My straighter writing: a selection of recent pieces, and some of my older work that I’m proudest of. You can find my political sketches for The Critic here, and full-on satirical pieces here.

Sadly, the internet has lost some pieces, including Gordon Brown’s printer-smashing and Cherie Blair calling Brown a liar. But they live on in the hearts of those who remember them.

• On the radar

  This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. In an age when my phone can tell me exactly…

• A very naughty boy

  “Can he come back?” There’s some kind of madness that overtakes people when they think about Boris Johnson. He resigns from Parliament, and ITV’s political editor immediately starts asking…

• The plot against Boris

  Boris Johnson is right. Nadine Dorries is right. You can’t trust Sue Gray’s report into Partygate. You could never trust it. Some of us said this at the time. It was always a stitch-up — but it wasn’t…

• Clear them all out

  There’s a concept called “moral luck”, describing how sometimes what we think of as our own virtue is simply good fortune. We never are in the situation where we’re faced with the difficult choices…

• New Year’s Rishilutions

  Rishi Sunak has made two big decisions in his political career that were all his own, at moments when an alternative course was possible. The first, in 2016, was to support Brexit. The second, in 2019…

• How Britain fell out of love with Boris

  This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Does every Johnson get a Boswell…

• The shows should go on

  The week my mother died, we took the kids to Legoland. We’d booked the trip months before, and there seemed no point in cancelling. Emotions were mixed, of course, but what would have been the benefit…

• The case for dismissal

  Poor Simon Case. The Cabinet Secretary’s defence of himself and the civil service this week was, in essence, that MPs had put Boris Johnson in Number 10, and so could hardly complain that standards of…

• Cleaning up

  Who is my neighbour? Or to put the question a different way, who is my cleaner? The BBC had to apologise this week for suggesting that Emanuel Gomes, a government cleaner who died in the first wave of…

• The end of the story

  Short of cash as the Labour Party is, they probably don’t want suggestions for things to spend money on. But if they can find any pennies, they’d be well advised to donate all of them to Boris Johnson’…

• The genius that was Dr Strangelove

  Rob Hutton reviews The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

• Boris must go – but that won’t solve the problem

  The ideal political scandal to be embroiled in is one that no one understands. The journalist setting it out for the busy reader knows they’re losing as they begin the second paragraph of explanation.

• Being Boris

  During Boris Johnson’s run for the leadership of the Conservative party, a familiar ritual developed.

• Putting the Boot in…

  David Cameron kept a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s peerless satire on his desk, but Boris Johnson’s eventful career is entirely in the Scoop mould…

• To govern is to blog

  Is he still going? At the time of writing, Dominic Cummings was six days into a Twitter thread about the government’s handling of Covid. It’s presumably a warm-up for his appearance before Parliament…

• Nothing matters to careless people

  Nothing matters! Did you think Boris Johnson caught once again with his hand in the cookie jar, might be about to finally get his comeuppance? Wrong! It turns out polls show the Conservatives just as…

• Sunday Times: The Mandarin Who Tried to Kill Our Philby Scoop

  The proceeds of a couple of days in the National Archives, digging into how the government tried to persuade Harold Evans that Kim Philby wasn’t very interesting.

  The mandarin who plotted to derail our bombshell Kim Philby spy story | News | The Sunday Times

• My Brexit hell

  What was Brexit like? America’s declaration of independence? A man leaving a golf club but demanding to still be allowed into the bar? Over the years, I went through a few analogies, but the one that persisted was of a married man who has for years enjoyed casually flirting with a work colleague. One evening he makes his traditional half-hearted pass, and instead of rolling her eyes, she replies: “Go on, then”. A month later, he’s living out of his car and negotiating through lawyers to see his children one weekend a month, and he can’t really tell you how it happened.

  My Brexit hell | Robert Hutton | The Critic Magazine

• Review: The Powerful and the Damned, by Lionel Barber

  I read Lionel Barber’s diaries* so you don’t have to. And you really don’t have to.

  *Not actual diaries.

  https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/review-the-powerful-and-the-damned-by-lionel-barber

• Dominic Cummings’s 2020 vision

  The government’s biggest problem wasn’t Dominic Cummings. It was its reluctance to tell itself the truth.

  https://thecritic.co.uk/dominic-cummingss-2020-vision/

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