Simon Heffer's Blog

Prince Charles, the Hollywood bride and the start of a new chapter in our national story

T he sight of the Prince of Wales walking his son���s fianc��e down the aisle of St George���s Chapel yesterday made a fundamental point about the Royal family: it has become less royal, in the sense of protocol and stiffness, and has become more of a normal family, in the...

Theresa May's failure to lead on Brexit is damaging the economy

T he governor of the Bank of England ��� whose forecasts suggest he should avoid a career as a tipster ��� said last week that interest rates would not rise this month because growth would be lower than expected, at 1.4 per cent . Various reasons were adduced for this...

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope: 'No-platforming has no place at Cambridge'

S tephen Toope is the first non-Briton in the 800-year history of Cambridge University to be its vice-chancellor. Since he assumed office last October, shortly before his 60th birthday ��� and following a distinguished career in Canadian universities teaching international law and international relations ��� the institution has retained its...

ECB is failing to address cricket's core concerns - the 100-ball circus will do nothing for first-class game

W hat a shame that the phrase ���it���s not cricket��� is such a well-worn cliche; because it aptly describes the 100-ball per innings competition the England and Wales Cricket Board have devised as their latest marketing stunt, and which so far has had a decidedly cool reception from most connected...

Prince Charles has just been given the greatest opportunity of his life ��� so far

T he Queen still regards the broadcast she made to mark her 21st birthday in 1947 as the most important statement she has made in her life ��� other than her Coronation Oath. She, her sister Princess Margaret and her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, were on a...

Peter Tatchell: ���The Commonwealth is institutionally anti-gay���

P eter Tatchell occupies the same modest Herbert Morrison-era London County Council flat, a stone���s throw from the Elephant and Castle, where he lived during the Bermondsey by-election campaign that brought him national recognition 35 years ago. It was the dirtiest by-election in living memory.

Remainers need to get over it: they lost

H earing the fatuities of ���Chris��� Patten last week, abusing Jacob Rees-Mogg and those who supported Brexit , and poor old Tony Blair, on the Today programme on Thursday, sharing with the nation his delusion that he felt it more likely now that Brexit would not happen than he had...

Darren Lehmann should have paid price for part in creating Australia's rotten culture

A sign that, for all their rhetoric, the halfwits who run Cricket Australia still fail to grasp the enormity of the offence committed in the game at Newlands last weekend came with the announcement by James Sutherland, its Chief Executive, that Darren Lehmann, the coach who has presided over one...

Sir James Macmillan: 'I look back on my Communist past with utter shame'

W ith artists usually competing with each other to embrace Leftism, it is refreshing to talk to Sir James Macmillan, possibly Britain���s greatest living composer of classical music .

We have had enough of Corbyn���s useful idiocy

W as last Wednesday the day Jeremy Corbyn definitively assured the British public that they could never allow him to be PM? His refusal to concede that Russia was behind the attempted murder of a former spy and his daughter in Salisbury, and that Britain was somehow to blame for...