You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at all the Hollywood celebrities rending their garments about Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech. In an ‘open letter’, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, among others, took the administration to task for browbeating ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show from
When Theresa May appointed me as a non-executive director of the Office for Students, the Downing Street press office decided to embargo the news until midnight on New Year’s Day 2018. It may be that it hoped to slip it out under the radar, calculating that most journalists would be too drunk to notice. If
The only holiday the Youngs had this summer was a week in Norfolk for the Hunstanton tennis tournament. I’m too hopeless to enter myself, but my friend Nell, who has a house nearby, organised a different competition that I was more suited to. It involved making an ‘elevator pitch’ for a policy that would fix
I’m feeling quite smug at the moment. Every year I vow to get in shape in the summer, which means losing weight, drinking less and going to the gym. The summer bit is because there’s a risk I’ll be seen in a swimming costume – I want a ‘beach-ready body’ – and there’s also the
Charlie, my 17-year-old son, was hopeful about QPR’s chances this season. True, we managed to avoid relegation only by the skin of our teeth in 2024-25, but we’ve just appointed a new manager: a Frenchman called Julien Stéphan, who won the Coupe de France in 2019 with Rennes, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final, and
Last week I took a day trip to Margate. Not to enjoy a swim in the sea, but in the hope of having a debate with a member of Thanet district council about its proposed ban on swearing. A few days before, when the ban was being discussed, a Labour councillor had challenged me to
On the face of it, Wormwood Scrubs is not particularly appealing. I don’t mean the prison, but the common in the north-eastern corner of Hammersmith and Fulham. It is 170 acres of unsupervised scrubland with enough wooded areas to attract a smattering of predatory homosexuals – a poor man’s Hampstead Heath. Often, as I walk
I’m just back from Vancouver, where I was speaking at a fundraiser for the Free Speech Union of Canada. At the dinner afterwards I sat next to an Alberta separatist, a movement I was unaware of until now. Dating to the 19th century, it advocates for the secession of the province of Alberta and has
When I was a young man, the claim that Britain was in danger of becoming the 51st state was a political slur mainly thrown about by the left, particularly those who objected to the presence of US military bases. But there was some anti-American sentiment on the right, too – Enoch Powell, for instance, had
I was surprised to read a report by Sunder Katwala’s thinktank British Future saying the UK is a ‘powder keg’ of community tensions and warning of further unrest this summer. In a foreword by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, who are co-chairing a commission looking into last year’s riots, Britain is described as ‘fragmented’ and
About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I’d read Wolfe’s essay in Harper’s magazine called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’ in which he urges ambitious young authors to
It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year and to my astonishment he’d lost about two stone and was nursing a glass of fizzy water. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, draining a goblet of red wine. ‘You’re usually about three sheets to
Earlier this week, GB News again found itself at odds with Ofcom. The channel had written to the broadcast regulator asking if, in light of the Supreme Court judgment affirming that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means biological sex, it could now treat the dispute between trans-rights activists and gender-critical feminists as a
God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate
One of the objections to the military parade in Washington, DC last Saturday – supposedly to mark the 250th birthday of the US Army – is that it was a breach of democratic norms. The real reason it took place, say Donald Trump’s critics, was because he wanted to celebrate his 79th birthday with a
In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride pudding’. This turned out to be a rainbow-coloured crumble created in honour of Pride month. ‘Er, no thanks,’ I said, and then noticed a large ‘Progress Pride’ flag behind the counter. Oh dear, I thought.
I’ve been mulling over Marco Rubio’s latest salvo in the Trump administration’s assault on the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The US Secretary of State has announced he’ll impose visa bans on foreign nationals judged to be censoring US citizens or US tech companies. And according to one news report, the ban will apply to their family members
I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make
Caroline has gone on strike. At least, as far as cooking is concerned. Her case for downing spatulas is that she’s been cooking steak, chicken and bacon for my three sons and me for the best part of 25 years and, as a vegetarian, she’s had enough. Henceforth, she’s going to prepare vegetarian meals. If
The weekend before last, I came home from walking the dog at about noon to find Caroline asleep in bed. This was surprising for three reasons. She’d been up and about when I left the house. She’s not one for taking naps. And her mother was coming to lunch. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked,
