ANDY KERSHAW (1959 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Andy Kershaw, the broadcaster who spent a career dragging the British listening public by the ear into the sonic badlands of Tuareg rock and Haitian meringue, has died at 66. Cancer, displaying the sort of grim efficiency Kershaw himself once reserved for a 45-minute Malian guitar solo, finally achieved what successive BBC controllers could not: it turned the volume down.

Born in Littleborough in 1959, the sort of Lancashire town that made Rochdale look like Monte Carlo, Kershaw arrived with the fixed expression of a man who had just discovered Bob Dylan and intended to make it everybody else’s problem. He began as Billy Bragg’s driver and roadie, a role that combined heavy lifting with light diplomacy, before blagging his way onto The Old Grey Whistle Test. By 1985 he was co-presenting Live Aid on television, looking for all the world like a sixth-former who had wandered into the wrong studio and decided to stay. For fifteen years on Radio 1 he played records so obscure that even the needle seemed embarrassed. Listeners who tuned in for a quick fix of chart pop were instead treated to the musical equivalent of a gap-year sermon on global injustice. He called it world music. Critics called it punishment.

Later he reinvented himself as a foreign correspondent, filing from Rwanda during the genocide and Haiti during one of its more optimistic coups. In 97 countries he proved that a man with no off-switch could still find places where the off-switch had never been invented. His autobiography, the similarly-titled "No Off Switch", was less memoir than public health warning. The turbulent personal life that followed—two children with Juliette Banner, a brief but memorable entanglement with Carol Vorderman, and a 2007 spell in prison for violating a restraining order—was handled with the same cheerful candour he once applied to Senegalese trip-hop. He never pretended to be easy company.

Sacked by Radio 1 in 2000 to make way for yet another dance programme, Kershaw returned sporadically, still evangelising, still impossible. In the end he outlasted most of his playlists. The world music he championed is now everywhere, which is to say it has become background noise. Kershaw himself was never background. He was the interference that made the signal worth hearing.

THE GREAT HUNGARIAN FEINT: DID ORBAN CON THE EU?

When I filed my previous report on the Hungarian elections – that melancholy dispatch titled “The Fall of Hungary,” in which Viktor Orbán, after sixteen years of stubborn resistance, delivered the political equivalent of a pub darts defeat with the weary dignity of a man who knows the referee has been nobbled – I rather thought the story was over. Hungary had, at last, been brought to heel. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party had swept to a two-thirds majority, the EU’s collective bosom swelled with relief, and the usual suspects in Brussels, Davos, and the more expensive bits of Manhattan could be imagined cracking open the good champagne while murmuring about “European values” and “democratic renewal.” It all had the satisfying finality of a sandcastle succumbing to the tide.

Yet, as is so often the case with these continental dramas, the tide has a way of receding again, revealing not driftwood but the faint outline of a rather more elaborate sandcastle. A theory has been doing the rounds on the wilder fringes of social media – one so deliciously baroque that it demands, if not belief, then at least the sort of respectful attention one gives to a well-crafted conspiracy yarn. The suggestion, in essence, is that Orbán did not lose at all. He merely staged the most elegant handover in modern European politics: a controlled opposition so controlled that the opposition itself barely noticed it was being controlled at all.

The notion originates, as these things often do, from a single tweet that has acquired the quiet authority of a rumour whispered in the right cafés. Its author, observing the post-election landscape with the narrowed eye of a man who has seen too many Hungarian political operas, cannot shake the feeling that Orbán and Magyar have together given the EU – and all those other left-wing, green, woke worthies – the most comprehensive political kicking since the Treaty of Trianon. Orbán, the theory runs, spotted the trap early. The international commentariat had him in their sights; the NGOs were sharpening their spreadsheets; George Soros was, one assumes, already drafting another memo. So what does a wily Orbán do? He sends in his best friend. Péter Magyar, once Orbán’s own man, a former insider with the sort of credentials that make Brussels salivate, was despatched into the electoral lists like a Trojan horse wearing a very convincing centrist smile.

The beauty of the scheme, if scheme it was, lay in the arithmetic. Hungary’s left-wing opposition parties, those plucky little outfits that had spent years positioning themselves as the authentic voice of anti-Orbán resistance, all failed to clear the 5% threshold. Poof – gone. Vanished like so many well-meaning manifestos into the Budapest fog. What remained was a binary choice that was not, on closer inspection, binary at all: Orbán or Magyar. Or, to put it in the slightly more conspiratorial vernacular of the tweet, Orbán or Orbán. The only complication was linguistic. Nobody outside Hungary speaks Hungarian, least of all the people in Strasbourg whose job it is to understand these things. The EU, Soros, Obama, Clinton – they all swallowed the bait whole, convinced they had witnessed the long-overdue liberalisation of a stubborn little Central European redoubt. One can picture Hillary Clinton in some well-appointed drawing room, glass in hand, declaring the dawn of a new era while a Hungarian waiter, polishing the silver, permitted himself the tiniest inward smirk.

It is, of course, the sort of theory that sensible people are supposed to greet with a raised eyebrow and a pinch of salt the size of Lake Balaton. After all, the personal animus between Orbán and Magyar has been well documented: the former ally turned sworn enemy, the allegations of abuse of office, the very public falling-out that would have done credit to a Renaissance court. Hungarian voters, one is reliably informed by those who actually live there, loathe one another with a sincerity that no amount of backstage choreography could fake. And yet… there was Orbán’s concession speech. Not the furious howl of a man robbed of power, nor even the stoic growl of a defeated boxer. Just that quiet, unfussy acknowledgement – the verbal equivalent of shrugging off a coat and hanging it neatly on the hook. No claims of fraud, no midnight rants, no desperate appeals to the constitutional court. Just a man who has lost a game of darts down the pub, as I rather uncharitably put it last week, and is now buying the next round. One begins to wonder. Could it be that the grizzled holdout, who spent sixteen years blocking EU directives with the cheerful obstinacy of a man parking a tractor across a motorway, had calculated that the only way to preserve Hungarian sovereignty was to appear to surrender it? That by installing a successor who looks and sounds sufficiently Brussels-friendly, he could unlock the frozen funds, quiet the NGOs, and still keep the actual reins in reliable hands? It would be the political equivalent of the old Hungarian joke about the man who sells his soul to the devil and then discovers the devil is on his payroll.

The satisfaction one feels at the possibility – and let us be honest, it is only a possibility – is not, I hasten to add, the crude glee of seeing one’s own side win. It is the pleasure of watching the great and the good of the European project being taken for the sort of ride that usually requires a very large expense account and a rented yacht. For years they have lectured Budapest on “values,” on “solidarity,” on the moral imperative of opening borders to whoever happens to be passing with the right paperwork. Now, if the theory holds, they have been handed precisely the government they demanded – only to discover, too late, that it may not be quite the government they thought they were getting. The EU’s heart, as Ursula von der Leyen so memorably declared on election night, beats stronger tonight in Hungary. One wonders whether it is beating with triumph or with the first faint flutter of suspicion. 

Of course, one must take all this with the aforementioned pinch of salt. Hungarian politics has a habit of being more Shakespearean than conspiratorial; the personal hatreds are real, the policy overlaps fewer than the theorists would like. Magyar’s voters speak of hope and change with the same earnestness one once heard in Britain before the Brexit vote, and they will not take kindly to being told they were merely extras in someone else’s long game. Nor should we underestimate the genuine appetite for a fresh face after sixteen years of the same one. Politics, even in its most theatrical moments, is rarely pure puppetry.

And yet the image lingers: two men who once worked in the same political stable, now apparently on opposite sides, exchanging the sort of courteous congratulations that suggest the rivalry was, if not scripted, then at least performed with a certain professional courtesy. Orbán felicitating his successor without the usual grumbling about stolen elections. The left-wing parties conveniently evaporating below the threshold. The EU breathing a sigh of relief that sounds, on second hearing, suspiciously like the exhalation of a man who has just been relieved of his wallet. If it is a con, it is a magnificent one – the sort of slow-burn satire that Thomas Hobbes himself might have appreciated in his prime, watching the Brussels bureaucracy congratulate itself on its own cleverness while the Hungarians, with that quiet Central European cunning, simply changed the labels on the bottles. If it is not… well, then we are back where we started, watching another small nation fold itself neatly into the European consensus, complete with the usual helping of guilt, diversity targets, and the slow erosion of anything that once tasted distinctly of paprika and poetry.

Either way, Hungary remains a splendid spectacle. One only hopes the next act reveals whether the curtain came down on a tragedy or a particularly deadpan comedy. In the meantime, I shall be watching Budapest with the same mixture of affection and scepticism one reserves for an old friend who has just announced he is giving up drinking. It may be genuine. It may be tactical. But one rather suspects the hangover, when it comes, will be felt most acutely in Strasbourg.

MOYA BRENNAN (1952 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Moya Brennan, who has died at 73, was the voice that made Irish traditional music sound like the wind complaining in several languages at once. Born Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin in 1952 in the Donegal Gaeltacht, she emerged from a family so musical that their local pub, Leo’s Tavern, must have felt like a perpetual ceilidh with occasional licensing hours. As the eldest of nine, she helped form Clannad in 1970 with siblings and uncles, a group that took the ancient sorrows of Ireland and polished them until they gleamed just enough for the 1980s charts. 

Their breakthrough came with the theme to Harry’s Game, a brooding, Gaelic lament for the Troubles that somehow reached Top of the Pops—a feat roughly as likely as a Gregorian chant troubling the disco floor. Clannad sold millions, won Grammys and Baftas, and soundtracked everything from Robin of Sherwood to the misty longings of a generation that discovered Celtic mysticism via television. Moya’s harp and crystalline vocals became the signature: ethereal yet sturdy, like Donegal granite wrapped in silk. Her sister Enya later floated away on a cloud of multi-tracked serenity to even greater commercial heights, but Moya remained the anchor, the one who remembered the words in the old tongue. 

Solo work followed—albums under her own name, collaborations with Bono (who called her voice one of the greatest the human ear had experienced, a compliment so lavish it risked causing structural damage to modesty), Mick Jagger, and others. She collected an Emmy, a lifetime achievement award from Michael D Higgins, and the quiet satisfaction of never quite abandoning her roots. Diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2020, she carried on with the stoicism of someone who had spent decades making fog and rain sound romantic. Her final album appeared in 2024; Clannad’s farewell tour had already drawn the curtains in 2023. 

She died peacefully in Donegal, surrounded by family, on 13 April 2026. Tributes spoke of her generosity, her peaceable presence, and how she never forgot where she came from. In an industry fond of overblown mythologies, Moya Brennan was the genuine article: a woman whose voice suggested the Atlantic had learned to sing, albeit with a sardonic undertow. The mists will sound a little thinner now.