Monthly Archives: June 2019

Just to say that I’ll be on my hols for the next three weeks – SE France, to visit La Cote Saint-André (birthplace of my favourite composer), and one or two other places. Grenoble has a Musée de la Revolution, … Continue reading →

On the plus side of my ‘good and bad effects of the British Empire list’, I always used put the spread of cricket. (Sometimes it was there alone.) It must have been the Empire that spread cricket, unlike football, because … Continue reading →

I’ve mentioned before that I was asked to revise my The Lion’s Share for a 6th edition, but that I couldn’t face the prospect of going back to my old sick: https://bernardjporter.com/2018/03/19/lions-share-mk-vi/. So Routledge found me a young American scholar to do the … Continue reading →

I take Tony’s point, in his comment on my last post, that Eton has ‘produced’ (if that’s the word) some good Lefties as well as Borises. But that’s because they’ve rebelled against their background, as many kids do. My take … Continue reading →

It’s largely Old Etonians who have got us into this ghastly situation. (I wonder what sort of History they teach them there?) So perhaps another Old Etonian should be made to get us out of it. But not Boris. Rory … Continue reading →

Many years ago I developed a theory that the reason why we in Britain didn’t guillotine our aristocrats in revolutionary times was that they played this clever game of making themselves out to be cuddly and eccentric old half-wits who … Continue reading →

For those aware of the plots against Harold Wilson and his governments in the 1960s – brilliantly chronicled in Ramsay and Dorrill’s Smear! (1992) and much more briefly in my Plots and Paranoia (1989) – it will come as no surprise … Continue reading →

The case for ‘Remain’ is, in my opinion, unanswerable. The Left-wing argument against it, that it will free us from European neo-Liberalism and enable us to establish ‘Socialism in One Country’, disregards a more isolated Britain’s vulnerability to the demands … Continue reading →

I’m  at Arlanda, downing a storstark  before my flight back to a UK I scarcely now recognise, thrown into utter confusion by the stupidity – yes, stupidity – that is Brexit. I was planning to write a piece on that stupidity, until … Continue reading →

A number of our Tory politicians began as journalists, and then moved on to politics. Not all journalists are rogues, but the ones who write for the Right-wing press very often are. Boris Johnson is a key example, filing anti-EU … Continue reading →