Age 13, Judy Wiegand was married off to the older man who sexually abused her. Age 15, already a mother, amid the indifference of neighbours and the police to her husband’s violent mistreatment of her, Judy finally fled when her …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
Russell Brand’s sexual apocalypse
What a tremendous shock the weekend’s revelations about Russell Brand’s treatment of women must have been to the bosses of Channel 4, the BBC, and any number of newspaper executives. I mean, who would have thought it? Sure, this was …
Peep Show is a national humiliation
The history of British comedy is a history of ever-increasing male humiliation. Let’s start in the Seventies, the decade of declinism and brown suits. Forced to bear witness to both is Basil Fawlty, the supreme specimen of self-righteous control-freakery who, …
The paranoia behind China’s spy war
The revelation that a parliamentary researcher was arrested in March on suspicion of being a Chinese spy has sent Westminster “reeling” and left the British political establishment in “shock”. Or that, at least, is the impression offered by London’s news …
What does Angela Rayner really want?
Listening to Angela Rayner this week has felt like real-time evidence for Karl Marx’s quip about the past weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Even before she had addressed the TUC conference, Rayner was fending off …
What American Bullies tell us about men
The first American dog to be awarded a medal was Stubby, a pitbull-type adopted as a puppy by J. Robert Conroy, a military private, after he kept showing up at drill sessions. After a distinguished life of service in the …
The student mental-health crisis is a myth
It’s easy to fall off the radar at university. Exactly 20 years ago — 17 years old, awkward and terribly uncertain of myself — I did just that. Too young to drink legally (and apparently too ill-connected to procure a …
Is this the end of the Soros empire?
Even in retreat, the Soros empire commands a feverish hysteria. When, last December, the 93-year-old George finally handed control of his Open Society Foundations (OSF) to his 37-year-old son, Alexander, many of his liberal supporters wondered whether it was the …
Britain is turning into South Africa
I’ve always suspected that Europeans are incapable of understanding South Africa, the strange and complicated nation where I was born and often return. At bottom, the issue is this: how can people so accustomed to safety, stability and a well-functioning …
The dark arts of Starmer’s reshuffle
New uniforms, new haircuts and new shoes at the ready, many children went back to school this week (to the ones that aren’t about to crumble around their heads, that is). It was, too, the return of “Hogwarts” — many …
Will Starmer be Britain’s Merkel?
A smell of death is now seeping out of Westminster, choking the atmosphere of the nation, poisoning everything it touches. With each new crisis, the smell only gets stronger and the reaction from the public more visceral. Where there was …
The dying light of fireflies
This summer I spent some weeks in the north woods, in a cottage on Lake Michigan, in an eerie little crescent of absolute climatic perfection between Canadian wildfires and the 110-degree South. It was 68 and crystal blue. Once a …
Why is Britain so depressed?
Anyone with experience of depression will recognise the approaching symptoms: a numbed blankness of feeling, or pangs of melancholy nostalgia for a lost contentment now impossible to imagine. A black cloud of affectless lethargy drains life of purpose, making any …
How I lost my sexuality
In hospital, one of the things that is never mentioned, and there really is no reason for it to be, is sex. There are no jokes, double entendres, or exchanged looks. The place is antiseptic in all senses. Of the …