On the face of it, Mr Cameron's was the easier task. In decrying the "slow-motion moral collapse" of parts of society, he was preaching to the long-convinced. His audience might even have been tempted to ask what took him so long. There was not a fli...

So indiscriminate and inhumane a weapon are these munitions that a global treaty outlawing them, the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), was adopted by 107 countries in 2008. It is shameful then, that some of Britain's biggest banks, including two...

When Samuel Johnson first came to London in the early 18th century, he was shocked by the casual violence of the city: “Some frolick drunkard, reeling from a feast, Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.” At the end of Johnson’s life, the Gordon...

But for me one of the most significant is the shorter, weaker, white boy being made to strip while a bigger black boy, or man, watches. The uniform that the white boy, and many white boys wear, is being taken from him. He is no more a human being. He...

The brutality is both appalling, and it is escalating. There are reportedly some 30 more dead since Saturday, after the government turned its gun boats on the port city of Latakia. While the options may be limited, that is no excuse for inaction. For...

The Conservative leader is the man who rescued his party from its "nasty" image by avoiding hardline talk on law and order, of the "prison works" type, which the party faithful love to hear.He made a much misquoted speech on youth crime five years ag...

It does not, however, tell you everything you might want to know about London, above and below the pavement. It rudely makes stations look much further apart than they are in real life, especially if they're on different lines. The addition of the ov...

Victory at Zawiyah is a double blow. It sits atop a key coastal road from Tunisia to Tripoli, over which arms and millions of litres of fuel may have been transferred daily. That will dry up fast, but the regime is also likely to quickly lose its onl...

It is disingenuous for the police to insist that they went on to the offensive all of their own accord, while chiding ministers with their absence. The original misjudgements are theirs; when a man was shot dead during a police operation in a sensiti...

There he was, enjoying a nice bowl of linguine al vongole and a glass of vino rosato in a 15-bedroom villa in Tuscany, reminiscing about the times when he used to create mayhem with his host, also an Old Etonian and a former member of Oxford Universi...

The start of the football season (I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t think it comes around quickly enough!) coincides with a new phase of the moon, and I found myself yesterday reflecting on some of the more unexpected changes to our landscape....

* Tomorrow is 34 years to the day since the death (or not) of Elvis. Did you know that he called his manhood Little Elvis? He did. On the question of size, Thursday is the 219th anniversary of the birth of Lord John Russell, that great and Whiggish r...