I saw someone like “Guy Wankey” from Policy Exchange on the telly today about solar power. He was very keen to say that it doesn’t make up very much of the grid today. This is apparently a reason not to use it tomorrow, in much the same way as the tiny numbers of computers in…
Read More Minor supplementary pointW1A has been a bit of a disappointment for me. It’s not so much the BBC self-regard, a notorious turnoff, but rather the lack of a plot driver. Twenty Twelve worked because it spoke to the steadily rising national dread before Operation Big Sportsday, something which nobody remembers now. This was wired into the show’s…
Read More Siobhan Sharpe rides againI find it both reassuring, and intensely funny, that after all the effort to get rid of the Secretary of State for Health’s duty to provide an NHS, top NHS officials are now moaning that Jeremy Hunt is micromanaging them. Sir Bruce Keogh can probably handle being micromanaged by someone like Hunt, and in general,…
Read More The system has won, and damn right tooSo it looks like we’ve identified the new Con Coughlin. Here’s a piece in the Torygraph that blames everything SIS might have done wrong in the Bush years on Tony Blair, built entirely on a single SIS source. When I first saw it, it weirdly didn’t have a byline, although it since acquired that of…
Read More Coughlin 2.0@yorksranter On the one hand, it seems bonkers. On the other, the Mail's reaction explains why he did it… — Stian Westlake (@stianwestlake) April 6, 2014 We refer of course to this Daily Hell story, in which best mate of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron, is supposedly astonished and deeply shocked to hear…
Read More Check the meetings register in a month’s timeThe UsVsTh3m crowd really gave me the horrors with this app, at least when it was returning UK No.1s. Mine has a fast start – Odyssey, in July 1980 – but then plunges into two Spice Girls tracks and, Christ!, Wet Wet Wet. And Frankie Knuckles has left the building. This of course was an…
Read More Music.So I recently read Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and also Svetlana Alexeivitch’s La fin de l’homme rouge : Ou le temps du désenchantement . The first is well known to readers, the second is a kind of oral history of the end of the Soviet Union as seen by self-identifying…
Read More Joint review: two books on Russia, and sausages