The BBC reporter Laura Trevelyan and her family have donated £100,000 to fund economic development in Grenada, where their ancestors owned 1,000 slaves and six sugar plantations. She discussed the decision and “her family’s journey” with a BBC colleague, Azadeh Moshiri, herself a billionaire heiress. Trevelyan justified her six-figure payment in the language that is customarily used in debates about race. “If anyone had ‘white privilege’, it was surely me, a descendant of Caribbean slave owners,” she has said. Trevelyan detailed the terrible effects of her family’s legacy, arguing to Moshiri that “obesity… is linked to slavery”. Trevelyan’s acceptance of guilt has drawn attention to another blight in her family history – the links between her four-times great-grandfather Charles and the Irish ...

Channel 4’s Consent,a single-episode, hour-long drama examining the culture of sexism and sexual violence in British schools, would have been less powerful if the perpetrator at its centre were the cartoonishly awful character Raffy – a teenager who acts a bit like how Jay from The Inbetweeners might have done if he’d been born into the Andrew Tate generation. “FFS. Stick your dick in her gob. Shut her up,” Raffy texts his friends on their #slutsandstuff group chat while the brilliant student Natalie delivers a speech at assembly. Instead, Natalie is betrayed by her friend, Archie, who also feels like a misfit in Burlingdale College, an all-boys’ private school that has only recently started admitting girls into its sixth form. ...

Salman Rushdie's work has staged a number of related battles – between freedom and repression, imaginative play and absolutism, rationalism and what he calls "the unreasoning mind". But David Remnick's profile of the novelist in this week's New Yorker emphasises a more personal kind of struggle: Rushdie's desire to find autonomy or normality as a citizen and a writer while being a cause and, for extended periods, a target. Rushdie's story emerges as one not about principles or arguments but defiance and resilience, of forging a path, preserving his energies, protecting his talent. As Remnick tells it, Rushdie's life can be divided into a series of more or less discrete periods. First there was childhood in Mumbai (where he was born in ...

As several generations of political opponents can testify, it is never fun to be on the receiving end of Alex Salmond’s venomous tongue. Few can deliver controlled rage as powerfully and eloquently as the former first minister. Since his fall from grace and subsequent exile, however, Salmond has become a much-reduced figure in the Scottish independence movement. His public outbursts have resembled smoky puffs from an ageing, exhausted dragon. His post-SNP venture, the Alba party, has been a failure. For those of us who remember the glory days, there was therefore something thrillingly vintage in Salmond’s weekend address to a Burns Supper in Dundee. This was the old man in incendiary form, eyes narrowed in contempt, voice like a flick knife, jowls ...

As this unhappy and exhausted Conservative government heads for probable electoral oblivion it is hardly surprising that some of its senior figures are looking for something that might win back disaffected voters. One of those things is an attack on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has explicitly called for Britain to leave it. The Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, has drifted towards a similar position, and now the Prime Minister himself has let it be known that he too is contemplating withdrawal. As a matter of international law, leaving appears deceptively straightforward. Article 58 of the Convention allows member states to leave on six months notice, a provision that Russia triggered in March of last year – understandably, ...

The prime-time GB News host Mark Steyn will not be returning to the channel. This afternoon he released a video on his website that called the channel's chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos a "habitual liar". Steyn called another GB News employee "Ofcom's bitch". Steyn has not been on air at the channel since mid-December after he suffered two heart attacks. Fellow GB News host Dan Wootton supported Steyn at the time, tweeting: “Sending love and prayers to Mark Steyn today. We need you back on GB News soon.” Wootton may be waiting some time. In his video today, Steyn claimed that GB News had sent him a new contract while he recovered from his illness. "I was all set to return to GB ...

Liz Truss’s Telegraph essay has provoked some extraordinary howls of outrage. With scarcely a word of contrition, she attempted to justify her time as prime minister, focusing on the disastrous mini-Budget that saw the pound fall to a record low and government borrowing costs surge. And yet, she said, she would do it all over again. Cue online consternation. But that front page isn’t aimed at you, dear New Statesman reader. It’s laser-targeted at the frontal lobes of the Conservative Party, or at least the 57 per cent of members who voted for Truss to become leader. The paranoid style and the attack on the “left-wing economic establishment” are closely aligned with Tory activists’ world-view. Derision from the leftie woke establishment ...

WASHINGTON DC – The balloon is down. I repeat, the Chinese surveillance balloon is down. After floating across the United States for most of last week, the balloon was shot down by an F-22 fighter jet using a heat-seeking missile off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday (4 February). Of course, this being America, the whole thing took place live on television. The major news networks showed the balloon drifting out over the Atlantic Ocean. Then you saw the condensation trails of the aircraft streaking towards it. The balloon ruptured and plummeted towards the sea. Somebody watching from the shore shouted: “We got him!” We now know that the US president Joe Biden was first briefed about the balloon on ...