Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You can’t trust the BBC

You may remember that in February the BBC found itself in a spot of bother regarding a film about the conflict in Gaza which, it transpired, had been narrated by the son of a Hamas minister. Some people, not least Jewish people, wondered if such an account perhaps might accidentally stray into the realms of partisanship, and the BBC was forced to withdraw the documentary forthwith. It then commissioned an internal report into why this young lad had been chosen to front the film, rather than, say, Rylan Clark or Clare Balding. As a consequence of the investigation, the BBC’s head of news, Deborah Turness, sent a round robin email

Peter Jones

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and the ancient struggle with shame

The most extraordinary thing about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is that he seems to have no sense of shame. That word in Greek was aidôs, which covered everything from a sense of shame, inhibiting one’s own behaviour, to respect, i.e. sensitivity to the feelings, status and claims of others. ‘When I consider that I am doing wrong, I feel aidôs to look my friends in the face’ (Agathon) is a typical example. This feeling is a major feature of Greek literature. In Homer’s Iliad, Hector the Trojan hero challenges the Greeks to single combat, but ‘they felt aidôs to refuse, but were afraid to accept’. They knew what society expected of

Wednesday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The cowardly publishing world betrayed Kate Clanchy

Has the vibe shift finally hit the publishing world? There might just be some hope that one of the industries most captured by woke scolds, by the nonbinary heirs of Mary Whitehouse, has finally clocked which way the cultural winds are blowing – away from cancel culture and identity politics and towards something freer and saner. This apology will be cold comfort for Clanchy, whose brush with cancel culture was particularly brutal – and totally unearned You may remember Kate Clanchy, the celebrated author whose cancellation in 2021 was among the most heinous of the post-BLM mania. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her hit memoir about her

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offence? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Women’s rights have been broken on the wheel of the trans ideology Ms Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Keir Starmer is letting China abuse our libel laws

The enormous cost of British libel law is a threat to national security. For the sake of enriching London barristers, Keir Starmer is preserving an unreformed and rapaciously expensive legal system that is wide open to abuse by oligarchs and dictatorships. And he knows it. When he was a young barrister in the 1990s,Starmer represented Helen Steel and David Morris. McDonald’stried to crush the two environmental activists because they had criticised its treatment of animals. The 1997 ‘McLibel’ affair remains notorious as the longest trial in British history. ‘This case shows the absurdity of the libel laws,’ Starmer said at the time. Now almost 30 years on, he is prime minister,

David Abulafia

The Rosetta Stone does not belong in Egypt

It was inevitable that the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo would accompany its much-delayed opening with demands for the restitution of several of the most famous objects that have survived from the days of the Pharaohs. It was inevitable too that this effort would be fronted by the irrepressible Zahi Hawass, formerly the government minister in charge of antiquities, and now one of the most voluble ambassadors for ancient Egyptian civilization. The history of the Rosetta Stone is not simply an Egyptian history Fortunately he is not asking for the return of everything. If he was, the largest museum of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt, in Turin, would be left

Tuesday

Eleanor Jolliffe

We should mourn the loss of Rome’s medieval towers

The Torre dei Conti, next to Rome’s Forum, partially collapsed yesterday. A construction worker who was carrying out restoration work on the tower was trapped and eventually killed, but this is not the first time the Torre dei Conti has been involved in the death of Romans. The 45 or so remaining medieval towers of Rome are not high on the list of most visitors to the city, but they stand testament to a fascinating, violent and formative period of Rome’s history. The Torre dei Conti was built in the thirteenth century by the Conti family, the family of Pope Innocent III, as a fortified residence to defend and strengthen their

Alexander Larman

John Lewis’s Christmas advert might be its worst yet

John Lewis’s Christmas advert is back – and this year’s effort is even more mawkish, unfocused and wearying than ever. The latest promo, conceived by advertising veterans Saatchi & Saatchi, is yet another underwhelming instalment in the store’s increasingly desperate attempt to sell their wares. Everyone’s favourite bastion of middle-class sensibility has latched on to increasing sales of vinyl records as the market to go after. And so, the two-minute film tells the story of a middle-aged dad given a record as a present by his son. The old man is briefly transported back to his clubbing days in his nineties heyday, as soundtracked by the once-popular Alison Limerick song

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Can the last ‘working person’ in Britain please turn out the lights?

Early morning surprises can be lovely, but not when they involve Rachel Reeves. Probably the last thing anybody wants to see as they wipe the sand from their eyes is the Chancellor looming over them. The sudden, unexpected appearance of Reeves at cock crow this morning – ‘My office, first thing, sharp!’ – felt like a dawn raid, the age-old military tactic for attacking when the human body is at its weakest. Well, it didn’t work. The recent wranglings over the exact definition of ‘working people’ wouldn’t fool a four-year-old We learnt today that despite Reeves having ‘fixed the foundations’ last year (don’t laugh!), ‘the world’ keeps throwing ‘challenges’ her

Alexander Larman

Is it all over for Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie?

There is a saying, variously attributed either to Euripides or Shakespeare, that is something along the lines of ‘the sins of the father will be visited upon the children.’ By anyone’s reckoning, this is deeply unfair and wholly undeserved, but the treatment of Prince Andrew’s children, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, will soon bear out the dread-laden maxim. Virtually all the international attention has so far come upon their parents, the Andrew formerly known as Prince and the unduchessed Sarah Ferguson. But now, with the inevitability of good hangings preventing bad marriages, interest is going to alight upon them. A pile-on towards these young women is coming, and it will

Monday

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Terror is becoming worryingly familiar in Britain

After the very latest mass casualty attack on Saturday night, on a busy London North Eastern Railway train in Huntingdon, police and government quickly told us not to speculate about the motives of the alleged attacker. Eleven people were hospitalised in the attack, with one in a critical condition at the time of writing. It’s hard not to speculate when a banal experience most of us are familiar with – a train journey – is brutally upended in this way. It is hard to ignore the fact that we are seeing more and more people with no ideology resorting to extreme, often spontaneous violence But we must stop there, apparently,

Lee Cohen

Harry and Meghan deserve the same fate as Andrew Windsor

The King acted with decisive authority to strip his brother, Andrew, of his Royal title and evict him from his Windsor mansion. The former Duke of York is now known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and he must vacate Royal Lodge for private accommodation at Sandringham. No formal Letters Patent were issued, nor was parliamentary legislation required; the King’s prerogative sufficed. The action, though severe, reflects a man whose associations – never proven criminal – had become untenable for an institution whose legitimacy rests on public trust. Andrew Windsor’s punishment was just and proportionate. The Sussexes’ case is more complex Yet another challenge persists: the conduct of the Duke and Duchess

Debbie Hayton

Where’s the money for Labour’s triple science plan?

Science, which has been kicked about since GCSEs replaced O-Levels in 1986, is in for another shake-up. The latest review of the curriculum – commissioned by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson – is set to recommend that all schools must teach separate sciences to children in Years 10 and 11. That should be a good thing. ‘Triple science’ won’t be mandatory, but it will become a statutory entitlement alongside the usual diet of ‘double science’.  If a child wants to learn an extra dollop of science then that will be their right. What’s not to like about that? Schools are so hard up that they cannot afford to pay for supply

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Welcome to the age of the troll

We’re accustomed, by now, to Catholic priests having eccentric hobbies. Even so, 57-year-old Father Mark Rowles turned out to have a humdinger. At the end of last week, he admitted in court that while, by day, he was a sad sack of a man in late middle age with thinning hair and specs who ministered to a congregation in Cardiff, by night he took on the persona of ‘skinheadlad1488’ in a series of neo-Nazi chatrooms, claiming to be a 16-year-old race warrior who fantasised about bombing mosques and shooting black people in the head. Father Mark Rowles admitted to taking on the persona of ‘skinheadlad1488’ in neo-Nazi chatrooms What are we to make of this? It’s hard, isn’t it, to take at

Sunday

Coffee House

What we know about the mass stabbing on a Cambridgeshire train

Eleven people were hospitalised, with one man still fighting for his life, after a stabbing spree on a train in Cambridgeshire on Saturday night. Two men were originially arrested on suspiscion of attempted murder. Only one, a 32-year-old black, British national, is being treated as a suspect, according to British Transport Police. ‘A 35-year-old man from London who was also arrested at the scene has been released with no further action,’ police said. ‘It was reported in good faith to officers responding to the incident that he was involved in the attack, and following enquiries we can confirm that he was not involved.’ The stabbing took place on the 18.25

James Tidmarsh

Britain’s trains are dangerously exposed

Europe has seen this nightmare before. On 21 August 2015, a gunman armed with an AK-47-style assault rifle, a pistol and a knife opened fire on a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, wounding three passengers before being overpowered near Arras. The attacker, Ayoub El Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan who had trained with Islamist militants in Syria, boarded the train intending to commit a massacre in the name of jihad. He was stopped only because three off-duty American servicemen happened to be on board and tackled him as he tried to reload. Without them, the carriage would have become a slaughterhouse. El Khazzani was sentenced to life by a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is extinction going extinct?

It is getting pretty bitter in the world of evolutionary biology, and it could come down to the survival of the fittest. In August I reported here on the extraordinary spat between Professor John Wiens of the University of Arizona – who formerly wrote of a ‘sixth mass extinction’ but has since changed his mind and now thinks the destruction of species would come in at a lower level – and Robert Cowie of the University of Hawaii, who damned Wiens for daring even to question the scale of the expected wipe-out of life forms over the coming centuries. ‘Arguing that we are not experiencing a sixth mass extinction, or

Rory Hanrahan

Why Jeremy Clarkson’s pub, The Farmer’s Dog, is thriving

The tale of the death of the British pub has been well told. Around eight boozers a week are serving last orders for the final time. But some pubs are bucking the trend, the most famous of which is The Farmer’s Dog in Oxfordshire, Jeremy Clarkson’s latest success story. What is its secret? Running a pub, Clarkson says, is harder than farming. He’s right It’s not hard to see the appeal of this pub, a welcoming brick building with a spacious terrace overlooking the rolling Cotswold hills. When I visited a few weeks ago, the pub felt alive, bustling without descending into chaos. It’s a far cry from the boarded-up

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The trouble with Louis Theroux

We’re woefully resigned to the strange situation whereby if an alien landed, they’d believe that being famous was hereditary, like being royal. But when I looked at the Wikipedia page of Louis Theroux, I almost fell out of my wheelchair chuckling. Not only is he the son of the ‘noted travel writer and novelist’ Paul Theroux, ‘he is the nephew of novelist Alexander Theroux and writer Peter Theroux. His older brother, Marcel, is a writer and television presenter. His cousin, Justin, is an actor and screenwriter.’ Theroux – educated at Westminster and Magdalen College, Oxford, naturally – is said to be a ‘massive hip hop head’ Kind of like the Beckhams without the beauty;

Nigel Jones

Andrew Windsor doesn’t know how lucky he is

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor will no doubt be feeling sorry for himself this morning. Stripped of his royal title and booted out of his Windsor mansion, Andrew probably feels that he has paid an unjust price following the Virginia Giuffre scandal. Indeed, King Charles’ defenestration of his disgraced brother is being described across the world as ‘unprecedented’. The truth is that Andrew should count himself very lucky indeed. Had he been born in a different era, his downfall might have been far more complete. These punishments make the penalties suffered by Mr Mountbatten Windsor – who will now see out his days in a nice house in Sandringham – seem mild