Last orders at the bar, please
One of my closest friends at university who now, and for reasons entirely unrelated to the following anecdote lives on the other side of the world, had a form of what I used to call "Cassandra syndrome." It was an inadequate description but it was the best I could come up with and, anyway, this was Magdalene College, Cambridge in the early noughties and I have a vague recollection of being a nauseatingly pretentious undergraduate.Matt (not his real name; I've changed it to protect the guilty) had this amazing gift. After a few beers and a few minutes of conversation with someone he'd never met, he was able to see deep into the darkest recesses of his companion's soul.

Oh, shut up Henry
Once again that tedious old high-Tory proponent of negative liberty, Henry Porter, heartens all would-be journalists by demonstrating that an inability to undertake the most basic research and a propensity to wilfully distort the facts through the medium of a writing style which would have a Key Stage 3 teac

On how whipping can be good for you
I really like the Liberal Conspiracy, but in every basket of premium truffles there's the occasional wild boar poo, and today this analogy manifests itself in a piece about how Parliament can be successfully reformed by abolishing the

Back online, at least two litres lighter
Once again, apologies.It appears I was more unwell than I thought: tonsillitis turned into a chest infection which turned into pneumonia, and I was hospitalised on Monday. I needed to have my left lung drained as the sea level had risen considerably since last week. Apparently, I was a classic case of "pneumonia with complications", a diagnosis which manifested itself in swarms of students all wanting to take turns to tap me on the back and make me say "ninety nine" a lot.Luckily the sample showed that fluid was clear (well, an attractive urine colour, actually) as opposed to nasty green infected pus (YUMMERS!) which meant that I'll probably

NOTE TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE PRESS GALLERY
[in response to "Another pointless week in the Commons?"]We are aware from your coverage of complex political issues passim that you are labouring under the misapprehension that which biscuit which party leader prefers to dunk in their Earl Grey is more important than the business of governing the country, mediating between differing policy positions, and undertaking the form of complex dispute resolution that comprises representative democracy. However, in spite of your attempts to persuade the electorate to th