In 2009, during the dying days of the Brown government, Andy Burnham was made Health Secretary. The country was teetering into recession and the press – now nakedly in love with David Cameron - was tearing Labour to pieces.

Money and popularity was in short supply, as it had never been during successive Blair ministries. Desperate to rekindle some of the animal spirits of New Labour, ministers began to turn to celebrity.

Leaning on Jimmy Savile’s extensive work within the National Health Service, Burnham was able to arrange a meeting. Burnham was not interested in a mere celebrity endorsement. Instead, he was looking to draw upon Savile’s fundraising expertise, to find the money for wide-ranging social care reform whilst the Treasury was battling the global financial crisis.

Now into his early 80s, Savile’s marathon running days were well behind him. But still he retained his inhuman energy. The driving live force which kept him on, and on, and on…

79 Whitehall, Richmond Terrace. November 2009.

‘Thank you, our Jimmy, for taking the time to talk to me, Andrew, a likely Northern laddy who just wants to do best by the most vulnerable in our society’

“Oooh..oooh…now then, now then, now then I won’t call you Andrew because to us, you are our Andy, now then…yes…I’ve always said, the Lords and the Ladies from across the realm have got to come together, knock heads, and establish a cross-party consensus oooo…..”

“Cross-party consensus, that. Wow. I’ve never thought about it like that before. But you are right. We do need a cross-party consensus before progress can be made to stop it being a err, political foot-”

“And you see Andy, the thing that bothers me most is the idea that people have got to sell their home to pay for their care. Imagine that. A Gran having to sell her only asset, that she earned with her own money, so her children have nothing to inherit. That means she’s being taxed twice. Oooho…noow, does that sound fair to you?”

“Yeah, what we absolutely can’t have is old people downsizing their homes. Much better to have it funded out of taxes to income, but look, Jimmy, how do we sell that to the public?”

‘Oooohooohooo, don’t you worry about that my son. You just call it the ‘National Care Service’, people love the NHS. It’s our national religion, don’t you know.”

“Jimmy, I can’t thank you enough, this is genius, you-”

“I think shall be thanking you once this National Care Service is up and running Andy my son, yes yes. Oooh yes. You ever seen the mortification of the flesh Andy? The process is a fascinating thing. And the end product. Ooohhohohoooh yes. Now, I’ll want one of these centres in Harehills, and we’ll need a couple in Scarborough…oooh…and maybe on in walking distance to Buckingham Palace if you don’t mind…oooho….ooho yes….

“Anything you need. Anything. How could I possibly thank you enough?”

“We’ll find ways, Andy. We’ll find ways.”

For the first twenty years of I frequently rubbed up the wrong way against authorities in both primary and secondary school. I was made to ‘face the wall’ most lunchtimes and lost many weekends as an adolescent being made to come in for detention. To this day I get a surge of panic whenever I hear my parent’s landline ring because my first thought is that the Headteacher is calling home and I am about to have all of my ‘tech’ taken off me as punishment because I forgot to bring my pencil case to French, or some other trumped up lawfare, because I had the nerve to reject the strictures of Footy at lunch.

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IF I wasn’t Britain’s most recognised political youth leader, and the foremost exponent of the post-Joycean novel and also a blockchain entrepreneur – I reckon I could’ve had a fair pop at making pic…

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By the Marquis

If you count yourself a man of the Left, everything about Andy Burnham should make your hair stand on end. Part of the 1997 intake, Burnham cut his teeth as a dogged Blair loyalist who …

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Rory was a Dog who loved to smile

Rory loved to make other people smile as well, especially small children

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By the Marquis

There was not one provincial antique dealer in the country who did not let out a low hum of recognition at the sight of the removals van that reversed so gracelessly through the gates o…

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This video of Andy Burnham wanly dancing to True Faith by the New Order has given m…

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I quite like the British version of The Office as it is remarkably classical piece of writing. David Brent is in fact a (relatively) good boss. We receive multiple signs of this in-universe. Unlike B…

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Sentimental admirers of British Imperialism sometimes intermix their respect for the world’s most progressive institution with affection for the constitutional monarchy that nominally headed it. This…

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Find out who you really are

Camberwell, where I have been recently living, feels like an admixture of both Clapham and Hackney. Like Hackney, the locals are liable to describe themselves as ‘young creatives’ and as in Hackney, ‘creative’ most often means ‘in marketing.’ Occasionally: ‘in film.’ But like Clapham, and very much unlike Hackney, they are unashamedly well-to-do. There is no pretence of late-in-life flatshare squalor the way you find in Haggerston. Nobody here looks like they’d settle for a Tesco’s own brand hummus picnic on London Fields for their birthday dinner; that part of their lives has been and gone.

Retired from the scene, they are fashionable in a more relaxed, less self conscious way than they might have been in their 20s - friends’ DJ sets and gigs have been replaced by opening nights for galleries and restaurants. NTS Radio is wafting gently from the kitchen speakers out over the back patio. Ahead of them is a long, leafy thirties full of dinners in the garden, long, leafy dinners lined up in rows. They sometimes moan half-heartedly that they’ve had to go to too many destination weddings this year - but that’s not so bad because these days, with work, with the kid (one per couple, like pandas), with the dog, it’s about the only time they get to do coke. Otherwise it’s all clean living, and they look it - they all look great for 36. If they weren’t so obviously well-off, they could pass for 25.

I am growing to like them; they are less pretentious, more hardworking, less stupid than their near-relatives in East London. Just by being close to them, I feel myself moving up in the world - these moseying, gentle people, who seem to swat away life’s stresses with one lazy swoosh of the tail; these herbivorous dinosaurs, late in the Indian summer of youth, enjoying the cud al fresco until middle age crashes like an asteroid.

Unbeknownst to them, they are the people the British Right have been rushing to defend in Twitter’s latest rehashing of the well-trodden ‘gentrification’ debate - sparked initially by a post from Sam Bowman, head of publishing at Stripe, which, much to the ire of the black population of South London as represented in his quote tweets, described Camberwell as ‘gentrifying nicely.’

The high-water mark of anti-gentrification rage in Britain has arguably been and gone, with the riots that broke out in protest of Shoreditch’s since-deceased Cereal Killer Cafe (a Millennial gimmick institution, which had people queuing to pay something around the £5 mark for a bowl of Lucky Charms) in 2015, and the arguments against - that the more established communities in places like Shoreditch and Camberwell are being priced out of their homes by the incoming middle-class adventurers - have remained virtually unchanged. In some important ways though, the debate looks very different than it did back then.

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WE can now announce that ‘the Summer Reforms’ have been completed.

UPAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! *furious applause, rhythmic banging against chair heads and desks, sound of leaflets being waved with great enth…

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My strength of feeling over gun rights are, as with my feelings about circumcision, evidence that I could never be a front-facing politician in Britain. In a country where the two coping mechanisms for Suez are ‘you lot pay $80,000 for yer ambulances’ and ‘you lot shoot up kids’ the strength of feeling against legalising assault rifles in Britain seems like an insurmountable mountain. As a man of principle who was raised on FPS Russia Golden Desert Eagle videos I would be unable to compromise on this point of honour.

As a creature of Blair’s Britain who remembers those Daily Mail headlines about farmer’s wives being arrested for waving knives at thieves, I fell in love with the United States the moment that I read about Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws circa the Trayvon Martin shooting. I wanted, and want, my own AR-15. I wish, and wished, to brandish it at those who see fit to violate my English castle.

A Britain where infants can shoot their parents for trying to circumcise them on self-defence grounds. That is the Britain that I want. The Britain that could never be.

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J’accuse can exclusively reveal that Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, was once a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

UKIP was a minor far-right party which made limited electoral breakthroughs in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s.

Our forensic investigative team has spent the past six months performing deep textual analysis techniques upon a paperback copy of One Party After Another by Michael Crick. The Wikipedia page for Nigel Farage was also consulted at some length.

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That the world’s most asocial nation should have delivered such an outsized contribution to literary realism in the 19th century is a historical irony requiring some explanation, though you shall not have it here. Dr. Stockmann’s people are of a solitary, pensive type optimised to roam the wooded hills and dales and generally live the life under which Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus; should the northman busy himself with social justice, it is only as a quaint hobby equivalent to folk dancing or collecting unusually shaped pieces of driftwood. In any event, this seems to have been a brief, historical aberration, and today Norway’s preeminent litterateurs (think Fosse or Knausgaard) are of a more introverted cut; a countercurrent whose spiritus rector is nevertheless a man of Ibsen’s time — Knut Hamsun, Nobel Prize winner and apart from that nothing else.

It is all too easy to read Hamsun as the contrary pole to Ibsen, Bjørnson, and their co-combatants in the national canon; indeed, Hamsun himself gave such interpretation his imprimatur through his open and rather frank criticism of the former. Yet though the contrast between his emotional prose and the older generation’s socially conscious objectivity might make for a tidy periodisation for the high school literature textbooks, Hamsun came of age as a writer under the influence of the Christiania literary establishment and, even while departing from its stylistic conventions, strove to preserve what was good in it, namely its overarching concern with social currents. Whether consciously or not, Hamsun grasped that the society of the 20th century wrestled with a feistier spirit than Ibsen’s sober, social-critical style could pin down, and that telling the truth of the times would require a new approach in which inner experience would provide the novel’s structure and substance. This modern spirit — repressed, but never quite dispelled, by our own age — fills the pages of Hamsun’s most timely work, Victoria (1898).

Writing is an unconscious art, and what lasts is only ever coincident with the writer’s aims. „If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak!“ My own few felicities are daughters of necessity, melodious bricolages of wrong words salvaged whilst groping about in the dark for the right ones, born of the imperative to flag down the feeling before it goes forever into the night. They are slung out to e-girls and bored housewives in a sunless hour, typed by sweaty thumbs on crowded trains before the thought goes forgotten in the crush, oddly capitalised and always with more Hs than really need be. If my poxy feuilletons have not pushed the front of European letters one inch closer to Moscow, these pensées have at least left a visceral impact. But what is the quality that makes a word endure? The debate over whether the property of a great writer is a heightened sensitivity to the temper of the times or an intuition for the timeless has rumbled on for what feels closer to the latter, and there is usually something of either side in every meritorious pen. Nor need they be opposed: what both ultimately treat of is the essence that places man on equal footing with God; the particle in which history and eternity meet.

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“You’ve gone a bit loopy Tim”. “Tim, this is bonkers.” And then less politely. “F--- you Tim”. These are just some of the notifications which were blowing up my phone when I appeared on Television at…

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Andy Burnham is about to become the first Catholic Prime Minister in Great Britain and the government he leads will possibly be the most hostile to technology we have had in our history. During the Makerfield by-election Burnham promised to increase taxes on Amazon warehouses. Before becoming Prime Minister he has announced that he will excise Palantir from the NHS, ‘slow down’ the rollout of driverless cars and move away from courting US AI companies and ‘tech boosterism’.

Though Andy Burnham is the first openly Catholic Prime Minister we must also remember that Tony Blair converted to Catholicism within a year of leaving Downing Street and that he had been clandestinely attending Roman masses for some twenty five years at that point having hidden his real faith so as to avoid aspersions being cast on his decision to surrender to the IRA. Boris Johnson was baptised as a Catholic (before converting to Anglicanism as a teenager) but subsequently married Carrie Symonds in a Catholic service whilst he was Prime Minister.

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The one thing missing from my colleague’s obituary to Sir Keir is that Keir was not ‘always known to be a duffer.’

If you asked anyone within SW1 who the best possible candidate for P.M would be – the…

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By the Marquis

It is the perfectly temperate afternoon of June 29th. The heatwave is spent, or in a lazy mood, and the express train out of Chickentown is sliding on its belly back to Euston at a stea…

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ALARM CLOCKS ARE RINGING

BRITAIN IS BURNING

A RECORD BREAKING 23 DEGREES

IT HAS NEVER BEEN THIS WARM BEFORE (APART FROM A FEW TIMES)

SO STAY INDOORS

STAY AWAY FROM THE WINDOWS

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HUNKER DOWN IN YOUR BURNHAM BUNKERS

AND READ J’ACCUSE

The J’accuse Summer sale is now live. 15% off. Offer ends 23/7/26.

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Woke has pulled a blinder in 2026. The British left has found a candidate who not only unites them, they’ve found one with a specific appeal voters tempted by Reform in the North of England. Burnham …

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