SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940 - 1016): AN OBTUARY

Sir Patrick Stewart, who has died at the age of 86, spent a lifetime proving that a bald head could be more expressive than most actors’ entire faces. Born in 1940 in the unpromising surroundings of Mirfield, Yorkshire, he emerged from a childhood marked by the usual post-war austerities and an abusive father, only to discover that the English language, properly spoken, could be a form of armour. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and stayed long enough to make the Bard’s verse sound less like homework and more like a series of elegant threats.

Hollywood eventually noticed the threat. In 1987 he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a role that required him to sit in a chair, issue measured orders, and occasionally raise one eyebrow with the force of a photon torpedo. American audiences, unused to an Englishman who did not wave his arms while speaking, took to him immediately. Picard became the thinking person’s action hero: a man who preferred negotiation to phasers, Shakespeare to shouting, and a cup of Earl Grey to the nearest available bar. Stewart played him with such grave authority that even the most absurd alien costumes somehow acquired dignity by proximity.

Not content with one franchise, he later donned a wheelchair and a slightly more benevolent scowl as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films. Here was a man who could make telepathy look like the natural extension of a well-run seminar. Between these two iconic parts he continued to return to the stage, reminding everyone that the man who once commanded the USS Enterprise could still stop a theatre dead with a single pause in Macbeth or The Tempest.

His private life was conducted with the same brisk efficiency he brought to the bridge. Multiple marriages came and went; the last, to Sunny Ozell, appeared to stick. He spoke openly about the violence of his childhood, turning personal darkness into public advocacy without ever sounding as if he expected a medal for it. Knighthood arrived in 2010, an honour he accepted from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with the dry amusement of a man who had already been addressed as “Captain” by half the planet.

Stewart’s great gift was seriousness without solemnity. He could intone “Make it so” as if the fate of the galaxy depended on the precise cadence of three syllables, then undercut the grandeur with a glint that suggested he knew perfectly well how ridiculous the whole enterprise was. In an age of actors who mistake volume for intensity, he remained the master of the quiet authority that needs no amplification.

He leaves behind a body of work that will continue to make starship bridges and mutant academies feel improbably civilised. The rest of us will simply have to manage without that voice telling us, in the most reasonable tones imaginable, that everything is under control. It never was, of course. But for a few hours at a time, he made us believe it might be.

THE GREAT BRITISH GERKHIN DISPENSATION

One approaches the latest Budget not with the trepidation once reserved for the reading of the Riot Act, but with the mild curiosity of a man examining a particularly ambitious jar of condiments. Chancellor John Healey, that tireless shepherd of the national larder, has seen fit to suspend import tariffs on gherkins, marmalade, and a supporting cast of more than a hundred “family favourites.” The nation, we are assured, may now breathe more easily. Up to twenty-one pounds a year more easily, if the Treasury’s arithmetic is to be believed. One almost expects the announcement to have been accompanied by a solemn fanfare of muted cornets and the distant sound of a lid being unscrewed.

It is difficult to overstate the grandeur of the vision. While lesser governments might have busied themselves with trifles such as energy prices, housing, productivity, or the general sensation that the country is held together by hope and residual EU regulations, this administration has gone straight to the heart of the matter: the price of small, vinegary cucumbers. History will record that when the British people stood at the crossroads of destiny, their leaders pointed firmly toward the pickle aisle. Future schoolchildren will learn that the turning point of the mid-2020s was not some tedious structural reform, but the moment the state decided that no citizen should ever again pay full tariff on a cornichon.

The rhetorical packaging is itself a masterpiece of understatement. These are not tax cuts, you understand. They are “everyday fixes.” The phrase has the cosy ring of a handyman arriving to mend a dripping tap, except the handyman is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the dripping tap is the entire cost of living. One pictures him arriving with a toolbox containing nothing but a jar of gherkins and a slightly sheepish expression. “I’ve fixed it,” he says, holding up the jar. “It was the import duty all along.” The public is invited to feel gratitude of a peculiarly modern kind: the gratitude of people who have been told that the ship is still sinking, but the water in the bilge has been given a pleasant briney flavour.

There is a certain genius in selecting the gherkin as the emblem of national renewal. The gherkin is not a glamorous vegetable. It does not inspire odes. It sits in its jar like a slightly embarrassed guest at a wedding, aware that it is present mainly to provide contrast. Yet here it stands elevated to the status of fiscal instrument. Marmalade, that other pillar of the new dispensation, brings its own tragicomic resonance. Paddington Bear must be wondering whether he has somehow wandered into a particularly austere episode of The Thick of It. One half expects the next Budget to feature tariff relief on fish paste and those mysterious grey biscuits that appear only at the back of elderly relatives’ cupboards.

The opposition, with its customary lack of subtlety, has described the whole affair as an insult. This seems unfair. An insult implies intent and a certain flair. What we have here is more in the nature of a clerical error elevated to policy. The government appears to have consulted a focus group consisting exclusively of people who eat their sandwiches in reverse order and concluded that the real barrier to prosperity was the twelve per cent duty on pickled cucumbers. The resulting savings—approximately fourpence a week if one is generous with the household averages—will, we are told, provide “breathing space.” One can only hope the breathing is done slowly, lest the space prove inadequate.

It would be churlish to deny the wider cultural moment. Pickles have, of late, enjoyed a modest renaissance. Fermented foods are said to be good for the gut microbiome, that fashionable internal parliament which apparently governs our happiness more effectively than the external one. Gen Z has discovered the joys of sourness. Dinner-party hosts now present jars of homemade pickles with the solemnity once reserved for a decent Burgundy. In this climate, the government’s intervention feels almost chic. They have not merely cut a tariff; they have aligned themselves with the zeitgeist. The Chancellor is not a dry fiscal technician. He is a man of the brine. The resulting legislation will doubtless be known to posterity as the Everyday Fixes (Gherkins and Allied Condiment Relief) Act 2026, and future constitutional historians will treat it with the same grave respect currently afforded to the Corn Laws, only with more vinegar.

And yet the satire writes itself with distressing ease. One imagines the Cabinet discussion; 

“What shall we do about the cost of living, Chancellor?” 

“I know—gherkins.” 

“Brilliant. And for the second reading?” 

“Marmalade.” 

“Inspired. The public will never see it coming.” 

There is, of course, a deeper comedy at work. Britain has always specialised in the art of the small gesture dressed up as national strategy. We once ruled a quarter of the globe while arguing about the correct way to take tea. We now face stagnation, demographic headwinds, and the lingering sense that the lights are being switched off one by one, and our response is to make the accompanying gherkins fractionally more affordable. It is almost touching in its domesticity. Other nations pursue industrial strategies or technological sovereignty. We pursue cheaper pickles. There is a kind of integrity in that. At least no one can accuse the government of over-promising.

In the end, the Gherkin Budget will take its place in the long British tradition of political bathos. It will be remembered not for what it achieved—history is rarely so cruel as to measure these things accurately—but for the perfect clarity with which it revealed the governing imagination. When the nation cried out for relief, its leaders reached not for the stars, nor even for the middle distance, but for the jar at the back of the fridge. And in that small, vinegary act of faith, they told us everything we needed to know.

One only hopes the savings materialise before the jars run out. There are, after all, only so many gherkins in the world, and the British public has never been famous for its restraint once the price comes down.

WALTER KOENIG (1936 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Walter Koenig, who has died at the age of 90, spent the better part of a lifetime proving that the universe is large enough for one man to be both the boyish navigator who never quite mastered the accent and the telepathic bureaucrat who could make a space station feel like a police state with a single raised eyebrow.

As Ensign Pavel Chekov on Star Trek: The Original Series, Koenig arrived in the second season like a mop-topped afterthought designed to appease the Russians and the teenagers in equal measure. The accent wandered about the steppes of Central Casting with the confidence of a tourist who has misread the map. Yet there was something disarming in the performance: a young man forever slightly out of his depth, forever ready with a line about inventing something that had clearly been invented elsewhere. He sat at the helm of the Enterprise for three seasons and seven films, ageing only slightly faster than the special effects, and somehow turned a secondary role into a permanent fixture of popular memory. One half-expected him, in later years, to claim that the warp drive itself had been a Soviet innovation.

Then came Babylon 5, and the joke turned sharper. As Alfred Bester of the Psi Corps, Koenig shed the wide-eyed ensign like an old uniform and stepped into the role of a man who could smile while rearranging your thoughts. Twelve episodes across five seasons, and each appearance tightened the screws. Where Chekov had been the eager subordinate, Bester was the superior who never needed to raise his voice. Koenig played him with a quiet, almost bureaucratic menace, as if the real threat to free will was not some alien armada but a civil servant with a clipboard and the ability to read your mind. Fans who had grown up watching him plot courses through asteroid belts now found themselves rooting, against their better judgement, for the man who plotted courses through other people’s heads.

It was, in its way, a perfect career arc: from the navigator who always looked slightly surprised by the stars to the telepath who was never surprised by anything. Koenig understood the joke and, more importantly, never spoiled it by explaining the punchline. In an industry that prefers its actors to stay in one orbit, he simply changed ships and kept flying. The final frontier, it turned out, was range.