Boris Johnson Archives - NevilleHobson.com

It should be adiós and not hasta la vista baby

Today, Boris Johnson formally stood down as UK Prime Minister and has been replaced by Liz Truss who accepted an invitation from the Queen to form a new government. Thus culminates a fraught summer in which Truss and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak battled it out in a leadership contest that started in July with eight candidates vying for the top job after Johnson resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. And so we have a new Party…

SDF42: 2020 Caught in the Gaslights

Last week, we published the 42nd episode of the Small Data Forum podcast. As this is December, this is our Christmas Special that, in previous years, we have recorded live from the Olivelli restaurant in south London where Sam, Thomas and I enjoy some outstanding Italian cuisine and wine, during which we put the world to rights, analysing and dissecting the uses and abuses of data big and small that have dominated politics, business, and public life in 2020. This…

Boris Johnson’s self-isolating kerfuffle

Yesterday evening, I watched Boris Johnson deliver the daily coronavirus briefing from No 10, with questions from the media entirely devoted to the Dominic Cummings kerfuffle (view on that from the Guardian and the Telegraph). If Boris had thought that his measly statement about it would have been enough so he could move on, he was sorely mistaken. In essence, he robustly defended his advisor saying he had spoken to him at length and was satisfied that his actions in…

SDF 31: Opportunity and chaos from #GE2019

On December 17, five days after voting ended in the UK General Election, Thomas Stoeckle, Sam Knowles, and I got together for lunch in London followed by a good old chat over a few beers in a live conversation we recorded for episode 31 of the Small Data Forum podcast. We continued our conversation about the state of the UK we started earlier in the year, informed somewhat by the outcome of #GE2019 where we have moved onward from the…

FIR 190: Digital vs analogue behaviour in the UK general election

For the December edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report – aka episode 190 of the For Immediate Release podcast – Shel and I picked an eclectic list of topics to talk about. As a European and, specifically, a Brit, my hot one was about the result of the General Election that took place here in the UK on December 12 – the result was a landslide win for Boris Johnson and the Conservative party – and the role social…