Category Archives: Uncategorized

Nostalgia

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 →

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Eton Mess

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 →

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Not like us

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 →

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Keep Corbyn – for now

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 →

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A cunning plan?

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 →

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St Theresa

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 →

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The End of Empire (at last)

After all that has gone on these last two weeks, it feels like the End.  Not of the world, exactly, although if the people who back Brexit are the same as those who deny man-made climate change, that may not … Continue reading →

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Chilcot – first thoughts

Well, the Report is out at last, and by all accounts it isn’t at all the ‘whitewash’ that cynics were predicting. It really lays into Blair, confirming what I and the majority of historians and commentators had been saying almost … Continue reading →

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Labour’s Leader

The Labour leadership contest is a dreadful mess. It would be comic if it weren’t so vital, and tragic for those of us ordinary voters who are crying out for an effective Opposition to take advantage of the Conservatives’ own … Continue reading →

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Spectres of the Somme

Yesterday’s ‘art’ commemoration in Britain of the centenary of the first day of the battle of the Somme was intensely moving: men dressed in authentic World War battledress walking around cities, sitting at stations as if ready to embark for … Continue reading →

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