Keir Starmer has his first attack line of the next general election campaign. He will say that England’s second lockdown was longer than it needed to be because the Prime Minister didn’t act when he had the chance. If Boris Johnson had listened to the scientists, Labour will say, we’d have had a two week
Washington, DC On election day in the capital there is no thrill in the air, but there is a sound: that of hardboard being placed over all of Washington’s windows. Wherever you go in the centre of town, the area is either boarded up or in the process of being so. I enjoy my sausage
It seems, then, that this latest lockdown has been instigated simply to protect two very questionable institutions — the National Health Service and Christmas. Both have a certain historicity about them and were widely liked. Both, too, have become bloated and hideous caricatures of what they once were. There is a certain infantilism about the
A frothy new drama called Emily in Paris arrived on Netflix last month. Starring Lily Collins — daughter of Phil — it tells the story of a pretty social media ‘expert’ who moves from Chicago to Paris, where she manages to offend almost everybody she meets, and yet somehow triumphs. It is Eloise in Paris
Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me
Aviation, nuclear power and public transport — along with good restaurants, golden retrievers and hand-knitted bed socks — are, as Julie Andrews put it, a few of my favourite things. So in a week when the news is as depressing as I can remember since the dark winter of 1973-4, I might as well write
