We discussed whether we would even know if the West has already reached the point of no return. And it was a great excuse to chat about Ancient Rome, which is always good fun.

As ever, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

The Committee for Academic Freedom has announced an independent investigation into how it was that Jason Arday was hired as a professor at Cambridge University. This may seem an odd undertaking, given that Cambridge itself had already promised a full inquiry. Unfortunately, the university has since backtracked, now focusing primarily on whether there was a lack of support for Arday once the media coverage became so intense. This has left the task of establishing how Arday came to be appointed in the first place to outsiders.

It was inevitable that Cambridge would renege on its original plans. To investigate these circumstances properly would involve rigorous scrutiny of the rot that has developed within academia itself. By contrast, as an independent body, the Committee for Academic Freedom can afford to be refreshingly direct in setting out its objectives. It intends to examine:

(a) the circumstances in which Arday was appointed;

(b) whether the appointment, and the assessment of the academic record relevant to it, were consistent with the standards of academic excellence, merit, academic integrity, due diligence and procedural fairness properly to be expected in an appointment to a professorship at the University;

(c) the role, if any, played in the appointment by considerations relating to equality, diversity or representation, including whether any positive action in recruitment was taken and, if so, whether it was consistent with section 159 of the Equality Act 2010; and

(d) how the University considered and responded to concerns raised, whether within or outside the University.

This is a vital investigation. The activist capture of universities has led to a situation in which the production of knowledge and the pursuit of truth are considered subservient to the promotion of an ideological creed. Jason Arday was the highest-profile victim of this generalised lowering of standards for the benefit of the activist class, but there have been many others.

One may as well be blunt. Cambridge cannot credibly investigate the institutional culture that produced this failure, because it has itself been instrumental in creating it. Like most universities, Cambridge has invested so much in DEI – a toxic and demeaning orthodoxy that reduces human beings to mere representatives of particular group identities – that there is no conceivable scenario in which the university would admit that DEI is itself a major part of the problem.

Debates have raged about Arday’s own conduct, but I consider him to be a victim of a corrupt system. His family deserves answers, and it will probably fall to the Committee for Academic Freedom to provide them. While I understand the accusations that he exploited the good nature of others to advance his own career, I also contend that such behaviour was enabled by those who should have known better. I do not say all this solely out of respect for the dead, but rather from a conviction that we should be hesitant before judging strangers on the basis of incomplete knowledge. Moreover, I believe it is necessary to examine whether the pressures created by promoting him far beyond his abilities contributed to the circumstances that ended so disastrously.

I have known plenty of fabulists in my life, the sort of people who embellish their achievements or invent stories out of vanity or a harmless desire to seem more interesting than they actually are. Usually the consequences are trivial. The man who tells preposterous stories in the pub is indulged by his friends, who soon learn not to take his words too seriously. The problem begins when institutions which are supposed to exercise judgement stop doing so and instead take extravagant stories at face value, conferring prestige on the fabulist rather than subjecting his claims to scrutiny.

In addition, for many decades now, ideological moralising – typically around issues of group identity – has passed for scholarship. Even back in my undergraduate days, it became clear to many of us that our essays would be especially well received if they amounted to a form of moral detective work: teasing out the prejudices of the author instead of analysing his work. It’s far easier to write about why Shakespeare and Dickens were racist, homophobic and sexist than to engage constructively with minds much more talented than our own. And it’s certainly more appealing when such crab-in-the-bucket thinking is rewarded with higher marks.

Arday’s death was a tragedy. That does not alter the obligation to be truthful about his academic record. His 2015 doctoral thesis at Liverpool John Moores University was ostensibly an exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers. As many readers will already know, extensive similarities have been identified between passages in the thesis and a doctorate submitted at Brunel University six years earlier.

Liverpool John Moores investigated allegations of plagiarism but did not uphold them, attributing the similarities to ‘honest and reasonable error’. Arday denied deliberate plagiarism or dishonesty, saying that his autism meant that his way of learning relied heavily on ‘mimicry’. This would not, of course, excuse the verbatim lifting from unattributed sources. Moreover, questions have been raised about whether Arday was autistic at all.

We need not pore over the various claims that Arday made, academic and otherwise, that have turned out to be false. The real question is why such a low standard of scholarship was rewarded with a meteoric rise in the profession. (Richard Dawkins has described Arday’s doctoral thesis as ‘illiterate’, failing ‘to meet expected standards for PhD, let alone a Cambridge professorship’.) This is why the investigation is not really about Arday at all, but about how the universities reached the point at which activism could be mistaken for academic achievement.

To understand how that could happen, we need to go much further back…

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It is always reassuring to see Shakespeare trending. It suggests that the wheezing decline of Western civilisation still has some way to go. This week, this little reprieve was courtesy of the actor Andrew Scott, whose recital of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy was circulating on X to great acclaim. Spencer A. Klavan called it ‘the best delivery of this soliloquy I’ve ever seen’, and there were many cries of assent in the comments.

It’s a fine performance, particularly when one considers what is at stake for an actor. This is the most famous monologue ever written for the most famous character in drama. In any production of Hamlet, the audience will be anticipating this moment, wondering how our lead will approach it, or whether he might surprise us with something new. Everyone knows the speech, so everyone has an opinion.

On a school trip to London in 1995, I was privileged to see Ralph Fiennes play the role, and the most memorable aspect of the production was that he rattled through the dreaded soliloquy so that it was finished before we knew it. It was a bold interpretative choice, one no doubt intended to capture the way in which Hamlet’s thoughts are outrunning his ability to marshal them – a kind of frenetic stream of consciousness – but to my green ears it sounded as though Fiennes was desperate to get it over and done with.

Scott’s approach is quite the opposite. Klavan argues that he ‘delivers this speech too slowly’ and that ‘some viewers will hate the way he breaks up the verse’. Judge for yourselves:

Scott is not the first to take this approach, of course, and Shakespeare invites it. His early plays – such as The Comedy of Errors and the three parts of Henry VI – tended towards a more rigid verse structure with end-stopped lines. Later, he developed an extraordinary fluidity with his use of enjambment (the sentence running across the line) and an increasingly flexible placement of caesuras (pauses that break the line; caesura means ‘cut’). This looser approach to iambic pentameter means that the poetry of the later plays can accommodate much greater psychological complexity.

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This matters particularly in the great soliloquies, because it is here that Shakespeare’s innovation expands the dramatic medium beyond anything his predecessors had achieved. No longer were soliloquies simply vehicles for characters to provide exposition, but in them we hear unmistakably human voices wrestling with their own souls. Sometimes, as with Macbeth and Iago, the soliloquies expose aspects of the self that even the speaker barely comprehends. Hamlet, as the insatiable thinker, is never satisfied with the process of his own thoughts, and in his soliloquies we sense a man trying to persuade or reorientate himself, navigating that gulf between his desires and his instincts.

Take, for instance, that moment in the ‘To be or not to be’ speech in which a new thought intrudes and redirects the argument he is having with himself.

To die: to sleep –
To sleep: perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.

This sense of self-interruption is best captured by the man who, in my view, achieved the best on-screen Hamlet.

Christopher Plummer played the role in the 1964 BBC television adaptation Hamlet at Elsinore (so called because it was filmed at Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, Denmark, the castle traditionally identified with Shakespeare’s Elsinore). The exceptional cast includes Michael Caine as Horatio, Robert Shaw as Claudius, June Tobin as Gertrude, and Alec Clunes handling the tricky role of Polonius better than I’ve ever seen, making him simultaneously irritating and endearing.

I cannot recommend this adaptation highly enough (you can watch it here). Plummer captures that turbulence of mind of a young man cast in a role for which he is so ill-suited: that of the revenger. He seems to embody the Hamlet that makes the most sense to me: a fledgling philosopher who has been thrown into a traditional Senecan tragedy and is trying to fumble his way through it. Hamlet is, as William Hazlitt said, ‘a great moraliser; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and experience’. Not so Laertes, who would avenge his father’s death without hesitation, even if it costs him his soul.

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The play’s major theme of revenge is why some critics have insisted that the opening of ‘To be or not to be’ is not primarily about suicide at all, but about whether Hamlet should take action against Claudius. On this reading, the question is initially not whether he should kill himself, but whether he should risk his own life in the act of vengeance.

To be, or not to be – that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep –
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.

I do not necessarily subscribe to this interpretation, but some productions have retained the possibility. Kenneth Branagh, in a performance that was far more bombastic than Plummer, delivered this soliloquy with an uncharacteristic restraint, and rather wonderfully sustained that ambiguity. His conceit was to have Claudius observing him through a two-way mirror, which meant that when he draws his knife on the words ‘a bare bodkin’, it is as though it is directed at the very man he wishes to kill. If Hamlet knows that he is being watched, the implications of the speech are even more varied.

Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film makes the suicidal implications unequivocal. He delivers the soliloquy on the battlements of Elsinore, suggesting that he might at any point teeter over, and even momentarily holding a knife towards himself. He takes advantage of the cinematic medium to convey some of the lines in voiceover, accentuating that quality of a mind at odds with itself. Olivier’s Hamlet allows the self-destructive impulse to pass, dropping his blade into the sea, which is of course in keeping with the character’s tendency to think himself out of action.

Mel Gibson’s rendition of the speech is likewise more directly in keeping with the notion of a young man gripped by suicidal thoughts. The director of that film, Franco Zeffirelli, even had Hamlet deliver the lines in a subterranean crypt surrounded by tombs and bones, thereby literalising the death that he contemplates. Gibson hesitates continually, seemingly searching for the next thought, a step closer to Scott’s more recent interpretation.

Getting Hamlet right is impossible. More than almost any character in literature, he seems to have escaped his creator and acquired a life of his own. He continues to evade us even while sharing his most private thoughts, and that paradox is one of the reasons no greater play has ever been written. Of the actors who have played him on screen, Christopher Plummer remains, for me, the most convincing. Which Hamlet is yours?

A new trend appears to be emerging in the world of film and television. Georgia Oakley’s movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is the latest example, in which one of the male characters, Mr Palmer, is played by a woman, Eliot Sumner. On screen, such casting decisions are typically comedic devices. One thinks immediately of Kathleen Turner as Chandler’s father in Friends. But here, the audience is expected to accept that Sumner is male because off-screen she happens to identify as non-binary.

We have grown accustomed to Hollywood and streaming services shoehorning ideology into entertainment. In the second series of Amazon’s The Rings of Power, a spin-off from The Lord of the Rings, an orc is portrayed sympathetically as a family man, anxious about the welfare of his wife and baby and reluctant to head off to war. After all, would it not be a form of racism to stigmatise all orcs as monsters? Bear in mind this is a race whose members slaughter humans, talk merrily about eating ‘man-flesh’ and occasionally dabble in cannibalism. They don’t even use cutlery.

The principle of verisimilitude in storytelling is far more important than many people realise. It obviously does not mean that fiction has to resemble reality, but it does mean that it must be coherent within the reality of the world that it creates. For example, we all accept that the warriors in Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can move in improbable ways, scaling trees and walls in manoeuvres that resemble levitation. But if Li Mu Bai suddenly transformed into a giant marshmallow and simply rolled on to his foes to subdue them, audiences would quite rightly consider the movie a failure. The power of near-flight is encoded into that world; marshmallow transmogrification is not.

So when a cross-dressing woman appears on screen, and every other character seems not to notice, it points to a specifically absurdist form of storytelling. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey made this fatal misstep in one of the opening sequences of the film, when an obviously female Elliot Page appears as the Greek warrior Sinon in full battle dress. In a film so relentlessly dour, the gambit feels both incongruous and self-satirising. It does not work.

As I say, comedy is a different beast. No audience member believes that Kathy Burke is actually a teenage boy in Kevin & Perry Go Large, but we accept that the character is male because the style of humour is so self-evidently preposterous. Now imagine Kathy Burke playing one of the schoolboys in Dead Poets Society and you’ll see the distinction.

There are rare cases where cross-sex casting has worked well. In Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, Linda Hunt played Billy Kwan, a male Eurasian photographer, and won Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars. It worked because Kwan’s strangeness was an essential aspect of the character. He was a dwarf, facially enigmatic, almost otherworldly. Hunt’s appearance and voice added to the sense that Kwan was an outsider rather than becoming an obstacle to our belief in the character.

The case of Eliot Sumner is not comparable. In Sense and Sensibility she is playing Mr Palmer, a traditional English gentleman. Sumner is unmistakably female, and so the audience is being asked to overlook a visible contradiction. Austen’s story is being played naturalistically, and so it makes no sense that not one character remarks upon the fact that Mr Palmer is quite clearly not a man. A female transvestite at the turn of the nineteenth century would have been socially provocative, not something that those around her would fail to perceive.

Similar arguments about verisimilitude arise with colour-blind casting in historical drama…

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I have recently felt a growing nostalgia for the days when words remained attached to their traditional definitions. We’ve become so used to activists in positions of influence mangling the English language that even basic communication is often impeded. Phrases such as ‘far right’, ‘genocide’, ‘racist’ and ‘hate’ have become so unmoored from their meanings that they have lost much of their utility.

We cannot even be secure in our use of the word ‘terrorist’ any longer, given that so many are determined to abuse it. How else might we explain the fact that John Cleese has been reported to Prevent, the UK government programme designed to stop people from becoming terrorists? Are disgruntled hoteliers, dead parrots and silly walks now deemed early warning signs of radicalisation?

The complaint against Cleese was made by a member of the public, and the details passed to 5Pillars, an Islamist media outlet based in London. In its report, 5Pillars repeated the complainant’s claim that Cleese’s jokes and comments ‘go beyond legitimate criticism of Islam and instead portray Muslims collectively as violent, criminal and morally depraved’. It insists that this may contribute to ‘radicalisation, communal tension, and hate incidents’. (If you haven’t heard of ‘hate incidents’, they are those non-crimes that the police seem to spend so much of their time investigating.)

None of this is true, of course. Cleese rightly rejects the nonsense term ‘Islamophobic’ and instead calls himself ‘Islamosceptic’. How could he be otherwise? This is a man who has brilliantly skewered closed systems of thought for many decades. Most of us will remember the Pythons’ televised debate with Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood following the release of Life of Brian in 1979. Just imagine the conniptions if the offended party were a representative from 5Pillars. The priggish outrage of Muggeridge and Stockwood would pale by comparison.

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Cleese has responded in the best possible way: by mocking it. He has said of the report to Prevent: ‘One of the proudest moments of my life. I would like to thank everyone concerned’. In another post he wrote: ‘I look forward to being arrested’. The tyrannical mindset – always humourless – cannot bear to be ridiculed. Few will be surprised that there are those who wish to see Cleese silenced, and that they will try to weaponise the law to that end.

But what exactly is 5Pillars? Protecting our Democracy from Coercion, a report published by the UK government in 2024, notes that 5Pillars has ‘expressed support for an Islamic caliphate, Sharia (Islamic principles and law) penal codes and physical jihad’ and ‘repeatedly abused and intimidated Muslim liberals, counter-extremists, and human rights activists’. They sound like a jolly bunch of lads, don’t they?

This isn’t the first time that there has been an attempt to co-opt Prevent for ideological purposes. In June 2019, The Revd Dr Bernard Randall, a chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire, was referred to Prevent for a sermon he had given to pupils about how it was perfectly legitimate to disagree respectfully with LGBT activists. It was partly in response to training sessions in which teaching staff were instructed to chant ‘smash heteronormativity’.

Here’s a flavour of what he said:

‘But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists “to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England,” anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore its very existence. You should no more be told you have to accept LGBT ideology, than you should be told you must be in favour of Brexit, or must be Muslim – to both of which I’m sure most of you would quite rightly object.’

No reasonable judge of this sort of measured argument could possibly suppose that it merited an investigation by counter-terrorist experts, but the woke ideology is not reasonable. In fact, reason and objectivity are often dismissed by the woke as oppressive Western constructs. (You can read the full sermon here.)

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The government has, of course, fallen in line with the woke orthodoxy. An official UK counter-terrorism website lists ‘cultural nationalism’ as one of the ideological strands associated with ‘extreme right-wing terrorism’. This same classification has been incorporated into the Home Office’s Prevent guidance. This is the gloss it provides to the phrase ‘cultural nationalism’:

‘A belief that “Western Culture” is under threat from mass migration into Europe and from a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups. The ideology tends to focus on the rejection of cultural practices such as the wearing of the burqa, or the perceived rise of the use of sharia law. In the UK this has been closely associated with anti-Islam groups.’

The belief that Western society is under threat from mass migration is not so niche as the government supposes. Indeed, numerous politicians have made broadly the same point, sometimes in the House of Commons. ‘After years of mass immigration, we now face the enormous task of building an integrated, cohesive society. Allowing more and more immigration would make that impossible’. For a fun quiz, ask a counter-terrorism expert whether these words came from a jackbooted far-right zealot or from former Prime Minister Theresa May.

The reckless debasement of language explains why perfectly reasonable objections to the most egregious aspects of Islamic theocracies, such as those outlined by John Cleese in his various social media posts on the subject, are suddenly deemed ‘terroristic’. For example, the complainant to Prevent specifically cited one post that read: ‘I personally prefer a culture that does not approve of FGM, child marriage and killing infidels’. Is that really all that controversial?

Even if it were, my instinct is to say: ‘who the fuck cares?’ The principle of free speech means that we ought to be able to express our opinions without the government getting involved. It is almost certainly the case that Prevent will not take seriously the claim that one of Britain’s greatest living comedians is a rabid extremist, but the fact that such complaints are raised at all shows that the old consensus on free speech is no longer secure.

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ Culture warriors have been known to mock the regularity with which lines such as this, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, are quoted to describe their behaviour. But if they wish to avoid the charge, they ought to stop acting in such a palpably Orwellian manner.

Take the news this week that the BBC has censored eleven sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look, recently added to its iPlayer streaming service. ‘This is a 20-year-old sketch show,’ explained a spokesperson for the corporation, ‘in consultation with the programme makers, we have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t’. One notes, with some weariness, the reframing of an entirely subjective judgement as though it were an infallible truth.

Naturally, the cuts have been made because of the BBC’s fealty to the creed of intersectional identity politics. To even joke about race is taken by the congenitally literal-minded as being an endorsement of racism. Nobody seriously believes that Mitchell and Webb were promoting bigoted notions in these sketches, not even their censors, and yet the paternalistic know-nothings at the BBC feel it is their duty to protect weaker minds from exposure to dangerous comedy.

The first time I noticed this behaviour from the state broadcaster was when I was watching an episode of Fawlty Towers on BBC iPlayer. It was ‘The Germans’, the last episode of the first series. A scene featuring a conversation between Basil Fawlty and Major Gowen had completely vanished. Having seen the show numerous times, I spotted the omission immediately. I briefly wondered whether the writers, John Cleese and Connie Booth, had been contacted to see if they objected to their work being mangled by humourless executives. Of course I already knew the answer.

The sole reason for deleting the scene was that the Major uses a number of racial epithets, but one would have to possess a brain of the softest cheese to interpret it as racist. The target of the humour is, of course, the Major himself. John Cleese explained, with infinite patience:

‘One of the things I’ve learned in the last 180 years is that people have very different senses of humour. Some of them understand that if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of, you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them. The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?’

Evidently, the BBC does not trust adults to curate their own viewing habits. If a viewer is genuinely upset by comedy from the 1970s, he or she can simply choose not to watch it. Thereby, the problem is solved. The last things we need is a crew of tinpot Savonarolas making decisions on our behalf because ‘they know best’.

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Given all the recent chatter about ‘Woke 2’ and what this latest mutation might entail, it’s hardly surprising to see that cancel culture might be adapting along with the movement that created it. The furore over the rapper Macklemore, who has been removed from the line-up on Ed Sheeran’s US tour, and the subsequent attempts to cancel Sheeran himself, s…

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Armageddon is trending. Jacob Coxon, an artificial intelligence researcher, has resigned from the AI company Anthropic in a spectacular blaze of whistleblowing. He has told the Wall Street Journal that the leading AI labs (including OpenAI, where Coxon also previously worked) are careering towards ASI: artificial superintelligence. In a post on X, he warned that ‘the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade’.

Amid the panic and the accusations of panic-mongering, perhaps the biggest surprise has been how few people were already aware of this increasingly grim situation. AI experts have been sounding the alarm for years. Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the ‘godfathers of AI’, resigned from Google in 2023 and later said that he believed the odds of AI causing human extinction were roughly 10 to 20 per cent within the next thirty years.

He’s not alone. Jan Leike, OpenAI’s head of alignment, resigned in 2024 claiming that ‘safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products’. Mrinank Sharma, formerly in charge of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team, quit in February of this year; he declared that ‘the world is in peril’ and announced his intention to study for a degree in poetry.

It is all too easy to disregard such statements as ‘doom-mongering’, on a par with climate alarmists such as Guy McPherson, the ecology professor who predicted that ‘there will be no humans on Earth by 2026’. We are so jaded with the Greta Thunbergs of this world that there will be a natural instinct to dismiss these concerns about AI as hyperbole. But these are not crazed activists with an irrational fear of technology. Many of the warnings are coming from people with formidable credentials, including researchers who have actually built frontier AI systems.

Coxon, for instance, is no keyboard warrior with a conspiratorial mindset. He has been working at the coalface of AI development and has been directly involved in training models both at OpenAI and Anthropic. It is worth remembering that Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers who left amid disagreements about the company’s direction and concerns over safety. No doubt there will be many who will be comparing the likes of Coxon to the Luddites, those who smashed up the new machinery that they feared would undercut their wages during the industrial revolution. But the comparison is flawed.

For one thing, Coxon is almost certainly correct about the extent of the concerns within the industry. Responding to his post on X, Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, said that ‘we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!’ He estimates that the probability is over 10% in the next ten years, and that there is, as yet, no plan ‘to solve alignment for superintelligence’. (‘Alignment’ is the problem of ensuring that increasingly powerful AI systems continue to behave in ways that humans can control).

For most of us, the idea that all of these AI experts are fully aware that they are creating the conditions for Armageddon but are continuing anyway makes little sense. If AI achieves superintelligence, it will be far more capable than us in virtually every area that requires thought. It will be able to produce its own superior models, effectively entering into a loop of intelligence generation. It will be so sophisticated that no human being could come close to understanding its abilities or decisions. In intellectual terms, we are talking about the creation of gods.

What these gods choose to do with us mere mortals is the key question…

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‘O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,
And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,
And get my bloody old sins washed white!’

These are the closing lines of Siegfried Sassoon’s war poem Stand-To: Good Friday Morning (1916). The soldier despises life at the front, and makes a deal to accept Christianity so long as Jesus arranges an injury that will get him invalided…

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There are many good reasons why men should not breastfeed. First and foremost, it’s because they’re men. There are other reasons too, but let’s just say that this one takes priority.

This weekend, the Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland (ALCI) paused ticket sales for its annual conference. This decision followed complaints about one of the scheduled speakers, Jacob Engelsman, who was due to give a talk on ‘lactation support for gender-diverse families’. This title is marginally more palatable than his previous talks on ‘inducing lactation for kinksters’ at fetish conventions, but only just. It has since been reported that the venue – the Ardilaun Hotel in Galway – will no longer host the conference, although the ALCI has not yet confirmed whether it will be abandoned altogether.

The concept of ‘male breastfeeding’ is not only sinister on a conceptual level; it also raises serious and unresolved safety questions. In order for lactation to be induced in males, treatment has commonly involved oestrogen and progesterone to develop the breast tissue, together with breast pumping and sometimes domperidone (a drug that raises prolactin and can stimulate milk production). The official product information for domperidone – sold under the brand name Motilium – warns that the drug passes into breast milk and that possible cardiac effects in the baby cannot be ruled out. Even if the risk is slight, why would anyone prioritise the feelings of a trans-identified male over the safety of a child?

Of all the insane demands of the genderist movement, the insistence that men ought to be able to breastfeed babies with a chemically induced mammary secretion must be among the most egregious. Frankly, I regard it as a form of child abuse. An adult male’s desire to breastfeed should not override the rights of the baby. I find it astonishing that I am even typing these words, but the behaviour of activists in recent years has meant that many of us have grown accustomed to stating the obvious.

There can be little doubt that male breastfeeding is scarcely on the radar of the general public; indeed, many people would probably be astonished to learn that it is happening at all. Yet only last month controversy erupted over an organisation called Queer Milk, then advertised as a weekly peer-support group welcoming ‘all LGBTQ+ people’. While the Scottish Government says Queer Milk itself receives no dedicated public money, the group is operated by LGBT Health and Wellbeing, a charity in receipt of substantial public funding.

Following criticism, Queer Milk insisted that it does not provide clinical advice or support induced lactation, and its chief executive went further, saying that the group is not open to trans women seeking to breastfeed and is not intended to encourage such activity. That clarification sits rather awkwardly with the breadth of its earlier publicity, and indeed with the name itself. Why, one is tempted to ask, should breast milk need to be ‘queered’ at all?

I don’t believe that it is particularly old-fashioned or reactionary to insist on a firm boundary between the feeding of babies and the sexual interests of adults…

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One of life’s small pleasures is the uncanny sensation of exploring a place previously encountered only in fiction. Those who have read Howards End by E. M. Forster will remember the vivid descriptions of the old property that Mrs Wilcox so adored. But are they aware that it exists in the real world in the form of Rooks Nest House near Stevenage? Simila…

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We discussed the government sending alerts direct to your mobile phone, Reform UK’s new welfare policies, and generally had a lovely chat.

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How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a ‘racist’ for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a …

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It would be far better for society if we were to execute the literal-minded. We could do it discreetly, under cover of night, so as not to upset their relatives. Instead of scouring social media for potentially offensive posts, the police could be enlisted to identify anyone who takes an obvious joke at face value. No trial. No appeal. Just toss them into a volcano and be done with it.

Might it be possible that anyone could read these words and assume that I meant it? You would be surprised. It was tremendously sad to hear of Rod Liddle’s untimely death last week, but it was some consolation to know that he would have relished all the unhinged reactions on Bluesky from its resident hobgoblins. Many of his old articles were dredged up as evidence of his wrongthink, and obviously satirical lines were quoted as though they were admissions of guilt.

How the ghouls celebrated and jeered, all the while exposing to the world the lie that they were ever on the side of compassion and progress. Titania McGrath even weighed in for the Spectator (you can read her thoughts here). Even many on the right were apparently delighted with Rod’s passing because of what they perceived to be his unpardonable sins. Literal-mindedness is a disease that transcends political boundaries.

The chief accusation – invariably posted underneath the many tributes from Rod’s friends, colleagues and admirers – was that he was a ‘nonce’ who had admitted that he ‘wanted to shag schoolkids’. And so, with due exhaustion and contempt, I feel obliged to explain that this is not even remotely true.

I suppose we had better take a look at the passage in question from Rod’s 2012 article about the story of a maths teacher who had run off to France with one of his charges.

‘…the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one. We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way – and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called. I just thought we ought to clear that up early on.’

It would take amoeba-level stupidity to assume that this was in any way serious. Such people would require 24-hour care in order to accomplish the most basic of quotidian tasks: tying shoelaces, brushing teeth, remembering to eat. And yet a surprisingly large number of people apparently cannot distinguish between a provocative and satirical article and an authentic statement of belief. The congenitally literal-minded do indeed live among us, and they are legion.

Of course, many of those citing Rod’s article as a confession of noncehood were doing so wilfully. In a sense, these people are even more deserving of the volcano treatment. It should be straightforward enough to admit that one finds Rod’s writing to be crass, offensive, or just downright unfunny. If Rod’s detractors believe that it is improper to make jokes about child abuse, they ought to say so. But to pretend that there had been no attempt at humour in order to score points against a dead opponent is about as low as it gets…

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As ever, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.

As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen ‘to twice its normal size’. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.

Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.

Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.

The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.

The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism…

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One of the defining characteristics of a tyrant is his or her unwillingness to be mocked. When the poet Osip Mandelstam poked fun at Stalin’s ‘cockroach whiskers’ and his fingers ‘fatty like worms’ he was exiled and eventually sentenced to five years in a corrective labour camp. Within a year of his imprisonment, he had died of malnutrition and was buried in an unmarked grave.

One might have expected that, given its history, Germany would be especially wary of laws that ringfence politicians from ridicule. Yet in 2021, its government expanded Section 188 of the Criminal Code – aimed at protecting politicians from defamation – so that even crude insults could result in prosecution. This draconian law is why the Free Speech Union is now hoping to launch a branch in Germany.

As with all ‘hate speech’ laws, Section 188 is wide open to exploitation by any politician seeking to suppress dissent. In November 2024, Bavarian police raided the house of retired soldier Stefan Niehoff for a social media post in which he had referred to Robert Habeck, then Germany’s vice-chancellor, as a ‘Schwachkopf’ (dummy). That mild insult was all it took to see his liberties violated by the state.

Such legislation is the equivalent of the lèse-majesté laws that still exist in certain parts of the world, designed to punish subjects who denigrate the king. Countries that retain these laws include Thailand, Cambodia, Jordan, Morocco, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Bhutan. The maximum penalty for insulting the king in Jordan is eerily identical to that prescribed by Section 188 in Germany: a prison sentence of three years.

In Turkey, citizens face similar oppression. Since becoming president in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has relied on Article 299 of Turkey’s Penal Code – a previously little-used offence criminalising insults to the president – to investigate and prosecute tens of thousands of his critics. Former beauty queen Merve Büyüksaraç was convicted and received a suspended sentence for reposting on Instagram a satirical poem about the president that she had found funny.

The case of German comic Jan Böhmermann is similarly revealing. In 2016, he had produced a music video which ridiculed Erdoğan. In response, the Turkish government summoned the German ambassador in Ankara to demand that the video be deleted from the internet. Böhmermann in turn responded with a poem that upped the offensiveness tenfold, including references to Erdoğan having sex with goats and sheep. Turkey then requested that Böhmermann be prosecuted under Section 103 of the German Criminal Code, which protected foreign heads of state from insults.

That law was repealed in 2018, but Section 188 remains on the German statute books in its expanded form and is arguably even more authoritarian. A little knowledge of the history of tyranny would not go amiss, and in particular how this kind of legislation has typically been so vaguely worded. Section 188 contains open-ended concepts such as whether a statement is ‘capable of significantly hindering’ a politician’s public work. In the UK, Section 127 of the Communications Act criminalises ‘grossly offensive’ speech, a categorisation that it makes no effort to define.

Such vagueness is not accidental. It enables the authorities to interpret the law expansively, applying it to whatever speech or behaviour they choose to regard as criminal…

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On the very first page of his seminal treatise On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill addresses the ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’. This simple phrase encapsulates the essence of our present-day culture war, the ‘woke’ movement merely representing the latest manifestation of the authoritarian mindset.

I have been at pains to argue in my articles and books that authoritarianism is the default in human nature. How many societies globally and historically have ever really been free? Even in the rare examples where freedom of speech is enshrined in law, there have always been caveats or exceptions to the principle. The UK is ostensibly a free country, but we have hate speech laws that outlaw certain points of view. No society has ever consistently lived up to wholly liberal principles, and all western political parties are, at present, authoritarian to some degree.

I have always believed that we are better off acknowledging this authoritarian instinct that we share so that we might continually resist it. Creating the conditions for genuine liberty is exceptionally difficult. It requires the gradual development of a civilisation that can uphold it. It requires tradition and inherited knowledge and a sophisticated educational system that can guarantee effective socialisation. More than anything, it requires individual self-awareness and a desire to correct course once we succumb to that universal authoritarian impulse.

With that in mind, here’s my list of five ways to tell if you’re an authoritarian…

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Yesterday saw the anointment of Andy Burnham as our new Prime Minister. He had not worked in parliament for over a decade, has no serious mandate from the public to lead the country, and has been helicoptered in by his colleagues in the hope that he can recover what is left of the reputation of the Labour Party. Given that Keir Starmer has presided over the most authoritarian government in living memory, is it possible that Burnham will see the error of his predecessor’s ways?

The early signs are not good. Burnham has already appointed two staff members from Hope Not Hate, a militant leftist organisation that has a habit of smearing people with mainstream opinions as ‘far right’. And the Telegraph has now revealed that a new report commissioned by the Government Office for Science early this year and published in May could end up influencing the Burnham government’s future direction on online misinformation and issues relating to free speech. It offers a guide to what it calls ‘psychological inoculation’ of the public. In other words, how to play mind games and manipulate the great unwashed into behaving themselves.

If Burnham has any sense at all, he will denounce this report at the earliest opportunity. Its fundamental ethos is illiberal and anti-democratic. It is called False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice, and it was produced by a consortium called Behavioural Research UK. It is without a doubt one of the most chilling and authoritarian documents that has ever been commissioned by a British government. It’s worth looking closely at its contents, because it might well become a roadmap for Burnham’s policies.

The report is Orwellian not simply in its recommendations, but in how it presents itself. The authors repeatedly describe it as an ‘evidence review’, but it actually contains numerous policy recommendations. Perhaps the most egregious is the suggestion that the public should be ‘inoculated’ against misinformation through a process of ‘prebunking’; a sinister euphemism for censorship. It describes prebunking as the ‘first line of defence’. Here is the relevant passage as it appears in the report:

‘Prebunking refers to a broad category of strategies aimed at stopping people from accepting false and misleading information before they encounter it. The most widely employed of these strategies is psychological inoculation, the core idea is that presenting someone with a weakened form of a misleading claim builds psychological resistance against future manipulation. Psychological inoculation typically consists of two elements: alerting someone in advance that their beliefs may come under attack (e.g., “warning: someone might try to influence you by claiming X”), and offering a preemptive counter-argument that undermines the false claim before it takes hold (e.g., “this is misleading, because Y”; van der Linden, 2025).’

The report offers vague guidance to the government on how to psychologically manipulate the public so that it is not susceptible to ‘misinformation’. It does not address the key problem: that ‘misinformation’ is often the term used by those in power to describe information that is accurate but inconvenient. The report does not consider the ethical aspects of treating the public like toddlers who can be tricked into certain modes of behaviour. Moreover, it refuses to specify how the manipulation might work in practice.

Let’s take one of the policy suggestions: ‘Game-based inoculation interventions’. One assumes that this is referring to computer games produced for schools and workplaces. We’ve seen this kind of nonsense from the Labour government before. Back in January, the Telegraph reported on the state-funded Pathways game, aimed at secondary school children and sixth form students, that warned them that questioning mass migration could result in a referral to the counter-terrorism unit.

It features a character called Charlie (pronouns they/them, naturally) who is lured onto the slippery slope of radicalisation by watching online videos. It’s difficult to decide which is more cringemaking: the game itself, or the government’s faith that such overt propaganda will have the desired effect.

We see the same paternalistic philosophy in this recent False and Misleading Information report, an attitude that evidently mirrors that of Burnham’s government…

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Few would deny that the internet both creates and amplifies bad behaviour. In the wake of the death of Ann Widdecombe, I made the mistake of browsing through comments on Facebook. Apparently, for some, the brutal murder of an elderly woman is cause for celebration. I had not realised that I was acquainted with so many sociopaths.

In truth, Facebook is a …

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