Sex

Every day, without fail, some celebrity or public figure will be quoted spouting a meaningless or disingenuous off-the-cuff cliché, to either big himself up or excuse some misdemeanour. Or simply to gull the public. From now on, then, we’ll be highlighting this sort of egregious shit in this brand! new! ‘Fatuous Phrase of the Week’ spot. This week it’s one that has always got my goat: ‘battling my demons’. I hate this phrase partly for its ubiquity and partly for political reasons. Slebs are always telling us they’re ‘battling with their demons’ and by so doing are attempting to get themselves off the hook. Poor old Brooks Newmark MP used it

The successful transplantation of a uterus represents the last major surgical goal in the field of reproductive gynaecology. This feat has recently been achieved by a team at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The 36-year-old patient was born with a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome. The condition occurs in one out of every 4,000 babies, and presents as the absence of a uterus and sometimes a vagina. The absence of a kidney may also be a feature of this condition. MRKH Syndrome usually manifests in late puberty. Because these women appear outwardly normal, the absence of a vagina or uterus will only be suspected after examination, and subsequently confirmed

How will Cameron be remembered in years to come? As a steady-as-she-goes pragmatist or a radical reformer? In actual fact, he’s both. No modern Tory leader has been so good at looking calm under fire, yet there is a more radical Cameron. The insouciance is partly an act. In this week’s podcast, Freddy Gray, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth examine these two sides of Cameron. With the party conference looming, and the election just eight months away, Cameron needs to make the case for Tory radicalism. The Manchester dogs’ home fire has revealed our strange attitude to animal suffering. There is a glaring double standard in our adoration for our pets

Ibiza This island is the Spanish equivalent of  the Greek sex rock of Mykonos, except its waters are murkier, its nightclubs and restaurants far more expensive. But its hookers are first-class and not to be compared to anything selling itself in Greece. Why that is so, I don’t know, but Greece gets the dregs where the world’s oldest profession is concerned, whereas Ibiza and Spain reign supreme. No, I did not indulge, but I invited a few girls to come on board for a drink very late at night and once they were done with their libations they offered sex. Now sex is a hard subject to deal with in

When Mary Jane Mowat remarked recently that rape conviction statistics would not improve ‘until women stop getting so drunk,’ the retired Crown Court judge knew there would be a row. It followed. The judge, knowing that only 60 per cent of rape charges that reach court end in conviction, was making a narrow point. There are big evidential difficulties in pitting the claimed recollection of someone who says she was too drunk to know what she was doing against the claimed recollection of someone who plainly wasn’t. But the row spread wider, as it keeps doing, into the moral status of taking advantage of an inebriated woman. Rape need not

Anybody with an ounce of compassion would have been doffing caps in recent days to Frank Maloney — as, indeed, absolutely everybody with an ounce of compassion vigorously and noisily was. His announcement that he is undergoing a sex change has been met by plaudits from far and wide, notably from within the muscularly male world of boxing in which he made his name and from where his former client, Lennox Lewis, has led the cheerleading. Quite right, too. Maloney’s appalling, sometimes suicidal misery of half a century is beyond imagination; his eventual admission to his beloved wife was heartbreaking to read and his courage, now, in going public — albeit

Yesterday was a chance for people to remember relatives who died in the 1914-1918 conflict, often the only record of their existence being grainy old portraits from a grandmother’s mantelpiece and a gravestone in France. I have no idea what my grandfather did, although he was old enough to be fighting by the end of the war; he was a journalist too so he probably just sat behind a typewriter encouraging others to fight and making stuff up. I do remember as a child hearing about how my great-uncle, Charles Leaf, had suffered terrible shellshock in the trenches. But I only recently read my grandmother’s memoirs, which were published in

I met a nice, middle-aged, middle-class mother at a dinner party who told me  that she was very worried about the effects of internet porn on adolescent males. What, she wondered, was all this internet porn doing to the young? Did we really want a generation of teenage boys whose idea of emotional intimacy was anal sex? Weeks later we ended up in bed and it left me wondering: what is all that internet porn doing to nice, middle-aged mums you meet at dinner parties? Do we really want a generation of forty/fifty-something women whose idea of emotional intimacy is anal sex? Society’s anxiety about internet porn has been so focused

Give the women a chance Sir: Melissa Kite’s article about the reshuffle seems downright unfair (‘A misogynistic reshuffle’, 19 July). Whatever David Cameron’s motives may be, the women he has promoted to cabinet and other posts in his government are presumably intelligent and hardworking and have certainly demonstrated great stamina. This is true of anyone who reaches these levels in politics. They are no doubt excited to be facing extremely tough challenges, but they must also be quite nervous. Instead of giving them congratulations and encouragement, the best Ms Kite can offer is a prediction that none of them will be very successful. Colin Angwin London W14 Media circus Sir: The

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_17_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Charles Moore and Fraser Nelson discuss the reshuffle” startat=851] Listen [/audioplayer]This must be the worst reshuffle since Mrs Thatcher demoted Geoffrey Howe in 1989. Unlike that one, its errors are unforced. This year, David Cameron had established a surprisingly strong position as the leader whose unpopular but necessary policies were starting to work. He and his team seemed steadier and more able than their opponents. Now he has thrown that away with changes so large that he looks as if he disrespects what he has achieved. He has singled out for punishment those ministers who were brave and active — most notably Michael Gove and Owen Paterson, demoting