Columns

Thursday

James Forsyth

Corbyn puts the EU referendum on a knife edge

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Corbyn's first few days as Labour leader" startat=1015] Listen [/audioplayer]No one watching Jeremy Corbyn walk around the Palace of Westminster would imagine that he had just won the Labour leadership by a landslide. He seems to spend his time practising the blank stare he gives to television cameras, his eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance. He doesn’t seem too keen on his colleagues either. There is none of the back-slapping bonhomie that normally surrounds a new leader. When he first addressed Labour MPs, there was no cheer when he entered the room which is, for a new leader, unprecedented. Corbyn is the accidental leader.

Rod Liddle

Why emote about migrants during a concert?

How should we deal with people who sneeze in public places? Stephen Jackson, aged 49, has found himself in court as a consequence of taking direct action against those people who are kind enough to share their nasal mucus with the rest of us. Stephen’s answer is usually to slap the offender across the head and say: ‘Don’t sneeze in front of me.’ He will be sentenced in a couple of weeks on four similar charges of assault, the victims all being people who sneezed when he was nearby. There was one other charge, mind, which involved spitting at a baby in its pram. Now, it may well be that we’ve all spat at a baby at one time or another — but to my mind that doesn’t make it acceptable behaviour.

Hugo Rifkind

The problem with Corbyn’s hatred of the media

The new leader walks across a bridge, in the dark, while the journalist asks him questions. He’s not shouting, this journalist; not like Michael Crick would be, all smug of face while shrieking ‘Isn’t it true you’re a terrible dickhead?’ None of that. Even so, the leader says not a word. He stares ahead, face stony, furious and fixed. Clip-clop go his feet. For two minutes. There’s a video. For two actual minutes. WATCH: This is what happened when I tried to ask #Corbyn about shadow cabinet. He accuses me of "bothering" him. pic.twitter.com/uyqQdwXYu3 — Darren McCaffrey (@DMcCaffreySKY) September 14, 2015 This was Jeremy Corbyn, being trailed across Westminster Bridge by Sky News in the small hours of Monday morning.

Matthew Parris

Soon we will accept that useless lives should end

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Freddy Gray debate whether assisted dying will ever become accepted" startat=1781] Listen [/audioplayer]Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed last week in the Commons, the ‘faith community’ (a quaint term for that category of human beings who throughout history have been more assiduous than any other in trying to kill each other) have with skill and persistence deployed an argument of great potency. Such is the argument’s intuitive appeal that the pro-assisted-dying brigade never found a way of countering it. They have resorted simply to denying that what the faith squad say would happen, could happen. But it could.

Thursday

Dan Hodges

How Gordon Brown’s hit man became Labour’s peacemaker

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3" title="Dan Hodges and John McTernan discuss whether Tom Watson can save Labour" startat=772] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week I was talking to a member of the shadow cabinet about Jeremy Corbyn’s impending victory as Labour leader. ‘Forget about coups and resistance movements. There’s only one person who can save the party now — and that’s Tom Watson.’ It’s a common theme: those who had just recently denounced Watson as a fat thug now see him as the party’s only hope of salvation. On Saturday, half an hour before Corbyn’s almost certain coronation, Watson will be unveiled as his party’s new deputy leader. He will appear a rather unlikely saviour.

Rod Liddle

Soon, having sex and having children will be utterly disconnected

What is tougher for a kid? To be born black in a predominantly white neighbourhood, or to be born to surrogate lesbian parents? Payton Cramblett, aged three, is both. She lives in Uniontown, Ohio — a suburb of unlovely Akron, tyre capital of the United States. Her parents are the butch, crew-cut dyke Jennifer Cramblett and the slightly less identifiably lesbian Amanda Zinkon. They are not best pleased. They bought six vials of semen from a nearby sperm bank at a cost of $400 a pop. I don’t know how much of the stuff you get in a vial — I assume no more than a couple of quick squirts — but anyway, it was via this wholly natural and romantic conduit that little Payton was created.

James Delingpole

The NHS was great for Girl, but I still don’t like it

When Girl came off the horse it didn’t look like a bad fall. More like an involuntary and rather hurried dismount. She’d landed on her feet, that was the main thing, so I wasn’t initially too concerned when she lay writhing and yelling on the grass. Nasty sprain I thought. Give it five minutes… But five minutes later she was still on her back, still in pain, and I began to worry. Mainly for my darling Girl’s sake, of course, but partly for my own. ‘Oh God oh God,’ I thought. ‘She’s supposed to be going back to school tomorrow. I am going to be in such shit with her mother.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Christianity is silent on my great moral dilemma

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Theo Hobson debate the role Christianity in the migrant crisis" startat=1383] Listen [/audioplayer]Proximity shouldn’t make a difference — should it? We were on a beach on the European side of the Mediterranean, it was a beautiful late August day, and I felt so happy. The sea was fresh, the sky was clear and a stiff breeze was whipping white horses out past the headland. ‘Rough weather for migrants,’ I thought, then checked myself. What an awful thing to think.

Hugo Rifkind

What we learned from the much-anticipated Clinton emails

‘Gefilte fish,’ emailed Hillary Clinton to a pair of aides in March 2010, ‘where are we on this?’ That was it. Two words in the subject line, five more in the body. Nobody really knows what she was on about. Maybe it was code, maybe it was a reference to a new Israeli import duty slapped upon carp fillets from Illinois. Either way, in a 4,368-strong trove of emails sent and received by the former US Secretary of State, and just released by the State Department, this is the interesting bit. This was as good as it gets. OK, so I exaggerate. Or rather, under-exaggerate.

Rod Liddle

The green ink brigade is now running the show

Daily they drop into my email account — alongside the more obviously useful stuff about how I might elongate my penis or ensure it performs with greater fortitude than at present, and the charitable offers from women who live ‘nearby your house, Roderick’ and apparently wish to test whether or not those previous solicitations I mentioned have been acceded to with success. Alongside all that stuff are the fecund exhortations from a bunch of online campaigning organisations. Click democracy, a sort of spastic form of activism whereby you stick it to da man simply by pressing a button. They come, these missives, from the likes of Change.org and 38 Degrees. Sometimes shrill, sometimes cloying, almost always stupid.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The contagious madness of the new PC

It’s becoming pretty clear, as the year rolls on, that some of our brightest youngsters have gone round the bend. It’s as if they’ve caught a virus, a mental one, a set of thoughts and ideas that might loosely be called political correctness, but seem to me weirder and more damaging than that. Back in the 1990s, PC students would stamp about with placards demanding equal rights for minorities and talking about Foucault. This new PC doesn’t seem to be about protecting minorities so much as everyone, everywhere from ever having their feelings hurt. It came from America, this virus, incubated in the closed minds of the Land of the Free, but it’s here now, and contagious.

Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s new army of Tory loyalists

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thereturnofassisteddying/media.mp3" title="Isabel Hardman and James Cleverly MP discuss the 2015 Tory intake" startat=1121] Listen [/audioplayer]Time was when the Conservatives believed that a small majority — which puts a government at the mercy of backbench rebels — would be worse than no majority at all. They dreaded the prospect. But now, well into their third month celebrating a majority of just 12 seats, it’s clear they’ve forgotten their fears about how precarious things could be. They talk as if they can now do anything — including implementing their manifesto in its entirety. It won’t take long for David Cameron to discover the truth.

Rod Liddle

I’m utterly sickened by this story of a man trying to talk to a woman on a train

What can we as a society do about the relentless harassment of women by terrifying men? Menacing men, threatening men, priapic men. Something must be done — and quickly. I reached this conclusion after reading a deeply distressing article by the Guardian columnist Daisy Buchanan, who announced that she has imposed a curfew on herself after a series of deeply unpleasant incursions by bestial males. ‘I can’t believe women have to live like this in 2015,’ Ms Buchanan lamented, having revealed that she has also given up dancing in case the same sort of thing happens when she is on the way home from wherever it is she dances.

James Delingpole

If On the Road’s great, what else have I missed?

This week’s column is dedicated to all those of you who have never read Catcher in the Rye and who, what’s more, are unhealthily proud of the fact. It’s OK: I understand. I was one of you myself till a couple of weeks ago when, at Boy’s insistence, I wearily set aside some of my valuable beach time to plough through this hideously overrated and tiresome ‘classic’. Why the reluctance? Well, for the obvious reason that Catcher in the Rye — like To Kill a Mockingbird or On the Road — is one of those books you just don’t need to have read because everyone else has done it for you. Including all the thick people who have only ever finished about three books. Or that was how it was when I was at school.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Labour MPs’ next choice: which leadership coup to back

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thecleaneatingcult/media.mp3" title="Isabel Harrdman and George Eaton discuss what happens if Jeremy Corbyn wins" startat=696] Listen [/audioplayer]Jeremy Corbyn’s close friend Tony Benn had five questions he always asked of those in power: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how do we get rid of you?’ Labour’s leadership election has a month left to run, but most of those involved think Corbyn will triumph. So they’ve already started working out how they’ll get rid of him. John McTernan, a former Blair adviser, recommends deposing him immediately.

Hugo Rifkind

Bisexuality is now everywhere (and nowhere)

I’m not aware of knowing many bisexual people. Or indeed, off the top of my head, any bisexual people. Which is odd, really, because back in my student days you couldn’t move for them. Being bisexual was quite the thing. Or, at least, claiming to be was. The girls really dug it. This was back in the mid-1990s, not long after the lead singer of a band called Suede, who is a man called Brett Anderson (married to a lady now; two kids) had declared himself ‘a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience’. That, at the time, was very much the sort of sexual identity that a trendy, bohemian young chap, of the sort I very much wanted to be, was supposed to be aspiring towards.

Matthew Parris

The welcome return of the valedictory dispatch

'All I ever tried to do was hold a mirror up and show you how beautiful you really are. Shine on, you crazy diamond.’ I have just read one of the finest ambassadors’ ‘valedictory’ dispatches ever composed, except it isn’t one: it had to be posted on the internet, and was, last month. What was essentially a sometimes-exasperated love letter to Lebanon will never see the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s printers. The valedictory died in 2006. So Tom Fletcher, who after four years as ambassador in Beirut had come to the end of his posting (‘Unlike your politicians,’ he tells Lebanon, ‘I can’t extend my own term’) had to write his loving, infuriated, despairing and hopeful tribute to the country as a personal blogpost.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Time is running out for Labour

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3" title="Isabel Hardman and Rowenna Davis discuss Labour's lost voters" startat=622] Listen [/audioplayer] The Labour leadership contest was supposed to be a debate about the party’s future. Instead it has oscillated between petty personality politics and bickering. Nobody is addressing the question of how to win back lost voters. The four candidates have barely mentioned the fact that Labour is not winning seats in the south of England, nor the huge challenge from Ukip in its heartlands in the north. Given that the party failed to win its majority in England, it is staggering that more attention hasn’t been paid to this at hustings and in speeches.

James Delingpole

The feminists who fell for a bleeding hoax

Did you know that tampons were just another brutal expression of the oppressive patriarchy? I must confess that I didn’t either, until the story broke this week about an unfortunate woman who decided to run the London marathon during her time of the month without any panty pads, in ostentatious protest against the alleged male practice of ‘period-shaming’. I’ll come to the ‘unfortunate’ part in a moment. But first, the background.

Thursday

Philip Delves-Broughton

How Hillary can win it – for the Republicans

 New York [audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/howtofixtherefugeecrisis/media.mp3" title="Philip Delves Broughton and Freddy Gray discuss how Hillary can swing it for the Republicans" startat=847] Listen [/audioplayer]Remember the fizz around Gordon Brown’s election campaign in 2010? The excitement he brought to the trail? The eerily intimate connection with the electorate? No, nor can I. But conjure up what you can and mix it with the thrill of a hot afternoon locked in a community centre discussing renovations to the ping-pong room and you’ll have a sense of the vibe around Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign for president.