No sacred cows

I read with some disappointment recently that the Encyclopaedia Britannica considers 61 – the age I am now – to be the beginning of old age. It defines ‘middle age’ as being between the ages of 40 and 60, which means that’s in my rear-view mirror. The only crumb of comfort is that some more

An ex-copper who blogs as Dominic Adler – not his real name – came up with a good phrase this week to describe where Britain is heading under this increasingly authoritarian regime: ‘Like North Korea, but run by David Brent.’ It echoed my own attempts to sum up the atmosphere in Keir Starmer’s Britain in

The headmaster of one of the best comprehensives in the country was once asked the following question by Tony Blair: ‘If you could do one thing to improve state education in this country, what would it be?’ ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d line up every civil servant in the education department and machine gun

When my youngest son Charlie was seven he was talent-spotted by a QPR scout who saw him playing football in the park and invited to try out for the junior academy. I struggled to take this seriously – he still couldn’t ride a bicycle – but duly turned up at a ‘sports academy’ in Willesden,

Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are

I almost choked on my cornflakes when I read that the Prime Minister had said he would slash red tape and ‘rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment’ as part of a bid to persuade global business executives to invest in UK plc. Is this the same Keir Starmer whose government has just published an

In his independent review of the Prevent programme last year, Sir William Shawcross warned that something had gone very wrong with Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy. Instead of focusing on Islamism, Prevent was wasting its time investigating complaints of ‘far-right’ extremism from left-wing teachers, e.g. 14-year-old boys ‘caught’ watching TikTok videos of Nigel Farage. He has pointed

I thought the Spectator dinner for Michael Gove hosted by Fraser Nelson would be cancelled. To be clear, this wasn’t a dinner where the Ming vase would be passed from one custodian to another, witnessed by the magazine’s general staff. Rather, this was a dinner to celebrate Michael’s legacy as education secretary organised weeks earlier

For only the second time in my life, I went to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last weekend. At least, it felt like I was in Saudi. I’m talking about the Anthony Joshua-Daniel Dubois fight at Wembley Stadium. Billed as the British version of George Foreman vs Joe Frazier, it was bankrolled by the Saudis

The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as ‘the climate crisis’, ‘public health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are ‘lit by rationality’ and based on

The summer holidays were a washout as far as my children are concerned, because we had to cancel our trip to Norway when I discovered two of their passports had expired. But in an effort to make it up to them, I managed to squeeze in a trip to Salcombe last weekend. Unfortunately, I failed

Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff

The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and

I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged

Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian

With depressing predictability, the riots have led to calls for more censorship. Historically, it was the authoritarian right who blamed outbreaks of civil disorder on too much free speech, but this knee-jerk, illiberal reaction is now more likely to be found on the left. I’m not just thinking of Paul Mason, who called for Ofcom

I had a revelation while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. It was during the infamous section that I (and almost everyone else) understood to be a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’. A large woman in a halo-like headdress was flanked by various avant-garde performance artists, including three drag queens. These, presumably, were

The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete. On the face of it, Professor Francis is ‘unburdened by doctrine’, to use Sir

I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about his family by an American television channel. I imagine most people’s reaction on hearing this was to think: ‘Are you stark raving bonkers?’ But as someone who’s appeared in several reality shows and been followed