Recent content by Winston Hughes

All About Eve, On the Waterfront, Jaws, Aliens, Pulp Fiction, Parasite

Indeed. They've been acting like that couldn't happen to them, but it's entirely possible.

And yet they're lining up to do it again. This isn't government. It's pantomime. Starmer is hitting the biggest poll leads in history just by virtue of him and his party not being insane.

Two good years, and for sure they could recover. But they're not going to be good years. They're going to be horrible. The Tories' best move right now is to pick a leader who can soften the fall. Johnson is the exact opposite of that. He'll only make it worse.

The Tories are in full collapse. If they bring Johnson back they will vanish without trace.

It's both, with the harm dialed up to 11 by dint of unbelievable idiocy. The only saving grace is Truss falling face-down on the starting line. The swing to Labour in the polls is unprecedented. She has destroyed any remaining notion of the Tories as the party of prudent finance.

As much as I see no good reasons justifying Russia's war on Ukraine, I kinda feel like it's self-defeating to treat everyone who dissents as if they're evil or stupid. We need dissent, on every issue, or else we have no grounds for thinking any consensus view is reliable.

I said almost exactly this to a friend the other day. Of the eight PMs I remember, while there have been none that I could say I liked, Truss is the first where I struggle to understand what it is about her that appeals (other than not being Boris or Rishi). Thatcher was driven, forthright...

Minorities in most of our republics are buried in the mass of popular opinion. In our monarchies they do better at representing their interests.

That's a mark in their favour imo.

If Rishi had got in, Starmer might have had a real fight on his hands. As it is, Labour just needs not to screw it up.

But, yes, there ought to be a better way. Two and a half thousand years working on it, though, and we're still deep in the reeds.

It's a matter of priorities. The unfairness of the monarchic element of our constitution is the least of our problems. Which is one reason why Liz was so popular. She recognised the absolute importance of staying in her lane, avoiding anything that would compromise her constitutional...

Truss is a political lightweight. She has no base of popular support in the country. She has the thinnest mandate to govern of any PM in living memory. She's the worst orator we've had as PM in living memory. She has no meaningful conviction or vision about anything that I can discern. The...

On average, Europe's monarchies are better governed than its republics. And not by a small margin. Most of the causality here is probably negative: they remain monarchies because they've been governed well enough that there hasn't been the impetus for a republican revolution. For those of us...