Monthly Archives: March 2017

Some crumbs of comfort for America. The horror of Trump seems to have galvanised the Left – certainly women (see last post but one) – which is all to the good. A few of his concrete policies might actually be … Continue reading →

Tony Blair and David Cameron have this in common: that despite their many achievements (Blair’s, anyway), they will be mainly remembered in history for their two great catastrophic failures of judgment – the Iraq war, and the EU referendum. Other … Continue reading →

A clear majority of people in the USA is against Trump, and a clear majority in Britain finds Farage risible; and yet these two clowns appear just now to be the immoveable political winners in their respective countries. There are … Continue reading →

My daughter Kate has just ventured into the entrepreneurial world (after her Oscar triumph) by putting on to the market this new skin cleansing balm: https://www.harbourelements.com (that’s her, in the second picture), which recently got this fantastic review in The … Continue reading →

The Guardian this morning reports an ‘epidemic’ of sexual harassment cases in British universities. What defines an ‘epidemic’? More, surely, than the handful that are enumerated in its tables on page 7. To take the three British universities I have … Continue reading →

If the Devil has all the best tunes, it seems to be the losers who have all the best laughs. Trump’s victory has produced a treasure-house of wonderful anti-Trump jokes and mockery, on television, in the press and (especially) on … Continue reading →

‘A tunnel vision nationalism, which focuses only on independence at any cost, sells Scotland short.’ That was Theresa May at the Scottish Conservative Party Conference yesterday. I misheard it at first, assuming she was referring to Britain and Brexit. The … Continue reading →

There’s an interesting report in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/mi6-returns-to-tapping-up-recruit-black-asian-officers-alex-younger-interview – that MI6 are reverting to their old policy of ‘tapping up’ likely recruits, in order to achieve greater ethnic diversity. In this case it’s in order to net more black … Continue reading →

The LRB Blog has just posted another of my pieces on the Trump/Sweden affair: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/03/01/bernard-porter/sweden-who-would-believe-this-sweden/. Most of it has already appeared here, apart from the embedded links.