ZELENSKY: PEACE'S SABOTEUR-IN-CHIEF

There comes a moment in every long-running international farce when the leading man, having milked the audience’s sympathy for all it is worth, overplays his hand and reveals that the tears were never quite real. Volodymyr Zelensky has arrived at that moment with the grace of a comedian who has forgotten the punchline and now stands blinking in the spotlight, wondering why the laughter has turned sour. The notion that this former television actor was simply the plucky steward of a distressed fledgling democracy always required a certain suspension of disbelief. One bought the ticket, of course; the alternative was to look like a brute. But the performance has gone on rather too long, and the props department has begun to look threadbare.

He has treated successive attempts at settlement with the petulance of a child who discovers that the birthday presents are not quite up to the standard advertised in the brochure. Peace deals arrive, are examined, and are then rejected with an air of wounded virtue that would have done credit to a Victorian governess. The allowance, naturally, must continue. Why, after all, would a man who has suspended elections, placed certain churches under the official frown, and arranged the political furniture to suit a more permanent occupancy, suddenly decide that peace is in his interest? Peace would require him to face the electorate again. Peace would require him to explain why the war that was meant to end last year, or the year before that, has somehow become a lifestyle. Dictators, even the telegenic variety, tend to find the prospect unappealing.

Into this prolonged theatrical run has stepped a piece of unexpected pragmatism from an unlikely quarter. The arrangement between Trump and Putin concerning diesel supplies—reached after repeated American requests that Ukraine cease striking Russian refineries had been met with the usual theatrical deafness—has the distinct smell of realism about it. Global markets do not care for the finer points of moral posturing; they care for the price of fuel. When those prices begin to inconvenience voters in the United States, even the most high-minded rhetoric starts to look expensive. The deal does not, of course, end the war. It does something more useful: it removes one of the incentives for prolonging it. By reducing the leverage that energy disruption provided, it makes further escalation less attractive to those who had grown rather fond of the disruption. In the arid language of diplomacy, this is what passes for a peace-preserving measure. One notes it without needing to break into applause; the mere fact that someone has finally noticed the cost of the performance is itself a small mercy.

Meanwhile, across the Channel and beyond the Rhine, certain European leaders have been conducting their own quieter calculation. The war has offered a convenient distraction from the awkward business of domestic accountability. Conscription talk, or the threat of it, has floated about the corridors of Brussels and various national capitals with a regularity that suggests more than pure military necessity. Young European men—particularly those of the demographic that still forms the statistical backbone of several electorates—have been invited to contemplate the possibility of becoming cannon fodder in a conflict whose strategic aims have grown increasingly elastic. The phrase “phony war” may be unkind, yet it is difficult to escape the impression that the conflict has served some as a useful holding pattern: a way of postponing the day when French and German voters must be faced with the ordinary questions of governance, prosperity, and demographic reality. Endless solidarity with Ukraine has the useful secondary effect of postponing the more awkward solidarity with one’s own taxpayers.

That particular hope is now under strain. Once the American side has demonstrated a willingness to deal directly with Moscow over matters that affect its own electorate, the European posture of permanent moral elevation becomes harder to maintain. The leaders of France and Germany, who have grown accustomed to treating the war as a kind of external morality play that conveniently excuses them from explaining their own domestic arrangements, find the stage lights suddenly turned upon themselves. There is nowhere left to hide. The electorate, that eternally ungrateful audience, has a habit of noticing when the script has run out of plot.

An end to the war in Ukraine is not a romantic aspiration; it is a practical necessity. Prolonged conflict has a way of consuming the very societies that claim to be defending civilisation. The Trump-Putin diesel arrangement, whatever its other imperfections, has the modest virtue of introducing a note of economic realism into a drama that had become addicted to pure gesture. If it helps to shorten the fighting, so much the better. The alternative is to continue indefinitely in the service of a narrative that has already outlived its usefulness, while European governments quietly hope that the demographic and political consequences can be deferred a little longer. History, as usual, is not in the habit of granting such extensions.

THE HUBRIS OF HOLBORN AND ST PANCRAS

One wakes, as one does, to the gentle hum of the central heating and the rather less gentle hum of the news. Labour, it appears, has retained Holborn and St Pancras by a majority described in the more enthusiastic quarters as “massive.” One pauses over the word. In the lexicon of modern politics, “massive” has come to mean anything larger than a modest majority in a safe seat after a by-election held on a day when half the electorate had better things to do. Still, the result stands. The new Member is in place. One is invited, indeed instructed by the more forthright observers of the metropolitan scene, to take a good long look at her.

Look one does. There is the inevitable photograph, the carefully lit portrait of arrival and achievement. The story that accompanies it is the approved one: a child refugee from Somalia, raised in Camden, risen through the local party machinery to the leadership of the council and now, with the departure of a former prime minister who had rather larger things on his mind, elevated to the House of Commons. It is a narrative of pure ascent, the sort that television producers and newspaper features editors reach for with the same automatic gesture with which a man reaches for his glass at the end of a long day. Progress, diversity, representation. The vocabulary is so well-rehearsed that it has long since ceased to require thought.

Yet the instruction was not merely to admire the biography. It was to contemplate the margin and then to perform a further, more uncomfortable calculation. While large sections of the native population spent the better part of two decades in a state of advanced moral anxiety—terrified that the mere observation of demographic change might earn them the scarlet letter of racism—the change itself proceeded with the quiet efficiency of a municipal works department. London, that once rather English city, became something else. The process was neither sudden nor secret. It was simply unmentionable in polite company. One could discuss the architecture, the restaurants, the theatres, the property market, the traffic, even the weather, but the shifting composition of the population itself was treated as a kind of meteorological phenomenon: inevitable, beyond human agency, and certainly beyond criticism.

The result, according to the more sardonic school of thought, is that the white Englishman or Englishwoman who still earns a living by ordinary means has discovered, somewhat late in the day, that the electoral arithmetic has altered beneath his or her feet. The seat that once belonged, in a cultural as well as a political sense, to a particular continuum of voters now belongs to another. The majority is not an accident of turnout or a temporary swing; it is the visible expression of a deeper reconfiguration. One’s opinion, once presumed to matter by the simple fact of residence and citizenship, has been rendered ornamental. One may still vote, of course. The ballot paper is still printed. The polling stations still open. But the outcome is no longer in serious doubt, and the doubts that remain are not the kind that can be resolved by argument.

There is a particular comedy in the timing. The same people who spent years insisting that any anxiety about numbers was a form of atavistic prejudice now find themselves confronted with numbers that have become, in certain constituencies, decisive. The fear of the epithet proved more powerful than the fear of the consequence. One kept quiet. One averted one’s gaze. One concentrated on the finer points of cuisine and the latest cycle lane. And while one was thus occupied, the demographic ledger was rewritten. The replacement, if that is the word one is still permitted to use without summoning a tribunal, is not a future event. It is a completed transaction. The receipts are already in the archive.

None of this is to deny the individual qualities of the new Member. Competence, diligence, and local knowledge are not the exclusive property of any ethnicity. The point is larger and more impersonal. It concerns the slow, almost administrative transformation of a city’s political character. Cities change. Empires rise and fall. Populations move. History is littered with such rearrangements, most of them accompanied by a great deal more blood than the present one. What distinguishes the contemporary version is the accompanying insistence that nothing of importance has occurred, that the old inhabitants are merely being asked to share a larger table, and that any sense of loss is evidence of a defective character rather than a reasonable response to observable reality.

The by-election itself was conducted with the usual low-grade pageantry. Turnout was modest. The Greens mounted a spirited challenge and were rewarded with a respectable second place, which their leadership will no doubt interpret as the beginning of a new era rather than the high-water mark of a temporary protest. The Conservatives and the various smaller parties performed their traditional roles as also-rans. Labour held the seat. The machinery of representation continues. Yet the larger lesson, for those willing to extract it, is that representation has a direction. Once a critical mass has shifted, the political weather changes permanently. The old majority becomes the new minority, and the minority discovers that its preferences, however passionately held, no longer command the decisive vote.

One is left, then, with the morning’s news and the slightly bitter aftertaste that accompanies it. The majority was not, in the end, quite as massive as the more triumphalist headlines suggested. The swing against Labour was noticeable. The Greens are emboldened. But none of that alters the fundamental arithmetic of the capital. The city has been remade. Those who once assumed it was theirs by inheritance or long residence have discovered that inheritance is a weak claim against numbers, and long residence is no defence against the quiet accumulation of new arrivals who vote as reliably as the old ones once did.

There is a certain dry satisfaction in observing the process from a distance, rather as one observes a slow-motion collapse of a building that was always going to fall. The scaffolding of polite discourse held for a long time. The warnings were dismissed as the fantasies of the disreputable. The language of replacement was declared beyond the pale. And then, one morning, the result arrives, the new Member is photographed, and the point is made with the clinical finality of a completed form. You were not going to be replaced. You have been. The only remaining question is whether anyone still thinks the observation itself is the problem.

BREAKING THE FEAR MACHINE

One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief in certain air-conditioned rooms when the news broke of a young laboratory technician in Irkutsk dying of pneumonia of undetermined etiology. At last: something that might be dressed up as the next big thing. Pneumonic plague, the reports whispered. A research institute that actually works with the stuff. Contacts under observation. The whole apparatus of dread wheeled out with the weary professionalism of a travelling circus that has performed the same act too many times. If this were the real article, borders would be slamming shut faster than a politician’s mouth after an inconvenient question. They have not. President Trump has not grounded the world’s airlines. Nations have not sealed themselves like medieval cities under siege. 

The reason is simple enough for even a public-health bureaucrat to grasp if he were ever required to: the official Russian assessment, and the World Health Organization’s subsequent risk rating, treat the episode as contained, unconfirmed as plague, and of low to very low international concern. Contacts have been monitored and largely released. No secondary wave of confirmed cases has materialised. Yet the media machinery, that tireless generator of ambient anxiety, continues to hum. How touching, how almost endearing in its predictability, that the same circles who treated every seasonal flu as a potential civilisation-ender should now discover fresh reserves of solemnity over an unconfirmed Siberian pneumonia. One might have hoped that after the late unpleasantness with the coronavirus they would at least change the script. Instead they have returned to the well-thumbed playbook, confident that the audience has forgotten the last performance.

Consider the monkeypox episode of 2022, that short-lived festival of selective alarm. A real virus, yes, circulating with particular efficiency in specific networks, mostly among men who have sex with men. The public-health apparatus swung into action with the usual mixture of genuine concern and theatrical overreach. Emergency declarations were issued. Vaccine campaigns were launched with the urgency once reserved for actual pandemics. Media coverage oscillated between lurid speculation and careful euphemism. And then, almost as abruptly as it had arrived, the thing subsided. Cases fell. The emergency ended. The same voices that had treated it as the next great threat moved on without apology or reflection, as if the entire episode had been a useful dress rehearsal rather than a demonstration of how quickly narrative can outrun evidence.

The exasperation one feels is not primarily with the virus, which does what viruses do, but with the human operators who treat every laboratory mishap or regional cluster as an opportunity to reimpose the psychology of 2020. The global managerial class—those itinerant experts, foundation-funded influencers, and institutional spokespeople who discovered during the last crisis that fear is a more reliable currency than competence—appear constitutionally incapable of learning the simplest lesson: people notice. They notice when the same rhetorical devices are recycled. They notice when borders stay open for a “plague” that would, in any earlier century, have emptied ports. They notice when the story requires perpetual escalation just to maintain the necessary level of dread before an election cycle.

There is something almost touching in the persistence. Having watched one carefully cultivated scare lose momentum, the operators simply select another pathogen, preferably one with historical resonance and a suitably medieval name, and try again. Plague carries the right cultural freight. It summons images of rat-infested harbours and blackened extremities. Never mind that the actual epidemiological picture in Irkutsk remains stubbornly ordinary by the standards of high-containment laboratories that have handled far more exotic agents without collapsing civilisation. The point is never the specific microbe. The point is the atmosphere.

Fortunately, the atmosphere is no longer quite so easy to control. When Elon Musk acquired the platform formerly known as Twitter and turned it into X, he did something more consequential than most of the professional commentary class have yet admitted. He removed the primary throttle on spontaneous, unfiltered contradiction. The old gatekeeping arrangements—whereby certain narratives could be amplified while competing ones were throttled, labelled, or disappeared—lost much of their force. Ordinary people, scientists outside the approved circuits, and even the occasional laboratory technician with an inconvenient timeline can now reach audiences that once required institutional permission. The result is not chaos, as the professional worriers predicted, but a rough and imperfect form of accountability. Claims that once travelled unopposed now meet immediate, often rude, scrutiny. 

The monkeypox cycle already showed the limits of the method; the current Siberian episode is testing those limits again under less favourable conditions. No less instructive was the coverage of hantavirus, that sporadic rodent-borne inconvenience which certain corners of the press insisted on treating as the next scheduled apocalypse. A few infections linked to mouse droppings in remote cabins or rural outposts would trigger the familiar cascade: sombre graphics, expert warnings about aerosol transmission, and the solemn implication that civilisation itself might soon be gasping for air. The tone suggested Black Death 2.0 with better production values. Then the cases remained local, the fatalities stayed mercifully few, and the same outlets that had hyped the threat simply packed up their cameras and moved on, as if the entire exercise had been a useful test of how long the public could be kept on edge by a virus that had never shown the slightest ambition to become a global spectacle. The pattern was becoming hard to miss.

One does not need to believe in a single smoke-filled room of cartoon villains to recognise a pattern of incentives. Institutions that expanded their budgets and authority during the last emergency have every reason to keep the sense of permanent emergency alive. Media organisations that discovered the commercial value of sustained anxiety have every reason to inflate the next candidate. Politicians who found that emergency powers simplify governance have every reason to look for fresh pretexts. The rest of us are under no obligation to play along.

What finally began to puncture the solemnity was the memes. Where once the official narrative could proceed with its gravity largely intact, a single well-timed image—a cartoon rat in a hazmat suit, a side-by-side of successive “this time it’s different” headlines, or a simple caption reducing the latest laboratory drama to farce—could travel farther and faster than any carefully worded press release. The scaremongers found themselves confronting not sober counter-arguments but the collective laughter of people who had seen the same performance too many times. Memes did what earnest rebuttals often failed to achieve: they made the apparatus look faintly absurd, and once something looks absurd it becomes considerably harder to fear. In that sense the humble meme became one of the more effective public-health interventions of the age.

So let us express the appropriate sentiment with the clarity the occasion deserves. To the professional scare-mongers, the foundation-funded amplifiers, the institutional voices still hoping that the next pathogen will restore the deference they briefly enjoyed: this particular performance is already failing its dress rehearsal. The population has seen the set design before. The props look second-hand. The dialogue is recycled. Thanks in no small part to an open platform that no longer pretends neutrality while enforcing orthodoxy, the audience can now shout back in real time.

May the present scare join its predecessors in the growing archive of overplayed hands. May the next one meet the same fate. And may those who keep trying this transparent routine eventually discover that the only thing more exhausting than perpetual crisis is the spectacle of people who refuse, at long last, to be perpetually crisis-managed.