A leak is a long time in politics
- 23 Apr 2021
My heart goes out to Boris Johnson who for the first time in his life is going to have to devote his time and energy to making the some of the most important decisions of his life. The most pressing is whether to change his mobile phone number which has served him so well over...
We are sleepwalking into tolerating intolerance. The racial Puritans are new McCarthyites
- 2 Apr 2021
It is a sad reflection on our society that we have allowed ourselves to sleep walk into tolerating intolerance. It began through our innate sense of fairness, yet now our nocturnal perambulations have turned into a nightmare of fear. Not of offending others, but of being vilif...
‘Freedom is precious so must be rationed’. I’ve glimpsed the future and it smirks.
- 16 Mar 2021
Sometimes I just despair. The latest Labour line on the Police Crime sentencing & Courts Bill is ‘defacing a statue 10 years. Rape 5 years’. Far from me to ruin an attack line, let me put the record straight. Defacing a statue will incur a maximum sentences of 10 years imp...
Piers Morgan is a good guy swimming in an ocean of shits
- 10 Mar 2021
There will be whoops and cheers from the enemies of Piers Morgan and of free speech. But as Walpole said about the War of Jenkins Ear, a delightful piece of fake news, “now they are ringing the bells but soon they will be wringing their hands”. Well, it has started. This morni...
The Begum ruling is much more than a decision about whether a misguided woman who has trashed everything decent this country stands for. It sets a very dangerous precedent on the power of the executive
- 28 Feb 2021
I do not practice in either constitutional or administrative law, although I did once lead for the complainant in a vain attempt to halt the 2005 general election because of postal ballot fraud. But I have been following the Begum case with interest, care, and now dismay. ...
Mr Micawber and the court of Queen Carrie
- 20 Feb 2021
The power dynamics at Number 10 are far more interesting and revealing than the sad mutterings of disgruntled cabinet ministers jockeying for survival. The reshuffle is now rumoured to be in June. But this is idle gossip compared to serious intelligence. The Johnson style of g...
Peter Mandelson has returned from the politically dead. Underestimate him at your peril
- 14 Feb 2021
The real problem for Keir Starmer is that he has never had to be a kick in the groin, gouge out their eye balls and piss the sockets politician. He only entered the Commons in 2015 and found himself catapulted into the seventh circle of hell as a prominent member of Corbyn’s s...
Come on Keir don’t encourage Johnson to tamper with our juries
- 30 Jan 2021
Never mind a week being a long time in politics, a day seems long enough. We started by mourning the one hundred thousand Covid related deaths (yes, Dan Hannan it really does kill you), saw the loonies howling at the full moon over deep state conspiracy theories, looked on in ...
It’s time we had a Secretary of State for Employment again & a law making it a sackable offence to unreasonably refuse to be vaccinated
- 23 Jan 2021
You may not believe this, but every week I really do try and find something pleasant to write about Boris Johnson. Some little piece of empathy he has shown. Some evidence that he has read more than the executive summary of a brief. Some glimmer of leadership. To be fair he ...
Who will be the British Qanon Shaman?
- 10 Jan 2021
Most of us in Britain looked on in horror and disbelief at the news footage of the storming and desecration of the Capitol building with Representatives and Senators cowering in fear amongst the swirling mists of cordite and tear gas. And most of us were not at all surprised a...