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One of the guiding instincts on the political left is that society should be ‘progressive’. Social attitudes, politics and the economy should all advance together, making society fairer and more equal in the process. In this view, a tax can be progressive if it targets the income of the wealthy, just as a law is considered progressive if it protects the rights of a minority. This progressive worldview permeates almost all thinking on the modern left. And yet the contemporary idea of the progressive society has undergone a logical collapse. It has been driven that way by activists, some of whom represent groups with valid causes, but whose messages have

I was in the kitchen preparing the family’s dinner when the inauguration of Joe Biden was on TV, so I caught only mysterious fragments of his speech, over the noise of the blender and stuff. ‘I want an hour — an hour — with my own teen wolf,’ Joe seemed to say at one point. And then: ‘America, America, I give to you my vest.’ I raced through to the living room when someone announced that Garth Crooks was going to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ — good choice, Joe, I thought. Garth seems to have lost a little weight and indeed colour, but he did a decent job. It all went

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly

Belle Delphine lives in a mock Tudor house in a gated community in Hove. It’s necrotic, and soothing. You could be anywhere, and this is apt. Belle lives on the internet, where she entertains her subscribers, who pay $35 a month through the website OnlyFans. She is 21, and she grew up on the internet. ‘It raised me,’ she says. I watch one of her films before we meet. It shows her dressed as a Disney princess in a long pink wig and small clothes. She attacks herself with paint and rides a fluffy unicorn while shouting. Is the unicorn the internet? Is she the unicorn? I hate the film

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on a mountain top. It makes sense while we’re all social distancing, but I suspect the elopement trend is set to continue — and I think it’s dismal. I first saw the signs when I asked a friend what he was up to this Saturday. ‘Oh, I’m just off to an elopement,’ he said. My immediate

Worth a shot? How worried should we be about people refusing to have a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed? In a YouGov poll for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate this week, 6% said they would definitely refuse a vaccination, a further 10% said they would probably refuse and a further 15% said they weren’t sure. A better guide, perhaps, is how many allow their children to be vaccinated. According to government statistics, the rate of vaccination among children varies from 86.5% for the MMR2 vaccination at five years to 94.2% for the DTaP/IPV/Hib at two years. Poor third The rapper Kanye West launched his campaign for the US

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’. Well, this year a monster called Covid-19 appeared in