Ceri Radford

“It should about what you achieve, not about being glam and pretty,” says Bridget Phillipson, a Labour candidate. Hear, hear.

Labour hopefuls: Luciana Berger, Rachel Reeves, Lucy Powell, Maryam Khan, Emilie Oldknow and Bridget Phillipson (Photo: Grazia magazine)

“We need to keep plugging the message: I’m around for policy, and that’s all,” says Dr Michelle Tempest, a Tory hopeful. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. The label “Cameron’s cuties” is cringy beyond belief: like “Blair’s babes” it is a patronising and infantile way of portraying women in politics.

Just one problem with the pronouncements from this election’s female candidates, though. If you want to make the very valid point that women should be judged by what they do and not how they look, I’m not… Read More

Is there no end to Sweden’s luck? The Scandinavian idyll has nice schools, pristine pine forests, beautiful women, low crime rates, flat pack furniture, the northern lights, meatballs and a Royal Family that make ours seem like lumpen bores.

Prince Carl Philip and bikini model Sofia Hellqvist (Photo: REX/Getty)

Just look at Prince Carl Philip: the jutting jaw, the molten eyes. In Britain our aristocrats have receding hairlines and chins that slope away like a chicken’s. Here, Prince William shilly shallies about for eight years trying to decide whether to propose to his girlfriend and the giddy culmination of the drama, to date, is that Buckingham Palace may or may not be stocking champagne. In Sweden, Carl has jilted his fiancée for a bikini model. Kate Middleton looks nice in… Read More

Is this the freakiest, creepiest video since Gordon Brown was seen grinning on YouTube?

It’s a Nike ad which shows Tiger Woods staring straight ahead while a voiceover of his dead father – yes, that’s right, his actual dead father’s actual voice – shakily intones:

“Tiger I am more  prone…  to be inquisitive…  to promote discussion…   I want to find out what your thinking was… what your feelings are and… did you learn anything.”

How is Tiger meant to respond to this querulous interrogation from beyond the grave? “Hi Dad, I learnt five new sexual positions and to keep the 9-iron locked away?”

Gordon Brown has started to remind me of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who just won’t die: his limbs are chopped off, one by one, but still his writhing torso fights on. Labour sleaze? Tax rises? Mind-boggling deficit? Chop, chop, chop. It’s just a flesh wound. “Come back here and I’ll bite your legs off!” says Gordon, as the headlines reveal that even if he fails to get a majority he may still cling on as PM. How come?

David Cameron clashes with Gordon Brown

Now, as astute readers of this blog site will have noticed, I’m not what you would call a political commentator, preferring to focus on weighty topics such as Carla Bruni’s website and the literary oeuvre of Jordan, glamour model, equestrian star and “novelist”. Nevertheless, here… Read More

Alistair Darling went out of his way to play the nice guy as he delivered his budget. He kept his voice to a civil and almost soporific monotone as he described how the Government has refused to “abandon families to their fate” during the recession, handing out sweeties like the stamp duty break for first-time buyers while surrounded by a sea of smiles on the front bench. There was even a nice little nod to the news about Samantha Cameron’s pregnancy when he was talking about child credits.

Cameron, on the other hand, jumped up and down, practically puce with jubilant rage, jabbing his finger at the “taxis for hire” on the opposite benches. He wants the manager to be sacked. The mess to be cleared up. Brown is the captain of the Titanic. He has set ticking bombshells to go off after the election. Cameron is clearly much too cro… Read More

For a Brit, it takes a massive leap of understanding to grasp how anyone in America can greet the news that Barack Obama has finally passed his healthcare bill with anything other than a sigh of relief. So 32 million Americans will have access to health insurance for the first time? So if you get cancer you no longer have to sell your house? So if you lose your job you no longer need to panic about how to pay for your daughter’s asthma drugs? So a prevailing system which costs the government more than in other rich nations but delivers less will finally be overhauled?

How can any of this be a bad thing, or, in the stir-crazy words of the talk show host Glen Beck, an “affront to God”?

I realise this is a naïve question. As Alex Spillius writes, the debate goes to the heart of the… Read More

'Without him, it was prophesied, they would not take Troy' Photo: Reuters

It’s easy to scoff at the idea of the poet laureate waxing lyrical on David Beckham’s tendon trouble, but I actually really like Achilles, the latest from Carol Ann Duffy. You could take it as a reflection on the nature of modern heros – the fact that today’s golden boy is goldenballs – or a reference to the warring tribes of football, or Beckham himself as some sort of tragically flawed figure. The poem doesn’t take itself too seriously, though: that sarong reference is a neat, presumably tongue-in-cheek quip, comparing the original Achilles’s concealment among women with Beckham strutting about in his wife’s beachwear. The rhymes slide nicely along towards that jarring, frustrated repetition at the end, giving… Read More

Germans are dangerous skiers because they lack awareness of others, Italians are show-offs and the British go too fast for their abilities, according to a survey. I’m not convinced. In my experience, skiing is one of those activities that transcends national boundaries and can turn any of its practitioners into sociopathic hoodlums. Nowhere do the standards of civilised behaviour decline as quickly as on the piste. Maybe it’s the anonymity of all that cold-weather gear, the hoods and scarves which give the skier the same facelessness as a bank robber in a balaclava or a blog commenter with a pseudonym. Or maybe it’s the essentially childish joy of sliding about that makes skiers regress to playground level.

Whatever the reason, all sorts of weird behaviour pass for normal on the mountain: on my last trip, I saw someone push in front in the lift queue,… Read More

Some people have always enjoyed caricaturing women’s libbers as dour, humourless, dungaree-clad harridans. I wish anyone nodding along happily to that description would watch Women, the excellent BBC Four documentary on the women’s movement which aired last night. The prominent feminists who were featured all came across as witty, vivacious and elegant, only showing their inner steel when they talked about the appalling sexism prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s – something which is only too easy for women of my generation to forget about.

By far the most moving bit was the last ever interview with the novelist Marilyn French, who died last year. She described graduating at a time when job vacancies were listed by gender, and when even as a very bright student the only advice her professors would give her was to get married. So she did, to a man who subjected her to “intolerable cruelty”… Read More

Anna Ford began the spat with a letter in Saturday's Guardian (Photo: Jeff Gilbert)

Other than the rarefied language and absence of bald bodyguards with earpieces, is there much to distinguish the Anna Ford versus Martin Amis spat from a daytime television bust-up?

For those who have missed the whole thing, in a letter to the Guardian on Saturday, the former newsreader accused Amis of being a terrible godfather and behaving badly (along with his friend Christopher Hitchens) by smoking and staying too long at the death bed of her husband, Mark Boxer. Never one to shirk either the limelight or controversy, Amis published a letter refuting her second accusation and asking with wonderful resonance how it “serves Mark’s memory, or warms his ghost” to accuse… Read More