Reporting News and opinions
So far, so dazzling. We have been unchained from the desk, from the camera, from the petrol pump, and soon, apparently, from the steering wheel itself. Progress has been relentless, elegant, and profitable.
Enoch Powell famously observed that “all political careers end in failure.” Whether one agrees with the man or not, the aphorism has endured because politics is an unforgiving profession. Few modern British politicians illustrate it more vividly than David Cameron.
Remember the good old days when politicians were treated like minor deities? Back in the UK, leaders ascended to power wrapped in such thick layers of pomp, circumstance, and blind reverence that you could practically smell the incense. Accountability? Never heard of her.
In the grand theatre of Nigerian public life, where contracts are signed with the solemnity of wedding vows and then abandoned with the enthusiasm of a jilted lover, few dramas have rivalled the Federal Republic of Nigeria v Process & Industrial Developments Ltd saga. The 2020 English High Court decision ([2020] EWHC 2379 (Comm)) was merely the intermission. The full production, complete with bribes, perjury and a near-$11 billion bill, only reached its denouement years later. Yet that September 2020 judgment by Sir Ross Cranston remains the pivotal moment when Nigeria was allowed, against all the usual arbitration orthodoxy of finality and speed, to drag the whole rotten affair into the light.
Every crisis deserves a prompt, and the far right is nothing if not punctual. Five men were arrested early on a Sunday near RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire base from which US B-1 bombers have flown missions against Iran, after a local farmer noticed three white vans heading towards it. Bomb disposal robots trundled about the woods, and dozens of villagers were bundled out of their homes. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, had already left the building, intellectually speaking.
