Where do we look for heroes, today of all days? Not at the war memorial. They have almost all gone away. There used to be soldiers, sailors, airmen, Waafs and Wrens everywhere, even if they were mostly invisible. The elderly gent shuffling home from the supermarket with a budget meal for one, a survivor ofContinue reading “Where do we look for heroes today?”
Category Archives: Independent
Rommel with ballet shoes: what it’s like to take tea with the man thrown out of the BNP
Richard Barnbrook, who won a seat on the Greater London Assembly for the BNP, is now being expelled from the party after an attempted coup, according to a report in today’s Guardian. I took tea with him at his home in Dagenham two years ago, for the Independent on Sunday, and it was a remarkableContinue reading “Rommel with ballet shoes: what it’s like to take tea with the man thrown out of the BNP”
The Cost Of The Bloody Sunday Inquiry
On a shelf in a glass case, in a room in the Bogside area of Derry, there is a yellowing cotton Babygro covered in brown blotches. The stains were made by the blood of Michael Kelly, a 17-year-old boy who was shot dead in the street just outside. “We carried him into a house,” recalls hisContinue reading “The Cost Of The Bloody Sunday Inquiry”
The Sun Has Set, Has It Not?
Sunrise on the south bank of the Thames, the morning after the election. This is where it all began for New Labour, all those years ago, with Tony Blair grinning like a preacher on fire. He saw the sky grow bright behind the Royal Festival Hall and told a gathering of true believers, ecstatic atContinue reading “The Sun Has Set, Has It Not?”
Out Of the Blue Sky: 9/11 Minute By Minute
The attack came on a Wednesday. By the time we went to stone on Saturday night I had compiled this detailed, harrowing account of death and horror in New York, thankful with every breath that I hadn’t been up in those towers. From The Independent on Sunday, September 2001.