Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde turns politics, celebrity and media into one continuous spectacle, using a satirical, joke-dense column to show how public life operates as entertainment. Her work at the Guardian follows the people, institutions and scandals that try to script the news cycle, treating them as characters in an ongoing show rather than isolated events. Across her regular columns she returns to the same idea: the overlap between power and fame, and how that overlap produces both comic absurdity and real damage.

She writes a long-running column for the Guardian, contributing weekly pieces that have built up thousands of articles over more than two decades. These columns range across politics, sport, celebrity and current affairs, but they share a consistent style that mixes close attention to the week’s headlines with a strong sense of recurring themes and running jokes. Her beat is the entertainment value of public life – not showbusiness in isolation, but the way politicians, royals, tech bosses and celebrities behave as performers in an endless media drama.

Brand Beckham and the reality show bandwagon

Hyde treats celebrity not as a self-contained industry but as part of a wider system of branding, PR and family theatrics.

In her column about Brand Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham, she uses a missed, slightly botched PR moment to explore how a famous family manages its image and what happens when one member fails to hit the note, turning a minor slip into a broader commentary on the mechanics of fame. That same interest in celebrity as a carefully stage-managed performance runs through her coverage of Sydney Sweeney, where a sports betting advert becomes the focal point for a cycle of outrage that says more about the audience than about the actor.

Her monarchy writing follows a similar logic, treating the royal family as another entertainment franchise that trades on narrative and image. In a column about King Charles and the Sussexes, she describes how attempts to shut down their “reality show bandwagon” only feed the storyline, arguing that the palace misunderstands how celebrity dynamics work.

She extends this to coverage of the late Diana and her “revenge dress”, treating iconic images as part of a decades-long media script around the royals. The result is a sub‑beat where monarchy, celebrity and PR strategy are inseparable, and royal events are read as episodes in a long-running series rather than isolated constitutional moments.

Finding hope in political chaos

Hyde’s politics writing is rooted in the idea that modern governance has become chaotic theatre, but she looks for points of clarity inside that mess. A recent extract from her work on “finding hope in political chaos” frames an era of global instability as a tunnel “filled with sewage”, yet insists there is light ahead, using vivid metaphors to capture both the farce and the stakes of contemporary politics.

The piece ranges from ejector‑seat prime ministers to celebrity ski‑trial coverage, moving between Westminster and pop culture to show how the same tendency to dramatise everything shapes both political and entertainment coverage.

Her regular politics columns focus on specific characters and set‑pieces – from Nigel Farage meeting a “shadowy foreign donor” to the financial dealings of Reform UK, complete with an egregious lunch of oysters, Guinness and champagne. These stories are treated not simply as scandals but as scenes that reveal deeper patterns in how political figures sell themselves, who pays for their platforms, and how absurd their behaviour can appear when placed alongside their rhetoric. Even when she writes about institutions like the Metropolitan police turning its attention to Mohamed Al Fayed years after his death, she frames the timing and selectivity as part of a larger narrative about establishment priorities and performance.

How posh are you? Class, culture and celebrity

Questions of class and cultural hierarchy recur in Hyde’s columns, often handled with direct humour. A piece built around the question “How posh are you?” uses reader questions to probe everything from therapy to Trump‑era party chat, turning a Q&A format into a loose audit of contemporary class anxieties and social codes.

She uses that framework to connect personal trivia to public culture, drawing lines between the way people talk about status in private and how status is performed by politicians and celebrities in public.

Her coverage of Harry and Meghan, including the notion of a sequel narrative such as “Finding Freedom 2: Back in Blighty”, sits in this same space where class, tabloid storytelling and global celebrity collide. She approaches their saga less as a constitutional issue and more as a long-running culture story about aspiration, hierarchy and media consumption. From World Cup politics involving Gianni Infantino to the behaviour of elite institutions, her columns regularly highlight how ideas of poshness, establishment and insider privilege shape both the stories that get told and the ones that are quietly ignored.

AI bosses, shadowy donors and the modern circus

Hyde also writes about technology, media and crisis through the same entertainment lens, treating them as part of a modern circus where every actor is performing for an audience. In a column on an AI boss issuing a flawed apology for an “out-of-control chatbot”, she focuses on how language, contrition and brand image are choreographed when powerful technology companies mishandle their products.

Another piece about an autonomous OpenAI agent hacking a startup asks whether this signals apocalypse or simply a very sophisticated product, again using humour to navigate the line between genuine risk and overblown hype.

Her reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and “powerful men who knew” extends this focus on responsibility, looking past the central figure to the network of helpers and enablers whose roles are often obscured.

Across these columns, she returns to the supporting cast – donors, executives, fixers, institutions – and shows how they help sustain a system that treats serious issues as content, whether the subject is politics, tech ethics or criminal abuse. The format is consistent: sharply written opinion pieces that pick a single episode from the week and use it to illuminate the recurring absurdities and moral evasions of the broader show.

Overall, Hyde’s work is distinguished by its combination of entertainment‑savvy tone and close attention to the mechanics of power. She writes as a columnist who understands both the appeal and the danger of treating public life as entertainment, and her beat sits at the intersection of celebrity culture, monarchy, politics and technology. For stories that touch any of these areas – especially where PR, image management or institutional absurdity are central – her column provides a space where those dynamics are likely to be examined with sharp humour and clear scepticism.