The guardian

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘“I feel like I’m losing her”: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right’. It was full of heart-rending tales from metropolitan liberals about how their dim-witted parents had been duped into believing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories by following people like Rupert Lowe on social media. One particularly exasperated man suggested a course of therapy for his mother, fearing that she might want to join Reform. But is it really the online radicalisation of elderly parents that’s putting families under pressure in the run-up to the local elections? I suspect it has more to do with their children, particularly their daughters, embracing a toxic strain of identity politics imported from America.

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts.  In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug.

Adam Dyster has gone to work for the shadow Defra secretary Steve Reed. I admit this is not an appointment which would normally trouble the political scorers, but it is a straw in the wind. Mr Dyster was, until recently, the adviser to both the chairman and the director-general of the National Trust. As Zewditu Gebreyohanes points out in her new pamphlet, ‘National Distrust: the end of democracy in the National Trust’, it was against the interest of the Trust that Mr Dyster advised both, since it blurred the necessary governance difference between the trustees and the management. Mr Dyster was previously, in the Jeremy Corbyn era, the national organiser of Labour’s environment campaign, influencing, he says, the party’s general 2017 election manifesto.

Free grub, free booze and the chance to fall in love. That’s the deal offered by Blind Date, a matchmaking strand in the Guardian that brings together lonely hearts and asks them to spill the beans. When I applied for this enticing freebie I had no expectation of being chosen, but my email was answered within hours. Amazing. Randy singletons are in short supply among Guardian readers. I was asked to describe my ‘interests’, which are rather limited. I tend to avoid travel, sport, art, museums, cars, planes, movies, pubs, music, parties, dancing, eating out or holidays. I’m never invited to dinner by anyone or ‘for the weekend’, thank God. I avoid TV, and my idea of hell is ‘a walk in the countryside’.

Who runs a newspaper – and especially a great liberal newspaper – in a digital age when liberalism often seems to be in retreat, menaced by its enemies internal and external? In the not-too-recent past, the question would be easily answered: the editor, supported by his (for in the past it was usually ‘his’) senior journalists ran the paper. Things are more complicated now. At least they appear more complicated at the Guardian and at the New York Times. At both papers, each the proud inheritors of certain liberal traditions, one may no longer say with confidence that editorial control of the paper resides with the editorial staff. This evening, the columnist Suzanne Moore announced she is leaving the Guardian.

I have been trying to write about a great unpleasantness for some time: the trans debate that we don’t really have. Men go to Woman’s Place meetings. So do trans women, it’s not a separatist organisation. But for some godforsaken reason the Labour leadership hopefuls thought they might endear themselves to their lost ‘red wall’ voters by signing pledges calling Woman’s Place and LGB Alliance ‘trans-exclusionist hate groups’. I was appalled to see that the signatories included Lisa Nandy, who is bright, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, who isn’t. Anyway, having been asked not to write about this subject for months (I still have the police reports from the threats I received last time), I insisted.