Oxford Debate: You Ask the Questions
Simon Heffer, Grace Blakeley, Marina Purkiss and Zoe Strimpel chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Thursday, 3 April 2025
12:00pm
I hour 15 minutes
Sheldonian Theatre
£8 - £20
Join our panel of leading political and media figures, Professor Simon Heffer, Grace Blakeley, Marina Purkiss and Zoe Strimpel, for lively debate on topics of the day, chaired by Yasmin Alibhai Brown. Ticketholders are invited to email questions before the event, and Yasmin will pick a representative range for audience members to ask.
Heffer is a journalist and historian. He is a professor of modern British history at the University of Buckingham. He works for The Daily Telegraph and has a weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. His most recent book, Scarcely English, An A-Z Of Assaults on Our Language, details the modern horrors of bad English.
Blakeley is a journalist at Tribune Magazine and author. She is former economics commentator for the New Statesman and a former research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Blakeley recently published her third book Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom.
Purkiss is a political commentator and campaigner. She features on Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine Show, Good Morning Britain, This Morning, LBC, BBC radio, Sky News and Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, and has her own ‘politically charged (but fun)’ podcast, The Trawl.
Strimpel is an author, historian and journalist who specialises in gender, relationships and sexuality. She has published three books, her most recent being Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of ‘the Single’. She writes regularly for both The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph.
The panel is chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a journalist and author who has written extensively on issues of diversity and social justice. Her books include In Defence of Political Correctness, Refusing the Veil and Exotic England: The Making of a Curious Nation.