonful of Sugar
Murder Island features eight real-life ‘ordinary people’ seeking to solve a fictional killing on a fictional Scottish island. What follows…
What it is to be English
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
Borrowed time
The nature of the Johnson government is still not clear, but has become more so with the announcement this week…
A novel view of Brexit: Middle England, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed
Jonathan Coe writes compelling, humane and funny novels, but you sometimes suspect he wants to write more audacious ones. He…
Gordon Brown’s memoirs show he is good at blowing his own trumpet – but nothing else
Gordon Brown has pitched his memoirs as the honest confessions of a decent man. He failed to win the one…
Women used to forgive men their defects, but the quality of mercy is under strain
Poor Gordon Brown. He embodies the problem traditionally associated with being male, which is that our sex finds it difficult…
The City needs to make new friends but is becoming pals with Putin a step too far?
In connection with the receding possibility of a London Stock Exchange listing for Saudi Aramco, I wrote that the City…
Monarch was an airline from an earlier era – but were its owners to blame for its demise?
Monarch Airlines was the ghost of an earlier age of holiday travel. When I used to see its planes lined…
Long life
It was a famous American editor and columnist Michael Kinsley who once defined the political ‘gaffe’ as something that occurs…
Labour’s England problem
My party needs to stop being scared of patriotism
Portrait of the week
Home Andrew Burnham described calls from Yvette Cooper, a rival candidate for the Labour leadership, for him to withdraw from…
Letters
What we’re building Sir: I was surprised and frustrated to read Ross Clark’s piece on housing associations in last week’s…
Come on you blues. Or, er, reds
Here’s an election-winning idea for Dave: forget about Aston Villa (or West Ham) and become a full-on Bournemouth fan. They…
A credit to the nation
Cameron was right about one thing: not sacking Lord Freud
Re-election
In a late schedule change, Channel 4’s Coalition was shifted from Thursday to Saturday to make room for Jeremy Paxman…
