Monday 21st July 2025
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Rewind: The Gunpowder Plot

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There are few icons more readily associated with power than the concept of absolute monarchy, and James I provides perhaps a near-perfect example of why this is the case. He was the ruler of a fast-growing island nation which had shown itself to be impervious to foreign invasion by defeating the Spanish Armada. He spun a wide-ranging and efficient web of patronage that ensured parliament was of little real significance. Most impressive of all, being Head of the Church of England gave him control over his nation’s spiritual life. Divine Right, centralised authority, global significance. It is hard to imagine a more powerful individual.

And yet, on the November 5, 1605, James I was nearly blown into a thousand pieces, along with his court and family. Twelve conspirators with an adequate knowledge of explosives were all that were necessary to bring this about, prevented by a single stroke of luck in the form of an anonymous tip off. Despite the King’s inarguable concentration of power, it is remarkable how close the plotters came to abruptly ending his reign in such a brutal way.

There is a lesson for us all here: no matter how powerful a premier or head of state seems, we are all just flesh and blood, and therefore all as vulnerable. No ruler can make themselves impervious to bullets, or guarantee that disease won’t carry them away.

Perhaps they may be able to gather resources to make this less likely, but this comes at the cost of multiplying the threats. Despite the growing mood of religious fragmentation and anti-Monarchist thought (which would eventually lead to Civil War), it seems unlikely that James would have been the target of a conspiracy if he had never inherited the throne.

Indeed, the threats a ruler will typically encounter are almost too numerous to count. A relentless balancing act needs to be conducted with all the significant stakeholders in society, lest the discontented become as dissatisfied as to revolt. This is compounded by recurrent economic and natural crisis, which typically are difficult to predict or control.

This is not to elicit sympathy for the powerful, but to remind us of how fragile their position really is, and prevent them from abusing an appearance of power to achieve their ends. It could all be undone with a little gunpowder, and a spark.

Memes, Trump and MLG

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“Dear FAZE POTTER, you have been accepted at Hogwarts school of MEMES AND QUICK SCOPING” Such is the opening of ‘Harry Potter and the Noscoper’s Stone’, a short film which, at time of writing, sits at 3,219,168 views on YouTube. It’s a prime example of the MLG video: a short, humorous montage of clips from a popular film or TV show, overlaid with text, memes, and video game assets. These videos have become very popular in recent years, and there are plenty of laughs to be had, but like everything else, they come with a dark side.

MLG refers to Major League Gaming, a professional e-sports organisation—like FIFA for professional video game players. In the same way sports broadcasters produce edited highlights of matches, MLG produces montages of players’ most impressive gaming moments: impressive kills, deft bits of strategy, that sort of thing. These montages started hitting YouTube in the early-2000s, along with a flood of copycats, usually amateur players crudely editing together their own footage. This was, obviously, a bit of a joke. Imagine if every pub league football player started putting out edited highlights of their own performance. The videos made use of several stock elements, including blaring dubstep, anguished shouting, and references to popular memes. They were loud, obnoxious and totally ridiculous, which gave them a cultural presence in excess of their actual popularity. It was only a matter of time before the meme lords got to work.

The process was gradual, but between 2011 and 2014(ish) MLG videos transitioned into what they are now: montage parodies of popular media, having moved beyond video games and into film and TV more generally. This new breed of video was similar to its forbears in its over-the-top obnoxiousness and frequent references to video game culture, but the presentation was both more ironic and far more information-dense. The modern MLG video is a compressed tissue of quotations, audio and visual, its humour coming not just from references but the speed and inventiveness of those references, not to mention a significant uptick in editing quality. What was once amateur backwash had become slickly-produced gold; the alchemy of the internet works again.

The MLG effect, like most great art, is better seen in motion than dryly described. You only need to see Albus Dumbledore say, “Welcome back to Hogwarts School of Memes, Weed, and Good Banter” once before never looking back. But the structure and style of MLG is not new in itself, having borrowed most of its tricks from the twentieth-century avant-garde tradition. Jarring shifts in pitch and rhythm are a standard trope of experimental music, and the irreverent remixing of disparate texts is basically Postmodernism For Dummies. MLG is western culture doing what it always does, folding the marginal back into the mainstream in a way which strengthens the latter and legitimises the former. And, as ever, the margins bring their revolutionary power along with them.

The power of MLG is that nothing is above reproach. News, movies, politicians—none of them is immune to this remixing spirit, and there’s nothing they can say that can’t be cut off and replaced with a text-to-speech program making references to cannabis. MLG’s power is its constant and relentless humour —nothing it says is taken seriously. And it is precisely this quality which, as well as being powerful, makes MLG profoundly dangerous.

Do a YouTube search for ‘Donald Trump MLG’ and you will get a slew of results, obviously. Trump is the most-memed politician in living memory. But the most popular videos do not, as one might expect, frame Trump as the deluded, incompetent fool he is; rather, they seem to actively root for him. One of the top results shows Donald Trump “reking” journalist Megyn Kelly at the first primary debate, and another simply shows clips of Trump’s speeches and interviews overlaid with images, often of Donald Trump himself. The presentation is joking, but the effect is to hammer home the message more forcefully than a sincere depiction ever could. This is what makes MLG, and memes in general, so dangerous as propaganda tools.

The aim has moved away from straightforward opinions to an attempt to flood the discourse with so many images and perceptions of Trump that support becomes a matter of instinct, rather than reason. Trump has got where he is partly through the power of online discourse. In the words of Adam Hess, he’s “proof that if Hitler was alive today he’d be the biggest thing on Twitter.” I’m not trying to start a moral panic about memes. But we need to think more critically about what we encounter online, and with an eye towards memes’ material impact. And if we could stay away from shady crooks like Nimble America that would be good too. Above all, we must be vigilant, and conscious that the ends do not always justify the memes.

Preview: Frankenstein

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It is rare in student drama to find a production which updates a classic text which such coherence and profundity as Fred Wienand’s 5th week production of Frankenstein promises to do. After deciding to stage Nick Dear’s 2011 adaptation of the novel, Wienand was convinced he could go further still, and proceeded to update the text beyond Dear’s version, staging it in a counterfactual reality in 1929. The First World War continued for another eleven years, eventually ending in a stalemate that left Europe a wasteland of broken-down political structures and thousands of displaced refugees. It is out of such a landscape that both Wienand’s brainchild and Frankenstein’s monster were born.

When I met with Wienand and producer/assistant director Megan Thresh, their enthusiasm for the upcoming production was palpable. They spoke passionately and convincingly about how their re-imagining of Shelley’s classic not only spoke to the original novel, but to a contemporary audience in a world increasingly tainted by masses of misplaced refugees and a pervasive fear of ‘the other’. Their production even nods to a post-war society feminized by thousands of deaths of male soldiers, and appropriate amendments have been made to portray Frankenstein as a product of a newly matriarchal society. Without wanting to give too much away, every aspect of their update has been given deep consideration in relation to the original novel; as Wienand himself put it: ‘There’s no point changing something if the text doesn’t respond to it’.

The rehearsals I witnessed in the week before the production suggested the cast is as strong as the concept. Tom Curzon and Seamus Lavan play Victor Frankenstein and the creature respectively. Curzon promises to deliver a compelling performance that embodies the post-war disillusionment underpinning the production. Lavan, as the creature, conveys the immense physical dedication involved in such a role: with no costume, make up or speech he transformed himself remarkably into a contorting, non-human beast. Such attention has been paid to the creature’s physicality that a dedicated choreographer has been hired to choreograph his movements. However, this won’t be the only impressive thing about Lavan’s performance: the directors were keen to assure me that an emphasis has been placed on the creature’s interiority and character development, in order to explore ideas of empathy and consciousness in non-human creatures. I also witnessed brief but commendable performances by Rosa Garland and Alice Boyd as Madam and William Frankenstein, suggesting that the characters surrounding Frankenstein and the creature will be anything but peripheral.

Wienand comes across as an engaging director, and one that his cast seem enthusiastic about working with. Whilst I was only privy to a brief snapshot of a rehearsal in Christ Church JCR, it is clear that the cast are fully behind Wienand and his innovative concept. So they should be; if it lives up to expectations this should be a brilliant production, and certainly one not worth missing.

“Dear Non-American Black…”

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Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.

The label ‘black’ is at the heart of Americanah, just as it is at the heart of so much modern political discussion. These human labels that have made their way into our everyday rhetoric are under continual scrutiny. But Americanah marks the beginning of a new way to talk about race. The interlaced and overflowing racial conversations in Americanah are held together by the slowly unravelling love story of Ifemelu and Obinze. Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love as teenagers in a Nigeria that is under military dictatorship, but their love story comes to a halt when life throws them into two different directions—Ifemelu begins a new life in America, whilst Obinze stays in Nigeria and eventually attempts to start afresh in England.

Oscillating between conversations about black experience in Nigeria, England and America, Adichie’s Americanah follows the direction set by Justin Simien’s 2014 film Dear White People in which the necessity for a conversation about intersectionality is mirrored by the intersection of narrative styles in the finished artwork. Echoing the seamless transitions between Hollywood film scale production and personal video-blogging in Dear White People, Americanah weaves together cutting blog posts and—overheard-on-public-transport—observations with its compelling wider narrative.

Adichie successfully sits close to the vivid minutiae of how race impacts the protagonists’ daily lives while drawing the reader’s attention toward the enveloping discussion of how this impacts the ways in which the entire world chooses to use the word ‘black’. The characters are sensitively constructed and bursting with human contradictions: insight and ignorance; passion and apathy; a desire for change and desire for stasis. All of this works together to create a novel that resonates with the reality of living within societal constructs out of our control and attempting to forge an identity in a world determined to tell us who we are.

Ifemelu asks the reader, in a throwaway line, “Why did people ask ‘What is it about?’, as if a novel had to be about only one thing.” Race is undoubtedly at the centre of the novel, but the characters we meet also create a generally nuanced insight into the ways in which humans, all humans, relate to one other and what it means to communicate. Americanah is daring, beautiful, darkly funny and undeniably real. It is Adichie’s most astonishing novel to date.

A night at the clubs: Two Doors Down @ The Cellar

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As the rowdy dregs of a Catz crewdate spill out onto the well-lit High Street, the unfamiliar strains of angsty guitar riffs angrily burst from the Cellar dancefloor. Last Tuesday’s TWO DOORS DOWN Presents Two Doors Down promised a hedonistic night of noughties indie rock and delivered quite spectacularly. Over the course of the night a perfect mix of genuinely indie tunes gave way to the soundtracks of many a misspent childhood. The coating of sweat on clothes, foreheads and the Cellar ceiling pays true testament to the ecstasy of the night. Dancers, knowing that chances to bop to some indie rock are far from ten-a-penny in Oxford, stayed out til the early hours of the morning hurling their bodies around to ‘When The Sun Goes Down’.

Any doubts about the music I had were put to bed when I heard the opening chords of ‘Last Nite’ and saw the Wadham-heavy crowd surge with immediate recognition, signalling the beginning of the night’s best set. From one til two in the morning the pacey beats of ‘Take Me Out’, ‘Someday’, and (a new favourite) ‘Radar Detector’ by Darwin Deez hurtled from the heavy-set speakers. The DJing was minimal (why mess with perfection?) and the sober crowd thanked the lanky music-mixers for it with their raucous appreciation at the end of every sweaty set. As the early morning rocked its way to 3am, the night faded its final chords to a close and turned bodies rinsed with sweat out onto the cold and sombre street. Survivors could be heard eulogising the night as they wound their way back to the austere walls of their colleges. The verdict was unanimous: nights as good as Two Doors Down are few and far between in Oxford.

Scientists of the literary world

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People in the humanities often seem to be allergic to the sciences. There are brilliant students who, in spite of their impressive knowledge of 13th century Polish agricultural economics or the battle tactics used by the Assyrians against Hittites in the Battle of Nihriya, cannot tell you the difference between translation and transcription, or what the three laws of thermodynamics are.

Not that scientists don’t also show an ignorance of the humanities—there are some scientists who know almost nothing beyond their field. But for the most part it is the scientists who learn history and literature, and the arts that let sciences get on with their thing. And this is partly due to the volume of information which prevents any one individual from being knowledgeable in many fields. However not all individuals stick to that dichotomy. There are polymaths out there, such as Jared Diamond or Joseph Needham, who have achieved great work in sciences and humanities.

But those polymaths aren’t the subject of this article. Instead, it is those whose public careers seem to have nothing to do with the sciences, yet who studied science at university. When you begin looking, there are a number of surprising literary intellectuals, who could also be described as scientists.

Perhaps the most surprising of these is Christ Church’s W.H. Auden. Yes, the poet who wrote: “The automobile, the aeroplane / Are useful gadgets, but profane” wanted nothing but to be an engineer as a teenager. He came to Oxford on a scholarship for the degree I am studying, biology. Sadly for biology, Auden had already fallen in love with words, and in his second year switched to English. Auden was barely a scientist—he took a year of biology at the university level. But he kept his love of science, his luddite views notwithstanding, and of the natural world, which occasionally, very briefly, leaps into his poetry.

Trotsky isn’t often thought of as a literary intellectual, but his book Literature and Revolution is still considered one of the foundational texts of Marxist literary criticism. And even most of Trotsky’s political works, on the theory and practice of Marxism, falls squarely within what C.P. Snow would have called the literary camp of the two cultures. Yet Trotsky himself had no formal training in history or literature, Instead, he was a mathematician, and not a bad one either. His biographer, Isaac Deutscher, said Trotsky was the brightest in his course on pure mathematics in the University of Odessa, and one of his classmates after the revolution thought he could have been one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century had he not been a revolutionary. Trotsky never became a great mathematician, but the rigour of mathematics stayed with him his whole life. Even in his most abstract works of politics you can see a mathematician’s rigorous mind at work, trying to make everything correct and consistent.

Vladimir Nabokov is the most scientific of these three figures. Before gaining notoriety for writing Lolita, Nabokov was curator of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Nabokov described a number of new species of Lepidoptera, and was renowned worldwide as the leading expert on Polyommatini. Ironically though, this most scientific of the literary intellectuals had the least scientific influence on his written work. Though he wrote Lolita on the evenings of his butterfly collecting expeditions, he never let the insects influence the romance of Humbert Humbert and Lolita. Instead the same personality drove both works: the emphasis on the particular which is essential for a taxonomist is what made Nabokov a great novelist, with a taste for particularities in words.

Science is not literature, and literature is not science: the two cultures will be entrenched for awhile to come. But sometimes, individuals, who in their work may be firmly in one camp, can straddle the divide as individuals. Auden the biologist, Trotsky the mathematician and Nabokov the entomologist show how one can start off a scientist and end up a novelist, poet or political theorist of the first degree. So remember that next time you’re in a pub complaining how scientists are boring—you may be talking to a poet or historian in the making.

Letter from abroad: Kobe

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Like any other Oxford student, stumbling to early morning lec­tures, followed by long sessions in the library is my daily way of life. Yet instead of a cold Michaelmas morning, drudging down St Giles’, I am presented with a sublime panoramic view of the Osaka bay area on my morning walk to class, such are the perks of studying abroad in Japan as an Oriental studies Second year.

Living in another continent has forced me to become acquainted with many unfamiliar facts of life: I have had to forgo choosing the perfect Tesco meal-deal for figuring out how to use my newly-bought rice cooker, swapping meeting that Friday night essay deadline and making that night out in Wahoo with having to come to terms with the drinking age of 20 in Japan, one of the drawbacks of going abroad in the second year.

However, my mind is cast back to Oxford with a recent discovery. Whilst ancient sandstone col­lege buildings coexist with 60s brutalist blocks, so too amongst the post-war urban sprawl that makes up Kobe’s outlying districts (my new home), are numerous Shinto Shrines and Bud­dhist temple complexes. On my morning walk to Kobe University, the fresh offerings at local shrines are evidence that spirituality still finds its place in a relentlessly innovating and secular 21st century Japan.

I was surprised to find these s paces so frequently playing an important role in daily Japanese society, hosting anything from an­nual local festivals to individual good luck messages written on wooden blocks. Somehow, the average ‘Salaryman’ finds time in their busy schedule to concern themselves with Japan’s natural environment. Recycling is carried out with care and precision, with a complex colour-coordinated schedule used to dedicate specific days and specific bags to various category of rub­bish. Litter seems like a foreign concept here as police warnings are frequently displayed on the streets.

Kobe is located in the very bizarre location between the Seto Inland Sea and the Maya mountains. We students here are lucky that, (despite the tiring daily hill climb to the bus stop) given the location of our dorms at the northernmost edge of the city, we have very easy access to the beautiful Maya mountain range, which is climbed by adventure-loving tourists and Kobe residents alike.

Natural spots are often a focus of great care in Japan, as, according to Japanese local folklore and religion (Shinto) many natural landscapes have enshrined local deities, known in Japanese as Kami. Therefore amongst the mountains are temples and other religious monuments, such as the Buddhist Tenjo-ji temple atop Kobe’s Mount Maya.

It is interesting how a gentle stroll can lead one to fascinating places of natural beauty, which, instead of being a mere relic of an ‘ancient Japan’, show that society can maintain tradition hand-in-hand with embracing modernisation. Hopefully I continue to encounter new surprises and challenges during my year abroad, so that Japan remains the same mysterious and fascinating land in my eyes.

I will be spoken, on people’s lips: and, famous through all the ages, I shall live

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Certain dates stick with you for the entirety of your life. For instance, I always remember December 7, 1995, as I was born on this day. I remember it well. Golden Eye had just been released in cinemas. One such date has recently been scored in my mind: August 4, 2016. After a summer of evil, where evil Theresa May, the deporter, came to power on the back of the evil Brexit vote, I took comfort in the fact that surely no more evil would come around until at least 2017.

Unfortunately, this was not to be. It was on August 4 that The Tab took a well-earned break from discussing the major issues of the day to report on a heart-breaking piece of local Oxford news: Wahoo, Oxford’s premier nightspot, was to close after many years of happy business. This week saw Wahoo’s last hurrah, as the club shut its doors for the last time in a Halloween spook-tacular. I couldn’t actually attend the night, as I was busy buying milk. This makes reviewing the evening a difficult task, especially as Wahoo is famed for the diversity of its entertainment. Perhaps now would be a fitting time to cast my memory back over the many happy hours I have spent in the venue.

I will never forget Fresher’s week at Wahoo, with its ‘fish-tacular’ theme. What a night! The club gradually filling with seawater and kelp until we were all bumping jovially against the ceiling. It was then that the organisers began to release exotic fish and dolphins into the dancefloor, and we all thrashed about in a fit of fishy ecstasy. Wahoo’s weekly vomit party, the notorious ‘bile-tacular’, was a staple for me as a fresher.

I am sure every Oxford student has similar memories from Wahoo and is, like me, full of uncertainty and sick with worry about a university with no facility for weekly wet play. In their tear-jerking report, The Tab cited the all-too familiar phenomenon of property development as the reason for Wahoo’s closure. As with all of The Tab’s reportage, this may or not be true—I have reason to suspect a rather different motive for Wahoo’s sudden demise. It is common knowledge the UK is currently in the grips of a savage intergenerational conflict.

On the one side, the beautiful, fun-loving, Buzzfeed-reading youth. On the other, the corpse-like, Brexit-voting, biscuit-eating old people. The nightclub is the current battleground for this conflict. Accepted theory in Conservative circles dictates that the only way to erase the toxic legacy of young people having fun in a room is to convert that room into a place where farm animals have their throats slit and get made into pies. Within a few years, the space where we all once so willingly exchanged bodily fluids will most likely be occupied by a state-of-the-art abattoir—a common fate for the 21st century nightclub in Britain.

It has been known for many years, at least in the circles I move in, that the processed-meat lobby has been working tirelessly to kill off youth culture. I think it slightly more than coincidence that the closure of Wahoo was announced shortly after the accession of the Theresa May, who is notoriously passionate about the slaughter and roasting of living animals.

What, then, is to be done? Each of us will find our own ways to stand strong against the oppressor’s carving knives, but in the interests of solidarity, I will share my own particular act of resistance with the people of Oxford. Every morning at sunrise I have taken to climbing the college bell-tower and shouting ‘Wahoo!’ as loudly as I can manage across the rooftops. I keep this up until I am violently sick into main quad, at which point I stop and wipe the vomit from my mouth, reassured that I have done what little I can to help.

If… Trump Becomes President

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The car seat creaked dangerously as the hairdresser settled into it. A deep sigh of flimsy metal put under far, far too much stress echoed throughout the structure of the vehicle. What did he expect? In the new state of America Magna all manufactures were produced in the great factory complexes of occupied Mexico. The oppressed population of that country, forever living in the shadow of the great walls which criss-crossed that benighted land, seemed to take some perverse pleasure in deliberately churning out poor quality vehicles. At least that’s what Fox and Breitbart said these days (the last rogue CNN contributor having long since been apprehended).

Ted, for that was this hairdresser’s name, pulled out of the parking lot onto the Grandfather Drumpf memorial highway. Highway was perhaps a rather kind way of describing this misbegotten patch of road. It had been built by the Consortium of United National Trumpians, a well known paper shell for El Rey de Mexico’s expansive business interests. As the engine stuttered, Ted glanced sadly at the ruins of the Donald Trump Monument, still smouldering from the terrorist attacks of the Californian Freedom Movement – it seemed such a shame to him that these strange people couldn’t see the truth of what the Donald had brought to his delighted nation. These days all that could be seen of the obelisk were the letters ‘T R U’, defiling the great man’s name which had been so proudly emblazoned across it. As he moved further down he looked somewhat mournfully at the remains of the Capitol. When the great leader had ascended to his throne not only had he quickly disbanded the ‘Main-Stream Politicians’ who had dared to resist him, he had also taken most of the structural supports of the building to erect on the top of the ‘Donald Trump White House’ (it was actually a strange shade of orange). Now all that remained were a few romantic ruins, bedecked in Pepe the Frog graffiti.

Passing a convoy of police tanks, Ted pulled up at Trump Tower 2 (The President always had to have the biggest tower, the best, one that was better than anyone else’s) and pulled off his gloves. It still seemed strange to him that all citizens were required to wear gloves several inches thick, designed to emphasise the great size of their hands. He knew though that if he wore them while cutting the Leader’s hair he might make a mistake again. Clumsiness was not easily forgiven in America Magna.

He stepped into the tower, it still struck him how deferential the crowds were, shuffling in great queues to gain the slightest glimpse of the dear leader. He skirted round the back as he always did, to the secret door at the back of the display case.

The leader was sitting there, as he always did, looking as if he were in mid speech. In the background a radio played a repeated snorting noise, a sound comfortingly familiar to all who watched the compulsory replays of the debates which had led to the kind leader’s rise to power. His fingers were pinched and posed as always, the leader seemed to be contemplating his next attack on the manipulative enemies of America.

Ted carefully lifted up the wig and put it on the stand. He knew by now that he would have to work quickly. First the spray, then the scissors. He set to work on the hair, a snip here, a trim there. Finally, stepping back, he admired his masterpiece. It amazed him how over the course of the last 30 years his careful substitution and manipulation of this headpiece had kept the whole of America convinced that Donald Trump was still a vibrant, forceful young premier. No matter that his speeches were now strung together from old recording and the strident braying of the ‘all nu Donald Trump imitating Donkey’. No matter that his physical form only existed as a wax effigy adored by thousands on a daily basis. The slowly mutating blond combover convinced everyone that the leader remained the potent force he always had been.

Of course there were some who wanted to put an end to Ted’s silent loyalty to the leader. All the actual power these days was wielded by his son, Barron Trump, and his wife, Chelsea Trump-Clinton (if you can’t stop them running against you in elections, dynastically involve them in your power structure…). They wanted him out. They wanted him gone. But Ted was happy, he liked his job, it gave him purpose.

Sajid Javid “should have been out on his ear”, says Lord Patten

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Cabinet minister Sajid Javid should have been sacked by Theresa May for his criticism of the High Court ruling on Brexit, Lord Patten has said.

Patten’s comments came on Peston on Sunday, in which he sharply criticised the Communities Secretary for his public view that the court was wrong for its ruling that the UK Parliament should be consulted before Brexit.

Javid said on BBC Question Time last Thursday that the case was “an attempt to frustrate the will of the British people”.

Although Javid stressed that his comment was directed at those who had brought the case to the court and not the judges themselves, Patten said that in the John Major years, “there would have been quite a lot of us that would have been reluctant to sit around a cabinet table with him”

Patten also levelled criticism at “tabloid editors” for their censure of High Court judges in the press this week, notably the Daily Mail and its headline referring to pro-parliamentary vote judges as “enemies of the people” on Friday’s front page.

He then urged Theresa May to show “leadership” in protecting the judges and the right of courts to rule on political matters, citing examples from his own time in government.

“Theresa May…made her reputation in politics by condemning the Conservative party for looking like ‘the Nasty Party’.

“Here we are with a debate in this country which is starting to make us look mean and a bit nasty,”

“Theresa May should make it absolutely clear that she don’t like the way that tabloid editors have been pushing this debate, that we actually need to behave more decently to one another and with a great deal more respect, as a couple of bishops have been saying. 

“It’s for Theresa May to give that sort of leadership.”

His comments come amidst debate between MPs on the legitimacy of the High Court’s ruling on Brexit. Jeremy Hunt’s became the first in cabinet to defend the judges and former Attorney General Dominic Grieve sharply criticised Downing Street for not doing so earlier.

Oxford University have been contacted for comment.