UnHerd

I liked Walliams so much that I even found him attractive in some of his Little Britain guises, which were all grotesque, such as Lou, the concerned carer of the apparently disabled miscreant Andy.

I also liked him as the recent widow who is reminded of her late husband Ivor by literally everything that exists. I even liked him — horribly — as the gerontophile who has unspeakable fantasies about his friend’s nan.

As it transpires, Walliams stands accused of being the very opposite of a gran-fancier: one 15-year-old describes her alleged experience with him as “sexual assault”, while another accuses him of grooming her as a teenager. (He denies wrongdoing and insists that he is not a sexual predator.)

Read more from Julie Burchill (@BoozeAndFagz):

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Chancellor John Healey has U-turned on a plan to crack down on benefits fraud.

Why can’t Labour get to grips with its welfare spending addiction? @DrDavidJeffery 👇

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This prosecution of Houellebecq provokes concerns that go far beyond freedom of expression.

In just over thirty years as a novelist writing mainly about the misery of bourgeois French life, he has lifted up a number of stones and allowed some pretty unsavoury things to crawl out from under them.

In no particular order these include sex tourism, paedophilia, mental illness, rampant narcissism, family breakdown, betrayal, social alienation, self-hatred, nihilism, prostitution and, inevitably, racism. But then anyone who understands what French society is really like will find none of this surprising.

Read more from Simon Heffer:

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It was the 19th century that really proved to be Portsmouth’s making, as a grand civic spirit, alongside the preternatural growth of the Royal Navy, gave rise to the city’s Guildhall and Victoria Park. W.H. Smith was the patron who paid for the beautiful St Mary’s Church in Fratton, while Andrew Carnegie gifted the nearby library. The spirit of the age was clear: urban improvement, a desire for visual harmony, and a belief in personal self-improvement alongside the inevitability of broader social progress.

But then the 20th century destroyed it. Photos from before the war reveal handsome brick palazzi, as proportionate and beautiful as any great European city. Today, by contrast, it’s arguably Britain’s ugliest town centre.

Read more from @aaronbastani:

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Rather than progressives or conservatives, or Roundheads or Cavaliers, a more compelling barometer of intrinsically opposing worldviews might be whether you identify more with a Dyson vacuum cleaner or with Henry the Hoover.

The Dyson represents technological advance for its own sake: expensive products of highly sophisticated engineering, produced at the end of long supply chains in the Far East. The brand increasingly incorporates robotics and AI at every stage from manufacture to consumer use, with online apps for software updates and user personalisation. You would not, however, risk kicking it down the stairs.

On the other hand, the cheap and needlessly cheerful Henry, as any builder or renovator knows, will accept any amount of punishment with its trademark idiot smirk. Originally designed to clean out commercial boilers, the Henry is a second-order product of Britain’s lost age of heavy industry, still assembled by hand in a Somerset factory. It does one job, sucking up dirt and dust, and does it as well as it needs to do, without communicating its performance, or user data, or its first flickering doubts and anxieties of consciousness, to distant data centres.

Read more from @arisroussinos:

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