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    If you were born before 1992, you will probably have a clear memory of the old 50p piece before it was deemed too large and withdrawn from currency that year. Even then, the coin had only been in our pockets and purses for under 30 years. Prior to that, and oblivious to the decimalisation of Britain’s currency still to come, the pound split in two was formerlyrecognised as the brown “10 bob note”. It was a similar size to the newest £5 notes we have today, but not of the same abysmal quality. During the 1960s, 10 bob was probably worth at least the same as our fivers. Formally known as the 10 shilling note, 10 bob held the value of 120 old pennies. It was the lowest denomination of note ever issued by the Bank of England, surviving from 1928 to 1969. Both at its bir...

    Meghan wears Princess Diana's ring Meghan Markle wore one of Princess Diana's rings to her wedding reception on Saturday evening. Following her death, a letter of wishes from Diana revealed she had left her jewellery collection to her sons, Harry and William who gave his spouse, Duchess Catherine, a pair of her earrings for their own wedding in 2011 to pass on to their future wives. I leave the exact division of the jewellery to your discretion. The stones were either side of a larger diamond from Botswana,which is where the couple enjoyed a safari holiday in September. The ring was made by Cleave and Company, Court Jewellers and Medallists to Her Majesty The Queen.

    Evidently breaking wasn’t hard to do and neither is saying friends. Both of Prince Harry’s ex-loves, Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas, showed up to St. George’s Chapel to watch their former boyfriend marry Meghan Markle. Chelsy Davy was first to arrive and was spotted in St. George’s Chapel looking somewhat rueful and quiet, staying her seat while guests mingled around her. She was accompanied by her brother. Davy had a somewhat tempestuous relationship with Harry over their seven year relationship. The South African native struggled being in media spotlight 24/7, and the couple broke up in 2011. The Zimbabwean national was widely believed to be “the one.” She  studied at the University of Cape Town, before moving to Leeds University to study law to be closer to Harr...

    Theresa May has been accused of hypocrisy after appointing nine new Conservative peers to the House of Lords, including several ex-ministers, despite vowing to end the practice. The prime minister sent six former MPs three of whom sat in the cabinet  to the upper chamber, which flies in the face of her claims that senior politicians should not expect automatic ennoblement. Announcing the appointments on the eve of the Royal Wedding was branded frankly pathetic by critics, who called the prime minister cynical for seeking to sneak out the news when it would receive little attention. Controversial appointments on the Labour side include Martha Osamor, who has been embroiled in the party’s antisemitism scandal, and also the DUP’s William McCrea, a Presbyterian ministe...

    As long as Brexit is a synonym for keeping out foreigners, there can be no hope for meaningful compromise with the rest of the EU. The Lords can inflict endless defeats on Theresa May. An entire dinosaur gallery of has-been politicians can clamber on rice sacks to issue grave warnings. All will be drowned out by this one guttural roar. Yet the anti-migrant arguments are a toxic alloy of barefaced lies and naked bigotry. None are new. But they were feverishly circulated in the days before the 2016 referendum. This time, crucially, migrants were made scapegoats for the misery caused by the government’s own drastic spending cuts – for a buckling NHS, a cash-starved school system and falling wages. The definitive guide to how that happened is a study from King’s Coll...