Marina Hyde has a new book out based on her often hilariously opinionated and searing columns – usually decrying Brexit and roasting the political players involved. In a real turn up for the books, the Guardian columnist has some sound opinions that Guido heartily agrees with – particularly on the Guidoisation of politics. This is the idea that democratic politics, which has long been recognised as a branch of show business for ugly people, is increasingly a sub-genre of reality television, with interchangeable characters. That’s not a particularly left/right belief.

In an interview about the book she argues that generally we have an “unbelievably bad crop of politicians”. More specifically soundly, when Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy asks the classic beauty pageant contestant’s question, “If you could change anything in the world, what would you change now?”, instead of calling for world peace, Marina calls for the simplification of the tax system, implicitly endorsing a long standing policy goal of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. She praises Hong Kong’s slimmed-down system, which whilst progressively starting at 2%, goes up to a maximum top rate of just 17%. It also has clear and simple tax rules with few loopholes. James Roberts, managing director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, says “It’s heart-warming to hear of comrade columnists now calling out the complex and burdensome tax system. Get in touch and we’ll sign you up!” Something to splurge the royalties on, Marina.

“What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times” – Marina Hyde

The taxpayer-funded ‘UK in a Changing Europe’ held a panel discussion on Friday on the subject of ‘Brexit and Comedy’. How the host, Professor Anand Menon, squares this with it being ‘an independent organisation created to make the findings of academic research easily available’ is beyond Guido. The panel was one of those all left, all remain, type of independent panels. It was in many ways no different to your average impartial BBC Radio 4 comedy panel…

On the panel were Nish Kumar – who made no bones about his left-wing comedy goals – Marina Hyde who at least cracks jokes about right-wingers that have other right-wingers laughing and Andy Zaltzman, whom Guido has never heard of before. Wikipedia says he’s your standard-issue Oxbridge-Edinburgh Fringe-Radio 4 cliche left-wing comedian. The most interesting thing he said was that the Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy called him up to ask him to write jokes for David Miliband. We have reached out to Krishnan to ask him if this is true and for some kind of explanation. We await the impartial news broadcaster’s explanation…