We’ll get more hosepipe bans if Prescott showers us in new homes
Most Daily Telegraph readers are of course far too young to remember the summer of 1976, but for some of us it was a critical moment in our adolescence.
It was so hot that a certain au pair girl decided that her bikini was a stifling encumbrance, and one lunchtime she turned up with nothing on at all, a dress code that was instantly copied with stunned approval by everyone else.
Soon our valley in Somerset was fabled as a kind of nymph-strewn Arcadia. People started to cadge invitations to see our au pair, and across the nation we British were briefly seized by the same deeply embarrassing tropical madness. There were streakers at Piccadilly and streakers at Lord’s, and no wonder.
Racial and Religious Hatred Bill
The best way to cure ourselves of Islamophobia is to have a laugh
Among the disasters of my early journalistic career was the time I was sent by the newsdesk to Walsingham in Norfolk, to report on what was promised to be a major religious bust-up. There were these Anglo-Catholics, the news editor explained, and they wanted to march with an image of the Virgin towards a shrine; and then there were these evangelical Protestants. It was gonna be a real ding-dong, said the news editor. He wanted action, colour, quotes, personality. He wanted ecclesiastical fisticuffs with lashings of sectarian abuse. He wanted the Gaza Strip comes to Norfolk.
Make Poverty History
Evidence Session on world poverty
Progress on the G8 debt relief and aid deal
International Development Select Committee
Since headlines on the 8th July when G8 leaders announced a $28 .8 billion ($50 billion) aid package and debt of the 18 poorest African nations cancelled, what progress has been achieved? Yesterday’s ID select committee at which the Secretary of State for International Development gave evidence sheds a few clues.
Boris-Johnson.com has evolved
As a reward for the countless eager readers and contributors to Boris’s site every day, we’ve taken a step forward and launched a new website design – and hopefully you’ll see the benefits in the coming days. The site now looks a lot cleaner and to give you a broader view of Boris’s work you can see related entries alongside each entry.
In the next few days, we’ll be tidying up any edges and adding a few new features, including an improved Photo Gallery. Let us know what you think!
Enlarging on the response to the London bombs
Just don’t call it war
in The Spectator
If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would do the same to all the other houses in the area thought to have been the temporary or permanent addresses of the suicide bombers and their families.
After decades of deranged attacks the Israelis have come to the conclusion that this is the best way to deter Palestinian families from nurturing these vipers in their bosoms, and also the best way of explaining to the death-hungry narcissists that they may get the 72 black-eyed virgins of scripture, but their family gets the bulldozer.
