At the beginning of the year, a scandal erupted over a TikTok trend of young women in tight clothes posting videos shaming men for hitting on them at the gym. As recently as 2018, the story would have been one …
Poland’s futile bid to be Ukraine’s saviour
Tomorrow, President Joe Biden will mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion not in Berlin or Paris — but in Warsaw. There, he will turn a blind eye to Poland’s nationalist government, and pat President Andrzej Duda on the …
Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?
Barely a day had gone by from Ukraine’s successful request for German Leopard-2 tanks when the government in Kyiv called on Nato countries to yet again prove their solidarity by supplying it with US-made F-16 fighter jets. While military experts …
Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history
So it’s goodbye from Nicola Sturgeon. During a relatively expansive press conference on Wednesday — the prolonged duration of which somewhat undermined her claim that she always knows when it’s time to go — she offered the official version of …
Jonathan Raban’s final message
A week or so before he died, Jonathan Raban sent me an email:
“I apologise for my dreadful tardiness in reading your manuscript, and promise you an explanation later. Many thanks for your communiques from the ship, and you are …
Why have scientists stopped taking risks?
A casual consumer of scientific journalism could be forgiven for thinking that we are living in a golden age of research. Systematic evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Breakthroughs comparable to the discovery of DNA — only 70 years ago — have …
Conspiracies are the price of freedom
Here’s a conspiracy theory of my own invention. Why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald? Readers under the age of 80 may need to know that Jack Ruby was a Dallas bar owner and small-time crook who shot dead …
Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon has exited the stage, but the threat of Scottish independence has not. Whatever the triumphalism in London over the First Minister’s resignation yesterday, the idea that the secession crisis has ended is absurd. For the time being, the …
The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies
On June 28 2001, the notorious conspiracy writer and broadcaster Milton William Cooper gave a broadcast from his hilltop Arizona studio. “Can you believe what you’re seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” he asked.
Wasn’t it strange, he suggested, …
In defence of Lee Anderson
There are moments in politics when the elite pull back the curtain and let you know what they really think. The astonishing reaction this week to Lee Anderson is one such moment. After being appointed by Rishi Sunak as the …
Nikki Haley’s neocon pantomime
In the run-up to the contest for a major party’s presidential nomination, a challenger emerges to run against the man widely acknowledged as that party’s standard bearer. The challenger declares that the party must be prevented from drifting too far …
The truth about conspiracy Britain
“The world is controlled by a secretive elite.” This claim will strike some as conspiratorial nonsense and others as an obvious statement of fact. Either way, it is now beyond doubt that a large minority of the adult population believes …
Salman Rushdie’s latest blasphemy
“Fictions could be as powerful as histories.” In his new novel Victory City, Salman Rushdie comes as near as he has ever come to issuing a manifesto. His champions see him as a free speech martyr, his detractors as Satan …
How the UK sacrificed its car industry
Will Britain, as Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have both promised, really turn into the “next Silicon Valley”? It is bold talk. Some might say Panglossian. Although in truth, perhaps it’s to be expected from a weak administration troubled by …
Do ordinary Russians support Putin’s war?
If you were a Russian mother, would you rather believe that your son gave his life heroically fighting Ukrainian Nazis, or that he died butchering innocent civilians? The former, most likely. It is not easy to admit — to oneself …