What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times (The Sunday Times Bestseller)

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I greatly enjoyed reading the book, partly because I agree with the author’s sentiments, partly for the style of writing and also because it was a sobering reminder of how the country has ended up in its present state.

I think the calibre of politicians is very, very badly depleted,” she continues. “The Conservative Party has been in a constant election cycle, but to do what? You feel they just want to be in power. They don’t seem to have any form of programme or any idea of how to achieve it. I find it really depressing.” On the one hand, there is merit here. Mariana Hyde is a good writer, who understands how to write engagingly about topical news. She does a very good job of capturing the readers attention, and the format of the book helps to keep up momentum. This book is a collection of Hyde's Sunday columns of the same name. It typically takes a piece of topical news and skewers it in a snarky, smug, centrist way. Therein lies another merit; this is a handy primer for anyone wanting a gentle way to remember the past five or so years. Unfortunately, the last five years being what they are, even Hyde's very light touch commentary can turn the reader's stomach. I think the caliber of politicians is very, very badly depleted,” she continues. “The Conservative Party has been in a constant election cycle, but to do what? You feel they just want to be in power. They don’t seem to have any form of program or any idea of how to achieve it. I find it really depressing.” Hyde was “fascinated” by politics as a child, and initially wanted to pursue it as a career. So when she arrived at Oxford to study English in the late 1990s, she made a beeline for the Union. “Talk about 10th circle of hell,” she says. “It was so dreadful. In that moment, I had this terrible realization that, actually, real politics was like this. It was a horrendous scales falling from the eyes. This thing I’d wanted to do all my life I no longer wanted to do at all, because of the people.” Half of them, she notes, are now “probably in the cabinet.”Set styling: Lee Flude. Hair and makeup: Alice Theobald @ArlingtonArtists using Morgan’s Pomade haircare and Tom Ford Beauty She has penned some incredibly funny descriptions of Boris Johnson over the past six years. How does she write those? “I’m letting you into my process, which I feel is the least interesting process ever. I go on Google Images, and I just look at the pictures and I kind of let my eyes drift a bit. And then you just think, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a Cabbage Patch Draco Malfoy.’ Or, ‘Oh, he looks like an Oxfam donation bag torn open by a fox.’” I wondered if this would work as an audio book. I had no doubt as to the content: Marina is a genius and a fair amount of the material was stuff I at least partly remembered from her columns over the past few years. But a collection of columns usually needs to be in ‘actual book’ form, and dipped into. But this totally worked as a continuous narrative…I don’t know how she did it, but it kept me hooked all the way through. Finally: the content. It showed what acres of top class, well informed and witty writing MH produces, week by month by year. Nothing in it, IMHO, was anything near sub par, and I can think of few other writers who seem to unable to write a bad paragraph. As well as being informative, it all contains at least wry amusement and, more often than not, just reduces me to helpless laughter. Columns from the inimitable Marina Hyde from 2016-2022: if you haven't read her, feast your eyes on quotations below and rest assured, there's plenty more of this sardonic commentary. In the interests of our sanity.

Pop your teeth-grinding guards in and gather round, because it’s time to talk about the Post Office scandal again. It remains something of a downer that the most widespread injustice in British legal history doesn’t get the full-spectrum fever coverage that is lavished on more frivolous news – but then, the forces formerly known as The Man have always wanted this one covered up. Don’t worry if you’re only belatedly catching up. The second-best time to start absolutely losing your mind that any of it was allowed to happen is right now, while the official inquiry is under way and precisely NO ONE has yet been held accountable for the ruin of hundreds of completely innocent lives, and the causing of deep suffering in thousands more. Until that happens, the plain reality is that less than 1% of reported rapes lead to a conviction in England and Wales, a systemic collapse aided by the horrendous and high-profile actions of some police officers, which means that the police have arguably the perfect situation for them: one where women are so without faith that the process works that they mostly can’t even face making the complaints in the first place. This morning, former Met chief superintendent Dal Babu said in passing that women often withdrew cooperation from rape inquiries “for whatever reason”. In fact, we know the reasons and can see them very clearly. It is all too often a rational act, which tells you everything about how utterly broken the process is. The UK is in the stifling, sweaty grips of a historic heatwave, but in the library of The Standard in London, a fire is roaring. It’s a slightly bemusing choice, but then, so is the hotel’s book arrangement – take the “Politics” section, which is housed next to “Tragedy”. “It’s not the classic Dewey Decimal system is it,” deadpans Marina Hyde, 48, surveying the room as she settles into a leather armchair in front of “Environmental Sciences” and “Despair”. By dying in April 2014 of a suspected heroin overdose, who knows how much entertaining copy Peaches Geldof deprived Hyde of? In the end, those columns are just my record of an era in which so many of us – but not all! – felt the news had become stranger than fiction. For instance, in the space of a very short time in early 2019, Tory MP Mark Francois and novelist Will Self had a spat about the size of Mark’s penis on a midday politics TV show; a Ukip leader wrote to the Queen and informed her she had committed treason when she signed the Maastricht treaty; and a Conservative MP stood up in the Commons and intoned to the house: “ This is a turd of a deal, which has now been taken away and polished, and is now a polished turd. But it might be the best turd that we’ve got.”Ultimately, it's hard to see Branson as anything other than the classic 'billionaire philanthropist' (is there any other kind of billionaire?) who declines to accept that the public finances would be in rather better state if people like them contributed their fair share. Forgive me for repeating myself, but philanthropy starts with paying tax. With the best will inn the world, it isn't enough to imply the only reason you operate out of a tax haven is because you like the weather." On a small feed day, its the kittens - usually little celebrities, outré or struggling in someway, with some dubious claim to plausibility or fame, tottering on their high heels these (often) silly girls are delivered though the hatch to the famished she-wolf of the Guardian newspaper. You’d have someone ring up and say, ‘I’m in bed with Robbie Williams, do you want to write the story?’” she recalls, breathless with excitement at the memory. “I mean, it was absolutely hilarious. It was constant mayhem.” Up until then, the world of newspapers hadn’t been a consideration, but in 2000 she landed her first proper gig at The Guardian, writing its Diary column, before starting the cult, long-running celebrity column Lost in Showbiz. Though Geldof was annoying she was turning a corner and was on her way to becoming an interesting woman, but we will never know now what she might have become, will we?

Weirdly, I discovered when going through the 47 trillion words I’ve written since 2016 that I often don’t even have a memory of writing half of them. It slightly felt like I had written a book I hadn’t read. A bit like Katie Price – only instead of not having even skimmed a single one of my seven autobiographies, I was completely in the dark about other stuff. Take the whole week of daily columns in March 2019, focusing on something called “indicative votes”. What in the name of sanity were they? I’ve heard of past-lives therapy; maybe I need past-columns therapy. Just as distinguished Hollywood crazy Shirley MacLaine is convinced she previously walked the earth as Charlemagne’s Moorish peasant lover, so I could be assured that I really did once, only last year, turn out 1,100 words on how Boris Johnson had literally swapped bodies with his dog. I mean, it sounds like something I might have done? And I don’t think I have an alibi for it? As settings go, it feels a little on-the-nose for a meeting with, arguably, this country’s foremost living satirist, one who – through Brexit, four Tory prime ministers, Trump and a global pandemic, via narcissistic celebrities, evil billionaires, disgraced princes, and, of course, spineless politicians – has become the chief chronicler of our stranger-than-fiction times. This is an incredibly funny and scary and brilliant book. It's not going to please people with certain politics, but for those whose politics is even centre-ground, Marina Hyde's pithy way with words will have you laughing out loud. She grounds you. She gets to the core of an issue, peeling away all the rubbish and says, look at this! Seriously, look at this!My daughter is being brought from school by my husband, so if you hear weird shrieks here that is a person,” says Marina Hyde. “And my best to your cat.” Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire, [1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford. [2] The Sun [ edit ] Guardian wins at the 2019 British Journalism Awards". The Guardian. 11 December 2019 . Retrieved 24 February 2021.