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Where would you rather come from, Pakistan or Liverpool? Assuming you were somehow given a retrospective choice in the matter. It is not too tough a call for me. I could just about suffer being accused of a ‘cheeky’ wit and perhaps a sense of victimhood — both qualities maybe unfairly associated with Scousers — simply for the benefit of being born in England: it’s Liverpool for me, all the livelong day. This was the question posed, in an extremely offensive truncated form, by a minuscule sub-section of Millwall supporters during the side’s otherwise heroic victory over Everton in the FA Cup last Saturday. By minuscule I mean something well

The first thing that struck me when I emerged from the metro station onto the Place de la Nation was the amount of corduroy. It was without doubt the trouser material of choice for the middle-aged men participating in Sunday’s inaugural Red Scarf (Foulard Rouge) rally in support of the Republic and its institutions. As I meandered through the crowd, which numbered only half of the 20,000 hoped for by the organisers, I was also surprised by the number of blue and gold flags. Some demonstrators were waving the EU banner and others were wrapped in it, like football fans on their way to a World Cup match. I spied a

This morning Police Scotland announced that a 64 year old man had been arrested and charged with unknown offences. Not just any 64 year-old man, however, but Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, twice leader of the SNP, and the politician who, more than any other, led Scotland to the brink of independence. Even if Salmond did not quite achieve that, his SNP still replaced Labour as the natural party of government. Salmond will appear in court this afternoon. I wrote about this for last week’s Spectator: here is the article.  Amid the wreckage of a Brexit process that has disrupted every aspect of British political life, it is

1. Santa – the Man Loose fitting but matted nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit. The distinct whiff of Jack Daniels and ammonia when you close. If he’s such a big shot, why is he drawing unemployment benefit for eleven months of the year? Something scary and offkey about him. And there are good reasons why the children are no longer allowed to sit in his lap for a cuddle. 2. Santa – the Concept Why would anyone half way normal want to live at the North Pole on a bunch of rapidly melting ice floes? Or stay up all night delivering presents to children of doubtful deservingness.

It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not working out quite the way that they had hoped. An inchoate existential rage, hilariously — in this case — exhibited by people wearing those absurd yellow fluorescent jackets. They have latterly realised that their leader, Emmanuel Macron, is a smarmy, loquacious, incompetent idiot with strange sexual tendencies. We knew that all along. We told you

Nic Roeg’s art-house thriller from 1973 Don’t Look Now was most famous, or infamous, for its lengthy and explicit sex scene. I think it’s fair to say that the lugubrious (and in 1973 near ubiquitous) Donald Sutherland gave Julie Christie a very thorough seeing-to, involving the first act of cunnilingus in a mainstream movie. Even after being trimmed a little it still received an X rating, but did well enough at the box office. It was shown again quite recently — in Derby Cathedral, for reasons which quite elude me. In its unedited form. The dean of the cathedral, Stephen Hance, observed that the film would not be showing God

If we are to ban states of mind, my vote would be for self-righteousness first, followed by sententiousness, with maybe imbecility as third choice. That would criminalise most of the people in the country I cannot abide, including all of the Lib Dems, Momentum and Justine Greening. Sadly, the state of mind which the government wishes to ban is that rather more useful quality, hate. You are not allowed to hate anything any more, except for hate itself. But at least in hating hate you can really let yourself go, even if it is usually a wholly imaginary hate that you are hating. You can spew out your bile suffused

I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the hunter saw this hunched, awkward, shambling black beast, stumbling over sodden logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his eye and cocked the trigger. One thing, and one thing only, saved me. The armed cracker, looking through his telescopic lens, thought to himself: ‘Hey, it’s a bear — but it’s… smoking a cigarette?’ And so, at the last second, refrained from pulling the trigger. I had this brush with death related to me, with great glee, by the

Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception. But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress

I took part in a debate organised by the Times this week about reform of our divorce laws. Well, I say a ‘debate’. There wasn’t much of that. Not much in the way of dissent. The four other panellists, who included a government minister, all wished to liberalise our divorce laws. And it was chaired with great impartiality by Sir James Lawrence Munby, who was until recently the president of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales. He made a stirring ten-minute speech on why we need to liberalise the divorce laws. Yes, it was like one of those exquisitely balanced Newsnight debates, then. The audience