We British: The Poetry of a People

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Team Starmer is not rejecting Lib Dem overtures outright. Though neither party will admit that conversations are taking place, both emphasise the existence of a left-liberal majority across the United Kingdom that has so far been suppressed. Politicians like Denis Healey and Margaret Thatcher were intellectually self-confident. They knew who they were and what they thought. Given a question designed to cause them a bit of trouble, they were likely to confront it directly and win the argument. Too many politicians these days think getting through 15 minutes on a political show without making a ripple is a success. They’re incredibly risk-averse. The speech proved divisive among viewers, with some hailing it as “speaking for all of us” while others accused Marr of delivering his criticism too late. u201c'I'm so bored of Boris Johnson I could scream.\u2019 \n\n@AndrewMarr9 delivers an epic takedown of the 'selfish, narcissistic' ex-PM in the form of poetry...\u201d — LBC (@LBC) Rishi Sunak, who seemed such a favourite as a future prime minister before the disaster of the Spring Statement and the controversy over the tax status of his wife, has the resilience of the seriously wealthy. There are not many people in the higher echelons of Westminster whom you could imagine walking away, perfectly happily, into an entirely different life. But he is one of them.

I’ve had an incredibly good decade since my stroke, given at the time my wife was told I might not make it, then that I might need a wheelchair and be unable to communicate. I’ve been largely vertical and communicating for the past 10 years. It’s been pretty good, though I’ve still got deficits: I’m hemiplegic, my left arm really doesn’t work much, my left leg only works a bit, I walk in a sort of jerky way. I can’t do my laces. I can’t cycle. I can’t run. I can’t swim. But I focus on what I can do, which includes painting and drawing, and I try to walk five miles a day.Labelling the current Tory part a government "governed by Whatsapp", Marr added that "like the country at the time of the Brexit referendum, he didn't know what was coming next.

Rishi Sunak nervously waits to see if more Boris Johnson allies will quit as MPsMPs from both sides of the warring Conservative Party have been writing in the Sunday papers about Boris Johnson's next moves. Putin is very sharp intellectually, but has a menacing presence. Elton John once asked me to give him a kiss on the cheek and a Donna Summer album. I’d interviewed Elton in Sochi before the opening of the winter Olympics. I didn’t give Putin the album, but I asked him if he had gay friends (he does) and whether he was homophobic. He said he wasn’t, but that he enjoyed Elton’s music very much.Yet this isn’t the time for uncontroversial journalism. We are told not to connect the history of Israeli occupation with the foul terrorism unleashed by Hamas. But without context, without explanation, all we are left with is a chaos of inexplicable human evil from which there is no political exit. I quoted Yeats. Here’s Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939”, written at another ominous moment: “I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.” Boris Johnson’s constituents react to resignation as Labour eyes by-electionA by-election and a new MP await for the people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in West London. PGMcNamara speaks to voters there about Boris Johnson’s resignation. Dismissive about Labour – she’s a proper Tory – May is prepared to be sharp about her own side, too. Looking at the wider picture after Grenfell, she complains that too many Conservatives came to see social housing as a matter of problem families and problem individuals, refusing to hear what they were saying. She thinks that, in Laurie Magnus, Rishi Sunak has appointed an ethics adviser without sufficient experience. And after a withering account of modern slavery in Britain she says of the current Prime Minister: “To my dismay, the government’s approach… has been driven by the desire to deal with illegal immigration rather than by the wish to stop slavery.” Much of it now resides not above Athens’s most famous war memorial and civic bank but in an echoing, grey chamber in the British Museum. That’s because the Parthenon, after being converted into a mosque under Turkish rule, had been used as a munitions dump and partly blown up in 1687. In 1800, Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, employed a team of artists to sketch the ruins, and claimed the following year he had instructions from the Turkish authorities to remove them for safekeeping. Eventually Bruce took them to London. It’s not true that this was considered acceptable at the time: among others, Lord Byron protested vociferously at the vandalism and theft.