Liam Fox's speech to the Taxpayers' Alliance yesterday was just the latest salvo from a wing of the Conservative Party that is trying to take out its frustrations with the constraints of coalition by making common cause with a resurgent Ukip. The cl...

Then there's the compassionate approach. Five years ago yesterday, the Government banned smoking almost everywhere it could. Despite the kvetching of addicts across the land, the cultural change has been enormous and largely positive – even for resid...

This evidence that the high cost of childcare is not something unique to London should alert ministers to the reality that this is a national problem and should be treated as such. The Government already recognises the value of good early-years educ...

There is little sign yet that the Government has listened to the many thousands of people who have protested about the plans. But I hope that, even at this late stage, ministers will stop this threat to desperately needed support and services for vi...

President Obama's announcement of a deadline for the departure of US forces always risked giving comfort to the Taliban and others intent on violent resistance to outside intervention. Nor is it easy to identify a trainee soldier or policeman who ma...

However bad things were in 1979, Adams died before the Brontitall nightmare finally came true. As internet shopping juggernauts its way forward, it has demolished almost all the shops I liked, and now the high streets sell mainly shoes (because, I g...

However, my current pet peeve is more literal than that. It concerns an actual pet: Wally, the (now deceased) lurcher dog, to whom Camilla Parker Bowles' niece Emma wrote an extensive tribute in a Sunday newspaper yesterday. Emma Parker Bowles descri...

The argument that high pay and lavish bonuses are needed to attract the best talent has surely now been exploded in an industry where such incentives have coexisted with such disaster. What shareholders like me need are steady, reliable, sensible an...

If the communities we represent are to continue to support Labour, we must live in their image and not expect them to live in ours. We must look to ourselves and build a Labour movement which reaches out beyond party and trade union to employee and ...

As I write, Twitter is dominated by comments from feminist columnists declaring that they are going to pursue the newly single Johnny Depp. I was tempted, by way of response, to tweet my intention to leave my family and jump on the Eurostar in order ...

Now, though, my Adele admiration is at a new zenith. At 24, she's pregnant. What a sensible, sussed, clever woman she is. And what a great role model for girls like my own four young daughters. Because the reality is my generation of women left it ...

All this – Mr Salmond's wiliness, the value of the North Sea hydrocarbons, ancestral sentiment and hard economic reality – raises the wider question of what English people think about Scotland. A hundred years ago, this enquiry could have been answe...

These criticisms tell one more about the conventionality and herd instinct of British opinion-makers than they do about Assange. Ignored, in all this, is his achievement as founder of WikiLeaks in publishing US government cables giving people across ...

Evan Davies had to apologise on the Today programme last week for accidentally saying that the Euros are "over". The football tournament is only over for the England team, unfortunately. For the rest of us, it is still going on. When that stops, a...

But let no one say that energy-intensive industries are not committed to lower energy inputs. They are the ones biting the hands off producers of technologies that reduce their energy consumption; they are at the forefront of trying to reduce energy...