Dear James,

Did you hear it? It began like a distant rumble of thunder and then built up into a rolling bellow accompanied by squalls of whistles and hoots. The crowd at last Friday’s Thanksgiving Service to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee was booing our Prime Minister as he entered St. Paul's cathedral with wife Carrie. Up the steps he went, still grinning, still genetically impervious to the storm breaking around his scruffy mop. It was a fifteen second example of walking the plank or rising to the guillotine. It was a reflexive, visceral condemnation of ‘The man who would be king’!

Read More

Dear James,

Do you have a conscience? A conscience is a word deriving from Middle English meaning ‘inner thoughts’ and, more recently, to be a person’s sense of moral right and wrong. Freud defined three levels of awareness, the Id (basic instincts), the Ego (sense of self ) and the Superego, (conscience) which implied that conscience was the most advanced sort of awareness. It’s the place where each of us is expected to balance right and wrong according to the dictates of our innermost beings and, by implication, by ignoring the opposing dictates of personal advantage.

Read More

Dear James,

Sue Gray’s Report on the ‘Partygate’ scandal landed this morning with a resounding thump on Boris Johnson’s desk and I have no doubt James, where you will stand on its main findings. You will support the Prime Minister through thick and thin. You will excuse him for breaking the law, deny that he misled parliament, forgive him for the "failures of leadership and judgment in No 10 and the Cabinet Office" and suggest that we should all move on, turn a page, put the past behind us?

Read More

Dear James,

A quick question for you? When will the UK no longer be recognizable as the United Kingdom? When Scotland leaves the Union? Or when Northern Ireland unhitches itself or when both of those nations plus Wales finally cut the Gordian knot and sail off into the open arms of the European Union? A silly question, I hear you chortle. Not so silly, I can assure you, after the results of last Thursday’s local elections.

When the dust settled last Friday, a new political landscape had emerged from the storm of psephological data.

Read More

Dear James,

We are at a turning point in Putin’s War. A battle of massive significance not just for the Ukraine but also for the whole free world is upon us. The outcome of this battle will demonstrate the competing strengths of the democratic and the authoritarian worlds. It is a clash of philosophies concerning the sources and legitimacy of power. It’s the battle of the next thirty years.HolyWar

Read More

ear James,

The difference between liberal democracy and authoritarian autocratic rule has never been so starkly and brutally revealed. Today Vladimir Putin is about to place a column of heavy weaponry, 40 miles long, around Kyiv, the capital of the Ukraine. These weapons include massive artillery pieces, multi-stage rocket launchers, hundreds of tanks and similar numbers of armoured personnel carriers. When they are unleashed they will kill thousands of innocent people in Kyiv. Women and children will be his victims. It has never been clearer that nations in the hands of autocrats and their cronies adhere to only two principles - that ‘might is right’ and they will protect that power to the end.

Read More

Dear James,

Last night Vladimir Putin declared war on the Ukraine. Early this morning his cruise missiles and other forms of artillery began falling upon this innocent nation. But it’s not just Ukraine that is under attack. Putin, this small man suffering from a Napoleon complex, is also carrying out an assault on the whole of the global post war security structure. The United Nations Security Council can protest but remains toothless. NATO can stiffen its troops and resolve along the borders of the Ukraine but has ruled out intervention. The EU remains frozen. Even the great USA sits uneasily on the sidelines as Russian tanks move across the Ukrainian borders and attempt to destroy its fledgling democracy. The only nations that applaud Putin’s aggression are the other autocracies.

Read More

t was a bit like sitting in front of a washing machine as the same old tired and worn out characters went round and round, churning and re-churning in the hope of achieving that elusive freshness of which every 1950s housewife used to dream. Boris’s ‘cabinet reshuffle’ this week will do little to revive his fortunes. The stains persist. The smell of chaos and corruption is locked into the fabric. The same old people are taken out, held up to the light and put back for the next cycle. Again and again. Over and over. And nothing changes. The same old tired Brexiteers are there. Each wash removes more colour, each churn frays the cuffs further, each spin flattens the collars

Read More

Dear James,

Boris Johnson is a political ‘black hole’. No one knows what happens inside that black hole – not even him - because no light ever escapes that impenetrable blackness. All we know is that any politician who gets near to its ‘event horizon’ will eventually be devoured. He or she will buffeted, spun, turned upside down, inside out by gravitational forces beyond our imagination. But finally they will disappear into that insatiable abyss, never to be heard of again.

Read More

Dear James,

Boris is hunkered down at Chequers. The phone lines are hot. The whips are working overtime. Even the Downing Street cat is wondering why they’ve forgotten his milk this morning. Poor Pussy, the reason is that Boris really is in his last chance saloon. This week, Sue Gray, the Senior Civil Servant tasked with delivering her report on ‘partygate’, will slap it onto Boris’s desk. Which is why your Prime Minister James is going, in short shrift, from despair to hope and back to despair.

Read More

Dear James,

Boris is finished. He was finished long ago. As a child he was finished by his fawning family As a student he was finished when he started to ‘get away’ with the lies and braggadocio in his years at Eton. None of his confreres stopped him. Everyone laughed. ‘What a bounder!’ they said, using that term of flattering misdemeanor so loved by that part of society.

Read More

Dear James,

Most anniversaries require some sort of celebration. The raising of a glass or two, the odd speech, the salute to past triumphs. But none of that will happen on January 31st 2022, when the anniversary of Britain’s departure from the EU comes up. Instead of celebrations, expect whispered intrigue and the poisoned, whirling mists of conspiracy. Your leader Boris Johnson, will be the ghost of triumphs past as his successors plot his downfall. Things have been going wrong for Boris and your party ever since those union flags fluttered and a diehard minority of Brexiteers danced in Parliament Square as Big Ben ticked its way towards midnight. Enjoy those fleeting memories, James. You won’t see them again.

Read More

Dear James,

How the mighty fall! Last Monday Boris, with his 80 seat majority, needed the Labour Party to push through legislation to contain Omicron. Ninety-nine – or almost a third of his MPs - voted against the motion. Boris is gravely wounded. This puffed up ball of hyperbolic fluff is deflating before our very eyes. There is no way back for him and, in the long-run, the wounds are probably fatal. Confused? Well the other story is that in that vote, the Tory party also revealed its own massive splits.

Read More

Dear James,

It was simple. Boris’s response, at PMQs yesterday, to the now infamous Allegra Stratton question of ‘What’s the answer?’ was true to character. ‘It wasn’t me gov! I was just passing by when the burglars smashed the windows and grabbed the jewellery! I’m mortified. The poor owners! To lose such precious sparklers! I know how they feel! It must have been awful!’

No one believed him. It was pure humbug.

Read More