Year: 2023
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And your enemies closer
’Close-marking’ is an electoral strategy, the invention of the now legendary Labour Party spokesman Alastair Campbell and strategist Peter Mandelson. — The idea is that an opposition party assembles focus…
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End of the line
The Conservative Party is, famously, the most successful political party in history. — The party is a shape-shifting cockroach that’s survived the whole industrial era, the expansion of the franchise,…
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Metre disorder
I love poetry. I write poetry, I love rhyme and rhythm and structural play of all kinds. I write in rhyme. But I can’t see metre. — I know what…
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Civilianise the police
Trying to turn a 19th Century property-protection force, organised like the army, into a 21st Century organisation, modelled on a corporation, is a mug’s game. — The Met is in…
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How do you like your tradition?
Essentially perfect small town joy or ridiculous and contrived ceremonial fiction? — I was watching this ace video about the shrovetide madness that takes over in several small English towns…
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1998, the last time New York City had the correct amount of visual chaos
It was the end of history but it was before 9/11, before the dot.com crash, a whole decade before the Great Recession — Zuckerberg was still at school. I was…
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More Klingon than Starfleet
A Musk spaceship will be a Musk workplace — FURTHER UPDATE 13 January 2025. It’s difficult to know where this will end. Musk – a foreigner, remember – now has…