CHUCK NORRIS (1940 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Carlos Ray Norris, universally known as Chuck Norris, departed this life on March 19, 2026, in Kauai, Hawaii, at the age of 86, mere days after marking another birthday with what his family tactfully called 'light training.' The cause was listed as natural, though one suspects the grim reaper finally summoned up the courage to ask if he'd kindly like to book an appointment with the pearly gates - at his own convenience, of course. Born in 1940 in Ryan, Oklahoma, Norris grew up in circumstances that would have broken lesser men into quiet compliance. Instead, he enlisted in the Air Force, discovered martial arts in Korea, and returned to claim the world professional middleweight karate title for half a decade or so, depending on the promotional calendar. He built dojos, trained celebrities, and generally treated physical frailty as an optional lifestyle choice.

Hollywood summoned him. He squared off against Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon (1972), managing the neat trick of losing convincingly while radiating the sort of invincibility that made audiences wonder if Lee had merely borrowed a temporary advantage. The 1980s delivered a parade of vehicles—Missing in Action, The Delta Force, Lone Wolf McQuade—in which he liberated hostages, dismantled cartels, and proved that a bare chest was the ultimate body armour in tropical combat zones. These were films where nuance went missing in action long before the plot did. Television sealed the icon status. Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001) ran for eight seasons on the simple premise that evil existed only until Walker showed up, at which point it apologised profusely and accepted its fate. The show offered moral lectures delivered with the same economy as his roundhouse kicks: direct, effective, and leaving no room for debate.

In an era when intersectional feminism politely requested that men check their privilege and perhaps lower the volume on traditional masculinity, Norris remained cheerfully unamended. He embodied a manliness so unapologetic it felt almost retro—broad-shouldered, stoic, protective—yet he deployed it not for domination but for quiet service. Through Kickstart Kids, the non-profit he founded in 1990 (originally Kick Drugs Out of America), he brought martial arts and character training to tens of thousands of at-risk youth in Texas schools, teaching discipline, respect, and self-worth to children who might otherwise have lacked both role models and hope. He supported veterans, the United Way, Make-A-Wish, and hospitalised troops, visiting and fundraising with the same understated commitment he brought to everything else. His philanthropy was never flashy; it was simply there, like gravity.

The internet, ever eager to mythologise, birthed Chuck Norris Facts around 2005: Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups, he pushes the Earth down; death once had a near-Chuck Norris experience, underneath his beard was another fist, he counted to infinity - twice. The hyperbole turned his toughness into cosmic comedy. Norris, far from bristling, embraced the absurdity with warm amusement. He read the jokes aloud in videos, chuckled at fan conventions, came up with some of his own, and treated the meme as a gentle tribute rather than an affront—proof that even icons can laugh at their own legend.

He leaves Gena, his wife since 1998, five children, and a body of work that blended action, instruction, and genuine good. At 86, the man who once seemed beyond mortality finally permitted it. The universe, perhaps relieved, let him go gently.

RED NOSE TO RED-FACED: THE FALL OF COMIC RELIEF

One might be forgiven for thinking that Comic Relief, that great British institution born in the mid-1980s amid a blizzard of plastic red noses and celebrity goodwill, had long since perfected the art of turning conscience into cash. Founded by Lenny Henry and Richard Curtis with the noble aim of making the world laugh while it gave, the charity once raised eye-watering sums through telethons that felt like a national knees-up. Yet here we are in 2026, with Red Nose Day looming like an unwelcome relative at a funeral, and a single tweet from Charlotte Gill lands like a well-aimed custard pie: boycott the whole circus. One reads her post—detailing yet another £340,000 grant to Bail for Immigration Detainees, that worthy outfit dedicated to springing people from UK immigration holding pens—and one is reminded of Clive James’s old observation that charity, like television, has a habit of promising the sublime and delivering the faintly ridiculous. Only now the ridiculous has curdled into something rather more sardonic. 

Let us begin, as all good cultural autopsies must, with the founding father himself. Lenny Henry, that colossus of British comedy who could once reduce a nation to helpless giggles by merely donning a red nose and pretending to be a hapless African aid worker, has in recent years discovered a new vocation: demanding reparations. Not content with the millions Comic Relief has funnelled into Africa over four decades—money raised, one might add, by British punters sticking plastic proboscises on their faces and feeling temporarily virtuous—Mr Henry now insists that true justice requires a formal reckoning for the transatlantic slave trade and colonial wrongs. One pictures him addressing the faithful, voice booming with the same righteous timbre he once reserved for sketches about overfed vicars, declaring that mere charity is no longer enough; what is needed is a proper invoice, stamped and delivered, preferably with compound interest. 

The irony, of course, is exquisite, here is the man who helped invent the very mechanism by which middle-class guilt was converted into African hospitals and wells, now implying that the whole enterprise was a bit of a swindle unless it comes with a side order of historical atonement. One is tempted to ask: if Comic Relief’s donors are already atoning with their wallets, why the extra bill? Perhaps the red nose was always meant to be a down-payment, and the reparations speech is simply the final demand note. In any case, it provides the first, and perhaps most delicious, reason to reach for the boycott button. Why subsidise an organisation whose co-founder now treats its core activity as insufficient penance?

But the reparations angle is merely the overture. The persistent, if unproven, rumours that swirl around Comic Relief’s African disbursements add a darker, more Jamesian undertone—one of those quiet, lethal ironies the late critic so relished. Word on the sceptical street, passed from expat to aid worker to the sort of chap who reads the small print in charity accounts, is that a not-insignificant slice of the cash ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of the very dictators whose regimes the telethon appeals so earnestly decry. One imagines the scene: a warlord in some sun-baked capital, fresh from a Comic Relief-funded “empowerment” seminar, converting British ten-pound notes into Kalashnikovs and surface-to-air missiles. 

The rumour is, naturally, impossible to verify without a team of forensic accountants and a helicopter; but then, so are most of the glowing impact reports the charity itself publishes. One recalls James’s dry verdict on foreign aid in general: it has a habit of arriving in the hands of people who already own the best Mercedes in the country. Comic Relief, with its celebrity endorsements and celebrity-scale overheads, has never quite escaped the suspicion that some of its largesse is less about digging wells than arming the well-diggers’ bosses. If even a fraction of the £1.6 billion it has raised over the years has been recycled into ordnance rather than orphans, then the red nose begins to look less like a symbol of mirth and more like a clown’s mask on a tragedy. Boycotting suddenly feels less like parsimony and more like basic hygiene.

Then there is the telethon itself, once the jewel in the crown and now a jewel that has been trodden into paste. Ah, the glory days—when Red Nose Day was a riot of cross-pollinated absurdity. The Vicar of Dibley gate-crashing Ballykissangel for a custard-pie fight; Call The Midwife witnessing Doctor Who materialising in Poplar to save the day with a sonic screwdriver and a comedy prosthetic; Men Behaving Badly being stunned by the presence of Kylie Minogue, all while Lenny Henry narrated the whole catastrophe with the straightest of faces. It was television at its most cheerfully puerile, the sort of event that made you forgive the licence fee for one night only. Compare that to the current iteration, and one is struck by the silence of the laughter track. 

The 2026 version, if past form is any guide, will be wall-to-wall virtue signalling delivered by the same cohort of presenters who have spent the preceding year lecturing the public on everything from pronouns to plastic straws. Gone are the sketches; in their place, solemn montages of suffering interspersed with millionaires in designer casualwear explaining, with the pained sincerity of a minor royal, why your tenner will change the world. One half expects a celebrity to appear in a red nose and immediately apologise for cultural appropriation. The format has not evolved; it has been euthanised and replaced by a sermon with added celebrity cameos. The humour, once the charity’s unique selling point, has been quietly retired to the same pasture as political incorrectness and the notion that laughter might actually be the best medicine. What remains is a three-hour exercise in collective self-flagellation, punctuated by appeals that make one feel less like a donor and more like a defendant in the court of public opinion. Small wonder the viewing figures have sagged like an old red nose left in the rain.

And into this atmosphere of earnest deflation comes the specific provocation that prompted Charlotte Gill’s tweet: £340,000—not a trifling sum, even by Comic Relief standards—handed to Bail for Immigration Detainees. The organisation’s brief is admirable on paper: providing legal aid to people languishing in UK detention centres while their asylum claims wind their way through the system. Yet one cannot help noticing the slight mismatch with the telethon’s traditional imagery. The adverts still show wide-eyed African children and drought-stricken villages; the small print, apparently, now includes lawyers in Wapping helping failed claimants avoid deportation. One pictures the average donor, red nose askew, watching the appeal and assuming their fiver is buying a mosquito net, only to discover later that it has funded a judicial review. 

The cognitive dissonance is almost comic—almost. In an age when the British taxpayer already spends billions on asylum processing and hotel accommodation, Comic Relief’s decision to divert comedy cash into the appeals process feels less like charity and more like a political subsidy. One is reminded of James’s line about good intentions paving the road to somewhere distinctly warmer than intended. If the donors wanted to bankroll immigration lawyers, they could have done so directly; instead, they are lured in with the promise of slapstick and emerge with a side order of open borders. The boycott, in this light, begins to look less like petulance and more like the only remaining form of consumer protest.

All of which leaves the would-be donor in a familiar quandary: cynical enough to see through the performance, yet sentimental enough to feel a pang at the thought of genuine need going unmet. The solution, of course, is not to stop giving but to stop giving to the circus. Local food banks, domestic hospice care, even those unfashionable British charities that still believe in quiet competence rather than celebrity photoshops—these remain untouched by reparations rhetoric, dictator rumours, or the slow death of the funny telethon. One can still stick a red nose on one’s face if the mood takes; it simply no longer needs to be Comic Relief’s proprietary model. The organisation that once made Britain laugh while it cared has, through a combination of mission creep, celebrity sermonising, and unfortunate grant-making decisions, become the punchline it once avoided. 

Lenny Henry’s reparations demands, the whispered arms deals, the virtue-signalling presenters—all conspire to suggest that the joke is no longer on the audience. It is on the red nose itself. And when the clown starts lecturing you about historical guilt while pocketing your tenner to fund legal challenges in the immigration courts, the only sane response is the one Charlotte Gill proposed: switch off, sit down, and keep your wallet firmly in your pocket. The laughter, alas, has already left the building.

WARM BEER & COLD COMFORT: MILLIBAND'S WAR ON THE PINT

In the great British tradition of turning national crises into opportunities for self-parody, one might have expected our politicians to confine their genius to matters of trade deficits or the weather. Not so Ed Miliband. The man who once led the Labour Party with the doomed charisma of a man attempting to fly a paper aeroplane in a hurricane has now, as Energy Secretary, achieved something truly immortal: he has proposed that the nation’s pubs turn off their beer fridges. Warm pints, he assures us, will save each establishment some two thousand pounds a year, a sum apparently sufficient to offset the £169 million the hospitality sector is bleeding thanks to those mysterious “bill surges” that no one in government seems willing to name aloud. One can only admire the precision. Not content with merely fiddling while Rome burns, Miliband has decided to warm the beer while the customers freeze.

The proposal, unveiled with all the solemnity of a papal bull via something called a “hospitality energy tool” (a phrase that sounds like the title of a rejected Star Trek device), rests on the heroic example of a Bromley pub that allegedly slashed its electricity use by 26 per cent. Twenty-six per cent! One pictures the landlord there now, basking in the glow of his own martyrdom, pouring tepid lagers to grateful punters who have decided that, after all, the authentic British experience was always meant to resemble the contents of a horse trough left out in the August sun. “Think of the savings,” Miliband intones from whatever think-tank bunker he currently inhabits, “and the profit from thousands of pints.” Profit from thousands of pints. The sentence has the ring of a man who has never actually ordered a pint in his life, let alone watched a customer recoil from one as though it had just confessed to voting Conservative.

The British pub is not merely a place of refreshment; it is a secular cathedral where the temperature of the beer functions as a sacrament. Warm beer is not an energy-efficiency measure; it is a declaration of war on civilisation itself. For centuries we have prided ourselves on the exquisite chill of a properly kept lager, the crisp bite of a cider served at the temperature God intended, Guinness cold enough to make the teeth sing, yet not so frigid as to anaesthetise the palate. Miliband’s suggestion is the equivalent of telling the French to serve their wine at room temperature (which, come to think of it, they already do, but that is hardly the point). It is the gastronomic equivalent of suggesting that the Queen’s Christmas broadcast would be improved if delivered in tracksuit bottoms. One almost expects him next to recommend that fish and chips be served without salt and vinegar, on the grounds that condiments are too energy-intensive.

The mind reels at the sheer imaginative poverty. Here is a man who, in his previous incarnation as Opposition leader, once brandished a banana on live television to illustrate the cost of living. A banana. Now, elevated to the cabinet, he has graduated from fruit to refrigeration. The trajectory is almost Shakespearean: from comic relief to tragic farce in a single career. One wonders what private griefs led him to this pass. Was there, in the Miliband household, a childhood fridge that refused to chill? Did young Ed once discover his milk had gone off and vow, there and then, eternal vengeance upon all cooling devices? Or is it simpler? Is this merely the latest chapter in the long Labour saga of believing that the British people can be improved by making them slightly more uncomfortable? First they came for the boilers; now they come for the beer. Tomorrow, presumably, the chip-shop fryers.

The economic case is, of course, watertight—provided one lives in the parallel universe where energy bills are solved by minor acts of self-harm. Two thousand pounds a year per pub. Splendid. That will certainly compensate for the fact that customers, faced with a pint that tastes like it has been strained through a warm sock, will simply stop coming. The Bromley pioneer may have saved 26 per cent on electricity, but one suspects the loss in custom will be closer to 100 per cent once word gets round that the place now specialises in “ambient-temperature ales.” Miliband’s own department, one notes, has presided over energy prices that have climbed faster than a Lib Dem leadership candidate after a leadership contest. Yet rather than address the root causes—those pesky global markets, the green levies, the intermittent wind turbines that seem to generate more ministerial hot air than actual electricity—he offers the hospitality industry the modern equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s advice: if they have no cold beer, let them drink warm.

The satire writes itself, yet Miliband appears determined to live it. One imagines him in his ministerial office, surrounded by advisers who have never set foot in a pub that wasn’t hosting a focus group on “levelling up.” “Ed,” one can hear them cooing, “the data from Bromley is transformative. Think of the carbon savings. Think of the optics—warm beer, warm hearts, warm planet.” The man nods sagely, oblivious to the fact that the only optics involved will be those of disgruntled regulars staring into their glasses as though searching for the lost dignity of the British working man. Somewhere in the background, a ghostly voice—perhaps that of George Orwell, perhaps that of the late, great landlord of the Moon Under Water—murmurs: “This is not what we meant by democratic socialism.”

Nor is this merely a matter of taste. It is, in the grandest sense, a betrayal of the national character. The British have endured blitzes, strikes, and the paraleiptic warbling of Ed Sheeran, yet we have always drawn the line at warm beer. It is the one immutable law, the final redoubt of sanity in a world gone mad with net-zero targets and heat-pump subsidies. Miliband, with the serene confidence of a man who has never had to explain himself to a hungover builder on a Friday night, proposes to breach that redoubt with all the subtlety of a battering ram made of recycled tofu. The pubs will comply, of course. They always do. They will disable their fridges, post little laminated signs explaining the patriotic necessity of tepid lager, and watch their profits evaporate faster than the condensation that used to form on a properly chilled glass. And Miliband will move on to the next bright idea—perhaps suggesting that central heating be replaced by communal singing, or that electric cars be powered by the sheer willpower of vegan activists.

One is reminded, inevitably, of those other great political visionaries who believed they could remake human nature with a few well-placed decrees. Robespierre had his Committee of Public Safety; Miliband has his hospitality energy tool. The guillotine was at least honest about its intentions. This, by contrast, is death by a thousand lukewarm sips. The man who once promised to save the planet now saves pennies by sacrificing the pint. It would be tragic if it were not so perfectly, hilariously, British. In the end, history will not remember Miliband for his green credentials or his leadership contests. It will remember him as the Energy Secretary who tried to warm the beer. And the nation, raising its glasses—now sadly at room temperature—will toast him with the only words that truly fit: “Cheers, Ed. You’ve done it again.”

KENT’S PLAGUE REDUX

As the calendar flips to 17 March 2026, the county of Kent finds itself in the grip of a fresh microbial drama: an outbreak of invasive meningococcal disease, chiefly the B strain, has claimed two young lives—a university student and a sixth-form pupil—while sending more than a dozen others to hospital in serious condition. Queues of masked students snake outside the University of Kent for prophylactic antibiotics; health secretaries utter the word "unprecedented" with the solemnity once reserved for lottery wins; and the UK Health Security Agency scrambles to trace nightclub contacts from a single weekend in early March. The bacteria, it seems, picked its moment with impeccable timing—six years to the day since another set of restrictions descended on the nation like a particularly humourless fog.

One might be forgiven for experiencing a faint flicker of déjà vu, that peculiar sensation of having seen this film before, only with worse lighting and a more expensive cast. Six years ago, on this very date in 2020, Britain entered its first national lockdown, an exercise in collective caution that began as a fortnight to "flatten the curve" and ended, depending on one's arithmetic, somewhere between eighteen months and eternity. The virus in question was, we were assured, novel, deadly, and democratically indifferent to age, class, or whether one preferred Netflix to the theatre. Yet the statistics, once the dust of panic had settled, told a quieter story: the median age of those who succumbed hovered around 82 for men and 86 for women, figures that politely declined to differ very much from the life expectancies already on the books before anyone had heard of social distancing. In other words, COVID-19, for all its headline ferocity, behaved rather like an unusually punctual grim reaper who simply brought forward appointments already pencilled in.

The response, however, was anything but restrained. Economies were shuttered with a decisiveness that would have impressed even the most enthusiastic central planner. Pubs, theatres, schools, churches, family gatherings—all deemed non-essential in a sudden reclassification of human existence that would have astonished Aristotle. The bill, when finally totted up, ran to somewhere between £310 and £410 billion, a sum so vast it could purchase most of the Home Counties twice over and still leave change for a decent round of drinks. We masked up, we clapped for carers, we Zoomed our way through birthdays and bereavements, and we learned to pronounce "R-number" with the solemnity once reserved for Latin Mass. All this, we were told, to save lives—though precisely whose lives, and at what cost to the living, became a question too impolite for sustained public discussion.

Six years on, the balance sheet looks less heroic. The young, whose futures were placed on indefinite hold, now confront a mental-health crisis of our own making, an economy still limping, and a national debt that mocks the very notion of intergenerational fairness. The old, whom we ostensibly protected, largely survived anyway—many to watch their grandchildren grow up through screens rather than sitting rooms. And the virus? It mutated, as viruses do, became milder in most cases, and was eventually absorbed into the background hum of seasonal ailments, much like influenza before it achieved celebrity status. Yet the habits we acquired—the suspicion of proximity, the readiness to defer to "the science" as though it were a single oracle rather than a cacophony of competing models—linger like an embarrassing tattoo from a misspent youth.

Now here comes meningitis B, striking precisely where one might expect: among the young, the sociable, the clustered—in halls of residence and nightclubs rather than care homes. It kills swiftly, horribly, without regard for modelling or ministerial briefings. The response is admirably brisk: antibiotics distributed, vaccines targeted, contacts traced. No calls (yet) to cancel Christmas or close the schools en masse. The machinery of panic, it seems, has not been entirely dismantled; it has merely been placed on standby, ready to be wheeled out when the next headline demands it.

One cannot help but wonder whether we learned anything at all. The great lesson of 2020–2022 ought to have been proportionality: that risk exists on a spectrum, that the young are not interchangeable with the elderly in matters of mortality, and that society cannot be paused indefinitely without paying a price measured in lost educations, lost businesses, lost conviviality. Instead we perfected the art of treating every emerging pathogen as the next Black Death, while forgetting that life itself carries a fatality rate of one hundred per cent. The meningitis outbreak in Kent is tragic, urgent, and—mercifully—limited. But it arrives on the anniversary of a far larger experiment in control, one whose architects still congratulate themselves on having "saved lives" while carefully avoiding the question of how many other lives were quietly eroded in the process.

Perhaps the truest epitaph for those six years is not to be found in the infection fatality rates or the Treasury spreadsheets, but in the empty high streets, the closed theatres, the generation that came of age believing human contact was a public-health hazard. We flattened the curve, all right. We just never quite managed to straighten the country out again.

THE MANDELSON NOOSE CARES NOT FOR STARMER’S LAST GASP

One cannot help but savour the exquisite, almost biblical cruelty of it all, were applause not rather vulgar and the spectacle not so exquisitely British in its quiet, bureaucratic savagery. Just as Keir Starmer’s government had reached its terminal velocity—plummeting not with a bang but with the dreary, bureaucratic whimper of a man who has finally run out of excuses—the Mandelson files dropped yesterday like the executioner’s polite knock at dawn. 

And there, pulling the lever with the serene efficiency of a man who has waited years for this exact drop, stands Peter Mandelson: the Prince of Darkness incarnate, a creature whose every instinct has always been tuned to the precise frequency of betrayal. This is his masterpiece of revenge, served not hot but frozen to absolute zero, and it is not merely the end of a prime minister. It is the final, irrevocable proof that Starmer’s administration will be remembered as the single worst government in the entire, blood-soaked, rain-lashed history of these islands—worse than the appeasers who fed Europe to the wolves, worse than the clowns who lost an empire and called it progress, worse even than the ones who turned the lights out and pretended the darkness was a feature.

The documents themselves—those December 2024 memos, now publicly disembowelled on 11 March 2026—are a thing of cold, lethal perfection: Whitehall prose sharpened to a razor that never quite draws blood until the victim is already bleeding out. They did not shout “danger”; they simply murmured, with the faintest curl of the lip, that elevating a man whose little black book once included an overnight at Jeffrey Epstein’s New York fun palace—complete with the 2009 “perfectly innocent philanthropy chat” that fooled precisely no one, and continued contact long after the 2008 conviction for procuring an underage girl—might, in a universe where consequences still existed, pose the teensiest reputational inconvenience. 

They noted, with the enthusiasm of a coroner filing a routine report, the 2014 conservation scam funded by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, an enterprise so ethically pristine it required neither ethics nor light nor the slightest flicker of shame. They waved the 2019 JP Morgan dossier like a bill one had hoped to bury forever. And still Starmer, that hollow paragon of legal pedantry who mistakes pig-headedness for leadership, simply shredded the lot. Vetting is for peasants. Rules are for the little people who still cling to the quaint illusion that power comes with responsibility. For the inner circle, the old New Labour coven, the only commandment is loyalty—and loyalty, as ever, flows only one way.

One pictures the scene in Downing Street: Starmer staring at the memo with the slack-jawed realisation of a man who has just discovered his closest ally’s alibi is “I was only following orders from a convicted sex offender.” Mandelson, somewhere in the half-light, offering that trademark smile—the one that says, “I told you so, and now you’ll pay for not listening.” The appointment went through regardless, “weirdly rushed” as even Starmer’s own national security adviser noted, with classified briefings handed over before the ink was dry on the vetting. Ambassador to Washington: a gilded exile across the ocean, far enough to dodge the domestic hounds, close enough to ensure the eventual implosion would be visible from space. Classic Starmer logic—outsource the stench, import the illusion of competence, and pray the Atlantic was wide enough to swallow the truth.

It wasn’t. September 2025 came like the axe, and Mandelson was dragged home in disgrace after fresh Epstein revelations forced Starmer’s hand. Or so the fools thought. Then came the January 2026 DOJ dumps, the police arrest last month on suspicion of leaking sensitive government documents to Epstein himself, and now yesterday’s 147-page tranche—timed with the surgical precision of a professional assassin—at the exact instant Starmer’s approval ratings have achieved the serene finality of a corpse in the morgue and the opposition is licking its chops like wolves who have just heard the sheepdog retire. Coincidence? In this rotting administration, coincidence is merely the euphemism for “Mandelson remembered where he hid the bodies—and made sure the public got the map.” The fingerprints are unmistakable. The man who invented the dark machinery of modern politics has simply oiled it one last time and set it running in reverse. This is not politics; it is poetic justice, black as pitch and twice as final.

And what justice. Not the messy theatre of a coup, but the slow, delicious strangulation that lets Starmer knot his own rope while the nation watches. He ignored the warnings; now those warnings are billboard-sized, blaring from every screen and front page with the cold glee of vultures circling a fresh carcass. He overruled the civil service; now their ice-dry prose is eviscerating him with the remorseless efficiency of compound interest on a debt that can never be paid. He gambled that the public would eventually tire of sleaze if you just kept droning “working people” like a broken record. The public, it turns out, has not tired at all. It is sharpening its teeth. It is buying popcorn. It is positively relishing the spectacle of this government’s long, slow, richly deserved descent into electoral oblivion—complete with the delicious detail that Mandelson, the architect of the whole fiasco, demanded half a million pounds in severance and settled for a taxpayer-funded £75,000 golden goodbye before being carted off for questioning.

This is the final nail—cold-forged in Mandelsonian malice, hammered home with a smile that never reaches the eyes. The coffin was already a grotesque work of art: the winter fuel cuts that kicked pensioners while they shivered; the tax pirouettes that made “fiscal responsibility” sound like a terminal diagnosis; the immigration farce that combined bombast with total surrender, infuriating every last voter with clinical impartiality. Add the economy that crawled forward like a dying insect, the NHS queues now a national monument to neglect, the foreign policy that managed to be both shrill and invisible, like a scream in an empty room. All of it the unmistakable signature of a government that read its own promises in a hall of distorting mirrors and decided the only duty was to betray every soul in the land with meticulous, equal-opportunity contempt.

But the Mandelson files—yesterday’s fresh tranche—are the lid slammed down, the screws driven through the wood, and the grave already dug six feet deep outside Number Ten. They expose the one unforgivable truth: this is a government that always believed the rules were for other people. The same party that spent years preaching ethics and “restoring trust” turns out to have the moral spine of a jellyfish in a blender. Mandelson was never the exception; he was the inevitable punchline, the elder statesman summoned for gravitas who instead became the political undertaker, embalmer, and chief mourner rolled into one. And now the British public—grumbling, cynical, but suddenly alive with a dark, almost festive anticipation—is preparing to deliver the verdict at the ballot box with undisguised, savage delight.

History will not merely judge; it will mock. Future scholars, picking through the wreckage with the distaste one reserves for a mass grave, will stare at the Starmer years and ask how a nation that once forged empires produced this colourless architect of its own extinction. They will record the by-election massacres, the leadership bloodlettings already being rehearsed in the shadows, the poll ratings that make the 1970s look like a renaissance. Above all they will relish the symmetry: the very fixer Starmer summoned for respectability has instead become his gravedigger. Mandelson’s revenge is absolute. He has ensured that the government he helped spawn will be remembered for exactly one thing—the moment it was gutted by its own preserved filth.

No pity. None whatsoever. Starmer built his gallows with his own hands and now swings from it, a fitting monument to arrogance meeting consequence. The British public, for its part, is already tasting the sweetness of the coming rout: Labour not merely defeated but obliterated, wiped from the map in an electoral catharsis that will be cheered from Land’s End to John o’ Groats with the grim, thoroughly British grin of people who have waited far too long for this particular clown car to plunge off the cliff. 

Somewhere—in a shadowed Mayfair room where the claret is older than most voters—Peter Mandelson perhaps permits himself the smallest, coldest of smiles. The Prince of Darkness has had the last word. Britain will endure the jest, as it always does, grumbling all the way. Labour, on the evidence of these files, will not. And the nation is already counting the days until it can dance on the grave.

CRITICAL, DRY & ACCURATE: A YOUTUBER'S LAMENT FOR GLASGOW

In the annals of urban calamity, where the grand gestures of history are reduced to footnotes in the ledger of municipal incompetence, few vignettes capture the farce quite so neatly as the one posted by that redoubtable Scot, the Critical Drinker himself. There it stands—or rather, there it stood: a four-storey B-listed edifice at the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street in Glasgow, erected in 1851 when Victoria was still a sprightly young monarch and the Industrial Revolution was still pretending to have a conscience. Before: a handsome slice of Victorian rectitude, all sandstone gravitas and arched windows that had stared down everything from Chartist riots to the Beeching cuts. After: a smouldering heap of rubble, courtesy of a vape shop on the ground floor whose lithium-ion batteries apparently decided that 170 years of architectural endurance was quite long enough. The Drinker's caption, delivered with the laconic precision of a man who has seen one too many Hollywood abominations and lived to tell the tale in a voice like gravel soaked in single malt: “Well, that sucks.”

One must, in the interests of intellectual honesty, offer a partial salute to Will Jordan, the purportedly inebriated fellow behind the Critical Drinker persona. He is no Carlyle thundering from the pulpit, nor even a latter-day Orwell sharpening his nib on the hypocrisies of the age. His métier is the YouTube monologue—half film criticism, half Glaswegian therapy session—wherein he dissects the corpse of modern cinema with the cheerful brutality of a pathologist who has long since given up expecting miracles. Yet here he is, turning that same unflinching gaze upon a real-world obscenity, and doing so in three words that land like a well-aimed brick. No hand-wringing editorials, no appeals to heritage quangos; just the blunt recognition that something irreplaceable has been vaporised (forgive the pun) by something utterly disposable. In an era when every minor outrage spawns a ten-part podcast series, Jordan’s restraint is almost heroic. He reminds us that satire need not be elaborate; sometimes a shrug and a “well, that sucks” will suffice to expose the absurdity of it all. One suspects the man himself would raise a glass to the observation, mutter something unprintable about council planners, and return to eviscerating the latest Marvel offering. Partial appreciation, then: the Drinker sees clearly where others merely squint through the smoke.

But let us linger a moment longer on the ruins, because the real joke is not the fire itself but the grotesque inevitability of it. Picture the scene: more than 250 firefighters battling through the night, Glasgow Central Station paralysed, trains cancelled, commuters herded like bewildered sheep, and the First Minister himself turning up for the obligatory photo opportunity, face arranged in the correct mask of solemnity. All because a building that had survived two world wars, economic depressions, and the aesthetic vandalism of the 1960s finally met its match in a retail unit peddling flavoured nicotine to the disaffected youth of 2026. One is reminded of those old music-hall routines where the straight man builds a magnificent edifice only for the comic to wander in with a match. Except here the comic is the entire modern commercial ethos, and the match is battery-powered.

The deeper lament, the one that curls like cigar smoke through any honest reckoning, concerns the relentless, almost gleeful proliferation of these vape emporia in the historic cores of our cities. They sprout like toadstools after rain—cheap leases, quick turnover, shelves groaning with pastel-coloured pods that promise escape from the very drabness they help create. Once upon a time, the great streets of Glasgow, Manchester, Edinburgh were lined with institutions that at least pretended to permanence: banks with marble halls, department stores with pneumatic tubes, public houses with etched glass and mahogany that whispered of continuity. Now the ground floors are colonised by the great god Vape, whose liturgy consists of aerosol and impulse purchase. The result is not merely aesthetic; it is a form of architectural assisted suicide. A Victorian façade, designed to endure the ages, is retrofitted with extractor fans and emergency lighting that somehow never quite meets the regulations when it matters. The building survives the Blitz, only to be brought low by a business model predicated on disposability. The irony is so thick one could bottle it and sell it as limited-edition e-juice: “Heritage Haze – with notes of civic negligence and quiet despair.”

And who, in this satirical passion play, bears the collective blame? Not the individual shopkeeper, poor soul, who in many cases had only just taken the keys (the latest proprietor, we are told, had owned the place a mere fortnight before his dreams went up in literal smoke). No, the finger points at the broader congregation of enablers: the planning committees who waved through the leases with the cheerful insouciance of men who have never had to live with the consequences; the property owners who prefer a steady trickle of vape-shop rent to the costly bother of proper stewardship; the vaping industry itself, that curious offspring of Big Tobacco’s rebranding exercise, which has convinced regulators that what the inner cities really need is more places to inhale strawberry fog. They form a sort of unholy trinity of short-termism—council, landlord, vendor—each convinced that the next quarterly return justifies mortgaging another slice of the past. The trope is as old as cities themselves: the barbarians are not at the gates; they are inside, signing the tenancy agreement and installing mood lighting.

One can almost hear the late Clive James chuckling from whatever celestial cocktail bar he now frequents, martini in one hand, cigarette in the other (the old-fashioned combustible sort, naturally). He spent a lifetime skewering the pretensions of television, of celebrity, of cultural decline, always with that trademark blend of erudition and mordant glee. He would have recognised this Glasgow vignette instantly: the grand Victorian pile, the modern banal intrusion, the inevitable conflagration, the subsequent official inquiries that will produce a report no one reads. “Well, that sucks,” indeed. It is the sound of a civilisation quietly admitting that it can no longer be bothered to maintain the stage on which its own drama is performed.

And so the rubble is cleared, the insurance forms are filled, and in due course another unit will rise—perhaps another vape shop, perhaps a nail bar, perhaps one of those ubiquitous chicken outlets that seem to multiply faster than the bacteria they occasionally harbour. The sandstone will be replaced by something cheaper, shinier, more 'fit for purpose.' The tourists will still photograph the station, the commuters will grumble, and the press will file another dispatch from the trenches. But something small and vital will have been lost: not merely a building, but the quiet assumption that some things are meant to outlast us. In the end, that is the real joke, the one that stings longest. History reduced to ash by a product whose entire selling point is that it leaves no trace—except, of course, when it does.

Anyway, as the Critical Drinker himself would lament, that's all I've got for today … go away now.

STRICTLY ARMAGEDDON

The Buggles, those forgotten prophets of 1979, told us video killed the radio star. What they lacked was the courage to finish the sentence: it also disembowelled dignity, castrated seriousness, and left the body politic performing an endless, desperate lap-dance for the algorithm. Yesterday provided the definitive demonstration. While the Middle East teetered on the edge of a conflict that even the most optimistic Foreign Office mandarin is describing as “rather concerning,” more than forty Members of Parliament gathered in the sunlit atrium of Portcullis House. Their purpose was not to debate, legislate, or even pretend to understand the gathering storm. No. They had come to dance. Under the expert tutelage of Angela Rippon – that ageless doyenne who once delivered the news with the gravity of a hanging judge – and sundry other emissaries from the glittering demimonde of Strictly Come Dancing, the Speaker of the House of Commons himself, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, took to the floor like a man who had mistaken Armageddon for the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.

One pictures the scene with the sort of appalled fascination usually reserved for motorway pile-ups. Briefcases cast aside, red boxes momentarily abandoned, the faint squeak of patent leather on polished stone as grown adults – including the Shadow Culture Secretary, a Conservative backbencher or two, and a fresh-minted Green – practised their Latin walks and Cuban breaks. All this while emergency flights were being scrambled from Oman and the Prime Minister prepared for questions he would no doubt answer with the usual masterclass in constructive vagueness. The stated rationale? “Promoting health and wellbeing.” 

One wonders what precise ailment afflicts our legislators that can only be cured by learning to spot their turns as the world learns to duck and cover. Perhaps it is the creeping suspicion that their actual jobs have become optional. This is not mere bad optics. This is a philosophical declaration, delivered in sequins and 4/4 time. It announces, with choreographed clarity, that in contemporary Britain the political class has given up any pretence of being serious people at serious moments. They have become content creators first and representatives second. The cha-cha is not an aberration; it is the logical endpoint of a system that rewards visibility over vigilance, performance over prudence. While history prepares to rhyme with something far nastier than 1939, our tribunes have decided the nation needs better core strength and improved posture.

 

One almost admires the audacity. It takes a special kind of tone-deafness to treat the brink of war as an opportunity for light entertainment – and then wrap the whole grotesque exercise in the sanctimonious gauze of public health. The comparison with Nero is now so obvious it feels almost vulgar to make it, yet make it we must. At least the original fiddler had the minimal decency to confine his performance to the palace and to accompany himself. Our version has outsourced the soundtrack to the BBC, invited the cameras in, recreated the famous Strictly goodbye flourish with a former newsreader, and then congratulated itself on its commitment to national resilience. Sir Lindsay twirling under the glass atrium is not charming; it is grotesque. It is the visual equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while insisting the band play on – except the band has been replaced by a glitterball, a former EastEnders actress barking instructions about rhythm, and the quiet, lethal knowledge that the clip will trend before the first missile has even left its silo.

What makes the spectacle particularly poisonous is the timing. This is not some quiet Friday afternoon lark during a period of tedious normalcy. This is a nation facing genuine peril being treated to the sight of its supposed leaders perfecting their competitive foxtrot for the evening news. One can imagine the average citizen – the nurse on night shift, the small business owner staring at rising insurance premiums, the parent wondering what sort of world their children will inherit – watching this footage and experiencing something close to existential whiplash. 

Is this really the best we can do? Is this the summit of our political imagination? Governance reduced to its purest modern form: not legislation, but likes. Not leadership, but content. The dispatch box has been replaced by the dance floor, and the nation is expected to applaud the transformation. The deeper cut is this: the dance is not harmless. It is symptomatic of a ruling class that has internalised the values of celebrity culture so completely that it can no longer distinguish between statesmanship and showmanship. They have learned the lesson of the age with impressive thoroughness: in the attention economy, being seen to do something – anything – is preferable to the quiet, unglamorous business of actually doing something. Seriousness does not trend. Gravitas gets no retweets. Far easier to master the rumba than to master a coherent foreign policy. Far safer to shake parliamentary hips than to risk an actual decision.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when British public life still retained a certain austere dignity. Crises were met with grim resolve, not jazz hands. The moving image, when it captured our leaders, showed them at work rather than at play. That Britain understood something our current crop of performers have forgotten: that some moments demand stillness, silence, and the saving grace of not making an exhibition of oneself. Instead we have this: a parliament that has become a branch of light entertainment, a Speaker who appears to believe the road to national resilience runs through the tango, and a political class so desperate for relevance that it will dance while the world burns if it thinks the clip might go viral. 

The Buggles were wrong after all. Video did not merely kill the radio star. It killed the Republic, and taught the corpse to do the cha-cha first.

NOT YOUR FINEST HOUR, KEIR …

One can only imagine the scene in the White House briefing room this week, or rather, one can imagine it all too vividly because it has become the signature choreography of the age: President Donald J. Trump, hair defying both gravity and good taste, gesturing with the expansive certainty of a man who has never met a metaphor he couldn’t mangle, announcing to the world that Sir Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill. This, mind you, because the British Prime Minister had the temerity to hesitate before letting American bombers use UK bases to pound Iran in the latest instalment of what history will no doubt call the Perpetual Middle Eastern Misunderstanding. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump added, for those slow on the uptake, as though the ghost of the old bulldog might materialise in a cloud of cigar smoke and brandy fumes to apologise for Starmer’s shocking lack of spine.

The remark is vintage Trump: part insult, part historical fan-fiction, and wholly revealing of the peculiar American love affair with Winston Churchill that has been running, uninterrupted and unexamined, since roughly 1940. It is an obsession so complete, so sentimental, and so detached from the actual country of Britain that one half expects the next Republican convention to open with a choir of red-hatted patriots belting out “Land of Hope and Glory” while waving little plastic V-signs. Churchill, to the American imagination, is not merely a politician; he is the Platonic ideal of the British Prime Minister, the default setting to which every subsequent occupant of 10 Downing Street is supposed to revert like a malfunctioning satnav. Cigar? Check. Brandy? Check. Ability to stare down tyranny while cracking wise in a plummy accent? Double check. Anything less and the poor fellow is immediately diagnosed with terminal feebleness.

One wonders, in the driest possible tone, what the real Winston Churchill would have made of being turned into this transatlantic mascot. The man himself was half-American, of course, which perhaps explains the enduring romance; blood will out, even when diluted by several generations of English boarding schools. But the Churchill Americans adore is not the complicated, brandy-soaked, empire-clinging, Gallipoli-fumbling, Bengal-famine-adjacent Churchill known to actual historians. No, theirs is the Hollywood version: Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, growling defiance from the bunker while the violins swell and the audience reaches for its Kleenex. He is John Wayne in a three-piece suit, saving civilisation single-handed because that is what Americans expect their British allies to do—preferably without asking awkward questions about logistics, public opinion, or the small matter of a sovereign parliament.

Starmer, poor sod, never stood a chance. Here is a man who looks like he was assembled from the spare parts of a particularly cautious solicitor and a mid-level NHS administrator. He speaks in the measured tones of someone who has read the risk assessment twice and still isn’t convinced. He refused, initially at least, to turn Diego Garcia and other British real estate into an American forward operating base for the latest round of desert fireworks. One can almost hear the collective American intake of breath: Not Churchill. As though Churchill would have leapt from his grave, lit a Romeo y Julieta the size of a baseball bat, and personally piloted a B-52 over Tehran while muttering something devastating about the Ayatollah’s mother. The fact that the actual Churchill spent much of 1940 begging Franklin Roosevelt for help—and promising, in effect, that Britain would become America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier—seems never to intrude on the fantasy. History, like so many other inconvenient things, is what you make it on cable news.

The deeper comedy, of course, is that Britain itself has been quietly trying to retire Churchill for decades. To the average Briton he remains a national treasure, certainly, but one kept in a glass case marked “Do Not Touch—Fragile Imperial Ego Inside.” We wheel him out for tourists, for VE Day anniversaries, and for those moments when we need to remind ourselves we once mattered. But we do not expect our prime ministers to channel him any more than we expect them to wear top hats and ride to hounds. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not in the business of re-fighting the Battle of Britain; it is in the business of not bankrupting the NHS and trying to pretend that net zero is compatible with keeping the lights on. When Trump demands Churchillian defiance, what he is really demanding is that Britain should once again subordinate its interests to America’s without complaint, all while wearing a funny hat and saying 'jolly good, bravo' at appropriate intervals. It is less a foreign policy than a costume drama.

And herein lies the exquisite sardonic twist. Trump, the man who once kept a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office like a religious relic, has now discovered that the British have committed the ultimate betrayal: they have failed to remain frozen in 1940 for his convenience. The special relationship, that most elastic of diplomatic fictions, is revealed once again to be special in the way a one-sided marriage is special—endlessly flattering to the larger partner, endlessly exasperating to the smaller. Starmer’s cautious multilateralism is not weakness; it is the weary realism of a middle-ranking power that has seen too many wars sold as moral crusades and ended as expensive regrets. But realism has never played well in Washington, where foreign policy is conducted as a cross between a Marvel movie and a real-estate negotiation. If the British will not supply the heroic soundtrack, then clearly they are letting the side down.

One pictures Churchill himself, somewhere in the afterlife cigar lounge, raising a glass with that trademark mixture of amusement and contempt. He knew better than most how fickle great-power friendships could be. He knew that empires rise and fall, that alliances are temporary, and that the Americans—charming, generous, and utterly convinced of their own destiny—would eventually tire of the old country’s diminishing returns. He might even have sympathised with Starmer’s predicament: the need to balance domestic politics, parliamentary arithmetic, and the small matter of not being dragged into someone else’s war on a Tuesday afternoon. But sympathy, like irony, is wasted on those who prefer their history in primary colours.

So here we are, with President Trump wielding Churchill like a club and the British Prime Minister politely declining to play the role of plucky understudy. Another American president has discovered that Britain is not a theme park. Another British prime minister has been informed he is not the second coming of the man who saved Western civilisation. And the special relationship, like so many other cherished illusions, staggers on, slightly more ridiculous than before. No Winston Churchill? Quite right. There was only one, and he had the good sense to die in 1965 before he could be reduced to a rhetorical prop in a White House briefing. 

The rest of us—Americans, Britons, and anyone else foolish enough to watch the news—must muddle through with the politicians we actually have. They may lack the rhetoric, the cigars, and the V-signs, but at least they are alive. In an age of perpetual crisis, that is perhaps the most heroic quality left.

RAVING LOONIES COME SECOND TO ACTUAL MADNESS

Ah, Britain, that once-sceptred isle, now a damp constituency where the Green Party has just pulled off what passes for a historic upset in these diminished days. On 26 February 2026, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer—a 34-year-old plumber presented as the very salt of the working-class earth—piped her way to victory with 14,980 votes, or a handsome 40.7% of the ballots cast. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin trailed at 10,578 (28.7%), Labour’s Angeliki Stogia limped in third with 9,364 (25.4%), and the Conservatives scraped together a pitiful 706 souls, barely enough for a decent wake. Turnout? A majestic 47.6%, down a whisper from the general election the year before, proving once again that the native Briton regards the franchise much as he regards dental hygiene: optional, mildly uncomfortable, and best left to someone else.

The real comedy gold, however, lay in the presence of Sir Oink A-Lot, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party’s porcine champion, who squealed his way to 159 votes (0.4%) with policies no more deranged (or at least, one hopes, intentionally) than the Greens’ earnest manifesto of tree-hugging, landlord abolition, and rent controls that would make a Venezuelan central planner blush. Yet the electorate, in its infinite wisdom, chose the uncertified crackpots over the registered ones. Monster Raving came second to madness. One can almost hear the ghosts of Disraeli and Churchill exchanging weary glances: if the certified loonies finish behind the genuine article, what hope remains for sanity?

Consider Hannah Spencer herself, the champagne socialist par excellence masquerading as a wrench-wielding heroine. Billed as the local plumber who rescues greyhounds and runs marathons, she triumphed in an emotional victory speech vowing to fight for the “left behind.” Touching, until one consults the Land Registry and discovers she co-owns two houses in Manchester’s most affluent postcodes, worth well over £1 million combined, alongside a former partner who happens to be a biochemist. She has offered tips on maximising property deals, enjoyed globetrotting holidays despite her party’s carbon tut-tutting, and somehow squared this portfolio with Green rhetoric about taxing the rich into oblivion. Hypocrisy? Perish the thought; she is merely living the dream—talking proletarian while walking plutocratic. One imagines her at the dispatch box, overalls artfully dirtied, promising to fix the nation’s leaks while her own investments gush eternal profit.

The victory was no accident of enthusiasm. Gorton and Denton, with its significant Muslim population, became a textbook case of sectarian bloc voting. Multilingual leaflets, endorsements from outfits like The Muslim Vote, and Labour’s perceived wobbles on Israel-Gaza drove ethnic-minority turnout with disciplined purpose. The Greens positioned themselves as the pro-Palestine, pro-peace saviours, and the votes duly flowed. This is the bitter fruit of decades of European Union folly: mass immigration of predominantly young Muslim men, encouraged by asylum pacts, family reunifications, and a bureaucratic blind eye to cultural chasms. Arriving often humiliated by poverty, conflict, and unfulfilled promises, these cohorts have coalesced into electoral battering rams, voting not for broad policy but for communal grievance and identity. The result? A splintering of the national polity into tribal fiefdoms, where Westminster seats are won not by ideas but by mobilisation.

And the deciding factor in this slow-motion tragedy? Not cunning strategy from Brussels or Bradford, but the magnificent apathy of the native Briton. While one side organised with near-military precision, the other preferred Netflix, pints, and the quiet conviction that “they’re all the same anyway.” Turnout at 47.6% means barely half the electorate could be bothered to interrupt their torpor. The young, the non-graduates, the renters, the merely indifferent—all stayed home, widening the chasm. Studies confirm it: participation is lowest among those who complain loudest. In constituencies like this, native lethargy becomes a suicide pact. The descendants of suffragettes, who queued in the rain for the vote, now treat elections like an optional episode of EastEnders.

One might almost despair enough to contemplate the unthinkable: compulsory voting, that antipodean abomination we affect to despise. Australia has enforced it since 1924, with a modest fine (A$20, scarcely adjusted for inflation) and the bribe of a snag or shrimp at the booth. Turnout hovers in the high nineties—90% plus at their last federal outing—while we limp along at 60% for generals and yesterday’s dismal 47.6% for a by-election. The logic is brutally persuasive: drag the sofa-bound moaners to the polls, and politicians must court the whole electorate rather than niche obsessives or mobilised minorities. No more pandering to pensioners or sectarian blocs while the rest binge-watch oblivion. Universal turnout might dilute the edge of organised voting, turning elections back into something resembling national conversations instead of tribal headcounts.

Yet the British genius for liberty recoils. Compulsion? Us? The nation that invented habeas corpus and the polite right to tell authority to sod off? Forcing a man to vote feels like making him eat his greens or recycle his crisp packets—the thin end of the nanny-state wedge. What if he spoils his ballot with artistic genitalia? What if he turns up only to scribble essays on why politics is bollocks? Australia tolerates informal votes (around 5%, often gloriously abusive); we’d turn it into a national sport. The fines would start small and balloon into a poll-tax-by-stealth; courts would clog with conscientious objectors claiming exemption from Keir Starmer’s tie or Reform’s latest wheeze. The bureaucracy would metastasise; the excuses would be epic. And the sausage sizzle? We’d botch it—vegan, gluten-free, low-carbon, ending in a quinoa kebab tasting of damp moral superiority.

Australia pulls it off because Australia is, at heart, a nation of conformists who like rules, cricket and barbecues. We are a nation of grumblers who regard rules as personal insults. Force us, and the polling station becomes a carnival of passive-aggressive spoilage. Yet the alternative stares us down: more by-elections decided by whichever faction could muster the fewest couch potatoes. If the native electorate keeps treating democracy like an optional gym class, we’ll wake governed not by consent but by whoever showed up. So here we are, the champagne plumber triumphed over the sofa class, and Islamic bloc voting—midwifed by EU-era immigration humiliations—threatens to fracture what remains of national unity. 

Despair is the rational response. But despair with a ballot paper in hand is marginally preferable to despair with a remote control. At least then we’d have earned the right to complain.

NEIL SEDAKA (1939 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Neil Sedaka, the indefatigable manufacturer of earworms who convinced several generations that breaking up was, contrary to all evidence, hard to do, has finally managed the one separation no amount of falsetto could forestall. He died on February 27, 2026, in Los Angeles at the age of 86, after a brief but apparently decisive hospital visit. The body, sources suggest, gave out before the catalogue did.

Born in Brooklyn in 1939, Sedaka began as a Juilliard-trained prodigy who could probably have played Schubert respectably had he not discovered that teenagers with pocket money preferred tunes about calendars and sweet sixteens. Partnering with Howard Greenfield, he became the Brill Building's most reliable hit factory, churning out "Oh! Carol", "Calendar Girl", "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" and the deathless "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" — a song so relentlessly cheerful about romantic catastrophe that it made heartbreak sound like a minor inconvenience, like misplacing one's spectacles.

Sedaka sang them himself in a voice pitched somewhere between choirboy and helium balloon, selling millions while others (Connie Francis with "Stupid Cupid", Captain & Tennille with "Love Will Keep Us Together") reaped the benefits of his melodies without the burden of performing in jumpers. When the British Invasion rendered his brand of pop temporarily surplus to requirements, he retreated, only to bounce back in the 1970s with "Laughter in the Rain" and a slowed-down "Breaking Up" that proved the original hadn't been maudlin enough. "Bad Blood" followed, ensuring that even disco could accommodate his particular brand of melodic optimism.

He outlasted trends, outlived partners, and kept performing into his eighties, as if sheer persistence might persuade time to hum along in 4/4. In the end, though, mortality declined to take requests. Sedaka leaves a widow, children, grandchildren, and a back catalogue that will continue to ambush unsuspecting listeners in supermarkets and lifts for decades yet — a final, ironic proof that some tunes, unlike their creator, really are impossible to break up with.

ROB GRANT (1955 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Rob Grant, the man who taught British television that the future would be less Star Trek and more a curry-stained skip drifting through the void, has at last achieved the one status even Dave Lister couldn’t wriggle out of: permanently dead. He was seventy, and he died suddenly on 25 February 2026, proving that even cosmic irony has deadlines.

Born in Salford in September 1955, Grant sampled psychology at Liverpool University for three tedious years before concluding the human mind was better left to the experts—i.e., a hologram with an inferiority complex, a cat who thought he was God’s gift to lycra, and a mechanoid whose only vice was ironing. Teaming with Doug Naylor in the 1980s satire factory, he helped birth Spitting Image’s latex venom and then, from a Radio 4 sketch about a luckless space cadet, the glorious rustbucket epic Red Dwarf. Launched in 1988, the show demonstrated that you could conquer the galaxy on a budget smaller than a vending machine’s annual servicing fee, provided the jokes were sharp enough to cut through vacuum.

Grant co-wrote the first six series, then sensibly jumped ship, announcing he wanted “more on his tombstone than Red Dwarf.” The tombstone, of course, will now read exactly that, because fate has the driest wit of all. Solo he produced novels—Backwards, where time ran in reverse like a BBC commissioning meeting; Incompetence, a dystopia so plausible it felt like a leaked government report; Fat, because someone had to say the unsayable. Later, with Andrew Marshall, he gave us the gloriously daft Quanderhorn and, only days before departure, the announcement of the Red Dwarf prequel novel Titan. Talk about leaving them wanting more.

Tributes now flood in, calling him a 'visionary.' He would have greeted the word with the same arched eyebrow he once reserved for Rimmer’s promotion prospects. In truth he was simply a professional northerner who understood that the funniest thing in the universe is humanity trying to matter. The Dwarf sails on without him, but the laughter will forever carry a faint Mancunian echo and the unmistakable whiff of vindaloo.

FLY-TIPPING, FAITH VOTES, AND THE DEATH OF HOPE

In the perpetually damp precincts of Greater Manchester, where the rain seems less a meteorological event than a form of municipal penance, the voters of Gorton and Denton are being invited this Thursday to perform one of those quaint rituals that still pass for democracy in these islands. A by-election, no less: the sort of contest that normally registers on the national consciousness with all the urgency of a parish council debate over dog fouling, yet this one carries the faint whiff of obituary. For here, in a constituency stitched together like a budget suit from the remnants of Manchester Gorton, Withington and Denton and Reddish, Labour’s long dominion faces the distinct possibility of an undignified eviction. 

One pictures the scene with a certain sardonic relish: umbrellas blooming like poisonous fungi along the streets of Longsight and Burnage, the occasional kebab wrapper eddying in the gutter, and a electorate—28 per cent of it answering the call to Friday prayers, the rest variously resigned, resentful or simply absent—deciding whether to stick with the devil they half-know or sample something newer and shinier from the populist or pistachio-coloured ends of the spectrum. The seat itself is a fresh-minted artefact of the 2023 boundary review, that periodic act of cartographic vandalism by which Westminster convinces itself it is listening to the people. It is England’s fifteenth most deprived constituency, a distinction it wears with the weary pride of a man who has won the wooden spoon at the village fête. Thirty-five of its forty Manchester neighbourhoods sit in the bottom quintile for deprivation; 45 per cent of the children live below the breadline; the average household income in parts of Longsight would not cover a modest season ticket at Old Trafford. Demographically it is a patchwork quilt of modern Britain: 57 per cent White overall, but with swathes where British Pakistanis predominate and the Muslim population reaches 28 per cent. The Manchester wards are young, student-heavy, graduate-prone and aggrieved; the Denton wards are older, whiter, more routinely employed and quietly furious about the state of the high street. 

In 2016 half of them voted Leave, a fact that still causes certain Islington dinner tables to emit a low, keening sound. Manufacturing has long since packed its bags; what remains is the service economy, the benefits economy and the eternal economy of complaint. Into this fertile soil of discontent stepped Andrew Gwynne in 2024, Labour Co-op standard-bearer and former health minister, who secured 50.8 per cent of the vote and a majority of 13,413. It looked solid enough at the time—until one remembers that it represented a 16-point drop from the notional 2019 figure and that Reform, the Greens and even the Workers Party had begun nibbling at the edges like mice in a larder. Gwynne’s tenure proved shorter than a Lib Dem leadership contest. In February 2025 he was suspended from the party after a WhatsApp group—those digital confessional boxes of the modern politician—leaked remarks deemed antisemitic and, for good measure, unflattering about an elderly constituent. 

One can only imagine the private horror in Labour HQ: not the offence itself, perhaps, but the discovery that someone had been so careless as to commit it in writing. Gwynne soldiered on as an independent until January 2026, when 'significant ill health' and medical advice that further parliamentary labours might prove fatal provided the exit ramp every politician secretly craves. He was promptly appointed Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, that glorious euphemism for “you’re out, old boy.” The by-election was called for 26 February, the second under Keir Starmer’s premiership and, one suspects, the one that will be studied in party seminars under the heading “How Not to Lose a Safe Seat.”

The candidates number eleven, a figure that suggests either glorious pluralism or the sort of fragmentation one associates with post-imperial Balkan states. At the centre, or rather clutching the centre with whitening knuckles, stands Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, a Manchester city councillor, former European Parliament candidate and professional lobbyist for the Arup Group, whose selection had all the smooth inevitability of a Soviet show trial. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester and local hero who can actually win elections, had thrown his hat into the ring with the enthusiasm of a man scenting a path back to Westminster and perhaps, whisper it, a future leadership bid. The National Executive Committee, in its wisdom, voted 8–1 to block him—Starmer and most of the high command against, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood abstaining, Deputy Leader Lucy Powell in favour. Fifty Labour MPs protested; Angela Rayner, Sadiq Khan and Ed Miliband were said to be unimpressed. The message was clear: better a safe pair of lobbyist hands than a popular mayor who might remind the membership what winning used to feel like. Stogia now campaigns on government investment, more GPs, breakfast clubs and a crackdown on fly-tipping—worthy pledges that have the authentic ring of municipal PowerPoint. Whether they will move the needle in a seat where the main grievances are rather larger remains to be seen.

Challenging from the right—or at least from the direction currently fashionable—is Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, the academic who discovered that sociology lectures on “British values” play rather better on GB News than in the senior common room at Kent. A former professor, honorary president of Students4Reform and one-time pizza delivery boy in these very streets during his Salford undergraduate days, Goodwin has the air of a man who has read too much Pareto and decided the circulation of elites requires a personal intervention. His literature promises a referendum on Starmer, crackdowns on crime and grooming gangs, tax cuts, more police and stop-and-search. Past remarks on family breakdown, childlessness, fertility and the cultural implications of mass immigration have been denounced, predictably, as everything from misogyny to Islamophobia—a charge that in a constituency with a large Muslim population carries the weight of tactical voting. One almost admires the audacity: the intellectual who once analysed populism from afar now embodies it, clipboard in hand, promising to speak for the people while commuting from Hertfordshire. Reform’s internal polling has them confident; their leaflets, alas, sometimes forget the legal imprint, a technicality now under police investigation. Campaign manager suspended for offensive posts; GB News complaints; the usual circus. Politics, as ever, imitates art—bad art.

From the environmental left comes Hannah Spencer of the Greens, a Trafford councillor, former Greater Manchester mayoral candidate and, gloriously, a 'working plumber'. One cannot help but feel this is the perfect metaphor: a woman who actually fixes leaks now offering to fix the leaks in the body politic. Spencer’s pitch is the full Green prospectus—wealth tax, rent controls, £15 minimum wage, nationalised utilities, free prescriptions, dentistry and eye tests, better-insulated homes and, inevitably, a robust stance on Gaza that has seen her literature translated into Urdu and endorsements roll in from Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Salma Yaqoob and The Muslim Vote. She has knocked on 18,000 doors and claims the race is neck-and-neck with Reform, Labour a distant third. Her opponents mutter darkly of “grubby deals” with non-standing parties; she denies it with the serene certainty of one who has communed with the wind turbines. In a seat where fly-tipping and heating bills matter rather more than net zero by 2035, the plumber’s pragmatism may yet prove her strongest asset—or her undoing when the bill arrives.

The supporting players provide the essential British ballast of eccentricity. Sir Oink A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party; Nick Buckley of Advance UK; Charlotte Cadden, the Conservative former detective chief inspector and trustee of Sex Matters; Dan Clarke of the Libertarians; Sebastian Moore of the SDP; Joseph O’Meachair of Rejoin EU; Jackie Pearcey of the Liberal Democrats; and Hugo Wils of the Communist League. Each will receive their handful of votes, their moment on the hustings, their paragraph in the local paper. The Workers Party stood aside, declaring that a Labour-Reform loss would benefit the working class—an exquisite piece of dialectical reasoning. Your Party urged tactical anti-Reform voting. The field is crowded, the message fragmented, the likely winner anyone’s guess.

Polls, those modern Delphic oracles with the reliability of a wet bus timetable, show the race as a statistical migraine. An Omnisis survey gave Greens 33 per cent, Reform 29, Labour 26. Find Out Now had Reform slightly ahead before apologising for the small sample. Electoral Calculus and others foresee Reform or Greens triumphant, Labour humiliated. Lord Hayward tips the Greens; Robert Ford calls it a pollster’s nightmare. Hypothetical polling with Burnham as candidate gave Labour a landslide; without him, the roof caves in. Whatever the numbers, the story is the same: a safe Labour seat reduced to a three-horse race in which the horse in the red rosette looks distinctly lame.

The campaign has been a joyless affair of rain-soaked hustings, accusations of racism, police probes into sausage rolls offered for poster-sticking (Labour insists it was “ordinary hospitality”), and the usual online bile. Labour backbenchers are said to be despondent, some privately hoping for defeat to hasten the day Starmer is invited to spend more time with his family. Reform talks of a “referendum on Keir”; the Greens of “cutting the cost of living while ending complicity in genocide”. The minor candidates add colour and little else. In the end, turnout will be low, the winner will claim a mandate the size of a postage stamp, and the new MP will discover that representing one of England’s poorest seats involves rather more casework on damp housing than speeches on the floor of the House.

One is reminded of those late-Roman emperors who paraded their triumphs while the barbarians massed at the gates. Gorton and Denton is not the end of Labour, still less of British democracy; it is merely a symptom. A symptom of a politics in which identity has replaced class, gesture has replaced governance, and the electorate has learned, with weary cynicism, that none of the offerings on the ballot quite matches the menu. Whoever prevails on Thursday—plumber, pundit or lobbyist—will inherit a constituency that deserves better than the slogans it is being sold. The rain will continue to fall, the potholes will remain unfilled, and the voters, having done their bit, will return to the serious business of getting on with life. In the grand satirical pageant of these islands, it is hardly the most edifying spectacle. But then, as any student of human folly knows, spectacle is what we do best. The curtain rises tomorrow. One almost feels sorry for the cast. Almost.

OF SHOVELS AND SOCIALISM …

One does not require the meteorological insight of a professional forecaster, nor the dialectical subtlety of a tenured socialist, to savour the exquisite farce now playing out across the five boroughs. New York City, that self-appointed capital of resilience and reinvention, lies under a historic February blanket—eighteen to twenty inches of the stuff, depending on which meteorologist you trust and how much they have invested in the narrative of 'unprecedented.' The year is 2026. The mayor is Zohran Mamdani, sworn in a mere two months earlier on a platform heavy with the usual progressive freight: equity, dignity, solidarity, and the cheerful assumption that human nature can be gently nudged toward the light if only the incentives are calibrated correctly.

The Emergency Snow Shoveler programme is not some wild-eyed innovation cooked up in a Brooklyn co-op. It is, we are repeatedly assured, long-standing. Citizens of goodwill have for years been invited to present themselves at Department of Sanitation garages, armed with two forms of photo identification, a Social Security card, photocopies of the foregoing, and presumably a notarised affidavit confirming that they have read the small print. In return they would receive $19.14 per hour to begin with, rising, after the first forty hours of the week, to $28.71. A rate, one notes, that in calmer weather might have purchased a serviceable oat-milk latte and a single subway ride, but which, in the teeth of a blizzard, proved about as magnetically attractive as a vegan cheese platter at a Trump rally.

The result? Zero. Zilch. Not a single taker at multiple garages in Queens and Brooklyn. The depots stood as empty as a campaign promise the morning after the election. One pictures the scene with a certain Beckettian purity: a lone official in a hi-vis vest, stamping his feet, checking his clipboard, perhaps permitting himself a quiet, unprintable observation on the civic spirit of the people who had, after all, voted the present administration into being. No queues formed. No hardy souls materialised, glowing with the inner warmth of communal endeavour. The snow continued to fall, the ploughs—2,300 of them, including 700 salt-spreaders—laboured on, and 2,600 sanitation veterans worked twelve-hour shifts, but the supplementary civilian army refused to materialise.

Enter the frantic revision. By Monday the rate had been 'increased'—the word 'frantically' belongs to the conservative commentariat, but it will serve—to a flat $30 an hour, with $45 after forty hours. The arithmetic had been adjusted with the speed normally reserved for correcting a tweet that has already gone viral for the wrong reasons. One can almost hear the late-night huddle in the mayor’s office: spreadsheets flickering, aides murmuring, someone suggesting that perhaps the dignity of labour required a slightly higher numerical expression of esteem. The mayor himself, addressing the cameras, maintained the necessary tone of calm urgency. Code Blue remained in effect. The city was mobilising. New Yorkers could still walk into any DSNY garage before 8 p.m., show their documents, and begin earning what was now, by the standards of the original offer, a small fortune.

Two months. That is all it has taken. Two months since the swearing-in, the photo opportunities, the ritual invocation of hope and change. Already the honeymoon is not merely over; it has been buried under drifts deep enough to conceal a double-decker bus. The conservative chorus on X (still the coliseum of choice for public blood sports) has responded with the glee of schoolboys who have discovered that the headmaster’s trousers have fallen down. “Marxists who voted him in are all lazy freeloaders.” “Never in the history of leftism has a lefty volunteered to do anything.” “They expected free handouts, not to be asked to work for them.” The pile-on is merciless, predictable, and—let us be honest—rather enjoyable in the way that all spectacles of exposed contradiction tend to be.

Yet the deeper comedy lies not in the partisan jeering but in the structural absurdity. Here is a political philosophy that has spent decades insisting that $15 an hour is barely enough to keep body and soul together in the Apple, that every form of labour possesses an inherent dignity that must be honoured with appropriate compensation, that the working class is the very engine of history. And when history, in the form of twenty inches of snow, actually asks a few members of that class to pick up a shovel for nineteen dollars and change, the engine stalls. The response is not outrage at the paltry sum but a polite, collective, metropolitan silence. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quip that socialism would take too many evenings; in this case it appears to require too many freezing mornings as well.

The bureaucratic garnish only improves the joke. Prospective shovelers must produce multiple forms of identification—requirements described, without apparent irony, as 'long-standing'. Federal law, we are told, demands it for payroll purposes. Fair enough. Yet the same administration that treats voter identification as a threat to democracy suddenly discovers that shovelling a fire hydrant is a transaction requiring the full panoply of bureaucratic proof. The right, naturally, has seized on the contrast with the enthusiasm of starving men spotting a dropped sandwich. “ID to shovel snow but not to vote?” The hypocrisy is not imaginary; it is simply the usual progressive distinction between sacred rights and secular chores.

Nature, of course, remains magnificently indifferent. The blizzard does not read manifestos. It does not care that the mayor is a democratic socialist or that the opposition is crowing. It simply falls, compacts, freezes, and waits to be moved. The city will clear its streets eventually—partly with union labour at union rates, partly with the newly incentivised civilians who will, one assumes, now materialise once the price has been adjusted to something approaching the market rate for voluntary discomfort. Sidewalks will be the responsibility of property owners by 8:30 p.m. or fines will follow. Life will resume its customary rhythm of complaint and litigation.

In the meantime we have been treated to a small but perfect parable. A progressive mayor discovers that even in the people’s republic of New York, the people retain an obstinate preference for central heating over civic virtue at bargain-basement prices. The right discovers, yet again, that its darkest suspicions about entitlement culture are not entirely without foundation. And the rest of us—those who merely watch from the warmth of our armchairs—are reminded that human nature has a way of resisting even the most elegantly drafted policy. Snow falls. Wages rise. Garages remain, for a while at least, empty.

It is the sort of episode that would have delighted the late PJ O'Rourke: elegant, ironic, and fundamentally human. The world turns, the drifts deepen, and somewhere in Gracie Mansion a calculator is being worked with the quiet desperation of a man who has just realised that ideology and meteorology obey different laws. The snow will melt. The spreadsheets will be filed. And New York, being New York, will survive—slightly poorer, slightly wiser, and no doubt already preparing the press release for the next inevitable storm.

JESSE JACKSON (1941 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, was the last of the great American civil rights orators to speak almost exclusively in rhyme, a habit that began as inspiration and ended as compulsion, rather like a jazz musician who can no longer play in anything but 7/4 time. In an age that preferred prose, Jackson insisted on verse; even his grocery lists, one suspects, scanned.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, he rose through the ranks of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the energy of a man who had discovered that indignation paid better than calm. Operation Breadbasket, the Rainbow Coalition, two spirited runs for the presidency — all were conducted with the solemn conviction that history was waiting for his next couplet. “Keep hope alive” became his signature line, delivered with such rhythmic certainty that audiences half-expected him to follow it with “jive”. There were stumbles. The “Hymietown” remark in 1984 revealed that even the most practised tongue could slip into territory where angels feared to tread. Jackson apologised with the fluency of a man who had apologised before and would apologise again; the episode merely added a minor key to his otherwise triumphant score.
In later years he became a roving ambassador of moral outrage, appearing wherever cameras gathered and injustice was suspected. He counselled O.J. Simpson during the trial of the century, offering spiritual support at a moment when the nation seemed to need less theology and more evidence. The visit was widely noted, though its precise effect on the verdict remains unclear. Immortality of a sort arrived courtesy of South Park, where Jackson featured in an episode that examined the etiquette of racial apology with the delicacy of a sledgehammer. The climax — a grown man literally kissing Jackson’s backside to prove his lack of prejudice — was absurd, unflattering, and, in the circumstances, weirdly accurate.
In the end Parkinson’s disease slowed the cadence, but never entirely silenced it. Jackson kept hope alive long after many had quietly declared it dead. One can imagine him now, ascending, still searching for a rhyme for “eternity”. He will not be easily replaced; very few people, after all, can make a moral point and a metre at the same time.