In the early afternoon of 18 November 1993, I was in the New York office of MTV’s programming director. At the end of our meeting an exec said, “Oh, would you like tickets to an Unplugged taping tonight?” Without even …
Adam Kay’s dangerous misogyny
It is clear, reading This is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay’s 2017 memoir, that he had a breakdown at the end of his years as an NHS junior doctor in obs and gynae: “brats and twats”. This is frightening for …
Why anti-racism should be resisted
“Young boys and girls must grow up with world perspectives”. On 22nd April 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, speaking at a meeting of the Massachusetts legislature, lamented the “tragedy” of school segregation. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights …
How James O’Brien destroyed the phone-in
For almost two decades, the biggest show on LBC has been Nick Ferrari at breakfast, followed in the schedule by James O’Brien, the latter playing, according to Miranda Sawyer in The Observer, “Alan Partridge to Ferrari’s Chris Morris”. But …
How the Left betrayed the Truckers
They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the …
Why comedians stopped being funny
The most exciting stand-up comedy show I’ve ever seen was Bill Hicks in a student union in the autumn of 1992. Being a comedy naïf probably helped. I had seen Hicks’ sensational Channel 4 special Relentless earlier that year but …
Were masks a waste of time?
Last summer, as the Delta wave was upending hopes that widespread vaccination would end the pandemic, several Democratic-run cities and states in America reintroduced the mask mandates they had ditched earlier in the year. A few other blue states and …
How Farage had the last laugh
Meet the teenage Nigel Farage. It’s the absurdly late Seventies. He is a stalwart of Dulwich College’s second XI cricket team, and a tittering purveyor of risqué racial banter. He likes snuff, golf, and brandishing a rolled-up umbrella at unsuspecting …
What Boris Johnson must do next
In the bowels of Westminster, if reports are to be believed, you can hear the constant rumbling of letters of no confidence being submitted to Graham Brady. At least a dozen Tory MPs have gone public with their desire to …
Why the Left eat junk
Back in the Nineties, reading food packets for junk ingredients was a typical Left-wing hobby. It was a fairly safe bet that if you had opinions on pesticides in farming, preferred “unrefined” or “unprocessed” foodstuffs, or questioned the benefits of …
What Can We Learn from Southend West?
Daddy Dragon’s Rally is in Warrior Square, Southend, opposite a blank-eyed Travelodge. It is a gathering of the English Constitution Party, which seeks secession from Britain, its oppressor, in support of its leader Daddy Dragon (or Graham Moore) in the …
How Britain became Putin’s playground
On Monday, Liz Truss warned Russia’s oligarchs that there will be “nowhere to hide” their dirty money in London. Which is pretty weird when you think about it, since the statement includes the implicit admission that the money is already …
Should we let children catch Omicron?
As we enter our third Covid year, much of the world is getting back to normal. Denmark yesterday dropped most of its Covid restrictions and welcomed back “the life we knew before”. In the UK, face masks and Covid passports …
Why Canada’s truckers will lose
The world does not usually pay much attention to Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy capital city. But over the weekend it generated international headlines. A “Freedom Convoy” consisting of anti-vaccine mandate truckers descended on the Canadian parliament to protest cross-border vaccine mandates …
Why the experts are losing
We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management …