Elon musk

All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible. The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. His contemporary equivalents in the

The pilot of the Black Hawk told me I could recline the seat if I wasn’t comfortable. ‘Oh, great!’ I said, and started fiddling with the rock-hard thing I was strapped into, looking for a recliner handle. ‘Not really,’ he laughed, and his square jaw barely moved. When I say square jaw, I mean he had the squarest jaw of any man I had ever seen. He looked like a cartoon character. I had not realised men could really look like that. I felt a fool. Of course the seat didn’t recline. I was strapped into a Black Hawk because I was on a press trip with Gordon Brown to

‘Oggy oggy oggy!’ shouted the Italian flight attendant over his intercom, and all the hen party ladies on the plane squealed with delight. I’m a nervous flier, so as I strapped myself into my seat I was already hyperventilating. It was not ideal that I was sharing my flight from London to Cork with a hen party and a head steward who was acting like he was off his rocker. The blonde girl in the seat next to me was giggling and shouting to her friends, and jumping up and down in her seat. I was about to tell her she really was going to have to stop doing that

It is always interesting to watch a dam burst. In the past week, as Elon Musk and other prominent Americans discovered the British ‘grooming gang’ scandal, British politics has suddenly had to face up to something it has spent a quarter of a century trying to ignore. One would hope that the claim that thousands of underage girls had been gang-raped by thousands of men in cities across the country would be a subject of profound concern for our politicians. Who did this? Why? How can we help the victims and prevent any reoccurrence? But no society asks questions to which it does not want an answer. The language used

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 based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really’. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ

The empty train seat looked inviting, and all three of us stared at it, then looked away, not daring to either take it, or offer it to the other. This train from Clapham Junction to Surrey was absolutely packed. But when someone got up and there was a seat right next to me, I realised that under the prevailing conventions relating to equality, I could neither take it nor offer it. I was squeezed between two ladies, one quite elderly who looked exhausted and desperate for a seat. She was standing slightly behind me, so, technically speaking, I was in line for the seat. But as she clearly had a

My old mucker Donald Trump’s return to the White House has predictably sent the woke brigade into hysteria. From posting demented videos and shaving their heads to banning Trump supporters from having sex with them, it’s been a masterclass in the sore loser mentality they profess to despise so much in him. The Guardian is suffering a particularly embarrassing outbreak of PTSD (post-Trump-success distress). The editor’s email offer of support therapy to traumatised staff made me laugh out loud, as did the paper joining the liberal exodus from Elon Musk’s X in an equally comical fit of pique. But to be fair to the kale-munching wastrels, it can’t be easy