BY PAUL T HORGAN Of course, Sir Keir could see a revival in the opinion polls. British armed forces could reveal a Wunderwaffe that, when used by Ukrainians, causes the Russian hordes to retreat from Ukraine like the Blue Meanies did from Pepperland when confronted by The Beatles, while, when used by the USA, permanently secures safe passage in the international waters of the Straits of Hormuz. … Continue reading Kicking the Can
BY PAUL T HORGAN Anything connected with Peter Mandelson seems to inevitably send shockwaves around Westminster and beyond. This is what Mandelson does. As Labour spin-doctor in the 1990s, his job was to disrupt the media landscape and reshape it to an approximation of his design. He did this by commoditising news. After Black Wednesday in 1992, simply everyone in the media seems to have … Continue reading The Mandelson Question
BY PAUL T HORGAN The news from what is being described as the ‘Iran War’ is that there is no news, well none about the actual fighting. This is normal. A study of war reporting, especially of the wartime periodicals that would emerge for every major conflict up to WWII, demonstrates that the actualité of the combat would take at least several days if not weeks or … Continue reading The Hormuz War
BY PAUL T HORGAN Perhaps it is because it was my teen years, but it seems to me as though the 1970s were the high-point in popular books about wars and militaries, not least because full-colour printing allowed illustrations of the weapons used to be depicted other than in drab monochrome. Certainly WHSmith was packed with these books and the stores were also packed with … Continue reading Blunderissimi
BY PAUL T HORGAN That Morgan McSweeney would have to quit his job in Downing Street was all but inevitable as soon as Peter Mandelson was sacked, but it was not for the reasons he gave in his resignation statement. The clue is in his job. McSweeney was Chief of Staff in Sir Keir’s operation. Being Chief of Staff means being able to fire said … Continue reading Roll Out the Barrel
BY PAUL T HORGAN SW1, Friday February 6, 2026: Politician “Shocked” That He Has Been Lied To There was outrage in Westminster, when a leading politician admitted he was “shocked” that he had been lied to by another, but less leading, politician who had once been a quite leading politician before having been forced to quit over questions of honesty a few times. That politicians lie … Continue reading ‘Shocked’
BY PAUL T HORGAN 2am, 2 February, 2026, London: Buckingham Palace announced today that, in the light of recent revelations discovered in the Epstein Files released by the US Department of Justice, the Prince of Darkness would have his title revoked. Peter Dark-Ness, as he will now be called, was found to have continued his association with the untimely deceased millionaire paedophile after said person … Continue reading Prince of Darkness Stripped of Title
BY PAUL T HORGAN While the Conservative Party is vying with a lump of uranium to see how much of its mass can leave the main body – and doing rather better – this is a deflection from the big question: Sir Keir has failed as a Prime Minister, so when will he step down? The defection of Robert Jenrick has had a predictable outcome. … Continue reading Counting the Days
BY PAUL T HORGAN Well, it’s not exactly a George Floyd moment. This isn’t the case of a Minneapolis cop blocking the airway of a repeat serious felon caught passing counterfeit dollar bills, the last minutes of Floyd’s life captured from the single perspective of a smartphone camera. The public outcry over the recent shooting in the same city has been limited to the ideologically … Continue reading A Tragedy Not An Outrage
BY PAUL T HORGAN Deng Xiao-Ping, The Butcher of Tiananmen Square, perhaps deserves some credit for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the months following the massacre in the Chinese capital in June 1989. By coincidence this happened at roughly the same time as Ayatollah Khomeini died, but more on that later. Sending tanks to face pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, and slaughtering thousands, … Continue reading Leipzig, Iran
BY PAUL T HORGAN Competitive sports are not, we are constantly told, just about winning. They are also about taking part: This, to a degree, makes sense. If no-one apart from one person took part in a sports contest, it would not be much of a contest. This is also the case in lawsuits. The suit is not only about the result, but about the … Continue reading The Last Trump for the BBC
BY PAUL T HORGAN What no-one has commented on is the actual point in time that the question stopped being how Sir Keir would step down as Labour leader and therefore also as Prime Minister, but instead when. The fall of the Marxist Human Rights lawyer from the head of His Majesty’s Government now seems all but inevitable. There will be a tipping-point, largely predicted to … Continue reading Aprés Keir, Le Petit Deluge
BY PAUL T HORGAN Deporting Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) is a rather hot topic connected with the overall issue of our current regime of unrestricted migration. The UK prison population has a disproportionate number of FNOs. They stay behind bars because there is a large and lucrative business model to keep them there. Immigration and Human Rights lawyers hold sway over the criminal justice system, … Continue reading The Moral Hazard of Deportation
BY PAUL T HORGAN Child actors. These unfortunates are thrust into the adult (in the decent use of the term) world well before they are capable of dealing with it. It is usually at the behest of an ambitious parent and their vicarious desires based on the reflected glory of their offspring’s success. That, and, of course, money. The career of a former child actor … Continue reading Progressive Wizardry
BY PAUL T HORGAN Ghislaine Maxwell, the Duke and Duchess of York, Peter Mandelson. Ask what all of these people have in common and the answer is obvious. All of them have been substantially negatively affected by the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. But that is not all. All of them are, or were, British. And yet we are told that Epstein was an American socialite, and … Continue reading The British Fall Guy
BY PAUL T HORGAN Rishi Sunak. Remember him? It may be the relentless pace of news, replacing the legacy analogue cycle of four discrete opportunities for the average person to catch up on the news, that makes it seem that Mr Sunak was Prime Minister a eon ago. It was only 14 months ago that he lost the General Election. Sunak went into the polls … Continue reading Did Sunak Throw the 2024 General Election?
BY PAUL T HORGAN A person mentioning the humorous magazine Punch to most people under the age of 50 will be met with blank stares. Punch closed, barring an abortive resurrection, in 1992, when today’s 50-year-old would have been in their teens, and by that time, Punch‘s mass appeal had long gone as monolithic markets began to break into smaller segments. A decision sometime in the mid-1960s had seen the magazine redesigned … Continue reading Artificial Dishonesty
BY PAUL T HORGAN Were it not for the office blocks dominating the southern, more populous, side of Reading Station, it would be an imposing piece of railway architecture. The building’s striking feature is its wide concourse, mounted above the eight platforms aligned with the Great Western Main Line. Much like Joseph Bazalgette, who built London’s sewers with four times the required capacity, this escalator-and-lift-linked … Continue reading The Ballad of Reading Station
BY PAUL T HORGAN In retrospect, the American bombing of Uranium enrichment plants in darkest Iran was obvious. There was a central fact that was deliberately ignored or played down by commentators for years. No one in the mainstream media, or indeed in the political bubbles, has actually explored what “enrichment” actually is. Unless a person was familiar with how an atomic bomb works, the … Continue reading Atomic Brinkmanship
BY PAUL T HORGAN The analogy isn’t precise, but seems similar. Consider the origins of the Great War. Serbian fanatics in Bosnia, a province administered by Austria-Hungary since 1878 and annexed in 1908, assassinate the heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown. There is a tenuous link between the fanatics and the Serbian Kingdom. Austria-Hungary is given a ‘blank cheque’ by Imperial Germany to crush Serbia in … Continue reading War-gaming Iran
