THE LIVER DOES NOT CALL BRUSSELS

The European Union, that grand confederation of good intentions and better stationery, has lately been reminding us that history does not so much repeat itself as develop a mild stammer. One had rather hoped, after the last century’s more theatrical experiments in central planning—those involving uniforms, mass graves and the occasional five-year plan that somehow produced neither the five nor the plan—that the continent might have learned to keep its hands off other people’s constitutions. 

Apparently not. The old disease has returned, not with jackboots and torchlight parades, but with briefing papers, procedural motions and the soft, insistent language of “harmonisation.” It is the same malignancy, merely better dressed and fluent in three official languages before breakfast. We once believed the tumour had been excised. In 1945 the visible growths were cut away; in 1989 the remaining metastases in the east were starved of oxygen. People of a certain optimistic turn even spoke of the end of history, as though the organism had finally achieved permanent remission. What they overlooked was that the diseased cells had never quite gone. The belief that a centre should know better than the periphery, that nations are inconvenient local colour rather than living tissues, that citizens require constant guidance against their own untidy preferences—these ideas survived in the deeper marrow. They merely waited for a more respectable host. The European Union obliged.

A healthy organism, as any biologist who has not yet been appointed to a Brussels working group will tell you, is not a dictatorship of the central nervous system. The liver does not telephone the pancreas for permission to metabolise. The individual cell goes about its quiet business of division and repair without waiting for a directive from the Commission. So it is, or ought to be, with societies. Families raise children, companies invent things that people actually want, towns mend their own roads, and nations attend to the few matters that genuinely cannot be handled lower down—borders, defence, the occasional outbreak of piracy. When one level begins to devour the others, claiming superior wisdom and an unlimited mandate to correct every anomaly, we are no longer watching governance. We are watching oncology.

Poland, that perennial canary in Europe’s coal mine, has lately provided the diagnostic scan. The government of Donald Tusk—Brussels’ favourite pupil, ever eager to earn a gold star for rule-of-law homework—has found itself in a brisk constitutional scuffle with the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. A judge whom the president had declined to swear in announced the suspension of the Tribunal’s president; police materialised; the actual president of the republic turned his aircraft around mid-flight and hurried home, employing language not customarily found in the Treaty on European Union. Liberal legal scholars who ordinarily have little time for the Tribunal’s previous leadership nevertheless observed that the legal basis for the suspension was, to put it gently, non-existent. One side calls it restoration of the rule of law. The other side calls it a coup with better lighting. Both may be speaking more truth than they intend.

There is a certain historical symmetry that would be almost comic if it were not so thoroughly exhausted. Poland is the country where the last great European catastrophe began in 1939, the country subsequently shared between two competing totalitarian brands, the country whose shipyard workers later helped crack the Soviet edifice from within. If any national immune system still carries the antibodies, it is the Polish one. That the current drama should unfold under the approving gaze of the European Commission only heightens the irony. When the ballot box and the existing institutions refuse to produce the preferred result, one simply rearranges the institutions. The vocabulary has been updated—no more talk of living space or class enemies, only of “shared values,” “disinformation” and the urgent need to prevent democratic backsliding by means that look remarkably like democratic backsliding—but the underlying appetite remains familiar.

The people driving this process are not cartoon villains. That is the truly unsettling part. They sincerely believe they are the grown-ups in the room, protecting the citizenry from its own provincial instincts. They are the sort of competent, well-briefed individuals who would have made excellent middle managers in any number of previous regimes, provided the stationery was of sufficient quality. Totalitarianism has never required monsters. It requires only people convinced of their own rectitude and a system that has gradually removed the awkward checks that once stood in the way.

There is, of course, an alternative. It involves the radical notion that a state might confine itself to the few things only a state can do, and leave the rest alone. Security, justice, borders, defence—those are the sovereign functions. Everything else can safely be returned to the organs that evolved to handle them: individuals, families, companies, towns. A smaller state, but one that is actually present when required, rather than omnipresent and largely useless. This is not nostalgia for some golden age of nationalism; it is simply the organisational logic of any organism that intends to survive. Distributed systems tend to endure. Centralised ones tend to produce impressive monuments and unfortunate body counts.

One remains, against considerable evidence, mildly optimistic. The organism has been this way before. It carries the scars and, more importantly, the memory. Information now circulates outside the approved channels with irritating efficiency. In Poland, in Hungary, in parts of France and even, occasionally, in the more restive corners of the older member states, people are beginning to notice the pattern. They may not yet have the precise vocabulary, but they feel the pressure of the growing centre. Antibodies are stirring. Whether they will prove sufficient this time is the only question that matters. 

History, as Clive James himself might have observed while reviewing a particularly earnest television documentary, has a long memory and a dry sense of humour. It would be a pity if Europe provided it with another punchline.

SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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. He openly sent himself up on Extras with Ricky Gervais, and in animated form as Avery Bullock in American Dad, as well as a marvelously flamboyant theatre director on Fraiser. In an age of actors who mistake volume for intensity, he remained the master of the quiet authority that needs no amplification, without taking himself too seriously. 

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.