A former producer of mine once posited that there should be a “breathalyser” attachment on computers that would prevent, in his case, the late-night purchase of a Fonz-themed board game for £50 from eBay. “I don’t even like Happy Days” was his rueful morning-after buyer’s remorse. Alcohol, or the kind of mass hysteria seemingly baked into the online world, might partly account for the oddest story of recent days: that an online auction for a Mr Blobby suit developed a crazed momentum that ended with a winning bid, later reneged on, of £62,000. But there is surely more to it than that. Generation Z start here. Mr Blobby, a bloated, demented pink humanoid inhabited initially by the actor Barry Killerby (who was ...

Much has been made of Rishi Sunak being our first Xennial prime minister (born between 1975 and 1983). But as much as our politicians represent a generational switch of gear, it’s the voters that exemplify the real tide of change. In 2023 another important sub-group is emerging, one that symbolises the latest societal shift. They are instantly recognisable in our workplaces, homes and social media feeds, and politicians ignore them at their peril: Prosecco Mums. They are more Hunsnet than Mumsnet; Xennial mothers who favour a certain Italian sparkling wine. One in-depth analysis of the prosecco consumer from 2018 identified that 41 per cent were graduates, 81 per cent lived with their partner or children and the majority, 52 per cent, lived in the ...

There’s an adage in American politics that voters don’t choose the candidate whose policies they most agree with, but the candidate they’d most want to have a beer with. This question, known as “the beer test”, tries to measure authenticity, likeability and general charisma. Looking back through American history, the last president nobody would want to be cornered with at a party was Gerald Ford (who was never elected to the office), and before that maybe Calvin Coolidge, who was president during Prohibition so nobody could drink with him anyway. This test holds up in our time too. Say what you will about Donald Trump, he has a magnetism that carried an entire reality television franchise, and appealed to plenty of middle-America Maga voters ...

The UK economy, as we have been pointing out for some time, is in a bad way. Britain is the only major country forecast by the IMF to suffer a recession this year and average real wages are expected to remain below their 2008 level until 2027. In the supposedly dismal 1970s – the decade used as a reference point for decline – average annual GDP growth was 2.6 per cent. Britain will be lucky to achieve half of that in the 2020s. The quip that the UK is becoming Italy without the sunshine is increasingly harsh on Italy. For these economic maladies, Conservative MPs have a purported cure: tax cuts. Backbenchers, most notably the party’s Trussite continuity wing, are clamouring ...

It is, according to the headline on Melanie McDonagh’s column in the Times yesterday (30 January), “an assault on Christianity”. Could it be referring to the massacre of Christians in Nigeria or the banning of church worship in some cruel atheist dictatorship? No, it’s the London School of Economics (LSE) renaming the Lent academic term “winter”, the Easter break “spring”, and so on. As GK Chesterton once said, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” And don’t worry, we’re still allowed to describe Chesterton as a Roman Catholic writer. Actually, we’re allowed to say pretty much whatever we want on this subject, and the faith given to the world by ...

One ritual of the economic news cycle is the release of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s forecasts for the UK economy. An update was published today, coinciding with the three-year anniversary of the UK’s exit from the European Union on 31 January 2019. The coincidence is unfortunate for fans of Brexit because the forecast makes for gloomy reading. The IMF predicts that the UK economy will shrink by 0.6 per cent in 2023, the worst performance out of the report 30 covered, and even this is a somewhat more optimistic view than that put forward by the Bank of England, which expects the economy to shrink by almost 2 per cent by the end of this year. Standing back from 2023, the ...

It is common to see the media – myself included – poke fun at Olaf Scholz, and his scholzing. In Germany, scholzing works politically. The German media were very tame during the period when the chancellor came under pressure to deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, but criticised the foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s comment: "We are fighting a war against Russia." It was an unwise comment, and created tensions between Baerbock and Scholz. The polls show that over the last six months Scholz's Social Democratic Party (SPD) has regained its pole position over Baerbock’s Greens, though both are trailing the CDU/CSU, the conservative party of Angela Merkel. In the Insa/Gov polls the Greens led the SPD all through the summer until ...

The music video starts with the arrival of a famous pop star in a club, as men in Lycra gyrate their bodies. It peaks with a fountain of liquid landing on all involved – including directly into the performer’s mouth. You may assume that I’m describing the video for Sam Smith’s “I’m Not Here to Make Friends” – which has provoked a backlash for its apparently “pornographic” and “hyper-sexualized” scenes. But no! I’m writing about Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” – the video that Smith’s pays homage to. It came out 40 years ago. Clearly, sexy pop videos are nothing new, so why the outrage? The response to Smith’s video feels rather sinister. Smith, a queer artist who came out as non-binary ...