Who can blame Boris Johnson for feeling smug?
The real victor of these local elections? Boris Johnson. According to Oscar Wilde, the only thing in life worse than…
Giorgia Meloni’s opponents are becoming hysterical
Like drowning men clutching at straws, Giorgia Meloni’s opponents are trying ever more hopelessly to justify their claim that she is a…
Vehicle metaphors
Various vehicular metaphors are commonly used to describe the unravelling of an incompetent government, usually involving train wrecks, car crashes,…
Making appointments, Coalition-style
A satirical look at the previous government’s conservative leanings
Four troubling features of the Higgins judgment
Everyone behaving badly, but only one is pronounced guilty in a social justice outcome
Music as pasta
It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…
Aussie life
From a nation that gave us riot police, rude waiters, baguettes and non-negotiable submarine contracts we have a new word,…
Language
The expression ‘non-racist’ is still missing from most of the world’s major dictionaries (Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Collins, Macquarie) but perhaps this…
Who decides which politicians are liars?
This week the Welsh parliament has been debating a law that would ban politicians from lying. Assuming it ends up…
Dear Mary: how can I help pay for an expensive lunch without seeming rude?
Q. My husband and I (both in our eighties) recently visited a carpet shop with a view to replacing the…
The strikers giving Southgate a headache
Poor Gareth Southgate. Having three outstanding finishers is giving him a thumping headache ahead of the European Championship. Harry Kane,…
Can MPs really defect?
‘He did it years before William Donaldson did The Henry Root Letters,’ said my husband querulously, as though I had…
