THE CULT OF ATTENBOROUGH

In the great British tradition of elevating the smoothly spoken to the status of secular saints, few figures have been polished quite so vigorously as the newly centeried Sir David Attenborough. There he perches, at the grand old age of 100, atop his pedestal of public adulation, murmuring in that velvet baritone about the wonders of the natural world while the camera performs its miracles of patience and expense. One half expects a choir of Attenborough impersonators to strike up a hymn: O come, all ye faithful, to the Church of the Holy Narrator. Yet peel back the reverent foliage, and what do we find? Not a towering scientist forged in the fires of fieldwork and falsification, but a supremely accomplished script-reader with a Cambridge natural sciences degree and the good fortune to have been born into the television age. 

Compare him, if you will, with the late David Bellamy – botanist, broadcaster, and heretic. Where Attenborough glided through life like a well-lubricated BBC limousine, Bellamy charged about the place with the untidy enthusiasm of a man who actually knew his subject from the mud up. President of the Wildlife Trusts, a familiar bearded presence on our screens in the days when the BBC still tolerated a degree of eccentricity, Bellamy had the unforgivable habit of treating science as a process rather than a settled liturgy. Around 2004, he committed the cardinal sin of calling global warming “poppycock” – or words to that effect – and suggesting that the Earth’s climate had a habit of naturally cycling through warmer and cooler phases, long before the invention of the SUV. The response was as swift as it was sanctimonious. Work dried up. Invitations evaporated. The man who had once been the corporation’s go-to green-fingered showman found himself politely airbrushed from the schedules. He spoke later of being “frozen out,” of being ejected from conservation groups he had helped build, and of the general social opprobrium that follows any public figure foolish enough to wander off the reservation. 

One pictures the BBC’s commissioning editors clutching their pearls, or perhaps their copies of the latest IPCC summary for policymakers, murmuring that poor Bellamy had rather let the side down. Better to stick with the safe pair of hands – or rather, the safe pair of vocal cords – who could be relied upon to read the approved lines with gravitas and without awkward questions. Attenborough, by contrast, has never suffered such indignities. His career trajectory is a masterclass in institutional survival: producer, controller of BBC Two, director of programmes, and finally the nation’s favourite uncle with a knighthood and a production company that, by some mysterious coincidence, continues to generate handsome returns. He is not, it should be noted, a field researcher who has spent decades testing hypotheses in hostile environments. He is a broadcaster who narrates what the camera crews and scientists have captured, often at eye-watering public expense. The distinction matters. One does not become a national treasure by quarrelling with the prevailing pieties; one becomes a national treasure by embodying them in a manner soothing enough to make the licence fee feel like a bargain. 

There is something faintly ridiculous about the reverence. Here is a man whose early television work involved, among other things, helping to supply zoos with wild-caught animals – a practice that sits awkwardly alongside today’s sermons on biodiversity and planetary fragility. His carbon footprint, accumulated through decades of globe-trotting filming, could probably power a small Pacific atoll. Yet he lectures the rest of us on restraint with the serene authority of one who has never had to fly economy. Bellamy, bless him, lacked that particular gift for soothing. He was too plainly a scientist first and a performer second. When the data (or his interpretation of it) pointed away from catastrophe, he said so. That he later conceded certain points on glacier measurements only underscores the difference: here was a man capable of revising his views in light of evidence, rather than simply updating the autocue. 

His reward was obscurity. Attenborough’s reward has been millions in earnings, endless awards, and the curious modern honour of being treated as an oracle on everything from population control to planetary doom. None of this is to deny Attenborough’s genuine contributions though. He has brought astonishing footage into millions of living rooms and fostered a widespread affection for wildlife. The sin is not competence at narration but the inflation of that competence into moral and scientific authority. In an age that claims to worship expertise, we have instead canonised the expert-adjacent: the man who reads the press release in iambic pentameter. Meanwhile, the actual qualified sceptic is quietly disappeared, not because his arguments were conclusively demolished (climate science remains a field rich in uncertainty, model assumptions, and political incentives), but because they were inconvenient.

The pedestal, in short, is too high. Lower it a notch or two, and we might see Attenborough more clearly for what he is: an accomplished populariser, a relic of the Reithian BBC, and a rather good actor in the role of Concerned Naturalist. David Bellamy deserved better. The public deserved better than the gentle suffocation of dissent dressed up as public service broadcasting. And the natural world – that gloriously indifferent, cyclical, endlessly fascinating place – deserves commentators with the intellectual honesty to admit when the script no longer matches the evidence.

In the end, the cult of Attenborough tells us less about nature than it does about our own need for comforting grandfathers who will pat us on the head and warn us solemnly about the weather. The real natural historians were always a scruffier, more argumentative lot. They only tended not to polish up quite so nicely for the cameras, and ultimately, that is not their sin, but ours.

A SHORT SHARP REFORM, A LONGER RESTORATION

One does not have to be a student of political meteorology to detect the gathering storm clouds over Britain as polling day approaches on this, the 7th May. The local elections, that traditional festival of pavement politics, recycled leaflets, and the occasional outbreak of actual voter enthusiasm, arrive at a moment when the Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer has achieved something remarkable: it has made itself simultaneously omnipresent and invisible. Omnipresent in the sense that its fingerprints are on every tax rise, every strained public service, and every evasive answer about immigration; invisible in the sense that its vision for the country appears to consist largely of hoping the next set of figures will be slightly less awful than the last. 

The record speaks for itself with the bleak eloquence of a balance sheet in the red. Economic growth has all the vigour of a retired civil servant on a Sunday afternoon stroll. The cost of living continues its upward march with the cheerful indifference of a medieval tax collector. The NHS waits lists grow like Japanese knotweed, while ministers issue statements of “concern” that carry all the weight of a Hallmark greeting card. Immigration policy remains a masterclass in performative compassion married to administrative paralysis, and cultural issues are handled with the delicacy of a man defusing a bomb by hitting it with a copy of the Equality Act. Labour’s achievement has been to unite large sections of the country in a single, heartfelt sentiment: enough.

In such a climate, the temptation for the disaffected voter is strong. The Greens, ever reliable, offer their familiar bouquet of solutions: more cycling, more taxes on the productive, and a foreign policy apparently devised by a committee of anxious undergraduates. Their appeal lies in moral purity untroubled by practical detail. One admires the sincerity with which they propose to solve the housing crisis by hugging trees and the energy crisis by wishing for windier days. Yet sincerity is no substitute for competence. A party that treats net-zero targets as holy writ while simultaneously advocating policies that would make energy more expensive and unreliable is not so much an alternative as a cautionary tale. Their recent performances suggest they may pick up seats from the protest vote, but the notion of them wielding serious power induces the sort of nervous laughter once reserved for announcements from the Ministry of Silly Walks. 

On the other side of the ledger, the right is in ferment – and not before time. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK enters these local elections with the wind in its sails and the scent of blood in its nostrils. Polling projections suggest significant gains, possibly hundreds of seats, as voters in councils across England look for the nearest blunt instrument with which to beat the incumbent order. Farage remains a formidable communicator: part showman, part tribune, capable of articulating the frustrations of millions who have watched their country change beyond recognition while being told their concerns were illusory. Reform’s message – stop the boats, cut the waste, prioritise the native population – resonates because it addresses observable reality rather than the polite fictions of Whitehall. In the short term, a strong showing for Reform on 7 May would serve as a necessary corrective: a loud, unmistakable signal that the post-2024 settlement is already fraying at the edges. 

Yet one must temper the euphoria with a dash of realism. Reform has momentum, but it also carries the risks of any insurgent force: candidate vetting issues that keep making headlines, the gravitational pull of personality politics, and the perennial question of whether electoral charisma translates into governing stamina. The civil service has ways of blunting even the sharpest blades, and charisma alone will not balance the books or unscramble decades of policy failure. Which is where Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain enters the picture as the more measured long-term prospect. Launched earlier this year, the party is still in its infancy – too new, by its own admission, to mount a comprehensive challenge in these widespread local contests. Lowe is focusing efforts where he has strength, notably in Great Yarmouth, while running some candidates under independent banners elsewhere. This restraint is telling. It speaks to a recognition that serious restoration requires infrastructure, discipline, and time – not just a surge of righteous anger. 

Lowe, the businessman-turned-MP, brings a directness unsoftened by years in the Westminster bubble. His emphasis on reversing unsustainable migration, confronting cultural erosion, and restoring national self-confidence is rooted in the same soil as Reform’s, but with a slightly more methodical air. Where Farage excels at disruption, Lowe gives the impression of a man prepared for the grinding work of reconstruction. Should Reform, in the unforgiving arena of actual power, prove better at campaigning than at delivering – or should its internal dynamics fragment under pressure – Restore Britain stands as the logical next vehicle: less dependent on a single star turn, more focused on building durable local and national machinery.

The sensible voter’s approach, then, is one of tactical sequencing. Vote Reform on 7 May where it offers the clearest rebuke to Labour’s failures and the Conservatives’ timidity. Use these elections to smash the old consensus, to rack up councillor gains, and to demonstrate that the silent majority is no longer silent. Let the results send a thunderclap through the corridors of power. But keep a weather eye on the longer game. Reform now, to halt the decline and clear the ground. Restore later, to rebuild with patience and precision once the initial demolition work is done.

Britain does not need more utopian experiments from the cycle-and-lentil brigade, nor another dose of Starmerite managerialism dressed up as compassion. It needs first the courage to acknowledge reality, and then the steadiness to act upon it. These local elections offer a modest but vital opportunity to begin that process. The alternative – another shrug of the shoulders, another drift towards managed decline – is too dispiriting even for the most sardonic observer to contemplate without a stiff drink and a longer view. On Thursday, kick the table. In due course, start building a better one.

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.