When Boris finally kicks open the swing doors of the Last Chance Saloon the Tories might decide that they have had enough of the Cowboy & that it’s time for the Indian
- 11 Aug 2021
It is now time for my annual lecture on the pointless irrelevance of the silly season sport of predicting who will be promoted and who will be parliamentary roadkill in the ‘forthcoming’ reshuffle. Dear readers they are total bollocks dreamt up in pubs and bars by journalists ...
Vaccines passports are for the market not the government
- 31 Jul 2021
MPs always get fractious before the summer break. But none so bitter as the various skirmishes within the Conservative party. A few weeks ago Starmer looked as if he was on the ropes. But now the message that was beginning to sound like an overplayed broken record, namely that...
At the moment it’s all a matter of tryst. But for how long?
- 26 Jun 2021
I am beginning to feel rather sorry for Matt Hancock. He has been vilified, humiliated, called ‘fucking useless’, by Johnson and a serial liar by Cummings. And now he has been caught in a clinch with an aide. But, if in the unlikely event of him resigning, it will be because ...
The paranoid chaos of Number 10 is briefing against a new enemy; Rishi Sunak
- 31 May 2021
In the weird, paranoid, toxic chaos that passes for a government another villain is emerging from the burning rubble of Number 10; Rishi Sunak. It’s crazy. But it is entirely predictable in Boris Johnson’s white knuckled ride on a political rollercoaster whose tracks are still...
Johnson must seize the moment and have his Night of the Long Knives
- 9 May 2021
I do not begrudge Boris Johnson his moment in the sun. Those election results were remarkable for a whole range of reasons. In an alchemy way beyond my comprehension, this old Etonian with as much emotional intelligence as a tub of cold pot noodle who thinks that monogamy is s...
A leak is a long time in politics
- 23 Apr 2021
My heart goes out to Boris Johnson who for the first time in his life is going to have to devote his time and energy to making the some of the most important decisions of his life. The most pressing is whether to change his mobile phone number which has served him so well over...
We are sleepwalking into tolerating intolerance. The racial Puritans are new McCarthyites
- 2 Apr 2021
It is a sad reflection on our society that we have allowed ourselves to sleep walk into tolerating intolerance. It began through our innate sense of fairness, yet now our nocturnal perambulations have turned into a nightmare of fear. Not of offending others, but of being vilif...
‘Freedom is precious so must be rationed’. I’ve glimpsed the future and it smirks.
- 16 Mar 2021
Sometimes I just despair. The latest Labour line on the Police Crime sentencing & Courts Bill is ‘defacing a statue 10 years. Rape 5 years’. Far from me to ruin an attack line, let me put the record straight. Defacing a statue will incur a maximum sentences of 10 years imp...
Piers Morgan is a good guy swimming in an ocean of shits
- 10 Mar 2021
There will be whoops and cheers from the enemies of Piers Morgan and of free speech. But as Walpole said about the War of Jenkins Ear, a delightful piece of fake news, “now they are ringing the bells but soon they will be wringing their hands”. Well, it has started. This morni...
The Begum ruling is much more than a decision about whether a misguided woman who has trashed everything decent this country stands for. It sets a very dangerous precedent on the power of the executive
- 28 Feb 2021
I do not practice in either constitutional or administrative law, although I did once lead for the complainant in a vain attempt to halt the 2005 general election because of postal ballot fraud. But I have been following the Begum case with interest, care, and now dismay. ...