Politics

Just over five years ago, I wrote an article here about sex and gender and the issues raised by policies and practices allowing people to self-identify in the gender of their choice. Then, the topic was obscure and marginal to a great many people: my decision to write about it was regarded by many friends and contacts as eccentric and perhaps self-harmingly misjudged. Today, with the sex/gender debate firmly established on the political agenda, I’ve largely left the conversation. Where once there weren’t enough people in politics paying attention, I sometimes think there are now too many. Would it really do any harm to ask a surrogate mother to affirm

It’s less than a month to go until the Coronation and already the media are going mad for anything royal-related. A great hullabaloo has been raised over everything from the role of non-Anglican faiths in the Order of Service to the shortened route that the King’s procession will be taking, compared to the much longer journey in 1953. And so, in a bid to join in this passion for pageantry, Mr S thought he would make his own inquiries as to whether Lindsay Hoyle would be doing his own bit for proceedings by using the official Speaker’s State Coach. This seventeenth century carriage has been used for every coronation since 1831

Oh dear. It seems that there’s something of a briefing war in the Sunday papers over who is to blame for Labour’s misfiring attack advert. On Thursday evening the party released a hard-hitting graphic which read: ‘Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t’ alongside a smiling photo of the Prime Minister. A series of figures on the Labour left queued up to condemn it, joining a chorus of protest from centrist commentators. So it’s no surprise that the shadow cabinet are now all pointing the finger of blame at each other, as the party debates whether to double down on the strategy. ‘Labour row

In 2019 Labour lost its fourth election in a row and suffered its worst defeat since 1935. The party was crushed, not just electorally but emotionally. In 2015, it had parted ways with Ed Miliband and fallen for Jeremy Corbyn, like a wounded lover rushing from one dysfunctional relationship into an even worse one. For four years it tore itself apart in a series of unseemly internecine rows over a leader despised by most of its own MPs, pilloried in the press, and held in contempt by voters, including traditionally Labour voters. Ideologues held sway in the party’s institutions and at its grassroots. The electoral map had been reshaped to