On 23 March 2020, 74 days after China declared coronavirus to the WHO, Britain went into lockdown. In the interim Boris “I Shook Hands With Everyone” Johnson had ignored emails about a Europe-wide PPE purchasing scheme; ignored experts’ recommendations to close pubs and restaurants; taken a holiday in Kent, back before it became clogged with…
Before Brexit, 44% of British musicians, including my showbusiness friend Fish from Marillion, earned up to half their income from now inaccessible European audiences. But, should Fish find some way around the government’s failure to preserve artists’ touring opportunities, his unfortunate choice of stage name could mean he was still subject to time-consuming delays at…
In 2019, Jeremy Hunt, who once hid behind a tree to avoid the press on the way to a party, said politicians boycotting Donald Trump’s state visit were exhibiting “virtue signalling of the worst kind”. Was Hunt also virtue signalling last week, then, when he conceded that Trump “shames American democracy”? Or have the goalposts,…
On Monday, the Oasis pop star Noel Gallagher announced his suspicion of masks: “If I get the virus it’s on me, it’s not on anyone else… it’s a piss-take,” declared the People’s Virologist. “There’s no need for it… They’re pointless.” The previous week, in a punctuation-resistant statement Auto-Tuned into near coherence, former Stone Roses singer…
My old university friend, the American geographer William Dyer, accepted my Skype call at a research station on the pebble shores of the Antarctic Sound. Once, it would have been too remote to receive messages and yet here I was, laughing at the Sub Pop Records baseball cap that fixed him temporally and culturally. Will…
Stay alert! On Twitter, Tom Tugendhat, The Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling, is talking. There! He is thanking the prime minister for his “very clear message”. Tom Tugendhat! On Twitter! Now! He is enjoying the sheer coral sea clarity of the prime minister’s Sunday statement, like sunlight shining through spring water in Waterford crystal!…