Constructed language

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Tim Shipman interviews shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick (plus – Tim explains the significance of Jenrick’s arguments in a special introduction); Colin Freeman wonders why the defenders of Ukraine have been abandoned; Rachel Clarke reviews Liam Shaw and explains the urgency needed to find new antibiotics; Michael Gove reviews Tom McTague and ponders the path that led to the UK voting to leave the EU; and, Melanie Ferbreach provides her notes on made-up language. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

First: Reform is naff – and that’s why people like it Gareth Roberts warns this week that ‘the Overton window is shifting’ but in a very unexpected way. Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls – not only because his party is ‘bracingly right-wing’, but ‘because Reform is camp’. Farage offers what Britain wants: ‘a cheeky, up-yours, never-mind-the-knockers revolt against our agonisingly earnest political masters’. ‘From Farage on down,’ Roberts argues, ‘there is a glorious kind of naffness’ to Reform: daytime-TV aesthetics, ‘bargain-basement’ celebrities and big-breasted local councillors. ‘The progressive activists thought they could win the culture war simply by saying they had won it’, but ‘the John Bulls and