Society

When was the last time you were in a Twitter mob? We know these maelstroms of anger so well now, and even remember the names of some of the people randomly caught up in them over the years too. There was Justine Sacco, who lost her job after tweeting a joke about AIDS, and Jon Ronson, who ended up getting it in the neck for writing about her. There was the beautician who tweeted about ‘barraco barner’ and ended up being called a ‘stupid cow’ and an ‘oxygen thief’ for what she admitted was a ‘ditzy moment’. There are MPs, journalists and plenty of far more normal people who have

Much as the appalling Shami Chakrabarti has insisted, I stand ‘in solidarity’ with Owen Jones and hope he makes a swift recovery. The question, though, is whether Owen Jones stands in solidarity with Owen Jones. By which I mean, does he agree that assaulting people because they have different political opinions to you is always odious and always wrong? He was full of glee when Nigel Farage was pelted with a milkshake, tweeting: ‘spare me the tears over a banana milkshake’ and praising the burger chain who were selling the milkshakes for having ‘joined the anti-fascist resistance’. But that’s not all. Jones also tweeted in support of Aamer Rahman who advised that it was morally

Nothing in cricket is quite as visceral, even quite as primeval, as the confrontation between a batsmen of the highest class and a bowler of the greatest velocity. Sometimes, as with a Colin Croft or a Charlie Griffith or Lillee and Thomson at their snarling fastest, this can be streaked with nastiness. Broken bones and shattered confidence is part of the point; the goal of the matter. But sometimes it is just different; somehow purer. Mike Atherton’s famous confrontation with Alan Donald falls into that category. And so to Saturday at Lord’s, always the highlight of the English summer, but rarely, even in the long history of the famous old

Victims Commissioner Vera Baird says the ‘double jeopardy’ rule – which prevents a person being tried for the same offence twice – should not apply in certain cases to those acquitted of less serious crimes against children. This is a big mistake. It would make Britain’s rules on double jeopardy – a legal principle established for thousands of years – among the most feeble in the West. Demands for cracking down on ‘criminals’ are easy to make. They are also politically popular. Boris Johnson has realised this with his calls for longer sentences for criminals. After all, tougher treatment of those accused of sexual crime are among the few things that unite