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Should Tim Davie resign over Glastonbury hate chant?

Should Tim Davie resign over Glastonbury hate chant?

Telegraph8 hours ago
After it was reported that the BBC director general was at Glastonbury when Bob Vylan chanted 'death, death to the IDF' and was personally consulted over what to do about the performance, there have been calls for him to resign.
Tim Davie was told of the chant soon after it had been made and ruled that the rap duo's set should not be made available to watch on demand.
However, the chant remained on BBC iPlayer for another five hours.
This week, we asked readers: Should Tim Davie resign over the Glastonbury hate chant?
A large proportion, 87 per cent, of 65,000 respondents said yes.
Reader Elvin Reece said: 'Regardless of your views on the Israel and Palestine conflict, it simply isn't appropriate content for our national broadcaster to stream across prime-time television.'
He continues, 'not in my name, not at my cost,' and urges others to 'write to your MPs', adding: 'It's time for non-payment of the licence fee to be decriminalised – so that the public can hold the BBC accountable – and for the BBC to be moved onto a subscription model.'
M. Bonorino concludes that 'the BBC is not impartial now.' The reader recalls when they were younger, the broadcaster was held up for people of all ages, but 'not now!'
'It has lost its appeal and is a disgrace,' they say, adding: 'Standards of the highest have long since gone.'
'Thrust his views on others'
Meanwhile, Ed Sproson asks: 'What about the crowd chanting? If it were a football crowd, the next five games would be behind closed doors.'
Reader R. Ellis says: 'The problem is Vylan's opinion is personal and being on a stage has given him the ability to thrust his views on others without others being able to counter his view at the musical festival.'
'The same method is used by dictators in autocratic countries,' they conclude.
Kristin Warburton found it 'much more frightening actually seeing it than reading about it'.
The reader offers their sympathy 'to our Jewish fellow-countrymen – I am so sorry you are going through this'.
'Subscription model'
Some readers argue that Tim Davie should not resign as BBC director general, but should make changes to the organisation. Others assert Bob Vylan is entitled to free speech.
For example, Andy Rushton suggests: 'This issue alone isn't enough to force Tim Davie out.'
Instead, he wishes there would be an attempt 'to 'right-size' the organisation, to move the entertainment branch to a subscription model, separate from the 'inform and educate' branch, which Davie could argue deserves a licence fee or some other type of public funding'.
J. Walford asks: 'With the BBC having so many employees, surely the Director General is not making operational decisions on a minute-by-minute basis?'
They continue: 'If he is, then the fundamental failure is lack of delegation, systems, safeguards, policies and management. This is the reason Tim Davie should be shown the door.'
Reader A. Tommy 'can't see the problem'. They ask: 'What is the difference between attacking Israel and attacking Putin? I think [Bob Vylan] is entitled to their opinion.'
Likewise, Jim Reid argues: 'The IDF has killed women and children. I think [Bob Vylan] has the right to free speech.'
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‘Props are quite weird people': Inside the Lions' secret society
‘Props are quite weird people': Inside the Lions' secret society

Telegraph

time21 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

‘Props are quite weird people': Inside the Lions' secret society

If the first rule of Prop Club is that you do not talk about Prop Club then Pierre Schoeman may have revoked his membership of the most exclusive and secret societies within the Lions squad. Historically, the beauty of a Lions tour is that it breaks down all national and provincial groupings. Some barriers, however, can never be overcome. Props, as the wildly engaging Schoeman articulates, are a breed apart, physically and psychologically from all others. 'I think looseheads all around the world are very similar,' Schoeman said. 'They are quite weird people. Something isn't right. We always say that playing rugby you must have a screw loose but playing rugby as a loosehead prop… I won't even get into the tighthead props. Looseheads like going to dark places, physically, mentally, spiritually. But tightheads can go even darker sometimes.' And so the six props – looseheads Schoeman, Ellis Genge, Andrew Porter and tightheads Tadhg Furlong, Will Stuart and Finlay Bealham – naturally band together whether walking down the street together or by night, they sneak into each other's hotel rooms without the other players' knowledge. 'We actually have a prop group that none of our other team members are allowed on,' Schoeman said. 'We are like bison, migrating together. We have a secret meeting every night, Finlay Bealham started it and now all the props have bought in. We stick together and have a tea after every training session and we get to meet each other's families and ask deep questions. But it is just for props in our group in whatever hotel we live in.' To be clear, it is props only. Hookers do not qualify and Luke Cowan-Dickie was nonplussed to discover its existence on Friday. 'They [the rest of the squad] don't know about it,' Schoeman said. 'But our secret is out now.' It is not always harmonious within the prop camp, particularly if they are rooming with Schoeman. 'I room with Ellis at the moment,' Schoeman. 'If I snore too much he gets grumpy, then I snore more.' Competition in training is also ferocious with Schoeman calling the props 'gladiators'. In which case what role does John Fogarty, the scrum coach, play? 'He has the key for the cage to unlock the gladiators,' Schoeman said. 'That's probably the best way to describe him.' The point of prop club is not necessarily to exclude the wingers and fly-halves but to build bonds among themselves by opening up to each other. Porter, for instance, discusses the challenges of being away from his six-week-old son while Genge has filled in Schoeman on the charms of his native Knowle West in Bristol. 'I know a lot of things about Gengey. I sat through phone calls, I know all his business friends, family everything,' Schoeman said. 'I have asked him to phone my family as well.' Those bonds extend through the generations of the Lions props. South Africa-born Schoeman, who qualifies for Scotland on residency, is fully aware of the outsized influence props have exerted in Lions history. That extends back to the role that the late Tom Smith and Paul Wallace's heroics in the 1997 series against the Springboks to Ian 'Mighty Mouse' McLauchlan, a star of the 1971 and 1974 tours, who passed away on the day of the Lions' opening match against Argentina on June 20. 'Tom Smith is close to my heart because he has played for Scotland as well and I have sat on the same seat as him at Murrayfield which I have been honoured and blessed with, but it is not about me,' Schoeman said. 'It is an amazing question and we do deep dive on it [history], sometimes Si [Easterby] our defensive coach before training or matches will take us through some of the key figures to create that aura. We speak about it, just a word, we have to be present in them and we have to deliver physically and mentally in that moment. 'That's what the jersey demands of us as loosehead props, like Mighty Mouse –- his family watch all our games – and that's the legacy of it. Our families will hopefully live a long and abundant life but it's much bigger than just that, it is much bigger than just that, so give it your all. That means fully submerge in everything in your tour.' After an encouraging performance up front in the 28-24 defeat by Argentina, the Lions scrum has been on the wrong end of the penalty count in the past two warm-up games against Western Force and Queensland Reds. On Saturday, Schoeman will aim to put the Lions on the front foot alongside Bealham against the Waratahs. This will be no easy task as Australia have released the 'Tongan Thor' Taniela Tupou specifically to play in this match. At his best, Tupou is one of the most destructive scrummagers in the world and Lions head coach Andy Farrell says that 'he's got a point to prove' on Saturday. With the games now coming thick and fast, the pressure is also on Schoeman's considerable shoulders to put the fear factor back into the Lions' scrum. 'We have massive respect for [Tupou],' Schoeman said. 'I played him for a few years in Super Rugby, when I played for the Bulls. It was a few years ago, RG Snyman was playing with me at the Bulls. I think we got the win. Since then he has been a powerhouse, played against him for Australia a few times, so have the other boys in the Lions squad. Respect to him. 'You have to be resilient [with the schedule]. They obviously chose the squad for their super strengths. But as Faz mentioned, as a Lion you put a smile on your face and there's no excuses. You have to deliver. Fans, travel, media, friends… anything goes. You have to deliver. You have to be sharp in training. You have to be on your game but also enjoy it.'

Biting the bat, urinating on the Alamo: 10 wild Ozzy Osbourne stories
Biting the bat, urinating on the Alamo: 10 wild Ozzy Osbourne stories

Telegraph

time21 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

Biting the bat, urinating on the Alamo: 10 wild Ozzy Osbourne stories

The final performance of Black Sabbath, at the Back To The Beginning concert at Villa Park on Saturday, is notable in two ways. Not only will it see the end of one of Britain's most influential bands, but with the retirement of singer John 'Ozzy' Osbourne, the world of rock 'n' roll will lose one of its genuine top-tier wild men. Likely, you'll be familiar with the phrase 'they don't make 'em like they used to'. Well, in this case, they really don't. It is worth noting I think, that stories of personal excess by people who seem at liberty to do whatever they want, and to get away with it, are usually a lot more fun for the people hearing about them than they are for those partaking in them. Certainly, some of the scrapes featured here seem squalid even at a distance of years and miles. Others, though, contain the right ingredients, in exactly the right measurements, for the creation of rock star folklore. Strap yourselves in, then, and place your hands inside the cars, for a ride on the rollercoaster of rock 'n' roll excess. 10. He went to jail before anyone had even heard his name At age 17, Ozzy Osbourne was sent to prison for being a burglar. With a finesse that was somewhat below the level of master thief, he stole a telly that was too heavy to carry and blagged an armful of clothes that were designed for babies. For his troubles, the young miscreant was sentenced to three months in Winston Green prison after his dad refused to pay the court fine (he ended up serving six weeks). 'I tried a bit of burglary,' he later said, 'but I was useless.' But Ozzy did find a measure of gainful employment in his teenage years. The job at which he was best, and at which he lasted the longest, was in an abattoir at which he was promoted to the role of killing cows and pigs. As you will see, this might explain rather a lot.... 9. He tossed a TV out of a hotel room window… and might have killed someone Following a concert at the Stadion Strahof, in Prague in 2002, Ozzy Osbourne realised that he was missing one vital accomplishment from the rock star playbook: he'd never thrown a television set out of a hotel room window. Perhaps fearing that the ghost of Keith Moon might be laughing at him, in order to right this flagrant oversight, the singer undertook the apparently tricky task of freeing the telly from its moorings in his room at the Four Seasons before seeing if it could fly. Spoiler warning: it could not. As he later told the Daily Star, 'I ripped the television off the wall, [guitarist] Zakk [Wylde] picked it up and threw it out of the f------ window. It landed on the floor and f------ exploded. It went like a bomb.' All good clean fun, though, no? All pretty routine stuff? Well, not exactly. As the singer added, 'Little did I know that there was a guy smoking [outside] and I shudder to think if that had hit him. I would have killed him stone dead.' 8. He bit the head off a bat Given that it's the chomp that was heard around the world, in all likelihood, you probably already know this one. What is less widely appreciated, though, is that when 17-year-old Mark Neal threw a dead bat onstage at a concert at the Veteran's Memorial Auditorium, in Des Moines in 1982, Ozzy believed he was biting the head off a toy rather than a real animal. After the show, the singer was taken to the nearby Broadlawns Medical Center for a series of painful rabies shots. Pam Culver, the nursing supervisor on duty that night, later told the Des Moines Register that 'for a week… probably 50 percent of my job [was] fielding calls from England and Canada and all over the United States [from] people who wanted to know how much did it cost to do that [treat the patient], and did it hurt, and how many shots did he have to have, and what part of his body did we have to attack?' For his part, Ozzy later said that 'the name of the town Des Moines is embossed in my head'. 7. He also decapitated a dove On the day of the release of the US edition of his debut solo album, Blizzard Of Ozz, on March 27, 1981, Ozzy Osbourne decided to forego a formal introduction to the suits and record executives attending a CBS sales conference in Los Angeles. Instead, in an experience they wouldn't soon forget, he bit the head off a dove. Contrary to contemporaneous reports, though, in what might just be a mitigating factor, it was later revealed that the singer had decapitated a bird that was already dead. Speaking to the Sounds journalist Garry Bushell three months after the outrage, he put the record straight. 'I wanted to make a real impression,' he said (which likely he did). 'The scam is the bird was dead. We were planning to release it there, but it died beforehand. So rather than waste it I bit its head off. You should have seen their faces. They all went white. They were speechless. That girl in the pictures was screaming. Eventually a bloke came up and said, 'You'd better go'.' The dead bird, he added, tasted like 'tomato sauce'. Despite his paymasters claiming he would never record for the label again, CBS (through the Epic label) continued to release Ozzy's albums long into the future. 6. Come to think of it, no animal is safe around Ozzy Osbourne. Buckle up; it gets worse. For reasons known only to themselves, at one point, the Osbournes owned 17 cats. Not just this, but for reasons known only to herself, Sharon Osbourne decided it was a good idea to leave her husband alone with them. Ozzy takes up the tale. 'I was taking drugs so much I was a f----up,' he said. 'The final straw came when I shot all our cats. We had about 17, and I went crazy and shot them all. My wife found me under the piano in a white suit, a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other.' Despite changing many of his wicked ways, the singer's animus for all creatures great and small remains present and correct. In 2021, in an interview with the Scotsman, Osbourne admitted to shooting at animals that wandered into the garden of his Los Angeles mansion during lockdown. He described the pastime as being 'good fun'. 5. Now we mention it, human beings ought to take care, too In a trespass for which he has been entirely forgiven – for some reason – in 1989, Ozzy attempted to murder Sharon Osbourne at their home in rural Buckinghamshire. He would later describe the mayhem as 'being the calmest I ever felt in my life. It was like serenity. Everything was just peaceful.' For her part, in the documentary Biography: The Nine Lives Of Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon recalled having 'no idea who sat across from me on the sofa, but it wasn't my husband. He gets to the stage where he gets this look in his eyes where his shutters are down and I couldn't get through to him.' Notwithstanding a sense of complete calm, afterwards, Ozzy claimed to have little memory of the incident. 'All I remember is waking up in Amersham jail,' he said. 'I asked the cop, 'Why am I here?' and he says, 'You want me to read your charge?' So he read, 'John Michael Osbourne, you have been arrested for the attempted murder of Sharon Osbourne'.' The case was later dropped after Sharon declined to press charges. 4. Striking Bill Ward in the unmentionables In Los Angeles, in 1972, Black Sabbath's appetite for cocaine had become sufficiently all-consuming that they considered bestowing the title Snowblind on the album on which they were working. This being said, quite how hard they were working on the LP remains a moot point. Certainly, they had time to partake in some 'fun and games' at the expense of drummer Bill Ward. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Ozzy recalled: 'I see this aerosol can and squirt his dick with it. He starts screaming and falls down. I look at the can and it says, 'Warning: do not spray on skin – highly toxic'. I poisoned Bill through his d---.' In what could be a sign that Osbourne's memory is not exactly up to code, in his autobiography, from 2010, the incident was recalled rather differently. In it, Ozzy writes, 'One day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks around the other side of the railing [and sprays Bill's] d--- with it. You should have heard him scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing and starts rolling down the hillside.' 3. Shark attack Despite its scant details, this story is just too good-slash-bad to leave out. When out on the promotional trail for his autobiography Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell With Black Sabbath, guitarist Tony Iommi recounted yet another incredible story of Ozzy Osbourne mistreating one of God's creatures. Speaking to the Daily Star, he said: 'With drugs you always get bored, so you must do something to one another. Like Ozzy hauling a shark through a window, dismembering it and soaking our room in blood.' Alas, this is all we have for this one. Incredibly, the journalist who wrote the story appears not to have thought to ask Iommi to elaborate. 2. He gave drugs to a vicar Shortly after moving to the English countryside, Ozzy Osbourne had one important instruction for his first wife, Thelma. 'Don't let anyone eat this fucking cake,' he told her. 'It will be bad.' And it was. Along with sugar, flour and eggs, the sweet treat contained a sizeable amount of Afghan hashish. A few days later, after returning from – where else? – the pub, the singer noted with alarm that his commandment had been broken in the worst way imaginable. 'I did a double-take because the vicar was in our house, having a cup of tea in the kitchen with a piece of this cake,' he recalled in an interview with GQ. 'I haven't got a driving license, but he was slumped in my kitchen, so I had to drag him out by his hair, push in the back of his, drive him to his door and then walk home.' The man of the cloth wasn't seen in his parish for the next two weeks. Ozzy continued: 'Then I saw him in a pub on a Sunday morning and he said, 'I must have caught such a dreadful flu at yours. I hallucinated for three days and had to miss church.'' 1. He urinated on the Alamo Not only did Ozzy Osbourne urinate at the site of the Alamo, but he did so in the middle of the day while heavily drunk. There's more. After soaking his own clothes by falling into a canal at the sharp end of an all-night drinking binge, he was also wearing a selection of his wife's clothes, including a pair of bloomers. In his rip-roaring book Can't Stand Up For Falling Down, the British journalist Allan Jones, who witnessed the scene, recalled 'looking around to see a man and a woman, the latter with her hands to her mouth, while her husband… looks like he's on the way to having a seizure of some kind'. Apprehended by a State Trooper, Ozzy's question as to what all the fuss was about was answered with the words, 'Mister, when you piss on the Alamo, you piss on the state of Texas – that's what all the fuss is about'. Incredibly, after Sharon Osbourne pointed out that the 15,000 people who had bought tickets for that night's gig at the nearby Hemisfair Arena might react badly to a sudden cancellation, the singer was released from jail before darkness fell. Decades later, speaking with his father on the History Channel, Jack Osbourne correctly noted, 'Dad, you literally pissed your way into American history books. Apparently, when people visit the Alamo, they ask more questions about you than they do about Davy Crockett.'

The year that permanently shattered our political mainstream
The year that permanently shattered our political mainstream

Telegraph

time21 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

The year that permanently shattered our political mainstream

Normalcy favours Labour. The conventional course of events is for a party to win a general election, run into trouble, lose popularity, grit its teeth, recover somewhat – and go on to be re-elected. Only once since the Second World War, during the roller-coaster 1970s, did a Government fail to win again: in 1974, the Conservatives' stiff, luckless Edward Heath was narrowly defeated by Labour's manoeuvrable, wily Harold Wilson. Wilson had lost to Heath four years earlier, but had won in 1966. Sir Alec Douglas Home had lost to Wilson in 1964, but the Conservatives had won a third successive election victory in 1959 under Harold Macmillan. Clement Attlee had lost to Sir Winston Churchill in 1951, but had won a year earlier for Labour in 1950. The same pattern was observable almost half a century on. Sir John Major lost to Tony Blair in 1997, but the Conservatives had won four elections in a row previously, three of them under Margaret Thatcher. Gordon Brown lost in 2010 – turned out by a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – but Blair had previously won three elections of his own. Which takes us to Sir Keir Starmer – victorious in 2024 after four terms of Conservative or Tory-led government. At 172 seats, his majority was only seven fewer than Tony Blair's 179 seat margin in 1997. A year into his premiership, he has good reason, if his history is anything to go by, to look forward to the next election with confidence. But history repeats itself until it suddenly stops doing so. And the question that the Prime Minister must surely be asking himself this weekend, as he reflects on the implosion of his authority this week, is whether the orderly, stable, predictable Britain of those election results is becoming more like, say, Italy – a country in which established political parties can unexpectedly collapse. For they hold firm only if their base is solid. What is Labour's? The clue is in the name: Labour, traditionally, was the party of the working class, drawn from the trade unions, in a country that was largely white. Their rivals, the Conservatives, stood for capital, property and, in the broadest of terms, the middle class. Such was the politics of the post-war settlement. In retrospect, it can be seen to have been quietly fading for three quarters of a century – since 1962, to be precise, when a Liberal by-election victory in Orpington heralded the erosion of the two party monopoly in England. Winnie Ewing signalled the rise of the SNP in Scotland five years later, winning a by-election in Hamilton. In the first of 1974's two general elections, the Liberals won six million votes and the SNP gained seven seats. By 1997, the age of three party politics in England had come: the Liberal Democrats won 46 seats. Ten years later, the SNP formed its first Government in Scotland itself, and has held power there ever since. Where is Labour's base in this brave new world? Much of the white working class doesn't vote at all: only three in five voters turned out to the polls last year. Older, working class, and former Leave voters are deserting Labour for Reform. Younger urban voters, many of them women, are opting instead for the Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents. In short, the coalition that Sir Keir built was shallow as it was wide – and the 411 seats he won may turn out to matter less than the 34 per cent of the vote he won it with: the lowest proportion of the vote for any winning party since 1945. Indeed, the combined share for the two main parties, at 57 per cent, was its lowest in modern times. Labour could recover, as history suggests that they will. Or a crisis in the markets could somehow rescue the Conservatives – establishing them in the public imagination as the party least likely to over-spend, over-tax and over-borrow (despite their record in Government in the wake of Brexit). But the electoral trends of this fragmenting politics suggest a hung Parliament – especially if, on the one hand, Labour clings to economic orthodoxy and, on the other, Jeremy Corbyn's new party gains significant traction and adds definition to the emerging coalition of Greens, Islamists and unreconstructed socialists. Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost control of all 15 councils they were defending in May's local elections, have fallen from 24 per cent in the polls last year to 17 per cent, and face hazardous local elections next year – especially in the east of England, where Reform is very strong. As matters stand, they are set to be the smaller of Britain's two Right-wing parties. The last major political party to collapse here as a governing force was the Liberals – dominant for much of the nineteenth century, displaced on the Left by Labour in the twentieth. 'To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,' wrote Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. One wonders what he would have said of an age that sees the loss of not one but two great political parties as dominant governing forces. It hasn't happened yet and may not happen at all. But a combination of fractured continental-style politics, with a multiplicity of parties and first past the post are set to produce unsettling results. Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange

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