Haven’t you heard? Prostitution is empowering. Liberated super-vixen and self-described feminist Lily Phillips, 23, has declared she is to embark on the sticky Sisyphean task of bedding 1,000 men in one day. Other OnlyFans “models” — a tellingly bashful euphemism …
How Britain’s trains were derailed
An apocryphal British newspaper headline once read: “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off”. It’s a nice phrase — but, in theory anyway, its whiff of British exceptionalism has long-since evaporated. Many educated people, if you asked them, would these days …
Labour’s politics of polite automatons
The foundations. The missions. The milestones. The targets. The earnest gestures and the hand-clasped, feigned intensity. In the end, none of it matters. Keir Starmer’s “plan for change” — resetting his government after months of drift — only proves one …
Keir Starmer has no dream
There are periods in history when old certainties and settlements suddenly begin to fracture under the weight of their own contradictions. In the Thirties and Seventies the very nature of the system seemed to be collapsing in on itself. Yet …
Why we worship the NHS
Across the pond, dire warnings are often intoned about something called Christian Nationalism. This is (we are told) a rising, virulent strain of theocratic fascism that fuses Christian dogma with sexism, ethnocentrism, and state power. Others, again, warn that this …
Say Nothing’s empty empathy
Ever since Nicéphore Niépce took a snapshot from a window, overlooking the rooftops of Saône-et-Loire, in the 1820s, we’ve been living, and lost, in the kingdom of the image. With the development of photography, cinema, television, and the internet, the …
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 …
What the death bill tells us about life
In my late twenties, I became clinically depressed and prone to bouts of suicidal ideation — “suicidal”, in un-medical English. From 1993 to 1998 I lived in northern Italy; paradise, apparently, but to me it felt more like a J.G. …
What remains of Churchill’s England?
Twee tea towels; tubby Toby jugs; cigar-puffing cosplayers. Churchill’s apotheosis surely ranks among the most odd developments in British cultural life. He has grown so larger-than-life that one in five teens thinks he’s a fictional character. And for some, moist-eyed …
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 …
The British scientists working for China
When Keir Starmer met his Chinese counterpart earlier this month, he gripped Xi Jinping’s hand and proclaimed the importance of a “strong” bilateral relationship. The meeting marked a warming of relations between the two nations, which have been decidedly frosty …
I’ve seen too many bad deaths
As an emergency physician, I make agonising life or death decisions every day. When caring for a terminally-ill patient whose organs are failing, and who can’t recognise her own children, I work with colleagues and family members to decide whether …
Kemi must turn Britain’s vice into virtue
In her first month as leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch has got off to an opportune start. Ignore all the headline-grabbing chatter about her unpopularity, the latest YouGov survey reveals that she has opened a viable route to …
Winters of Discontent are coming
I was expecting Starmer to be awful. But less than six months into his premiership, his government’s prissy authoritarianism, student-union self-righteousness, and vindictive taxation has plunged Labour from a net favourability rating of +6 on taking power in July to …