You would be forgiven for tossing your copy of the Mail on Sunday in the bin yesterday morning (24 April). The tabloid carried an article so crass that it almost beggars belief the piece made it past newspaper editors. Conservative Party sources had accused Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, of being so intimidated by the Prime Minister’s “Oxford Union debating training” that she used her body to distract him in parliament. An accompanying picture of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct gave readers the proverbial wink.   The response was unequivocal horror at such a crude debasement of a senior female politician. On social media, many women not only expressed their outrage but also shared stories of ...

One can never be certain with the Conservatives whether they know that to conserve does not have to mean to hinder. Having done its best to conserve the economy by locking it in a dark room for two years, warning it not to go outside for fear of a miasma stalking the land, it is now applying that approach to the recovery, jacking up taxes disproportionately on the young and optimistic lest they get the mistaken idea that the worst is over. We can be under no illusion that the pandemic’s after-effects were not going to be painful. However, it does seem worth wailing when, in its conserving zeal, the government seeks to row back on what positives emerged from the pandemic. Working ...

I sleep trained my son -- that is, I taught him to fall asleep without me. Do take a moment to gasp and clutch your pearls. When I mentioned it in my usually supportive NCT Whatsapp group there was radio silence in response. I didn’t know it then, but I had stumbled into one of the taboos of parenthood. Apparently, in most yummy mummy circles the very effective controlled-crying method of teaching your child to fall asleep on their own is now considered passé and even traumatising for the child. Supposedly everyone is now using gentler no-cry methods (you know, ones that don’t work). One year on, with a well-rested toddler and a full night’s sleep for all three of ...

Boris Johnson has found Jesus. Or at least one of the messiah’s representatives on Earth, and given him a good kicking. The Prime Minister complained that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had made some entirely reasonable criticisms of the government’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda, had been “less vociferous” in his criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is, of course, total nonsense. Welby has repeatedly condemned Moscow, describing the barbarous attack on its neighbour as a “great act of evil”. But then factual accuracy has never been a strong point in this government's responses. It was once said, perhaps by Benjamin Disraeli, that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. That, however, changed a long time ...

Netflix was the future once. Not all that long ago, we lived in an era where watching television meant waiting for programmes to come on scheduled TV, or else recording them in advance, or relying on Sky+ type recording boxes with pricey subscriptions. Worst still, everything – even DVDs purchased for £15 or more – came with endless adverts before you could watch what you wanted. And how could you discover what to watch next? It’s no wonder that when Netflix suddenly offered hundreds, if not thousands, of television box sets and movies for a couple of pounds a month, it took off like a rocket. When a few years later it announced it was going to make its own shows ...

During Theresa May’s six-year stint as home secretary, her signature policy was the “hostile environment”: a series of measures intended to turn private citizens into unwilling immigration authorities and thus make it so unpleasant to be a migrant in Britain that people would just leave of their own accord, which amounted, the UN later said, to “stoking xenophobia”. This was an unpleasant enough way to go about treating illegal immigrants, but so useless did the Home Office become under May’s tutelage that it was hardly any friendlier to anybody else. It forced entirely legitimate overseas students to queue outside through the night to sort out their paperwork; then, for an encore, it deported British citizens who happened to lack the requisite ...

For at least two weeks out of every month, my emotions rule everything I do. If they tell me to get into a screaming row with a complete stranger, or go to bed for three days straight, it’s happening. Indeed, this is par for the course for those of us with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a hormone-driven mental illness officially classed as a disability. PMDD affects about 5 per cent of those of us who menstruate. And PMDD makes me one of those “emotional women”. The kind of woman Kenny Shiels, manager of Northern Ireland’s women’s football team, was referring to when he blamed his team’s emotions for their recent loss to England. In his words: "I’m sure you will have noticed if ...

After briefing the announcement six times previously in moments of political difficulty, the government has officially revealed its intention to send migrants arriving via the Channel to Rwanda. Under the proposals, male asylum seekers who cross the Channel in small boats will be sent to the central African country, because they are “most likely to be economic migrants”, according to the Times. Perceptive readers may note that now is another vulnerable time for the government -- further partygate fines are predicted for Boris Johnson -- and that the Rwanda plan is probably legally unworkable anyway due to breaching Britain’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention and human rights laws. Nearly two thirds of people who migrate to Britain’s shores in small ...