Last night, Stephen Colbert told his audience: ‘It’s only March, and 2020 has done the impossible: Made me nostalgic for 2019.’ But nobody in his audience laughed because they were all dead. Or at home. It isn’t clear at the moment, because I haven’t read the news.
Author: Andrew Trower
I have the mildest of manners. But as soon as someone tilts their seat back even an inch murder becomes a priority. If a baby makes baby noises, I think of Joan Rivers (‘is there a terrorist on board? I’m willing to help’). And if there really is a terrorist on board, forget it. I would rather die than go on trying to eat a sausage out of a paper cup with a spork.
But “concentration camp” is the only possible definition of Fort Sill, a place that was used during the Second World War to cage those Americans who looked (subversively) Japanese. It had been closed as of 2014. But there is no achievement of the last administration so minor that it cannot be undone, and the camp will now open again, this time to intern children, seekers of asylum from the hysteria of gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Bower is on familiar territory when he gets on to the sex life of his unhappy victim: he pounces with the salacious information that Corbyn once had an affair with a member of his inner circle. Is it Dianne Abbot? Yes. Is it that one about how he brought his friends round to reveal her splayed out naked on his bed? Yes.
The city retains something that has faded from Paris and Barcelona and Berlin: it has not yet become a self-parody, and that makes it real, and that in turn makes it, for tourists and travellers at least, worth a visit.
I would have told all this to John McDonnell. I would have asked, as security personnel dragged me away, why the left has so casually abandoned the right of free movement, as if it was not in fact a right but some unhelpful loophole that could only be exploited by foreign workers.
