The Opposition Benches

Having ticked off Reform UK plc last week, Simon Alexander MP surveys the rest of the supporting cast who now oppose the 400 Labour MPs on the government benches

The two most important people in my political life are the ones nobody sees. It’s time to reintroduce the band, my bassist and drummer if you will (and you might not).

Vish spent 18 months working for one of the 2024 intake of Labour MPs before deciding he had joined a sinking ship. He was sick of ‘bloody Gaza’ and ‘bloody Starmer’, and when a vacancy arose in his old post of policy advisor to Muggins, he applied and dazzled me in his interview.

‘So what qualifies you to work for me?’

‘I worked for you for three years.’

‘You’re hired.’

That was pretty much it, although he does make a very good cup of tea and, above all, can talk in English to constituents who bring their problems to me. He’s like a nurse to my doctor, triaging problems and streaming them to the correct person, be they the police, Citizens Advice or even dear old Alex Berrygrove, the leader of the council and my nemesis.

Here at Al Towers, we aim to please, but we also have several irons in several fires. As policy adviser, Vish is also abreast of the latest doorstep issues, so you can see why he might have been fed up of Bloody Gaza and Bloody Starmer when he went knocking with his boss. He has an easier life with me, and he is thankful for it.

As I mentioned a fortnight ago, there is a new Em in town. Em-Dash is what she answers to, a highly proficient Media Advisor who stunned me with her presentation on how to get my message out to constituents.

‘I know you have your coffee shop surgeries,’ she correctly said, ‘but people are used to swiping and thumbing and doomscrolling, so we need you to up your follower count.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’

‘Well, for a start you need to be quirky and show your personality to the people.’

‘Did I not do that in print?’

‘Nobody my age reads your diary, apart from me. You need to go visual.’

‘Like Jacob Rees-Mogg? Or Zarah Sultana?’

‘Yes, but also nothing like that. Look at Dawn Butler and her Things To Do For Free series.’

‘I am not as photogenic as her. I can’t wear yellow. Are you going to give me a glow-up?’

‘I’m just thinking of the kind of person who gets their politics news from Cody Dahler.’

‘Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb guy?’

‘Yes. Presentation matters these days.’

I gave her the job even though I knew it was only a matter of time before she ended up working for a cabinet minister, Ed Miliband perhaps, travelling the world as his videographer and keeping him away from sandwiches. Indeed, Em-1, who was my Media Advisor during the 2023/24 term, is now part of the PM’s team, having initially worked for him when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. I sent her a congratulatory message when her man was elected PM unopposed. She’ll be down here infrequently given that she’s based at Number 10 North but I hope for a brush-by with her boss; sadly there are 400 other people wanting one too.

Far easier to speak to other MPs, with less demanding in-trays. I need to reintroduce my fellow Independent MPs, not least the man in Islington North who seems to have ruined another party by being impossible to work with, like he’s Nigel Farage in a different coloured jacket. Your Party (Whose?) is another one of the left’s grand wheezes which didn’t work; since it launched last year it has been torpedoed by in-fighting and petty politics which prove that that sort of MP is better out of power than in it. Technically Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are both members of Your Party (My Party?), but I still see them as independent warriors competing in a Judean People’s Front vs People’s Front of Judea style. I fear Reform UK plc, aka the Bendelo Party, are heading that way too.

There are several MPs who got into power talking about Bloody Gaza, some of them with microscopically small majorities: Shockat Adam won Leicester South by 979 votes, Ayoub Khan Birmingham Perry Barr by 507, Adnan Hussain Blackburn by 132. Iqbal Mohamed took Dewsbury and Batley, some of whose voters the late Jo Cox and her surviving sister Kim Leadbeater represented, by the more comfortable margin of almost 7000, because Leadbetter became MP for Spen Valley due to boundary changes.

Now to the ex-Labourites sitting as independents for a plethora of reasons. With a 4000 majority Bayo Alaba became the first ever Labour MP for Southend East and Rochford, earning a seat on the DCMS select committee based on his past as a music venue runner. Lately, though, he became the latest Labour MP to have the whip removed, in his case over allegations over improper financial conduct concerning bounceback loans during the pandemic. He maintains a robust defence but we must let due process occur.

He joins two other Labour MPs sitting beside the mob of Members Without Parties: Rosie Duffield (Canterbury, majority 8600), who lasted about ten weeks as a government minister before resigning on principle over Keir Starmer’s freebies; and Karl Turner (Kingston Upon Hull East, majority of just under 4000), who has been an MP since 2010 and was turfed out on March 31 this year because he disagreed with what his party were saying about stopping trial by jury in certain cases. He also called Morgan McSweeney ‘McSwindle’ and was reprimanded for talking to an activist journalist; I expect Turner will have the whip restored, but I don’t know what the party thinks anymore because it changes its spokespeople every ten minutes.

Alex Easton won the North Down seat in Northern Ireland as an independent, after three tries as a DUP candidate. I will never climb Mount Kilimanjaro, as he did last summer, but I respect him enormously. He and the lovely Jim Shannon are often chinwagging; Shannon sits in front of me as part of the Northern Irish contingent (less, of course, Sinn Fein MPs, who still do not sit in Westminster).

Dan Norris unseated Jacob Rees-Mogg in North East Somerset and Hanham (majority: 5300). He still sits as an independent after he was suspended 18 months ago for all kinds of crimes, which he still denies, including bullying and much worse. A few thousand people, but not 10% of the registered voters, have signed a recall petition but he has not resigned his seat. Josh Simons had to give up Makerfield in a tactful resignation which suited all parties. As for NESH, could we see the return of the Mogg? I sincerely hope not.

Cameron Thomas of Tewkesbury (majority: 6000) is that rare thing: an MP suspended from the Liberal Democrats. A former RAF officer, he was arrested in June on suspicion of assault and coercive behaviour, which is (to put it lightly) a big no-no. The Lib Dems have 72 MPs, so I will deal with them separately; their party conference takes place in Brighton this weekend, so someone tell Sir Ed Davey that he has to go to the Arcade on the Pier. His big speech is next Tuesday at 2.30pm, too late for next week’s diary entry. I am keen to hear what he thinks about Mr Trump(!).

Reform UK plc aka the Bendelo Party have already had their conference, but (I shall as ever be careful) the morally questionable banker James McMurdock was not there. Last year they kicked him out of the party after The Times revealed that he had claimed loans during the Covid-19 pandemic that seemed fishy. He also neglected to mention that he had been to a young offenders’ institution for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, but the Bendelo Party plc preached Christian values and kept him in the party for that. Morals vs Money: the story of Nige al-Faraj’s life. McMurdock was elected MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock by 98 votes, a result declared after three recounts. Why don’t the people get on with a recall petition. Enough already.

Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth (majority 1426) has become Nige’s nemesis. I try to avoid them both just in case my temper gets the better of me, but Lowe is making a killing by posting defamatory things on Elon Musk’s social media platform. Yet because of our wonderful democracy, Lowe serves on the hallowed Public Accounts Committee alongside a dozen or more others including lovely Watford MP Matt Turmaine (majority: 4700). Yesterday the Committee took evidence from the HS2 CEO Mark Wild(!) about how things were going with this never-ending project to modernise the London-to-Birmingham trainline that carves up the country. Vish is in the middle of summarising the evidence.

We are now up to five Green MPs, not including their quirky leader Zach Polanski, who wants me on his podcast (Em-Dash vetoed it on the spot) and who wants to represent the people of Holborn and St Pancras. The by-election falls on October 8, and the deeply impressive Labour candidate is Sagal Abdi-Wali; Mail journalists, start your teeth-clenching.

Of the Green quintet, my favourite is Carla Denyer (Bristol Central, majority of 10,000), who took a mental health break this year due to burnout. Co-leader Adrian Ramsay, with a majority of 5500 in the seat of Waveney Valley in East Anglia, took up the slack. The Gorton and Denton MP Hannah Spencer is always a good laugh, although she is busy representing the party in matters Education, Culture, Business and Housing.

She is not the only multitasker: Sian Berry was handed Dr Caroline Lucas’ Brighton Pavilion seat (majority: 14,000), and is party spokesperson for Justice, Transport, Work and Pensions and all things Home. Dr Ellie Chowns won North Herefordshire from the Conservatives with a 6000 majority, and is the go-to person for Foreign Affairs, Defence, Treasury and Constitutional Issues. And you are quite right to wonder who has the Environment brief; maybe they all do, as befits members of what used to be called the Ecology Party.

These are the kinds of MPs I see in the tea room, in the Chamber and in the security queue when I come into work fumbling with their passes. When I entered This Place as part of the Conservative intake in the glory years of Brexit (paging Dr Oxymoron), I was one of hundreds; now there are barely 120 of them left, with five ex-Tory Bendelo Party members (pronounced with the stress on ‘Ben’ so it sounds like ‘pedalo’) snarling at them across the opposition benches. Jenrick, Braverman, Kruger, Rosindell and Anderson: the famous five, famous for being part of the government and not able to sustain life in the Conservative Party. At least Tice, Pochin and Farage (and Lowe and McMurdock) wore a teal rosette when they won their elections. Enough already.

It really is fascinating to look at a coloured-in map of Britain that shows just how pathetic the Conservative Party looks in 2026. London is almost entirely red for Labour, and there are chunks of yellow around Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton. It’s also very lonely for Tories in Scotland, with three MPs up in Aberdeen and four more representing the Borders, including David Mundell, who won the seat down in Dumfriesshire in 2005 and has survived Cameron, May and some others whose names history will not remember or just be deeply embarrassed by.

The Tories do far better in Essex and the South East, plus the old heartlands of Wiltshire, Devon, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, the Three Counties (Herts, Beds and Bucks) and the posh bits of Yorkshire. Witness the type of MP who kept their seat in 2024. They were usually a big beast who had served in one or more Conservative cabinets, and among their number are Karen Bradley, Gavin Williamson, Jeremy Hunt and the man formerly known as Lame Duck Billionaire, Rishi Sunak, who rarely shows his face in This Place these days and is more interested in writing for the Sunday Times, working for an AI company and representing the people of Richmond. He is one of only five Tory MPs with a majority of over 10,000.

For fact fans, the other four belong to the new Chancellor Andrew Griffith, the new Shadow Foreign Sec Tom Tugendhat, the lovely Alicia Kearns and Harrow East’s very own Bob Blackman. LOTO’s majority is a very slim 2610, not much more than the one held by Shadow Home Sec Chris ‘The Philpster’ Philp. Even Jesse Norman, the wisest owl in opposition and author of very chewy books (and husband of the great Kate Bingham from Covid), barely scraped 1000, with Jeremy Hunt winning by a nose with 891 and Sir Mel Stride by a toenail with 61.

As for Ric Holden, who shuffled from Durham to Basildon and Billericay, he won by 20 votes, which represents 0.04% of the electorate, and that is still not the smallest margin in This Place (that belongs to a man we shall discuss next week, David Pinto-Duschinsky). What good luck that Holden’s partner is Kate Ferguson, the political editor of the Sun on Sunday and owner of the lobby’s finest diastema. I am sure they both prefer Essex to Durham, given that Ferguson works in Whitehall and writes, I imagine, for the super soaraway Sun reader who also loves the music of Depeche Mode (from Basildon) or Ian Dury, writer of the song Billericay Dickie.

Then there’s Esther McVey in Tatton, with a comparatively enormous majority of 1136. Tatton is the constituency whose voters, aside from a brief flirtation with independent MP Martin Bell, elected Neil Hamilton and Austerity Osborne. One of them has disappeared from public life; the other is Neil Hamilton (haha just kidding, Baron Osborne and your VIP Palantir friends who got a preview of the Bayeux Tapestry). McVey, meanwhile, presented on SovereignTV until 2023, since when she has devoted all of her time to the people of Tatton.

Aphra Brandreth is the Conservative MP for Chester South and Eddisbury, keeping the seat by 3000 votes after it was gifted to her by Edward Timpson, brother of Baron James and scion of the great family who runs the high street keys-and-shoes business, and also (did you know) Snappy Snaps. Aphra is thus one of very few MPs in her part of the world who aren’t Labour. The people of Runcorn and Helsby, which neighbours Chester South, is represented by (I choose my words carefully) the lovely Sarah Pochin, who won a majority of 14,700 to become the Bendelo Party’s token woman (Suella Braverman has since become the token former Home Secretary).

Aphra appeared on Any Questions the other week when it landed in Bury, not far from her seat. She thus could be heard on the station where her dad Gyles appears to speak without hesitation, repetition or deviation on the comedy slot. I asked Aphra in the tearoom yesterday, after commending her performance, to tell me the truth about her dad, whom Private Eye have branded Brandeath, grim reaper to the stars. She laughed politely and said she would keep him away from David Attenborough. I asked her if Vish could give someone in her office a copy of Breaking The Code to sign, her dad’s unexpurgated diaries of his time as a Tory Whip and MP for Chester in the 1990s; it is, he would surely quote Oscar Wilde as saying, full of sensational things to read on the train.

Gyles B lost his seat when, as he writes, ‘they didn’t want us anymore’; out with two decades of Thatcher and Major, in with a man with a Bambiesque smile who was to turn 44. In 2024, Aphra was one of only 26 new Tory MPs; must be those jumpers wot won it. I was in the chamber for her maiden speech two years ago, since when she has been part of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (chaired by Dame Emily Thornberry) and has sought to improve the broadband service in the North-West. She also presented a bill asking for food to be better labelled with their country of origin, which will not be debated for another six months: it will make clear that food grown, rather than assembled, here will be called Beautiful British Food.

Aside from her time in This Place, Aphra’s career has gone in a completely different direction from her dad’s, and indeed her brother’s; Benet is a former World Public Speaking Champion and author of books on Shakespeare. Her house must have been very loud growing up, and full of famous faces; Gyles, a Scrabble nut who has written books on A.A. Milne, the Royal Family and Scrabble, doesn’t so much drop names as cause the earth to shake with them. His daughter did Economics at UCL and worked for a decade for DEFRA before joining her husband in the family vet business. She also owns two tortoises, which lumber around telling anecdotes about Her Majesty the late Queen and popping up on Radio 4.

Aphra got her campaigning experience in the Boris Election of 2019, when she gracefully lost to Sir Ed Davey in Kingston but still won 20,000 votes. How many people were voting for her surname, I wonder. I also wonder if she took Gyles’ advice that there are two kinds of people in politics: ‘people with problems and people who are right’. Another aphorism towards the end of the diary is that ‘nobody really knows anything’ in This Place, which I should put on my office wall.

Aphra reminded me that she and Gyles have worked together, even as she represented the people of Chester South. Between 2022-25, the Commonwealth Poetry Podcast celebrated the fine works of verse from across the realm we used to call Empire. To celebrate this sceptered isle’s verse, Her Majesty Queen Camilla (clang!) was a guest, with poems by English writers read by Gyles’ friend Dame Joanna Lumley (double clang!)

Gyles is such a gadfly that he now has ex-podcasts to his name. Something Rhymes With Purple, which he hosted with Countdown’s Susie Dent, was essentially dropped into the Radio 4 schedule as Unspeakable, hosted by the great and funny Phil Wang. It now lives in the slot that Just A Minute often lives, Monday night at 6.30pm; it’s on at the moment. I do sometimes try to listen to Gyles fail to repeat, hesitate or deviate on Just A Minute. ‘Has he ever managed a full hour?’ I asked Aphra, and perhaps she has a drawerful of broken stopwatches which waved a white flag after 40 minutes.

I’ve even subscribed to the Oldie magazine in order to read Gyles’ monthly diary. It appeals to my inner Victor Meldrew, which I am positive is a reference nobody younger than I am will get. I don’t believe that. One day I hope to pop up on Rosebud, Gyles’ chatty podcast, one of the best of the genre. He has so far welcomed over 200 famous people to talk about their formative experiences and childhoods. Whenever he gets a week off, he provides listeners with some of his old diaries. Truly, the man does the Lord’s work.

He sold out his Edinburgh run of, essentially, talking for an hour about his specialist subject: Gyles Brandreth. You know how Ken Dodd used to talk until they physically told him to stop, or how there was that movie They Shoot Horses Don’t They about dance marathons in a time even before wireless radio? I think, for charity or for democracy, we should see how long Gyles lasts. I bet he’d easily clear 48 hours.

The Not So Hateful Eight: Reform UK plc and Democracy

This week, our intrepid independent MP turns his gaze upon Reform UK plc, a business whose USP is division, spite and (alleged) financial enrichment

How do we solve a problem called fascism?

We went through it in the 1930s with Mosley, in the 1970s with the National Front and in the 2000s with the British National Party. Now, with even far-right sympathies an electable option in Germany, British fascism has an acceptable face: a Dulwich College schoolboy who went into the City of London before time in European politics, who got into This Place at the eighth attempt and who earns far more money through his extraparliamentary interests than he does representing Clacton.

It’s a shame that he comes to the House of Commons so infrequently, pleading (quite rightly) that his life is in danger. But some would say he brought it on himself with his rhetoric, demeanour and colleagues. Let us consider the Not At All Hateful Eight who embody Reform UK plc, whose business is rage and who would rather not clean up, or have anybody else succeed in mucking out, the mess they helped create.

I think enough has been said about the party leader, except that one man is desperate to claim that the new MP for Clacton is called Nige Al-Faraj. I can’t see it catching on, but then the term ‘suicidal empathy’ has only taken a few week to be seeded into public discourse as the latest mutation of what used to be called ‘being politically correct’ or ‘woke’; like fascism, it’s the same body in a different cloak.

Robert ‘Jenners’ Jenrick, the MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire, is the man who embodies a certain type of politician: where the wind changes, so does his stance on everything. He is a shell of a man, whom I am sure is kind and generous to his friends, but it is clear he wants to be to Farage what JD Vance is to Donald Trump. Perhaps one day he will be the acceptable face of British fascism; a lot of people are saying that, but not I!

Third in line at Reform UK plc must be Richard Tice, the MP for Boston and Skegness and a very objectionable fellow. Did you know his mum loved horses more than him? I heard it on Radio 4 once. Although you can’t send a horse to Uppingham (but you can try to make it drink!), Dicky the Tice was like Jenners a Tory in the Brexit years but, unlike Jenners, was elected to represent Reform UK plc. He is (and I must say allegedly here) a spokesman for the forces that dislike ‘Net Stupid Zero’. Yes, that is his argument; fascism doesn’t really do nuance.

Then we come to the four other former Tories who, like Jenners, were poached by Reform UK: the born again Christian Danny Kruger, son of National Treasure Prue Leith from Bake Off; Suella Braverman, who was twice Tory Home Secretary despite being deeply unqualified; Andrew Rosindell, a man who rose without trace and represents the good people of Romford in Essex; and Lee Anderson, the Ashfield MP who started out as a Labour researcher, became a Tory MP and is now the man Reform UK wheels out when Tice is in Dubai, where his partner lives.

The business/party’s token woman is Sarah Pochin, who won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in May 2025, taking over from Mike Amesbury, who hit someone while in public office, which is a no-no in a way that open fascism is a yes-yes. Ms Pochin won by six votes. Democracy!, as Count Binface of Sigma IX would say. To prove that they’re not racist, there an actual Iraqi behind the scenes in Nadhim Zahawi (albeit one who was pals with Jeffrey Archer) and Zia Yusuf, who got his start fixing stuff for rich people and is now hopelessly compromised and lashing out whenever he is near a microphone. He too wants to be the leader, but as my media adviser Em said a while ago, he thinks he’s Gaston but he’s really LeFou.

Pray silence please for James McMurdoch, tossed to the wolves and the back benches for crimes that came to light even before he became MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock. What a lucky man, with constituents in Essex AND Kent!

Aditya Chakrabortty has followed a few messiahs, and can also speak money. He wrote a comment piece recently in the Guardian that Em flagged up for me, headlined ‘Does Nigel Farage know what people really think of him? I do – and he won’t like it’.

‘You know how in football it used to be Anyone But United?’ Vish said, as he took off his cycling gear and prepared for a day of speechwriting. ‘Here it’s Anyone But Reform.’

‘Or Restore,’ Em-Dash said. ‘The writer doesn’t mention the MP for Great Yarmouth.’

‘What’s his majority?’

‘Ha! He was born on Halloween. Ah, ah, ah!! Six racists. Ah, ah ah!’

‘He’s a muppet alright, allegedly,’ I said, munching on the first croissant of the day.

‘Your answer is 1426,’ Em said. ‘Very reachable if Binface goes up against him.’

‘Does Binny want to swap Sigma IX for the Suffolk coast?’

‘Norfolk, Al.’

‘Oh Norfolk’s sake. Let me reread your summary.’

Based on research by Hope Not Hate, who asked 9000 people to tell them where they would place their vote if there were to be a snap election, there would be two cohorts in the ABFs: what the US would term Antifa and what I call Not-Jenrick.

Writes Chakrabortty: ‘A party that wants Trump-style deportation squads on British streets, to curb further the right to protest and to slash social security might still lead the next government, or at least become the official opposition. Anyone worried by that prospect needs to understand who those anti-Farage voters are and what could get them off their sofas at an election.’

These ABFs certainly include your usual graduate types who have read some Monbiot or Laurie Penny, go Green or Labour ‘and ask their baristas for exotic milks’, but the others are to the right of the hard right, especially on economics; ‘think driveways [and] tidy lawns’. Such ABFs disdain Farage and Reform UK plc because they don’t go in hard enough; racism is ‘vulgar’ rather than offensive, even though the window has moved to make racism great again. Every time a Labour politician stands in front of a flag, or has a go at white liberals while appearing on a podcast hosted by a white liberal (cf the Home Secretary talking to Matt Forde), part of democracy fades.

Chakrabortty makes two points from this poll (and while I’m on this hobbyhorse, no more of these polls to prove a biased point, especially from the Marshall-Rothermere-Murdoch Mainstream Media, of which/whom much more in a future entry):

1. ‘What works against Reform in one seat will almost certainly not work in others’ because, unlike in the devolved regions, English nationalists ‘wear red corduroys and are bankrolled by foreign billionaires while bleating on about remigration for brown and black people’;

2. ‘Opponents of Reform share with its supporters an utter abhorrence of Westminster’ and the main parties rarely try to connect with them. Independent MPs like me, of course, depend on the votes of these Anyone But Incumbents.

The PM needs more than good TikTok game, important though that is, because Reform UK plc have aced social media and are big on Facebook, which has a light-touch approach to laws and suchlike. Just because James Purnell, the guy who pioneered BBC Sounds, is in charge behind the scenes, doesn’t mean he can do better than Morgan McMandy. Chakrabortty predicts ‘a disaster, not just for Labour, but for the rest of us’ if Purnell, the PM and the rest of the administration do not rid us of this canker. A lot of Guardian writers end their pieces with variations of ‘or else the fascists get in’.

Chakrabortty is on a roll, actually. On the train into This Place today I read his most recent piece from last week, where he did some shoe-leather journalism and went to Luton to talk to employees of the now shuttered Vauxhall plant. I implore you to read the piece in its entirety, hyperlinked here, because it looks at the cause, not the symptoms, of fascism, which begets racism, sexism and plenty of other isms; from desperation, we get fascism.

‘See this from a Luton worker’s point of view,’ the reporter asked the reader. ‘The company to whom you’ve given half your life has first castigated you for not being as cheap as your Turkish counterparts, then upped and left. The union to whom you pay your subs wasn’t able to stop it going. Also impotent was the Labour government you voted for – again. Luton lost its car plant under Tony Blair, it lost its van plant under Starmer. Now you’re out of work, and…you’ve just bought a house with a hefty mortgage.’

These ex-factory workers have switched their vote to Reform UK plc, and I wonder how much attention they paid to the Verbatim investigation into where the party get their money from (clue: it’s not through the trade unions). I expect the Labour Party were paying close attention to places like Luton, which has had more reason than most to fear fascism, what with the large Muslim population and, as Chakrabortty reminds us, being the town that brought us Andrew Tate and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. It should worry the government that these men, admittedly a tiny sample size of five, believe that all the workers have left the UK and taken their skills with them.

‘The economic models these guys discuss now are Donald Trump’s protectionism and Beijing’s historic public investment. European social democracy doesn’t rate a mention. “The system of capitalism is dying because people are seeing it’s not worked,”’ says one of the men. The quintet are pictured as the kind of honest men who toil in the engine room of our great nation. But Luton is struggling: even the town’s football team have been relegated twice in the last three seasons, having risen all the way to the Premier League after falling into non-league 15 years ago. They get a new stadium soon, which should be a boon to local industries, not least the airport, which helps transport people away from Luton.

While Reform UK plc took over Birmingham for Faragestock, its famous son Joe Lycett was live on Channel 4, the very broadcaster who screened the Verbatim investigation. On Friday night, he was Live From The Lycett Arms in East London, bringing back the spirit of TFI Friday, which itself is back as a Youtube show because all culture is nostalgia now. Incredibly, Em knows someone who knows someone who knows Lycett, and that somebody sorted her out with a pass to the show.

Lycett, who upstaged Liz Truss in 2022 by whooping and hollering as the poor thing was interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg, no longer seems welcome on the BBC, but he would never enjoy the straitjacket of due impartiality. His comedy is fuelled by anger, and he has on his face the same great silly grin that the old satirists did in the 1960s; one of those satirists was Alan Bennett, and that is probably the first time Bennett and Lycett have been put in the same sentence. Channel 4 was made for Lycett, whom Em calls ‘the yummy Brummie mummy’.

The man promised 'an unmissable anarchic hour of comedy, mischief and celebrity pub chat’, all in the best POSSIBLE taste; so he’s Kenny Everett too. I did tune in to see if Em was part of the show, but she wisely told me afterwards that she stayed hidden and asked the production team to, if at all possible, look for other people in the crowd to contribute to the skits and sketches. They made her go on her hands and knees so that Lycett could tell his guests not to worry, it was just a pub crawl.

Sara Cox, herself no stranger to zoo TV and now entrusted with the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, was the celeb manning the bar this week, with appearances from Guz Khan aka Man Like Mobeen and Marc Silcox, whose comedy is an acquired taste I am yet to acquire. This is the Britain that some have called Silly Sausage Britain. Most people would rather listen to Lycett than Reform UK plc; his 2022 stunt of shredding a vast amount of money was revealed to be a satirical attack on David Beckham, who seemingly (allegedly, I must add) says yes even before he knows which company is offering him a million dollars this week.

I asked Vish what companies Beckham sponsors or once sponsored, and he came back with this list: Pepsi, McDonalds, Stella Artois, Home Depot, Verizon, Bank of America, Lenovo, Nespresso, Emporio Armani, Gilette, Disneyland, EA Sports and, of course, Adidas. And Manchester United, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Paris St-Germain and the LA Galaxy, who all employed him to do his actual job of bending a football. Plus Inter Miami, which the folks who run American soccer gifted him and which is responsible for the twilight of Lionel Messi’s career.

Beckham prefers Walkers crisps and perfume, while Nigel Farage promotes bitcoin, gold bullion and fascism. And here’s where I come into it: I know that, when my constituents go to the polls to re-elect me or cast me out, many of them will vote with their heads. They will have watched the debates, heard the local radio appearances and read the manifestos, choosing where to place the X that defines parliamentary democracy in Britain. Many, however, will vote with their hearts. Which party has the most passion, the most volume, the most kudos, the nicest haircut, the ability to stand in a queue to pay their respects to Her Majesty? And what about that nice man who is fighting the establishment, even though his part is an establishment party bankrolled by billionaires?

David Beckham is now Sir David; Nigel Farage is plain old Nigel, and it appears he will not be in his post much longer. As Bob Dylan once sang, how many financial investigations must a man be under before you can end his career? The answer, my friend, should be one, but the genus Nigellus Faragius of the Fascist species is a reptilian creature who is covered in slime, ie. cryptocurrency millions. Rollcall: George Cottrell and his mum Fiona, Ben Delo who was pardoned by the US President, the Thai-based squillionaire Christopher Harborne who wants absolutely nothing in return for a £5m donation to Farage’s security. Or a Brexit bonus. Or a way to (allegedly) influence crypto policy.

Enough already. I think my constituents, if this weekend’s coffee shop surgery told me anything, are in two camps: some of them take his lead and call all of this an establishment smear that doesn’t stop the boats, while others are just fed up with how economical they are being with the truth. ‘I wasn’t listening’ is just about the least worst thing Mr Farage could have said after his policy director and de facto chief of staff, who are not ‘contractors’, were suspended or expelled. They couldn’t even get the story straight on Friday: Anderson said they were gone, Tice said there was an investigation, while Orr and Jukes, tossed overboard like so many other pieces of flotsam on the Good Ship Farage, couldn’t say a thing because it might upset the Great and Powerful Nigel.

That’s where we are: he is the Wizard of Clacton finally being revealed, after many millions of words, to be a puny little weasel, sticking to a fascist script that stopped being funny when Count Binface became the hero of an unnecessary by-election. I have received so many messages since Thursday night more or less ordering me to call the man a liar and a fraud. I think we should wait for this investigation to proceed, but I take their point. Maybe Joe Lycett should say something on his show, or turn him into a caricature.

Reform UK plc are an unserious organisation masquerading as anti-establishment; need I tell you that I twigged in 2023 that they were the Anti Elite Party (That Were Actually Elite). If you’re not establishment, why is your leader a member of Mayfair gentlemen’s clubs? Why do you contain five MPs who were literally Conservatives in the rump government of Sunak the Lame Duck? Why do you take money from billionaires? Why does a multimillionaire hedge fund manager, who also owns the Tory house magazine The Spectator, sink millions of pounds into a TV station with News in its name that exists as entertainment to promote fascist viewpoints to an audience who don’t like impartiality?

And yet Mr Farage and his party will keep claiming victimhood, will harp on that the system is rigged, will call everything a smear or a hoax; anything to keep SovereignTV viewers and conference attendees in a state of fear and anger. ‘Look at our MoU for the boats which are clearly being stopped! Don’t look at our finances, look at the migrants! Is that a dead cat in your pocket or do you just like my retail offering?’

Enough already, as one of the old codgers yelled at a cloud after I spoke to him at the coffee shop. I’m actually most angry at the Conservative Party. Whoever it was who said that there were far-right sympathies in the 1970s (the National Front) and the 2000s (the British National Party) whenever a gap emerges on the right of British politics needs to get themselves to The Rest Is Politics. This is all becoming even more of a farce than it already was. It will take a team effort, from members of This Place, from the client journalists who just follow the orders of their owners, and from the British public, who need to lobby their MP to call out these fabrications and bring an end to this era of British politics.

Far from being silly sausages, Reform UK plc are meat on the turn, with visible mould spores sprouting from it. And you know what you do with rotten meat: you toss it in the bin(face).

September 1 2026: New Term, Same Al

The 650 Members of Parliament trundle back to This Place today. Among them is Simon Alexander, one of the dozen independent MPs who will be writing a weekly diary throughout the 2026/27 term

Hello there. Welcome back to This Place, a diary of an independent MP. I’m Simon Alexander, though please call me Al. That’s A for Apple, L for Lexus, because it looks like AI (A for Apple, I for Indigo) on the page. “Do you love AI? I love AI.” So says Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, who used to be famous. Expect some AI chatter during the next few months; I’ve plotted out a series of posts, and I promise I won’t get Claude or anyone else to write them!

When I wrote my first piece in advance of the 2023/24 term, Rishi Sunak was the Prime Minister, the Lame Duck Billionaire whom I was sure was going to fly off to California. To his credit, he stayed in Richmond, West Yorkshire, with his massive majority of 12,000; unlike his two predecessors, he is still a sitting MP and intervenes in debates in the chamber, an ordinary mortal without a ministerial car or an impossible in-tray to manage. In fact, his predecessor but seven, Gordon Brown, has just put out another one of his Here’s What I Would Do books, which he will be plugging on BBC Radio 4 next week; this one’s about ‘how global instability and civic decline are connected’. On an unrelated note, Mr Sunak is more interested in AI, what with his sinecure at Anthropic.

Back in September 2023, I began the diary with the following statement, which I repeat three years to the day later: ‘Without fear or favour…I aim to cut through the thickets of noise and fury, introduce you to some friends and foes, guide you through the mazy corridors of power and slaughter the most sacred of cows.’

I also mentioned the council leader Alex Berrygrove, who is still in post, budgeting away, trying to fill in the potholes and keep the library open; he’s got a podcast now too! In terms of priorities, for me at least constituents come first and parliament comes second. Older readers may know that I never attend Prime Minister’s Questions at noon on Wednesday, because pantomime should be enjoyed once a year at Christmas and not in a packed chamber when everything is for show anyway. I prefer to hang out with Vish and Em in the office, wearing party hats and joining in with the booing.

Yes, my policy and media adviser are back, and this time it’s a different Em. Vish thought it was shrewd of me to hire a media spad with the same name as my old one, for continuity’s sake, but really Em-Dash, as I call her, was the best candidate and she had also flattered me by quoting from the blog. Yes, I can conclude that flattery will get you everywhere, and by ‘everywhere’ I mean This Place.

In my spare time I enjoy attending the APPGs, the all-party parliamentary groups that act as societies for MPs to relax, socialise and talk to interesting people. If you need an alternative to a sleeping pill, I suggest the 900-page document on the Parliament website that lists all members of all APPGs. Your humble diarist is still involved in several: Antisemitism, Classical Music, Jazz, and Political and Media Literacy. My pet subject of Oracy no longer has its own APPG, and nor does American Football, although I still hope to attend a Superbowl Party on February 14, with all the other bachelors.

In lieu of this I’ve joined the Women’s Football group, and hope to get along to a few England games when I can in advance of the 2027 Women’s World Cup, which the USA will win because they have an English coach in Emma Hayes. I have also joined Chris Evans, author of a couple of books on football, on the Writers APPG, which also boasts as a member Pete Wishart, the man from Big Country and Runrig.

Pete survived the cull of SNPers in the 2024 General Election to become the longest serving party member in Westminster: there were 56 just after the 2014 Independence Referendum; now there are only eight, thanks in part to the activity of the husband of the woman Private Eye magazine have imprinted on my mind as the ‘wee lookalike Krankie’. In fact, poor Pete is the last man standing from the group MP4, although Kevin Brennan has gone to the Other Place and is still kicking around on the estate fighting for songwriters like him (indeed, he’s up on Thursday at a committee meeting to talk about his fan-led review of British music).

Lord Berkeley is also there, whenever he isn’t recording episodes of Private Passions, appointment listening at noon on Sundays on Radio 3. He is still part of the Classical Music crew, as befits Benjamin Britten’s godson, although we miss the boy William Wragg, whom I periodically check in on after he left public life in 2024. We’re all Promming next week, heading to see and hear Mahler’s Ninth Symphony played by the Mahler Academy Orchestra. If you’ve missed any Proms from the 2026 season, I recommend the Marvin Gaye one which I attended last month. Wowee.

I have on my desk an application for the Compassion in Politics APPG, which aims to ‘promote compassion, empathy and integrity’ in This Place and is spearheaded, naturally, by the sister of the late Jo Cox, whom we lost ten years ago this June. Kim Leadbeater has been busy during this administration trying to move the needle on the assisted dying debate, which is a noble thing to do. Lauren Edwards is having another go this year, with Second Reading this month for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is all getting very Jarndyce v Jarndyce, in that it seems to be going on forever with no sense of an ending, which my writer colleagues would point out is ironic in the extreme.

Other debates to look forward to include bills from two Tory doctors: Neil Shastri-Hurst is keen for schoolkids to learn Emergency and Lifesaving Skills, while Dr Luke Evans, aka Dr Hunk, will bring forward a bill early next year to prevent relationships between first cousins, which cause all kinds of illnesses. My Writers APPG colleague Sir John Whittingdale will be coming in hot with the SLAPP Bill in November, while his fellow Tory survivor Victoria Atkins aka Vicky the A, the former Health Secretary, is going to be counting on my vote to allow legislation to build solar panels on farmland. She is a keen supporter, either politically or actually, of British farmers.

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Right, so now that the newbies are up to speed, let’s look at some potential storylines for the 2026/27 Parliamentary term, starting with Burnley; not the old mill town, but the Andy Burnham-John Healey axis which is the latest twist on the PM-Chancellor dynamic. It’s hardly Blair and Brown, or Thatcher and Nigella Lawson’s dad, but it seems notable that after two years of Rachel Reeves, who worked at the Bank of England, Burnham has picked his fellow Northerner Healey, who got his start interviewing journalists for the house magazine (called The House).

The MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough in South Yorkshire (majority: 7000) was very vocal in his dismay for the Starmer administration, resigning his role as Defence Secretary and kicking off the beginning of the end. I hope he rises to the role of being in charge of the economy, or at least as ‘in charge of the economy’ as you can be when world leaders are chucking tariffs out of the pram. B-Day aka Budget Day is at the end of October, so there’s only two months of build-up to the biggest day for what the comedian Al Murray calls ‘Reckonomics’.

Prisons and the police never sleep, which means that between them the Justice Secretary Alex Norris (Nottingham North and Kimberley, majority 9400) and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will have plenty of sleepless nights and brickbats in the coming months. Ms Mahmood has a surprisingly low majority of 3500 in the Birmingham Ladywood seat that was handed to her upon the retirement of the great Clare Short in 2010. Now there’s a big beast, although you never hear from her these days despite her accumulated knowledge from her time as International Development Secretary.

Ms Short infamously resigned her cabinet post over the Iraq War and left the Labour Party, which means I sit in the exact seat that, as an independent MP, she sat in during the Gordon Brown years. I do wonder what she makes of it all, when the party has squandered the goodwill from the 2024 vote, and has been trying to (I will choose my words carefully because they are litigious folk) mollify the Reform UK members who sit in front of me, carping from inside the tent rather than on SovereignTV and the Telegraph comment pages. I’ll deal with the Not So Hateful Eight next time, as I have much to say about the band of merrie men and, to their credit, two women.

Who’s next? Ah, Dr Cooper will see you now, the career politician and wife of a podcaster. She is now in charge of health and social care, and good ruddy luck to her. And watch out for the next social media superstar Ed Miliband, who as Foreign Secretary will get lots of digital stamps in his passport and represent Britain on the world stage whenever the PM is too busy up North. Miliband vs The World should take him to Syria, Ukraine and New York City, where his brother and former Foreign Sec David lives and works, in his role as head of the International Rescue Committee.

The woman who has taken Ted’s seat in the cabinet round table is Lady Miatta Fahnbulleh, a think-tank veteran whom I tipped for a parliamentary seat in one of my Wednesday round-ups of potential MPs back in 2023/24. Dame Harriet Harman gifted her the Peckham seat, where the winning MP’s majority was 15,000. Ms Fahnbulleh, who was born in Liberia and has a degree in PPE from Oxford and a PhD from the LSE (come on now, that’s just showing off!), is the only black woman in cabinet. She follows in the enormous footsteps of Auntie Diane Abbott, the first black woman to sit in This Place who is (for now) back in the Labour fold.

Auntie D is also the Mother of the House, having been MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (majority also 15,000) since 1987, when Rick Astley was having his first hits. A subplot of this administration is how, when and how much the M of the H will criticise the government, because people still listen when she speaks. Very. Very. Slowly. You could operate on people’s hearts in the time it takes her to finish an intervention.

Lady Miatta is in charge of Energy and the Planet, so she has quite a broad brief. Lucy Powell is now in charge of schools, and a few weeks ago she straight-batted questions about the Jason Arday tragedy (which some have called a lynching) on the Today programme. Ms Powell is the MP for Manchester Central (majority: 14,000), one of the starriest constituencies in the UK and, of course, home to Number 10 North, where the PM will be working three days a week because he is loved anywhere that has a North-West postcode. This is Burnham country, and he is master of his domain.

In the Irony Department, Angela Rayner is in charge of housing and local government, with her loyal deputy Matthew Pennycook still looking after the housing brief as we approach the ten-year anniversary of the Grenfell Tower inferno. I give Ms Rayner a year before something happens to end her political career, which is already in extra time; nice lady, though, and she will certainly inspire the next generation of self-proclaimed ‘gobby’ women.

As for Lisa Nandy, the PM’s less gobby mate from Wigan, she is of course still in Culture, given that in 2027 the BBC Charter is up for renewal. As well as the NHS and HRH (the Royal Family), the BBC is the third great three-letter acronym in Britain. God help us if David Attenborough, who must have received a gold-embossed 100th birthday card from his friend the King, goes the way of Dolly Parton this session. We will not see his like again; he invented televised snooker, you know.

Over at DEFRA, listening to celebrity farmers like Kaleb Cooper and his boss whose name escapes me, the PM has installed another Northern woman, Dame Angela Eagle (MP for Wallasey since 1992, PPE at Oxford, majority 18,000). We shall see if she has better luck than poor Steve Reed (MP for Croydon North, majority 15,000), who is out on his ear along with your friend and mine, Darren Jones, the boy DJ (MP for Bristol North West, majority also 15,000). Steve and DJ will be mooching around the backbenches with their pals Sir Keir and Sir Galammy, intervening when necessary on behalf of their constituents.

For the sake of completeness, David Lammy kept his Tottenham seat by 15,000 votes, while S’Keir Starmer beat all the novelty candidates to keep representing the voters of Holborn and St Pancras by 11,500. It’s the former PM’s birthday tomorrow, his first normal one since he took over the Labour Party in 2020. I’ve told Vish to send his team a picture of a weeping Ian Wright hugging his old teacher Mr Pigden; he’ll always have Arsenal, after all.

As for the regions, which are terribly important in this new era, three top blokes are going to be telling Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland what’s what. Doug Alexander (MP for Lothian East, majority 13,000), whom you might remember from such roles as Gordon Brown’s International Development Secretary, is the Scot with the Scotland brief. Steve Kinnock (MP for Aberafan Maesteg, majority 10,000) is the Welsh non-windbag deputed to liaise with Plaid Cymru’s leader Rhun ap Iorweth. Kinnock can always turn up to a meeting with his wife, the former PM of Denmark, or his dad, who led the Labour Party but lost the 1992 election.

A complete masterstroke has seen the PM appoint the great Chris Bryant for the Northern Ireland brief. Bryant, the voluble MP for the Rhondda valley (majority: 7800), deserves a cabinet position purely because he literally wrote the book on This Place. He was elected as part of the 2001 intake along with the PM, so maybe the MP for Makerfield (majority: only 9000) just wants to feel less old around the cabinet table, where the oldest members with big briefs are John Healey and Dame Angela Eagle, who were both born in the early sixties and are thus in their early sixties.

Here’s a fact for you, for free; Andy Burnham and Steve Kinnock were both born in the first week of the 1970s. Kinnock was a New Year’s Day baby, and Burnham arrived on January 7. Incredibly, Ed Miliband is a Christmas Eve 1969 baby, which means he’s a fortnight older than the PM. All three men, at 56 years old, are children of Thatcher who came of age in the 1980s, around the same time that Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne and Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson were mucking around at Oxford. Of that quartet, three have gone into newspapers since they left This Place, and the other was briefly the Foreign Secretary and now gets a seat for life in the House of Lords. What a weird place This Place, rewarding failure.

The PM spent the 1990s watching his beloved Everton FC and listening to Oasis, who brought rock’n’roll from Manchester to the world and will likely be back at Knebworth next summer; think of the freebies! The man he replaced as PM is only a few schools years older than Miliband, Kinnock and Burnham, but he seems from a different generation, and not just because he spent most of his life at the bar (the courts, not the saloon). I hope S’Keir goes back to doing case work, and I reckon he will find human rights law a jolly sight easier than explaining why his chief of staff was so keen to give Peter Mandelson a plum job. Remember the Mandy Law, which states that everyone you put in post has the potential to end your own political career, or at least send you to the backbenches.

I’ve run out of words, so in future weeks I promise to deal with today’s media environment, the rise of Count Binface and the Leader of the Opposition, to whom I don’t think I gave a name in my old columns. KemiLOTO, as in Camelot? Suggestions welcome, but keep them clean. In the meantime, I’ve got some emails to answer. There are always some emails to answer. Onwards to Inbox Zero!!

You can read Simon Alexander MP’s This Place column every Tuesday at jonnybrick.com

This Place: A Reintroduction in Advance of the 2026/27 Labour Administration

Since he was re-elected as an independent MP in July 2024, Simon Alexander has been listening to his constituents, meeting with them for coffee, supporting local events and engaging with stakeholders great and small. This is on top of his duties in the Houses of Parliament, aka ‘This Place’, where he scrutinises legislation, attends debates and talks to one of the other 649 Members.

On the launch of his weekly column, which resumes ideas he raised in his diary during the 2023/24 Parliamentary session, the man known as Al talks to Jonny Brick about the things he intends to write about every Tuesday as the new term, and new Prime Minister, begins.

Jonny Brick: Hello, Simon. Can I call you Al?

Simon ‘Al’ Alexander: Absolutely yes! I answer to anything that isn’t preceded by the word ‘oi!’

JB: That’s good to hear. How are you? It’s two years this summer since you published your diary This Place.

Al: Is it? I seem to have blinked and two years have gone past. Enjoy your youth while you still can!

JB: I’m 38, Al, the grey hairs and creaky knees are assailing me already. So, have there been any highlights of the last two years?

Al: To answer your question, by the way, I’ve been better but a whole lot worse! (laughs) I suppose it was a shame England couldn’t reach the World Cup final but it was a Pyrrhic victory, wasn’t it? It won’t ‘come home’ until we find a manager who can keep hold of a lead.

JB: Don’t give Thomas Tuchel any dogs, eh? So, at the risk of this turning into that Two Ronnies Mastermind sketch, can you name one highlight of the last 24 months, either personally or professionally?

Al: Yes, sorry. Four candles, fork handles. Sorry! To your question, to the highlights: I genuinely can’t think of too many. Maybe having a real world impact on some of my constituents’ lives, helping them sort a housing issue or get their business out in the community. It’s like crossing a desert, really, my job; you just keep going and try not to think of how hot and thirsty you are. And speaking of hot, the recent heatwaves have not been fun at all: shirt sleeves, plenty of Factor 50, hydration, and realising that quite a lot of my constituents are frightened about next summer. Winter pressures are bad enough, but I agree with some of the health and care workers who are not looking forward to summer 2027.

JB: You mention healthcare, Al. We’ve got a new Health Secretary in Yvette Cooper…

Al: And I wish her well. The first Labour mum to get the job in a generation, I think. My Policy Advisor Vish dug up that factoid, although he did point out that the Conservatives had put Victoria Atkins in post during my year writing my diary.

JB: Vicky the A, you called her.

Al: Yes, Vicky the A, friends with Bob Jenrick. Did you see that TV interview where they both appeared and Ms Atkins said it was practically the first time they had been in the same room since Jenners defected to Reform UK.

JB: Dare I ask what you think of that party and their leader?

Al: Oh, it doesn’t matter what I think of the Hateful Eight, parentheses Not Hateful for Legal Reasons. My Media Advisor Em – who is actually a different Em from the one I had working for me in 2023 and 2024, which is why I call her Em-Dash – Em-Dash wants to call him Nige Al-Faraj, because you can’t tell the difference when you say it aloud.

JB: How droll. And do you still boycott Prime Minister’s Questions?

Al: Is the Pope Catholic?

JB: (pause) I think I can translate that. I hear Kemi Badenoch, who beat Jenrick to the role of Leader of the Opposition, is enlisting her predecessors to help her.

Al: And this has worked, although when you are asking Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron for help, you really need to find a new oar and a new boat (laughs).

JB: Understood. Before we turn to the government, what about the Lib Dems?

Al: That is actually their official name on the ballot paper: What About The Lib Dems. They’ve got six dozen MPs, and Ed Davey wrote that book on care which is outstanding, but nobody will vote for them after the coalition compromises. And as for Nick Clegg, swaggering back into public life over here after working for Facebook, give me a break. Almost as bad as when Tony Blair writes an essay to cajole his old party into action.

JB: And the Greens?

Al: Not an electoral force, and the leader is a bit of a curiosity. I like the Gorton and Denton MP, though, a real person in a sea of former researchers and career lickspittles.

JB: Well, that leads me neatly, as if you had planned it, to the Prime Minister.

Al: Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Burnham. Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub! Fool me seven times, shame on me.

JB: So you’re not a fan.

Al: Oh I am. I thought he did brilliantly to support the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, and he is a genuine fan of football, indie music and localism. I just don’t like that he wrote a book with Steve Rotheram, his fellow mayor in Liverpool, where he basically said that Westminster was a stuck record and it was all ’appening int’ North. We shall see if this new Number 10 at Coronation Street can help rejuvenate the country, or if the civil service will stymie him, like they always do.

JB: I sense a great degree of pessimism.

Al: Well, we have to eat the pudding first, although he’s got about six months to bed in. I think he’s still in pre-season, touring the country, literally putting out fires, responding to events beyond his control like that dreadful suicide of Professor Arday. Complete lynching, it would seem to the reasonable person.

JB: That’s a very serious charge to levy on the press.

Al: Certain writers, and they know who and what they are and who pays them, are deeply compromised now. If they need to be sacrificed for the good of the media, so be it, but I think this phrase ‘suicidal empathy’ needs to be retired quickly. Last thing I heard, empathy was what gave Andy Burnham the party leadership.

JB: Parliament goes back next Tuesday, September 1. That marks three years exactly since you started what was a daily diary.

Al: Yes, still available on Amazon and at the Wordpress site.

JB: I am surprised you didn’t want to start a podcast.

Al: Nobody needs another podcast.

JB: Did you keep writing during the last two years?

Al: When I had the time. The new administration kept me on my toes, though, with all the debates that were always going to pass because of their sizeable majority. I realised pretty early on in the term that it was going to be more useful to shake as many hands and kiss as many babies as I could for that first year. Whenever I sat down to write, the phrase I kept coming back to was ‘could do better’.

JB: Can you give some examples of where they went wrong, in your view, for Sir Keir Starmer?

Al: Who? (laughs) I bet he’ll pop up on some Arsenal fan podcasts, or maybe Starmer at the Bar. I wish him well too, and I hope to run into him in Portcullis House soon. To answer your question: he took a big risk with Rachel Reeves, the first female occupant of number 11 Downing Street. The whole Rachel from Accounts meme was unsavoury, as was some of the targeting of Angela Rayner. But as with Chris Pincher and Boris Johnson, proximity to harm did him in. The Mandelson Rule will apply for every appointment now: Will this person one day force me to resign?

JB: That reminds me, Al: you called David Lammy and Wes Streeting…

Al: Sir Gawes, now in charge of the armed forces, and Sir Galammy, backbench MP for the Spurs. If Streeting botches defence as much as he botched health, he’ll never be PM. And as for Ed Miliband, I bet his heart leapt when the PM told him that he was coming off the Net Zero brief and moving on to the Middle East, Ukraine and the USA.

JB: Yes, did you agree with the PM’s appointments last month, away from the square (that is, Health, Home and Chancellor)?

Al: I’m trying to make Burnley happen: Burnham and Healey, you see. You seem about as convinced as Em-Dash. Rayner won’t be there long, because the usual suspects will turn their fire on her. I am sure the Home Secretary will continue to get a kicking too, then there’ll be more mud thrown at Bridget Phillipson, the Mackem with the Equality brief.

JB: Mm, she made an intervention last week saying the country was racist and sexist.

Al: And good on her. Especially after Southport, which really was quite horrific, and those riots that some want to pin on certain politicians, whom I cannot name for legal reasons. I might have to tackle race, or crime, or the legitimate concerns about immigration. It still comes up on the doorstep, because fear is always a motivator and some people want to monetise it. It’s pretty much the Daily Mail’s business model, when they aren’t comparing the Duchess of Sussex and the Princess of Wales.

JB: Before I let you go, I did want to ask what your priorities will be for this column. You have just mentioned race and immigration, and there are some massive issues that will never not be in a PM’s in-tray: defence, foreign aid, social care, winter pressure on the NHS, the climate emergency, schools standards, economic policy, universities, artificial intelligence, public funding for the arts…

Al: And a partridge in a pear tree. I think something that helped me when I was writing the diary was being aware of what was going on in the committee rooms, in the chamber, in the comment pages of the newspapers. It’s easy to get stuck on problems, in the weeds, but I felt that zooming out was always useful. How will this clause have a real world effect, and which constituent will this new law help?

JB: Plus you’re in several All-Party Parliamentary Groups.

Al: Yes, in whatever spare time I have. As to your question about priorities, whatever is on my mind that fills the word count, you can expect me to write about it. It might be the threat of fascism, or the BBC Charter Renewal, or potholes and bins, or the old standby of statues and symbols. On a very bad week, I’ll have to look at what SovereignTV is saying, especially because the MP for Clacton might be back there by Christmas. It’ll all be over by Christmas.

JB: And so that brings me to my final question: are you, or any of your colleagues in This Place, scared of Count Binface?

Al: I encourage all challengers, whether from the traditional parties or aliens from Sigma IX. My majority isn’t the biggest, but at least it isn’t in the double digits like some members. It’ll be an interesting term, and I cannot wait to write about it. I might even ask Binny to help me draft a Private Members’ Bill about nationalising Adele, or take him doorknocking with me. What a wonderful democracy we are, by the way, for a man with a bin on his head – I mean, an intergalactic space warrior – to stand for election. Long may Binface reign.

You can read Simon Alexander MP’s This Place column every Tuesday at jonnybrick.com

Bad Apples or Impossible Orchards?

It’s hard to remember the decent people doing jobs in an often rotten world

A few years ago, I came up with a catchphrase that I would type underneath articles on the website of The Times newspaper: ‘Does anything in this country work?’ It appears thousands of others think the same way and voted accordingly at last year’s General Election to change things (results still pending). Let us consider institutions which have lost the trust of the people, and which form a numbing series of case studies.

Parliament relies on probity, as outlined by the seven Nolan principles of people in public life which include integrity, accountability and openness. The scandal over MP expense accounts, which precipitated reform that was much needed, is remembered for claims for duck ponds and moat cleaning, only because they made the most outrageous headlines. Far more prosaically, it was really about abusing the privilege of owning two homes – one in London, one in the MP’s constituency – and giving the appearance that elected officials were gaming the system and taking the electorate for fools.

They still are: contracts for PPE going to friends; peerages for favourable editors and businessmen; and questions in parliament on behalf of lobby and special interest groups. Independent news sites and campaigners attempt to hold them to account, funded by interested readers, while other magazines become mouthpieces and organs that do political parties’ dirty work or help them run ideas up the proverbial flagpole. Nothing can be done except to shine sunlight upon them, although the reputation of print media is still lower than it ought to be after years of hacking phones to find stories.

Every few weeks, someone writes a piece about how the Royal Family benefit from tax exemptions or gifts, but one of the definitive images of the fall of the House of Windsor comes from the BBC’s interview with Prince Andrew. He had to pay a large amount of money to a victim of his friend Jeffrey Epstein, a man whose connections to the great and good helped him operate a global sex trafficking enterprise. For all the philanthropy among the rich and powerful, the bad tales dominate.

The BBC themselves have an annual bout of handwringing about their most visible talent, whether it involves Jimmy Savile, Martin Bashir or Huw Edwards. It is clear that allowing Edwards to keep the money he earned while on leave from his job, that of commentator of royal events and most famous utterer of ‘good evening’ before the day’s headlines, is unfair, especially on the thousands of unseen, unheard employees who must defend the actions of a famous few.

Stuart Maconie’s book The Nanny State Made Me, which I read over the Bank Holiday weekend, ends with a defence of the Corporation, which nonetheless has a problem with class even if it has done well to focus on closing the gender and ethnicity gaps. In advance of another charter renewal, they have asked their audience to fill out a Your BBC survey, which will likely conclude that they should focus on what they do best: impartial news coverage and universally beloved entertainment franchises which attract family audiences in a fractured media market.

Each sector of British society has its ups and downs, with the focus mainly on the latter when it comes to judging its reputation. The church feeds the poor but covered up child abuse which made the Archbishop a martyr. The banking sector brings global finance to Canary Wharf but also overreached itself in the late 2000s, which led to the billion-pound bailout because it was too big to fail. The charity sector helps those in need around the world but also, as Oxfam did in Haiti, commits crimes of a sexual nature that preys on the victim.

Town centres sparkle with shopping emporia but fill their shops with clothes made in sweatshops by workers who are unfairly remunerated; shamefully, some factories are in Britain too, pumping out cheap fashion as the market permits. Ethical fashion, like ethical food shopping, is an admirable lifestyle choice. The esteem in which Harrods is held plummeted with the recent news of Mohammed Fayed’s treatment of staff, and even though it was sold on a long time ago the brand has lost some of its lustre.

Fayed used to own Fulham FC, and the football industry is a weathervane for social issues, be it racial or pertaining to ownership. The national pastime has an outsized influence on the news, and each week brings stories about abuse towards players or referees, or fans enduring terrible owners who are taking out of a club far more than they are putting in, although there are plenty of pleasing stories concerning their social impact; to name just one club, Port Vale.

This June, Glastonbury will once again demonstrate the life-affirming power of live music, but the industry’s biggest figures, from Michael Jackson to R Kelly to the man formerly known as Puff Daddy, have abused their power and, significantly, have been allowed to do so by willing enablers who looked the other way while the money was rolling in. As with Jimmy Savile, it may be that Diddy’s crimes outweigh the man’s achievements, but we are constantly reviewing the past and ignoring the present.

How can songwriters make a living in an era of streaming, or how can a new band come up in an environment where so many music venues have been forced to close through gentrification or high running costs? Record labels have so much catalogue to market that it makes launching a new act harder than ever, but Bruce Springsteen won’t be around to play stadiums forever. Thank goodness for Sam Fender, set to play them this summer, whose writing touches on social issues even if he will never write about the Saudi Arabian ownership of his beloved Newcastle United.

There’s more. The construction company Carillion went bust in 2018, months after the Grenfell Tower went up in flames thanks to its shoddy cladding. South West Trains has just been taken back into public ownership as part of a Great British Railways. It may be that water companies follow them, given the extraordinary debts some of them have been allowed to accrue to pay shareholders their dividends while sewage is dumped into rivers and sites of natural beauty. Stuart Maconie’s book comes back to the year 1979, when the Conservative government allowed the free market to dictate how the economy ran, as opposed to the postwar state-centric enthusiasms of 1945.

And I have yet to touch upon the now completed inquiries into the Horizon and the Contaminated Blood affairs, as victims wait for the justice they were promised. Or how the Metropolitan Police and the NHS, like the BBC, deal with so many bad apples that one may think the entire orchard is spoiled.

This procession of bad news, like a Generation Game conveyor belt, might be depressing, or it might serve as a reminder to make the world as good a place as it can possibly be. It is so easy to collapse into a slough of despond, a pit of despair, especially when everything costs more and TV pictures from faraway conflicts seem impossible to resolve. It starts, however, with your own doorstep, and to remember community and belonging can counter the wickedness of individuals, corporations or politics.

An Evening with the Gallaghers

As I prepare to perform the music of Liam and Noel, I wonder why they still matter to people

Tomorrow night (May 22), I’ll be performing the songs of Noel and Liam Gallagher to what I hope is a crowd in double figures at the Caxton Arms down in Brighton. I have been assured that the landlord is a big Oasis fan, while the fact that fans of the football team use it as a base might attract some of them to kickstart their late May Bank Holiday weekend early.

This is the sixth show I’ve put together that combines factoids, quotations and, significantly, the one time in the year where I perform onstage. In 2018 it was country music, followed from 2021 onwards by Bob Dylan, Garth Brooks, George Michael and Robbie Williams. Having initially thought about doing Elton John for 2025, when Oasis reformed last August it made the decision easy, and I quickly wrote an essay which I made available online here.

Having chopped it down to seven sides of A4, I have spent the last month learning my cues and hoping that they stick in the mind. Fortunately I’ll have a setlist listing the montages and a keyword that follows them, prompting a critic’s words about their ‘unfettered everyday blokeishness’ or how Liam once compared the band to a Ferrari which will ‘spin out of control if it goes too fast’.

The story of the Gallaghers isn’t particularly deep or meaningful. Its soundtrack really only comprises two dozen copyrights written and recorded between 1993 and 1995, songs which dominated the band’s set even as they ended their first life in 2009, with only the brothers remaining from the original lineup. Noel called the debut album Definitely Maybe ‘the last great punk album’, and he ranks his band within a notional seven or eight bands who are spoken of as definitive British acts.

I am positive a music magazine or website has already plotted out just such a ‘where to put Oasis’ list. The band are heritage rock now, just as the music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones was classic back in 1994. Live Forever and Champagne Supernova can fit alongside Satisfaction and Yesterday, Wonderwall next to Lola or My Generation. Oasis covered that song by The Who, aware of the lineage in which they were operating; Pete Townshend bucked the apathy shown towards (What’s The Story) Morning Glory by praising Liam’s voice as ‘our voice…everyone’s’.

Noel used Paul Weller as his musical model: even though both men are now making interesting albums that take their longtime fans with them, they know that people will show up to hear those classic hits, often done in different musical settings. Noel often plays the slower version of Wonderwall which he took from Ryan Adams, although if he really wanted to mess around with his work he would go for the loungecore cover that Mike Flowers Pop almost took to number one. This was the time when Oasis sold albums and two TV actors, Robson and Jerome, sold millions of singles.

Nobody listens to their schmaltzy cover of Unchained Melody today, because it was product that capitalised on their TV fame. Oasis were big on TV too, in a time before wireless internet access; in one week in 1994, they were on the covers of three magazines, only two of which were dedicated to music. The following year saw them make their US debut on The Tonight Show, at a time when American kids were being presented with dozens of acts that sounded like Nirvana. Noel wrote Live Forever, one of his greatest copyrights, in response to those alternative rock acts.

Otherwise his goal was to rid the world of ‘junk food music’ like Phil Collins and Sting. Dave Grohl, the Nirvana drummer whose band Foo Fighters have been playing stadiums for three decades, once said his band was trying to do similar, with Wilson Phillips the opposition. In perhaps the most interesting thing he has said about his songwriting, Noel argues that his songs should say more to the listener about themselves and their lives than they do about his own life; if he writes a lyric that is too personal, he is liable to take it out.

During the show, I will linger on certain lyrics that offer pearls of wisdom: ‘we should never ponder on our thoughts today ‘cos they hold sway over time’ or ‘cos in the end the past means nothing’. Mostly, though, I will sing songs which sound better than they mean: ‘she’s electric, she’s in a family full of eccentrics’ is an easy rhyme and is fun to shout, while the power of the anthems come in the vowel sounds. Look at ‘tonight I’m a rock’n’roll star’, or the repeated mentions of things shining, which Liam pronounces as ‘shee-yine’.

It was Liam’s band in the first place, and he wanted to draft in his brother as manager because he’d had experience within the music industry, but he became a band member to stop him getting jealous. The pair grew up in Burnage, within walking distance of two golf courses, and sold rock’n’roll spirit in the same way the Rolling Stones had done. Noel used to complain about the nostalgic emptiness of a Stones tour t-shirt; I would guess that this summer we will see plenty of Oasis tees and bucket hats, as nostalgia for the nineties rises up.

This matches trends in the music industry: festival lineups are full of old acts with bulging catalogues of hits which are known to thousands; new hits interpolate classic copyrights; even the boyband Five, who split in 2001, have reformed to play songs that were hits when I was ten years old and they weren’t that much older. It’s a safe bet for a promoter to sell the past back to someone, especially when the present is so precarious.

Oasis were already their own nostalgia act in 2009, when a conveniently thrown plum caused the dissolution of the band; four years previously, when all but two tracks of their set came from their first two albums, one reviewer thought they might not last beyond that summer, so disengaged Liam seemed. But people still showed up to bellow the hits; in fact, Noel was surprised to see teenagers in the crowd who were barely alive when Morning Glory dominated British music, realising that their big brothers or uncles had introduced them to the magic of Oasis.

‘Liam’s attitude, my songs and the solidity of the band’ was how Noel summarised the group’s power, to which I would add the participatory nature of them, welcoming the audience in and allowing them to yell along. When I first learned guitar, it was Oasis I turned to first: the riffs are simple, the chords rudimentary and the melodies very quick to grasp. Blur and Pulp might be more interesting, and the latter are actually putting out new music this summer to help promote a reunion show, but Oasis caught the mid-nineties zeitgeist.

Like Friends, the National Lottery and the Spice Girls, Oasis are easy shorthand for a period of time before cameraphones, which will broadcast the Wembley shows this summer. ‘You can’t download spirit’ is another pithy Noel aphorism, although those ticket revenues will certainly help alimony payments to his ex-wife Sara.

Eurovision 2025: What the Hell Will Happen?

Remember Monday are set for three minutes that will change their lives

It’s that time of year again: defrost Cheryl Baker, dust off Johnny Logan and direct your eyes to Basel for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is still, only just, about the ‘song’ part of the name.

For all the geopolitics and sloganeering, it’s a fluffy TV show watched by millions of disinterested folk and a few million passionate, zealous, face-painted people. When I sat at the back of the stadium in Duesseldorf in 2011 with Laura, one of those zealots, I was effectively in the studio audience for a TV show; after being in our seats for 45 minutes, host Stefan Raab came out before the cameras were live and told us to chant ‘I can’t go! I can’t go!’ during the opening number.

As one of the nations who funds the competition, the UK supports Eurovision with extensive coverage. On TV, Graham Norton has slid into the chair occupied for many years by Terry Wogan, while on Radio 2 Scott and Rylan are Eurovision husbands. On a recent episode of their Pop Top 10 podcast, the pair profiled ten modern icons including winners Conchita, Lordi, Loreen, and Måneskin as well as people’s champion Verka Serduchka, whose silver suit and gurning face captured the attention for three minutes. Also on that podcast was Duncan James whose band Blue, marking their comeback after seven years away, represented the UK in 2011 with I Can.

They did okay, finishing 11th out of 25 finalists, fifth in the public vote, and thus reaching the left side of the scoreboard; since then, incredibly, only the second-place finish of Space Man by Sam Ryder in 2022 has repeated the feat. In 2025, Holly, Charlotte and Lauren aka Remember Monday are set to yell ‘What. The. Hell. Just. HAPPENED?!’ for three minutes in what I imagine will be a theatrical performance, given that two of them have been West End stars (Six, Phantom, Matilda) and the other taught musical theatre for years. ‘We have not held back on the theatrics,’ they told Scott on a recent Radio 2 appearance.

In December 2023 I saw the trio in their country guise playing at Bush Hall; as well as making us aware that they had recorded something for US TV, which turned out to be a cover of Hand In My Pocket by Alanis Morrissette, they announced that they had quit their jobs to focus on the band full-time. This made sense: after main songwriter Lauren’s long run as Miss Honey in Matilda, she was finally free to devote time to the project, which seemed to be more pitched at teens and tweens than thirtysomething blokes like me.

They know how to entertain a small crowd, and there is a Little Mix-sized gap in the market for a girl group. They are already booked to support The Corrs next month at Blenheim Palace, as well as the Latitude and Isle of Wight festivals. Their setlist is impressive and they had pre-existing fans from their run on The Voice in 2019: all four judges turned their chairs when they auditioned with Kiss From A Rose by Seal, and they performed their original song Jailbreaker rather than a cover in the later rounds.

Six years on, they have a worldwide audience for three minutes with their song, which is really a series of musical sections glued together. It shows that they can harmonise and hit the high notes, and as with Space Man, their Eurovision entry is over the top, hugely catchy and will position them as popstars. Sam Ryder has only had one real follow-up hit, 2023’s You’re Christmas To Me, a tie-in with an Amazon movie, so are we to expect that the girls will do a Christmas song later in the year, as part of their label’s attempts to break them and, significantly, make money?

In the ten weeks after the song was unveiled, it had crept up to just under three million Spotify streams, which is far fewer than the 40m+ streams for the Contest favourite Bara Bada Bastu by KAJ, which is a bit like that Numa Numa song, probably on purpose. After Sweden made it through the first of two semi-finals – the second is on Thursday – the trio should, if the odds are to be believed, win it for them for a record-breaking eighth time.

It is doubtful that Remember Monday will follow Sandie Shaw, Lulu, Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz and Katrina & the Waves to take it for a sixth time for the UK; in recent years, the goal has been to finish on the left side of that scoreboard. To that end, the trio have spent the last few weeks shlepping around Europe: they have sat on sofas, pressed the flesh, performed the song and uploaded dozens of social media videos.

As with sport, Eurovision is not just about the week but about a campaign, and the Eurovision social media and Youtube teams are very good at hyping the event. A slew of commentators, podcasters, writers and Eurovision fans including the BBC’s Paddy O’Connell pop up across the media landscape to give their view on costumes, songs and countries, while skirting the politics given that Eurovision is about peace, love and pop music.

This year, countries not taking part include Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia and Russia. Montenegro return with a song sung in their own language, while there will also be outings for the native tongues of Albania, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania and Serbia. Spain, Germany and France have also chosen not to perform in English, which they have been able to do since 1999, while Estonia’s entry, a rap by Tommy Cash, will be a mix of Italian and English, given that it is called Espresso Macchiato. Lovers of language and European geography will be well served this year.

Across four long, tedious hours, the Song Contest will bring a mix of the ballad, the berserk and the banal, with far fewer key changes than in the Contests I watched in the 1990s and 2000s, although that KAJ track does have one. Ballads won in 2023 and 2024, so uptempo tunes may find favour with the judges and the public, whose votes are treated equally. Last year, 22 juries gave Switzerland the full douze points, while wartorn Israel, who are still at war today, got the maximum from 15, with only Ukraine giving the Swiss 12.

The TV audience gave the UK entry, Dizzy by Olly Alexander, nul points, as they had done Embers by James Newman in 2021. Will Remember Monday enjoy the success of Sam Ryder, who took 283 points from the jury, including eight maximums, and 183 from the public? Will the fact that Eurovision falls in the same month as the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War help the trio win votes, or are they doomed to make up the numbers?

They would not have accepted the offer to represent the UK if they did not think it would boost their career, but Mae Muller took on that mantle in 2023 and has more or less disappeared. As is so often the case for Eurovision in the 2020s, it’s about exposure, not the song.

The Eurovision Song Contest airs at 8pm this Saturday (May 17) from Basel, Switzerland

Beyoncé Isn’t Diana Ross; She’s Frank Sinatra

The world’s premier pop performer returns to the stadium, her natural habitat

At the end of April 2025, Beyoncé began her Cowboy Carter world tour with five dates at the 70,000-seat stadium in Inglewood, California which usually houses the LA Rams, a team owned by Stan Kroenke, whose money also bankrolls Arsenal FC.

Three dates in Chicago and five in New Jersey follow, before six across three weekends in June at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium; then there’s three at the Stade de France in Paris, two hometown shows in Houston, Texas and two, including a July 4 show, in Washington, DC. She also ticks off Atlanta and Las Vegas later in the month.

Here are some of the superlatives for a show whose cheapest LA ticket costs $85, taken from professional critics who headed in their droves to see the hottest show in the world. From Chris Willman of Variety: ‘deliriously great, blurry, boundary-busting fun…you may feel the urge to grab hold of your head to keep it from spinning’. From the Guardian: ‘Beyoncé doesn’t just take the stage – she takes the narrative back…attention to detail is unmatched…tightly executed masterwork. She isn’t here to prove she belongs. She’s here to remind us she already owns it.’

There is also generous appraisal for Blue Ivy, the heir to the throne, and her dancing. Given the dynastic success of the British Royal Family over centuries, it makes sense for Beyoncé to involve her daughter in her work, quietly reminding people that she is the hardest-working mum in showbiz. I once realised how incredibly hard, nigh on impossible, it is for a mother to be present at home and then perform on the road: Adele no longer tours, preferring to base herself in either Las Vegas or Munich for dozens of performances at a time, specifically so it doesn’t impact on the life of her son. All credit to P!nk, who did take her daughter with her as she travelled the world.

For most of the last few years, I have thought of Beyoncé as Diana Ross 2.0: emerging as the lead singer of a girl band, respectively Destiny’s Child and the Supremes; moving into the movies, be it Goldmember or Lady Sings The Blues; and fashioning a mix of uptempo songs and ballads with top writers and producers. Crazy In Love, surely among the top three pop songs of the century, exceeds any of Diana’s Chic collaborations, be it I’m Coming Out or Upside Down. As in the case of Berry Gordy, the man behind Miss Ross, it is clear that Jay-Z has done very well out of marrying a talented singer and performer.

That’s the same Jay-Z who once called himself ‘the new Sinatra’, and who in a very mafioso move publicly suggested that the committee who give out the Grammy Awards finally bestow upon Beyoncé the Album of the Year prize she had failed to win four times. It seemed preordained that Tayoncé, a contest between Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s albums, would be the buzzword of early 2025, but it may have been politically shrewd for the competing PR agencies to back away from the fight, given that Taylor had done her touring in 2023 and 2024, and Beyoncé was about to embark on her own jamboree.

Awards are a bauble or a stepping stone, or mere confirmation, when a star is shining that brightly. Back in 1959, at the very first Grammy awards, Frank Sinatra was nominated for the Record and Song prizes for the song Witchcraft as well as for two separate albums; he took the latter prize the following year and ended up with 11 statuettes in a crowded trophy cabinet. But his impact, like Beyoncé’s, goes beyond awards, not least because he is Simon Cowell’s favourite singer and is thus the face that launched 101 pop idols and singers who had the X Factor.

One of them is Alexandra Burke, who ended up on the West End stage inhabiting the role Whitney Houston created in The Bodyguard. Until then, aside from her pop career, Alexandra was best known for holding her own in 2008 when, as part of that year’s X Factor final, Beyoncé popped up on Saturday night primetime to perform Listen; in a moment which proved culture always eats itself, the song comes from the movie adaptation of the musical Dreamgirls, which was based on the career of Diana Ross and The Supremes. Listen became a song trotted out by hopeful superstars every year, before those singers went on to sing Sinatra standards during Big Band Week.

With Adele as her fellow balladeer, and with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry as all-singing, all-dancing global popstars, Beyoncé and the people helping craft new stadium-sized pop anthems did both: slowies Halo and Best Thing I Never Had, and dance-pop numbers Sweet Dreams and Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It). I remember watching the TV coverage of her 2011 Glastonbury set, where she performed all of these smash hits; looking back, it has become a neat division point in her career, given that Blue Ivy was born in January 2012.

In May 2014, Saturday Night Live began popping up videos of individual sketches onto Youtube. One of the most prescient was The Beygency, which skewered the Cult of Bey via a crime thriller pastiche starring the agents from the show 24. ‘Not a huge fan of that Drunk In Love song,’ says Andrew Garfield’s character, before the skies darken and he is told by a newsagent he no longer exists. ‘I like most of her music!’ he pleads, but the suggestion is that he needs to like all of it, because that is what is demanded of him.

The sketch still stands up even as Beyoncé has moved into the status of legacy artist, putting out complete bodies of work akin to Songs for Swingin’ Lovers or In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, which were Sinatra concept albums at a time where rock’n’roll teenyboppers would not appreciate a fortysomething crooner. This was music for their parents who had screamed for a younger Frank before surviving the Second World War and settling down.

The Beyoncé of 2025 is the Sinatra of 1956. How many people of college age will be heading off to see Beyoncé this year, the music of their parents’ generation and a star that barely gives interviews and does not mess with TikTok or Instagram? Sabrina, Olivia and the rest are all conversant with today’s teenagers, who were born well after Crazy In Love and Baby Boy. Those hits are, incredible to remember, over 20 years old, and are as much retro classics as Come Fly With Me and It Was a Very Good Year.

Sinatra had his nightclubs, while Beyoncé can create longform movies or stadium shows to promote albums in an era of quick dopamine hits. Just as Sinatra was a teenage idol, so she had her phase in a girlband and making radio-friendly pop songs; they both took the lead role in movies too, because that’s where the audience was, and their music was produced by the very hottest arrangers or beatmakers. Their status as their era’s top popular entertainer is secure; the Cowboy Carter tour is a victory lap for the conquering Bey.

Awards are a bauble or a stepping stone, or mere confirmation, when a star is shining that brightly. Back in 1959, at the very first Grammy awards, Frank Sinatra was nominated for the Record and Song prizes for the song Witchcraft as well as for two separate albums; he took the latter prize the following year and ended up with 11 statuettes in a crowded trophy cabinet. But his impact, like Beyoncé’s, goes beyond awards, not least because he is Simon Cowell’s favourite singer and is thus the face that launched 101 pop idols and singers who had the X Factor.

One of them is Alexandra Burke, who ended up on the West End stage inhabiting the role Whitney Houston created in The Bodyguard. Until then, aside from her pop career, Alexandra was best known for holding her own in 2008 when, as part of that year’s X Factor final, Beyoncé popped up on Saturday night primetime to perform Listen; in a moment which proved culture always eats itself, the song comes from the movie adaptation of the musical Dreamgirls, which was based on the career of Diana Ross and The Supremes. Listen became a song trotted out by hopeful superstars every year, before those singers went on to sing Sinatra standards during Big Band Week.

With Adele as her fellow balladeer, and with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry as all-singing, all-dancing global popstars, Beyoncé and the people helping craft new stadium-sized pop anthems did both: slowies Halo and Best Thing I Never Had, and dance-pop numbers Sweet Dreams and Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It). I remember watching the TV coverage of her 2011 Glastonbury set, where she performed all of these smash hits; looking back, it has become a neat division point in her career, given that Blue Ivy was born in January 2012.

In May 2014, Saturday Night Live began popping up videos of individual sketches onto Youtube. One of the most prescient was The Beygency, which skewered the Cult of Bey via a crime thriller pastiche starring the agents from the show 24. ‘Not a huge fan of that Drunk In Love song,’ says Andrew Garfield’s character, before the skies darken and he is told by a newsagent he no longer exists. ‘I like most of her music!’ he pleads, but the suggestion is that he needs to like all of it, because that is what is demanded of him.

The sketch still stands up even as Beyoncé has moved into the status of legacy artist, putting out complete bodies of work akin to Songs for Swingin’ Lovers or In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, which were Sinatra concept albums at a time where rock’n’roll teenyboppers would not appreciate a fortysomething crooner. This was music for their parents who had screamed for a younger Frank before surviving the Second World War and settling down.

The Beyoncé of 2025 is the Sinatra of 1956. How many people of college age will be heading off to see Beyoncé this year, the music of their parents’ generation and a star that barely gives interviews and does not mess with TikTok or Instagram? Sabrina, Olivia and the rest are all conversant with today’s teenagers, who were born well after Crazy In Love and Baby Boy. Those hits are, incredible to remember, over 20 years old, and are as much retro classics as Come Fly With Me and It Was a Very Good Year.

Sinatra had his nightclubs, while Beyoncé can create longform movies or stadium shows to promote albums in an era of quick dopamine hits. Just as Sinatra was a teenage idol, so she had her phase in a girlband and making radio-friendly pop songs; they both took the lead role in movies too, because that’s where the audience was, and their music was produced by the very hottest arrangers or beatmakers. Their status as their era’s top popular entertainer is secure; the Cowboy Carter tour is a victory lap for the conquering Bey.

Everybody’s Doing It, So Why Can’t We?

The local elections take place tomorrow, but what am I voting for?

In 1993, The Cranberries put out an album which features the evergreens Dreams and Linger; the latter, which appears on NOW 27, has just surpassed one billion Spotify streams, joining a very exclusive club of just under 1000 songs to do so. Other recent additions include: classic rock from Foreigner, Pink Floyd and Van Halen; country songs from Luke Combs and Post Malone; and the ten-minute version of All Too Well by Taylor Swift.

But this piece is not about those songs; instead it focuses on the title of that Cranberries album: Everybody’s Doing It, So Why Can’t We?

I was struck by a series of missives on Bluesky by Charlotte Lydia Riley, a professor at the University of Southampton whose books include Is Free Speech Under Threat? and Imperial Island, her ‘alternative’ history of the British Empire. I found a book she edited, The Free Speech Wars (2021), in Waterstones last year, and have it on my Leaning Tower of Tsundoku.

Responding to complaints by journalist Jennifer Williams about the ‘broken…social contract’, Prof Riley scaled up Williams’ grumblings from the local to the national: ‘Large numbers of people voted Labour because you can’t get an ambulance to come to your house any more and there’s sewage on all the beaches’. I used to wonder if anything in Britain worked, and it seems Prof Riley is aware of this too.

‘There’s no affordable childcare, people are dying on NHS waiting lists and in ambulance bays, school buildings are crumbling, the trains are never on time, the roads are full of potholes and you can’t swim in the sea. People might be forgiven for asking what they are paying taxes for, actually.’

Lo and behold, in ride the four horsemen of Reform UK. A piece on PoliticsHome reported that, should Reform win control of councils in tomorrow’s local elections, or win the seat of Runcorn and Helsby, they will attempt to do none of these things; instead, says the MP for Ashfield, who has been a member of the Labour and the Conservative Parties, they will copy Elon Musk and try to make efficiency savings by ‘cutting DEI’.

Their constitution, formerly a contract, promises all the populist sweets – standing up for ‘British culture, identity and values’, stopping the boats, restoring ‘law and order’, cutting taxes, slashing energy bills which are in thrall to global events and market fluctuations – while also hopeful of landing a killer punch on the ‘failed’ Conservative Party.

Money talks, as it always does: the billionaire real estate magnate Nick Candy is sweet-talking donors, which is making life difficult for the Tories, who have been so reliant on rich backers like Frank Hester. The party took Hester’s millions in spite of his comments towards the Labour MP Diane Abbott which were definitely racist but were called ‘wrong’ without explanation by desperate MPs defending the indefensible. Then there are the ex-politicians and staffers under investigation for betting on the date of last year’s General Election using insider knowledge, a few years after those ‘all guidance was followed’ parties which, to my understanding, were not cricket. 

In a brilliant piece on his Forking Paths Substack, Brian Klaas outlined the importance of the schema, of branding, which mostly takes the form of negative attacks on others, rather than positive PR; think of how Donald Trump used nicknames to whittle down his rivals for the Republican ticket in 2015, one of whom, Little Marco Rubio, is now a nodding dog overseeing Trump’s foreign policy.

Then there’s Liz Truss and her lettuce, Boris Johnson and his hair, and the schema of branding the Chancellor the quite pathetic Rachel from Accounts. Phillip Hammond got the nickname Spreadsheet Phil, while George Osborne got away with parroting the phrase ‘long-term economic plan’ as an excuse for his austerity-led policies. To win in politics, Klaas puts in italics, ‘it doesn’t matter what’s true; it matters what mental framework voters use to assess political options before them’.

You can see precisely this strategy in the tactics of the Leavers back in 2016, summarised in James Graham’s TV docudrama as ‘£350m and Turkey’. Whoever said that people will remember not what you say but how you say it, is the progenitor of modern political discussion. Has Fr Farage ever said anything quotable or, indeed, notable? What is his ‘The lady’s not for turning’ or ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’? Does he need one, when all he needs to do is get people to feel an affinity with him, to be empowered to vote, and to flash his winning smile, his equivalent of a supermodel’s bit of leg? He mostly sits tight.

The main parties, to paraphrase a line used of Johnson by the other architect of Britain’s leave vote Dominic Cummings, veer hither and yon like a shopping trolley. Farage convinced five deprived areas of the country – Boston and Skegness, South Basildon and East Thurrock, Ashfield, Great Yarmouth and Clacton – to vote for his new party, coming second in many seats to Labour. Naturally, one of those five MPs is now independent, having been kicked out of the party for dissent, which means Rupert Lowe sits beside Jeremy Corbyn, who effectively won the seat of Islington North for himself.

Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 by deviating from the norm, which made Labour’s election prospects in 2017 and 2019 tougher than they ought to have been. Nonetheless, UK grime musicians got behind the man, and activist journalists like Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar also fought for the cause. Jones has turned his attention to a new movement, We Deserve Better, while Ash trod the podcast circuit to promote her much delayed book Minority Rule, in which she told progressive folk to stop wanging on about race and gender.

Perhaps she knows what will happen in the next few years, given that the big money is backing a party which was set up as a limited company. She and dozens of other political pundits will be offering hot takes on Friday after the local elections, but I think the danger is that Reform UK look and sound like the other parties: their MPs have been jailed for domestic violence, have been rude to staff on the parliamentary estate, defect from other parties, have experience running small businesses and can hold their own in a room with right-leaning politicians.

What is it that distinguishes Reform UK from other parties? The colour of their rosette, or the fact that they are untested at a time when the big beasts have far fewer members than they used to have. This can benefit the Liberal Democrats, the traditional third party who won 72 seats in the 2024 General Election, and the Green Party, who are interested in trans and human rights issues now that they no longer have the monopoly on matters ecological.

But neither the Lib Dems nor the Greens are offering quick fixes to deep problems. They do, however, have leaders or co-leaders untainted by their association with the presidents of Russia or the USA. But can their political schema beat Fr Farage’s schema, and can his in turn beat those of the main parties? If everybody’s doing it, why can’t they?

Am I A Patriot?

Would I die for king and country, or merely exercise my right to chuckle at it?

I don’t even celebrate St George’s Day, although I do remember it was the birthday of William Shakespeare, who wrote a lot about British kings. It does appear that to be a patriot means acceptance of monarchy, offering no criticism and, dangerously, either fawning over lovely Wills and his lovely wife or brushing aside any racism or worse.

The American comedian Conan O’Brien accepted the Mark Twain Prize for Humor this year and quoted the writer’s view on patriotism, to which I am drawn: ‘loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it’. Without listing Britain’s faults and various current inquiries into its people’s criminal negligence, we should be able to have a grown-up and sensible discussion about, for instance, the Royal Family or the government, who enact laws which are given royal assent.

As of 1215, thanks to Magna Carta, the monarch is not above the law, although he cannot be arrested for breaking it; whenever a criminal case is brought, it is always Rex versus, which is perhaps why Prince Harry’s recent court battles have been so crucial; this man, who could still one day be King, has followed his great-great-uncle Edward VIII in marrying an American woman and moving abroad.

Handily, and in a rather old-fashioned manner, British subjects are told to treat Harry unkindly via his wife, Meghan Sussex, who is far less lovely than his lovely wife Catherine, Princess of Wales. I was nine when Diana was killed in a car crash, but I thought the week-long mourning period was excessive; this month, on the coveted Friday night comedy slot at 6.30pm, Radio 4 aired this joke as part of the News In Haikus spot on The Naked Week: ‘Charles and Camilla/ 20 years! “More like forty-/five,” says Diana’.

Private Eye writer and the show’s host Andrew Hunter Murray noted it would be the show’s ‘last ever episode,’ but he must know that part of being patriotic is to indulge in good-natured badinage about the Royal Family, which is a soap opera that has run longer than Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Eastenders put together; almost a millennium longer, in fact.

What with new characters, babies, castles up in smoke, divorces, rogues and the fact that the monarch has the nation’s attention for nine minutes every Christmas Day, the Royals are characters and avatars rather than real people. You can visit their palaces, buy shortbread tins and, in any given week, watch TV dramas like The Crown, musicals like Six and sitcoms like The Windsors; the last of these was created by two blokes named George and Bert, which seem like pseudonyms given that King George VI was known as Bertie to his family.

Among the cast are Harry Enfield, who gives a good impression of King Charles, and Hugh Skinner as the now Prince of Wales; the latter’s CV includes a role as a soldier in the wartime drama The Wipers Times, co-written by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. The magazine has a Court Circular column which refers to the King as Brian – as in, ‘he’s not the Messiah…’ – and formerly referred to his mum as Brenda. They had probably prepared the cover of their Coronation issue – Man In Hat Sits On Chair – back in the 1960s.

There’s satire, and there’s agitprop. In the last 40 years, songwriter Billy Bragg aka the Bard of Barking, has grown into a national treasure. He wrote A New England, which was more about love than country, and also the lost gem Take Down the Union Jack, which I taped off the radio in the early 2000s. It was from his album England, Half English, and noted that Britain is ‘really not that great…doesn’t even have a patron saint, just an economic union that’s past its sell-by date’. Discuss!

Bragg also wrote a book called The Progressive Patriot in the aftermath of the London Bombings of July 7 2005. In it, he suggested ways people on the left of the political spectrum could counteract the shouting and caterwauling of those on the right. He selects figures both musical (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon) and literary (George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling), while dropping in on historical moments in English history: Magna Carta, the Civil War and, of course, the war against Hitler.

Reviewing it for the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead complains of ‘sub-GCSE level’ history and incoherence. Nonetheless, she does quote Bragg’s words on ‘developing a narrative’ about Englishness, perhaps looking at how Scotland and Wales see their place in this still United Kingdom; from my five years in Edinburgh, which is one of the more cosmopolitan places in the nation, I could tell Scots were proud of Rabbie Burns, the rugby team, folksongs and, clichéd though it is, whiskey, which they call the Water of Life.

I really did try to get into Sunder Katwala’s 2023 book How to be a Patriot, but it read like a think-tank study of nationalism and ‘inclusive patriotism’, with chunks of memoir thrown in. With talk of ‘shared rituals’ and the monarchy, which plenty of people want to abolish, the book just felt didactic rather than encouraging, dry rather than stirring, in opposition to those Billy Bragg songs. Katwala is good on demolishing Enoch Powell’s arguments, and how they were formed in the first place, and he has a go at tackling various topical issues within the culture which I summarise as Statues & Symbols.

And so to the 80th anniversary, technically the Oak anniversary, of Victory in Europe. When I was 12, I read the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; the former thought it ‘dulce et decorum’ to die for your country, a sentiment that was made still more stark when, at 14, I visited the trenches and battlefields where millions fought. Then there’s the celebrated football match on Christmas Day between German and English forces, and the football tournaments involving Prisoners of War at the Ruhleben camp.

In the next fortnight, I implore you to spot where people question or affirm their patriotism, using what The Sun newspaper call ‘our boys’ as cover; the tabloid papers biennially try to turn the men’s England football team into a regiment of the King’s armed forces. The Daily Telegraph used to be the newspaper for retired colonels and commanders, but with that audience shrinking they have pivoted to battles about Statues & Symbols, usually the wedge issues that exercise Fr Farage.

I imagine Private Eye will also be scanning the papers to find the most jingoistic, illogical and plain stupid thing said, done or predicted about the commemoration of an event which, in 2025, overshadows the 80 years that came after it. Last year’s winner came when Rishi Sunak, who was Prime Minister and is still MP for Richmond and Northallerton in Posh Yorkshire, left the D-Day commemoration early to give an interview to ITV; Fr Farage accused him of not being patriotic enough and not understanding ‘our culture’.

Whether Farage was referring to his class, race or heritage, it showed that one way to win votes was to play the Patriot card. And what channel does he present programmes on? The one with the Union flag in its logo. If only the King could do something about it.

The Football Novel

Alex Allison’s new book Greatest Of All Time makes him the new custodian of the football novel

My pandemic project has outlived the plague era. Since 2020 I have spent time collecting football books, and I even had one of my own published, on the FA Youth Cup, but I’m not here to plug From Kids To Champions or my book on punditry, with the neologism Banternalysis for a title.

Instead, I’m going to recommend some pieces of football fiction: stories that use the game as a pivot around which to revolve tales of the human condition. I’ve got a whole shelf of them, ranging from Keeper by Mal Peet, which will appeal to fans of the movie Field of Dreams, to John O’Farrell’s comic novel There’s Only Two David Beckhams.

Musa Okwonga and Ian Wright, who now co-present the Wrighty’s House podcast, collaborated on Striking Out, in which Wright’s cipher named Jerome mimics the England forward’s South London upbringing. UEA Creative Writing graduate and former amateur referee Ashley Hickson-Lovence gained many plaudits for Your Show, a fictionalised telling of the story of referee Uriah Rennie, whom you may remember for being the only black ref in the Premier League years. Fun fact: Rennie is now president of Hallam FC, an amateur club founded in 1860 in Sheffield.

You might know Brian Glanville as the doyen of football writers, but he would prefer to be known as a novelist. As well as his children’s book Goalkeepers Are Different, Glanville published his own set of short stories, The Man Behind the Goal. Football is one of those subjects you cannot busk: you need to have intimately researched the world, its tempos and its mores. Adrian Duncan does this in his own set of short stories, Midfield Dynamo, whose chapters are numbered by football position – 1 is followed by 2, which is followed by 6, which is followed by 5, and eventually ends with 9 – and with sections called Defence, Midfield and Up Front.

Two stories are football themed: the one that gives the collection its title, first published in the Dublin Review in Winter 2014, is told by a son about his father, who was captain of a football team made up of ‘a bunch of long-haired and moustachio’d outlaws [sic]…for an hour and a half, twenty-two young men marauded [sic] in beautiful patterns up and down the pitch, and in between the moments of skill, vision and finesse, they kicked lumps out of each other’.

The other football-themed story is named Prosinečki, after the Yugoslav/Croatian playmaker who played for both Barcelona and Real Madrid and who, fun fact, is the current manager of Montenegro’s national team. The story’s protagonist is a ‘limited but committed midfielder’ with a ‘permanently destroyed’ knee. He recalls how he admired the playmaker’s ‘brio’ and ‘re-visualize his movement…how he span away from bewildered defenders at the least likely moment’. He ‘always made the most moral decision on the ball’; no pundit ever talks like this, or notes ‘the impotent, incidental and unforgiveable beauty’ of the game.

He appreciates how ‘it is the pragmatic that serves the aesthetic – that it is only from the core of good service that any beauty can bloom’. When he weighs up the taints and honours of his career, he concludes that he is an ‘age-thickened footballer mooching around a large circle with a line through it’. The protagonist reckons that fans go to the stadium merely ‘to be among the decaying trusses that shelter our deep single-tiered stands’ to watch a club that ‘seems to exist now only out of the ghost of some habit’. When a goalkeeper gets up after being clattered into, they ‘cheer as if he were a miner being lifted from a blast’. The story first appeared in the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly; the editor was Sally Rooney.

Greatest Of All Time is Alex Allison’s recently released tale, published by Dialogue Books. He jokes in the acknowledgements that friends ‘still maintain that the novel should be called Man On’, and then seriously dedicates it to ‘queer sportspeople, both closeted and out. We’ll be ready if and when you are’. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Allison said that he wished to explore the players’ ‘heads and hearts’ that were often missing from the general conversation about the game. It was noted by presenter Nick Ahad that there are no out gay male footballers in the Premier League, to which Allison namechecked Justin Fashanu, whose biography is called Forbidden Forward.

In a way, the tale resets Amadeus to a Premier League football club somewhere in the North-East (yes, the one you’re thinking of). The anonymous protagonist is the only homegrown player left at the club, and under the auspices of his Italian manager nicknamed The Oracle, he has to compete for his position as centre-forward with Samson, a Rwandan-born Frenchman brought in on loan from Monaco. Samson takes our hero’s number ten shirt and then takes his breath away: ‘Before he was everyone’s,’ reads the opening sentence, given its own chapter and its own page, ‘he was mine’.

Allison, whom the dust jacket tells us is an AFC Wimbledon fan, puts us in the world of professional football, starting with a pre-season camp in the Middle East. We learn that our protagonist is only 19, that his father is his agent and that the pair started out going to games, ‘embracing an identity larger than our differences’. As a striker he has ‘the steely focus of a born predator’, which seems a little like pathetic fallacy given that his prey becomes Samson, who is praised as ‘all limb and length, as though his body were set to a beat’.

With a ‘digital self’ valued by FIFA video game at £13m, he pales in comparison with Samson, who can master one of his real-life skills in moments. Soon the pair are roommates for away games, our hero deputed to ‘look after’ his antagonist. Envy turns to self-improvement: ‘I felt myself altering my behaviour as though he were watching…exaggerated the aspects of my personality that most closely mirrored his’.

We never forget that the pair are teenagers, with faces that ‘looked misplaced among the gruff beards and hardened jaws of our teammates’. We also appreciate plenty of truisms from our narrator: ‘I would need to reprogramme myself…to perceive him as a threat’, ‘I was clout incarnate, a magnet for likes’, ‘I wanted the life of my teammates – their assured confidence, the convenience of their ordinary desires’.

There are plenty of other football similes and metaphors throughout the story: ‘Searching his name had become a muscle memory, a reflex – like taking the ball down on your chest’; ‘the turf was solid, seized up like a muscle’. There is impressive verisimilitude that grounds us in the Premier League: one player ‘can’t afford to get relegated. Not at this point in my career’; the team cannot enjoy the lobster at their Christmas party, accustomed to ‘a restricted diet of lean meats, grains and fresh vegetables’; Sky Sports presenters ‘celebrated each transfer like personal triumphs’; our hero’s salary, when compared with his dad’s, has a ‘comic book inequality’.

Another player from the Netherlands boasts how ‘Ajax are responsible for the basis of the modern game’ and a Crystal Palace fan has ‘the sincere belief that his club has the best fans in the country’. At such points, Allison is adding to the experience of the non-fanatical reader, and about the only faux pas is that a team from the North East travels down to Watford for a Boxing Day fixture, something necessary for the plot but which would never happen in the Premier League, who never set teams on too long a journey on December 26. I also loved the line from a Watford mascot: ‘This is my Christmas present, but I wanted a dog’.

Samson, meanwhile, is ‘the first player from our club for twenty-nine years to find the net ten times before February’, hitting the mark with a stunning goal against Arsenal. Mimicking the real-life Cristiano Ronaldo, a fan invades the pitch and meets Samson, her idol, while young ladies throw themselves at him at a nightclub. Samson opens up to our narrator, complaining of the racism of the English, whose fans are the only ones in the world ‘who love a tackle more than a goal’. The Frenchman tells our hero that ‘the keeper is afraid of real football’ and that ‘the world around us is so ugly, but here, with just a ball, we can make a beautiful thing’.

There is editorialising from the author about how fans are ‘a living history of their clubs…curators of an endless well of legacy and expectation and suspicion’. Notably, the prospective agent, the therapist and The Oracle are all non-English, testament to the international influence on the Premier League. One scene brings in Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces campaign to fight homophobia, which is necessary as captain Bert Kendall seems, with great dramatic irony, to be fond of queer-bashing.

There are, as with any work of fiction, crisis points where we need resolutions: our hero mulls over a new agent, and then sits down with a psychotherapist who reminds me a lot of Pippa from James Graham’s play Dear England. Hanging over the whole story is the fact that Samson is on loan from Monaco, with top European clubs interested in signing him permanently when his loan ends and he is taken from our protagonist ‘as swiftly as he had been gifted to me’.

Ross Raisin’s book A Natural offers an easy comparison to Allison’s story, because it also deals with homosexuality, in that case a little further up the British Isles in Scotland, although Raisin was born in Silsden, West Yorkshire. I’d also recommend the novelised reboot of Roy of the Rovers, an origin story which also brings in Roy’s sister Rocky to mark the interest in the women’s game, written by Tom Palmer, who is from Leeds.

But for contemporary football literature, Greatest Of All Time is pretty good.

Over 300 episodes of the Football Literary Society radio show can be found at soundcloud.com/jonny_brick.

The Perfect Pop Song

And the nominations for the perfect pop song are…

Since Easter and Passover coincide this week, and I’m off the carbs to remember the miracle of Moses and the Israelites escaping persecution in Egypt (oh is that the ironyometer exploding?), here’s a departure from the normal prosaic column, in memory of Buzzfeed and the other sites that went mad on list articles (listicles) in the late 2000s and 2010s. Now we have TikTok, which serves up 15-second dopamine hits and ruins people’s attention spans.

To that end, here are the songs in the running for my entirely subjective but also entirely objective list of Perfect Pop Songs. I’ll touch on structure, lyric, mood and timbre, and the song’s status as the ultimate piece of ear candy. All six songs are united by major keys, upwardly mobile melodies and bits of nonsense, be it titles that do not occur in the lyrics or occur too much or humorous noises made with the mouth.

All of them date from the best of all decades: the 1990s. Let’s start with two songs from 1990 itself:

Deee-lite – Groove Is In The Heart and Jellyfish – Baby’s Coming Back

Russian DJ Dmitry Brill and his wife, Ohio-born singer ‘Lady Miss’ Kier Kirby were signed to Elektra Records, who threw money behind this irresistible slice of pop, which drafts in funkmaster Bootsy Collins and Tribe Called Quest rapper Q-Tip. It means very little: the Dr Seuss book Horton Hears A Who gets a reference, while Kier rhymes ‘malicious/delicious’ and sings of a ‘succotash wish’.

Throughout it all, there’s a sampled bass lick and, with disco tambourines running underneath, all sorts of percussive vocal effects: a pop, a brrrr and some na-na-nas. Simultaneous retro and contemporary, analogue and electronic, it cannot fail to lift your mood. It is no wonder that the band emerged on the New York club scene: this is visual music built for dancing, not for headphones.

As for Jellyfish, their song was taken to the top of the UK charts by McFly after singer Tom Fletcher discovered the band and wanted to ape their psychedelic pop sound. This one is in the optimistic key of D-flat, with stand-up drummer Andy Sturmer’s boisterous voice tripping over dotted rhythms and singing of ‘dumb mistakes’ and of being a ‘beaten man’. The chorus has ‘yeah yeah’ and ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals and a new chord pattern, followed by a proper middle eight which mentions ‘wild oats’, to hook the listeners. There’s even a part where the listener can clap along to the ‘knock three times’ line. It is perhaps the only pop tune ever to set ‘I’d buy a handgun’ to West Coast harmonies.

To paraphrase DJ Mark Radcliffe: how were there 50 better songs for sale on the record racks the week it hit number 51 in Spring 1991? (A glance at OfficialCharts.com tells me Cher was number one with the glorious Shoop Shoop Song, with Chesney Hawkes descending after his One and Only smash.)

The Cardigans – Lovefool and Hanson – Mmmbop

Here are two songs from the middle of the decade, one from some Swedes and the other from a trio of Oklahoma teenagers.

Lovefool, which gained prominence in Baz Luhrmann’s take on Romeo & Juliet, kickstarted The Cardigans’ great period where they scored worldwide hits. They haven’t put out a record since 2005, perhaps because they did so well out of copyrights like this UK number two hit that was kept off the US Hot 100 entirely by a stupid rule about songs needing to be released physically to chart.

With verses in the key of A minor and a chorus that bursts into the key of A major, a discotastic bassline and hi-hat cymbals drive the song on, with various earwormy guitar sounds popping up every few bars. It is the sonic bed on which Nina Persson’s gentle complaints float: her ‘problem’, which she ‘desperately ponders’, is that she ‘can’t care about anything but you’. Her plea to be loved is desperate, and she even wants her beloved to ‘pretend that you love me’. The Swedish-English of the second verse is fun: ‘Reason will not lead to solution/ I will end up lost in confusion’. As we will see later, writing in one’s second language can lead to unorthodox choices.

When I went to see Hanson play in London a few years ago, I was impressed with their pop/rock sound, but everyone in the room knew what they were there to hear: ‘Mmmbop, ba duba dop ba, du bop ba duba dop Ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du’ is how the A-Z Lyrics website notates it. But how many casual Hanson fans know the meaning behind the verses: ‘Hold the ones who really care, in the end they’ll be the only ones there’.

So much perfect pop is a mix of happy and sad, or what I call putting vinegar in the pudding, and the blockbuster chorus rather buries the lede in this song, written by philosophers who were 11, 13 and 16 at the time. Devout Christians, the brothers have since had 16 kids between them: Isaac has three, Zac five, and Taylor seven!

The New Radicals – You Get What You Give and Britney Spears – Baby One More Time

And from the very end of the decade, two songs that were omnipresent on music television at the time.

Max Martin never needed to work again after writing the biggest song on planet Earth, which was unleashed in early 1999 and begat the Britney soap opera. Turned down by TLC, the song begins with three hooks in three seconds: the opening keyboard, the ‘baby baby’ and the ‘ha-ha-ha’ breathing. Our narrator, singing Swedish-English (‘show me how you want it to be’) and overenunciating her vowels (‘oh prettay baybay!’), is losing her mind in loneliness, ‘blinded by her lover’ and willing to do anything. Long after Max, the most successful individual pop songwriter of the last century, has stopped making music, we will always have Baby One More Time.

Like Max, Gregg Alexander can walk into a high end retailer and buy everything in the store without being recognised except by people who watched music TV in 1999. Before the first verse comes in, we’ve already had a song’s worth of ideas and grunts, oohs and woahs, climaxing with the ‘ONE! TWO!’ chant before the intro proper. The song’s first line proper, ‘wake up, kids!’, is more or less pop music summarised in three words.

The long coda, notorious for a line which crams in ‘Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson’, is a list of words sung over straight semiquavers that mean nothing written down. ‘Don’t! Let go!’ cries Alexander’s bucket-hatted visage in the clip for a song which he co-wrote with Rick Nowels, himself a very successful pop writer best known for Heaven Is A Place On Earth; Alexander and Nowels also wrote Life Is A Rollercoaster and Lovin’ Each Day for Ronan Keating and, for Santana, The Game of Love, which originally had Tina Turner on vocals.

Alexander retreated to the writer’s room after his own brief pop stardom. I’ll be spending the next few years working on a Pop Syllabus, and I can’t wait to listen to hundreds of pop songs. These six, though, are by all objective criteria the finest.

If you want hundreds more pop songs, buy my new book Now That’s What I Call Now: A History of Pop Music in Britain, 1983-2025, available for £4.99 as an eBook or for nothing with a Kindle Unlimited subscription

Record Store Day 2025 in Watford

On April 12, the Sound of Watford will fill the town with music

You wouldn’t call Watford a musical town. It used to be known for two things: printing newspapers and making beer. Although The New European newspaper is still printed in the town, the Sun Printers building at the very bottom of Whippendell Road was converted into flats. The Benskin Brewery, just down from the High Street, is now awaiting new tenants, with the new Watford Museum soon to open as part of the Cultural Quarter beside the Town Hall and the Colosseum.

Yet Watford, a town of about 100,000 people at the very point that London stops and becomes the bit just north of the city, is associated with some of popular music’s biggest stars. Elton John, who grew up in Pinner, owned the football club and used to play benefit gigs at Vicarage Road, while his friend George Michael worked at the Regent Cinema as a teenage usher. In turn, George’s friend Geri Halliwell grew up in the town too, as did Bradley Walsh, who has also been known to sing; he will be out on tour this spring with Brian Conley, Shane Richie and Joe Pasquale in the self-mockingly named Prat Pack, singing swing and big band music with a 15-piece horn section.

We will hear a lot about this tour, with starts at the end of the month but which doesn’t come to Watford (yet), although the Milton Keynes show on May 12 is a quick hop on the train away. In the meantime, the town will entertain its folk on Record Store Day (RSD) across six venues and 25 bands or artists. This is the Sound of Watford event, which officially begins at 8am outside the LP Café on The Parade when dozens of folk queue up for an exclusive RSD release which promotes the glory of shopping for physical product.

As well as a live DJ at the Café, the other big live music venues in town, sited within a mile’s radius of one another, are hosting the two dozen Sound of Watford acts. This allows fans of live music to hop from gig to gig and sample as much music as they can. High up on my list are The Cloak of Starsky, part of the Pump House’s bill from 7-11pm; they put out four fuzzy tracks last year which sound as sweaty as the tiny rooms that would reverberate to them.

The other five acts on Saturday at the year-round cultural hub, which hosts jazz, folk and musical theatre, include Gender Crisis, Phil Matthews, Gurt and ‘industrial nu-punk duo’ Pest, the chorus of whose new single O121DO1 goes ‘scare humanity, increasing entropy’. Ellie Capocci, whose new EP is due in July, released Pretty Girls at the end of last year, which would fit on to the daytime playlist of Vibe 107.6, a local station with a Sunday night Raw Vibes show playing music by local acts.

Johnny’s Bar, which hosts regular goth nights, welcomes Seethe, Trashed, Mishikui and Skarlet Envy, who are all set pulverise the eardrums. Far more sedate are the three acts set to play The Mad Squirrel, the craft ale venue with a Watford FC mural, during the evening: The Romulus Jazz Society, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Momajoja.

The last of these acts has a residency at The Castle in Harrow and released a funky four-track EP called Soul Dive last year, the best track on which is the immediate Misinformation. Meanwhile, the Rickmansworth-based duo Vampires describe themselves as ‘uneasy listening with a death mariachi vibe’, which rather distracts from how good their music is. Their 2024 release Psychedelic Soul & Trash Vol 3 falls under the genres of ‘bubblegum sci-fi/horror indie pop’, which sounds like they just picked them out of a hat. Some of the drum loops they use are recognisable: Be My Baby on Rialto, Superstition on A Long Walk Home, 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover on Season of the Witch.

Then there are six acts playing The One Crown, the olde pub which is equidistant between Watford High Street Overground station and the Mad Squirrel, opposite the street entrance to Boots. Opening band Fused are on just after 5pm, followed by Stray Fox, The Nevers, Trainwrecker, Nick Byrne and headliners Ramona Marx, all playing 30-minute sets. It will be amusing to hear the segue from Byrne’s ‘indie-folk melancholia’ into the ‘spunk band’ from Hemel Hempstead who close things out at 9pm with songs from their recent EP Splenectomy.

The LP Café will set up speakers at 11am at the Pond, the plaza at the very end of The Parade which is filled with sand or deckchairs every summer. Paul Terris from the venue is gearing up for the busiest day of the year but took a few moments to tell me his view about The Sound of Watford.

‘It picks itself,’ Paul tells me of the lineup. ‘Ninety percent of the acts are local submissions, then it's up to us to do with the acts what any good record shop does with their records: organise and curate them.

‘I take great pleasure in the scheduling and coordinating of the line up, giving each venue their own vibe that fits with the character and history of each one. We work with many of them all year round to promote new and independent acts.’

The lineup playing by the Pond includes six more acts, including The Tiles, guitarist Callaine, indie-rockers Blueshift, the quartet Safe House and the trio Them 71s, who also played outside the café on a warm day last August. The act I am most looking forward to catching, either at The Pond or anywhere else, is Harry T Pope.

Pope is a piano-playing songwriter – hmm, I know another one of those – from Croxley Green. He put out his own five-track EP A Different Kind last year, which includes the outstanding and jazzy Stay Away and the seven-minute 11:11, with strings from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra playing Pope’s arrangements. Catch him for free before you have to pay large amounts of money to see him.

Paul Terris marvels at the eclecticism of the event’s two dozen acts. ‘As big as it grows the line-up is barely scratching the surface of the populous creativity in Watford.’

Visit The LP Café on Instagram here, and for a full events listing on what’s on in Watford, visit the Watford Actually site here

Reality Remade the TV Star, and TV Stars Remade Reality

Scripted TV is in decline because reality TV has taken over the world

Big Brother returns, yet again, this week, but why do we need reality TV when TV is giving us reality?

This is not a new observation. In my lifetime, we have gone from cheering on or booing actors in dramas and soap operas – Dynasty, Dallas, Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited – to watching people-as-brands, whose careers blend the scripted and unscripted. Look, because we have to, at Kim Kardashian, who parlayed a sextape into 20 years of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which has made stars of her sisters, husbands, mother and stepfather.

Not for nothing has Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gone back to her day job as a TV personality, except she’s not Meghan from Suits but Meghan from The Firm. I have no intention of watching her Netflix series, or even watch it to hate it, but the fact it has been made indicates that her mere presence is enough to get it commissioned. If Netflix had any gumption, they would make her watch paint dry, with her husband and kids popping up to ask if she wants some tea.

I watch so little TV these days, because I’m a print and radio guy, but outside of comedy and late-night US talk shows, I have little interest in doing so. I always think that TV drama, or competitions like Bake Off or The Apprentice, are the water cooler of the middle classes; when people rave about Bodyguard and Bridgerton, or Stranger Things and Squid Games, they are admitting to their friends and colleagues that they take the time to watch what other people are watching.

But increasingly it seems we’re all watching the world, and its politics, rather than a scripted story with character arcs and endings all mapped out. I still think the big story in the UK today is whether Fr Farage can achieve his (financial backers’) dreams and grab control of the legislature, although I am positive the Royal Family will stick their gloves on the tiller and ease right-wing figures away from representing them in Parliament.

That’s why our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are barristers, and why the Chancellor is a former Bank of England employee; her deputy, Darren Jones, is a lawyer too, as are a great many members of His Majesty’s Government. Can Labour, not the natural party of power, ride the waves of populism and mistrust into the 2030s, or will the support of media barons including Lachlan Murdoch, son of nonagenarian Rupert, and Sir Paul Marshall convince people to vote against their best interests and let the lunatics take over the asylum?

When Nigel Farage was paid £1.5m by ITV (the same people screening Big Brother this year) to take part in I’m A Celebrity, he knew this would increase his chances of winning over the people of Clacton; and this came six months before he announced he stood for the seat. During the pandemic, his I’m A Celeb predecessor Matt Hancock became the fall guy precisely because, as Health Secretary, he had been so visible in the daily briefings. As for Boris Johnson, a man whose first name is Alexander and who backed leaving the European Union for selfish, political reasons, the majority of folk first saw him on Have I Got News For You, not speaking in the Chamber as MP for Henley.

If I could go back in time, I would fire Mark Burnett before he had the idea of turning a bankrupt real estate mogul into a ferocious TV star telling people they were ‘fired’. It appals me that NBC, who aired The Apprentice for many years, pay Seth Meyers to lampoon the President’s activities, although the satire remains very watchable and astute. Shows like his, and those of Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, demand a knowledge of current events much as how rabbis need to know the Torah inside out to comment upon it.

Social media enjoys polarisation and side-taking, to ‘own’ one side or the other. In a recent development, newspaper headlines have started to comment on how a think tank report can be a ‘blow’ to the Prime Minister or Chancellor, or how ministers are ‘under pressure’ when things go awry. Hang about: isn’t this how sportswriters talk about football managers? And there we have it: politics is being turned into the Premier League. And what are Bukayo Saka, Erling Haaland and Mo Salah other than TV stars who are watched by millions of people around the world?

Again, in my lifetime, English football has become a product, with Russian, American and Saudi businessmen owning the top clubs and running them as fiefdoms. Managers have become coaches, players multimillionaires, fans customers, and to what end? This year, Manchester United fans have marched against the new ownership of Jim Ratcliffe, a tax exile who voted to leave the EU, while their rivals in the East of the city are involved in another court case. The first one threatened to eject them from European competition but, happily, they were not ejected and they won the Champions League.

In recent years, the richest and best run team has won the Premier League, usually Manchester City. Liverpool will, barring an almighty collapse, win their 20th league title and their second post-1992 championship in a competition where any of the 20 teams can beat anyone else. At this point I am duty bound to remember Leicester City’s 2016 triumph, which will be marked next year in the usual way such anniversaries are marked (cf Man United winning the 1998/99 Treble, Man City winning the Premier League in 2012); only Jamie Vardy, the team’s goalscorer, is still at the club, and he might well retire this year or next.

Vardy’s wife Becky, you recall, was subject to a court case by Coleen Rooney, famous purely for being the wife of Wayne, a great footballer who has failed in the three managerial jobs (Derby, Birmingham, Plymouth) he has had since retiring. He is back on the punditry circuit alongside his former United team-mates Rio Ferdinand, Roy Keane and Gary Neville, who are paid to criticise their ex-employers (but never their old manager, Alex Ferguson); even the commentary surrounding the Premier League is monetizable.

In politics, too, there are former ministers editing magazines (Michael Gove), hosting podcasts (Rory Stewart, George Osborne) and popping up as professional agitators (Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for seven long weeks in 2022). They write columns, accept speaking engagements and take jobs in the private sector using the knowledge they aren’t officially allowed to use for profit until two years after they leave government.

Meanwhile, the US President has become the human face of Project 2025, which is ripping up the democratic norms of a 250-year-old republic. Who could not fail to be gripped by another executive order, or a debate about capitalism, in comparison with watching Anderson Cooper present the news on CNN? What started with a group of young people on MTV’s Real World in the early 1990s has, via Big Brother, morphed into politics as reality show, with fun characters like RFK Jr and ‘Little Marco’ Rubio, who is now the US Foreign Secretary, a quite amazing piece of scriptwriting from a man who used to trade insults with TV contestants on The Apprentice.

Karaoke and the Consensus Hit

At Uncle Darryl’s 60th birthday in March, I was reminded of the power of the universal hit song

There was drink, sushi and karaoke when Uncle Darryl, my mum’s brother, turned 60 last month. In the three hours I was at the party (I ducked out at 9.15pm), at least 30 songs had been played, all of which were consensus hits: songs that everyone knows and loves, even if they say they don’t.

The hits were a mix of songs from long ago and from more recent years: Rule the World by Take That, Angels by the most successful former member of Take That, and songs not by Take That. All You Need Is Love from 1967, Bohemian Rhapsody and Dancing Queen from the mid-1970s, Livin’ on a Prayer and Summer of ’69 (never a UK Top 40 hit, actually) from the mid-1980s, Yellow and Mr Brightside from the early 2000s; all we needed for the full house was bloody Sweet Caroline.

At some point I realised that all these songs, which without exception are in major keys, were versions of Molly Malone or God Save The King: folk anthems to be sung in celebration of being alive. I remember people bellowing along to Bon Jovi at a wedding and realising that the band may have written it, but it belonged to the audience now. All those songs do: Robbie Williams has said how Angels has become ‘the world’s biggest karaoke session’, while the abovementioned Rule The World was built for the stadiums Take That were playing at the time.

I asked a black friend what sort of consensus hits soundtrack gatherings of black people who have grown up with hip-hop (Eminem, for instance, is notoriously hard to do karaoke to). She asked around and came back with Before I Let Go by Maze and Frankie Beverly, which failed to reach the top 10 of the US R&B charts but came back in a big way in 2019 thanks to Beyoncé including a version of it in her Homecoming concert movie aka Beychella. And what about in Australia? Apparently there’s a line dance for Nutbush City Limits by Tina Turner, and of course there’s the unofficial national anthem You’re The Voice by John Farnham.

Consensus hits extend to books, movies and TV too. I’ve just started listening to a podcast about How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom that ran on CBS between 2005 and 2014; I came to it after the show had finished, and appreciated the acting, writing and storylines. It also acts as a warm hug or hot toddy, full of earnestness and lessons learned.

Episodes of the How We Made Your Mother podcast, which mentions in its third episode how the show belongs to its audience, begin with superlatives and anecdotes from fans who feel comforted by the show and its characters: single guy Ted, young couple Marshall and Lily, Canadian TV host Robin and besuited bro Barney, played against type by Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris.

The show’s success coincided with the Obama administration, as did Parks and Recreation, where lovely Leslie Knope strove for positivity against the show’s antihero, Parks Director Ron Swanson. Amy Poehler, who played Leslie as an extension of herself, links that show with the Pixar movie Inside Out, which was imagineered to perfection and was a critical hit; the sequel was the world’s biggest movie of last year, even though it lost the novelty factor of the first movie, which took the novel approach of personifying emotions like Anger, Sadness and Joy.

Despicable Me, with its irritatingly adorable yellow Minions, helped Steve Carell move on from Michael Scott, the American equivalent of David Brent, and I can’t wait to watch the movies with my nephew. It’s already cued up in my mind alongside the other Pixar animations that were, and still are, consensus hits: Toy Story 1 and 3, Up, Wall-E and Coco. You know what the films are doing to you, but once your prefrontal cortex latches on to them, you are powerless to stop the tears from flowing.

Humans like stories and feeling involved in them, a literal consensus that gives such a status to these pieces of art. None has been more successful in my lifetime than the saga of the wizard boy who came of age at boarding school alongside his two best friends; almost 30 years after the first book in the heptalogy came out, Harry Potter still casts his spells upon the children and grandchildren of the book’s first readers. I suppose part of the series’ success is, like the Bible or Torah, to do with the shared nature of it, with readers of every creed and colour feeling kinship with the characters.

There’s a difference between niche causes and epochal artworks like Guernica or the Mona Lisa, which at this point in their lifetimes are seen to be seen, for a photo op, rather than to be understood. Much of the coverage of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which I think of as a giant niche even though she has sold more records than anyone else in the last few years, focussed on how much money she took in, or how much money was added to the GDP of the city she played in, or how long the set was. Consensus isn’t about how big your appendage is, however, but how you wield it.

I always remember a review of a Kings of Leon gig which, to paraphrase, noted that the band would love not to play Sex On Fire, but they would also like to pay the man who cleans their swimming pools. The consensus hit entraps the movie studio or the performing artist, boxing them in and forcing them to do the same thing over and over again until it falls out of fashion; no Kings of Leon song has been anywhere near as successful since Sex On Fire, even if it didn’t even breach the US top 50. It means they can tour Australia and the UK, both of whose charts it topped, until the end of time.

NOW 120 is out on Friday, gathering a few dozen tracks that have been popular in recent months, and I am running over the final edits of a book that tells the story of pop music through four decades of NOW compilations. Back in 1999, they could afford to omit Genie In A Bottle, Livin’ La Vida Loca and Flying Without Wings, which are all consensus smashes, because they could include Baby One More Time, S Club Party and Tragedy by Steps. There were more chances for consensus when there were fewer opportunities to hear a song via a personal feed on TikTok.

Last month the Netflix hit Adolescence got people talking about teenage mental health, and TV shows or podcasts about scandals or evil men can become global topics of discussion. It is ironic to note that R Kelly, whose music will never again be heard in polite society, is Track One on Disc Two of NOW 44; another of his songs, the remix to Ignition, was a party staple before it very quickly wasn’t. Luckily, we have Uptown Funk, Livin’ on a Prayer and bloody Sweet Caroline.

Consensus is cross-generational, after all: this year, Baby One More Time passed a billion Spotify streams, although we didn’t sing that at Darryl’s 60th.

Now That’s What I Call Now: A History of Pop Music in Britain from 1984-present is out as an eBook later this month, but you can read original versions of the pieces at nowthatswhaticallnow.com.

Elton John, the Troubadour from Metroland

In advance of a new collaborative project with Brandi Carlile, I look out of my lounge window for inspiration

Last week I hymned Paul Gambaccini, who turns 76 a week from now (April 2). Gambo’s friend Elton John, who is two years, a week and a day older than him, is still singing and releasing music. In fact, he celebrates his 78th birthday tonight at the London Palladium, but I don’t have to go anywhere to see him; I just need to turn my chair around.

To mark Elton’s final shows at Vicarage Road back in 2022, a massive mural was done of him on the side of Watford Library: glasses, sparkles, ebullience in an image. If you look out of my lounge window, Elton stares back, like the demon eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, or Sauron.

Next Friday (April 4), Elton releases his album Who Believes In Angels, a duets project with Brandi Carlile, who is fast becoming my generation’s Joni Mitchell or, indeed, our Elton. Working with the great Bernie Taupin and producer Andrew Watt, who has already ticked off the Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam as he tries to collect the set of Rock’n’Roll Stars, the pair of them have recorded a set of songs that build on their life’s work: comforting people, including gay and marginalised ones, with their music.

The album ends with When This Old World Is Done With Me, the type of song David Bowie and Leonard Cohen were singing in their seventies; Rock Star Stares Death in the Face a whole genre in itself, led by My Way, sung by a fiftysomething Sinatra. Elton’s take on the genre ends with a brass band, and after he played it through for the first time, Brandi recalls he wept and ‘his whole body crumpled over the piano’. ‘Is it too Lion King?’ said the man who wrote the songs for The Lion King, which will help Disney+ gain subscribers for decades to come.

As we learned from his memoir, a biopic and a documentary, this is the legacy of a shy pianist who, between the demise of The Beatles and the moonwalking rise of Michael Jackson, was the world’s most popular entertainer. He headlined Wembley by himself! He topped the US singles charts multiple times!! He was camp and flamboyant in an era of three-day weeks and economic decline!!!

We will soon see Elton in the forthcoming Spinal Tap sequel, which is not his first foray into acting; indeed, he has played ‘Elton John’ most of his life. He made a cameo in sitcom Ab Fab (‘I’ve always had hair, BITCH!’) and, in the best scene of Tommy, he mimed Pinball Wizard with stadium-rock gusto wearing oversized glasses and shoes.

As the book Watford Forever makes clear, Elton replaced drugs with Watford Football Club, whose Sir Elton John Stand I sat in just the other week to watch an FA Youth Cup tie. (Can I mention I wrote a book, From Kids to Champions, about the competition?) With £1m of Elton’s money, and the expert management of Graham Taylor, Watford cantered up the Football League and finished the 1982/83 season as the second best team in England; the 1983/84 season began with games in European competition and ended at Wembley, where Elton was filmed with tears in his eyes during the FA Cup final anthem Abide With Me.

Then came the score to the movie about meerkats, warthogs and lion cubs, as well as sundry soundtracks for stage musicals that played on Broadway and in the West End: Aida, Billy Elliott, Tammy Faye and The Devil Wears Prada, the last of these currently running in the Dominion Theatre where We Will Rock You used to live. Elton’s memoir Me, in which he revealed that Bob Dylan was useless at charades, made it clear that his career is motivated by the fractured relationship between young Reginald and dad Stanley, who was played in the movie Rocketman by the same actor who had been in the Underworld movies.

When Elton topped the UK album charts with his Diamonds collection, 18 months after putting a bow on his career with a Glastonbury headline slot, it reminded people just how many hits he had had: Bennie and the Jets, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Philadelphia Freedom, Are You Ready For Love, Tiny Dancer, Crocodile Rock and, of course, I’m Still Standing, Your Song and set closer Rocket Man. The biggest selling song of all (and until the end of) time is Candle in the Wind, written in honour of Marilyn Monroe and reset to commemorate the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose younger son Elton is godfather to.

Then there’s the philanthropic work with his AIDS Foundation, established in 1992. He is also in the exclusive club of 65 Companions of Honour, alongside fellow melodist Paul McCartney, fellow national treasure David Attenborough and fellow gay icon Ian McKellen. Above all, though, he is father of two boys, respectively an aspiring footballer and a wannabe musician. Paul Gambaccini and I agreed that their dad had done his job correctly.

I came to Elton in the 1990s, so my first exposure to him was probably Circle of Life. Not wanting to spend £100 on a ticket to see him and his crack band play Watford’s football stadium, I took my partner and walked down to sit on a bench outside the hospital beside the ground and listen to the second half of the set. It sounded like rock’n’roll music, but there was also opera, orchestral and pop music, a combination only Elton could have brought together; this was a kid who attended the Royal Academy of Music to learn piano but loved the pre-rock chart-topper Winifred Atwell.

I do not know why he doesn’t join forces with Gambo and launch a podcast called The Rest Is Pop. Elton has hosted over 400 episodes of his Rocket Hour for Apple Music showcasing his deep love for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, pop music. He has been known to buy multiple copies of CDs for both friends and his multiple homes dotted around the world: in Windsor, Venice, Nice and, in the USA, both Atlanta and LA. All that Lion King money has been used sensibly.

Although he is no longer jetting around the world to fulfil concert dates, Elton is looking after his legacy just as Jimmy Page is shepherding the Led Zeppelin remasters and as McCartney and Ringo Starr are still talking about their band, which broke up 55 years ago. Among Elton’s greatest achievements is that along with Led Zep and the Fabs, he is in the tiny rank of popular entertainers who gained huge success in the USA. They have since been joined by the Bee Gees, Sting, Phil Collins, Coldplay, Adele and Elton’s good friend Ed Sheeran, who have all written top tunes and sold out stadiums.

Elton is also very good at selling his material, always game for an interview; he dealt with an enthused Jack Black on Graham Norton’s show very well, and he and Brandi recently spoke to Radio 2’s Scott Mills from his Vinyl Room. ‘The song just appeared,’ Brandi sighed about her friend, a man who has been inventing melodies, which have been heard by millions, if not billions, for over 50 years. Hence why I can see him out of my window.

Always Meet Your Heroes

It’s quite disconcerting to have your hero bellow questions at you, as I found out this year

I’m on the radio on Sunday. For the third time in as many months, my voice will come out of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. I first applied to be on the music quiz Counterpoint in 2021, and I was not chosen as one of 27 contestants for that series, or 2023’s, or 2024’s.

I was promised I would definitely be on the 2025 series, the 38th, questions for which have been set by Stephen Garner (pictured below), whose fiendish mind thinks up 67 per show, 14 of which are unused. Somehow, in 28 minutes of valuable audio real estate, 53 questions are asked in full or in part. Because it’s a music quiz, there are also clips to play; in my heat, I was given the love theme to the movie Up and three pieces of music by Wham! You can hear the show here as a podcast.

You will discover what Stephen has thought up for the three finalists on Sunday afternoon at 4.30pm, when there is no Premier League football on 5 Live. Rather humorously my two fellow finalists – Jim from Northern Ireland, and Sarah, who describes herself intersectionally as a ‘Cornish Australian Mancunian’ – are former Mastermind finalists, while in 2022 Sarah reached the Counterpoint final and won Brain of Britain. She was wearing a t-shirt of her favourite band The Divine Comedy, which was a nice conversation starter as we waited for the quiz to begin (we recorded it a month ago yesterday).

In the semi-final, I had gotten lucky when Country in the 21st Century came up as a bonus round. I was asked a septet of questions that ranged from the artist who covered Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, to which trio were ashamed that George W Bush was from Texas, to the Californian country festival that happens every April. In case you want to test your knowledge, here’s the link to the show.

The final round is on the buzzers, the same dot buttons used by Just A Minute contestants to interrupt hesitators and deviators; the show is recorded in the same BBC Radio Theatre on a stage where pretty much every great British entertainer of the past century has trodden upon. The green room in which contestants mingle and where they leave their belongings during the recording, Stephen told me, has held Joanna Lumley, Michael Palin and Sir Elton John, whom Stephen chaperoned at a recording of Paul Gambaccini’s celebration of his 40 years on the BBC.

Photo credit: Christopher Sykesud

Segue: Paul Gambaccini (pictured left) is my hero. I used to stay in on Saturday evenings, even when I could listen back to the show on the pre-Sounds iPlayer, to hear America’s Greatest Hits, a two-hour programme that played rock, country and R&B ‘then and now’. The show always ended with the number one song of the moment. It’s the first place I heard Just Dance by Lady Gaga, I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry and Fence Post by Aaron Watson, a country artist who lamented that an executive didn’t believe he had ‘commercial appeal’.

I wrote to the man everybody calls Gambo to borrow the format for the show when I did my own version of it in 2015, and he graciously sent me a letter back giving me his blessing. I had attended that BBC celebration, which meant that Stephen called me over to the questioner’s table before the recording of the heat. Weren’t we close to the 50-year hootenanny, I asked. Yes, Paul Gambaccini from the radio told me, and that’s not all: if he, who turns 76 on April 2, held on for a few more years he would break essayist Alistair Cooke’s service record of 58 years.

In a media landscape where the BBC have to serve every possible audience in every possible way – news, current affairs, drama, music documentary, children’s programming – there is room to give Gambo a two-hour Sunday night show on Radio 2 show called The Paul Gambaccini Collection. In the first year, he has broadcast tributes to Quincy Jones and his Radio 2 colleague Johnnie Walker, and in February, either side of a Valentine’s Day special, the themes were Comic Books and songs with Happy or Sad in the title.

The critic David Hepworth once remarked that the man possessed a ‘discographic memory’, perhaps because alongside Mike Read and Jo and Tim Rice (yes, that Tim Rice), Gambo wrote the literal pop discography. That’s why they call him the Professor of Pop, which is befitting a man who studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1970s and settled in London after becoming Rolling Stone magazine’s man in Rock’n’Roll London, in a country which had just begun to put the genre on the air with Radio One in 1967.

Across half a century, in a broadcasting career which included a spot reviewing the movies on breakfast TV, Gambo has presented for every one of the main BBC networks and several commercial stations including Jazz FM, Classic FM, LBC and Greatest Hits Radio. The last of these stations is where America’s Greatest Hits now lives, broadcast from 5-7pm on Saturday afternoons. He records it in his West London home with ‘studio manager Chris Sherwood’ on hand to push the buttons as he reads the script, as I was told in the green room after the final recording.

He has published two books of essays, Masters of Rock and Track Records, based on hour-long profiles written for Radio One in the early 1980s; the Michael Jackson essay begins ‘I don’t want to talk about the llama’. Only a man used to Oxford tutorial essays could have taken on such an assignment, one which had a ‘hideous deadline pressure’, in a time before Google and digital search capabilities.

In 1996, Paul published a memoir called Love Letters, which I am duty bound to say took its name from a copyright which was a UK top ten hit for three artists: Ketty Lester (number 4, 1962); Elvis Presley (number 6, 1966); and Alison Moyet (number 4, 1987). I had to look that up, but I bet Paul would not needed to do so.

In Love Letters, Paul wrote about seven men he loved. One of them was David Carroll, who fell victim to the AIDS virus that struck down so many gay men in the 1980s: ‘We both suffered to come to terms with a sexuality that was first impossible, then inadvisable and finally a blessing’. When Gambo marked the 80th birthday of his mate Tim Rice in November 2024, he closed the programme with Anthem, written by Rice for the musical Chess, in which Carroll originated the role of The Russian, Anatoly Sergievsky.

Gambo’s achievements in broadcasting and discography rather bury the lede: a few years before he came to England, the Sexual Offences Act was passed; one of the clauses legalised homosexuality between consenting adults over 21 in private. Alongside his close friend Elton John (more on whom next week), Gambo has been a high-profile gay figure in British life; Elton might have sold millions of records, but Gambo was the one who played them on air and introduced people to Elton’s magnificent songwriting.

Who will replace Elton, or Gambo, when they are gone? Well, who can.

Journalism and The Truth

Two small words, Truth and Trust, are obsessing me in this post-whatever age

Maria Ressa’s outstanding book How To Stand Up to a Dictator was written about Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, whose daughter Sara is in the middle of being impeached as vice-president. Maria and her fellow female journalists at Rappler had to undergo the slings and digital arrows of trying to hold the powerful accountable, with troll farms and public pronouncements turning people against the truth.

Truth and its cousin, Trust, are so important in the new digital world. Jamie Susskind, a qualified barrister who is on first-name terms with the Rule of Law, has written a couple of books about this new Digital Republic, one of which was praised for its chunky bibliography; his brother Daniel, who would have been a classmate of mine had we not gone to rival schools just North of London, has received plaudits for his ‘reckoning’ on the concept of economic growth, which has fascinated him at an academic and policy level. I remember Daniel doing some magic tricks as a teenager; now, with plaudits from former Prime Ministers, he’s hoping to work some magic of a different kind.

And then there’s the USA, to which the whole world is gripped; never mind Dallas or M*A*S*H, Seinfeld or Friends, Succession or whatever this year’s hottest show is, Trump II: This Time It’s Worse is the sitcom of the ages. This series has a fun new character: a nasty billionaire with a passion for space exploration, electric cars and also autocracy.

We’re supposed to be scared and distracted, especially those of us with family in the country, and trust the media to mediate, as they have always done. It’s not particularly optimal that Fox News, assorted online gobsheets and the recently freed Steve Bannon, who invented Bannoning aka ‘flooding the zone’, are all working hard to spread the Trump message. Nor is it great that progressive voices are choosing their words carefully: it saddens me to thank that Seth Meyers is earning a living on NBC, the very same network which turned Trump from a tabloid star into a TV star with a catchphrase: ‘Make America Great Again’. I mean, ‘You’re Fired’.

What worries me greatly is the silencing of journalists and big media organisations. Why has Amazon earmarked $40m to do an Imelda Marcos-style portrait of Melania, mother of Barron Trump, a freshman at New York University? Why has Meta told its Facebook users to do their own fact-checking? Why did Reddit act to stop criticism, stating publicly that ‘debate and dissent’ is good but threats are not, of the hired goons who acted on behalf of DOGE aka the Elon department of state? Maybe the threats need to be coded or, as per Nigel Farage, asked in a jokey ‘Whhhhat’s all that about?’ manner.

If you are paid to report the truth objectively and fairly, you cannot be cowed by the people on whom you are reporting. It did not surprise me to learn that in the early years of Nazism, Hitler rapidly took measures to shut down the free and Jewish-owned press, with journalists of all stripes fleeing the country which was now hostile to Jews, communists and anyone who wasn’t Aryan enough. Are the tech bros the new Goebbelses, controlling the message and making it impossible to challenge power (whhhhat’s all that about)?

There is a reason the resignation of Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes made the news after her cartoon was spiked. Although it was foreseeable to know that painting the ultimate owner of her paper as a man in thrall to Trump, next to Mickey Mouse and Mark Zuckerberg, it still smacked of censorship, or at the very least extreme caution. Rupert Murdoch, before his company Fox News paid a gargantuan fine rather than go to court to say that they not defame Dominion voting systems, the truth of which of course is made moot by the settlement, gave another of his axioms which I have not forgotten since: ‘It’s not red or blue; it’s green’.

This means that he, as well as Musk, Zuckerberg and Farage, can change shapes and colour to suit the mood. Words don’t matter; money does. Piers Morgan congratulated Trump on his accession to the throne – sorry, the presidency – four years after flipping the bird after the Capitol riots of January 6 2021. Morgan, who has been employed variously by ITV, CNN and Talk TV, is now an independent entity and, in spite of everything, helped newspapers sell copies and TV channels gain viewers. He is also a very, very rich man, even though the commentator George Monbiot wrote in 2023 that his rise was ‘one of the abiding mysteries of public life’ (whhhhat’s all that about?).

Like Murdoch, Morgan showed his hand back in 1999 when he admitted that he sought to ‘ingratiate’ himself with ‘newspaper owners, potential newspaper owners and billionaires’. Morgan claims, in spite of a court case stating the opposite, he ‘neither hacked a phone nor told anyone to hack a phone’ while editor of the News of the World (before he was 30) and the Daily Mirror, a job he lost after publishing faked photos of Iraqi prisoners. He then headed to Britain’s Got Talent, where he was present to witness the rise of the Susan Boyle phenomenon.

Morgan turns 60 years old at the end of March, and I would genuinely love to be at that birthday party or be there when he opens his cards. Which old Fleet Street legends will pay homage to a man who in 2008 won the seventh season of the US Celebrity Apprentice, beating off his fellow Hydra team members Lennox Lewis, Gene Simmons and the guy who played Big Pussy in the Sopranos? Morgan now hosts Uncensored on his Youtube channel, free of any broadcaster or even requirements for balance; he is more Andrew Tate than Andrew Marr (whhhhat’s all that about?).

The show, sponsored by an American jewellery broker (‘get up to $15,000 in free silver’), has recently included interviews with Ukraine president Vlodymyr Zelensky and, in Riyadh, Tucker Carlson, respectively Putin’s foe and the man who was, to Morgan, ‘licking’ the Russian leader somewhere I can’t write because you might be eating. Before his fall from grace, Carlson was the top TV pundit in the USA with a nightly show on Fox News; watching clips of the interview where Morgan and Carlson met for the first time is like the celebrated Spiderman meme. Indeed, both got to question one another for their respective channels.

Both men are successful in monetising the attention of a global audience, and I do wonder if history will be kind to them. They quack like journalists, talking to people in power and communicating to an audience, but they are at heart entertainers. In a world where news is a marketplace, they are the fearless truth-tellers, and their audience trusts them.

It also helps the powerful people that voters are watching Morgan or Carlson; better them, than reading Maria Ressa on Duterte, or Carole Cadwalladr on Brexit-backing businessmen, or journalists reporting on Hitler in 1934. Ah, no; they couldn’t do that, because their employers had fled.

The fewer journalists there are, the likelier that the powerful can write history themselves, rather than be written about.

On The Plane, The Game You Cannot Lose

The latest round of ‘What? No [Player X]?!’ is upon us, as Herr Tuchel selects the first England squad for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers

Every two years, providing that the England men’s football team qualify for an international tournament, the great debate begins: who should be the next James Bond?

No, sorry, I mean: who should be the next Doctor Who?

No, again, sorry, I mean: who should be on the plane to [insert international tournament here]? It is a parlour game with no right or wrong answers, and places importance on the squad, which has been expanded from 23 to 26 players for no reason at all.

Thomas Tuchel will follow Gareth Southgate as the most loved/hated man in Britain according to how well England play across 90 minutes this spring and autumn. Oodles of newsprint will be wasted by those doing the most pointless job in England: writing about the national team. It’s pointless because any opinion counts, no matter how stupid or, indeed, racist. The USA has its many sporting franchises, and Australia has the cricket team, but really the England men’s team (not the women’s…yet) is the albatross around our neck.

Someone once wrote that, whereas Shakespeare, HRH, the NHS and the BBC are British, only the football team is separate from those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They know their place, but England has a nation of many millions who, in 2026, will mark the diamond jubilee of the 1966 FIFA World Cup victory on home turf. Only one of the starting XI remains, Sir Geoff Hurst, while as of the time of writing in March 2025 only two other squad members are still alive. Strangely, both are wingers: Ian Callaghan, who is 83 in April, won five First Division titles with Liverpool across 20 years, and Terry Paine, who played 808 games for Southampton and will turn 86 this month.

For this reason, the 2026 World Cup in North America and Mexico assumes plenty of importance. For the first time, a German coach will lead England (barring catastrophe) to a finals that will be overlong and overshadowed, as ever, by the nastiness of the host nation’s leader and the usual blitheness of football’s governing body (‘today I feel…Trumpian’). The English FA have appointed a career coach who won the Champions League with Chelsea and has managed in France (with Paris St-Germain) and Germany, where he took over from Jürgen Klopp at both Mainz and Dortmund, and took charge of Bayern Munich in 2023/24. Rather shockingly, Bayern did not win the league that season, which meant he was relieved of his post.

Tuchel brings with him an English coach in Anthony Barry, a Scouser who came through at Everton but was released as a young pro. He went on to play for such clubs as Accrington Stanley, Yeovil Town, Chester City, Fleetwood Town and Wrexham – all hail the football pyramid! – before starting a coaching career at Wigan Athletic and moving on to work first with Chelsea and then with the Republic of Ireland and Belgium. He is apparently known for his set-piece work, so expect the focus to be as much on Barry, corners and free-kicks as on Tuchel, tactics and open play; indeed, the 2018 World Cup saw England have a great deal of joy from dead-ball situations.

That tournament included plenty of players who are still under consideration for Herr Tuchel, and thus we turn to On The Plane. Bear in mind that injuries and form can play a huge part in who makes the cut, which is why Marcus Rashford will be nowhere near the squad, in spite of regaining first-team football with Aston Villa. Trent Alexander-Arnold was a 19-year-old one-cap wonder when he went to Russia in 2018, while first-choice goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and defender Harry Maguire had only played three and five times respectively going into a tournament in which they both shone.

There is every chance that an unknown player will have three good games for his club, impress the manager during a friendly in Spring 2026 and force the manager’s hand. As it stands, there are several players who are, so to speak, clutching their tickets. They include Jude Bellingham and Declan Rice in midfield, Cole Palmer and Bukayo Saka in the wide positions and Pickford, who has now played 73 games for his country. In 2025/26 he will play in goal for Everton in their new stadium, and with any luck he will face fewer shots per game under the management of David Moyes. His understudies will be two from Nick Pope, Aaron Ramsdale, James Trafford and Dean Henderson.

Into the centre-back positions and it seems likely that Marc Guéhi and John Stones will be picked, with Ezri Konsa building on his success at Aston Villa. Joe Gomez and Levi Colwill are other options, as is Brighton captain-leader-legend Lewis Dunk. Pickford’s Everton teammate Jarrad Branthwaite made his England debut just before EURO 2024 and was on standby for the tournament.

Other provisional squad members included Jarell Quansah of Liverpool and James Maddison of Spurs. It may be that Maddison is the type of player Tuchel wants in his squad, but he is blessed with playmakers, three of them from Manchester City alone: Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and James McAtee. In any case, Bellingham will start every game and potentially captain the side.

What to do about Harry Kane, England’s record scorer and the man brought to Bavaria by Tuchel in 2023? Dominic Solanke’s absence for this month’s games will ensure Ollie Watkins or possibly Noni Madueke starts one of the two games in rotation with Kane, or with each other. Had he scored any goals off the bench this season, Eddie Nketiah of Crystal Palace would join his team-mates Henderson, Guéhi, Tyrick Mitchell and Eberechi Eze in the squad; the injury to fellow striker Jean-Philippe Mateta gives Nketiah a decent run of games. Adam Wharton, who has missed much of the season through injury, and his replacement Will Hughes are also in with a shout.

With Bukayo Saka due to be making his way back from injury, Eze or Jarrod Bowen might have the opportunity to start on the right, with Palmer on the left or perhaps through the middle. Luke Shaw, whose body is too unreliable, might miss out in favour of Rico Lewis, who will be joined by any number of players who, alongside him, won the 2023 under-21 EURO tournament. They include: goalkeeper Trafford; defenders Branthwaite, Colwill and Taylor Harwood-Bellis; midfielders Harvey Elliott, Morgan Gibbs-White, Angel Gomes, Anthony Gordon and Curtis Jones; and strikers Palmer and Madueke.

Gareth Southgate famously started his time as England manager by informing Wayne Rooney that his international career was over, and professional England-watchers will be primed to go, ‘What, no [insert player here]?’ when they report on Tuchel’s first squad for the fixtures at Wembley against Albania and Latvia. Will any of Newcastle United’s Englishmen – Pope, Gordon, Harvey Barnes, Lewis Hall, Tino Livramento or Joe Willock – make the squad?

Will Manchester United’s horrendous league position relegate Kobbie Mainoo, who is looking to leave the club, to a squad player rather than a starter? Will Alexander-Arnold, Jones and Harvey Elliott mysteriously pull out of the games so as to help Liverpool more speedily pull level with United as they search for their 20th league title, which will delight (the win) or appal (the withdrawl) Ian Callaghan?

The one to watch for the starting place is Conor Gallagher, who played under Tuchel at Chelsea in 2022/23 and now plays in Spain for Atlético Madrid alongside Kieran Trippier who, aged 34 and having won over 50 international appearances, has made himself unavailable for the World Cup qualifiers. In the midfield, England will need a quarterback in front of the defence, a playmaker behind the striker and a sweeper-upper in the middle of the pitch.

Rice and Bellingham are the starters, with Mainoo, Gallagher, Jones and Gibbs-White ready as impact players. If Arsenal’s very young Max Dowman does a Rooney and comes through at 16, following the path to the first team that his fellow teenagers Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri have followed, then he might win a seat on the plane. You can call it the Theo Walcott role of Promising Young Talent. There might not be space for him anyway, as competition is intense.

Even though it doesn’t matter, and unlike Tuchel and Barry I am not being paid millions by the English FA to do this for a living, here is my squad of 26 for The Plane to Mexico and North America, with 11 players on standby to account for loss of form or injury.

Goalkeepers: Jordan Pickford, Nick Pope, Dean Henderson

Centre-Backs: Jarrad Branthwaite, Lewis Dunk, Joe Gomez, Marc Guéhi, Ezri Konsa, John Stones

Wide Midfielders: Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jarrod Bowen, Lewis Hall, Rico Lewis, Tino Livramento, Bukayo Saka

Central Midfielders: Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Conor Gallagher, Morgan Gibbs-White, Angel Gomes, Curtis Jones, Kobbie Mainoo, Declan Rice

Central Forwards: Harry Kane, Cole Palmer, Ollie Watkins

On Standby: Aaron Ramsdale, Levi Colwill, Jarell Quansah, Myles Lewis-Skelly, Anthony Gordon, James McAtee, Eberechi Eze, Jack Grealish, Harvey Elliott, Dominic Solanke, Nomi Madueke

The Death of the Congregation Generation

Generation Z, aged between 15 and 30, have much to teach the world, but so do their preceding generations

It hit me as I was listening to a Radio 4 podcast which brought together Nick Robinson and David Willetts, Amol Rajan and Nadia Whittome. The Times had commissioned research into Generation Z, the tranche of Britons born between 1996 and 2011, which coincides exactly with the Labour government which helped America kill Saddam Hussein, allowed bankers to get involved with credit default swaps then rescued their industry because it was too big to fail.

Meanwhile, these kids, who are today approaching their 15th, 21st or 30th birthdays, have grown up with broadband and mobile internet, the answers to any question at the tips of their hyperactive fingers. Never has any generation of young person been more aware of the world around them, and never so prone to mis- and disinformation. There’s a reason the BBC hired Marianna Spring, a 1996 baby, to investigate this phenomenon, even as the Corporation loses audience and listener share to Netflix, TikTok and the podcast.

I started to think about the generations before Gen Z. I was born in 1988, which makes me akin to Amol Rajan (b. 1983): a Millennial, a tranche now in our late-thirties and mid-forties, perhaps looking at secondary schools for our kids and watching their parents enjoy the fruits of working hard for 50 years. Our parents are either Baby Boomers, who are children of the 1960s, or Gen X-ers, kids of the 1970s.

Respectively the Boomers, like my mum (b. 1961) and dad (b. 1958), grew up with three channels on TV and innovative pop and rock music on the BBC’s fab new pop station Radio 1; they also had to knock on their friends’ doors or ring the house phone to see if they were in, and had to go to a physical library to research their homework, which they wrote down on paper.

The Gen X-ers could at least use word processors while they watched Duran Duran and Michael Jackson music videos on MTV or, if their parents did not have cable TV, Channel 4’s groovy show The Tube, hosted by the dynamic Paula Yates. When it came to going out and having fun, while their Boomer parents headed to Northern Soul or punk clubs, the Gen X kids went to illegal raves in fields around the new M25 motorway (which, since it opened in 1986, is actually a Millennial).

Back to that discussion on Radio 4, which for all its youth-targeting is still a station most enjoyed by Boomers over 60. Labour MP Nadia Whittome, a former ‘Baby of the House’ who was elected at the age of 23 in 2019 to serve the Nottingham East constituency, was complaining about the lack of inheritance for her generation, who are on the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z. They were teenagers while the Cameron-Clegg Coalition cut back on public expenditure in a necessary but awful programme of austerity.

In 2016, there was a vote where not enough of the electorate wanted to stay within the European Union, some of whom believed the promises of sovereignty from that man in the blazer who led the UK Independence Party. In 2020, a lethal pandemic disrupted their education and forced them on to their tablets, laptops and phones even more than they were used to being on them. We now have a hyperconnected generation who are taught on tablets, which must have destroyed the photocopier market, and for whom science, technology, maths and engineering seem to outrank music, drama, and classical and foreign languages.

I gravitated towards the latter category, a humanities student who attacks questions by considering pros and cons, benefits and burdens, and tries to come down on one side of the fence. My history teacher Mr Brown, when he wasn’t delivering sermons off the top of his head that we had to capture in note form, would insist that we could not sit on the fence when arguing, for instance, if discovery was greater than development when it came to the history of medicine. I can add up and convert fractions into percentages, but I can’t use a logbook or do any form of engineering.

However, ask me to have a go at translating a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid into English and explain what’s going on, and I can still just about manage. My classical education focussed on the Golden Age of Athens – Socratic dialogues, military tactics and the dramatic innovation of a third lead character – and the Roman world of Caesars and love poetry. Catullus came up with the epigram ‘Odi et amo’ (I hate and I love), which GCSE Latin students appreciate when they aren’t looking up all the naughty words the Roman poet used.

My favourite epigram comes from my main man Marcus Tullius Cicero, about whom my classics professor at Edinburgh Dr Dominic Berry is a world expert; he literally wrote the book on Cicero, the lawyer and writer who came up with the epigram ‘O Tempora, O Mores’. This can be translated in thousands of ways: ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ is basically what it means, if we want to bring another modern poet into things.

And this neatly returns me to my argument: a 20-year-old today scrolls through TikTok the way I scrolled through Facebook or Myspace; or the way my 50-year-old cousin sat for hours watching afternoon TV; or the way my mum and dad tried to find some privacy with radio and pop music when they weren’t watching TV with their mum and dad. My grandparents, who were born between the 1920s and 1940s, came of age in a time before TV, when you had to go outside or, significantly for them, go to synagogue or youth clubs to socialise with other people.

This is what made me pause the Radio 4 discussion. My grandma Sandra is my only living grandparent, a spry and wily octogenarian who became a mum before she was 20. When she was growing up in leafy Chislehurst in Kent, she had to go up to Piccadilly to dance and mingle with men, who would mark her card and offer her a dance to the music of the day, some of which was being pioneered down the road in various Soho coffee houses and trad jazz clubs.

It was at the Pigalle that she met Malcolm, a 25-year-old from Manchester, and within a year they were married. It is more amazing that Sandra and Malcolm did not meet at the local synagogue, or because they had mutual friends; their daughter Nicky moved down from Hull to Stanmore for school, and she met Alex Brick, who was a few years her senior but was besotted by her charm, intelligence and beauty. They married, and now I’m writing this piece lamenting the decline of the Congregation Generation.

The Internet is an amazing leap in technology, but you cannot see, hear, smell, touch or taste someone you meet on there. We cannot recork the bottle or put the lid on the jar, but we can at least acknowledge the benefits of encountering someone in three dimensions. The Zennials, including my nephew Hugo (b. 2023) whose parents were on the same Philosophy course at UCL, have a chance to bring congregation back to their generation.