I bet Rishi Sunak didn’t get much sleep overnight. This would primarily be because he’d have been up with party workers looking over the local election results as they came in, but also because even if he had been able to doze for a few sweet minutes, there would have…

Yes, I too have a tedious hot take on the whole Lineker business — If you were to ask most football fans about Gary Lineker, the first thing they’d tell you wouldn’t be about the Golden Boot he won at the 1986 World Cup, nor would it be that he is fourth in the England international all-time scoring lists¹. The odd wag might mention…

Another whiffy dead cat dropped on the table — There may be some amongst you who may have raised a quizzical eyebrow and wondered why yesterday, in the midst of the maelstrom of public discontent that is making itself evident through strikes, and the ongoing politically motivated destruction of the NHS, our bonsai Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has decided…

My first tweet was posted sonetime in May 2007, dipping an experimental toe in the water while I was browsing in the office between teaching sessions at work, when I used to play at being an academic. Twitter was still called twttr then, and I first set it up so…

When I was at school in my teens, a bunch of us used to listen to Late Night with Graham Robb on Radio Tees¹. Weeknights from 10pm were blocked out for listening to mad Teesside phone callers, and a strange mid-80s proto-zoo radio format with characters like Cecil the Hairdresser…

“Eye watering” decisions are easy if they don’t affect you at all. — Back in 1992, before he went a bit “rogue”, Roger Waters released the album “Amused to Death”, which is probably the most complete and coherent piece of work in his solo répertoire as far as I’m concerned¹. Amongst the righteously angry, sparkling gems on that album, is this song…

Forty four days. Boy was I ever the optimist, thinking she’d struggle to make it past Alec Douglas-Home’s 362 days as Prime Minister. Now she’s destined to be barely an historical footnote, relegated to being the half-recalled answer to a pub quiz question sometime next decade. But you can’t say…

On the morning after the EU referendum result, back in those distant, hazy times of 2016, David Cameron washed his hands of his own disastrous tactical balls-up, and announced his resignation. I remember being struck at the time at the imagery he deployed, casting himself as “the captain of a…

Or: it’s not dead, but it sure smells funny — Day 3 of the Hunger Gam… sorry, Conservative Party Conference, and all in the totally normal Kingdom of Panem is absolutely hunky dory, and not a clusterfuck binfire made of lava and homicidally angry wasps. The day started totally normally¹, Truss gave yet another train wreck interview (of course she…