The joke’s on us
The award for the funniest joke at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was won by Lorna Rose Treen, with this: ‘I…
The great sociology con
My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I…
You can’t fight injustice with injustice
This week’s truism: all top-down attempts at leftie social engineering end up causing rather more misery and injustice than the…
Across Europe by train
I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered,…
Intersectionality is a dud
The almost complete absence of anything remotely resembling an intersection in the progressive doctrine of intersectionality poses a problem for…
The BBC’s biggest problem
As I write this, the director-general of the BBC is being quizzed on the corporation’s future by people who were…
The BBC is self-destructing
There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware…
The myth of intersectional politics
A few years ago I mentioned the profusion of moaning women on BBC Radio 4, after a longish car journey…
The trouble with teachers
A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time…
The judgment of Carla Foster
‘No one has the right to judge you’ was one of the last posts made on Facebook by Staffordshire ‘mum’…
On the hallowed terf
The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as…
My northern honours list
Exciting news arrives. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has let it be known that he wants more northerners nominated for…
Welcome to the theatre of the absurd
Iam on the horns of a dilemma, I am in a moral quandary. I had intended to spend this morning…
My Eurovision winners and losers
I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in…
Wrong but not ‘harmful’
Three years ago this week marked my first misgivings about the government’s Covid lockdown. Sure, I was late to that…
What King Charles gets wrong
Marooned in London for a day between meetings, I walked for miles in an attempt to find something good to…
The delicious doublethink of Diane Abbott
I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life…
Scotch and rum
For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party…
A law unto themselves
The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or…
The women can’t save us now
It is with great sadness that I must report the departure of the world’s only female head of state who…
The rule of lawyers
Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used…
Childcare: an inconvenient truth
Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that,…
Who cares what Gary says?
There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called…
