New European

At a club in Berlin recently I was chatting to a German trans girl and when I mentioned I was a sex worker she asked if I had a zuhälter, the Deutsche word for a pimp. I explained that no, I’ve worked mainly in ein Puff (a brothel) and now I work completely for myself, a share of my earnings going to no one.  I began to think about pimping in general, how the concept is sometimes weaponised and at other times euphemised, and how many things can be considered to fall under its umbrella.  Mos

As one more interminable hydration break saps the atmosphere from another World Cup match, a bored cameraman spots a remarkable-looking Argentina fan in the stands. She sashays down the stadium stairs towards her seat in a blue-and-white bodycon dress, assorted male fans gawping at her passing.  The clip, cut for social and pasted into Reels, Shorts and TikToks, does 36m views. A man’s outraged reaction at his girlfriend’s openly-lustful appreciation of a muscular Norwegian fan in full voice ge

A few days after a wildfire tore through villages north of Athens killing more than 100 people, Greece’s then minister of defence Panos Kammenos visited the popular seaside resort of Mati, where most of the deaths occurred.  “The tragedy is the fault of the residents,” he declared. Despite the fact that 150 people also had been severely burned and more than 2,500 homes set ablaze amidst thousands of acres reduced to scorched stubble, he doubled down: “This is a crime from the past,” he said

PICK OF THE WEEK Furious (Disney+) Loosely inspired by Bob Rafaelson’s psychological thriller Black Widow (1987), Elizabeth Meriwether’s eight-part series is vastly superior to its notional source material. Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) is a former NYPD homicide detective who – escaping an abusive relationship with fellow cop Marshall Connelly (Jake Lacy) – has transferred to the FBI, where, as a junior agent, she is assigned to the call centre. Much to the irritation of her boss, ASAC Ed Geor

The claim that US officials struggle to locate the rest of the world on a map is often – and rightly – dismissed as snobbish European condescension. But not, alas, in the case of a map of Africa used by the State Department at a conference in Brazil which spectacularly managed to put every country in the wrong place. It has emerged that a presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro by US health envoy Jeff Graham, showing a map illustrating the State Department’s new health

Last week Reform-led East Sussex Council announced it was ending school holiday food vouchers for the borough’s hungriest children, saying, big-heartedly, that the focus should be to “help build longer-term financial resilience”. The vouchers allowed families in difficulty to ensure the poorest children did not go hungry during the holidays. But Andy Woolley, the council’s Reform leader, said that the government had withdrawn funding it previously provided and introduced a £1bn Crisis and Resil

With all the controlled, incandescent fury of a monarch suffering the indignity of lèse-majesté, France and Europe’s richest man is out for revenge. Bernard Arnault, the lonely head of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey, also known as LVMH, is worth over $200bn. He is also deeply paranoid about journalists and a man of few words who, according to his outspoken wife “has no friends”.  What King Bernard does have are courtiers. But staff who work in Arnault’s vast luxury empire must stay trim and can b

Ten days in, and still no word from Andy Burnham on his plans for Britain’s relationship with the European Union. That’s the complaint from the European Movement UK, the pro-EU group which didn’t wait until it was halfway through its Burnham advent calendar (“oh, it’s a bus again”) before issuing its first public complaint about the new PM. “One major question remains unanswered: what is the government’s plan for Europe?” asks Nick Harvey, the former Liberal Democrat MP who is now CEO of the gr

The Daily Sceptic, the website owned and published by Brexit-loving Tory peer Toby Young, has been running a series of articles aimed at “challenging climate change orthodoxy”.  One recent contribution, by Gautam Kalghatgi, takes aim at electric vehicles (EVs), arguing that the drive towards electrification is both environmentally futile and economically damaging. If the UK continues to push EV adoption, he claims, the “British auto industry will be sacrificed on the altar of the green cult but

A rare outbreak of sanity at the Daily Telegraph this week as one of its ordinarily headbanging columnists left his house, felt the sweat on his brow and began to wonder if maybe – just possibly – there might be something in this climate change thing after all. Columnist and podcaster Tim Stanley – random recent column: “Trump embodies the spirit of George Washington” – wrote an article headlined “Climate change is real – and the Right needs to get serious about it, presumably shocking readers

‘Why ARE so many mothers (me included) taking cocaine at children’s house parties?’ ran a full-page article in the Daily Mail in August 2025, with a writer named Anna Melton telling the first-person story of livening up a birthday do for five-year-olds. Telling the story of taking her son Jack to the party in South London, ‘Melton’, who said she had “worked in publicity for years”, painted the picture of the unlikely adult buffet laid on by “a glamorous fashion buyer I’ll call Cleo”. “‘Come

When not jabbering away in language impenetrable to anyone who didn’t attend Haileybury College in the early 1970s, tiresome Daily Mail sketchwriter Quentin Letts can often be found displaying an offensive and often downright weird attitude to women. Letts’s sketches often focus on female politicians’ looks, hair and tone of voice – inevitably “clucking” or “shrieking”, while being compared to “schoolmistresses” and “witches”. Suggested Reading

Obviously the t-shirt was and is beyond the pale. If you managed to miss all the news stories about it – lucky you! – then picture a Green Party supporter wearing a garment featuring a drawing of a guillotine, with a man standing next to it. The caption, clearly legible even from a distance, reads “We’re only making plans for Nigel”.  It’s tasteless and appalling, and the man who bought it presumably thought he was being funny and edgy when he did so. Though there is no world in which he would

As Nigel Farage pounds the sunny streets of Clacton in his by-election battle against a bin, the mystery of how his partner Laure Ferrari managed to pay £885,000 cash for a house in the Reform leader’s constituency deepens.The property is in Ferrari’s name, yet her lack of visible funds has led some to speculate that Farage may have contributed. He has always denied this, yet new accounts at her company Baxter Laois show no signs of the kind of booming business that would allow its owner to spla

“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” – Elon Musk, X, July 22, 2026 The elevator pitch Gladiator meets Mad Max: Fury Road by way of The Football Factory in this high-octane, visually spectacular action-adventure about the ultimate survivor.   A Disgraced war hero must survive ten years of mythological monsters, seductresses, and a vengeful sea god to get back to his family – only to find

In the past week, the Pentagon quietly disclosed that almost 200 more soldiers have been wounded in the Iran war than previously known. The war’s official toll currently stands at 18 killed and 482 wounded. But that wasn’t the only change in the numbers. There was also confusion when, last Friday, four casualties from July – the three soldiers killed in Jordan and another killed in Northern Iraq – disappeared from the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System’s “Operation Epic Fury” tally. Th

Being a rich and powerful man, isolated from the consequences of your own actions, comes with its burdens – one of which seems to be total obliviousness to how you’re coming across. When Prince Andrew gave his now notorious Newsnight interview, he finished it in a celebratory mood, offering Emily Maitlis a tour of the palace after it wrapped. Similarly, after Elon Musk – the world’s richest man – concluded his interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, he was visibly

Adolf Hitler lived in the house he was born in for only a few weeks before his family moved. Austria has spent considerably longer than that deciding what to do with it. The one priority everyone could agree on: to deny neo-Nazis their five-star Tripadvisor place of attraction. The Führer’s Geburtshaus stands in Braunau am Inn – literally, Brown Meadow on the Inn, on the German border. Unhelpfully, braun has been political shorthand for Nazism ever since Hitler’s Brownshirts, and is to this day

Immanuel Kant thought murderers should be put to death regardless of whether that had a deterrent effect. If a society collapsed and there was no state to impose the penalty, the last killers on death row should still be executed, by civilians if necessary. The harm of death is so great, he believed, that it could only be balanced this way. His was a version of lex talionis, the ancient principle of an eye for an eye. Kant realised that exactly mirroring the method of murder was not appropriate

Nic Aubury’s 4-line poem: (They’ve All Got It) Infamy