Best Of

"Middle-class white men banned from public sector internship
National Audit Office’s six-week paid programme only accepts female, black heritage or lower socio-economic applicants" (£)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/06/middle-class-white-men-banned-from-public-sector-internship/

Are white, middle-class heterosexual men the most put upon cohort in UK society?

@Mexicanpete defending DEI to the hilt!

Give over Sunil. Is that the time?

The details of my life are quite inconsequential...

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving corner shop owner from Zanzibar with low-grade lethargy and a penchant for psephology. My mother was a 20-year-old newsreader named Gargi with gap-teeth.

My father would plagiarize; he would snigger. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the opinion poll. Sometimes, he would accuse free-range eggs of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the insane possess and the genius lament...

My childhood was typical: summers in Penarth... sudoku lessons... In the spring, we'd make Quorn helmets... When I was insolent I was placed in a Sinclair C5 and beaten with Tory Party leaflets - pretty standard, really. At the age of 12, I received my first Coelacanth.

At the age of 14, a Bristolian named Brenda ritualistically shaved my buttocks. There really is nothing like a shorn bottom - it's breathtaking... I suggest you try it!

I genuinely understand none of this.

It’s a riff on the Dr Evil speech from Austin Powers.

Thanks. Still absolutely no idea of the context.

Austin Powers is the main character from the Austin Powers movie series, which is a parody of James Bond movies. The character Dr Evil, who is a parody of Blofeld, who was the main (but not only) villain from said movies, makes the speech that Sunil quotes in the first movie.

Errr, no.

Dr No gives the speech in the first James Bond film.

Blimey, makes me wonder about the Bedchamber Crisis now

Revealed: cover-up of attempted rape that let Lord Palmerston into No 10

The Victorian leader told a woman that no one would believe her if she told anyone of the attack in 1837, a memo in the Royal Archives has shown

He is lionised as one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers, but a 185-year-old memo reveals Lord Palmerston was involved in a scandal that could have stopped him ever getting to Downing Street.

In 1837, Palmerston, 52, who was then foreign secretary, was visiting Queen Victoria when he attempted to rape one of her ladies-in-waiting, Susan Brand, 22.

The memo, which was recently discovered in the Royal Archives and will be published in a new book this month, reveals for the first time the extraordinary operation that swung into action to cover up the incident.

Victoria’s adviser, Baron Stockmar, and her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, feared the ensuing scandal would “damage” the character of the Queen, who was then 18. She had acceded to the throne just three months earlier and had not yet been crowned. They also anticipated that it would cause the “immediate break-up” of Melbourne’s administration, in which Palmerston held a key position.

Their decision to suppress the incident — the memo describes them persuading and bribing eyewitnesses into “silence” — meant that Palmerston, an Anglo-Irish viscount, never faced any consequences for the assault. He remained in office with his reputation intact and in 1855 became a popular prime minister.

Jehanne Wake, the historian and biographer, stumbled across the memo on a visit to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle while she and her daughter, Katie, were researching their upcoming book The Countess: Seduction, Power and the Extraordinary Life of Emily Cowper, which will be published on June 25.

Countess Cowper, Melbourne’s sister, was at the time of the assault Palmerston’s long-term mistress. They married two years later. Wake found the memo among Cowper’s papers, some of which are held at Windsor.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/history/article/revealed-cover-up-of-attempted-rape-that-let-lord-palmerston-into-no-10-n2znw5tlh

"Middle-class white men banned from public sector internship
National Audit Office’s six-week paid programme only accepts female, black heritage or lower socio-economic applicants" (£)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/06/middle-class-white-men-banned-from-public-sector-internship/

Are white, middle-class heterosexual men the most put upon cohort in UK society?

@Mexicanpete defending DEI to the hilt!

Give over Sunil. Is that the time?

The details of my life are quite inconsequential...

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving corner shop owner from Zanzibar with low-grade lethargy and a penchant for psephology. My mother was a 20-year-old newsreader named Gargi with gap-teeth.

My father would plagiarize; he would snigger. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the opinion poll. Sometimes, he would accuse free-range eggs of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the insane possess and the genius lament...

My childhood was typical: summers in Penarth... sudoku lessons... In the spring, we'd make Quorn helmets... When I was insolent I was placed in a Sinclair C5 and beaten with Tory Party leaflets - pretty standard, really. At the age of 12, I received my first Coelacanth.

At the age of 14, a Bristolian named Brenda ritualistically shaved my buttocks. There really is nothing like a shorn bottom - it's breathtaking... I suggest you try it!

I genuinely understand none of this.

It’s a riff on the Dr Evil speech from Austin Powers.

Thanks. Still absolutely no idea of the context.

Austin Powers is the main character from the Austin Powers movie series, which is a parody of James Bond movies. The character Dr Evil, who is a parody of Blofeld, who was the main (but not only) villain from said movies, makes the speech that Sunil quotes in the first movie.

"Middle-class white men banned from public sector internship
National Audit Office’s six-week paid programme only accepts female, black heritage or lower socio-economic applicants" (£)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/06/middle-class-white-men-banned-from-public-sector-internship/

Are white, middle-class heterosexual men the most put upon cohort in UK society?

That's not the point. This is officially sanctioned discrimination by sex and race, and that will create injustice.

If you play this game, you create social division.

I think most people would look at the situation and say that giving an occasional helping hand up to historically marginalised groups helps undo existing injustices. But some white middle class heterosexual men are snowflakes and easily triggered when their familiar advantages are reduced in the slightest.

I think most people would look at the situation and say that discriminating against anyone is wrong.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

I think two wrongs don’t make a right. But you’re the one who favours ethnically cleansing Palestinians, so I kinda thought you were in the two wrongs DO make a right camp.

I am not in favour of it, I do think relocation might be the least worst option to end the cycle of violence.

I would love to see a better, sustainable, option but as long as Hamas exist and their like, and as long as they are supported by the likes of Iran, it does not seem limely.

As long as Netanyahu and his uber Zionist clique lives then Hamas are not the genocidal nutters but actually freedom fighters.

Netanyahu is the best recruitment agency Hamas and Hezbollah have ever had.

Without him and his ilk, Hamas and Hezbollah would be starved of necessity and relevance.

Palestine is a State and it belongs in defined borders on the Gaza Strip and West Bank stolen by Israel.

The best solution is to empty Gaza of Palestinians, and move them all to the West Bank, moving all the Israeli settlers out of the West Bank and back in to Israel and Gaza to house them.

That means Israel is a whole state without a dangerous enclave of Palestinians who hate them, and Palestine is a whole state without illegal Israeli settlements. It is fair and just - nobody gets everything they want, but everyone gets what they need.

Leaving aside several issues with this plan, I note that there are over twice as many Gazans as Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Which I think should be fine. Gazans would tend to live more densely than Israeli settlers. I'd be more concerned that the Israeli settlers would burn and raze it all to the ground rather than let Palestinians live there, which would be very probable, but it would still be worth it to solve the problem.

Any moral solution to Israel-Palestine issue needs to remember that both Palestinians and Israelis should have the same right. Simply removing the Palestinians, is clearly in breach of that.

The Palestinians are idiots. They have ruined their own country.