Dear James,

Yesterday Boris stitched up his rebel MPs by agreeing the Neill Amendment to the Internal Market Bill which allows the government to unilaterally abrogate key clauses in the UK ‘divorce agreement’ of last January. However, the fact that MPs will now be able to vote on the bill instead of just Ministers does not mean that the threat of breaking the law disappears. It simply spreads complicity to a wider population ie, parliament. So now, even you James will become directly complicit in the threat to break the law.

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Dear James,

Your leader is at it again. Last Wednesday he launched ‘Operation Moonshot’, a £100bn plan for mass coronavirus testing. Ten million people would be tested each day and countless millions of a new type of test, saliva based rather than swab based, ‘simple, quick and scalable’ and delivering ’results within 90 minutes’ would be available across the nation by next Spring. Now, while not wishing to be a Cassandra, haven’t we heard all this before?

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Dear James,

Last December Boris claimed to have pulled off the ultimate diplomatic coup to overcome the impasse preventing Britain withdrawing from the EU without wrecking the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. To avoid a hard border between the North and the South, something very likely to reignite the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the province, he agreed to do something that all previous Prime Ministers had refused to do.

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Dear James,

History and politics are inseparable. Two weeks ago Boris said, “It’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, about our culture and we stopped this general fight against self recrimination and wetness”. Instead, he seems to be saying, we have to believe in ourselves, in the nationalistic nostalgic narrative of ‘Rule Britannia’. The latest furore about the non-singing of that song at the Proms is a case in point. It was a storm in teacup

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Dear James,

How long can this go on? Shock after shock, disaster after disaster, your government crashes on through the undergrowth like a herd of bull elephants intent on the destruction of themselves and any others in their vicinity. The latest rogue elephant in the herd, Mr Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary, suffers from a deficiency of ability, a surplus of self-belief and the protection of Boris’s 87 seat majority in a pacified parliament. But his impact on the people he is supposed to represent is disastrous. And this time his victims are thousands of A level students who have seen their efforts brought asunder by that prime tool of the current government, an algorithm!

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Dear James,

What is it about your government? It blusters along, pretending omniscience, assuring us that they know what they are doing and then, with consistent regularity, crashing into the brick wall of reality. It was on May 20th, that your blusterer-in-chief, Boris Johnson claimed that the NHS Test, Track and Trace System would be ‘world beating’ by June. Today it is mid-August and they have just announced that they are cutting 6,000 of the 23,000 tracers employed because clearly the system needs ‘adjustments’.

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Dear James,

Three weeks ago, Babergh District Council agreed to the building of 64 houses on prime agricultural land in Boxford. At the first meeting in 2019, up to 160 villagers had objected to the plan and many of them had attended the planning meeting in person. So the first time round the plan was refused. The more recent meeting was virtual (on Zoom) and the planning committee seemed removed, confused and at odds with the feelings of the local people of Boxford.

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Dear James,

Boris told us last week that there is a prospect of a “significant return to normality” by Christmas. Oh boy! Where does the man live? From the climate crisis, to the pandemic, to the massive clash of values currently erupting between the West and China, the world has not been in such geo-political confusion since the Second World War. Christmas? Normal service will not be resumed for many years to come.

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Dear James,

Boris Johnson once characterised his policy on cake as “pro having it and pro eating it.” Now it is China’s favourite dish, the dumpling, which he aspires to have and consume. But Boris cannot kick Huawei out of the UK 5G system and simultaneously have China as a major new trading partner

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Dear James,

It hasn’t been a good week for Boris or Trump. Both continued to spin their falsities and both failed dramatically. Today is ‘July 4th’ in the USA and ‘Super Saturday’ in the UK, the day when we ‘return to normal’. Hang on to your hats. Yet again, the world is on the cusp of more change!

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Dear James,

Each of us, in our own small ways, are judges of each other. We all think we know a good person from a bad person, a right action from a wrong action, acceptable behaviour from unacceptable behaviour. Judgment is wired into our very genes and probably comes from our original fight-or-flight response to danger in the wilderness. I see someone and I react instantly - positively or negatively - to age, gende

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Dear James,

Once upon a time there was a person called Grigory Potemkin, a minister and lover of the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great (1762-1796). Potemkin is alleged to have set up artificial "mobile villages" on the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress his Empress that ‘things were better than they were’. Potemkin's men, dressed as peasants,

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Dear James,

Following Boris’s on-air censoring of his scientific and medical advisers last week, something most interesting has just happened. Firstly, the two gagged advisers, Professors Vallance and Whitty, members of SAGE, the government’s committee of 50 expert advisors, seem to have refused to reappear at the press conferences. Then, at Saturday’s conference, Professor Van-Tam,

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Dear James,

At yesterday’s press conference, Boris’s message was ‘Move on - the Cummings matter is ‘closed’. When journalists questioned his two senior scientific advisers about whether Cummings had stuck to the rules at Castle Barnard, he intervened to stop the questions. Boris

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Dear James,

So, at long last, the man became flesh. Yesterday Dominic Cummings came out of the long grass and faced the nation to explain his recent exploits in Durham and Castle Barnard. Here was Svengali, Rasputin, Mephistopheles or even the devil himself throwing himself before his accusers. And the result? Bit of a let down really. He

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Dear James,

Words fail me and, yet they are all I have and so here goes! Yesterday I witnessed one of the most craven acts of political desperation and cowardice in my life time. Boris Johnson, that self-promoting, ‘paragon of strength and leadership’, was revealed in all his weakness. Commanded by his ‘chief adviser’ to shape up and back him, he fronted yesterday’s daily coronavirus press conference, looking seriously discomfited, huffing and puffing,

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