Villain
Beyoncé, who has been stoking Sweden’s inflation problem. The pop superstar began her world tour in Stockholm last month, leading to a surge in local restaurant and hotel prices as fans flocked to the Swedish capital from around the world. According to Denmark’s Danske Bank, her two Stockholm concerts were responsible for 0.2 percentage points of Sweden’s 8.2% inflation rate in May.
Hero
Boris Johnson, at least according to Rod Stewart, who still has a soft spot for his fellow blonde bombshell. “I think he’s got wonderful charisma,” the rocker told Sky News this week, though he admitted that the former PM had “told a few porkies” over the years. “How’s he going to make a comeback?” Stewart mused. “I don’t know; maybe he should talk to me. I’ve been making comebacks for years.”
Villain
Amol Rajan, who referred to “a mass of noisome seaweed” in Dorset when hosting the Today programme, only to be immediately corrected by his guest, the environmentalist Chris Packham, for insulting what, says Packham, should rightfully be called “marine algae”.
Hero
Elizabeth Gilbert, a bestselling author who has dutifully cancelled herself after an online backlash to her (formerly) forthcoming novel. Gilbert – who wrote Eat, Pray, Love – recently revealed that her new book was about the real-life Lykov family, who fled to the forest in the 1930s to escape religious persecution by the Soviet Union. Six days later, Gilbert canned the entire thing, after people complained it was inappropriate to set a book in Russia given the war in Ukraine. “If we can’t stomach novels set in countries that have dark and ugly stains on their records,” says Leigh Stein in UnHerd, “I have bad news for anyone writing fiction about America.”