Gareth Roberts

The Telegraph reported at the weekend that the Conservative party appears to be attempting, in its selection process for parliamentary candidates, to weed out anybody who might just possibly be a conservative. This strategy – with all its ineptitude and wilful blindness – is a perfect capsule of the parliamentary party and its upper echelons. A party can leap over disappointment and rage; contempt is a much higher hurdle to clear It’s hard to find the right word to describe what the Tories have done since their incredible election win in 2019. ‘Disappointment’ is polite, but too mild. ‘Rage’ is too hyperbolic. I think ‘contempt’ hits the mark best. And this is significant I think.

Holy Week is the most important part of the year for many Christians, but it will come as little surprise that some members of the Church of England appear to be focusing on racial justice rather than Jesus. ‘I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn,’ the Venerable Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, archdeacon of Liverpool, wrote on Twitter. 'It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender. So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, & let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.

Celebrity deaths range from the ‘tragically young’ (Amy Winehouse) to the ‘I thought they’d gone years ago’ (Peregrine Worsthorne) and the monumental (Michael Jackson). But there’s another type: a more low-key one that knocks you a bit, as much as the death of a stranger can. Steve Harley, whose death was announced this weekend by his family, was one of those.  Everyone knows Harley and his Cockney Rebel band’s ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. But Harley was no one-hit wonder: dig a little deeper than that 1975 song and it’s clear to see what a brilliant and underappreciated musician he was.  Vanishingly few endure in the pop music sphere.

The Tories have hit an all-time low: an Ipsos poll shows the party on a dismal twenty per cent, with the percentage of under-35s intending to vote for them in single figures. Never has a flush looked quite so busted as Rishi Sunak. It was against this bleak backdrop that the Prime Minister's lectern was trundled on to Downing Street on Friday night. There was something about the suddenness and urgency of this occasion – asking the press to assemble just as the pubs fill up at the start of the weekend – that put a little spring in the heart. After months of blatant antisemitism on the streets, and now with the intimidation of MPs by Islamists and their fellow travellers, was the PM finally going to actually do something?

The miners’ strike has struck again. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the protracted dispute of 1984-85, which means that you have to be about my age (55) to have had anything approaching an adult understanding of it at the time. The same old footage, the same old talking points, the same old grievances, excuses and myths regurgitated yet again As you get older, and time speeds up to a quite ridiculous and frankly unacceptable degree, anniversaries start to whip by like stations on a non-stopping train. It only feels like ten minutes since the thirtieth anniversary of the strikes, and now we have to go through the whole thing all over again.

John Lewis is, to most people, a department store that exists to sell toasters, cushions and lamps. But it turns out we have been labouring under a massive misapprehension all these years. John Lewis's internal magazine Identity reveals that the shop's purpose is rather different: it exists to affirm the bespoke identities of its staff. The publication, created by John Lewis's LGBT network, contains advice to parents on how to allow their child to express their gender identity. Identity includes testimony from the mum of a trans-identifying girl in a story titled 'Raising Trans and Non-Binary Children'. She writes that 'a (chest) binder is always safer than the alternatives.

One of the most tedious and repetitive observations made in the often tedious and repetitive discourse around cancel culture is the notion that ‘freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences’. This slightly sinister cliché is the progressive version of ‘well, think on, you wouldn’t have been shot if you hadn’t been trying to escape’. It is usually offered forth as if it is somehow a seismic statement. Some clumsy clots – the hapless Graham Norton last year, for example, when discussing JK Rowling – have even tried to frame cancel culture as ‘accountability culture’ or ‘consequences culture’. But it strikes me that there is a shadow image of cancel culture that we might call ‘no consequences culture’.

Leave Cliff alone! Peter Tatchell has weighed in on Cliff Richard’s refusal to declare his sexual orientation. Tatchell was spurred on by the reemergence of a video clip of Cliff declaring on Loose Women: ‘I don’t mind talking about things but there are things that are mine, that will go with me to my grave…I don’t talk about my family, I certainly don’t talk about my sexuality.’ This interview, from 2016, rattled Tatchell’s cage. As ever he can’t keep his nose out of anybody else’s business. ‘Sure, it is up to him,' said Tatchell, 'But –’. (As usual, everything after the 'but' is nonsense.) ‘Hiding his sexuality colludes with the idea that it is shameful. It's not! It plays into homophobia & a lack of candour sets a bad example to young people’.

Michael Gove has written a staunch defence of the government’s 14 years of ‘achievements’ for Conservative Home. ‘Do we really want to go back to square one?’ the Tory MP and 'levelling-up secretary' asks, reminding us of the dim, dark and distant days of the country after 13 years under Labour. If that was genuinely on offer, I’d snap Gove’s hand off. It may seem hard to remember but in 2009 it was still generally understood that jokes are jokes and not statements of genocidal intent, that there are two sexes, that economic growth is a pretty spiffing idea and that the police are there to enforce civic order. Yes, there were many problems and incipient disasters clearly looming, many of those the products of the Labour administration.

Nadia Whittome, no longer Britain’s youngest MP but still quite possibly its daftest, has a new bee in her bonnet. Writing on Nottingham’s funkiest website LeftLion, she reveals that she has teamed up with campaign group Art Not Evidence and plans to bring a bill before parliament about rap lyrics (particularly the bleak subgenres of trap and drill) being used as evidence in court. Her bill will aim to raise ‘the threshold of admissibility to ensure that it’s only considered when it’s relevant and justified, and not indiscriminately.’  Nadia is upset about ‘negative stereotypes’. ‘[Rap] can still be viewed with suspicion, and associated with gangs, drugs and violence,’ she tells us. Heavens to Betsy, I wonder why that could possibly be?

The coronation of Sam Thompson, Scrappy Doo in human form, as King of the Jungle in this year’s I’m A Celebrity... was an inevitability. It was unthinkable that Tony Bellew – his still, stoic Scouse sparring partner – would not come second. And that Nigel Farage wouldn't trail in third. When Farage made it through the public votes, all the way up to the final, there was much amused speculation about him coming out on top. The ‘banter’ outcome would’ve seen Farage take the crown, just for the sheer devilment of it. Yes, that would’ve been delicious, the ultimate wind-up of Farage's many detractors.