Hugo Rifkind
@hugorifkind
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I didn't write the headline, though. Writing @thetimes, talking @timesradio Monday-Thursday, 10am-1pm. Latest novel, Rabbits, at link below...
Joined February 2009
My novel Rabbits is only £1.99 on Kindle this week. Move fast before they put it back up again. (Link in next tweet)
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In awe of Russian protesters. Who among us would be so brave?.
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It’s Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, I’m thinking of a woman called Sulamita Szapiro. Here she is as a student. We weren’t related and I don’t even know much about her, but I’m pretty sure that remembering her still falls to me. This is a thread about why.
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"This has become a distraction and I would like to move on and talk about growth."
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Remarkable to hear Braverman say multiculturalism has failed. She's a British Home Secretary descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, in a government headed by Britain's first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?.
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So, that’s why today I’m thinking of Sulamita, because otherwise nobody will. Here she is again. Maybe you’ll think of her, too. Thanks for reading.
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Rees Mogg looks exhausted. Like he hasn't had time to hang upside down in his belfry for weeks.
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Being the only person in shot to have brought his own cagoule is the most Keir Starmer thing I can imagine.
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Raab saying he can't talk about Geidt letter to the PM because he hasn't seen it or been told about it. WHY NOT? YOU'RE THE DEPUTY PM AND YOU'VE GONE ON THE RADIO TO TALK ABOUT IT. DIDN'T YOU THINK TO ASK ANYBODY? WAS IT AN UNEXPECTEDLY BUSY MORNING? DO THE KIDS HAVE NITS? WTF?.
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How does Hancock have the time? I work from home and I can barely manage to walk the dog.
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Can a President who tweets the wrong Theresa May be trusted to nuke the right Korea?.
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The thing is, the best way to understand Theresa May’s predicament is to imagine that 52 percent of Britain had voted that the government should build a submarine out of cheese.
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Quite proud to have just caught London's summer. It lasted from 13.15 to 13.42 and I went out in the garden and ate a sandwich. Thunder now. Hope next year is nice.
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And suddenly I'm all in.
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The good news is that no deal is off the table. The bad news is there isn't a table.
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Big relief to hear Priti Patel on the radio explaining that Britain is at the forefront of Global Britain. Imagine how embarrassing it would be if somewhere else was. France, maybe. Awful.
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The Question Time audience cheering the idea of no deal is just a staggering, terrifying thing. They're not even cheering the threat of it, but that actual outcome. What do they think is happening here? We're so fucked.
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Scenes from Parliament aren't just farcical. They're also sinister. No democracy can function like this.
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I'm still trying to process the way that, after deciding in 2016 that they had no interest in Boris Johnson being their leader, Conservative MPs then watched him dramatically screw up everything he attempted for the next three years, which somehow changed their minds.
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It makes your jaw hang open. It makes you drool. They bring the country to its knees with their vanity, terrible judgement and inability admit past mistakes, and they think the answer is. bring back Boris Johnson? It boggles me. I despair of everything.
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Were you in France?.
Just been to a local supermarket. The expressions of relief, joy and thanks that we are out of the EU were extraordinary. Needless to say, I wasn't in Central London.
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All this government has ever done is kick the can further down the road. On Brexit, on Covid, on everything.
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I don't live a Jewish life. I don't keep kosher, go to synagogue, do Friday night dinner. None of that. But even from whwre I'm sitting, something has dramatically changed for British Jews in the past fortnight and I'm not sure how we even begin to fix it.
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I'm very impressed that the Conservatives have managed to lose an election which only had Conservatives running in it.
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But isn't the *whole point* of tying aid to a % of GDP that you don't *need* to cut it when GDP drops, on account of the way it so very obviously cuts itself?.
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Here begins a full day of Brexiters complaining that the only feasible Brexit looks self-defeating and horrible, without ever admitting that this is exactly what the other side has been telling them for two years.
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I'm told this is in the window of a vet in the Scottish Borders. Strong approve.
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Spare me from the constant Twitter conspiracy theories about Story X being released as a distraction from Story Y. This never happens. It's chaos out there. Nobody is in charge of anything.
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To repeat, nobody alive knows more about these people than I do. And I know almost nothing. It's in living memory, but there is nobody to remember. This is what genocide means. This is what the Holocaust means. It’s a story of eradication. It wasn’t thwarted. It worked very well.
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The whole Cummings idea of putting "maverick geniuses" into the heart of govt is just such lazy, anti-complexity, magic-bullet bollocks. It's Jay from The Inbetweeners. It's "how hard can it be to fly a plane, anyway?" Just nonsense.
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Black Shirts Matter.
Time for some home truths on the black lives movement, I will be on LBC at 10am.
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How strange to see this newfound conviction among Conservatives that people who get something wrong in the House of Commons should immediately lose their jobs.
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Five years from now British politics will be 98% scuffles between uniformed supporters of Jacob Rees Mogg and Jeremy Corbyn while the rest of us sigh, sleep in parks, cook rats on open fires and still somehow don't vote Liberal Democrat.
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For work purposes, I'm watching Russia Today. Their current item is an attack on the West for treating Ukrainian refugees (murderously bombed by Russia) better than Syrian refugees (also murderously bombed by Russia). Pretty special.
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Quite tired of my house, and my desk, and my screen, and my keyboard, and myself.
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I try really hard not to care about royalty in any way whatsoever, but it's becoming really hard not to notice how many of the worst people in the world really do have a massive problem with Meghan Markle.
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The most humiliating thing about Britain being righteously trolled by senior EU diplomats is the way they so effortlessly do it in perfect English.
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Shame on you all. I for one completely support the Government in its sudden desire to go to University and finally learn about Brexit.
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We all make mistakes. But if I had zero scientific qualifications and had confidently predicted in a national newspaper in summer that there would be no 2nd wave, "not now and not in the autumn, either" then I might be inclined to wonder what the fuck I was doing with my life.
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I've just seen a leaked timetable for future govt lockdown announcements:.1. Saturday at 3am.2. Sunday on Marr at the exact moment you leave the room to go to the toilet. 3. Monday at midday but in Latin and in black ink on black paper inside a locked filing cabinet in a cellar.
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What a fucking bellend.
Mark Francois on BBC just now accused Airbus's Tom Enders of "Teutonic arrogance", adding: "My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son. So if Mr Enders is watching, that's what he can do with his letter"
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This is amazing. You think it's all over in the first five seconds, but it builds and builds.
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Whether you thought we were headed for hard Brexit, no deal Brexit, soft Brexit or no Brexit, try to get your head around how outrageous it would have seemed two years ago that we wouldn't actually know which it was going to be with only weeks to go.
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The fact that the world contains 9 whole people who think Esther McVey should be Prime Minister is obviously shocking enough, but the coincidence of them all already being Tory MPs is little short of remarkable.
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It's Holocaust Memorial Day. This is a photograph of my great-grandparents, Joachim and Amalia. Before the war, they owned a woodwork factory in Krakow.
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This is exactly like that time that almost everybody I knew came to that party in the downstairs of my house while I was up in my bedroom and I didn't know about it for a year. #PMQs.
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You co-founded UKIP when you were 29 and you've been an MEP since you were 35.
My contempt for career politicians knows no bounds.
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If the EU is Pharoh and Theresa May is Moses then this means we now all have to spend 40 years in a desert living off scavenged bread before we reach the promised land and I for one am not keen.
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Hope somebody is keeping a list of all the bits of the UK that want. "regulatory alignment" with the EU. So far I've got Northern Ireland, Scotland, London, farms, banks, universities, healthcare, Grimsby and Cornwall.
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This was two days before the Cummings Barnard Castle thing broke. Think of all the people who have sat stonewalling through that story and every other lockdown busting story since, while knowing at the back of their minds that they themselves had brought their own bottle to this.
EXCL: Email obtained by @itvnews proves over 100 staff were invited to drinks party in No 10 garden at height of lockdown to “make the most of the lovely weather”. We’re told PM and his wife attended, with staff invited to “bring your own booze!”.
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This is Suez-level humiliation. We're a small, frightened country, being pushed around.
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Ironically, I've heard it said that Piers Morgan can cure heterosexuality in women.
On next we’ll meet the man who claims he can 'cure' homosexuality in men. Any thoughts?.
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At what point does everybody stop being surprised that in a country where 52% of a referendum voted for an ill-defined, unrealistic Brexit, lots of people are also prepared to vote for an ill-defined, unrealistic Brexit Party?.
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He was my grandfather. Jozef. Here he is after the war in Rio, with the only survivor from his own family, his brother Leon. He’d go on to meet my lovely grandmother, a Polish exile pianist, and they’d have my mum. He died when I was three. I am now one of six living descendants.
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Heartbroken at the loss of my dear friend Jeremy Hardy. Not merely one of the funniest men I've ever known, but one of the kindest, cleverest and most supportive, too. Sending my love to all who loved him, too.
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Every single bit of this is mad nonsense in every single direction, but I'm particularly impressed he's managed to forget that in France they speak French.
The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting “We Want Trump!” Love France.
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Corbyn will go, but the Corbynites will blame Brexit and the media, and never themselves or him.
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How is it possible for her to have talked about something so much, for so many months, and with such conviction, and to still know absolutely nothing about it? How? How?
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They're not even quitting because they're scared they'll lose. They're quitting because they don't even know what they'd do if they won. They've spent eight years driving all sense and moderation out of their party and now even they don't want to be a part of what's left.
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I Have Done The Same Thing As Everybody Else But For Different Reasons Because I Am Special.
My reluctant, self-interested Covid vaccination was an act of surrender to an new controlled world.
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I don't normally retweet stuff like this, but this long thread might be useful for anybody still wondering whether the US alt.right truly are Nazis. Conclusion: totally.
@EvanMcLaren @TOQJoyce That's strange. You're a specifically "non-Semitic European ethnic nationalist" and you've given no thought to history's most notable previous specifically non-Semitic European ethnic nationalists? Don't you feel you should? It makes you sound awfully ignorant.
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I am so sick of the people who shat the bed telling me off for being unenthused about living in shit.
Allison Pearson: For Brexit to work, we need Dunkirk spirit not 'Naysaying Nellies' #Premium.
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I know we shouldn't tweet about Laurence Fox. I know, I know, But the *arrant bellendry* of a man who brags about breaking minor laws running for mayor on a platform of cracking down hard on people who break minor laws. .
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Am feeling a new wave of fondness for the EU as Nigel Farage complains that Brussels is full of people who hate him and that lots of restaurants "won't even let me through the door". #c4brusselsthing.
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But if it's like Nazi Germany why don't the neo-Nazis like it?.
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A thread on Holocaust Memorial Day, and what it means to be descended from Holocaust survivors. Many, many people could write a thread like this, but this one is mine.
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Already this evening I have garotted a Nepalese snow leopard with an antique cello string. How's your day going?.
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The demonisation of the Lib Dems for making compromises in coalition is one of the stupidest and most short-sighted things about our politics. No party is polling above 25 percent, ffs. If compromise is taboo, what exactly is your big plan here?.
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It's not for me to suggest that I know what works or not, and what science indicates what. But the lesson of the pandemic so far has been that everything we do, we do at least three weeks too late. So let's think about what we'll be forced to do in three weeks, and just do that.
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Sulamita, though, has no living descendents. No family survived. Until I learned of her existence a couple of years ago, there was not one person in the world left to remember her name. Nor to know the name to that child, who my grandfather wouldn’t speak of at all.
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Tomorrow's Astrazeneca reporting (and indeed today's) is a real test of whether the media can report mildly complicated science without dangerously sensationalising it.
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So much of what we have become comes down to the fact that British people this smart simply don't go into politics.
This, by Spanish Foreign minister @AranchaGlezLaya, is absolutely superb. The clearest expression of the problem I've heard. The UK is trying to use a trade deal to do something it's not designed to do. This, fundamentally, is why negotiations have failed. Well worth sharing.
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On the Mail's homepage right now, 30 of the top 31 stories are about Harry and Meghan. The other one is about Caroline Flack.
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When oh when oh when will the stupid stupid EU start behaving in the best interests of the Conservative Party.
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It's not some huge gotcha that Danny Dyer voted Leave. It's the whole point. Presented with two cases by supposedly serious people, he didn't expect that one of them would turn out to be unachievable and mendacious bullshit.
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Look, I'm as shocked as anybody else that a man who has always wanted to leave the EU, and campaigned in the last election on a manifesto pledge to leave the EU, and has resisted any attempt by his party not to leave the EU, now wants to leave the EU. Who saw this coming.
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Yes, how dare they fund Airbus to help them do business in the UK. The TOTAL BASTARDS. Thank God we'll soon be free of all that.
Hardly surprising Airbus are threatening us today when they've taken billions in EU funding.
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Wow. I can't even begin to reply to all the responses to this thread. But I have read them all and truly appreciated them all, too. Thank you. I'm so glad I posted all that.
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Parliament currently doing a great job of illustrating the benefits of rule by faceless Belgian technocrats, tbh.
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I am not a fan of religious leaders involving themselves in elections.
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Anybody who doesn't know the dynamics, history and supposed pretexts of murderous pogroms, in the UK and elsewhere, should be informing themselves, sharpish. Call this what it is.
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Unless you are in a bus being driven by your enemy, and so is everybody else, and it's on a cliff.
“Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake”.
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Is it still "Project Fear" when it is actually happening?.
Amsterdam overtook London as Europe’s largest share trading center in after Brexit saw about half of the U.K. capital’s trading volumes move to the EU, according to FT
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May's deal is going to go thru. Right at the end. The ERG will fold in panic, then enough of Labour will, too. And then, even though she's been a hapless mad fiasco throughout, everybody will say "she held her nerve, brilliant victory!" because politics is never not stupid.
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Braverman is about to get sacked and genuinely not understand why.
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Relax, guys. It's slightly off-beam.
Michael Gove: “There are one or two aspects of the Sunday Times report that are slightly off-beam”. Which must be the weakest rebuttal of all time. #ridge.
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I find Greta Thunberg's speech extraordinarily difficult to watch. I suppose everybody does. I wonder if the people who make the bizarre decision to attack her realise how obvious it is to everybody else that they are motivated by self-loathing and guilt?.
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But WHY do the racist racists of the racist party Ukip keep attracting racist racists? Will we EVER know?.
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In tent at Glastonbury. Man in tent next door, here with his daughter, is on phone to her school pretending she has a dentist appointment.
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Lots of pro-Putin stuff on Twitter this morning from accounts with tiny follower counts doing huge numbers on likes and retweets and it is of course VERY CONVINCING.
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The Mogg/Bridgen story reminds me of what Norman St John-Stevas said about Margaret Thatcher - "when she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks".
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It may be unfair, but my involuntary response to Labour saying they'll back a second referendum is to wonder which bit of the pending small print will clarify that they actually won't.
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Maybe Ed Davey is always doing this stuff and it takes an election for anyone to notice?.
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