It is with nodding regret that we witness the repeat violence in Egypt and count the 200+ dead last night in Syria.   Those who lauded the freedom after Mubarak was deposed in Egypt had very short-sighted views of the real world. Whoever was most organised and best financed would always win the power vacuum - the extremists !!   Those who use the muslim faith as a weapon seem to hate fel...

If there are ‘no votes in skills’, as the old dictum goes, there seem to be some in apprenticeships. Hence David Cameron's call this morning for apprenticeships to become a ‘gold standard’ qualification ranking alongside degrees from the best universities. His goal is to rectify Britain's shockingly poor performance on mid-level skills compared to world leaders su...

Why were the parents of the Dutch teen who sailed the world deemed incapable of deciding what's best for their child?

This India thing: how incompetent do you have to be not to be able to give money away? And that's not the best of it. Sources in Delhi suggested British officials begged India to accept the aid. One commented: 'They said British ministers had spent political capital justifying the aid to their electorate.Yes, indeed: we're all in this together and got to tighten our belts, but we need to fight har...

In the free and fluid exchange of opinions and ideas is there some basis of measurement that makes one man's more valuable than another's? Heading to CPAC this week I am looking forward to speaking with, and listening to, some of the best minds in the conservative movement. As the United States heads into the heart of the 2012 election cycle with a somewhat flawed Republican candidate (r...

The economist Dieter Helm is one of the few policy thinkers respected on both sides of the coalition. Oliver Letwin is a long-standing friend of his and Clegg’s office views him as one of the best economic brains in the country. All of which makes Helm’s attack on Chris Huhne’s energy policies in The Times today as interesting as the anti-wind farm letter signed by a 101 Tory MPs...

Paddy Ashdown has an opinion piece on Afghanistan in The Times today (£) in which he says: We have repeatedly deluded ourselves about “successes” that never existed and thus took so long recognising that a victor’s peace was beyond our reach that we wasted the best opportunities for a negotiated one. We failed to understand

David Miliband says his brother Ed will lead Labour into the next election and is the "best man" to do so.

Blanche Berryman, who has died aged 91, was an extraordinarily gifted teacher who made history into everyone's best-loved subject at our stuffy grammar school, Tiffin in Surrey, in the 1950s and 1960s. Never boring, never condescending, sometimes attractively risque, she was the only teacher who kept perfect order in her classroom purely by her inspiration and personality, without the heavy w...

One of my hobbies is to browse the pages of the (London) Times from a hundred years ago. As I intend (though I promise nothing) to write the odd post around articles from the time I thought it might be a good idea to describe (as best I can) the world in 1912. Or, at least, the world as seen through the pages of the Times which is a potentially dangerous thing to do. Imagine,...