KENT’S PLAGUE REDUX

As the calendar flips to 17 March 2026, the county of Kent finds itself in the grip of a fresh microbial drama: an outbreak of invasive meningococcal disease, chiefly the B strain, has claimed two young lives—a university student and a sixth-form pupil—while sending more than a dozen others to hospital in serious condition. Queues of masked students snake outside the University of Kent for prophylactic antibiotics; health secretaries utter the word "unprecedented" with the solemnity once reserved for lottery wins; and the UK Health Security Agency scrambles to trace nightclub contacts from a single weekend in early March. The bacteria, it seems, picked its moment with impeccable timing—six years to the day since another set of restrictions descended on the nation like a particularly humourless fog.

One might be forgiven for experiencing a faint flicker of déjà vu, that peculiar sensation of having seen this film before, only with worse lighting and a more expensive cast. Six years ago, on this very date in 2020, Britain entered its first national lockdown, an exercise in collective caution that began as a fortnight to "flatten the curve" and ended, depending on one's arithmetic, somewhere between eighteen months and eternity. The virus in question was, we were assured, novel, deadly, and democratically indifferent to age, class, or whether one preferred Netflix to the theatre. Yet the statistics, once the dust of panic had settled, told a quieter story: the median age of those who succumbed hovered around 82 for men and 86 for women, figures that politely declined to differ very much from the life expectancies already on the books before anyone had heard of social distancing. In other words, COVID-19, for all its headline ferocity, behaved rather like an unusually punctual grim reaper who simply brought forward appointments already pencilled in.

The response, however, was anything but restrained. Economies were shuttered with a decisiveness that would have impressed even the most enthusiastic central planner. Pubs, theatres, schools, churches, family gatherings—all deemed non-essential in a sudden reclassification of human existence that would have astonished Aristotle. The bill, when finally totted up, ran to somewhere between £310 and £410 billion, a sum so vast it could purchase most of the Home Counties twice over and still leave change for a decent round of drinks. We masked up, we clapped for carers, we Zoomed our way through birthdays and bereavements, and we learned to pronounce "R-number" with the solemnity once reserved for Latin Mass. All this, we were told, to save lives—though precisely whose lives, and at what cost to the living, became a question too impolite for sustained public discussion.

Six years on, the balance sheet looks less heroic. The young, whose futures were placed on indefinite hold, now confront a mental-health crisis of our own making, an economy still limping, and a national debt that mocks the very notion of intergenerational fairness. The old, whom we ostensibly protected, largely survived anyway—many to watch their grandchildren grow up through screens rather than sitting rooms. And the virus? It mutated, as viruses do, became milder in most cases, and was eventually absorbed into the background hum of seasonal ailments, much like influenza before it achieved celebrity status. Yet the habits we acquired—the suspicion of proximity, the readiness to defer to "the science" as though it were a single oracle rather than a cacophony of competing models—linger like an embarrassing tattoo from a misspent youth.

Now here comes meningitis B, striking precisely where one might expect: among the young, the sociable, the clustered—in halls of residence and nightclubs rather than care homes. It kills swiftly, horribly, without regard for modelling or ministerial briefings. The response is admirably brisk: antibiotics distributed, vaccines targeted, contacts traced. No calls (yet) to cancel Christmas or close the schools en masse. The machinery of panic, it seems, has not been entirely dismantled; it has merely been placed on standby, ready to be wheeled out when the next headline demands it.

One cannot help but wonder whether we learned anything at all. The great lesson of 2020–2022 ought to have been proportionality: that risk exists on a spectrum, that the young are not interchangeable with the elderly in matters of mortality, and that society cannot be paused indefinitely without paying a price measured in lost educations, lost businesses, lost conviviality. Instead we perfected the art of treating every emerging pathogen as the next Black Death, while forgetting that life itself carries a fatality rate of one hundred per cent. The meningitis outbreak in Kent is tragic, urgent, and—mercifully—limited. But it arrives on the anniversary of a far larger experiment in control, one whose architects still congratulate themselves on having "saved lives" while carefully avoiding the question of how many other lives were quietly eroded in the process.

Perhaps the truest epitaph for those six years is not to be found in the infection fatality rates or the Treasury spreadsheets, but in the empty high streets, the closed theatres, the generation that came of age believing human contact was a public-health hazard. We flattened the curve, all right. We just never quite managed to straighten the country out again.

THE MANDELSON NOOSE CARES NOT FOR STARMER’S LAST GASP

One cannot help but savour the exquisite, almost biblical cruelty of it all, were applause not rather vulgar and the spectacle not so exquisitely British in its quiet, bureaucratic savagery. Just as Keir Starmer’s government had reached its terminal velocity—plummeting not with a bang but with the dreary, bureaucratic whimper of a man who has finally run out of excuses—the Mandelson files dropped yesterday like the executioner’s polite knock at dawn. 

And there, pulling the lever with the serene efficiency of a man who has waited years for this exact drop, stands Peter Mandelson: the Prince of Darkness incarnate, a creature whose every instinct has always been tuned to the precise frequency of betrayal. This is his masterpiece of revenge, served not hot but frozen to absolute zero, and it is not merely the end of a prime minister. It is the final, irrevocable proof that Starmer’s administration will be remembered as the single worst government in the entire, blood-soaked, rain-lashed history of these islands—worse than the appeasers who fed Europe to the wolves, worse than the clowns who lost an empire and called it progress, worse even than the ones who turned the lights out and pretended the darkness was a feature.

The documents themselves—those December 2024 memos, now publicly disembowelled on 11 March 2026—are a thing of cold, lethal perfection: Whitehall prose sharpened to a razor that never quite draws blood until the victim is already bleeding out. They did not shout “danger”; they simply murmured, with the faintest curl of the lip, that elevating a man whose little black book once included an overnight at Jeffrey Epstein’s New York fun palace—complete with the 2009 “perfectly innocent philanthropy chat” that fooled precisely no one, and continued contact long after the 2008 conviction for procuring an underage girl—might, in a universe where consequences still existed, pose the teensiest reputational inconvenience. 

They noted, with the enthusiasm of a coroner filing a routine report, the 2014 conservation scam funded by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, an enterprise so ethically pristine it required neither ethics nor light nor the slightest flicker of shame. They waved the 2019 JP Morgan dossier like a bill one had hoped to bury forever. And still Starmer, that hollow paragon of legal pedantry who mistakes pig-headedness for leadership, simply shredded the lot. Vetting is for peasants. Rules are for the little people who still cling to the quaint illusion that power comes with responsibility. For the inner circle, the old New Labour coven, the only commandment is loyalty—and loyalty, as ever, flows only one way.

One pictures the scene in Downing Street: Starmer staring at the memo with the slack-jawed realisation of a man who has just discovered his closest ally’s alibi is “I was only following orders from a convicted sex offender.” Mandelson, somewhere in the half-light, offering that trademark smile—the one that says, “I told you so, and now you’ll pay for not listening.” The appointment went through regardless, “weirdly rushed” as even Starmer’s own national security adviser noted, with classified briefings handed over before the ink was dry on the vetting. Ambassador to Washington: a gilded exile across the ocean, far enough to dodge the domestic hounds, close enough to ensure the eventual implosion would be visible from space. Classic Starmer logic—outsource the stench, import the illusion of competence, and pray the Atlantic was wide enough to swallow the truth.

It wasn’t. September 2025 came like the axe, and Mandelson was dragged home in disgrace after fresh Epstein revelations forced Starmer’s hand. Or so the fools thought. Then came the January 2026 DOJ dumps, the police arrest last month on suspicion of leaking sensitive government documents to Epstein himself, and now yesterday’s 147-page tranche—timed with the surgical precision of a professional assassin—at the exact instant Starmer’s approval ratings have achieved the serene finality of a corpse in the morgue and the opposition is licking its chops like wolves who have just heard the sheepdog retire. Coincidence? In this rotting administration, coincidence is merely the euphemism for “Mandelson remembered where he hid the bodies—and made sure the public got the map.” The fingerprints are unmistakable. The man who invented the dark machinery of modern politics has simply oiled it one last time and set it running in reverse. This is not politics; it is poetic justice, black as pitch and twice as final.

And what justice. Not the messy theatre of a coup, but the slow, delicious strangulation that lets Starmer knot his own rope while the nation watches. He ignored the warnings; now those warnings are billboard-sized, blaring from every screen and front page with the cold glee of vultures circling a fresh carcass. He overruled the civil service; now their ice-dry prose is eviscerating him with the remorseless efficiency of compound interest on a debt that can never be paid. He gambled that the public would eventually tire of sleaze if you just kept droning “working people” like a broken record. The public, it turns out, has not tired at all. It is sharpening its teeth. It is buying popcorn. It is positively relishing the spectacle of this government’s long, slow, richly deserved descent into electoral oblivion—complete with the delicious detail that Mandelson, the architect of the whole fiasco, demanded half a million pounds in severance and settled for a taxpayer-funded £75,000 golden goodbye before being carted off for questioning.

This is the final nail—cold-forged in Mandelsonian malice, hammered home with a smile that never reaches the eyes. The coffin was already a grotesque work of art: the winter fuel cuts that kicked pensioners while they shivered; the tax pirouettes that made “fiscal responsibility” sound like a terminal diagnosis; the immigration farce that combined bombast with total surrender, infuriating every last voter with clinical impartiality. Add the economy that crawled forward like a dying insect, the NHS queues now a national monument to neglect, the foreign policy that managed to be both shrill and invisible, like a scream in an empty room. All of it the unmistakable signature of a government that read its own promises in a hall of distorting mirrors and decided the only duty was to betray every soul in the land with meticulous, equal-opportunity contempt.

But the Mandelson files—yesterday’s fresh tranche—are the lid slammed down, the screws driven through the wood, and the grave already dug six feet deep outside Number Ten. They expose the one unforgivable truth: this is a government that always believed the rules were for other people. The same party that spent years preaching ethics and “restoring trust” turns out to have the moral spine of a jellyfish in a blender. Mandelson was never the exception; he was the inevitable punchline, the elder statesman summoned for gravitas who instead became the political undertaker, embalmer, and chief mourner rolled into one. And now the British public—grumbling, cynical, but suddenly alive with a dark, almost festive anticipation—is preparing to deliver the verdict at the ballot box with undisguised, savage delight.

History will not merely judge; it will mock. Future scholars, picking through the wreckage with the distaste one reserves for a mass grave, will stare at the Starmer years and ask how a nation that once forged empires produced this colourless architect of its own extinction. They will record the by-election massacres, the leadership bloodlettings already being rehearsed in the shadows, the poll ratings that make the 1970s look like a renaissance. Above all they will relish the symmetry: the very fixer Starmer summoned for respectability has instead become his gravedigger. Mandelson’s revenge is absolute. He has ensured that the government he helped spawn will be remembered for exactly one thing—the moment it was gutted by its own preserved filth.

No pity. None whatsoever. Starmer built his gallows with his own hands and now swings from it, a fitting monument to arrogance meeting consequence. The British public, for its part, is already tasting the sweetness of the coming rout: Labour not merely defeated but obliterated, wiped from the map in an electoral catharsis that will be cheered from Land’s End to John o’ Groats with the grim, thoroughly British grin of people who have waited far too long for this particular clown car to plunge off the cliff. 

Somewhere—in a shadowed Mayfair room where the claret is older than most voters—Peter Mandelson perhaps permits himself the smallest, coldest of smiles. The Prince of Darkness has had the last word. Britain will endure the jest, as it always does, grumbling all the way. Labour, on the evidence of these files, will not. And the nation is already counting the days until it can dance on the grave.

CRITICAL, DRY & ACCURATE: A YOUTUBER'S LAMENT FOR GLASGOW

In the annals of urban calamity, where the grand gestures of history are reduced to footnotes in the ledger of municipal incompetence, few vignettes capture the farce quite so neatly as the one posted by that redoubtable Scot, the Critical Drinker himself. There it stands—or rather, there it stood: a four-storey B-listed edifice at the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street in Glasgow, erected in 1851 when Victoria was still a sprightly young monarch and the Industrial Revolution was still pretending to have a conscience. Before: a handsome slice of Victorian rectitude, all sandstone gravitas and arched windows that had stared down everything from Chartist riots to the Beeching cuts. After: a smouldering heap of rubble, courtesy of a vape shop on the ground floor whose lithium-ion batteries apparently decided that 170 years of architectural endurance was quite long enough. The Drinker's caption, delivered with the laconic precision of a man who has seen one too many Hollywood abominations and lived to tell the tale in a voice like gravel soaked in single malt: “Well, that sucks.”

One must, in the interests of intellectual honesty, offer a partial salute to Will Jordan, the purportedly inebriated fellow behind the Critical Drinker persona. He is no Carlyle thundering from the pulpit, nor even a latter-day Orwell sharpening his nib on the hypocrisies of the age. His métier is the YouTube monologue—half film criticism, half Glaswegian therapy session—wherein he dissects the corpse of modern cinema with the cheerful brutality of a pathologist who has long since given up expecting miracles. Yet here he is, turning that same unflinching gaze upon a real-world obscenity, and doing so in three words that land like a well-aimed brick. No hand-wringing editorials, no appeals to heritage quangos; just the blunt recognition that something irreplaceable has been vaporised (forgive the pun) by something utterly disposable. In an era when every minor outrage spawns a ten-part podcast series, Jordan’s restraint is almost heroic. He reminds us that satire need not be elaborate; sometimes a shrug and a “well, that sucks” will suffice to expose the absurdity of it all. One suspects the man himself would raise a glass to the observation, mutter something unprintable about council planners, and return to eviscerating the latest Marvel offering. Partial appreciation, then: the Drinker sees clearly where others merely squint through the smoke.

But let us linger a moment longer on the ruins, because the real joke is not the fire itself but the grotesque inevitability of it. Picture the scene: more than 250 firefighters battling through the night, Glasgow Central Station paralysed, trains cancelled, commuters herded like bewildered sheep, and the First Minister himself turning up for the obligatory photo opportunity, face arranged in the correct mask of solemnity. All because a building that had survived two world wars, economic depressions, and the aesthetic vandalism of the 1960s finally met its match in a retail unit peddling flavoured nicotine to the disaffected youth of 2026. One is reminded of those old music-hall routines where the straight man builds a magnificent edifice only for the comic to wander in with a match. Except here the comic is the entire modern commercial ethos, and the match is battery-powered.

The deeper lament, the one that curls like cigar smoke through any honest reckoning, concerns the relentless, almost gleeful proliferation of these vape emporia in the historic cores of our cities. They sprout like toadstools after rain—cheap leases, quick turnover, shelves groaning with pastel-coloured pods that promise escape from the very drabness they help create. Once upon a time, the great streets of Glasgow, Manchester, Edinburgh were lined with institutions that at least pretended to permanence: banks with marble halls, department stores with pneumatic tubes, public houses with etched glass and mahogany that whispered of continuity. Now the ground floors are colonised by the great god Vape, whose liturgy consists of aerosol and impulse purchase. The result is not merely aesthetic; it is a form of architectural assisted suicide. A Victorian façade, designed to endure the ages, is retrofitted with extractor fans and emergency lighting that somehow never quite meets the regulations when it matters. The building survives the Blitz, only to be brought low by a business model predicated on disposability. The irony is so thick one could bottle it and sell it as limited-edition e-juice: “Heritage Haze – with notes of civic negligence and quiet despair.”

And who, in this satirical passion play, bears the collective blame? Not the individual shopkeeper, poor soul, who in many cases had only just taken the keys (the latest proprietor, we are told, had owned the place a mere fortnight before his dreams went up in literal smoke). No, the finger points at the broader congregation of enablers: the planning committees who waved through the leases with the cheerful insouciance of men who have never had to live with the consequences; the property owners who prefer a steady trickle of vape-shop rent to the costly bother of proper stewardship; the vaping industry itself, that curious offspring of Big Tobacco’s rebranding exercise, which has convinced regulators that what the inner cities really need is more places to inhale strawberry fog. They form a sort of unholy trinity of short-termism—council, landlord, vendor—each convinced that the next quarterly return justifies mortgaging another slice of the past. The trope is as old as cities themselves: the barbarians are not at the gates; they are inside, signing the tenancy agreement and installing mood lighting.

One can almost hear the late Clive James chuckling from whatever celestial cocktail bar he now frequents, martini in one hand, cigarette in the other (the old-fashioned combustible sort, naturally). He spent a lifetime skewering the pretensions of television, of celebrity, of cultural decline, always with that trademark blend of erudition and mordant glee. He would have recognised this Glasgow vignette instantly: the grand Victorian pile, the modern banal intrusion, the inevitable conflagration, the subsequent official inquiries that will produce a report no one reads. “Well, that sucks,” indeed. It is the sound of a civilisation quietly admitting that it can no longer be bothered to maintain the stage on which its own drama is performed.

And so the rubble is cleared, the insurance forms are filled, and in due course another unit will rise—perhaps another vape shop, perhaps a nail bar, perhaps one of those ubiquitous chicken outlets that seem to multiply faster than the bacteria they occasionally harbour. The sandstone will be replaced by something cheaper, shinier, more 'fit for purpose.' The tourists will still photograph the station, the commuters will grumble, and the press will file another dispatch from the trenches. But something small and vital will have been lost: not merely a building, but the quiet assumption that some things are meant to outlast us. In the end, that is the real joke, the one that stings longest. History reduced to ash by a product whose entire selling point is that it leaves no trace—except, of course, when it does.

Anyway, as the Critical Drinker himself would lament, that's all I've got for today … go away now.