Johnson and His Cabinet: A Confederacy of Bastards
- July 25, 2019
- by
- Matt
Watching Netflix’s documentary The Great Hack last night, I was struck by the ‘Breibart philosophy’ ascribed by one of its contributors to Steve Bannon, to the effect that it is necessary to destroy and break countries in order to be able to rebuild them on Bannonite lines.
Yesterday marks another milestone in our ongoing collapse as a serious country, that Bannon will surely take some satisfaction from in his ongoing ‘culture war.’
It was a day when 0.13 percent of the British population replaced the worst government in British history with the worst government in British...
Comrade Johnson: When Boris Met Sasha
- July 22, 2019
- by
- Matt
On the eve of Boris Johnson’s coronation as PM, I have a counterfactual for you, readers.
Imagine that we’re in 2015 in the middle of the Labour Party leadership contest. All polls suggest that Jeremy Corbyn is going to win. Only days before his inevitable election a Reuters reporter publishes a story alleging that Corbyn is...
“Running Around Like Idiots”: Britain’s Brexit Crisis
- July 19, 2019
- by
- Matt
“The weight of this sad time we must obey/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” declares Goneril’s husband the Duke of Albany at the end of King Lear, as the body of the old king is taken away. Given the carnage, corruption, madness, vanity and greed that has preceded this observation, Albany’s...
Epstein’s Monsters
- July 15, 2019
- by
- Matt
Many people will be familiar with the observation made by John Stuart Mill in 1867 that ‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.’ This is true as far as it goes, but there are also cases when the triumph of evil is not...
Our Ex-Man in Washington
- July 11, 2019
- by
- Matt
One of the most extraordinary revelations during our ongoing descent into the political vortex has been the supine feebleness and incompetence with which the British ruling classes have responded to a direct threat from the right to their most cherished institutions. Back in the 1970s there were weird rightwing organisations like Moral Rearmament, secret service...
The Resistible Rise of Boris the Clown
- June 26, 2019
- by
- Matt
Yesterday morning I watched Boris Johnson give two absolute car crash interviews on LBC and Talk Radio. It was hard to know which of them was the worst: the one in which he refused to answer Nick Ferrari’s question regarding the date of his ‘Boris and Carrie’ photo, or the one in which he mumbled...
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