The Right Dishonourable

I have always felt that Elizabeth Day’s podcast betrays its own premise. How To Fail promises a celebration of things “that haven’t gone right”, with guests exploring “what their failures taught them about how to succeed better”, to quote the show’s own blurb. Arguably it only does one of these things.

Rather than lauding failure for its own sake, the podcast uses it as a foil for success. The guest list only includes people who succeeded in life overall, whatever temporary setbacks. Their only real failure is that they can’t fail properly.

At the risk – nay, the certainty – of fuelling an already stupid argument, I would like to comment on whether the president’s wife, Jill Biden, should be using ‘doctor’ as a title.

The frivolity of this topic should probably be confined to a blog of the Right Dishonourable’s low esteem, but such is the nature of American journalism that the debate has spread from the Wall Street Journal to Vox via the Atlantic, the New York Times and the Washington Post. In Britain the Telegraph and the Independent are even now discussing it.

In the depths of remoaner denialism a stereotype emerged of the regretful leaver who, having seen the effects of his ballot, wished he had voted the other way. Such people were especially championed by those lobbying for a second ‘people’s vote’ because they didn’t like the first one.

Various polls will tell you that more people would vote to remain now than leave (although they said much the same on the referendum’s eve). We have nonetheless left, legally speaking, and the transition period that keeps us under EU rules looks likely to lapse without any formal arrangement of where we go from here.