Tagged with Dan Hodges

Farewell again then, Dan Hodges

Dan Hodges chats to Michael Dugher

Dan Hodges chats to Michael Dugher

You know Twitter has reached peak absurdity when someone like Dan Hodges – really only known by super hardcore political people – has become a trending topic. The occasion of Dan’s elevation to internet celebrity is yet another piece of finely crafted miserablism for the Telegraph. His double whammy of likening Jeremy to hard right Tory patrician Enoch Powell and announcing his resignation from the party, again is what sent Dan flying up the Twitter charts as sundry Corbyn supporters luxuriated in a bath of his bitter tears. I’m sure the Telegraph aren’t minding the extra traffic either. Continue reading →

London’s recovery, Dan Hodges and dumb empiricism

Dan HodgesIf you read my articles, or if you don’t, you may know what stupid empiricism is. Stupid empiricism is to take an event or a phenomenon as proof of a general trend, even when associated evidence thoroughly discredits that line of thinking. Examples include snow in the winter = no climate change, or growth of food banks is because of the increased publicity about them. It is a mendacious, willfully ignorant way of thinking; of knowing you’re right because it underpins your politics/world view in some way, in spite of everything else pointing to the contrary.

Culprits usually include ‘kippers and Tories, but it can be found across political traditions and in all kinds of institutions. But I’d like to introduce a further term, which perhaps isn’t as extreme but makes up for it by being mercenary. That would be ‘dumb empiricism’. And to illustrate how it works, it’s thank you – again – to Dan Hodges for providing the foil. Continue reading →

Progress: a political embarrassment

Progress-party-within-a-partyDan Hodges is not the most reliable of soothsayers. On the eve of the announcement of Ed Miliband’s victory, the journalist and self-described “Blairite cuckoo” infamously proclaimed that “David Miliband has won.”

But Hodges, who now pops up whenever Newsnight or Sky News require a useful idiot to attack the leadership qualities of Miliband the younger, may have it right this time round. Writing on the Telegraph website, he argues that Progress, the most established pressure group of Blairite Labour, has become “a cowed, timid political irrelevance.”

Continue reading →

The Barclay brothers’ cuckoo in Labour’s nest

Walking in the Northamptonshire woods over the weekend, I heard that harbinger of spring, the cuckoo, calling for the first time. It is an unmistakeable sound to be sure, but one that very quickly becomes quite repetitive. There are other traits associated with cuckoos that don’t exactly endear them to many, most notably the propensity of the adult bird to lay its egg in the nests of other birds, and for the cuckoo fledgling to push out the offspring.

If a cuckoo were able to share its soliloquy, how could it explain the greed to drive its non parents to keep on frenetically feeding it, all the while knowing that it had done the dirty on their offspring?  There is something innately self serving about the cuckoo, and that put me in mind of its political near relative, dedicated, without any hint of irony by Daily Telegraph editors to one of their blogger scribes as the ‘Blairite cuckoo in Labour’s nest’.

I refer of course to one Dan Hodges, the Telegraph’s resident blogger, who has made a name for himself as an ardent critic of Ed Miliband, and who now pops up on the television programmes most watched by the so called ‘Westminster village’. Continue reading →

Dan Hodges doesn’t want Ken to win, and won’t vote for him

Yesterday, asking the question “does Progress want Ken to win?“, I confess I missed something. I did take a holiday in August. 10 days. Missed both the riots, and, it turns out, an interesting piece Dan Hodges wrote for the New Statesman. In it he reveals that, in his view, “neither Boris Johnson nor Ken Livingstone are fit to lead London.” All he cares about, it seems, is that neither of them become Mayor again:

I don’t care about the politics. I don’t care if Labour wins in London, or if the Tories get a good hiding. All I care about now is that Londoners win in London.I’ll vote Tory. I’ll vote Green. I’ll vote independent. I still hope and pray I’ll be able to vote Labour. But I’m not helping place my city back into the hands of a clapped out revolutionary or an Etonian comic.”

Did Progress know this when they commissioned Dan to cover the London election? Perhaps they too were on holiday. Continue reading →