on a brief serious note - I've received hundreds of tweets from gender critical people today and dozens of those were accusing me of being a handmaiden, of trying to get the attention of men, of not being a feminist, and so on

to set the record straight: I co-founded the Words By Women awards, which aimed to shine a light on female talent in journalism and force traditional awards to redress their gross gender imbalance, at risk of alienating basically every potential future employer

I personally, publicly called out three

hello, two quick points on the relative safety of Johnson's leadership in this week's column: 1. the 2019ers' rebellion was more important than it seemed, I think; the Red Wallers were, until then, a bit of a known unknown, and them showing they'd be happy to get rid of Boris will bolster other intakes: independent.co.uk/independentpre…

I find this stuff really interesting because it's got everywhere now - the constant attempts to guess what "normal" people will care about - and I think it's symptomatic of the fact that basically most people in Westminster do not remember what life is like under a big majority

https://twitter.com/bnhwalker/status/1455870388181864457

it's the Goldilocks theory of consequences - under a small or non-existent majority basically everything could, in theory, matter, and so everything was suddenly very important because it always had the potential to be

in a big majority, there's the opposite problem

there's something I've been half-thinking about for a year or so, and the universal experience of the lockdown has kind of brought it into sharper relief, so I'm going to have a stab at putting it into words: I don't think the problem with the internet is that we now live in bubbles. I think the problem with the internet is that we're all together, all the time, and that's not something humans are built for. We're not made to be constant; people will always change what they say, and

went to the pub with this French friend who was visiting tonight, and the upstairs room was reserved but there was no one there so we sat at one of the tables just waiting for people to turn up and kick us out people eventually turned up and kept giving us these dirty looks but I, after ten years in Britain, had had enough

"they're being stupid British cowards", I told my friend, "if they want us to leave one of them can just act like a normal adult and come tell us"

so we stayed

have been thinking quite a lot about the way political coverage of Brexit has been going and there's something I've come to see as quite jarring (with the caveat that it may be about my own fatigue rather than the media itself, who knows) a lot of the coverage we see from political journalists on Twitter these days seems to revolve around stuff that's about to happen; amendments about to be put down, factions about to announce they're backing something or not backing it, and similar

In the space of about a week recently, there was a video of Kim Kardashian explaining that the corset she'd wear to the Met gala was so tight she wouldn't be able to sit down all night, and a story of some actress at Cannes who fainted at a lunch because her corset was too tight. I don't know what it was about those stories - maybe the fact that they happened one just after the other - but I can't stop thinking about them, and how much I worry we've regressed in terms of what we expect from women in the public eye

[coughs]

[taps mic]

Hello, do you have a minute? I would like to talk to you about a profile of David Davis that was published in the Telegraph in 2005. This is the first sentence. We're not having a drop intro here, just straight into action.

Hi, I'd like to talk about flirting. We've had a lot of men in the past few weeks going "oh but does X mean that I'm not allowed to flirt with anyone anymore?". Beyond the obvious disingenuity there, I think the core of the issue is that clearly, not all but a lot of men see