Plus: Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins shows you what equality between the sexes really looks like
David Oyelowo as Javert in Andrew Davies’s Les Misérables. Photo: BBC / Lookout Point / Laurence Cendrowicz
As the Allies advanced towards Germany in September 1944, their supplies were brought all the way from western Normandy in a constant shuttle convoy known as the Red Ball Express. If you were making a realistic movie about this, three quarters of the truck drivers would be played by black actors, because that’s how it was in real life.
Similar rules would have to apply to any remake of Zulu or Zulu Dawn. It is an awkward but inescapable historical fact that there was no diversity whatsoever among Cetewayo’s Impis: they were all, resolutely, from the same African tribe. At the Battle of Crécy, on the other hand, every single participant was white European — even the misleadingly named Black Prince — so any movie version probably wouldn’t involve a call to Samuel L. Jackson’s casting agent.
Prime Minister Theresa May has (narrowly) survived the vote of no confidence and delivered another of her bullish speeches about how the people voted for Brexit and how Brexit is what she plans to deliver.
“Overwhelmingly, the British people want us to get on with delivering Brexit, and also address the other important issues they care about. But the deal I’ve worked to agree with the European Union was rejected by MPs and by a large margin. I believe it is my duty to deliver on the British people’s instruction to leave the European Union and I intend to do so,” she tells us.
Global warming has not caused an increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, a study published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation has confirmed.
Climate alarmists such Michael Mann, Kerry Emanuel, and Al Gore often claim that hurricanes are among the extreme weather events that have been exacerbated by man’s selfishness, greed, and refusal to amend his carbon-guzzling lifestyle.
But there is “little evidence” that this is so, according to the study’s author Paul Homewood.
Even the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged in its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013 that there has been little change in long-term hurricane activity:
But what if, actually, Proctor & Gamble’s “toxic masculinity” ad campaign turns out to be a stroke of genius?
What if the reward it reaps in increased sales far outstrips any losses that may result from the fury it has caused its male customers?
The parallels with Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign are disturbing.
Initially, Nike’s favorability ratings took a 15-point hit when the sportswear brand chose provocatively to associate itself with the national-anthem-dissing, perma-kneeling, afo-sporting NFL star.
But the subsequent #boycottNike campaign never really took off. And, as a result of the ad, Nike’s sales increased by 61 percent, boosting the company’s value by $6 billion.
Perhaps it’s true that in advertising there is no such thing as bad publicity. Whatever you think about those Gillette ads, it is currently the world’s most talked-about brand.
Personally, I’m now going to go out of my way to avoid using any more Gillette products if I can.
But it might not be as easy as I’d hoped.
I was about to subscribe to a company called Harry’s Razors, which delivers shaving products by post.
Then somebody drew this puke-inducingly woke advert from a couple of years ago to my attention:
Today is International Men’s Day. Believe it or not, that’s a thing.
Now more than ever, being a man demands introspection, humility, and optimism. To get to a better tomorrow, we need to take a look at today, and at the misguided stereotypes that got us here in the first place. pic.twitter.com/1lViZqWbIx
Today is the day when Theresa May loses the vote on her Brexit “deal” and is confirmed as the worst Conservative prime minister ever.
Apart from this small piece of Schadenfreude I’m not sure that will be much else to celebrate when the result is declared this evening.
As Brendan O’Neill points out in The Sun, the reason that Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement is going to get voted down is not because Parliament is chock-full of bright, eager, democratically-minded patriots who know a craven capitulation when they see one.
No, the reason May’s deal is going to be voted down is because Parliament is chock-full of Remainers who see “taking down May’s deal as the first step to taking down Brexit itself.”
At dinner the other night, a QC friend of mine — I forget what the Q stands for but I know exactly why they’re all called Cs — tried explaining to me why Theresa May’s Brexit ‘deal’ is actually a good deal for Britain.
So I asked him to explain to me what’s good about it.
He began by agreeing that the deal isn’t perfect but said that there’s got to be a bit of give and take on both sides. Then he conceded that of course “No deal” might have been better but because the government had made such poor preparations for such an eventuality over the last two and half years…
“Let me stop you right there, you despicable, fat, Establishment sell-out tosser…” I said.
Heavy snow has brought parts of Europe to a standstill. At least 21 people have died as a result of the extreme conditions, and many more have been injured, including the victims of an avalanche which hit a hotel in Switzerland. Parts of Germany and Austria remain on high alert after extreme snow in Alpine regions.
But don’t worry. None of this is real. We know this because of a prophetic climate change article published by the Guardian in 2013.
Its standfirst read:
“Under Mont Blanc’s glittering peak, mountain guides and scientists tell the same story: the Alps are warming, the evidence of climate change is clear and the golden years of ski tourism will soon be past.”
In the days when I was less happy in my skin than I am now, I used to feel stabs of envy whenever I visited the large country homes of much grander friends. I’d notice their array of class signifiers — the boot room with battered hunt coats and riding crops; the massive Victorian baths with enormous taps, weird cylinder devices instead of plastic plugs, and funny little dog foot stands; the framed pictures in the loo of Oxbridge matriculations and born-to-rule offspring posing with the beagle pack at ‘School’ — and think: if only this could one day be me.
Well now it is me, more or less. Finally, in my early fifties, I’ve got round to joining, near as damn it, the country squirearchy. And let me tell you, it’s every bit as enjoyable as I’d hoped. I get to be rude, eccentric, antisocial, reckless, prejudiced, reactionary, unkempt, unapologetically conservative and free to a degree that just wouldn’t have been possible in my benighted townie years.
The BBC has only one genuinely impartial political presenter. His name is Andrew Neil.
So naturally the left — which, not inaccurately, sees the BBC as its amen corner — has made it its business to discredit and destroy him.
Last night, on the BBC’s This Week show, the left — in the deceptively cute form of Care Bear Commie Owen Jones — had another go.
Neil attempted to ask Jones a question about the far-left’s double standards: why is it forever accusing the “far right” of violence when it is so fond of violence itself?
But Jones wouldn’t answer. Instead he deflected it by accusing Andrew Neil of being part of the problem because he is chairman of the conservative publication the Spectator.
I think they’re correct. It wasn’t a victory for truth, integrity or accuracy. But it was definitely a win for the hard left which has never been about decency, fairness or honesty; only ever about the ruthless promulgation of The Narrative.
The Narrative requires that the hard left should continually deflect from its manifest wickedness — its anti-Semitism, its support of terrorists, its communist economic policies, its endorsement of violence, its utter disregard for the truth — by accusing the right of being even worse.
This is objectively untrue and almost everyone with eyes to see knows this. Violence — and the endorsement of violence — is much more prevalent among hard left groups like Momentum, Antifa, Occupy, Black Bloc, and Black Lives Matter than it is anywhere on the right.
As for the idea that the Spectator — of which Neil is chairman, not editor — in any way foments or promotes violence: this is, as Oxford-educated Owen Jones must surely understand on some subliminal level, the most outrageous calumny.
Yes, the Spectator is conservative by inclination. But it has always prided itself on publishing a diversity of opinion and its spirit is playful, witty, urbane — never shrill and angry; its readership is thoughtful, educated — and more than sophisticated enough to gauge context and tone.
Jones isn’t interested in context and tone. It suits his purpose to cherry pick an unrepresentative minority of mildly provocative articles written with tongue firmly in cheek by licensed jesters such as Taki and Rod Liddle and pretend they are almost literally Hitler:
The idea that I can’t talk about this in a discussion about the media and the far right, when I’m sitting with the chair of the Spectator’s publisher, whose position as a BBC presenter gives this magazine huge prestige, is a farce. It’s not “lies or smears” either: it’s the truth
This is manifestly dishonest and also deeply sinister. Not only is Jones wantonly smearing Britain’s most intelligent, readable, and entertaining political journal, but he is also sending out a thinly veiled threat to its editor and indeed to Neil: keep it safe, keep it boring, keep it doggedly centrist or we’ll send our boys (and girls, and transgenders…) out to get you.
Now put yourself in Andrew Neil’s shoes on This Week when Owen Jones tries to smear you in this way, live on air.
Do you defend your publication’s integrity? Of course not. Unlike Jones’s smear, it’s not a rebuttal that can be delivered in a ten second sound bite. Also, it concedes the notion that when you ask a guest a question they are under absolutely no obligation even to pretend to answer it.
That’s why Neil had no option but to point out that Jones was failing to answer the question and to refuse to allow Jones to promote his leftist canard that the Spectator helps “mainstream fascism and racism”.
But the consequence of this is that, at least from the hard left’s perspective, it looked like evasiveness, denial of an awkward truth.
No serious, intelligent person with full possession of the facts would ever see it that way.
Owen Jones, though, isn’t addressing serious, intelligent people. He’s addressing people like this:
So in those narrow terms Owen Jones “won” the argument.
This is an excruciatingly painful thing to admit since I am a huge admirer of Andrew Neil’s and I find Owen Jones intensely irritating.
But if ever we on the right side of the argument are going to win the battle of ideas, we need to understand our enemy.
It’s no good in Jones’s case just going “God, I hate that little Mummy’s boy twerp with his flouncing petulance and maddening cockiness and his endless blatant lies”.
We need to acknowledge that like his fellow Care Bear Commies — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Laurie Penny, Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani, and that hot new bird whose name eludes me — Owen Jones is a devastatingly effective political operator.
It takes massive chutzpah, years of practice and extraordinary political agility to be able to go on live TV, in front of the most rigorous and demanding interviewer in British political broadcasting, and accuse him to his face of being a far right shill – all the while wearing the innocent expression of a choirboy about to sing the solo opening verse of ‘Once In Royal David’s City’.
Raging against these Care Bear Commies is not enough. We need to find a more effective counter: and fast…
