This week’s column: about the gap between heroic stories that Conservative MPs tell themselves about their political struggles and the true character of Boris Johnson’s government.

This week’s column is on Labour malaise and the leader’s contribution to it.

Also, I pontificated on the Guardian weekly politics podcast.

This week’s column is about the long tail of Brexit in British political culture; Boris Johnson’s gift for deferring hard choices and Keir Starmer’s difficulty getting into the national conversation.

In which we discuss his new book and the ways in which he failed as leader of the Labour party.

This time with China, and the new US president wants Europe to get ready.

(And, related, a column I didn’t post the other week on “Global Britain” delusions and cabinet rows over an Australian trade deal.)

After some delay (sorry, long story) there is a new edition of Politics on the Couch, all about how the minds of violent extremists work, how radicalism affects the brain and how to walk people back from the dark side.

Check it out.

That declaring the intention to do something is pretty much the same as getting it done.

Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe, by Niall Ferguson

… and not the imaginary one you like to beat. That’s the lesson in this week’s column on what Labour tends to get wrong when it campaigns against the ‘same old Tories’.

I very much enjoyed this conversation with Hugh Linehan of the Irish Times, for their Politics Weekly podcast. We covered a psychology, politics, technology, nationalism, history, a bit of economics and the inevitable splash of Brexit … Listen here.