TED TURNER (1938 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Ted Turner, the buccaneering media magnate who proved that a short attention span and a bottomless chequebook could reshape the world’s living rooms, has died at the age of 86. Or 87. Or possibly 104, depending on which of his own cable channels was running the ticker at the time. In the end, even Turner’s longevity became another ratings grab. Born into billboard fortune in Cincinnati, young Ted displayed an early genius for turning inherited money into more interesting inherited money. 

He built an empire on the heretical notion that people might enjoy watching television at any hour of the day or night, an insight that now seems about as revolutionary as discovering oxygen. CNN arrived like a 24-hour nervous breakdown and promptly made news addictive. For this alone, future generations will curse his name while refreshing their feeds at 3 a.m. His nautical period produced the 1977 America’s Cup triumph with Courageous, a victory that briefly convinced the nation its loudest sailor was also its finest. Turner celebrated the way he celebrated everything: at maximum volume, with maximum gin. One almost expected him to demand the Cup be mounted on a missile.

Then came the wrestling phase, surely the most gloriously unhinged chapter in a gloriously unhinged life. He bought Jim Crockett Promotions, rebranded it World Championship Wrestling, and hurled it into battle against Vince McMahon’s WWF. The Monday Night Wars that followed were less a business rivalry than a pay-per-view cage match between two egomaniacal showmen who understood that Americans secretly prefer their soap operas with folding chairs and suplexes. For a while, WCW actually won. Turner had taken billionaire excess and bodyslammed it onto basic cable. The spectacle was undignified, absurd, and wildly entertaining; in other words, perfect.

His personal life reached its highest camp when he married Jane Fonda in 1991. The union of the Mouth of the South and Hanoi Jane was less a marriage than performance art. They seemed ideally matched until it turned out they weren’t, which came as a surprise to absolutely no one except perhaps Ted’s publicists. Environmentalism provided the late-period halo. Turner’s grandest gesture in this arena was Captain Planet and the Planeteers, a cartoon of such toe-curling worthiness that it stands as his only documented faux pas. Even the man who greenlit The Man Show apparently had limits, though they proved temporary.

He leaves behind several ex-wives, a herd of bison, more money than most small nations, and a media landscape that still bears his chaotic fingerprints. Ted Turner didn’t just live in the future; he cablecast it, wrestled it, and occasionally tried to lecture it about recycling. The world is quieter now. One suspects he would have hated that.

BALKAN BACKLASH: ANOTHER EUROCRAT BITES THE DUST

In the grand opera of European politics, where the chorus of Brussels functionaries intones hymns to fiscal rectitude and ever-closer union, one can always count on the Romanians to provide a touch of Balkan colour. On this fine May day in 2026, the Romanian parliament has done the unthinkable: it has toppled Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, that most impeccably pro-European of leaders, in a no-confidence vote that passed with the sort of thumping majority usually reserved for motions praising the weather. Two hundred and eighty-one votes, if memory serves – well above the threshold, and delivered with the gleeful opportunism of a family reunion that has finally decided the old uncle's inheritance should go elsewhere. 

One pictures Bolojan now, packing his ministerial briefcase with the quiet dignity of a man who has always known his place in the great scheme of things: a reliable steward of EU funds, a faithful executant of austerity measures demanded from afar, and a living embodiment of that curious modern faith which holds that the path to national greatness lies in obeying one's betters in Strasbourg and Frankfurt. His crime? Leading a minority government that dared suggest Romania might trim its heroic budget deficit – a mere 9% of GDP, the sort of figure that would make a Greek finance minister blush with professional envy. The Social Democrats, those stalwart guardians of the people who had lately been his coalition partners, took one look at the proposed cuts and remembered that they quite liked being popular. They walked out and, in a plot twist worthy of a Restoration comedy, made common cause with the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) to bring the whole edifice crashing down. 

Ah, the PSD-AUR axis. History does have a sense of humour, even if it tends toward the dry and sardonic. Here were the heirs of Ceaușescu's more presentable successors clasping hands, however temporarily, with George Simion's nationalist firebrands. Simion, that tireless champion of "family, nation, faith, and freedom," emerges as the day's clear victor, beaming like a man who has just discovered that the European Union is not, after all, a vending machine that dispenses euros without occasional mechanical failure. One can almost hear the gnashing of teeth in the better salons of Brussels. Another Eastern European leader – pro-European, reform-minded, thoroughly house-trained – dispatched to the political wilderness. How satisfying. How refreshingly ungrateful of the Romanians.

The backstory only adds savour. Recall the 2024 presidential election, that awkward business with Călin Georgescu. The man had the temerity to win the first round, buoyed, we were solemnly informed, by the dark arts of Russian interference via TikTok – some eight hundred accounts or thereabouts, a digital army apparently more persuasive than the combined might of European Commission press releases. The election was duly annulled, Georgescu barred from the rerun, and the whole democratic exercise sent back to the drawing board with the firm instruction that the people had got it wrong the first time. 

One wonders, in one's more cynical moments, whether the real interference was the sort that arrives in nicely wrapped structural adjustment programmes rather than viral dance challenges. But such thoughts are, of course, unhelpful.Now the wheel turns once more. With Bolojan reduced to caretaker status and President Nicușor Dan scrambling for a new pro-EU majority, the door stands ajar for early elections or, whisper it gently, some role for the sidelined Georgescu himself. Simion talks of national reconciliation and future governance. The leu trembles, credit ratings wobble, and some €10 billion in EU funds hang in the balance. The usual suspects warn of instability, populism, and the eternal return of the 1930s. One has heard it all before.

Yet there is something almost touching in this recurring Eastern European habit of disappointing their Western tutors. For decades now, the former Warsaw Pact countries have been treated as wayward pupils who must be taught the catechism of open borders, green transitions, and the ineffable wisdom of supranational bureaucracy. Poland had its flirtation with defiance. Hungary persists in the sin of Orbán. Now Romania joins the awkward squad. One begins to suspect that these peoples, having endured actual totalitarianism within living memory, possess an instinctive allergy to new varieties of it – however benignly packaged, however garnished with subsidies.

The globalist project has always rested on a charming contradiction: it celebrates "diversity" while demanding uniformity of thought, particularly on matters of sovereignty and economics. Bolojan was the perfect vessel for this vision – competent, Atlanticist, willing to wield the scalpel on Romania's bloated spending at Brussels' behest. His fall is more than a parliamentary procedural. It is a small but vivid reminder that nations are not NGOs. They have memories, interests, and, occasionally, the bad manners to assert them.

One should not, of course, get carried away. Romanian politics has a habit of producing more twists than a Carpathian mountain road. The PSD may yet discover that dancing with AUR brings its own complications, and the EU has many subtle ways of reminding recalcitrant members where their bread is buttered. Yet for today, at least, one may permit a quiet, thoroughly undiplomatic chuckle. Another globalist Eastern European leader down. The scriptwriters of history, it seems, have not yet exhausted their supply of ironic reversals. Romania, in its messy, contradictory way, has reminded us that sovereignty, like poetry, is best when it refuses to follow the syllabus. Pass the popcorn. The next act promises to be entertaining.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN (AND HAND OVER YOUR PAPERS...)

In the grand British tradition of moral panics, where every generation discovers that the latest amusement might corrupt the young and promptly demands that the state do something about it, we have arrived at the social media age limit. The government, ever obliging when it comes to expanding its own prerogatives, has committed to raising the barrier to sixteen. Parents, teachers, health professionals and sundry concerned parties cheer this as a victory for the children. One pictures them linking arms and singing hymns of deliverance, much as the villagers once did when the witch was safely ducked.

It is a touching spectacle. One is reminded of Sheila Broflovski in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, that tireless crusader whose rallying cry—“Think of the children!”—launched wars, censorship campaigns and quite a lot of gratuitous musical numbers. The comparison may be unfair; Sheila was at least cartoonishly direct in her hysteria, whereas our modern parental lobbyists cloak their demands in the soothing pastel tones of safeguarding and evidence-based policy. Still, the family resemblance is hard to deny. The impulse is the same: protect the innocents by restricting everyone else’s access to the dangerous toy. And, as in South Park, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and funded by the taxpayer.

The ostensible problem is real enough. Endless scrolling, algorithmic outrage, and the peculiar social dynamics of platforms designed to maximise engagement have not, on the whole, produced a generation of stoic philosophers. Mental health statistics for adolescents flicker with warning lights; grooming and exploitation lurk in the darker corners. No sane observer denies that unlimited smartphone access at age eleven has its drawbacks. The old solution—family computer in the living room, a sturdy Nokia brick for emergencies, and the gentle art of saying “no”—has been unfashionable for years. It required actual parenting: supervision, boundaries, the occasional row. Far easier, it seems, to outsource the heavy lifting to Whitehall.

Yet herein lies the quiet comedy of our age. In their zeal to shield little Timmy and Emily from TikTok’s siren song, campaigning parents have lobbied for measures that necessitate robust age assurance. “Highly effective” is the regulatory euphemism. In practice, this means identity verification: facial scans, biometric estimation, digital wallets, government-issued credentials, perhaps even linkage to NHS numbers or Open Banking data. What begins as a polite request to keep the under-sixteens off Instagram swiftly mutates into infrastructure capable of checking every internet user’s credentials before granting passage. The state does not build such systems for one narrow purpose and then politely dismantle them once the children are safe. Bureaucracies are not known for their minimalist aesthetic.

One almost admires the sleight of hand. Parents animated by left-leaning ideals—those who instinctively reach for collective solutions, who view private restraint as insufficient and state intervention as enlightened—have helped midwife a mechanism of universal surveillance. They did not set out to erect an Orwellian apparatus, of course. They merely wanted the harms mitigated. But good intentions have a habit of arriving at unintended addresses. The same cohort that once tut-tutted at CCTV creep and data retention now finds itself applauding the digital equivalent of an ID card for the entire online realm. The children were the Trojan horse; the surveillance state slipped in behind them while everyone was busy virtue-signalling concern.

Compare this with the low-tech alternative so unfashionable among the digitally anxious: place the family computer in plain sight, hand the offspring a device incapable of infinite doom-scrolling, and accept that raising humans involves some friction. It worked tolerably well when the greatest online peril was a dodgy Geocities page. It requires no national database, no facial recognition middleware, and—no small mercy—no new quango to oversee compliance. Yet such measures lack the grandeur of legislation. They cannot be announced with fanfare in the Commons or celebrated as a “huge win.” They demand responsibility from actual parents rather than the comforting abstraction of society.

Instead, we march toward the logical terminus: every citizen presenting digital papers at the gates of the internet. Refuse, and access is denied or throttled. The infrastructure, once built for the protection of minors, will prove irresistibly useful for other purposes—content moderation, behavioural scoring, the quiet expansion of what constitutes “harmful” material. Today it is social media for sixteen-year-olds; tomorrow the definition of acceptable discourse may tighten further, always in the name of safety, always with the most compassionate rhetoric. The censors of yesteryear at least had the decency to be obvious about it. Our modern variant prefers to arrive wearing the concerned frown of a safeguarding officer.

The irony is particularly rich for those parents steeped in progressive instincts. Many who would recoil at old-fashioned authoritarianism have cheered measures that hand the state potent new tools of control. They imagined a gentle nanny state gently patting errant algorithms on the head. What they are helping construct is something closer to a panopticon with better branding. The state, ever hungry for legitimacy, gratefully accepts the mandate: “You asked us to protect the children; we shall require certain assurances from everyone.” Slippery slopes are dismissed as paranoid until one finds oneself halfway down, clutching a biometric token and wondering how it came to this.

There is, naturally, an antidote more elegant than regulation. It is called parental responsibility, exercised in the analogue world before the digital one consumes it entirely. It is the willingness to endure the mild social awkwardness of saying your child does not have the latest device. It is the dull, unglamorous business of conversation, example, and occasional confiscation. Supplement this with a cultural commitment to free expression—something like the ASI Freedom of Speech Bill, which seeks to push back against the creeping censorship apparatus—rather than layering ever more rules atop the existing ones.

In the end, Britain risks sleepwalking into a peculiarly polite dystopia: not the jackboot of classic totalitarianism, but the soft, data-driven embrace of perpetual verification “for the children.” Sheila Broflovski would recognise the script, even if the accents have improved and the musical numbers are now delivered via algorithmic recommendation. The tragedy is not that parents care; it is that they have been persuaded to care in the manner most likely to empower the very forces least suited to genuine guardianship. The state makes a poor surrogate parent. It is, however, an excellent custodian of power once granted.

One can only hope that enough citizens retain the wit to notice the swap: the promised shield for the young quietly reforged into chains for all. Otherwise, we shall find ourselves, in a few short years, logging on with our digital papers in order, murmuring the updated mantra: “Think of the children”—while the state smiles indulgently and tightens the net.