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…
Senior CON MPs threaten not to back the PM
Cyclefree on attitudes to obeying the law “Britain does not break treaties. It would be bad for Britain, bad for our relations with the rest of the world and bad for any future treaty on trade we may wish to make.” – Margaret Thatcher , Leader of the Opposition, April 1975 “The first duty of government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when it’s inconvenient, if government does that,…
There used to be (may well still be) an enjoyable pastime for readers of Robert Fisk’s articles: a point by point rebuttal of the factual errors and other idiocies contained in them. Other journalists can be fisked with equal pleasure. At one point there was a veritable cottage industry dependant on Polly Toynbee’s output. So on a rainy day starting a new week of political fun and games, it is time to revive this practice and apply it to another…
Time to bet that he won’t make it as PM until the next general election? I first began reporting professionally as a journalist on PMQs in 1972 when I was part of the small team that produced the “Today in Parliament” programme for BBC Radio 4. Three years later I was one of the editors that handled the parliamentary broadcasting experiment that was the forerunner of the proceedings of the House being broadcast on radio and then later television. These…
Boris Johnson’s government may be pretty incompetent at most things but you can’t fault its ability to sniff out a topic to rally its base to its side. The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence, but the government gleefully seized on a fresh opportunity to whip up its parochial white English nationalist base against those of duskier…
Have ministers panicked? Today’s front pages give a good representation of the main pandemic stories and what the papers think are the issues most likely to impact on their readers. Once again the Daily Star manages to produce the most striking front page and that paper is to my mind having the best pandemic. So often it is taking the most eye-catching and humorous approach which is very much in the spirit of the early days of the tabloid Sun….
The one poll we get every week is by Opinium for the Observer – a pollster that provide some of the best cross tabs for analysis. Because there can be such a high margin of error in taking the splits from one poll I have gone through all four polls that were published by Populus during this month and the figures shown are the average. The part of the surveys I have focussed on are the net approval ratings for…