James Meek

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.

Pushkin lies entombed in the vast mausoleum of his reputation. According to Oleg Turnov, who compiles an annual list, new works of Russian Pushkinography are published at the rate of several hundred a year, rising to an average of three a day in 1999, the bicentenary of his birth, and range from multi-volume academic studies and serious biographies to lurid works like Aleksandr Zinukhov’s Who Killed Aleksander Pushkin? And when you finally get to Pushkin, you’re liable to be told that if you don’t speak Russian you can’t get to him anyway.

The internet hasn’t so much changed people’s relationship to news as altered their self-awareness in the act of reading it. Before, we were isolated recipients of the news; now, we are self-consciously members of groups reacting to news in shared ways. Marvellously, this facilitates solidarity for the truly oppressed, for campaigners, for those with minority interests. But it also means that the paranoid, the suspicious, the xenophobic and the conspiracy-minded know they’re not alone. They’re conscious of themselves as a collective, as an audience, weeping, cheering, heckling and screaming from the safety of the darkness over the stalls, occasionally pulling on a mask to jump onto the stage and pull down the trousers of the performers or to start a false panic that the theatre is on fire.