Had he not made this concession, David Cameron would have been forced to lead a minority government or – less likely, given the electoral arithmetic – to stand by as the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with Labour. With the date for the referen...

It shouldn't come as a surprise. For the worst part of 30 years, teaching has been ruled by government diktat: you will be told how, when and what to teach. Teachers have lost any influence over the curriculum and have become deskilled, deprofessiona...

Since fireworks are illegal in the South they had to be bought in the North and smuggled across the border – which is ironic, considering the tons of explosives the IRA smuggled in the opposite direction during the Thirty Years' War it waged on Ulste...

Even so, the notion of an index of well-being has tempted politicians ever since. The last to try it in Britain was Tony Blair who held "life satisfaction" seminars and commissioned various studies before concluding that happiness changed shape like ...

This was a man who built a convenience-food empire on turkey meat. And he did it by belonging to that peculiar group of larger-than-life entrepreneurs who become the faces of their often-eponymous businesses, and appear in their own advertising. Peop...

The working class and the aristocracy were united in their disdain for those who were neither rich nor poor, neither posh or the salt of the earth – but tediously middling. To be middle class was to be a shopkeeper or the like; you were petty; you we...

EC policy is incoherent Calum Roberts displays his usual superficial and one-sided views on the North Sea fisheries as he describes high-grading (report, 18 November). What Professor Roberts omitted to say was that high-grading in the North Sea h...

The most famous example of a Tory politician blundering into this territory was when the former Social Security Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, was campaigning to be leader of the Conservative Party in October 1974. "The balance of our human stock is th...

Last week we had the 1980s Cabinet minister Lord Young opining, over the clink of expensive cutlery, that most Britons "had never had it so good" during the "so-called recession" and predicting that before long everyone "will wonder what all the fuss...