ABBOTT GOES FROM CALAMITY … TO CLAIRTY?!

There comes a moment in every thoughtful person’s life when the universe stages a practical joke so exquisite that one is forced to question not merely one’s political compass but the very integrity of one’s sense of smell. Mine arrived, as these things tend to do, while scrolling through the usual digital slurry and encountering the latest pronouncement from Diane Abbott. The Russian threat, she declared with the serene confidence of someone who once calculated the annual salary of a policeman at roughly the price of a decent sandwich, is a “Nato fiction.” The war in Ukraine, she has elsewhere observed, amounts to little more than a Nato campaign against Russia. And here I sit, a man who has spent decades regarding Ms Abbott’s public utterances with the same wary fascination one reserves for a distant relative who insists on demonstrating card tricks after three glasses of wine, forced to murmur, against every instinct of self-preservation: she may, on this particular point, be onto something.

Let us first pay proper respects to the long and distinguished record that makes any such agreement feel like an act of intellectual self-harm. Diane Abbott has, over the years, perfected the art of the political stumble with a consistency that borders on the athletic. There was the immortal 2017 radio performance in which the cost of recruiting ten thousand extra police officers floated freely between three hundred thousand pounds—thirty quid a head, if one is feeling generous—and eighty million, a figure that would still have left each officer roughly on the financial footing of a Victorian chimney sweep. One half expected her to revise it further downward until the entire force could be paid in bus tickets and kind words. Then there was the serene suggestion that Chairman Mao had, on balance, done more good than harm, a claim delivered with the air of someone reviewing a particularly ambitious restaurant rather than a regime whose body count would have given even the more industrious twentieth-century monsters pause. 

Add the taxi tweet, the Finnish nurses who had apparently never met a black person and were therefore unsuitable for multicultural Hackney, the private-school decision for her own son after years of denouncing such choices as indefensible hypocrisy, the mojito on the Overground (a moment of pure proletarian solidarity with the tinny), the mismatched shoes on election day, and the letter in which Jewish, Irish and Traveller experiences of prejudice were briskly filed under the same heading as the tribulations of redheads. One could almost admire the range. Most politicians specialise in one or two reliable howlers; Abbott treats the entire spectrum as her personal playground.

And then, of course, there is the romance. In the late 1970s, while the rest of Britain was discovering the joys of inflation and punk, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn embarked upon what can only be described as the least erotic political liaison since John Major decided he rather fancied a late night Currie. She has herself recounted how their great romantic outing consisted of a drive to Highgate Cemetery so that Jeremy might proudly display the tomb of Karl Marx. One pictures the scene: a young woman dressed for what she fondly imagined might be a wine bar, only to find herself standing in the drizzle before a monument to dialectical materialism while her suitor beamed as if he had just presented her with the Koh-i-Noor. There was, apparently, a motorbike tour of East Germany as well—because nothing says passion like the German Democratic Republic in winter. The relationship, she notes, eventually collapsed under the weight of Jeremy’s discovery that politics occupied ninety-nine per cent of his available attention, leaving her the unenviable one per cent. One struggles to imagine the domestic conversation. “Darling, shall we go out?” “Yes—Highgate, and bring a notebook.” It is the sort of courtship that makes one grateful for the invention of the dating app, if only so that future generations might be spared such ideological package holidays.

All of which brings us, by a route as circuitous and poorly signposted as one of Abbott’s own statistical explanations, to the present discomfort. For years I have watched the Ukrainian conflict with the growing suspicion that the official narrative has acquired the same self-sealing quality once reserved for certain theological disputes. Nato’s eastward expansion, the broken assurances of the 1990s, the transformation of a brutal regional war into a quasi-existential crusade complete with moral blackmail and escalating weaponry. Abbott’s formulation is characteristically blunt and lacking in diplomatic polish; she has never been accused of excessive nuance. Yet the insistence that every expression of caution about endless escalation, about the wisdom of treating a nuclear-armed power as a cartoon villain, or about the domestic cost of perpetual rearmament constitutes “Kremlin talking points” that somehow synchronises perfectly with American electoral cycles and presidential preferences, a certain scepticism is not only permissible but obligatory.

I do not suggest for one moment that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood agrarian reformer, nor that the corpses in Bucha and Mariupol are optical illusions. Reality is under no obligation to be tidy. But the spectacle of Western capitals discovering, rather late in the day, that Russia constitutes an existential menace precisely when budgets need inflating and political capital needs harvesting, has a familiar odour. Abbott, for all her habitual clumsiness, has simply refused to pretend that the emperor’s new strategic concept is anything other than a rather threadbare set of underpants. In doing so she has, against the odds and against her own considerable body of previous work, momentarily aligned herself with the awkward, unfashionable observation that great-power rivalries are rarely as pure as the press releases claim.

It is a deeply unsettling sensation. Agreeing with Diane Abbott feels rather like discovering that the relative who cannot count change has correctly predicted the winner of the Grand National by studying the horses’ names for Star Trek references. One wants to check the calculation three times, then four. Yet here we are. The woman who once reduced police recruitment to the price of a takeaway coffee has, on the matter of Nato’s Ukrainian entanglement and the convenient inflation of the Russian peril, managed to sound more lucid than half the commentariat currently demanding that we all dig deeper for the next tranche of munitions. 

The universe, as I say, has a sense of humour. It is not always a kind one, and it rarely bothers with punchlines that flatter the listener. Still, one must occasionally tip one’s hat to the absurd. Even if the hat in question was last seen on the wrong foot.

STARMER: GOOD RIDDANCE … BAD OMENS ??

There are moments in the long, grey afternoon of public life when the universe, usually so indifferent to human vanities, decides to offer a small, dry smile. Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he is quitting Parliament to pursue 'international affairs' is one such moment. After being gently but firmly shown the door of Downing Street by his own party, the former Prime Minister now prepares to take his leave of the green benches as well. One notes the timing with a certain aesthetic satisfaction. The man who once promised to stabilise the nation has succeeded mainly in stabilising the revolving door of British leadership.

It is difficult to survey Starmer’s career without a sense of mild astonishment that so much earnestness produced so little lasting architecture. Professionally, he specialised in the careful avoidance of definition. He arrived as the great resetter of Labour, the man who would make the party electable by the simple expedient of looking serious in spectacles. He left having demonstrated that seriousness, when unaccompanied by either vision or luck, can become a form of elaborate self-parody. His government managed the rare feat of making the previous chaotic decade look, in retrospect, almost purposeful. U-turns were executed with the solemnity of state funerals. Immigration numbers continued their determined upward trajectory while the language surrounding them grew ever more circular. The Southport aftermath revealed a government more fluent in the vocabulary of 'misinformation' than in the more awkward business of public order and public grief. Censorship, or its more fashionable cousin 'online safety,' advanced under the banner of protection, as if the British public were a collection of delicate children who might otherwise encounter an unauthorised opinion.

Personally, the portrait was hardly more flattering. Starmer projected the demeanour of a senior partner in a particularly humourless firm of solicitors who had somehow wandered into politics and decided to stay out of professional courtesy. There was the celebrated business of free spectacles and free suits, those small tokens of largesse that somehow managed to look both petty and revealing at once. Hypocrisy, when practised at this level, acquires a certain bureaucratic dignity. One did not so much dislike Starmer as find oneself increasingly unable to believe in the three-dimensionality of the figure before the cameras. He seemed less a man than a carefully briefed outline of a man, forever promising to 'deliver' while the contents of the package remained a closely guarded secret even from himself.

The satisfaction at his political demise is therefore not purely partisan. It is the quieter pleasure that accompanies the correction of a category error. Britain had, for a brief and expensive interval, mistaken managerial competence for leadership and lawyerly caution for statesmanship. The correction has now been applied, and the former Prime Minister finds himself with time on his hands and a résumé that still looks impressive on certain continents.

Here, however, the smile begins to freeze. Starmer has made it known that his future lies in 'international affairs,' a phrase that in modern political usage often translates as “somewhere with better catering and fewer voters.” The European institutions, the outer reaches of NATO’s civilian apparatus, or the more ethereal altitudes of the World Economic Forum all present themselves as natural destinations for a man of his particular gifts. One can already picture the carefully lit conference rooms, the soft-focus declarations about 'global challenges,' the quiet assumption that the British public, having proved itself insufficiently grateful, might benefit from a little external guidance.

The concern is not that Starmer will fail in such a role. On the contrary. The danger is that he may succeed in the limited, durable way that certain international functionaries do: by treating national electorates as temporary inconveniences rather than the ultimate source of legitimacy. Having been rejected by the country he once governed, he may discover a certain moral clarity in the higher atmosphere of transnational bodies, where the air is thinner and the accountability more diffuse. From those altitudes it becomes easier to regard the stubbornness of the British people as a problem to be managed rather than a verdict to be accepted. Revenge, in such circles, is rarely announced. It arrives instead as a series of well-intentioned frameworks, reporting obligations, and 'shared values' that somehow always seem to constrain the awkward island more than its more enlightened continental partners.

One hopes, of course, that this is mere pessimism. Starmer may simply settle into a comfortable sinecure, write the occasional thoughtful essay, and fade into the kind of well-remunerated obscurity that is the modern politician’s version of a country estate. Yet the pattern of the last few years suggests a residual grievance. The man who could not quite connect with the British public may find it easier to instruct it from abroad. The 'vile little man' of popular caricature may yet prove less little once equipped with the long levers of international bureaucracy.

In the end, the British have exercised their traditional right to grow tired of a leader. The question now is whether that leader, having been shown the door, will content himself with looking for another entrance or will begin designing a larger, more permanent set of keys. History is littered with rejected domestic politicians who discovered a second act in the global conversation. Few of them returned with undiluted affection for the electorates that first dismissed them. Starmer’s next chapter will tell us whether he belongs among their number, or whether, for once, the universe’s small dry smile will prove permanent.

THAT'S WHY MUMS SAY "NO" IN ICELAND

The Icelanders have spoken, and they have spoken with the blunt, brine-scented authority of a people who know the precise difference between a national identity and a regulatory annex. On a grey North Atlantic morning, while the rest of Europe was still debating the precise shade of grey required for the next Commission press release, the voters of Iceland delivered their verdict on the question of whether they should resume accession talks with the European Union. 

They said no. Not with the hysterical flourish of a continental protest march, but with the quiet finality of a fisherman hauling in a net that contains exactly what he expected and nothing he did not. The government’s clever notion of advancing the vote by more than a year, in the apparent belief that a spot of geopolitical weather might panic the island into the waiting arms of Brussels, was met with what can only be described as a giant North Atlantic cod applied vigorously to the collective official face.

One must pause to admire the economy of the gesture. Iceland, that improbable outcrop of lava, saga and stubbornness, has never been particularly interested in being told that its destiny lies in a PowerPoint presentation drafted in a glass building several time zones away. Its culture is not a regional variant of something larger; it is a deliberate, centuries-long experiment in remaining itself. The sagas were not written by committee. The language, that austere and beautiful survival of Old Norse, did not evolve in order to accommodate twenty-seven official translations of a directive on the curvature of bananas. The people who live there have spent a millennium learning how to extract a living from a landscape that regards human ambition with glacial indifference. The idea that this hard-won particularity should now be dissolved into the great bureaucratic consommé of the European project was always going to strike them as a peculiar form of self-harm.

And so they rejected it. They rejected the soft coercion of globalisation dressed up as historical inevitability. They rejected the assumption that national sovereignty is a picturesque anachronism to be retained only in folk museums and tourism brochures. In doing so they performed a small, bracing act of cultural self-respect that ought to make more fashionable capitals shift uncomfortably in their seats. Icelandic culture is not a lifestyle accessory. It is the accumulated result of isolation, literacy, volcanic interruption and an almost unnatural attachment to the idea that a free people ought to decide their own fishing quotas. The cod, in this context, is not merely a fish. It is a symbol of the proposition that some things are not for sale, and that the sea does not recognise the Common Fisheries Policy.

The European Union, of course, took a different view. For years it has regarded the remaining non-members of the north-western fringe with the proprietary interest of a landlord eyeing an empty flat. The pitch is always the same: come inside where it is warm, where the rules are harmonised, where the currency is shared and the destiny is collective. What is left unsaid is that the warmth is institutional, the rules are written by people who will never have to live under the consequences in a small open economy, and the collective destiny has a curious habit of looking remarkably like the destiny preferred by the larger members. The attempt to draw Iceland into the process was less an invitation than an exercise in administrative gravity. Assimilation was the unspoken destination; the referendum was merely the procedural obstacle.

At the centre of this project stands Ursula von der Leyen, a figure who has perfected the art of looking simultaneously earnest and slightly surprised that anyone might disagree with her. One imagines her receiving the news from Reykjavík with the expression of a headmistress who has just been informed that the prefects have voted against the new school uniform. There is something almost poignant in the spectacle: the President of the Commission, that tireless evangelist for ever-closer union, confronted by an island that has looked at the prospectus and decided the boarding fees are too high and the house rules intolerable. The embarrassment is not merely political; it is aesthetic. To be rebuffed by a nation whose entire population could fit inside a medium-sized European city, and whose principal export has historically been fish and literature, is to be reminded that scale is not the same thing as authority, and that moral seriousness does not automatically confer the right to absorb one’s neighbours.

Von der Leyen’s difficulty is structural. She embodies an institution that has come to regard national difference as a transitional inconvenience rather than a permanent feature of the human landscape. The Icelanders, by contrast, appear to regard it as the entire point. Their rejection was not a fit of xenophobia or a romantic attachment to autarky. It was a cold-eyed calculation that the unique character of their society – the language that still reads like the Middle Ages, the democratic habits forged in isolation, the economic dependence on resources that Brussels would prefer to manage from a distance – was worth more than the dubious consolations of membership. In an age when globalisation is sold as both inevitable and benign, they have insisted on the right to remain particular.

The rest of us are left with the mildly unedifying spectacle of a superstate that cannot quite believe it has been declined by a country whose most famous literary achievement involves blood feuds and poetic justice. The cod has been delivered. The face of official Europe, and in particular the carefully composed features of Ursula von der Leyen, bears the imprint. One suspects the bruise will fade. The principle, rather less so. Iceland has simply declined to be improved. In the current climate, that counts as a minor miracle of good taste.