No sacred cows

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,

Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’. That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault,

In its manifesto, Labour pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers and the Education Secretary reiterated this a few days after the election. ‘From day one, we are delivering the change this country demands and putting education back at the forefront of national life,’ said Bridget Phillipson. ‘We will work urgently to recruit thousands of brilliant

Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an

Within a few months, the constitution that has served this country so well for hundreds of years will yet again be vandalised by a Labour government drunk with power. Tony Blair did what damage he could, what with devolution, the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court. But Sir Keir Starmer wants

I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely

At the end of my first day at the House of Lords, I staggered out with so many books and leaflets and three-ring binders I could barely see over the top. These were the official rules, what Walter Bagehot would have called the ‘dignified’ part of the constitution. But on top of these are the

One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the

In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were

Is the ‘Cathedral’ about to fall down? That’s the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But

I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a

David McKelvey, a former detective chief inspector in the Met Police, has called for the prosecution of Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP forced to resign as a health minister last weekend for posting racist and sexist comments in a private WhatsApp group. ‘One rule for MPs, another for police officers?’ he asked on LinkedIn, pointing

When I first heard that Angela Rayner had been tasked with creating an advisory council that will draw up an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’, I assumed it was another poisoned chalice handed to her by No. 10, particularly as Dominic Grieve has been suggested as the chair. Is that the same Dominic Grieve who was

A friend of mine got a nasty shock last week after a Google Meet call, thanks to a new AI function that he was unaware of. On this occasion, the consequences were quite funny, but on another day his failure to get his head around this new technology could have ended his career. Had the

I can’t say I know the new President of the United States very well, but during the five years I lived in New York between 1995 and 2000 we were on nodding terms. That is to say, when I turned up at a party and he was there too, we would politely acknowledge each other.

The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting

So farewell then, Justin Trudeau, last of the lockdown tyrants. Or should that be the last of the democratically elected lockdown tyrants? After all, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still in office. But setting aside those authoritarians, it’s difficult to think of a single democratic leader apart from Emmanuel Macron who was in power

One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be on the board of the Office for Students (OfS) in the autumn of 2017. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious position: the OfS was to be a new regulator of higher education in England and I