What ‘populist’ really means
Two months ago, in these pages, I predicted that Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party would win the Slovakian elections and everybody…
The rise of the groupthink podcast
A long tradition in the Liddle household on a Saturday morning is to read aloud sections from the Guardian Weekend…
The inequality of sex
As we all shroud ourselves in grief at being unable to watch Russell Brand any more on terrestrial television stations,…
Covid’s back. Don’t panic!
How terrified should we be of the new Covid variant nicknamed (on Twitter) ‘Pirola’? Out of our wits? Or should…
Mildly pleasant 1980s hard rock: ‘Angry’, by the Rolling Stones, reviewed
The new Rolling Stones single, supposedly their best in many a decade, is called ‘Angry’. And while on the surface…
Right-on Kew
We must all hurry down to the Temperate House at Kew Gardens next month to enjoy Queer Nature After Hours,…
The best new album I’ve heard this year: Being Dead’s When Horses Would Run reviewed
Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to…
It shouldn’t be a crime to sniff a goshawk
I notice that the naturalist Chris Packham has been reported to the police for the ‘crime’ of sniffing a goshawk.…
What a joke
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…
Why ‘affirmative action’ doesn’t work
This week’s truism: all top-down attempts at leftie social engineering end up causing rather more misery and injustice than the…
You think British trains are bad? Try German ones
I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered,…
The doctrine of 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’…
What terfs get wrong
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 verdict on Eurovision
I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in…
Who gets to decide what is ‘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…
