At this time of the year, when part-time Christians all over the country will be making a rare visit to their local church in order to keep their membership up to date for another nine months, it has been salutary...
Read moreIt is becoming increasingly difficult to take the appropriate attitude towards England's patron saint - that is, to treat him as a slightly embarrassing joke. Once it was easy, when the white flag with a red cross was as reliable...
Read moreThe face of that familiar figure, the government nanny, is changing. Until recently, she was a scary, smiling appropriateness-enforcer with a hint of Cell Block H about her. In the imagination, she looked a bit like Harriet Harman. The new...
Read moreAlthough saving money is always welcome in these tricky times, it is with a real pang of sadness that I will be cancelling my direct debit to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and resigning my membership. Watching...
Read moreNo words encapsulate the spirit of the age more perfectly than that familiar phrase "named and shamed". When someone receives the named-and-shamed treatment, the world briefly seems a better, fairer place. Whether the guilty party is a politician, a dodgy...
Read moreHow comforting it is to be on the side of the good guys. Life may be complicated but at least there is one issue about which every decent, sensible person can agree. We hold these truths to be self-evident: the...
Read moreImagine that, instead of being an article in a newspaper, these words were part of an opinionated dinner-party conversation. Across the table is someone presenting a controversial and contrarian view - Melanie Phillips, perhaps, or Ken Livingstone. The question is...
Read moreAssume good behaviour and the bad can be eradicated It is not difficult to find symptoms in everyday life of our low self-esteem as a nation. Binge-drinking is one, casual violence another. But the most obvious and universal sign of...
Read moreIt has been a good few weeks for Max Clifford, Britain's new face of morality. With the quiet, caring authority of a bishop, he has presided over the difficult case of Alfie, the 13-year-old boy who may or may not...
Read moreProving that life can sometimes come up with punchlines with which no satirists could compete, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook have both been in the news this week. Moore, who died in 2002, is being remembered by his rather odd-sounding...
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