A world-champion darts player writes home…
Dear Mother and Father,
Shame you can’t congratulate me. I am, I know, a disappointment to you. You hoped I would follow in your footsteps and become a literary critic or expositor of abstruse …
Gregg Wallace is a working-class hypocrite
“I’ll munch the living daylights out of your little tart.” It’s the sort of thing a woman might expect from the local park-bench drunk, not a BBC star paid £400,000 a year. Yet that’s exactly the remark Katy Brand received …
Britain’s new Class War
Imagine a Conservative Party intent on moving to the political centre but anxious about alienating its Right-wing by doing so. One way of resolving this problem would be to appoint as its deputy leader a wine merchant who owned a …
Why haters gonna hate Jacob Rees-Mogg
According to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s housekeeper her employer “likes it quite stiff”. It turns out she’s talking about the starched crease on his boxer shorts but it might as well have been his attitude to the proverbial upper lip.
We learn …
Chelsea’s bitches are back
On Tuesday nights, in the boarding houses of my single-sex school, girls crowded around laptops to watch seasoned Sloanes tear each other to bits on catch-up TV. They gawped as the cast of Made in Chelsea shagged each other’s boyfriends, …
The rise of the posh roadman
Friday afternoon in Clapham Junction, and two well-to-do white boys are swaggering down Falcon Road to Al’s Place Cafe. “He’s got bars, no?” says one, talking about some musician or other. “Nah g, allow. Paigon. Nehgateeve XP.” Off they shuffle …
In defence of Brits Abroad
Shagaluf. Ayia Napa. Marbella. Beefa.
Scouring maps of southern Europe like a Napoleonic general, the Brit Abroad plots his summer holidays. He seeks abandon, hot sun, cold beer and cheap 20-packs of Camel Blue. Territory selected, he readies his armoury: …
How Habitat made Britain’s middle class
An elegantly dressed woman is polishing her nails, looking into the camera with a kind of feline arrogance. Before her on the dressing table lies a beautiful pair of hairbrushes, while in the background a young man is making the …
Farewell to my Princess Diana dog
My dog Maisie bore a striking resemblance to Princess Diana. Looking across at her one evening, she shot me a look and I saw it. With those beseeching big eyes, she was a dead-ringer for the People’s Princess in that …
Why American cities are squalid
The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to …
Why sneer at Wetherspoons?
Until I walked across England, from Liverpool to Hull, I’d never heard of Wetherspoon. I certainly had no idea that, as a well-educated person, I was supposed to be scornful of the chain of pubs. When I discovered it, I …
The happy dysfunction of Dover
Three hours after landing at Heathrow, I was in Chaplins, just off Dover’s Market Square, 15 yards from a sign proclaiming: “Here while searching for his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, David Copperfield rested on the doorstep and ate the loaf he …
Blue-collar workers are our only hope
Amid all the hysteria, technological wreckage and gallons of spilt ink, artificial intelligence’s most potent legacy is yet to be discerned. As we enter the fourth industrial revolution, everyone from the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab to 61% of Americans …
Peter Thiel has launched a class war
“We’re building a city,” Dryden Brown declared last June, with the air of a man unfazed by the enormity of his words. “We’re building a city from scratch. Somewhere in the Mediterranean.” Brown, who has spent years explaining to investors …
The last hope for English cricket
The furore over the “spirit of the game” suggests, misleadingly, that there is indeed some such thing in contemporary cricket. But take a closer look and it becomes apparent that the much-fetishised “spirit”, a code of honour about as anachronistic …