DINNER WITH A SIDE ORDER OF LEAD

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has long been one of those ritualistic American spectacles that contrives to make democracy look like a black-tie cocktail party with an open bar and a side order of self-congratulation. On the evening of 25 April 2026, the usual suspects—journalists in rented tuxedos, cabinet secretaries in borrowed gravitas, and a president who had finally decided to grace the proceedings—gathered at the Washington Hilton to celebrate press freedom, roast one another with the ritual barbs, and pretend that the republic was in rude health. Then a 31-year-old Californian named Cole Tomas Allen, armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, decided to audition for the role of uninvited guest. He charged a security checkpoint, exchanged fire with the Secret Service, and was subdued before he could reach the ballroom. No one in the main party was harmed, though one agent took a round to the vest. The evening’s theme—press freedom—suddenly acquired a more literal, if unintended, resonance.

Blaire White, never one to let a cliché pass unexamined, had posted the day before: “All you hear about is right wing violence, and all you actually see is left wing violence.” It was the sort of epigram that lands with the dry thud of an unfashionable truth. In the hours after the Hilton incident, the usual chorus of commentators could be heard rehearsing the standard libretto: isolated, mental health, rhetoric poisoned by the other side. One veteran pundit, interviewed live while the champagne was still cooling, managed to blame the whole business on Donald Trump’s “poisoning of the discourse,” as though the president had personally handed Mr Allen his manifesto and a map of the Hilton’s service entrance. The manifesto, when leaked in dribs and drabs, revealed the gunman styling himself a “friendly federal assassin,” railing against Christians, Trump officials, and assorted grievances that would have fitted neatly into any number of campus seminars on systemic injustice. He had donated, modestly, to Kamala Harris’s campaign; he had attended a “No Kings” protest; he was, by the polite metrics of our age, a man of the left. Yet the narrative machine, that vast and tireless contraption, continued to hum its accustomed tune.

One is reminded of Clive James’s old observation that the British press could be relied upon to report the same story in two different keys depending on whose side was playing the villain. Here the American variant is even more refined. Right-wing violence is never merely violence; it is a symptom, a metastasis, a dark flowering of the national id. Left-wing violence, by contrast, is a regrettable aberration, the work of a lone eccentric whose politics are incidental, like a man who happens to collect stamps and also shoots at presidents. The data, of course, have been behaving most disobligingly. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, that sober temple of think-tankery, reported last year that 2025 marked the first time in more than three decades that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots outnumbered those from the far right. One might have expected a modest editorial footnote or two. Instead, the coverage maintained the serene poise of a dowager aunt refusing to acknowledge that the family black sheep has just set fire to the gazebo.

Consider the recent precedents. In 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a university event in Utah; the perpetrator, still at large when the first reports broke, was widely assumed (and later confirmed by the tenor of the manhunt) to be operating from the progressive end of the spectrum. The reaction in certain quarters was a masterclass in studied ambiguity: thoughts and prayers, certainly, but also a gentle reminder that Kirk had been “polarising.” A few months later, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered in their home by Vance Boelter, a man whose anti-abortion views and conservative leanings placed him squarely in the right-wing column. That crime received the full treatment: wall-to-wall condemnation, solemn editorials on the rising tide of MAGA extremism, and the inevitable invocation of January 6 as the original sin from which all subsequent evils flowed. The asymmetry was almost poetic. One dead conservative influencer: a tragedy with footnotes. Two dead Democrats: proof that the republic teeters on the brink.

Mr Allen’s little adventure at the Hilton fits the newer pattern with almost embarrassing neatness. A Caltech-educated engineer turned part-time teacher and video-game developer, he was not some toothless Appalachian militiaman nursing grievances against the federal government; he was the sort of chap who might once have been invited to speak at a TEDx event on innovation and empathy. His social-media trail, before it was scrubbed or memory-holed, showed the familiar blend of anti-Trump animus and anti-Christian spleen that has become the house style of certain corners of the resistance. Yet within hours the framing shifted. Pundits spoke of “trauma,”, “a nation divided,” and “the need for “dialogue.” Dialogue, in this context, usually means the right agreeing to be quiet while the left explains why its violence is really the fault of the right’s existence.

The dinner itself was meant to be a celebration of the First Amendment, that sturdy old document which guarantees everyone the right to say what they like—provided, of course, that what they like aligns with the prevailing consensus. The correspondents had spent the evening poking fun at power in the approved manner: witty enough to raise a chuckle, safe enough not to risk cancellation. Then reality, in the form of Mr Allen’s arsenal, intruded like a drunk uncle at a wedding. The guests dived under tables in their gowns and dinner jackets, Secret Service agents shouted “shots fired,” and for a brief, clarifying moment the gap between the narrative and the observable world became visible to the naked eye. One almost expected a voice from the dais to murmur, “This is not who we are,” before realising that, on the contrary, this is increasingly who we are—on both sides, but with the media’s selective hearing tuned only to one frequency.

Satire, James once noted, is the last resort of the civilised mind when confronted by the incorrigible. The incorrigible fact here is that political violence has become a bipartisan pastime while the commentary class insists on treating it as a unilateral franchise. The right produces its share of cranks and cruder operators; no one with an ounce of honesty denies it. But the left’s contribution—targeted assassinations of conservative figures, attacks on immigration facilities, and now an armed incursion into the very gala where the press corps congratulates itself on its fearless independence—has been growing in both frequency and theatricality. Yet the official story remains that the real danger skulks in the shadows wearing a red hat and muttering about stolen elections. It is as though the press, having spent years warning of wolves, cannot quite bring itself to notice when a sheep in wolf’s clothing starts biting.

One suspects James would have appreciated the absurdity. He had a gift for spotting the moment when solemnity collapses into self-parody, when the guardians of truth reveal themselves as custodians of a preferred fiction. The Hilton ballroom, with its chandeliers and its hors d’oeuvres and its sudden rattle of gunfire, was that moment made flesh. The correspondents will reconvene next year, no doubt, to toast press freedom once more. Mr Allen will face the courts, his manifesto will be psychologised into irrelevance, and the great American narrative will trundle on, serene in its conviction that the violence it sees is never the violence it fears. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us—those who still prefer evidence to incantation—will continue to note, with the driest of smiles, that what we hear and what we see remain stubbornly at odds. The dinner may have been disrupted, but the script, alas, was not.

FOOTBALL LOSES IT'S FOCUS

The announcement that Football Focus, that sturdy old warhorse of the Saturday lunchtime schedule, has at last been put out to grass after 52 years comes as no great surprise to anyone who has watched the BBC's long, slow surrender to the modern age. Audiences, we are told with the sort of pained sincerity usually reserved for a minor royal's minor scandal, have simply changed their habits. They nibble at highlights on demand, graze on podcasts, and scroll through social media while the kettle boils. Linear television, that quaint relic, has been declining since 2018, and the figures tell their own melancholy tale: from nearly 850,000 viewers in 2019 to somewhere around 564,000–600,000 by 2023. The corporation, ever the responsible guardian of the licence fee, must evolve or perish. Or at least pretend to evolve while quietly axing the bits that no longer pull their weight.

One feels a certain dry sympathy for the show's final host, Alex Scott. She has already declared, with the graceful pre-emptive strike of one who has seen the writing on the autocue, that she herself had planned to depart. No blame attaches to her personally. Scott is a former professional footballer who knows the game from the inside, and she has conducted herself with the sort of composure that suggests she could read the shipping forecast without causing a riot. The fault, if fault there be, lies not in the presenter but in the packaging — and in the peculiar modern compulsion to wrap every last scrap of sport in the bright, brittle cellophane of entertainment.

Sport, once content to be itself, has increasingly been asked to play the role of lifestyle accessory. Consider Formula One, that roaring cathedral of noise and money. Under the stewardship of Liberty Media, it has been transformed from a niche pursuit for petrolheads and engineers into something closer to a Netflix soap opera with very expensive cars. Drive to Survive did for motor racing what The Crown did for the Windsors: it turned insiders into characters, rivalries into plotlines, and the paddock into a catwalk. The result? A younger audience, a markedly higher proportion of women (now around 40% or more in some surveys), and a global boom in casual fandom. The actual racing — those long afternoons of tyre strategy and aerodynamic nuance — still happens, of course, but it is now flanked by celebrity cameos, glossy drama, and enough interpersonal tension to keep the gossip columns fed. The sport itself has not become worse; it has simply been asked to sing for its supper in a key more pleasing to the streaming gods.

Football, that great English obsession, has undergone a similar cosmetic overhaul, though with rather less success on the traditional front. The beautiful game remains, at root, twenty-two men (or women) chasing a ball and a referee chasing both. Its appeal to the traditional male viewer — the sort who once settled down with a pie and a pint to hear Bob Wilson or Jimmy Hill talk tactics — was never primarily about glamour or representation. It was about the game talking to itself: the geometry of the pitch, the sudden flash of genius, the tribal roar. When the packaging begins to shout louder than the contents, the old audience quietly reaches for the remote.

Here one must acknowledge an awkward truth that the BBC, in its institutional wisdom, would prefer to treat as an optical illusion. The increased prominence of female presenters on programmes covering men's football has coincided with a noticeable drift away from the traditional male demographic. This is not, as some fevered online commentary would have it, because such presenters are inherently incapable — many are perfectly competent professionals. It is because a large slice of the core audience experiences a subtle but persistent sense of cultural displacement. They switch on expecting the familiar rhythms of the Saturday ritual and instead encounter a tone that feels, to them, imported from another conversation altogether: one heavy with the vocabulary of inclusion, equity, and the quiet implication that the old way of watching was somehow problematic. The result is not rage so much as indifference. They simply stop watching. Numbers fall. The show is quietly retired. And everyone involved expresses polite bafflement.

Yet one must not fall into the opposite error of imagining that women's sport requires artificial life support. Quite the contrary. Women's football, women's rugby, women's cricket — these have been enjoying genuine growth in popularity, including among male viewers. The Lionesses' triumphs, the rising attendances at Women's Super League matches, the record audiences for major tournaments: these are not figments of a diversity report. Men watch because the sport itself is worth watching — the skill, the commitment, the narrative arc of underdogs and breakthroughs. No amount of political correctness or virtue signalling is required to achieve this. Indeed, the heavy-handed application of such things often proves counterproductive, breeding resentment where organic interest might have flourished. The lesson is as old as entertainment itself: let the thing be good on its own terms. The audience will find it, or it will not. Forced admiration is the surest way to kill affection.

Ultimately, sport should do the talking. The ball, the bat, the engine, the athlete's body in motion — these are eloquent enough without endless overlay of messaging. When Football Focus began in 1974, it understood this. It was a simple programme about the weekend's football, presented by people steeped in the culture. That it has now been deemed surplus to requirements is less a comment on Alex Scott than on the broader confusion of our age: the belief that every institution must be remodelled in the image of the moment's approved sensibilities, even if that means alienating the very people who once sustained it.

The BBC will doubtless replace the old slot with something shinier, more digital, more inclusive. One wishes them luck. But one also suspects that the game, in all its stubborn, unscripted glory, will continue to outlast the packaging. Sport, like literature or music at its best, has a way of surviving the people who try too hard to improve it. The audience may fragment, the formats may shift, but the ball keeps rolling. And in the end, that is all that ever really mattered.

A CENTURY OF QUIET MAJESTY

If one were to stage a birthday party for a monarch who had the impertinence to die four years short of her century, the British establishment would doubtless rise to the occasion with all the solemnity of a Whitehall committee deciding on the colour of a new passport. Yet here we are, in the spring of 2026, celebrating what would have been the hundredth birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, and the national mood is less a firework display than a low, sardonic chuckle at the gods for arranging matters so inconveniently as to avoid her having to send a telegram to herself. The bunting is out, the television schedules are clogged with archive footage of her waving from Land Rovers, and the newspapers are full of those solemn editorials that manage to sound both reverent and slightly relieved she is not around to read them. One almost expects her to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in spectral form, give that trademark half-smile of mild amusement, and remark, in the voice of a slightly disappointed headmistress, that really, one had hoped for better.

She was, of course, the last monarch who understood that the job was not to do things, but to be there while things were done. Born in 1926 into a world still recovering from one world war and about to plunge into another, she spent her girlhood learning the difference between duty and drama. By the time she ascended the throne in 1952, the British Empire had already begun its long, polite retreat into the history books; she simply refused to turn the retreat into a rout. Seventy years of it: the Suez fiasco, the Profumo scandal, the decolonisation that turned half the map from pink to various shades of embarrassed beige, the divorce of her own children, the death of Diana, the rise of the internet, and still she never once looked as though she might be enjoying herself too obviously. That was her genius. She made boredom into a constitutional art form. While prime ministers came and went like guests at a particularly tedious garden party—Thatcher with her handbag, Blair with his grin, Johnson with his hair—she remained the fixed point, the woman who could make a state banquet feel like tea with the vicar. Her contribution was not policy; it was presence. She held the monarchy together by the simple expedient of never appearing to notice that it was falling apart.

One thinks of her wartime service, driving an ambulance in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, getting her hands dirty with engine oil and refusing to make a fuss about it. Compare that with the modern royal who feels the need to lecture us on carbon footprints from the back of a private jet, and you begin to see the scale of the loss. Elizabeth understood that the Crown’s power lay in its invisibility. She never gave interviews, never wrote memoirs, never once suggested that her opinions on anything—from the weather to the Common Market—might be of the slightest interest to anyone except her corgis. The result was a reign that felt less like government than like weather: sometimes overcast, occasionally stormy, but always, reliably, there. She survived the abdication crisis of her uncle, the wartime Blitz, the swinging sixties, the punk seventies, Britpop, the Diana years, and the social media age without once appearing to break into a sweat. In an era when every minor celebrity feels obliged to “share their truth,” she kept hers to herself and thereby became the last public figure whose silence carried weight. The nation, in its perverse way, loved her for it. We grumbled about the cost of the Civil List, we mocked the hats, we speculated endlessly about what she really thought of Tony Blair’s shirt-sleeves or Boris Johnson’s bicycle, and all the while she simply got on with being Elizabeth the Unflappable. It was, in its quiet way, heroic.

Her contribution to the national character was subtler still. She embodied a particular kind of Britishness that has since been declared obsolete: the belief that one’s highest duty is to keep the show on the road without drawing attention to the fact that the road is crumbling. She presided over the transformation of Britain from imperial power to middling European archipelago without ever sounding like a mourner at the funeral. The Commonwealth, that improbable club of former colonies who somehow decided they quite liked the old lady in the hat, was her personal triumph. She kept it going by the same method she used on everything else: showing up, smiling faintly, and refusing to acknowledge the awkwardness. When she danced with Nkrumah or chatted with Mugabe or welcomed the latest batch of prime ministers to Balmoral, she did so with the air of a woman who had seen worse and was not about to let it spoil the scones. It was, one suspects, the last time the British monarchy felt remotely necessary to anyone outside its own press office.

And then, of course, came the succession. Poor Charles. One feels almost sorry for him, which is the most damning thing one can say about a king. He had waited longer than any heir in history—decades of patient, slightly petulant preparation, writing letters to ministers, talking to plants, and designing buildings that looked like the offspring of a Victorian prison and a municipal swimming pool. At last, in 2022, the throne was his. The nation held its breath, expecting the seamless continuation of the Elizabethan style. What it got instead was a man who appeared to believe that the job description had changed to “activist monarch with strong opinions on organic farming and the built environment.” Where his mother had mastered the art of dignified silence, Charles seemed determined to fill every available silence with speeches. The result has been four years of slightly embarrassed national wincing.

It is not that he lacks qualities. He is, by all accounts, a well-meaning fellow who genuinely cares about the environment, architecture, and the spiritual health of the nation. The trouble is that caring visibly is precisely what the monarchy was never meant to do. Elizabeth’s genius was to make the institution feel eternal and slightly dull; Charles’s misfortune is to make it feel contemporary and slightly embarrassing. One pictures him at state banquets, earnestly discussing biodiversity with some bemused head of state while the footmen try not to roll their eyes. The coronation, that glorious piece of medieval pageantry, somehow managed to look both expensive and slightly apologetic. The public, having grown used to seventy years of glacial continuity, now finds itself with a monarch who appears to be auditioning for the role of national therapist. The Camilla question, long since resolved in the only way such questions ever are in royal circles—by sheer persistence—still hovers like an awkward guest who refuses to leave the party. The less said about the tampon phone call and the various other youthful indiscretions the better; they were, after all, the sort of thing that happens to princes who have too much time and not enough discretion. But they have left their mark. Where Elizabeth was the embodiment of restraint, Charles sometimes feels like the embodiment of having tried rather a little too hard.

One watches the current royal operation with the same melancholy fascination one reserves for a vintage car that has been handed over to an enthusiastic amateur mechanic. The engine still runs, but the suspension is shot and the paintwork is starting to flake. The younger generation—William and Kate, Harry and whoever is currently advising him—appear to be doing their best to modernise the brand, which is precisely the problem. Monarchy does not modernise; it endures. Elizabeth understood this in her bones. Charles, for all his undoubted sincerity, appears to believe it can be improved. The result is a reign that feels less like a continuation than a slightly awkward sequel with patchy special effects. The polls, those blunt instruments of public sentiment, suggest the monarchy remains popular enough, but the affection is no longer automatic. It has to be earned, and earning it requires precisely the sort of effort Elizabeth never bothered with. She simply was.

So on this, her hundredth birthday—celebrated in her absence with all the sincerity a grateful nation can muster—we are left with the uncomfortable realisation that the golden age of the British monarchy may have ended not with a revolution but with a perfectly pleasant, slightly bumbling transition. Elizabeth II did not save the institution; she made it irrelevant in the best possible way. Charles III, bless him, seems determined to make it relevant again, which may yet prove its undoing. One can almost hear her, somewhere in the great beyond, giving that small, dry cough of disapproval and murmuring, “One does hope they’re not overdoing it.” In the end, that was always her greatest gift: the ability to make the rest of us feel, however briefly, that we were the ones who were overdoing it. 

Happy birthday, Ma’am. The country misses you more than it quite knows how to say.