Simon Lincoln Reader
Simon Lincoln Reader was born in Johannesburg. He spent a decade living in London, where he worked in financial services, eventually co-founding investment marketplace Lofotr Investors. He writes a Friday column for The Daily Friend, podcasts twice week and is a trustee of the Kay Mason Foundation, a charity awarding bursaries to young people in Cape Town.
Articles By This Author
Farewell, Telegraph
There was once a CEO of CNN called Jeff Zucker, and at the same time, a reporter on CNN called Brian Stelter, and because they
The sheer confusion of the UK’s position on the Middle East
Not in your wildest dreams could you have imagined, three years ago, that one day the United Kingdom would occupy the bizarre position it currently does on the Palestine Israel situation. The narrative is incomparable, changing hourly from scolding to encouraging.
Our inverted pyramid of congratulations
The Helen Suzman Foundation is the latest organization to congratulate Navi Pillay for her controversial Nobel Peace prize. Not entirely convinced the old dame would approve; it’s fine that there’s the whole girl-boss-power thing, but then there’s also Pillay’s performance at the 2009 Durban II convention. Not so much peace that was, more the standard blood libel you’ll find at any of London’s theatres these days, medium price.
Seeing Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma through dystopian French literature
In September 2015, not three weeks after Germany temporarily suspended the Dublin Regulation for Syrian asylum seekers that would eventually see between 890,000 and 1.1m people added to that country’s population, the English translation of the brilliant French writer Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (‘Submission’) was published. Two months later, Paris would be brought to its knees by a series of Islamist atrocities occurring on one night, notably at the Bataclan theatre.
Unlike the UK, the US still has faith in South Africa
I wasn’t expecting any warmth toward South Africa before I arrived at a conference held in my new hometown in Texas, and I couldn’t have
For today’s elite, even war is oblivious cosplay
In March 2021, the broadcaster Sky announced that it was offering a placement programme exclusively for minority candidates across its news division. Bosses there felt
Afrikaans coloured is coming to Westminster soon
When the ANC’s Minister for Water and Sanitation Pemmy Majodina called a man with a crutch ‘jou ma se p***’ at an event some weeks
The most endearing feature of the high-trust society is the honesty box
In many English villages, eggs or vegetables are left outside homes on tables. You take half a dozen of the former, then you slip cash into a box, ordinarily a few pounds. Nobody is guarding the table, nobody is monitoring the box. At the end of the day the person selling is almost guaranteed to reconcile to the penny.
Kneeling before narcissists
It’s been a good few weeks for pro-Palestine supporters, starting with a murder in New York.
So woke was a scam. Who knew?
I liked how US congresswoman and saucy LatinX Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) spoke about ‘woke’ recently on American television. Talking about yet another mentally deranged Democratic Socialists and a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly called Francesca Hong, AOC quoted a New York councilman who had remarked to her that ‘woke 1 was crazy’.