… 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.

This week’s Guardian column charts the evolution of British politics from cabinet government to potentate’s court – and considers how it might end. (Spoiler: badly.)

Read it here.

Also, while I spoke to the Guardian’s Today In Focus podcast. That one is here.

This week’s Guardian column is all about the way Boris Johnson’s party is monopolising debate at Westminster and hogging the bandwidth of English* politics.

*Scotland, as ever, tells a different story.

The latest episode of Politics On the Couch, in which I discuss the brain’s innate tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good things, with honoured guest Tali Sharot, professor at the department for experimental psychology, University College London.

This week’s column: on the one thing Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal is good for, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of euroscepticism that isolates the UK from its neighbours.

A column on the way Russia’s now incarcerated anti-corruption campaigner gets under the skin of the president in a way that no previous opposition figure has managed.

A Guardian column on what the pandemic should be teaching the Conservative party, but isn’t.

Here is the latest episode of Politics on the Couch, visiting the front line where science and truth are defended against the massed battalions of weaponised lies and hatred.

Not a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. An essay about a personal brush with cardiac calamity and the connection with a toxic atmosphere in British politics at the time.