While cowards flinch…
I’ve been scratching my head for the past half hour trying to work out how I would react if I were a Conservative MP and a BBC reporter stuffed a microphone in front of me and told me that Arthur...
View ArticleLaughing at people for wearing weird clothes is now to be regarded as a crime
So. As of last week, punching a goth is a political act in Greater Manchester, but not in Derbyshire. Sussex is still making its mind up. Odd, yes; funny, no. As you might have read, those police...
View ArticleThe stoic approach
A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to detail is bordering on the obsessive’. Aside from observing that an obsessive attention to detail...
View ArticleWhy I’m on board for the homophobic bus
London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people who, like me, work in the media, as they call it. I was born in London...
View ArticleDamn. I should have seized my chance to appear on BBC3
Are there enough black and minority ethnic people on our television screens? The comedian Lenny Henry thinks not and has proposed targets to ensure better representation. Lenny means stuff like...
View ArticleKilling jokes
Driving along in the car, listening to the radio news, the boyfriend turned to me and said he thought the Michael Fabricant row a very strange one. Fabricant was being pilloried for having tweeted that...
View ArticleDoes social work work?
In 1980, June Lait and I published Can Social Work Survive?, the first critique of British social work aimed at the general public. She was a lecturer in social policy and a former social worker; I was...
View ArticleClarkson and the case of the cowardly comedian
‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’ Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report? Clue: it’s that...
View ArticleMy top ten most fatuous phrases
An apology. A few weeks back, in my blog, I promised a regular series called ‘Fatuous Phrase of the Week’. Like so many publicly uttered promises, this one has failed to materialise. There has been no...
View ArticleLetters
Mind games Sir: I hope that people are not unduly put off by Melanie McDonagh’s misrepresentation of mindfulness as a cop-out for navel-gazers who lack the moral fibre to engage in ‘proper’ religion...
View ArticleStudents of dogma
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/8f1c0b97-698e-45c6-b50a-84e0e4b3773a/media.mp3 Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks....
View ArticleHigh life
Welcome to 2015, the year that speaking and writing freely had to stop. Anything that might cause trauma to anyone of any race except the white one will be expunged, and the perpetrators of politically...
View ArticleThe new PC from A to Z
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3 Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad...
View ArticleRise of the new young puritans
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3 I wonder how many of you know that you’re cis. Not very many, I’m guessing. So let me break this gently. You are almost...
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Call me insane, but I’m voting Labour
Quite often when I deliver myself of an opinion to a friend or colleague, the reply will come back: ‘Are you out of your mind? I think that is sectionable under the Mental Health Act.’ In fact, I get...
View ArticleMy part in a masterpiece of political correctness
Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like...
View ArticleHigh life
The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and...
View ArticleTrigger
A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should get a trigger warning. Otherwise something nasty in the woodshed might trigger...
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From ambrosia to zabaglione
Should sugar be taxed? Some of the contributors to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets seem to think so. Sugar certainly appears less appealing than it used to. Its negative effect on our teeth is...
View ArticleA Bullingdon for feminists
We’re at the tail end of Trinity term at Oxford, when the university finally begins to look like the ‘city of dreaming spires’ depicted in the postcards. The dismal weather cheers up; the quadrangles...
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