There are two facts about inheritance tax that are pretty much unavoidable. The first is that it is one of the easiest forms of tax to justify. Taxing income or investment potentially deters things that economists generally deem to be good, such as, well, income or investment. Taxing the estates left by the dead is not, by contrast, going to deter people from dying. And if you have a choice between raising government income by taking money from the living or taking money from the dead then surely it should be no contest, should it? The dead don’t need money. The dead don’t vote.  This, though, runs slap bang into the second unavoidable fact about inheritance tax, which is that most ...

I’ve never understood the trend in the West of governments appointing tsars. A catch-all expression for someone given an unusual job, they are wheeled out like the Ghostbusters or the A-Team to solve problems elected officials are struggling with. Why we decided on the term, I’m not sure. If modern tsars are anything like London’s current night tsar it may have something to do with living in relative opulence while everything in their domain decays around them. Perhaps it’s a sotto voce reference to the feeling that sometimes an iron fist is needed to smash a problem, like homelessness, teen pregnancy or pothole proliferation. Maybe it’s an ironic reference to the victory of secular democracy, that the once quasi-religious title can be ...

It seems almost fantastical now, as Michael Gove consults on expanding the reach of the planning system by requiring permission to turn homes into holiday lets, that this government was only a few years ago committed to long-overdue reform to unlock the new homes this country desperately needs. Nor is it any less surreal to see right-leaning newspapers such as the Times and the Daily Telegraph, so often happy to write about areas being "threatened" with new construction or to praise this or that heroic local campaign against economic development, suddenly grasping the paramount importance of housing supply once the interests of second homeowners are threatened. As so often when ministers reach for the old-woman-who-swallowed-a-fly playbook, Gove is trying to palliate a ...

Is there nothing that the Daily Mail can’t blame women – or more specifically, women’s empowerment – for? This week, the paper published a truly, almost admirably, bonkers piece on “how the rise of women triggered the DOWNFALL of Tupperware”. “Even the Queen liked their little plastic pots, but the firm is teetering on the brink of collapse because dutiful housewives no longer exist,” the headline continues. The piece describes how the plastics brand boomed in the post-war years, when “Tupperware parties” were the rage among housewives, before being swept out of favour by second wave feminism. “Women’s rise in status diluted their interest in Tupperware,” it claims. By the Eighties, instead of Tupperware parties, there were Ann Summers parties. “With women ...

Among my many great business ideas is the sing-nav, a car satnav that incorporates directions into the music you’re listening to. Rather than a robotic voice harshly interrupting Chris de Burgh, an AI synthesises De Burgh’s voice and fits the directions into his lyrics: “lady in red…. turn left at the next junction… cheek to cheek”. This is a great idea and if you patent it immediately, you need never work again. That said, you might get an angry call from De Burgh himself, who would rightly be concerned that if the AI can sing the directions, it can sing the whole thing, and maybe release a new album to his fans. Similar calls are already being made across the music industry. Yesterday, ...

The observation that average-seeming men date attractive, accomplished women but average-seeming women never date attractive, accomplished men is the premise of the millennial book of the moment, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. The protagonist Sally Milz creates a TV sketch in which a couple is arrested because the boyfriend is more attractive than the girlfriend, thus breaking the “rule”. On the eve of the novel’s release, a trailer for the new Barbie film aired with the tagline, “She’s everything, he’s just Ken” – prompting social media users to post the phrase alongside photos of famous couples such as the actress Megan Fox and the rapper-cum-walking-advertisement-for-tattoo-removal Machine Gun Kelly. The suggestion being that the woman is far more beautiful, charming and successful than the man, who is ...

It’s very easy to mock Liz Truss’s speeches (fun, too), as the seven-week prime minister shares her purported wisdom on the political circuit. Yet her legacy may be stronger than her implosion suggests, especially if the polls predicting a major election defeat prove correct and the Tories soon find themselves scrambling to find meaning. Given the chaos that engulfed her, it is easy to forget the forces that propelled Truss into No 10. Around a third of the parliamentary party ensured her spot in the final round of voting, and more MPs fell in behind her after that, while nearly 60 per cent of the members backed her against Rishi Sunak. While she will never have another tilt at the leadership, ...

Joe Biden is allegedly in possession of a “deep hatred of the United Kingdom… especially the English” – at least according to one presenter on GB News. The US president “hates the United Kingdom”, explains the unionist former first minister of Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster. “Biden, like Barack Obama before him, has shown nothing but contempt for Great Britain and the special relationship,” an op-ed in the Telegraph argues. Quite the slew of accusations. Biden’s crime? His much publicised four-day tour of Ireland. The president is proud of his Irish roots – his ancestors emigrated to America from Ireland in the 1850s, fleeing the Great Famine. He quotes Seamus Heaney. He is the second Catholic president of the US (the other ...