Today

25 Feb 2021

In defence of Piers Morgan

The Liberal Democrat party’s foreign affairs spokesgoblin, Velma from Scooby-Doo — or ‘Layla Moran’ as she is known to close friends and family —has decided that freedom of speech on university campuses is of absolutely no consequence. Indeed, she described the government’s initiative to preserve the rights of students to hear a diverse range of opinions as ‘divisive’ and quite unnecessary, while she was appearing on one of those BBC Question Time editions that nobody watches any more. Velma presumably thoroughly approved of her own party’s subsequent decision to remove the tweeted clip of her spouting this bilge so that the public couldn’t hear it. If you are opposed to freedom of speech it is important to be consistent on the issue, and so if one’s own freedom of speech is repressed one should rejoice rather than cavil.

In defence of Piers Morgan

Thursday

18 Feb 2021

Where will vaccine passports take us?

Desperate to find someone to commemorate with a statue for having done great things, but who isn’t a white male, some people in Devon want to honour a couple of lesbian pirates. A statue of Anne Bonny and Mary Read has been proposed for the beauty spot of Burgh Island, to salute their important work in ‘breaking gender boundaries’ in the 18th century. Their long careers of psychotic violence and theft are easily eclipsed by the suggestion that they liked a spot of how’s your mother from time to time. A problem here is that there is no proof that they were actually lesbians. A few revisionist historians, of the kind who trawl back through the years in the hope they will find someone who might possibly have batted for the other side, have suggested as much, but that’s about it.

Where will vaccine passports take us?

Thursday

4 Feb 2021

What if Covid had struck in the 1970s?

We have reached Covid-19’s first anniversary in the UK — and I really think we should do something fitting to mark the occasion. The actual date is pretty much a moveable feast. The first patient in the UK known to have died of the disease was Peter Attwood, aged 84, on 30 January. But we didn’t know then that he had Covid, finding out only about six months later. On 4 February, the government instructed all Brits living in China to get the hell out and return to the UK sharpish and breathe all over us, as I believe the press statement had it. On 11 February, the little baby was actually christened Covid-19. Perhaps we should commemorate the anniversary of something more down-home and folksy. The first time you had to clean your bottom with the lid from a sardine can because hordes had stockpiled all the lavatory paper, for example? Or the very last time you used a cash machine? The first time Matt Hancock addressed us as if we were disobedient puppies? The first time Professor Neil Ferguson got his hyperbolic calculator out? Maybe we should vote on it.

What if Covid had struck in the 1970s?

Thursday

28 Jan 2021

The big tech bullies

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 well enough, given the circumstances, and at no point did Joe ask why all those people were there and was it his birthday or something. A very self-regarding young woman appeared and read an awful poem, so I went back into the kitchen.

The big tech bullies

Thursday

21 Jan 2021

As pretty as anything he’s written in four decades: McCartney III reviewed

Grade: A- The greatest songwriter of the 20th century, or just one of the top two or three? Who else would you have up there? Kern, Gershwin, Ray Charles, maybe. Dylan for the words along with the music. But not, I think, John Lennon. It’s McCartney’s melodic imagination that captivates and sometimes staggers — ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. The Beatle it was not OK to like, and yet who, today, would prefer to hear the overwrought ‘Strawberry Fields’ to the easy, loping chime of ‘Penny Lane’? Yes, Wings were the naffest band imaginable. But even then I would take their worst album (Red Rose Speedway) over Lennon’s solo best (Some Time in New York City). And ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ was a witty musical and lyrical parody of ‘Imagine’.

As pretty as anything he’s written in four decades: McCartney III reviewed

Thursday

14 Jan 2021

Who volunteers to be lectured by children?

The screenwriter Russell T. Davies has said that only gay actors should be cast in gay parts, believing this leads to greater authenticity. The obvious question here is how would Russell know who is gay and who is not gay when he comes to casting? It is not always obvious, surely. Do all gay actors who attend casting sessions enter the room humming hits from Mamma Mia! before enthusing over the decor? Perhaps Russell just guesses, like I do when I’m watching the BBC weathermen flouncing around. The other obvious question is that if it’s authenticity you’re after, surely gay men must never be cast in straight roles? For reasons never properly explained, authenticity doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to straight roles.

Who volunteers to be lectured by children?

Thursday

7 Jan 2021

The age of de-enlightenment

Depictions of Thomas Carlyle and David Hume in the Scottish Portrait Gallery will be altered to make it clear they were horrible racist bastards, apparently. All of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers are under review, including Adam Smith, who thought that people living beyond Europe were largely savage. I am not sure how they will alter the bust of Carlyle — perhaps chisel a swastika on his forehead? Carlyle was certainly rightish on many issues: you don’t get Friedrich Nietzsche in your fan club if you’re woke. But when I started reading the chap, back in the late 1970s, it was for the witty and sharp Sartor Resartus that I loved him, and his essays on heroes and hero worship. ‘All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

The age of de-enlightenment

Thursday

24 Dec 2020

At least Santa will arrive before Hermes

I took advantage of Google and NORAD’s 'Santa tracking app' to find out when my presents would be delivered. It says that my gifts should arrive in eight hours. Fine, I’m happy with that. Better than Hermes. But I notice three things. First, Google seems of the opinion that Santa is either a man or a woman, contrary to traditional thinking. There is an image of a woman Santa and a man Santa together. And yet, in the sleigh itself, there is no trace of the woman. Is she at home cooking mince pies? How recherche is that? I also notice that while Santa is allowed to be a woman, she is not allowed to be black or asian. Only whites allowed: isn’t that racist on the part of Google? I also notice that at the time I accessed the app, Santa was delivering parcels to people in Lahore and Karachi: is that not a grave insult to Islam? Happy Christmas, all of you.

At least Santa will arrive before Hermes

Thursday

17 Dec 2020

‘You can’t have opinions any more’: Rick Wakeman interviewed

‘Classic rock’ is a rather fusty old oxymoron, but then the term ‘classic’ is applied these days to chocolate bars and that most in-demand of consumer undurable, lavatory paper, so I suppose one shouldn’t complain. Covid-19 will probably be remembered as a ‘classic virus’ one day not too soon, when there are other more baleful new-wave viruses with spiky hair pogoing around. ‘Classic rock’, meanwhile, is a term applied to the sort of chest-beating rawk that people of my generation admire: the Who, Bad Company, Blue Oyster Cult insisting, in timely fashion, that we should embrace death, and Lynyrd Skynyrd informing us, with unforeseen irony, that they can fly, free as a bird. The classic keyboard player Rick Wakeman, once of the classic rock band Yes, has curated a triple album of classic rock from that most magical (for me) of decades, the 1970s.

‘You can’t have opinions any more’: Rick Wakeman interviewed

Thursday

10 Dec 2020

In defence of the booing Millwall fans

It is an enormous shame that the Millwall fans who booed their players for ‘taking a knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter last week were not better acquainted with one of the British BLM leaders, Sasha Johnson — they might have taken a knee themselves out of admiration. In August Ms Johnson tweeted: ‘The white man will not be our equal but our slave.’ If there is one thing Millwall supporters respect it’s aspiration, and Ms Johnson has that in abundance. I am sure the FA, the English Football League, and indeed the Millwall club board, who condemned the booing, all wish Sasha the best of luck in her exciting project. One voice should not be allowed to demean an entire movement, of course. The trouble is — and it is so tiresome to have to point this out every time the issue is raised — Ms Johnson’s views are not especially extreme in a foul organisation that wishes to dismantle capitalism and the family.

In defence of the booing Millwall fans

Thursday

3 Dec 2020

The Tavistock is a national scandal

How noble of the British Library to have apologised to the family of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes for having identified him as a beneficiary of slavery. The library’s scrupulous and deranged researchers had unearthed evidence that Hughes may have been a distant relative of a man called Nicholas Ferrar, born in 1592, and that Ferrar had some early involvement in the slave trade. Ferrar died childless so the precise link was not known, but it was enough for Liz Jolly’s maniacs to besmirch the man. Ms Jolly is chief librarian and the woman who said that racism was ‘a creation of white people’ — along with body odour, sin, cholera, poverty, werewolves and mosquitos, presumably. We are an inventive lot, after all.

The Tavistock is a national scandal

Saturday

28 Nov 2020

Thursday

26 Nov 2020

The public sector delusion

I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an amenability towards doing a spot of teaching? They still seem terribly averse to the whole idea. During the first lockdown, 60 per cent of young children received no virtual lessons at all from teaching staff, and one in five pupils over 12 was given no work to do, according to the Children’s Commissioner. Virtual lessons shouldn’t have been terribly difficult to arrange, but most of the time there were none. My own daughter had no virtual lessons from March to July (which is why she’s no longer in the state sector). She did, however, complete five physics papers and, being scatty, sent them — one after the other — to the wrong email address.

The public sector delusion

Thursday

19 Nov 2020

The march of the fascist mushrooms

It has been too long coming. While conscientious and decent liberals have tried to explain why, to their horror, millions of people in Europe and the USA have embraced populist causes in recent years, none has really got near the nub of the issue, dug down to the very core. For example, I have long been of the opinion that the Brexit vote, along with the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the continued popularity of right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary, are almost entirely the consequences of the malign influence of fungi. I have attempted to advance this argument in political debates but am never taken seriously. Now at last I have some support. Next week at Loughborough University Dr Lenka Vrablikova will be delivering a guest lecture entitled: ‘Othering Mushrooms: Migratism and its Racist Entanglements in the Brexit Campaign.

The march of the fascist mushrooms

Thursday

12 Nov 2020

Voters have lost their nerve

Elections teach us nothing. Instead, each tribe dredges succour from the minutiae, proving that they had been right all along. The moderate left — here and in the US — insists that tacking to the centre is the way to beat a populist right-winger, despite the fact that Joe Biden won by the skin of his teeth, through the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to go to the polls on polling day and against a candidate of whom the most charitable description would be ‘fundamentally deranged’. The woke far left, meanwhile, argues the reverse, implying that the tightness of the vote was down to a lack of progressive zeal, much as was the Democrat failure to capture the Senate. Everything that happens in the world today is simply grist to the mill of whoever’s side you are on.

Voters have lost their nerve

Thursday

5 Nov 2020

The infantilism of locking down to ‘save Christmas’

It seems, then, that this latest lockdown has been instigated simply to protect two very questionable institutions — the National Health Service and Christmas. Both have a certain historicity about them and were widely liked. Both, too, have become bloated and hideous caricatures of what they once were. There is a certain infantilism about the repeated demands to ‘save Christmas’ which conjures up the image of serious adults — Chris Whitty, for example, or Sir Patrick Vallance — hanging up their stockings on Christmas Eve and jumping up and down on the bed in excitement at five o’clock the following morning. There is no Santa Claus, Patrick. There is no sleigh and the elves have been long ago furloughed. It all comes from Argos, mate.

The infantilism of locking down to ‘save Christmas’

Thursday

29 Oct 2020

The morality of free school meals

The main problem with the government giving in over free school meals during the holidays — other than that it is immoral and unconservative, neither of which have been bars to Conservative policy-making in the past — is that it is a hostage to fortune. What if, next week, another highly paid professional footballer — Tottenham’s Harry Winks, for example, or Liverpool’s Joe Gomez — decides that the nation’s children should also be given by the taxpayer elevenses and high tea? Such a campaign would generate enormous traction, especially among the affluent. Newspapers would feel unable to resist. Come on, Prime Minister, how can you deny a starving child his right to a scone with some cream and strawberries? And someone would dig up a photo of Boris eating a scone.

The morality of free school meals

Tuesday

27 Oct 2020

The BBC needs a reality check

One of my favourite moments of viewing in this strange and dark year was the outgoing director-general of the BBC, Tony Hall, explaining why the Corporation had decided to drop the singing of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Last Night of the Proms. The BBC had already, needlessly, dug itself a capacious hole and Tony had turned up with a big spade to continue the work. 'The fact is we have come to the right conclusion, which is a creative and artistic conclusion,' his emollience announced, his nose growing fractionally longer with every second of the interview. Earlier 'BBC sources' had – shamefully, out of cowardice – attempted to suggest that the guest conductor, the Ukrainian-Finnish Dalia Stasevska, being a bit of a leftie, had objected to the jingoistic nature of the words of those anthems.

The BBC needs a reality check

Thursday

22 Oct 2020

Spare us David Hare

Having not watched television for nine months and already growing bored of the 1,000-piece jigsaw of General Alfredo Stroessner (part of the ‘Vigorous Leaders’ range from Waddingtons), my wife suggested — for a novelty — that maybe we should take in the new political thriller starring Hugh Laurie, called Roadkill. We have fond memories of Laurie from previous dramas and are both mildly interested in politics, so it seemed an agreeable idea. ‘What side is it on?’ I asked, with a note of warning. ‘BBC One,’ replied the missus, and we looked at each other glumly and I said: ‘Oh Christ. It’ll be a woke BAME-athon. Isn’t there an old episode of Midsomer Murders on somewhere, one starring John Nettles and with DS Troy being disparaging about homosexuals and gypsies?’ But there wasn’t — I think they’ve all been purged.

Spare us David Hare

Thursday

15 Oct 2020

What I got wrong about lockdown

The news that residents of Liverpool are not allowed to visit any other cities in the UK is a hammer blow not just for the Scousers themselves, but even more so for the rest of us, who will be forced for an indefinite period to abide without their famous cheeky wit. I am not sure how I will cope. Covid has impinged horribly on the lives of all of us, but this may be the most grievous development of all. Luckily we can still treat ourselves to the pleasures of hearing the Metro Mayor for the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotheram, on the radio every five minutes or so demanding cash from the government. Mr Rotheram has been praised by the Prime Minister for his ‘strong leadership’, despite the fact that the mayor himself eviscerates Boris Johnson and the government almost every time he opens his mouth.

What I got wrong about lockdown

Thursday

8 Oct 2020

Who’s missing from that list of Great Black Britons

There are two striking things about the new book, 100 Great Black Britons, which was compiled to celebrate the achievements of British people from an African or Caribbean heritage. The first is the sheer number of people included who are ghastly or mediocre or both. The second is the number of truly brilliant black Britons who were left off the list — for reasons which are not, I think, terribly mysterious. Under the ‘both’ category we have, to name but a few, Diane Abbott, David Lammy and the reliably hilarious Dawn Butler. There is also Kehinde Andrews, of course, a lecturer at a former polytechnic who will be appearing on a TV programme in your front room very soon opining about how everything in the universe, from hydrogen to oganesson, is racist.

Who’s missing from that list of Great Black Britons

Thursday

1 Oct 2020

The sound of pop eating itself and throwing up: A.G. Cook’s Apple reviewed

Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a spoon and digging in. A mash-up of everything — largely very sickly EDM, but also trance, house, power ballads, industrial techno, soft rock, winsome acoustic guitar. Meticulous to the point of almost derangement, endlessly inventive both musically and rhythmically, full of arch puns. Such as the album’s title here — Apple. Mr Cook is the boss of the record label PC Music. Geddit? Sides splitting? That’s the other thing — the future also promises to be very irritating. What you cannot doubt is A.G. Cook’s nerdish attention to detail, nor the crucial thing overlooked too often — he writes a good tune, as in the opener here, ‘Oh Yeah’, which is simultaneously utterly inane and pretty.

The sound of pop eating itself and throwing up: A.G. Cook’s Apple reviewed
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