Reports of Boris Johnson's intention to knight his own father have attracted much attention this week. This jaw-dropper of a story may provide perfect cover for Johnson to sneak through some other controversial nominees in his long-awaited resignation honours list. The Guardian reports today that Johnson has, for a second time, nominated Paul Dacre, the former long-standing Daily Mail editor, for a peerage. Dacre, who remains editor-in-chief of DMG Media, the newspaper's publisher, is understood to have been rejected for a peerage last autumn by the House of Lords appointments commission. (Johnson also apparently tried to install Dacre as the chairman of Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, before that proposal was nipped in the bud.) In some ways, the prospect of Lord Dacre ...

Over the last few years there's been a low rumbling of discontent among young women around the increasing ridiculousness of hen weekends. Once upon a time it was simply a hen “do” – a night out on the town. Now brides are given a two-day send-off with so many bells and willy-shaped whistles that the hen weekend spoof in Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love has become a common reference point. (“Saturday will begin promptly at 8am. Please join us in the Tower of London for a Tudor cooking course”; “We are superexcited to have had chocolate moulds made of a variety of male anuses by the artisan chocolate company Sucre et Crème.”) The trope has even entered the ...

In the latest instalment of Britain: The Culture Wars, the Prime Minister has promised an urgent “review” into the teaching of relationships and sex education (RSE) after concerns were raised about children being taught “inappropriate” content. Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP and Christian, has claimed in the Commons that children are being given “graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely and 72 genders”. Cates has called these “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate” lessons a “catastrophe for childhood”. Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain’s strictest headmistress and controversial content creator, took things one step further by tweeting, albeit rhetorically, “Should we normalise sex with kids? Should we allow chaos in the toilets so that 11 year olds can have anal sex ...

Breathe in, breathe out. It’s the simplest thing a person can do, even in moments of extreme duress, requiring little to no effort. Perhaps this simplicity is why Entonox – a blend of nitrous oxide and oxygen, often called gas and air – is such a popular form of pain relief for women in labour. Inhaled through a mouthpiece or mask during contractions, Entonox is used in virtually every birth setting across the UK. Or at least, it was, until recent investigations revealed dangerously high ambient levels of Entonox in some NHS labour wards. At the time of writing, gas and air has been withdrawn from at least five English maternity units, including those at Basildon and Watford, where Entonox ...

Sci-fi geeks with a fondness for the early 1990s will be familiar with Data, a loveable robot who serves as Captain Picard’s second officer aboard the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show’s writers described Data as a fully-functioning male android. Although he is “self-aware” and “sapient”, he is unable to feel emotion like his human counterparts. Data has no real childhood to speak of that would lead him to do such things as hate his dad and grow up to join a hippy commune; get his heart broken and binge drink for a week; or feel the spark of inspiration that would make him write this essay. He does have the capacity to make decisions, but they ...

In 1994, Walkers Crisps launched an advertising campaign in which Gary Lineker, the nice man of football, returned to his hometown of Leicester, received universal adoration and began stealing food from children. That’s how nice Gary Lineker is: for nearly 30 years, a major British snack brand has been playing on his reputation for niceness. More than 150 crisp adverts later, though, being nice is out of fashion. Niceness, some think, should be a sackable offence. Yesterday on Twitter, Lineker described Suella Braverman’s latest attempts to shore up the government by kicking refugees as “beyond awful”. Later, when criticised, he replied: “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to ...

Gary Lineker’s latest politically charged tweet – yesterday likening the government’s asylum policy to “Germany in the 1930s” – should have come as no surprise to BBC bosses. The corporation said the Match of the Day host would be “spoken to” about his comment as the right-wing press bays for Lineker to be shown a red card.  But Lineker is unlikely to be overly concerned. In an interview with the New Statesman last year, he said of the director-general Tim Davie: “I don’t think he’ll ever stop me talking about politics. I don’t think he wants to stop me talking about politics, either.” This was after Davie, grilled on Lineker’s tweets before a select committee hearing, said that reining the presenter in was a “work ...

WASHINGTON DC – Qin Gang, the new Chinese foreign minister, is not known for his subtlety, but his remarks on the sidelines of the country’s annual parliamentary session on 7 March were particularly stark. During his first press conference since assuming the role in December, he warned that the US and China were moving towards confrontation and that the “future of humanity” was at stake. “If the United States does not hit the brakes, and continues to speed down the wrong path,” Qin said, the countries were headed towards “conflict and confrontation” that would have “catastrophic consequences”. His words were carefully chosen. Joe Biden, the US president, said during his state of the union speech in February that he had made clear ...