I was in London giving a talk when I went on Twitter and read Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle, where he wrote in the Sun that he was “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”. Even though the internet has erupted with condemnation of Clarkson, and rightly so, I read his comments with a sort of melancholic hopelessness rather than shock or astonishment. Of course, I am appalled, too. I had a sleepless night thinking of how words such as these from someone with such significant media influence could legitimise the violent thoughts of other men, ...

In the end, none of it mattered. Not the migrant deaths, nor the homophobic laws, nor the repressive monarchy – not even one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the EU parliament, exposed even as the quarter finals were under way. Yesterday’s thrilling World Cup final – surely the best of my lifetime – merely underscored that Qatar’s bet paid off. If there were doubts about the tiny emirate’s ability to pull off the logistical challenge of hosting one of the world’s biggest sporting events, they were soon erased as the tournament kicked off. And for all the talk of standing up for morality and liberal values, in the end football trumped everything. The teams which said they ...

Recently I visited some friends of my boyfriend’s parents in Wiltshire, who had a lovely country cottage with a garden and a huge fireplace. Normally I’d waste my time feeling envious of their home, but instead I, more productively, started perving on their vintage red fridge. I did a Google search and discovered that a model like the one I saw costs around £1,600 at John Lewis. There's no imaginable scenario where I, on a journalist's income, would be able to buy a country home unless I inherited wealth from some unknown source, which is unlikely. However, I can dream about an extraordinary string of events where I could one day own that fridge. What this illustrates is that ...

The Tory press has revelled in allegations that Qatar has been bribing denizens of the European Parliament with suitcases full of cash, including the Greek MEP Eva Kaili (suitcases were the same means of delivery, incidentally, with which a senior Qatari politician allegedly gave €3m to King Charles’s charities in 2015). “The EU has never looked more bankrupt,” declared a Daily Telegraph headline after the story (which has been denied by Kaili and Qatar) broke, with the columnist adding hyperbolically that “Brexit was the greatest victory for democracy in postwar British history”. A Daily Mail counterpart deplored, with similar hyperbole, “the sewers of sleaze that run through EU institutions”. A Times editorial observed rather more soberly: “Time and time again [the ...

Le Corbusier said that a house is “a machine for living in”, and he was right: housing is the most fundamental technology we use. In most areas of life technology evolves and the old stuff, if it’s not buried or recycled, is maintained by enthusiasts for demonstration purposes. But in housing almost all the old rubbish is still in use. British consumers will actually pay more for an old, cheaply made house than a new one built with the latest technologies, and they are encouraged to do so by the government. Victorian houses are ugly, cold and grotesquely overpriced even by the standards of the shared hallucination that is the UK’s housing market. This week a report from the Resolution Foundation found that 40 per ...

Twitter, Elon Musk said in the run-up to his $44bn purchase of the social media platform, is the “de facto public town square”. Yet as with any social network, Twitter occupies an odd position: it’s a vital public forum for the exchange of ideas, but it is privately owned. It’s a traditional gripe of those who fall foul of social media’s rules that we think of these places as public utilities, but instead are subject to the whims and decisions of their owners. Traditionally, those owners – Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram; Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter and until recently its CEO; and Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube – have at least given lip service to propriety. ...

Mike Chubb is the most influential cultural figure you’ve never heard of. Every year at this time we debate or deride his work. Every year, his legacy receives vast acres of newsprint. That’s because Mike Chubb is the man who invented Winterval. This unassuming council administrator is the man who stole Christmas.  That last sentence is, of course, nonsense. Winterval, a portmanteau of "winter" and "festival" that Chubb coined while head of events at Birmingham City Council, was a programme of festivities scheduled for November and December 1997. They included Diwali, the festival of light celebrated by several south Asian religions; but also New Year’s Eve, the Christmas lights switch on and a Christmas market. The following year the programme was extended ...

If anybody was still looking for lessons in why the Jeremy Corbyn project failed, his former senior adviser is on hand to remind everyone. It is seemingly a subject his former acolytes never tire of, as they relentlessly publish on the topic. On Wednesday (14 December), one of the key architects of Labour’s catastrophic election defeat in 2019 wrote a comment piece in the Guardian decrying the state of the party that has for months held an average 20-point polling lead. “Where is Labour’s fervour?” writes Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s executive director of policy from 2016-19. “Can anyone imagine hundreds of thousands of young people chanting ‘Oh Keir Starmer’, as they did about Corbyn?” Leaving aside the sheer absurdity of this question, one might ...