Seriously, he does. And he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, either, as he said to Sky News yesterday. Thing is, as we all watch the uncomfortably inappropriate close ups, his dad dancing and numerous other cringeworthy snippets, we are compelled to listen to what is actually quite a good song by the Good Suns. A

While there are hundreds of prop bets (exotic wagers that include everything except just picking a game winner) for the New York Giants-New England Patriots Super Bowl, how about some political prop bets for the 2012 presidential election? For the most part the wagers available for the 2012 presidential election race are plain vanilla in nature that will offer you odds for who will win the Republi...

Today’s White Paper on defence procurement makes disappointing reading for the UK defence industry — and for anyone who believes that one of the lessons of the last few years is that we need a more active industrial policy. IPPR set out the case in a recent report on globalisation, arguing for sustained support for industries, like defence, which have high potential for growth, for exp...

Today’s leaked NATO report on ‘the state of the Taliban’ has generated the predictable responses: excessive attempts by the media to hype it up, and excessive attempts by NATO and the Pakistani government to play it down. What is its true significance? It’s a good scoop, but there is little or nothing in it which really counts as ‘news’ to anyone who has been fo...

I’ve got a new little netbook to travel with. And the littel bastard just keeps running out of memory. I’m already running Firefox without downloading images. And that seems to take 250 MB or so of the 1GB RAM available. As far as I can tell cache is set  to 4096. I really shouldn’t be

When it comes to defending the free market, and making the case for fiscal sanity, there's scarcely anyone better than David Cameron. He was on superb form in Davos yesterday, giving much-needed blunt advice to the continentals. ‘Eurozone countries must do everything possible to get to grips with their own debts,’ he said. And he's right. The snag is that Cameron's ...

But Labour will adopt one good policy. They will bring back rent controls. Facepalm. Second only to aerial bombing in a major war as a successful method of reducing the available housing stock. Doesn’t anyone actually remember? The 70s, early 80s? When it was near impossible to find rental property anywhere in the country? Who

                 One of Betsy's newer lickspitles signs the pledge. The list, which covers anyone who snubbed an honour from the Queen between 1951 and 1999 and has since died, was released by the Cabinet Office. It also includes details of honours rejected by Trevor Howard, the actor, Alfred Hitchcock, the Hollywood director, Aldous Huxley, the au...

Nick Clegg’s Mansion House speech on “a more responsible capitalism” gathered publicity, particularly for his widely-reported call for employees to be given the right to ask for shares in the company they work for. I am still puzzling over how people can be given a right they already have. Anyone can ask for shares at

(Enter the caption contest in the comments section below) And any kind of humor is very much needed after last nights State of the Union Address! But first, for anyone who played along with the SOTU cliche game, did you pick the correct first one of the speech and if you did what was it? As for this joke we had to dig deep in the archives (actually a friend of mine emailed it to me yesterday), but...