Not everyone will have heard of Oli London, a British social media influencer who made news for two reasons last week. The first was that London came out as plural. Which is to say that he came out as a non-binary person. Which is very 2020 and something so un-noteworthy that I’m sure you’ll agree
Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes derided as worse than damned lies. Thus we’re often suckers for ‘known facts’. Besides, if the UK’s Office for National Statistics doesn’t produce reliable data, where’s a poor scribbler to turn? Nevertheless, the current uptake
We are currently house-hunting — please let me know if you have one going spare. We are looking for a home in the north-east of England in any constituency which was once solidly Labour and is now in the talons of a brutally right-wing Conservative MP — this is my wife’s stipulation and I find
I was looking forward to my dinner at Daquise in South Kensington, a Polish restaurant that’s been there for ever yet feels curiously up-to-date; but that wasn’t until 7.30. I’d finished my afternoon’s work, I’d brought in the washing and written two thank-you cards, and it was still only five o’clock. I hate hanging around.
I think Keir’s had it. This may not discomfort you terribly, I know. Still less the fact that Labour will rummage around in its idiot box and find someone even more un-electable to lead the party. Cheeky Nandos perhaps, or Angela No-Brayner. Someone mental for whom patriotism is an anathema and who finds it difficult
I’m used to waiting for the Catholic church to make sense. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and Catholic ideas sometimes take a while to become clear. I start from a position of suspicious distaste, but if I sit tight, I’ve found, the strangest things come right. It’s in this spirit of patient confusion that, since
The official review into the Manchester Arena bombing was published this week. Four years after 22 mainly young people were killed at a pop concert, the review by Sir John Saunders reveals a catalogue of failings, as such reviews always do. Yet one failing stood out in particular. On the night in question the bomber,
Covid restrictions are meant to end on 19 July. But parliament will not return to normal until September. The Commons goes into recess on 22 July and there’s no desire in government to end proxy voting for the dregs of the session. The chief whip has told colleagues that he might struggle to get MPs
A couple of decades back the Radio Society asked me to moderate a debate for its summer festival. ‘Between who?’ I asked them and was delighted when they replied: ‘It’s entirely up to you.’ I chose the charismatic hook-handed Muslim cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri and the then leader of the British National party, Nick
During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited both principle and pragmatism — qualities sorely lacking in her capitulation to the conniving EU paradigm whereby Northern Ireland made Brexit supposedly insoluble. The legacy of that surrender, Ulster’s disastrously unworkable trade protocol, will wait
By the side of the road from Sudbury in Derbyshire to Ashbourne, there is a lone eucalyptus tree. This is rolling country, small fields bordered by oak, ash and hawthorn. A eucalypt in this unlikely place stands out, its grey-green foliage so different from the more vivid greens of rural England, its pale trunk slimmer,
Boris Johnson’s predecessor was destroyed by her inability to meet deadlines. Theresa May extended the Brexit transition period so many times that her party eventually turned against her. Johnson, who was notorious for pushing deadlines when he was a journalist, is now discovering the political problem with missing dates. The Prime Minister may still be
It’s risky planning a trip to the British seaside at any time of year. But if the weather forecast is to be believed, Boris Johnson will get away with this gamble at the weekend’s meeting of the G7 at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. Brexit’s critics were always going to seize on any evidence that Britain
Now that the government has kindly allowed us to go out again, I wonder if anyone has discovered the same social challenge I have encountered? Which is that almost nobody agrees on anything. I should pre-empt a possible line of attack here and acknowledge that I am aware of the case study I am basing
If you ask people what they’ve missed out on since the pandemic, they’ll probably lament their cancelled plans. Weddings postponed, birthday parties axed and family reunions moved to Zoom. Me, I’ve missed the unplanned. The spontaneity that knocks your routine, muddles your diary and lands you tipsy in the pub on a Monday night when
This is a difficult issue to raise on the eve of a major football tournament, but as a progressive individual I am deeply disturbed by the England manager Gareth Southgate’s reverence for Sir Winston Churchill. Twice in the past this man who holds English football’s most important position has cited his apparent hero. Once, commenting
I have a mean streak. Perhaps my cruellest urge is to give people what they claim to want. When political parvenues disparage capitalism and the unfairness of meritocracy while talking up an ‘equitable’ socialist utopia, I want to stick them personally in a society where work pays the same as sloth, the well-off flee and
The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed
Should the name of Dominic Cummings ever make it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, there’s one Cummings phrase our successors are sure to see. ‘Weirdos and misfits’ were what he valued. He said so in his blog, describing his preferred applicants for a job with his team at No. 10. I like the
The theory that the pandemic began with a leak from a research laboratory in Wuhan is rapidly gaining currency. Since Matt Ridley’s cover piece for The Spectator last week, Joe Biden has ordered US intelligence agencies to ‘re-double their efforts’ and report to him within 90 days on the origins of Covid. The US administration
