James Meek

The plague may have heightened awareness among the peasantry that communicating with God through a priest and doing their manorial lord’s work for free was something they acquiesced to, rather than the natural state of things, but these were customs and rituals linked directly to essential matters, eternal life and bread. With us, it is the reverse. Our practices, lost not as a direct result of epidemic mortality but the frantic effort to prevent it, seemed when we had access to them to be merely things we did, but can now be seen as substitutes for existential meaning: the office, the pub, the restaurant, the foreign holiday, the cruise. When you aren’t going anywhere, the danger is that you might start seeing the way things are going. Just as medieval peasants wondered whether the world would end if they refused to give their lord their labour for free, we might find ourselves wondering why, if the world is capable of mustering so much financial and material firepower to fight Covid-19 and save businesses from going under, it can’t muster it for other purposes.

Election​ season in the Trapped-Together Kingdom, and people are talking about politicians and parties, sort of. The talk isn’t always talk, as such. To put it another way, when was the last time someone told you a joke? When was the last time you saw a fresh quip inked on the door of a toilet? No, I can’t remember either. But when was the last time you clicked on a link to a...

Iwent​ travelling in Remainia. My aim was to write about St Albans in Hertfordshire, a city just north of London where voters and the local MP are out of sync on the wedge issue of the day. In 2016 the people of St Albans voted heavily to remain in the EU – among cities, St Albans was behind only Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote...

I used to share the feeling that there was something contradictory about Rees-Mogg’s elderly Edwardian schoolboy act in Parliament and his cosmopolitan quest for value in the stock markets of the world. Burrowing deep into the facts in search of a gotcha! moment is a vital journalistic endeavour, and may it continue for ever. But having read through years of Rees-Mogg’s voluminous parliamentary speeches and looked at the activities of Somerset Capital Management, I find that the paradigm ‘He says he’s one thing, but actually he’s another’ misses the bigger point, which is that there is no contradiction. Rees-Mogg is out in plain sight. The Rees-Mogg of SCM and the Rees-Mogg of Parliament are facets of a single worldview that shows the actual nature of Faragist Britain.