Watching Emmanuel Macron hard on the campaign trail in the Northern France rust belt yesterday morning, mere hours after he’d scored a surprisingly decisive top place in the first round of the French presidential election, a question sprang to mind. …
Five rules for fighting transactivism
It will not have escaped the eagle-eyed that something about modern transactivism seems to make otherwise Gillick-competent adults veer towards the infantile. From the EHRC’s recent clarification about the legality of single-sex spaces under the terms of the Equality Act, …
Texas is the future
In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where …
Sweden’s inconvenient Covid victory
When, the summer before last, the results of the first Covid wave began to be tallied in the media, there were different ways of measuring the devastation. One way of looking at the pandemic was to focus on how many …
Why Putin’s invasion failed
Nothing was more predictable about this most predictable of wars than the certain failure of Putin’s Coup de Main invasion to seize Kyiv and conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop. And yet its success was confidently predicted by Russia’s FSB …
Gary Neville won’t save Labour
When he played football, Gary Neville was often compared to a rat. He was never beautiful, not in his callow face, and certainly not on the pitch; no one made that claim for him. In 600 appearances for Manchester United …
The corruption of the feminist library
It was a feminist bookstore that led me to the Women’s Liberation Movement. I was a shy 17-year-old, in Leeds, in 1979. I nervously opened the door of the shabby shop front, which had posters of Audre Lorde and Kate …
When libel laws are needed
“Andrew Doyle is an ultra-conservative anti-feminist homosexual who uses a drag persona on Twitter to attack trans and queer people… He wishes with all his heart that he was Julia Hartley-Brewer. Pathologically so.”
Only one assertion in this tweet is …
How Marine Le Pen conquered Normandy
Here is a confident prediction about tomorrow’s first round of the French presidential election. In my lovely, peaceful village in the Calvados hills, Marine Le Pen will comprehensively top the poll. President Emmanuel Macron will come third or maybe even …
How Britain betrayed my Ukrainian family
“This reminds me of the Soviet Union,” joked the elderly Ukrainian woman as we joined the queue snaking out of the UK Government’s visa centre in Warsaw. Of course, we had expected a queue — what we hadn’t expected was …
Louis CK won’t be cancelled
Recall the early days of #MeToo: the excitement, the promise, the sense of a tectonic shift reshaping the culture from the roots. There was a time, in the movement’s first fecund months, when powerful men were falling like dominos. It …
Disney has always spread propaganda
“Disney is the worst enemy of family harmony.” You’d be forgiven for thinking those words were uttered yesterday, given the number of conservative politicians and pundits castigating Disney for “grooming children” following its criticism of the “Don’t say gay” bill.…
This isn’t a war between good and evil
The images emerging from Bucha are haunting. Dead civilians line the streets, many with their hands bound behind their backs. They are the victims of systematic executions, left to rot before the Russians decided to retreat.
Reports of such atrocities …
The week the trans spell was broken
I always knew it would start with sport.
Back in 2018, when the obvious fallacies of gender ideology made me feel merely puzzled as opposed to completely enraged, a friend of mine went to the Commonwealth Games. He’s a sportswriter, …
Have the Republicans gone too far?
How far is too far? From the Access Hollywood tape that many felt sure had sunk Donald Trump’s presidential hopes to the violent crescendo of January 6, this is the existential question Republican politicians have been forced to ask themselves …