When is a protest not a protest? When we decide to call it a revolution
It’s ages since I last went on a decent demo and had a bit of a dust-up with the pigs.…
Neknominations – this is what the internet is for
Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers…
We buy dogs to reflect ourselves. So who’s buying all these killer pitbulls?
I’ve called the doggie hospital three times now to find out how Jessie’s getting on. She’s just come round, at…
Won’t some other quango come to the rescue of poor Sally Morgan?
Can someone please explain to me why the BBC newsreaders were not wearing black armbands last weekend when reporting the…
Why I’m on board for the homophobic bus
London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people…
If Lord Rennard looked more like Orlando Bloom, none of this would have happened
When I was promoted to being editor of a programme at the BBC, back in the late 1990s, my line…
What would Dawkins and de Botton do?
Two years ago this week the philosopher Alain de Botton unveiled his proposals for a giant gilded tower in central…
Once more, the spectre of Enoch Powell is raised to stop debate about immigration
One of the genuine seasonal pleasures to be enjoyed as 2013 slipped around the U-bend was Enoch Powell making his…
Try my resolution for 2014: ignore the internet
At last, it has been scientifically proved that Jesus Christ is better than Muhammad. We’d always known that our lad…
The strange disappearance of Gordon Brown
It may come as a grave surprise to you that, when it was offered as a prize in a charity…
Is it racist to want a high street where you can understand the shop signs?
A very useful feature in the Daily Telegraph informs me of the best 20 towns in Britain ‘for Christmas’. Number…
You can’t say that
There are many truths that cannot be uttered in modern Britain
Go on, own up: which of you female TV stars is secretly a godawful novelist?
I am still trying to get some sort of closure. For almost three weeks now I have been tormented by…
Is it ever possible to fight a war in full accordance with the Human Rights Act?
The ghost people, the letter people. The ones we hear about in court but never call by their real name;…
Off your bike!
Why it’s time for a campaign against cycling
It’s a tough life when you wear a burka. Believe me, I know
I dressed up in a burka to wander around the streets of Canterbury recently, to see what level of Islamophobic…
What do we call the people who abducted Maria? It’s a minefield
How should we describe the people who allegedly abducted that little girl in Greece, after a neighbour claimed that they…
If we stop stigmatising fat people, we’ll have lots more of them
Trying to get good, healthy, nutritious food down the ungrateful throats of the lower orders, especially northerners, has become a…
Hugh Grant’s censorious friends may be about to win the day
It is a peculiar alliance, when you think of it, which wishes to bring to an end 300 years of…
Here we go again: say one word against an icon of the left and the phone won’t stop ringing
Ring, ring goes the telephone every minute God sends. Sometimes I pick it up and say hello, sometimes I don’t.…
Fury and loathing in the New Labour gang
There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at…
Does the BMA prefer real fags to e-cigarettes?
What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than…
The reassuring stupidity of John Kerry
The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to…
What are we supposed to say when a grooming ring comes to light?
It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit…
The sad story of Oprah, the handbag and the shop assistant
Listen, this story is moving so quickly stuff will almost certainly have happened in between me writing it and you…
