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.

RAVING LOONIES COME SECOND TO ACTUAL MADNESS

Ah, Britain, that once-sceptred isle, now a damp constituency where the Green Party has just pulled off what passes for a historic upset in these diminished days. On 26 February 2026, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer—a 34-year-old plumber presented as the very salt of the working-class earth—piped her way to victory with 14,980 votes, or a handsome 40.7% of the ballots cast. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin trailed at 10,578 (28.7%), Labour’s Angeliki Stogia limped in third with 9,364 (25.4%), and the Conservatives scraped together a pitiful 706 souls, barely enough for a decent wake. Turnout? A majestic 47.6%, down a whisper from the general election the year before, proving once again that the native Briton regards the franchise much as he regards dental hygiene: optional, mildly uncomfortable, and best left to someone else.

The real comedy gold, however, lay in the presence of Sir Oink A-Lot, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party’s porcine champion, who squealed his way to 159 votes (0.4%) with policies no more deranged (or at least, one hopes, intentionally) than the Greens’ earnest manifesto of tree-hugging, landlord abolition, and rent controls that would make a Venezuelan central planner blush. Yet the electorate, in its infinite wisdom, chose the uncertified crackpots over the registered ones. Monster Raving came second to madness. One can almost hear the ghosts of Disraeli and Churchill exchanging weary glances: if the certified loonies finish behind the genuine article, what hope remains for sanity?

Consider Hannah Spencer herself, the champagne socialist par excellence masquerading as a wrench-wielding heroine. Billed as the local plumber who rescues greyhounds and runs marathons, she triumphed in an emotional victory speech vowing to fight for the “left behind.” Touching, until one consults the Land Registry and discovers she co-owns two houses in Manchester’s most affluent postcodes, worth well over £1 million combined, alongside a former partner who happens to be a biochemist. She has offered tips on maximising property deals, enjoyed globetrotting holidays despite her party’s carbon tut-tutting, and somehow squared this portfolio with Green rhetoric about taxing the rich into oblivion. Hypocrisy? Perish the thought; she is merely living the dream—talking proletarian while walking plutocratic. One imagines her at the dispatch box, overalls artfully dirtied, promising to fix the nation’s leaks while her own investments gush eternal profit.

The victory was no accident of enthusiasm. Gorton and Denton, with its significant Muslim population, became a textbook case of sectarian bloc voting. Multilingual leaflets, endorsements from outfits like The Muslim Vote, and Labour’s perceived wobbles on Israel-Gaza drove ethnic-minority turnout with disciplined purpose. The Greens positioned themselves as the pro-Palestine, pro-peace saviours, and the votes duly flowed. This is the bitter fruit of decades of European Union folly: mass immigration of predominantly young Muslim men, encouraged by asylum pacts, family reunifications, and a bureaucratic blind eye to cultural chasms. Arriving often humiliated by poverty, conflict, and unfulfilled promises, these cohorts have coalesced into electoral battering rams, voting not for broad policy but for communal grievance and identity. The result? A splintering of the national polity into tribal fiefdoms, where Westminster seats are won not by ideas but by mobilisation.

And the deciding factor in this slow-motion tragedy? Not cunning strategy from Brussels or Bradford, but the magnificent apathy of the native Briton. While one side organised with near-military precision, the other preferred Netflix, pints, and the quiet conviction that “they’re all the same anyway.” Turnout at 47.6% means barely half the electorate could be bothered to interrupt their torpor. The young, the non-graduates, the renters, the merely indifferent—all stayed home, widening the chasm. Studies confirm it: participation is lowest among those who complain loudest. In constituencies like this, native lethargy becomes a suicide pact. The descendants of suffragettes, who queued in the rain for the vote, now treat elections like an optional episode of EastEnders.

One might almost despair enough to contemplate the unthinkable: compulsory voting, that antipodean abomination we affect to despise. Australia has enforced it since 1924, with a modest fine (A$20, scarcely adjusted for inflation) and the bribe of a snag or shrimp at the booth. Turnout hovers in the high nineties—90% plus at their last federal outing—while we limp along at 60% for generals and yesterday’s dismal 47.6% for a by-election. The logic is brutally persuasive: drag the sofa-bound moaners to the polls, and politicians must court the whole electorate rather than niche obsessives or mobilised minorities. No more pandering to pensioners or sectarian blocs while the rest binge-watch oblivion. Universal turnout might dilute the edge of organised voting, turning elections back into something resembling national conversations instead of tribal headcounts.

Yet the British genius for liberty recoils. Compulsion? Us? The nation that invented habeas corpus and the polite right to tell authority to sod off? Forcing a man to vote feels like making him eat his greens or recycle his crisp packets—the thin end of the nanny-state wedge. What if he spoils his ballot with artistic genitalia? What if he turns up only to scribble essays on why politics is bollocks? Australia tolerates informal votes (around 5%, often gloriously abusive); we’d turn it into a national sport. The fines would start small and balloon into a poll-tax-by-stealth; courts would clog with conscientious objectors claiming exemption from Keir Starmer’s tie or Reform’s latest wheeze. The bureaucracy would metastasise; the excuses would be epic. And the sausage sizzle? We’d botch it—vegan, gluten-free, low-carbon, ending in a quinoa kebab tasting of damp moral superiority.

Australia pulls it off because Australia is, at heart, a nation of conformists who like rules, cricket and barbecues. We are a nation of grumblers who regard rules as personal insults. Force us, and the polling station becomes a carnival of passive-aggressive spoilage. Yet the alternative stares us down: more by-elections decided by whichever faction could muster the fewest couch potatoes. If the native electorate keeps treating democracy like an optional gym class, we’ll wake governed not by consent but by whoever showed up. So here we are, the champagne plumber triumphed over the sofa class, and Islamic bloc voting—midwifed by EU-era immigration humiliations—threatens to fracture what remains of national unity. 

Despair is the rational response. But despair with a ballot paper in hand is marginally preferable to despair with a remote control. At least then we’d have earned the right to complain.

NEIL SEDAKA (1939 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Neil Sedaka, the indefatigable manufacturer of earworms who convinced several generations that breaking up was, contrary to all evidence, hard to do, has finally managed the one separation no amount of falsetto could forestall. He died on February 27, 2026, in Los Angeles at the age of 86, after a brief but apparently decisive hospital visit. The body, sources suggest, gave out before the catalogue did.

Born in Brooklyn in 1939, Sedaka began as a Juilliard-trained prodigy who could probably have played Schubert respectably had he not discovered that teenagers with pocket money preferred tunes about calendars and sweet sixteens. Partnering with Howard Greenfield, he became the Brill Building's most reliable hit factory, churning out "Oh! Carol", "Calendar Girl", "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" and the deathless "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" — a song so relentlessly cheerful about romantic catastrophe that it made heartbreak sound like a minor inconvenience, like misplacing one's spectacles.

Sedaka sang them himself in a voice pitched somewhere between choirboy and helium balloon, selling millions while others (Connie Francis with "Stupid Cupid", Captain & Tennille with "Love Will Keep Us Together") reaped the benefits of his melodies without the burden of performing in jumpers. When the British Invasion rendered his brand of pop temporarily surplus to requirements, he retreated, only to bounce back in the 1970s with "Laughter in the Rain" and a slowed-down "Breaking Up" that proved the original hadn't been maudlin enough. "Bad Blood" followed, ensuring that even disco could accommodate his particular brand of melodic optimism.

He outlasted trends, outlived partners, and kept performing into his eighties, as if sheer persistence might persuade time to hum along in 4/4. In the end, though, mortality declined to take requests. Sedaka leaves a widow, children, grandchildren, and a back catalogue that will continue to ambush unsuspecting listeners in supermarkets and lifts for decades yet — a final, ironic proof that some tunes, unlike their creator, really are impossible to break up with.