I bought a record in a second-hand shop in the summer of 1981. A double album. I made sure nobody was looking when I handed over my money, and kept the purchase hidden in its brown paper bag all the way home. Back in my room, I locked the door to make sure my house-mates
I’ve been looking at my predictions for 2016 made this time last year. It’s extraordinary — don’t check, just trust me — all 12 of them came true. If you had placed a £1 accumulator bet on my forecasts that Britain would vote Brexit, Trump would be elected US President, and that Scarlett Moffatt off
Most of my predictions for 2016 were wrong; so let’s not revisit them. But I was right, in January, to identify as a theme of the coming year an evident gulf between ‘the reinvigorated and the demoralised’. In small business sectors and provincial towns, as well as in the attitudes of millions of citizen voters
