Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, apparently has restless thoughts and only finds ease in destroying. Doubtless, Dorries is aware on some level of the epic poem, in her capacity as guardian of the nation’s cultural treasures, and as an author herself, and yet she learns nothing from it. So…
The inspirational Leicester comedy festival awards ceremony, which I attended on Monday in the ballroom of the refurbished Grade II-listed Mercure Leicester Grand, could only have been improved by a multimillionaire performatively punching another multimillionaire in the face. Nonetheless, my once-in-a-lifetime Legend of Comedy statuette win was overshadowed by the violent brawling of the Oscar…
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…
Michael Gove is standing in a public waste disposal site in west London, objective reality dissolving around him, surrounded by a semicircle of imaginary attendants he has made himself from discarded rubbish; mop-handle spines, coathanger arms, sofa cushion bodies, and rotting rubber football heads. “These are my attendants, Leapy Lee,” he cried up at me,…
Hibernation is over! Outside our front window, sex workers comfort strangers again, and opposite Sainsbury’s men fight with their shirts off, like boar or rutting stags, arousing passing women, loveless for too long in lockdown. And in Parliament Square, Winston Churchill emerges from his winter wooden box, snuffling the virus-free air like a cocaine groundhog.…
Every Tuesday at 8.45pm, I stand in the silent lane alone and bang my Le Creusets in support of a group of brave people who must never be forgotten; unsung martyrs who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves working at the very heart of a terrible unfolding disaster of an unprecedented scale…