STARMER FALLS OFF HIS SILICON HORSE

In the great tradition of British political leadership, one occasionally encounters a figure so perfectly suited to the role of national disappointment that it seems almost cruel to mock him. Almost. Then one remembers that this particular specimen, Keir Starmer, has appointed himself the nation’s nanny-in-chief, determined to shield the youth of Britain from the terrible peril of TikTok while leaving them perfectly free to inherit his own masterclass in mediocrity. One pictures the man now: that permanently startled expression, like a provincial solicitor who has just discovered his filing cabinet has been infested with something progressive, peering out from behind the curtains of Downing Street as if the electorate might at any moment storm the gates demanding actual governance. Instead, they receive a social-media ban. How very Starmer. How very, pathetically, him.
Let us be clear from the outset. This is not the action of a serious statesman weighing evidence and public mood. This is the reflexive spasm of a weak-willed authoritarian who has spent his adult life confusing the removal of civil liberties with moral seriousness. Starmer, that hollow man with the face of a disappointed supply teacher and the political instincts of a weather vane in a hurricane, has reversed himself yet again. Two years ago he was dismissing the very idea of age-appropriate smartphone edicts. Now, with the polls sagging like his own jowls on a Monday morning, he is suddenly the valiant protector of the nation’s teenagers from the horrors of short-form video. One wonders what particular blend of focus-group despair and parental sob-story finally penetrated that thick skull of his. Probably the same blend that convinced him Brexit was both a good idea and a bad idea simultaneously, depending on which way the wind was blowing through Islington.
The timing, of course, is exquisite in its cynicism. Days before a by-election, with the vultures already circling his leadership, Sir Keir decides his legacy shall be the state telling parents they are too stupid to manage their own children’s screen time. This from a man whose own offspring, one gathers, navigated the digital world without apparent catastrophe. But then consistency was never Starmer’s strong suit. The fellow flip-flops with such elegant regularity that one half-expects him to announce a ban on political consistency itself, lest some dangerous principle take root in the Labour Party.
What a pathetic creature he is, when you look at him squarely. There he stands, the very picture of out-of-touch bewilderment: a knight of the realm who achieved his highest office by promising everything to everyone and then looking wounded when reality proved uncooperative. His idea of bold leadership is to ban the very platforms where the public mocks him most effectively. One can almost hear the internal monologue in that nasal, lawyerly whine: “The people are saying mean things about me on the internet. Quick, pass a law. Make it look caring. Something about the children. The children are always a winner.” Never mind that the evidence for such a sweeping prohibition is about as robust as Starmer’s spine. Correlation, hysteria, and a handful of tragic anecdotes dressed up as causation will do nicely when one’s primary concern is not truth but the desperate preservation of one’s own floundering authority.
Here is a man who rose to prominence by presenting himself as a decent, moderate sort—only to reveal, in office, the soul of a minor bureaucrat convinced that every social ill can be solved by tighter regulation and a sufficiently stern expression. Social media makes teenagers anxious? Ban it. Never mind the evidence that suggests the causal link is, at best, tenuous. Never mind that previous moral panics over everything from penny dreadfuls to video nasties eventually looked ridiculous. Never mind, above all, that British parents might just be capable of exercising judgment without the Prime Minister inserting his clammy handshake into their domestic arrangements.
No, Starmer knows better. Starmer, who looks as though he has never had an original or dangerous thought in his life, has decided the nation requires his personal intervention to prevent the young from encountering unapproved opinions, unflattering memes, or—God forbid—laughter at his expense. One imagines him in the small hours, pacing Number 10 in his sensible slippers, muttering about 'harmful content' while ignoring the rather larger harm inflicted on a nation's personal liberty by his own government’s incompetence. The economy stutters, the borders leak, the public services groan, and the Prime Minister’s big idea is to stop sixteen-year-olds from doom-scrolling. Magnificent. The ship is listing badly, the captain is rearranging the deckchairs on his phone, and the passengers are to be denied access to the shipping forecasts.
This is authoritarianism for the terminally timid. The sort of man who needs facial recognition technology and age-verification schemes to feel safe in his own skin. The sort of man who believes the state should play the role of disappointed parent to an entire generation because he himself lacks the courage to address genuine problems. Starmer does not lead; he manages decline with the anxious fastidiousness of a man who has never quite recovered from being mildly unpopular at school. His entire bearing screams “please don’t shout at me.” Unfortunately for him, the British public has rather a lot to shout about, and the louder they shout on X and elsewhere, the more frantically he reaches for the off-switch.
The unintended consequences, naturally, will be vast and hilarious. Teenagers, being teenagers, will circumvent the ban with the effortless ingenuity that Starmer himself so conspicuously lacks. The law will be mocked, evaded, and ultimately discredited—teaching the young an excellent lesson in the futility of official edicts, if nothing else. Meanwhile, the real issues—family breakdown, educational failure, a culture that has lost confidence in itself—will remain untouched by this pathetic gesture. But never mind all that. Sir Keir will have his legacy: the man who tried to save Britain’s youth from Instagram while presiding over their inheritance of a diminished nation.
One almost feels sorry for the fellow. Almost. Then one remembers the expression on his face whenever he is required to answer a difficult question—the slight pursing of the lips, the hunted look in the eyes, the air of a man who wishes the whole business of democracy could be conducted via pre-approved talking points and a reliable majority. This is not leadership. This is the last refuge of a political nonentity who has run out of ideas and is now reduced to banning other people’s ideas instead.
In the end, Keir Starmer’s social-media panic reveals him perfectly: a hollow, authoritarian lightweight, terrified of public opinion, contemptuous of parental autonomy, and utterly adrift in a country that increasingly sees him for what he is—a temporary embarrassment with delusions of moral grandeur. The teenagers will be fine. It is the adults who inflicted this man upon them who should be seeking therapy. Preferably offline.

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE" (2026)

One approaches a new Masters of the Universe film with the wary optimism of a man entering a revival meeting who has already been saved once, in 1987, and remembers the collection plate. Travis Knight’s version arrives clad in $170–200 million of shiny new armour, yet somehow contrives to look like the most expensively produced meme yet committed to celluloid.

The casting, one must concede, is mostly splendid. Nicholas Galitzine makes a perfectly serviceable Prince Adam/He-Man: broad of shoulder, square of jaw, and possessed of that slightly bewildered sincerity required when one is obliged to deliver the line “I have the power” without audible inverted commas. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is the sort of baroque, eye-rolling villainy that keeps supporting actors in caviar; one half-expects him to demand a close-up on his exposed cranium. Idris Elba brings gravitas to Man-At-Arms as if he had wandered in from a better film, while the supporting Heroic Warriors are competently represented by a roster of faces one is vaguely pleased to see again. In short, the players do what they can with the material, which is rather more than the material does with them.

Knight directs with a certain visual brio; the action sequences, particularly the set-pieces around Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain, possess a chunky, Saturday-morning-cartoon grandeur that occasionally approaches the sublime. When He-Man swings that power sword, the screen knows it has been swung. And then there is the contribution of Brian May, who has lent his guitar to Daniel Pemberton’s score. One feels the spirit of Flash Gordon nodding approvingly from the asteroid belt. When those familiar riffs crash in over a climactic battle, one is briefly transported to a purer, more innocent age of heroic nonsense. For these mercies we should be grateful.

Yet the film’s virtues are repeatedly undone by its desperate need to be liked. The humour is pure Marvel house style: quippy, self-referential, and fatally convinced of its own adorableness. One half-expects Rocket Raccoon to wander through demanding a share of the royalties. The pacing lurches like a man trying to dance at two weddings simultaneously - one on Eternia, one in a focus-grouped boardroom. And the nostalgic tone is ladled on with the subtlety of Skeletor’s Havoc Staff. The nadir arrives when the film itself stages the dreaded “Hey, ey, yeah, what’s going on?” meme, complete with dancing supporting cast. At this point one realises the picture is not merely winking at the audience; it is doing that awful modern thing of elbowing them repeatedly in the ribs while shouting “Do you get it? Do you ?, Do you get it?”. 

Compare this, unfavourably if you will, to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. Those pictures understood that the secret to making cosmic absurdity work is not to apologise for it but to commit. They balanced sarcasm with sincerity. Knight’s Masters cannot decide whether it wants to be a knowing pastiche or a sincere myth, and so ends up achieving neither. It is the cinematic equivalent of a man wearing a vintage He-Man T-shirt under an ironic Hawaiian shirt.

Even more damning is the comparison with the much-derided 1987 Cannon film. That picture was low-budget, cheesy, and corny, yes. But it had the courage of its own ridiculous convictions. It took itself relatively seriously, drew on the darker undertones of the original MOTU mini-comics, and memorably gave us Frank Langella’s towering, Shakespearean Skeletor - a performance of such lip-smacking grandeur that one almost believed the character might actually conquer the universe if only the special effects budget would allow. Langella understood that the only way to play a skull-faced tyrant is as if he were Richard III with better lighting. The new film’s Skeletor, for all Leto’s scenery-chewing, feels like a supporting act in his own origin story.

Then there is the inevitable messaging about toxic masculinity—a weary hangover from the 2023 Barbie film, as if every children’s property must now submit to the same corporate sensitivity seminar. He-Man, once the unapologetic beefcake saviour of Eternia, is now obliged to deliver lectures on emotional intelligence between sword fights. One almost longs for the days when the greatest ideological threat was simply having 'the power.'

In the end, this new Masters of the Universe is perfectly competent corporate entertainment: loud, colourful, intermittently thrilling, and hollow at the core. For He-Man and his friends to be taken seriously as a modern retro property, it must first take itself more seriously. Irony is easy. Earnestness, properly handled, is revolutionary. By the power of Grayskull, perhaps next time they will remember. 

ANTHONY HEAD (1954 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Anthony Head, that unflappable purveyor of tweedy gravitas and instant-coffee seduction, has finally staked his last demon at the age of 71. Or perhaps he simply stepped through a hellmouth for one last research trip. Either way, British television lost its most reliably unruffled uncle figure, the man who could make demonic apocalypses feel like overdue library fines.

Head’s career was a masterclass in quiet competence dressed up as mild eccentricity. To a generation raised on American teen drama, he was Rupert Giles, the Watcher in Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a librarian who fought evil with obscure texts, sarcastic asides, and the occasional reluctant sword. Where lesser performers might have camped up the role, Head played it with the bone-dry exasperation of a man who had seen the end of the world and still worried about filing. He brought Oxbridge gravitas to a show that cheerfully mixed Valley Girl slang with ancient Sumerian prophecies, proving that a well-timed “dear lord” could deflate even the most operatic forces of darkness.

Later he popped up in Doctor Who (having lost out on the role of the Doctor himself to Paul McGann in 1996) as the sort of authority figure who made Time Lords seem vaguely irresponsible by comparison. Then came Ted Lasso, where he embodied the genteel English foil to American optimism with such precision that you half-expected him to apologise to the football for any inconvenience caused by being kicked.

Yet for all these cultured accomplishments, Head’s most culturally indelible performance may have been in those interminable 1980s Nescafé Gold Blend advertisements. There he smouldered across the fence at his neighbour with the brooding intensity of a man advertising not merely coffee, but sophisticated continental longing. If his character was as smooth, rich, and devastatingly handsome as the product he was flogging, one wonders why it required five long years—and several million jarred pauses—for him finally to get his leg over. Romance in advertising moved at the pace of a particularly cautious kettle.

Head never quite became a household name in the Hollywood sense, which suited him. He was too intelligent, too wry, too fundamentally English to surrender to the louder demands of stardom. In an age of screaming superheroes and franchise fatigue, he represented something rarer: the quiet dignity of simply turning up, glasses slightly askew, ready to catalogue the end times. The world is a touch less civilised without him.