Comment from Times Online

It’s not that I don’t care about football. I just don’t care enough

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:51:00 GMT

Let me say this clearly, so that nobody misunderstands. I am not anti-football. I just don’t care very much. This should not be so hard to explain.

Yes, Obama is angry with BP, but not Britain

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:50:00 GMT

Let’s get one thing straight. Barack Obama has not been calling BP “British Petroleum”. Not repeatedly, not pointedly, not — as far as anyone who has bothered to search the record can tell — at all. Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, has used the words instead of the initials, but he is a different person.

Can we truly judge Robert Green on one mistake?

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:49:00 GMT

Can you judge someone on one day, on one mistake, on one catastrophe? Is a sample size of one ever enough? That is the question that Fabio Capello must answer as he decides whether to drop Robert Green after his howling error. The specifics revolve around football. But the subject is universal: the philosophical difficulty of trying to make sense of a single, serious error.

Cameron offers us the audacity of despair

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:47:00 GMT

Gordon Brown has a reputation as a gloomy curmudgeon who sees a cloud hovering around every silver lining. David Cameron is seen as a sunny optimist, always keen to look on the bright side of life. The Labour man is portrayed as Eeyore to the Conservative leader’s Tigger, Lennon to his McCartney, Picasso to his Matisse.

De Gaulle would have hated the Saville inquiry

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:45:00 GMT

Charles de Gaulle would have been baffled and outraged by the Saville inquiry. Not by its findings, but that any country would go to such lengths to explore a painful and complicated chapter from the past.

Gaza’s misery does not make Israel safer

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

As far as we know, nine people died in international waters off the coast of Gaza under circumstances that demand an inquiry. This must be an inquiry that Israelis, Palestinians and, above all, the people of Turkey can believe in. It has to be credible, rigorous and impartial; we must find out exactly what happened on the morning of May 31.

The mesmerising change from clod to god

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

A look of almost perfect anguish flickered across the face of Robert Green as the ball slid under his body and beyond his despairing lunge.

Where Egon Ronay led, we’ve been slow to follow

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

There are few people who leave a legacy that is entirely to the good. One of them is Egon Ronay, the author of the eponymous restaurant guides, who died on Saturday aged 94.

All we are saying is give Field a chance

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

A favourite kitchen-table game is this recessionary pastime, more stimulating than I-Spy: each player announces, with appropriate fervour, which items of public expenditure should be cut. Whereon each of the others raises objections, backed up with imaginary shock-horror newspaper headlines. The game heats up nicely, until it becomes clear that the only universal area of agreement is abolishing all government advertising. Especially expensive, illuminated panels on railway stations bearing fatuous messages such as “Your NHS — Your Choice!” Oh, and that abominable little film of a father reading a bedtime story about how global warming will drown pet doggies if the little girl doesn’t switch the lights off.

Where now for the crisis-hit European Left?

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

Political labels such as left and right, we told ourselves when the Cold War ended two decades ago, are now meaningless. Yet we still use them, pondering endlessly which of the Eds, Miliband or Balls, is the most “left-wing” of the candidates to lead Labour. This may be a generational problem — too many of the ponderers grew up under Harold Wilson — or it may be for want of anything better. But the economic crisis should give us a further explanation: it is that until the Left (as it were) works out what it actually stands for, no new label will be forthcoming or, more important, convincing.

We are not all in this together, after all

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

As transport secretary, I used to joke in the House of Lords that I was one of the few peers who didn’t have to declare an interest in a free bus pass. Most of their lordships, like everyone else over 60, get free bus travel, not just in their own locality but throughout the country. Free to them, that is. The cost to the Treasury is a cool £1 billion a year, about a tenth of the total transport revenue budget.

I think it's all over for the WAGs

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

The thing about having boys is that no matter how resistant you were to start off with, you eventually become interested in football. It happens by osmosis (see also the minutiae of dinosaur life and the names of every single Thomas the Tank Engine “character”). So I’m rather looking forward to the World Cup but I don’t know whether this is because resistance has finally been broken completely or whether it is due to the fact that Wags seem to be hurtling towards extinction faster than you can say “French pedicure”.

Oi, townies - don't treat Mr Fox as a pet

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

When I lived in London a couple of years back, we had a fox resident in our street. This was Dulwich, so his name was probably Giles or Oliver. A fellow a few doors down from me, who worked in marketing, used to feed him every evening with organic free-range chicken cutlets served from a Heal’s dinner plate; there was almost certainly a rocket side salad and moutabal dip with roasted pine kernels, and a chilled chablis.

Oh Diane, you are Labour's Sarah Palin

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

If I were Diane Abbott, I would be smouldering with mortification and rage. Just because she is a woman and black, she has been forced by her own party into a position that is humiliating and untenable. Although she herself was able to get only a handful of supporters for the Labour leadership contest and so could not on her own merits make it to the ballot list, she has been pushed and shoved into the race at the 11th hour by powerful Labour MPs who wouldn’t otherwise support her and all, supposedly, in the name of diversity. It is monstrous, or so she ought to think.

To cut poverty, we must cut also welfare

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

Oh dear, Frank Field has only gone and thought the unthinkable, again. Appointed last week as the coalition’s “poverty czar”, the man asked to “think the unthinkable” by Tony Blair as minister for welfare reform (and then sacked for taking this remit seriously) promptly observed that the nation’s officially sanctified target for poverty reduction was “almost mathematically unobtainable” and therefore redundant.

They must know our mission is doomed

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:25:00 GMT

David Cameron has picked a fine time to make his Afghan debut. Convoy torched; helicopter shot down; the two security advisers to President Karzai whom the West most trusts resigned; and 29 Nato and British servicemen killed in nine days.

Nought to 60 seconds for a mere 250 grand

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:23:00 GMT

A Swiss company called Cabestan (which sounds like the imaginary Central Asian republic that London taxi drivers think minicab drivers come from) has, I gather, finally produced the wristwatch the world has been waiting for: the Scuderia Ferrari One.

It’s a myth that big sporting events boost the economy

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:22:00 GMT

In the small town of Mogwase, not far from Rustenburg, where England will play their first world Cup match tonight, local schoolchildren are benefiting from newly laid football pitches, which will be one of the legacies of the World Cup 2010. Expect to see a number of uplifting stories of investment and legacy over the next four weeks, most of which will carry the Fifa logo.

Altruism + incentive = more organ donations

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:21:00 GMT

In March 2006 a friend gave me her right kidney. I had been searching for a donor for more than a year — my kidneys mysteriously gave out in 2004 — and things were not going well.

Pornographers and parents should unite

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:13:00 GMT

Is the internet part of society or does it transcend it? Is it a glorious, anarchic pirate empire of images and information that recognises no national boundaries, is unaccountable to any government and has no morality or responsiblity?

How Labour blew the children’s inheritance

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

Should the Government have a ten-year plan for every child growing up in England? To paraphrase the new Chancellor, setting out his expenditure tests this week: does government really need to do this? In its attempts to replace Big Government with the Big Society, the coalition could start with some radical pruning of overreaching Labour programmes such as the Children’s Plan.

I’m off to the World Cup. I’ve updated my will

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

Mark Twain once said there’d been a lot of terrible things in his life but most of them didn’t happen. Thus lives the worrier. I’m about to fly out to the World Cup in South Africa and I’m a bit frightened.

I love my ID card. Can they really be taking it away?

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

The Government giveth. The Government taketh away. For the past three months I have been in possession of the most useful gift that any British government has ever given me. In my shirt-pocket wallet, grouped with credit cards, my pass for the Commons, my driving licence and my Bannatyne’s gym entrance is a national identity card. Now the coalition wants to take it away.

The clock is ticking. Iran must come to the table

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

This week the UN Security Council sent a strong signal to Iran that the world will not walk away in the face of its refusal to negotiate over its nuclear programme. The new resolution is a statement of resolve and determination that the new British Government welcomes and played a leading role in bringing about. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections and the dramatic scenes that followed. The two events are distinct, but they paint a picture of an Iran that is isolated and at loggerheads with the international community as well as many of its own people.

That’s enough ‘kicking ass’, Mr President

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:01:00 GMT

The great British love-in with Barack Obama may be coming to an end. While there has been deep understanding of the environmental catastrophe that has struck the United States and of BP’s responsibility, there is also growing concern that the President’s angry rhetoric is going over the top and risks dividing the United States and the United Kingdom.