This week’s Guardian column is on the hunt for ever purer national sovereignty and the trap that means Britain is condemned to be always reenacting the bitter politics of trying to leave the EU … with no prospect of satisfaction because we have already left.

I haven’t updated this site for a while. In the unlikely event that anyone visits it to catch up with what I have been writing for the Guardian, that is all here. (The latest one was on Boris Johnson and the shallowness of Tory conversion to the cause of carbon reduction.)

But the reason for posting today is the arrival of a new Politics on the Couch podcast – on rationality and democracy, recorded in person with Professor Steven Pinker.

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