Society
Portrait of the week
Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, proposed reaching net zero in 2050 ‘in a better, more proportionate way’ such as by…
Shoplifters need to feel shame
This is my brother’s story and, like many telling stories, it’s small. Tim lives in Iowa, as our mother’s family…
Letters
Whose victory? Sir: Politicians are often accused of engaging in doublespeak, and I fear in the case of Boris Johnson’s…
Dear Mary
Q. Scrolling through my WhatsApp contacts, I have found a name I don’t recognise but when I click on the…
What a full English breakfast can tell us about the state of the NHS
Among devotees of the full English breakfast, few things polarise more than the inclusion of baked beans. Some people are…
Biddy Baxter and the perils of remembering the past
I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend,…
Why Britain needs more marriage
Hungary is something of a bête noire in the international community. Viktor Orban and his government have had much-deserved condemnation…
Why your more successful friends will drop you
How success kills friendships
The toxic cult of the superhero
Why this mad insistence that everyone has special powers?
Beware the sex party bores
You know you’re getting old when your friends start going to sex parties. In our twenties, there were parties, and…
Parenting matters. It's about time we were brave enough to say so
The Duchess of Cambridge has been out and about hosting roundtables with very important people, discussing what can be done…
Why the Bible still matters
If you look to our schools and universities, you will not see a serious engagement with the Bible as part…
Not all masculinity is ‘toxic’
Anyone who has passed through an education in thepast decade will have encountered the term ‘toxic masculinity’. It is one…
The close friend I never really knew
I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one…
The cult of sensitivity
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
Why Russian tactics won't win the war
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, the war has settled into a largely attritional struggle –…
My strange encounter with foot fetishists
My strange encounter with the foot fetishists
Why should I be 'cancelled' for arguing that biological sex is real?
‘I just get the impression she hates men’, said a wound-licking James Max, on TalkRADIO, after he interviewed me on Wednesday.…
Virtue signalling is really status signalling
A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white…
The path to re-enchantment
Most social occasions now seem to kick off with a wasted hour or two. The time is spent discussing Covid:…
The bogus business of stigma-busting
Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so…
Is living without risk really living at all?
Taking my life in my hands — as we all do when getting out of bed — I walked along…
The secret excitement that lurks beneath our distress
Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we…
Cameron's sinister purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
