The latest episode of Politics on the Couch is now live – on nostalgia, how it works, what we get from it and why political campaigns love to exploit it.

https://politics-on-the-couch.zencast.website/episodes/nostalgia-canvassing-the-politics-of-memory-lane

Column on the fundamental calculus of Brexit – and how it hasn’t changed since 2016.

A raw deal, whichever way you slice it.

In this essay for Prospect magazine I pondered the question of whether the liberal dread of a resurgence of 20th Century-style threats is misdirecting us from what is really going on. Perhaps vigilance that is too focused on the rear-view mirror carries its own risk of complacency about unimagined threats.

This week’s column is on the hybrid party that has emerged from years of ideological congress between Tories and Ukip. Here.

In which I consider the possibility that there is more mileage in the Johnson project than has sometimes seemed likely, given his incompetent handling of the coronavirus response

Writing on the 75th anniversary of the first Nuremberg trial, I found myself thinking about memory of war as a kind of cultural inoculation, among other things.

A conversation with the very engaging Professor Drew Westen, of Emory University, on the US election result, the incumbent president’s refusal to recognise it and some clinical answers to the perennial question of what, exactly, is his problem …

Neither of which contain the truth.

I had the peculiar, but not unfamiliar task this week of writing to a deadline that fell before the outcome of the US presidential election would be known; before the polls had even closed. It’s not my favourite challenge but it is always interesting – looking for something to say the night before that has a fighting chance of still being relevant the morning after.

I’m not best qualified to judge whether or not I managed it. At least the reference to Strictly Come Dancing in the intro is probably timeless.

Read it here: What Trump and Johnson show us about the need to restore a boundary between news and entertainment; politics and show biz.

Latest Guardian column, on a catch-22 for the Chancellor: serving in the cabinet puts him in pole position to succeed Johnson, but the longer he is loyal to the incumbent serves the less attractive he gets as a prospective prime minister. Here.