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Articles by Simon Campion-Brown

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About Simon Campion-Brown

A former lecturer in politics at Keele University, Simon now lives in Oxfordshire. Married with two children, in 2007 he decided to monitor the Westminster village via newspaper and television and has never looked back. More Posts

Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Did anyone out there, like me, find something decidedly weird about Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘apology’ for employing Andy Coulson at Number 10, following the guilty verdict reached against Coulson in the much-covered phone-hacking trial? As I saw it, it seemed to amount to: “I – and [...]

June 25, 2014 // 0 Comments

Fish in a barrel

Our esteemed former prime minister Tony Blair appeared on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday. His purpose seemed to be to claim that ‘the West’ had to act on the threat posed by the growing Isis phenomenon in Iraq. We had brought it all upon ourselves by failing to get rid of Assad in Syria. In [...]

June 16, 2014 // 0 Comments

Oh dear – my record’s got stuck again

Today, at the risk of boring regular readers, I must begin with my traditional opening statement of declared interest – I personally have no time at all for the political class. In fact, I’d go further and state I despise and distrust them on sight. When the news broke recently that Jeremy [...]

May 19, 2014 // 0 Comments

The higher education battleground

[Preface: One of the great joys of being a National Rust contributor is that, generally speaking, the restrictions and constraints to which one is subjected are few. Nobody is pretending that we are attempting to emulate the output of professionals in the media world. We are simply commentators [...]

May 16, 2014 // 0 Comments

Shooting oneself in the foot

Yesterday I deliberately sat down to watch BBC2’s Daily Politics show, hosted by Andrew Neil. His first guest guests were James Delingpole of The Spectator and Daily Telegraph and wunderkind left-wing commentator Owen Jones, currently of The Guardian. One of the first topics of the day was the [...]

May 10, 2014 // 0 Comments

Like a comfy old armchair

To begin at the beginning, as I embark upon this piece, I am happy to declare once more my well-known personal interest when it comes to British politicians: I have no time for any of them. That said, in turning to the subject of Tony Blair today, I am mindful of the possibility that I might [...]

April 24, 2014 // 0 Comments

Maybe a common sense implant might help

My sleep patterns, never regular, have been awry recently. As a result, yesterday I was up before midnight, returned to bed at about 4.00am, rose again at 8.15am and felt a tad dozy all day. The cornerstone of my schedule was to be viewing Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons, [...]

April 10, 2014 // 0 Comments

Do they think nobody notices?

These days, on my chosen subject, I’m beginning to sound like a stuck record, or – to be more accurate – write like one. Rather like the crashing bore – the only candidate to be school class captain who cannot understand why he’s not automatically the most popular bloke in [...]

April 4, 2014 // 0 Comments

Losing by default

I don’t know what the viewing figures were, but I was one of those who tuned in to BBC2 at 7.00pm yesterday to the second of two ‘live’ television debates between Nick Clegg (the Lib-Dem leader) and Nigel Farage (his UKIP counterpart), this time chaired by the BBC’s venerable anchor David [...]

April 3, 2014 // 0 Comments

It’s that time of year again

As has been heavily trailed upon both radio and television, today is Budget Day. At some point in the last twenty years I cannot identify, after many years of stopping work – clearing my afternoon – and religiously watching or listening to ‘live’ coverage of this occasional parliamentary [...]

March 19, 2014 // 0 Comments

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