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E-cigarettes are mainly used to quit smoking – don’t stifle them My recent speech in the House of Lords on the dangers of too much regulatory precaution over electronic cigarettes has sparked a huge amount of interest among “vapers”. I am reprinting the speech here as a blog: I congratulate my noble friend Lord Astor, […]

Who’s on the committee to deal with it if there is? My Times column on how earthlings communicate with life in space: The Hubble telescope has revealed that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has fountains of water vapour near one of its poles, which means its ocean might not always be hermetically sealed by miles-thick […]

Paradoxical features of the genetics of intelligence My fellow Times writer the cricketer Ed Smith posed me a very good question the other day. How many of the people born in the world in 1756 could have become Mozart? (My answer, by the way, was four.) So here’s a similar question: how many Britons born in […]

If they do, renewable energy will look even worse My Times column was on the likely effect of weaker oil and gas prices on competitiveness: The Chancellor is to knock £50 off the average energy bill by replacing some green levies with general taxation and extending the timescale for rolling out others. On the face […]

The elite benefit, so it’s becoming a leftish issue My Times column is on immigration: It looks as if David Cameron is determined not to emulate Tony Blair over European immigration. Faced with opinion polls showing that tightening immigration is top of the list of concerns that voters want the Prime Minister to negotiate with […]

Home thoughts from abroad After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the Spectator: I flew from London into Sydney, then Melbourne, to make three dinner speeches in a row. Through nerves I never finished the main course of three dinners. Pity, because in my experience Australian […]

Review of a book on the people who made the shale gas revolution My review of Gregory Zuckerman’s book The Frackers appeared in The Times on 23 November. In the long tradition of serendipitous mistakes that led to great discoveries, we can now add a key moment in 1997. Nick Steinsberger, an engineer with Mitchell […]

Reply to a misleading article in the Guardian I have the following letter in the Guardian (online). While preaching to others to be accurate, John Abraham is himself inaccurate in his critique of me ( Global warming and business reporting – can business news organizations achieve less than zero?, 18 November, theguardian.com). In correcting one […]

China’s growth comes not from dirigisme, but from low-level freedoms I know very little about what is being discussed inside the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party, which started at the weekend. The meeting is being held in secret — although one of the subjects to be discussed is […]

In the UK, 40% fewer emergencies of all kinds for the fire service than ten years ago This morning’s brief strike by the Fire Brigades Union, like the one last Friday evening, will, I suspect, mostly serve to remind those who work in the private sector just how well remunerated many in the public sector […]