DERMOT MURNAGHAN (1957 -2026): AN OBITUARY

Dermot Murnaghan, who has died at the age of 68 after a bout with prostate cancer that he faced with the sort of stoic understatement one associates with men who once read the news as if it were a mildly disappointing cricket score, was the sort of broadcaster Britain used to produce before everything went shouty and sponsored. Known to a grateful nation of housewives as “Dishy Dermot,” he combined the silver-fox appeal of a man who looked as though he had stepped out of a 1950s advert for pipe tobacco with a delivery so measured you half-expected the autocue to apologise for wasting his time.

In an age when newsreaders increasingly resembled startled meerkats on energy drinks, Murnaghan maintained the old-school belief that the job was to inform, not audition for a part in your own personal drama. He could make a train delay in Kent sound like the fall of the Roman Empire without once raising his voice above the level of a concerned vicar. This gravitas served him well when history came calling uninvited. 

In 1997, as an ITN man, he had the melancholy honour of telling a disbelieving Britain that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died. One moment the nation was being reassured she’d merely broken a collarbone; the next, Dermot was reading the grim confirmation with the expression of a man who had just been handed a telegram from the gods and found it in poor taste. A quarter of a century later, on Sky News, he performed the same sombre service for Queen Elizabeth II. By then he had become the anchorman who announced the end of eras the way other men announce the end of office hours: calmly, professionally, and with the faint air of someone wondering why fate always chose his shift.

Of course, television being television, he also found himself in lighter waters. Viewers of a certain vintage will recall his cameo in Jeremy Clarkson’s Peel P50 adventure, in which the minuscule car—roughly the size of a resentful wheelie bin—made its stately progress through the BBC’s corridors. When Clarkson needed turning round, there was Dermot, obligingly giving the tiny vehicle a shove like a helpful uncle assisting with a particularly stubborn shopping trolley.

He presented Eggheads, anchored for pretty much every major network that would have him, and generally conducted himself with a decency that now feels almost eccentric. In our current era of performative sincerity and algorithmic outrage, Dermot Murnaghan was a reminder that the news could be delivered by someone who looked as though he might, in a crisis, actually know what to do with a fountain pen.

He is survived by his wife, children, and a profession that will miss his unflappable calm more than it realises. The autocue, one suspects, is already weeping quietly into its circuits.

BONNIE TYLER (1951 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh songstress whose voice sounded like gravel soaked in whisky and regret, has finally achieved the one thing her career never quite managed: universal silence. She died aged 75 in a Portuguese hospital, after complications that proved more conclusive than any record label’s marketing plan. The woman born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen had spent decades proving that a name change and a pair of lungs roughened by surgical misfortune could turn a council-house girl into an international curiosity. 

Her breakthrough arrived with “It’s a Heartache,” a tune so cheerfully lachrymose it convinced listeners that love and indigestion were much the same thing. Then came the big one. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” - that overblown, bat-winged power ballad written by Jim Steinman - turned her into the high priestess of melodramatic darkness. Millions bought it, billions streamed it, and Tyler herself, with characteristic dry wit, admitted she earned “just about nothing” from the whole celestial circus. In the music business, even total eclipses leave the artist in the shade. 

Tyler’s great gift was sincerity wrapped in foghorn sincerity. With that magnificent rasp - the result of nodules removed and character left in - she could make the most bombastic sentiment feel like it had been dragged across a pub carpet at closing time. “Holding Out for a Hero” became the anthem for every generation that realised the cavalry was late and probably on minimum wage. She never pretended to be subtle. Subtlety was for people who hadn’t survived the 1980s with big hair and bigger shoulder pads.

Her career had its gentle descents. In 2013 the BBC, in one of those fits of patriotic optimism that usually precede sporting disappointment, sent her to Eurovision with “Believe in Me.” At 61, Tyler stood on stage in Malmö looking like a rock veteran who had taken a wrong turn at the M4 services. She came 19th. The continent, it turned out, did not entirely believe. It was a typically British result: noble effort, dignified failure, mild national embarrassment, and the quiet suspicion that nobody abroad had ever really understood us anyway. 

She outlasted most of her contemporaries by the simple expedient of refusing to go away. While lesser talents chased relevance, Tyler kept singing as if relevance were something that happened to other people. In the end, the voice that once promised total eclipse simply faded behind the clouds. The world will miss that unmistakable croak — part Janis Joplin, part colliery brass band, and entirely, defiantly, Bonnie.

DEMOCRACY GETS THROWN IN THE BIN

In the great carnival of British democracy, where the electorate periodically queues in the drizzle to affirm its sovereign right to choose between varying shades of disappointment, one finds oneself confronted by Count Binface. This metallic-headed apparition, lately elevated to the status of principal challenger in the Clacton by-election, is not merely a joke candidate. He is, as my recent correspondent so astutely observed, the avatar of the establishment parties themselves: a gleaming, galvanised monument to their collective cowardice, their preference for theatrical disdain over the messy business of actual argument. 

One pictures the great and good of Westminster, those custodians of the status quo who loathe Nigel Farage with the passion usually reserved for a tax audit, clapping their soft hands in glee. Here at last is an opponent they can safely mock without risk of rebuttal. A man in a bin requires no manifesto rebuttal; he is his own punchline. Yet even as satire, Count Binface represents a curious declension. Compare him, if you will, to the late David Edward Sutch, better known to the ages as Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Lord Sutch was a proper English eccentric, a rock 'n' roll howler who understood that politics and music share the same essential quality: both are louder than they are meaningful. His policies—proposals to lower the voting age to five and put a lie detector in Parliament—were delivered with the anarchic gusto of a man who had grasped that the system was absurd and decided the only honest response was to amplify the absurdity. 

Sutch stood in dozens of elections over decades, polling respectably for a chap whose campaign headquarters appeared to be the nearest telephone box. He was, in his way, a democratic pressure valve: a protest vote for those who recognised the farce but still wished to participate in it with style. One could imagine sharing a pint with Sutch and emerging, if not enlightened, then at least entertained by tales of werewolf ancestry and floating parliament buildings. Count Binface, by contrast, is Sutch with the soul removed and replaced by focus-group polling and a faint whiff of metropolitan self-satisfaction. Where Sutch screamed, Binface smirks. Where Sutch offered policies so deranged they achieved a kind of Zen coherence, Binface offers the contemporary protest vote's preferred currency: performative knowingness. He is what happens when satire becomes institutionalised, when the court jester secures a residency at the palace and begins to imagine himself indispensable. His appeal is to that substantial portion of the electorate for whom politics has become less about conviction than about signalling one's superior detachment. "I vote Binface," such a voter announces, not because he has weighed the issues of net migration, fiscal incontinence, or cultural disintegration, but because it allows him to feel clever for five minutes while contributing precisely nothing to their resolution. It is the protest vote optimised for the low-IQ sophisticate: maximum ironic distance, minimum intellectual effort.

One must admire the economy of it. The major parties, those trembling colossi of the centre, have absented themselves from the field, leaving Farage to tilt against a recycling container. This is not democracy in action; it is democracy in abeyance. The establishment has decided that certain challenges are better met with a raised eyebrow than a counter-argument. Farage, for all his faults—and they are numerous enough to fill several bins—has at least forced them to confront the possibility that large swathes of the public have grown tired of being governed by people who regard their concerns as symptoms of moral deficiency. The response? Unleash the novelty act. Let the man in the bin have his moment. The laughter in the salons will be hearty, the coverage in the right-thinking press gently condescending. "How very British," they will coo, as if the nation’s greatest strength were its capacity for elegant self-sabotage.

This is the deeper joke, of course. Binface does not personify youthful rebellion or outsider wit; he embodies the exhausted insider's last resort. He is the political equivalent of those restaurant critics who, faced with a challenging new cuisine, declare that the real sophistication lies in appreciating the chef's ironic use of microwave meals. The voters drawn to him are not the salt of the earth registering a heartfelt protest. They are, by and large, those who find genuine conviction faintly embarrassing and prefer their dissent pasteurised and shrink-wrapped. Sutch, bless him, wanted to blow the whole thing up with laughter. Binface merely wants to prove that one can remain above it all while participating. The bin remains firmly on the head, shielding its wearer from any uncomfortable contact with reality.

In the end, one is left with a certain melancholy. British politics has always accommodated its eccentrics, from the Duke of Wellington's boots to Churchill's cigars. But there is a difference between a Lord Sutch, who mocked the system from a place of affectionate exasperation, and a Count Binface, who mocks it from within the system’s own comfortable confines. The former was a safety valve; the latter is a pressure cooker labelled "Entertainment Only." When the serious business of governance is reduced to a choice between a career disruptor and a man cosplaying as municipal waste, one begins to suspect that the real protest vote—the one that might actually change something—has already been cast, and not in favour of either. 

The bin, one fears, is not on Count Binface’s head alone. It is descending, slowly and inexorably, over the entire spectacle. And the establishment, ever so politely, is holding the lid.