In the grand, overheated circus of British politics, the phrase “Nigel Farage partner” does not, alas, refer to a plucky EU bureaucrat forced into an arranged fox-trot with the man who spent three decades trying to divorce her. Rather, it signals the latest curiosity from the international sideshow: the revelation that Farage’s long-time French partner,…
The Curious Case of Ian Murray: A Small Scottish MP Who Accidentally Became a Global Weather Vane By the time the BBC’s London graphics department had finished animating Ian Murray’s face over a spinning globe, the man himself was probably still stuck on the 07:48 from Edinburgh to London, reheating a Pret croissant between his…
The Eurostar, that sleek steel eel that slithers beneath the English Channel, is often praised as a triumph of European cooperation. In reality, it’s a 400-metre-long metaphor for the continent’s ability to charge premium prices for the privilege of queuing together. Board in London, debark in Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam—three capitals that have perfected the…
Olly Murs and the Quiet Collapse of the Post-Brexit Pop Empire A dispatch from the wreckage of global soft power, with sequins. By the time the first missile fragments rained down over the Red Sea, Olly Murs was somewhere above the Persian Gulf in seat 3A, rehearsing falsetto runs for an Abu Dhabi brunch crowd…
The Curious Case of Djed Spence, or Why the World Keeps Buying Wing-Backs Like NFTs By Our Man in the Transfer Twilight Zone The planet is presently on fire—literally from Athens to Anchorage—yet the global economy still finds room to obsess over a 23-year-old Englishman whose principal talent is running up and down a patch…
