Hold your noses, everyone. Swampy’s back in town. Dressed like a jumble sale version of a dodgy children’s television entertainer, he’s turned up in London at a protest against the HS2 railway line. Swampy and his tree-hugging mates have dug themselves in on a patch of land outside Euston Station. And when I say ‘dug … Read more
Boris Johnson is reportedly flying to Scotland this week ‘to save the Union’. Why? It’s not as if he hasn’t anything better to do, apart from the small matters of dealing with a global pandemic and the economy going to hell in a handcart. Yet the Prime Minister is about to drop everything to race … Read more
The date is March 1, 2024, and Britain is about to enter its fifth year of lockdown. Despite the entire population being vaccinated every six months and the death toll from Covid-19 falling to zero, scientists are still warning that it is too early to ease restrictions. At the Old Bailey, anti-lockdown campaigner Piers Corbyn … Read more
When I started out in this game 50 years ago, on a now defunct weekly paper in Peterborough, we used to drink in a city centre pub called the Black Boy & Trumpet. Nobody gave the name a second thought. We had no idea that half a century later we would have been committing a … Read more
Think yourselves lucky I’m here today. I could have been up before North London magistrates, charged with resisting arrest, if not attempted murder. At the weekend, having been confined to barracks since September recovering from a gammy leg, I took my physio’s advice and attempted a walk in the local park. My first faltering steps … Read more
War Horse author Sir Michael Morpurgo is refusing to include The Merchant Of Venice in a new book adapting Shakespeare’s plays for children under 16. He has decided the anti-Semitic portrayal of Jewish money lender Shylock is too ‘raw’ for young minds. Without doubt, the play may be considered offensive by modern standards. But that … Read more
The best way to assess Boris’s trade deal with the EU is to look at who’s for it and who’s agin it. Despite the bad blood between the two of them, Nigel Farage has given the agreement a magnanimous, if cautious, welcome. While Farage is wisely reserving final judgment until he’s read the small print, … Read more
They love their NATO-style acronyms, don’t they? How many times during this pandemic have we been informed ominously that the Prime Minister has convened an emergency meeting of COBRA? Back on March 3, as coronavirus was coming to be seen as a clear and present danger, I observed in this column: ‘COBRA sounds like something … Read more
This is the season when newspaper columnists are expected to pull on their Old Moore outfits and have a stab at predicting the year ahead. Forgive me, but I opted out of this hackneyed tradition years ago, even though I’d never really taken it seriously. No matter how outrageous or spectacularly silly my forecasts, they … Read more
With Christmas approaching, I couldn’t help wondering how The Nativity might have turned out if coronavirus had been around back then. The Bible would probably have recorded it something like this… And lo, Caesar Borisius decreed that a mass vaccination for the pestilence which is called Co-Vid should take place among all the citizenry of … Read more