Tom Beardsworth

Tom Beardsworth is a barrister

Saturday

Tom Beardsworth

Speech crimes are still on the statute book

From our UK edition

It is both a vindication of English justice and a cause of some embarrassment that the services of a High Court judge have been required to adjudicate on the cause of minor scuff marks on a mobile phone. Nevertheless, that is what Mrs Justice Tipples did yesterday and thereby delivered a genuine, if oblique, victory for Graham Linehan and the cause of free speech. The Linehan saga has plainly frustrated Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley Linehan was originally charged with harassment and criminal damage relating to the same transgender complainant, who had confronted Linehan and filmed him outside a public event in central London in October 2024.

graham linehan

Friday

Tom Beardsworth

There is no conspiracy against state school students going to Oxford, honest

From our UK edition

On A-level results day it was inevitable really. Of the roughly 14,000 applicants not to have received a place at Oxford this year, one of them, Alastair Herron, has done astonishingly well in his A-levels, receiving 7 A* grades. He’s done so well in fact, that something fishy must be going on. How could Oxford reject such a brilliant student, thundered BBC Radio Ulster’s Stephen Nolan. 'On what planet do you turn someone down with seven A*s?' Presumably a planet in which over 17,000 pupils, most of them brilliant, are competing for 3,500 undergraduate places.