It’s becoming hard to write this blog without being repetitious and, in being repetitious, introducing a distasteful ‘I told you so’ tone. But distasteful as it may be, the deepening chaos of the fortnight since I last posted, which saw Kwasi Kwarteng sacked, the government’s economic policy abandoned, Suella Braverman resign, and culminated in the … Read more
In a couple of weeks we will have a new Prime Minister, bringing an end to the strangest political summer of my lifetime. It has been a summer marked by excessive heat and drought which are themselves emblematic of perhaps the most important global political issue – if there are exceptions, they would be those … Read more
Against the backdrop of a serious, growing, and multi-faceted economic crisis, the Tory leadership contest grinds on. The two contenders have little to say that matches the scale of this crisis and even less about Brexit, which is not only one of its components but the one most obviously unique to the UK. Nor do … Read more
An air of sticky and suffocating unreality has pervaded British politics this week, quite as much as it has the weather. The ongoing contest to replace Boris Johnson seems completely detached from the realities of a country enduring a sharp lesson in the what climate change is going to mean, still gripped by a pandemic … Read more
As the dust begins to settle on Boris Johnson’s downfall, it’s worth emphasizing that it was inextricably bound up with Brexit even though Brexit wasn’t its direct cause. Unusually and fittingly, it was his character and conduct rather than any particular policy which ended his premiership. Not, I think, because the Tory Party had some … Read more
The dramatic collapse of Boris Johnson’s premiership is inseparable from Brexit. His rise to power was built on Brexit, whilst the spectacular immorality and mendacity that caused his eventual downfall were at the heart of the tawdry campaign he fronted that yielded Brexit. There’s much more to say about that, and I will do so … Read more
The peril of writing a blog which is contemporaneous with events is that it can suddenly be overtaken by those events. Actually, in the years I’ve been writing this blog that has happened surprisingly rarely, but it certainly did with last week’s post. There, I wrote about how Brexit was seemingly in the process of … Read more