The conference season is upon us, may God have mercy on our souls. — The LibDem conference passed off last week in the shimmer of apathy it generally engenders in most of the population, but seeing as Parliament is in recess and the autumn is starting, it’s time for the “Big Guns” now. On Sunday, the Tory circus lurches into Manchester. In the immortal…

18 September 2023 — City Varieties, Leeds — It seems that motivational and self-help media are modish once again. After all, only recently, we saw the Alan Partridge’s Stratagem doing the rounds. Well, anything Alan can do, Brian can do … better? A bit of a side note here…

Ad ondatra, mortem cupio¹ — I had sort of promised myself I wasn’t going to write any more about Elon Musk, with his smug self-satisfied backpfeifengesicht, and his ongoing mission to destroy Twitter. Just for the record, I refuse to use the new “is this a porn site or something?” name he has dropped onto…

“Jesus Christ, they’ve done it. They’ve done it” — There’s a new social network in town, kids. Apparently, 70m people signed up to Meta’s new Threads app in the first couple of days. At this point, I’ll issue a disclaimer, and say that I’m not one of them, nor am I ever likely to be, for reasons I’ll explain…

If the Tories want the Johnson smell gone, they have to finish the job — It was supposedly Harold Wilson who once said that “a week is a long time in politics”, though I’m not sure what he’d have made¹ of the seven years of famine we’ve had to endure since June 2016 and “The Event” that has been the source of so many of…

Stuart Maconie, Harper North 2023 — It’s hard not to like Stuart Maconie, even if he is from Lancashire¹. Over the course of a number of entertainingly garrulous, and personable travelogues over the last few years that might make certain metropolitan columnists drop cliched references to “northern good humour”, he’s shown a (critical) love of the…

David Baddiel, TLS 2023 — At more than one point in this book David Baddiel describes himself as a “fundamentalist” atheist, but even then he undercuts that with the revelation that he is also a reluctant one. There’s an echo of Carl Sagan in this, who, when writing in his book, The Demon Haunted World¹…

…look at all the Nat-C farties — There are rabbit holes, and then there are rabbit holes. The great and the good (and I’m being extremely generous there) of wonky-eyed, manic Conservatism have assembled, in a gathering of the clans in London to swap stories and map out their vision for a New England. very much with…

I bet Rishi Sunak didn’t get much sleep overnight. This would primarily be because he’d have been up with party workers looking over the local election results as they came in, but also because even if he had been able to doze for a few sweet minutes, there would have…