Ross Clark

Have 425,000 children really been abused during the past two years? That is the extraordinary claim suggested in a report put out earlier this week by the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, which was swallowed whole by the Today programme and many newspapers. Not even the normally-inquisitive John Humphrys raised the slightest doubt about the figure when he interviewed a

In a TV stunt, a Brazilian actress recently lay on a beach asking male passers-by to rub suncream into her back. Many were eager to oblige only to recoil, when she turned over and they saw a bulge – a prosthetic penis – in her bikini. It is a good job she didn’t try it

There has been predictable frothing at the suggestion by Professor Averil Macdonald, Chairwoman of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, that more women than men oppose fracking because women are more prone to follow their gut instinct than the science behind fracking. I am going to keep out of that debate, not because I fear for

How easy it would be to scorn the environmentalists who are up in arms about George Osborne’s new pet project, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. You can understand their anxiety: subsidies for green energy are being slashed, yet the Chancellor will do anything — and pay anything — to get this project up

That the Conservatives came up with the idea of extending the right-to-buy to housing association tenants was a symptom of their failure to believe they could win this year’s general election. Such an ill thought-out policy can only have made it into the manifesto in the expectation that it could be used as a bargaining

The idea of private schools as bastions of academic achievement has taken me some getting used to. When I left school 30 years ago, private schools were places of cold showers, beautiful but crumbling buildings and expansive playing fields. But good exam results? We never knew, of course, because exam results were not published, but

The liberal-left is very rapid to react when a terror suspect faces deportation or an extremist preacher is put under house-arrest. So why isn’t it on the streets chanting the name of Honey Rose? Ms Rose is an optometrist who appeared in court on Tuesday charged with manslaughter by gross negligence after allegedly failing to

Why doesn’t the Office of National Statistics want us to know that Mohammed is the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales?  Yesterday, it put out its annual survey of the top 10 baby’s names.  In 2014, it reported, the most popular boys’ names were Oliver, Jack and Harry. This contrasts somewhat with a

The right to free movement of people and goods across the EU is, as we keep being told when the government proposes to trim benefits for Romanians, a fundamental and inalienable principle of the Treaty of Rome. Why then does the European Court of Justice show no interest in the French ferry workers whose strike has

If you were deliberately trying to obtain a record high temperature reading an international airport would be a good place to take your thermometer. With huge concrete aprons and planes spewing out large quantities of hot air, airports have a microclimate of their own. That is one reason not to get excited by today’s record

So Sepp Blatter has substituted himself hardly 30 seconds into the second half, or rather the fifth half. But his rhinoceros skin still doesn’t seem to have been breached. His parting shot contained a bewildering statement: ‘We need a limitation on mandates and terms of office. I have fought for these changes but my efforts