Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result
On the cusp of an almighty row over Trump’s planned mass deportations, let’s look to Europe for light relief. Last month, the pridefully left-wing management of the storied 19th-century Parisian theatre Gaité Lyrique, owned by the pridefully left-wing Paris council and traditionally the home of operettas, digital arts and musical performances, staged a free conference
When I first saw the headline I was highly optimistic. Sir Keir Starmer had identified the threat to society posed by ‘young men in their bedrooms’. What would follow, surely, must be a polemic in the style of Robert Baden-Powell or John Harvey Kellogg on the dangers of masturbation. It’s about time this was politicised,
Keir Starmer surprised his colleagues during his first week in power when he appointed his old friend Richard Hermer KC as Attorney General. Emily Thornberry, the holder of the role in opposition, was banished to the backbenches. Senior Labour figures had sensed something was afoot. ‘Sue [Gray] was keeping those transition talks under lock and
It will probably only damn me further in the eyes of many, but when I was a government minister I often used to ask Labour predecessors for advice. Tony Blair especially. He may have felt it was a forlorn exercise ever offering me his wisdom, especially when I went on to back Brexit, support parliament’s
It is some time since I could claim any close acquaintance with the daily skirmishes of workaday Westminster. From risers and fallers on the stock exchange of parliamentary esteem I stand somewhat aside these days: no longer a war correspondent sending back dispatches from the battles between tribes in the febrile atmosphere and smelly carpets
Have you been to a ‘divorce party’ yet this season? If you haven’t, not to worry, there’s still time. Divorce season lasts for the whole of January, I’m told, so there’s a couple of weeks left to celebrate. And if perhaps the details of your own nasty separation aren’t yet finalised, or if your lawyer
Last Saturday I was making my way across the road from St Pancras to King’s Cross when I noticed a large bearded man blundering towards me, dodging the traffic, with a look of great urgency on his face. Assuming he was one of the 78 per cent of people in the capital who are mentally
What’s in a word? ‘Equality’. ‘Equity’. It’s the sort of thing that Channel 4 newsreaders find impossible to understand. Surely they’re the same thing, aren’t they? And even if they aren’t then what kind of pedant would keep trying to point it out? What difference does it make anyway? Well, quite a lot. Potentially the
‘We’ve had enough of living in two-tier Britain,’ bellows Nigel Farage to cheers from an 800-strong crowd at Chester’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, where he is holding court. ‘There is not a single person on that Labour frontbench who’s ever worked in private business,’ the Reform leader declares. ‘So, is it any wonder they’re making such
I was intending to write one of those ‘Ten tips to change your life’ lists that fill so many column inches at this drab time of year. But I got no further than ‘Buy bigger trousers’. Instead, I’ll tackle some of the obvious questions you might be asking as you watch snow turn to slush
January is the ideal month for gaining a sense of perspective. I’m increasingly convinced that the ‘climate emergency’ is another social mania we’ll look back on with: ‘J-eez, what was that about?’ Why? The paradigm displays the classic anthropocentrism of our era. As organised religion declines, we replace God with humanity. Arrogating to our species
Twin studies are one of the most useful exercises in scientific inquiry. Take two biologically identical children who are brought up in different environments, and study their progress through life. Pioneered by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, they can demonstrate how much of our destiny is dictated by nature or nurture. This government
I can see one possible benefit of having a full inquiry into the almost exclusively Muslim grooming gangs who raped and assaulted and in some cases murdered young white girls and are perhaps still doing so in a selection of Britain’s ghastliest towns. The number of lawyers it would employ and the enormous salaries they received
Donald Trump isn’t back in the White House yet, but already his victory is being felt across the world. Greenland is pondering the prospect of an invasion after the President-elect refused to rule it out during a Mar-a-Lago press conference. In Canada, the last western leader from the days before Trump has just exited the
Lying in bed pissed on Boxing Day night, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future, dressed in a grey jacket with a velvet collar, hovering over my pit cackling and in a similar state, alcohol-wise, to myself. It seemed very happy, this ghost. It led me to a graveyard where it pointed, in
On Christmas Day, 12 million people watched the will-they-won’t-they couple Smithy and Nessa finally marry after 17 years in the finale of the hit BBC comedy series Gavin and Stacey. Yet for all the cheery sentiment, it’s a depressing thought that – statistically – in the real world the characters would be earning roughly the
At the beginning of the spring term of my second year at university, a French boy called Xavier looked up from where he was sitting, on the floor of my friend’s flat, and announced that his new year’s resolution was to give up fantasising. Xav was deep in unrequited love with my friend so we
As we sat down at the Royal Opera House to watch one of the Royal Ballet’s soloists perform Letter to Tchaikovsky, an announcement began. ‘Tchaikovsky is understood to have been a gay man, who was forced by the conventions of society to marry a woman,’ explained an earnest female voice from off-stage. ‘The music, words and
I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to