Dear James,
We hadn’t seen Boris for over a week. Rumour had it that, contrary to speculation that he was holed up with one of his paramours in yet another love triste, he was in fact at Chevening attempting to work out how to ‘change our country for ever’. Today however, he turned up at PMQs and ran straight back into reality
Read MoreDear James,
It was all so embarrassing. It started on Monday with the press invited in to meet the new cabinet. There they all were, the grinning boss with his beaming new wunderkind, Rishi Sunak, at his side and the rest of the merry crew in respectful obeisance around the table. ‘How many new hospitals are we going to build?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘Forty!’
Read MoreDear James,
It looked like the perfect political assassination. No finger prints. No blood. Not even a weapon. By refusing to accede to Boris’s demand that he sack each and every member of his personal staff, Sajid Javid took the poisoned pill and committed political suicide. Quelle surprise! What a shock! Except of course
Read MoreDear James,
According to the FT, Donald Trump vented ‘apoplectic’ fury at Boris when the two leaders spoke last week about Huawei and the 5G issues. If that does not tell you about the new relationship, I don’t know what does. Would Donald do the same with Kim Jong Un
Read MoreDear James,
On Monday the black hand of Dominic Cummings was at work again in Whitehall. Full of the usual manufactured optimism and hand jerking calls to action, poor Boris was strutting his stuff at a Press Conference to set out the UK’s stance
Read MoreDear James,
They used to say that the USA and the UK were two nations divided by a common language. Today, rather than dividing us, that language is re-uniting us in a most unfortunate embrace. It is the embrace of a new nihilism. ‘Destruction must come before the Future can Begin’ and ‘Everything is permissible if it achieves that end’. Your party is part of this James, even if you are not aware of it.
Read MoreDear James,
So the big day has come. Brexit is done. In a few hours we shall all be ‘free’ from malign Europe! From every public building in Westminster the Union Jack is flapping splendidly, flying bravely, shouting out ’Floreat Britannia!’. Meanwhile Boris has…
Read MoreDear James,
An ugly new word has been forced into my vocabulary of late. ‘Relatable’ is a neologism, a verb made adjective by the distortion of a perfectly good infinitive. If someone is ‘relatable’ it means they share your view of life. 'He’s a good bloke'. 'He’s someone with whom you would share a pint'. The word came into my ken last week on a Channel 4 programme on ‘focus groups’,
Read MoreDear James,
You are probably too young to remember Billy Bunter but for those of us of a certain age, he was the public-schoolboy anti-hero of the black and white television age. Bunter was a ‘loser’, overweight, mischievous, devious and with a permanent grin on his greedy face, always ready to raid the ‘tuck shop’. I think his public school chums would have called him ‘a bounder’.
Read MoreDear James,
I must apologize. I was working in Paris last week and therefore unable to write my normal letter to you or even say thank you for your own rare response to me. But needs must and work must take first priority. As it happens I was well aware that my Eurostar trip would be my last as a European Citizen. From January 31st I shall become a member of a ‘Third Nation’ with…
Read MoreDear James,
Something strange just happened. Something that was brewing up to be one of the great ‘Fake News’ stories of all times has suddenly been turned on its head and become one of the great ‘Truth Stories’ of all times. The Iranians have just admitted publically that they shot down, by mistake, the Ukrainian airliner on Wednesday.
Read MoreDear James,
Now comes the hard bit. While claiming that Britain is about to usher in ‘a golden age’ and boasting of our ‘tremendous potential’ in the world, Boris Johnson now has to face realities. The first reality is in foreign policy. The second is home economics. On neither count is the news encouraging.
Read MoreDear James,
For months I have been searching for any biography of your party’s Senior Adviser, Dominic Cummings. I’ve scoured Waterstone’s, searched the web, pestered friends but all I’ve found so far is a vapid cameo of the man in Wikipaedia. It is clearly too soon for a biography and much much too soon for an autobiography. But yesterday, amazingly, we were given,
Read MoreCall me old fashioned, but I want to offer you my sincere congratulations for your win last month and to wish you and your family a happy new year. Chivalry, you see, is still alive and well in our land despite the violence done to it during the last three years.
Read MoreDear James,
There was one big winner last Thursday. That winner is called democracy for it is democracy that has allowed the needs of the people of the long neglected North and Midlands to be heard. At last they have the nation’s ear.
Read MoreDear James,
The vast majority of us are innocent of history. Things that look small in our everyday lives eventually prove themselves to be of huge historical importance. Larger events prove themselves over the long-term as insignificant.
Read MoreBoris has a new base and I’m not referring to his posterior. It is the North and the Midlands and consists of all those traditional Labour seats which so comprehensively abandoned Jeremy Corbyn on Thursday. Boris and his new base will make strange bedfellows. No doubt they will start off co-habiting. But will it ever lead to a real marriage?
Read MoreLast night was a great night for democracy. With unwavering accuracy it identified the central problem of our nation with pinpoint accuracy. Bolsover, Bishop Auckland, the Don Valley and Workington in Cumbria are just a few of the prime Labour seats, some dating back to well before the second world war, that have gone to the Conservatives.
Read MoreDear James, Do you have a soul? Or is the soul some out dated concept left over from our mediaeval past? Certainly no one has found it yet, discovered it with MMR techniques or revealed it through x-ray crystallography. It has no location, no scientific identity, no way to measure its dimensions or its activity levels. And yet…
Read MoreAn American friend has sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal. The author, Joseph Sternburg, claims that Brexit is not really about Brexit. ‘Brexit is only one of several possible pathways by which Britain might reach whichever state of good or bad governance it attains next.’ How right he is.
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