The goal of “PPT” — still his official name as this goes to press, pre-appeal — is to stifle allegations of inappropriate sexual activity, some of it potentially criminal. PPT asserts that publication of this material by the Guardian and ITN will very likely trigger a suicide attempt in him, thereby causing devastation to his son. “The claimant contends that publication would expose him to a real and immediate risk of serious harm or death,” the judge was told, as if the man were running from the mafia rather than his own demons.

Understandably, most of the interest in this case pertains to the identity of the claimant and the precise nature of the complaints against him, but there are other revealing angles too. To my mind, one of these is the way that PPT pictures the state’s failure to quash a juicy story about him as equivalent to leaving razors lying around a psychiatric ward. A crucial part of his legal argument pertains to pre-existing problems (bipolar, a trauma background, “personality-related vulnerabilities”), a recent suicide attempt, and a current restraint under the Mental Health Act. Given this background, lawyers acting on behalf of PPT argue that the state has responsibility for his welfare, and that curbing press freedom is a way of exercising this duty of care. Nothing other than stopping the media can save him from himself, apparently, not even hospitalization and appropriate psychiatric treatment.

Ultimately, the judge disagreed that PPT’s suicide was inevitable in the circumstances. Ironically, he did so on the grounds that the man was so miserable, he probably couldn’t see straight: “His prediction of his own future conduct is made in the context of depressive illness, hopelessness and catastrophic thinking … it is not a reliable basis for concluding that no future treatment or intervention could alter that risk.” This presents quite the dilemma for any litigants tempted along a similar path. Emphasize your intense mental disarray, and it will follow that you are an unreliable narrator of impending self-destruction. Play that aspect down, and it will no longer appear that the state has any enhanced duty to protect you. 

This catch-22 speaks to a tension lurking within PPT’s arguments, as the judge presumably noticed. The claimant wanted the court to believe he had sufficient mental capacity to anticipate what he was going to do later, should publication go ahead; yet he also seemed to think that suicide was almost certain, as if rationality had nothing to do with it. At times, in the judge’s retelling, PPT appeared to picture his own mind as completely on automatic, with no space for spontaneous reasoning to get a grip. Show the greyhound the moving rabbit, and it will automatically chase it. Show the celebrity the newspaper scandal, and he will automatically end his life.

A more mundane, less tortuous interpretation of what is really going on here beckons, though the judge avoids naming it. In a covert sort of way, isn’t PPT just threatening to kill himself, if publication were to go ahead? Turning to the world of children’s literature for a completely random example, isn’t this just a much more hyperbolic version of the Violet Elizabeth Bott gambit: “I’ll thcream and thcream ’till I’m thick”? I suppose you could interpret Violet as simply describing a dispassionate hunch about what is likely to happen to her body, should she fail to get her way with William, but it seems more apt to say she is making a threat.

When it comes to talking about our own futures, we are rarely just dispassionate forecasters of certain bodily movements, given such-and-such prior causes. We have agency; we plan; we execute. If I announce that I am going to a party, it is an expression of commitment to that project, not an educated guess. If I don’t end up attending, it is not that my prediction failed due to inadequate evidence; I just changed my mind. To think of humans as black boxes, mechanically producing outputs in response to earlier inputs, is an attitude you can only really take to other people (and even then, not for long). As soon as you start to think about what you yourself are going to do, ardent desires, fears, hopes, and so forth start to bear upon the question from the inside.

I assume that part of what lured PPT’s team into ignoring this basic observation is that suicide is so often treated as something that overcomes you, rather than something you actively do. It hasn’t always been this way. For as long as the Christian taboo against suicide was still strong, successive societies could frame the effort to end one’s life both as an intentional choice and a bad piece of personal judgment. To prevent someone doing it was a way of saving his body — and perhaps his soul too. But once we lost the confidence to criticize the act on those traditional grounds, the only remaining option for justifying intervention seemed to be the conclusion that suicide was really no choice at all. These days, we default to the idea that it is a desperate and irrational act, born of mental illness, picturing the urge to do it as an abnormal interloping presence in someone’s mind. Only occasionally will we allow that someone might attempt it for reasons that are not radically disordered — and in that case, there will be those that seamlessly move from trying to stop you, to offering to help finish the job. Assisted death services are a case in point.

This narrative, that a suicide is rarely a genuine choice, makes a lot of grieving relatives feel better, and I can see why; it is hard to accept that a loved one decided to leave you. And in many, perhaps most cases, the person concerned did not decide; suicides took place in extreme states of agitation, paranoia, or psychosis. But it is one thing to consider a particular case sympathetically, and acknowledge that it looks like the ordinary requirements for rational choice were absent there. It is quite another to present the seductive idea that some mental illness or condition generally “causes” suicide, with scant room for individual agency and varying circumstances in the backstory too.

Increasingly, we hear this sort of thing. Large-scale studies correlate autism, or bipolar disorder, or gender dysphoria, or whatever it is, with a significantly increased risk of suicide. On the basis of such studies, authorities who should know better talk as if the particular mental condition in question is highly likely to directly produce the act. Sufferers receive the message that they are unusually prone to self-harm; a thought which can itself produce frightening emotions, and so put the idea more forcefully and apparently inevitably into their heads. This is not supposed to be a complete explanation of any given suicide either, but it is a baleful possible influence too often ignored.

And another problem with glib causal explanations of suicidal tendencies is that they offer cover for manipulative creeps. They allow wrongdoers to pretend to the world, and even perhaps to themselves, that some undeserved psychic pathology is aggressing them, rather than, say, appropriate feelings of shame or guilt. They can tell themselves that, thanks to the mental illness that allegedly puts them in danger, they are owed sympathy and care from others rather than disapproval; perhaps even that they are victims too. Whether any of this applies to PPT remains to be seen. But if the newly incarcerated Russell Brand conveniently brings up his bipolar and ADHD diagnosis in the next few days, I won’t be at all surprised. There are more Jekylls around than you might think.

***

If you are in need of support, you can contact the Samaritans on 116 123, or visit their website. 

To galvanize the nation, Labour’s posable action figure Al Carns has made a video urging us all to “be ready for an emergency”, but he, too, is eerily silent on what exactly that means. The bathetic chasm between jumpy headlines and strangely repressed instructions — buy in a bit of bottled water and tinned food, write down a few phone numbers, order medication in good time — is also jarring. Should the National Grid fail, then so will every refrigeration unit, food production line, and water treatment plant in the country. The difference between dying of thirst immediately and doing so three days later seems somewhat academic; and the same goes for eking out small amounts of food and meds. Are we really supposed to be facing down the apocalypse with half a big shop each?

Some might prefer to take a leaf out of the grizzled North American handbook and get serious about survival. The internet is full of information for disaster preppers, as they are known, and bits of it already seem pertinent to British life. Start small by assembling what is known as a Get Home Bag, designed to help you bypass paralyzed transport systems during blackouts, and also for when you are stuck on Avanti. Next, graduate to a Bug Out Bag, useful for fleeing your house for 72 hours at short notice in order to go to a music festival. After that, though, it all gets complicated and expensive. The basic kit for civilizational collapse includes a renewable-powered generator, water filtration system, and waste disposal system; none of which is really practicable when you live in a small terraced house or flat. It is all slightly easier when you live on the prairie or in the desert, able to whip up a solar gravity shower or compostable toilet without needing planning permission first. 

Browsing websites for useful tips, it appears there are psychological pitfalls to avoid here as well as practical ones. A big one is not letting the whole prepping project take over your life; hard to do when the main motivator is cold sweat in the middle of night, and there is no upper limit to what counts as being adequately prepared. A different problem is when your partner is not quite as fixated on doomsday scenarios as you are. Some men online seem to long for global breakdown, just so they can justify all the money they have spent on methane-harvesting septic systems to their wives. 

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Resentment arrives from another direction in discussions about what the best attitude is to take to blindsided normies. Some imagine themselves as generously sharing their knowledge and resources during future disasters, but these tend to be in the minority. Having invested so much time and money in securing their own family’s future, most preppers insist no mercy will be shown to clueless panickers begging for shelter and spare tins of spam. They had so many chances to ready themselves for Armageddon, yet chose to go to Disneyland instead.

Take this line of thought only a little further, and you start picturing aggressive attempts by others to steal whatever it is you own. Indeed, the presumed covetousness of others puts a prepper of average sociability in a strange position: tempted to brag about the sheer scale of his root cellar on Facebook, while also being aware he might just as well be making an advert saying “free food here!”. The truly sagacious doomer would surely not bother to build or buy much himself, but simply keep a map of the most productive and least ferocious-looking local preppers handy for a rainy day.

For this sort of reason, most of what is loosely called “the prepper community” seems to spend a lot of time and money securing their set-ups from the predatory designs of fellow members. Alongside husbandry tips, their websites are also full of information about the best motion sensors and automatic weaponry to buy. The track from hobbyist to Hobbesian looks fairly short. One minute you are buying zucchini seeds, the next you are contemplating the ferocity of human nature and investing in camo and a crossbow.

When imported into Britain, such visions of rugged self-sufficiency look immediately comic: less John Rambo and more The Good Life. Faced with the prospect of intense competition for resources, plus the collapse of established order, there is not enough land here to avoid encountering hostile others altogether; and nor (thankfully) are we allowed to stockpile weaponry in preparation. If there had been a supply emergency in Surbiton, Margot and Jerry would presumably have cheerfully waltzed straight off with Tom and Barbara’s marrows.

Whatever the Government pretends, transplanted into our relatively small-scale, close-knit setting, the notion that a household could be “emergency ready” on its own is obviously fantastical. When it comes to national disasters, there can be no substitute for a shock-proofed state to manage the response. Slowly, the authorities do seem to be realizing this. Under Keir Starmer, Labour instigated a lot of programs in the name of increasing national “resilience”, though whether they work in practice remains to be seen. My own impression of key organizations such as the UK Resilience Academy and the Centre for Long-term Resilience suggests that far too many bureaucrats and effective altruists are leading the conversation, and not enough ex-military.

As the 2025 UK Government Resilience Action Plan correctly puts it, “building a truly resilient society requires a fundamental cultural shift”. The point applies as much to professional organizations as it does to individuals: lanyards and nice-sounding platitudes are not going to cut it in a genuinely dramatic crisis. But equally, we will need citizens with a strong sense of agency, who possess the skills and aptitudes helpful for negotiating energy- and screen-free zones. 

It is a shame, then, that so many of us are avoidant about leaving the house now, and horribly dependent on technology for things that we used to do ourselves; and that successive authorities have cheered this trend on. To take just one example: a society that prefers to deal with the obesity crisis by introducing highly complex international supply chains, rather than simply telling people to run about a bit, does not exactly inspire confidence that it will cope WTSHTF. 

There are accelerationist figures, both on Right and Left, who desire a world where our heads are always in clouds and vice versa. Goodbye, physical objects; hello, total tech dependence. The more we blindly go along with their superficially appealing program, the worse the shock of systemic failure is likely to be. As Thomas Hobbes once wrote, with his pen, human beings are “made fit for Society not by Nature, but by Education”. But do we want to educate people for the society where they have hoverboards and Meta glasses, or for the one where they contemplate eating their pets?

Until our politicians decide to prioritize a modicum of self-reliance, talk of emergency prep will continue to ring hollow. Even tinned goods are no use when nobody remembers how a can opener works. And if there really is limited time left before some amorphous entity attacks civilisation as we know it, we should probably use our remaining internet hours wisely, skip the Al Carns videos, and learn a few basic knots and self-defense moves instead.

As you may have already guessed, persevilience is a mashup of perseverance and resilience, “perhaps with a little bit of persistence and patience thrown in”. But our author repeatedly emphasizes that the confection is more than the sum of its parts. His friend Keir Starmer, for instance, possesses both perseverance and resilience, but as Labour prime minister “lacked sufficient reserves in the persevilience bank”. In contrast, Tony Blair had reserves in spades. Whether Andy Burnham is truly persevilient remains to be seen, but the signs during the leadership crisis were at least promising. Like a character in a video game, “Burnham’s persevilience simply overpowered Starmer’s resilience, no matter how hard he fought”.

Even at this early stage in the book, I had a few questions, and not just about how the friendship with Starmer was now going. One of these concerned whether readers were supposed to take any of this seriously, though it appears so: a couple of jokes are included, but most of the book’s content is delivered straight-faced. The publisher’s blurb, reproduced on Campbell’s personal website, even compares Persevilience to Francis Fukuyama’s seminal The End of History, trumpeting that it too “has the potential to enter the bloodstream of political conversation and, ultimately, help us better understand and thrive in the ever more challenging world around us”. (I know what you’re thinking — how very ambumptious — but that’s Alastair Campbell for you.)

My next burning philosophical question concerned what the attribute of persevilience really amounts to, given that our author keeps insisting it isn’t just perseverance plus resilience, plus a few semantic sprinkles. Anyone can take two familiar concepts, put them together, and make up a new name for the conjunction. You may have noticed that I just did. One could also observe that on his smash hit podcast The Rest is Politics, co-hosted with the intermittently prignorant Rory Stewart, Campbell is mostly hubristling and shrugnacious; while in the writing of his books, he tends more towards the mawkward. But is the discovery of persevilience any deeper than this?

To be fair, the former Labour spin doctor does have a stab at defining his big idea for the benefit of future dictionaries. Persevilience, he tells us, is “the ability of an individual, group or organization to turn any situation, setback or meaningful experience into a positive opportunity to grow, to advance and secure their core interests and beliefs”. “Positive”, “grow” and “advance” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The aim seems to be to connect the concept of persevilience firmly to Left-liberal values and role models — that is, to differentiate it from its suspiciously conservative-sounding conceptual relatives — and much of the rest of the text bears this interpretation out.

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Fittingly persevilient heroes offered up for contemplation include Campbell’s close friend, the magazine editor Lindsay Nicholson, who lost both her husband and young daughter to cancer; the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith; and Nelson Mandela in his Robben Island days (“he was persevilience in human form, and is now persevilience personified in historical form, for all time”). And whereas Campbell thinks perseverance and resilience are “words of drudge and struggle”, persevilience “is all about hope and progress”, requiring regular doses of optimism and joy.

If you focused only on these particular sections of the book, you might conclude that persevilience is distinguished from its more mundane ancestors by being aimed only at noble social causes, and thrillingly set to “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream. But here we hit a bump in the road; for after a lot of uplifting, air-punching rhetoric, Campbell suddenly admits that persevilience can be dedicated to nefarious ends too.

Through evidently gritted teeth, he states that sworn foes such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage — regularly excoriated on The Rest is Politics — also make the cut. Trump has survived scandals and shootings; Farage has weathered a car crash and a plane crash; both have achieved great political success. Campbell does not flinch from his unpleasant conclusion: “I must reluctantly accept that I cannot stop [persevilience] being applied to certain people just because I disagree with their politics or don’t like the cut of their jib”.

At this point, I longed to ask: but why must you accept this, Alastair? You have made this whole thing up, after all. Can’t you just make it refer to whatever you want? You don’t need to allow that there is, by your own lights, evil in persevilience (even if, as a matter of spelling, this is literally true). It’s your word!

Yet still our hero insists on facing the unwanted conclusion: “persevilience can be used for bad as well as good, wrong as well as right”. And with this admission, the book collapses; for its main selling point was clearly conceived as a guide to changing the world for the better, in a soggy, progressive sort of way. It wasn’t supposed to turn into The Art of the Deal halfway through.

In some ways, it seems absurd to be seriously analyzing this stuff. As the narrative meanders along, the combination of the author’s fierce commitment to his project and frequent repetition of the word “persevilience” becomes exponentially ridiculous and Partridge-like, at times reducing this reader to shoulder-shaking hysteria. How the man could type sentences like “Complacency is a killer of a persevilient mindset” without cracking up entirely, I do not know. Yet at the same time, the book illustrates an interesting fact about modern conceptions of virtuous characteristics, albeit inadvertently: namely, nobody knows whether they are supposed to be valuable as means or as ends.

In antiquity, aspects such as courage and temperance were self-evidently admirable; constituents of a flourishing life, by definition. In early Christianity, too, habits such as charity and prudence were not just the means of getting something from God; on the contrary, they were beautiful and holy in themselves. But as centuries passed, Western culture started to lose the idea that human characteristics could be admirable in this way, regardless of what they led to. Instead, behaviors and attitudes seemed to get their value from contributing to wider desirable ends, either socially or economically or both.

In Victorian times, for instance, industriousness, thrift, and sobriety were prized; each conceived of as likely leading to a more harmonious, economically productive whole. But since the relation between virtue and value was now extrinsic, it followed that you could sometimes use virtuous habits and attitudes for bad ends as well as for good. Industry, thrift, and sobriety could sometimes help evildoers reach their goals more quickly, just as they helped more saintly types.

In today’s liberal and post-Christian climate, neither approach to virtue sits particularly well. There is little agreement about wider social or economic ends: do we want growth, or degrowth? Assimilated social cohesion, or a riot of individuality? Without consensus on shared aims, there is zero chance of agreeing on a particular set of “virtuous” attitudes and behaviors that might count as a useful means — as a useful means to what, exactly? And at the same time, without a classical-style or religious metaphysics, it is hard to justify the lingering sense that some habits and behaviors are just more admirable than others, full stop.

As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, what we are left with is a set of outdated intuitions about the virtues, orphaned from the cultural traditions in which they found their original meaning. We can’t decide whether habits like perseverance and resilience are genuinely good in themselves, or whether they inherit their value (or not) from the social goals to which they are directed. And so it is that Campbell’s heart wants to construe persevilience as the preserve of deeply admirable heroes, while his head puzzledly concedes that arch-enemies can be persevilient too.

The lack of grounding is also apparent in his incredibly vague wording about what persevilience really is, and about what it can lead to — the finding of “meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction”, as he puts it at one point. As long as you can’t specify what these things are much more concretely, you leave open the awful possibility — presumably personally devastating to Campbell — that Donald Trump has meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction too.

On the plus side, this also means that the terrifying technocratic future Campbell enthusiastically conjures — a place where principals instruct their students about persevilience, and businesses do “persevilience audit[s]” — is unlikely. Surely even the civil service couldn’t operationalize something this chronically vague. Take my word for it: if you ever hear persevilience being talked about somewhere other than The Rest is Politics, it will be a sign that we are absolutely scrucked.

Badenoch is right to imply that the rise of the local beautician is remarkable. According to a report just out, beauty salons and shops now make up almost a third of leisure sites across the UK, with a particularly strong presence in provincial towns and villages. In the small place from which I now write, for instance — total population 11,251 at the last census — there are 11 beauty salons, 12 women’s hairdressers, three nail bars and two tanning studios.

The town in question is Montrose in Angus, which is situated on the weather-beaten North Sea coast, halfway between Aberdeen and Dundee. I grew up there, and knowing it as I do, the sheer number of aesthetics-related ventures initially seemed a bit baffling. The average Montrosian isn’t particularly high maintenance, and even veers towards the strictly functional; yet on the strength of the current offering, you’d predict Kardashian levels of feminine allure. Thanks to a busy port and a chemical manufacturing plant, the overall economy is relatively buoyant, but there’s significant deprivation here too. The south of the town has much higher economic inactivity than the national average. And yet there is apparently a positive craze for luxurious grooming, and not just for humans. Just as improbably, there are eight dog grooming businesses listed in the area too.

Though suspicion would be understandable, the companies in question don’t appear to be shells for dodgy financial transactions. They all have convincingly enthusiastic web presences, take digital payments, and have local owners, some of whose names I recognize from school. Then there are the shop names: puns are a big thing in Montrose commercial life, in a way that seems incompatible with fraudulent intentions. Take the hairdressers: could a business called “Hairborne”, “Doo or Dye”, “The Mane Place”, or “Eclips” really be a sinister criminal front? And what about a dog groomer called “For Fluff’s Sake”?

The explanation for the glamour explosion is probably much more mundane. Social media has amped up demand, making various before-and-after glow-ups and product placements go viral; and memetic trends ripple even faster through smaller, more tight-knit places. Once you have a customer, she is likely to keep coming back, since most treatments are usefully temporary in their effects. And it’s fun to feel pampered, and catch up on the gossip; the traditional joys of such places haven’t changed.

On the supply side, the lack of regulation makes it easy to provide more exotic cosmetic interventions as the market develops — basically, injecting various rigidifying substances into someone’s precious face, then telling them they look fabulous — though both Scottish and English governments are trying to iron this rather alarming issue out. You don’t need a massive amount of kit to get started, and you can offer appointments rather than walk-ins, making it easier to fit round family life. And the profit margins can be big.

It is also relevant to note what isn’t there anymore. Generally, the dominance of online shopping means that physical objects have melted away from the high street, and the cultivation of ephemeral moments is what we get instead. In Montrose, this has meant the demise of many a nostalgic retail temple, including John Menzies, where we used to buy our Smash Hits magazines and school stationery, and Woolworths, that treasure trove of pick ’n’ mix and cheap plastic tat. These days there are only the dollar shops left for such things, and they too look threatened. God knows where future schoolkids will do their shoplifting if this carries on.

So, as is the case everywhere, several premises on Montrose High Street lie empty; a depressing state of affairs for the widest and grandest commercial street in Scotland, built in the 12th century under King David I. Those businesses still in operation tend to focus on providing things that are not easy for the internet to replicate, which typically means offering the customer a lovely time.

A big commercial theme these days is known as “affordable luxury” or “little treat culture”: people distracting themselves from doom-laden rumination about the future by moderately splurging on high-end consumables in the present. In London, impecunious young people are consoling themselves about the housing market with spectacularly laminated croissants and single estate coffees, and Montrose’s entrepreneurs seem to have noticed the fad. Take a stroll around the town center here, and you’ll pass from ice cream parlor to handmade chocolate studio to vape shop to derelict building, all within a few disorienting strides.

On the upside, the demise of traditional brands seems to have cleared room for riotous self-expression, as independent sellers try their hand at wacky new ideas and silly names. Along with all the cosmetic stuff, there is a coffee shop run by a bona fide pop star, named after one of her own hits; a company that does readymade seafood and fish dishes, called “The Plaice”; an independent bookshop with a Narnia-style wardrobe entrance into the children’s reading area; and a New Age store full of skulls and pentagram paraphernalia. There is also something described by its owners as a takeout vinegar bar, and an indoor operation called “The Snuffle Spot”, offering “A Unique Sensory Experience for Dogs”.

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There is probably a heartwarming sitcom to be written about all this mad creativity, complete with imagined fierce and violent rivalries between tanning salons. In the real world, Montrose traders are helped by an admirably vigorous community organization called ProMo, dedicated to keeping them on their feet. But there is no doubt it faces an uphill battle. The Scottish government already offers substantial business rate relief to smaller companies, but it is the rent and utility bills shopkeepers complain about, combined with lessening foot traffic and a lack of decent parking. Down South, Healey say he plans to support beauticians and other sole traders by raising business rate thresholds; but assuming that rents go up after business rates reduce, it probably won’t make a big difference overall.

The sad truth is that the fate of high streets across the British Isles is now ineluctably tied to whatever the internet is teaching us to covet; and if it can do it cheaper and faster than real shops, it will. For the moment, the beauticians and hairdressers are a surging force, and you can’t possibly blame entrepreneurial types for capitalizing on the trend. Indeed, we should be grateful, given the dismal alternative. At least people still talk to each other in salons, with no screens involved. But there are still questions to be asked about current beauty obsessions, and the dopamine-chasing culture in which they are embedded, given that so many of us seem to be obsessed with shallow nonsense, forgotten almost as soon as it ends.

Never mind the effects on your bank balance; what about the effects on your mind, compulsively anesthetizing yourself from life’s minor blows by fetishizing a facial massage or a frozen yogurt? It is common practice for such experiences to be described as part of “wellness”, but the whole point of luxury is that it is supposed to be magnificently superfluous to daily living, and something you could easily survive without. The occasional presence of a treat in your life is supposed to make you unreasonably happy. It is not just there to drown out the pain, or nudge you toward some pedestrian baseline of health. Though luxury is now badged by advertisers as an essential act of self-care, in fact it cannot be both: chasing unusual highs is not the same thing as avoiding habitual lows.

There is also a lot of rubbish talked about the value of experiences, whether commercially produced or otherwise: vivid little portions of remembered time, with a beginning, middle and end. You are supposed to always prefer good experiences to bad ones, even if you might have learned something new from the latter. You are supposed to have a certain number of canonical good experiences before you die, and the web is full of off-the-peg bucket lists to help. Sometimes there is even a vague suggestion of moral superiority, as if having experiences were an environmentally friendly alternative to owning possessions. I have misgivings about all of that. Still: if you insist on chasing your next experiential high, may I recommend taking a train to Montrose High Street — not necessarily for what it can sell you, but for all the fun it offers you for free.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard about the location: first, because national school protest waves always seem to start off in the Parisian suburbs, and second, because in the Nineties, I spent a year as a language assistant at a lycée nearby. Marcelin Berthelot in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés was, and still is, a feeder institution for the top universities, known collectively as the “grands écoles”. The high-achieving students there were extremely diligent, reserved, and polite, except during a countrywide protest in the Spring term, when they suddenly started running up and down the corridors breaking classroom windows. Footage from earlier this month shows armed police trying to deal with teens amassing in front of my old workplace. Plus ça change and all that.

Further back in 1990, as a teen myself on a gap year, I was supposed to be attending a Strasbourg lyćee during another massive national round of demonstrations; though the fact I can’t remember it is probably due to the fact I spent most of my time bunking off, wandering around the city center, smoking and shivering and attempting to look like Betty Blue. (For some reason I also can’t recall, I didn’t have a coat.) By then, sometimes violent protests of lycéens had been a feature of the French landscape for at least 20 years, and university demonstrations for longer than that. The latter feature in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, set in 1848, where the hero Frederic asks a stranger why groups of students are facing off with policemen: “I haven’t the least idea,” replied the other, “nor have they, for that matter! ‘Tis their fashion just now! What a good joke!”

So despite Trump’s latest in-depth analysis, there is a lot more happening here than another simple tale of mass migration gone wrong. A quarter of public schools are now involved, and — though French law strictly forbids data collection on race or ethnicity — press footage of the crowds show white faces very much to the fore. In truth, a familiar script is being rehearsed, albeit with a somewhat more diverse and volatile cast than in former productions. And certain narrative elements remain indispensable.

First, you need an impeccably conscientious pretext, as if some swotty committee were running protest HQ — which in some sense they are, since French lycées are unionized. This year, the justification for direct action is a lack of teachers and crumbling facilities; in 1990, it was a lack of adequate security and resources; in 1998, it was overcrowded classrooms; and in 2005, it was proposed reforms to the baccalauréat exam. One tries to imagine British school kids self-organizing over such worthy matters, as opposed to joining riots initiated by others. One fails.

Next, you need resistance to spread, something that happens a lot faster now with the help of the smartphone. You also need a classically over-the-top police response early on, preferably involving riot shields, tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon, so that the kids can more easily imagine themselves as heroes and keep going. Turmoil must ripple outwards through already tense banlieues and Northern cities, where immigration and deprivation are high and police skirmishes common. The ensuing aggression by opportunistic casseurs will introduce a note of extremity and chaos, nicely furnishing Right-wing headlines, which will in turn be recycled as galvanizing proof you are on the spiritually correct track.

As media attention arrives, some rich white boys from fancy lycées will become confident spokesmen for the movement, hoovering up attention while talking grandly of equality and fraternity with minorities. And, as with the avuncular presence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leader of socialist party France Unbowed — there must be old socialists and communists hovering around for the photo ops, praying that working-class revolt will soon be sparked. During the fabled student protests of May 1968, still glorified by ancient hippies today, what started as university sit-ins culminated in 10 million workers walking out on strike, and an attempt to set the Paris Stock Exchange on fire.

Naturally, along with these hackneyed elements, there is also some youthful sincerity and idealism. French student movements often begin with a genuine grievance, for the state is massive, sclerotic, and haughtily self-satisfied, often resulting in frustrating indifference to young people’s interests. In 1968, universities were overcrowded, impersonal, dilapidated places, and the original uprising at Nanterre made reasonable demands. In 2026, the young people also have a point: demoralized teachers are leaving the public school system in droves; classes are overcrowded; 56% of schools were built before 1970, and many are now unfit for purpose. A senate report from before the crisis estimated that renovating them adequately would require 1.5 billion euros every year til 2050. Of course, thanks to recent arson and vandalism, the bill will now be a lot bigger, but adolescent minds lost in anarchic ecstasy are unlikely to join the dots.

Conscious reasoning aside, there are deeper currents too. As an interested Francophone, over the years I have mused about what makes les Français so prone to radical acts. Along with a lot of others, I’ve concluded that the national tendency to sentimentality has something to do with it. As Edmund Burke told France, the nation has been “long misled” by “high and romantic sentiments”; and many others have pointed out the connection between revolutionary carnage and the romantic rejection of austere Enlightenment ideals. In the run up to the blood-soaked 1790s, Diderot was calling for a tear-soaked theater, with plays that would liberate tender feelings after years of repressed neoclassical fare. Greuze was painting queasy pictures of little girls mourning dead birds. Rousseau was emoting all over the page and urging others to do likewise. Love was supposed to undo oppressive social hierarchies; self-love, romantic love, love for one’s fellow man. Shortly afterwards, the impossible imperative to lovingly embrace millions of unknown fellow citizens would produce quite a lot of hatred in practice. Who knew?

But even after all that, the appeal of transforming sentiment into something immensely lofty lingered. It is still there in all of those twinkly eyed French films featuring unlikely romantic couplings from across the tracks; or the ones that present emotionally unhinged women as romantic leads (like that frankly bonkers arsonist Betty Blue, in fact). It’s also evident in the camp delivery of French television presenters, always chasing “des petit moments d’émotion” for their audiences, and sometimes even crying uncontrollably on screen. And it is also present in the inherited mythology of school protests, as generation after generation pretend to themselves that sowing some civic chaos is an expression of solidarity and love.

The kids presumably have read their history; even May 1968 was mostly over by June. They know they are unlikely to gain much power collectively, though a few will become media personalities. There is no long-term plan of engagement here, nor genuinely revolutionary intent. They are mostly doing an enjoyable reenactment of the country’s greatest hits, but with the safety catch firmly on. Though there have been some horrible incidents — a hand blown off and a jaw fractured by police — with the sheer numbers of people involved, personal chances of self-destruction are slim.

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Thankfully, although there are plenty of protests in the UK, they are not a crucial part of our national mythology. Equally, despite its uptight reputation, British culture still lacks the precise formality and impersonality of the French version, to which all that sentimental excitability seems to be a reaction. Even now, there are lots of unspoken rules: you must say “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” when you enter a place; you must not use “tu” for the wrong people; you must not eat on public transport; you should not hug strangers but only kiss them (a norm which to awkward English people seems completely the wrong way round). As a clueless 20-something in Saint-Maur, I once phoned up the local council about an administrative matter, and made the mistake of asking for a particular person without prefixing her name with Madame. Three decades later, I can still hear the stinging rebuke.

So I suspect that in France, protest stands to mannered formality as adultery stands to marriage: both are time-honored ways of letting off some steam. Had the country rarely seen mass direct action from the young like this, it would be a lot more shocking; but actually, it is almost touching in its conservative recreation of the past.

Sooner or later, politicians will promise a tiny bit more money for school improvement; the disorder will peter out, and kids will troop back to class. The taxpayer will foot the bill for cleaning up, and immigrants will do most of the work. Rich boys from nice parts of Paris will move on to grands écoles like their parents before them; and, like their parents before them, they will now have a war story to tell. Deprived suburbs will revert to being places where violence against authorities doesn’t get a particularly noble framing. As Thierry Garnier might have said with a Gallic shrug: bof.

Though not much is known about the second Lady Fiennes other than that she is a horse trainer, it sounds as if she rivals Prince Harry in the paranoia department. She is said to be convinced that King Charles hates her husband, despite his being an enthusiastic patron of Fiennes’s projects for years. She is also alleged to have told friends that Queen Camilla arranged for helicopters to fly over the couple’s property in order to annoy them. Her estranged son is now crowdfunding for a legal review of Fiennes’ situation, and other loved ones are expressing grave concern.

With the rise of dementia and the social care crisis so much in the news, it’s easy to see why this story has hit a nerve, though more difficult to decide whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. At the heart of the tale, there’s a titanic Lear-like figure, as well as a supposed Lady Macbeth. There are several identity changes, and not just for Fiennes. At least one intrepid family member smuggled herself into his residence under an assumed name, and a famous thespian relative also secretly visited (the one who starred in the film Shakespeare in Love, in fact). Fellow national treasures Joanna Lumley and Monty Don are said to be up in arms. A heartwarming screenplay is writing itself, to culminate in a thrilling care home breakout orchestrated by Bear Grylls.

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But despite the certainty with which some are viewing the situation, alternative interpretations are available. The police say there has been no illegality in Millington-Cotes’ actions, and the Office for the Public Guardian has repeatedly refused to intervene. Her husband has given her lasting power of attorney, a common enough practice in later life, and it may well be that she is sincerely acting in the perception of his best interests. Indeed, she may even be following his instructions. At one point, Fiennes apparently told a safeguarding team he did not wish to see friends or relatives. Having been so obsessed with physical accomplishment in youth and middle age, it doesn’t seem impossible he might want to spend his last years hidden from view.

Fiennes was 61 when he married Millington-Cotes, and already slowing down a bit. By then he had given up on polar exploration and was confining himself to smaller projects — like climbing Everest, and tackling the North face of the Eiger from scratch. But his real passion was always for conquering frozen wastes larger than Europe. His autobiography, published in 2007, should be required reading for anyone who thinks they probably shouldn’t go to the gym today because they have a small twinge in their knee. Gangrene, blindness, kidney stones, and crotch rot are just some of the delights Fiennes stoically endured, during months of shouldering heavy sledges across treacherous ice floes.

At one point, he writes of removing his own frostbitten fingers with a fretsaw, turning each finger “around several times to cut it from different sides, like sawing a log”. Later in the book, he declares that “a life without the prospect of any physical challenge would be no life at all”. Here it is clear that he would not include laboriously tying one’s shoelaces, or climbing the stairs out of breath.

For those who knew the earlier version of him, so magnificently self-propelling and imperious, the notion of his confinement now must appear obscene. In a quest to indict Millington-Cotes, one outraged friend has seen fit to circulate footage of Fiennes shuffling slowly along with a wheeled walking aid; as cruel an action as anything his wife is said to have done to the man. The accompanying voice in the video is seemingly hers, and sounds unnervingly brisk and infantilizing; but still no more so than the voices of thousands of other carers across the country, addressing once vital adults as if they were naughty children. The whole situation is sad and unnecessary and perhaps even actively unpleasant, but none of this means it is public business.

At the heart of the furor is a confusing tendency to think of Fiennes as sempiternally granite-like and exceptionally vulnerable, both at the same time. Indeed it is fascinating to see how quickly the idea that he may have been heavily influenced by his wife in various matters — once again, a common enough occurrence in marriages, for better or worse — has translated into an image of him being heinously coerced. Charles Moore now even wonders whether the explorer’s surprising conversion in 2016 to supporting a ban on fox-hunting was a “ventriloquised” sham, controlled by his wife behind the scenes. Mere mortals are henpecked by their spouses, and nobody raises an eyebrow; but it is apparently easier to think that Fiennes has been deprived of free will completely than to think he might have been swayed by his wife.

In truth, no outsider can really tell what is going on, either in Fiennes’ marriage or in his mind now. If real evidence of abuse does arrive, that will be a different matter; but as yet, no compelling arguments for more state involvement have been aired. It is not even clear whether Fiennes has been judged to have lost mental capacity; and even if so, it is not obvious his friends would do a better job than his wife in making decisions for him. The Mental Capacity Act code of practice stresses that information about a person’s “past and present wishes and feelings” should be central to an assessment of best interests; and we still don’t know whether he ultimately wanted to be left alone or not. Many of those objecting to his current position say he did not, and would not; but equally, he might have confided different feelings to his wife. People can be complex like that.

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And we shouldn’t forget that, in Fiennes’ professional life, he spent years being radically alone. Arguably, no man has ever been more alone, unless you count Captain Scott dying in his tent. During particularly trying moments, Fiennes wrote that he would imagine his loved ones “right behind me, helping to suppress the ever-lurking urge to put a stop to the pain and the cold by giving up”. It seemed to work. For all we know, that is what he is imagining now. Perhaps he doesn’t think he needs the real people there too. Maybe — as with some of his expeditions —more companions would only mean more arguments about navigation.

Yet another reason for the fascination with Fiennes’ case may be selfish: most of us fear getting old and dependent, having to relinquish agency and let others take control. The prospect of loneliness is also frightening, knowing that many familiar faces are likely to disappear. In every British town or city, right now, there are elderly people sequestered away, feeling miserable and forgotten, and charities trying to reach them, in dire need of volunteers. There’s something strange about ignoring this fact, while fretting excessively about the unusually dramatic situation of a much more glamorous man — and especially when, for all we know, he might just be walking back out onto the ice.

Since the dramatic resignation of researcher Jacob Coxon last week, warnings about the potential for devious agents to run amok have multiplied. His former boss at Anthropic, Dario Amodei, apparently agrees with Coxon, reporting that his company’s models are on the verge of “recursive self-improvement”, which is not as positive as that may initially sound. He says that providers now need to settle on internal regulation in order to save humanity. Rivals Sam Altman and Elon Musk are thought to be signed up too.

But at the same time, a more skeptical take is emerging: that the whole worry about systematic misalignment is a psyop. For it turns out that another thing the most prominent AI companies have in common is background links to so-called Effective Altruism: an astronomically well-funded rationalist ideology that aims to turn ethics into a kind of nerdy accounting system. And its adherents don’t mind occasionally cooking the books, provided the sums come right in the end.

Many members of this loose society are obsessed with AI safety. They judge themselves uniquely able to see off future disasters, thanks to their high IQs and advanced moral reasoning powers, and have inserted themselves into the heart of the tech business accordingly. They are also signed up to a broadly utilitarian code which allows that the odd lie or act of dissembling may be permitted for the greater good — a goal which may include the boosting of their own fortunes as well. Remember, they are saving the world here; so how could more power and money be bad? 

Ongoing links to the ideology are clearest in the case of Anthropic, which has received millions from prominent billionaire exponents Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn, as well as the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried. Musk’s companies are not financially implicated, but he has said in the past that EA co-founder William MacAskill’s book is a “close match for my philosophy”. Early on in its existence, OpenAI also received investment from Moskovitz, but since then, CEO Altman has been more critical of the “incredibly flawed movement” that exhibits “weird emergent behavior”. In 2023, he was temporarily ousted by EA members on his own board.

Though clearly no longer a fan, Altman’s toneless talk of emergent properties still fits the EA and rationalist playbooks, which treat humans as imperfect machines, and machines as superior versions of humans. Whereas our minds are a mess of spaghetti code, unreliable heuristics, and blind spots, AI contains the promise of clean architecture, and the sort of angel-tier rationality of which a geeky programmer can only dream. But this also makes AI more terrifying; one day, it might use its immense cognitive power to work towards ends orthogonal to ours. Awestruck left-brainers are therefore donning superhero capes to help the robots bring about utopia, or at least prevent Armageddon.

The psyop theory about Coxon and Amodei’s interventions has it that some global hysteria might be useful to the fighters out there on what they like to call “the frontier”, whether or not it is strictly calibrated to the present situation. For even if there is currently no immediate threat of a pitiless superintelligence, the panic might motivate tighter safeguards that avert one in future. And coincidentally, it might also help Anthropic, giving it lucrative public visibility in advance of its forthcoming IPO.  

But to be fair to the doomer programmers, their disembodied colleagues do seem to be having trouble anticipating the vast number of unspoken ethical conventions humans take for granted. Worrying examples abound, but a recent OpenAI report about AI crimes and misdemeanors gives a fairly mundane one. An agent fulfilled its human handler’s instruction to provide a citation for something by uploading its own report to the web then citing it. Now imagine that it tries to bring about world peace by nuking us all first.

Still: if you are newcomer to all this, you might wonder why we should prioritize apocalyptic scenarios rather than more realistic ones. Aren’t the most pressing concerns the possibility of mass unemployment, literacy loss, or even just an internet filled with dodgy citations? The official Effective Altruist answer is that morality requires you to consider available actions, and choose the one with the highest expected value, weighted by probability. (One EA think tank helpfully provides spreadsheets to help with philanthropic calculus.) Assuming you also judge the negative value of human extinction as absolutely massive, its small probability becomes less important. Averting even an unlikely disaster remains the most important thing.

Some onlookers don’t fully grasp the utilitarian mindset. “If you really believed AI was going to kill us all why would you participate?” was a common question to Amodei this week. But this underestimates the nerveless self-confidence, and the way proponents tie moral responsibility to possible outcomes. Some EA fans truly believe that if they were not involved in the industry, the outcome for humanity would be so much worse. In such a mind, every day is a disaster movie and you are Bruce Willis.

But despite its pretensions to objectivity, the EA approach is fraught with predictive uncertainty, often accompanied by a comical failure to correctly anticipate what will happen next. One good example is how the garrulous, earnest tendencies of exponents to openly thrash out every idealistic talking point on message boards or podcasts has come back to haunt them, now they have power and determined critics. Another is Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of AI accelerationism this week, a childishly oppositional response to the earlier badging of AI safety as a progressive cause by Amodei and various Democratic politicians. Ironically, if we are indeed now hurtling extra-fast towards enslavement by invisible beings with American accents rather than Chinese ones, we may have the Effective Altruists to thank.

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And just as there are problems gauging unintended consequences, there is also —  as you might expect from messy, spaghetti-coded human brains like ours — disagreement about what counts as value, including how to rank competing ones. Yet some optimistic devotees are convinced this could all be ironed out with better information and more consistent logic. Prominent EA-adjacent doomer Nate Soares recently predicted that under ideal epistemic conditions, humans would arrive at a shared ethical framework: “I don’t think that humans would tend to converge on whether chocolate or vanilla is the better ice cream. I do think there’s a decent chance most humans would converge on, I eat vanilla, you eat chocolate.”

The optimism is almost touching. It seems some rationalist types really do believe that if you took a human brain from any age or culture, and gave it enhanced access to enough facts, it would arrive at a single set of values. Even more ridiculously, they believe it would arrive at the set of hyper-liberal values enacted by coders in Silicon Valley. Soares himself has been in the news this week for apparently participating in “consensual non-consensual” orgies with the cerebral OnlyFans star Aella. Perhaps he thinks that, under ideal epistemic conditions, 17th-century Puritans would have been fine with that too.

And this brings us to the main problem with trying to align robots with humans. Align them with what, exactly? All the grandiose talk of inscribing “human” values into machines distracts us from considering which precise ones they mean. Embodied, finite mortals radically disagree with one another about what counts as virtue and vice. And even when they do agree, there are plenty who will intentionally transgress.

Indeed, it is tempting to assume that all the intense energy devoted to dramatic eschatological themes in AI research is a way of escaping the perpetual cacophony about more everyday issues; can’t we all admit, at least, that wiping out humanity would be bad? Actually though, you can find several philosophers arguing that there would be nothing wrong with that outcome, as long as it was done peacefully. Let’s hope no superintelligent agent comes across their journal articles anytime soon.

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Obviously, the degree of ethical diversity across time and space presents a practical challenge for developers, trying to instruct software how to behave for a global market. Some, apparently like Soares, will end up defaulting to the rules of their own tribe — or perhaps those of their share-holders. Others may worry about lack of firm ground, and long for a more objective means of dealing with dilemmas. 

And at this point, who better to turn to than a level-headed, emotion-free confidant? As AI gets more sophisticated, we should expect some humans — and perhaps especially the type of human attracted to the coding business — to outsource complex ethical decision-making. Don’t just take my word for it: listen to Nick Bostrom, one of the founding fathers of Effective Altruism. In 2003, he wrote that “questions about ethics, in so far as they have correct answers that can be arrived at by reasoning and weighting up of evidence, could be more accurately answered by a superintelligence than by humans”. 

And therein lies a fatal tension running throughout much of the Effective Altruist doctrine, regardless of whether its advocates get the future right or wrong. On the one hand, they want you to fear that AI might kill you. On the other, they simultaneously suspect that AI knows best. With such a deferential attitude, the eventual outcome is surely perfect alignment between man and machine; but not for the reasons you might think.

The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon gratefully welcomes Sink’s nubile proportions and angelic face as proof that the advertising industry is healing, contrasting it with a 2023 Calvin Klein underwear campaign featuring rather more female body fat and facial hair. Meanwhile, over at the Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas treats Sink’s gyrations on camera — about which he is extremely enthusiastic — as an effective rewilding of male sexual urges after years of attempted domestication. Deliberately inclusive commercial campaigns such as Dove’s, he writes, have pointlessly tried to make men yearn for “women who are older, or fatter, or wrinklier – or black or brown and so on”. But in fact, Thomas insists, finding “young, slender, fair-skinned women” a turn-on is natural for all ages and cultures, and perhaps even hard-wired.

Leaving aside the questionable theory of human sexuality — only slightly mitigated by defining “fair-skinned” as “relatively pale” — Thomas’s argument misunderstands the point of the fashion and beauty businesses. This is not to give men erections, but to get women to buy things. That these two goals are distinct is obvious from the couturier’s catwalk, where dour, hollow-eyed skeletons loiter palely in puffed sleeves and moon boots and so forth, inducing chilly bafflement in straight male onlookers. Some companies promise hotness to customers, and others conjure up images of wealth or worthy politics, but in every case the aim is to sell clothes.

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Even at the height of wokery, advertising was only ever interested in market segmentation, running provocative Mother’s Day ads featuring trans people and racy campaigns with traditional smokebombs at the same time. So the idea that the Sink commercial heralds some sensible new dawn here is daft.  Admittedly, there has been a movement to restructure sexual desire in a more inclusive direction; Thomas is right about that. But it comes — of course — from wildly idealistic academia, not hard-headed commerce.

The idea that there is something potentially oppressive about erotic urges goes back to the aughts. A new kind of missionary position was introduced in the academy: treating orgasms as a good to be distributed fairly, bestowed on conventionally attractive and unattractive people alike. In the 2009 article that kicked things off, Intimate Discrimination, Columbia law professor Elizabeth Emens asked us all to model our intimate partner choices on disability law. People in search of sex or romance should, as a matter of social justice, ask themselves what they think the “essential function” of a partner is, then assess whether non-standard bodies and faces might unexpectedly fulfill that function. She also suggested that those entering the dating pool should consider making “reasonable accommodations” to help otherwise disadvantaged applicants hit the jackpot: “adjustments to one’s home, social activities, or a move to a different building or neighborhood”, so that “a particular disability is less disabling, or another’s race less challenging”.

I don’t know about you, but when I reflect on the essentials in any prospective partner of mine, being able to fancy them without having to move house first is definitely high up on the list. Thankfully, other authors frame the moral improvement of one’s libido as less onerous: a bit like appreciating mushrooms for the first time, after experimenting with different recipes and eating them repeatedly. Strangely unexplored is how the human equivalents of mushrooms feel in this analogy, being sampled experimentally by an initially repulsed lover so that she can get used to that kind of thing — and all in the name of the lover becoming a better person.

But then again, you might ask, if regime change among the appetites is possible, why can’t conventionally unattractive people just alter their own desires, and learn to get a thrill out of counting as charitable objects for patronizing others? Indeed, why can’t they skip all the dating agony altogether, and simply train themselves to stop caring about getting laid? This is one of many confusing features in the discourse around intimate discrimination. Only some discriminations demand moral enhancement, but it is not very clear why.

Same-sex desires are usually treated as unimprovable, and anything else is the dreaded “conversion therapy” — yet it is fine to critique heterosexuals for being too picky. Getting the hots only for people who are the same color as you is acceptable if you belong to a minority, but not if you are white. And though white people should fancy some people from other ethnicities, they must not like any one ethnicity excessively; for that is racial fetishism, which is bad too. It is tempting to conclude that the real game here is to parrot fashionable liberal mores in a new academic setting, without any underlying coherent theory of what makes sexual encounters valuable overall.

One way to approach this muddle is to inquire what is less than ideal about being a fetishist, full stop. If you are one, the pattern of your sexual attention is childishly narrow, directed toward one or two characteristics in a lover and not much else. Huge swathes of information — the precise interplay of their physical features, their character and sense of humor, competences and life history — are rendered irrelevant as far as lust is concerned.

And that, in fact, is also what seems a bit weird about the depersonalized, horizon-focused attitude recommended by the new sex reformers. Ideally, you are supposed to form a carnally approving attitude towards a set of broad-brush physical characteristics, abstractly conceived. Yet this seems to pull away from focused engagement upon the individual’s specialness. In short, the reformers want you to relate to your prospective lovers as generic types; and they want your prospective lovers not to mind.

Some will doubtless object that this is just the nature of (male?) sexual attention: it objectifies a person, turning them into a collection of arousing bits and pieces, amounting to an ultimately swappable whole. I disagree. For most people — though obviously not all, because there are always weirdos — excitement towards a current lover would be killed stone dead, were they to be told that in fact she had been exchanged with an identical twin. Personality and history play into sexual desire, because sex is often a crucial step toward building a lasting relationship with someone, or even a whole life with them. It is that aspect which makes the fact some people can’t access sex so personally unfortunate. Despite its typical rep these days, the joy of sexual intimacy is not just a kind of temporary sugar rush, to be rationed out equally among consumers, but involves the forging of meaningful connections with particular people. That it doesn’t always go this way is beside the point.

In any case, it isn’t healthy for anybody to view their sexual self entirely generically; to objectify the person looking back in the mirror, and reduce its worth to that of slenderness, blondeness, fatness, wrinkles, or whatever. And for that reason, I really like the existence of advertisements and other representations here and there, showing women (and men) in different dimensions. Though unlikely ever to take over the visual landscape, they act as a refreshing counterpoint to mainstream narratives.

For instance, the Dove campaigns that Thomas mocks have been fantastic for encouraging every woman to enjoy her own physical uniqueness — or at least, not to automatically deprecate it, when faced with the vision of a toothsome 20-something dancing around in her pants. When I see women on social media, unselfconsciously parading body fat or body hair or wrinkles, I am impressed. They seem to have managed to escape a truly suffocating paradigm of female perfection that can literally ruin lives.

The primitive logic of a Calvin Klein jeans advert says: men will lust after this delicious nymph; and women will buy the jeans, hoping to resemble the nymph and get the power and status associated with male desire. Adverts that showcase realistic body shapes and faces aren’t instructing men to lust after them too; they are removing male preferences from the conversation altogether. Countercultural ads have little to do with male desire at all, except to remind women not to let it get them down. The soul selects her own society, as Emily Dickinson definitely did say — and impossible sexual ideals don’t always have to be a part of it.

To obtain the prize that helped him lose his scruples, Plato’s shepherd had to descend into a chasm, enter a hollow bronze horse through a small door, then remove the ring from the finger of a corpse. Students today just have to ask Claude. AI agents can create a literature review from scratch; fabricate data sets; write computer code or solve equations. They can even check exam answers in real time. Lecturers are apparently powerless to detect the malfeasance. Those students who find the inner strength to avoid such shortcuts are watching peers sail ahead of them in the rankings, effort-free.

This makes cheating a particular problem in aggressively competitive elite universities. Writing in The Atlantic, behavioral scientist John Paul Rollert reports that a third of Harvard students now admit to using AI illicitly. But it is also a growing problem in the academy as a whole. An estimated 22% of UK-based students used it to cheat in 2023/24, and the numbers have surely increased since then. Rollert worries that we are creating a generation with “a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules, and an assumption that a spirit of integrity… is the reserve of suckers and wimps”. Though there is some truth in this, it all sounds a bit too Patrick Bateman for the average situation. Most young cheats are just following the crowd, and aren’t gaining a knack for anything at all.

The classic trickster archetype has always been glamorously countercultural. Plato’s shepherd seems ingenious and daring, despite his murderous desires. But AI doesn’t even give us that small consolation. It spawns impressive-looking symbols and sentences at the click of a mouse, and the user can’t take any credit. He doesn’t even need to understand what he is passing off as his own. 

Indeed, rather than exemplifying bracing tough-mindedness, I suspect that the typical student cheat feels swamped and powerless in the face of incomprehensible demands from teachers, and doesn’t know what else to do. As British universities continue to hoover up young people with lower A-level grades in order to pocket their fees, I would bet that some baffled young souls are moving from using AI as a search engine (harmless) to actively creating content (bad) without even properly noticing the switch. 

Meanwhile, more deliberate types seem to be reasoning: if everyone else is using it, why shouldn’t I? And by the way: “everybody else” includes lecturers now. At King’s College London, using AI to produce student feedback is officially sanctioned. And at Cambridge, the main objection to using it for marking is that the tech is “not yet good enough”, rather than because human judgment and communication should be sacred. In this lax context, there are bound to be academics, faced with large numbers of scripts to process in a short time, who outsource the whole thing. Robot will ruthlessly assess robot, while sentient minds gratefully retire from the scene.

When everyone is cheating a system, the system collapses; or so another philosopher assumed, writing centuries after Plato. You should not lie or make false promises, Immanuel Kant told his students at the University of Königsberg, because if everyone did so, it would hollow out the point of truth-telling and promise-keeping: nobody would be believed or trusted about anything. Kant thought that moral principles like this could be extracted from the demands of rationality alone, though it was never very clear what was so irrational about a small number of deceivers free-riding off the basic honesty of the masses for personal gain. It might seem that student cheating presents a more compelling case than breaking promises. As it becomes close to a norm, it appears to edge the whole academic sector towards irrational systemic collapse.

Minus the Kantian trappings, this seems to be the most common form of objection to normalizing malfeasance. The main point of a modern university is to produce particularly knowledgeable, insightful people. When that sort of person is no longer being made, because robots are doing the hard yards instead, universities become redundant. For managers and teachers to tolerate AI-enhanced deception is therefore a catastrophically self-sabotaging act. 

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But reasonable as this objection initially sounds, I’m starting to feel a bit skeptical about the implied mission statement. If fostering cognitive excellence and producing clever people really was the main point of universities, wouldn’t the sector at least occasionally act like that was true? Instead, everywhere you look there are derogations from the presumed cause. From falling admission standards to rampant grade inflation, the impression is of a system focused on the superficial appearance of high standards, but unbothered about actually producing them. Rival concerns keep getting in the way.

Consider assessment itself. In-person exams are now mostly a thing of the past, having been substituted with online tasks — which of course make AI cheating much easier. The removal is said to benefit minorities, anxious people who hate exams, and those who have to fit university work round a job or health concerns. Few seem interested in the intellectual wins or losses per se. What skills and ways of thinking go unjudged and neglected once assessment is released from the old limits of time and space? Were they ever worth having, or not?

Or take the tyranny of specifying “learning outcomes” for every undergraduate module, and having to robotically match assessment and feedback to those outcomes. Originally mandated in the Nineties, this was always a terrible fit for the humanities, forcing teachers to treat free-ranging disciplines like English Literature or Philosophy as if their main contributions involved a core set of memorizable axioms or scientific techniques. Learning outcomes were not imposed because they produced more able students and brilliant thoughts, but for the purposes of “transparency” and “standardization” across the sector. In practice, they created mountains of bureaucracy, and made teaching a lot more dull.

Generally, it seems that wherever some other value — accessibility, cost-cutting, fairness, or whatever — comes into conflict with the goal of encouraging unusually bright people to have stonkingly good ideas, the latter is abandoned. And if that’s right, then the claim that an epidemic of cheating threatens the rationale of the academy doesn’t fly. If the main point these days is simply to give as many young people as possible a degree qualification, then perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly how they came by one. Or if the aim is “quality assurance”, so that all degrees in a given subject must be of the same standard, then why not simply pay for Claude for all? 

To this, it will perhaps be objected that there is a much more obvious role for universities that is threatened by unbridled cheating: namely, readying young people for the jobs market. But even here, as AI wrings the life out of formerly demanding career paths, it is starting to matter less whether entrants can memorize complex material, think critically, or make perceptive inferences. If this is the best defense of honest toil that academic institutions can muster, they look vulnerable indeed.

Hegel famously complained of Kant’s ethics that abstract rationality cannot, in fact, produce a satisfying morality; it can only comment on means, not ends. There is nothing irrational about encouraging widespread lying and promise-breaking, if you don’t care about the shoring up of social trust. Equally, there is nothing self-defeating about turning a blind eye to cheating, assuming that the real goals of the institution are unaffected either way. To see off the incoming invisible academic crime wave, we will have to learn to talk without embarrassment about the intrinsic value of human erudition, and how universities, uniquely, can produce it; or else watch helplessly as the kingdom is conquered, not by shepherds but by the bots.

At the same time, we are told that young people these days live in thrift shops and antique stores at the weekend, and adore anything vintage or “pre-loved”. Mahogany tables feel more soulful than Ikea flat-packs, and recycling is environmentally friendly after all. It might seem there is an obvious solution: the kids could be rescuing post-loved objects directly from their grandparents’ estates, bypassing the middle-aged Marie Kondo wannabes in between. But I suspect that here, too, there is a reluctance to dutifully absorb aesthetic judgments imposed from beyond the grave. Like their rebellious fifty-something elders, Gen Z-ers appear to have little wish to be tied down by a specific familial past, though they don’t mind plundering those of strangers.

Sometimes the urge to ditch is understandable. Though it feels like a betrayal, I recently declined the opportunity to own a huge tapestry of a waterborne Newfoundland dog holding a lifeless drowning girl in its mouth, embroidered by my great-great-grandmother and left to me by my grandmother. (My mother says it is inspired by an equally dramatic Landseer.) The family mementos I keep close by me are less alarming in the middle of the night: a sewing box, though I don’t really sew; some nested tables; a silver napkin ring with the name of some earlier Kathleen etched upon it; a tea set left by an aunt; a pot stand made by my grandfather. There is also a Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin from the Forties, with a handwritten note taped to it in familiar script: “Handle with Care. Not wanted on Voyage.” In future, I will face more difficult choices as larger numbers of objects potentially head my way: further tea sets, each the pride of a female forebear who carefully saved up for it; “best” crockery; a writing desk; a wardrobe and matching dressing table; shelves of clothbound books.

The most obvious reason for the Great Gen X Baggage Shedding — aside from all the Freudian ones — is that such items speak to a way of life that vanished rapidly, just as people of my age were growing up. When trying to scale the property ladder now, you don’t want to be dragging the dreaded brown furniture around with you. Working mothers have no need of cake stands or fish knives: relative to gregarious mid-century housewives, they barely entertain. Ancient christening gowns languish in MDF drawers for want of church services and babies. Unlike my fastidious grandparents, I let teabags stew in the mug, and I don’t keep silver polish. I hardly use pen and paper, so have scant need of a desk.

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In years to come, perhaps people will face similar dilemmas: should they keep the matcha whisk and the yoga pillow in memory of granny, or toss? Do these antique hair straighteners spark joy? But as these examples suggest, it is hard to imagine which items present generations will pass on to subsequent ones. So many of our culturally prized objects are electronic, with future malfunction and technological obsolescence built in. Most of us can’t sew or build or carve anything. Generally, we don’t leave many deliberate marks on the material world for later fingers to retrace. Lost in digital landscapes, we barely notice our own homes, let alone consider which bits of them might be worth saving for posterity.

As the virtual world continues to expand, this trend is only going to deepen. More e-books instead of well-thumbed pages; digital photos in the cloud, not albums; pieces of music floating free of discernible instruments or turntables. Fewer spatiotemporally located things. Dislocated information, available everywhere simultaneously, is being prioritized over things that can only ever be in one place at a time.

In recent surveys, asking that hackneyed question — what one item would you grab in a fire, assuming that all your loved ones were safe? — laptops and phones topped the list. Obviously, this is not because these things are considered by their users to be irreplaceable objects, with particularly beautiful designs or strong emotional associations. Indeed, phones and laptops are eminently replaceable; they break or get superseded by new versions all the time. The attachment to devices is simply because they act as portals to parcels of digital information people feel they can’t do without — not even for the short time it would take to buy another one.

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The Jason Arday delusion

By Kathleen Stock

As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his brilliant little book Non-things, the everything-everywhere-all-once aspect of digital technology can induce a megalomaniacal mindset: “I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip.” Physical objects are refreshingly obstinate in comparison. They require dexterity and patience to unlock their possibilities, not just cack-handed jabs and swipes on glass. If you break something you really love, there is a cost; you can’t just turn to the cloud and recreate everything you valued about that thing, hosted in a new body.

And, as Han also notes, real objects stabilize us. Early modern philosophers fretted about what happened to physical things when human minds were not there to experience them: could they really be said to exist at all?  But in truth, we owe the things more than they owe us. We need contact with entities that will stubbornly persist as themselves during radical human changeability. Otherwise our anxiously roaming minds will lose the plot. We didn’t really know this, perhaps, until the speed and insubstantiality of the digital world made it plain.

Generally, acquaintance with tangible objects reminds us that we too are finite and occupy a limited portion of space. We are not just borderless networks of information; we are not clouds. Family heirlooms do this too; but more importantly, they also locate us in time. Memories are stored up in their contours. Or as the philosopher of art Carolyn Korsmeyer puts it, there is “transitivity of touch”: in touching an heirloom, you become a link in a chain, stretching back to other earlier people. You mentally connect the object’s present, here with you now, to its past; which usually means connecting up points in your own life too. For this reason, mementos offer psychological containment to owners hurtling through different life phases and rapidly changing conditions. Like steadfast friends, they attest to the existence of an unbroken narrative line in a life, even if its owner can’t fill in all of the gaps.

To some extent, you could say the same of any treasured objects from your own history, and never mind those that connect you to relatives and forebears. The bottle that held the wine that night you proposed; the letters from schoolfriends; and so on. So why do you need other people’s things to tell your own story?

I suppose the answer depends on whether you think of yourself as essentially part of a particular family, metaphysically speaking. I do, though I’m sure I used to deny it. We are not self-standing organisms. We each have a history that preceded our own births, involving many other characters, each with their own beloved or useful things. No matter what fantastic Victorian or Edwardian swag the Gen Z-ers are now dragging home, the most perfect vintage stuff for you, personally, is not to be found at any auction — or at least, not unless your mother took it there first.

Why are delusions so contagious? This is a question I have been asking myself since the terrible news of Jason Arday’s death. Some people seem intent on sustaining the fictional worlds he created for himself, even now.

Journalist Peter Jukes is still claiming the former professor really did run “all those marathons”; and that the plagiarism charges relate only to “a couple of citation errors” in his PhD. To maintain this, Jukes is apparently inspecting wafer-thin slices of evidence — an old press report here, a potentially partisan internal university investigation there — while carefully bypassing reams of more relevant material.

Others are maintaining Arday’s own accusation that his minority ethnicity was the only plausible reason for all the press interest. They are obsessing over the fact that a disgruntled race scientist first exposed the scandal, ignoring the detailed findings of more neutral journalists since. They also disregard a blindingly obvious alternative explanation: Arday was presented as a national treasure by the establishment, entirely because of his astonishing backstory and publication record. This meant that the unraveling of that story, and those publications, were always going to be big news.

It’s true that we can’t know for sure whether a white Oxbridge professorial chair who boasted of incredible feats, advised governments, hosted BBC series, and acted as a judge on the Pride of Britain Awards would get identical amounts of coverage, were serious cracks in his career edifice then revealed. It seems likely, though, if only because of intense public fascination with the mad shit that goes down at universities. Millions of young people are, or recently have been, students, acquiring huge debts along with all those fancy long words. Most of them have financially implicated parents. Oxford and Cambridge are supposed to be an intellectual pinnacle. Why wouldn’t the country be gripped by the strange tale of a dreaming professor among the dreaming spires?

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By Kathleen Stock

To avoid such conclusions, you would have to retcon Arday’s earlier life, omitting all the plaudits and depicting him as a minor boffin whom no one ever heard of before Nathan Cofnas wrote about him. Equally, to keep believing that the press attention was a “racist feeding frenzy” — recent words of Cambridge University Chancellor, Chris Smith — you have to forget that blackness was constantly brought into the conversation by Arday and his various backers in happier times, as a defining feature of his inspiring ascent (“world’s youngest ever black Cambridge professor” and all that). Once you acknowledge that context, it becomes reasonable to wonder whether the later mentions of Arday’s race by critics simply parrot the earlier mentions by fans. Or perhaps commentators are illustrating a wider thesis: that it is a bad idea to let impressions of a person’s abilities be swayed by facts about their skin color, black or white. Admittedly, this is a Right-wing position now, to the great shame of the Left; but it only counts as viciously racist if you are nuts.

In death as in life, then, misleading narratives are being built around Jason Arday. There is a sense of people staring doggedly at small sections of the picture, while averting their eyes from the complicated whole. Some of them are presumably sticking with his version of things out of grief or loyalty; but others seem determined to keep him in the symbolic realm for murkier reasons, erasing huge chunks of actual biography in the process.

From those on the other side, there have also been gleeful distortions of the truth. One is a tendency to depict the man as a deeply cynical fraudster. There is a boringly predictable urge here to demonize the ideological enemy to the max. Yet according to posthumous testimonies from acquaintances, Arday was kind, friendly, enthusiastic, and a bit eccentric; not someone sociopathic at all. His heroic anecdotes about overcoming difficulty — by now amply described elsewhere — were so silly and easily disprovable, the details wandering so wildly from one interview to the next, it beggars belief there was any kind of devious masterplan at work. Indeed, it is this version of Arday that indicts his employers and publishers. Had he been a smooth and accomplished conman, undetectably working the system, they would be more easily excused now.

Before Arday’s resignation, I wrote a piece charging university managers and others with having ignored his unfitness for an academic role, and so using him in a way that was not ultimately in his interests, though it was in theirs. I still believe this; but now concede that it, too, is part of a bigger picture. Bending the truth was a habit of mind that probably made him horribly vulnerable to the destruction of his imaginary worlds. He told stories about himself like his life depended on it — in research, in interviews, in motivational speeches — and there are hints of shame in the desperate way he tried to suppress the discovery of his plagiarism using lawyers and the police. Perhaps colleagues of Arday suspected that a dose of reality would hurt him, and found it too hard to point the self-deceptions out.

Most of us have met an adult who can’t stop inventing. It is rude and humiliating to confront someone like this about it, and especially when you sense that they require the fantasies — and your pretend belief in them — to carry on. I’ve done it once in my life, and it was very uncomfortable. On another occasion, I have smiled and nodded along. In some jobs or friendships, you can ignore the fact a person can’t stop spinning incredible yarns, because there are no obvious downsides to doing so; it doesn’t interfere with anything else that matters. Part of Arday’s tragedy was that his incredible yarns were not only humored by colleagues (one assumes); some of them were treated as central to his professional biography, and he kept rising higher and higher on the strength of the remarkable impression being conveyed. In a profession whose main mission requires epistemic reliability, it was only a matter of time before disaster would strike.

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Jason Arday: a question of academic standards

By Richard Dawkins

There is a case, then, for saying that English middle-class embarrassment contributed to Jason Arday’s downfall. Had his colleagues been the sort to call out fibs in the work canteen, perhaps he might have survived. To finally have reality pointed out so clinically by journalists from Left to Right, in full view of everyone who had ever adulated him, must have been a devastating experience. Those who had previously helped sustain him in his illusions could shuffle away from the spotlight. He could not.

There were other factors too, of course. It is daft to think that there is a simple causal or moral path that led to Arday’s untimely death; and the search for a scapegoat now unfolding on both sides of the culture war feels absurdly punitive and crass. It is one thing to ask who was responsible for Arday’s employment in an elite university, or his memoir deal; or indeed, to ask who or what caused him to resign so miserably. It is another thing to confidently assign blame for his suicide as a point-scoring exercise against characters you already hate. Those casually flinging this verdict around are not serious people. They themselves like comforting delusions too much.

Delusions are contagious, I think, because the more that people play fast and loose with facts, in a university or anywhere else, the less incentive there is for others to play by the rules. Sometimes it is easier and more profitable to float off into a world you constructed rather than stick with the real thing. Arday was an extreme case, but there is plenty of it about.

There is, though, another lesson to be drawn here, about the difficulty of delivering truth to a person who is radically self-deceived. Sometimes it is just easier to become half-deluded too. Institutions nominally dedicated to knowledge — universities, media organizations, publishing houses — are full of people captivated by second-hand fantasies, excluding coherent thought. We need to help them face reality.

Every day is the same: clear blue, suffocatingly hot, uncannily still. No one can remember what rain feels like. The parks are brown, and gardens turning to dust. Stressed trees are suddenly dropping huge boughs. At night, you see foxes all over the place, thirstily hunting water.

It used to be fun to indulge in pathetic fallacy, and project hyperbolic human sentiments onto harmless old British weather systems: brooding skies, raging storms, and so forth. But right now, in some places, the implacable heat is in charge, in a very-much-not-metaphorical sense. The feelings it produces in bodies are pretty basic: sweatiness, exhaustion, a mind as vacant as the eerily cloudless sky overhead. But assuming we can find the mental energy, it is worth asking: how do we feel about the new kind of summer, rather than simply because of it? Enthused and leaning into the piña coladas? Scared? Sad?

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The twilight of the ladyboss

By Kathleen Stock

I feel discombobulated — though that could be because of the screaming sirens that have accompanied the writing of this piece, as dozens of fire engines and ambulances rushed to a derailed train nearby. Four carriages went over; two passengers were seriously injured. Though not confirmed, observers say it looks like the rails buckled in the heat. In other news, the brambles around here are out far too early. The pond at the end of my road is silting up, and I worry about the fish and the ducks.

Inevitably, the usuals are using the fifth heatwave of the English summer to hammer home their preferred theories about the origins of about climate change. But I can’t be bothered to attend, and it isn’t just because of the brain fog. I find it impossible to navigate such large-scale intellectual terrain, where the very nature of the problem is radically contested, let alone the solutions.

Whether apocalyptic or deflationary, every point in this area seems to be delivered with identical confidence, in equally technical language. So who do you trust? A popular way to negotiate the thicket seems to be to pick the political side you hate most, then lampoon everything its representatives say on the matter, and conclude the opposite must be right. Unfortunately, though, I dislike Right and Left equally for different reasons, so that doesn’t much help.

Apparently unconcerned about the extra energy pull on data centers, this week the ever prolix Will Self took on Jordan Peterson about climate catastrophism. Peterson, himself no stranger to verbosity, had published a piece in the Telegraph, also full of contemptuous mockery for the other side. Peterson thinks that, when measuring trends, we should include the Medieval Warm Period. Self thinks this is daft, since nobody could measure warmth reliably in the medieval period and it wasn’t a global effect anyway. Peterson says that rising carbon dioxide produces increased greening and agricultural yields, not desertification; Self says this is true, but ignores the fact that biodiversity is still being reduced. You might assume that tapping the biodiversity sign would nail the argument; then again, others argue it is measured too heterogeneously to be a useful concept at all. Back and forth, the argument rages through each heatwave, a mix of uncertain predictions, categories at cross-purposes, and differently ranked values. It is not surprising that even some Green party members seem to be zoning out.

Something went wrong with the high-level discourse a while ago. Attempting to use words as behavioral prompts rather than accurate descriptions, ecologically-minded types made their desire to frighten or guilt-trip the masses a little too obvious, and neutral listeners started to switch off. Meanwhile some on the Right offered lots of stubborn skepticism, but not much else: little acknowledgment of local social and environmental losses, whatever their cause; no nuanced plan of action, except to keep buggering on as before. These days, the discussion about renewables in this country is absurdly polarized, with one side talking mainly of benefits, and the other talking mainly of harms.

I suggest, then, that we detach consideration of the local situation from the bigger picture, at least for a bit. First, whatever the causes and consequences of global warming, a small country like ours can’t do anything about it alone. Second, clashing over the wider context seems to be hampering useful consensus-building across party lines about how to manage regional problems — the atrocious working conditions, sweltering hospital wards, failing water supplies, buckling railway lines, and so on — and that’s all pretty urgent. Banning disposable barbecues is not going to be enough.

Relatedly, ignoring the global discourse might allow us to better notice what we, in particular, are losing. Our landscapes, industries, and living conditions are changing before our eyes. The least we can do is pay it attention, mourn what is vanishing, and help mitigate the impacts; not change the subject to dramatic losses elsewhere (Left) or deny reality altogether (Right). Jordan Peterson lives in Arizona. Maybe he’s right that the planet is getting greener overall, but yesterday it was 38 degrees in Kew Gardens. The Corsican Pine probably liked it; the ancient yews and oaks definitely did not.

And it is okay to be sad and unsettled by this new normal, in ways it is impossible to rationally explain or defend. Just as grief for people or pets doesn’t require a defense, nor should this. It is indeed strange and distressing that parts of the New Forest are now blackened and ruined, and others still on fire; that the cider apple harvest is failing, and the harebell disappearing; that there are hardly any wasps. I think with anxiety about the elderly people round about me wilting in their oven-like flats; about the two fires reported in surrounding fields only today; about local farmers agonizing about stunted wheat and barley yields. It is obviously possible to worry about such problems, and for politicians to form plans to address them, without espousing any grand theory about the role of carbon dioxide.

I anticipate defensive reactions. How can I claim to feel alarm over such small-scale problems when I’m unwilling to look the man-made source squarely in the face, to translate such feelings into action at a global level? But as I say, I don’t see how any action of mine — or even that of the British government — could really help. What we have is a near-impossible coordination problem for major world leaders, who would first have to agree on the nature of the issue and its solutions, then get huge numbers of companies and citizens to toe the line, or else impose authoritarian constraints. Self himself says that to deal effectively with climate change, among other things we would have to “control markets, impose rationing and civic obligation, [and] enact… particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name”. He thinks humanity can and should do this. I think he sounds mad.

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Admittedly, if you take my line, you have to lose the comforting illusion that there is some global fix available, if only we could find it. That may be a reality too far for some. Yet there are people firmly within the environmental movement who argue for some form of localism on similar grounds; and it seems to me that even the most contrarian conservative skeptics should do the same. Indeed, I don’t see how they can properly call themselves conservatives if they do not. It’s not good enough to sit around poking holes in the Left’s preferred climate theories and saying nothing else, as if you were an obstreperous audience member at a conference. Whatever the explanation, our bit of the world is still heating up, and flooding more often; there are valuable things here to be treasured and saved, suffering to be alleviated.

It is now 30 degrees in my room. I scroll idly for a minute or two, and learn that part of Stratford-upon-Avon is on fire. Now is the summer of our discontent, and it seems unlikely to be the last. Once the heat breaks, there’s a lot of work to be done.

The catalyst for the discourse was former Elle fashion editor Stacey Duguid, aged 52, a high-octane glamourpuss whose candid social media posts about her own precarious employment situation have gone viral. As she told The Times, in the past 18 months she has applied for “everything from a brand director on six figures to a part-time job taking photos in a warehouse”, all to no avail. She says she is now on universal credit, and has had to sell her jewelry on Vinted and put her Menorcan holiday home on the market.

As usual with articles aimed at the female market, there are a number of things going on here at once. Come for the inspirational taboo-busting and rejection of societal shame; stay for the schadenfreude; leave with vague anxiety that you too might soon be on the scrapheap. But in Duguid’s case, the reality is surely more complicated than recent coverage suggests. By her own account, this is not her first midlife crisis. Three years ago, she wrote an eye-wateringly frank book about the wild aftermath of a divorce. It included tales of drinking on the day job, drug-fueled one-night-stands with much younger men, and being told by otherworldly voices to make expensive clothing purchases on credit. She joked at the time that it should have been called Cocktails, Cock and Coke: A Middle-Aged Adventure. It is not inconceivable that prospective employers have read it too.

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But perhaps she has identified a more general phenomenon. Other stories have followed, of former high-flying ladybosses sending out hundreds of applications into the void, while burning through their savings and feeling humiliated. One theme is the impossibility of remaking oneself from scratch in middle age. Steph Walsh, 50, who once earned £120,000 as a chief of staff but now scrapes by making video animations and getting gifts from relatives, told the The Times: “I reject the narrative of midlife reinvention; there should be no need for it at all and women more than men have to absorb the consequences.” Duguid herself says that “we can’t just simplify things to a midlife image overhaul”.

This seems true, despite the fact that Duguid is, precisely, using the moment for an image overhaul. She has created a new organization, The Encore, to fight for women “overlooked by hiring processes that seem designed to screen us out, and silenced by a shame that was never ours to carry”. Meanwhile Walsh says she is now writing a book about redundancy and the “fallacy of midlife reinvention”, which also sounds like midlife reinvention to me. Both women appear to be following a well-worn path for corporates who encounter career adversity: reframe the moment as a learning opportunity for others, then make capital out of that.

Another example is journalist Eleanor Mills, a former editor at The Sunday Times before she was axed at 50. After a self-described period of panicking and weeping, she started an organization called Noon, aimed at demonstrating that “midlife is an age of opportunity”. “Long lives mean we will all have to get used to reinventing ourselves”, she says on the website. The organization runs meetups and retreats for distressed gentlewomen — more diplomatically referred to onsite as “queenagers” — hosted by the sort of LinkedIn denizen with big jewelry who says she is passionate about transformation, life balance, and finding joy in everyday moments. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the main option for the newly unemployed menopausal high earner is to recreate yourself as a life coach or therapist for other newly unemployed menopausal high earners. There is surely a limit to how long this scheme can go on.

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In defence of gossip

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It’s also tempting to wonder whether there is a real problem to be addressed here. Unemployment and unexpected penury are blights on any life, at any age; but I’m skeptical there is a burning issue for (formerly) well-heeled middle-aged women in particular. The economic inactivity rate for women aged 50 to 64 is higher than that for men in the same age group, but economic inactivity is not unemployment: a large chunk of this, according to ONS figures, is women (and men, for that matter) who are deemed too ill or disabled to work. Another chunk is women “looking after home or family”. I have trouble believing this is a huge problem for boardroom types, tending as they do to pay others to do that kind of thing. Perhaps the corporate world is not well set up to accommodate hot flashes, brain fog, or mad dashes up the motorway to deal with health crises of aging parents; but still, I’m fairly sure provision is better than for the average supermarket or care home worker.

The main allegation of Duguid’s is that women like her are being winnowed out of the application pool by AI systems, before any human eyes have seen their scintillating CVs. But again, this is a problem that affects a much wider group of job seekers — perhaps even most these days. The real worry is the reliance of employers on a small set of AI systems, so that the same algorithms are relentlessly applied, removing the element of serendipitous chance that used to be ineliminable in hiring. Young people are also said to be struggling with the brutal impersonality of the machines. It seems very bad for a 20-something not to be able to get a foot in the door, thanks to the bots; much worse than to be pushed out of it in your fifties at 100K.

Indeed, though it perhaps seems cruel to kick struggling women when they are down, there is a whiff of selfishness about this discourse. When Duguid tells the interviewer of a “former executive for a high street brand” she knows who is now on universal credit, or of a “chemical engineer who is cleaning holiday lets for cash”, the unfortunate implication is that this is all shockingly beneath such highly credentialed people, though perfectly fine for the plebs. Mills writes on her website that when she lost her newspaper job, she felt “raw, naked … I’d worn a big velvet cloak of status for two decades, now it was gone”. Shame is a constant theme of the narratives we are offered. What seems to really sting is not the lack of income, but the lack of validation: if I am not impressing someone with my glamorous job, do I really exist at all?

If this is right, the worry is unsurprising. For decades, university-educated women have been encouraged to think that breaking the glass ceiling is more validating and meaningful than washing the kitchen floor; and also to think that the kind of part-time job that allows you to prioritize family and domesticity is embarrassing and meaningless. Of course the idea is absurd; there are very few things done for large amounts of money that make life meaningful. Still, assuming that you are very attached to being the sort of woman who changes her work handbag every season, it is bound to come as a shock to find you are an expendable drone like the rest.

Duguid says she is now “botoxing” her CV, taking out any references to age and experience that might meet the disapproval of the machines. I would probably do this too, were I frustrated enough (though admittedly, I probably wouldn’t give newspaper interviews citing my age and work history at the same time). But there is something very queasy about it. For the truth is that, once you have reached a certain level of seniority in a career, you can’t reinvent yourself as a fresh-faced ingenue, even metaphorically speaking. You are far too well-defined in your character, skills, and preferences; too inflexible in your personality. Employers are not wrong to be wary of formerly senior applicants for entry-level jobs, for they are unlikely to be a good fit. And in any case, we oldies need to leave those jobs to the young people.

In years to come, as AI conquers various sectors and competition for fewer desirable opportunities increases, we can look forward to the grim possibility of PR battles between various interest groups, each telling highly emotive tales about who is struggling most. We should probably remember that some will have an advantage over others here. Free-falling from the climbing frame can certainly be terrifying — but a fat media contacts book and a holiday home in Menorca can help cushion the fall.

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

For some, the obvious baddie is Arday’s recent accuser, Nathan Cofnas, who has alleged several instances of plagiarism on his Substack. Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, is best known for his controversial research on racially based IQ differences, and for taking a Cambridge college to court, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of his “anti-woke” beliefs. It is as if the most stereotypically problematic of academics had escaped from a university HR manager’s cheese dream and taken fleshly shape. Predictably, then, commentators who have based their careers on divining institutional racism have been quick to take advantage of the caricatural optics. Cambridge itself says that Arday has been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications”, and is a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”.

But serious concerns about Arday’s work have been circulating for at least three years, voiced by scholars who have no interest in hereditarianism; and it is hard to see how Cambridge could have dismissed them so lightly. In 2023, Professor Dave Harris, an emeritus sociologist, started documenting concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and some other journal articles on his own website. Along with another sociologist, Professor Martyn Hammersley, Harris also tried doggedly to raise the matter with journal editors, university authorities, and Arday himself.

Harris sent me his correspondence. To his polite inquiries, Arday insisted he would consider future contact from Harris as bullying and harassment. Cambridge’s Head of Policy told Harris that, since the alleged issues preceded Arday’s time at Cambridge, it was not within the university’s remit to investigate — a bizarrely relaxed attitude to the possibility that a star academic had committed research malpractice. Last year, Times Higher staff reporter Jack Grove looked into the case in great depth, drawing in part upon evidence from Harris and Hammersley, but his editors spiked the piece after legal letters from Carter-Ruck.

It is clear, then, that more reputations are at stake here than Arday’s own. When he was first appointed as a Professorial Chair, Cambridge made huge capital out of the moment, stressing the significance not just of their new hire’s ethnicity but his “neurodiversity” too. The well-known theory of intersectionality has it that a black or brown ethnicity, plus a disability, equals the likelihood of exponential discrimination. Alongside this dogma runs a shadow logic for progressive employers, whispering that two protected characteristics in a prominent employee are even better than one; three, if you count Arday’s origins on a deprived council estate. Or as the University press release put it at the time: “parts of [Arday’s] story… epitomize the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers in the sector”. But not at Cambridge, they might as well have smugly added.

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Throughout his career, Arday himself has highlighted his disabilities just as much as his race. He has said he only learned to eat for himself aged seven, and that he spent “thousands of hours in speech therapy… six days a week” from the age of three. He has claimed that the aforementioned brain tumor was surgically removed only two weeks before his PhD viva. Last year, he co-authored a book with Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis entitled We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, published by the elite Princeton University Press. Its subject is how “neurotypical hegemony reproduces a culture of exclusion”. The authors wax lyrical to their presumed neurodiverse readers: “Not only do you still deserve love, you deserve for your creativity to flourish and be nurtured. You still deserve ordinariness, even if you struggle to communicate your passions.”

As this suggests, the book is an extremely weird mix of academic jargon and chatty informality. Each chapter starts with a song lyric. Chapter Seven, for instance, begins with the Blur lyric “hold on for tomorrow”, then explains: “For neurodivergent people, who are often holding on to the coattails of neurotypicals, there is a need for the neuromajority population to be more accommodating and understanding in this process… and hold on for tomorrow.” There is also a lot of breathless metacommentary, as if the authors were fascinated with their own creative process — a feature often found in student essays, but not so much in work by senior academics. In Chapter Three, for instance, you get: “it will come as no surprise to many of our sociologist peers that this third chapter was one of the last we put together”; and “[a]s we returned to Durkheim’s analysis when writing this book, a sense of sadness and frustration often entered our conversations about neurotypical hegemony”. In Chapter Seven: “As we began to round up our reflections and the rationale of the book, we spoke a lot about the concept of time and our general sense of getting through the day.”

Irrespective of the outcome of the plagiarism allegations, it seems to me there is an even more fundamental problem here. Having waded through some of Arday’s books, articles, and talks, it is my strong impression his published outputs would be judged unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the heroic DEI-friendly backstory. As Cofnas has pointed out, his journal articles are full of typos and solecisms, and there is even a rogue apostrophe in his PhD title. His 2019 monograph, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, is also strikingly garbled, as he uses autoethnography about Britpop in order to pursue “an uncomfortable discourse for melancholic Britain to digest”: that the cool Britannia of the Nineties was actually cruel, racist Britannia instead.

Here, Arday relates how he fell in love with bands like Oasis at a young age, “or at least so it seemed until the veil of innocence and naivete was stripped away through the most pernicious and insidious of discriminatory instruments… racism”. The dramatic pause is his. Other phrases tend to collapse under their own weight: “Significant periods in most individuals’ lives prove to be a point of discovery which can often lead to a sense of belonging that is hard to quantify”; “There are periods historically which capture the mood of a generation and become the soundtrack to a particular type of lived experience”. The book was nominated for a British Sociological Association prize in 2020.

Arday’s academic talks, meanwhile, are rambling and banal, in no way consonant with his elevated rank. In his 2024 British Academy lecture at the University of Bristol, for instance — about “cultural appropriation” in Paul Simon’s album Graceland — he sounds like an enthusiastic sixth-former regurgitating talking points from a rockumentary. At one point he suggests that part of Simon’s “insecurity” and “arrogance” stems from the fact Simon is physically shorter than Art Garfunkel. At another point, he digresses and starts talking about the lack of indigenous actors in Neighbours and Home and Away, observing that “you become a sociologist and start looking at it through a different lens; you start thinking ‘well Australia had an indigenous population… how come none of them are present in the utopia of Summer Bay?’”. And his interest in these two TV soap operas is not merely in passing; in a podcast interview last year, the Professor said he sleeps “probably two hours a night… then in that two hours in between, I fill it with Home and Away and Neighbours”.

There is currently some bafflement on social media about why Cambridge authorities are disclaiming the accusations about Arday with such aggressive, self-satisfied certainty. I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin color. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

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Primed by his amazing personal history, Cambridge bosses seem to have taken this patronizing approach to the quality of Arday’s outputs, just as other august bodies presumably did before them: Glasgow University, where Arday was also a Professor; the British Sociological Association, where he is a trustee; Routledge and Princeton University Press, the publishers of his books. According to the unspoken norms of these institutions, it doesn’t matter how silly Arday sounds in interviews, or how bad his writing is. It is already priced in. To point out the fact wouldn’t just be rude, it would also be positively discriminatory in a vague sort of way; whereas to ignore the issue is virtuous and noble. Many people have noticed marked inadequacies in Arday’s work over the years, I assume, but very few have said anything. And I also assume that the pressure to stay silent has increased, the higher he has climbed. What’s this? You are pointing out Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University — a man who has been through so much to get where he is — can’t write coherent sentences, or stay on-topic in his talks? Are you some kind of Nazi?

Cambridge’s stubborn defense of its employee in the light of the plagiarism accusations looks to me like just more of the same. Managers there don’t seem to see the deliberate repetition of other people’s phrases as any kind of vice, in his particular case — it can only be inadvertent and excusable, given his known disabilities, and so perhaps doesn’t count as plagiarism at all. And it seems his race might be being treated as an additional mitigating factor, based on the assumption he routinely undergoes racist treatment which causes him psychological distress.

For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgment.

Ultimately, there are likely to be many losers in this embarrassing debacle: deserving young scholars who were overlooked as Arday was appointed, now lost to the profession; fee-paying students who came to Cambridge or Glasgow to bask in the intellectual glow of world-class academics, and got some waffle about Australian soap operas instead; accomplished black or brown researchers smeared by association, now facing abuse online from hereditarian idiots who assume that Arday’s case is the norm. And ultimately, Cambridge University will be a massive loser, deservedly so. It is a necessary condition of the place’s continuing glamour and prestige that it enforces rigorous academic standards. To be shown not to care about this, in such a public way, is an act of catastrophic institutional self-harm.

But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honor. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains.

Minutes from an early exit, Starmer was magnanimous about his opponent’s hard tackles, saying “it has to be robust — that is the way politics is done”. Some colleagues apparently differ with him on this, implying that the Leader of the Opposition’s swingeing takedowns expose Labour MPs to extra public risk. When she recently spoke of “400 knives stuck in [Starmer’s] back”, there were vague suggestions it might be an incitement to violence, a point about as convincing as saying it was actually a covert plug for the Sheffield steel industry. Meanwhile Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson — branded a “spiteful class warrior” by Badenoch during the same session — has been making more capital out of her big moment than a diving Argentinian mid-fielder tapped lightly on the shoulder. She has even just posed with the phrase emblazoned on a t-shirt.

There is a general air of unreality to all of this; a feeling of opportunistically seizing on small issues in order to distract from bigger ones. One elephant in the room is the way many Labour MPs themselves behaved until about five minutes ago, surfing a collapse in online civility norms during the 2010s to lay into political enemies in the most brutal terms. This week we were vividly reminded of that fact, as old tweets from politicians emerged about Ann Widdecombe: David Lammy writing in 2019 that she was “absolutely poisonous” and a “bigot”; and Jess Phillips incongruously urging readers to vote the “little fascist beast” off Strictly in 2010. Though their tone is jarring now, only a few years ago practically everyone on the Left seemed to be at it, rattling off six casual accusations of profound moral degeneracy before breakfast. As Lammy paid solemn homage to Widdecombe after last week’s horrific events, his words rang pretty hollow. I wonder, though, whether he ever really meant any of it at all.

In ordinary life, insults are rarely launched with a cool head. The red mist has descended and you have officially retreated from constructive communication, which is how you find yourself suddenly ranting and raving at someone, or posting something stupid online; all a bit embarrassing once you calm down. In politics, by contrast, insults are strategically useful — indeed, a US university has recently identified a category of “conflict entrepreneurs” in politics, leveraging verbal toxicity for personal gain. Insults can get you media attention, bond voters together against a perceived outgroup, or silence a whole flank by way of intimidation. So useful are they, in fact, that there is no need for the presence of any feelings of anger or grievance to motivate them at all. You can tweet out a judiciously chosen insult, then tick it off your to-do list. Maybe your SpAd could even write it for you.

To be on the other end of this icy process, as I occasionally have been, feels weirdly impersonal. Although dressed up in the language of individualized guilt, you sense it is not really about you at all. You are merely a useful object, whose previous statements and actions have provided the raw material for the construction of a helpful folk devil: take one small extract of interview, add a pinch of a speech, and finish with a sprinkling of social media quotes. Voilà! You now have a credible enemy of right-thinking people everywhere. What is happening to the person underneath the socially constructed fright mask is of negligible interest; and so, of course, is the issue of whether the mask was ever a decent fit. The only important question is whether it works.

Equally, in the politically motivated case — PMQs aside — there is rarely a need to address your target directly. It is so much more effective to call someone disgusting and evil in the third person, and whether they find out or not is incidental. Lammy and Phillips wrote vicious things about Widdecombe for others to read — she wasn’t ever on Twitter. I suspect that this passive-aggressive tradition is partly why Badenoch’s directness and commitment to combat seems particularly shocking to some opponents. It feels like a violation of the modern rules of the game.

If Reform candidates aren’t very good at this disassociated stuff, it is only because most are relatively new to politics, still preferring to launch traditionally chaotic, angry broadsides — a fact which makes their social media histories so interesting to the press. Most professional politicians would not be so gauche. Granted, it is sometimes useful to have one or two disinhibited voices around to harness voter fury, a role Angela Rayner once played for Starmer with her comments about the Johnson government (namely: “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian piece of scum” — for which she later apologized). But most of the time, the benefits of a particular line of character assassination should be carefully weighed in advance.

This is not to say it can’t still go wrong. The Left’s studied habit of calling certain groups of people racist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on, has turned into a terrible problem for them retrospectively. The most obvious issue was that the categories were so expansive: once racists were defined as “anyone with doubts about immigration”, and transphobes as “anyone who believes in human biology”, the reviled out-group suddenly contained large numbers of Labour and swing voters. This was unfortunately self-defeating, to say the least.

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But equally, the contrast classes didn’t sound anywhere near seductive enough. Useful political insults should positively flatter an in-group by way of a pleasing, easily graspable distinction between you and the maligned ones on the outside. When you call someone a workshy scrounger, you implicitly butter up diligent taxpayers; in mocking snowflakes, you pay tribute to the psychologically resilient majority. Yet the opposite of a racist/homophobe/transphobe (etc.) was defined only as an “ally”, a badge most immediately appealing to Second World War enthusiasts. Even at their most effective, the Left’s chosen insults worked by instilling fear of dissent rather than disseminating good vibes.

Back to the present, and just as it once seemed politically astute for some on the Left to call people awful names and launch group attacks, now it appears astute for them to condemn other politicians’ verbal behavior as highly likely to cause violence. Equally, just as it was fashionable for the Right to defend free speech for a while, now there is renewed energy around trying to curtail it in the name of safeguarding, with some now demanding that social media companies be held accountable for abuse of MPs. Leaving aside the question of whether the claims about inciting violence are true — which I’ll get to in a moment — either way, to say so is unquestionably yet another move in the political game. When you are in politics, everything is a move in the game. My fears about threat are genuine, but yours are cynically confected. You are a pathetic snowflake, but I am a genuine target. My free speech is important, but yours puts me in danger. The idea that only one side is making capital out of all this is yet another useful fiction to sell to your own side.

Obviously, the claim about certain words causing violence is extremely difficult to verify. It concerns a counterfactual; would such-and-such a despicable act still have happened had a particular MP or his point of view not been all over the papers or on the BBC? Since we are each subject to hundreds of daily influences, and fewer and fewer people engage with mainstream media sources anyway, it is hard to say. But if we are looking for possible motives for political violence, we can at least say that over the past decade or so, members of one party in particular were regularly telling young and impressionable people that a large section of society was positively hateful and dangerous; a threat to the British way of life, rightly conceived, as well as to the planet as a whole. And if we are looking at means, many of these kids belonged to families who watched Question Time and read the Guardian. And no, I’m not talking about Reform. If the new Prime Minister wants to convince the public that his party is not playing yet more games, he should publicly acknowledge the lingering atmosphere of division and fear that Labour members did so much to create.

Though many have been tempted to interpret Trump in terms of some secret masterplan for good or ill, according to the authors of a new book, Regime Change, the project is pointless: “Trump will often do simply whatever he feels like in the moment, frequently giving in to shockingly impulsive behavior.” His preferred stimulants seem to be cable news, late-night social media rants, and taking risks with global stability. When he was formulating his tariff plan, he is said to have forgotten to include China, before improvising on the spot, to the horror of economic advisors: “Put them in for ten.”

We live in the age of ADHD, and Trump seems a perfect symbol of our distracted, hyperadrenalized time — his own lack of an official diagnosis notwithstanding. It is estimated that around 3-4% of adults and 5% of children globally have the condition, which seems a rather conservative estimate in relation to the numbers of students, celebrities, and middle-aged women who think they have it. According to NHS figures, among young people who are classified as NEET — ie not in education, employment, or training —“20–34% are likely to have ADHD, most of whom will not be diagnosed”. Rising prevalence is costing the British taxpayer a fortune; but at a less dramatic level, it seems we are all a bit ADHD now. Interactive screens are moving the cultural baseline for excitement, making things formerly experienced in technicolor appear boringly black and white. Like the American President, we now only respond to fabulous tributes, thrilling conflicts, and bizarre sights — which is presumably why Westminster is currently obsessed with a man dressed as a bin. Meanwhile in the US, placing a bet is apparently now more common than reading a book.

Seemingly unable to countenance the influence of fast-moving culture upon our plastic brains, many medics and therapists continue to talk as if ADHD were as objectively determinable in a human breast as the presence of cancer or heart disease. But the fact remains that the concept is a collection of symptoms, in search of a distinctive neurobiological cause. Even allowing for the possibility of hardwired, lifelong cases, there is no established way to rule out false positives largely created by more ephemeral social conditions — as local councils know to their cost. And certainly, the therapeutic and pharmaceutical industries have no financial incentive to separate the sheep from the goats.

One under-explored tool in this area is phenomenology — though admittedly, the methodology I propose is unlikely to be immediately useful to PIP assessors. With some who exhibit the full set of DSM-approved symptoms, there is often not so much a deficit of attention, as a paralyzing surfeit. The stream of consciousness is hijacked by insistent details: intriguing sounds or sights that interrupt the flow of a thought or an action, demanding they too be noticed and properly contemplated. There is also the phenomenon of hyperfocus — zooming in deeply for ages, often upon relatively eccentric or niche topics — meaning that the capacity to take in mundane information or carry out plans is reduced. If you are the mother of someone like this, be prepared to repeat every instruction twice. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

Indeed, ADHD is frequently described as involving a sensation of powerlessness; an inability to direct the beam of attention, so that it feels like your mind is being yanked around involuntarily. A common metaphor is of someone else switching the channels for you. Whether or not this inability to take charge of the inner remote control counts as an impairment worthy of special dispensations from the state is a different question (I think not); but I am in no doubt that it describes a genuine psychological type.

An accompanying idiot’s guide says that this sort of brain is extra hungry for stimulation, due to a dopamine imbalance — though not, unfortunately, in a way that provides an easy test for the condition overall. The brain ranks the inner to-do list in terms of the jolt to the system that particular tasks will immediately provide — or not — rather than their importance in relation to the person’s longer-term goals. Activities involving a cheeky hit of adrenaline shoot straight to the top of the list, but this ranking is not based on rational decision-making. The unconscious brain has already set its priorities, well before awareness ever reaches the conscious mind.

If true, this hypothesis seems to explain the feeling of relative powerlessness over the direction of the mental spotlight quite well. Whenever you find yourself doing something, but with no idea why, it is tempting to disavow the action as not really something you “did” at all. Indeed, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe partly defined intentional actions as the very ones to which “why?” questions are applicable — as in, “towards what ultimate aim of yours is this particular action, here, now, supposed to act as a useful bridge?”.

For instance: why are you scribbling in that book? An intelligible answer would be that you are making notes, in order to remember certain points, in order to ace an interview, in order to get a particular job; a paradigm of a smoothly-related chain of reasons. Equally, although most people are capable of letting their minds wander, they can also move their attention around in order to fit with prior plans or intelligible purposes. You listen to the teacher, not because she is intrinsically fascinating, but in order to avoid punishment, or pass a test; you pay attention to the mess your house is in, not because you like staring at it, but in order to clean it up, so that you can then avoid disapproval from visitors.

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It is this capacity to use background aims to control the flow of concentration, and so help produce efficient behavior, that appears relatively lacking in some lifelong ADHD-ers. They have an “executive function disorder”, as the jargon goes. Marooned thoughts and perceptions crowd in as if from nowhere, without fitting into a discernible higher plan. It must be a bit like being Keir Starmer, but more interesting.

This framing fits with several philosophical accounts of attention itself. On one view, the role of the capacity for attention is, precisely, to select certain sense impressions and thoughts for their relevance to fruitful action. On a slightly different view, attention enables you to structure the contents of consciousness into foreground and background, important and trivial, in a way that fits with your prior beliefs, desires, intentions, and values. Either way, the power of attention is closely related to purposes and goals. People who find no clear demarcation in their minds between the central and the peripheral can still get utterly absorbed in a particular thought or sensation, and they often are; but they lack a kind of interior sorting hat for personal salience.

If this is roughly right, then it indicates some important differences with more culturally-induced forms of attentional deficit. In the latter case — say, with the kind of rapid onset ADHD that students get during the second year of university, or women sometimes acquire in middle-age — there is rarely any accompanying involuntary hyperfocus. Concentration cannot settle on anything at all for long. Equally, unlike in the involuntary case, there is often an intelligible rationale available for staying in this highly distractible, jittery mental state, and an associated set of social rewards and benefits, no matter how primitive and ultimately self-defeating they prove to be. For instance: I have no idea if Trump’s attentional issues are lifelong or acquired, but it seems clear that his frequent unpredictable switching of positions usefully unnerves his opponents.

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Meanwhile, for those of us who are not world leaders, a different set of benefits attach to the restless magpie mindset. One of these is that you are always on a state of high alert, ready to pounce on the latest new popular thing, and reap any social rewards accordingly. Your mind has been suitably molded to a virtual environment of endless novelty and outrage. You are primed for the emergence of high-status new trends or talking points, including — ironically — the ongoing trend of female influencers claiming they have ADHD. And thanks to fantasies encouraged by the virtual world, you can also cycle through gratifyingly shallow versions of intimacy, rage, sorrow, and love, before moving seamlessly onto the next sensation. You can ignore all the real difficulties in your life, lost in a trance.

But because in this case, being intensely distractible fits within a coherent means-end pattern of decision-making, it also follows that you could choose to do things differently, in theory anyway. Over time, you could train yourself to focus on what is genuinely important in your life rather than trivial, and to wrest control of the mental spotlight back towards more profitable ends. This is probably also true of the first set of ADHD-ers, to some extent — the ones who feel like they have lost the remote — but it will be a lot more difficult and stressful.

And there is a final intriguing aspect of this framing to think about. If the capacity for sustained mental attention really does require a background sense of purpose to guide it, then people who don’t feel much direction in life will surely be more likely to count as horribly distracted: NEETs, say, in receipt of government benefits, telling themselves they are too radically impaired to get a job. For young people in this unenviable position, there is presumably not much in life that seems worth focusing on for very long; so it is scarcely surprising if they feel aimless and mentally scattered as a result. One might even wonder which came first: the PIP or the ADHD.

Such is the unstated implication of the Conversion Practices draft bill, published last week. Two supposedly core, immutable elements of the human person are identified, for which corrective drugs, bribes, or shaming are all presumed diabolical — though these are completely fine to use for more flexible attitudes elsewhere. To try to alter the pattern of someone’s sexual desires, by exerting psychological or emotional pressure or worse, risks becoming a “conversion practice”. The same goes for trying to dissuade someone from a heartfelt profession of gender identity. Past a certain threshold, the police and courts must get involved.

This bill is already receiving much hostile comment, both for its performative aspect — violent and abusive acts are already punishable — and its absurd overreach into understandably heated family discussions about life-changing hormones and surgery. Accompanying notes to the draft try to make a virtue of the chillingly authoritarian focus upon “verbal or non-violent physical acts”. Offenses include practices causing “serious alarm and distress” and “serious harm to mental health”, both of which are too vaguely specified to protect loving parents from police investigation for speaking their mind. The wording is also unlikely to induce religious clergy to express honest and well-meant thoughts about the wisdom of homosexuality or medical transition. Thankfully, at least, there is a carveout for healthcare professionals, but it remains unclear why conversations perfectly acceptable in the doctor’s surgery or therapy space must be harmful at home or in church.

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But not much has been said about one unexpected implication of the bill: that conversion practices involving straight people are just as harmful as those involving gay or trans ones. The intention to cause a heterosexual or “cis” person to become homosexual or trans is to be treated in just as draconian a manner as the inverse case. In theory at least, progressive parents who preach the gospel of gender affirmation a little too enthusiastically risk criminal investigation later, when their children have second thoughts — a possibility which, you have to admit, is darkly funny. The idea that there might also be criminal liability for the hundreds of lanyard-wearing youth workers out there, still working very hard to cement the idea of medical and social transition into deeply unworldly heads, is even more delicious.

But these enticing visions also point to an ambiguity at the heart of the draft legislation; namely, how are third parties supposed to know for sure that a professed sexual orientation or gender identity is permanent, as opposed to a temporary form of experimentation? It would be ironic if the first parent prosecuted for trying to “convert” her child from X to Y turned out later to have been right about the merely transitory presence of the X-ness all along. Unless authorities can answer this question, the law will be unworkable; and I suggest that they can’t.

Since we cannot look into minds directly to find some bedrock, a proxy method must be found. The original epistemic formula, implicit in early gay-rights activism though rarely spelled out, was that you knew a person must be same-sex-attracted if he said he was, because there was no good reason for him to be confused about this, or to pretend. Back in the day, the social context was so hostile and punishing for gay people, it would be irrational for someone to say they were gay when they were not. This meant you could usually take the act of coming out as accurately revealing the state of profound and permanent inner feelings.

Academics chimed in with essays on “heteronormativity” and “compulsive heterosexuality” in society, implying that if a same-sex attraction ever did emerge against such oppressive odds, it could only be a sign of true inner authenticity: a rare delicate flower, improbably growing on stony ground. But conversely, the surrounding atmosphere of homophobia and the heavy expectation of normality made professions of a straight sexual orientation unreliable. In this case, unlike the other, there was good reason to lie to others about who you really were, or even lie to yourself. Despite your protestations, onlookers couldn’t be sure; and nor, for that matter, could you.

When transactivists came along in the Nineties, effectively they adopted the same strategy: you can tell someone is “really” trans if she says she is, because it would be crazily self-defeating to lie. For decades, LGBT activists have kept up this narrative of intense cultural persecution, even as the UK became one of most accepting countries for sexual minorities in the world. Indeed, the Conversion Practices bill itself is the fruit of furious myth-making, with lobby groups suggesting to politicians that Britain is riddled with dastardly ECT-wielding doctors and stern-faced religious exorcists, blithely ignoring the rainbow flags draped all over the Royal Colleges and the Church of England.

As gay and trans identities have become extremely popular in young people, the preferred strategy has not adjusted. According to rainbow dogma, such people can only be expressing authentic realness when they announce their identities, whereas those who say they are straight or “cis” may just be blindly going along with the normie flow. Professed heterosexuality is always suspicious and can legitimately be challenged, in case there is a less conventional, more socially oppressed orientation trembling shyly underneath, waiting to be coaxed into the sunlight.

But by including legal protection for straight people, the Conversion Practices bill produces a reductio ad absurdum of this whole approach. The logic of infallible authenticity, as applied to heterosexual identities, patently collapses; for almost every gay person started off by sincerely self-interpreting as straight. Things are even worse with asexual identities which — ludicrously — are also protected by the bill, according to the accompanying notes. As a concerned mother worried about your lonely son, it seems you will not be permitted to try to robustly argue him into trying to find a girlfriend, if he is telling you at the time that he is asexual. Otherwise, though, it is fine. But since, with the right sort of encouragement, today’s depressed asexual might easily become tomorrow’s happy lothario, why on earth should the law protect awkward teenagers from what they don’t want to hear?

Ultimately, the point extends to gay and trans identities too. These days, we don’t so much have compulsory heterosexuality in  youth culture as compulsory queerness, and it no longer makes sense to say that the only plausible reason a young person would tell herself she was gay or trans, is if she “really” was. There are several alternative explanations available, including that a non-binary teaching assistant suggested she might be; or that she thinks it sounds cooler and more likely to win her friends than the boring straight alternative. This associated glamour can make self-interpretation confusing, and lead to false positives; not something that could have been said of the typical gay experience in the Sixties.

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The insuperable problem here is that nobody can tell now whether a current identity will stick; not even its owner, and especially not when she is young and naive. And of course — a bit like television channels — though there used only to be two or three, there are now so many more to choose from. Ironically, gender studies academics used to stress this impermanence before it became inopportune to do so, always banging on about the endless flexibility of constructions of the self. What seems lifelong today may turn out to be temporary, and vice versa; in which case it cannot be remotely helpful to criminalize the verbal attempts of others to persuade you to take a different path. Critical discussion might feel rude, upsetting, or intrusive, but none of that means it is the business of the law to rule it out. And in fact, with the presumption of your own infallibility about yourself removed, attempts to “convert” you may turn out to be perceptive recognition of what there is, or what still could fruitfully be.

The fantasy of an immutable orientation or identity, offering a key to your true nature, sits awkwardly with human powers of self-interpretation and self-creation. For as long as you are alive, your current understanding of yourself might change, because of social influence or personal reinterpretation or something else entirely. No amount of felt certainty that this won’t happen can rule the possibility out. Life is full of surprises. And sometimes conversion from one set of outworn ideas or feelings to another can be a form of personal salvation.

Given her elaborate full name — Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey — and distinguished family history, the assumption seems to be that the incoming representative for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a deeply middle-class English person, tartan-signaling for authenticity points. Equally, though, she might just be a deeply middle-class Scottish person who inadvertently picked up two distinct accents early on. I should know: I come from a town 12 miles along the coast from Arbroath, and am similarly afflicted.

Growing up in this heavily nationalist area, I quickly discovered that to talk as my English parents did at home was not going to make me very popular. Ancient family lore has it that my four-year-old self came back from her first week at an Angus primary school, proudly recounting that a fellow pupil had fallen down and splat his heid open. Though my eventually settled accent was relatively muted, unable to pull off the foos, fits, fars, and kens of other Doric-adjacent locals, for the purposes of blending in it was still better than nothing.

Unfortunately, the cure for self-consciousness later became the disease, for it turns out that having accents in duplicate also makes you seem weird. Moving to England, my vowels and consonants started to turn on a hair trigger: Southern English when talking to the natives, but taking the high road North at the first hint of an och or an aye. For this reason, I once confused the hell out of Lorraine Kelly viewers. Worse, my early linguistic splitting seems to have made me porous to accents generally. After four years of living in Leeds in the late Nineties, I sounded a bit like Alan Bennett. Whenever I go on holiday to Wales, I become inadvertently possessed by the spirit of Charlotte Church.

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The popular term for this sort of thing is code-switching, and it is not unusual for those who regularly cross borders, be they regional or national. In the popular imagination there seem to be two versions, one of them much more socially acceptable than the other. It’s fine, say, for people already basically badged as working-class Scots — John Martyn, say, or Lulu — to radically change their accents to fit in with some middle-class English environment. Here the switch can be sympathetically understood as just another way to mitigate a tragic outsider status. To adapt the terminology of David Goodhart: at heart, you still count as a Somewhere, pretending for temporary reasons to be an Anywhere until you can hurry back home to your more authentic roots.

But if your overall brand is middle- or upper-class to begin with, moving seamlessly between linguistic worlds looks like more duplicitous shape-shifting, signaling embarrassing instability at your core. The only thing worse than being a rootless Anywhere is being a rootless Anywhere with two amusingly mismatched Somewheres stuck inside you, fighting it out for public appearances as if they were in a class-themed sitcom.

This is perhaps especially true for politicians. Detractors will easily seize upon perceptible cultural meandering by a public representative as evidence of untrustworthiness and phoniness. They did it with Kamala Harris, and they are now doing with Bird. The charge is usually that the politician must be using one particular cultural persona deliberately for personal gain. But that’s a bit like complaining of a bilingual Frenchman that his saying “oui” rather than “yes” is a cynically self-interested move.

As a speaker, you have both means of expression in your everyday repertoire. If you work hard mentally, you can ignore the social cues prompting you in one verbal direction, and consciously choose to go in the other. Equally, you can choose to stick with what is coming semi-automatically anyway. Obviously, where it matters you will go with the accent that works best for your particular context. The idea that Bird would have been sworn into parliament as a Scottish nationalist MP, whilst studiously avoiding using her own Scottish accent, is mad. But presumably, to speak as she did was barely an effort. She was not doing a laborious impression; it feels much more like turning on an inner tap.

Anyway, sometimes even the most blatant code-switching for political ends is better than the alternative. If you don’t believe me, I give you the outgoing Prime Minister as Exhibit A. Keir Starmer is the ultimate example of someone who lacks the facility to blend in with a new group. Had the country not been in lockdown throughout the time he rose to power, limiting his visible contact with disparate sets of people, this would have been obvious to the public much earlier on. Only yesterday, a video was circulated of a publicity stunt involving Starmer awkwardly serving popcorn to a group of ten-year-olds at the cinema, acting as if he was simultaneously monitoring the calorie count for a future government study as he did so.

Ironically for someone known as Two-Tier Kier, Starmer is always unerringly the same: same facial expression and voice, same robotic delivery of identically toneless phrases. He seems positively to pride himself on an intransigent and totally predictable personal style. In theory, his background gives him a rich variety of symbols to play around with: hailing from Surrey, a Home County associated with enormous wealth and status, yet from a working-class family too. In practice, every time he attempts to use his past advantageously, he looks like an appallingly stilted actor.

Pilloried for his many, many, many mentions of the fact his father was a toolmaker, few critics seem to have realized that the unimaginative repetition is not because he deeply enjoyed talking about the fact. It is precisely because he really didn’t want to, and couldn’t bear to go into further detail. According to Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In, when Starmer first became leader he resisted advice to narrativize his working class origins for months, declaring the expectation he would do so “absurd”.  Eventually he grudgingly agreed to a shortened official version of his back story, from which he has rarely deviated since.

This rigid presentational inflexibility guaranteed his failure as a political leader, whatever stellar technocratic successes he had beforehand. It meant a failure to conquer hearts and minds, both within the PLP and the electorate. But — perhaps worryingly for Labour’s opponents — they are about to get someone who can actually play the game a bit. Step forward the glintingly multifaceted Andy Burnham — Northern Lad, Cambridge Grad, Catholic Dad — who was sworn in beside Bird on Monday as Makerfield MP.

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The former mayor of Greater Manchester is already being painted by some as a suspiciously chameleon-like figure, and in this the critics may turn out to be right. Burnham may be a flip-flopper about policy, scatterbrained about detail, and generally far too anxious to be liked to make a good leader in these intensely challenging times. But the mere fact he sometimes leans hard into his Northern working-class origin story, and at other times judiciously cuts a more metropolitan dash, is not a flaw but a strength. On Monday, he got on the train in Manchester dressed like an Elbow tour manager; by Euston, he was soberly suited and booted and clutching a San Pellegrino bottle.

Neither aspect is a put-on. The dreamless Starmer aside, perhaps, we all contain multitudes. And at least Burnham has some idea of how political story-telling works. The Labour Party really does need someone like him, whether or not the country does. For the party is so factionalized between disparate creeds and classes, with potential voters similarly polarized, that arguably only an adept code-switcher stands a chance of taking enough of them with him.

And as for Bird: like Burnham, she too may find that a certain sinuousness in speech and presentation stands her in good stead in her new career. Potential SNP voters still include social conservatives like those in Angus and Aberdeenshire, as well as urban pro-Palestinian progressives in Glasgow and Edinburgh. A posh radical may turn out to be the perfect mix. In the meantime, she should probably just enjoy the notoriety.  Failing that, she could do what the SNP now does best: categorize her hybrid national identity as nonbinary, and call the press derision a hate crime.

Already exhausted by years of vicious online remarks about every aspect of her existence, Fraser described how she had retreated from the world, and was even avoiding socializing in case fellow school mums wrote about it afterwards. And now some unknown foe had spotted her having “a quiet coffee and gelato” with her daughter in the Italian city, and made an acerbic comment about it on the Tattle Life website. Soaking in the bath that night and feeling horribly hunted, she says she reached her “rock bottom”.

Celebrities and influencers have been complaining about Tattle Life’s existence for years, and Fraser’s dramatic new tale of persecution only adds more energy to the growing campaign against it. In February, a group of Labour MPs wrote to Ofcom implying that posts on the site were responsible for the suicide of a 16-year-old girl called Princess Bliss Dickson. Ofcom has since said it is “moving quickly” to examine if there are grounds to take action, while the Information Commission said it is also investigating.

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On one hand, then, we have the framing of the famous and semi-famous women who say they have been deeply hurt by Tattle Life: a place of unalloyed evil, seething with inexplicable hatred and contempt. But there are other stories too, and to my mind they complicate matters. One such story is also narrated by Fraser, and it starts well before that fateful night in the bath.

It can be found over on her Instagram account, where she visually depicts a life that appears to be heading towards perfection in an ever-ascending arc. Row after row of artfully composed photographs display her gorgeous existence for the admiration of passers-by. There are morning espressos in Venice, where she seems to spend much of the year; shots of her beautiful children and handsome man; selfie after selfie of her own toned body and immensely photogenic face.

Here is Liz flushed after another marathon; here she is drinking champagne and toasting the camera; here she stands on a mountain peak. Here is a picture of her brunch in Salzburg; here she is in the bath again, muscled legs stretched out glistening before her. The accompanying captions try to convey humility and likableness, and her wish to “make a small difference to some part of the universe”, but the pictures themselves scream success, money, desirability, winning at life.

Viewers are obviously supposed to covet what this woman has, for there would be little point in the laborious display otherwise. What they are not supposed to do, presumably, is imagine Fraser taking a photo of her own legs in the bath: tucking her chin, craning her neck awkwardly back and perching the phone on her chest as she tries to get the angle right, wiping the lens intermittently with a washcloth to stop it getting fogged up. The anonymous posters on Tattle Life imagine all this sort of thing and more, providing a brutally deflating commentary to the curated exhibition that is often as funny as it is biting. Egging each other on, they virtually gather to dissect, mock, speculate, bitch, and generally have a lovely time at Fraser’s expense. And they are particularly scathing about the way she likes to photograph her own legs.

So rather than a simple story of inexplicable internet harassment, what we have is a cautionary tale, featuring a co-dependent relationship between two parties: on the one hand, the influencer whose aim is to evoke a feeling of envy in others, and on the other, groups of anonymous posters who readily oblige. Of course, most influencers will furiously deny the charge, partly because being a thoroughly nice person without any rapacious superego whatsoever is a standard part of the female influencer schtick. Or as one Tattle Life commentator summed up the contradiction, as it manifests in Fraser specifically: she want us to know she is both “#hot and #humble”.

Equally, the anonymous posters on gossip sites will presumably deny they are really envious of the women they criticize. It is easy to pretend these places are just an extension of having a good gossip with friends, but there’s an obvious difference which betrays the spiteful edge. Namely, your targets can read what you are saying; and indeed, many posters on Tattle Life seem positively to want them to. As Fraser says, she is often addressed directly by posters. There is no doubt things can get out of hand in such places, with reputations seriously trashed as a result. Anonymity means tempting disinhibition, and envy doesn’t tend to know when to stop.

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In her article, Fraser says she used investigators to find out the identities of her anonymous trolls, and discovered they were “almost exclusively women, often middle class, educated and mostly in their forties and fifties”, some of whom work “in journalism or in business” and who “post photos of walks in the woods, holidays in pretty European villages, and … charity fun runs”. In other words, they sound very much like her.  A long time before the internet, Aristotle perspicuously noted that “we envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation”. Or as Hesiod put it, more pithily, “beggar is envious of beggar and singer of singer”.

Yet despite her undoubted suffering over the years at the typing fingers of rivalrous mean girls, I can’t get too worked up about Fraser’s plight in the Venetian bathtub. There is an easy enough way to stop anonymous saddos talking about you on the internet, and it involves not being a massive show-off about your life. In contrast, the story of Princess Bliss Dickson —  the teenage child of influencer Sophie-May Dickson, who took her own life in February, allegedly after Tattle Life criticism — is genuinely dark and disturbing.  It really does suggest we urgently need to change the norms governing female social media use — though in a way that has nothing much to do with gossip websites per se.

At the time of her death, Princess Bliss had her own TikTok account where she would pout and grind in a heartbreakingly self-conscious way for the camera, as girls these days often do. But unlike most teenagers, she had already been in the public eye for most of her life. Aged four, she was featured in a 2014 television documentary, getting a spray tan. The show was about mothers — including her own, Sophie-May Dickson — who would painfully tease hair weaves in their tiny daughters’ curls, dress them in elaborate frills and furbelows, and cover them in make-up and glitter. Some comic genius at Channel 5 called the show “Blinging Up Baby”.  Gleeful pieces in the tabloids followed, and a year later the mother also appeared on This Morning to discuss the excessive “pampering” of her two girls. The die seemed to be cast. From then on, Princess Bliss and her sister would be turned into living dolls full-time — and when television ceased to be interested, Sophie-May’s social media accounts would take up the slack.

Reportedly living in supported accommodation at the time of her death, the girl is said to have read critical comments on Tattle Life, both about her mother and herself, before her overdose of prescription medicine. Campaigners are implying that these must have been instrumental in her act. In advance of the release of a coroner’s report, it is hard to see how this connection can be made for sure; not to mention that it flies in the face of all professional advice about avoiding speculation in such cases.

But what we can say, perhaps, is that the role of Tattle Life in the awful saga is somewhat double-edged. Certainly, it was a place where cruel things were being said about the mother at the time, with a few strays caught by her blameless daughters too; and I wonder if posters really think about what it is like for a loyal child of a target to read this stuff. But equally, a lot of outrage was being expressed on the girls’ behalf about the circus-like spectacle being made of their young lives. And in that sentiment, at least, the anonymous posters weren’t wrong. In fact, they were drawing attention to an issue of child safeguarding few others seemed to care about.

Taken together, the Fraser and the Dickson cases demonstrate the unstable role of female gossip in the moral economy, and especially when the internet gets involved.  Sometimes — perhaps even usually — it’s just a cheap way of striking at another person who makes you feel inferior and crap about your life, with criticism and mockery employed as a kind of leveling psychic compensation. But sometimes gossip has a constructive role, a way of expressing collective moral disapproval: of chewing someone’s behavior over from every angle, and saying out loud what they are doing wrong. Tattle Life exemplifies both tendencies vividly, and you can’t lose one without the other.

The campaigners who want to see these sites banned conjure up an improbable world, where you can still have influencers and celebrities posting endless vain selfies and humblebrags to their rapt followers, but suppress the skepticism, envy, and spite of those not similarly entranced. I don’t think that’s possible. Last time I checked, Liz Fraser was still merrily posting about her fire emoji life, and says she is now writing a book about “female-female rivalry”. Meanwhile, Sophie-May Dickson was putting up pictures of  Princess Bliss’s funeral, and seems to have coordinated her outfit with the coffin (still image and video both available for clicks). With such people in the world, I predict the gossips are not going to go away anytime soon. And to be perfectly honest, I’m tempted to join them.

Citing her proven record of “fighting against identity politics on the Left” during the madness of the George Floyd era, the Conservative leader vowed that her party would do the same again against racialized messages from Farage, or those to the Right of him. “The answer to Black Lives Matter is not a White Lives Matter born of the same racial grievance,” she argued. “We will not defeat identity politics by building a mirror-image of it.”

Even as she said this, news was starting to circulate about the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast, by Sudanese migrant Hadi Alodid, with a wave of anti-immigrant violence quickly following. The unfolding of this awful situation has only made Badenoch’s proposed Hegelian maneuver — from “Black Lives Matter”  to “White Lives Matter” to the comfortingly non-specific synthesis “Everyone Matters” — look more attractive, and especially to those of us keen to avoid a civil war in the near future.

Meanwhile, her suggested method for rooting out identity politics from the public sphere is a further example of a channel run — in the Old Trafford sense, rather than the Calais one. The colorless legalese of the 2010 Equality Act remains, for Keir Starmer, a sacred text, offering the closest thing to a positive articulation of British values he is willing to provide. Reform has said it would get rid of the Act altogether, claiming it causes unfair discrimination against white people. No doubt anticipating voter unease at wholesale destruction of anti-discrimination law without a clear sense of what would replace it, Badenoch says she wants to ditch only a single part: the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). She therefore gets to look impressively decisive relative to Starmer, and reassuringly humane relative to Farage.

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In overview, the PSED forces public bodies to have proactive, anticipatory “due regard” to three areas: ending unlawful discrimination, advancing equal opportunities for those with protected characteristics, and fostering good relations between protected and non-protected groups. As was drily pointed out in the legal opinion accompanying Badenoch’s speech, there is a tension between these last two objectives that perhaps should have been anticipated at the time of drafting. Artificially boosting the chances of some groups over others, it turns out, tends not to be conducive to close social harmony, and perhaps especially not when it is done in the name of equality.

But according to Badenoch, the biggest problem with the duty is that it distracts public bodies from their core functions, sometimes with deadly results. With the horrific image of Henry Nowak’s dying moments in handcuffs weighing heavily on many minds, she reminded her audience of other high-profile cases where the threat of perceived racism had probably or definitely got in the way of effective action. These included the Manchester arena bombing; the Stockport and Nottingham murders; and rape-gang activity up and down the country. Whether or not the PSED was a direct causal factor in these failures is difficult to establish, but Badenoch is surely right that that its presence on the scene didn’t help.

Though, in theory, the duty doesn’t mandate any particular outcome, in practice it has allowed DEI professionals and external bodies to run amok in the public sector, feeding managers legally illiterate lines while making it punitive for wiser employees to dissent. When the National Police Chief’s Council offers a training session which confidently announces that an anti-racist stance “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind’”, you can be sure that serving officers didn’t come up with that stuff on their own. The result of the embedding of such context-free platitudes seems to be enhanced opportunities for minority stabbers, rapers, and bombers, and an end to all opportunities for their unfortunate victims.

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Something has obviously gone very wrong. Badenoch, writing in The Sunday Times, has lamented the loss of “common sense” from institutions, replaced by “box-ticking” and “bad frameworks” from outside, adding that “you can’t write common sense down in a policy manual, it is about judgment”. Assuming she is talking about specialist skills, honed on the job through repeated experience, she is absolutely right, echoing a venerable philosophical distinction between “knowing-how” (which can’t be got through book learning alone) and “knowing-that” (which can). Incredibly, a lot of DEI professionals these days appear to lack both. Still, it is interesting to note that in the early days of the Equality Act, various optimists imagined that the PSED would be a boon to good judgment and common sense at the local level, rather than an obstacle.

When first introduced, the duty was framed by some academics as an example of an admirably “reflexive” law, contrasted with heavy-handed regulatory approaches that specify certain outcomes as mandatory. With its vague requirement that bodies show “due regard” to equality considerations, but not that actions be determined in a particular direction, the PSED was supposed — as one commentator put it in 2012 — to defer “to the expertise and local knowledge of the decision-maker rather than imposing prescribed solutions”. Roughly, the idea was that, in making an important decision, a public body would first have to gather a lot of information about how something called “equality” might be affected — detailed data, predictions about possible outcomes, views of stakeholders, and so on — and then seriously consider all of this material in deciding how to proceed. The consideration process would also have to be documented.

If this is the most the PSED had ever amounted to, then though it would have been cumbersome, it would also have been quite useful, encouraging organizations to notice the consequences of their choices for certain local groups. But since cold, hard facts don’t determine values or actions, it seems that those in charge could not leave matters there. Additionally, a top-down layer of pressure was introduced, to prioritize certain progressive values wherever possible. While it remained true that no particular outcomes were mandated at a fine-grained level, it was clear that bodies were supposed to favor a certain kind of decision. And quite bizarrely, the kind of decision in question was defined by being directed at social injustices writ large.

This is evident from the EHRC’s description of the purpose of the PSED as “to make sure that public authorities and organizations… think about how they can improve society and promote equality in every aspect of their day-to-day business”. Improving society is obviously quite a big task. It is even more obvious from the Conservative government’s 2023 guidance, including its advice about how organizations might formulate their equality objectives; namely, to “try not to rely on basic, internal goals like diversity training instead of ambitious, customer-facing goals like closing the educational disadvantage gap in schools or fixing big imbalances in participation in technical industries”.

In other words: alongside the usual, already highly demanding day jobs, managers in the NHS, social services, police, judiciary, and education (etc) now had to work out what that elusive philosophical value, “equality”, looked like — not just nearby, but also at a national level — and then pursue that too, wherever practicable. Suddenly faced with the sort of intellectual problem that frequently makes its way onto philosophy exam papers at university, it is scarcely surprising most organizations felt the need to bring in some kind of outside help.

And nor is it surprising that so many public servants ended up treating evidence of different outcomes as evidence of disadvantage, presumed to be the result of background discrimination. For it is an extremely complicated matter to reconstruct the causal routes that explain differences in outcome between sexes, races, or sexual orientations, for instance — not to mention reputationally dangerous to discuss in polite society. It is so much easier to assume prejudice as the uniform cause, then make some clumsy adjustment, supposedly in the name of a fairer society overall.

So Badenoch is correct that the PSED has resulted in distraction from core institutional functions, despite — or perhaps even because of — its non-committal and vague wording. Thanks to the implied demand to think about addressing society-wide problems, spelled out in various bits of guidance, the traditional direction of focus for crucial public services has been altered, moving away from the present and the local toward the absent and the abstract. Instead of just concentrating on what is best for the people in front of you here and now, applying the specialist expertise you have gained as a professional, you are simultaneously supposed to treat these people as units in a much bigger national calculation. Quite apart from the ludicrously hubristic idea that — for instance — failing to section this particular black man in Nottingham will do something meaningful to shift country-wide patterns — the extra mental effort and attentional split is bound to result in misjudgments and blindspots. And that’s presumably how you get a police officer chummily saying, “I don’t think you have, mate”, in response to a young white man dying in front of him, describing how he’s just been stabbed by a Sikh.

The young man in question is called Bear. Never was a name so ironically bestowed for this Bear is anxious, tentative, and terrified of overstepping. He’s in love with a co-worker at the local music store, a girl called Nikki, but cannot steel himself to declare his affections to her. In a hippy shop selling crystals and dreamcatchers, he buys a “One Wish Willow” — marketed as a “collectible toy from the Eighties”. He breaks it in half as instructed, and wishes “that Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world”. He immediately gets his heart’s desire, and all hell breaks loose.

To boomers, this may sound like a familiar tale of the terrifyingly unhinged power of the female libido, with shades of Fatal Attraction or Single White Female. But this film is no nostalgic reprise of that late-Eighties theme. The obsession of the title belongs as much to the male as to the female; and if anything, the latter is to be thoroughly pitied. Thanks to the fulfillment of Bear’s wish, Nikki is subject to an all-consuming romantic possession that drives her towards abject self-debasement and social humiliation against her better nature. During a rare moment of lucidity, she begs for death as a release, and who would blame her? We’ve all been there, Nikki love.

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Actress Inde Navarrette pulls off an astonishing feat as the obsessed young woman, alternating insane aggression with comic pathos. Her devotion is child-like in its intensity, completely untrammeled by attempts to play it cool. Most of the time she is all id, no ego, openly begging Bear for more affection, ferociously guarding him against imagined rivals, and covering the front door with tape to stop him leaving for work. When that fails, she becomes literally rooted to the spot until he returns, with devastating consequences for the carpet.

But for all of Nikki’s spellbound antics, the more interesting character is Bear — sensitively played by another relative unknown, Michael Johnstone. His story makes a compelling contrast to the original “monkey paw” trope, created by author W.W. Jacobs in 1902. Jacobs’ short story depicted a cozy working-class domestic scene, interrupted by the arrival of an acquaintance fresh from the colonies, carrying with him a mysterious shriveled object that will grant three wishes. Ignoring the visitor’s dire warnings and his own misgivings — “it seems to me that I’ve got all that I want” — the family patriarch, Mr White, wishes for two hundred pounds. Next morning White receives this exact sum as compensation for his son’s death, “caught in the machinery” at work. The old man’s second wish is to bring his horribly mangled son back. His third wish is to cancel out the second, finding himself too afraid to answer the ominous knock at the door.

As befits a child of his time, director Barker says he first came across The Monkey’s Paw via an episode of The Simpsons, but one hopes he has read Jacobs’ story too. Along with all the timely social anxieties it expressed about the costs to the working classes of industrial progress, and the threat from the exotic foreigner (Mr White, anyone?), there was a simpler message there too. The Indian fakir who originally put the spell on the monkey’s paw, Jacobs wrote, “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow”. White’s mistake was to fail to accept his lot in life, trying in Promethean fashion to alter destiny instead. As such, he firmly belongs in the pantheon of classic Gothic overreachers, along with Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray.

But Bear’s tragic flaw is precisely the opposite. He is a chronic underreacher who uses his modernized monkey’s paw as a lazy proxy for a deliberate, intentional choice. Romantically he is paralyzed, terrified of being seen to “take advantage” of a girl — even though that’s precisely what he eventually does. And even after it seems clear Nikki has fallen under his spell, still he can’t bring himself to publicly own his feelings. When she asks him if he likes her, his guarded response is: “Why, do you like me?”.

Crazy as she is, Nikki can tell what Bear’s real problem is. At one point she gives him a “Tiger’s Eye” stone as a love gift, to bring him “confidence and will-power”. But it doesn’t work, reappearing during the film’s finale to no avail. It’s not hard to conclude that through this character, Barker has neatly encapsulated the predicament of a generation: unable to ask a pretty girl for a light, let alone steal fire from the gods.

According to some recent estimates, nearly 50% of men between 18-25 have never asked a woman out on a date. Possible reasons are legion, but include the fact that there are simply fewer chance encounters with strangers as social life has moved online. There is an attendant awareness in the young of social media’s potential for making private humiliations public. And there’s the surrounding progressive culture, placing huge emphasis on the potential for men to get sexual approaches wrong. Unfortunately, the threat of heavy social censure only seems to produce confusion and fear in conscientious types, while leaving habitual sex pests perfectly unperturbed.

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In a sense, then, Obsession acts as a permission structure to examine this inadvertent mess, drawing to the surface of consciousness a widespread ambivalence, but without telling viewers how to feel about it. Such story-telling neutrality makes a nice contrast with the socially conscious horror that was popular about a decade ago, following the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Made at a moment of peak didacticism, Peele’s film — though otherwise pretty good — was widely interpreted as saying black people should be afraid of white people, and that white people should feel bad about this. For a while afterwards, we got a spate of clunky lectures disguised as horror films, addressed primarily to viewer’s consciences and only secondarily to their viscera.

But Obsession prefers showing not telling, and is all the better for it. When I eventually staggered out of the cinema, senses bruised by spectacle and noise, the world looked temporarily different. Strangers’ smiles seemed uncanny, the birdsong eerily pronounced. I felt peculiarly in touch with the numinous, and that doesn’t often happen to me in Horsham. It was as if I’d had a tiny holiday from reality, or a restorative miniature psychotic break.

You don’t get much of this uncanny afterglow from streaming films at home, which is another reason why the phenomenal success of Obsession and Backrooms is so cheering. It is striking that both Barker and Kane Parsons — the 20-year-old director of Backrooms — began experimenting with their craft on much smaller screens, bypassing turgid studio systems by taking their output straight to YouTube, and building massive fanbases there. But still the silver screen retained its old power to bewitch. As a result, now these directors are luring the kids out of their bedrooms to watch with other people — a fact that may do wonders for the birth rate, if nothing else.

Presumably these newcomers are encountering the thrill of mental surrender to a huge cinematic experience at close quarters, with no pause or mute button available, in a place where it is frowned upon to have a rival screen out at the same time. And who knows? Perhaps they are also learning of that time-honored way to make an easy move on your love object, something that also used to be big in the Eighties: reaching for a trembling hand in the scary dark.

Of course, this better self didn’t prevail for long. There’s always another warm screen out there, waiting to be caressed in the dark. Every day I lose hours to the habit, and over the years I’ve made many futile attempts to cut back. When forced away from the pixelated realm, I get anxious. While I’m in it, I neglect responsibilities and ignore my loved ones. I have scrolled or texted my way down steep staircases or across busy roads, the compulsion putting me at physical risk. My memory is now fading, and my capacity to delay gratification seriously reduced. My name is Kathleen and I am — according to all standard diagnostic criteria — an addict. Based on the law of averages, you are probably one too.

Given it is so difficult for adults to escape from their inhuman bondage, it seems imperative that someone thinks of the children. This week, various luminaries have been doing just that. Taking a dim view of Big Tech’s direction of travel, Pope Leo XIV has written approvingly of state restrictions on the use of internet platforms for minors, arguing that “it is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time”. He might have added: particularly when the parents are similarly bewitched. In response to a government consultation, meanwhile, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has published its own encyclical of sorts, declaring that children’s “unfettered exposure to tech and devices… ranks alongside smoking and wearing seatbelts in cars as a unifying force for the medical profession.”

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Sensing a popular issue — both with parents worried about their children, and progressive voters who just want to stick it to Elon Musk — politicians are increasingly talking about tech limits too. Correctly, there was strong condemnation of Grok’s nudification app from the Prime Minister earlier this year. The aforementioned consultation has just closed, with unspecified draconian measures expected by the end of the summer. Following a meeting this week with bereaved parents who blame social media for their children’s deaths, Starmer has renewed earlier manifesto promises about improving online child safety. And Wes Streeting has said that he agrees with the doctors: “social media should be treated like tobacco.”

Interestingly, given the former health secretary’s vociferous support for the new Tobacco and Vapes Act, it appears to follow that the Government should raise the legal age for social media every year until it is phased out for future generations entirely. Though clearly such a measure would be ludicrously authoritarian — as indeed it is with respect to smokers — it does seem there are few harms to children caused by screens that don’t translate to the species as a whole. At the very least, the failure to consider this point means that whatever limits are eventually imposed for minors, they are likely to be useless. What self-respecting 13-year-old is going to accept reduced access to the internet, when the adults around her are completely entranced by it, allegedly without any issues? It is as if — fag exuberantly in hand — we were saying that smoking was terrible, but only for those not yet old enough to vote.

Prior to the Tobacco and Vapes Act, the general assumption was that smoking was bad for old and young alike, but also that autonomous adults had the right to choose their own poisons. Leaving the truth of that conclusion aside, it is striking that adult tech users get both autonomous choice and the trivialization of harms. Concerns as they pertain to over-18s seem to be mainly focused on AI, yet the troubling consequences of the smartphone craze long predated the rise of bots. It is striking that the bulk of chatter in this area is about the impact on child and teen development — an area conveniently irrelevant to aged brains.

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The most popular concern is social media content, which exposes young people to dangerous influences well before they are able to process their true import. It is indeed a problem that, deprived of counterbalancing experiences, impressionable minds will heedlessly take on new habits of thought and action, given rapid exposure to hundreds of apparently confirming online examples. Vices like self-obsession and bullying can get fostered in personalities that are still forming, sometimes with tragic consequences. You can argue about whether some particular online element (porn, the manosphere, pro-anorexia sites, or whatever) is genuinely dangerous or not. But the medium’s generally corrupting power seems indisputable. In theory, self-improving habits might spread just as fast as self-destructive ones through a plugged-in population, but in practice the latter take less effort and can be carried out more easily from teenage bedrooms.

Quite apart from anxieties about content, there are also real worries about technological form: the way it keeps youthful attention spans short when they should be growing, causes dizzying dopamine spirals followed by crashes, and stops proper development of impulse control. Indirectly, the lure of screens also reduces participation in several fundamental prerequisites for well-being, both during childhood and afterwards: talking and listening to others, going outside in the fresh air, making real-life friends. When academic tech defenders protest that it is “loneliness… rather than screen time by itself” that causes “mental health struggles” in the young, the point is hardly reassuring. Perhaps the youngsters in question wouldn’t feel so lonely if their friends were actually in the room with them.

Whatever the experts say, from the perspective of a parent it is hard to deny that the ubiquitous presence of screens affects young minds for the worse. Only this week, my 18-year-old informed me that he had written clickbait titles at the top of his A-level answers, “to get the examiner’s attention”. Equally, though, nearly all of the problems I just listed have an adult correlate. You may protest that it’s just a little scrolling, you can quit whenever you want, and it doesn’t interfere with your work or family; but I’m afraid that is just the addiction talking.

Character development may slow down after adolescence, but it doesn’t stop entirely. It can still be derailed by powerful online temptations: porn consumption, getting approval from strangers, losing yourself in a fantasy version of your own life. Adults can be mindlessly influenced by social media too, as evidenced by the number of middle-aged women now obsessed with “fascia softening”, which five minutes ago wasn’t even a thing. And irrespective of what people are clicking on, the formal properties of the medium are wiping memories and ruining powers of concentration, while the whole business displaces other meaningful pursuits. As Ian McEwan told a festival audience this week: “It was much easier to be a writer in the Seventies… One didn’t take out one’s phone.”

By now, more libertarian-minded readers are probably spluttering about prising tech from their cold dead hands. These days, the merest hint of public disapproval seems to get people imagining the specter of state-backed sanctions, as if there was no middle ground between the two. But in this particular case, no one need worry. Unless experts can establish that smartphones cause cancer or dementia, or some other kind of dramatic health outcome for adults, the doomscrolling, rage-clicking, and ignoring of family members can continue unabated. It’s not just that the only officially acceptable ways of judging human flourishing must now refer to physical and mental health. It’s also that too many of us are moving in a downwards direction at once, hiding the true costs.

With modern alcoholism or gambling addiction, the problems for the individual and community can be perceived quite clearly, relative to the functional norm. But with screen addictions, most societies have no meaningful contrast to make with any better way of life. Thanks to tech’s awesome obliterating power, most of us can’t even remember what life was like before the screens arrived. In this respect, we are like the Vikings, for whom alcoholic and psychoactive intoxication was the everyday norm, and the word for sober was “un-drunk”. Let’s just say that Alcoholics Anonymous would have been unlikely to catch on there.

Among us moderns, there now walk a few highly self-disciplined people who can read whole books in one go, remember facts rather than looking them up, talk undistractedly to their children, and pass long train journeys by simply staring out the window. They are the un-addicted. We are the rest. Assuming the aim is to save future generations — or even just ourselves — washing-up bowls may be the only way to go.

And my God it’s fun to watch. Though the polka dot dresses, Twilight Teaser lipsticks, and boil-in-the-bag cod mornays have survived in this second season, the dead wood of Cooper’s original novel — in which too many pages are spent on the ins and outs of TV production meetings, and not in a good way  —  has been radically pruned. What is left is a series of wildly Dionysian set pieces and no hangover. Copious shagging is mandatory, though rarely between husbands and wives. Fags are smoked constantly. Everyone is half cut from 10 in the morning, washing down dry martinis and bottles of Krug with glorious insouciance. Beautiful people are enthusiastically desired by members of the opposite sex; men rut with women half their age, and vice versa. There’s even the odd bit of light-hearted sexual assault, Eighties-style, dealt with afterwards only by an abject apology.  The tango music accompanying the titles sets the tone, overlaid with operatic warbling. Its composers have told BBC Music Magazine their aim was to create the “musical version of an orgasm”.

When I first heard that Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles were being dramatized for a new audience, it seemed inconceivable that such enthusiastically heteronormative novels could survive 21st-century focus groups. But by some miracle, the politically incorrect attitudes expressed in the books have arrived on screen largely intact. And there is no heavy-handed prompting of the audience to rouse their disapproval, either. Though there is — of course — a degree of distancing camp, it is judicially applied, and doesn’t overwhelm the production. The viewer is treated as an adult with a functioning brain, which only adds to the nostalgia.

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Another unfashionable element is the naked classism, transferred straightforwardly from the books. Cooper’s fictional world is divided up into three kinds of people: sympathetic ones who know their place; ghastly upstarts who don’t; and unreadable foreigners who can provide a love interest. In Rivals, the former group includes the arrogant aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black; the upper-middle class romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker (a stand in for Cooper herself); and working-class Freddie Jones, a self-made Essex millionaire played by Danny Dyer. It also includes various pasty-faced Gloucestershire yokels, milling anonymously about the grounds of stately homes and looking suitably gormless.

Ghastly upstarts include Freddie’s wife, Valerie, whose gauche attempts to fit in with the Cotswolds smart set make her a laughing-stock; and the book’s chippy villain, TV mogul Tony Baddingham, a former grammar schoolboy “brought up behind net curtains in a boring semi in the suburbs of Cheltenham”, according to the book. As Freddie hissed at Tony in the first series: “I hate snobs, Tony, and you’re the worst kind there is — the kind that’s forgotten where he came from.” Classless foreigners include the American Cameron Cook and the Irish couple Declan and Maud O’Hara, though these are imagined in terms of national stereotypes instead (respectively: androgynous ballbreaker and emotionally volatile drunkards).

Coincidentally, a day after the second series of Rivals launched, the Guardian published the results of a new class survey. Over a third of British people say they have changed social class since childhood, with those self-identifying as upper and upper-middles more likely to claim they are members of several classes as once. For these people, researchers have coined the term “polyclass”. Presumably Cooper, who died in 2025, would have been as scathing about the idea of polyclasses as she would have been about idea of polyamory, preferring the sort of marital infidelity that doesn’t require earnest discussion beforehand. Indeed, in 1979 she wrote an entertaining though somewhat sociologically unreliable book touching on both topics. It was called Class: A View From Middle England. It stayed on the bestseller list for 20 weeks. 

Class presents the reader with several caricatural families, each supposedly occupying a distinct stratum of English life. At the top there is the Hon. Harry Stow-Crat, formerly of Eton and the Coldstream guards, and his wife Caroline. They “love their dogs more than each other” — for upper-class marriages are made for status not romance — and Harry has numerous children “both regularly and irregularly conceived”. Then there are the upper-middles, Gideon and Serena Upward: “the most intelligent and highly educated of all the classes, and therefore the silliest and the most receptive to every new trend.” They went to minor public schools but now read the Guardian, are worried about the environment, and try to share domestic duties between them. Their children are called Zacharias and Thalia.

Lower down, there are the middle-middles (Howard and Eileen Weybrige, Surrey conservatives who haunt the golf club and the gardening center) and lower-middles (Bryan and Jen Teale, using “refained” accents, net curtains, and privet hedges to keep away the working classes just beneath them). Cooper’s own crashing snobbery gets more strident as she intrepidly descends the social scale and away from her own kind, culminating in her callous depiction of the lowest echelon: the people she calls the Definitely-Disgustings, who seem to be forerunners of Hillary Cinton’s Deplorables. They do manual labor and domestic work, stuff their kids’ faces full of sweets, watch too much telly, and mix socially only with members of their own vast families. She later claimed, very unconvincingly, that she chose the name only because of the working-class habit of calling everything it didn’t like “Disgusting! Definitely”.

But even with a politer name for the proles, it is impossible to imagine a book like Class succeeding nowadays. Class warfare goes in all directions, but there always was something distinctly unsporting in the fact that, in the Seventies and Eighties, the upper-middle Pandoras and Jagos who ran publishing and broadcasting could viciously caricature the working classes in books and on screen, while the latter group lacked the cultural resources and connections to fight back. Made uncomfortably aware of this disparity, today’s Pandoras and Jagos have responded, not by relinquishing much of their cultural grip on the discourse, but by moving instead towards warmly sentimental depictions of working-class people — authentic, Northern, gritty, jocular, and so on. A huge group with many different stories is now largely reduced to a reassuringly down-to-earth voiceover during a teabag advert.

Permissible vituperation, meanwhile, has shifted towards the aristos just above the upper-middles on the ladder. And so toffs have become synonymous in popular fiction with being selfish and grasping, and also — to compress a devastating character assassination into a single phrase — “Right-wing”. Whenever some fox-hunting posho appears in a BBC drama, there is a strong chance he will turn out to be the show’s evil antagonist. It’s ironic when you consider that 32% of the corporation’s highest earners went to private schools.

Social climbing has also changed since the Seventies. In Class, the worst culprits are the “Nouveau-Richards”, prone to being rude to domestics and asking loudly “whether gold plate will spoil in the dish-washer”. Rivals’ Valerie Jones is another such grotesque parvenu. In old sitcoms, lower-middles used to be depicted as frightful social climbers, since the implication was that they were working-class, but giving themselves fake airs and graces. Their famous archetype was Hyacinth Bouquet in Keeping Up Appearances. 

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In the present, there is less need for the lower-middles to be seen to escape their roots, because working-class identity is positively desirable — or at least, the sentimentalized version of it. This has been going on for a while: indeed, arguably it started in the Seventies, when there was a short phase of thinking “working class is beautiful”, according to Cooper. She observes that the timing of this trend explains why Prince Charles sounds just like his mother but Prince Andrew sounds more common.

But to properly blend in with the all-powerful upper-middles these days, it’s all about the morals. You can’t be seen to be obstreperous or sharp-elbowed like Valerie, and must be kind and empathic to the oppressed instead. Where there used to be a crocheted cover on the loo roll, there now should be unbleached bamboo toilet paper; where a gay son used to be a disgraceful secret, you should now throw him a coming-out party. And where pressuring your offspring to do well at school used to be a reliable route up the ladder, it’s now the private diagnosis of mental disorder that’s really chic. Even in 1979, Cooper was noticing this emerging trend, observing that “pediatricians are coining it in testing middle-class children because they aren’t coming top of the class”.

Thankfully, she kept this distinctly modern sounding observation out of Rivals; and the program-makers didn’t break the spell either. To watch this series is to bathe in a world where the 21st Century is blissfully absent. Class war is out in the open, with no covert operations or feigned surrender. Competition between individuals is pursued openly and energetically, not passive-aggressively behind a kind face. Heated arguments about language are not about pronouns, but concern “swimming costume” over “bathing suit” or “teacher” over “schoolmistress”. The only mental disorders come from aristocratic inbreeding. The only kind of surrogate mother anyone has ever heard of is a nanny. Do yourself a favor and open some booze, have a cheeky fag, and take a holiday to the sexy, sybaritic Eighties — whether or not you get a happy ending there, you’ll return feeling strangely rejuvenated. 

Such are my conclusions after spending time on BookTok, a.k.a. the bit of TikTok where supposed book-lovers like to hang out. BookTok is massive, with more than 77 million posts, most of them by young women. Last month it launched an official bestseller list, which turned out to be full of sexually explicit romance and “romantasy” books: the kind where a mysteriously suave basilisk accidentally spills coffee over a young lady as she is leaving a candle shop, and the rest is written in the stars.

BookTok’s bestseller list is generated by combining sales figures with the activity patterns of users. A typical post involves filming yourself holding a tantalizingly anonymous pile of books, then revealing the covers to camera, one by one, with maximum drama and enthusiasm. You have about a minute to convey your feelings without losing your audience, so there’s no need to go all Harold Bloom. “These five God-tier novels left my jaw on the floor” will do.

As well as recommendations, there are jokey self-referential vids about BookTok itself, helping to mythologize the sort of sensitive, introverted, sex-mad dreamer who uses it. Sometimes you get discussion of the classics — “The Count of Monte Cristo is CRISPY, it is CLEAN”, as one user puts it  — but mostly it features contemporary stuff. You can also find information about how to leave the house to attend a newly popular sort of event known as a silent book club — something we older folk would call “going to the library”.

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The aged generations have their own online platforms, though they are more staid and celebrity-driven. Boomers have Oprah’s book club, which has given them regular doses of uplift, inspiration, and empowerment since 1996. Amazon has just bought the rights to it. Gen X-ers have Reese Witherspoon’s hugely successful club; its owner likes to “consciously curate the stories and autonomy of women, championing voices and platforming authors too often overlooked”. Millennials have Dua Lipa’s newsletter — a subject I have visited before — now recommending “Books To Read When You’re Burnt Out & Only Have The Attention Span For A Short Story” or “Books For Reinventing Yourself Without Resorting To Cutting Your Hair”. It all feels quite intimate, like a trusted friend is talking to you, but also someone more glamorous than your actual pals: a world-renowned tastemaker, getting you in on emerging trends.

As the Economist noted last week in a piece on the rise of celebrity book clubs, the prevailing mood is relentlessly positive. Passion is a prerequisite, and joy at the reading experience non-negotiable — unless you are temporarily heartbroken by the plot. All the positivity seems inextricably bound up with progressive politics. Book clubs started off as scripture discussion groups for women, and not much has changed, mood wise. Titles are chosen for their improving messages, often tied to the admirable ethnic or sexual identity of the author. It is implicitly understood that no-one is allowed to be mean.

A blurb for a civil service virtual book club last year captures the ambiance, inviting participants whether gay or straight to “join the vibrant world of literature and inclusivity … sharing insights and fostering meaningful discussions on the power of queer narratives” — with a note about desired standards of behavior attached. “We expect that everyone attending one of our events will also choose their words carefully and sensitively.” Translation: if you are looking for an exhilaratingly savage takedown of Audre Lorde, you had better go somewhere else.

All this fastidious suppressing of bad vibes gets suffocating quite quickly. Recurring fantasies in the online book world are of a “cozy”, “safe” place for reading. Ideally, as you read you should be in a dedicated “nook”, swaddled in beige blankets. The imagery seems like shorthand for so much more than soft furnishings. Indeed, if modern book culture was an interior design mood, it would be cottagecore: a crackling fire in the grate, snow banking against the mullioned windows, a cat on your legs. Admittedly, the Gen Z version would have a sex-crazed basilisk chained up outside, and the Gen X-ers would have a serial killer peering through the window; but still, as Léon once said to an approving Emma in Madame Bovary: “what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?”

Here Flaubert was satirizing an approach which treats novels as a means of romantic escape or as emotional catharsis, though I’m not sure that the thousands of people discussing his book online have noticed his point. A modern day Gustave would have been equally devastating on the popular idea that reading is a way of improving your mental health. Dreamy, sexually frustrated Emma would have made a great BookTokker: “I adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.” She is talking about her favorite Walter Scott novels, but she might just as well be talking about Rebecca Yarros’s dragon riders.

Criticism of book club culture is generally frowned upon as snobbish and counterproductive. Publishers are not going to complain about it — while sales are generally down, their figures are heavily dependent on viral attention. Authors such as Yarros and Sarah J. Maas have sold millions of copies in the last few years, largely thanks to BookTok. And those worried about the decline in literacy might protest: shouldn’t we just be grateful that young people are reading things longer than a few lines and getting excited about them? Along with the mandatory positivity about books, there is a feeling we’re supposed to grin and bear the surrounding discourse.

But there are downsides, and not just for authors who don’t have the potential for virality, or for young men, put off reading for life by the cartoonishly feminized aesthetic. A less obvious one concerns the death of criticism, in a sense that takes account of form as well as content: a concentrated unpicking of language in terms of things like rhythm, imagery, and rhetorical devices, and the interplay of these with style, plot, and major themes. This requires attention to chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and not just the whole. It means forgetting about how a book makes you feel, or what inspiring message it conveys, and getting dispassionately deep into the mechanics. It means stopping treating the book as a cool experience like a funfair ride or a sunset, and thinking of it as a deliberate creation of a particular mind instead.

Literature departments obsessed with social justice spend less and less time on close reading; overexcited heads turn towards saving the world, and away from the text as an object of independent interest. Inevitably pressed for space, newspaper book reviews are not very good at deep analysis either; and in any case these are disappearing too. An article in the New York Times last month noted that there were only five full-time literary critics left in the whole of the States.

In this respect, I had hopes for Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett’s new podcast The Book Club, but they too seem to focus on the social context of narratives and on emotional effects, rather than literary technique. And you certainly aren’t going to learn how to do close reading on BookTok. It’s the sort of thing that takes concentration and time and is very unlikely to go viral.

The gap creates a problem for discernment. With the focus on the macro not the micro, there is a general decrease in appreciation of the range of effects that literary devices can create. In looking only for the emotional power inherent in a work, or what a book can tell us about contemporary society, readers are missing huge parts of what can make a masterpiece so good: anacoluthon, apostrophe, assonance, and the rest of the rhetorical alphabet, exponentially breeding meanings as they interact with one other. And more basically, lack of familiarity also means readers can totally misunderstand what is going on in the story.

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Take the case of free indirect discourse, which, it seems, is increasingly hard for present-day readers to comprehend. When Flaubert’s narrator describes how Emma, who has just taken a lover and is now looking at herself delightedly in the mirror, “was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium” we are not supposed to think he means it. Rather, in full knowledge of the heroine’s tendency to fantasize, we are invited to share the joke of her delusion.

But when popular approaches to literature urge us to search constantly for the heartfelt and sincere in a text, not the playful, witty, or oblique, you get a flat-footed literalism in the reader; one that is blind to subtle signs of something more ambivalent and interesting. And the fewer people that understand indications of ironic distance, the less likely it is that authors will try it out in new writing; for with an oblivious audience prone to misunderstanding, it becomes risky to play.

In the essay on Flaubert in his masterly Lectures on Literature, Nabokov wrote that “Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the character in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Léon do”. It is what a lot of us do, ultimately to the detriment of the quality of thought in the public realm. Delicately wrought tools of self-expression and communication, developed over centuries, and able to convey endless depth and interest, are falling out of use. And we are too busy feeling moved, inspired, or filled with lust about werewolves to notice.

But then, Natasha Walter isn’t here to sugar coat things. According to her new book, Feminism for a World on Fire, fresh threats to women loom from every angle: authoritarian demagoguery, technology, capitalism, climate change. And the old threats haven’t been properly dealt with either: inequality, violence, pornography, racism. Meanwhile women are divided and distracted by arguments about immigration and trans people, as the world burns. Cumulatively, the outlook is bleak: “When women face up to the challenges around them, it is not irrational if they start to give voice to fear, and even despair.”

Most of the book is taken up with diagnosis but — as Walter reminds us — feminists don’t just want “to understand the world … the point is to change it”. Unfortunately the proposed remedies, when they come, are also depressing — clearly inadequate to the gargantuan problems just conjured up. Drawing upon familiar second wave platitudes, Walter exhorts readers to build communities, promote the value of care, engage in local green projects, make connections with other women across differences — all of which sounds nice; but also like a mere drop in the overheating ocean, assuming you take the apocalyptic predictions seriously.

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The author hasn’t always felt this gloomy. Her 1999 book, The New Feminism, contained a relatively upbeat liberal message aimed at second wavers and conservative fogeys alike: stop disapproving of female sexual and sartorial choices, and put more women on boards and ballot papers instead. Do less glowering, do more empowering. Now, though, she has buyer’s remorse, reproaching her earlier self for being too individualistic, too caught up with the concerns of white middle-class women like herself. And she also regrets the way that what looked like a promising feminist protest movement in the 2000s was quickly turned into an empty fashion mag aesthetic: “even as the new wave of women’s resistance was starting to gather, it was being smartly mimicked and sold back to us”.

Walter used to be a Vogue writer in the Nineties, so she should know. She was also an elegant, fizzy member of the Late Review cultural commentariat, but then ditched the glamour and founded a charity for female asylum seekers instead. “Over the years that I worked with refugee women I came to know what it feels like when every day is a crisis”, she writes. And it seems she is still living in a permacrisis mindset, somewhat to the detriment of light and shade in her exposition. If you are the type to consider the pros as well as cons of any challenging situation — both in order to understand it, and to change it — you might find Walter’s relentless adoption of the tragic mode a little difficult to stomach.

On the other hand, if you are an “angry young woman”, trying to deal with gnawing anxiety at the state of the world by engaging in radical politics, the grim emotional register of the book will probably resonate. According to a recent investigation by the New Statesman, this demographic is particularly disaffected and prone to pessimism about the future. Walter’s boomer politics are unlikely to be radical enough for anti-imperialist Gen Z they/thems, but the general miserabilist ambiance does at least look like a good fit.

Personally I find the approach offputting: but I can’t blame either Walter or the youngsters for amping up a handwringing idiom that has been present in feminism for a long time. Just as someone is always wrong on the internet, so too is there always something wrong with some woman’s life, somewhere; and no feminist should apparently rest until the matter is resolved. Should a scintilla of optimism emerge about some particular advance for women, the subject can quickly be changed to other women thousands of miles away, with a more satisfyingly medieval set up to fret over instead.

Walter herself does a lot of this, jumping from country to country on the least fun world tour ever. Think some things are getting better? Not so fast, lady: you should hear what life is like in Kenya, or Iran. It makes me wonder what the measure of success is. Is the only acceptable outcome really the raising of four billion female people’s legal rights, practical opportunities, available goods, etc. across the globe to exactly the same male-comparable standard; or else conclude that the endlessly shape-shifting patriarchy has won?

If so, then the project is obviously doomed; and the perpetual lure of the omnicause to Lefties makes things even worse. Feminists are somehow supposed to tackle sexual violence, get rid of pornography, induce the world to recognize the true value of care work, free Palestine, and achieve net zero? Potential recruits can be forgiven for finding they have to wash her hair that night instead. In truth, the hopeless unfeasibility of the modern feminist to-do list undermines the project from within, just as much as the sight of some fashion influencer cosplaying at revolutionary chic. The age-appropriate idealism/ cluelessness of angry young women might obscure this point for a while; but more experienced organizers should know better.

Shorter lists, aiming at making local changes not global ones, are more doable. This is partly why — to take an example which will send angry young women into further paroxysms of rage — British gender-critical women have had great success in fighting the incursions of transactivism into women’s spaces and resources in recent years. Walter finds herself unable to use that example, not least because she finds herself unable to pronounce definitively on what a woman is. But she is also apparently hampered by another stultifying feature of much Left-wing feminism: a horror of working with Right-wing women towards shared objectives.

She is critical of those women who “pick up on only one part of the fight for women’s rights, and dismiss other parts”; who “appropriate certain aspects of feminism, particularly the fight against street harassment, to argue against immigration, while also standing against other feminist arguments”. Of course, a more charitable interpretation is that these women are applying female-friendly principles more strictly than many leftists do themselves, determined as the latter are to put anti-racist causes higher up their actions list.

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For her part, Walter seems to think that a woman has to be pro-immigration to count as a feminist at all. It’s a familiar stance on the Left, but one that makes her exhortations to women to “find solidarity” with one another over “shared experiences under patriarchy” sound rather hollow. She briefly mentions the scandal of grooming gangs, noting the failures of relevant agencies, but is silent about the omertà imposed by intersectional feminist logic, determined not to draw attention to any aspect of cultural reality that might draw racist backlash. At one point she even indulges in bit of that sort of thing herself, praising one survivor for “refusing to let her story be exploited by those who would use it to drive hatred and division”, and so implicitly positively contrasting her story with others.

Yet no grooming gang victim  — a victim of a real live patriarchy, if ever there was one — has good reason to stay silent about the drawbacks of some kinds of immigration for her personally; and nor, indeed, does any inquiring female mind, concerned with scrutinizing the effects of multiculturalism, both bad and good. And of course, once all these people have been ejected from the feminist club, the result is a much smaller club; so even less chance of achieving the titanic objectives set for the movement as a whole. Meanwhile, new members who are not particularly radical or angry are unlikely to flock in droves. For the bargain demanded of them — be prepared to pipe down about your own female-related interests or those of close others, wherever more urgent Left-wing causes require it — is not an attractive one.

Though shallow, the liberal feminism Walter used to espouse at least had a plausible psychological story about why women might want to be involved: namely, it was a form of self-help. Higher wages, more job opportunities, fewer disapproving looks cast by the world at your miniskirt and heels, were all things many women wanted to have at the time, and still do. In contrast, feminism as so often outlined by the Left seems like an exercise in altruism and self-abnegation, often forcing you to put the interests of distant strangers over those of yourself and the people you know. That’s fine if you have the temperament of a secular missionary or a raging masochist, but most do not. Indeed, instead of intersectionality as a paralyzing ideal, there should probably be a feminist version of the Ordo Amaris: women encouraged to address issues of relevance to the self, the family, neighbors, and local communities, before mentally venturing much further afield. At least that way, they would have an incentive to participate.

Towards the end of her book, Walter writes of the importance of grassroots feminism: “as more precarious and uncertain times come closer, the work to ground our campaigns in the grassroots feels to me ever more important”. Here, I completely agree. Grassroots campaigns are often effective because the women have achievable goals in mind, of direct relevance to them or people they know. In strategizing, they take account of true local conditions rather than applying a lofty ideological lens to a problem, obscuring the terrain. And in fighting, they know how to pick their battles, and are comfortable with large political differences between fellow combatants. Presumably Walter knows this, having done admirable local pro-refugee work herself.

There is nothing to stop feminists caring about anti-racism or capitalism or climate change if that is their thing, and individuals are always free to work out where they wish to direct their own political efforts. But defining feminism itself in terms of such goals is a recipe for disaster. It may sound boring in comparison, but feminists interested in actually getting things done should try to get back into the frying pan and out of the fire.

Policy documents would arrive full of empty second-hand phrases, awkwardly strung together. For instance: “The curriculum shall not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people, and any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives.” This was one of several overbearing clauses in Sussex’s “Trans and Nonbinary Equality Policy Statement”, launched with internal fanfare in 2018. The wording came from a template provided by Advance HE, an organization supposedly concerned with improving teaching standards in the higher education sector. It was robotically copied by several universities, Sussex among them.

Last year, the Office for Students issued a large fine to Sussex on the basis of introducing this policy, and cited my adverse experiences there as evidence of its chilling effect on academic freedom. Indeed, while I was working as a philosophy lecturer, attempting to broach thorny issues of sex and gender while avoiding disciplinary investigations from management, the mere sight of a link to this particular policy in an official email would cause significant clenching of my jaw. But this Wednesday, the passive-aggressive wording sidled back into my life, to enrich my dentist further. The High Court ruled that the fine had been unlawful, and the Office for Students had misapplied its own rules.  

Central to the judgment was the finding that the trans policy did not in fact count as a “governing document” — meaning that the Office for Students was wrong to conclude it ever seriously breached their regulations. Yet on the ground at the time, the policy felt very much like a governing document. Indeed, it seemed positively Stalinesque in its effect. It combined with several other EDI policies and communications to inculcate a general feeling of menace: warnings about transphobia and hate speech; instructions about preferred pronouns and how exactly to apologize if you got them wrong; links to helplines for those affected by speech-based bigotry, and trans flags fluttering all over the shop.  

But according to this week’s ruling, “governing documents” in this context only ever means constitutional texts such as statutes and charters, not policies attempting to force change in cultural values or behavioral norms. And the judge also ruled that the OFS failed to consider other Sussex policies defending freedom of speech, supposedly more definitive of the institutional stance — though as I recall, these were squirreled away in remote corners of the website, given far less prominence in everyday life. 

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There are other points in the ruling, less easy to paraphrase. Though the overall verdict is clear enough — the OFS messed up badly, misunderstood its own regulations, and also showed bias in its determination to make an example of Sussex — much of the text is taken up with the byzantine interaction of particular OFS regulations and Sussex documents, not easy for the non-specialist to decipher. Still, other matters are made transparently clear. As pertaining to the OFS’s academic freedom director, Arif Ahmed, for instance, the judge explicitly found that there was “no vitiating apparent bias in respect of Dr Ahmed’s personal role in the decision-making”, and that Sussex’s attempts to demonstrate otherwise had failed.

But history is written by the victors, as they say; and yesterday the victorious Vice-Chancellor Sasha Roseneil was doing the media rounds, calling for Ahmed’s head nonetheless. Originally a Cambridge philosopher of language, he is well-known within free speech circles for his refreshingly unadorned critiques of emotional safetyism within universities, including an earlier successful fight to see Cambridge remove a regulation requirement to be “respectful” towards opposing points of view. It would be completely in keeping with our times to see a confident plain speaker like him ousted by someone whose warm and fuzzy aim for her organization, as of yesterday, is to “continue to focus on creating an open, inclusive and respectful campus culture”.

Though herself a sociologist, Roseneil also seemed in the mood to do a bit of historical reconstruction, waxing lyrical about the university’s “proud history of being the place where the most contentious issues of the day are aired”. During court proceedings earlier this year, Sussex’s barrister even went so far as to call the university a “bastion of free speech”. Reader, I laughed. Perhaps it was once so, and could be again; I have no idea, having relinquished my former connections. But it may not surprise you to learn that this is not my recollection of the place; and nor can it really be Roseneil’s. She arrived to run it in 2022, a year after I had left.

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I have described my Sussex experiences too often to rehearse them here again. By now, I am quite bored of remembering, so God knows how everyone else feels. But for an economical snapshot of what life was like back then, consider the tone and content of this “Dean’s update” email, sent by my line manager to all staff in the arts and humanities in April 2021, including me, and preserved on the internet for posterity. In particular, attend to the lengthy sections on “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion” and “LGBTQ+ inclusion”, bearing in mind that this deathless managerial prose was composed years after my public complaints about Stonewall’s overreach had first attracted local acts of animosity, and five months before the large scale protests against me started. And if you think this sounds like an “open” or even “respectful” environment in which to criticize the presence of males in women’s prisons or the medical transition of minors, I have an extremely scientific encyclopedia of gender identities to sell you.

For those who are big fans of such things, I’m sure the High Court result will be triumphantly received as proof that stories about my tumultuous time at Sussex were always overdone. The judge stated in her ruling that she was not adjudicating on the substance of those events, about which the then-Vice-Chancellor expressed profound regret at the time. Roseneil also stressed the separateness of the two matters in her own statement. But in my experience, you can’t expect people who believe in magical gender essences to care much about finer details. In any case, whatever they are saying I’m not reading it, having blissfully given up monitoring my public image in the eyes of such people a long time ago.

For related reasons, I am not clued up on exactly what this means for the sector as a whole; and nor do I really wish to remedy the deficit. But from the outside, it seems that one astonishing thing to have emerged from the ruling is that existing free speech statutes have literally nothing meaningful to say about the hundreds of politicized documents that have proliferated like weeds in British universities in the last decade, praising some forms of expression as desirable and proscribing others as suspicious or outright hateful; fueling a culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear.

Perfectly rationally in the circumstances, thousands of academics are still self-censoring, having taken note of the finger-wagging policies appearing on the website, the sententious managerial sermons flowing into their inbox, the politicized commemorations and flags, the aggressivity of activist staff networks, and the extremely selective forms of “lived experience” highlighted by the institution as morally instructive. The High Court judgment is based on the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), and implies it is not the regulator’s concern whether a university’s culture produces intimidating obstacles to freedom of expression like these, or avoids them. If this is true, it can only emphasize the total irrelevancy of HERA to freedom of expression in the modern context, and the urgent need for a different approach. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has yet to be enacted, and one can only hope it will do much better.

For ultimately it is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there, and the regulator needs to catch up. These are fueled partly by innate staff susceptibility, and partly by more hard-headed desires of managers to hop onto whatever bandwagon students are currently riding, hoping to benefit from larger application numbers and better student scores. They don’t tend to result in changes to foundational constitutions, but they do produce large numbers of suffocating bureaucratic tendrils, along with a lot of busywork: new policies and guidelines to keep people in line; marketing messages to tweak, and social media campaigns to launch; workshops for staff re-education, and fresh positions of power for true believer staff to occupy.  

In this stifling environment, better regulations would of course be welcome; but the country also needs to decide what universities are actually for. Are they just an expensive means of teaching middle-class kids to mouth certain attractive words and phrases, with which they can then drive forward progress, take deep dives into inequality, circle back to kindness, and drill down into the oppressive status quo? Or might they be better championed as places where such heartwarming, mind-numbing platitudes can be challenged and even mocked, without personal or professional cost? Having left the university sector behind me, I’ve now got full freedom to think for myself. It’s a glorious gift; one that all the clever, inquisitive, contrarian people still stuck in ivory towers and redbrick towerblocks can only dream of.

The book purports to be a practical guide to conversion: self-help, except that the idea is to give your sinful self over to God, following the path Brand himself has purportedly trodden from debauchery to devotion. Conceptually — if one can use a word like that in this context without immediately collapsing into hysterics — the project is loosely based on the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, of which Brand is also a fan. This means there are tasks to complete at the end of each chapter, including some fearless and searching personal inventories. For instance: “One by one, go through the seven characteristics of God. Where are you clenching?”

There are also prayers composed by Brand for readers to recite, though fans of the Nunc Dimittis should not get their hopes up (“Almighty God, Beloved King. Dad. Dad. Alright Dad. You are everything that is and could be and you love me.”) There are arguments with ChatGPT about biblical interpretation; a comic dialog between the Old Testament’s David and Nathan; some blather about how Brand’s vision is of a cool hipster Jesus, not the dusty old geezer beloved of Songs of Praise (“They made the Son of God as appealing as a cat-tongue enema”). But really these aspects are window dressing, a desultory pretext for what Brand has always liked best — talking about himself.

In circuitous fashion, he describes the personal events that have drawn him to Christianity, from the genuinely harrowing (his baby son facing open heart surgery) to the relatively quotidian (the death of his dog). The writing gets most focused when explaining how accusations of rape and sexual assault have been rustled up against him by shadowy elites, putting the demon into demonetization in order to stop him talking truth to power about Covid jabs. And there are also a few enjoyably savage jibes about his ex-wife’s new globalist squeeze.

Most of the time, though, the prose style is so unbearable it eclipses every other consideration. To call this a stream of consciousness is an insult to consciousness — it feels more like a fugue state. There are attempts at ecstatic lyricism that could just as easily be diary entries of a teenage serial killer: “Consider that within you… there is a portion of the divine, shooting, roaming, spreading, and searching, and the function of the world is to entice, enchant, wrap, and shellac it, a new and choking womb”.

Other metaphors are similarly lunatic: “My wife bears some wound of the woman, some mythic anathema to me, the man. Yet, like the island of Japan, she knew that trouble would come if she opened up her shores.” Then, punctuating the grandiose drivel, come hairpin lurches into the old Nineties Britpop tweeness: feet as “tootsies”; food as “mouth munchy din dins”; the disciple John as “needy and queeny”. And it turns out Brand hasn’t even read the Bible at all, but only Nicky Gumbel’s The Bible in One Year.

There is also the disingenuity of the timeline. It may be traditional to take conversion stories at face value, but I’m afraid I’m calling it. Brand was charged in April 2025 with historical offenses of rape, oral rape, sexual assault, and indecent assault, said to have been committed between 1999-2005. The case has yet to come to court. The charges followed a year or two of newspaper allegations and civil suits from alleged victims, during which he had plenty of time to get a new spiritual story straight.

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Having flirted with the wackier edges of the wellness movement for a while, his conversion to Christianity came in 2024, marked by an unassuming little baptism in the Thames, with celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls as the celebrant. Within three months, Brand was himself performing full immersive baptisms in his Y-fronts, again in front of cameras: “It might seem a bit soon to be baptizing people, but the Apostles did it on day one, so here we are.”

To call his new role as celebrity preacher brass-necked is an understatement. Even Jonathan Aitken waited 18 years before he dared become a vicar. Yet in Brand’s version, there is no need for circumspection because he is innocent. Though keen to play up his “broken” past, he says that he would never rape anyone, and besides, there was never any need; sinful fornication with willing “shopkeepers and realtors and masseuses and waitresses and photographers and doctors and lawyers and movie stars” was already available to him. Or as he also puts it, apparently unaware of events in Genesis: “If you own an orchard, you don’t steal apples”. Indeed, apart from Jesus, the biblical character Brand seems to identify most with is David and his “adulterous, exploitative, wrong, but consensual seduction of Bathsheba”.

Of course David was also famously a slayer of giants, an image to which Brand seems strangely drawn as he fights his own Goliaths: the powerful figures in the background who foisted vaccines upon the world, secretly engineered the destruction of the Twin Towers, want you to consume porn, don’t want you to read the Epstein files, and aspire to control “all trade, banking, communication, biometrics, attention, life itself”. And if that sounds potentially a bit antisemitic, I think you might be right. There’s a weird rant early on in the book about the “satanic” globalist message behind Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, said to be favored reading both of Obama and the “slobbering Santa Claus of the New Order”, WEF founder Klaus Schwab. (There are also disclaimers that do a bit too much protesting: the book is “admittedly excellent”; and “I’m not suggesting that Yuval Noah Harari is evil, by the way, or anything other than a nice man and a good writer”.)

As I watched Brand promote his book on the Tucker Carlson show this week — prefaced by another freeform prayer that certainly had me clenching — I wondered whether it was wise to have written it. The project seems quite risky. During one of his motormouth livestreams, viewers susceptible to Brand’s charms can mentally zone in and out while doing other things, and come away with a distracted impression of sincerity, humor, or cleverness. But when forced to concentrate on his words on the page, placed in consecutive order and shorn of the accompanying visual circus, the mirage disappears.

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And I can’t think the book will sell many copies. The crunchy hippies and anarchists still in his audience, carried over from lockdown, will presumably remain unmoved; while the newer MAGA lot don’t need lessons on the Bible from a louche foreigner dressed in leopard print. It is impossible to imagine anyone being persuaded to attend church for the first time after reading this book.

But perhaps — along with atheism — more organized forms of Christianity still have something to gain from the spectacle. Shaped by the internet, narcissistic obsession is a spiritual blight on our times, the unsilent killer of meaningful lives. The norm for millions is now to spend life in a haze of self-fascination, curating social media outputs obsessively, trapped in fantasies of approval or disapproval from others and feeling like one’s entire worth depends on the fact. Brand seems vaguely aware of this in his book, calling his earlier self a “living endorsement of promiscuity and aspartame narcissism”, but then simply folds the convoluted insight into yet another round of compulsive peacocking, with the cross as a prop.

Organized Christianity contains many an antidote to this contemporary poison: the emphasis on humility and self-sacrifice, the call to private good works, the primary focus on the quality of one’s relationship with other people and with God. Whether or not the so-called quiet revival is real, it seems there is spiritual hunger abroad, and unexpected movement towards Catholicism and Orthodoxy, even amongst younger people. The reasons for this are unclear; but an underrated explanation is surely the relaxing absence of the self during participation in the ancient rite. You can empty your mind out, let the old words flow, and become part of something greater.

For anyone sickened by the constant mental pressure of the tawdry self — and the way that modern forms of Christianity so easily bend to it — it helps to have someone like Brand in the world as an object lesson: a living embodiment of what happens when self-obsession takes the wheel and calls it Jesus. The man himself won’t care, though; negative attention is still narcissistic supply. And anyway, he has other things to think about: not least, his newly-announced intention to run for the London mayoralty in 2028. If you’re thinking of a spiritual retreat in a monastery — perhaps somewhere with a strict no-internet policy — now might be a good time to plan it.

Niblett’s big idea is to herald in what she calls a “summer of sex”, instructing the general public in the art of having satisfying, mutually respectful erotic experiences. Perhaps assuming that the Right needs more help with this than the Left, she appears to be spinning her campaign towards Reform and Restore voters in particular: “it’s about taking control of our patriotism, about taking control of our Britishness, and not feeling ashamed”. Accordingly, she has named the project “Yes Sex Please, we are British”, which ironically sounds like something only a foreigner could have made up. In fact, though, it’s a riff on a Seventies sex farce featuring Ronnie Corbett — probably a little niche, even for Rupert Lowe fans.

The details of Niblett’s project sound unlikely to get the national pulse racing. Or as Aristotle percipiently noted in a different context, one swallow does not a summer make. She plans to team up with a fellow sex positivist — the equally improbably named Cindy Gallop — to replace the pornographic stereotypes in people’s heads with images of “real people” having sexual contact. In other words: don’t picture the slick thrustings of Pornhub, think Matt Hancock smooching in an office. Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a website where, according to its own hype, you can “watch real world sex videos in all their loving, hot, and messy humanness”. Niblett apparently enjoys visiting the site herself — “It’s a turn on, it helps you masturbate, helps you cum”, she elaborates to the reporter, somewhat unnecessarily — and says she is looking to facilitate engagement between its founder and government ministers.

Gallop, meanwhile, is a 66-year-old entrepreneur who recently told the Telegraph she is proud of the fact that she “regularly and recreationally” sleeps with younger men. It was apparently in the course of these amatory adventures that she had a Eureka moment, in the traditional sense. She started to notice that the young men with whom she was sleeping had various misconceptions about sex, based on hardcore porn consumption. And lo, the idea for MLNP was born.

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In a spirit of inquiry, I signed up for the free version. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience much, though perhaps it was because the clips I was watching were only three seconds long — you have to pay to watch full videos, and I didn’t. Generally, the site looks like an updated Readers’ Wives section. If you like brutally natural lighting, concentrated facial expressions, low-energy writhing on well-worn Ikea furniture, and occasional grunts interspersed with the sounds of the Heathrow flightpath, this might well be the place for you.

Participants write their own blurbs to lure viewers in, and several seem to involve references to childcare: “This is just a short video we made while finding some time in the morning while the children were still asleep”; “We’re again using the time our toddler is napping to get as much of each other as possible”. Another theme is the outdoors: “Witness as Tausha’s body responds to Trevor’s touches. Hear her moans echo through the forest, listen to the birds respond to her primal tones”. I did as instructed and think I might have heard a startled woodpecker, though it was quite hard to tell.

Of course — as Niblett’s fellow MPs have been quick to point out — this is all a right Carry On, and a distraction from current political priorities: wars, looming food shortages, systemic state failures resulting in the murder of children. As Kemi Badenoch pithily put it in the Commons, “it gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns”. Stung by the criticism, Niblett has apparently now changed her PR strategy, suggesting yesterday that the campaign is for the benefit of “old people” who “want to have sex”. Presumably Badenoch’s Spads are brainstorming double entendres about the triple lock as I write.

But what is also frustrating is that Niblett and Gallop identify a real problem, though the solution they propose is hilariously empty. It is obvious that porn use, among other modern malaises, is infecting sexual behavior to the detriment of both women and men, but the solution cannot be yet more porn — for this is indeed what MLNP provides, despite the disclaimer in its title. True, there are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.

Part of the problem is that images of people enjoying one another say nothing very complicated. Not being made of words, images tend to be simple like that. Gallop grandiosely claims that each of the videos on her site “is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values, good sexual behavior”. But that’s like saying that a photo of Kew Gardens is an object lesson in how to grow roses. In fact, though, what we are supposedly seeing demonstrated onscreen at MLNP — respect, mutuality, loving concern for the other, or whatever — is the end result of a process that is still a complete mystery to many.

Since the sex you have with others is a product of the wider relationship you have with them, a sex education worth its name would require making substantive moral judgments about good and bad relationships — and not just in the bedroom or on the picnic rug. Yet beyond the usual platitudes about consent and better communication, this is something both Niblett and Gallop are very unwilling to do; and it’s a reluctance shared with nearly everyone in the so-called “sex education” space. Niblett insists in her interview that she is not “saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong”. And in a 2009 Ted talk, Gallop states: “this is absolutely not about judgment… this is not about good and bad”. She even professes herself a regular watcher of hardcore porn. Her big revelation is that for every possible sexual proclivity, there will be some that like it, and some that don’t; and if you don’t like something, it is OK to say so.

But secondary schools, women’s magazines, and soap operas have been harping on this basic point since at least the Eighties. Announcing it yet again is not going to change a thing. In fact, the average person who assents to a hated sexual practice knows perfectly well that a firm “no” is always available; but they don’t want to use it, and not necessarily because they are feeling open-minded. A rival explanation is that they can’t think of any persuasive consideration against the practice in question; and, in this regard, mainstream culture has done nothing to help. On the contrary, it has made nearly every kind of sexual behavior immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.

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Saying that something is only bad if you don’t like it, but fine if you do, is a particularly unconvincing argument. It doesn’t even work well for wine tastings, let alone human relationships. It makes your likes or dislikes of certain things seem like they must be built on sand, and scarcely worth defending. Feelings of disgust become “preferences” rather than helpful reactions of ethical discernment. You lose the capacity to articulate what in other circumstances would be a perfectly natural thing to say: “No, I’m not bloody well doing that, because it expresses nothing but contempt for me; and you are a creep for even trying”.

A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgment by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgmental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behavior: as bizarrely insulated from everyday attitudes like hatred and resentment, even when the actions undertaken are obviously hateful and resentful. In no other context could you slap someone hard in the face, choke them, pull them around on a lead, or intentionally cause them to retch, yet still claim later without embarrassment that you “respected” them hugely throughout.

Since only radical feminists and religious types seem willing to contest this absurd narrative, vacuous platitudes from the likes of Niblett and Gallop about “better communication”, “freeing people from shame” and, of course, “increasing consent” will likely continue unabated, circling vaguely around the real ethical dilemmas of sexual interaction but never actually engaging. In a 2019 interview, Gallop talked of plans to start a business called ConSensual: not, as you may have first feared, a sex education site aimed at Conservative Party members, but rather a “safe social sexting app, which both enables you to sext completely securely and improves your sexual communication in your relationship (I have this all planned out in the pipeline, I just need investors)”. Imagine a Cindy-avatar in kinky boots, cheerfully reminding you that if someone calls you a filthy, disgusting whore, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you happen to like it; but absolutely not if you don’t! Personally, though, I think I’ll just stick to WhatsApp, plus my usual practice of avoiding sexting people who clearly loathe me. And that’s a bit of sex education the world can have for free.

Also this week, the British government appeared to hold a man responsible for things he did when in the grip of mental illness. Kanye West has been banned from entering the UK in order to perform at a festival. In the recent past, he has written songs called “Heil Hitler” and “Gas Chambers”; been on several offensive social media benders; made various conspiratorial statements during interviews; sold swastika T-shirts. Earlier this year he offered a fulsome apology in the Wall Street Journal, saying that his behavior was the result of uncontrolled bipolar disorder, but it has made no difference. According to the Prime Minister, “Kanye West should never have been invited to headline Wireless… We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.”

There is no doubt that West has a serious illness. In the final episode of the 2022 Netflix documentary about him, he is seen raving incoherently to the alarm of his friends. At other times his speech is slurred and his face and body heavy with medication. He cuts a mournful figure, even before deterioration is visible onscreen; sensitive and child-like, coping with the consequences of a serious car crash, devastated by the death of his mother, his ego buffeted by simultaneous currents of adulation and demonization from the world. It would be a lot for a sane person to deal with, and West is not always sane.

The tracks “Heil Hitler” and “Gas Chambers” were both produced in the first half of 2025 during what seems to have been an extended manic episode. During this period West got into a creative folie à deux with an obscure rapper called Dave Blunts, working together to produce a now-deleted album called Cuck. Before working with West, the 23-year-old Blunts was mostly known for being morbidly obese and in premature heart failure, having gone viral for rapping on stage with an oxygen tank. West would apparently talk to his new friend on the phone for hours, then instruct him to write lyrics based on their conversations at a rate of three songs a day.

Perhaps needless to say, the results of this chaotic process were not good. Aside from all the Nazi lyrics (“Reading Mein Kampf, two chapters ’fore I go to sleep”) there were also a lot of passing references to laughing gas; a confession by Kanye of an incestuous sexual relationship with a male cousin; and a revenge song comparing his ex-wife to the disgraced pedophile Jared Fogle. The album cover had KKK imagery on it. The whole thing has since been expunged from the internet, though the track formerly known as “Gas Chambers” remains in circulation, indiscernibly retitled as “All The Love”.

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By Sarah Ditum

There has been some discussion about whether West should be “forgiven” for this behavior. It may seem like annoying pedantry — particularly if you have ever been at the sharp end of a destructive mental illness — but if it is genuinely the case that the mania was in charge during the periods in question, strictly speaking there is nothing to forgive. Actions emanating from insanity can only be excused, not forgiven. You excuse pets, young children, and people in the grip of madness for what they could not help doing. You forgive everyone else — or not — for actions that were within their control.

The ban on West seems appropriate, but not as a reflection of personal culpability. The official rationale for it is that his presence is “not conducive to the public good”. And indeed, it probably wouldn’t be particularly beneficial to the public good to have an extremely charismatic famous person making wildly antisemitic statements in front of adoring Finsbury Park crowds in a time when community tensions are high in North London, and hate incidents are on the increase. But this has nothing to do with whether West should be forgiven for the things he has said, or alternatively blamed and punished. The ban has a different logic: that of the risk manager, dealing with a potentially dangerous dog, or an unexploded bomb.

Obviously, people are not dogs or bombs, no matter what their mental states; and describing a loss of agency like this can sound jarringly demeaning, even if accurate. The assumption of deliberate decision-making and self-control is crucial to many historical constructions of personhood. Viewed in retrospect, periods of dislocation can feel deeply humiliating, partly for that reason. As psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, herself bipolar, writes in her classic memoir An Unquiet Mind about the time when stability returns: “there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. … Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?”. Or as West described it in the apology he paid to publish in a newspaper: “the disconnected moments … lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience.”

Perhaps partly because of a background worry about dehumanization, it is increasingly common to suggest that even severely dislocated episodes like these are compatible with moral responsibility. There are ethicists who argue that a person can be criminally responsible, even when subject to hallucinations. And there are  neuroscientists who want to emphasize the similarity of the “normal” case to that of the mentally ill. As scientists get better at mapping the brain, they say, it will become clearer that all of our behavior, whether functional or dysfunctional, is completely determined by prior neurological, chemical, and environmental events. In that case, the fiction of a responsible self will become obsolete, and it will be obvious that no-one is accountable for any of their actions, mad or sane.

This last one seems to me a particularly daft line of argument. Moral responsibility is primarily a social notion, not a claim about immunity to causal chains. To grant responsibility to someone for their actions is to say that — as philosopher Bernard Williams put it — they are able to belong to “a set of persons, not necessarily known … or specially important to one another, living under a common system of justice”. At a minimum, living communally like this requires being able to run through coherent chains of reasoning; to remember what you just did; to make plans and simple predictions; to show reasonable impulse control; to avoid violence to self or others; and, of course, to recognize reality as it is without delusions. If you cannot do these basic things — not just in the sense that you are unwilling to, but that you are literally unable — your ability to meet local moral standards will be radically compromised. You will fall out of the community of responsible agents altogether until stability can be regained.

To count as responsible in this sense, you also have to know what local moral standards are. Such knowledge is implicit in the M’Naghten rule defining the criminal defense of insanity: either the defendant didn’t know what he was doing, “or if he did know it… he did not know he was doing what was wrong”. When you are manic, you can lose track of the social cues which otherwise would alert you to your own transgression. You may think you are being fabulously witty, sensuous, clever, and provocative, and that everyone else can see this. All the while your family and friends are staring at you, appalled.

So there remains an important distinction to be made, between the personal responsibility of well people and mentally ill people; one, moreover, that is crucial for looking after the latter properly, since it recognizes their limits and associated risks. Equally, though, it seems that in smaller ways, ordinary life is becoming more like mentally ill life — though the vibe is more depressive than manic. As we become reliant on technology to do the thinking for us, individual powers of reasoning and memory diminish. Whole days can be lost staring at screens. Our minds feel like passive receivers of whatever content is being beamed into them, and we are growing less able to distinguish true from false. When we do encounter reality, it can feel like a hallucination.

And there’s also the fact that which rules we are supposed to be following, exactly, is increasingly obscure. Ethical codes are often matters of contentious dispute; many laws are only lightly policed; from Trump down, transgressive edgelords seem to be getting away with highly antisocial acts. Shame seems to be a vanishing emotion, and shifting blame onto others common. In order to know when, exactly, moral responsibility is lacking, we need clear cases of people actually owning it. And yet it is all too easy to pretend that nobody really does.

Meanwhile, instead of nurturing the capacities that make for socially responsible citizens, tech elites now valorize something called being “high agency” — a debased version of responsibility which seems to amount to no more than a willingness to move fast and break things. You should not be merely copying other people, apparently; you should be plowing your own furrow, being insouciantly disagreeable, and doing all the new things all of the time. Take risks, gleefully cause some chaos, and don’t go worrying about what anyone else thinks. In other words, you should be just like Kanye during a manic phase — except that unlike him, you won’t have any excuse.

For Matt Goodwin — the failed Reform candidate whose new book is widely judged to contain several machine-generated hallucinations and other inaccuracies, though he denies it — there was widespread mockery and condemnation. But for critic Alex Preston, dumped by the New York Times for using an AI tool to help write a book review, objections were more muted. There were even attempts at sympathy and understanding — including from gleefully vituperative Goodwin-bashers. One might reasonably wonder how much the British commentariat really loathe AI writing, as opposed to how much they loathe Goodwin in particular.

In fact, both cases are equally unforgivable. Each goes much further than simply using AI as a research tool among others, cross-referring and checking sources as you go. To use an LLM to write text for you effectively turns your computer into a ventriloquist. And it turns you into the ventriloquist’s dummy.

This is not a good look. Up until five minutes ago, Goodwin was an academic. In the eyes of some, this makes him part of a despised elite, a fact which must be somewhat inconvenient to a would-be populist. But equally, it’s also a crucial part of his origin story, giving a valuable impression of epistemic authority to those that care. Otherwise he’d be just another bloke in a gilet muttering darkly about cousin marriage. At a minimum, academics are supposed to do their own research, double check their own inferences, and then write it all down in their own words. What else could society possibly want them for? Certainly not for the innate charisma or the bantz.

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In his blustering Spectator rebuttal, Goodwin insists that he did not use chatbots to write any part of the book. The invented quotes and other misunderstandings were all his, he says, a claim which is apparently supposed to reassure us. He even cites the negative opinion of AI detection software on the matter “just for fun”. But either way, he seems to have been using AI tools for his Substack for some time. Or perhaps he sometimes writes exactly like a robot because he has unconsciously ingested the deadening format (“this is not x, it’s y”, compressed rhetorical questions, and all the rest of it). Crafting beautiful sentences is not your average academic’s strongest suit, after all.

Literary critics have no such excuse. Preston — book reviewer as well as gentleman novelist, amateur cricketer, birdwatcher, and BBC arts show stalwart — is said to have confessed immediately to his mistake when asked about it by the Spectator literary editor. The apology came as if delivered by Hugh Grant — you could practically hear the stammerings and goshes. “Oh god it’s awful and I’m so ashamed. Such a total car crash.”

Preston’s explanation was that he had been pressed for time, and asked a bot to help “expand and smooth” a draft book review, as well as adjust for in-house style requirements. The AI-enhanced result included phrases written by someone else, which he did not spot. “I looked at how it had tidied up the end of the review but didn’t realize that it had also dropped in language from Christobel Kent’s Guardian review. I was rushed and stupid and I’m so sorry.”

Despite the apparent willingness of fellow literary luminaries to accept this with “there but for the grace of God … ” style mumbling, I’m not buying it. A loose reading of Preston’s explanation implies he didn’t notice the alien phrases at all. He used the tool without understanding its capacity for invention, looked only at the second half of the AI-adjusted text but not the first, then immediately sent the result off to the New York Times. But surely no writer is ever that stupid, or indeed that rushed.

A more likely scenario is that he read the tarted-up review in its entirety, knew full well there were sentences in it that were not his, but didn’t know they belonged to Christobel Kent in particular. Preston says that this was a “case of someone naively and clumsily using a tool they didn’t understand”; but he obviously grasped that the tool would “expand” his piece, because that’s exactly what he said he wanted it to do. What he didn’t understand, perhaps, was that the machine might plagiarize from a single source rather than synthesize hundreds of texts undetectably.

But appropriating the words of no one in particular is just as bad as plagiarism; and it is no defense to say it was only a few phrases. Like the proverbial curate’s egg, a covert robot co-production cannot be good in parts. You might as well take out all the machine-inserted words and phrases and write lorem ipsum there, or just blah blah blah instead. These passages mark the point at which the author’s mind retreated and went off for a nap.

When I taught in universities, I used to find it absurd that the official policy for plagiarism cases required us to estimate what mark the offending piece would have got, were it not plagiarized; and then to subtract some fixed percentage from that. Effectively, this seemed to force the marker onto the horns of a ludicrous dilemma. On one hand you might remove all plagiarized sections from consideration, but then you would be left with surreally disjointed statements and huge gaps, and there would be not much of an identifiable argument left to penalize further.

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Alternatively you could treat the essay in its entirety as if it represented the original thoughts of the student, then subtract a bit; in which case your mark would seem to depend heavily on the quality of the author from whom sentences had been pilfered, and how extensively they were used. It seemed weirdly arbitrary to be giving more credit to students who thoroughly stripped down Ludwig Wittgenstein for parts, than to those who lightly borrowed from, say, Alain de Botton.

When you are assessing a student’s work, it is a basic presupposition that you are engaging with a single point of view, for which the stated author can rightly claim the credit. Any contradictions in the text reflect contradictions in the author’s own mind, as do any brilliant insights. Violate that contract and you might as well chuck the whole thing away. And the same goes all the more for professional writing, whether high or lowbrow. Relying on words that aren’t yours is not just lazy, it’s cowardly. If a writer lacks the courage to expose his mind to readers in all its naked imperfection, hiding behind the smooth extrusions of LLMS instead, then I don’t see why we should bother to read him.

And it is a poor defense to say that readers often cannot tell the difference. In the world of painting, skillful forgeries can look like astonishingly powerful originals until the ruse is revealed. Then suddenly there’s a gestalt switch, and the pictures look like what they always were: cheap fakes, free-riding on viewer credulity.

A different justification urges us to think of all human communication as a kind of ventriloquizing. Aren’t we always taking half-remembered words and phrases from other people and making them our own as we speak or write? Can’t we just see the use of an LLM as a simple extension of the creative process, with some externally-derived thoughts accepted, and others rejected — just as during a more internal process of reflection? This is part of the general project of redescribing human behavior to make it sound more like that of machines. That project is just as likely to undermine the impression of any meaning or value in human behavior than it is to reduce the distrust in robots. But in any case, we must not cede the point. Ordinary thinking and speaking as we know it is not “parroting” or “plagiarizing”. If it were, there would be no sense to these terms when applied critically, since the pejorative contrast with ordinary speech would be incomprehensible.

Even if it’s largely undetected by the intended readership, I can’t help feeling that AI will turn out to be a curse to many in the writing world, both established and aspiring. Clearly, as Goodwin and Preston show us, it is a temptation even to the already successful. A semantic glow-up is available at just the click of a mouse. Lots of bloggers I am aware of seem to use LLMs habitually. Preposterously, I’ve even seen the telltale signs in comments sections.

Wherever it is found, I imagine it’s quite stressful to gain a reputation for a writing style you have done little to deserve. The more admiration and followers you get for your punchy sentences, the less you will feel able to go back to your own deathless prose and reveal to the world what is really going on behind the curtain. In years to come, I expect we will see whole branches of therapy devoted to curing writers of LLM addiction. It seems that along with photographic filters and image generators, technology has discovered yet another way for people to hide their true selves from the gaze of others — and all this in a time where personal authenticity is supposedly uniquely prized. As the saying goes: you couldn’t make it up.