On Saturday evening, an attempt was made to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The suspected gunman is Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from California, and his likely target was President Donald Trump and other figures from his administration. This is the third assassination attempt against Trump in less than two years. At this point, few would deny that political violence has become normalised. The more contentious question is what we can possibly do to reverse the trend.

Once again, the usual debates are raging online and in the legacy media. Does the left have a particular problem with violence, or is the right just as bad? Is the incendiary rhetoric of public and political figures to blame? On CNN yesterday, the political commentator Scott Jennings broached both of these questions, citing a speech this week by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in which he vowed ‘maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time’.

All such debates are understandable. The gunman at the Correspondents’ Dinner sought not only to deprive other human beings of their lives, he sought to deprive voters of their democratic rights. At times like this it is always worth emphasising that political violence is fundamentally authoritarian, a means by which an individual or group seeks to enforce their worldview on others.

But it is not helpful to explain away this behaviour as the unique tendency of a particular political tribe, or the impact of intemperate language on a malleable population. Those who have equivocated or even celebrated recent political murders – such as those of Brian Thompson, Melissa Hortman or Charlie Kirk – all share a tendency to justify violence through a process of moral reframing. There is good reason to believe that this is a sign of an increasingly infantile culture and a weak educational system.

Allen is surely a case in point. The recent ‘No Kings’ rallies – which Allen is said to have attended – saw thousands take to the streets to protest against a President who won both the popular vote and an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College. Criticism of the ruling class is healthy and necessary, but pretending that they are unelected tyrants is childish and self-defeating.

Allen apparently sent a ‘manifesto’ to his family shortly before the attack on Saturday. It is the usual sub-literate and self-aggrandising affair, but the contents are interesting for what they reveal about the anti-democratic mindset and how it seeks to justify itself. Most notably, Allen presents an argument for political violence, one that reframes it as a form of defence against tyranny.

There is nothing new in this approach, of course. It was the reason given by the conspirators against Julius Caesar, the most famous political assassination of all time. In his manifesto, Allen claims that all administration officials are legitimate targets, and calls Trump a ‘pedophile, rapist, and traitor’. This is simply an extension of the standard activist tactic of branding one’s opponents as evil in order to dehumanise them. Charlie Kirk was falsely branded a ‘fascist’ by those who defended and celebrated his murder. Feminists are routinely branded as ‘TERFs’ to excuse violence against them. This trick is as common as it is transparent.

Allen goes on to describe anyone who attended the Correspondents’ Dinner as ‘complicit’, the kind of guilt by association that we have come to expect. It’s the same logic as those activists who cancel speakers for ‘sharing a platform’ with those they have decided are beyond the pale.

Thereafter, Allen makes the standard case for political violence as a form of defence. He is not fighting for himself, he claims, but for the marginalised. This of course is the entire guiding principle of the ‘woke’ movement, which simplistically divides the world into categories of oppressor and oppressed – oftentimes misattributing each label – and poses as the defender of the latter. Allen writes:

‘Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.’

So let’s examine his claims a little closer…

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I met Victoria Wood only once. I had been told by those who knew her to expect her to be ‘prickly’ and ‘standoffish’, which might seem strange for the woman who once won a nationwide poll of ‘People You’d Most Like To Live Next Door To’. As it happens, I enjoyed our conversation, but I certainly detected that guarded quality I had been warned about. It wasn’t until we got on to the subject of her revisions to her play, Talent – then enjoying a sell-out revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory – that she seemed to relax. She told me that the opportunity to improve the script had been the most enjoyable aspect of the production. As anyone who is familiar with Wood’s output will know, she wasn’t one to rely on past successes and was forever looking forward to the next project.

It is typical, of course, for stand-up comedians to be mistaken for their on-stage personae. In her live shows Wood was invariably open and warm. I saw her perform on numerous occasions over the years, and even in the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall it felt like an intimate experience. In his superb biography, Let’s Do It, Jasper Rees refers to this phenomenon as ‘the two Victorias’. ‘When they met her’, he writes, ‘people were looking for their friend Victoria, the one who always seemed to be bouncing for joy on the piano stool of life’. And although by all accounts she was generous and unfailingly kind to those who were closest to her, she also had the kind of edge that was necessary to succeed in an industry then dominated by men.

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The extent of this achievement cannot be overstated. For anyone who grew up after 1990, it is difficult to envisage a comedy scene in which women are largely absent. When I was at school, the majority of my peers’ comedy idols were female, and nobody thought twice about it. The shows we enjoyed most were those by French and Saunders, Jo Brand, Rita Rudner, Josie Lawrence, Madeline Kahn, Rosanne Barr and, of course, Victoria Wood. But when she appeared in the final of ITV’s New Faces back in 1974, Wood was considered an oddity. Of course there had been hugely successful funny women in the past – one immediately thinks of Joyce Grenfell, Gracie Fields and Phyllis Diller – but in the UK comedy circuit of the 1970s, they were undeniably scarce.

It was therefore inevitable that Wood would have to find her own route to stardom. From an early age she had always wanted to be famous, but it took her a while to work out precisely for what. New Faces was not quite the big break she assumed it would be, even after it secured her a regular gig on BBC One in That’s Life! playing topical songs. Ultimately, it was as a dramatist that she first became widely known, following a television adaptation of Talent in 1979, the play that had won her the Evening Standard ‘Most Promising Playwright’ award. Later in life she wrote some excellent dramas for television, including Housewife, 49 (2006) and Loving Miss Hatto (2012).

Like most comedians, Wood didn’t find her ‘voice’ until many years after she had embarked on her career. Her first comedy sketch series, Wood and Walters (1982), co-starring Julie Walters but written entirely by Wood, was an uneven affair, producing only momentary flashes of her later genius. It was the two series of Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985-1987), a show which blended stand-up, sketches and music, in which she perfected her craft. Her work was brought to life by a flawless cast, including Julie Walters, Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston, but really it was the sharpness of Wood’s writing that elevated her so far above her peers.

To this day, As Seen on TV remains the unrivalled pinnacle of the sketch genre. Her astutely observed mockumentary sketches pioneered a format which years later would become the go-to style for British sitcoms. One of the most effective is ‘Just An Ordinary School’ starring Felicity Montagu (who went on to play Alan Partridge’s long-suffering assistant, Lynn), which skewers a group of affluent boarding-school girls who are blind to their own privilege. In ‘On Campus’, Wood plays a shy fresher who is bullied into a suicide attempt on account of her size. In ‘To Be An Actress’, a newly graduated Mary Jo Randle attempts to make it in the theatre, only to have her dreams shattered by the brutal nepotism of an over-competitive industry (she gets her first role after stripping naked in an audition, and has to work with a director whose obsession for his female lead compromises the production). In ‘Swim the Channel’, Wood plays a schoolgirl who fulfils her sporting ambitions at the cost of her life. So neglected is she by her parents that they barely notice when she fails to turn up on the French coast. ‘What do your other children think about it all?’, the presenter asks. ‘Oh’, replies the mother, ‘I’d forgotten we had any other children’.

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The perception of Wood as a ‘national treasure’, and her congenial onstage persona, often belied the darker aspects of her work. That this so often went unnoticed made it all the more potent. She was particularly effective when pricking the pomposity of the bourgeoisie. Her character Kitty, played wonderfully by Patricia Routledge through a series of direct-to-camera monologues, was searing without being cruel. That is to say, Wood was always able to find the humanity within even her most objectionable characters. ‘What has China ever given the world?’, Kitty sermonises over a third glass of sherry. ‘Can you really respect a nation that’s never taken to cutlery?’

Her reactionary right-wing continuity announcer, played by a deadpan Susie Blake, was another recurring favourite. (‘We’d like to apologise to our viewers in the north. It must be awful for them.’) Wood was seemingly fascinated by snobbery and its attendant lack of self-awareness. This topic was most effectively tackled in the episode ‘Staying In’ from her eponymous 1989 series of half-hour plays, in which an affluent friend persuades Wood to attend a posh Christmas party as a novelty guest. As Wood reluctantly mingles with the elite, we overhear scraps of dialogue from Moira (the party host) and her guests.

‘Super show, Moira.’

‘Lovely party.’

‘Gorgeous tree. Did you dress it?’

‘No, I simply ordered fistfuls of tartan ribbon and set the Filipinos on to it.’

‘It’s very effective.’

‘Yes, because it’s Christmas and yet Scottish.’

The tartan tree is Moira’s patronising gesture for her Scottish housekeeper, Ailsa. ‘She used to live in a cardboard box, you know!’, Moira repeatedly boasts, while Ailsa is left cleaning up after her guests.

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This kind of class-conscious satire was also a prominent aspect of Wood’s stand-up, and it was arguably in this medium that she most excelled. In many ways she was an actor’s worst nightmare because she had a very rigid conception of how her lines ought to be delivered. In the context of stand-up, however, she was able to remain in total control of her material. The impact of her punchlines so often depended on the rhythm of the delivery, which is why I am doing her work no favours by quoting it here. Nevertheless, by way of example let’s take her observation about the reserved quality of the English:

‘If a man dies in India, the widow flings herself on to the funeral pyre. If a man dies in England, the woman just drags herself into the kitchen and says “Seventy-two baps, Connie. You slice, I’ll spread”.’

The cultural comparison works brilliantly, but it is the specificity of the language that really makes the joke. ‘Baps’ is better than ‘rolls’, even though the latter would be more intuitive. Likewise, seventy-two is the right number; reduce it to seventy and the rhythm would be botched. The choice of ‘Connie’ couldn’t be bettered either, and the duplicated spondee of the final line is why the joke lands so well. Like a poet, Wood considered carefully each and every syllable.

I am fully aware, of course, that any analysis of comedy destroys its effect, but when I taught a course in stand-up at the Soho Theatre in London I would routinely use clips of Wood to explore the craft of structuring and delivering a gag. Although some of the course members were too young to be familiar with her comedy, it was notable how responsive they were to the strength of her writing and her attention to detail. Sometimes the biggest laughs would come from Wood’s seemingly casual asides that were, in truth, just as meticulously crafted as her stand-out jokes. ‘If there’s a Heaven’, she once said, before digressing: ‘which I doubt; I think the people from Hell have probably bought it for a timeshare…’

Wood died ten years ago today at the age of 62, but she leaves behind an astonishing body of work. All comics know that their material has a limited lifespan – Woody Allen once remarked that he should have devoted his time to writing tragedies – but it seems likely that Wood’s brand of humour will outlast many of her contemporaries. She died far too soon, leaving a number of projects unfinished, but like all great artists it is her influence on others that guarantees her legacy. Wood may no longer be with us, but her voice can still be heard in the generations of comedians she has inspired.

The woke movement has been a disaster for the arts. Any creative work that it touches suffers as a result. Good ideas are frequently sabotaged by the insertion of incongruous sermons in the name of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, and audiences are left with the unshakable feeling that they are watching establishment-approved propaganda.

Take the reboot of Malcolm in the Middle, which has shoehorned in a new ‘non-binary’ character in the form of Malcolm’s sister Kelly. The show’s creators, married couple Linwood Boomer and Tracy Katsky, have said this character reflects their own experiences. ‘Three out of four of our kids are queer,’ said Katsky in a recent interview, ‘and without making it a thing and without making an issue, I think it’s really nice to have a character that, that’s just a facet of their personality as opposed to the entire story.’

We don’t know if Katsky has three gay children. It is a huge statistical improbability, and so we are not being unfair in assuming that some other category (from the ‘TQIA+’ appendage) has made an appearance here. Given that most of the ‘queer community’ now comprises of attention-seeking heterosexuals, there is simply no way of knowing. But it would be dishonest not to notice how self-defined ‘queers’ tend to be overrepresented among the progeny of the celebrity class.

It goes without saying that Katsky, like all creatives, is free to make her own artistic choices. It’s just a pity that virtually all studio executives are in lockstep and, ironically, there is so little diversity as a result. I can make no judgement whatsoever on the quality of Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair as I haven’t seen it. It might be brilliant. Yet a recent viral clip from the show (which you can watch here) would suggest that ideology is once again taking priority over storytelling.

The clip shows Kelly giving a speech in praise of Hal, but somehow making it all about herself. ‘I was like five when I started feeling wrong,’ she says in a monologue to camera, while mawkish music reminds the audience that they are meant to find it moving. The struggles of being ‘non-binary’ – i.e., aligning oneself completely with establishment trends – appears to be the topic. ‘Thought I was great at hiding it, because you guys never said anything.’

Hiding what exactly? That she didn’t feel entirely comfortable with old-fashioned tropes of masculine and feminine behaviour? This is a feeling that virtually everyone shares, but most people don’t require the formation of an entire ‘identity’ around it. The invention of a third category, supposedly to escape from the ‘oppressive’ sex binary, is simply to surrender to – and thereby reinforce – the very sex stereotypes that one is claiming to reject. Like so much of the new woke orthodoxy, it’s a reactionary notion dressed up as progressivism.

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Around fifteen years ago, I had a stand-up routine in which I would bemoan the ever-expanding initialism for sexual minorities. First it was LGB, then LGBT, then LGBTQI. I ended up increasing it gradually until every letter of the alphabet was represented and had its own assigned meaning. It was more a memory trick than a joke, but it always landed well.

By the time we reached 2016, the routine had been taken over by reality and I never performed it again. The ‘community’ was using variations in earnest that were far more ridiculous than anything I could invent. There was LGBTQ2SIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit, intersex and asexual), LGBTQQIP2SAA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit, asexual and ally), and even 2SLGBTQQIA+ (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual and related communities). Who could have predicted that mathematical symbols would eventually intrude?

Not to be outdone, Canadian MP Leah Gazan has coined a new variation, MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, and the clip has this week gone viral.

It’s the kind of nonsense that seems engineered to appeal to anti-gay reactionaries who already believe that we’re all mentally ill. Of course, very few gay people use this linguistic bilge, and most see it for what it is: the symptom of a generation of activists who have been trained in jargon but not in thought. I hadn’t heard of Gazan before, but editor of Quillette, Jonathan Kay, has explained that she is a fringe figure from a minor party in his home country of Canada. As he points out:

‘She’s not in the government. She regularly calls for dumb things, such as criminalizing anyone who dares talk candidly about the 2021-era unmarked-graves social panic. CBC types treat her as a serious person because she’s indigenous and because she always talks in the tear-drenched idiom of white-settler colonial evilness. But she’s not.’

This is important context for a viral video in which many people will assume that Gazan is a mainstream politician. Yet of course she is just a short step away from the likes of Zack Polanski and Hannah Spencer or any of the Green Party cranks who might very well enjoy significant gains in the next general election here in the UK. Labour has its fair share of gender ideologues too, most notably the MP Nadia Whittome, who surely represents the best possible case for mandatory IQ tests for parliamentarians.

As for MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, it adds to the rainbow initialism the category of ‘Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls’, which would seem to confirm that victim status is all that is required for eligibility in the alphabet soup. Hence Gazan’s absurd misuse of the term ‘genocide’. This mindset has been ruinous for gay rights, encouraging sexual minorities to feel sorry for themselves and to complain endlessly about anything and nothing. At this point, ‘Pride’ really ought to be rebranded as ‘Pity’.

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To give yet another example from Canada, now ground zero for the demolition of gay respectability, last September the chair of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation considered an ‘emergency motion’ regarding a Harry Potter event in Stanley Park. The resolution was later announced on social media: ‘Apologized to TGD2S community after emotional discussion. Shared some tears. Disavowed JKR. Will undertake concrete actions to rebuild trust.’

It was a triple whammy: childish histrionics, demonisation of J. K. Rowling, and deployment of yet another inelegant initialism. That such people are in positions of authority speaks to the ongoing infantilism of Canadian politics.

Needless to say, very few gay people want anything to do with any of this. It’s profoundly embarrassing, and is partly responsible for the results of numerous polls showing that support for gay rights is declining. Such word games ought to be restricted to the incurable logomachists of higher education, and in particular those of the postmodernist ilk who rely on obscurantism to bypass the need for serious ideas. An advertisement for a lecturing post at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, includes a commitment to the LGBTQIATakatapuiMVPFAFF+ community. Feel free to investigate the meaning of this verbiage if you do not value your limited time on this earth. Personally, my patience has expired.

The unstoppable bloating of the once manageable LGB initialism has followed the same path as that of the pride flag. It started out in 1978 as Gilbert Baker’s design of a rainbow with eight stripes, which was soon whittled down to six. This simple image worked well for decades as a symbol of unity; it was never meant to expand into a hodgepodge of competing identity groups.

Fast forward to today, and that ‘Progress Pride’ monstrosity has become ubiquitous, with its added colours and chevrons and symbols to incorporate additional victim categories. Given that the original flag included everyone by the very nature of its design, there was never any need for these incessant modifications.

The alphabet soup encapsulates the woke obsession with group identity and victimhood. It is a divisive, pointless and ultimately self-defeating strategy which alienates more than it attracts. And while feather-brained ideologues like Gazan will continue their efforts to colonise the political sphere through jargon, the rest of us would be wise to back away and reserve our energy for the adults.

Censorship is one of the first signs that a society isn’t working. A truly free nation can tolerate the expression of offensive opinions, even repugnant ones, because where debate and discussion are encouraged the worst ideas can be exposed and defeated. When a government sets limitations on speech, it is admitting that authoritarianism is easier than liberty.

The news that Kanye West – these days self-styled as ‘Ye’ – has been banned from entering the UK is one such admission. He had been booked to headline the Wireless Festival in Finsbury Park, London, but the event has now been cancelled. The Home Office has claimed that West’s appearance ‘would not be conducive to the public good’.

This kind of thing has happened before. In 2015, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, banned the rapper Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, the Creator) from the country for at least three years under anti-terrorism legislation. One might legitimately ask how rap lyrics can be said to be a form of terrorism, but that was the argument that the government opted to make.

Presumably the decision to ban West is based largely on his infamous track ‘Heil Hitler’, released in May 2025, which includes the lines: ‘Man, these people took my kids from me, then they closed my bank account. I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out… So I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain’. The chorus features a group of male voices repeatedly singing the refrain ‘Nigga, Heil Hitler’. The song closes with a recorded excerpt from one of Hitler’s speeches.

West’s antisemitism goes far beyond lyrics, of course. In October 2022, he posted on X his intention to go ‘death con 3 on Jewish people’. In December of that year, he appeared on Alex Jones’s show and claimed that he ‘liked Hitler’, saying that he ‘seems like a cool guy’ and went on to deny the holocaust. He was suspended from X for posting a Star of David combined with the Nazi swastika, and in early 2025 – having been reinstated – posted a series of unhinged remarks, including ‘I love Hitler now’ and ‘I’m a Nazi’, ‘every Jewish wife is a bitch’ and ‘Jews were better as slaves’.

West has since apologised, taking out a one-page advert in the Wall Street Journal for an open letter ‘To Those I’ve Hurt’, putting his behaviour down to bipolar disorder, and asserting ‘I am not a Nazi or an antisemite’ and ‘I love Jewish people’. He had previously met with Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto and expressed his ‘profound remorse’. Video footage of West hugging Pinto was widely shared.

Is West’s apology sincere? Has his medical condition really driven him to such depths? When it comes to his banning from the UK, neither of these questions is relevant. Either we have freedom of speech in our country or we do not…

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It’s a standalone introductory lecture in which I discuss the historical circumstances that enabled Shakespeare to flourish.

And if you’d like to enrol at the Peterson Academy, you’ll have access to all their courses, including my other course on Shakespeare’s comedies. You can enrol here.

Anyway, here’s the full lecture. Let me know your thoughts!

We live in an age of fake news. The scourge of online misinformation, combined with a media class that prioritises ideological narratives over the truth, means that most of us now routinely check multiple accounts of the same event to cobble together the reality behind the agenda. But yesterday the phenomenon of fake news hit a new low. For it was widely reported that Jonathan the tortoise had died.

Jonathan is the world’s oldest living land animal. He is at least 193 years old, and could well be over 200. He met King George VI and Elizabeth before she was queen (see image below). When he was hatched, the British empire was entering its period of global dominance. There was no electric lighting, no telephones, no radio. He is a creature of a different universe. And yes, he is still alive.

We should have expected that this was an April Fool’s stunt, but of course these annual pranks are typically more light-hearted and less cruel in nature. In reality, the false reports of Jonathan’s death were the results of a scam by an online account soliciting crypto donations. The culprit had pretended to be Joe Hollins, the senior vet on the island of St Helena – Jonathan’s home – and had posted an announcement of his death on X.

The hoax served no satirical purpose, but was rather a cynical effort at making money. But what does it say about our current media landscape that major international media outlets repeated the lie? The X post itself was viewed over a million times, but that in itself is no guarantee of authenticity. And yet the BBC, USA Today, the Daily Mail and many more reported it as fact.

All of which is a reminder that in the digital age we all need to keep our antennae pricked permanently for frauds. Moreover, this is precisely the kind of climate in which conspiracy theorists and smear-merchants are able to thrive. The old adage has never been more pertinent: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes’. That line is usually attributed to Mark Twain, but I’m afraid that’s probably fake news too.

However, while many thousands of people around the world were devastated at the news of Jonathan’s death, they can at least now bask in the collective relief that he is still with us. And this gives me a good opportunity to reshare my interview with Jonathan – and his good friend Joe Hollins – which I recorded during a visit to St Helena two years ago (see clip below).

As Joe pointed out to me, Jonathan is ‘quasi-immortal’ and has shown signs of regeneration. So with any luck he’ll still be plodding on long after the rest of us have taken our final leave.

In 1692, a coalition of villagers, ministers, judges and other local authorities took on the witches of Salem, Massachusetts. The trials lasted just over a year, but by the end more than two hundred had been accused, twenty had been executed and five others had perished in jail. There was just one problem: the witches did not exist.

It is tempting to mak…

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‘Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in ten or twenty years. It won’t matter.’ Such are the prophecies of Elon Musk, who believes that the inevitable improvement of Artificial Intelligence and robotics will mean that in the near future we simply won’t need to work. When AI becomes superintelligent, it will have the capacity to fulfil…

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Most successful politicians are adept at linguistic sleight-of-hand. I am not talking here about outright lies, but rather the twisting of the truth through wordplay. One of the most striking examples was the US military spokesman during the Vietnam War who described a bombing raid as having ‘obtained a 100 per cent mortality response’. This verbal form…

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We discussed whether Starmer might finally be on the right side of public opinion, why TV has suffered from being dominated by the middle-classes, and why Americans have no taste when it comes to cheese.

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‘We must all play our part in eradicating Islamophobia,’ Keir Starmer said before he became Prime Minister. ‘My Labour Party is committed to tackling it in all its forms.’ Given this government’s patronising and cynical efforts to pander to Muslim voters, one wonders whether the real problem is not Islamophobia, but Islamophilia.

According to a draft leaked to the Spectator, Starmer is about to unveil plans for an ‘Islamophobia tsar’. But what for? Hate crimes based on religion represent approximately 5% of those recorded, as compared to 14% for sexual orientation and 60% for race. Why not a ‘homophobia tsar’ or a ‘racism tsar’?

Of course, we shouldn’t be bothering with these tsars at all. It’s an odd term anyway, harking back to Russian autocrats before the revolution. But by creating a specific government role to tackle anti-Muslim ‘hostility and hatred’, Starmer is making clear that this particular community is one of his chief priorities.

There is nothing ‘progressive’ about any of this. No other belief system is deemed worthy of protection from ridicule or criticism, and in a free society it is intolerable that the government is singling out one ideology for special treatment. If I were Muslim, I’m sure I’d have something to say about a Prime Minister behaving as though I were some kind of pet in need of coddling.

This week the government issued its revised definition of ‘Islamophobia’, which it is now calling ‘anti-Muslim hatred’. This is some kind of progress, given that ‘Islamophobia’ is a nebulous term that was invented and propagated to curb criticism of the faith…

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Imagine a criminal justice system modelled entirely around the perspective of the accused. We would have no need of trials, as the defendant would simply have to answer one question: ‘Do you perceive yourself to be guilty or innocent?’ Prisons could be abolished, since only a handful of criminals would choose to be so accommodated. The very concept of the law would be redundant, as crime would be redefined as non-crime by the perpetrators.

As absurd as this sounds, this is precisely what we are doing by allowing prisoners to decide for themselves whether they are male or female and housing them accordingly. There are clear incentives for violent and predatory men to prefer the female estate, not least that they are unlikely to be attacked by inmates who are physically weaker. But the biggest incentive must surely be opportunism. Many of these offenders have a history of lying about their identity to gain access to vulnerable women, so it seems unfeasible that they would stop when the state itself is facilitating their lies.

Consider the case of Nathan Venable (aka ‘Natasha’), a man who is held in the women’s facility at the Maine Correctional Center having committed multiple sexual assaults on children. In a male prison, he would be a major target for violent retribution; in the female estate, he enjoys greater protection. Worse still, as feminist Jennifer Gingrich has pointed out, his female inmates ‘are apparently terrified of him’. Their rights apparently matter less than those of a convicted paedophile.

According to a report this week in the Sun Journal, another male inmate at the same prison, Andrew Balcer (aka ‘Andrea’), has been accused of forcing himself on women. At over six feet tall and weighing over three hundred pounds, he has allegedly ‘terrorized’ other inmates with his sexual behaviour. The report claims that ‘at least six women – and perhaps as many as 11 – have filed complaints against Balcer since she [sic] arrived, but they said it has gotten them nowhere’.

It is unethical enough that a news report is falsely identifying the accused as female, but it is even more troubling that Balcer was housed in the wrong prison facility in the first place. Jennifer Gingrich’s account of a direct conversation with an inmate at the Maine Correctional Center makes for harrowing reading:

‘The situation is much worse than we thought. There isn’t just one male murderer in there – there are a bunch of physically intact rapists & murderers of women. Women are paying each other with pop tarts & Mountain Dew to accompany them to the bathroom & showers because they’re so afraid of being trapped in an area with no cameras with these men. The men rub their crotches against them when they pass them and make jokes about getting them pregnant and killing them. “It’s not fair. Why doesn’t anyone care about us?” she asked me. I didn’t have an answer.’

The official policies of prisons in the UK is scarcely better, in spite of the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 that women’s facilities cease to be single-sex if they admit men who identify as female…

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Today sees the publication of my book The End of Woke in paperback. It’s a ‘book of the year’ in the New Statesman, the Spectator and Compact Magazine. You can read reviews here.

And to whet your appetite, here’s the book’s prologue, in which I argue that while woke is not yet dead, it has sustained too many wounds to persist in the form it once took. I…

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The end point of armed conflict is impossible to predict. In her book On Violence (1970), the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that when it comes to political violence, ‘the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals’. However well planned and executed, wars have a tende…

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There is little doubt that historians of the future are going to look back on the ‘woke’ era with utter bafflement. How is it that intelligent people were suddenly caught up in this identity-obsessed hysteria? Why did they forget that free speech mattered? Or that human beings cannot change sex? Or that judging people by the colour of their skin rather …

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As a child, my favourite character from Neighbours was the villainous Mrs Mangel played by Vivean Gray. Her performance was far better than it needed to be for a soap opera; she was waspish and priggish and cruel, and yet you could tell that beneath all the bitterness there was a human heart that yearned for affection.

So impressive was Gray’s acting that fans of the show would shout angrily at her on the street. In a 1989 interview, she explained that all this negative attention meant that she eventually felt compelled to quit:

‘I loved Neighbours and the rest of the cast were marvellous. But because it was so successful, I could barely set foot outside my own door without someone screaming abuse at horrid old Mrs Mangel. People didn’t seem to appreciate it was acting. So I decided to take a break.’

Gray’s experiences with literal-minded audiences came to my mind the other day as I was reading about a recent production at a theatre in Bochum, Germany. The play’s provocative title is Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, and it has caused quite a stir. This week it was reported that Ole Lagerpusch, who is playing a far-right villain in the piece, was attacked by audience members during his performance. So outraged were they at the character’s political views that he was aggressively heckled. Someone threw an orange and, eventually, people rushed the stage and tried to drag him off.

The premise of the play is an interesting one. It concerns a family who each year kidnap a well-known far-right figure and execute him at their home. The writer is exploring the extent to which some people are willing to suspend the principles of democracy in the belief that they are defending it. Given the recent rise of political violence, and the disturbing mania for falsely branding people ‘far right’ in order to justify assaulting them, the play could not be more timely. I haven’t seen it, so I cannot say whether it falls into the trap of sermonising, which is the default failing of most new theatrical writing.

Still, it isn’t real life. And the fact that some people were so angered by this make-believe scenario that they felt it had to be stopped is deeply troubling. We could speculate endlessly about their motives. Perhaps they genuinely forgot that the actor was merely reciting a script. Or perhaps they believed that the writer was using the play as a vehicle to promote his character’s views. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that the Scottish government introduced a hate speech law to crack down on the ‘public performance of a play’ if it was ‘intended to stir up hatred’.

As for Ole Lagerpusch, were he not so traumatised by the attack this would perhaps be the best review that he could hope for. After all, his performance must be highly accomplished if he is able to provoke this kind of response. The melee kicked off during a long monologue in which, presumably, the character verbalises his apparently offensive worldview. I do hope this audience doesn’t attend a production of Macbeth any time soon; they’d be rushing the stage to rescue Duncan and beating his assassin to a bloody pulp.

In recent years, many of us have noticed an escalation of literal-mindedness…

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Keir Starmer’s instincts are essentially authoritarian. Under his watch, the government has cracked down on free speech, assaulted the principle of due process, attempted to surrender the Chagos Islands to Mauritius against the wishes of the majority of its people, ordered the deletion of the UK’s largest independent court-reporting archive, laid the gr…

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

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