Simon Heffer's Blog, page 15

Nicholas Sarkozy is a vulgar failure and French voters know it

I n a display of typical vulgarity, Nicolas Sarkozy has launched his campaign to become president of France again when the elections are held next spring.

Alastair Sim: our greatest comic actor?

W hen we made amusing films in this country and if you will forgive me for being the proverbial old fart, I mean films that did not rely on obscene or cruel humour to be amusing their success depended not so much on scriptwriters, important though they were,...

How grammar schools can work for everyone ���including those who don't go to them

A ll too rarely in the past 25 years has the Conservative Party remembered what it is really for, but one such moment came during my recent holiday. News arrived on my iPad one morning that Theresa May and her education secretary, Justine Greening, were in favour of opening more...

Nigel Farage deserves a knighthood for giving the British their freedom

D avid Camerons resignation honours rewarded corruption, dishonesty, lack of principle and failure. Earlier appointments littered the Lords with such political heavyweights as Michelle Mone, an underwear queen, and Karren Brady, a football executive.

How the First World War robbed us of one of Britain's greatest young composers

W hose death in the Great War represented Britains greatest cultural loss? Poets command the field, with Owen, Thomas, Brooke, Grenfell and Rosenberg: but whether, had they been spared, they would have written great poetry without the inspiration of war we shall never know. By contrast, a composer who died...

Run rates are up and crowds are down: there are many reasons four-day Test matches are a good idea

T he International Cricket Council will shortly debate whether test matches should be shortened to four days. Those advocating truncation and most test playing nations appear to be - have powerful facts on their side.

Is Britain really safe from Islamist terror?

A ll terrorism is atrocious, but the notion of two Islamist criminals going into a church and cutting the throat of an 85-year-old priest seems to set a new standard of wickedness.

Who on earth decided to give Philip Green a knighthood in the first place?

W atching the spectacle of Sir Philip Greens thuggish response to attacks by a House of Commons Select Committee on his stewardship of what used to be British Home Stores, one saw why so many wonder how such a man ever merited an order of chivalry.

Decline and Fall: Evelyn Waugh's orgy of bad taste

D ecline and Fall was the first novel by Evelyn Waugh I ever read; and the first he ever wrote, being published in 1928 when he was just 24. I was 16 when I read it my English master put it in a pile of reading I had to...

It's time that Mark Carney went the same way as George Osborne

A week after the referendum Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England and a rabid Remainer, warned Britain on the basis of no reliable data at all, but obsessed by his own ego that in my view the economic outlook has deteriorated.