Simon on Beeban

This week, Simon Alexander MP continues thinking about Big Tech and AI, and also promotes a book that stops you looking like a Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb

‘Do you love A.I.? I love A.I.’

My policy adviser Vish is obsessed with that sentence, even though like me he cannot abide the man who said it, who will be present and incorrect at the Cenotaph this Sunday because (it says here) he was Prime Minister of this country for three years. But what is Artificial Intelligence, and why should we care about it?

Every week some newspaper or website does a feature about how the lunatic machines are taking over the asylum. AI is either generative or destructive, beneficial or apocalyptic, so who better than Baroness Beeban Kidron to guide us down the bumpy track. She’s before the Communications and Digital Lords Select Committee this very afternoon to discuss the Online Safety Act, but before we get to her, might I recommend Ted Gioia, the only man to have started his career as a jazz pianist and ended it as a must-read Substack scribe.

When he wrote about AI at the end of August, Gioia posited ten predictions for AI (‘I love A.I.’). They ranged from the technological – AI-on-AI battles, cartels – to the way humans interact with it as a religious deity to how we need to distinguish between junk food and haute cuisine, when it comes to what we enjoy about art and culture. Gioia also thought that the humble book or handwritten note would be a reliable defence against plagiarism, and that there would be a huge revolt not just from consumers but from within the tech industry, from the folks that brought us Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And not just the ones blowing the whistle so they can get a book deal and a panel appearance.

Gioia’s final two predictions resonated with me: ‘Money always calls the shots, and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most. The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism; already $3.7tn has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year…For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world. And still have plenty of cash left over.’ Gulp.

To counter this, our friendly honest broker, to use the title of his Substack, advises people to go outside and live ‘in the real world. Put your faith in reality, not digital constructs. Connect with actual people. Take a walk in nature. Read a book. Go to a concert. Get a pet. Learn a musical instrument, a foreign language, an artisan skill. Visit a new city, a new country. Volunteer at a school or non-profit. In other words, get a life. That’s something no bot can do for you.’ He’s taken the same thing that Professor Susskind took last week. I hope for the sake of my wallet it’s cheap hooch, not rich vermouth.

From a jazz pianist to a film director: Baroness Beeban Kidron made her name directing movies like the second Bridget Jones movie and that lovely Victoria & Abdul with Judi Dench. This year, Baroness K poured a decade of hopelessness about AI into Users, a book which demands that the horrible bosses of AI – Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Karp and yes they are all men of a certain age and type – can be overpowered by public and government action.

In her sights are Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia; the last of these makes the microchips that power AI (‘I love AI’), and their recent profits came in at $64bn, which would look great if future expenditure wasn’t six times that, with another $160bn invested in data centres. Nvidia have invested plenty more billions in other AI companies, making them the modern-day Facebook…sorry, Meta. As I mentioned last week, Anthropic is set to float for over 7000 times more than the £280m sum being promised to Britain’s AI Security Institute and brand new lab. That’ll show Elon, Sam, Mark, Alex and Peter, the bounders!

Because Em works for me, as well as for the people of my constituency, I asked her to summarise the book in a manner which allows me a) to contribute in the chamber about AI, which I love, and b) to arrange a meeting in PCH with the Baroness so I could tell her how much I enjoyed her early, funny work. To prepare myself, I listened to a couple of her book tour appearances, touring the podcasts and posh event spaces, including with the much-missed Media Confidential. ‘They are hacking our human instincts to keep us online at all times for the purposes of making money’ is how she put those blokes’ goals clearly. ‘And then comes the lobbying.’

It was a mistake, she said correctly, for the Starmer government to cosy up to Trump, then to rename the AI Safety Unit in 2025 (surprise!) as the AI Security Unit. As for the Online Safety Act, which Baroness Kidron helped scrutinise for years in the Other Place, I will paraphrase by saying she is not a fan. I made sure Vish and Em both signed the petition for safe tech, as I did, on the website of Beeban’s 5Rights Foundation. Those five rights are Privacy, Safety, Development, Agency and Participation.

The Foundation is chaired by Sir Peter Wanless, another overachiever who was CEO of the NSPCC after working in the Department of Education in the Blair years (don’t get Beeban started on the former PM either). Through the Foundation, Baroness K seeks to create ‘a digital world fit for children and young people, that they can access creatively, knowledgeably and fearlessly. To this end we fight for systemic change that ensures the digital world caters for them by design and default.’

Feeling overwhelmed should not be normal. Watching videos of people being beheaded shouldn’t either, nor should we accept the status quo when it comes to Big Tech. Interestingly, Baroness K echoes what Daniel Susskind was saying in how, like him, she felt that machines had betrayed her trust: the Susskind family were fans of a history podcast narrated by kids whom it turned out didn’t exist, while Beeban told the Guardian that the moment where the penny dropped was ‘watching a child’s face as she realised that the person who she thought was her friend wasn’t her friend; that the sex acts she’d been doing weren’t for her friend; and that there may have been other people in the room.

‘And I watched her face and I watched her crumble. It was her spirit, it was her trust, it was her sense of who she was, it was her judgment. It was all those things that you need to be a human being, smashed.’ The interviewer well captures her anger here. He also mentions that Beeban’s dad Michael was a Socialist and economist, which informs her politics and activism. Plus, Users has a walk-on cameo from Elton John, who recently called the government ‘absolute losers’ for their stance on copyright.

We must get better at denying our captors the right to our attention, and we ought to lobby politicians (hello there!) to make better laws. And why can tech companies, at governments’ request, censor things to do with Covid misinformation ‘but not child sexual abuse, not abuse against women, racism?’ I can’t think of a reason.

All of this reminds me of the sort of rebellious acts that made the activist and comic Mark Thomas a national treasure to a particular type of person. There’s a little bit of Beeban in Joe Lycett, whose Friday night live shows have been a little chaotic but very British. Then there’s Cody Dahler, who has a book out on Thursday based, really, on his catchphrase ‘But you don’t want to look like a Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb in front of all your mates!’

I’ve ordered a copy and hope it is under many a tree this Christmas. I’m trying to make ‘T2D2’ catch on as an even shorter catchphrase, and will tell Dahler this when he comes to This Place next. He was at PMQs the other week, actually, and I know some of Em’s friends were quite excited to see him; perhaps even more keen than seeing actual MPs who can actually do something about online safety.

Dahler is an example of the internet being used for good, much as how smokers’ gardens were good in the time before people traded smoking for vaping: it just gives you a slightly different context to how awful the thing is. Dahler’s targets, all with silly names or comparisons to villains, include Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, the US President and Nigel Farage, whose name is extended to include the part of the body out of which some would say he does most of his talking.

Count Binface is, of course, plugging away, probably having signed a book deal of his own after his summer of fun going up against the Reform UK plc leader. Would you believe Jonathan Pie is on a UK tour this autumn doing his shouty ranty comedy too, and there’s Michael Spicer with his Room Next Door skits which are very good. All of this is in the great British tradition of what I’ve heard is called the Silly Sausage. I asked Em what she understands by that term.

‘Saying “beveragino”?’

‘Yeah but I was thinking more people who are silly.’

‘Oh so basically the entirety of Gemma Collins’ public persona.’

‘Blessed be the GC,’ said Vish as he chomped on a croissant. ‘This coffee is your best so far this month!’

‘It’s the first working day of November, you scamp!’ I admonished Vish as I pulled up an article about Silly Sausage Britain, written before Binface Summer. Here’s Sofie Jenkinson of the climate charity Round Our Way on a term she allegedly coined: ‘The Britain that has a laugh and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is underpinned by self-deprecation, our kindness toward each other and fairness. This is the Britain of comedians such as Victoria Wood and Bob Mortimer…It’s the adverts for Yorkshire Tea, Tango and Irn-Bru, and it’s the Liz Truss lettuce. It’s 2p arcade machines and queen of “hun culture” Alison Hammond’s laugh.’

‘Half of that is just annoying,’ Vish said.

‘But wait, there’s more!’ I said to his disdain. ‘Louis Theroux rapping. Susan Boyle doing Just One Cornetto. Ainsley Harriott. Boaty McBoatface. Mr Blobby. Em, do you have any idea who Mr Blobby is?’

‘I’m not that young, Al!’

‘Well apparently the woman who brought us Silly Sausage Britain also came up with Mr Blobby Patriotism: “In not taking ourselves seriously, we find our common ground and find a lighter way through when things are really tough…It is a patriotism of taking the piss out of yourself and your mates, but also rolling up your sleeves and helping someone carry a pram up the stairs. Being patriotic isn’t about Britain being perfect, it’s about loving a place because we see ourselves in it and making fun of it because it’s ours.”’

‘And how is this going to help us defeat evil Elon?’

‘If we don’t try, nothing will change. Em, brainstorm some ideas! The sillier, the better.’

Em looked at Vish and I think they were more concerned than enthused. Tough!

Professor Susskind on the AI-Led Future

This week, our diarist MP Simon Alexander is concerned with Artificial Intelligence, and he doesn’t mean some of his robotic colleagues

It’s Budget Week, the day the man (except from 2024-26) in 11 Downing Street gets to hold up a battered briefcase and attempt to hold back the tide, knowing that the OBR, IFS, IPPR and WTF will critique the hell out of a carefully planned series of announcements, many of them dribbled into the newspapers.

I’ll be sitting in the chamber tomorrow as John Healey gives the address and LOTO does her ‘it doesn’t go. far. enough’ stuff. Those with long memories will remember the Mini-Budget of 2022 which torpedoed the Conservative Party, followed by the 2023 Jeremy Hunt Budget; Lame Duck Millionaire aka the MP for Richmond has commented from his Sunday Times sinecure, and declared support for the AI industry, that (as per the headline he didn’t write) ‘this budget will be built on a fairytale’. LOTO has already called Burnham a ‘showman PM’ thanks to his appearance on Channel 4 on Friday; ‘jealous much?’ was Em-Dash’s summary, with which I concur.

I remember the hullabaloo about Rachel Reeves’ ‘Things Can Only Get Worse’ Budget in 2024, but last year’s has evaporated entirely from my memory. I do know it was painful to see it breadcrumbed for weeks in the supportive press and attacked, like this one, by the unsupportive press before it was even announced. It was all a lot of fury and sound, which is all that the Starmer government was left doing once Morgan McSweeney resigned.

This week alone, we have had breadcrumbed news of: funding for a North of England bid for the Olympic Games; £1bn added to the pot for social and affordable housing; a bump in the minimum wage for the youngest workers; taking tariffs off 100 items of food including gherkins and cough drops to save ‘40p a week’(!); support for carers to come in in 2030; increased defence spending, as the Chancellor wanted when he was Defence Secretary; support for small breweries, because there must always be something about pints in every Budget; and further devolved support for mayors and local councils as a sop to Burnham’s former tribe.

Most pertinently to what I’m writing about today, there is to be £100m sent to build an AI Biosecurity Lab and a separate £180m to the existing AI Security Institute and a National Cyber Shield. What with outside being unbearable, meteorologically speaking, I spent the weekend reading some books, which meant I at last got round to reading Growth: A Reckoning, by a very clever man named Daniel Susskind, which takes us from the beginning of money to a prognosis of what to do to stop degrowth.

The final part of the book calls for ideas to stimulate growth, where he suggests that people move to where the money and that ‘one of the best things a society can do to promote the discovery of new ideas is to allow more immigration’. There’s is a sentence you definitely do not want to tell the Bendelo-Harborne Party, whose leader was shouting over Nick Robinson on the Today programme this morning. He wasn’t angry, Mr Farage, just disappointed. His time will ebb, although it’ll be fun to hear Robert Jenrick critique the Healey budget.

Susskind also points out that with technology becoming more sophisticated, a) we need more people to research and develop it and b) we need to see how it can be synthesised with ‘meat machines’, ie you and me (or is it ‘you and I?’ Let me ask a Large Language Model, or consult a grammar book to remind myself of analogue days). He also mentions in passing how the Covid-19 vaccine was developed by Moderna with the help of AI, and how scientific research can be summarised and utilised by time-poor brainiacs.

There is a quite phenomenal graph in the book which shows the precipitous plunge from prosperity suffered by rich nations like the UK, US and especially Japan (three of the G7 countries along with France, Germany, Italy and Canada). You can clearly see the growth in the UK economy after about 1993, which coincided with cheap credit and the effects of the Big Bang of deregulation.

Prof Susskind has spent his life trying to work out how to get Britain growing, using his many academic qualifications and positions within the PM’s office and the Cabinet Office. He has a very famous surname: his dad Richard literally wrote the book on computers and the legal profession, then wrote a very readable book on this decade’s hottest topic, the one Alexander De Pf. Johnson calls ‘A.I.’ but normal people call AI (trust me, watch the clip; there’s a difference).

No sooner had I read Susskind’s book on growth than he has only gone (two years later, actually) and brought out a follow-up. What Should My Children Do? is a father-of-three’s cry to the future, and a complement to Richard’s recent primer on AI (‘I love A.I.!’). For his sins Daniel had to share a panel with the Gover (ladies, form a queue!) last month but last week he had an event in London as part of the 5x15 series. He’s also doing a series of lectures on AI, Copyright and the Fight for Free Culture for Gresham College, available gratis online with the first one on Creativity here.

I was in the chamber yesterday intending to contribute to the debate on the emerging risks of advanced AI but there was too much other discussion. Fortunately, we had plenty of AI chatter during last week’s call for evidence launched by the Education Committee’s enquiry into how AI impacts kids in schools. The inquiry is being led by committee chair Helen Hayes, Labour MP for the safe seat of Dulwich and West Norwood (majority: 18,800, but it got as high as 28,000). She’s a Scouser who used to be a town planner, and her husband Ben Jupp is the brother of Rachel, former Panorama editor and recently appointed head of BBC News, the Impossible Job.

I daresay the BBC, with its excellent Bitesize series, can help get ahead of what they call EdTech by complementing how and what kids (Hayes has two of them) learn at school. I asked Vish to look at the transcript and pull anything ‘interesting or invigorating’ from it, and after he rolled his eyes he did his job that I pay him to do. There was lots of hand-wringing and pleading for money, but I’ll wait until the inquiry delivers its report to decide how doomed we are on a scale of 1 to Elon.

In the meantime, I settled down to read the rest of Susskind’s book on Budget Day Minus One and had a rollicking good time learning about the usefulness of Artificial Intelligence, particularly how we should ‘teach both, test both’ when it comes to using machines and setting them aside. There’s also a précis of the book as part of a discussion for the Royal Society of Arts Youtube channel here.

He is wise to suggest attention as a skill to acquire and hone, the better to read massive books (and also small ones like Susskind’s 190-page tiddler). He also wants kids to become, effectively, master of their domain, be it law, medicine or politics, as a vocation: go into law because you like casework, or into politics because you like casework. Then there’s the Korean example, where there are too many graduates for too few jobs and the ranks of unemployed all have letters after their name. And pause a second on page 146 of the hardback for 20 little graphs showing the exponential increase in researchers using AI: it’s up to over 20% of the total in linguistics and over 5% in engineering.

Susskind quotes the Nobel Prize winning futurist Geoffrey Hinton who says we humans need to be better at distinguishing when AI is a savant and when it’s an idiot, which is a really good joke that I bet AI would be able to tell as well as Jerry Seinfeld. Therefore, we need to be literate and numerate and to think critically, rather than outsource these skills to machines; Susskind whacks in another stunning chart which shows how rapidly the ability to count and write has plunged since a) the smartphone and b) ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok have come along. Never mind the Beatles; here’s the BeAItles. (No, Vish didn’t laugh at this.)

And here’s another jaw-dropper: whereas the Internet was built by the US Defense Department to allow information to be exchanged, AI is being ‘funded and shaped by private institutions, and so expertise is overwhelmingly concentrated inside their walls, not the state’. So all hail Elon, Altman and the rest. At the same time, Susskind concludes, ‘the greatest bottleneck is our imagination’, the same one which made Michaelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. If a machine painted like a Renaissance artist, Susskind writes, we’d appreciate it for its beauty, but a human never did it so we might be less impressed.

Ergo, ‘there are a great many things in economic life where we value not simply how well an activity is done but how it is done’. And people still play chess, don’t they, he adds. But will the kids of today grow up to pass down the wonder of human creativity when they’re busy staring at screens in their prams and bedrooms? I’m not sure. Susskind suggests, in his hello-trees-hello-sky conclusion, some personal uses for the new technology, which range from asking an AI agent to search the Internet for rare books and write him a weekly report on their findings, to a sort of Shazam for bones and plants, to reading literature with the help of a robot tutor (ParadAIse Lost? Eh? Eh? Vish?!).

‘Push back on this pessimism,’ he writes like a sort of Willy Wonka. ‘Look out on the future with curiosity and a spirit of adventure, excited to explore the expanding universe of what is now technologically possible, driven on by a sense of awe at this remarkable thing that we have somehow created.’ All the better to get the young ‘uns involved quickly, before Elon goes full Grok.

So how do I link Healey’s Budget with all of this? By reminding you of the £280m the government is giving to the AI sector, to help the men behind Grok, Claude, George and Ringo to flourish and help us all out. It may well be the case that Musk, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg ruin the planet, but won’t we all have a jolly old time distracting ourself with AI. Fun fact: Anthropic are just about to make an initial public offer that is somewhere between $1.5-2tn. That’s 2 with 12 zeroes after it: $2,000,000,000,000. £280,000,000 is a lot smaller, isn’t it? About 8000 times (well, 7,142 times). And that’s just Claude, never mind Grok, Ringo and ChatGeorgePT.

Next week: more on Big Tech, online safety and the World Wide Web, through the lessons of the woman who directed the second Bridget Jones movie and is married to the guy who wrote Billy Elliott.

Selfian SITREPs

This week, Simon Alexander MP sees the late career turn of author and former Shooting Stars team captain Mr Will Self

‘Did you read the new Will Self SITREP?’

‘Vish,’ I told my policy adviser as I reached out for a croissant, ‘do you think I have time and energy to read any Will Self, given that you need to have to hand a mountain of books and a dictionary even to grasp the point of one of his paragraphs?’ I took a sip of coffee, expertly put together by media adviser Em-Dash, and picked up the latest edition of The House magazine. ‘What’s he on about now?’

‘Well,’ Vish said, ‘I just learned that he’s irritable.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘No I mean his skin is literally irritated. Here,’ he said, passing me his iPad. On it was an interview from earlier this year when Self was promoting one of his long, rambling novels. It transpires that the man had had a stem cell transplant; he can no longer go on his long rambles through cities, and needs to apply topical cream to his whole body.

‘Crikey, that thing about Alastair Campbell is actionable. He needs to respect the law.’

‘I don’t think he respects anyone. He has the air of a man with a terminus in mind and a rage to expel before the light dies.’

‘Are you actually Will Self in disguise?’ Em-Dash said, pausing from her video cropping (of me, not of her).

‘No, because as it says here Self was sacked from a newspaper for shooting up in John Major’s plane. The rascal! The rogue!’

‘You don’t remember Shooting Stars, do you?’ I said. ‘That nice Bob Mortimer from the tele, and his friend Vic Reeves, a man who now paints birds. Here,’ I said, finding a clip of Reeves saying nonsense words for two minutes. Both advisers were unimpressed.

‘“Uvavu?” I guess this was funny in the Stone Age?’

‘It was funny before Youtube. Remember, this was when Ricky Gervais wasn’t outrageous yet, and when we all thought Russell Brand was hilarious.’

Jimmy Carr told actual jokes: he had one whose punchline I absolutely cannot repeat without being reported to HR, but the feed line was: “What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?” Different times. As I thought on this, Vish clicked on another clip, this time of Matt Lucas in a tight outfit corpsing over the word ‘Peanuts!’ ‘I literally have work to do,’ he said, sighing, leaving me to read the rest of Self’s interview with the New Statesman. I didn’t know Self was a pariah after he criticised Sally Rooney’s literary work, but I did briefly hear about the treatment of his late wife, which he pushes back on in the interview.

I had no interest in his new book, being more of a Jonathan Coe man; I cannot wait until I get a moment during the Christmas break to read his new book about early 20th century classical music, a copy of which I’m going to get signed at an event at the Institut Français next month. About halfway through the piece I felt sad for the man: he was Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud, his rage misplaced and being quite keen to attack his fellow authors. It seems like saying that the book could be his last was like an ageing crooner announcing a farewell tour, before inevitably reneging on the threat to retire.

As for pAs for politics, Self says it is all ‘comfort food, weight-loss injections, holidays, consumerism and promises’. He should read my inbox. He wants people to be good Samaritans, to protest against war and to read his late-period trilogy (sorry Will, duty calls). As Vish recommended, I turned to Self’s Substack, where he publishes his long, rambling essays full of five-dollar words. In August he was radicalised by the Jason Arday suicide, first accusing lots of (mainly female) journalists of not being good at their jobs, and then attacking the system and the status quo.

Here’s what he wrote in his second piece on the subject at the end of August, which I read just before term started. He was discussing the attention economy which demanded ‘reader loyalty, contributions and digital engagement’ and, more to the point, ‘MORE: more items, more users, more reaction, more duration, more recursion.

‘Publication now decisively alters the field it purports to describe: an article produces searches, posts, denunciations, defences and fresh disclosures; those reactions are counted; the counts enter editorial judgement; that judgement produces another article. Reality is recursively reordered around the journalist writing the story. The public interest becomes indistinguishable from the public being interested, while the measurable fact of interest is used as evidence that further publication serves the public. Everyone was only responding–nobody was responsible. But somebody wrote every word; somebody commissioned every article; somebody pressed publish.’

Persuasive, and with no need of recourse to a dictionary. Some newspaper owners, Self continues, want to build their reputation, others the length of their summer holiday thanks to the value of the shares they hold. Journalists, meanwhile, need to rediscover shame and courage, and we can infer that Self wants the tribe to call out other members for their crimes, rather than upholding ‘the Fleet Street omertà whereby journalists demand transparency from every other institution while treating their own editorial conferences as inviolable mysteries’.

About 5000 words into his 6000-word screed, Self gets to his take-home point. The reader ‘has watched journalism investigate everybody except itself, comfort its own afflicted and afflict anybody made sufficiently interesting by the metrics. You call this a debate? It’s the muffled snoring of a tired old industry dreaming that it is awake and chasing the evil rabbits of some forgotten era.

‘My dear dead Jack Russell, when he got hold of anything – a stick, a slipper, a newspaper – would shake it as if his little life depended upon killing it. The British legacy media now resembles the object in the animal’s jaws. The vicious little Jack Russell shaking it is social media–but social media is itself clamped in the jaws of a far larger dog: the magnificent seven technology companies and their stupendous market capitalisations, shaking the platforms for more churn, more arousal, more behavioural data and more capital return.’

Jason Arday was symptomatic of the current media landscape: he was made into a mascot by Cambridge then discarded when he became a distressed asset. ‘Legacy journalism did what it does best nowadays: supplying the authority that produces much, much more repetition. Social media may well have supplied velocity, appetite and apparent public warrant, but the same platforms that support the entire legacy media supplied the architecture of recurrence. And most importantly, it’s capital–which knows no borders, allegiances and disabilities, while recognising vulnerabilities only to then exploit them–that supplied the command: MORE. No one dog needs to have intended the killing, but the thing in their jaws is dead.’

In a final Selfian rhetorical flourish at the peroration, he brought us back to the dog: ‘All they can do is cast around for somewhere to bury it, before walking off in that slightly embarrassed way that dogs do when they’ve just done a big, bad shit.’

I paused, watching Vish work through the inbox and Em-Dash altering the lighting of the video that was going to go up later today. We need Will Self and his ilk, but we also need the scrutineers of legislation. Ooh, Word hasn’t put a red line under ‘scrutineers’, so I’ll definitely use that around the estate this week (segue), where work is in full swing after conference recess. The PM, who seems hilariously compromised after letting Abu Dhabi money rejuvenate Manchester while he was Mayor, is doing his best to corral his cabinet into pursuing his legislative agenda.

We are all excited to see how John Healey will gently let everybody down next Wednesday with the Budget, like his predecessor did in 2024 and 2025. Dr Cooper, the Health Secretary, and Sir Gawes Streeting in Defence are begging for slices of the economic pie, while Ed Miliband continues his world tour as if he’s Bob Dylan. He’s got G20 responsibilities next year and G7 presidency in 2028; in fact, Manchester will host the G20 Leaders’ Summit next November. Rollcall for the G7: Canada, the US, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the UK. That’s five that lean to the left and two which are led by troublesome right-wingers, and two of the others go to the polls either side of Easter.

Auf Deutschland, the AfD party are snapping at Friedrich Merz’s heels; Frau Wiedel has three months to persuade non-Nazis to get her and her party over the line on January 30. La France picks her successor to President Macron in two rounds of voting in April and May, if they stop setting fire to their democracy and schools. Will they opt for Gabriel Attal, the heir to Macron who is currently his party’s National Assembly leader, or Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the late Jean-Marie and leader of what used to be called the National Front? It’ll be fourth time lucky for her if she gets in, and I am sure there will be much chatter about an entente cordiale between the UK and France, especially now we’ve got that Tapestry in our Museum.

I haven’t planned this link, but Will Self is married to a French literary critic named Nelly Kaprièlian, so I expect there’ll be a Sitrep on that theme soon. Last time I checked, Self’s most recent essay was a month ago, concerning Naomi Klein’s new book End Times Fascism. Instead of dealing with the issue as if Hitler and Stalin are behind it, he writes, we should follow his lead (of course we should) and obey his edict of dromodronology, which roughly means things are connected to one another like the Dem Bones song.

‘It goes like this: AI companies demand energy because their competitors demand more; states subsidise AI because they fear strategic subordination; fossil-fuel interests exploit the new demand; climate disruption accelerates migration; migration supplies the affective material of nationalist mobilisation; nationalism fortifies borders and licenses surveillance; surveillance expands the computational infrastructure; and that infrastructure further increases both energy consumption and the capacity of platforms to isolate, excite and activate their users.’

And this is one of Self’s more comprehensible sentences. Try this one: ‘It instantiates the bidirectionality their argument is incapable of adequately conceptualising.’ ¿Que? I literally had to read that four times to spot where the main verb is. Self does persuasively suggest that Klein’s book is her latest brand exercise, after No Logo and This Changes Everything and even Doppelganger. ‘Their/our denunciation of the technology barons becomes content for platforms owned or governed by those barons; their/our summons to collective action becomes a succession of individuated acts of reception; their/our opposition to acceleration is itself accelerated so forming another accelerator—wheeee!’

Wheee indeed. He then mangles Timothy Leary’s advice to kids in the 1960s, telling us to ‘turn off, tune out, drop in’ and maybe read some of Self’s novels while we’re at it. I like his argument that fascism is emotional and then retroactively ideological, which segues into a discussion of the tech bros – your Elons and Altmans, your Zucks and Bezoses – who have unleashed the forces of evil while ignoring Google’s dictum not to be evil. I’ll write about AI and tech barons in a fortnight or so, but I’ve got Daniel Susskind’s book on growth to read this week.

Naturally, Self doesn’t offer any solutions because he’s a writer, not a politician, but I shall certainly bear his criticism in mind as we in This Place take on Rupert Lowe, the Not So Hateful Eight of Reform UK plc and the less sinister forces of my old party, who seem to be on another one of their jolly purges while in opposition. Such fun.

Top of the Commentariat Pops

In this week’s diary entry, Simon Alexander MP plays Good Journo Bad Journo with his two advisers, Vish and Em

Em-Dash has been busy again, which is always a sign that I haven’t done enough work to get the message out about what I am doing for the people who voted for me. She has set up a spreadsheet, which she has circulated around her fellow media spads, full of names of people in the media. It is unfair, she says, to include any Westminster lobby journalists; ‘allegedly, they’re drunk most of the time’, she says knowingly, although I couldn’t possibly comment given that some of my best friends are in the lobby. Their job is to parse the runes and tell their readers and listeners who is up, who is down and who isn’t moving. Yes, it’s Top of the Parliamentary Pops!

There was a time when some of the top members of the executive, ie the government, were journalists. Boris Johnson edited a magazine before becoming Mayor of London, while Michael Gove was a witty writer of comment pieces for The Times and now edits that same magazine. He also, Em-Dash tells me, has a podcast called Quite Right, which is a fab title, to credit the Govester (ladies, he’s still single, what are you waiting for?!). The audience are Conservatives, and the type of people who shed a tear when Rod Liddle died back in July. I liked Liddle, especially his football columns moaning about Millwall, but found he crossed the line too much for me to take seriously.

He was, according to Em-Dash and the other media spads, a polemicist. ‘So who are of their tribe?’ I said, munching on a croissant this morning.

‘Oh the usual. Piers Morgan, Owen Jones, Peter Hitchens, Alastair Campbell.’

‘Don’t bring AC into this,’ Vish said, drafting something I need to contribute to the debate on INSERT DEBATE HERE later this week while also keeping an eye on the inbox.

‘I’m sorry, but anyone who has been banging on about Brexit and Trump for ten years is a polemicist. Rory Stewart is not one of them.’

‘Rory taught Prince Harry how to read,’ Vish said.

‘He should have been his lawyer,’ I said, standing by the coffee machine because this office is a democracy and I get my round in when needed. ‘So who are the good guys, and don’t just rattle off Guardian commentators!’

‘Well, since you mention it: Jon Freedland, Nesrine Malik, Aditya Chakrabortty, Monbiot…’

‘Hang on, Monbiot is a full-on polemicist. Didn’t you spend 20 minute summarising his arguments against neoliberalism last week?’

‘Vish, everything he says is true.’

‘Are you a cult member, Em?’

‘Shut up. Anyway,’ she ran her finger down her phone, ‘there’s Byline Times and their fact-finders, and their lovely editor Hardeep Matharu.’

‘Alright, enough about Byline,’ Vish complained. ‘I suppose you’ll be telling me what bloody Peter Oborne has written next.’

‘He’s heard so many lies he’s practically a lie detector machine now,’ I said, looking at a copy of one of his books on the office shelf. ‘Bullshit detectors with a nose for the truth. Here, can I try to name some of the people on your list?’

‘Go ahead, Al. “We asked 100 people to name good commentators in British newspapers and websites. Your time starts now!”’

‘Okay. Erm, Matthew Syed and James Marriott in the Times, even though Syed is becoming more and more eggheady with every byline photo update. Ian Birrell, across multiple places. David Aaronovich, when he had an editor.’

‘Yes, yes, yes and no. Well, I’ll put him as a maybe.’

‘What’s wrong with Big Dave?’

‘Vish, remember how he used to be a Communist.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘You know it is. Communism died when the Soviet Union broke up. You’re so 1990-and-late.’

‘Children, please!’ I said. ‘Oh I’ve got one. Lord William Hague.’

Em-Dash and Vish both groaned. ‘You can’t be a good guy if you literally failed to win an election.’

‘Em, even Mandela would have lost to Blair that year. But you were still in school then. How about the Matts at The New World, Kelly and D’Ancona?’

‘Yes and yes, lots of respect around the spads for them. D’Ancona is like one of those people you meet at a think-tank mixer who can tell you everything and use five-syllable words while doing it.’

‘You can see his brain at work,’ I said, polishing off the croissant and pouring Vish his none-more-black coffee. He accepted the cup with a nod. ‘Okay, enough of the angels. Give me the devils, and remember: no swearing in this office, please.’

‘It didn’t used to be a curse-free office,’ Vish said. ‘Back in 2023, you’d be effing all over the shop.’

‘Those were different times,’ I said, remembering the slow decline of the Conservative Party in the 2023/24 session which you can read about in this ebook. ‘And yet the journalists all remain, unencumbered by the need to get anything right because they’re just asking questions. Go on, Em-Dash, give me the pack drill. Rollcall!’

Vish tapped out a military beat on his desk. Em shot him a look and he retreated to his inbox.

‘Madeline Grant, who does the Spectator podcast with Gove. Sarah Ditum and Allison Pearson, need I say more? Allister Heath, Tim Stanley, Fraser Nelson, Boris Johnson…’

‘The man said no swearing!’

‘No no,’ I interjected, ‘Johnson is not a swear word any longer. Nobody I bump into on the estate or in the chamber reads his bilge. He’s as irrelevant as John Cleese: his own tribute act fit for regional theatres and page 23 of the Saturday Mail and at the Remembrance Sunday wreath-laying ceremony. He is an ex-parrot.’

‘His old adviser Cleo Watson has a big media profile. Lots of people listen to the Poshcast.’

‘The Poshcast? Peterborough United, or Victoria Beckham?’

‘Shut up, Vish. She and Sophia Money-Money-Money talk about etiquette and stuff for debs.’

‘So Help, I Sexted My Boss but for people who went to Bedales?’

‘Pretty much, Al.’

‘I wish them well. I notice you didn’t mention the former Mrs Gove.’

‘Top answer! Sarah Vine polled the worst of any columnist, just ahead of Janice Turner of The Times, Amanda Platell and Ash Sarkar.’

‘Ash Sarkar? The leftie Novara woman?’

‘I literally think that is the first non-white columnist you have mentioned in the last three minutes.’

‘Shut up, Vish.’

‘Yes Vish, shut up. Hardeep Matharu isn’t white, and nor is Stephen Bush of the FT. Nor is Matthew Syed, actually, who last time I checked was a paid-up Conservative member.’

‘Him and the other 12 must really have had fun at Conference.’

‘And yet The Times still hires old Tory MPs like Matthew Parris and Tory peers like Danny the Fink. Where’s the new blood?’

‘Charlotte Ivers,’ Em said instantly. ‘She’ll write anything if you give her word count and deadline. People who know her say she’s a good laugh.’

‘So,’ I said, bringing this little chat to a close, ‘there are good guys and bad guys, gobs-on-sticks with blue or red flags, perfect for Question Time panels and heated debates. Does it add anything to anything?’

‘Yeah, does it help improve the national conversation?’ Vish added mid-slurp. ‘Or does it just add tinder to the box?’

Em paused. ‘Do you know, I’m not sure. I know all these guys are paid to have opinions, and to oversee the facts and draw up an argument that comes as close to 900 or 1200 words as possible so it fits into a little box on a page of a newspaper. But it all seems very old hat when you can just get a podcast or go on TikTok.’

‘Don’t mention TikTok!’ I said.

‘But the PM is trying to focus on new audiences, who do not subscribe to the old media. They don’t want to look like a Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb in front of all their mates, to coin a phrase. I literally have not seen someone reading a physical paper today, unless you count the Metro or City AM on the train on the way in.’

‘Don’t, said Vish. ‘Times change, Em. Surprisingly nice coffee, boss.’

‘Thank you, Vish,’ I said, happy that I had employed two useful people who were in touch with the commentariat. I must start weaning myself off the habit of reading or caring about what Sarah Vine or Allister Heath have to say about what goes on in This Place. Have they scrutinised bills, as I’m doing this week? Do they go out and talk to constituents about problems with damp and landlords? Do they heck: they just opine in a manner that tickles the tummies of their audience, be they bored debs or retired members of the armed forces.

The role of the right-leaning newspaper is to assert the prejudice of the people who read them. David Yelland, who a few months ago infamously got two black Conservative grandees mixed up (‘David, I’m the other one,’ said Jimmy Cleverly astutely), has said that ‘we’re all a little bit Daily Mail at eight in the morning’, and he’s correct. But by 9am we’ve all adjusted to social norms and perhaps have some compassion for (deep breath) asylum seekers, refugees, single parents, the BBC, celebrities in the public eye, state schools, teachers, doctors, nurses, impartial judges, the Green Party and the Home Secretary.

Also, the Mail were the ones who realised it made economic sense to pay the brother of the late Princess of Wales to offer highlights of his book. And they deemed this to be more important than the price of diesel breaking the £2/litre barrier and NHS waiting lists. Enough already.

I am more interested in the independent media, the indies as I call them: Byline Times, the Manchester Mill, London Centric, the Londoner and, of course, the daddy of them all, Private Eye. Did you know that some people have their copy of the magazine taken from them at security in This Place? Their reputation precedes them, and we MPs know that the 250,000 loyal readers will be grateful for the titbits and morsels that go beyond the headlines. God bless Private Eye.

As for Byline, whose political editor was barred from two party conferences this year, they complain that only 1% of people who read their investigations pay for them. Shame! I would encourage readers of this diary to take out a digital subscription, in order to read columns by ‘bloody Peter Oborne’ and examinations of what they call the Dark Enlightenment which stalks the influencing game. By influencing, I don’t mean ‘look at this dress’ but ‘look at how we can get people to hate foreigners and love AI’. God bless Byline Times.

The Tories and Project 2029

This week, Simon Alexander MP looks on from home as his old party hold their annual conference in Birmingham

I caught Any Questions on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and Isabel Hardman was on it. She works for the Paul Marshall-owned publication that used to be called the Spectator, where she is assistant editor to the Gover; ladies (and fellas!), Michael is single now! He’s going to have a brilliant Conference, and I’ll listen out for him on the airwaves; like lichen, he’s always there, although I didn’t buy him as the PM on that recent Sky TV nonsense. Penny Mordaunt needs to get back into This Place soonish.

I didn’t realise how young Ms Hardman was; she turned 40 in May, and has already written three books. One is about the NHS on the occasion of their 75th birthday, although as per the title it remains Fighting For Life (good luck Dr Cooper). The Natural Health Service extolled the role of the great outdoors in our wellbeing, inspired by Hardman’s mental collapse, but the one I took off the shelf in my office last night was published in 2018 and has the excellent title Why We Get The Wrong Politicians.

What a good thing her immediate boss is Michael Gove, who is such a chatty Cathy that the Dead Ringers impression means that whenever I see or hear him I instantly hear Jon Culshaw’s ‘Govey Govey Govey!!’ Then I remember Govey was best mates with Dominic Cummings and I book a Specsavers appointment. Anyhow, when I put myself forward to the electorate again in 2019, I remembered much of what Ms Hardman had written, and a lot of it came to mind yesterday when I followed coverage of the 2026 Conservative Party conference, which might as well have as its theme song The Only Way Is Up.

That song was a hit in 1988, when Margaret Thatcher was entering the endgame much as how Rishi Sunak presided over the end of the 14 years of Tory rule between 2010 and 2024; or, a better comparison, when John Major’s time as PM petered out in 1997, mired by sleaze and the rise of New Labour. After the 1997 victory for young Call Me Tony, helped by the now disgraced friend of Jeffrey Epstein Peter Mandelson and the current co-host of the leading political podcast Alastair Campbell, the Grand Old Party of British politics elected great leaders and also Iain Duncan Smith to be the figurehead while Yo Blair! was waging war in Iraq. He was also opening Sure Start centres to help kids who would one day go to university; the fact that Blair’s own son has made his fortune fighting against university as the be-all and end-all is an irony not lost on my Writing APPG colleagues.

A few years ago Samuel Earle wrote the most brilliant book Tory Nation, and I periodically dip into it when I pluck it off my shelf of books. His point was that my old party, from whom I resigned during the Covid-19 pandemic which is why I am an independent MP, is born to rule and that any time in opposition is an unfortunate accident. As long as they scream at people that Labour can’t be trusted in the economy, and make us forget the Kwarteng-Truss budget of autumn 2022, they will turn the heads of the electorate.

A long time ago during the Tories’ lost noughties, Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote the book on The Strange Death of Tory England, and followed it up with the tragic pamphlet Bloody Panico in their new wilderness period. The party of Thatcher, Heseltine and Heath is now represented by (it says here) Chris Philp, Andrew Griffith and Tom Tugendhat, respectively Shadow Home Secretary, Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Foreign Secretary.

‘What?! Tug End Hat?’ Vish messaged me when he learned of the reshuffle on Bank Holiday Monday. ‘What did Priti Patel do wrong?!’

‘Where to begin…’ I replied, pleased that someone at CCHQ had made the call to replace Dame Priti, honoured for services to dropping the letter ‘g’, and Sir Mel Stride, a competent but not stellar Shadow Chancellor. Tom, who is ex-Army, has an MPhil from Cambridge and a majority of 11,000 in the seat of Tonbridge and Malling. His dad was the lawyer who represented the Beckhams when Andrew Morton wanted to bring out a warts-and-all book about them, and he also advocated for Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the famous case against Hello! Magazine. But wait, there’s more: he also overturned the superinjunction over former England men’s football captain John Terry, and he literally wrote the book on the media and privacy law.

I was keen to hear what Tommy the Tug (‘toog’) had to say at the party conference, which takes place this week in Birmingham, that bastion of Tory support (not). It’s good that they scheduled it when they did because they have no interest in the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, whose new MP will be decided on Thursday: in the green corner, the former hypnotist who didn’t pay tax on his houseboat; in the red corner, Camden Council’s best available candidate, whose birthplace is really important to Zia Yusuf, whose nickname among some Reform UK plc-ers is unprintable in a family-friendly diary entry. I expect Sagal Abdi-Wali will win by several thousand votes, providing Labour gets its voters out and uses the Burnham boost from last week’s emotive peroration.

Anyway, back to the Tories: did you know they have a secret project to take over Britain, timed uncannily to coincide with the time that the PM has to call a general election, come what may? The Policy Exchange so-called think-tank has put together Project 2029, a programme ‘to address head-on the biggest issues facing Britain’, many of them caused by the government in charge between 2010-24. I can’t remember who they were, because Will Smith shone a pen torch in my eye in about 2019.

‘Successive Governments have failed to overcome the country’s challenges. Governments of both hues have squandered their large majorities, unwilling or unable to take the decisive actions needed to properly address the biggest issues of our time. We must learn the lessons: that a failure to plan for Government in advance is fatal and that a Government must have a clear understanding of its desired outcomes.’ Sherlock, you’ve done it again.

‘An effective reforming Government will need three qualities: skill, will and courage.’ But also money from some lovely billionaires, but they can’t say that. ‘It will need a plan (not a diagnosis, but a prognosis) before the election which considers both trade-offs and downsides, a mandate from the electorate, a fiscal plan, a legislative programme and a timescale for achieving it.’ But also money from some lovely billionaires, but they can’t say that.

‘Policy Exchange will use its unique convening power to bridge party divides, bringing together outside insurgents with fresh ideas and dissident insiders with the expertise to turn them into reality, creating the coalition for radical change.’ I know it just sounds like I am repeating myself, but why don’t they mention the people who fund all of this?

Here’s where it sounds like a Telegraph doomster column: ‘The State has been captured by “stakeholder” groups who lobby for sectional interests, not the common good. Powerful Quangos, overmighty courts and overreaching legislation at home and abroad increasingly raise impediments to every aspect of public policy. National debt is at near record levels, with unfavourable fiscal projections and demographics and an increasingly challenging international security backdrop – and yet politicians are unwilling to level with the electorate about the costs of fixing it.’

Have they copied and pasted all that from previous Policy Exchange documents or old Michael Gove speeches? Even Oasis can’t play the hits forever, although that might be a bad analogy. So long as the money they aren’t mentioning appears, Project 2029 highlight six big issues: government reform of the kind the PM is already looking at; human rights and international law, including leaving the ECHR and amending (or better yet repealing) the 2010 Equality Act which Labour passed into law; dealing with the ‘Small Boats Emergency’ which, honest guv, the Conservatives didn’t cause by restricting legal routes to Blighty; preventing the next Grooming Gang scandal and moving away from ‘“two-tier” justice’; ignoring the Net Zero movement; and not exacerbating the effect of mental health issues caused by, I don’t know, policies thought up by Policy Exchange and the rest of them.

Also, build a bonfire and load it with treaties and international bodies, because we’re outside the EU, like Russia and Belarus. Then, adopting a Bond villain voice, they want to ask about ‘the key roles in Government and the public sector in which allies must be placed’. In the very last paragraph of the Project document, the authors say that the work ‘will draw inspiration from international examples but adapted to the UK’s distinctive political, legal and social settlement, in addition to looking to our own historic methods of Government that have been forgotten and distorted over time. Our aim is radicalism, not revolution: restoring, not destroying, the core British institutions of Parliament and Government, while stripping away the ideological expansive conception of domestic and international law that have marred their operation.’

Hear ye billionaires! Stop donating crypto money to the Bendelo-Harborne Party because you’ve been wined and dined by Nick Candy and come back to the true party of Britain. You know you love it. Also, Thatcher!! Even the duly impartial BBC, whose board includes Theresa May’s former spin doctor Robbie Gibb, let Laura Kuenssberg lightly editorialise in her little column this week: ‘Kemi Badenoch is visibly more confident and is aware of the chance in front of her – seemingly unworried about the possible downsides of making an increasingly direct argument to you, eager to stride that mercifully bigger Birmingham stage.’

She sounds like Tom McTague bigging up the PM in the New Statesman (see the last diary entry). Are journalists cheerleaders for a worldview or impartial? Laura the K mentions the opportunistic amnesia which will make LOTO spend time ‘disavowing much of what the Conservatives did in office between 2010 and 2024, when the civil service grew, the tax burden grew, a law was passed to try to combat climate change’ and so on.

I had already had my breakfast on Sunday before going out the door to put on a pop-up surgery and carry out some constituency obligations (which is much more fun that it sounds) when I turned BBC One on to watch LOTO’s 20-minute chat with the Kuenns. Would it be another shoutathon, as it was when LOTO spoke to Emma Barnett the other week on Today and disgraced herself, or would she actually wait for the point to be made?

It turned out her new catchphrase is ‘I want to grow the economy’, and she has also adopted the old stance of going after scroungers and, in a remix to an old song, those ‘reporting as disabled’. How many are there? Dunno, she said. Dunno doesn’t get you elected, but the first to the bottom wins. Bear in mind she’s been in post two years, only now has she come up with a fun manifesto which, as she told the Sunday Times, she calls ‘Kemistry’ (stop making ‘fetch’ happen, LOTO!). In fact, Vish told me, Kemistry was the name of a drum’n’bass DJ from the 1990s who formed the Metalheadz label with the great Goldie, whose recent three-part series on black musicians and classical music for Radio 3 is on BBC Sounds here.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00318hh/episodes/player

The Sunday Times, of course, compared LOTO to Thatcher, because right-leaning political thought always goes, to coin a phrase, back to the seventies (for the Tories it’s 1870s, for Labour the 1970s). But would the woman who took away free school milk grant universal nursery care to all, even to the millionaire parent? And are you not becoming the ‘Nasty Party’? No, we’re the Common Sense Party! Enough already.

After a long day out and about, I tuned into Radio 4’s Westminster Hour hosted by the great Ben Wright, the son of former Labour MP for Cannock Chase Tony, a politics lecturer-turned-lectured about. This week, Ben turned his attention to the opposition, who must have been the scourge of the kitchen table growing up. He welcomed the Deputy Leader of the Tories (it says here) Alex Burghart, another academic, who tried to defend the indefensible as always. I hope he’s enjoying the bollix Bayeux Tapestry that the party has put together to give the right-leaning press something to print in lieu of actual credible policy, most of which it turns out has been purloined from Project 2029.

All is propaganda now, which is why the BBC, for all its faults and headcount reduction aka firing people, is so vital in presenting both sides of an argument. News broke yesterday that Rachel Jupp has taken on the role of Head of BBC News, to which I say: good luck chuck. Ms Jupp will have most of the country gunning for her. Every word on radio and TV, plus everything on the BBC News website, will be scrutinised and diced for bias and prejudice: the lefties will think the language isn’t hard enough, while the righties will think it’s far too hard. It’s an impossible job to rival that of the England manager, and the Head of BBC News can’t win 7-0, as the men’s team did at the weekend. Good luck to Tuchel’s tots tonight at Wembley against Czechia; it’ll come home soon enough.

While I was WFHing yesterday (Parliament goes back on Monday after recess), I turned on Matt Chorley, a very funny man with a very serious role in explaining politics to BBC 5Live listeners between 2-4pm on weekdays. He’s a serial conference attendee – the Tory conference is his 61st of any stripe – and having been poached from propaganda network Times Radio he is now forbidden to have opinions at all. He did bring on his friend Lord Finkelstein, who helped set up Onward, for some lack of balance, although nobody mentioned the role of Policy Exchange, which is another think-tank, in setting up Project 2029. ‘She’s really sure who she is,’ Lord F said, and was echoed by Iain Duncan Smith (‘she knows what she wants’).

‘We’re gonna clear the decks,’ he added of a party who want us all to forget about Johnson, Truss and PPE contracts. Look into the eyes, not around the eyes. I admit that I tuned out when Ric Holden’s partner Kate Ferguson, a Murdoch employee, started talking about ‘Kemi’. Maybe Ms Jupp has more work to do than I thought to level the playing field.

I could have looked at what SovereignTV (GB News, for new readers) had to say about LOTO and the conference, but we know their tune and we know they won’t stop playing it. Smash The Tories is their Wonderwall, Look Back in Anger their…well, you can guess. Chorley loves a tune too, so I was keen to hear which pieces of music he would use to set up his features. He chose Eye of the Tiger for the Shadow Chancellor, and nothing by Kemistry.

Our Leader Speaks

This week all eyes are on the PM at his Labour Conference speech. Our diarist MP Simon Alexander writes about the narrative around Andy Burnham, driven especially by the New Statesman magazine

Did you see The Speech? It was very good: no notes, a bit of unfeigned emotion, plenty of red meat to the electorate, the audacity of hope. Let us see what happens next.

I am more concerned with the house journals, and I will apply the same method next week when the Conservatives have their conference. How are they trying to pick themselves up off the floor upon which they were knocked out in 2024, and where do the right-leaning newspapers and magazines think the next election – probably the next but one election – will be won?

Over on the left, of course, I have to go to the Guardian, who before the conference began were concerned as to whether the PM was going to be ‘radical’ enough and bring an end to ‘40 years of neoliberalism’. Alas the piece dissolved into think-tankery and my eyes glazed over much of it, although I did note down a bunch of names to look out for: Graeme Cook, Marc Stears, Carys Roberts, George Dibb, Arthur Downing. Remember their names. I also wrote down the names of think-tanks like the Haldane Society and the Good Growth Foundation, some of which would be useful in providing the PM with ideas.

The lede paragraph reminded us of what seems to be the PM’s main message: he comes to fix people’s everyday problems, like Martin Lewis, except someone you actually want to have a drink with. His Lewis-approved policies in his first ten weeks as PM have included cheaper bus fares, lower electricity bills, relief for pubs and gig venues, more council housing, a national care service and, most importantly for people like Feargal Sharkey, ‘public control’ over private ownership of utilities. One professor compares the PM to ‘a screen on to which different Labour factions project their hopes, telling us more about what other people want to happen than what he might do’. So he’s also the Princess of Wales.

Anyhow, to the New Statesman, which is to the Labour Party what The Spectator is to the Conservatives. The PM gave an interview to Tom McTague, the magazine’s editor and author of a chunky book on postwar Britain that I keep on meaning to borrow from Vish. The interview was 5000 words long, so I told Em-Dash to summarise it; she obliged, not because she wanted to (she did) but because I pay her to keep me informed of such things.

Vish scoffed at both the portrait photo that accompanied the interview (‘he looks presidential’) and its strapline: ‘“‘O’Andy Burnham seizes control: The Prime Minister on life, fate and his plan to make Britain believe again”. Pffft.’

‘Come on now, Vish,’ I said, biting into a raisin Danish, ‘it’s harmless propaganda. It doesn’t mean anything. Would you rather he posed in an Everton third strip or a New Order 1987 tour t-shirt instead?’

‘Yes. Both.’

I left Vish to the inbox which I pay him to work through, and began to read Em’s executive summary. ‘Burnham himself is seized by the sense that this time it will be different, that he will be different’ comes with a note that simply reads: ‘Miliband. Corbyn. Starmer. Fourth time’s the charm.’ Then there are the editorial lines from McTague that are pathetic attempts at injecting drama into his piece: ‘An opportunity was coming in Westminster – he could feel it. And he wanted me to know something: he was ready.’ The writer’s final flourish was that ‘Andy Burnham has a sense of the power he possesses. Now he has to prove he’s up to wielding it.’

Buried amongst all of this puffery was news of how the PM runs his Westminster office: weekly meetings of the kind Tony Blair used to do 20 years ago; buffet lunches after PMQs with some of his 400 MPs; a bigger role for the bag-carrying principal private secretary aka unpaid aide.

Resilience and devolution will be key themes in the Burnham government, with a sharp focus on AI and the ‘business-friendly socialism’ perfected during his time as Greater Manchester mayor. It was interesting that he had a section of his conference address where he effectively wanted to take back control. ‘We seem to have lost a sense of ourselves, what do we stand for,’ he told McTague, planning on ‘rewiring the country’.

In his address he preached honesty, giving people what they wanted in a politician. There are seven Nolan Principles of public life and Honesty is one of the seven, alongside Openness, Accountability, Integrity, Selflessness, Objectivity and Leadership. Remind me to measure LOTO by that yardstick next week, and the leader of Reform UK plc too.

Phil Tinline used to work for the BBC and turned one of his final radio series into a meaty book about the Death of Consensus, another one on the tsundoku pile of books to read when I’m not fighting fires on behalf of my constituents. Tinline, who is turning into a public intellectual on the level of Olusoga or Beard, wrote another long piece in the same issue of the New Statesman based on his academic paper Power Failure: A New Theory of Power, written for one of those thinktanks whose mere names bored me rigid in the Guardian article. To quote Tinline’s summary of his paper:

I argued that British politics desperately needed a clearer conception of power, and how, over the last few decades, it has come to be so badly misallocated: concentrated when it should be devolved, and dispersed when it should be centralised. Everything is expensive. Nothing works. The people who are supposedly in charge are either useless or just don’t care. They say what they think we want to hear, but really, they just help their mates, and themselves. They don’t play by the rules, so why should we? 

Tinline noticed that Burnham was allocating blame not on the poor hapless public representative voted in by the electorate, but by the civil service mandarin, just as we all learned in the 1980s when Jim Hacker was stymied by his foe Sir Humphrey. Localism, which the PM wants to achieve by decentralising power from SW1 to all the other postcodes, may be tough when local government is so weak; just ask James Berrygrove, or don’t as the case may be.

After the Second World War, Tinline writes, ‘town halls built vast numbers of houses, while Whitehall instigated the construction of universities, motorways, nuclear power stations and even whole new towns’. After they did all that, in the 1960s the public stopped trusting the government entirely. We then got privatisation, outsourcing, consultancy and regulators, all polysyllabic words that to many sound like the adults in Snoopy cartoons (‘wah wah wah!’)

Plus the Human Rights Act of 1998 led to everyone’s favourite bugbear, the ECHR, being written into English law. Tinline concludes that ‘this has led to a state in which power is certainly centralised as far as local government is concerned, but at the same time is entangled in risk-averse restrictions and continually reliant on multiple outside organisations’.

In fact, politicians like, to pick one entirely at random, Rupert Lowe have far less power than, to pick another entirely at random, Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group investment firm. Witness, Tinline correctly says, ‘the way British government seems unable or unwilling to stop huge foreign companies buying up swathes of our homegrown businesses, even our critical infrastructure’; or, I might add, the United Arab Emirates from building an Etihad Campus in East Manchester.

What caused subpostmasters years of grief? Fujitsu’s computer software. Who is at fault for polluted rivers? The shareholders whose profits go up as quality of water goes down. Social care has probably gotten worse since private companies started running the firms, although more of us are ill. And why are streaming subscriptions going up even as we have to deal with mandatory adverts in the middle of shows we pay to see? Here’s Tinny again:

It is much harder to put a face on the unaccountable power that arises from a Whitehall department outsourcing a contract to a huge all-purpose company, for instance, or on the US private equity firm that owns a failing children’s care home, or the conglomerate that decides to close a cherished GP surgery.

Why he isn’t one of those thinky-tank people I can only guess, but Tinny diagnoses the issues well. It’s easy to point at boats and brown people and promise to Make Britain Great Again, and easier still to buy a balaclava and throw stuff at the police. But the PM is tasking himself with changing the country at a time when we are fragmented, poor, depressed and sick. Enough already, I say, and good luck to the man and all of those faceless figures mentioned above (do you remember any of them? Carys something, Arthur somebody else.)

The Labour Party have wasted two years of their five-year mandate standing still. They have sacked Angela Rayner and brought her back, and now the boy DJ, Darren Jones, lurks menacingly as Keir Starmer’s representative in This Place. The PM moved Ed Miliband to the Foreign Office and Yvette Cooper to Health and Social Care; like Burnham, the pair of them served in the Blair-Brown government in a time before Cameron, Osborne, austerity and arguments over being outside of the European Union. By the way, good on the PM for saying Brexit ‘hasn’t given us control’ and has done ‘more harm than good’, and also for reminding us that Labour’s opposition were the ones who gave away the control of our infrastructure. (Jeremy Corbyn didn’t help, did he, but they kicked him out too.)

The PM also promised electoral reform so that ‘everyone’s vote counts’, but I reckon a cryptobillionaire’s vote will count a multiple of millions more than, say, a first-time voter in my constituency (hello if you’re reading this!). There was also something about abandoning the triple lock on pensions that I am sure will have the members of the Other Place spluttering into their subsidised beverages. But I can promise a waterslide on the high street if I wanted to, but that doesn’t mean I’ll deliver it, or can successfully convince council leader Berrygrove to cut some of the library budget.

Before I go home for the night and read a book – can a chap not enjoy some of his recess? – I’ll just type what the BBC’s man on the spot Chris Mason had to say during the duly impartial six o’clock news. He led with the tears shed by the PM for his late father, because the news always craves emotion, and noted the ‘sense of purpose’ Burnham gave the party. Mason finished with an agonisingly long clause which I'll summarise as: ‘do you think he’s telling you what you want to hear, given the hellish state the country and the world is in?’

He might as well promise the moon on a stick.

Jewish Members of This Place, and The Other Place too

This week, Al greets his Jewish readers, who have just spent ten days saying sorry for the sins of the previous year. Would that his colleagues in this place would self-reflect too

Chag Sameach to all my Jewish constituents and readers of this column, who yesterday spent all day in synagogue for the Day of Atonement, waiting for sundown so they could eat again after fasting for 25 hours. When I heard that a man had been stabbed outside a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2025, I was thankful that nobody inside had been harmed. Then I realised that what was supposed to be the holiest day of the Jewish Year – where ten days of repentance were inscribed in the Book of Life so, as one constituent of mine told me, Jews could ‘sin and sin again for another year’ – had been hijacked.

The then Prime Minister, whose wife Vic is Jewish and therefore his children were of the faith, was absolutely correct to pledge his support to the Jewish community, funding police support for Shabbat and festivals to the tune of £330m over this administration’s time in office, plus £7 million to tackle antisemitism in schools, colleges and universities. This is the first New Year since last year’s act of terrorism, and it remains disturbing to see so many men in yellow jackets outside places of worship. Nobody in this great country should fear expressing their faith, be they Jewish, Catholic, Muslim or Baha’i.

And then we come to the State of Israel, a potato so hot that it scalds anyone who touches it. In the chamber a fortnight ago, an atheist Jew Foreign Secretary debated the merits of Israel with his Tory shadow, who is the grandson of a German Jew who converted to Catholicism after he fled Austria. On the same day, I attended the debate at Westminster Hall on the safety of British Jews. God bless Vish, who was tasked last week with summarising 13,000 words of it so I could quote it in this diary entry. He wrote in brackets at the bottom, ‘Definition of irony: MPs so verbose that the presiding chair had to chastise you for talking too much. In a debate about Judaism.’

Don’t worry. He knows plenty of Jews, and they are a garrulous lot. A Westminster Hall debate must last no more than 90 minutes, with 30 of those minutes allowed for winding-up speeches and contributions from government ministers. It was clear that an hour was nowhere near enough for some MPs to grandstand and say Something Must Be Done; I was keenest of all to hear from Jewish contributors to the debate, none of whom were from Reform UK. Jenrick could have been there as he too has married a Jewish woman and his party need to be seen to be Good for the Jews (spoiler: they’re not).

The motion was moved by Catherine West, the only Labour MP not to vote for the PM to be PM, because she had to put herself up as a stalking horse. Ms West was elected in 2015 to be the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, a constituency with several thousand Jewish people who this weekend and last walked to and from synagogues in Southgate and Muswell Hill in a heightened state of awareness. These people had returned her with a majority of 21,500 in 2024, which is more than double the PM’s. She turned 60 years old yesterday so, as my Jewish friends would say, the heartiest of mazaltovs to Ms West.

Her constituency houses people who can speak 180 languages and have sought asylum from wars in Ukraine, Syria and the Middle East, just as a century ago Jews from the former Soviet Union and Poland sought sanctuary from all the pogroms. I did not know that in 1977 the battle of Wood Green at Ducketts Common ‘saw a rainbow coalition led by Jewish, Irish and black communities unite to drive out the far-right National Front’. Four decades before that, Jews stood up to Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts at the Battle of Cable Street in East London, and there is still a massive Orthodox Jewish presence in Stamford Hill.

This is why the arson attack on an ambulance in March was so disturbing, an act of intimidation against a service which also helps non-Jews, and likewise the stabbing in broad daylight in April in Golders Green, who also have a Jewish MP in Sarah Sackman. Enough already.

Last But Not Least Jim Shannon (MP for Strangford: majority 5100) was up second, which was lovely to see. I told him I too was mourning the passing of Dolly Parton, about whom he once tabled an Early Day Motion to say how wonderful she was. He stood up ‘against those who seek to bully or delegitimise the Jewish state…Having witnessed where identity-based hatred leads in my country, we must reject it completely,’ he trembled politely. Indeed, four young Israeli athletes were unable to compete in a triathlon in Derry/Londonderry because they, who are not committing acts of alleged genocide, are from a country whose government are doing so. This is where we are, and will forever be.

Lovely Munira Wilson, who was handed the safe Lib Dem seat of Twickenham by Vince Cable (majority: 21,500, like Ms West’s), said that the University of Cambridge has high incidents of antisemitism. ‘They hid where the Jewish society would meet. One student said she had done Hebrew teaching as part of her extracurricular activities, but is keeping that off her CV because she is worried she will be discriminated against.’ Jews in hiding; never good optics for that. Ms Wilson’s fellow Lib Dem Tom Morrison, MP for Cheadle (majority: 12,000), spoke to the stepdaughter of Melvin Cravitz, the murder victim of the Heaton Park shul attack. She was shamefully assailed by online trolls sending her messages about her dead stepfather, saying Jews were behind his murder.

‘Things need to change. We need solutions, conscious action and resolve,’ he said well-meaningly, starting with proper funding for the Community Security Trust, who train up volunteers to man synagogues on Shabbat and festivals like yesterday’s Day of Atonement. ‘When institutions fail to act against hatred,’ he added, ‘prejudice simply becomes policy.’

Connor Rand, who took Graham Brady’s seat of Altrincham and Sale West in 2024 with a majority of 4200, pointed to The Rabbi & The Imam, a project which goes into schools and tells kids, probably, that shalom and salaam have the same cognate, ‘peace’. Rachel Blake, the Labour MP who took the seat which houses This Place (Cities of London and Westminster: majority 2700), spoke of some of the synagogues whose congregations voted for her, including the very old Bevis Marks and the very young New London in St John’s Wood.

The Jewish community down in Guildford, represented by Lib Dem MP Zoe Franklin (majority: 8400), numbers in the low hundreds, swelling during termtime from 450 to 600. She hoped Jews could light the menorah on Guildford High Street on Chanukah without the presence of armed police, and agreed that it was shameful that some Jewish people were removing visible symbols of their faith and taking the mezuzah – a metal casing with a Star of David which contains passages of holy scripture – off their front door.

‘Our local rabbi has received death threats and has even been physically assaulted in public,’ she said. ‘Jewish residents have faced verbal abuse, a swastika has been drawn at a local golf course, and a single Jewish mother had a rotten chicken thrown through her open window while she was with her five-year-old child.’ Enough already. This isn’t Berlin in 1938; it’s Surrey in 2026.

There’s a big Jewish community down in Bournemouth, who are represented by Labour MP Tom Hayes (majority: 5500). He celebrated the opening of a new synagogue by the Chief Rabbi, for whom this time of year is Christmas and Ramadan rolled into one, and added that how some voters hired extra security when they held wedding anniversary celebrations at synagogue. Matt Vickers, the Conservative MP for Stockton West up in the north-east (majority: 2100), reminded us that Kemi Badenoch called antisemitism ‘a national emergency’ and he ran the numbers on antisemitic attacks: ‘In the first half of 2026, the organisation logged more than 200 incidents of anti-Jewish hate in every single month, and more than 300 a month from March to June. Those incidents ranged from threats to life, assaults and arson to damage and desecration of Jewish property and abusive behaviour. But there is another statistic that should stop every Member of this House in their tracks.

‘The latest Home Office figures show that in England and Wales, there were 106 police recorded religious hate crimes targeting Jewish people for every 10,000 Jewish people. Across the population as a whole, the equivalent rate was 1.7 recorded religious hate crimes per 10,000 people. If we put those figures alongside one another, the disparity is extraordinary and horrifying. On that population-adjusted measure, the rate of recorded religious hate crime targeting Jewish people was more than 60 times the rate in the overall population; I repeat, more than 60 times the rate. Religious hate crime is concentrated against Britain’s Jewish community, and on an extraordinary and horrifying scale.

‘We need to tackle the ideologies creating this mindset, because antisemitism does not begin with an attack on a synagogue. It begins with ideas and conspiracy theories. It begins when Jews are treated as a sinister collective and ancient prejudices are allowed to spread under new guises. The need to tackle this across communities is unfortunately clear…We must combat the intellectual idiocy that upholds and spreads antisemitic views. The test of a liberal democracy is not whether the majority feel safe; it is whether minorities can live openly as themselves, without fear.’

Hear hear. How soon will it be, with the conflict in the disputed territories not abating and Israel poised to go to the polls again at the end of next month, until British Jews decide enough is enough and take their traditions and ways of life to Israel itself. We will lose so much if they do, not least the comedians and writers who have brought us Borat, Friday Night Dinner, Little Britain and the complete works of David Baddiel.

One of the great thrills of working as an MP is being invited to book launches, and not just for the subsidised nibbles. I am often told Jews are the People of the Book, and Britain is such a tolerant place (at least on Tuesdays) that it has permitted Jewish people to stand for Parliament. Some of them are elevated to cabinet, as in the case of Foreign Secretaries Malcolm Rifkind and the Milibands, Ed, David and Steve (Miliband, Miller Band).

Hamish Falconer (MP for Lincoln: majority 8800) is one of the rising stars of government, having followed his dad Charlie into the family profession; he is far too good for This Place. Georgia Gould, daughter of the late New Labour architect Philip, was probably campaigning for more minutes at breaktime at nursery. She’s at Queens Park and Maida Vale (majority: 15,000) and is, quite rightly given her history, Minister for School Standards.

Her mum is the estimable Dame Gail Rebuck, who sits in the Lords as Baroness Penguin Random House (ah no, it says here Baroness Rebuck of Bloomsbury). I’d say she was one of Britain’s most reputable Jewish people, but even she would bow down (if Jews could bow down, because I am told they cannot except for one service on Yom Kippur) to Alf Dubs. John O’Farrell wrote about him in his books on the Labour Party, which are worth a read if only to cry at how much apathy there is in local politics.

I wrote in the 2023/24 diary about Alf, who was ennobled with a peerage and has just published his memoir The Boy with the Knapsack. Lord D’s publishers have done their best to get the book in front of potential readers: he spoke with Janet Ellis, latterly known as the woman who brought us Sophie Ellis Bextor, at a book festival event that Em-Dash went to with a group of her fellow Spads, and he popped up on the BBC and in the Times, those two eminent media institutions.

Alf’s story is summarised in the memoir’s subtitle An Extraordinary Life, from the Kindertransport to the House of Lords. At the age of six, he came to Britain without his parents, then became MP for Battersea during the Thatcher years before losing his seat in 1987. Tony Blair stuck him in the Lords in 1995 and involved him in the Northern Ireland peacekeeping negotiations. O’Farrell dedicated his book Things Can Only Get Worse? ‘to Alf Dubs, who never gives up’; Alf, not Lord.

In fact, he is not halachically Jewish, given that his mum is not of the faith, but he seized upon his faith after his cotton trader dad died after his mum, whom he recalls was called ‘that bloody foreigner’, had joined them in Britain. He lived first in London then in Northern Ireland then in Manchester. He returned to London for university, attending the LSE in the 1950s, and spent his life determined to oppose evil with good; he is definitely a disciple of Sir Nicky Winton, the man who secretly helped over 600 children including Alf escape persecution.

Perhaps those antisemites who make the lives of today’s British Jews so miserable could actually take seven minutes out of their own wretched lives and watch the clip of the TV show That’s Life where an entire room of people sabotage Winton by standing up in his presence. It’s available on the BBC website here, and it is no wonder that they made that 2023 film of him, One Life, with Sir Anthony Hopkins. Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106. Lord Dubs is about to turn 94 and has been married to Ann for 66 years, which would have been the same number my own grandparents would have reached had my grandpa not passed away just before I entered This Place. No Nicky Winton, no Lord Alf Dubs.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/videos/cz9987l2998o

Leeds has a couple of Jewish MPs in its ranks – Alex Sobel in Leeds Central and Headingley (majority: 8400) and Fabian Hamilton in Leeds North East (majority: 16,000) – while in London there’s Sarah Sackman (Finchley and Golders Green, majority 4600), Ben Coleman (MP for Chelsea and Fulham, majority 152) and David Pinto-Duschinsky, whose Hendon constituents elected him in 2024. Had eight people not put an X in the box beside his name, he would not have had a majority of 15 (fifteen!).

Young Damien Egan is doing well in Bristol. He is a convert who married into the faith, which sounds like purgatory if you ask Max Olesker, whose book and one-man show on conversion Making The Cut does make reference to the covenant all male Jews swear to their God, usually at eight days old when they have no say in the matter. Even the market town of Bury St Edmunds has a Jewish MP in Dr Peter Prinsley (majority 1452), who can look at your ear, nose, throat or tricky issue with asylum. His wife Marian is the Sheriff of Norwich, another triumph for the Jewish diaspora.

I often bump into Charlotte Nichols, MP for Warrington North (majority: 9200), who is always hurrying into the chamber to bob up and down, hoping to contribute to a debate. She must be loving seeing her constituency neighbour in Makerfield seven days a week, what with being down here from Monday to Thursday and up in Manchester at weekends; ditto Matthew Patrick, who represents the people of the Wirral Peninsula where he grew up and who has a majority of 9,998.

Apart from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, every single one of the above MPs is affiliated to Labour, so which Tories are of the tribe? Well, many of them have passed on or left the House. Good old Michael Fabricant aka Mickey the Fab, scion of Lichfield, was better known for his wig than for his faith, while John Bercow was the perfect man to shout ordurrrr as Speaker. Julian Lewis did survive the axe in 2024, keeping his New Forest seat with a majority of 8495. Grant Shapps aka Michael Green aka Sebastian Fox did not, although it is a truth that he was active in Jewish youth groups as a teenager. Ditto Robert Halfon, who did not contest his seat in Harlow, Essex in 2024.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat, who wanted to lead the party at some point and sounds a lot like Dave Cameron, represents the good people of Tonbridge (majority: 11,000). In the Weald of Kent, which is south of Maidstone and west of Ashford, Katie Lam has a safe majority of over 8000. She is being positioned as a future Tory minister, and is now shadowing Angela Rayner (someone has to), although her grandparents met canvassing for Labour in the postwar years after their respective families settled in Britain after fleeing the Nazis. She also, to Em-Dash’s delight, did Classics at Cambridge.

A few years ago, at one of the Antisemitism APPG meetings, Dame Margaret Hodge was present. She was the woman who held back the tide of far-right effluent in Barking about 20 years ago, and she too has just put out her memoir Battleaxe, timed as far as I can tell to coincide with Jewish New Year. She was born in what was then Alexandria, but came to England after she lost family in the Holocaust; her grandma’s widow was an enemy alien who was interned after he came to Britain, which hardened young Margaret and prepared her for a lifetime of public service.

As detailed in her book Called to Account, Dame Margaret was an especially good chair of the Public Accounts Committee, which let in Rupert Lowe last year for balance and so the rest of the committee can glare at him and wonder just what it is about him that Elon Musk loves so much, and how soon he will go away and shut up. But wait there’s more: Dame M also brought us Sure Start, fought intraparty antisemitism when her old foe Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party, and is now enjoying relative retirement in the House of Lords having given up her seat a few months before she turned 80. In fact, she turned 82 this month, and she’s still holding court here, contributing to Lords debates and scrutinising legislation.

At the debate into the safety of the Jewish community, Hendon MP David Pinto-Duschinsky asked Sarah Jones (Croydon West: majority 14,000), the overworked Police and Crime Minister serving under the Home Secretary, to do more for his fellow British Jews than merely ‘building higher walls’. Those walls are metaphorical but also physical, given that they need to prevent intruders from getting into synagogues. In response, Ms Jones noted the government’s ‘journey to tackle antisemitism’. Perhaps this is the opposite journey to the one Adolf Hitler and his National Socalist Party took to tackle philosemitism across Europe, which began in 1933 and ended in a bunker in 1945 with six million dead, the vast majority of whom were guilty of being Jewish at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

Ignorance of the Holocaust is no excuse; it’s on film, in books and in the memories of people who are now in their eighties, nineties and beyond. They have passed those memories on, when they were ready to talk, to their children and grandchildren, who have also spread the word. The presence of Lord Dubs and Dame Margaret Hodge in the Other Place, two people who actually did make a journey across foreign borders, shows up how stupid this metaphor is.

Enough with the metaphors already. We must cherish the community of British Jews, just as we must help descendants of the Empire Windrush emigrants, the millions of British Hindus and Muslims from the former empire outposts of India and Pakistan and, indeed, everyone who has come to Britain in the last century to escape persecution or because they wanted to live in the land of the BBC, NHS and HRH.

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