Prometheus volume 4 is my guardian end of year columns from 2018 and 2019,

followed by the whole of my book, The Future of British Politics.

This was my end of year review in the Guardian in 2018.

Consider the plight of the satrist. I know you've got your own plight and there are only so many

plights that you can consider at any one time, and that the plight of the satrist might even seem

to be one of the easier plights. A satrist, you imagine, is having a pretty heavy week if they

do more than pop up on the news quiz to say that every MP in the DUP looks like a committee member

of a bowling club who's just seen a visitor enter the bar wearing jeans. I know that you put it

like that. Yes, you're right. It's not much of a plight at all, really. The plight of the satrist,

such as it is, is a compulsion to look at the grimest, most important thing they can think of,

and then for reasons that probably wouldn't survive a really good therapist, try to make it

funny. To try to address the inequities of their society, the satrist must manufacture some hope

that what they're doing might make a difference, then type it all up and send it off somewhere

before they remember that it never does. Looking back over the events of this year,

it's a bit like holding a doll for a therapist and pointing to where the bad man hurt you. Among the

lowlights were Theresa May, dancing on stage at the Conservative Party conference, choreographer,

Ray Honeyhausen, looking like an unclogged mentor on a hen weekend. A group of deranged

kippers burning a cardboard effigy of Grandfell Tower, they were later quizzed by police

and Kensington and Chelsea council who asked them to quote for some public housing projects.

A scenic grilling of Mark Zuckerberg who gave the general impression of a Batman villain

whose back story is being given puberty-delaying drugs by a pedophile and who seem divisibly

relieved to be questioned on privacy concerns rather than Facebook's monopoly pivot.

...