Culture wars

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 film is played by a trans actor, would be box office poison. Better to take the tax write-off, he decided, than spend tens of millions of dollars trying to market the film to an American public that was fed up with being lectured by virtue-signalling Hollywood liberals. Incidentally, the highest-grossing film of 2022 in the

Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’, I had a queasy sense of recognition. Lawford claims that Vladimir Putin has no real desire for a peace deal in Ukraine, because both his personal political power and his country’s militarised economy depend on the conflict. She quotes an IMF former chief economist as saying: ‘He’s enjoying the war. It’s awful. But he doesn’t want to end the war.’ Doing the podcast rounds in London during the past week, I’ve felt a sheepish kinship with Vladimir. Have I, too, been enjoying the war? The culture war, that is. If

Douglas Is Cancelled, the new drama series on ITV, should come with a trigger warning – for me, anyway. Watching it brought back memories of my own cancellation six years ago, which I found so traumatic that I lost half a stone. Admittedly, the middle-aged white man at the centre of this drama (Hugh Bonneville) only has one position to lose – he’s a television presenter – whereas I lost five. But apart from that the similarities are uncanny. Did the writer, Steven Moffat, read the 5,000-word piece I wrote about my experience? Or do all cancellations follow the same pattern? Douglas’s trial begins when someone on Twitter says they

I’m in New Zealand on a speaking tour organised by the Kiwi Free Speech Union, and in some ways it’s like visiting Britain in a more innocent era. This struck me when I went on a tour of the Hobbiton movie set, where The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were filmed. The Shire of Tolkien’s imagination, lovingly created by Peter Jackson, is an idealised version of rural England – and New Zealand, with its perfectly manicured lawns and open-faced, friendly people, is a bit like that. Although, to be fair, I may be viewing the country through rose-tinted spectacles because Labour was heavily defeated in the most recent

I originally intended to observe that American universities’ anti-Israel protestors and Hamas terrorists deserve each other, because they’ve so much in common. They’re both vicious, authoritarian, fanatical, powered by antipathy and focused on either unachievable or pointless aims (even if Columbia did divest from Israel, the pittance withdrawn would have no effect on financial markets, much less on Gaza). But many commentators have decried the protestors chanting ‘From the Mississippi to the Pacific!’ as poorly informed, faddish, spoilt, pathetic and anti-Semitic. So rather than assess the logic of what I’d have called ‘woke-lam’, we’ll pivot elsewhere. On 1 May, the US House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Bill by

Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news. Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and

Among my generation of Oxford graduates – late fifties, early sixties – there is currently a great deal of talk about who the next chancellor should be. In February, the present incumbent, Chris Patten, announced he was stepping down at the end of this academic year, thereby triggering an election to find his successor. The electorate consists of anyone with a degree from the university, which is about 350,000 people. In addition to the predictable runners and riders – Tony Blair, Rory Stewart, Imran Khan – three ex-Conservative prime ministers are in the mix. The chancellorship of Oxford is one of the few remaining elected offices in the UK in

The only strikes I really enjoy are actors’ strikes. Teachers’ strikes leave me cold. Train strikes get me into a cold fury. But there are few more enjoyable spectacles in life than members of the acting profession making demands which – if left unmet – will see them refuse to work. Why should girls dream of being something like a deputy under-secretary at the United Nations? My first urge is always to clasp my head in my hands and in my best South Park voice scream: ‘You mean no movies with Susan Sarandon for six months? Nooooo.’ Then there’s the fact that most of the strikers haven’t seen work in