‘I’ve changed my mind!’ It is a year this week since Nigel Farage uttered those fateful words, marking his decision to return as leader of Reform UK during the general election campaign. Much has changed in those 12 months. The party’s polling has doubled, membership has soared to 235,000 and new faces make up most
The Cambridge bike bandit emerged. I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his bungalow and urged me to join him around the back; he didn’t look like a thief. We entered his grassless yard filled with bikes, tyres and tools. ‘This Raleigh, £80,’ he said, withdrawing a creaky
Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow to action but quick to push its ideological agenda in all manner of insidious ways. Wrong. Or rather, this is only the half of it. Whatever the gargantuan size of
Some sorts of books and dramas have very strict rules. We like a lot of things to be absolutely predictable. In romantic comedies, a girl chooses between a charmer who turns out to be a rotter and another man she hates at first but then falls for. In the BBC’s long-running Casualty, if a worried
In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores!’ Do we? I ask because Sydney Sweeney, an American actress, is selling her bathwater to men with unfathomable desires. No woman would buy it. We have an infinite
My name is Hamit Coskun and I’ve just been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence. My ‘crime’? Burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Moments later, I was attacked in full view of the street by a man. I was hospitalised. Then I was arrested. Some may say
The hospice movement is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain. Inspired by the doctor Cicely Saunders, who in effect founded the field of palliative care, it has united cutting-edge research with a profound understanding of suffering and how to relieve it. Britain’s hundreds of hospices are Saunders’s legacy. But can that legacy survive
It’s funny the ways we lie to ourselves. The little lies. The white ones. We say we’re exhausted when we mean we’re unfit. That we’re joyful when we’re drunk. That we want to be alone when in fact we’ve simply been left out. Parliament is the same. We invent ways of saying things to mask
I felt a mixture of annoyance and relief when I bought my first non-disposable Elf Bar last weekend, ahead of the disposable vape ban. Relieved, because to all intents and purposes, the new vape is identical to the old one. It looks the same, tastes the same and costs the same. The only difference is
