Society

Greta Thunberg’s yacht, the Malizia II, has delivered her to the UN climate conference in New York – two weeks after she first set sail from Europe. The transatlantic trip was a masterstroke in PR, with every major media outlet broadcasting updates on the journey and detailing the hardships Thunberg has endured – no toilet, no shower and sea sickness. The accusations of hypocrisy have also rolled in thick and fast, criticising everything from the plastic water bottles used by the crew, to the long-haul flights taken by the sailors responsible for returning the yacht to Europe. Thunberg has discovered the perils of pursuing such an ideologically pure cause: if you preach

Who knew the Royal Mint, of all places, had been captured by the cult of political correctness? According to the Mail, the Mint’s Advisory Committee decided not to put Enid Blyton on a 50p coin to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her death because she is ‘a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer’. That’s an odd statement, since it suggests that had she been a better-regarded writer, her racism, sexism and homophobia would have been overlooked. Perhaps that’s the Mint’s rationale for not removing Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare from the £10 note and £20 note respectively, in spite of their liberal use of anti-Semitic caricatures. The

I’m on holiday with my family in Turks and Caicos, and maintaining my current weight is proving difficult. Regular readers will recall that I lost about half a stone at the beginning of 2018, after an army of offence archeologists started sifting through everything I’d written, dating back more than 30 years, looking for evidence that I was an unsuitable person to be involved in education. Since then, this type of inquisition has become much more common — scarcely a day passes without someone being defenestrated from public life on account of having said or done something imprudent in the past — but 18 months ago it was sufficiently distressing

The Oval, 1902. Headingley 1981. Melbourne 1982. Edgbaston 2005. And now Headingley 2019. Move over Sir Ian Botham, you’ve got company and there’s a new king in the north. This astonishing, heart-stopping, game will forever be remembered as Stokes’s match and recalled for as long as test cricket is still played and savoured. For a game perpetually teetering on the edge of crisis, cricket’s in pretty good shape when it comes at you like this. Ben Stokes has now, as everyone agrees, played two once-in-a-lifetime innings in six weeks. The World Cup final was one thing; this was improbability on an altogether different, still more elevated, level. England’s final pair,

The past decade has not been kind to those we entrust, in the words of Sir Robert Peel, ‘to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen’. Since 2010, police numbers have fallen by more than 20,000, with too many choosing to leave the force owing to physical and emotional assaults in a stressed and underfunded job. I can sympathise, because I had to step away from the front line and the job I loved three years ago. At the time, friends and family repeatedly asked me why I felt I had to leave. Set against the latest news of escalating assaults on police, I’m not so