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…

“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…

“Alexa, show me a tweet that will have aged REALLY REALLY well by around two hours from now.” I think this one wins, don’t you? Mason’s condescending dig at local radio presentation has come back to bite him pretty hard for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t really…

At just after six thirty on the evening of Thursday, 8 September 2022, two footmen came to the railings at the front of Buckingham Palace in London, and attached a wooden frame to them, containing the message that announced, in the traditional fashion, the death of a monarch. This is…

Here we are, in the morning after the night before. As I write¹, Boris Johnson has announced that he is to resign. But for now he plans to cling to office for some time yet, trying to stay on over summer. At this point even that seems too much to…

Some days almost defy description. And 6 July 2022 has been one of them. It didn’t start hugely auspiciously. Nadim Zahawi, who’d been Chancellor for barely 12 hours after the ructions of the previous day, found himself wheeled out to defend the man who given him the job. He gave…