My straighter writing: a selection of recent pieces, and some of my older work that I’m proudest of. You can find my political sketches for The Critic here, and full-on satirical pieces here.

Sadly, the internet has lost some pieces, including Gordon Brown’s printer-smashing and Cherie Blair calling Brown a liar. But they live on in the hearts of those who remember them.

• The cinematic future is bright

  For Hugh Grant, it was another example of how the internet is destroying all we hold dear. “Fulham Road cinema closing after 94 years,” he wrote on Twitter.

• Ulster’s deadly web

  What if one of the most useful British agents inside the IRA was also a mass murderer?

• The rise and fall of Rishi

  How is Rishi Sunak so bad at this? Having posed the question some months ago, it’s time to have a crack at answering it. The election campaign has left little dispute about his lack of political nous…

• The Conservatives deserve to be taught a lesson

  It would, Grant Shapps says, be bad news for British democracy if Labour won too large a majority next month. For a moment I wondered whether his words reflected a realisation that his own party had…

• In the name of God, lead

  In retrospect the best clue to what Rishi Sunak would be like as prime minister can be found in the letter that ended his time as chancellor of the exchequer. Given that it precipitated the fall of…

• The Plot thins

  This article is taken from the December-January 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Anyone working in journalism…

• On the radar

  This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. In an age when my phone can tell me exactly…

• A very naughty boy

  “Can he come back?” There’s some kind of madness that overtakes people when they think about Boris Johnson. He resigns from Parliament, and ITV’s political editor immediately starts asking…

• The plot against Boris

  Boris Johnson is right. Nadine Dorries is right. You can’t trust Sue Gray’s report into Partygate. You could never trust it. Some of us said this at the time. It was always a stitch-up — but it wasn’t…

• Clear them all out

  There’s a concept called “moral luck”, describing how sometimes what we think of as our own virtue is simply good fortune. We never are in the situation where we’re faced with the difficult choices…

• New Year’s Rishilutions

  Rishi Sunak has made two big decisions in his political career that were all his own, at moments when an alternative course was possible. The first, in 2016, was to support Brexit. The second, in 2019…

• How Britain fell out of love with Boris

  This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Does every Johnson get a Boswell…

• The shows should go on

  The week my mother died, we took the kids to Legoland. We’d booked the trip months before, and there seemed no point in cancelling. Emotions were mixed, of course, but what would have been the benefit…

• The case for dismissal

  Poor Simon Case. The Cabinet Secretary’s defence of himself and the civil service this week was, in essence, that MPs had put Boris Johnson in Number 10, and so could hardly complain that standards of…

• Cleaning up

  Who is my neighbour? Or to put the question a different way, who is my cleaner? The BBC had to apologise this week for suggesting that Emanuel Gomes, a government cleaner who died in the first wave of…

• The end of the story

  Short of cash as the Labour Party is, they probably don’t want suggestions for things to spend money on. But if they can find any pennies, they’d be well advised to donate all of them to Boris Johnson’…

• The genius that was Dr Strangelove

  Rob Hutton reviews The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

• Boris must go – but that won’t solve the problem

  The ideal political scandal to be embroiled in is one that no one understands. The journalist setting it out for the busy reader knows they’re losing as they begin the second paragraph of explanation.

• Being Boris

  During Boris Johnson’s run for the leadership of the Conservative party, a familiar ritual developed.

• Putting the Boot in…

  David Cameron kept a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s peerless satire on his desk, but Boris Johnson’s eventful career is entirely in the Scoop mould…

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