Author: Max Frances
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Leaving Party 🎉

The golden rule for the cognoscenti when you leave a job is to walk out and don’t look back. Any glance in the rea-view mirror offers you only a glimpse of second-raters picking bits off your professional reputation for their own ends. It’s a harsh blow to be basking in your own irrelevance, which is…
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Clowning Glory

Looking at the free school meals row, you might feel that this is a classic confrontation between a government and an opposition with diametrically opposed positions on social welfare. It isn’t. It’s actually an artificial squabble for political ground that distracts from a much more damaging affliction: local government incompetence. If local government agencies had…
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Noes Out of Jaunt

The UK’s chief Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, has told his opposite number, Michel Barnier, not to bother coming over for the final bout of trade talks unless the EU fundamentally changes its position. In response, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission’s head Beurocrat has noted that her own team will go to London anyway,…
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Tiers for Fears

Who are the most relieved people in the UK right now? No, apart from the Russian currency speculators? Retired epidemiologists. Like many other academics, epidemiologists have merrily nurtured careers and pontificated on their theoretical expertise, their forecasts, and their models, and then it all came crashing down. They became relevant as reality kicked in. Worse…
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Dread Locked

So, batshit albino-bear Johnson gave his conference speech, which was less of a serious manifesto and more that of an acid-dropping ‘Generation Game’ contestant with a limited time to recall as much as possible on the political conveyor belt before the breathing walls closed in around him. And ‘Didn’t he do well?’ Well, no. The…





