The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.
1. Former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hasting in The Guardian
on Boris Johnson
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I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister
“It would be fanciful to liken the ascent of Boris Johnson to the outbreak of global war, but similar forces are in play. There is room for debate about whether he is a scoundrel or mere rogue, but not much about his moral bankruptcy, rooted in a contempt for truth. Nonetheless, even before the Conservative national membership cheers him in as our prime minister – denied the option of Nigel Farage, whom some polls suggest they would prefer – Tory MPs have thronged to do just that.”
2. Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph
on good manners
To solve Britain’s rudeness epidemic we need to start dressing well
“As a country, we’ve become allergic to the formality that once defined us – hence the posturing that has gone on with British politicians for decades, whether over the ditching of ties or poppies, or the deliberate wearing of generally disrespectful attire, like the filthy raincoat Jeremy Corbyn wore to last year’s Armistice Day service at the Cenotaph. When by the time you’ve finished making your pre-teen point, you might as well have put the damned suit and tie on and focused on what’s important.”
3. Huge Rifkind in The Times
on Facebook’s newfound civic aspirations
Nick Clegg should come clean about Facebook
“What grates, still, is the absolute refusal of the company to accept its own hideous culpability for this global age of political madness. Far more than Russia, or even shadowy billionaires, the culprits are virality, peer pressure, and wilfully engineered addictions to both approval and rage. Many of us have come to live by them, so it is no surprise that politicians now campaign by them, too. I would be more inclined to believe that Facebook could solve that problem if just once, and with absolute clarity, it would admit it was actually there.”
4. Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times
on the gentrification of New York
New York, once the city of dreamers, is now dangerously dull
“The question of the existence of New York City is one each generation of residents confronts in their own time. The spot on the map remains, the streets still heave with bodies, and the business of the municipality grinds on. But between youth and maturity every New Yorker wakes up to the possibility that the city that possessed them, The Real New York, is gone.”
5. Pauline Bock in the New Statesman
on the unintended consequences of compulsory national service for young people
Why the French are revolting against Emmanuel Macron’s national service programme
“Everyone, including the government, might have missed the obvious: teenagers spending weeks in close proximity might lead to more flirting than social commitment. A columnist jokingly referred to the SNU [universal national service] as ‘Tinder IRL’ and observed: ‘The government has just opened the biggest national flirting space.’”
