Gaby Hinsliff's Blog, page 3

Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us | Gaby Hinsliff

If it’s not superinjunctions, it’s Epstein files or deepfakes. It’s hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when sometimes they really are out to get you

If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.

A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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How does woke start winning again? – podcast

British progressives have suffered major setbacks in recent years, in both public opinion and court rulings. Was a backlash inevitable, and are new tactics needed?

By Gaby Hinsliff. Read by Carlyss Peer

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Yes, the problem is men like Gregg Wallace – but it’s also those who should stop them and don’t | Gaby Hinsliff

Agents, employers, board members all have a moral and legal duty to make people behave decently. If not now, when?

It was only a handful of “middle-class women of a certain age”. That’s how the MasterChef host Gregg Wallace originally dismissed his accusers, when allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour first surfaced. Just a few humourless posh birds, in other words, who couldn’t take a joke from the self-styled “cheeky greengrocer” and star of a cookery show enjoyed by – well, lots of other middle-class women of a certain age, for starters.

But those jokes were apparently sexualised enough that the former Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, no shrinking violet, raised concerns privately with producers after appearing as a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef. Meanwhile, her fellow broadcaster Kirstie Allsopp, who recalled Wallace allegedly describing a sex act with his partner within an hour of meeting her at work, succinctly described all the reasons women mostly didn’t say anything at the time: “Because you feel, in no particular order, embarrassed, a prude, shocked, waiting for a male colleague to call him out, not wanting to ‘rock the boat’, thinking it’s better to plough on with the day, assuming you misheard/misunderstood or just don’t get the joke.”

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Whatever the truth of The Salt Path, I know why people wanted to believe it | Gaby Hinsliff

As questions are asked about the bestselling memoir, is the demand for hope-over-hardship stories outstripping reality?

Was the story always, in hindsight, just a little too good to be true? A middle-aged couple, brutally down on their luck after bankruptcy and a terminal diagnosis, escape their troubles on an epic walk round the South West Coast Path, finding comfort along the way in the kindness of strangers. Billed as an “honest and life-affirming” story of prevailing against the odds, The Salt Path became first a bestseller and then a blockbuster film, starring a windswept Gillian Anderson. Though it was never really my thing, I knew plenty of people for whom The Salt Path genuinely resonated, with its romantic central theme of being (as the film’s director, Marianne Elliott, put it) “reformed by the elements” of a blustery English seascape.

If it seemed a bit unlikely that a dying man could be rejuvenated by a strenuous trek involving wild camping in all weathers – well, getting readers to suspend their disbelief is what good storytellers do, and The Salt Path’s Raynor Winn was definitely good. Arguably, as I said, too good.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Who’s really to blame for Labour’s troubles – Rachel Reeves or the invisible PM? | Gaby Hinsliff

The Treasury focuses on numbers when what’s needed is vision. The party and the country are crying out for leadership, but it’s nowhere to be seen

She is not the first chancellor to cry in public, and may not be the last. But Rachel Reeves is the first whose tears have moved markets. No sooner had the realisation dawned that she was silently weeping – over a personal sorrow she won’t be pushed into revealing, she insisted later, not a political one – as she sat beside Keir Starmer at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, than the pound was dropping and the cost of borrowing rising. The bond traders who forced out Liz Truss’s hapless chancellor still clearly rate her judgment and want her to stay, even if (perhaps especially if) some Labour MPs don’t. Yet it is an extraordinary thing to live with the knowledge that a moment’s uncontrolled emotion can drive up the cost of a nation’s mortgages, just as a misjudged stroke of the budget pen can destroy lives.

The most striking thing about her tears, however, was Starmer’s failure to notice. Intent on the Tory benches opposite, the prime minister simply ploughed on, not realising that his closest political ally was dissolving beside him. Though within hours, a clearly mortified Starmer had thrown a metaphorical arm around her, and Reeves herself was back out talking up her beloved fiscal rules as if nothing had happened. But it’s the kind of image that sticks: her distress and his oblivion, an unfortunately convenient metaphor for all the times he has seemed oddly detached from his own government.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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It is politicians – not regulators – who must make sense of the supreme court’s gender ruling | Gaby Hinsliff

The chair of Britain’s equalities regulator spoke to MPs this week. But instead of clarity, there was more confusion

It’s almost two months now since the UK supreme court ruling on what makes a woman in the eyes of the law, which was hailed as a turning point in the battle over transgender rights.

Not long enough for wounds to heal, in other words, but long enough surely to hope for a bit more clarity about what this means for everyday life: which toilets trans people can use, what this means for your local women’s running club or gym, how employers can handle sensitive situations at work without outing or humiliating trans staff in front of colleagues and customers. But instead, the waters are getting muddier with every passing week.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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How Not to Be a Political Wife by Sarah Vine review – a bitter memoir of power and betrayal

She was Michael Gove’s wife and Samantha Cameron’s best friend. But then Brexit happened

Politics is awful.

If you want the digested read of Sarah Vine’s memoir on life as a Westminster WAG, that’s it: politics, she writes, is a hateful business that ruined her marriage to Michael Gove, her health and happiness. (Don’t ask what the Cameron years did to anyone else: this book is absolutely not about anyone else.) But like many a passionate hatred, this one started out as love.

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How does woke start winning again? | Gaby Hinsliff

British progressives have suffered major setbacks in recent years, in both public opinion and court rulings. Was a backlash inevitable, and are new tactics needed?

Inside a coffin-like glass box lies the figure of a man, his face streaked with scarlet paint. Above it a video plays on loop, showing the afternoon in June 2020 when an exuberant crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters yanked this statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth near Bristol harbour and rolled it triumphantly into the water. Five years on from that cathartic execution, the graffiti-smeared statue occupies the far end of the exhibition on protest at the city’s M Shed museum, in a thicket of placards left behind by the departing crowd. Their slogans – “Silence is violence”; “Racism is a dangerous pandemic too” – evoke the radicalism of a summer that already feels oddly consigned to history, when frustration erupted on to the streets but never quite seemed to be channelled into lasting change.

The museum leads visitors to Colston via older stories of resistance figures, once considered shockingly radical but now celebrated without question: Theresa Garnett, the suffragette who brandished a horsewhip at Winston Churchill at Bristol Temple Meads station, or the heroes of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott, who walked to work in protest against the bus company’s refusal to hire black drivers (and helped pave the way for the 1965 Race Relations Act). But the legacy of protests at the modern end of the gallery, where the statue lies sandwiched between exhibits on Extinction Rebellion and Occupy, remains, for now, more contested.

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Trump has unleashed something terrifying in the US – that even he may be powerless to control | Gaby Hinsliff

The protests in LA are what everyone feared, and a warning to countries that flirt with populism

She was live on air to viewers back home, her TV microphone clearly in hand, when the rubber bullet hit her. The Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi was the second journalist after the British photographer Nick Stern to be shot with non-lethal rounds while covering protests in Los Angeles sparked by immigration raids. But she was the first to be caught on camera and beamed around the world. There’s no excuse for not knowing what the US is becoming, now that anyone can watch that clip online. Not when you can hear her scream and see the cameraman quickly swing away to film a panicking crowd.

It was the scenario everyone feared when Donald Trump took office. Deportation hit squads descending on the kind of Democrat-voting communities who would feel morally bound to resist them, triggering the kind of violent confrontation that creates an excuse to send in national guard troops – and ultimately a showdown between federal and state power that could take US democracy to the brink. Now something like this may be unfolding in California, where the state governor, Gavin Newsom, has accused the president of trying to “manufacture a crisis” for his own ends and warned that any protester responding with violence is only playing into his hands. Suddenly, the idea that this presidency could ultimately end in civil conflict no longer seems quite so wildly overblown as it once did.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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What is Britain's elusive 'national character'? The Ballad of Wallis Island might just tell us | Gaby Hinsliff

Rain, cardigans and puns: a melancholic new romcom set on a windswept island hints at a relatable British identity

It is, according to no less an authority than the romcom king Richard Curtis, destined to be “one of the greatest British films of all time”. But don’t let that put you off. For The Ballad of Wallis Island – the unlikely new tale of a socially awkward millionaire who inveigles two estranged former halves of a folk-singing duo into playing a private gig on his windswept private island – isn’t some floppy-haired Hugh Grant vehicle, but a reflection on our national character that is altogether more of its times.

It’s a lovely, melancholic comedy about the acceptance of failure, loss and the slow understanding that what’s gone is not coming back: an ode to rain and cardigans, lousy plumbing and worse puns, shot in Wales on a shoestring budget in a summer so unforgiving that a doctor was apparently required on set to check for hypothermia. Its main characters have not only all messed up at something – relationships, careers, managing money – but seem fairly capable of messing up again in future. Yet as a film it’s both gloriously funny and oddly comforting, taking a world where everything seems to be slowly coming adrift and making that feel so much more bearable.

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