Gareth Roberts

‘I don’t feel safe’ is the cry of students the western world over at the prospect of hearing terrifying opinions such as ‘there are two sexes’ or ‘your skin colour shouldn’t matter’. This bluff talk of ‘hate’, terror and even, incredibly but regularly, ‘trans genocide’, used to come over merely as pathetic and entitled. Singer Will Young telling the Labour conference that he was ‘terrified’ of the Tories winning the next election would, the week before, have been merely laughable. Coming days after the slaughter in Israel, it sounded unforgivably crass and narcissistic.

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show's opening episode last night made me wonder whether we're trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted. Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because it never does; one of the great sources of fun is watching these affectations drain away, leaving the contestants effing and blinding at each other like Wolverhampton fishwives.

When Boris Johnson won his eighty-seat majority, Labour looked to be destined to spend a decade or so in the political wilderness. But 'Partygate', the eventual defenestration of Boris plus the psychodrama of Truss and the fraught first year of Sunak meant that the tables turned. All of a sudden, dreary Keir Starmer – with his cardboard hair and his voice like the recently recreated Aztec death whistle, said to be ‘somewhere between a spooky gust of whistling wind and the scream of a thousand corpses’ – was not the lame duck Kinnockesque caretaker. Labour's leader became the shoo-in next PM. Now the numbers seem to be shifting again. A poll this week revealed that Labour's lead has shrunk to just ten points over the Tories.

Theresa May always had a camp appeal. The clumsiness, the dancing, the incredible squareness. Mrs Thatcher never took that crown – she had too much of a hard edge – though it was a surprise to me to discover that Australians and Americans saw only the hair and the handbags and made her that most tedious and reductive of things: a gay icon.  Bantering podcasts are now an essential part of public rehabilitation But unlike Thatcher, May had a dissociation from reality not only about trivialities but also about the really important stuff. Her recent declaration that she is ‘woke and proud’ is typical of her.

Liz Truss is back and she’s got a book to plug. ‘It will set out what we must do to counter the disastrous ideas of the global left,’ she told X at the weekend. Now, I think she’s right that there is a smorgasbord of disastrous ideas about in the modern West – net zero, increasing state power and general economic nuttery, and a whole host of barking cultural ideas about biological sex and race. But can these really be laid at the door of the left, and at a hypothetical global left?  I think these foggy notions come from a different place, and they’ve seeped in to all sides of politics. Yes, some have indeed risen from the sediment of people who think of themselves as left wing, or are routinely described as such.

The Office for National Statistics let a bombshell drop on Friday. Halfway down the first page of their grippingly-titled document ‘Impact of methodological and data improvements on current price and chain volume measure of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP), 1997 to 2021’, they slipped out this sentence: ‘Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised up 1.1 percentage points to an 8.7 per cent increase; this follows an upwardly revised 10.4 per cent fall in 2020 (previously an 11 per cent fall).’ This dry text conceals the revelation that GDP is 1.7 per cent higher than they had previously reckoned. This meant that by the time the Omicron variant hit, the UK economy was actually 0.6 per cent above its pre-Covid level – not 1.2 per cent below, as had been thought.

Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to take’. Phew. Along the ministerial corridor, Kemi Badenoch says she would ‘never have guessed how much time I would spend looking at toilet policy,’ and that ‘increasingly, my job is spent legislating for common sense and stopping people determined to do destructive things’. What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘normie’ as ‘a normal person, who behaves in the same way as most other people in society’.  Merriam-Webster tells us it refers ‘to one whose tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude are mainstream and far from the cutting edge, or a person who is otherwise not notable or remarkable’. Oh, how I miss normies. Flicking through the streaming channels recently, I took a swerve from Domina and The White Lotus – both excellent – and found myself rewatching two old British sitcoms, Sykes and Duty Free, for the first time since their original transmissions.

Have Just Stop Oil finally met their match? The splendidly named counter-organisation 'Just Stop Pissing People Off' have pulled off two bracing publicity coups in the last week. First, in Elephant & Castle in south London last Wednesday JSPPO ‘kettled’ JSO activists who were planning one of their slow marches down the public highway, forming a human ring around them (for a whole thirty minutes). Then at the weekend, and rather more spectacularly, JSPPO infiltrated JSO and spoiled their lovely lunch at the Heritage Centre in Bow in east London, releasing balloons up to the very high vaulted roof of the building and then switching on the ear splitting panic alarms they had attached to them.