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Portrait of the week: Second wave fears, cash for cyclists and a cat catches Covid

Home At a few hours’ notice, the government removed Spain from the list of countries from which it was possible to enter Britain without spending two weeks in quarantine. Among those caught by the regulations was Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, whose department regulates so-called ‘travel corridors’. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said: ‘In Europe, amongst some of our European friends, I’m afraid you are starting to see in some places the signs of a second wave of the pandemic.’ Oldham followed neighbouring Rochdale in imposing stricter regulations, prohibiting social visits to houses. A Siamese in southern England was found to be the first cat in Britain to have been

How did I end up in Epstein’s little black book?

Every time Jeffrey Epstein is in the news, I start getting calls from strangers wanting to scream abuse at me. This happened a lot when the billionaire financier was found dead in his jail cell last year after being arrested on sex trafficking charges, and it has started again following the arrest of his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell a couple of weeks ago. The reason is that my contact details were in Epstein’s ‘little black book’, and whenever his name pops up some kindly soul takes it upon themselves to post a picture of the relevant page, which shows my mobile phone number, on Twitter. I may have to change my

Welcome to the world you created, J.K. Rowling

Why does the most important writer in English, J.K. Rowling, haunt the sewers of the Twittersphere? Why try to deal with the many complexities of transgenderism in a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without its Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm? Indeed, Twitter prizes a quite different Victorian moral order, namely that of Jack the Ripper, as the baying muezzins of social media hourly pronounce the end of someone’s reputation in the merciless perpetuity of the internet. This time three years ago, I was a well-known journalist in Ireland, with a modest profile in Britain. On the last weekend of July, on the

The art of the incel

Let’s say you have a diagnosis of autism, depression or anxiety. You sleep too much or too little. You masturbate too often. You play computer games and don’t open the curtains. You have no money and you are often profoundly lonely and frequently bored. From this unedifying starting point, can you, let’s say, weightlift your way out of misery? Can you trick yourself into being sociable? Can you ultimately get beyond your fantasy that a woman will save you (she won’t) and learn to live with everyday misery? Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary TFW NO GF, internet-speak for ‘that feel(ing) when no girlfriend’, is the first attempt to make cinema out

It is a pity both Trump and Twitter can’t lose

It may be the ultimate Kissinger Dilemma: Donald Trump versus the platform that helped make Donald Trump president. Contemplating war between Iraq and Iran, Henry Kissinger is said to have mused: ‘It’s a pity they can’t both lose.’ It’s a pity Trump and Twitter can’t both lose their current skirmish. On Wednesday, the social media publisher that pretends it’s not a publisher attached a fact-check to a Trump tweet. The President had posted: Trump is concerned that ballot impropriety might cost him re-election, rather than his Covid-19 response or the absence of a wall on the Mexican border. Twitter flagged the tweet with a link, ‘Get the facts about mail-in

Trump vs Twitter: the battle begins

When Tony Wang, general manager of Twitter in the UK, described the company as the ‘free speech wing of the free speech party’ he was expressing an ideal that would soon collapse. This was in 2012, long before the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was anything other than a flippant punchline in The Simpsons. Six months after the 2016 election, Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams expressed his regret for the part they played in securing Trump’s victory. The implication – that the decisions of the general public are shaped by bad actors who prey on their malleability, and it is the responsibility of technocrats to do something about it –

Did anyone really believe what my wife wrote about me?

One of the nice things about having a column in The Spectator is that I get a chance to reply to all the smears and lies published about me. Which brings me to my wife’s remarks in last week’s magazine. The editor asked the partners of regular contributors to write a few words on what it’s like living with us during lockdown and Caroline was unbelievably rude. Among other things, she accused me of being a ‘complete hypochondriac’, said the pandemic had sent my anxiety levels ‘through the roof’ and ascribed my own life-and-death battle with the virus to a bout of shingles brought on by the stress. Needless to

Obviously Boris doesn’t deserve coronavirus – but do those who say so deserve to lose their jobs?

Not for the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, controversy has hit Derbyshire. While the other week it was the county’s finest sending up drones to spy on and shame people walking in the Peak District, this week it’s a Labour councillor who has had the whip withdrawn and lost her job at a law firm for saying something nasty about Boris Johnson on the internet. Sheila Oakes, who is also the mayor of the Derbyshire town of Heanor, made a fool of herself the other day on Facebook. In response to another post, encouraging people to pray for the PM, she said that Johnson, who has just come

How far should we go to defend free speech?

This week sees the official launch of the Free Speech Union — an organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members. It’s my baby, but a number of people have come on board as directors, including Douglas Murray and Professor Nigel Biggar. I’ve also had a lot of help behind the scenes from people who got in touch after reading about it in this column. I was on the Today programme on Monday to talk about it and have done a number of interviews since. By the time you read this, I’ll be recovering from the launch party, scheduled for Wednesday night. So far, it’s going pretty

Like Twitter, but with food: Market Hall Victoria reviewed

The Market Hall Victoria is an international food shed opposite the station terminus. I have long hated Victoria, thinking it the most provincial part of central London. It longs for the provinces, it impersonates them, it summons them. It is odd because the station itself is beautiful: a grimy Edwardian fantasy with tall grimy chimneys and a fantastical clock. But the rest of it is painful: the ugly road to parliament; the immense new blocks with their hideous restaurants; the sad and stripy Roman Catholic cathedral, which searches for grandeur but just looks weird; the Queen’s back wall, which I marvel at, because it tells so much. Victoria is a

My part in Godfrey Elfwick’s downfall

Godfrey Elfwick was a reassuring presence on Twitter. The parody account of the right-on hipster was the perfect antidote to the online mob who shout down those who don’t sign up to the prevailing groupthink. But now, Elfwick is gone: banned from Twitter after a petty spat. It’s a big loss – and for those increasingly fed up with the factionalism on the site, another reason to wonder whether continuing to use Twitter is really worth it. So who was Elfwick? For his fans – and there were plenty of them – the self-defined demi-sexual genderqueer Muslim atheist was at his best when people fell into the trap of believing that he

Antisocial media

Two considerable injustices were undone this week. The first was the reinstatement of Sir Roger Scruton to the government’s ‘Building better, building beautiful’ commission. The second was the prosecution of Carl Beech for fraud and perverting the course of justice. The cases may be very far apart in their details, but their origins lie in precisely the same contemporary malady. Scruton was sacked from his unpaid position in April. The root cause was a doctored and false interview carried out by George Eaton. The New Statesman subsequently apologised for misleading its readers. But what was most shocking was not that one left-wing hack doctored his quotes, nor that by publishing

Diary – 11 July 2019

I am beginning to feel like a sort of fairground curiosity: one of those pickled things in jars that Victorians stared at. It is Boris’s fault. Because I once had a close friendship — all right, all right, a tendresse — with Mr Johnson, I am pointed at, photographed, and harried in the aisles of shops. Soon members of the public will be tearing off bits of my clothes — something Russian peasants used to do with anyone who had met the Tsar, as if this would bestow some of Batiushka’s divine status. Tabloid journalists doorstep me, believing I have the answers. I am a female Zoltan Kapathy; not so much an

When did calorie counting become offensive?

An author of spoofy, light-hearted mysteries, my friend Ruth Dudley Edwards has had unusual difficulty completing her new novel, Death of a Snowflake. The trouble isn’t lack of material —she’s spoilt for choice — but real life outpacing satire. As we now live in a world of ‘you could not make this stuff up’, readers looking for a laugh are spurning fiction in droves in preference for the newspaper. To wit, exam administrators rather than students are now tested. Stirring widespread consternation this month, a GCSE English exam cited a passage from H.E. Bates’s short story ‘The Mill’, which in due course —not in the passage itself — portrays a

Twitter: no country for old men

As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend not to know what ‘John Cleese’ means. If anything saves him from cancellation, it will be the hope that he can snuggle down and hide in that gap until it’s all over. The cancellers won’t try too hard because they didn’t know who he was in the first place; others will register the row, furrow

Split personality | 2 May 2019

The news over Easter that Lord Adonis, the counterweight to nominative determinism, was standing as a Labour Remain MEP was greeted with a fair degree of scepticism. Many commented that it would be a novelty for him to stand for anything — in his early twenties he became an SDP councillor in Oxford, but that’s the last time he was elected to anything. His career has been based entirely on patronage, mainly from Tony Blair, who plucked him from journalism (he worked for the Financial Times and then the Observer) to run his policy unit, and then made him a peer so that he could become minister for education. (Adonis

The Scruton tapes

Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob. It is now four years since the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt was fired by University College London (among other institutions who were lucky to have him). That happened after one member of the audience at a conference in Korea tweeted something he had said about working with women and professed

‘Brexit shows democracy doesn’t work’: An interview with Titania McGrath

Titania McGrath, 24, is a radical intersectionalist vegan activist, feminist slam poet and the author of Woke: a Guide to Social Justice. She won’t meet me in person for security reasons – she fears doxxing – or send me a photograph of her face. Rather, she consents to an interview by email from her gîte in the Buis-les-Baronnies district of France, where she is “working on a new anthology of slam poetry which will end the patriarchy” in the nude. This is from her poem Cultural Appropriation: Plunderbeast of history. My ancestors scream in your hollow wigwam, Ghostrolling in the ectoplasm of your hate. I staunch the flow of simpering

Diary – 14 February 2019

‘You OK?’ was the message I sent to Luciana Berger last week. As I scroll back through our previous WhatsApp chats I can see that I’ve sent this same message painfully frequently. I’ve sent it each time someone is jailed or charged in court for abusing her and threatening her for being Jewish. I’ve sent it every time the anti-Semitic abuse she receives reaches fever pitch, such as the time last month when she asked for our party to put down a vote of no confidence in the Tories. After which she was attacked as ‘the member for Liverpool Haifa,’ an ‘Israeli shill’ and more merciless racial abuse. We live

Antipodean notebook

Whenever I visit a country I try to pitch high and meet the president or prime minister. In Australia this proves tricky. At the start of the week Malcolm Turnbull and I are on for lunch, but commitments force me to call off. By the end of my visit he is no longer prime minister. One of his excellent predecessors comes to see me at my hotel. At first I marvel at the ease with which former prime ministers can move about in Australia. But I soon wonder if people are unfazed because they reckon it might be their own turn to run the country next. I am here for