Monthly Archives: July 2016

There was a huge crowd to hear Jeremy Corbyn in Queen’s Gardens yesterday; the biggest gathering any of us had ever seen in Hull. All sorts of people: young, old, men, women, ‘workers’, professionals, white, black, a few Trotskyites (of … Continue reading →

When I was eight years old I was sent – alone – to a residential school for children with serious chest complaints, mainly TB and asthma, in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. It was the most miserable three months of my young … Continue reading →

MI5 has a record of targeting left-wing MPs and parties in Britain, sometimes via retired agents and third parties. The best known examples are the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ affair of 1924, and the ‘Wilson plot’ (that is, the anti-Wilson plot) of … Continue reading →

I doubt if I’ll be blogging much over the next month – everything is too depressing politically, especially vis-à-vis the Labour Party here and the Republicans over the pond, and I can think of no new historical parallels to draw. … Continue reading →

Getting away from the dreadful events in France and Turkey, and from the clown at the FO, this is a reminder of how things used to be. It’s a version of a review article I wrote for the LRB, but which I don’t … Continue reading →

Well, one good thing – the public schoolboys have gone. (From the new Cabinet, that is.) Apart from Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who is there, I presume, to clean up the international mess he’s made. Or as a punishment, … Continue reading →

Meeting Kajsa at Gatwick Airport. I thought I’d need to fill her in on events here in Britain. Not a bit of it. The Swedish papers are full of it. They of course are gobsmacked. ‘Clearly’, one of Kajsa’s friends … Continue reading →

Theresa May seems to have sorted it for the Conservative Party. She’s the best outcome for them, and a potential winner, I predict, so long as she can keep her Brexit wolves at bay. Some of those are already growling … Continue reading →

Could it all be a cunning Establishment plot? We know they didn’t want Brexit, but they’ve got it. So, how to get out of it? Well, there are those 1,000 lawyers telling us that pulling out of treaties is the … Continue reading →

We should keep an eye on Theresa May. (For foreign readers, or any Brit who’s just come out of a coma, she’s one of the two runners in the current Conservative party leadership contest, and consequently our likeliest next prime … Continue reading →