I’ll be giving my lecture ‘Charles the Rash’, hosted by Republic, at 7pm on Wednesday 1 November, at Mary Sumner House, 24 Tufton Street, London SW1P 3RB

The country is bitterly divided. The political class is in disarray. Things couldn’t possibly get worse – could they?

A new head of state, the most egregiously unqualified since Edward VIII, is waiting in the wings. Step forward Charles Windsor, a credulous fool and a man in a hurry.

We’re about to get a lesson in what inherited privilege really looks like – and it’s the biggest opportunity for British republicans in decades.

Daily Telegraph, Monday 9 October 2017

Over the last couple of years, I’ve heard very disturbing reports about the extent of sexual violence in some schools. I’ve heard about girls who wear shorts under their uniform skirts to protect themselves from sexual assault; I’ve heard about groups of boys who have all been accused of sexual violence, including rape; and I’ve heard about distraught parents being advised to move their daughters to another school, leaving the boy or boys who raped them in place.

I’m not talking about children being targeted by adults. This is sexual violence carried out by under-18s on other children – and I’ve been told that some schools are reluctant even to acknowledge they have a problem, for fear it will have a negative impact on their Ofsted reports. Most, though not all, of the victims are girls – and the assaults are being carried out by boys who are the same age or slightly older.

I’ve heard about these alleged incidents because I’m Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, which brings together senior police officers, representatives of the criminal justice system and organisations that work with victims of sexual violence. But nothing prepared me for hearing the testimony of parents and children in a harrowing Panorama programme, ‘When Kids Abuse Kids’.

No mother should be confronted with the discovery that her six-year-old daughter has been digitally raped in the playground by two boys over a period of six weeks. No teenage girl should have to sit GCSEs in the same room as a boy who has raped her. No girl should suffer bullying and abuse at school from other teenagers because she has had the courage to go the police. Yet all these things happened to the girls whose stories are told in the Panorama programme.

Whether anyone should be surprised that such horrendous abuse is going is another matter. In September last year, a Parliamentary committee published a damning report on the extent of sexual violence in schools. The Women and Equalities Committee found that sexual harassment and abuse of girls was being ‘accepted as part of daily life’. It highlighted the fact that even primary school children are learning about sex and relationships from hard-core pornography, and called on the government to take urgent action.

A year on, campaigners say the government has been too slow to act to the committee’s report. In March, ministers announced that sex and relationships education is to be made compulsory in all schools, but the plan is unlikely to come into effect until September 2019 – and parents will still have the right to withdraw children from the classes.

In the meantime, many schools appear to be floundering, reluctant to involve the police even when serious (and criminal) incidents are reported. Girls who have told teachers about sexual assaults by male pupils claim they were advised to stay out of the boy’s way and block him on social media sites – a response campaigners describe as ‘hopeless’.

According to Rachel Krys, Co-director of the End Violence Against Girls Coalition, teachers have been left waiting for guidance from the government and girls are still being exposed to danger. It is a stark picture, and one some people will find hard to believe. But a slew of figures, collected from 38 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales for the Panorama programme, provides dramatic new evidence for the claims.

They show that almost 30,000 reports of under-18s sexually assaulting other children have been made to the police in the last four years. More than 2,000 of those alleged offences (2,625 to be exact) were said to have occurred on school premises, including in primary school playgrounds. That figure includes 225 alleged rapes. Reports of peer-on-peer assaults, where victim and perpetrator are close in age, rose from 4,603 in 2013 to 7,866 last year – an increase of 71 per cent.

Most shocking of all are the figures relating to alleged sexual offences committed by children under the age of 10, who are below the age of criminal responsibility and can’t be prosecuted. Reports from 30 police forces showed that the numbers had doubled from 204 in 2013-14 to 456 in 2016-17. The boys who assaulted ‘Bella’, the six-year-old in the Panorama programme, fell into this category.

Many victims, and their parents, are shocked and horrified by the failure of schools to offer the support they need. ‘It’s not what actually happens that has the worst effect on you, it’s what comes after it’, said one of the girls who took part in the Panorama programme. ‘It’s the being disbelieved – it’s the people failing you.’

Just over a year ago, the Women and Equalities Committee accused the government of having ‘no coherent plan’ to ensure that schools tackle the causes and consequences of sexual violence. From the anecdotal evidence I’m hearing, and the dreadful cases unearthed by Panorama, that is still the case. The figures show that ministers are failing to protect children in the very place where they should feel safe, and the situation is getting worse. They should hang their head in shame.

Sunday Times, 24 September 2017

Many journalists live in fear of a big story that falls apart, prompting cries of ‘fake news’. That’s what happens to investigative reporter Marcus Murray in So The Doves (Bluemoose books, £15), an unforgettable crime novel by the poet and author Heidi James. Murray has just published a sensational story revealing connections between a British bank and the arms trade, but then his source disappears and the emails he relied on turn out to be forged.

Banished to his home town in Kent by his editor, who wants him out of the way, Murray finds himself covering the discovery of a decades-old dead body on the route of a high-speed rail link. He isn’t much interested until he realises that the remains are connected to a sequence of violent events he witnessed as a teenager. James writes lyrical prose, combining a compelling plot with a portrait of a man forced to question the entire basis of his life.

Henning Mankell is often credited with creating the worldwide appetite for Nordic crime. He died two years ago, at the age of only 67, and his final novel confronts themes of ageing and loss. After The Fire (Harvill Secker £17.99), translated by Marlaine Delargy, brings back the main character from an earlier Mankell novel, Italian Shoes. Fredrik Welin is a retired doctor who lives alone in the isolated house he inherited form his parents in the Swedish archipelago.

One morning he wakes up to find his house on fire, and narrowly manages to escape with his life. The blaze was started deliberately, one of a series of arson attacks, and Welin is left with the suspicion that someone he knows has tried to kill him. The novel’s atmosphere is bleak and elegiac, suggesting that Mankell wrote it with his own impending death in mind.

A couple of years ago, the Swedish writer David Lagercrantz published the first volume in his continuation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Lagercrantz is an accomplished author in his own right and he’s just published his second Millennium novel, The Girl Who Takes An Eye for an Eye (MacLehose £20), translated by George Goulding. It begins with the super-hacker Lisbeth Sander banged up in a brutal women’s prison, where she enlists her old ally Mikael Blomkvist to help her investigate a sinister research project involving twins.

This is a promising plot, recalling the failures of real-life psychoanalysts in the case of the bogus Swedish serial killer Thomas Quick. But Lagercrantz is almost too respectful of Larsson – instead of allowing the original characters to develop, he falls back on what he already knows, playing up Salander’s tendency to extreme violence and Blomkvist’s tedious love life. The best sections are about the dire impact of the twins project, and they would work just as well in a stand-alone novel.

Ann Cleeves is one of the most consistently interesting British crime writers. She lives in the North-east and her latest novel, The Seagull (Macmillan £16.99), brilliantly evokes the run-down seaside resort of Whitley Bay. A former  police officer, serving a prison sentence for corruption, offers to tell DI Vera Stanhope about a long-ago murder if she promises to keep an eye on his grown-up daughter and her children. Stanhope is wary but the conversation leads to the discovery of two bodies, and a mystery as satisfying as anything Cleeves has ever written.

Daily Telegraph, Thursday 21 September 2017

There is an epidemic of domestic abuse in this country. More than a quarter of women aged 16 to 59 have experienced abuse at some point in their lives, according to the government’s own figures. Many victims are trapped in violent relationships, unable to leave because refuge places are in short supply and they have nowhere else to go.

In such circumstances, who could possibly believe that staying with a brutal partner is a choice, rather than a counsel of desperation? Yet a major new report shows that too many of the people who provide front-line services – police officers, social workers, health professionals, youth offending teams and probation officers – apparently believe that putting up with domestic abuse is a ‘lifestyle choice’.

The conclusions of the report – written by inspectors from four government bodies, including Ofsted – make for distressing reading. The inspectors looked at what was being done to support child victims of domestic abuse in six local authority areas up and down the country, from the north of England to the home counties. In some cases, they found that child victims were being ignored because police officers believed they had made a ‘lifestyle choice’.

The inspectors even found reports that talked about victims learning to ‘make better relationship choices’, as though anyone – adult or child – would actually choose to live with emotional or physical abuse.

‘We found instances of language being used that incorrectly held victims responsible for the risk of domestic abuse,’ the inspectors say. ‘We also found instances of inappropriate practice, including a police log that had been updated to state that a safeguarding visit would not be appropriate because both parties were “as bad as one another”’.

Men are sometimes victims but we know that women are twice as likely to experience intimate partner violence, according to the Office for National Statistics. Yet the notion that both partners are equally culpable is stubbornly hard to shift, whether we’re talking about statutory bodies or members of the public.

‘Why didn’t she leave him?’ people ask when a woman is murdered by her partner, even though statistics show that victims are at greatest risk immediately after leaving a violent, controlling man. It’s not that long since police officers used to describe violent incidents in the home as ‘ just a domestic’, as though such assaults belonged in a lesser category.

These attitudes are wearily familiar, which doesn’t make them any the less shocking when they appear in an official report. Even more astounding is the habit of assuming that children bear some responsibility for the damage they suffer at the hands of adults – and the fact that it is still going on

It should be obvious that children can’t make ‘lifestyle choices’ and they certainly can’t give consent, legally or morally, to being in an abusive relationship. Back in 2013, a report into the activities of sex-grooming gangs in Rochdale rightly caused outrage. One of the victims, a girl who was repeatedly raped at the age of 15, revealed that social workers had told her parents she was a ‘prostitute’ who had made a ‘lifestyle choice’.

Things were supposed to have changed in the wake of such scandals. Yet it’s been revealed in the last few days that draft guidelines drawn up by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) would allow child victims of sexual exploitation to be denied compensation on the grounds that they ‘consented’. The guidelines have been described as ‘deeply shocking’ by the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, who is calling on the government to rewrite them.

At the heart of tall these scandals is a long-standing tendency to focus on the behaviour of victims instead of perpetrators. Official agencies are still asking ‘why did they put up with it?’ when they should be looking at what allows perpetrators to get away with abuse for so long. The authors of this latest report on the treatment of domestic abuse are clear that there needs to be a ‘sea-change’ in attitudes. They are calling for ‘a widespread public service message designed to shift behaviour on a large scale’.

It isn’t hard to work out what that message should be. Each year, an estimated 1.3m women experience domestic abuse in this country, according to official figures. When are we going to stop blaming them for being beaten up by their partners?

Sunday Times, 20 August 2017

The Navarra region of northern Spain is best known for its largest city, Pamplona, which hosts a controversial bull run each summer. It is also the setting for a remarkable trilogy of crime novels by Dolores Redondo, which has sold a million copies in Spain. Redondo’s detective, Amaia Salazar – named after a sceptical Inquisitor who investigated allegations of witchcraft in the 17^th-century – is based in a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The final volume in the series, Offering to the Storm (Harper Collins £12.99), translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, is a brilliant novel in its own right.

It begins with the death of a baby, smothered by her father who claims that the body was an ‘offering’ to an evil spirit. When Salazar looks for similar cases, she uncovers a pattern of child murders, many of them committed in the wild Baztan valley where her own family has a cruel and tragic history. Like the French novelist Fred Vargas, Redondo boldly combines pre-Christian myths with modern investigative techniques. But Offering to the Storm does something even more audacious, upending everything that seemed to have been settled in the earlier instalments of the magnificent Baztan trilogy.

Val McDermid’s readers have come to know her detectives, DCI Carol Jordan and the profiler Dr Tony Hill, over a series of novels which share the best elements of soap opera. In Insidious Intent (Little Brown £18.99), a drink-driving case is hanging over Jordan’s career when she is called to investigate the murder of a woman in a burned-out car in north Yorkshire. The killer’s modus operandi – he selects his victims at weddings – marks him out as a chilly misogynist. McDermid’s insistence that the crimes are an extreme form of domestic violence is brave, but she has opted for a shocking ending that feels rushed and out of character.

Anthony Horowitz’s most recent crime novel, Magpie Murders, was a Sunday Times book of the month. His latest, The Word is Murder (Century £20), features an enigmatic ex-Scotland Yard detective, Michael Hawthorne. Horowitz is the author of two Sherlock Holmes novels and the mystery that confronts Hawthorne is Holmesian in character, featuring a woman who is murdered on the very day she arranges her funeral. He is aided by a first-person narrator who appears to be Horowitz himself, assuming the role of a bumbling Dr Watson. Their investigation is interspersed with vignettes from ‘Anthony’s’ life as a screenwriter, including a squirm-making scene with Steven Spielberg. It’s hard to think of a more annoying double act.

The Scandal (Michael Joseph £12.99), translated by Neil Smith, is a new novel from the best-selling Swedish author Fredrik Backman. Set in a small town surrounded by impenetrable forests, it recreates the stifling atmosphere of a dying community, kept going only by the unexpected success of its high-school ice hockey time. A rape at a post-match party shows testosterone-fuelled young men behaving at their worst, and the police investigation turns into an ordeal for the victim. This is a mature, compassionate novel about gender, sport and sexual violence.

We are blamed for most of the world’s misfortunes and now we’re paying for a misspent youth. In our defence, we were ignorant of the dangers of drink

The Guardian, Thursday 24 August 2017

For my generation, arriving at college in the 1960s and 70s, the dire warnings were all about drugs. My parents sat me down and told me about the dangers of smoking “pot”, which they had read about in the papers. But they never said a word about alcohol. When I asked my mother what I should drink when I went to bars with my new student friends, she suggested cider. It was soon abandoned for the joys (or so they seemed at the time) of a cheap red wine called valpolicella.

Now the baby-boom generation is paying the price for what researchers writing in the British Medical Journal call “liberal views” towards alcohol. “Risky drinking” is in decline for other age groups, especially among people aged under 35, where alcohol-related hospital admissions have dropped from almost 30% to 9%. People in their 20s and 30s think nothing of sticking to water or soft drinks, and for the most part they don’t face anything like the social pressure that existed for years after I left university.

But alcohol-related hospital admissions have tripled among people aged between 55 and 74 during the last decade; the group now accounts for almost half of such cases, with more than 500,000 admissions in 2015-16. The baby-boom generation is used to being blamed for most of the world’s misfortunes; and now, it seems, we are paying for a misspent youth. The habits acquired in those long-gone days are hard to shake off – and one of the worst, for people of my age, was drinking on an empty stomach.

If you were broke, which I was at university, and for quite a few years after, it was easy to spend the evening in the pub and make do with a nourishing bag of chips, liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar, on the way home. I remember “races”, more accurately a pub crawl, when teams of half a dozen students tied their legs together and proceeded from pub to pub, knocking back a pint at each one.

In our defence, there were few health warnings about drinking too much in those days. Every generation thinks it is immortal, and we were no different. We didn’t know about liver damage. Cirrhosis was an obscure disease we read about in biographies of long-dead authors. At parties, refusing another drink attracted ribbing and ridicule, as though staying sober was for wimps. I cringe when I remember hearing someone urge “Oh, go on, another one won’t hurt,” even though the holder of the empty glass was driving home.

Attitudes towards drink-driving have changed dramatically, I’m glad to say, and many people of my age confine their drinking to meals. But it is hard to convey just how normalised heavy drinking was, with no advice about safe limits or having days off.

Men and women viewed it differently, I seem to remember, although it might just be that their drinking habits were viewed differently by other people. Even now, you don’t have to look far to find censorious attitudes towards women and alcohol, but some men treated it as a challenge – as though being able to “hold their drink” proved their manliness in some way.

A few years ago, I began to notice references to “heroic” drinking in obituaries of well-known people – authors, journalists and so on – who had clearly died too young of alcohol-related diseases. I recognised it as a species of denial, demonstrating how hard it is for some people over the age of 50 even to acknowledge the existence of alcoholism. It is part of a growing age divide, more evident every year, that the over-50s still tend to dismiss dangers that are obvious to younger generations.

The baby boomers grew up with moral panics about cannabis and LSD, distrusting almost everything we were told by adults, and missed the thing that was under our nose. The statistics on age and drinking tell the story: when it comes to that second or third bottle of wine, much of my generation is still in denial.

Daily Telegraph, Monday 21 August 2017

There’s good news today for anyone who’s ever lived in fear of turning on their mobile phone or computer. From now on, prosecutors will treat threats delivered online just as seriously as offences committed face-to-face. The news was announced by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who rightly said that “hate speech has devastating effects.”

It is a brave decision. Saunders knows she will be attacked by people who dismiss online abuse as empty threats, but we’ve recently heard about the life-changing impact on a number of well-known women.

Gina Miller, the woman who won a Brexit legal challenge against the Government, has been threatened with acid attacks and said she is afraid to leave her home. Last month a man called Rhodri Phillips, also known as Lord St Davids, was jailed for 12 weeks for racially abusing Miller on social media.

The new policy covers race, religion or disability, as well as homophobic, bi-phobic and transphobic offences – and it’s absolutely right that it does so. But there is a glaring omission

Another internet troll, John Nimmo, was jailed for two years and three months in February after targeting Labour MP Luciana Berger with anti-semitic messages. He sent her a photo of a knife and a threat that she would ‘get it like Jo Cox’, a reference to the MP murdered in June last year. Berger said Nimmo’s threats had caused her “great fear and anguish.”

Unfortunately, these are not isolated cases. Official figures show a 20 per cent increase in all types of hate crime reported to the police in the first quarter of this year - but it is believed to be significantly under-reported. According to Saunders, “an increasing proportion of hate crime” is now carried out online, and she hopes to see more prosecutions and longer sentences.

This is all to the good, but many women will spot a glaring omission in the different strands of hate crime cited by the Crown Prosecution Service. The new policy covers crimes based on race, religion or disability, as well as homophobic, bi-phobic and transphobic offences – and it is absolutely right that it does so.

But there is a glaring omission: misogyny. Specifically, threats to hurt or kill women because they’re women. This has been overlooked, even though it has the potential to affect over half the population.

It also seems to be one of the most frequent forms of abuse on social media sites. Remember the torrent of rape threats aimed at Caroline Criado-Perez when she campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes? Or the man who threatened to kill the Labour MP Angela Eagle, calling her a ‘bitch’ and telling her she would die if she became leader of the Labour party? Eagle also received homophobic messages, a reminder that victims are often targeted by more than one type of abuse.

Many men appear to be goaded to fury simply by the fact of a woman expressing an opinion they don’t like. Or an opinion full-stop. Rape and death threats have become an occupational hazard for female politicians, journalists, novelists, singers – any woman who uses social media, in fact.

The reason this is so serious is that women have always had a tenuous relationship with public space. Defence barristers still demand to know why young women wear short skirts when they go out at night, perpetuating the age-old suggestion that rape victims are ‘asking for it’ if they don’t cover up in public. Some women don’t feel safe on public transport late at night or walking home from a bus stop down dark, deserted streets.

The internet is a new form of public space, and the purpose of misogynistic hate speech is to scare women out of using it. Saunders’s recognition of the effects of hate speech is welcome but she – and social media companies – need to be more aware of the specific nature and impact of misogyny.

A few months ago, when I reported a tweet from a man who wanted to see me ‘lying face-down in a ditch’, Twitter responded that it did not breach their terms and conditions, and took no action.

It’s obviously right that other online hate crimes, such as anti-semitism, will at last be treated more seriously online. But when abuse of women on social media is so common and yet not recognised as a specific offence, it sends a very dangerous message.

We know it’s linked to domestic violence in some cases, where men have threatened former partners online, and that women have been terrorised into leaving social media sites. If that isn’t recognised as a hate crime? Then there’s something wrong with the definition.