A strange sound has been echoing through the streets of the Arab world’s capitals of late. It is the awful chinking of a handful of coins being shaken in a begging bowl the size of a nation. Delegations from Egypt, the largest Arab country and the supreme petri dish of political Islam in the wake of the Arab Spring, have been touring their neighbours’ finance ministries furiously in an increasingly desperate appeal for loans.First they canvassed the obvious candidates. Qatar, the Armani-suited uncle with the unsmiling eyes, proved obliging at first, lending $2.5 billion in December. Egypt promptly spent this with unhealthy alacrity and went back for more. It did not meet with much sympathy (STOP PRESS: Qatar has since announced an emergency loan of $3 billion, either in the form of treasury bonds or bank deposits). When Doha dried up, Egypt turned to less likely sources. Flush with hydrocarbon dollars and reeling from the news that its GDP has more than doubled in the last y ...

If football really is a business, one-sixth of Liverpool FC has been sold. In October last year, New England Sports Ventures (NESV) bought the club in a deal that valued it at £300m. On the last day of the January transfer window, Liverpool sold Fernando Torres to Chelsea for £50m. The potential for comment here is almost endless. What of Liverpool’s aspirations to compete with and ultimately surpass Chelsea? What of Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool’s greatest striker, whose first significant move in his second coming as manager was to sell the man once touted as a possible rival to his crown? What of the idea that the Liverpool of 2011 is not the same Liverpool that rejected Chelsea’s huge-money offer for their other world class player of this decade, Steven Gerrard, in 2005? Perhaps claims to footballing pedigree and past glories can no longer ward off the cheque books of the world's wealthiest. Football's subprime These issues, the business of football, are overshadowed by ...

I am the owner of a smartphone, it is minimalistic, black, sleek, shiny and has a touchscreen. By now you are probably thinking ‘iPhone’, however you would be wrong, but you would certainly not be in the minority, and indeed many people who have actually physically seen my phone mistake it for an iPhone. It generally goes like this, ‘I didn’t know you had an iPhone...oh wait it’s not...but its like an iPhone...[confused and puzzled expression]...what is it?’, at which point I inform them its HTC’s ‘Desire’. For most people the very notion that other touchscreen smartphones can exist is a novel and alarming concept, the choice always seems to be iPhone or Blackberry, the latter being seen simply as things that can receive and send emails that wannabe City-slickers buy. I often end up having to explain that ‘iPhone’ is a subcategory of ‘smartphone’ - ‘iPhone’ does not equal ‘smartphone’. While this misconception is always slightly irritating, I can’t ...

There is no better time for debate than when everyone agrees. That way the contortions, hypocrisy and cant of political actors can be displayed to the world in all their glory. It is a most political act, hypocrisy: one which implies the deferral of truth to power.So when Osborne stood in the House of Commons, the Labour members erupted in derision at a policy they largely supported. By contrast the Liberals cheered him. At the election they denounced his plans as fiscal lunacy; now their agreement was unanimous. Apparently it was the Greek crisis that convinced them. I’m a Liberal Democrat, and not even I pretend to believe that’s true. In fact they were using a most outrageous get-out: that because the facts had changed, they changed their minds. The facts had not changed. Neither had their minds. It was only the political reality that was different: one where support for fiscal retrenchment was prerequisite to the maintenance of electoral reform. Or something. The Lib Dems we ...

Over the summer I spent some time in Scotland. At the end of our stay in Edinburgh, my companion and I wanted to leave our bags somewhere for half a day, as our train to the Highlands didn’t leave until later that afternoon. The most obvious solution was the left luggage office at Edinburgh station. Contrary to my romanticised expectations, this was not a cosy room where leather suitcases with exotic labels were piled high, but a much leaner and meaner operation, in which people’s bags were heaved up to the counter, x-rayed, and then mysteriously stowed away by the staff. As the notice on the wall informed us, leaving one’s luggage also entailed answering certain questions. I told the unsmiling employee that yes, I had packed my suitcase myself, and that I hadn’t left it unattended, but when it came to "Are you carrying any firearms?" I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I decided to answer this question with another: "Do I look as if I’m carrying a firear ...

This weekend I finally threw away my t-shirt from the 2010 Conservative Party Manifesto launch. It was not a political statement. I did not throw it away in disgust at the state of the country, and I still have my copy of the Party Manifesto perched on the shelf between Niall Ferguson’s Empire and Will Hutton’s Them and Us . The Lib Dems probably would not like to be compared to runaway slaves I liked the shirt, a lovely soft blue, but it was simply uncomfortable. In fact, I could not bear wearing it, with stiff plastic letters emblazoned across the chest in the shape of Great Britain proclaiming, “We’re all in this together”. Frankly, it did not make me feel any better to know that the whole country was banding together with a stiff upper lip, bravely to take whatever fiscal retrenchment the Treasury sent our way. In the same way, it does not make it any easier to suffer through a Saturday morning hangover to know that all my mates’ heads are pounding just as much a ...