Two years ago, Katie White set up Enough, which distributes self-swabbing rape kits. These are DIY kits that people who believe they have been raped or sexually assaulted can use at home by collecting DNA and posting it to a private laboratory for analysis. White was responding to a few stark facts about sexual violence…
Parisian waiters are professionals, providing an excellent service – they are not rude or unfriendly, just sometimes slightly misunderstood. No, really, hear me out. We’re all familiar with the trope of the rude Parisian waiter, looking down their nose at your inferior wine choice. They have been called “brusque and unwelcoming”, “snooty and rude” by…
It’s hard to pick a favourite PG Wodehouse line, but the one I’m perhaps most fond of is this: “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is…
It is said that there can be no truer revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children. The Bar Council of England and Wales has just concluded an expert review of the minimum age of criminal responsibility. At 10, it is the lowest in Europe. We recommend that it is raised…
It’s seven years since I stopped presenting the Today programme and started listening to Radio 3 instead. Or at least, that was the plan. On the first day it lasted for almost an hour. By the second day I’d given up on it. I suppose it was inevitable. You can’t spend 61 years as a…
Quick look at the Clacton byelection field as it stands: Nigel Farage, Count Binface, Piers Corbyn, Laurence Fox, some bloke who’s been on Married at First Sight and Dating Naked … anyway, there’s more, but you get the picture. It’s going to be a long hot summer. By the end of this contest Clacton will…
It has taken more than seven decades, but the grievous wrong done to Ruth Ellis has finally been recognised. Ellis was the last woman to be hanged for murder in the UK, the victim of a pitiless justice system that was uninterested in her history of horrific domestic abuse. The announcement of a posthumous conditional…
It is a cast-iron rule of the comments-section era that there is absolutely no celebrity you can write about without some person dialling in to post a contemptuous: “Who?” Did I say some person? Forgive me: I think I might have meant some guy. Strangely, you never see a “who?” below articles about sport, as…
Keir Starmer has stepped down and Andy Burnham is, in all likelihood, about to walk through the door of No 10. I have had the rare privilege of working closely with both men. For five years I served as a chief prosecutor while Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions (DPP). And for much of…
Wellington House is in north Brighton, and known to the people who frequent it as Welly. It has the austere look of an old Victorian school, but what goes on inside is all about care and empathy. The building is the home of the city’s last council-run day centre for adults with complex needs, autism…
