Category: Politics

BIE Were Best

The British are at heart isolationist while our leaders are strategists who see the benefit of alliances with almost anybody. I’m no historian but any fule can see we have fought against and subsequently fought alongside almost every country in Europe (and the United States). And then there’s Russia …

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Yes to Europe

Our collective memory of the 2016 referendum is emerging: voters were not told by either side the pros and cons of membership of the EU. Our collective memory of the 1975 referendum is that voters were deceived into voting for a Common Market and were kept in the dark about ever-closer economic and political union.

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Today

The Today Programme has changed a lot in its sixty years on air. Every tweak has been met with outrage from listeners allergic to change of any sort and then been accepted as the new normal.

Trexit

This is not an April Fool – I wish it were. Today is the first day of Trexit when Hammersmith and Fulham leaves the tri-borough of H&F, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster.

Local Notes

1. Periwinkle, planted in 1984, seems indestructible. It has spent months buried under building materials over the years and gets trampled on by me and the bin men.

Russian Election

There is a Presidential election in Russia on Sunday. 420 Short Term Observers have been deployed. I applied but did not get chosen. Why not?

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Boots

“It was a lonely land then, the vast frontier held by the last scattered remnants of the once great armies that fought the Civil War. To such as these, all but forgotten, doing a dirty, thankless job, without reward or glory, the army was a way of life, the only one they knew or wanted.”

Thelma

Thelma Cazalet-Keir (1899 – !989) was a Conservative politician and feminist, serving on the London County Council and as a Member of Parliament. She was also, amongst much else, a member of the Arts Council and a Governor of the BBC.

Robert Herrick

Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen is PG Wodehouse’s last complete novel, published in 1974, a year before he died aged ninety-three. At an age when his creative juices might be expected to dry up, it is right up to his usual high standard. If you want to know why Bertie Wooster is mistaken for arch-criminal Alpine Joe… Continue reading Robert Herrick