Patrick Kidd is former diary editor of the Times and author of The Weak are a Long Time in Politics, an anthology of his Times political sketches from 2014-19.
The cellar room is almost silent save for the sound of slurping and spitting and the odd gentle sigh. One woman has her head buried in a bucket, while a chap lays his on the desk before raising a hand and asking for a refill. It has the air of a rather polite orgy, only
It was an unusual Christmas morning chapel service. There was a bishop, for a start, and a baptism and then, somewhere between the peace and the eucharist, two of the congregation started trying to thump each other. Boxing day, it seemed, had come early. ‘It unnerved the bishop slightly,’ the priest in charge admits, ‘but
The Great Storm of 1987 doesn’t have a name like those hurricanes that devastate the Caribbean and the United States each winter — it wasn’t until Abigail in November 2015 that British storms were given a personality — but it deserves its capital letters. The worst storm to hit England since 1703 killed 18 people,
