Reading about the Wagatha Christie libel trial between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney has had the the nation enthralled. Some of its quotes – such as when Vardy said under oath, “if I’m honest”, to which Rooney's barrister quipped: “I would hope you’re honest because you’re sitting in a witness box” – have brought much-needed light relief to grim news cycles.  However, this has led to unpleasantness against them on social media. It might feel like a media circus to us reading it, but we know this must be humiliating for those involved. Yet one saving grace for the “wags” is the fact that this court case hasn’t been televised. They don’t have to be hyper aware of their facial movements. There ...

When I was asked by the New Statesman to write a piece in response to Julia Hartley-Brewer’s tweet that she had “laughed at many good jokes about rape”, you might expect that I’d write a blistering refusal to accept rape as comedy. I am a comic who tweets my dismay, constantly, on “actual acts of sexual violence” - the phrase Ms Hartley-Brewer used during the eye of her Twitter tornado to delineate these acts from jokes. While there are times when words do, I believe, lead to violence, I had to reply to the editor: “Well… this is awkward because my solo comedy show (Vanilla – soon available to stream on NextUp) has a 10 minute section where I go ...

There will be huge relief in Downing Street that Boris Johnson is to receive no more fines for partygate, and at first sight it does appear that the “greased piglet” may have wriggled out of yet another impossibly tight corner. Politics is about expectations after all – and the expectation was that the Metropolitan Police would issue the Prime Minister with two or three more fixed-penalty notices for the eight gatherings that occurred during the draconian lockdowns he imposed on the country during the Covid pandemic.  However, the Met did not do so – because it appears to have bought his excuse that No 10 was where he lived. Helen Ball, the Met’s acting deputy commissioner, said a determining factor in deciding ...

Muslims in Britain are almost used to being criminalised. Our subjugation is entrenched in law, our marginalisation woven into policy. We are surveilled and policed by every institution: in the nation’s hospitals, airports and schools. The Prevent strategy turns public sector workers -- who should be keeping us safe, treating us when we are ill and getting us through exams -- into counter-terror spies. Our very Muslimness makes us a threat. Prevent, which was created in 2007 to safeguard those vulnerable to radicalisation, has long been criticised by Muslims and their allies. In February this year a People’s Review of Prevent -- an alternative to the upcoming Shawcross review, a government-commissioned inquiry -- was published, concluding that the programme is “discriminatory ...

On 17 May Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, announced that part-time, volunteer special constables will be allowed to use electroshock weapons, ie stun guns, one of several measures included in “Operation Sceptre”, a government campaign promoting crime-fighting. This is cause for concern for several reasons. For one thing, there was already a 37 per cent increase in the use of stun guns in England and Wales in 2019-20 compared with the previous year. The company Taser says that its devices have saved 257,195 people “from death or serious bodily injury” in situations in which firearms could otherwise have been used. However, Amnesty International says that in practice -- in the US at least -- stun guns are rarely used an alternative to firearms. Since 2000 more ...

Three weeks ago I woke up early, got ready for work – then began vomiting. My period had started and, an hour after I woke, the pain was so bad I couldn’t move. I had experienced this level of agony before – when I was in labour: paracetamol didn’t touch the sides; over-the-counter codeine provided only slight relief. So I emailed my boss to say I had a “stomach thing”, then spent the day in bed, throwing up occasionally and staring into space, unable to eat or sleep or even turn over without groaning in pain. A few days later, I happened to have a scan scheduled, and the consultant found a cyst so big it was completely obscuring my right ...

Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Minister, said on Saturday that state school pupils should only be offered places at Oxbridge if they meet the same high standards as their privately educated peers. He described ensuring more state school pupils attend Oxbridge as “tilting the system”, suggesting that it would mean admissions were based less on “merit”. The most obvious point to make is that it’s strange that Zahawi sees policies such as contextual grade offers as tilting the system, as opposed to un-tilting it. The gap between private and state school A-level grades is greater than it has ever been; the increase in A and A* grades was 50 per cent higher among private schools at the last set of results. The ...

Conservative MPs seem to be spoiling us at the moment. Every other day another one comes out with a new tip for surviving the highest rate of inflation on record. The latest gem is from the Home Office minister Rachel Maclean who, instead of providing solutions for the “short-term” pressures on people’s budgets, said that to “protect themselves better” in the long term people should be “taking on more hours or moving to a better-paid job”. When pressed by Sky News’s Kay Burley on the examples of people working three jobs yet still having to visit food banks, Maclean doubled down. “Of course it’s not [straightforward],” she conceded. “We have often heard in the past when people are facing problems with ...