Michael Douglas’s defining performance remains his leading role in Falling Down. He plays the part of a man who, when his car gets stuck in an unending traffic jam, steps out on foot and strikes against the annoyances and dangers of everyday life in a way that audiences would have dreamt of but never have dared. One of the joys of the film is how it leads its audience to identify with and cheer on a man who act out…
Ladbrokes have a market up on the first scheduled Presidential debate for the end of September and my first instinct is to back Biden. Success equals performance minus anticipation and thanks to the Trump and his campaign they’ve lowered the bar for ‘Sleepy Joe’ so low that not even a baby Hobbit could walk under that bar. Then there’s what the Trump campaign have been up to President Donald Trump’s campaign launched a series of Facebook ads on Thursday featuring…
Let me take you back to a different time, a time when we worried about how the transport system was going to cope with the weight of numbers placed on it. Just six years ago, the tube drivers were confident enough of their clout that they could strike to try to get their demands. The strike was not total, but the effect was nevertheless crippling for London. Yet, as an LSE study found, a funny thing happened. Improvise, adapt, overcome….
In the past week there’s been some astonishing revelations about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, some of which I covered last week, but for me the most fascinating was this revelation by The HuffPost’s revelations that Jeremy Corbyn’s office ordered that a raft of “moderate” Labour MPs should be stripped of extra campaign funding in the 2017 general election, a senior former party official has revealed. Patrick Heneghan, who was executive director for elections and campaigns, said that he was asked to…
How Covid-Alert are you? Or, put another way, without checking, can you tell me what the current Covid Alert Level is? And without checking, can you tell me what that alert level means? I expect that most of you will have proven unalert by that measure.* It was supposed to be a touchstone measure. When Boris Johnson addressed the nation on 10 May, the introduction of the Covid Alert Level System was his central point. Let me remind you of his words: “And to chart our…
Team Corbyn learnt that Labour would lose the 2019 general election three months before a voter had gone to the polls. On September 22, the Sunday morning of the party’s annual conference in Brighton, John McDonnell walked with his wife, Cynthia, to a meeting room in the bowels of the Metropole hotel. What the shadow chancellor was about to find out would prove difficult to stomach. In the last days of August, Niall Sookoo, Labour’s director of elections, and Tim…
When it comes down to it, most articles only have one point at their heart. They can be tricked out with lively language or illustrated with telling examples (or they can be pedestrian plods through the topic). Nevertheless, that one point is usually missed by most readers. So let me sum up the point of this article in one plain paragraph. The EU can choose the terms of a deal with Britain that it wishes to offer. Britain in turn is…
Paddy Power have a market up on whether Gavin Williamson will be out of the cabinet by the end of Sunday, now we should praise Paddy Power for putting up both sides of the markets. I’m advising taking the 1/7 because the bar for being sacked from Boris Johnson has been raised to the point where I suspect only denouncing Brexit or saying Dominic Cummings broke lockdown & quarantine rules on his excursion to Durham will get you sacked. I…