Guardian

Shortly after midnight on 1 January my phone began to vibrate repeatedly. Happy New Year messages from absent friends? No, I was trending on Twitter — the third-most popular topic on the network after #NYE. The cause was a story about me in the next day’s Guardian that had just gone live. The headline read: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ Now, that is wildly overstating it. I’ve been appointed to the board of the Office for Students (OfS), the new body created by merging the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Fair Access — one of 15 people! But the Guardian’s spin

Christmas – the season of goodwill, turkey, tinsel and general over-indulgence. Except that is, if you work at the Guardian. With just two days to go until Christmas day, the paper has produced a late contender for most Grauniad article of the year. Writing for the paper, Saskia Sarginson shares her Christmas dilemma: can one permit traditional indulgences when ‘they seem at odds with the world we live in today’? Sarginson’s environmentally-conscious children have changed her perspective on Christmas traditions: ‘My children have no desire to hark back to something that is gone, and I see their point that traditional indulgences seem at odds with the world we live in today. I

Isn’t Meghan fabulous? Hasn’t she totally brought the monarchy into the 21st century? Doesn’t she make Kate look like such a square? We were so bored of Sloaney English roses, weren’t we? Meghan Markle is widely considered to be the best thing to have happened to the royal family — and Britain — in a long time. The newspapers are ecstatic, and not just the patriotic ones. There will be pictures, pictures and more pictures to come. Or fake pictures, if that’s what sells. The Sunday Sport recently ‘discovered’ a fake topless picture of Prince Harry’s squeeze, stuck it on the front page and ran with the headline ‘Harry’s Meghan

Stories about members of the establishment using offshore tax shelters — ooh er missus! — come along about once a year, thanks to the efforts of the liberal media. Cue a chorus of disapproval from Jeremy Corbyn, Vince Cable, Margaret Hodge and other left-wing panjandrums who demand that the government ‘seize’ Britain’s overseas territories and ‘clamp down’ on tax loopholes. Then, as night follows day, it emerges on the Guido Fawkes website that a large number of these sanctimonious prigs are themselves direct beneficiaries of offshore tax arrangements — and the kerfuffle over the Paradise Papers is no different, as I will shortly make clear. It’s like an annual festival

Oh dear. Much excitement today among the commentariat over Rafael Behr’s op-ed in the Grauniad. The Guardian columnist says that for ‘hardline Brexiters, the lure of the cliff edge is irresistible’. Unfortunately for Behr, it’s his byline – rather than his words – that’s receiving the most attention: Perhaps the Fleet Street doom-mongers were right when they said newspaper sub-editors’ days are numbered…

This one is priceless, believe me. Truly priceless. For a long time now I’ve been buying The Guardian for its unintentional hilarity. Not just the columnists, but even more so the letters pages. This is from their fatuous Saturday family section: yes, it is a minor miracle that such a reactionary receptacle still exists at The Guardian. This is an anonymous letter from a reader saying something they’ve always wanted to say – they have one every week. If you have the time read it all – because it tells you what these people are really like underneath. These tolerant, caring, liberals. If you can get to the part about

Earlier this week the Guardian launched ‘Brexit Shorts’, a series of monologues written by Britain’s ‘leading playwrights’ about the aftermath of the EU referendum. Now I know what you’re thinking: ‘What fresh hell is this?’ But bear with me. Watching the first batch of these short films, which are on the Guardian website, isn’t complete purgatory. Not because they’re much good, obviously — although one is, and I’ll come to that in a moment. But because the reason these writers are so anxious about Brexit is due to their uncritical acceptance of Project Fear. Perhaps they’ll become a little less hysterical once they’ve been introduced to some solid facts. Take

So now we know who’s really responsible for the horrible attack at Finsbury Park Mosque: it was the Sun wot done it. And maybe the Daily Mail too. No sooner had Darren Osborne allegedly crashed a hired van into Muslim worshippers than certain so-called liberals were stringing up the tabloids. The low-rent press poisoned his mind, just as it’s always poisoning plebs’ minds, they claimed, without a morsel of evidence. He could take the Guardian for all we know. They present their tabloid-baiting as a challenge to bigotry, when anyone who knows anything about history knows that fearing the tabloids and their dim, malleable readers is classic British bigotry. Just

After George Osborne was announced as the new editor of the Evening Standard, there was outrage across the House as many asked: how can Osborne serve as an MP, financial advisor and daily newspaper editor all at the same time? Alan Rusbridger has now graced us with his take on the situation. In an editorial for the New York Times, the former Guardian editor says that it  ‘would be better’ if Osborne were to make ‘a clean break from politics’ and become ‘a great crusading editor on behalf of the people’. Part of Rusbridger’s issue with Osborne’s appointment is that he doesn’t understand how the former Chancellor will have the time: ‘I edited

It was International Women’s Day on Wednesday of this last week. The Guardian had enjoined its readers to send in reports of what they had done to advance the struggle, or how they had been in some way oppressed by men — perhaps raped, or talked to as if they were stupid, or looked at a little coldly when they squirted breast milk over fellow diners at The Ivy. I tried to think of something I had done for the cause but came up short, sad to say. So instead I tried to show solidarity by spending a substantial amount of International Women’s Day looking at a photograph of Emma

What has the left been doing wrong? This is a question which has taxed many minds. But at last we have an answer – from the ever reliable Hadley Freeman of the Guardian. The first part of her paragraph below makes no grammatical sense whatsoever – but it’s the sentence I’ve put in italics that does it for me. ‘Similarly, terms such as “mainstream media, or MSM” (translation: journalism I don’t like), “experts” (people who say things I don’t like) and “identity politics” (politics that don’t assume the primacy of straight white men) were redefined, while not-very-codified euphemisms such as “swarm” and “global order” continue to perpetuate racism and antisemitism. And

One should not speak ill of the dead, but if their flaws or vices are glossed over that is also problematic. George Michael was admirable in some ways, especially for his quiet charitable donations, but less so in others. I don’t see why his penchant for anonymous sexual encounters should be politely passed over, or treated as a harmless lifestyle choice. He ‘loved anonymous sex’, said Owen Jones in the Guardian – as if fondly recalling someone’s love for opera or snooker. Jones and others will doubtless say it is homophobic to moralise about this. So it must clearly be said that sexuality is irrelevant: whether it is homosexuals or heterosexuals