Watching the Channel 4 leadership debate last night was thoroughly depressing. If only Boris Johnson’s premiership hadn’t ended in the way it did – a surreal version of the famous butterfly effect where one man gropes another in the Carlton Club and the leader of a nuclear power gets the boot. Without Boris there seems
It’s hard to watch Nick Kyrgios for long without the sense he wants the world to know he considers everything beneath him. Clearly, journalists are beneath him and he treats them with open contempt at every opportunity, but so too are the officials he abuses, the opponents he mocks and even tennis itself. ‘I don’t
Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance. I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes,
Would Donald Trump still be president if Twitter and Facebook had not prevented people from sharing the now-infamous New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop? It’s a question that can legitimately be revisited thanks to covertly recorded videos released last week by conservative activist media organisation Project Veritas. The videos appear to show senior
If you judge a man on what he does and not just what he says, then it seems obvious multimillionaire Labour activist Gary Neville is in reality a Tory. ‘I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist,’ the former Manchester United defender turned Sky Sports commentator and plutocrat businessman told the world on Instagram this week.
If ‘real recognise real’ – by far my favourite piece of modern American vernacular – then Donald Trump’s latest tiff with Piers Morgan seems final. ‘I don’t think you’re real’, the former President spits angrily in the excitingly edited promo for their upcoming interview, shortly before seeming to storm off set – a choice of
Will Smith’s straight arm slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars was, for my money, the most interesting event ever to have transpired at any awards show in history. It pips even my previous favourite, which was when Jarvis Cocker ran onstage during the 1996 Brits to reveal his buttocks in protest at Michael Jackson’s
Novak Djokovic’s readiness to walk away from tennis on a point of principle is an act of sporting heroism on a par with Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam war. Like Ali was when he said he had ‘no quarrel with them Viet Cong’, Djokovic is widely accepted to be the greatest master
Joe Rogan is wildly popular with men because his podcast most closely approximates the way the majority of us speak, think and interact with one another. By turns funny, clever, stupid, thoughtful and irreverent, there is nothing else like it in the media. This means it needs to be cancelled. If you’re trying to organise
I’m no Westminster insider, but there comes a point when you have to consider that perhaps Carrie Johnson was right about Dominic Cummings. That point for me arrived in May last year when, without giving any indication he might be the one at fault, Cummings unblinkingly described to a parliamentary committee his relationship with his
Like you, I am hugely enjoying the Novak Djokovic drama Down Under. What’s not to like? It is extremely funny. Quite possibly the world’s healthiest man has been deemed a danger to public health in a nation where two thirds of adults are overweight or obese by a government that has, at various points over
How cowardly of the BBC to axe Michael Vaughan from Test Match Special for the winter Ashes series on the basis of two words – ‘you lot’ – he might or might not have said more than twelve years ago. Is this really how the BBC wants to play this? Anyone can make accusations of
Is Michael Vaughan a racist? I hope not. Certainly, referring to Asian cricketers as ‘you lot’, as he is accused of doing – and which he strongly denies saying – would suggest he is. Or, at the very least, that in the past he has been guilty of being egregiously politically incorrect. I’ve met Vaughan
Does Boris Johnson really believe, as he told COP26 a few days ago, we’re at ‘one minute to midnight’ on the man-made climate change doomsday clock, and that ‘if we don’t get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow’? I ask only because in 2013
Last weekend, the first formal inter-gender mixed martial arts cagefighting contest – post Enlightenment, at least – took place in front of a paying audience in the city of Czestochowa, in Poland. Remarkably, the fight went to a second round. Many well aimed blows were landed by Piotrek Lisowski on his female opponent Ula Siekacz.
Although it’s deeply unfashionable to say so – particularly if you work in the media – I like Boris Johnson tremendously. I’m sure I’m not alone. I like him chiefly because he’s unfailingly funny. Every time I hear him on the radio or see him on the television, he says or does something that brightens
For most little boys of my generation, and several before, the only man who could conceivably have beaten up their father was Superman. Which is why now discovering that Superman is sexually attracted to men is so brilliantly subversive. It’s like discovering Mount Everest is gay. Back in August, DC Comics artist Ethan van Sciver
Towards what seemed like the halfway point of his show in London last night, Dave Chappelle announced to the crowd he was going to tell us something he was refusing to tell the media. He wanted us to know, he said while looking sadly at the floor, that his quarrel was not with the gay or
Something perfect at the death of summer: Emma Raducanu in full flight, smoking winners up the lines and progressing without dropping a set into the last eight of the US Open at the improbable age of 18. The very best, in tennis as in all sports, almost without exception, make it look beautiful – it’s
It was some achievement of England’s, frankly, not winning Euro 2020 given the players we had. As I sat down before kick off and began the customary cursing at the inexplicable omission once again of our best player, Jack Grealish, my wife tried to console me. The fact Gareth Southgate very clearly had no clue which
