Columns

Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found not guilty of raping a former pupil. Malcolm admitted to getting young (though over-age) girls drunk and to having sex with them in the back of his car. But he and his lawyer, Ben Myers QC, were keen to stress that the girls were all up for it. The one who cried rape even wore fishnet tights in his presence, for heaven’s sake. So no harm done, eh, Malcolm? All’s well that ends well. Raise a glass of that cheap Scotch you kept in the glove compartment for the kids. Perhaps it’ll help you sleep. But if it doesn’t, there’s something I’d like you to think about, in the small hours perhaps.

Where would you rather live, Dewsbury or Bradford? I ask because it seems that there are probably some good property deals to be had in this particular corner of West Yorkshire right now, as a consequence of half the population decamping to Syria in order to blow themselves up. I mean, property was pretty cheap already — in Savile Town, Dewsbury, right in the heart of the Muslim ghetto, you can buy a nice grey stone cottage for not much more than fifty grand. Two beds, back yard, only a stone’s throw from the local sharia court and that vast mosque run by those jovial extremists Tablighi Jamaat. But it’ll be even cheaper now, I would guess.

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.

I have spent the last few days posing with a tampon as part of an international campaign to demystify the important issue of menstruation. I do not usually menstruate myself, although out of a wish to show solidarity with those who do I set aside five or six days each month to behave in a grotesquely irrational and bad-tempered manner, snapping at people for no reason and moaning a lot. As a man this seems to be the very least that I can do, an attempt at empathy which still recognises my privileged position as a male. The campaign which I mentioned — and I would urge you all to take part in it — is called JustATampon.

Call me petulant, but I’m not sure Britain is getting enough credit for our fine, fine work in Libya. The Islamic State, so recently present only in the semi-mythical lands of Syria and Iraq — places you see on the news, but don’t really have to believe in — has now set up residence a short hop away from Italy, in the Libyan town of Sirte. Which is, just to be clear, a hell of a lot closer to Italy than we are. Maybe one-and-a-half times the stretch of a Hull– Zeebrugge ferry. We did that. Well done everybody. Top marks all around. Also, Derna. That’s another town they’ve got. I’d never heard of Derna before, but apparently, Isis has held it since last October.

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults brush past without leaving a mark, others pierce the skin and sink in. This one sunk like a splinter, and like a splinter I’ve been worrying away at it ever since, turning what was a small injury into a painful, bloody mess. I can dismiss the accusation easily enough — the Spectator office is multi-racial, the magazine’s editorial line consistently pro-immigration. It’s the questioner who haunts me.

One of the fundamental principles of English common law is that you are innocent until proven guilty. And rightly so, for imagine how unfair it would be if any old loon with an axe to grind had only to lodge a trumped-up complaint with the relevant authorities in order to have you punished for no reason whatsoever. Actually, though, this cruel and capricious system exists in Britain.

Yet another exciting discovery from the world of Islamic science. As you are probably aware, Islamic culture has always paid a high regard to science and Muslims will tell you proudly that they invented absolutely nothing. That is, they have provided the world with the mathematical representation of absolutely nothing, what we now know as zero. Where would we be without nothing? In the tenth century the scholar Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi decided that it would be useful to draw a little circle to signify zero if you were doing some complex calculation. He called it sifr.