Culture

There are plenty of questions to be asked about the decision by Rupert Murdoch to sell 21st-Century Fox, including Sky in this country, to Disney.  On what, for example, will Momentum blame the loss of the 2022 election if not the malign influence of the Australian tycoon? Is the old rattlesnake finally bowing out of the game, or is he already plotting a comeback? And how will the dynastic power struggle within the Murdoch family play out? But the most interesting one is this. Has the master media deal-maker pulled off another coup, or will he come to regret selling what has long seemed the jewel in his corporate crown?

The death last week of Christine Keeler, a central player in the Profumo scandal which helped bring about the end to thirteen years of Tory rule in the early 1960s, can be seen as another salutary reminder of Britain’s decline. To put it simply: even sex scandals ain’t wot they used to be. British decadence is usually measured by such dull yardsticks as GDP, the fall in value of the pound, withdrawal from the far flung outposts of Empire, and the decision – taken by the then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan just before the Profumo affair broke – to apply for membership of the Common Market, today’s European Union. But

This has got to be the own goal of the year. Millennials want people to stop calling them ‘snowflakes’ because it is an unfair term of abuse that damages their mental health. Get your head round that if you can. In response to the accusation that they’re soft, oversensitive and too easily wounded by words and ideas, young adults are effectively saying: ‘No we aren’t. And if you keep saying we are, we will be plunged into mental despair.’ There aren’t enough faces and palms in the world to express the exasperation such a self-defeating defence deserves. This epic self-own was uncovered in research by Aviva. It surveyed 2,022 Brits

In August 1988, after weeks of practice, I created the perfect Mr Whippy ice cream. I was 14 and I had a Saturday job in a cafe. When the sun shone I’d get to lean out of the serving hatch, chat to passers-by and sell ice creams. Rarely have strawberry sauce and sugar sprinkles been so lovingly applied to such gravity-defying cornets. Go to your local cafe this Saturday and the chances are you won’t be served by an over-enthusiastic 14 year-old. Figures released to the BBC this week, under the Freedom of Information Act, show the number of teenagers with part-time jobs has declined markedly in recent years. Businesses

Almost every day a new email pops into my inbox from the website ‘change.org’. One day they’ll be asking me to sign a petition to free Nazanin Ratcliffe, the next to lower the age for bowel cancer screening. Once you sign one, the requests keep coming. But the other day, one in particular caught my attention. Novelist and former SAS sergeant Andy McNab had started a petition entreating the Defence Animal Centre (the home of the Ministry of Defence’s canine training squadron) to save the lives of three former service dogs. The three dogs – Kevin, Dazz and Driver – were all due to be put down this week, a

England, Belgium, Tunisia, Panama: it doesn’t make an acronym as alluring as the ‘England Algeria Slovenia Yanks’ headline The Sun ran at this stage in 2009, but English football fans will have breathed a sigh of relief after being placed in a group we might call BTEC – Belgium Tunisia England Canal folk (Panama) – because it certainly wasn’t the hardest option out there. A cautious optimism must now seep into the England set-up. Encouraging draws against Germany and Brazil proved that this generation are more dour and pragmatic than the extravagant ensemble that preceded them. Even at managerial level, the contrast between unfashionable Gareth Southgate and his predecessors is stark:

It’s a summer of change for the House of Windsor — out with the old, in with the young. The Duke of Edinburgh has just announced that he is standing down. The Queen carries on, but she’s 91, and now the younger members of the royal family are expected to step up. For an institution that supposedly represents stability, a period of transition inevitably brings dangers. How will Princes William and Harry and the photogenic Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge cope? The early signs are not altogether promising. Nobody these days expects the royal family to heed Walter Bagehot’s famous warning that they should not ‘let in daylight upon magic’; that

Last Saturday, the high-street chain Paperchase ran a promotion in the Daily Mail offering two free rolls of wrapping paper. Nothing objectionable about that, you might think, even if the design was migraine-inducingly awful. I have lost count of the number of times I have been dragged into this ghastly emporium by my daughter on a weekend in pursuit of some overpriced piece of tat. Not recommended if you are nursing a hangover. Later that day, the left-wing lobby group Stop Funding Hate launched a fusillade against Paperchase on Twitter for having the temerity to advertise in Britain’s second-best-selling daily newspaper. ‘Is a Daily Mail promotion what customers want to

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Lena Dunham. OK, so she stinks as an actress and her brand of self-indulgent, pity-me feminism leaves me cold. But credit where it’s due: she’s now managed to unite America’s culture-warring and politically divided population. Surely a Nobel Peace Prize nomination can’t be far behind. Loathing for Lena has gained such momentum it has spawned its own insult. It’s the worst insult that could possibly be levelled against a white, bourgeois but self-berating, feminist-identifying and politically ‘woke’ woman: ‘hipster racism’. For those struggling to keep up (aren’t we all nowadays?) Dunham has, over the years, fuelled panics about campus rape culture, suggesting ‘sexual assault

Stepford students have been busy in recent years picking off targets from the past to vent their fury at. Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and Edward Colston in Bristol are the most high-profile victims of this attempt to wipe parts of posterity from the face of university campuses. Now, there is a new target: William Gladstone, the only man to have served as Britain’s Prime Minister on four separate occasions. Students at the University of Liverpool are demanding that Gladstone’s name is removed from a hall of residence. His crime? According to a petition, he is guilty of having benefited from the proceeds of slavery: ‘William Gladstone is known to have