Mea Culpa: the no longer decadent Nigella Lawson

The use and abuse of language in last week’s Independent, as adjudicated by John Rentoul

‘And let me tell you another thing about vaccines, Brexit and foreigners...’ (Getty)

We had this headline on our front page on Tuesday: “Nigella Lawson says she rarely hosts decadent dinner parties anymore.” We should have put “decadent” in quotation marks. We did not mean that Lawson often hosts austere and morally upright dinner parties; we meant that she rarely hosts any dinner parties these days, because she thinks they are “decadent”.

Also, and this is a mere stylistic preference, I would have “any more” as two words.

Cycle of hate: In an opinion article railing against Elon Musk’s decision to allow Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson back on Twitter, we asked: “What do Hopkins and Robinson contribute other than pedalling misinformation framed as ‘truth’?” That was changed to “peddling”.