I firmly believe that comedy can be applied to any subject – but of course, the more difficult, sensitive and triggering, the more skilful the writing needs to be. That’s why Channel 4’s Prince Andrew: The Musical rang such gigantic alarm bells when it was announced. Not because it involves the Royal Family, who are fair game and whose pomposity and self-importance often needs to be pricked – doing so is practically a national pastime. But because, among the jokes about sweating and pizzas and Fergie and bungs and toe sucking, we shouldn’t forget that Prince Andrew is associated with a scandal that involves coerced sex with trafficked minors. That his story overlaps with that of Jeffrey Epstein, who abused ...

There was a time when people used to enjoy things for what they were. No longer. Now we live in an era hellbent on crudely ranking everything without any nuance. Twitter may be stronger for it, but discourse is weaker. Enter the Goat (Greatest Of All Time) debate – a trite discussion about who is the best footballer ever to have lived. For decades, Pelé – who died on Thursday (29 December), aged 82 – was almost universally regarded as the greatest. The wondrous little Argentine, Diego Maradona, flirted with usurping the 5ft 8in Brazilian, but Maradona was too troubled and his peak, at the 1986 World Cup, did not last long enough. Pelé’s reign endured through three World Cup wins. Only ...

The past few years have proven a golden age of fraud. Part of that is due to Covid. Pandemic times have always led to fraudulence. Con artists used to sell snake oil as a miracle cure, after all. The Covid pandemic was no different – with essential oils and unlicensed medicines making the unscrupulous rich.   But another consequence of the Covid times was purely financial: the sloshing around of immense amounts of capital – trillions in stimulus cash and cheap borrowing – which desperately sought increasingly outlandish returns.  Much of that money was invested in what now seem unwise ways. Money piled into the housing market, inflating that bubble further. It was invested in the crypto world – driving a very temporary boom ...

We’re all in agreement that everything in Britain is broken. The whole national health service is on the verge of collapse, from cancelled GP appointments to ambulances and A&E departments so overwhelmed that it is approaching a humanitarian crisis. Travelling anywhere by train is either catastrophically expensive, unreliable, overcrowded, or some combination of the above. All this was the case even before a winter of strikes. Our infrastructure is creaky or crumbling. Housing is unaffordable. Heating is unaffordable. Everything is unaffordable and nothing seems to work as it should do. It isn’t hard to search for causes. After a decade of austerity, the public sector was running on fumes even before the rolling crises of Covid, energy price hikes, and the ...

There are few indisputable lessons from history, but if there are any it is that virtually no-one would choose to live under autocracy – in the long run – people flee the nation and seek refuge elsewhere. As one tyrant concentrates power, the elite who used to share in the spoils eventually turns on them. You cannot rely on laws, or systems, or processes – they can be overruled by whim at any given moment. We are getting to watch a vastly lower stakes version of this phenomenon play out in real time online. I’m talking, of course, about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Musk has been trying to draw attention to the wrongdoings of the former regime of Twitter – ...

The Conservative Party has had a long year: three prime ministers, four chancellors, and a precipitous drop in public support. Though polling at this stage doesn’t guarantee the outcome of the next election, it points to something between defeat and destruction. All of this should worry the party, but so too should a trend buried beneath this – the growing disillusionment of its members. Tory members never seem particularly ecstatic with the way the party is headed. As the most committed minority, an estimated 1 per cent of the party’s voters, there is always a sense that the party should be doing more, achieving more, in one direction or another. That instinct tends to be placated by winning, but with ...

As 2022 draws to a close it seems like the culture wars will never end. The Cambridge Dictionary recently updated its meaning of woman to include anyone who is “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. Trans rights activists are still angry at JK Rowling. Meghan and Harry’s Netflix documentary featured the historian David Olusoga, the author Afua Hirsch and the academic Kehinde Andrews as experts condemning Britain for its racism. Ngozi Fulani is a righteous hero or the complete reverse (depending on your point of view) for publicising her interaction with Lady Susan Hussey at Buckingham Palace. Piers Morgan is apparently destroying woke snowflakes on YouTube. ...

A recent article in the Financial Times, which caused an outcry online, contained a statistic that I’m personally very familiar with – one in ten men say they have paid for sex. As a sex worker myself, I hardly bat an eyelid at this figure, having heard it trotted out over a decade ago by Harriet Harman, the minister for women at the time, who used the data as grist for her argument to abolish the sex trade and her campaign to close down organised workplaces in the industry such as strip clubs (where I have been working since 2006). The one in ten figure only tells us how many of the men surveyed were willing to tell the truth when ...