15 h. ago Victoria Beckham has trademarked her kids’ names – and my dog is not happy about it | Zoe Williams

My pup Romeo and daughter Harper share names with the Beckham offspring. Could VB not just have laid claim to ‘Posh’ instead?As a sidebar to the civil war in the House of Beckham, it emerged at the weekend that Victoria has trademarked all her children’s names. A lot of people think this is a peculiar parenting move, and a lot of other people think this a perfectly natural thing to do, for someone who has built a global brand from just their name and raw talent – but I thought, wait a second: my daughter is also called Harper and my dog is called Romeo, and even though neither of them has imminent plans to launch a perfume, I still should have been consulted on this.My Harper was born two years before the Beckhams’, and therefore by any reasonable metric, Posh copied me. But – see brand-building, above – by the time my Harper was four, even her own father couldn’t remember which one had come first. No such excuse for Romeo the dog, who started out 14 years younger than Romeo Beckham...

Politics

20 h. ago Why Keir Starmer's blunder over Andy Burnham makes his downfall more likely

Many Labour politicians may conclude that Keir Starmer has put his own survival as Prime Minister ahead of party and country

Events

35 h. ago Why is Andy Burnham such a threat to Keir Starmer? Everyone likes him | Zoe Williams

Labour may have successfully blocked the mayor of Greater Manchester from running for parliament, but this definitely hasn’t solved their problemsSome people call Andy Burnham Labour’s prince across the water and others call him the King of the North. Those are two pretty different symbolisms – the first referring to James Francis Edward Stuart, the exiled son of James II, the second referring to Robb Stark, and later Jon Snow, from Game of Thrones. Everyone on Team Starmer will be sticking with the Stuarts, since that whole saga was defined by fakery and flakery. Since the moment of his birth, there were rumours that James was an impostor. It was all a little bit convenient that, just as his father was about to be deposed, this heir would appear. If history had taught the era anything, it was that having sons could not possibly be that easy.The Starks, by contrast, were known for honour, bravery and legitimacy, even the ones that were definitely illegitimate. The fact that they are...

Events

41 h. ago ‘Psychodrama’ threat to Labour led party chiefs to block Andy Burnham Commons comeback, says minister

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer hit by furious backlash from MPs, particularly on the Left of the Labour Party

Events

42 h. ago Doctor issues warning to people who take vitamin D supplements

Dr Zoe Williams regularly appears on ITV's This Morning

Events

42 h. ago This Morning doctor's warning to people taking vitamin D tablets

Dr Zoe Williams told This Morning viewers they could be unknowingly causing themselves harm

Events

62 h. ago Andy Burnham blocked from byelection race by Labour ruling committee

Decision likely to set off ferocious row between Keir Starmer loyalists and allies of Greater Manchester mayorLabour’s national executive committee has blocked Andy Burnham’s request to seek selection for the Gorton and Denton byelection, according to Labour sources.The decision is likely to set off a ferocious row with allies of the Greater Manchester mayor. Continue reading...

Politics

5 d. ago Keir Starmer could face imminent leadership battle as rival's path to top job is cleared

Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing a growing threat from the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham as the northerner finally has a path to mount a leadership challenge

Politics

5 d. ago This Morning star reveals she’s undergoing spinal surgery – forcing her to leave show for a MONTH

THIS Morning doctor Zoe Williams has revealed she is due to undergo surgery next week. The Sun’s resident doctor will be having a spinal operation on Tuesday after suffering from back problems for months. Zoe appeared on the ITV sofa to confirm she would be having the operation as well as taking some time off...

Politics

8 d. ago Why can’t women enjoy Heated Rivalry without being treated with contempt? | Zoe Williams

The TV hit has cracked open a rich seam of misogyny: romance is written off as a weird thing that women like, and the audience is dismissed as ‘wine moms’I’ve never heard anything more sexist in my life than the (mounting) reasons why women supposedly love the hit TV drama Heated Rivalry. Quick recap: if you’re a woman, or even if you’re not and don’t yet love it: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) are two professional ice hockey players on rival teams. It matters that they’re hockey players, beyond the athletic perfection of their “insanely oiled, slick bodies” (as my friend, Eve, who’s 21, put it). And it matters that Rozanov is Russian, because the obstacles are real: he cannot be gay – think about the sponsorship, think about the fans, think about the oppressive patriarchal regime. Think about it for two seconds and this can not happen; and it achingly doesn’t, and almost does, and does, then doesn’t happen, over years.Heated Rivalry dropped in C...

Politics

1 week ago JAN MOIR: Starmer's Ikea insult shows what a Tarnestad knob he is (£5 for two)

Keir Starmer put in another abysmal performance at PMQs this week. Like a sulky child throwing their toys out the pram, he floundered, he flustered and then got angry.

Economics

1 week ago Kemi Badenoch likens Keir Starmer to a 'plastic bag in the wind' after digital ID U

Keir Starmer has been likened to a 'plastic bag in the wind' yesterday - as Downing Street hinted he was considering further U-turns.

Politics

2 w. ago I am moving house – and being a lifelong hoarder has finally caught up with me | Zoe Williams

As I pack up for pastures new, I’m wondering why I still can’t tell the difference between a knick-knack and a messI’m trying to move house; so are more than one pair of friends. We spend a lot of time trying to get on the insurance for each others’ cars, because some can fit a sideboard, and others can’t fit a handbag. We swap recommendations for things like secondhand book exchangers, and avoid talking about fond memories of the home about to be departed, concentrating on all the brilliant things there are to be said about new pastures. The main thing we don’t talk about is that none of us know how to do anything and that all of us are hoarders.There’s a reason not to know the big stuff – how to paint a skirting board, how to mend a bannister spindle – never doing a thing without landing in a place of pure ignorance. Probably if any of us were 25, we’d be no worse at painting than any other 25-year-old. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Social media is corrupting young minds – but a ban is not the answer | Zoe Williams

Kicking under-16s off the social platforms is tempting, but it ignores the root of the problem: the older generations who made them so toxic in the first placeKemi Badenoch is evolving into one of those politicians who, whatever she says, it’s not just likely to be wrong, it’s likely to be the opposite of what’s right. She says Greenland is not a big deal (a “second-order issue” is how she described it to the BBC) – it is a big deal. She says net zero is too expensive – the opposite is true: net-anything-but-zero is a cost we can’t afford.But her promise to ban under-16s from using social media, echoing Australia’s recent move, is hard to write off completely; people across the spectrum, including Andy Burnham, agree with it. Nobody who has ever met a teenager, or read the news, will be completely at ease with the role of social media in young lives. There are horrific effects, which have been well documented and inadequately addressed ever since the death of 14-year-old Molly Russe...

Politics

2 w. ago My favourite family photo: ‘We’re plainly not allergic to our mother here, as her legend always had it’

Our politically engaged mother loved deriding me and my sister for being stroppy and delinquent. This picture tells another story – and is a testament to our sunny dispositionsMy mother, Gwen, liked to describe things in broad brush strokes. Me and my sister’s teenage years, mid-80s to early 90s, she’d cover with: “Zoe was delinquent, couldn’t get a word of sense out of her.” Or: “1986? That was the year Stacey was awful.” Going through photo albums to make a montage for her funeral, all her pictures from that era were testament to our ill-behaviour: me, sniffing a geranium, sarcastically; Stace, outside a cafe in an indeterminable European city where you can almost lip-read her stroppy “piss off” to camera in the still moment.Gwen was politically engaged – you’d come downstairs on a Wednesday morning to find a handwritten letter starting, “Dear Pérez de Cuéllar, I cannot deplore enough your silence on the matter of the Western Sahara” – and heavily involved in progressive politics:...

Culture

2 w. ago If Donald Trump thinks Greenland should be his, how long before he sets his sights on Scotland? | Zoe Williams

By the expansionist logic of the president and his advisers, the US is entitled to annex just about anywhere‘We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Donald Trump told the Atlantic on 5 January, with the hand-wavy follow-up, “We need it for defence.” His adviser Stephen Miller was more aggressive still in an interview with CNN, saying: “The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? The US is the power of Nato obviously Greenland should be part of the United States.” His wife, Katie Miller, posted an image on X of a map of the country papered over with the US flag, with the caption “soon”. It’s hard to orientate sensibly towards things that happen on X these days: if she had posted a Grok-generated image of Greenland in a bikini, would that be more or less concerning?Still, we’re right to be concerned. There is no comfort to be had from old-era ideas such as: “Maybe they’re just sabre-rattling about Greenland t...

Politics

3 w. ago The electric vehicle revolution is still on course – don’t let your loathing of Elon Musk stop you joining up | Zoe Williams

Other firms are taking advantage of Tesla’s sales slump, while technological advances mean that glitches are being left in the rear-view mirrorIn another era, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed its name to X to mark the spot of its descent into barbarism, honed Grok, a generator of far-right propaganda, swung behind Donald Trump and made what appeared to be a Nazi salute, I already knew he was a wrong ’un. The year was 2019, and I was test-driving a Tesla; while I was ambling off the forecourt, the PR told me jauntily that the windscreen was made of a material that would protect the driver from biohazards. I hit the brakes. “You what? What kind of biohazard? Like, a war?” She misconstrued me, thinking I intended to go and find some toxic waste site to see if it worked, and said: “I’m not sure it’s operational in the press fleet.”That wasn’t my question: rather, what kind of a world was Tesla preparing for? One so unstable that an average (though affluent) private citizen would...

Politics