Gareth Roberts

Labour MP Andrew Gwynne has been sacked from the government, and suspended from the party, for sending ‘vile’ WhatsApp messages. Gwynne, who reportedly wrote that he hoped an elderly constituent who had complained about bin collections would die, is also said to have made antisemitic remarks and jokes about Diane Abbott. He stands exposed of being a callous bigot. Case closed. Gwynne's career is over. If making horrible jokes in private is a sin, we're all damned Except, of course, Gwynne – and his Labour colleague Oliver Ryan MP, who was also a member of the WhatsApp group and has been suspended – are not bigots. Yes, their remarks were tasteless and offensive – and they shouldn't have made them.

The news that the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the adenoidal android, has employed a voice coach is simply astonishing. ‘I’ll take no lectures from the party opposite,’ is one of Starmer’s most well-worn sentences. At least now we know who he will take lectures from: actress Leonie Mellinger, star of The Winters Tale and the BBC's Bergerac, who has been helping Starmer find his voice. ‘The transformation,” she says, “has been enormous.’ Really? Even after receiving years of tuition from the classically-trained actress, Starmer's droning voice still send me to sleep.

The Village People joined Donald Trump on stage at the conclusion of his pre-inauguration rally last night. ‘You won’t recognise them, they’re a little bigger, but that’s life,’ The Donald informed us beforehand, in one of the many interesting digressions in his long, long address. This was less of a speech and more of a mellifluous ramble of his achievements, with other odd interludes about handshakes and culture – ‘Silence Of The Lambs, anyone see that movie? Lovely movie’.  As Trump did his funny little one-potato, two-potato dance along with the fuller-figured but actually still very recognisable Village People, I had to keep reminding myself that this was by far the saner option at the American ballot box last November.

The re-eruption of the rape gangs scandal has shone a dazzlingly bright light on the language that makes us flinch and fluster, and clutch at euphemistic straws. For years, the mass sexual abuse of thousands of vulnerable girls in towns across England has been blamed on 'grooming gangs'. But this euphemism hardly does justice to this appalling scandal. ‘Asian grooming gangs’ is a mealy-mouthed phrase In the last fortnight, there has been a shift to a different, more accurate term – ‘rape gangs’ – that better describes who was responsible. This change in terminology is long overdue. And while it offers few crumbs of comfort to the victims, it is good that people are – finally – beginning to face up to the facts of a story that shames modern Britain.

The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well still be happening) in towns and cities around Britain blasted into public consciousness and global headlines. This is obviously one of the very worst things, maybe the very worst thing, to have occurred in Britain since the war It’s been a strange few days – not least because none of this information is new. What feels different this time is that its importance has broken out and been acknowledged, by the public if not yet entirely by some politicians.

A feud can be very tedious and tiring if you’re one of the combatants. But let’s be honest: for onlookers, feuds are fun. Videos of spats in which one or other party is ‘schooled, owned, destroyed’ ratchet up millions of views. It’s even more fun when both sides don’t lose their temper and civility is maintained. There is glorious entertainment in watching people ‘throwing shade’ at one another without it ever quite coming to the boil.  The smaller the differences, the funnier the feud Now we have a new one to enjoy, in the classic mould. Ding ding, in the blue corner is Kemi Badenoch. While in the slightly different shade of blue corner it’s Nigel Farage.

Keir Starmer’s critics might have you believe that the Labour government is fighting a class war. They point to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s crackdown on private schools and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s attack on farmers. These initiatives certainly don’t appear to be just about money: whacking VAT on school fees and hitting dead farmers with inheritance tax won’t raise much cash in the scheme of things. But they will inflict totally unnecessary amounts of pain. Their targets are, supposedly, people with cash to splash, on behalf of the needy.  Labour’s disastrous first few months in office don’t resemble a class war at all But hang on: look at this government closely and it’s obvious that ministers aren’t horny-handed sons of toil.

Hate crimes, hate speech, hate groups… It is quite possible that we have less of these things today than ever before – they originated before our age, as anybody who’s read Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale can vouch – but we have never obsessed about them quite so much. What is hate in its 21st century, British sense? And why are some varieties of hate seemingly justified and good, and some appalling? In the public sphere, hate often seems ludicrously hyperbolic. A certain kind of person on the internet spent much of the last 14 years ranting about, and at, the Tories; appending the hashtag #GTTO (Get The Tories Out) to every passing thought and blaming the Conservatives for anything and everything they didn’t like.