Six months ago, I was abruptly removed as independent Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, an unpaid role I’d held since 2013. For more than a year, I had been trying to get an …
How Twitter forced us to hate
It is hard not to be cynical about “the media” these days, especially if you work in it. Spend any significant amount of time reading newspapers and magazines, watching cable news, or following discussions on Twitter, and you notice that …
The abject failure of Cool Britannia
Storm Eunice tore the Millennium Dome’s PTFE-coated fibreglass roof to shreds over the weekend. In the footage that circulated on social media, the steel struts that make up the underlying structure lie unnervingly exposed, like a whale carcass on the …
Putin’s spiritual destiny
Threatened by an uprising of his treacherous generals, the Christian Emperor Basil II, based in the glorious city of Byzantium, reached out to his enemies, the pagans over in the land of the Rus. Basil II was a clever deal …
The power of victims who settle
It’s two years today since the #MeToo movement brought down its biggest monster: on February 24, 2020, Harvey Weinstein was convicted on two of five charges against him, including rape in the third degree.
Weinstein’s guilty verdict remains unusual. Despite …
How the truckers split indigenous Canada
Canadians aren’t known for the depth of their political feeling. If anything, our easy-going passivity is often a point of pride and distinction against our overzealous neighbours to the south. Yet if the recent Freedom Convoy revealed anything, it was …
Vladimir Putin’s dangerous madness
“He’s lost his fucking mind.” It’s Monday night, and I’m speaking to my friend, the American-Ukrainian author Vladislav Davidzon. We have both just watched Vladimir Putin’s televised speech from the Kremlin, and he — like Putin — is no longer …
Australia is ruled by clowns
Of all the absurdities currently plaguing Australia’s political class, perhaps the most revealing is the recent surge in voters Googling “April Sun in Cuba”. For the uninitiated, April Sun in Cuba is a Seventies song by New Zealand band Dragon. …
Covid has created a capitalist nightmare
Over the past two years, as the pandemic claimed the lives of millions of people and upturned the lives of everyone else, a silent revolution was taking place. Western capitalism suddenly found itself usurped; replaced by an even more oligarchic …
The case that changed the gender debate
In 2019 I lost my job after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity.
Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender …
How to lose a leadership election
With MPs reassembling after their February break, the great Boris Johnson Leadership Melodrama will soon be back in the headlines. For the time being, at least, the Prime Minister survives, bloodied but not yet fatally wounded by that tumultuous encounter …
We deserve better than these weaklings
Vladimir Putin is many things. To Boris Johnson, he is “irrational”. To Joe Biden, he is “a killer”. To Barack Obama, he is the “bored kid at the back of the classroom”.
I suspect that Putin is all of these …
Kanye West’s tragic victory
It took me a while to figure out what the first two instalments of the new Netflix documentary jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reminded me of, this portrait of the artist as a young man trying to get ahead in the …
Who betrayed Anne Frank?
Embedded in the cobbled pavements of the Netherlands are thousands of brass memorial plaques dedicated to victims of the Nazi genocide: stumbling stones, or Stolplersteine. “As you stumble over them, you stumble over the past,” writes Rosemary Sullivan. “It is …
Why I stopped being a good girl
I was always a good girl, by which I mean a people pleaser, because that is what being a good girl is. I enjoyed the benefits that such a personality brings (straight As at school, a close relationship with my …