Eee, but January is grim, isn’t it. Here we are, day 20, and it feels like it will go on for ever: a never-ending expanse of gloomy weather and dark evenings and heavy coats. The focus on self-improvement that seems to have intensified in recent years hasn’t helped: Christmas decorations hadn’t even come down this year when social media was flooded with ads featuring alcohol-free spirits and carb-free meal plans and other ideas aimed at draining away whatever little bits of joy we had planned to get ourselves through this, the dreariest part of the year. Now we have been told that office cake – one of the few things that can be relied upon to entice many into the office ...

The government’s release of its latest tranche of "levelling up" funding has brought the project its annual moment in the spotlight. The headline statistics are difficult to sugar-coat. The south-east of England will be receiving £210m from this latest round, compared with £108m for the north-east. Rishi Sunak’s own, well-off constituency of Richmond in North Yorkshire will also receive a heap of cash (as it did in the fund’s first round) while, in England, 52 Tory constituencies benefit, more than twice as many as those represented by Labour MPs. The GDP per capita of the south-east was £35,361 before the pandemic – nearly 50 per cent higher than the north-east. This is why regional investment is desperately needed in the UK and ...

Wow! How refreshing to see New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern resign of her own free will, with dignity, grace and humility, rather than be dragged from the prime minister’s office. If only other world leaders would learn from her example. There’s Donald Trump, more than two years after his defeat by Joe Biden, still insisting that the US presidential election was stolen and preparing to run again in 2024 – uncaring or seemingly oblivious to the fact that his refusal to depart the scene merely tears his country apart. In Brazil another populist with a giant ego, Jair Bolsonaro, is adopting the same destructive tactics. He has refused publicly to acknowledge his defeat by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last October, and stands ...

Dystopian fiction feels different when you’ve just been through a mini version of your own. It was March 2020 when HBO announced it would be adapting The Last of Us, the video game masterpiece about a mysterious and lethal pandemic, for television. You’ll remember that as the month when everything changed. In this new context The Last of Us takes on new significance. While other post-apocalyptic dramas such as The Walking Dead, The Road and The Rain portrayed worlds descended into horrifying anarchy, The Last of Us accumulated more contextual baggage. It’s well aware of it, too. Among the first words we hear in the first episode, streaming on Sky and Now in the UK, are “something like influenza … a ...

It was as sudden as it was predictable. On Thursday morning (19 January) Jacinda Ardern announced that she was resigning as prime minister of New Zealand. She will step down on 7 February and a general election will be held in October. Ardern made the announcement at the Labour Party’s annual caucus. “It’s time,” she said. “I’m leaving because with such a privileged role comes responsibility. The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.” Ardern was first elected in 2017 at the age of 37, becoming ...

Was it really worth it? I refer to the five years of consultation and discussion, entitled “Living in Love and Faith”, undertaken by the Church of England over the issue of sexuality. Or, to be specific, the subject of the church marrying LGBTQ+ people. Because on Tuesday (17 January) the bishops announced that they would not change their teaching and allow the church to catch up with the state, which legalised equal marriage in 2013. The bishops did agree, however, that "prayers of dedication, thanksgiving or for God's blessing" on same-sex couples could be said for civil marriages or partnerships, that they’d apologise for the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people, and to reform the 1991 demand that clergy in same-sex relationships be ...

Jeremy Clarkson’s world is crashing all around him. What began with a crude joke about Meghan Markle in his Sun column a few weeks ago has developed into a delirious media storm.  Clarkson made the same joke about Markle four years ago, albeit from the opposite position. Yet social attitudes have shifted since then, and “abusing a woman of colour” is no longer acceptable, as one critic put it. The TV presenter could lose a lucrative contract with Amazon, and his apology has been rejected by Markle. A statement made by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused Clarkson of spreading hate, conspiracy theories and misogyny.  Clarkson has spent his entire career attracting and enduring rage for his controversial comments and jokes. ...

It looks as though we are going to have a another legal battle between the UK and Scottish governments. For the first time the UK government is going to use the power in section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to prevent a Scottish bill from becoming law. The bill in question is the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill which aims, among other things, to speed up and simplify the process of obtaining a gender recognition certificate. While I’m no fan of the SNP, whose obsession with independence at the expense of issues such as drug deaths and education is pretty shameful, this time not only are the actions of the UK government unprecedented, they are wrong. First, there seems to ...