Saturday night, a guest commentator on Sky News sputtered that Donald Trump has ‘normalised white supremacy’. Once the American President has floated off to the horizon after his three-day visit to the UK as an inflatable media punching bag, we will doubtless have been subjected to much further denunciation of this diabolical, fiendish, authoritarian, hate-filled,
How do you feel about the standard of political debate in this country? I ask this question at the very moment two blimps are flying over London. The first attempts to depict President Donald Trump as a giant baby in a nappy and is the property of people who do not like Donald Trump; the
Philip May seems a decent cove. He’s been stoic and loyal but I can’t help hoping that the next prime minister’s spouse will be a bit sparkier — and give us something to talk about other than Brexit. I suspect that it will be a woman. If so, who? We have Lucia, Jeremy Hunt’s wife.
If I’ve been incredibly rude to you or snappy or tearful lately, if I’ve taken offence where none was intended, or I’ve wildly overreacted to something you said on social media, I do apologise. It wasn’t the real me you experienced in those moments: it was the mad brain that sometimes seizes control of me.
Is it ethical for vegans to own cats? It’s an interesting question because vegans look set to take over — there are more than 3.5 million now, up from 500,000 in 2016, and a fifth of us say we’d eat less meat if only we could be bothered. Veganism is the life-style choice for the
The European elections were a gift for Britain’s two new political parties, Change UK and the Brexit party. But only the latter seized the opportunity. Change UK have had myriad problems. They have been unable to settle on a name and a logo. Their MPs, exiles from the two main parties, have struggled to understand
Sit down, my swivel-eyed Brexiter friend, and pour yourself a stiff whisky. I’ve something to tell you that’s going to be a bit difficult for both of us. Sitting comfortably? Your swivel-eyed Remainer columnist has discerned just the tiniest glint of a silver lining to the dark cloud of a possible Boris Johnson premiership. And
Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The
To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart
Washington, DC Trump, believe it or not, is smarter than the last two presidents, who started fires they couldn’t extinguish Donald Trump has an itchy trigger finger, and his name is John Bolton. The President’s national security adviser is a lifelong war hawk who, unlike Trump, was a diehard supporter of the Iraq War. Now
‘Repeat after me, gentlemen: “Thank you for not letting me into your Oxbridge college because I belong to the wrong social class and I have been too well taught.’’ ’ I do hope they include this catechism in the new ‘gratitude’ lessons that they’re about to introduce at Eton. They should do because it’s true.
The echo chamber is the defining characteristic of this berserk and entertaining political age: squadrons of foam-flecked absolutists ranting to people who agree with them about everything and thus come to believe that their ludicrous view of the world is shared by everybody. It is true, for example, of the Stalinist liberal Remainers — that
Can Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn reach a satisfactory compromise on Brexit? The two leaders’ positions are not, in fact, that far apart. Neither wants a second referendum. They both think that the referendum result means that Britain has to leave the EU. Yet neither wants a dramatic rupture. They would prefer to inch away
You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong. Featuring the likes of Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes,
‘Too tweedy? Goodness gracious me!’ Rory Stewart sounded startled. A contender for the Tory leadership, he was being interviewed by the BBC’s Paddy O’Connell last Sunday morning on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. O’Connell asked the MP for Penrith and the Border how he responded to the criticism that ‘the Conservative party is too tweedy’. A
The former BBC presenter Gavin Esler has very kindly given us an insight into how BBC people think (had we been in much doubt). Esler, who is now standing for election as a member of the hilarious Change UK party, said the following: ‘TV news must stop giving airtime to the “village idiots” of Brexit
It is more than three years since the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decided to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost had been known for 60 years, a consequence of the large amounts of canola produced in the region and the fact that they have lots of bees.
This is the time of year when the English countryside reaches peak incredible: when we rural folk mentally pinch ourselves in disbelief at our extraordinary good fortune in inhabiting the most beautiful landscape on earth. On every walk you see something to delight the eye and lift the spirits. First the blackthorn exploding in the
Last week, on the first day of the government’s ban on farmers shooting pest birds, I walked across St James’s Park and came across a pigeon murdered by a crow. It was on its back, wings spread, with a nasty hole torn in its chest. It looked like a botch job by an amateur heart
Any hopes that the parliamentary recess would help resolve the great Brexit impasse have been dashed. MPs have returned from their break more entrenched in their positions. The essential facts remain. Theresa May doesn’t have enough votes to pass the withdrawal agreement. Equally, no Brexit option from a second referendum to a customs union has
