The Mirror Crack'd

Boomers have been getting a bad press of late but the time has come for us to stage a fightback. Lest the prospect of hordes of disgruntled pensioners of the 'Baby Boom' generation getting militant should cause alarm on the one hand or derision on the other let me make myself perfectly clear. I'm not suggesting for one moment that, collectively, we oldies should campaign for yet further concessions for ourselves, rather mobilise our political clout on behalf of those young, disabled and disadvantaged people who are facing yet more hardship as a result of punitive government policies. Our generation turns out to vote disproportionately, while others are either too apathetic or too disenchanted to make the effort. That gives us enormous political clout which, if harnessed to the common good rather than selfish ends, could be transformational. Losing our winter fuel payment (known by some as the wine allowance) was insulting for loyal Labour voters and, for many, caused anxiet...

JD Vance just let the cat out of the bag - to the Americans the 'special relationship' with the UK is not only not special, it's laughable. Many of us have long suspected this to be the case but it's helpful to have it finally confirmed for the avoidance of any doubt by someone at the heart of the US administration. Vance obviously believes his role as Vice President is to act as an  agent provocateur, sowing alarm and discord amongst former allies the better to wrong foot them. He demonstrated this in his castigation of the assembled delegates at the recent Munich Security Conference and again in the Oval Office last Friday at the car crash of a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky.  Now, he's upset the US' two major European allies, Britain and France, by suggesting that they haven't had relevant battle experience in the last thirty or forty years to enable them to support Ukraine against Putin's aggression. When it was pointed out to him by aggrieved polit...

And it was all going so well... Volodymyr Zelensky's much-anticipated visit to the White House on Friday got off to a promising, if understandably tense, start but rapidly turned into a car crash following an intervention from the Vice-President, JD Vance. Whether this was a spontaneous eruption of frustration on Vance's part or a show of synthetic anger gamed in advance by him and Trump to blindside Zelensky is impossible to know. But, as the situation deteriorated into a major diplomatic fiasco, leaving the Ukrainian ambassadress head in hands in shocked disbelief, one had the distinct impression that Zelensky had walked into a trap. It was a most unedifying spectacle but threw into sharp focus the characters of the three men. Zelensky, nervous and ashen-faced, looking shaken by the sudden ugly turn of events; Vance, Trump's attack dog, going for the jugular and Trump delivering the coup de grace. It was clearly a case of bullying by two powerful men of a beleaguered supp...