Columns

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim; the potential for suffering too much to bear. What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once they’ve discarded half their chromosomes, the skin cells can then be fertilised with sperm, just as if they were human eggs.

For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organisation whose storm troopers comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head round that. Last year, a trove of intra-organisational emails exposed the recklessness of its indiscriminate promotion of ‘gender-affirming care’ (neither affirmative nor care) for ostensibly transgender minors.

In the Palace of Westminster a fortnight ago, I spoke at a reception celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Tory gay rights movement now called LGBT+ Conservatives. And last weekend I read a book to be published on 9 October. It turns out that its author and I are saying the same thing. Professor Ronan McCrea has chosen the title The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom. My speech bore no such title, but here’s more or less what I said. I began by recalling, for a young audience, the dismal beginnings of what was to prove a cultural revolution. ‘I will never forget the sniggers and winces at our then name: the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality.

The Charlie Kirk assassination has triggered a spate of duelling death counts. The usual media suspects on both sides of America’s epic left-right divide have trotted out set lists of the past decade’s politically motivated violence. For once, the faction that chocks up the most fatalities in this warped real-life video game loses – for the competition is over which end of the political spectrum can blame the other end for the frenzied ideological bloodlust we’ve been told for days now characterises the contemporary United States. For the left, the starring evidence that the right’s crazies pose the greater threat to the orderly conduct of civic life is January 6th.

‘Good news for patriots,’ said one of our most celebrated national newspapers this week: ‘Your numbers are likely to swell.’ This was on the editorial page, where the opinions of the paper are laid out, and it referred to a poll conducted by ‘More in Common’ which had found, to everyone’s surprise, that British teenagers are pretty patriotic. About half of all 16- and 17-year-olds feel proud of their country, it found, which is more than their parents. It was an interesting poll for anyone considering the rise of Reform and how that might interact with the incoming slew of teenage voters. Interesting too for those of us in liberal London, trying to keep the flickering pilot light of patriotism alive in our children’s tiny, K-pop-infested minds. (What’s K-pop?