It is one thing cheering on a team that we know, deep down, cannot prevail. But what happens when we follow a proven winner? Andy Murray says he faces a different kind of pressure as last year’s Wimbledon victor. How does he think it is for us?
False cries of rape debase the true crime
As President of the Oxford Union Benjamin Sullivan was cleared of rape charges, there was an uneasy exchange on Twitter between two feminist public figures, Helena Morrissey and Julia Hobsbawm.
Morrissey wrote: “The treatment of Ben Sullivan was disgraceful.” Hobsbawm responded: “Women don’t seem to want to talk about the terrifying (and tiny) minority who set men up with false allegations of rape.”
It seems to me that women have an overwhelming obligation to speak up on this. Silence cannot be taken as a form of mitigation. This newspaper has championed action against war rape, the most nihilistic kind because it is strategic as well as opportunistic.
Rape is an abominable distortion of the act of love. Those who make false allegations undermine the gravity of the offence and become complicit in the male myth that women are unreliable and consent is not fixed.
If Ben Sullivan now mistrusts women, who can blame him? I feel ashamed for my sex.
Paxman’s next quiz to master
Without the emotional strain of England remaining in the World Cup we are free to choose second nationalities. I am feeling increasingly Dutch. It makes me sympathetic to the many foreigners who become British citizens.
An American business leader told me proudly the other day about passing her citizenship test. She knew the wives of Henry VIII and the fortunes of the Wars of the Roses.
Being an Alpha student, as many of those taking citizenship tests tend to be, she wished there were a more advanced quiz. Why doesn’t Jeremy Paxman, looking for a new show, do a version of University Challenge for new British citizens?
