Mary Wakefield

The foster care system in this country is collapsing. There are roughly 80,000 children who’ve been removed from violent or neglectful parents and need homes, but there’s a catastrophic lack of people prepared to care for them – a shortfall of around 6,500 foster carers. The rate of decline is terrifying. Every year the small

I’ve seen signs of life in the Conservative party – unlikely I know, but true. I had thought it a dead thing, dripping its life-blood slowly into Reform. But ten days ago I saw on YouTube a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don’t know. I felt hope.

Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot

It’s disorienting but satisfying that Labour now accepts that Asian grooming gangs exist. Some of my left-identified friends are even beginning to share the outrage – over Qari Abdul Rauf, for instance, one of the nastiest of the Rochdale rapists, who still lives in Rochdale a decade after the first steps to deport him were

A new book by an American writer, Christine Rosen, details the way in which we are losing touch with the real world: the one we evolved in, as opposed to the virtual one. All the scrolling and texting means we’re forgetting the look and feel of life unmediated by screens. The book is called The

I know an astonishing 89-year-old who climbs mountains, uses a chainsaw and has the muscular, vice-like grip of a gym-built thirtysomething. He refuses pills and painkillers and considers it vital to embrace life’s most horrifying experiences. Last week the astonishing 89-year-old tore his Achilles tendon (leaping into a moving car), was driven to A&E and

I’ll bet most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering when on earth the man is going to get round to asking them a question. The man gets home. We ask about his meetings, his lunch, his colleagues, showing empathy and imaginative curiosity. Then we wait in vain for our turn.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out, a slim, thoughtful introduction to Christianity. But that’s not quite why I went to Cardiff to visit him. I went because, although I admire the superstar culture warriors of the right, there’s something Williams is witness to which they lack. Like many readers, I

My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or four times a year, when the weather warms up, she stands on her doorstep, smashed, and yells at the world. I don’t blame her. Rose has been through the mill. She’s a slight woman and

I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke out from their bodies. I don’t like the constant showing off of their puckered bums, or their disregard for the normal rules of mammal eye contact. There are nearly 13 million cats in Britain –

We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for jobs they did many decades ago. It’s not that the SAS should be allowed to behave like trigger-happy psychos, but as Paul Wood wrote in this magazine before Christmas, Special Forces are now being hounded

I never expected to have strong feelings for a member of Germany’s Green party, but I really do feel extremely sorry for Stefan Gelbhaar, once (but not now or ever again) an MP for Berlin. Women should hang together, say some feminists. I couldn’t disagree with this more  Gelbhaar is a 48-year-old criminal defence lawyer