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Fear and Loathing in Darlington: Dispatches from a Council Chamber Gone Mad There are moments in public life when you realise, with a cold jolt to the spine, that you are no longer observing politics—you are trapped inside it. Not the dignified, pipe-and-slippers version they sell on the BBC, but the raw, twitching, hallucinatory underbelly of it. The kind where logic is optional, procedure is weaponised, and common sense is dragged out back and quietly shot. This is one of those moments. Some of you may remember my previous dispatch, written in the aftermath of my private school shutting its doors—a casualty of the slow, grinding machinery of policy dressed up as progress, aka Labour's Tax on Education. Back then, I made a promise: I would not rest. Not until the people responsible were held to account, not until the direction of travel in this country was dragged, kicking and screaming if necessary, back towards something resembling sanity. And so, fuelled by caffeine, stubbornne...