Society

Leave Cliff alone! Peter Tatchell has weighed in on Cliff Richard’s refusal to declare his sexual orientation. Tatchell was spurred on by the reemergence of a video clip of Cliff declaring on Loose Women: ‘I don’t mind talking about things but there are things that are mine, that will go with me to my grave…I don’t talk about my family, I certainly don’t talk about my sexuality.’ This interview, from 2016, rattled Tatchell’s cage. As ever he can’t keep his nose out of anybody else’s business. ‘Sure, it is up to him,’ said Tatchell, ‘But –’. (As usual, everything after the ‘but’ is nonsense.) ‘Hiding his sexuality colludes with the

‘Skins gambling,’ anyone? No, until yesterday, me neither. It’s nothing to do with strip poker or 70s bovver boys. It’s the name given to a completely unregulated gambling industry, aggressively promoted to teenagers and estimated to be worth multiple billions of pounds a year – yes, billions with a b. One reason this isn’t a major scandal, I think, is that it will sound too far-fetched and too obscure and confusing to the sorts of people who we might hope would be scandalised into doing something about it. But so it was, too, with credit default swaps. So let’s try to explain. (I’m largely indebted for my own understanding to

The row over Richard III rumbles on. Disability groups have objected to the Globe’s forthcoming production in which Michelle Terry will take the lead. The able-bodied Terry, who happens to be the Globe’s artistic director, has apologised ‘for the pain or harm that has been caused by the decision for me to play Richard III.’ This carefully worded statement gives the impression that some external authority reached ‘the decision’ to award her the role but was that really the case? Casting decisions at the Globe, she goes on, are made ‘rigorously’ and ‘always in dialogue with members of our many communities.’ One of the ‘communities’ she seems to have ignored

Europe’s ablaze, but not on this side of the English Channel. Paris has been besieged. Dutch politics turned upside down. Yet in the country that gave history the Peasant’s Revolt, the only thing British farmers are flailing is hedgerows. As tractors blockade the chancelleries of Belgium and Germany, why is it that the only traffic gridlock caused by British agriculture is the queue of cars outside Jeremy Clarkson’s café? Partly, it’s who we are. Battlefields of industrial strife like Peterloo and Orgreave aside, our culture of protest is different. As the comedienne Victoria Wood put it, the British do not have revolutions, preferring instead to write to ‘Points of View’.