Registered

Thursday

Toby Young

Toby Young: once more unto the breach

I naively thought that if I resigned from the Office for Students, stepped down from the Fulbright Commission and apologised for the offensive things I’d said on Twitter the witch-hunt would end. In fact, it has reached a new, frenzied pitch. The mob’s blood lust is up and it won’t rest until it has completely destroyed me. Things took an ugly turn yesterday when Private Eye published a story saying I had attended ‘a secretive conference’ at University College London last year organised by Dr James Thompson, an Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at UCL. This is an annual affair known as the London Conference on Intelligence. It then went on

Saturday

Robert Hardman

Should Donald Trump be invited to the Royal Wedding?

Two golden rules of royal weddings. First, it’s always wonderful on the day. Second, there is always an almighty official spat beforehand which no one saw coming. When Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, there was a Spanish boycott because the honeymoon included Gibraltar. In 2011, Prince William’s marriage plans had a crisis moment when it turned out the guest list had included the Syrian ambassador but not ex-PMs Blair and Brown. We can already spot one sensitive issue. Should Donald Trump be invited? For: the bride is American. Against: she backed Hillary. In fact, Mr Trump is unlikely to be invited because he is not a friend and this

Thursday

Carola Binney

Beyond the pale | 17 August 2017

Setting off to spend a year teaching English in Zhejiang province in south-eastern China, I expected plenty of surprises. But what struck me most was something they tend not to tell you about in the guidebooks: the racism. It started when I went around the classroom, asking pupils which city they were from. When I got to a slightly darker-skinned boy, his classmates thought it was hilarious to shout ‘Africa!’ It’s a theme. A girl with a similar complexion was taunted with monkey sounds; her peers refused to sit next to her, saying she smelt bad. I apparently erred when, teaching the word for wife, I showed my students a

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Lights, camera, politics: the triumph of showbiz over argument

At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell shocked looking member of the audience. After an hour and a half of brutal, bitter exchanges, a man asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump if they could think of ‘one positive thing that you respect in one another’. In the resulting pause and exhalation it felt as though the country had seen itself in a mirror and realised it looked hideous. Unlike some of our MEPs, the candidates for US president only sparred verbally in St Louis. And nobody watching politics from the continent of Europe (Beppe Grillo anyone?) should