Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
From our UK edition
Topless men. What does that mean, then? I was opposite one on the tube the other day, heading north from Finsbury Park, and I just couldn’t stop -staring. In terms of sheer comfort, I was quite jealous. There was me, sweating in my shirt and suit trousers, and there was him, open to the air in
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The Conservative party is trying to redefine marriage. I can’t believe they think they’re going to get away with this. Throughout human history it has been one thing, which is a loving commitment between two people who want to share a life. Now they’re trying to turn it into something completely different. A tax break.
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Wouldn’t it be nice just once in a while to have a war in the -Middle East that wasn’t predicated on outright duplicitous nonsense? Just occasionally? There are, after all, any number of sincere reasons one could advance for intervention now in Syria. (If one thought that was a good idea, which as it happens
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Eeek! The snooper’s charter is back from the dead! And still, for some reason, its advocates don’t seem able to grasp that the objections stem not from what they want to do, but from the manner in which they wish to do it. It’s not about your web history, they say, or your browsing habits
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This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine
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We’ve got bogged down, that’s the thing. Bogged down and caught up, all at once. The Prime Minister is rude about people and people mind, even if they’re the sort of people who are habitually rude about him. Europe is a mess we either need or we don’t, and the notion of chaps marrying other
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Look, we’ve known each other a while, you and I, so I think it’s time for a confession. It’s a big one, this. I haven’t even told my parents yet. But I think I might be a member of the ruling elite. Granted, it doesn’t feel that way of a morning, when I’m using my
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I’ve no particular beef with the French, gruesomely tortured beef as it would no doubt be, but I’m a little tired of being told we ought to follow their example with our children. Elizabeth Truss, the normally quite sensible education minister, is the latest culprit. She believes that Britain’s nurseries are chaotic, noisy places. Children
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So. As of last week, punching a goth is a political act in Greater Manchester, but not in Derbyshire. Sussex is still making its mind up. Odd, yes; funny, no. As you might have read, those police forces who now define assaults on goths as hate crimes have taken this decision in direct response, pretty
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Last time I was here (two weeks ago; how’ve you been?) I briefly mentioned Bitcoin, an emerging internet currency I didn’t understand at all but via which I had nonetheless made a bit of money (£57). Since then, I’ve been reading up and the whole thing has gone supernova, largely thanks to the extent that
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So I’m outside Finsbury Park tube station, the other morning. There’s a girl in front of me, white, twentysomething, rosy-cheeked, long and ruddy hair bouncing in the brisk spring air. Not that I’m, like, noticing. From behind me, overtaking, comes a tall, handsome black guy, smartly dressed. ‘You’re so lovely,’ he booms, as he draws
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It started the other week, when David Cameron was in India. Although it started like a bout of malaria starts, so I suppose the more precise term would be ‘recurred’. There he is in Amritsar, touring the site of a massacre, possibly in that hat. And all Britain wants to know is what he thinks
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Coercing the long-term unemployed into work placements is not a stupid idea. Nobody thinks it is. And by ‘nobody’ in this context, I mean Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, and Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, and they’re pretty much the only people worth listening to. Doubtless, quite a few
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I’m turning into a Holobore. I can feel it happening, and it’s sapping at my soul. What a week. It started with David Ward, the Lib Dem MP and anti-Semite. No, shut up. Yes he is. If you say ‘the Jews’ should have ‘learned the lessons of the Holocaust’ and that they clearly haven’t because
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Torture is wrong. You can tell it’s wrong easily, not by the way it makes you feel, or by the extent to which it does or doesn’t conform to ancient moral codes made up in deserts, but by the way that, when it happens, it screws stuff up. When Barack Obama assumed office four years
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So let us return, you and I, warily and wearily, to the topic of gay marriage. Gingerly, in fact, as though with a hangover after an ill-tempered, bickering party. And, in the cold and Nurofenned light of day, let us find our common ground, and think about where it leads. I’m still for it and
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To Edinburgh for Christmas this year, and I can’t wait. We’ll be leaving any day now, in our pathetic London squib of a car. You know the sort — it’s got a fuel tank the size of a milk carton and on the motorway it sounds like a bee. It never feels pathetic in London,
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I mean, honestly. What kind of mimsy, soggy-spined, weak-kneed, faffing, lentil-eating, self-loathing, lefty north London ninny gives a damn that prisoners don’t have the vote? Pretty much my entire social circle could be described in such terms (as mimsy ninnies and suchlike, not as prisoners) and nobody gives a flying monkey’s. I had a conversation
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The first time I came across skunk cannabis was in an underground out-of-hours bar in Nottingham in 1997. I think I’ll leave that as ‘came across’, if it’s all the same to you. I might want to be prime minister one day, and it’s important to have my tenuous denials lined up in advance. More
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Thus finishing his grand survey, Disgusted Strephon stole away Repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits! That’s Jonathan Swift, as you’ll know, charting the disappointment of Strephon, the disillusioned peeping Tom. It came to me, though, reading the Mail on Sunday last week. For, therein, I learned that David Cameron had