Society

I write this half-naked, sucking on ice cubes, breaking off sentences to stick my head in the fridge. In the flat below, one neighbour dangles out of her window, trying to reach fresh air, while another keeps having to go to hospital because the heat exacerbates a life-threatening heart condition. We live in a beautiful new development on the banks of the Thames. Fancy pamphlets in our lobby boast of our building’s energy efficiency. In winter, we bask in a balmy 24ºC, without having used the radiators in two years. The insulation in the walls is super-thick; our energy bills are super-low. But from spring to autumn, whatever the weather,

Last night Chris Evans was announced as Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear successor, following Clarkson’s fracas with a BBC producer. However, this doesn’t mean Clarkson won’t be appearing on the BBC anytime soon. In fact, despite previously calling those at the corporation ‘f—ing b—–ds’, Clarkson has already made a star appearance on BBC2 this lunchtime as part of their tennis coverage. Clearly not too downhearted by Evans’ appointment, the former Top Gear presenter decided to use his free time to take in some tennis at Queen’s. This led to some scintillating commentary from the BBC tennis pundits as they tried to avoid the topic of Clarkson’s untimely departure: Andrew Cotter: Big names here

Reports of deflation’s death are exaggerated – sure, the CPI index has risen from -0.1pc in April to +0.1pc in May. But many important things are still getting cheaper: food, for example, costs 1.7pc less than this time last year. And the prices of larger-ticket items, the so-called ‘consumer durables,’ fell an average 2.6pc in May – the sharpest year-on-year drop since Labour’s 2009 emergency VAT cut. But as the above graph shows, Citi reckons (pdf) that inflation will not bounce back to where it was before. Sluggish pay and a strong pound mean we’re in for a relatively long period of stable prices. Its chief economist, Michael Saunders, sums it up thusly:- ‘A fairly

Today’s report from Alan Milburn’s Commission on Social Mobility found young people from working class backgrounds are being ‘systematically locked out’ of top professions because they fail the ‘poshness test’. The figures are stark: 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, over half of senior civil servants and a staggering 71 per cent of senior judges in Britain went to private school which educate just seven per cent of the population. It’s common for organisations and businesses to focus on the gender, race and disability of their recruits but some are leading the way on social background too. Tristram Hunt and I recently visited The Spectator, which has long taken work experience

Question: which comes out worse from the Tim Hunt affair – the lynch mob on Twitter which brought him down, or University College London, which pulled the rug from under both him and his immunologist wife once they gathered that one of their own had said something off message? It’s a tough call, but I reckon, UCL, on the basis that it formerly had some academic and intellectual credibility whereas rationality was never the strong suit of the Twitter mob – the contemporary equivalent of the women who, in Greek myth, tore Orpheus to pieces for reason’s we’d better not go into. Tim Hunt and Mary Collins have had their

The Greek crisis has been going on for so long now, it is hard to imagine it actually coming to a conclusion. But next week’s meeting of European Finance Ministers is one of the last chances for a deal to be struck. However, there is no sign of an agreement yet. The Financial Times today picks up on German press reports about the German government preparing for Greece leaving the Euro. The Germans have long been convinced that any contagion from Greece leaving the single currency could be contained privately many in Whitehall think that Berlin is far too complacent about this. Now, it appears that Merkel is turning her