Beyond the Fringe: do we really want our politicians to be funny?

From Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph: Today’s politicians are desperate to appear human, even funny. But some are better at it than others, writes Tom Chivers ‘The fact is, I really do respect the press,” said the President, in grave tones. “I recognise that the press and I have different jobs to do. My job is to…

David Cameron, fixing the world one trivial issue at a time

My Sunday Telegraph column: Why should Mr Cameron waste his time on the economy? There are biting footballers to deal with Last weekend, the world shook with outrage after Luis Suárez, the Liverpool striker, did the single worst thing a human being has ever done, gently biting Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic on the bicep. But the…

Bangladesh disaster: Forcing sweatshops to radically improve safety standards could do more harm than good

The sweatshop disaster in Bangladesh is horrible, and the people who allowed it to happen – the people who, it seems, forced the factories to stay open, even though the building was visibly cracking – have blood on their hands. As David Blair says in today’s paper, the guilt can be shared around: to anyone…

We may not feel it, but we’ve never been safer

From Thursday’s Daily Telegraph: Even though murder and mayhem dominate the news, violence is rarer than ever before We live in the safest time ever to be a human being. You might find that hard to believe, as the Boston bombs still echo, but we live in a golden age of peace and non-violence. It’s…

France votes to recognise same-sex marriage. Surely, now, it’s inevitable here as well

News has just broken in the last few minutes that France has become the latest country to allow same-sex marriage, after their parliament voted it through. It’s hard to see it not happening here, now: it feels unstoppable. In Europe, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Spain and Portugal already have it, some of them…

Don’t worry, be irrationally happy

My Sunday Telegraph column: You want to hear some good news? A study last week found that humans are innately optimistic creatures. Apparently we are much more likely to look forward to good things than to fear bad ones; we expect good things to make us happy, but don’t expect bad things to make us…

New Zealand parliament bursts into song after voting for same-sex marriage

Good old New Zealand. They get everything right. Universal suffrage, The Lord of the Rings, and now this. Plus their House of Commons speaker sounds exactly like Murray out of Flight of the Conchords. The song is called “Pokarekare Ana”, and it’s apparently a Maori love song. [Hat-tip Dan Gardner.]

Margaret Thatcher’s funeral: at least George Osborne didn’t get the giggles

George Osborne has been photographed in tears at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, and it’s got some attention. (Some of the less charitable comments have been quite funny, it must be said: “St Paul’s evacuated after Osbot-2000 seen leaking arsenic from optic orifices”, or something like that.) As The Sunday Times’s India Knight pointed out, there’s something…

Boston marathon bombings: terror is meant to terrorise. The way to defeat it is to remember how safe we really are

Last year, when the horrible April Jones case was in the news, I wrote that it was important to teach parents about risk and statistics, so that they could place the danger of something similar happening to their child in a proper context. I hope you won’t think it’s bloodless and cold of me to…

‘Do you see whom I see?’

We’re running a grammar quiz online at the moment, and it’s upsetting a lot of people who aren’t scoring as highly as they’d like. I’m grumpy about it as well because I got a couple of them wrong. But its very first question (which I actually got “right”, I feel I have to point out,…

More idioms will no doubt be along in a half-hour

My Sunday Telegraph column: There’s nothing worse than when the language gets infested with alien words. Like Japanese knotweed clogging up the waterways, once they’re there, you can’t get rid of them. Suddenly the kids are dropping these foreign idioms into conversation, and forgetting how their mother tongue is spoken. Seriously: why can’t people speak…

The Independent should be ashamed of itself for giving Andrew Wakefield a soapbox

As the largest measles outbreak in more than 10 years rages in Swansea, with dozens of people hospitalised, what the hell is The Independent doing giving a platform to the man who started the scare which led to that outbreak? The newspaper has, inexplicably, given its front page over to a piece by Andrew Wakefield, the…