General Election 2019: Tories to up stamp duty for non-UK residents November 22, 2019 Foreign residents will be slapped with a higher rate of stamp duty than UK home-owners under a Conservative government, as part of efforts to tackle the country’s housing crisis. A three per cent surcharge will be levied on companies as well as individuals buying property who are not UK tax residents, the Tories will announce [...]
General Election 2019: Conservatives go head-to-head with Labour on housing November 21, 2019 The Conservatives are hoping to take Labour head-on with a series of pledges designed to tackle the housing crisis. Jeremy Corbyn will today unveil a flagship policy that includes plans 100,000 council homes a year by the end of the five-year term, an increase of more than 3,500 per cent. Read more: Sadiq Khan to miss his [...]
Flood the streets with art: traffic-free weekends and an all-night celebration in the City for a cultural comeback May 24, 2021 The City’s reopening is building up to a crescendo with the return of visitors and audiences to some of the Square Mile’s iconic cultural institutions. One of the things that I – like many others – have missed the most during lockdown has been the opportunity to enjoy world-class art and culture in person rather [...]
How Instagram conquered the antiques world January 20, 2022 It was a classic case of love at first sight. Over breakfast I’d spotted my ‘forever-table’ on Instagram, and by that afternoon my partner and I were en route to a residential street in Brixton to pick it up. The caption gave some dimensions and the price; the seller’s bio read ‘shop via the grid’. [...]
Timewarp one-owner 1979 Ford Escort up for auction April 1, 2021 The low-mileage Ford Escort comes with a wad of service history, including a copy of the cheque for £4200 used to buy it.
Channel 4 privatisation risks pulling the plug on UK production June 23, 2021 When Thatcher’s government set up Channel 4 back in 1982 as the boisterous youth-focused challenger to the BBC behemoth, it was a radical shake-up of Britain’s fusty broadcasting landscape. Now, almost four decades later, that same landscape is unrecognisable, its skyline dominated by the giants of the internet and streaming age. It’s in this context [...]
UK house prices leap 4.1 per cent in bumper January – Halifax February 7, 2020 UK house prices jumped 4.1 per cent in January on an annual basis to come close to a two-year high, fresh figures from Halifax showed today. Homes rose 0.4 per cent in value compared to December, and climbed 2.3 per cent on a quarterly basis, Halifax’s house price index revealed. Russell Galley, managing director of [...]
Pandora Papers leak: Putin, Tory donors and the King of Jordan among the rich and powerful with financial secrets exposed October 3, 2021 The secret deals and hidden assets of the world’s most powerful politicians and billionaires have been revealed in the biggest leak of financial offshore data in history. More than 100 billionaires, 30 world leaders and 300 public officials’ undercover dealings have been exposed in a joint investigation by BBC Panorama with the Guardian and other [...]
The best sports cars to buy in 2022 November 18, 2022 We nominate the best sports cars on sale in 2022, from the eccentric Morgan Super 3 to the venerable Porsche 911.
The vaccine rollout has been a success but it has still fallen prey to Whitehall inefficiency June 17, 2021 Dominic Cummings has yet again attempted a forced exorcism of Matt Hancock from the government. To the ex-special adviser, the Health Secretary represents everything wrong with Whitehall and its bureaucracy: a failure to innovate, to find creative solutions or to ensure pinch points of stasis in existing symptoms do not become endemic. In this, at [...]