John O’Farrell

Two brilliant pieces (if I may say as someone who was absurdly proud of writing for The New Statesman…)

Betcha the new Editor gets him back, maybe as their version of Prospect Mag’s brilliant ‘Prisoner’ column before D Goodhart went mad…

YES

"Most dishes can be improved with the addition of bacon."

How can Brexit Britain navigate Trump's World? New post on my Brexit & Beyond Blog. With the rapid deepening of a dangerous global divide, the UK faces hard choices. Could the latest proposals for UK-EU 'mutual recognition' be part of the answer?
chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-...

"Betrayed. First Zelensky, and soon us? The radical rejection of the US by its allies" – today's cover of the German Der Spiegel

I'm so naive. When I imagined Fascism taking over an old friend I expected rallies and concrete. I should have realised it would just be banal sour pettiness.

Opinion | Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes? (Gift Article) There can be no appeasement. None.

"Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists." Gift Article www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/o...

Passaporta in Brussels

We would love to create a starter pack of bookstores in Europe people can visit on their travels.

Please recommend your favourites and we will get it going.

Old hack here who covered Belfast Agreement alongside @telegraphnews.bsky.social NI Corr Toby Harnden, who could school Henry on difference between the B/GFA & Johnson’s Irish Sea Border/ Windsor Framework

Lord Trimble loved DT’s news coverage, while often despairing the op-eds

Plus ca change

Old hack here who covered Belfast Agreement alongside @telegraphnews.bsky.social NI Corr Toby Harnden, who could school Henry on difference between the B/GFA & Johnson’s Irish Sea Border/ Windsor Framework

Lord Trimble loved DT’s news coverage, while often despairing the op-eds

Plus ca change

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence. So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Frank Wilhoit seems very topical today: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

Putting together a -very- small stack of books that have been banned (in the U.S.) for a customer

How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

“The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.”

The euphemisation of far right politics over decades has led to the inability to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute and fascist politics fascism

The use of populism, Euroscepticism, nationalism/nativism have all played a role in diluting and minimising the threat often based on the FR's own wishes
1/

Via Giulia, Rome

Sunset from Ponte Luis 1

Ponte Luis 1 in Porto

Ponte de Arrabida in Porto

Ponte Vecchio in Florence

Roman bridge at Salamanca

Via Giulia, Rome

Sunset from Ponte Luis 1

Ponte Luis 1 in Porto

Ponte de Arrabida in Porto

Ponte Vecchio in Florence

Roman bridge at Salamanca

The best explanation is perhaps not that the prince and Watson had finally buckled to costs risk; it instead looks like a desperate last-minute move by a publisher anxious to avoid a public trial of the claims. It appears from the evidence available that NGN signalled that it would actually accept liability. If so, this would change everything. If NGN accepted it was liable for at least the main part of the claims, there would be no need for a full trial—for there would be nothing to be tried. The prince and the politician would not now be able to force a full trial even if they had wanted to do. For a defendant to admit liability is an unusual, if not unique litigation ploy.

NEW

How Harry and Watson forced News Group Newspapers to admit wrongdoing

Why the circumstances show it was NGN wanting to avoid a public trial—and not the costs risk on the claimants—that brought this case to its end

By me, at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

Frankie Quinn took this around 2000 for a profile in Fortnight Magazine, written by Eamonn Hughes.

Frankie Quinn took this around 2000 for a profile in Fortnight Magazine, written by Eamonn Hughes.

Frasers Group says two-thirds of retail staff are still on zero-hours contracts MPs examining plans for legislation were told 11,500 staff on the contracts, which do not guarantee weekly shifts

Driving growth in the UK economy is vital, but not at the expense of workers' rights.

The Employment Rights Bill aims to fix issues like last-minute shift changes with no compensation—leaving workers unable to plan their lives.

More here:

www.theguardian.com/business/202...