Gareth Roberts

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.

Like many people this weekend, I couldn’t tear myself away from videos of the booster rocket of Elon Musk’s Starship shrieking back to earth, to be clutched in the giant ‘chopstick’ arms of a towering metallic cradle. I must have watched it now about 50 times from varying angles. The most impressive are the videos recorded at a distance on ordinary phones. The thing thunders down like a missile launch on a strip of film run backwards, and there’s a tantalising moment at the very end where you think it’s going to miss. Then it rights itself with a neat little manoeuvre, like an Edwardian gent straightening his cravat before he steps into his club.  Starship rocket booster caught by tower pic.twitter.

There’s been another development in the wearying saga of Gary Lineker, the over-salaried presenter of football on the BBC and banal takes on Twitter/ X. An email leak suggests that a draft BBC statement preparing to announce his departure from Match Of The Day is in the works, but he has laughed this off on screen and told a reporter to 'f-off' in the street.  I strongly suspect that not a single viewer would be lost if he departed from Match Of The Day The leaked message, seen by the Daily Mail, purports to be from the broadcaster’s director of sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, and features a statement announcing the former England striker’s departure after 25 years presenting the iconic show.

Are you one of the growing number of ‘second screen’ television viewers? For all too many of us, it seems that watching one screen just isn't enough; modern technology and, in particular, our obsession with looking at our phones has so addled our brains that plenty of us fiddle with our mobiles while ostensibly ‘watching’ TV. Two thirds of people watching TV now do so while browsing their mobile phones, according to a study in the United States. Being glued to our phones certainly ruins the magic of television It's tempting to react to this news with Olympian disdain; what has happened to people that they need two screens to keep themselves amused? But feeling smug and pious isn't an option for me; I'm as guilty of 'two screening' as the next addict.

Labour's honeymoon didn't last long. Keir Starmer won power less than three months ago with a vow to 'change Britain'. But the Labour government's missteps over the last few weeks – not least the ongoing row about freebies – makes it hard to distinguish life under Labour to what came before. ‘Vanity snappers’, free posh frocks and taking thousands of pounds of hospitality tickets while telling voters that hard times are coming: what did Starmer expect voters were going to make of this politically toxic combination? Taking 'unpopular decisions,’ as the Prime Minister pledged to do, sounds good, but the trick is to present these in a way that makes you seem steely and determined, not – as with the winter fuel payment cut – as cruel and nasty.

Arguing about the last night of the Proms is as much of an annual tradition as the music itself. Usually this hubbub has something to do with it being the very last place, or occasion, where people sing along with a straight face to ‘Rule, Britannia’. This year though the storm revolves around EU flags being confiscated by Proms' security staff. There is nobody more committed to the EU than a certain type of British Remainer What seems to have sparked the flag crackdown at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday was a gathering outside by a pro-EU campaign group called ‘Thank EU For The Music’. Ten thousand EU flags were dished out to lucky ticket holders.

We are now governed by people who were left-wing students in the 1980s and early 90s. This is one of those facts that you try to forget, like getting older in general, but which – occasionally, suddenly – hits you in the mush. It’s fine in the normal run of things but every so often I remember that these left-wing students are in power and I get a rush of panic and horror, and emit an (internal) scream.  Eighties student Tory haters have matured into Labour politicians and Labour’s useful idiots I was a student then as well you see. Gold Label at 50p a bottle in the Union bar. Pamphlets, pamphlets, photocopied pamphlets, everywhere. And what a soundtrack.

Are Conservative politicians 'weird'? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly in seats won by the Lib Dems – find elected Tories increasingly strange. It's hard to disagree, but this isn't the party's only problem. Who cares if a politician is weird? As the Tories battle it out to elect their new leader, the reality is that hardly anybody out there recognises any of the candidates. The one that rings the most bells is Priti Patel. This is because, as anybody who has ever worked in marketing will tell you, she possesses an alliterative name. Tom Tugendhat also scores here, but loses because his surname is unfamiliar to most people outside Westminster and also impossible to spell. By such tiny things are careers made or destroyed.