In a way it’s amazing that Top Gear is still on telly at all. Richard Hammond ends up in a coma after a disastrous attempt at the world land speed record? Fine. Jeremy Clarkson punches a producer in the face? Change the presenters and, quite literally, keep on trucking. A show that can survive replacing its popular hosts with Matt LeBlanc and Chris Evans can presumably survive anything. When one of its current presenters, the former England cricket captain Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff, was injured in a pretty brutal filming accident last December, the first thought was quite naturally “how horrible, I hope he’s okay”. The second thought was “wait, Top Gear is still on?” It is. But you’d be forgiven for not ...

Jamie Angus, a former BBC News bigwig, has lifted his head above the parapet to declare that Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, was right to suspend Gary Lineker from Match of the Day earlier this month. And he thinks many of the BBC’s journalists quietly agree with him. Asked about the Lineker affair on Roger Bolton’s Beeb Watch podcast, Angus said: “I, perhaps unfashionably on Twitter, take the view that Tim was right to ask Gary Lineker to come off air.” This may constitute some comfort to Davie, who faced widespread anger (and a presenter boycott) for his decision to suspend Lineker before performing a swift U-turn days later. Angus, a former Today programme editor and World Service boss who last year left SW1 ...

As central banks across the world, including the Bank of England, continue to raise the cost of borrowing, the strains on a financial system hooked on a decade of ultra-low interest rates are becoming apparent. Silicon Valley Bank is merely the most prominent example of what could be a string of financial failures and defaults. Worse, as I argue with my co-authors in a short new book on the cost-of-living crisis, is that the inflation we are experiencing is unlikely to be tamed by interest rate increases, because price rises are flowing from a lethal combination of global instability and profit-maximising monopolies. We are being marched into an economic polycrisis of financial failure, soaring inflation and recession. A comprehensive change ...

We’ve all mocked a “live, laugh, love” poster at some point, a celebrity book on “living a better life”, or the mind/body trilogies stacked on smart-thinking bookshelves. But my issues are not with this genre of literature, or even with the boardroom girl-boss. Instead, I’m concerned with how the guidebook and its related forms (pamphlets, manifestos, handbooks) has infected social justice subjects – and how this is killing critical thinking. One example is the recently published Rebel Bodies – A Guide to the Gender Health Gap Revolution by Sarah Graham (2023), billed as an "inclusive and empowering manifesto for change in women’s healthcare". It is a distinctly utility-based approach to ridding ourselves of gender disparities in healthcare. Similar is How Men ...

The Bank of England has raised interest rates from 4 per cent to 4.25 per cent today, the 11th consecutive rate increase since December 2021, to continue the steepest programme of rate rises in recent history. This will increase the cost of mortgages and rents, depress wages and make it more expensive for businesses to borrow – but it is highly unlikely that this is the last rise of the current cycle. Expectations of further increases had been reduced by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and its UK subsidiary. SVB’s management failed to manage the risk of sharply rising interest rates, which led to severe losses and a bank run of unprecedented speed and size. Other mid-sized US banks ...

In his duplicity, incomparable talent to contort answers to fit the question, his conviction that he can’t be wrong, with an eye to the revolving movement of politics: Boris Johnson has mastered the art of the modern politician. When I sat behind him in the committee room alongside the sketch-writers, I had a perfect view of his freshly trimmed hairline. Against the clock and under the unmoving eyes of the Privileges Committee chair Harriet Harman, his protestations became flustered, exasperated. Johnson’s determination to “correct” the record on whether he intentionally misled parliament over partygate led him to drive a bus over his staff, as I noted yesterday. He averted his face when his statement on partygate in the House of Commons was ...

If you missed yesterday’s skirmish between terminally online people from the US and the UK over the different proprieties of tipping restaurant workers in America and Europe, suffice to say you can rest easy: having hit a bump in the road, socialism is back on track. The skirmish flared up on Twitter yesterday when a waiter in an American restaurant complained that Europeans are terrible tippers who fail to respect the convention of adding a 20 per cent gratuity. A number of Europeans, riled by this generalisation, retorted that the fault lay with American working practices; businesses should pay their workers more rather than force them to rely on tips. Well! That the answer to the question is obvious (pay workers ...

Extinction Rebellion was out in force on Wednesday morning (22 March), splashing the offices of several newspapers with green paint to protest “blatant suppression of crucial news on the climate and ecological crisis” by the “the billionaire tabloid press”. Targets included Rupert Murdoch’s shiny News UK headquarters in London Bridge, home to the Sun, Times and Sunday Times, as well as Telegraph towers in Victoria. Hacks at DMGT, an obvious target as the publisher of the Mail newspapers and Mail Online, thought they'd dodged a bullet when they noticed Extinction Rebellion daubing the wrong building. Protesters were evidently unaware that Northcliffe House, the long-standing home of the Mail, is currently vacated and undergoing renovations. Mail staff have been packed off to another Kensington office ...