Society

Would you buy a used car from the disc jockey Chris Moyles? I’m fairly gullible but even I’d have second thoughts if the gobby lardmountain approached me with a 2004 Nissan Micra, one careful owner mate, sound as a pound. This is what Moyles told the Inland Revenue he did for a living so that he could save one million quid in tax. What he was actually doing was presenting various unspeakably awful radio programmes for obscene amounts of money. He has been told by a tribunal – which his legal team tried to have held in camera, so as to protect the oaf’s foundering career – to pay the

I was robbed! News has just come in that despite making the shortlist I failed to win ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ in any of the categories. Proving once again that Ayatollah Khomeini was a big fat liar when he said there are ‘no jokes’ in Islam, the Khomeinist ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ last night named President Obama as overall ‘Islamophobe of the Year’. Various other continent-specific categories were closed to me, though it is interesting to note that Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi stormed the ‘Asia and Australia’ section. Yet the UK results are cause for most bitterness. The shortlist apparently consisted of Theresa May, Maajid Nawaz, Raheem Kassam

‘Kool-Aid conservationists’ are on the rise, and they’re part of the reason why Britain is still covered in water. So says Melissa Kite in this week’s Spectator, as she highlights all of the weird and wonderful creatures whose existence prevented the Environment Agency from improving flood defences. As Melissa puts it: ‘The river Thames was left undredged to prevent the disturbance of a rare mollusc called the depressed river mussel. Seriously, this is not funny. It would only be funny if it were not happening. But it is. The species known as the depressed taxpayer doesn’t seem to be on any priority list.’ And it’s not just the depressed river

Was the church right to intervene in the debate about food banks and benefit cuts? I argue in my Telegraph column today that it was – but that the way the 27 bishops (more have since spoken out to support the letter to the Mirror – and Justin Welby has agreed with their argument that benefit cuts are pushing up food bank demand) intervened says a number of interesting things about the Church of England today. But there is another interesting question worth asking, which is not what would Jesus do but what would Labour do? As I explained earlier in the week, the party finds these attacks from church

You can trust the BBC to behave like a leaf blown by any breeze, but even that spineless leviathan (if such a beast could exist) might have tried to grow a pair and stick up for its admirably manic commentators at the Sochi Winter Olympics. It was Ed Leigh, Aimee Fuller and Tim Warwood on the opening weekend’s snowboarding contest that really got people going. There were a few hundred complaints, and one or two media observers who really should have known better got very snooty. Frankly anybody who can get worked up about some slightly over-the-top commentary on a sport no one has ever seen before should really get