Louise Distras was once a darling of the anti-establishment Left. An underground punk singer whose hits include “Dreams From the Factory Floor”, this working-class woman is unafraid to speak her mind. Five years ago, she was being invited onstage by …
The psychological battle over trauma
We live in traumatised times. Over the past few years, our social media channels, reality TV shows, and even playgrounds have become saturated with therapy speak. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, people now feel “triggered”; listening to a friend is now …
The Democrats have walked into an immigration trap
For the American Left, the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency offered ample opportunity to criticise his immigration policy. Those were the days of coast-to-coast airport shutdowns and street demonstrations, hipsters with “Abolish ICE” T-shirts, and a weekend in which …
Rishi Sunak’s war on the young
What does a fair distribution of economic resources look like? It is a question that will dog the Conservative Party Conference this week as questions over inheritance tax, VAT on school fees and the triple-lock on state pensions return to …
The impotence of the porn industry
Just north of the Strand, behind where the Australian High Commission now stands, there used to be what the press called “a fetid, miserable lane”. One of 19th-century London’s more disreputable districts, it housed the poor, the criminal, the prostitute …
Canadian parents are sick of progressives
Last June, late one night after my kids had gone to bed, I stumbled across a Twitter Space for parents concerned about what their children are being taught at school. There were 60 or so participants, mostly from Ontario: Canadians …
Will Hollywood strike back?
In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first …
How Donald Trump crushed Fox News
No one is better versed in Washington intrigue than American journalist Michael Wolff. His bestselling trilogy on the Donald Trump administration, beginning with Fire and Fury, exposed the chaos and division that stalked the White House. Now, he’s turned his …
Hard truths about Britain’s immigration crisis
It’s been a tough 10 days for Elton John. First, it was revealed that our Rocket Man is having to part ways with his beloved condo in Atlanta (on the market for a cool $5 million). Then, as if that …
The reason lads want Joe Rogan
In terms of scale, there are podcasts, then there is The Joe Rogan Experience. The difference is an order of magnitude. If The Joe Rogan Experience were a pop single, it would make Bryan Adams’s monolithic 16-week stint at Number …
The myth of Chinese imperialism
When President Xi Jinping first announced his plan to revive the ancient “silk road” between Europe and China in a speech in Kazakhstan 10 years ago, Western leaders paid little notice. There was no indication that the man on stage …
Stephen King’s boomer propaganda
Of all the plagues on contemporary literary culture, the absolute worst is the notion that depiction equals endorsement: that every protagonist in every book is just a thinly-veiled authorial insert; that evil characters doing evil things reflect the morals of …
The white heat of Britain’s decline
A nation lost in what one American commentator described as “an orgy of self-criticism”; an exhausted Tory government out of ideas; an endemic sense of decline. This might describe the Britain of today, but it also describes the Britain of …
Joe Biden’s billion-dollar oil mistake
One of the many ironies of the Just Stop Oil movement is that, for the past year, their protests have been positively correlated with the price of oil. If you were tempted to indulge in a little schadenfreude, you might …
The conservative case for Strictly
In 1976, Angela Rippon was already well-known to Britain’s TV watchers — from the waist up — as Britain’s first female national newsreader. Then aged 38, she appeared on a Morecambe & Wise Christmas special, sitting behind her desk, only …