Allison Pearson

The big bombshell of the compelling first episode of The Celebrity Traitors was actor Richard E Grant announcing to the assembled company that he was a Traitor.

On the latest Planet Normal podcast columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson discuss Andy Burnham’s proposals for social care and Shabana Mahmood’s immigration plans.

If the blinkered pro-Palestine crowd want to talk about ‘genocide’, they should start with Israel’s murdered mothers and mutilated children

What is wrong with people? Seriously, how grotesquely insensitive is it possible to be and still retain your membership card for the human race?

“Every single sentence uttered by the chancellor or the prime minister is scrutinised closely by bond market participants”

Britain's benefits dependency is so embarrassingly bad it is starting to attract global derision.

“ I begged Conservative Home Secretaries for some help, and got none.”

It could have been any of us. On the morning of October 21, 1966, I was one of the thousands of boys and girls in South Wales who woke up as usual, got dressed, grumbled a bit, asked to stay at home (refused), took their lunch money off their mothers and walked – laughing, chatting and jumping in puddles – to school. Our fringes had been trimmed by our mams, and the new shoes we had for the start of term (Clark’s T-bars, our only pair of shoes) were worn in by then and no longer pinched. The girls wore a cardigan (often knitted by mamgu) over our dresses.

IT COULD have been any of us. On the morning of October 21, 1966, I was one of the thousands of boys and girls in South Wales who got up as usual, got

On the latest Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, the columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson discuss the week’s biggest cultural and economical flashpoints at the Battle of Ideas Festival, with special guests professor Robert Tombs and Lucy Connolly.