JAMES VAN DER BEEK (1977 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

James Van Der Beek, who has departed for the great unkown at forty-eight after a courageous and unflinchingly public fight with cancer, leaves behind a legacy that is equal parts poignant and preposterous. He will forever be the man who taught an entire generation how to cry on television—properly, operatically, with the kind of commitment that made strangers on the internet decide this was the only acceptable response to minor inconvenience. The Dawson’s Creek crying scene, now a digital artefact older than most of its users, remains his most enduring contribution to culture. It is mercilessly reused, yet somehow never feels cruel when directed at him; the tears were too honest for that.

In his prime he embodied a very specific American fantasy: the sensitive, articulate teenage boy who quoted Spielberg and treated heartbreak like a graduate seminar. Dawson Leery was, by any rational standard, insufferable. Van Der Beek played him with such disarming sincerity that the character became lovable in spite of himself, and the actor emerged as the rare teen idol who seemed genuinely surprised to be one. Hollywood, unsure what to do with earnestness once puberty ended, sent him to football fields in whipped-cream bikinis and later to the thankless terrain of straight-to-video thrillers. He accepted the demotion with good grace and kept working.

His later role as FBI agent Elijah Mundo in CSI: Cyber—an enterprise whose very name sounded like a prank on the audience—offered steady employment and the quiet dignity of not having to emote quite so extravagantly. He brought to it the same unshowy competence that marked most of his post-Creek career: reliable, watchable, never bitter. In his final years he spoke openly about illness and family, displaying a wry, self-aware humour that suggested he had finally located the joke everyone else had been laughing at for decades. He appeared, at long last, entirely at ease with the absurdity of his own myth.

He is survived by his wife, Kimberly, and their children, who will inherit a father’s gentle decency and the eternal challenge of explaining to the world that the crying man on the internet was, in real life, rather good company.

EVERYBODY HATES KIER

In the long and dishonourable history of British political disappointment, few figures have managed to unite the nation quite like Keir Starmer. Tories loathe him because he exists; the Labour left loathe him because he exists while refusing to be Jeremy Corbyn; the centre loathe him because he sounds like a man reading out the terms and conditions for a pension plan; and the apolitical majority loathe him for the simple reason that he is now the face that launches a thousand sighs whenever the news comes on. It is a rare and almost admirable achievement: a hatred so universal that it feels almost churlish to question it, like complaining that rain is wet. 

One says 'hatred,' of course, in the mild, British sense of the word—the way one hates the new postcode lottery rules or the price of a pint. It is not the full-throated, pitchfork-and-torch hatred once reserved for Margaret Thatcher or, in more innocent times, for traffic wardens. It is a low, background hum of resentment, the sort of feeling that makes you change channel when his face appears, then change back again because the other side is Rishi Sunak doing his best impression of a man who has just discovered he is overdrawn by several billion pounds. 

Starmer hatred is democratic. It crosses class, region, age group, and—most impressively—political affiliation. Even people who voted for him seem to do so in the spirit of a man choosing the least uncomfortable chair in a waiting room full of nails. The beauty of the phenomenon is its sheer irrationality. Nobody can quite put a finger on the original sin. He has not (yet) started any unpopular wars. He has not been caught snorting the ashes of the Queen. He has not even, as far as we know, accepted a free suit from a donor who turned out to be a pop star with strong opinions about Israel. His crimes are subtler. He is competent, which is unforgivable in a country that still half-believes its leaders should be lovable rogues or grand visionaries. He speaks in whole sentences, without shouting, which feels suspiciously like taking the public for adults. Worst of all, he looks like a man who files his tax returns early and enjoys it.

There was a brief, shimmering moment—roughly between July 4 and July 5, 2024—when some of us thought we might learn to love him. The exit poll came in, the Tories were obliterated, and for one glorious evening the pubs rang with the sound of people saying “Well, at least he’s not Liz Truss.” It was the political equivalent of the morning after a particularly bad breakup when you wake up next to someone perfectly pleasant and think, “This could work.” Then he started governing, and the national hangover set in. He promised change, naturally. All politicians promise change; it is the political equivalent of “I’ll call you.” What he has delivered so far is the sort of change you get when you move the furniture around in a room that still desperately needs redecorating. The winter fuel allowance is trimmed, the rhetoric on immigration toughens, the green investment plans are scaled back, and suddenly half the Labour Party is gazing at him the way vegetarians regard a friend who has quietly ordered a steak. 

Meanwhile the right-wing press, which spent years insisting he was a Marxist sleeper agent, now complains that he is betraying socialist principles. It is the ultimate compliment: both sides hate him for letting the other side down. One must admire the economy of it. In the old days a prime minister had to work hard to alienate everybody. Tony Blair had to invade Iraq. Gordon Brown had to lose an election he was supposed to win. David Cameron had to call a referendum. Theresa May had to dance. Boris Johnson had to—well, exist in three dimensions. Starmer has managed the same result simply by turning up on time, wearing a tie, and declining to set anything on fire. It is efficiency taken to the level of art.

Part of the problem, if we are being charitable, is that he looks like the actuary he might have been in another life. There is something inescapably actuarial about the man: the neat hair, the tidy suits, the faint suggestion that he has already calculated your life expectancy and is quietly disappointed. One watches him at the dispatch box and waits for the spark that never comes. He is fluent, certainly; he is clear; he is occasionally ruthless. What he is not is alive in any way that registers on screen. Television, that cruel medium, requires a flicker of mischief, a hint of danger, even a touch of derangement. Starmer offers the viewer the mild reassurance of a man who has never in his life lost his temper in public, and possibly not in private either. It is like watching a very expensive watch tick: admirable, precise, and utterly devoid of soul.

And yet—and this is where the hatred becomes interesting—there is something almost heroic in his refusal to pander. Most modern politicians treat the electorate like a nervous date, forever checking their phone and wondering whether to lean in for the kiss. Starmer behaves as though the relationship is already settled and he is now explaining the joint mortgage. It is bracing, in its way. After years of leaders who grinned too much, shouted too much, lied too much, here is a man who seems to regard charisma as a form of moral weakness. One suspects he would rather be caught shoplifting than telling an anecdote about his childhood. 

The irony, of course, is that we asked for this. For years we complained about showmen, about bluster, about leaders who treated politics as performance art. Be careful what you wish for: we have ended up with a leader who treats politics as a job. The complaints now are the same ones we once directed at civil servants: too cautious, too incremental, too fond of process. We wanted a manager; we got one. The national mood is that of a child who asked for a bicycle and received a very sensible pair of shoes. There is nothing to Starmer. He is a sphinx without a riddle, a pudding without a theme, a late middle-aged human rights lawyer that had done sufficiently well for himself that he fancied a career change. Most blow their mid-life crises on affairs with au pairs or fancy sports cars. He decided to become Prime Minister, despite having no obvious interest in politics, policy or improving the country. We are all victims of his viciousness.

Perhaps in the end the hatred is not really about Starmer at all. It is about us. We do not know what we want, only that whatever is on offer is not it. We want vision but we do not want ideology; we want competence but we also want excitement; we want change but we become hysterical the moment anything actually changes. Starmer is merely the latest mirror held up to our confusion, and mirrors are rarely popular with people who do not like what they see. So we go on hating him, quietly, politely, in the way only the British can hate. We hate him when he speaks, we hate him when he is silent, we hate him when he wins, and we will almost certainly hate him even more if he starts losing. It is a hatred born not of passion but of disappointment, the slow realisation that politics, like life, rarely delivers heroes. The best it can manage is someone who keeps the lights on and the trains running approximately on time, and even that feels like a swindle.

Poor Keir. He will never be loved, and he probably knows it. In a saner world that would be the beginning of wisdom. In this one it is just another reason to change the channel.

GENERATION GAMES Pt III: THE REVENGE

Nine years ago, in the immediate aftermath of yet another British general election that left everyone claiming victory while secretly nursing a hangover, I penned a modest manifesto on behalf of my fellow travellers in Generation X. We were, I declared with the breezy confidence of a man who had just discovered that his mortgage was slightly less ruinous than expected, the overlooked middle child of history: industrious yet playful, cynical yet optimistic, the generation that invented the internet only to watch everyone else monetise it. 

We had, I argued, the best of both worlds — the Boomers’ work ethic without their nostalgia for ration books, the Millennials’ tech-savviness without their conviction that a strongly worded hashtag constitutes civic engagement. While the old and the young squared up to each other like rival stag parties in a provincial nightclub, we — Generation X — would quietly get on with saving the world. And, I added with a flourish, we would do so without expecting anyone to pick up the bill for both sides’ mistakes. How young I was then. How touchingly naïve. I return to the subject now, in the chill opening weeks of 2026, prompted by a post on what we must still call Twitter — or X, if one wishes to sound like a failed Bond villain — from a Canadian observer who has articulated, with admirable economy, the quiet despair that has settled over my cohort like a damp North Atlantic fog. “Gen X lived, and will die, in the shadow of the Boomers,” he wrote. “We’ll never really get our turn. They’ll still outvote us for another 10 to 15 years, and when they’re gone, Millennials and Gen Z will take over right where they left off. Gen X will never truly have a say. That’s why we’re pissed.” 

One does not need to be Canadian to recognise the sentiment. One merely needs to be alive, solvent, and born between, roughly, 1965 and 1980. The numbers, those remorseless actuaries of human ambition, are unambiguous. The Baby Boomers — that vast, echoing cohort born in the afterglow of victory and penicillin — continue to dominate the electoral rolls with the serene implacability of a herd of elderly elephants refusing to yield the watering hole. Higher turnout among the over-55s, a phenomenon as predictable as the tide, ensures that their preferences — lower taxes on pensions, higher spending on healthcare, and a vague suspicion of anything invented after the compact disc — remain the default setting of democratic politics. 

Meanwhile, the Millennials and their younger siblings in Gen Z, armed with the megaphone of social media and the moral certainty of people who have never known a world without Wi-Fi, are already queuing impatiently at the stage door. And there we stand, Generation X, in the wings, clutching our dog-eared scripts and wondering whether the director has forgotten we exist. It is not merely a matter of demographics, though demographics are cruel enough. In Britain, as in Canada and much of the Anglosphere, the Boomers’ numerical advantage, combined with their enthusiastic participation in the democratic process, has kept the political conversation anchored in the late twentieth century. We are governed, to a remarkable degree, by people who came of age when the Berlin Wall was still standing and the threat of nuclear annihilation lent a certain urgency to one’s choice of hairstyle. Even when the faces change, the assumptions remain: property is the only reliable store of wealth, the welfare state must be preserved in amber, and the young should jolly well stop complaining and get on with it, just as we did.

Yet the young, bless their cotton socks, have no intention of getting on with it. They have discovered the novel expedient of voting in large numbers for parties that promise to redistribute the remaining assets of the middle-aged downwards, ideally before the middle-aged have finished paying off their student loans from the 1990s. The result is a pincer movement of rare elegance: the Boomers guarding the past, the Millennials seizing the future, and Generation X compressed in the middle like a forgotten slice of processed cheese in a gourmet sandwich. One might have expected, back in 2017, that our moment would arrive naturally. After all, we were entering our prime earning years, our cultural references were suddenly retro-chic, and our leaders — Trudeau in Canada, Macron in France, even our own fleeting experiments with middle-aged competence — were beginning to appear on the world stage. Surely, I thought, the Boomers would eventually retire to their cruises and their conservatories, leaving us to impose a sensible, ironic order on the proceedings.

Alas, biology is not so accommodating. Advances in medicine — many of them, ironically, developed by Gen X scientists who grew up watching too much Star Trek — have extended Boomer lifespans to the point where actuarial tables now resemble optimistic science fiction. They are not merely living longer; they are voting longer. And when, eventually, the inevitable actuarial correction arrives, the stage will not be cleared for us. It will be occupied by a generation that has grown up believing that disagreement constitutes violence and that the primary function of government is to validate one’s identity. 

There is, I confess, a certain comic symmetry to our predicament. We who prided ourselves on our independence — latchkey children who learned to microwave our own dinners while our parents pursued self-actualisation — now find ourselves permanently supervised. We who mocked the Boomers’ nostalgia for the post-war consensus are now nostalgic for the 1990s, when house prices were merely extortionate rather than hallucinogenic. We who once dismissed Millennials as fragile now watch them reshape institutions with the serene confidence of people who have never been told no. Some insist that we have only ourselves to blame: we raised Gen Z, and must therefore accept responsibility for their more exotic pronoun preferences. A few cling to the hope that longevity research will keep us around long enough to enjoy the fruits of our own ingenuity, like elderly rock stars refusing to leave the stage after the encore.

All of which is true, yet none of it alters the central fact: we are the intermission generation. Our cultural contributions — grunge, Britpop, the first tentative steps toward a digital world — have been absorbed and commodified by others. Our political leaders, when we produce them, are swiftly co-opted into the prevailing orthodoxies of left or right. Our characteristic stance — sceptical, self-deprecating, allergic to ideology — is precisely what renders us unfit for power in an age that demands absolute conviction. There is, perhaps, a bleak consolation in this. While the Boomers and Millennials engage in their interminable culture war, each convinced of their own moral superiority, we remain free to observe the spectacle with the detached amusement of the true cynic. We know how these stories end: the Boomers will eventually depart, taking with them their encyclopaedic knowledge of the Beatles’ B-sides; the Millennials and Gen Z will inherit a world they believe they invented; and somewhere in the middle, a small cohort of middle-aged people will continue to fix the Wi-Fi, pay the taxes, and occasionally permit themselves a wry smile at the absurdity of it all.

In 2017, I concluded with the hopeful assertion that Generation X had this in hand. Today, with the wisdom of added years and subtracted illusions, I revise that verdict. We never had it in hand. We were merely passing through, briefly illuminated by the stage lights before the next act began. And yet, in our quiet, sardonic way, we endure — the only generation capable of laughing at its own irrelevance. That, at least, is something the others cannot take from us.