Mad World

Driving past Birmingham is something I do a fair bit. Driving into  Birmingham is something I do far less often, but when your favourite public intellectual – like, ever  – Jordan Peterson is speaking, it has to be done. Even when you are charged £17.50 for parking by paying in advance (only on arriving do you realise you could have paid half that amount on the day) and you spend £13.79 for a modest Mac and Cheese and a lemonade at a nearby pub, the latter which you knock over the moment you sit down, leaving yourself with one tiny mouthful. Anyway, on with the show, which was scheduled to start at 7.30 but actually started at 7.45 presumably because of the snaking queues to get in. I looked around at my fellow Jordanites. They looked at me back. We were all wondering what kind of crowd goes to see Professor Peterson. The answer was: completely normal, perfectly fine people, some dressed to the nines, some in shorts. (Sigh, if I must go down this route: yes, they were mostl...

The Telegraph’s website has banned me from its message boards permanently, and I’m pretty miserable about it. Why was I banned? I have no idea - they don’t tell you your crime. This is the same Daily Telegraph that is big on extolling the virtues of free speech, apparently having little truck with social justice warriors who censor those with a different point of view. Let me run through what occurred, with a bit of background to start. About a year ago I took advantage of my dad having a Telegraph account and their offer for one other person to use the website for free. I’ve been familiar with the paper for years and it was great being able to read, gratis, the fine likes of Douglas Murray, Allison Pearson, Allister Heath, Andrew Lilico (when he was in lockdown sceptic mode) and Philip Johnston (when he wasn’t in jab-happy mode).  These were times of derangement and despair, as a nation emerging from the catastrophe of lockdown - by far and away the most disastrous decision ever m...

After writing this blog about Covid and the counter-productive measures taken to ‘fight’ it for nearly two years I appear to have finally got the bug. Has it changed my mind on anything I have previously written? Will all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity? Read on. The week beginning March 21 was one of my most active in a long time. I went out with friends, visited several pubs, played football, went into the office three times, did a supermarket shop, took my car for an MOT and more. So lots of mixing with the great unwashed. By the Saturday, March 26, ambling round a village in Wiltshire, I began to feel a little ‘off’. Initially I put this down to have been bitten nine ruddy times by some pesky insect the night before - perhaps it had given me some mild fever. By the following day the bites were certainly itchy but I also felt a bit ‘flu-y’ and with less energy than normal. My back was a bit sore too, but sadly that’s nothing new. By Monday I had an occasional dr...

  Well, almost everything.    In this post, which I hope will be my last on the madness we have endured, I boast of my sagacity in seeing lockdown measures for the disasters they have been. As  more and more are waking up  to the terrible damage inflicted on countries by their own governments on the pretext of fighting a virus, I go all Trump and show off, pointing to my 2020 posts that say exactly the same things that many commentators are now saying, but certainly were not at the time.    The reason I set this blog up was Toby Young. I emailed him a piece I had written entitled ‘Whatever happened to Boris Johnson?’ and he responded to say that his website Lockdown Sceptics (as it then was) would link to it if I published it online. So I created Mad World expressly for that reason, published my Johnson article on it, sent it to Toby - and he responded: “This isn’t for us, Russell”! I was gutted! And slightly annoyed. I wanted to whimper in response “B...