19 h. ago Enjoying the implosion of the Tories? That’s understandable – but completely wrong | Zoe Williams

The world’s most successful democratic party is in a death spiral of its own making – leaving no bulwark between the moderate and truly far rightThere have been times in living memory that Conservative leaders have sounded almost sensible on the surface – and times where they have sounded animal crackers, yet were still adored by their party. This is not either of those times. Kemi Badenoch left the crowd unmoved when she addressed her conference, even as she threw out the red meat of migrant-baiting she thought they wanted. It’s not so much that they’d all woken up with a renewed sense of humanity; more that they didn’t believe she’d ever be in a position to deliver it. It was, in effect, fake vegan meat. Tories hate that. One senior Conservative apparently called it a “New Orleans funeral”: noisy, energetic, but still a goodbye.What next for the group with a decent case to make for itself as the most historically successful democratic party in the world? Some are having another sq...

Politics

5 d. ago The joy of Traitors is in rooting for real people. Does anyone care about celebrities in that way? | Zoe Williams

Having famous contestants is a betrayal of all that’s great about the show – and a misunderstanding of what makes humans tickIf you have never seen Traitors, you will be sick to death of people telling you to watch Traitors: everybody loves it, no one can ever explain why. They describe the premise and it’s a load of people lying to one another. Contestants perform challenges – such as the challenge of running faster than most of them would like – and then they lie. They are often presented with the dilemma of whether to lie or not, but there is very little suspense, because they always choose lying. That is, of course, if they have anything to lie about; the ones who don’t just operate in a perpetual fog of misdirected trust and reptile-brained paranoia. It sounds like the kind of thing you wouldn’t have to watch twice, but that is so far from true you could easily find yourself scouring the world for the connoisseur’s Traitors (Traitors Australia, season two).Theoretically then, C...

Politics

5 d. ago The joy of The Traitors is in rooting for real people. Does anyone care about celebrities in that way? | Zoe Williams

Having famous contestants is a betrayal of all that’s great about the show – and a misunderstanding of what makes humans tickIf you have never seen The Traitors, you will be sick to death of people telling you to watch The Traitors: everybody loves it, no one can ever explain why. They describe the premise and it’s a load of people lying to one another. Contestants perform challenges – such as the challenge of running faster than most of them would like – and then they lie. They are often presented with the dilemma of whether to lie or not, but there is very little suspense, because they always choose lying. That is, of course, if they have anything to lie about; the ones who don’t just operate in a perpetual fog of misdirected trust and reptile-brained paranoia. It sounds like the kind of thing you wouldn’t have to watch twice, but that is so far from true you could easily find yourself scouring the world for the connoisseur’s The Traitors (The Traitors Australia, season two).Theor...

Politics

7 d. ago A school field trip to see neoliberalism in action? Count me in | Zoe Williams

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from my daughter’s A-level geography class, but I had plenty of ideasIf you happen to have children of an age to willingly study geography, you’ll know that it’s the topic with all the best field trips. They’re constantly going somewhere. That place is rarely cool to begin with, and they zone in on the least cool thing about it, so if they go to the seaside, they’re there to measure groynes rather than taste-test ice-creams; and if they go to a shopping centre, it’s to ask local residents what they think of urban regeneration, not to look round the shops. But they seem really into it, so who am I to cavil?Therefore, while only somewhat listening to a conversation about an A-level module on globalisation – which is split into categories, one of which is shipping containers, like a parody of school being boring, and another is neoliberalism – I got it into my head that my daughter had to go on a field trip to see some neoliberalism in action. Conti...

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7 d. ago My son is turning 18 – and I am inexplicably sad | Zoe Williams

He is now an adult, so I have no right to dictate the state of his hair or his choice of diet. But I hadn’t expected this to be such an emotional wrenchNot counting the many thousands of words I spent complaining about being pregnant, I wrote my first column about my son, T, 18 years ago today, when he was three hours old. Someone said, “Is there some kind of union you could join? Because I’m sure you’re entitled to at least one whole day of maternity leave,” and I was baffled. As far as I was concerned, they should have held the front page – this wasn’t work, this was a dispatch from the frontline of a brave new world.Anyway, some time passed, and T could suddenly talk, and then some further time passed, and he was his own person, out there in the world, and then I blinked, and he was as tall as a tree. People always say to you, “Treasure this time, it goes by in a flash,” right at the moment you have an armful of toddler, puree in your hair and a mouth full of wet wipes because yo...

Politics

1 week ago If Starmer wants to beat Reform, he’ll need more than ‘patriotic renewal’ – whatever that is | Zoe Williams

Today’s big ‘fightback’ speech continued with the prime minister’s curious strategy of ceding ground to his enemiesKeir Starmer was at his most clear today not in his speech to the Global Progress Action Summit in London, trailed as a fightback against the politics of hate and division, but in the panel afterwards. That’s when he said he wanted the next election to be an “open fight” between “Labour and Reform”. In the speech itself, however, he identified his enemies in the abstract. He was against the “politics of predatory grievance”, which used the “infrastructure of division”. He also made a lovely case for London at the start, with its plentiful pubs and pleasant parks, remarking wryly that it was nothing like “the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe”.The problem is he needs to pick a lane. Either he was referring to Donald Trump’s comments at the UN earlier this week, when the leader of the free world said Britain’s capital had a “terrible mayor, terrible, t...

Politics

2 w. ago My blood type made me a donor superhero – until my weakness for crisps let me down | Zoe Williams

‘It’s such a shame,’ said the nurse as she turned me away from the donation centre, and I realised my assumptions about being O-negative were all wrongI’ve flexed before about having the world’s best blood type: O-negative. For some reason, all niceties around boasting vanish in the face of this natural-born superiority. If the “first-responder” rubber bracelet they sent me matched any of my clothes (how could it? It’s the colour of blood), I would definitely wear it everywhere I go.Last week, though, for the third time, I got turned away from donating because my iron wasn’t high enough. It was low only by a margin, and this is normally acknowledged as just natural human variation, but they operate quite a strict three-strikes rule, and now I can’t even present my (also pretty superior) veins again for a full two years.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in ou...

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3 w. ago The truth about smartwatches? Life is better without a hectoring zealot on your wrist | Zoe Williams

According to a new survey, many people experience ‘tech regret’ – especially when it comes to surveillance devices they have boughtThe most regretted house tech, according to a recent survey, is smart lighting and video doorbells, with speakers in third place. It’s pretty obvious why: smart lighting addressed itself to the unbearable onerousness of getting off your arse and turning on a light, a problem nobody ever had, or if they did, they probably had 99 more pressing concerns. The appeal of the video doorbell was that something interesting may happen; maybe it would catch someone doing a crime, or a heartwarming moment when your kid ran back for one last hug on their first day of school, and you could put that on TikTok and be famous for five seconds, or – ideal world – it would catch one of your friends bitching about you. It is amazing, in this world of hypersurveillance and connectedness, how rarely any of those things, or indeed, anything interesting or unpredictable at all, ...

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4 w. ago Who should you smile at in the street? Here are my rules – from dogs to babies | Zoe Williams

I’ll acknowledge young people in love, anyone in hi-vis and a dad who seems to be pulling his weight. The rest of the time, I have a face like thunderI just smiled at a middle-aged woman on a pushbike, and she looked at me as if to say, “do we know each other?”, and I thought, good point, we don’t know each other, why am I smiling?That was a straight solidarity smile – you are on a bike, I also have a bike. I wouldn’t just smile willy-nilly at anyone the same age as me, they would have to be doing something that not all of us do: vaping; cycling; whistling. I’ll always smile at a baby in a pram, but I won’t smile at the mum, because I remember how much I used to hate it when people assumed that, just because I had a baby, it meant I was nice. You’ve already lost so much identity, so fast. I will, however, smile at a dad, because if he’s pushing a pram, he’s pulling his weight. I know that walking to the nursery is the absolute bare minimum and doesn’t tell you anything about the dis...

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