It’s been less than a week since British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered two patrol vessels to the Channel Islands port of St Helier in an escalation of tensions with France. Amid front-page banner headlines and media fanfare, government sources accused Paris of sinking lower than Jersey’s Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. According to…
Within hours of last week’s Myanmar coup d’etat, the denunciations came pouring in. Britain began considering new sanctions. US president Joe Biden pledged action against the military leaders who had directed the coup, which dislodged Myanmar’s Nobel-prize-winning leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. In London, the British Foreign Office hauled in Myanmar Ambassador U Kyaw Zwar Minn, citing the…
Predictions of the break-up of the UK may be reaching a crescendo, but they are scarcely new. In 1707, Jonathan Swift wrote a poem deriding the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which had just been passed, for seeking to combine two incompatible peoples in one state: “As if a man in making posies/…
Britain got its independence back and got the best trade deal it could hope for with Brussels. Too good to be true? There was a great deal of bluffing on both sides, right up to the line. But the Brexit deal, finally nailed on Christmas eve, was ultimately a considerable victory for Britain and a…
What with Covid, Brexit, almost dying and becoming a dad again, it’s been a big year for the British PM. Here are the past 12 months in his own verbose words… the very best (or worst) of BoJo in 2020. Boris Johnson is mildly obsessed with Winston Churchill. And they do actually have a fair…
Boris Johnson’s picturing the finally agreed Brexit deal as some sort of bonanza for Britain is both wrong and misleading. As the devil is always in the details… So the deal has been agreed. This was always going to happen; as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Boris Johnson was clearly bluffing about his…
