For about six straight hours after taking magic mushrooms – psilocybin – I had visions of a vast, skeletal shark coming at me out of the watery gloom, mouth open, teeth inches from my face. It wasn’t a hallucination – I only saw the shark when my eyes were shut – but even with my
Dame Edna Everage says one of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. You may lament this instinct, yet we all harbour it. New Yorkers are especially prone when it comes to property envy. Every couple of years, it feels like, a skyscraper goes up in the city
An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on
We throw around pejoratives such as ‘Idiot!’ a bit too carelessly, because then when we need to flag up genuinely subpar intelligence, the slag doesn’t land. I sometimes resort to the distinction ‘medically stupid’. As in, ‘Kamala Harris is medically stupid’. As I write this, next year’s Congressional balance of power is uncertain. What is
Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively. They were both irritated by the way Liz Truss was being praised as a ‘true Tory’ in some Conservative circles, compared with her more cautious predecessors. One of them remarked, as the other nodded, that
Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British Indian Ocean territory, the islands and the sea around them, known as the Chagos Islands. To be more precise, in talks with Mauritian officials while in New York, she set in train negotiations with Mauritius
Bullying appears to be suffering from inflation, like everything else. Certainly as an art form it seems to be in decline. As exhibit A I should like to present the ‘bullying’ recently ascribed to Gavin Williamson MP. Williamson is a hard man to defend. He has not excelled in any of the portfolios he has
Immigration is now at the top of the political agenda in a way that it hasn’t been since the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Two factors have propelled it up the list, one very real (the small boats arriving across the Channel) and the other theoretical (economic modelling). The market reaction to
I know a man who plans to burn an effigy of Elon Musk on his bonfire on 5 November. Musk will be on a cardboard rocket and it will be hilarious, apparently,to watch him being engulfed by flames, because he’s ridiculous, he and his weird ideas about Mars. The idea that Musk is laughable is
It is sometimes said, correctly, that conservatism is more an attitude than an ideology. And for me there have always been certain individuals who embody that attitude. The late and much-missed Tessa Keswick was one such person, and for some reason a remark of hers has recently been in my head. A few years ago
It was a difficult one for the BBC, but they got through it. The problem was this: how to do the story on the chaos at the migrant centre in the former Manston airport which might result in the Home Secretary’s resignation without acknowledging that the root of the issue was a huge increase in
So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since the following story has gone almost unheeded in the Anglophone press, let me point at one especially suggestive current which could be glimpsed on the Continent this month. Cast your mind back to March 2016
During the summer leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, Sunak’s team were braced for a bloodbath if he won. It would have required a major polling error and gone down as one of the biggest political upsets in recent years. ‘If we win, we win by 1 per cent,’ was how one close
Punters and pundits alike reacted to rising mortgage rates in the wake of Truss’s mini-Budget with indignant horror. Leaving aside a market overreaction to fairly modest policy proposals, I wanted to tell aghast homeowners: ‘Well, what did you think was going to happen, people?’ In 2008, the plunging of central bank rates to nearly zero
Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if often embarrassing, interlude. Liz Truss has gone in short order. The threat of a comeback by Johnson has been lifted. What a rollercoaster. Each of these events, in its time, took centre-stage in our politics
The pop-up ad I get most frequently these days is David Beckham’s promotional video for the Islamic sandpit of Qatar, in which the smirking tattooed oaf enjoins us to discover such delights as buying some spices in a market and being short-changed in a local shop. Around him is the bling architecture of Doha, which
I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the nation are scrambled, Westminster’s insane, of course the country’s bleeding out. But at least, I thought, I can help a bit. I’ve given blood in the past and I enjoy it. There’s the feeling of
One of the most important ingredients in the oil used to anoint King Charles during his coronation is becoming a bit of an issue – and it may give us a signal as to what sort of monarchy lies in wait for us. Aside from cinnamon and ambergris, the oil also includes musk from the
At the first stage of the Conservative leadership race, when Liz Truss was trying to win MPs’ support, her message was that she was the one who could ‘unite the right’. Now, her plan to survive in No. 10 relies on dividing the Tory left. Regicide is a messy business. ‘It’s very hard to push
These are bleak times in our land, and we must take our pleasures where we can. Personally I have been able to find a great deal of consolation over recent days in watching members of the public confronting protestors from the Just Stop Oil movement. There is some especially pleasing footage of van drivers in
