THE RANTING BRUMMIE’S ANNUS TERRIBILIS (OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING & LOATHE THE ALGORITHM)

Ah, 2025—what a gloriously indulgent year for the human banquet, as we gorged ourselves on another twelve months of richly seasoned folly, washed down with a vintage blend of hubris and hysteria. As the final crumbs are swept from the table of this year, one can only raise a glass to civilisation’s unerring knack for transforming every triumph into a soggy canapé and every catastrophe into a flaming pudding that sets the dining room alight. 

In the end, 2025 proved that humanity's greatest talent is persistence: persisting in conflict, in denial, in viral absurdity. As we stumble into 2026, one can only hope the next year brings fewer disasters and more genuine progress—or at least better memes. After all, in the grand comedy of errors that is history, laughter is the only sane response. I, for one, have had enough. The wheel is still spinning, the hamster is on fire, and the only sensible response is to step off, lie down in the sawdust, and wait for the whole circus to burn itself out. Preferably before the next “visioning workshop” on net-zero pronouns. 

Let us, then, conduct a brief post-mortem on the corpse of the year now twitching its last on the carpet.

January–March: The Triumph of the Thermostat

The year began, as all good years should, with the nation discovering that its energy bills had reached the sort of figures previously reserved for Qatari sovereign wealth funds. The government’s response was characteristically bold: it instructed the populace to wear an extra jumper and consider the possibility that being cold builds character. Somewhere in Davos, UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer wept a single tear of empathy before boarding his helicopter. Meanwhile, the BBC unveiled its new flagship drama: a gritty eight-part series about a non-binary Viking who invents vegan mead and confronts toxic masculinity using the medium of spoken-word poetry. Critics called it 'stunning and brave'. Everyone else reached for the remote and accidentally discovered the shopping channel, which suddenly felt like Chekhov.

Donald Trump, freshly reinstalled in the White House like an updated version of Microsoft Paint, wasted no time in reminding the world that subtlety is for losers. On his first day back, he pardoned over 1,500 January 6 enthusiasts—because nothing says "law and order" like absolving a mob—declared a border emergency, and promptly withdrew from the Paris Agreement and WHO, proving once again that global cooperation is best handled unilaterally. Tariffs flew like confetti at a bankrupt wedding, prompting lawsuits from California and trade spats with half the planet. By year's end, Trump's Mar-a-Lago peace talks with Zelenskyy had produced... well, more talks, while Ukraine droned on (literally) and Russia reclaimed bits of territory with the enthusiasm of a landlord evicting squatters.

April–June: The Summer of Cultural Enrichment

Spring brought the now-traditional festival of street furniture removal, as various municipalities discovered that bollards were symbols of colonial oppression and that the real enemy of inclusivity is anything that prevents a Deliveroo cyclist from achieving 47 mph through a pedestrian zone. In London, the Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan—still convinced that the internal combustion engine is powered by the tears of poor children—expanded the ULEZ zone until it effectively encompassed the Home Counties and parts of Belgium. Motorists responded by purchasing diesel generators the size of small bungalows and running them 24 hours a day out of spite. Emissions, oddly, went up.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel expanded its military hobbies to six countries, striking Iran in a 12-day extravaganza dubbed Operation Rising Lion—presumably because subtlety was on holiday. Gaza saw a fragile ceasefire hold just long enough for everyone to reload, while Sudan quietly hosted the world's largest displacement crisis, with millions fleeing famine and gangs in a conflict so under-reported it might as well have been scripted by Netflix for obscurity. Syria, fresh from ousting Assad, pondered whether the new bosses would be different from the old bosses, and Haiti demonstrated that gang violence plus hurricanes equals a humanitarian crisis even aid workers treat like a bad blind date.

July–September: The Age of the Expert

The long, hot summer was dominated by experts. Experts told us that the heatwave was unprecedented (a claim that would have surprised anyone who’d lived through 1976 and hadn’t spent the intervening decades pickling their memory in oat-milk lattes). Experts told us that eating beef would doom the planet, then quietly boarded transatlantic flights to lecture other experts on the importance of reducing one’s carbon footprint. One particularly luminous expert suggested that the solution to knife crime was to redesign knives with rounded ends. The nation nodded sagely, then went back to stabbing one another with screwdrivers, which are notoriously difficult to redesign without compromising their utility when assembling flat-pack furniture.

Nature, ever the reliable comedian, chipped in with wildfires in California that barbecued billions, floods in Texas that turned the Hill Country into an inland sea, and a parade of cyclones and earthquakes across Asia that killed thousands and cost fortunes. Extreme weather racked up insured losses exceeding $120 billion, reminding us that climate change is the gift that keeps on giving—mostly insurance premiums and despair.

October–December: Peak Britain

Autumn delivered the coup de grâce. The UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer—having promised to “get Britain working again”—promptly put the entire civil service on a four-day week and reclassified “quiet quitting” as a protected characteristic. The Royal Academy’s annual exhibition featured a sculpture entitled “Untitled (My Trauma)” consisting of a discarded Greggs wrapper suspended in a tank of the artist’s own urine. It sold for £340,000 to a hedge fund that wanted something “confrontational” for its reception area. And then, just when we thought the cultural septic tank could take no more, the Church of England announced that it was considering replacing the Lord’s Prayer with a land acknowledgment and a trigger warning. One suspects even God is now on LinkedIn, frantically networking in case the pews empty entirely.

And The Rest ...

On the brighter side—or at least the side with better lighting—AI continued its relentless march toward making humans redundant. Agentic AI agents promised to plan our lives better than we could, while breakthroughs in gene therapy slowed Huntington's disease and new HIV preventives achieved 100% protection in trials. Quantum computing inched closer to usefulness, and space tourism hit new heights when Katy Perry warbled "What a Wonderful World" in zero gravity aboard Blue Origin, proving that even orbital joyrides can't escape the gravitational pull of kitsch. 

Culturally, we feasted on Labubu plush toys turning into meme gold, Kendrick Lamar resurrecting bootcut jeans at the Super Bowl, and Beyoncé finally snagging that elusive Album of the Year Grammy for Cowboy Carter. Celebrity scandals abounded: Diddy jailed, a Coldplay kiss-cam exposing corporate adultery, and Jon Hamm's viral dance reminding us that even Mad Men can boogie. Pope Francis's death led to the election of America's first pontiff, Leo XIV, who no doubt pondered the irony of a nation withdrawing from global pacts while exporting its clergy.

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Yours truly, meanwhile, has spent the year hunched over a keyboard like a man trying to defuse a bomb made entirely of opinions. I have written 164 posts, a rant virtually every other day, approximately 4.5 million words—enough to fill several modest libraries or one particularly tedious House of Lords debate—on subjects ranging from the death of civility to the rise of the battery hen as a metaphor for modern existence. My reward? A modest uptick in subscribers and a comment from someone calling himself “BasedYeoman1488” informing me that I am simultaneously a Zionist shill and a cultural Marxist. 

Truly, the algorithm knows me better than I know myself. I have become a caricature: the man who can no longer watch the news without composing imaginary footnotes. I saw a pigeon the other day and immediately began drafting an essay entitled “Columba livia as Symptom of Late-Stage Capitalist Alienation.” I found myself staring into the fridge at 3 a.m. muttering about the semiotics of semi-skimmed milk. It is time to stop before I begin referring to myself in the third person and demanding that my own posts be fact-checked. 

So I am taking a break. Not the sort of break that involves wellness retreats and being yelled at by a woman named Kaia while holding the plank position—no, thank you. I intend to do absolutely nothing with the sort of dedication normally reserved for tax avoidance by multinational corporations. I shall read books that do not come with discussion questions printed at the back. I shall listen to music written before auto-tune was invented. I may even attempt to cook something that does not arrive in a cardboard box with a picture of the meal it vaguely resembles. And I shall refuse—utterly refuse—to have an opinion about anything that happens between now and the moment I decide the world has once again earned my contempt.

So, if you do not hear from me for a while, do not assume I have been cancelled (though the way things are going, it feels increasingly like a matter of time). I am simply practising the most subversive act available to modern man: strategic silence. So may your turkey have been moist, your relatives bearable, and your Wi-Fi strong enough to sustain the illusion that doom-scrolling counts as a personality. And if, in the new year, you find the discourse suddenly a fraction less bilious, you will know that, somewhere in the Midlands, a very exasperated man has finally managed to shut up for a minute.

Yours in voluntary obscurity,

The Ranting Brummie

(For the moment, at least)

BRIGITTE BARDOT (1934 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Brigitte Bardot, who has died at the age of 91, managed the neat trick of becoming the most famous French export since champagne and baguettes while spending much of her life insisting she wanted nothing to do with the fuss. Born in 1934 to a pious industrialist father and a mother who treated child-rearing as an extension of ballet discipline, young Brigitte was packed off to dance classes where she excelled at pointing her toes, but showed early signs of preferring to point them in whatever direction she fancied. 

By fifteen she was on the cover of Elle, looking like the sort of girl who could make a convent school uniform seem subversive. Roger Vadim, six years older and already practising the art of looking wolfish, spotted the photographs, tracked her down, and promptly turned a teenage infatuation into a marriage, a career, and – with And God Created Woman in 1956 – an international incident. America, still recovering from the shock of Elvis’s pelvis, greeted Bardot’s barefoot mambo and unapologetic appetite for life with a mixture of rapture and moral panic. Cinemas banned the film; critics banned the word 'decency' from their vocabularies; Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay declaring her the first truly liberated woman. Bardot herself, trapped inside the phenomenon, complained that she had mostly been required to undress rather than act. A fair point, though one suspects the complaint was delivered while wearing something that left very little to the imagination.

Marriages came and went with the reliability of French railway strikes: Vadim (the svengali), Jacques Charrier (the resented pregnancy), Gunter Sachs (the playboy who arrived by helicopter), and finally Bernard d’Ormale, a political adviser who provided the one apparently stable harbour in a stormy sea of lovers, lawsuits and suicide attempts. Motherhood, when it arrived, was greeted with the enthusiasm usually reserved for tax audits; her son Nicolas later sued her after she remarked in print that she would rather have given birth to a puppy. One can only admire the consistency of her candour.

By 1973, after nearly fifty films and enough pout to power a small nation, she quit the screen, auctioned her jewels, and announced she was giving her remaining beauty to animals instead of men. The Brigitte Bardot Foundation became her true vocation: seals were saved, horses defended, stray dogs sterilised, and anyone who disagreed was informed, in forthright terms, that they were barbarians. Alas, the same forthrightness extended to immigrants, the gay community, and more or less anyone who failed her increasingly stringent purity tests, earning her a string of court appearances and fines that left even French prosecutors wearily declaring they’d had enough.

In the end, the girl who once embodied absolute freedom chose to spend her later years as a recluse, surrounded by pets and protected by a husband whose politics made her early scandals look positively wholesome. It was, in its way, a perfectly Gallic trajectory: outrageous, contradictory, impossible to ignore, and utterly indifferent to what anyone thought.

CHRIS REA (1951 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Chris Rea, the gravel-voiced troubadour who made melancholy sound like a warm engine idling in the rain, has finally pulled into the ultimate lay-by. He died at 74, presumably after a long, slow cruise down the highway of life, with the heater on and the windscreen wipers set to intermittent. Born in Middlesbrough in 1951, Rea never quite shook the Teesside accent, even when it was buried under layers of cigarette smoke and road tar. His signature deep voice, that marvellous rasp, was the sound of a lifelong smoker clearing his throat at dawn—deep, unapologetic, and oddly comforting, like discovering the last cigarette in the packet is still smokable. He didn’t so much sing as confide, and the listener felt privileged to be let in on the secret.

Rea’s great subject was the road. Not the romanticised American highway of Springsteen, but the British A-road: the one with lay-bys full of lorries, sodium lights, and the faint promise of a bacon sandwich at dawn. Songs like “Road to Hell” and “I Can Hear Your Heartbeat” were less about rebellion than resignation – the quiet knowledge that the journey is the point, even if it’s only to the next petrol station. He wrote them in a voice that suggested he’d already seen the end of the road and wasn’t particularly surprised by it.

Away from the microphone, Rea was a man who loved cars the way other rock stars loved football or women. He owned a collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Jaguars, and occasionally raced them with the same unhurried grace that characterised his music. There was something touching about this: the boy from industrial Cleveland who made his fortune and spent it on beautiful machines that could outrun almost anything except mortality.

In later years, illness slowed him down, yet even in its quieter register, it remained unmistakable – a gravelly benediction for anyone who has ever driven at night and wondered what the hell they were doing with their life. Chris Rea may have gone, but the road is still there. And somewhere, in a lay-by on the A1, a CD player is still playing “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, waiting for the next driver to pull in and listen.

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA" (2025)

One has to admire the sheer audacity of a Doctor Who spin-off that manages to be both a triumph of casting and a masterclass in environmental sermonising. The War Between the Land and the Sea is, in its better moments, a brisk little five-episode thing that feels like Russell T Davies decided to remake The Day After Tomorrow but with more Dalek-adjacent sea creatures and considerably fewer ice caps. The plot, such as it is, concerns a subterranean amphibious race rising from the depths to reclaim the surface from humanity’s carbon-emitting clutches. It is, in short, the sort of story that might have been written by a particularly earnest Year 9 geography teacher who has recently discovered eco-anxiety and a word processor.

The acting, however, is where the show briefly escapes its own sanctimony. Russell Tovey, as the beleaguered UNIT employee, gives a performance of such quiet, sardonic charm that one wonders why he isn’t given more to do than run around in a raincoat looking mildly put-upon. He has the rare gift of making exposition sound like conversation rather than a briefing note from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gemma Redgrave, meanwhile, is magnificent as Kate Stewart: steely, weary, and just the right side of camp. She delivers lines about “the planet’s last stand” with the conviction of someone who has seen too many committee meetings and not enough actual saving of the world. 

Together they are the best thing in the show, and one suspects they know it. The environmental messaging, however, is less messaging than a full-blown lecture tour. Every third line is a finger-wagging reminder that we’re all doomed unless we stop using plastic straws, and the show seems to believe that if it shouts “climate crisis” loudly enough, it will become drama rather than propaganda. It is the televisual equivalent of being trapped in a lift with a vegan who has just read The Uninhabitable Earth and wants to make sure you’ve suffered for it. One half-expects the closing credits to be followed by a QR code to sign a petition.

Worse still is the narrative sleight-of-hand that Davies attempts with the Doctor himself. The Fourteenth Doctor—David Tennant’s return, remember, the one who was supposed to be the emotional anchor of this whole era—plays no role whatsoever in The War Between the Land and the Sea. Not a cameo, not a phone call, not even a mention. He is, apparently, too busy enjoying a quiet retirement in a TARDIS-shaped bungalow somewhere in the Home Counties, while UNIT and the planet itself are being threatened by angry fish-men. One might charitably call this “subtle world-building”. One might less charitably call it “a gaping hole in the continuity that even a blind Dalek could spot”. If the Doctor is the universe’s designated problem-solver, why is he sitting this one out? Has he run out of regenerations, or has he simply decided that saving the Earth from climate change is a bit too on-the-nose for a man who once regenerated to avoid a tax audit?

One cannot help but wonder whether this curious absence reflects a larger problem: that Davies, having poured so much of his creative energy into this spin-off, left Ncuti Gatwa’s second series of the main show undercooked and under-supported. The Fifteenth Doctor’s sophomore outing arrived with the enthusiasm of a soufflé that had been left in the oven too long—beautiful in theory, but rather flat in practice. The ratings were dismal, the critics were kind but unconvincing, and Gatwa himself has since vanished into the ether, leaving the show in a state of what can only be described as narrative limbo. One is tempted to ask: did the boss spend too much time worrying about the sea rising and not enough time worrying about the audience?

In the end, The War Between the Land and the Sea is a show that wants to be taken seriously but keeps tripping over its own moralising shoelaces. Tovey and Redgrave are excellent, the production values are handsome, and the monsters are reasonably convincing. But the preaching is relentless, the Doctor is AWOL, and the whole thing feels like a side-project that might have done better as a side-project. If this is the future of Doctor Who, it is a future in which the Time Lord has apparently decided that the best way to save the planet is to let UNIT do all the work while he tends his begonias. One can only hope he remembers to water them.

LABOUR'S ELECTILE DYSFUCNTION

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a government in possession of a majority must be in want of a reason to postpone elections. The Labour administration, ever attentive to the needs of its own comfort, has now hit upon the splendid idea of delaying up to sixty-three local council elections scheduled for May 2026. The pretext is as familiar as it is fragrant: local government reorganisation. Councils, it seems, are in the process of being lovingly rearranged like furniture in a sitting room that nobody actually uses. To hold elections during such a delicate period would be like trying to conduct a wedding in the middle of a house move. Far better, the reasoning goes, to let the incumbents remain comfortably in situ until the dust settles, the boxes are unpacked, and the new boundaries are drawn with the precision of a drunken cartographer.

The Electoral Commission, that stern Victorian aunt of British public life, has naturally taken one look at this proposal and declared it “unprecedented” and “likely to undermine public confidence”. It is difficult to disagree. The Commission’s chief executive, Vijay Rangarajan, has even gone so far as to point out the rather obvious conflict of interest involved when elected bodies get to decide when they themselves would like to be re-elected. One might have thought that the principle of not being judge in one’s own cause was established somewhere around the Magna Carta, but apparently it is still news in the corridors of Whitehall.

The government’s response has been admirably consistent: they are not delaying elections, they are merely adjusting the timetable to accommodate the vital work of reorganisation. This is rather like saying that one is not cancelling a dinner party, one is merely rescheduling it until such time as the guests have forgotten they were ever invited. The phrase “postponement for administrative convenience” has been deployed with the solemnity of a bishop intoning the Athanasian Creed, as though the mere repetition of it will make it sound less like the sort of thing one does when one has been caught with one’s hand in the till.

Let us not pretend this is entirely novel. The same government has already postponed mayoral elections until 2028, thereby establishing the important constitutional precedent that if one can find a sufficiently good reason, one may put off democracy for a bit. The reasons, it should be noted, are always of the highest quality: boundary reviews, local government reform, the need to ensure that the electorate is properly informed, the necessity of aligning the cycle with some other cycle that nobody else can quite remember. These are the sort of reasons that, in the hands of a really skilled civil servant, can be stretched to cover almost anything short of a full-scale invasion.

The public, predictably, are less impressed. There has been the usual chorus of complaint: that democracy is not a convenience to be rescheduled at the whim of those in power; that the right to vote is not a privilege to be granted or withheld like a parking permit; that the sight of politicians deciding their own terms of office is not exactly reassuring to the average citizen. One might have expected the government to be embarrassed. Instead, they have taken the view that embarrassment is a luxury they can ill afford, and have proceeded with the calm assurance of people who know they have the majority and the media will eventually move on to something else.

In the end, it is all very British. We do not, as a nation, like to make a fuss. We prefer our democratic backsliding to be conducted in the polite, understated manner of someone quietly slipping a parking ticket into the glove compartment. The government has mastered this art: they do not cancel elections, they merely defer them. They do not cling to power, they merely extend the mandate for the greater good of local government efficiency. And if, in the process, a few million voters are left wondering when exactly they will next be allowed to have a say in who runs their bins and their bus shelters, well, that is a small price to pay for the smooth running of the state.

One can only hope that the Electoral Commission’s stern words will be heeded. But experience suggests otherwise. The British way is to tut, to shake one’s head, and to carry on regardless. In a few years’ time, when the next government finds it convenient to postpone another set of elections, the precedent will be there, neatly filed and ready for use. And the public, having been trained in the art of not making a fuss, will tut once more and go back to watching Strictly Come Dancing.

It is, when you think about it, a remarkably efficient system. No messy revolutions, no dramatic constitutional crises—just the quiet, relentless postponement of the democratic moment until such time as it becomes inconvenient for those in charge. A triumph of pragmatism over principle. And, in the finest British tradition, nobody will be rude enough to point out that it is also, by any reasonable standard, a complete disgrace.

THE CANNON FODDER CONTINGENCY

One contemplates the latest fashion sweeping the salons of Brussels and the chancelleries of Europe—the quiet, creeping return of conscription—with the same enthusiasm one reserves for a letter from the taxman announcing a retrospective audit. It arrives disguised as "voluntary service," "needs-based registration," or "incentivised national duty," but we all know what it is: the backdoor draft, slipped in while we were distracted by the latest diversity initiative or climate directive.

Look at the map. Latvia has already hauled young men back into uniform. Croatia is polishing the boots for a compulsory two-month stint starting next year. Sweden, that paragon of Nordic sensibility, selects its conscripts with the impartiality of a lottery. Denmark has extended the pleasure to women, because equality, darling. Germany, having suspended the practice in 2011 with the airy confidence of a man who believes wars are things that happen to other people, now mandates questionnaires for every eighteen-year-old male, with the polite threat that if volunteers prove insufficient, compulsion will follow as night follows day. France, under the guidance of President Macron—who appears to view foreign policy as a form of performance art—has announced a voluntary youth service, but one suspects the voluntarism will prove as durable as a New Year's resolution.

And why this sudden enthusiasm for turning the flower of European youth into target practice? Ostensibly, the Russian bear is at the gates, growling about NATO's eastward promenade. Fair enough; Moscow has never been renowned for its sense of humour about encirclement. But let us be honest: the real architects of this martial revival sit not in the Kremlin but in the glass palaces of Brussels and the think-tanks of Paris (or what remains of it). Globalist organisations—NATO, the EU, the whole alphabet soup of supranational busybodies—have decided that Europe must prepare for a war nobody particularly wants, against an enemy who has shown as much desire to invade the Baltic states or Poland as Katie Price has to end up on a PAYE register.

The plan, whispered in the corridors, is brutally simple: send the native European male to the front in sufficient numbers to depopulate him demographically. While he is busy holding some frozen trench outside Kharkiv, the borders remain open to the great replacement project: millions from the Third World, invited in on the assumption that they will prove more compliant, less likely to object when the next tranche of sovereignty is surrendered to Brussels or the next tax hike is imposed to fund green windmills. One is reminded of the Ottoman devshirme, that charming system whereby Christian boys were seized, converted, and turned into Janissaries to guard an empire that despised their origins followed by replacement by peoples who have no historical stake in the cathedrals, the constitutions, or the culture they inherit. History rhymes, as they say, though this time the sultans wear suits from Savile Row and speak in the soothing cadences of human rights rhetoric.

This is the final proof—if proof were needed—that globalism, corporatism, communism, and socialism have failed spectacularly. Globalism promised peace through interdependence; it has delivered interdependence upon adversaries. Corporatism assured us that markets would tame nations; instead, nations are being dissolved to serve markets. Communism, in its lingering academic form, preached equality; it has produced only new hierarchies of the virtuous and the deplorable. Socialism vowed prosperity through redistribution; it has redistributed prosperity to consultants, NGOs, and arms manufacturers while the native working class foots the bill and, soon, provides the bodies.

The failure is total. Economies stagnate under regulation. Cultures dissolve under mandated diversity. Young men, taxed into childlessness and shamed into silence, are now to be conscripted into futility. And for what? To defend a Europe that no longer believes in itself, that apologises for its past while importing its future. The centre-right has been little better, but at least some fragments of it still remember what a nation is for. Throw the rascals out, every last one who speaks of "European values" while eroding the very peoples who created them.

It is not too late. Look again at Bulgaria and Lithuania, where this very month the people have risen—not with pitchforks, but with the quiet, massive dignity of citizens who have simply had enough. They have toppled a government over corruption and a ruinous budget, reminding the continent that sovereignty begins at home. If they can do it, so can we. Before the call-up papers are printed. Before the next generation is sacrificed on the altar of a failed ideology.

And finally, a word—if one may descend to the gutter—for Sir Keir Starmer, that spineless, sanctimonious little apparatchik whose leadership qualities combine the backbone of a slug with the moral grandeur of a parking warden issuing tickets during a funeral. Should this pathetic, quivering nonentity dare to follow the continental trend and smuggle conscription back in through some characteristically cowardly British loophole—perhaps a “voluntary national resilience programme” backed by ruinous fines and prison threats—one can forecast the outcome with absolute certainty.

The country will erupt. Not with the usual crusty anarchists or paid agitators, but with millions of ordinary, long-suffering citizens who have finally run out of cheeks to turn. Rebellion on a scale that will make the poll tax riots look like a particularly spirited Morris dance. And where will our brave Knight of the Realm be then? Cowering in whatever reinforced bunker the civil service has prepared for him, whimpering into his herbal tea, issuing recorded statements about “tough but necessary decisions” while the realm he has so diligently undermined goes up in flames above his head.

One can be equally certain that the 'new arrivals'—his pampered, untouchable clientele—will be granted blanket exemptions, at worst recruited and deployed as his own personal Delta Force, because the entire point of the exercise is to cull the native stock and spare the designated replacements. Watching the demographic ledger tilt ever further in the direction he desires would, one suspects, afford Sir Keir a private, shameful frisson—something perilously close to self-pleasurable satisfaction for a man whose emotional range otherwise runs from pious to smug. 

Take heed, you wretched, treacherous little man. Even contemptible weaklings like you can be dragged into the light when a patient people finally lose theirs.

It wont be long now.

GIL GERARD (1943 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Gil Gerard, who has died at 82 after what his wife described as a brief and merciless skirmish with a particularly aggressive form of cancer, will forever be remembered as the man who thawed out in the 25th century and somehow made tight white spandex look like a viable career choice.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1943, Gerard started life far from the stars—first as an industrial chemist, then as a New York cabbie who moonlighted in nearly 400 television commercials, peddling everything from Ford cars to whatever else paid the rent. A chance fare led to a bit part in Love Story, but it was daytime soap The Doctors that kept him employed for years as the reliably handsome Dr. Alan Stewart. Fame arrived in 1979 when Glen A. Larson defrosted the old Buck Rogers comic strip and handed Gerard the title role. 

As Captain William “Buck” Rogers—an astronaut frozen for 500 years only to wake up quipping in a disco-flavoured future—Gerard brought a breezy, winking charm to a show that teetered gloriously between camp and adventure. Ably supported by Erin Gray’s Colonel Wilma Deering and a beeping robot called Twiki (voiced by Mel Blanc, no less), the series ran for two seasons, delighting children and baffling critics in equal measure. After Buck’s shuttle was grounded, Gerard kept busy with television movies, the short-lived martial-arts series Sidekicks opposite young Ernie Reyes Jr., and occasional film roles, including a cameo alongside Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys. He was candid about his struggles with weight and addiction, even subjecting himself to the reality lens in Action Hero Makeover.

In later years, he reunited with Gray for fan events and a web pilot, proving that some heroes never quite hang up the ray gun. Gerard is survived by his wife Janet, after eighteen years of marriage, and by his son Gib from his earlier union with Connie Sellecca. One suspects Buck himself would have approved of the exit line Gerard prepared: “See you out somewhere in the cosmos.”

IF ONLY WE HADN'T ...

There are moments in a nation’s life when the electorate, like a man who has drunk three bottles of supermarket Merlot and discovered Tinder, decides to do something spectacularly self-harming for the sheer novelty of it. The general election of July 2024 was one such moment. We looked at fourteen years of Conservative government (admittedly a period that had all the grandeur of a damp firework) and concluded that the remedy was to install Sir Keir Starmer with a majority so large it could have its own gravitational field. History will record the decision with the same puzzled admiration it reserves for the captain of the Titanic ordering 'full speed ahead' after the first iceberg sighting.

The economy responded with the enthusiasm of a turkey at Christmas. Growth promptly committed hara-kiri. Inflation, having been tamed to the point where it almost looked house-trained, was released back into the wild with a cheery wave from the Bank of England. Rachel Reeves, our new Chancellor, discovered a £22 billion black hole with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except the rabbit was dead and the hat was the taxpayer’s pocket. National Insurance on employers was hiked, capital gains tax was sharpened, and non-doms were invited to become non-existent. The City, never a sentimental place, began pricing offices in Frankfurt with the keenness of a man checking Rightmove the morning after the wedding.

Still, money is vulgar. Let us speak instead of higher things: culture, identity, the quiet certainty that when you ring 999 someone will eventually turn up who was born within fifty miles of the crime scene. All that has been reorganised with the brisk efficiency of a Soviet agriculture. Net migration, already running at levels last seen when the Romans popped over for a long weekend, was encouraged to new heights. The English Channel became the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing. Small boats arrived in such numbers that the RNLI began issuing loyalty cards. Many of the new arrivals are, of course, doctors, engineers, and future Nobel laureates temporarily employed as Deliveroo cyclists. Others have more specialised talents. The courts have been kept busy with an apparently endless supply of young men whose cultural enrichment consists of gang rape, knife crime, and a robust indifference to the concept of consent. The statistics, when anyone can be bothered to collate them, are so grotesque that even the Guardian has taken to printing them in very small type on page 47, next to the Sudoku. Two-tier policing is no longer a conspiracy theory; it is an operational manual.

Meanwhile, on the foreign desk, Sir Keir has discovered the joys of escalation. Long-range missiles are dispatched to Ukraine with the airy assurance of a man posting a letter bomb because the stamp is pretty. Putin, not renowned for his sense of humour, updates his nuclear targeting list and wonders aloud why Britain imagines itself exempt from the laws of physics. The Ministry of Defence quietly calculates how many young British men would be required to hold the Fulda Gap and reaches for the smelling salts. The combined effect is a slow, methodical castration of the native British male. He is taxed until he cannot afford children, educated until he is ashamed of his forefathers, policed until he dare not defend his own daughter, and finally, when the balloon goes up over Donetsk, invited to die in a war that began as a Twitter spat. It is demographic replacement with the paperwork filed correctly and a foreword by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

If only we had voted differently. Picture it: a turnout of 85 per cent instead of the usual apathetic shuffle. The shy Reform voter unsheathing himself in the polling booth. The Conservative remnant remembering why anyone ever voted for them in the first place. A parliamentary arithmetic that forced even a Labour government to notice the existence of the English. Borders would have been closed with the polite finality of Fort Knox. Deportations would have resumed at the pace of a Victorian workhouse. The Treasury would have confined itself to mere incompetence rather than ideological looting. And when the next Russian ultimatum arrived, a British prime minister might have replied with something more robust than a strongly-worded letter to The Times. The churches would still be open. The pubs would still be full. The streets would be safe after dark. Young men could afford mortgages, young women could walk home without rehearsing their self-defence classes, and the phrase 'cultural enrichment' would have returned to its proper place in the anthropology syllabus. 

In Bulgaria they have taken to the streets because their government tried to sell the country twice—once to Brussels, once to the Kremlin—and the people decided they would rather not be sold at all. They have stood in difiance of the technocratics, and reminded Europe that the Balkans still possess a pulse. Meanwhile, our government wobbles like a jelly on a hot plate. There is, perhaps, a lesson there. The British are slow to anger, but when they finally move they tend to move all at once, like a glacier that has suddenly remembered it has an appointment in the valley. One day before 2030 (perhaps on some drizzly Saturday when the Wi-Fi is down and the football has been cancelled for climate reasons) a few million people may gather in London, quietly, politely, but quite immovable. They will not ask for much: merely the return of their country, intact and recognisable.

Until then one nurses the faint, ridiculous hope that history is not yet finished with us. That the Long Stupidity of 2024–29 will one day be spoken of in the same tone we now reserve for the South Sea Bubble or the Children’s Crusade. That a schoolboy in 2040 will tug his grandfather’s sleeve and ask, “Grandad, what was there really a time when we let strangers run the place?” And the old man will smile the thin, wintry smile of a survivor and reply: “Yes, lad. We did something very silly indeed. But we came to our senses in the end. Just in time, as usual.” 

If only we hadn’t voted Labour. 

And if only, please God, we soon stop.

THE GENTLE ART OF SAVING HUMANITY (BY ENSLAVING IT)

Two days ago, on the golden sands of Bondi Beach—where one expects nothing more menacing than an overzealous seagull or a rogue wave—two gunmen turned a joyous Hanukkah celebration into a scene of calculated slaughter, mowing down fifteen innocent souls, including a ten-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor, in what authorities have rightly branded an act of anti-Semitic terrorism. The perpetrators, a father-and-son duo armed with licensed firearms and improvised explosives, chose the first night of the Festival of Lights to extinguish as many as they could, proving once again that hatred requires no grand ideology, merely opportunity and a willingness to pull the trigger. And yet, in the very wake of such barbarism, our global guardians of progress press on undeterred.

They promised us utopia by 2030, and being generous souls, we believed them. After all, who could resist seventeen goals so radiant with altruism that they required their own colour wheel? End poverty, end hunger, end war, end climate change, and—while we’re at it—end the tedious business of letting individual nations decide anything for themselves. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Agenda 2030, the United Nations’ modest proposal for turning the planet into one vast, pastel-coloured kibbutz run by people who have never in their lives missed a connecting flight at Davos.

The document itself is a masterpiece of the genre known as “bureaucratic erotica.” Page after page throbs with phrases like “interoperable digital architectures,” “whole-of-society approaches,” and—my favourite—“leave no one behind,” which is diplomatic code for “we know where you live.” The latest flourish, courtesy of the World Health Organization’s October 2025 Bulletin (funded, naturally, by that noted philanthropist and mosquito fancier Bill Gates), is a proposal for a lifelong digital health passport, stitched at birth to your socioeconomic metadata so that 'equity' can be delivered with the precision of a drone strike. Nothing compulsory, you understand. Merely a gentle, lifelong nudge toward compliance, administered by algorithms too polite to call themselves totalitarian.

One is reminded of earlier, less sophisticated attempts at human improvement. The Khmer Rouge, for example, also wanted to end inequality; they simply did it the old-fashioned way, with ditches and slogans. Stalin’s planners were similarly obsessed with five-year targets, though they preferred the aesthetic of the gulag to the cheerful infographics of the Sustainable Development Goals. Even the Nazis, those tireless innovators, dreamed of a thousand-year Reich complete with biometric registration—admittedly tattooed on the forearm rather than encoded in a QR code, but one mustn’t quibble over delivery systems. The difference, we are told, is intention. Pol Pot wanted to murder; the UN merely wants to help. The road to hell, as we know, is paved with good intentions, but Agenda 2030 has upgraded the surface to solar-powered asphalt and added cycle lanes.

What staggers the imagination is the sheer banality of the evil on offer. Genocide used to require passion—marching music, hysterical speeches, the odd torchlit parade. Today’s version arrives as a 91-page PDF full of footnotes and stakeholder consultations. The new totalitarianism doesn’t goose-step; it PowerPoints. It doesn’t send you to the camps; it adjusts your social-credit score until the camps become superfluous because you have already incarcerated yourself in a life of approved behaviours. One almost misses the honesty of the old monsters. At least they had the decency to look like villains. Our current crop resemble the nicer sort of estate agent—smooth, interchangeable, and convinced that the future will be grateful for their spreadsheets.

And the crowning joke? They call it “inclusion.” You will be included whether you like it or not, rather like a lobster is included in a bisque. The Global Digital Compact—adopted with the solemnity usually reserved for treaties ending world wars—commits us to “an open, free, secure and human-centred digital future.” Translation: every baby born after 2025 will be issued with a digital leash at the same moment it draws its first breath, the better to ensure that its carbon footprint, vaccine status, and opinions remain within the acceptable parameters set by a committee in Geneva that has never once had to queue for anything in its life.

There is, however, a delicious irony at the heart of this enterprise. The architects of Agenda 2030—those fragrant technocrats who jet between climate conferences in fleets of private aircraft—genuinely believe they are the first people in history to have discovered the secret of perpetual human happiness. They are like children who have found their father’s gun and decided to play doctors with the planet. One longs for the day when their names—Tedros, Guterres, the entire roster of the World Economic Forum—will be spoken in the same breath as Himmler or Beria, not because they have murdered millions (they are far too efficient for anything so labour-intensive), but because they have attempted something even more sinister: the murder of human freedom under anaesthetic.

Let us be clear. The only moral response to supranational governance in all its forms—UN, WHO, WTO, IMF, and the rest of the alphabet soup of condescension—is immediate, irreversible, and cheerfully profane abandonment. These bodies should be dissolved with the same ceremony we reserve for bankrupt casinos: lights turned off, locks changed, and a polite notice on the door reading “Gone away—try minding your own damned business.” The European Union can be next; it has already perfected the art of turning democracy into a multiple-choice questionnaire written in Brussels.

I have no doubt that this will happen, because history has a sense of humour darker than anything I can muster. The peoples of the earth—those irritating, ungovernable, magnificently obstinate creatures—will eventually tire of being improved by their betters. They will rise, not with pitchforks (too carbon-intensive), but with the far more devastating weapon of laughter. They will mock the goals, boycott the apps, and delete the QR codes until the whole suffocating edifice collapses under the weight of its own sanctimony.

And when that glorious day arrives, may the technocrats who dreamed of a managed planet be remembered only as cautionary tales—footnotes in the history books, their smug faces preserved in grainy photographs next to captions reading: “Here were men who thought they could replace God with a dashboard.” May schoolchildren giggle at their solemn declarations. May their names become synonyms for murderous vanity. And may the rest of us, delivered from their tender mercies by the twin forces of popular contempt and divine exasperation, raise a glass to the only future worth having: one in which no one, ever again, is required to ask permission to be human.

GENERATION GAMES Pt II: BONDI'S SHADOW

It has been eight years since a blog post made by yours truly in 2017, when the generational squabble was still in its charming infancy – a mere playground spat between the Baby Boomers, who had pulled up the ladder after climbing it with the aid of free education and houses cheaper than a decent bottle of Barolo, and the Millennials, who responded by inventing avocado toast as a form of economic protest. Back then, I noted with a certain weary amusement that the real adults in the room were Generation X, those uncomplaining drudges sandwiched between the self-congratulatory elders and the perpetually aggrieved young. We were the ones who invented the internet on computers the size of suitcases, pioneered grunge as a fashion statement against excess, and somehow managed to raise families while remembering what it was like to queue for milk during the Winter of Discontent. 

We were, in short, the evolutionary link: respectful of the past without living in it, optimistic about the future without demanding it be handed to us on a silver smartphone.

Fast-forward to this very day, 14 December 2025, and the game has not merely evolved – it has detonated. Just hours ago, as the sun dipped over Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach, a place synonymous with carefree summers, surfboards, and the occasional shark sighting, two gunmen turned a joyful Hanukkah celebration into a scene of carnage. At least twelve innocent lives snuffed out – including a beloved assistant rabbi – and dozens more wounded, in what authorities have swiftly declared an antisemitic terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community on the first night of the Festival of Lights. One might almost appreciate the grim irony: a festival commemorating light triumphing over darkness, eclipsed by the darkest impulses of hatred. The politicians, ever quick on their feet when cameras are rolling, have condemned it in the strongest terms – 'an act of evil', thunders the Prime Minister – while quietly convening national security committees to ponder how such horrors could unfold in a nation priding itself on mateship and multiculturalism.

But let us pause, and consider how this atrocity fits into the broader tapestry of division that governments have so assiduously woven. The Australian under-16 social media ban, an apparent noble crusade to shield the young from online ogres, now looks rather quaint amid real-world gunfire. One wonders if the architects of that policy imagined it would prevent the spread of 'misinformation' that ASIO itself cites as fuelling polarisation – the very polarisation that, alongside imported conflicts and unchecked intolerance, has elevated our terrorism threat level to 'probable' since last year. Yet here we are, on the probable end of probable, with Bondi – of all places – transformed from postcard paradise to crime scene, complete with improvised explosives in a nearby car and heroic bystanders wrestling rifles from assailants.

The generational divide, once a matter of inheritance taxes and house prices, now intersects with deeper fractures: imported hatreds amplified by the very digital platforms soon to be gated for the young, while the old fret over superannuation amid rising threats that no policy seems able to quell. The Boomers, many of whom built lives in the sunny suburbs now shadowed by such events, gaze upon a world where their grandchildren's playgrounds are no longer safe from ideological imports. The young, already silenced in one arena by bureaucratic fiat, now witness how unchecked division manifests in blood on the sand. And the politicians? They promise unity while stoking the fires – one day banning TikTok tirades to 'protect mental health,' the next scrambling to explain why known risks were not mitigated, all while eyeing that great wealth transfer as a fiscal lifeline.

It's divide and conquer, now with added ballistic accompaniment. The Jewish community, long a vibrant thread in Australia's multicultural fabric, becomes the latest casualty in a game where polarisation pays electoral dividends. Antisemitic incidents have surged in recent years, we're told, yet the response often feels more performative than preventive – until, of course, the inevitable occurs on a beach packed with families lighting menorahs. And in the middle? Ah, yes, Generation X, still there, still paying the mortgages on houses we bought at merely extortionate rather than astronomical prices, still funding the universities that saddle our offspring with debt, still propping up the superannuation schemes that politicians eye like a starving man eyes a buffet – and now, perhaps, attending vigils for victims of hatreds we neither imported nor ignored.

One might almost feel sorry for us – except that pity is a luxury we can't afford alongside the school fees and, today, the profound national grief. No, Generation X endures because we must, and in that endurance lies our peculiar strength. We are the ones getting it from both ends: taxed to support the pensions we ourselves may never see, while watching our children priced out of the market we once entered with nothing more than a decent job and a bit of optimism – and now, shielding them from a world where beaches are battlegrounds. We remember the 1980s, not as some golden age, but as a time when interest rates hit 17% and unemployment queued around the block – yet somehow we survived without blaming entire communities or demanding safe spaces from reality.

It is precisely because we are squeezed hardest that we hold the greatest potential to unravel this farce. The Boomers, bless them, are too busy defending their gains to notice the broader sleight of hand. The young are too immersed in immediate outrage – or soon to be deprived of it – to see the long game. But we Xers? We have the cynicism born of experience, the irony that comes from inventing the digital age only to watch it weaponised, and the quiet determination to protect both our ageing parents and our bewildered children from a state that views society as mere revenue streams and voting blocs, even as it fails to safeguard the most basic public joys.

If anyone is going to bridge this chasm – to call out the politicians for pitting group against group, generation against generation, while hatred festers and terror strikes – it will be us. We'll do it without fanfare, without viral hashtags (age-gated or otherwise), and probably while working a second job to cover the latest levy, or today, donating to relief funds. Just don't expect gratitude. After all, saving the world – or at least preserving some semblance of sanity in it – is what we've been doing all along, sandwiched between the mistakes of those before and those after. 

And if we fail? Well, at least we'll have the satisfaction of knowing we saw it coming – back in 2017, when the games were just beginning, long before the shots rang out over Bondi.

JOANNA TROLLOPE (1943 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Joanna Trollope, the undisputed empress of Aga-saga and chronicler of the Home Counties’ emotional plumbing, has let the aga of existence go out at the age of 81, leaving behind a nation of middle-class women who now face the prospect of rearranging their own kitchen islands without professional guidance. Born in her grandfather’s rectory in Gloucestershire (a location so quintessentially English that even the placenta probably apologised for the mess), Joanna was a collateral branch of the Victorian Trollope dynasty, which had already supplied the reading public with quite enough moral anguish for one family. 
Undeterred, she set about updating the formula: same three-volume crises of conscience, but now featuring people who owned their own horses and worried about private-school fees instead of consumption. For four decades her novels arrived with the reassuring regularity of the Church of England once managed at Christmas. Each bore a title (The Rector’s Wife, The Choir, A Village Affair) that functioned like a safe word for the comfortably divorced: utter it in any branch of Waterstones and the staff knew exactly which shelf to steer you towards, somewhere between the cookery books and the Valium. 
Her genius was to make adultery in the Cotswolds sound both inevitable and deeply tasteful. Affairs were conducted in reclaimed-pine kitchens; betrayals unfolded over bottles of Sancerre that had been allowed to breathe just long enough for someone to confess they’d always felt unseen. Readers wept, recognised themselves, then immediately booked a cottage in Chipping Campden to recover. Critics carped that she wrote the same book thirty times. Joanna, with the serene smile of a woman who had never once run out of Laura Ashley cushion covers, replied that if the British middle classes could be relied upon to have the same crisis thirty times, the least an author could do was show up on time with the prose equivalent of a nice cup of tea and a tissue. 
She leaves behind millions of copies in charity-shop rotation, an OBE she wore with the mild embarrassment of someone who has been caught doing the right thing, and an entire generation of women named Camilla or Henrietta who secretly believe their lives are one sensitive vicar away from a six-figure advance, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, whatever fresh hell the twenty-first century unleashes, someone will still need to be told, gently but firmly, that feelings are not an optional extra.

STANLEY BAXTER (1926 - 2025): AN OBTUARY

Stanley Baxter, the Scottish comedian, impressionist and clandestine master of drag who could impersonate the Queen better than the Queen ever managed herself, has died at the age of 98. One feels compelled to add 'finally,' because Baxter had been threatening to outlive us all ever since he vanished from television in the early 1990's, presumably to spend the rest of eternity perfecting a new sketch in which he played both Margaret Thatcher and a corgi simultaneously. 

Born in Glasgow in 1926, Baxter grew up in a city whose natural climate is damp disapproval. This proved ideal training for a career spent sending up the British establishment with a sweetness that made the knife go in unnoticed until the victim was already bleeding smiles. His great gift was to look exactly like whoever he was taking off, only more so. His Noël Coward was more Coward than Coward; his Princess Margaret had the authentic note of someone who had just discovered the lower orders were still breathing her air. For two golden decades the Stanley Baxter Show and its successors turned BBC and ITV schedules into a national pantomime in which the entire ruling class was played, with loving malice, by one small Glaswegian in a frock. 

Audiences howled; the subjects themselves watched through their fingers and, in several documented cases, rang up to ask for private performances. The Palace, it is rumoured, kept a discreet file marked “Baxter: Do Not Encourage.” Then, abruptly, he stopped. No farewell tour, no tear-stained This Is Your Life, just a quiet retreat to a cottage somewhere north of civilised complaint. Offers poured in; cheques were written in sums that could have bought half of Dundee. Baxter sent polite refusals, apparently content to let the world remember him at the peak of his powers rather than risk the indignity of a comeback in which he played the Queen Mother doing the Macarena.

He leaves behind a nation that still, in moments of pompous crisis, finds itself thinking “What would Stanley do?” and then realises, with a pang, that he isn’t there to do it. A unique talent, a genuine original, and—by the standards of showbusiness—almost indecently modest. One suspects he is already upstairs, dressed as St. Peter, telling God he’s early and suggesting a nice cup of tea while they wait for the rest of us.

SOPHIE KINSELLA (1969 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Sophie Kinsella, born Madeleine Sophie Townley on 12 December 1969, has departed this vale of escalating credit-card limits at the age of 55, leaving behind a world slightly less inclined to impulse purchases and a great deal more inclined to mourn the loss of its favourite literary spendthrift. One might have thought that an author who made her fortune chronicling the fiscal misadventures of Becky Bloomwood – that indomitable shopper who could turn a modest salary into a towering edifice of debt with the effortless grace of a magician pulling rabbits from a hat – would have arranged her own affairs with a touch more prudence. 

Yet glioblastoma, that most aggressive of uninvited guests, arrived in 2022 and refused to be bought off with even the most seductive designer discounts. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy: she endured the lot with a courage that her heroines might have admired, had they paused long enough between sales to notice. Under her real name, Madeleine Wickham, she began respectably enough, producing novels that observed the middle classes with the cool detachment of a financial journalist – which, coincidentally, she once was. But respectability, like a sensible investment portfolio, evidently bored her. Reinventing herself as Sophie Kinsella (a nom de plume assembled with the same ingenuity Becky might apply to justifying another pair of shoes), she unleashed Confessions of a Shopaholic upon an unsuspecting public in 2000. The book sold by the millions, spawned nine sequels, and proved that satire wrapped in frothy romance could empty wallets faster than its protagonist ever managed.

Her oeuvre expanded to include standalone confections – Can You Keep a Secret?, The Undomestic Goddess – all testifying to a gift for turning everyday feminine anxieties into bestselling balm. Over 50 million copies shifted worldwide; translations into more than 40 languages ensured that women from Stockholm to São Paulo could share Becky’s particular brand of delightful delusion. In recent years, as illness intruded, Kinsella turned even that experience into literature with What Does It Feel Like?, a semi-autobiographical novel that faced the grim reaper with the same upbeat pluck her characters reserved for closing-down sales.

She died peacefully on 10 December 2025, surrounded, as her family touchingly put it, by family, music, warmth, Christmas, and joy – a combination that sounds suspiciously like the contents of one of her own happy endings. She is survived by her husband Henry and five children, who will doubtless discover that some debts, emotional ones, can never be fully repaid.

SORRY URSULA, BUT THE ADULTS ARE TALKING

Even as the European Union congratulates itself on being the world’s most sophisticated exercise in self-administered tedium, a voice has lately drifted across the Atlantic with the calm, dispassionate authority of a man who has already abolished several impossible things before breakfast. Elon Musk, part South African wizard, part Bond villain who forgot to apply for the licence, has publicly recommended that the entire EU be abolished. Not reformed, mind you; not trimmed around the edges like an overweight hedge in a Versailles side-garden. Abolished. The word lands in Brussels with roughly the same charm as a grand piano dropped through the roof of a Michelin-starred restaurant during the fish course.

One pictures the scene in the Berlaymont press room: spokesmen clutching their reusable coffee cups, eyes widening like rabbits who have just read the menu and discovered they are the plat du jour. Musk, speaking from the comfortable distance of several billion dollars and an even larger number of kilometres, offered no detailed roadmap, only the serene observation that the EU has become a regulatory blob that smothers enterprise faster than a wet duvet smothers a candle. Coming from a man whose companies are regulated by entities that still use fax machines for light entertainment, this counts as almost touching concern. Yet the suggestion hangs in the air like cigarette smoke in a post-war Paris café: impossible to ignore and guaranteed to annoy everyone who believes the continent’s problems can be solved by another 400-page directive on the curvature of bananas.

In an age when the European Union resembles nothing so much as a vast, overfed bureaucracy suffering from existential indigestion, it is refreshing—nay, exhilarating—to contemplate the one figure who might finally administer the necessary emetic. That man is Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, fence-builder extraordinaire, and the living embodiment of what one might call true Europeaness. Not the watery, Brussels-approved version served lukewarm in Strasbourg canteens, but the full-blooded, paprika-spiced variety that still believes nations are allowed to disagree without first filing Form 27B/6 in triplicate.

The distinction, as any discerning observer must now acknowledge, is between Europeaness and Euroness. The former is the glorious chaos that gave us Roman ruins, Renaissance swagger, Bach, bratwurst, Proust, patisseries, Fellini, fettuccine, the siesta, the sauna, and the peculiar British conviction that their language is the only one worth speaking properly. It is the continent’s genius for arguing over borders the size of a suburban lawn while producing wine that makes angels weep. Euroness, by contrast, is the grey sludge brewed in the Berlaymont building: a monochrome dream of “ever-closer union” enforced by regulations so numerous they require their own bureaucracy to catalogue the bureaucracy. It is the euro that turned Greece into a debtor’s prison, the Common Agricultural Policy that pays French farmers to grow nothing while ensuring tomatoes taste of wet cardboard, and the starry blue flag that nobody asked for and fewer still salute unless a subsidy is attached.

The European Union, in its current incarnation, has become the world’s most ambitious exercise in herding cats with PowerPoint presentations. Its founding myth—that without a federal superstate, the continent would immediately revert to flinging trebuchets at one another—is touching in its naïveté. Europe has enjoyed eighty years of peace not because Jean Monnet had a particularly persuasive slideshow, but because NATO parked a great many tanks on the Elbe, because Marshall Plan dollars rebuilt the rubble, and because even the most enthusiastic nationalist eventually grew tired of total war. Yet the Eurocrats press on, dreaming of a United States of Europe that would require another American Civil War just to agree on the spelling of 'catalogue.'

Enter Viktor Orbán, stage right, wearing the expression of a man who has read the Lisbon Treaty and found it wanting. Orbán understands that Europe’s strength has never lain in conformity but in its magnificent, quarrelsome variety. He looks at the Brussels machine—currently attempting to fine Hungary for refusing to turn itself into a migrant transit camp—and sees not a noble project but a sausage factory with a fetish for red tape. Where lesser leaders tremble before the wrath of the Commission, Orbán builds a fence, vetoes a sanction, and pockets an exemption with the serene confidence of a card-sharp who knows the deck is marked in his favour.

Imagine, if you will, Orbán elevated to the presidency of the European Council (or whatever grandiloquent title they invent next). The first act would be symbolic yet devastating: the quiet retirement of that circle of gold stars on a blue background. In its place, perhaps nothing at all—because real Europeans do not need a flag to tell them who they are. The second act would be the Great Unravelling: Maastricht reversed, Lisbon shredded, the euro gently euthanised and replaced by a polite arrangement whereby each country prints whatever currency best matches its national character. The third act—ah, the third act—would see the European Union transformed back into what it was always meant to be: a benign association of sovereign nations who cooperate when it suits them, trade enthusiastically, argue incessantly, and otherwise leave one another alone. A continent of checklists replaced by a continent of cafés.

One envisions the scene in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen, pale beneath the studio lighting, demanding 'solidarity' in the tone of a disappointed headmistress. Orbán, leaning back, orange tie glowing like a Carpathian sunset, murmuring something about national sovereignty in the soothing cadences of a man who has never felt the need to apologise for existing. The translators would give up in despair; the simultaneous interpretation booths would fall silent; and for the first time in decades the European Parliament might actually hear itself think. Of course, there are risks. The Eurocracy does not surrender power gracefully. When confronted with a leader who refuses to accept that “European values” are whatever the Commission declares them to be on a Tuesday afternoon, the response is predictable: Article 7 procedures, frozen funds, sanctimonious editorials in Der Spiegel, and—when all else fails—the discreet funding of “civil society” groups whose commitment to democracy is curiously selective. One need only glance at the treatment meted out to Poland’s Law and Justice government, or the sudden discovery of “corruption” whenever a troublesome nationalist wins an election, to see the pattern. 

Orbán, having survived more coup attempts than a Latin American colonel in the 1970s, is harder to shift than most. But the machinery is patient. Give it time, a pliable opposition leader, a few well-timed leaks to the international press, and even the Magyar Magyarbuster might find himself replaced by a photogenic globalist who promises to “bring Hungary back into the European family”—which is to say, back onto the leash. Thus the warning, dear reader, delivered with the weary cynicism of one who has watched too many good rebellions end in focus groups: enjoy the spectacle of Orbán tweaking the dragon’s tail while it lasts. The Eurocrats play a long game, and their weapon of choice is not the tank but the NGO, the grant, the “independent” judiciary, and the slow drip of manufactured scandal. One day we may wake to discover that Hungary, too, has been returned to “normality”—a colourless, borderless, flag-free normality where the only permissible patriotism is the kind that salutes twelve gold stars and apologises for its carbon footprint. 

Until then, let us savour the glorious anomaly of a European leader who still believes Europe is something worth defending from its own supposed guardians. Viktor Orbán may not save the continent—he may only delay the inevitable—but in an era of managed decline, delay itself is a kind of victory. And if the price of that delay is the permanent outrage of the bien-pensant commentariat, then all I can say is: pass the popcorn, comrade. The show is just beginning.

STEVE CROPPER (1941 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Steve Cropper, the guitarist whose riffs were so understated they made minimalism look ostentatious, has finally laid down his Telecaster at the age of eighty-four, presumably after checking it was in tune one last time. He died peacefully in Nashville, surrounded by amplifiers that still worked and a family who had long ago accepted that 'just one more take' was a lifelong commitment.

Cropper never sought the spotlight; he merely stood in it by accident while everyone else was busy falling over. As the house guitarist at Stax Records he supplied the backbone to more soul classics than most people have functioning vertebrae. Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” whistles because Cropper’s little guitar figure the way a bored man whistles while waiting for a bus that will never arrive; Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” struts because Cropper refused to strut himself; and Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” only reached the midnight hour because Cropper counted it in at exactly the right tempo, which is to say, not too fast, not too slow, just fast enough to remind you that life is short but grooves can be eternal.

He co-wrote many of these songs yet insisted his name appear in smaller type, a humility so extreme it bordered on the subversive. While other guitar heroes of the era were busy inventing new ways to look as if they’d been electrocuted, Cropper stood stage right in a short-sleeved shirt, playing chords so clean you could have performed surgery on them. Jimi Hendrix set fire to his instrument; Eric Clapton informed us that he was God; Steve Cropper simply made the drummer sound better, an act of generosity that should have earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. In later years he joined the Blues Brothers Band, where his reward was to wear a black suit and dark glasses indoors while Dan Aykroyd shouted. He endured this with the serene expression of a man who has seen every possible futures and concluded this one will do. Film buffs will remember him as the only musician in that enterprise who appeared to have met actual Black people.

Cropper outlived the Stax building, the original Muscle Shoals rhythm section, and most of the hair in Memphis. He is survived by a wife who still laughs at his jokes, several children who can actually play, and millions of listeners who never knew his name but can hum his licks in the shower. Somewhere tonight, a bar band is murdering “Green Onions.” Steve would have winced, corrected the tempo, and made it immortal. He has now, with typical restraint, left the stage without an encore.

THE POSTPONEMENT OF DEMOCRACY

One has to hand it to Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and, by coincidence, Britain’s Chief Postponer-in-Ordinary. When the great dictators of history wished to cancel an inconvenient election, they at least had the conscience to do it with panache. Stalin staged a show trial first, then shot the defendants; Hitler burned the Reichstag and blamed the Bulgarians; even Nicolae Ceaușescu waited until the crowds were chanting before he had them machine-gunned from helicopters. Crude, certainly, but one respected the forthrightness. One knew where one stood—usually against a wall, blindfolded, listening to the click of reloading.

Sir Keir, by contrast, cancels elections the way a nervous suburbanite cancels a dinner party: with a politely worded memo about “ongoing local government reorganisation” and the faint suggestion that everyone will have a much nicer time in 2028 once the canapés have been properly consulted upon. Four new mayoral elections—Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Hampshire and the Solent, Sussex and Brighton—were meant to occur in 2026. They will now occur, we are reassured, “when the time is right,” which in Starmerese translates roughly as “once Reform has been declared an illegal organisation and its voters safely re-educated in tasteful community gulags located in former Premier Inn conference suites.”

The excuse, delivered with all the solemnity of a man discovering a new species of damp in his downstairs loo, is that local councils need more time to merge, split, re-brand and generally faff about with new logos before they can be trusted to hold a vote. One pictures the Minister for Levelling Up, Ms Angela Rayner, standing atop a cardboard box in a village hall, earnestly explaining to the peasantry that democracy must be postponed until the new unitary authorities have agreed on a typeface. The peasants, being British, nod politely and go home to put the kettle on, which is precisely how the Starmer revolution works: not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with the soft rustle of yet another consultation document.
Compare this to the classics. When Pol Pot wanted to abolish elections, he abolished the electorate along with them—radical, yes, but at least he committed to the bit. When Kim Jong-un postpones a vote, he does so by promoting the ballot box to the rank of three-star general and then executing it for treason. Sir Keir merely sends it on gardening leave for two years while a task force of highly paid consultants decides whether 'devolution' is still inclusive enough for people who identify as spreadsheets.
And yet, in its bloodless, beige way, the Starmer method is more sinister than any of the old monsters. Dictators of yore were at least embarrassed by their own authoritarianism; they draped it in red flags, gigantic portraits—something, anything, to hide the naked power-grab. Starmer does it in broad daylight, wearing a [donated] suit that cost more than most people’s cars, and with the serene confidence of a man who knows the BBC will describe any criticism as 'populist noise.' The postponement is not announced by goose-stepping stormtroopers but by a press release quoting something called the English Devolution White Paper, which sounds less like a policy document and more like the title of a particularly depressing Morrissey album.
One remembers that this is the same Sir Keir Starmer who, as Director of Public Prosecutions, once pondered aloud whether jury trials might be a bit too much bother for complex fraud cases. Nothing to see here, merely the quiet euthanising of eight hundred years of common law because some accountants in the City found 12 citizens from the Clapham omnibus a touch déclassé. One trial at a time, one election at a time, one ancient liberty at a time, the whole edifice is put on hold “until the conditions are right,” which is Starmer-speak for “until I am certain of winning.” The beauty of it—the sheer, dazzling, North Korean brilliance—is that he believes he will never be caught in a lie. There will be no tanks in the streets, no midnight knock on the door. There will only be another delay, another review, another urgent need to 'build capacity.' The British people will wake up in 2030 to discover that elections have been postponed indefinitely because the climate emergency requires a permanent technocratic stewardship, whereupon they will shrug and ask whether the postponement qualifies them for a council-tax rebate.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. Starmer can’t even manage that, but he has ensured that democracy itself will arrive precisely two years late, and only after it has filled in the correct equality-impact assessment in triplicate. History will record that Britain’s first truly post-democratic leader was not a ranting corporal or a psychopathic peasant general, but a mild-mannered knight of the realm who cancelled elections the way other people cancel Amazon Prime—quietly, bureaucratically, and with the vague promise that the new season will definitely drop eventually. There is, of course, a pattern here, and it is the pattern of a frightened little boy who has been told he is in charge of the sweet shop and must on no account let the bigger children have any. Every time a jury acquits a climate protester or a pro-Palestine activist (as juries, being composed of human beings rather than party whips, have a tendency to do), Keir experiences the political equivalent of a bed-wetting incident. The solution, in his fevered imagination, is not to examine why ordinary people keep refusing to convict other ordinary people for crimes of conscience, but to abolish the ordinary people from the process altogether. It is the legislative equivalent of a child stuffing his ears and screaming “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” whenever reality threatens to intrude.
Let us be clear: this is not the behaviour of a Prime Minister. It is the behaviour of a prefect who has been given a whistle and a clipboard and told to keep the lower fourth in line while the headmasters are at lunch. Starmer does not stride the stage like a Caesar; he scuttles across it like a supply teacher who has just realised the little darlings have discovered he can be made to cry. His terror of the public (real, grubby, unpredictable Britain) is so palpable that one half expects him to govern from inside a fortified crate labelled “Handle With Care: Contents Fragile Ego”. And the tragedy, the exquisite, almost Greek tragedy of it all, is that he actually believes this makes him tough. In his mind’s eye he is Churchill, brooding over the maps while lesser men quail. In reality he is Miss Trunchbull, swinging the judiciary like a shot-putter whenever a child dares to suggest that cake might belong to everyone. The difference being that even Roald Dahl’s monstrous headmistress had the courage of her cruelties. Starmer cannot even muster that. He outsources the cruelty to civil servants and then affects sorrowful puzzlement when the public objects. “Why are they so angry?” he asks the mirror, adjusting the knot of a tie that has never known the stain of honest sweat. “I only wanted to be loved.”
Well, Keir, here is a newsflash from the world you have spent your life avoiding: love is not something you extract by removing ancient rights and replacing them with efficiency reviews. It is not secured by declaring paint-wielding idealists to be the moral equivalent of people who fly planes into buildings. And it is most certainly not achieved by a man whose every political instinct is to run, trembling, for the nearest bunker the moment twelve citizens threaten to think for themselves.
History, which you affect to respect while busily dynamiting its foundations, will not remember you as the stern but necessary realist who modernised Britain. It will remember you as the timid little technocrat who, when faced with the first moral test of his premiership, reached for the statute book and began frantically crossing out centuries of liberty in the margin. A man so paralysed by the possibility of being disliked that he preferred to be feared (and even then, only by proxy, through the police baton and the magistrate’s gavel). One almost wants to pat him on the head and send him back to the comfortable obscurity of North London dinner parties, where the greatest threat to civil liberties is the host running out of quinoa. Almost. But the damage is real, and the hour is late, and there comes a point when sympathy for the architect of one’s own imprisonment must give way to something colder.
So let us say it plainly, in the calm, surgical language you pretend to admire: Keir Starmer is unfit for any office higher than assistant under-secretary for paper clips. He is a small man presiding over the shrinkage of a large country, a moral vacuum in a suit so expensive it has to be dry-cleaned of any residual principle. If Britain still possessed the self-respect of a serious nation, the resignation letter would already be written (not in the usual oily prose of political departure, but in the blunt terms a weary people might finally force from his trembling hand): “I discover, to my surprise and sorrow, that I am simply not brave enough for this job.”
Until that happy day, we are left with the spectacle of a prime minister who governs like a man perpetually checking under the bed for the bogeyman. It would be funny, if only the bed were not our own. Compared to the vulgar theatrics of the old tyrants, Sir Keir’s bloodless little coup is a masterpiece of the genre: the first dictatorship to be run entirely on Microsoft Teams, where dissent is dealt with not by firing squad but by muting the participant and pretending the connection dropped.
Bravo, Sir Keir. Even Lenin would have been forced to admit: that’s style.