I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely
At the end of my first day at the House of Lords, I staggered out with so many books and leaflets and three-ring binders I could barely see over the top. These were the official rules, what Walter Bagehot would have called the ‘dignified’ part of the constitution. But on top of these are the
One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the
In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday
Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were
Is the ‘Cathedral’ about to fall down? That’s the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But
I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a
David McKelvey, a former detective chief inspector in the Met Police, has called for the prosecution of Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP forced to resign as a health minister last weekend for posting racist and sexist comments in a private WhatsApp group. ‘One rule for MPs, another for police officers?’ he asked on LinkedIn, pointing
When I first heard that Angela Rayner had been tasked with creating an advisory council that will draw up an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’, I assumed it was another poisoned chalice handed to her by No. 10, particularly as Dominic Grieve has been suggested as the chair. Is that the same Dominic Grieve who was
A friend of mine got a nasty shock last week after a Google Meet call, thanks to a new AI function that he was unaware of. On this occasion, the consequences were quite funny, but on another day his failure to get his head around this new technology could have ended his career. Had the
I can’t say I know the new President of the United States very well, but during the five years I lived in New York between 1995 and 2000 we were on nodding terms. That is to say, when I turned up at a party and he was there too, we would politely acknowledge each other.
The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting
So farewell then, Justin Trudeau, last of the lockdown tyrants. Or should that be the last of the democratically elected lockdown tyrants? After all, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still in office. But setting aside those authoritarians, it’s difficult to think of a single democratic leader apart from Emmanuel Macron who was in power
One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be on the board of the Office for Students (OfS) in the autumn of 2017. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious position: the OfS was to be a new regulator of higher education in England and I
Back in January, I wrote about my new year’s resolution to cut down on my drinking. The thought of total abstinence was too bleak, so my plan was to limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in 2024. Not quite the NHS’s recommended limit of 14 units of alcohol a week – roughly one-and-a-half bottles
Bishop did not wish to be associated with ‘someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain’ In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was ‘common sense’ and that ‘all our social policies are
I read with some disappointment recently that the Encyclopaedia Britannica considers 61 – the age I am now – to be the beginning of old age. It defines ‘middle age’ as being between the ages of 40 and 60, which means that’s in my rear-view mirror. The only crumb of comfort is that some more
An ex-copper who blogs as Dominic Adler – not his real name – came up with a good phrase this week to describe where Britain is heading under this increasingly authoritarian regime: ‘Like North Korea, but run by David Brent.’ It echoed my own attempts to sum up the atmosphere in Keir Starmer’s Britain in
The headmaster of one of the best comprehensives in the country was once asked the following question by Tony Blair: ‘If you could do one thing to improve state education in this country, what would it be?’ ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d line up every civil servant in the education department and machine gun
When my youngest son Charlie was seven he was talent-spotted by a QPR scout who saw him playing football in the park and invited to try out for the junior academy. I struggled to take this seriously – he still couldn’t ride a bicycle – but duly turned up at a ‘sports academy’ in Willesden,
