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.

STRICTLY ARMAGEDDON

The Buggles, those forgotten prophets of 1979, told us video killed the radio star. What they lacked was the courage to finish the sentence: it also disembowelled dignity, castrated seriousness, and left the body politic performing an endless, desperate lap-dance for the algorithm. Yesterday provided the definitive demonstration. While the Middle East teetered on the edge of a conflict that even the most optimistic Foreign Office mandarin is describing as “rather concerning,” more than forty Members of Parliament gathered in the sunlit atrium of Portcullis House. Their purpose was not to debate, legislate, or even pretend to understand the gathering storm. No. They had come to dance. Under the expert tutelage of Angela Rippon – that ageless doyenne who once delivered the news with the gravity of a hanging judge – and sundry other emissaries from the glittering demimonde of Strictly Come Dancing, the Speaker of the House of Commons himself, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, took to the floor like a man who had mistaken Armageddon for the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.

One pictures the scene with the sort of appalled fascination usually reserved for motorway pile-ups. Briefcases cast aside, red boxes momentarily abandoned, the faint squeak of patent leather on polished stone as grown adults – including the Shadow Culture Secretary, a Conservative backbencher or two, and a fresh-minted Green – practised their Latin walks and Cuban breaks. All this while emergency flights were being scrambled from Oman and the Prime Minister prepared for questions he would no doubt answer with the usual masterclass in constructive vagueness. The stated rationale? “Promoting health and wellbeing.” 

One wonders what precise ailment afflicts our legislators that can only be cured by learning to spot their turns as the world learns to duck and cover. Perhaps it is the creeping suspicion that their actual jobs have become optional. This is not mere bad optics. This is a philosophical declaration, delivered in sequins and 4/4 time. It announces, with choreographed clarity, that in contemporary Britain the political class has given up any pretence of being serious people at serious moments. They have become content creators first and representatives second. The cha-cha is not an aberration; it is the logical endpoint of a system that rewards visibility over vigilance, performance over prudence. While history prepares to rhyme with something far nastier than 1939, our tribunes have decided the nation needs better core strength and improved posture.

 

One almost admires the audacity. It takes a special kind of tone-deafness to treat the brink of war as an opportunity for light entertainment – and then wrap the whole grotesque exercise in the sanctimonious gauze of public health. The comparison with Nero is now so obvious it feels almost vulgar to make it, yet make it we must. At least the original fiddler had the minimal decency to confine his performance to the palace and to accompany himself. Our version has outsourced the soundtrack to the BBC, invited the cameras in, recreated the famous Strictly goodbye flourish with a former newsreader, and then congratulated itself on its commitment to national resilience. Sir Lindsay twirling under the glass atrium is not charming; it is grotesque. It is the visual equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while insisting the band play on – except the band has been replaced by a glitterball, a former EastEnders actress barking instructions about rhythm, and the quiet, lethal knowledge that the clip will trend before the first missile has even left its silo.

What makes the spectacle particularly poisonous is the timing. This is not some quiet Friday afternoon lark during a period of tedious normalcy. This is a nation facing genuine peril being treated to the sight of its supposed leaders perfecting their competitive foxtrot for the evening news. One can imagine the average citizen – the nurse on night shift, the small business owner staring at rising insurance premiums, the parent wondering what sort of world their children will inherit – watching this footage and experiencing something close to existential whiplash. 

Is this really the best we can do? Is this the summit of our political imagination? Governance reduced to its purest modern form: not legislation, but likes. Not leadership, but content. The dispatch box has been replaced by the dance floor, and the nation is expected to applaud the transformation. The deeper cut is this: the dance is not harmless. It is symptomatic of a ruling class that has internalised the values of celebrity culture so completely that it can no longer distinguish between statesmanship and showmanship. They have learned the lesson of the age with impressive thoroughness: in the attention economy, being seen to do something – anything – is preferable to the quiet, unglamorous business of actually doing something. Seriousness does not trend. Gravitas gets no retweets. Far easier to master the rumba than to master a coherent foreign policy. Far safer to shake parliamentary hips than to risk an actual decision.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when British public life still retained a certain austere dignity. Crises were met with grim resolve, not jazz hands. The moving image, when it captured our leaders, showed them at work rather than at play. That Britain understood something our current crop of performers have forgotten: that some moments demand stillness, silence, and the saving grace of not making an exhibition of oneself. Instead we have this: a parliament that has become a branch of light entertainment, a Speaker who appears to believe the road to national resilience runs through the tango, and a political class so desperate for relevance that it will dance while the world burns if it thinks the clip might go viral. 

The Buggles were wrong after all. Video did not merely kill the radio star. It killed the Republic, and taught the corpse to do the cha-cha first.

NOT YOUR FINEST HOUR, KEIR …

One can only imagine the scene in the White House briefing room this week, or rather, one can imagine it all too vividly because it has become the signature choreography of the age: President Donald J. Trump, hair defying both gravity and good taste, gesturing with the expansive certainty of a man who has never met a metaphor he couldn’t mangle, announcing to the world that Sir Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill. This, mind you, because the British Prime Minister had the temerity to hesitate before letting American bombers use UK bases to pound Iran in the latest instalment of what history will no doubt call the Perpetual Middle Eastern Misunderstanding. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump added, for those slow on the uptake, as though the ghost of the old bulldog might materialise in a cloud of cigar smoke and brandy fumes to apologise for Starmer’s shocking lack of spine.

The remark is vintage Trump: part insult, part historical fan-fiction, and wholly revealing of the peculiar American love affair with Winston Churchill that has been running, uninterrupted and unexamined, since roughly 1940. It is an obsession so complete, so sentimental, and so detached from the actual country of Britain that one half expects the next Republican convention to open with a choir of red-hatted patriots belting out “Land of Hope and Glory” while waving little plastic V-signs. Churchill, to the American imagination, is not merely a politician; he is the Platonic ideal of the British Prime Minister, the default setting to which every subsequent occupant of 10 Downing Street is supposed to revert like a malfunctioning satnav. Cigar? Check. Brandy? Check. Ability to stare down tyranny while cracking wise in a plummy accent? Double check. Anything less and the poor fellow is immediately diagnosed with terminal feebleness.

One wonders, in the driest possible tone, what the real Winston Churchill would have made of being turned into this transatlantic mascot. The man himself was half-American, of course, which perhaps explains the enduring romance; blood will out, even when diluted by several generations of English boarding schools. But the Churchill Americans adore is not the complicated, brandy-soaked, empire-clinging, Gallipoli-fumbling, Bengal-famine-adjacent Churchill known to actual historians. No, theirs is the Hollywood version: Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, growling defiance from the bunker while the violins swell and the audience reaches for its Kleenex. He is John Wayne in a three-piece suit, saving civilisation single-handed because that is what Americans expect their British allies to do—preferably without asking awkward questions about logistics, public opinion, or the small matter of a sovereign parliament.

Starmer, poor sod, never stood a chance. Here is a man who looks like he was assembled from the spare parts of a particularly cautious solicitor and a mid-level NHS administrator. He speaks in the measured tones of someone who has read the risk assessment twice and still isn’t convinced. He refused, initially at least, to turn Diego Garcia and other British real estate into an American forward operating base for the latest round of desert fireworks. One can almost hear the collective American intake of breath: Not Churchill. As though Churchill would have leapt from his grave, lit a Romeo y Julieta the size of a baseball bat, and personally piloted a B-52 over Tehran while muttering something devastating about the Ayatollah’s mother. The fact that the actual Churchill spent much of 1940 begging Franklin Roosevelt for help—and promising, in effect, that Britain would become America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier—seems never to intrude on the fantasy. History, like so many other inconvenient things, is what you make it on cable news.

The deeper comedy, of course, is that Britain itself has been quietly trying to retire Churchill for decades. To the average Briton he remains a national treasure, certainly, but one kept in a glass case marked “Do Not Touch—Fragile Imperial Ego Inside.” We wheel him out for tourists, for VE Day anniversaries, and for those moments when we need to remind ourselves we once mattered. But we do not expect our prime ministers to channel him any more than we expect them to wear top hats and ride to hounds. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not in the business of re-fighting the Battle of Britain; it is in the business of not bankrupting the NHS and trying to pretend that net zero is compatible with keeping the lights on. When Trump demands Churchillian defiance, what he is really demanding is that Britain should once again subordinate its interests to America’s without complaint, all while wearing a funny hat and saying 'jolly good, bravo' at appropriate intervals. It is less a foreign policy than a costume drama.

And herein lies the exquisite sardonic twist. Trump, the man who once kept a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office like a religious relic, has now discovered that the British have committed the ultimate betrayal: they have failed to remain frozen in 1940 for his convenience. The special relationship, that most elastic of diplomatic fictions, is revealed once again to be special in the way a one-sided marriage is special—endlessly flattering to the larger partner, endlessly exasperating to the smaller. Starmer’s cautious multilateralism is not weakness; it is the weary realism of a middle-ranking power that has seen too many wars sold as moral crusades and ended as expensive regrets. But realism has never played well in Washington, where foreign policy is conducted as a cross between a Marvel movie and a real-estate negotiation. If the British will not supply the heroic soundtrack, then clearly they are letting the side down.

One pictures Churchill himself, somewhere in the afterlife cigar lounge, raising a glass with that trademark mixture of amusement and contempt. He knew better than most how fickle great-power friendships could be. He knew that empires rise and fall, that alliances are temporary, and that the Americans—charming, generous, and utterly convinced of their own destiny—would eventually tire of the old country’s diminishing returns. He might even have sympathised with Starmer’s predicament: the need to balance domestic politics, parliamentary arithmetic, and the small matter of not being dragged into someone else’s war on a Tuesday afternoon. But sympathy, like irony, is wasted on those who prefer their history in primary colours.

So here we are, with President Trump wielding Churchill like a club and the British Prime Minister politely declining to play the role of plucky understudy. Another American president has discovered that Britain is not a theme park. Another British prime minister has been informed he is not the second coming of the man who saved Western civilisation. And the special relationship, like so many other cherished illusions, staggers on, slightly more ridiculous than before. No Winston Churchill? Quite right. There was only one, and he had the good sense to die in 1965 before he could be reduced to a rhetorical prop in a White House briefing. 

The rest of us—Americans, Britons, and anyone else foolish enough to watch the news—must muddle through with the politicians we actually have. They may lack the rhetoric, the cigars, and the V-signs, but at least they are alive. In an age of perpetual crisis, that is perhaps the most heroic quality left.