On 15 September 2007, Gordon Brown said: "I give the people of Darfur a commitment: the world will not abandon you"; but did he mean what he said? The UN-African Union peacekeeping force took over more than two months ago, but lacks helicopters, prop...

The Bill promises a network of protected marine areas to cover a fifth of British waters by 2012, as well as some welcome measures to give the public the freedom to walk around the entire English coastline for the first time. But the central provisio...

This is a political row fuelled by the Prime Minister's anxiety to pacify Middle England. There is a widespread, but mistaken, belief that the country is in the grip of an epidemic of cannabis-induced psychosis. This is based on the conviction that t...

His children, through their last survivor – the Old Bailey Judge Henry Fielding Dickens, who died in 1933 – gave the view that when they and Dickens's friends were dead, that request would cease to operate. From the number of monuments, memorials and...

Although Mr Ahern was a Haughey protégé, he seemed at first interested in power but not money. He presented himself as a man of plain and simple tastes, a happy workaholic content to run the country and let his own financial future look after itself....

The result is that they are accepting fewer children who receive free school meals than neighbouring, non-religious schools in similar circumstances. As one education expert has suggested, there can only be one reason for that – to achieve better exa...