Women

We live in a cynical world. One cannot simply advertise something for sale and expect people to believe what one is saying. The first person to turn up to view the horse lorry did not even want to test-drive it on the basis that it was clearly a death trap. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about that roof.’ I looked at the roof, baffled. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the roof.’ Genuinely, it’s the last bit of the lorry I have ever worried about. I tend to worry more about the floor, given that that is the bit the horse is standing on. I had the floor fully

To mark International Women’s Day, Liz Truss took over the Treasury for one night only. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury kicked off the celebrations at No 11 with a speech praising Destiny’s Child, the American girl group: ‘I can’t put it better than Destiny’s Child when they sang “all the honeys making money”‘ While Truss’s speech was primarily focussed on encouraging the women of the world to open their minds to finance (and liberty) – it also appeared to have a message for Philip Hammond. Truss told a room of female businesswomen and hacks that there was still much work to do for women’s progress. She noted that while

Every now and then one suddenly misses somebody. I miss Bron, who died 17 years ago last month. There’s an Auberon Waugh-sized hole in British satirical journalism. Listening to the radio last week — it was all about famous women, women in history, women’s suffrage, sexual harassment of women, equal pay for women at the BBC, women this and women that — I felt vaguely irritable. Not that I seriously disagreed with anything being said, or wished to rain on any suffragist’s parade, or have ever been remotely sympathetic to inappropriate male behaviour towards women … no, I’d place myself on the ‘politically correct’ side of the argument on every

It has been a good year for the girls. The filly Enable was the horse of the year, winning not only the Oaks, amid a thunderstorm, but also collecting the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot, and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris, in scintillating style. Jessica Harrington trained the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Sizing John, and Josephine Gordon became only the second woman ever, after Hayley Turner, to ride 100 winners in a calendar year. I have been banging on for 20 years about giving women riders more opportunities, but even so I was surprised to discover, when researching Sixty Years of Jump Racing

I may have spoken too soon last week when I defended my old friend Harvey Weinstein. It now looks very bad for him, with even Hillary Clinton joining the Greek chorus condemning him. It is not just boorish behaviour towards the fairer sex that he now stands accused of; it is also rape, something that he and his lawyers strenuously deny. Mind you, I’ve always thought that someone was innocent until proven guilty — but that does not appear to be the case in these hyper-feminist times. And the idea that Bill and Hillary were unaware of Harvey’s shenanigans — not to mention the sleazy bunch that is Hollywood —

I am not a bad friend. I enjoy my mates, and I am generous, showering them with fun, money and sympathy. But I do not crave their company when I am without it, for whatever length of time, and should we lose touch, I do not miss them. In fact, I find there’s a profound pleasure in parting with a chum, whether by their hand or by yours. We should all have the courage to admit it when a friendship has become more work than play, more duty than beauty. Maybe my origins led me to feel this way. I was an only child who, at an early age, became

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists’ war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women

You know a Man Having Baby story really would be a story if it were true. But the latest Man Mother story is only true if you accept the notion that the mother in question really is a man. And that depends on whether you go down the whole notion that being transgender involves biological reinvention, rather than hormonal/surgical intervention plus credulity and the creative use of language. Two people with wombs, ovaries and XX chromosomes, conventionally known as women, have had babies. As it happens, one of them has taken drugs to suppress lactation on the basis of an unwillingness to breastfeed, but, you know, it took drugs to

I ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus; the doors shut behind me as I skipped on. I sank into a seat beside a young chap who was turned sideways and chatting with the fellow behind him, who was leaning forward. They were speaking in English, quietly, about Melania Trump. The chap beside me was French; the one behind us, Turkish. They were agreeing on how good for her age she looked. She hadn’t had any ‘aesthetic’ surgery either, as far as he could tell, which was a brave choice, thought the Turk. She was Czech, wasn’t she? ‘Slovenian,’ said the French guy authoritatively. ‘Yes, they look after themselves those

Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a pirate radio station. Last week he got into hot water when he said on the radio that his wife was ‘utterly dedicated to her job, as indeed are the other girls in my office’. Before he knew it, Today got some American academic on air to denounce him. ‘We know, looking in the dictionary,’ she said, ‘that girl means a young woman only up to the age of 11 or 12.’ This bossy woman should get a bigger dictionary to look in. There is plenty of evidence that girl has

Tesco chairman John Allan provoked feminist fury by telling would-be non-exec directors, ‘If you’re a white male, tough: you’re an endangered species’ — then claimed he was really trying to make the opposite point, that ‘it’s a great time for women’. But to the contrary, this was a week in which tough white males grabbed the corporate prizes, while one high-flying woman from an oppressed minority was hounded out of her job. First, the blokes. HSBC announced, for the first time in its history and to the satisfaction of governance zealots, the appointment of an outside chairman. Incumbent Douglas Flint is to be succeeded by Mark Tucker, a former professional