The Critic May 2025

THE LAST TIME THIS MAGAZINE CALLED on a Tory leader to go was in July 2022 [“THE FAILURES OF BORIS”]. “The country deserves better,” we said. It didn’t get it, but we were right to say that time was up for Mr Johnson. He announced his resignation on 7 July, though we’re suitably modest about the role of The Critic in making that happen. No such Cassandra-like gifts attach themselves to our saying that Kemi Badenoch has failed as Tory leader, is failing, and shall go on failing until she leads her party to a defeat every bit as wretched as the one to which Rishi Sunak took the Conservatives. And the simple truth is that she likely won’t go. In part Mrs Badenoch will probably stay in place because…

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IS THERE ANY MORE UNBECOMING WAY FOR AN adult to respond to a telling-off than “it’s not fair”? That was the main reaction of the University of Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, to the record fine of £585,000 levied on her institution by the Office for Students for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom. Sussex was just one university among many “navigating contested issues”, Roseneil said, but was “explicitly and deliberately being made an example to other universities”. She might as well have added a stamp of her foot and a wail of “everyone else was doing it too”. The fine was the culmination of a years’-long investigation by the OfS into campus culture at Sussex in response to the treatment of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who…

LODGE RE JOYCE John Self is right to praise the novels of David Lodge [SERIOUSLY FUNNY, APRIL] but Lodge should also be celebrated for his critically acute, catholic (pun intended) and highly readable criticism. Working with Structuralism (with its playful title as if the controversial movement is some form of struggle as in “Working with Disaffected Youth”) has a groundbreaking discussion of Hemingway’s short story “Cat in the Rain” while “After Bakhtin” contains a stunning dissection of Kipling’s ultimately unknowable short story “Mrs Bathurst”. During the 1980s at the University of Birmingham, Lodge offered undergraduates a one-year course on Joyce’s fiction with most of the year spent on Ulysses; I will always be grateful to him for introducing us to that masterpiece. Since those seminars in 1980, Joyce’s novel has…

SHOULD POLITICIANS criticise judges? In February, both Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch attacked Upper Tribunal Judge Norton-Taylor’s decision to allow a Palestinian family to settle in Britain on Convention grounds, notwithstanding the fact that Parliament had not provided a specific pathway for their application. The Lady Chief Justice, who now dual-hats as the judiciary’s shop steward, said she was “deeply troubled” by the remarks, which is the technical legal term for “incandescently furious”. Then, in March, shadow lord chancellor Robert Jenrick called for William Davis LJ to be sacked as chairman of the Sentencing Council over the “two-tier” guideline which favoured ethnic minorities. This time, it was the Attorney-General, Lord Hermer KC, who had a fit, calling such remarks “entirely unacceptable” and creating “a huge threat to the rule…

Defying a pervert COMING THROUGH ZURICH AIRPORT, I WAS flashed in the ladies’ loo by a man in a skin-tight beige bodysuit and a dodgy Chelsea facelift. It was emphatically not a unisex bathroom, but at first I wasn’t too bothered to see a bloke dressed as a woman in there. I actually felt a bit sorry when he asked me in a chummy voice which of two lipsticks suited him best (note to aspirant women, we don’t actually go up to random strangers by the sinks and come on all 12-year-olds’ sleepover), and merely resigned when he asked me if his bra was showing. But then he took his penis out. “Oh love,” I thought, “You’ve really, really picked the wrong day.” Call me intolerant, but when returning from…