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I have been putting off writing about Russell Brand. I did not want to get involved but the nonsense has reached such a pitch that I have to do something. I am finding it depressing that so many people whose support  for  Johnny Depp I admired last year are now foolishly accepting Brand’s own account of himself as a hero and a victim. It seems that because Depp was falsely accused, Brand must…

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Island on March 26, 2023. https://island.lk/the-sick-man-of-europe/ According to The Economist, “Britain has endured a grim decade during which perhaps a quarter of a million people died younger than expected.“ Declining Life Expectancy Between 1980 and 2011 life expectancy in the UK rose at a steady pace of nearly three months every…

Part Two A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Island  on March 19, 2023 Gender Identity Development Service In my previous article I reviewed Hannah Barnes’s excellent book Time to Think which is a detailed investigation intothe bizarre and horrific events  at the GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service) clinic operated by the  Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust…

Part One Sri Lanka’s first president, JR Jayewardene, famously boasted that the newly-created executive presidency gave him the power, “to do anything, except make a man a woman, or a woman a man”. Today, there is much conflict in many countries about making a man a woman or a woman a man. The issue recently contributed to the downfall of Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who had…

Part the Second A shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday Island on February 26, 2023. The decline and fall of the British State DeclinismLast week, I wrote that ,for decades, there had been a thriving literary genre consisting of works that portrayed Britain as the sick man of Europe (as the Ottoman Empire used to be known) and, indeed, in poor health globally. Much of…

Part the First This article was published in the Sunday Island on February 19, 2023 There is a certain class of Sri Lankan citizen who believes that their country would be better if still ruled by the British as part of its benevolent Empire.  This is pure fantasy because the Empire was never benevolent and there would be no chance of Britain ruling again in any of its former colonies. Today…

A shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday Island on February 11 2023 I have always dressed to the left and cannot contemplate any circumstances in which I would ever vote for a member of the Conservative Party. I have always voted for the Labour Party except for one occasion when I engaged in tactical voting. When I first went to live in Wimbledon, it was a Tory stronghold.…

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Island on February 5, 2023. When asked  about Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahawi’s  £5 million payment to HMRC (His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) by Labour MP Alex Sobel at prime minister’s questions (PMQs) on Wednesday, January 18, Rishi Sunak said his “honourable friend” had already addressed the matter in full, and there was…

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Island on January 29, 2023. Just after my article was published, Nadhim Zahawi was sacked. I claim no credit for this. When Rishi Sunak  became prime minister of the UK, he stood outside  Number 10  and promised, as the anti-Johnson, the not-Truss, to deliver, “integrity, professionalism and accountability” at every level. As Paul Waugh…

A review of a novel by Shama Perera As I was reading Finding Arthur, the word picaresque kept coming unbidden to my mind, because the plot revolves around a journey during which interesting and scary things happen to the protagonists. The author, Shama Perera, told me that one of her aims in writing the book was to take the reader on a journey around Sri Lanka. “The whole project was motivated…

Recruiting Foreign Health Staff

Every foreign nurse gained by the NHS is a nurse lost to a poorer country. On November 8, 2022, in her column in I-News, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown took strong exception to comments made by Keir Starmer on BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show.  Starmer had said that the NHS is “recruiting too many people from overseas” and we should be “training people in this country”. Ms Alibhai-Brown took this as an…

Out of the Blue

A review of the Liz Truss biography by Harry Cole and Richard Heale A shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday Island on November  6 2022 https://island.lk/?s=out+of+the+blue The Life of Truss When Liz Truss sacked her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, she held a press conference in which she gave an even more inept performance than usual in attempting to justify the U-turn (now…

Sunak as Prime Minister

“A bright and decent man with bad ideas.” The Economist. A Prime Minister who Understands Money Labour Party supporters might have been cast down by the prospect of a seemingly competent Tory leader after the destructive ineptitude of Liz Truss had given Labour a 36 point lead in the opinion polls. There are many things to like about Rishi Sunak. He is the youngest British prime minister since…

Customer Service in a Septic Isle: Part Two

This article was published in the Sunday Island on October 23, 2022. Customer Service in a Septic Isle A man waiting in a bus queue is anxious about an aggressive, unleashed dog who is continually barking at him and intimidating him. He says to the man next to him in the queue, “Does your dog bite?” “Naah,” says the man. At this point, the dog bites the first man savagely on the calf. “I…

Customer Service in a Septic Isle: Part One

A shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday Island on October 16, 2022. Customer Service in a Septic Isle Mellifluous Amiability During our lengthy visit to the UK from Sri Lanka, my wife and I went to the Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain. I bought Matthew Sturgis’s hefty biography of the painter from the Tate shop and found it an absorbing read. Sickert was a…

A Tale of Three Elizabeths

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Island on September 18 2022 A tale of three Elizabeths England’s Glory My mother had the same name as the UK’s latest and current (as I write) prime minister. My mother was Elizabeth Jane King and when she married Jeremiah O’Leary, the Irish labourer who helped to build her parents’ house, number 9, Stanway Road, Coney Hill, Gloucester,…

This article was published in Ceylon Today on July 29, 2022 https://ceylontoday.lk/2022/07/29/tory-leadership-battle/ Sri Lankan readers with a taste for schadenfreude might find light relief from their own troubles by enjoying the shenanigans in the British ruling party. The UK is on a similar trajectory of misgovernment, democratic deficit, inflation, budget deficiency, low growth,…