24 Apr 2004

24 April 2004

In this issue

Featured articles

This is the time of year when we stop complaining for a moment about the dreadful spring weather and start complaining about the neglect of England’s patron saint, St George. Our grumbles go something like this: we don’t know what to do to mark his feast day (23 April), we have no traditions like the shamrock or daffodils to fall back on — and the nearest we can manage to a dragon seems to be a bout of football violence.

Recipe for terror

Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths One morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John’s Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel and that her daughter, on aliyah (the Hebrew word for immigration to the Holy Land), was a doctor in Jerusalem.

Oh, to be in England ...

... now that April’s thereThe annual miracle of spring is thrilling everywhere. It is especially beautiful in the Chilterns, where the Prime Minister has a country house courtesy of you and me, the taxpayers. Our leader, however, scorns the beechwoods, the bluebells, the song of the blackbird and the call of the cuckoo. The Blairs preferred to spend Easter in Barbados. They must really hate England. They spend as little time as possible on this sceptr’d isle.

Passport to Eton?

Bruce Anderson says the Tories’ revolutionary new education policy will devolve power to schools and parentsIn 1874, Disraeli told the House of Commons that ‘Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.’ Over the subsequent decades, few senior Tories would have disagreed — yet hardly any of them can be said to have put those words into practice. Rab Butler did devise the 1944 Act which was intended to shape the structure of post-war education.

The man who calls the shots

Peter Oborne says that the Prime Minister is a client of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire — and he decided to hold a referendum on the EU constitution only because the press magnate told him toAn essential part of the New Labour belief system is structured around the proposition that Tony Blair is a resolute, bold, decisive leader. The Prime Minister has worked hard to build and then to sustain this myth. Last October he informed the Labour party conference that ‘I can only go one way.

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