Can it be anything more than sour grapes when a writer (who has not been asked) gets snarky about the Hay Festival? I’d like to think it can. For there is a lot to snark about. 

My encounters with Wes Streeting

Burnham’s fate will be decided in the Strait of Hormuz

The changing economics of war

Don’t get me wrong. The one time I was invited to speak at Hay, about a decade ago, it was jolly nice. Benedict Cumberbatch said hi to me in the green room, thinking I was someone he was meant to recognise, while Ian McEwan milled about topping up his coffee. Hay is, of course, a pornographically pretty town amid the rolling sheep-studded fields and quaint little streets with pop-up Eccles cakes shops and independent bookshops. 

The problem with Hay these days, though, is the problem with everything relating to the cultural establishment: it takes itself seriously in ways that are no longer merely fodder for some fond eye rolling. In short, it has become sinister. Gaza cheerleading, the signal toxin of our era, is one example that comes to mind. In one event scheduled to take place next Tuesday, the terrorist group Palestine Action is normalised as part of civic culture and treated as if it might have a point by being folded artfully into an event called ‘Just Stop Oil, Palestine Action: A Public Nuisance or a Public Good?’

See the switcheroo there? The laundering of violence,........

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