Society

In just over a week, Britain will have a new prime minister. No one can say that the 160,000 or so Conservative party members who will have made the choice have been deprived of exposure to the two candidates. The leadership race has dragged on for longer than a general election campaign, with endless televised hustings and public appearances. The process is supposed to be a training ground, testing candidates on their answers to all the toughest questions that will confront them in government. But in this respect it has failed. High tax is a symptom of a wider problem: big spending. Unless spending changes, any tax cut will be

Celebrities used to dread being outed as gay. Now they seem to dread being outed as straight. Consider Harry Styles. The poor fellow seems to live in constant fear of being exposed as a boring old heterosexual. Mr Styles, the current king of pop, dances around questions about his sexuality. It’s ‘outdated’ to define your sexuality, he says. We shouldn’t have to ‘label everything’, he insists. Why should you have to go around clarifying ‘what boxes you’re checking’, he said to an interviewer. All right, mate – they only asked about your sexuality. There’s a palpable defensiveness in young Harry’s comments on sexuality. Only it’s the polar opposite of the

It’s fair to speculate that the head honchos at Spotify might be wondering if their company got enough bang for its buck following its reported $25 million multi-year deal with Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. It’s been 611 days since Spotify announced the agreement. But until today, Meghan and Harry had only managed to produce one 33-minute ‘holiday special’ on their Archewell label in December 2020. You can’t rush royal content, clearly. Never fear, Meghan has now launched ‘Archetypes’ – maybe the couple spent a year or so coming up with the brilliant name. Harry has been shoved into the background, natch, so that Meghan can concentrate on

They say that shopping centres are the cathedrals of late capitalism. It is amusing sometimes to think of future generations shuffling reverently around the monumental structures of glass, faux marble and strangely treated wood as if they were structures worthy of awe or wonder, perhaps pausing to peer at the tracery of a former Burger King. Westfield, London’s great temple that looms over Shepherd’s Bush, is an example of this genre I find particularly stressful. It is an endless cavalcade of stimuli: flashing adverts, muzak ricocheting off intensely polished surfaces, bright lights and endless, endless stuff to buy. We are not even spared olfactory assault, as the artificially intensified scents

Gaining a place in medical school has always been a lottery, made even more difficult for aspiring doctors this year. For those who failed to achieve their A level conditional offer grades, this will come as a hard blow and may seem grossly unfair. Some students are entitled to feel victims of the A level grade inflation in 2020 and 2021 when exams were cancelled due to the Covid pandemic and acceptance to medical school was determined by over-generous teacher-assessed predicted grades. As the government returns the cap on the number of medical school places to approaching pre-pandemic levels, fewer places have been offered to students for 2022 entry and