THE USEFUL ENEMY

It has become the received wisdom of our time that Russia, that perennial bogeyman of the European imagination, is the party itching for a wider war. One hears the pronouncements from Brussels and the various national capitals with their carefully calibrated notes of alarm, and one is invited to picture Vladimir Putin as a man who spends his evenings polishing bayonets while muttering darkly about the restoration of the Tsars. The truth, as usual, is both simpler and more embarrassing. Russia does not particularly want a war with Europe. Europe, or at any rate those portions of it that still believe themselves to be in charge, rather does. The reason is not strategic genius or historical destiny. It is that the political and ideological model under which large parts of the continent have been labouring has reached the end of its shelf life, and everyone concerned knows it.

There is an old observation, attributed variously and never quite pinned down to a single source, that the problem with socialism is that you can vote your way into it, but you have to shoot your way out of it. The phrase has the rough elegance of a frontier proverb, and it has rarely felt more apt. What we are witnessing is not the confident advance of a coherent system but the final, slightly frantic manoeuvres of people who sense that the experiment has failed and who would prefer almost any catastrophe to the simple admission of error. The rhetoric directed at Russia has taken on a peculiar intensity precisely because the domestic alternatives look so unpromising. Better a distant enemy whose motives can be painted in primary colours than a long, honest look at the books.

The difficulty with the particular strain of narcissism that thrives in modern European politics is that it cannot relinquish power without also relinquishing the flattering self-image that power supplies. To step back would be to concede that the grand project—call it democratic socialism, social democracy, progressive governance, or whatever soft synonym is currently preferred—has not delivered the promised combination of prosperity, cohesion and moral superiority. Multiculturalism, that most sacred and least examined article of the faith, has proved especially divisive, producing not the harmonious tapestry of official literature but a series of parallel societies held together by the thin glue of official optimism and the occasional riot. Rather than adjust course, the stewards of the project prefer to double down. History offers no shortage of precedents for this preference. When the ideology falters, the enemy abroad becomes indispensable.

One notices, of course, that large numbers of ordinary citizens have begun to notice the gap between proclamation and result. They have begun, in that awkward modern phrase, to “wake up.” Yet the conditioning runs deep. Marxism, or the diluted, academic, bureaucratic version of it that has soaked into institutions for decades, has a talent for producing people who resemble drones more than citizens—shells of human beings whose critical faculties have been carefully trained to operate only within the approved narrative. They can recite the latest orthodoxy with impressive fluency and genuine sincerity, but the moment the script is interrupted they look faintly panicked, as if someone has switched off the teleprompter mid-sentence. This is not a conspiracy in the usual sense; it is something more mundane and therefore more durable: the cumulative effect of education, media and professional incentives all pointing in the same direction for a very long time.

The result is a curious inversion. The side that talks most loudly about peace and European values is the one that appears least able to tolerate the possibility that its own model might need revision. Russia, for all its many and obvious faults, has no particular interest in conquering the suburbs of Lyon or the business districts of Frankfurt. It has its own difficulties, and wars of choice are expensive. Europe’s political class, by contrast, finds the prospect of heightened tension useful. It supplies distraction, moral clarity of a crude sort, and a ready explanation for why living standards feel sticky and social trust continues to fray. The psyop, if one may borrow the vernacular, is less a secret plot than the natural consequence of people who cannot afford to be wrong.

One is left, then, with the unedifying spectacle of a civilisation that would rather risk escalation than confront the possibility that its governing assumptions have passed their sell-by date. The leaders do not plot this outcome in smoke-filled rooms so much as drift toward it, sustained by the conviction that any alternative would be unthinkable. The rest of us are invited to accept the invitation to panic. It is an invitation best declined. The shelf life of ideology is finite, even when those who stocked the shelves refuse to check the date.

DOOMSCROLLING THROUGH THE GOLDEN AGE

As we continue to hurtle into an uncertain and dystopian future, it’s important to take the time to enjoy the present. Even though things could be, and have been, better, it’s very likely that at some point you will remember this time period as 'the good old days.' Enjoy the now. There. That’s the sentiment, delivered with the forced cheer of a hospice nurse trying to brighten a terminal ward by suggesting a game of cards. It’s the sort of advice that sounds almost wholesome until you notice the blood seeping under the door. We are, after all, living through a period that future historians—assuming we still have historians and not just algorithmically generated content summaries delivered via neural implant—will almost certainly look back on with the same misty-eyed fondness currently reserved for the 1990s, or the Blitz, or any other era that involved slightly less sophisticated methods of making people miserable.

Consider the present carefully. We scroll endlessly through carefully curated despair, pausing only to argue with strangers about whether the latest atrocity is slightly more or less important than the previous one. Our phones buzz with notifications that someone, somewhere, has been cancelled for a joke they made in 2014, or that a new strain of something unpleasant is making the rounds, or that the weather has once again decided to behave like a poorly written villain in a disaster film. The air is thick with the low-grade anxiety of knowing that the systems holding everything together are held together by the digital equivalent of chewing gum and crossed fingers. And yet, in a few decades, some grey-haired survivor will sit in what remains of a pub—probably a VR recreation of one, with the faint smell of hops added for authenticity—and sigh about how simple it all was back then. “Remember when you could still pretend the climate was mostly fine if you just didn’t look at the charts? Remember when the AI only hallucinated mildly and didn’t yet run the government? Those were the days.”

This is the cruel joke at the heart of human nostalgia. We are hard-wired to sand the edges off the past until it becomes a soft-focus commercial for a product that never existed. The 'good old days' are always the ones that weren’t actively trying to kill you in ways you fully understood. People once fondly recalled the trenches of the First World War once enough time had passed and the mud had dried. They missed the rationing and the blackout curtains once the immediate threat of being flattened by a bomb had been replaced by the more abstract threat of nuclear annihilation. The pattern is consistent: whatever fresh hell we currently inhabit will, given sufficient temporal distance and a selective memory, acquire a certain rustic charm. Future generations will romanticise the era of performative outrage, of algorithmic radicalisation, of people filming themselves crying in their cars for engagement metrics. They will speak of it the way we speak of vinyl records—warm, imperfect, somehow more authentic than whatever sterile nightmare has replaced it.

We live in a time when you can order a meal with a few taps on a glowing rectangle, have it delivered by a stressed stranger on a bicycle, and then complain about the packaging while simultaneously fretting about the collapse of civilisation. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history, and we use it primarily to confirm that everything is falling apart and that the other side is to blame. We have medical advances that would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents, and we spend our evenings doomscrolling through lists of new ways those advances might be weaponised or monetised into irrelevance. Progress, it turns out, is less a straight line and more a drunken stagger in which we occasionally trip over our own innovations and land face-first in a fresh puddle of absurdity.

And still the advice stands: enjoy the now. Not because the now is particularly enjoyable, but because the alternative is to spend your remaining functional years in a state of permanent low-level panic, which is both exhausting and, frankly, a bit passé. The dystopia is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed and packaged with free next-day delivery. The uncertain future is not some distant horizon—it’s the next software update, the next election cycle, the next heatwave that makes the previous heatwave look like a mild inconvenience. To 'enjoy the now' is therefore less a lifestyle tip and more a form of grim stoicism. It is the decision to notice the small, temporary consolations while they still exist: the taste of coffee that hasn’t yet been synthesised from algae, the absurdity of a viral video that briefly unites strangers in shared ridicule, the brief illusion of control that comes from deleting an app only to reinstall it three days later.

There is something almost touching in the way we cling to the idea that this particular stretch of history might one day be missed. It suggests a residual optimism so deeply buried it borders on the pathological. Yes, the systems are fraying. Yes, the discourse has the intellectual coherence of a bar fight. Yes, the planet is running a temperature and the adults in the room appear to have left for a long lunch sometime around 2016 and never returned. And yet the human capacity for retrospective romanticisation remains undimmed. One day, someone will look back on the great pandemic years, the culture wars, the slow-motion technological upheaval, and decide that it all had a certain rough-hewn integrity. They will miss the freedom of still being able to log off, even if most of us never did. They will miss the relative simplicity of a world in which the machines still needed us more than we needed them.

So by all means, enjoy the now. Pour yourself a drink. Watch something frivolous. Argue with a stranger on the internet if that’s what passes for connection these days. Take a walk while the air is still, for the most part, breathable. Do it with the full knowledge that this moment—this messy, anxious, over-connected, underwhelming moment—is already being prepped for the nostalgia treatment. Future you, or more likely some distant descendant with fewer illusions and better implants, will look back and shake their head fondly. “They had no idea how good they had it,” they’ll say, conveniently forgetting that we had every idea and simply chose to doomscroll through it instead. The present is a joke told in real time. The punchline is that we’ll miss it.

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "70 UP" (2026)

The melancholy that settles after watching 70 Up is of a particular, refined sort: the kind that arrives not with a bang but with the quiet certainty of a man who has just realised the party ended several hours ago and the host has been politely stacking the chairs around him. We always knew the ending, of course. That was the entire point of the exercise, launched in 1964 with the Jesuitical certainty that the child at seven would reveal the man. What we did not quite bargain for was how thoroughly the man—and the woman, the few of them they allowed in—would eventually reveal us.

Asif Kapadia, stepping into the enormous shoes left by Michael Apted, has the good sense not to try filling them with anything flashy. He simply walks the same path, more slowly this time, and lets the archive do most of the talking. The result is less a new instalment than a long, elegiac retrospective of an experiment that has outlived several of its own subjects and one of its principal architects. Lynn Johnson is gone. Nick Hitchon, the farmer’s son who became a nuclear scientist and once wanted to know about the moon, filmed his final contribution three days before departing the planet entirely. The screen notes the fact with a restraint that is almost British in its refusal to make a scene. One almost applauds the decorum, then feels slightly ashamed for doing so.

They start as innocent kids believing in happy ever after. That much is true, and the early footage still has the power to wound precisely because it is so unselfconscious. Little Tony wants to be a jockey. Little Neil wants to be an astronaut. Little Suzy does not much care for her expensive school. The intervening decades have performed the usual acts of quiet sabotage. Some of the dreams were simply revised downward into something workable: cab-driving, fostering more than a hundred children, sitting in a French house full of books and mild loneliness. Others were abandoned with the weary pragmatism of people who have discovered that life is less a narrative arc than a series of administrative appointments. The illusion falls away, as the original post observed, before their eyes and ours. The difference is that we have the luxury of watching it happen to other people first.

Kapadia understands that the real subject was never class mobility or the predictive power of the age of seven. It was the slow, democratic erosion of hope. The series has always been most interesting when its participants refuse to cooperate with the hypothesis. Neil’s trajectory—bright boy, homelessness, local politics, solitary contentment in exile—remains the most stubbornly human. Symon’s late flowering as a foster parent of heroic proportions feels like a quiet rebuke to the notion that the die is cast early. Even the ones who more or less fulfilled the expectations of their seven-year-old selves look faintly surprised to find themselves still here, still being asked the same questions by a new director who has the good manners to stay mostly out of shot.

There is something almost comically English about the whole enterprise. A nation that invented the stiff upper lip decided to film its own slow collapse into pensionable reflection every seven years, then sat down politely to watch. We did not turn away. We returned, decade after decade, like relatives who cannot quite bring themselves to miss the funeral. The second half of 70 Up even allows the remaining participants a certain amount of meta-complaint about the process itself—the intrusiveness, the framing, the way Apted’s silences could feel like moral judgements. Fair enough. After sixty-odd years of being national case studies, a little resentment is the least one can expect. The series was always a “little pill of poison,” as one of them once put it, and the patients kept swallowing it anyway.

What remains is the melancholy of recognition. These people are not especially representative, not especially diverse, not especially anything except themselves. Yet they have become our mirrors by the simple, brutal method of ageing in public at regular intervals. The childhood belief in happy ever after did not so much shatter as quietly dissolve, the way a coastal path dissolves under successive winters. We watched it happen to them so that we would not have to admit it was happening to us. Now the cameras have been packed away for good, and the rest of us are left alone with the knowledge that the experiment is over, the data is in, and the results are, on the whole, rather ordinary, which is, of course, the most devastating result of all.

THE SWEDISH ARITHMETIC

There are few spectacles more reliably diverting than a European election in which the result is declared a triumph of democracy by one side and an existential catastrophe by the other, both of them quite certain that the arithmetic of the ballot box has somehow been interfered with by reality itself. Sweden has just furnished us with another of these small masterpieces. The centre-left has edged back into contention after a narrow contest, and the explanation offered in certain quarters is as blunt as a fishmonger’s cleaver: the immigrants did it.

One can almost hear the collective intake of breath among the more refined commentators. To notice that people who arrive in a country under one set of circumstances tend to vote in a particular way is regarded, in polite society, as the rhetorical equivalent of breaking wind at a state banquet. Yet the data, those tiresome little numbers that refuse to take instruction from the higher moral faculties, keep insisting on the point. Voters of foreign background in Sweden lean heavily toward the left; those of Swedish background are more evenly divided. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern, observable across much of Western Europe, and it has the awkward quality of being both predictable and politically radioactive.

The argument that follows from this observation is simplicity itself, which is why it offends. If a large and growing portion of the electorate consistently prefers one political family, then the other political family faces a mathematical problem that no amount of better messaging or more photogenic candidates can solve. The left’s strategy, according to this view, is the open frontier: welcome the arrivals, naturalise them in due course, and collect the resulting votes with the serene confidence of a man who has just discovered that the roulette wheel is fixed in his favour. The right’s counter-strategy, if it wishes to remain in the game rather than become a permanent minority interest, is said to be “remigration” — a word that manages to sound both bureaucratic and faintly medieval, as though the Interior Ministry had briefly consulted the chronicles of the Reconquista.

Fire, as the original notice put it with admirable economy, is fought with fire. One may quarrel with the metaphor. Fire, after all, is an equal-opportunity consumer of furniture, and the political arsonist often ends up standing in the same ashes as his intended victim. Still, the underlying logic has a certain grim clarity. If demographic change is treated as destiny by one side, the other side can hardly be expected to treat it as an immutable force of nature. To do so would be to accept permanent exclusion from power with the stoicism of a Stoic who has misplaced his copy of Epictetus and is making do with a pamphlet from the local Green Party.

What elevates the whole business from mere arithmetic into high comedy is the solemn pretence that none of this is happening. Official discourse prefers to speak of enrichment, diversity, and the moral imperative of openness, while carefully avoiding any discussion of the electoral consequences of those virtues once they have been translated into citizenship papers. It is rather like a host who invites half the neighbourhood to dinner and then expresses mild surprise that the conversation has turned against the previous seating plan. The guests, for their part, are under no obligation to vote for the host’s preferred party simply because the canapés were adequate. Loyalty is not a condition of entry, and gratitude is not a political programme.

The right, meanwhile, finds itself in the unenviable position of having discovered the problem rather late in the evening, after the furniture has already been rearranged. Its more voluble spokesmen now talk of remigration with the sudden enthusiasm of a man who has just remembered where he left the fire extinguisher. Whether such a policy is practicable, desirable, or even coherent is a separate question; the fact that it is being proposed at all tells us something about the scale of the anxiety. Permanent minority status is a prospect that concentrates the mind wonderfully, even among politicians whose usual talents run more to slogan than to strategy.

One need not endorse the remedy to acknowledge the diagnosis. Societies that import large numbers of people from cultural and political traditions markedly different from their own should not be astonished when those people bring their preferences with them. To pretend otherwise is to treat the electorate as a blank slate upon which the host nation may write whatever values it prefers — an assumption that sits oddly with the simultaneous insistence that every culture is of equal worth and must be celebrated rather than assimilated. The contradiction is so glaring that only a professional intellectual could fail to notice it, and even then only with considerable effort.

Sweden’s narrow result is therefore less a verdict on any particular policy than a reminder of an older truth: politics is downstream of demography, and demography is downstream of decisions that were sold at the time as acts of pure benevolence. The left has played the longer game with some skill. The right is now being invited, by its own more impatient voices, to play a shorter and sharper one. Whether either side will ultimately thank the immigrants for the opportunity remains to be seen. The immigrants themselves, one suspects, will continue to vote according to their own lights, which is, after all, what free citizens are supposed to do. 

The rest of us are left with the spectacle of two political camps arguing over the consequences of a transformation that both of them, in different ways, helped to create — and doing so with all the grace of men who have just realised that the house they are fighting over no longer belongs exclusively to either of them. It is, as the original note observed with devastating understatement, as simple as that. The difficulty, of course, is that simplicity has never been democracy’s strongest suit.

BIT BY BIT, THE SWITCH FLIPS ...

Picture the scene, dear reader. Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit bunker that smells of institutional coffee and quiet despair, a group of extremely serious people in extremely expensive suits are nodding along to a PowerPoint about “streamlining identity verification.” One of them is Lisa Nandy, Culture Secretary at the time, looking for all the world like she’s just discovered the secret to happiness: forcing every adult in the country to exist as a neat little data packet that the state can ping whenever it feels insecure. She went on the telly and said it with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been on the wrong end of a government algorithm. All British adults will have a digital ID by the end of Parliament. 

Not a card you have to wave about like a Soviet internal passport, she insisted. Nothing so vulgar. Just a lovely digital thing on your phone that you’ll only really need to prove you have the right to work. It’s for your protection, you see. Against illegal workers. Against fraud. Against the terrifying spectre of people existing without the state’s prior approval. How thoughtful. How modern. How very, very fucking convenient for the people who will eventually own the off-switch.

The original objection still stands, and it stands taller than ever. Many people might want the sort of UN-flavoured, centralised data framework the government was so keen on building. Some will think it’s really convenient. They don’t mind the government being able to watch what they spend their money on, who pays them, where they go on holiday, what vaccines they take each year, how well they did in school and what their political opinions look like online. Some will even clap like seals at the idea that international Digital ID will magically stop illegal migration and fraud and make the streets safer. Fair enough. People clap for all sorts of things. Some people clap for reality television.

The problem—the screaming, copper-bottomed, Black Mirror-shaped problem—is that no one was asked to vote for it. Digital ID is not a card or a wallet on your phone. It is an entire YOU file, accessible by authorities, that will eventually grant you permissions depending on your behaviour. That framework was already being sketched in. The permissions logic is baked into the concept from the start. Once the infrastructure exists, the temptation to expand its uses is not a bug. It is the entire operating system of power.

If this was so marvellous, so obviously better for everyone, why didn’t the government spell out exactly what it was, what it would do, and—crucially—what it could do in five years, ten years, when the political weather has shifted and the same machinery is being run by people who make today’s lot look like soft liberals? Why didn’t the parties put it in their manifestos in plain English? Why the soft-focus language about convenience and “gateway to government services” while Nandy reassured everyone it would never, ever be used to restrict access to the NHS or pensions? Because they knew. They knew the majority would look at the full prospectus and say, in no undertrain terms, sod off. And that is not an acceptable answer in a country that still pretends to run on consent.

Bit by bit the control changes. First it’s just for right to work. Then it’s the easiest way to access benefits. Then it’s the preferred method for banking, travel, healthcare records, age verification, everything. Suddenly not having the digital equivalent of a gold star means life becomes a series of minor, grinding humiliations. You are not banned. You are simply… less convenient. Less trusted. Less permitted. The government does not need jackboots when it has an app that can quietly throttle your existence.

This was never just about Lisa Nandy, though she was a particularly enthusiastic salesperson for the product. It was the entire apparatus—ministers, civil servants, the think-tank circuit, the same revolving door of consultants and global forums that treat the population as a management problem rather than a collection of free adults. A cartel of the well-connected, convinced that the only thing standing between civilisation and chaos is more data, more verification, more central visibility. They talk about “trust frameworks” and “useful, inclusive, trusted” systems while building the architecture for something that looks, smells and walks like soft authoritarianism with a user-friendly interface.

Orwell didn’t warn us about the jackboot first. He warned us about the language that makes the jackboot feel like common sense. “Protect Britons.” “Tackle illegal working.” “Cut bureaucracy.” “Digital age.” Every phrase is a little anaesthetic. By the time you notice the needle, the drip is already running. The plans were eventually watered down under pressure, then publicly scrapped when the political weather changed. Three million people signed a petition. Public opposition was loud enough that even a government with a large majority had to retreat. That should be the end of the story. It never is. The infrastructure thinking remains. The appetite remains. The belief that ordinary people cannot be trusted with their own lives without a digital chaperone remains. 

And the next time the same idea is wheeled out—perhaps under a different name, with slightly softer edges and a new set of smiling ministers—it will arrive wearing the same patient smile Nandy wore while explaining that this was all for our own good. The only rational response to that smile is to treat it the way you treat a man offering you a free tracking collar “for your safety.” You smile back. You say "no". And you remember that the people building the systems of control are never the ones who will live under the worst version of them. This is point where "no" simply has to become "fuck off". 

They will have exemptions. They will have workarounds. They will have the power to redefine what 'behaviour' looks like when it becomes inconvenient. We were not asked. That remains the point. Everything else is just the long, darkly comic process of watching a political class try to sell the public their own subordination as an upgrade.

Time for that revolution, methinks.

9/11 @ 25: THE DAY THE ORDINARY ENDED

The towers fell on a Tuesday, which is the sort of day that usually reserves its dramas for committee meetings and the slow death of office plants. Twenty-five years on, one is still obliged to notice that the sky was the colour of a particularly smug postcard, the sort that arrives from a friend who has forgotten you exist until the photograph proves otherwise. Then the first aircraft arrived, and the postcard tore itself in half.

I was not there, of course, most of us were not, I was at home from University. Distance is the modern condition, and television made sure of it. We watched the second impact live, which is a phrase that still sits in the mouth like a bad olive. Live. As if death had decided to keep office hours. The commentary teams, those professional noticers of the obvious, fell briefly silent, which is the nearest television ever comes to dignity. Then they recovered, as they always do, and began the long process of turning horror into narrative, narrative into analysis, and analysis into the sort of solemn waffle that eventually requires a theme tune.

What remains, a quarter-century later, is not so much the image of the buildings collapsing—though that has been burnt into the collective retina with the efficiency of a branding iron—as the sudden discovery that the ordinary was not protected by its ordinariness. People went to work. They carried coffee. They argued about nothing in particular in elevators that would shortly cease to exist. The banality was the point. Evil, when it bothers to show up, rarely bothers with originality. It prefers the familiar street, the familiar skyline, the familiar assumption that today will resemble yesterday closely enough to allow for lunch plans.

The aftermath was a masterclass in competitive solemnity. Flags proliferated with the enthusiasm of a rash. Politicians discovered their inner Churchill, or at any rate their inner Churchill impersonator, and the language of resolution thickened like gravy left too long on the stove. We were assured that the world had changed forever, which is the sort of claim that looks impressive until one notices that the same people making it continued to book tables at the same restaurants and complain about the same traffic. Forever is a long time, and most of us are not built for it. We are built for the next news cycle, the next scandal, the next opportunity to feel briefly important by association with catastrophe.

There was, inevitably, the war. Or rather the wars, plural, which multiplied with the generosity of a bad idea that has found funding. One could argue about the wisdom of any particular response, and many did, at great and largely pointless length. What was harder to argue with was the spectacle of a civilisation that had spent decades congratulating itself on its subtlety suddenly discovering that subtlety is of limited use when the other party has decided that aeroplanes make excellent missiles. The satire wrote itself, which is always a bad sign. When reality starts producing its own punchlines, the professional satirist is left looking for alternative employment, preferably something involving less irony and more gardening.

Memory, meanwhile, has done what memory always does: it has edited. The sharp edges have been smoothed by repetition until the event resembles a particularly grim public holiday, complete with obligatory moments of silence and the soft focus of retrospect. Young people who were not alive at the time now study it as history, which means they study it with the same mixture of duty and mild boredom that earlier generations brought to the Treaty of Versailles. The photographs remain, of course—those terrible, beautiful photographs in which the light is perfect and the smoke is photogenic and the falling bodies are reduced to abstract marks against the blue. Art has always known how to make suffering look interesting. That is one of its less attractive talents.

And yet the lament persists, dry as it may sound. One does not need to inflate the occasion with purple prose to notice that something was taken that day which has not been returned. Not innocence—innocence is a commodity that was already in short supply—but a certain unexamined confidence that the skyline was permanent, that the morning commute was a private affair between a person and their destination, that the ordinary day could be trusted to remain ordinary. That confidence has been replaced by a low-grade vigilance, the sort that checks the exits in restaurants without quite admitting it is doing so. It is not heroic. It is merely accurate.

Twenty-five years is long enough for the politicians who spoke of resolve to have been replaced by other politicians who speak of other resolves. It is long enough for the children who watched the towers fall on classroom televisions to have children of their own, who will one day be shown the same footage and asked to feel something appropriate. Feeling appropriate is a skill that can be taught, rather like table manners. Whether it is the same as understanding is another question, and one that the anniversary industry is not notably eager to answer. The dead remain dead. That is the one fact that has resisted all attempts at narrative improvement. Their names are read aloud each year with the careful neutrality of a railway timetable, and then the living go back to their living. There is no satisfactory conclusion available, which is perhaps why the occasion continues to attract the attentions of those of us who make a living from unsatisfactory conclusions. 

The towers are gone. The sky is still the same colour on a clear September morning. The difference is that we now look at it with a certain suspicion, as if it might be planning something. That suspicion is the real memorial, and it requires no plaque. It is carried, uncomfortably, in the ordinary act of looking up.

BURNHAM'S CHOICE: WELFARE OVER THE REALM

There are moments in politics when a phrase drops with the soft, wet thud of a body hitting a skip. Andy Burnham’s contribution this week was one of them. Standing at the despatch box, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom delivered a line so perfectly calibrated for the current age that it deserves to be carved into the side of a white elephant somewhere in Whitehall: national security “can’t come at the expense of social security.” Let that settle for a moment. The first duty of any government, the one they all claim with a straight face when the flags come out, has just been politely informed it must wait its turn behind the housing benefit spreadsheet. The tanks can wait. The submarines can hold their breath. The serious threats that 'cannot wait,' as the opposition kept insisting, will simply have to form an orderly queue behind the resilience of our communities, which, as we all know, is best measured in the unbroken flow of local housing allowance.

It is a masterpiece of modern political English. It sounds compassionate. It sounds balanced. It even sounds vaguely profound if you say it slowly enough while staring at a middle distance that contains no actual enemies. What it actually means is: we will do everything for national security except the difficult bit that involves choosing. We will not be forced to choose between the two. Which is politician-speak for “we have already chosen, and the choice is the one that keeps the more immediate domestic constituency from shouting too loudly.” Imagine the briefing notes: “Prime Minister, the world is getting darker. Russia is poking around the North Sea. Argentina still mutters about the Falklands. Defence spending needs to rise if we are to keep pace with the commitments we keep signing.” Burnham’s answer, distilled: yes, absolute commitment, of course, but not if it means anyone ends up in temporary accommodation because we reformed housing benefit. Strong national security, you see, depends upon having resilient communities. And resilient communities, in this telling, are communities that continue to receive the current level of transfer payments without interruption. Deterrence, it turns out, is downstream from the benefits system.

There is a darkly comic elegance to it. Picture the hypothetical invasion. The enemy lands, looks around at the temporary accommodation statistics, and decides the game is not worth the candle because the social fabric is simply too robust. “Stand down the battalions,” the foreign general mutters. “Their housing benefit is intact. We cannot prevail against such resilience.” Or the cyber attack that pauses mid-keystroke because somewhere a young person is receiving enhanced mental health support. The absurdity writes itself, and yet here we are, treating the phrase as statesmanship rather than a sophisticated form of kicking the can while looking concerned. The real fury is in the false choice presented as moral clarity. No one serious argues that the answer to every problem is simply to slash the welfare bill and hand the money to the Ministry of Defence. 

But the inverse position—that the defence of the realm must never inconvenience the domestic transfer system—is not compassion. It is a refusal to admit that resources are finite and that some priorities are, by definition, prior. Burnham’s formulation pretends the two can always expand in harmony if only we fix education, support young people, and expand mental health provision hard enough. It is the politics of the perpetual free lunch, delivered with the solemnity of a man who has just discovered the secret to governing without trade-offs. And of course the language is designed to make any disagreement sound monstrous. Challenge the priority and you are apparently volunteering to put hundreds of thousands of children into temporary accommodation. 

The alternative—actually funding the hard power that keeps the soft power possible—is framed as cruelty. It is a rhetorical trap so neat it should come with a small round of applause from the people who write the lines. National security is important, naturally. Just not important enough to sit at the head of the table when the social security bill is already in the room looking hungry. This is the same political class that will lecture you about seriousness on the global stage while treating the defence budget as the residual claim after everything else has been protected. They will talk about resilience until the word loses all meaning, then act surprised when the actual threats do not check the latest welfare projections before acting. The phrase will be repeated, softened, explained away by spokesmen who insist the Prime Minister remains absolutely committed to national security as the first duty. The record will show the hierarchy he actually voiced when the cameras were rolling.

In the end it is pure Orwellian territory: a society so determined to protect every domestic comfort that it treats the protection of the society itself as an optional extra that must not disrupt the main programme. National security cannot come at the expense of social security. Of course it can’t. Not in a country that has decided the real front line is the benefits office, and the real threat is the possibility that someone, somewhere, might have to make a harder choice than the one currently on offer. The rest of the world can wait. The spreadsheet comes first.

THE NOT-SO-QUIET REDISTRIBUTION

The Portsmouth affair of early September 2026 has already taken on the slightly moth-eaten dignity of a provincial pageant, the kind of thing that future historians will file under “Incidents of Mild Inconvenience” before moving on to the more photogenic collapses. A large rubber dinghy, freighted with approximately one hundred and forty individuals who had apparently decided that the English Channel was less a barrier than a slightly damp suggestion, bobbed into view near Eastney. The local response was instantaneous and, in its way, rather touching. Citizens, many of them dressed in the contemporary uniform of the concerned civilian (black clothing, facial concealment, and an expression of sustained disappointment), decided that the coaches waiting to convey the newcomers onward might benefit from an extended period of contemplation. Roads were occupied. Traffic was discouraged. Chants of the traditional English variety were offered up into the night air. The police, those eternal umpires of the national cricket match, eventually restored order with the weary efficiency of men who have seen this particular play before and rather hoped the run would close. 

The coaches departed. The statement was issued. And the great British public was left to reflect that democracy, in its modern form, consists largely of being allowed to complain about the arrangements after the arrangements have already been made. Compare this genteel English kerfuffle with the more robust theatre of Ceuta. There, at regular intervals that would do credit to a railway timetable, large cohorts of young men assemble on the Moroccan side of the fence and, with a collective enthusiasm that would make a Wall of Death rider look hesitant, surge over the barrier in a cascade of limbs, plastic bags, and official Spanish consternation. The Spanish authorities still retain a residual belief that a border is something more than a decorative feature for the tourist brochure; they respond with a degree of physical assertion that, had it occurred in Portsmouth, would have produced at least three emergency sessions of the European Court of Human Rights and a special edition of Newsnight featuring a solemn academic explaining that fences are a form of violence. Yet the underlying choreography remains eerily familiar. The arrivals are counted, processed, and redistributed. The fences are mended. Expressions of regret are drafted with the care once reserved for diplomatic notes. And the whole performance is ready for its next booking.

What unites these two productions is not merely the logistics of arrival but the sublime consistency of the official reaction. Across Western Europe the governing classes appear to have arrived at a quiet understanding that the steady importation of large numbers of uninvited persons is less a policy failure than a form of long-term social engineering, conducted with the unhurried confidence of people who no longer feel obliged to consult the audience. The language is invariably humanitarian, the mechanisms invariably bureaucratic, and the consequences invariably described as “complex challenges requiring nuanced responses.” One is invited to believe that the repeated inability to stop the boats, or the fence-climbers, or the coaches, is the result of legal knots, budgetary constraints, or an excess of national compassion. Alternative interpretations are available, of course, but they tend to be filed under “regrettable opinions” and left to circulate among those who have not yet been issued the correct talking points.

A more jaundiced observer might notice that a population continually topped up with newcomers who possess neither deep historical attachment to the host society nor any particular reverence for its awkward traditions of free speech and limited government is, over time, a population less inclined to make a fuss when the rules change. The resulting electorate becomes more “inclusive,” more “forward-looking,” and, in the quieter rooms where the real decisions are taken, considerably more convenient. Whether this amounts to a deliberate strategy for the gradual installation of a more compliant citizenry suitable for the enforcement of some global, back-door variety of collectivism, or merely the accidental by-product of a ruling caste that has grown bored with the tiresome particularities of the nations it administers, is a question the reader may entertain while waiting for the next coach to leave. Public discussion of such possibilities is, naturally, regarded as a form of intellectual untidiness, rather like mentioning the cost of the catering at a state banquet.

The Portsmouth protesters, in their unrefined way, seemed to grasp that the coaches were not simply moving people from one place to another; they were confirming a principle. The principle is that the border is now more of a conversation starter than a fact, and that any citizen who treats it as a fact will be treated, in turn, as a temporary obstruction to the smooth running of the system. A national strike, as the original chronicler of the Portsmouth scene suggested, would at least possess the elegance of reciprocity: if the state can bring daily life to a standstill through calculated inertia, the citizens might try the same through calculated action. Whether such a gesture would permanently alter the deeper trajectory is another matter entirely. Governments that have already demonstrated an impressive ability to absorb successive waves of arrivals while simultaneously instructing their populations on the virtues of quiet acceptance are unlikely to be permanently inconvenienced by a few days of closed shops and empty trains.

Ceuta continues its ritual of energetic fence-scaling and temporary official dismay. Portsmouth has enjoyed its evening of blocked roads and subsequent dispersal. The coaches roll. The statements are polished. And somewhere, in those air-conditioned chambers where the demographic and political balance of Western Europe is quietly adjusted, the work proceeds with the serene confidence of people who no longer feel the need to explain themselves to the audience they once claimed to serve. The satire, as so often these days, requires no exaggeration. One only wishes the scriptwriters would occasionally vary the plot.

DAS FEUER UND THE FIREWALL

The morning after the night before in Saxony-Anhalt, one can almost hear the sound of well-upholstered chairs being scraped back across expensive floors in the better parts of Berlin, Brussels and a dozen other capitals. The voters have spoken, and the people who usually speak for them are now engaged in the delicate business of deciding how loudly to pretend they did not hear. A follow-up note is therefore in order, not so much a prophecy as an exercise in watching the machinery of respectability begin to whir.

It is an ancient and reliable pattern. When the electorate shows an inconvenient preference for parties that treat certain subjects as discussable rather than radioactive, the established order does not immediately retire to the country with a good book. It reaches first for the milder instruments of exclusion. The famous firewall is already in place, of course: a political cordon sanitaire so solemnly maintained that one half expects it to come with its own ceremonial guards and a visitor’s book. Coalitions will be constructed with the architectural ingenuity once reserved for cathedrals, the sole purpose being to ensure that the largest party in the room remains standing outside it. This is presented, with a straight face, as the defence of democracy. The irony is almost too perfect to improve upon.

Beyond the polite ostracism lie more energetic measures. Intelligence services will continue to classify inconvenient regional branches with the sort of bureaucratic thoroughness once applied to the classification of butterflies. Media organisations, many of them already predisposed to regard any deviation from the approved narrative as a form of moral failure, will intensify the moral framing until the average reader begins to feel that voting the wrong way is only a few degrees short of a public health hazard. Legal challenges, funding inquiries and procedural roadblocks will appear with the regularity of seasonal allergies. None of this requires a secret cartel meeting in a smoke-filled room; it requires only the ordinary reflexes of people who have grown accustomed to managing outcomes and are mildly affronted when the managed object.

How far might such reflexes extend? History suggests that elites under pressure rarely stop at the first available lever. One has seen, in various European settings, the quiet expansion of surveillance justifications, the creative interpretation of hate-speech provisions, the pressure on platforms to adjust the visibility of certain voices, and the occasional attempt to place entire political formations under a form of administrative quarantine. The language remains elevated—democracy, values, the lessons of the past—while the practical effect is to make the expression of majority sentiment on immigration feel slightly illicit. The danger, as always, is not that these efforts will succeed completely, but that they will succeed just enough to convince a larger portion of the public that the game is fixed. Nothing accelerates the growth of the very parties being restrained quite like the spectacle of restraint itself.

There is a particular comedy in the far-left contribution to this performance. Having spent years arguing that institutions are irredeemably captured by the powerful, they now discover a sudden and touching faith in those same institutions whenever the powerful happen to share their own aversions. The globalist tendency—less a cartel than a shared set of assumptions among people who attend the same conferences and read the same briefings—operates with a similar lack of self-awareness. It treats national electorates as temporary inconveniences to be educated rather than permanent facts to be accommodated. When education fails, management follows. When management frays, the tone grows sharper.

None of this is to claim that every critic of the AfD is a conspirator, or that every institutional response is illegitimate. Parties with radical edges invite scrutiny, and democratic systems are entitled to defend themselves against genuine threats. The concern lies in the proportionality, and in the temptation to treat electoral inconvenience as existential emergency. The more the centre and the left lean on extraordinary measures to remain in effective control, the more they risk confirming the central charge against them: that they prefer the appearance of consensus to the reality of consent.

Saxony-Anhalt has provided the latest reminder that consent can be withdrawn. The response now unfolding will tell us whether Europe’s political class has the wit to adjust, or whether it will prefer the older, more comforting strategy of tightening the rules until the voters finally notice the cage. The latter course has a long and undistinguished history. It tends to end not with the restoration of order, but with the order itself looking faintly ridiculous—and the voters, once again, declining to laugh on cue.

A LAMENT FOR THE CALLOUSED HAND

Ah, the romance of honest toil—how it glints in the rear-view mirror like a miner’s lamp in a long-abandoned seam. One pictures those sturdy forebears of ours, the miners, the shipbuilders, the factory hands, the farmers, bent double under the weight of actual achievement. They didn’t “facilitate stakeholder synergies” or “curate content strategies.” They dug coal, welded hulls, turned lathes, and coaxed crops from reluctant soil, all while the nation they were building quietly got on with the business of existing. Their hands told stories in calluses the way our palms now tell only of repetitive strain from scrolling. And yet here we are, heirs to their sweat, wondering why the inheritance feels so suspiciously like a participation trophy wrapped in student debt.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has ever tried to assemble flat-pack furniture without swearing that manual competence has been quietly airbrushed from the national portrait. We speak of “deindustrialisation” as though it were a polite meteorological event rather than the collective decision to swap forges for focus groups. The miner who once emerged blinking into the daylight with the honest grime of productivity on his face has been replaced by the graduate emerging from three years of media studies, blinking into the daylight with the honest grime of overdraft on his soul. Both are covered in something, mind you. Only one of them built anything that could still be pointed to with pride decades later.

I confess—and here the self-deprecation must intrude, for I am hardly the man to lecture on the nobility of labour—I possess all the practical skills of a particularly indolent house cat. My attempts at DIY tend to end in tactical retreats to the pub, where I can at least philosophise about the shelf I failed to put up. Give me a hammer and I become a minor health-and-safety incident. The thought of spending a day down a mine, or wrestling with the rivets of a ship, fills me with the sort of awe one reserves for Olympic athletes and people who can parallel park on the first attempt. What must it have been like, I wonder, to finish a shift knowing you had added something solid and measurable to the world? Not “value” in the vaporous sense beloved of management consultants, but actual, tangible stuff: a ton of coal shifted, a hull strengthened, a field ploughed. The satisfaction must have been almost indecent.

Instead, we have perfected the art of training an entire generation to be unemployable in any weather that doesn’t involve Wi-Fi. Universities, those cathedrals of deferred adulthood, continue to churn out degrees in subjects so ethereal they make medieval angelology look like hard science. The students emerge blinking, diploma in one hand, loan agreement in the other, ready to compete for jobs that consist largely of attending meetings about the next meeting. Meanwhile the shelves in the supermarket still need stocking, the lights still need keeping on, and the drains—dear God, the drains—still need unblocking by someone who actually knows which way a spanner turns. These are the quiet heroes who prevent civilisation from descending into a particularly fragrant apocalypse, yet we speak of them, if at all, with the faint condescension usually reserved for people who still listen to vinyl.

There is something almost comically masochistic about a society that celebrates the abstract while quietly depending on the concrete. We lionise the “knowledge economy” as though knowledge could power a hospital during a blackout or keep a tractor running. The office class, of which I am a reluctant and underachieving member, has convinced itself that thinking about things is superior to doing them. We write reports about productivity while the people who actually produce things get treated as picturesque relics, suitable for heritage documentaries and little else. One almost admires the audacity of it all. It’s rather like a man standing on the roof of a building he didn’t build, complaining that the foundations are terribly old-fashioned.

And yet one wonders—what if? What if, instead of stumbling through a series of arts degrees and journalistic misadventures, one had learned to lay bricks, or weld, or coax machinery into reluctant obedience? There is a dignity in that sort of competence that no amount of LinkedIn endorsements can replicate. The quiet pride of the craftsman who knows his work will outlast him; the farmer who understands that nature doesn’t do focus groups; the engineer whose mistakes announce themselves with alarming immediacy rather than hiding politely in a spreadsheet until bonus time.

Perhaps the greatest satire of our age is that we have managed to make uselessness expensive and usefulness slightly embarrassing. We pay fortunes to be taught things that nobody needs while paying rather less to the people we cannot do without. A strong nation, as the original observation had it, honours its working people, not merely its office class. Until we remember that, we shall continue our elegant decline, tweeting furiously about sustainability from buildings whose plumbing was installed by men who never needed a wellness app to tell them when they were tired.

The lamps may still be on, for now. But one suspects the chaps who keep them that way aren’t checking their notifications while they do it. More’s the pity. And more’s the wonder.

ABBOTT GOES FROM CALAMITY … TO CLAIRTY?!

There comes a moment in every thoughtful person’s life when the universe stages a practical joke so exquisite that one is forced to question not merely one’s political compass but the very integrity of one’s sense of smell. Mine arrived, as these things tend to do, while scrolling through the usual digital slurry and encountering the latest pronouncement from Diane Abbott. The Russian threat, she declared with the serene confidence of someone who once calculated the annual salary of a policeman at roughly the price of a decent sandwich, is a “Nato fiction.” The war in Ukraine, she has elsewhere observed, amounts to little more than a Nato campaign against Russia. And here I sit, a man who has spent decades regarding Ms Abbott’s public utterances with the same wary fascination one reserves for a distant relative who insists on demonstrating card tricks after three glasses of wine, forced to murmur, against every instinct of self-preservation: she may, on this particular point, be onto something.

Let us first pay proper respects to the long and distinguished record that makes any such agreement feel like an act of intellectual self-harm. Diane Abbott has, over the years, perfected the art of the political stumble with a consistency that borders on the athletic. There was the immortal 2017 radio performance in which the cost of recruiting ten thousand extra police officers floated freely between three hundred thousand pounds—thirty quid a head, if one is feeling generous—and eighty million, a figure that would still have left each officer roughly on the financial footing of a Victorian chimney sweep. One half expected her to revise it further downward until the entire force could be paid in bus tickets and kind words. Then there was the serene suggestion that Chairman Mao had, on balance, done more good than harm, a claim delivered with the air of someone reviewing a particularly ambitious restaurant rather than a regime whose body count would have given even the more industrious twentieth-century monsters pause. 

Add the taxi tweet, the Finnish nurses who had apparently never met a black person and were therefore unsuitable for multicultural Hackney, the private-school decision for her own son after years of denouncing such choices as indefensible hypocrisy, the mojito on the Overground (a moment of pure proletarian solidarity with the tinny), the mismatched shoes on election day, and the letter in which Jewish, Irish and Traveller experiences of prejudice were briskly filed under the same heading as the tribulations of redheads. One could almost admire the range. Most politicians specialise in one or two reliable howlers; Abbott treats the entire spectrum as her personal playground.

And then, of course, there is the romance. In the late 1970s, while the rest of Britain was discovering the joys of inflation and punk, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn embarked upon what can only be described as the least erotic political liaison since John Major decided he rather fancied a late night Currie. She has herself recounted how their great romantic outing consisted of a drive to Highgate Cemetery so that Jeremy might proudly display the tomb of Karl Marx. One pictures the scene: a young woman dressed for what she fondly imagined might be a wine bar, only to find herself standing in the drizzle before a monument to dialectical materialism while her suitor beamed as if he had just presented her with the Koh-i-Noor. There was, apparently, a motorbike tour of East Germany as well—because nothing says passion like the German Democratic Republic in winter. The relationship, she notes, eventually collapsed under the weight of Jeremy’s discovery that politics occupied ninety-nine per cent of his available attention, leaving her the unenviable one per cent. One struggles to imagine the domestic conversation. “Darling, shall we go out?” “Yes—Highgate, and bring a notebook.” It is the sort of courtship that makes one grateful for the invention of the dating app, if only so that future generations might be spared such ideological package holidays.

All of which brings us, by a route as circuitous and poorly signposted as one of Abbott’s own statistical explanations, to the present discomfort. For years I have watched the Ukrainian conflict with the growing suspicion that the official narrative has acquired the same self-sealing quality once reserved for certain theological disputes. Nato’s eastward expansion, the broken assurances of the 1990s, the transformation of a brutal regional war into a quasi-existential crusade complete with moral blackmail and escalating weaponry. Abbott’s formulation is characteristically blunt and lacking in diplomatic polish; she has never been accused of excessive nuance. Yet the insistence that every expression of caution about endless escalation, about the wisdom of treating a nuclear-armed power as a cartoon villain, or about the domestic cost of perpetual rearmament constitutes “Kremlin talking points” that somehow synchronises perfectly with American electoral cycles and presidential preferences, a certain scepticism is not only permissible but obligatory.

I do not suggest for one moment that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood agrarian reformer, nor that the corpses in Bucha and Mariupol are optical illusions. Reality is under no obligation to be tidy. But the spectacle of Western capitals discovering, rather late in the day, that Russia constitutes an existential menace precisely when budgets need inflating and political capital needs harvesting, has a familiar odour. Abbott, for all her habitual clumsiness, has simply refused to pretend that the emperor’s new strategic concept is anything other than a rather threadbare set of underpants. In doing so she has, against the odds and against her own considerable body of previous work, momentarily aligned herself with the awkward, unfashionable observation that great-power rivalries are rarely as pure as the press releases claim.

It is a deeply unsettling sensation. Agreeing with Diane Abbott feels rather like discovering that the relative who cannot count change has correctly predicted the winner of the Grand National by studying the horses’ names for Star Trek references. One wants to check the calculation three times, then four. Yet here we are. The woman who once reduced police recruitment to the price of a takeaway coffee has, on the matter of Nato’s Ukrainian entanglement and the convenient inflation of the Russian peril, managed to sound more lucid than half the commentariat currently demanding that we all dig deeper for the next tranche of munitions. 

The universe, as I say, has a sense of humour. It is not always a kind one, and it rarely bothers with punchlines that flatter the listener. Still, one must occasionally tip one’s hat to the absurd. Even if the hat in question was last seen on the wrong foot.

STARMER: GOOD RIDDANCE … BAD OMENS ??

There are moments in the long, grey afternoon of public life when the universe, usually so indifferent to human vanities, decides to offer a small, dry smile. Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he is quitting Parliament to pursue 'international affairs' is one such moment. After being gently but firmly shown the door of Downing Street by his own party, the former Prime Minister now prepares to take his leave of the green benches as well. One notes the timing with a certain aesthetic satisfaction. The man who once promised to stabilise the nation has succeeded mainly in stabilising the revolving door of British leadership.

It is difficult to survey Starmer’s career without a sense of mild astonishment that so much earnestness produced so little lasting architecture. Professionally, he specialised in the careful avoidance of definition. He arrived as the great resetter of Labour, the man who would make the party electable by the simple expedient of looking serious in spectacles. He left having demonstrated that seriousness, when unaccompanied by either vision or luck, can become a form of elaborate self-parody. His government managed the rare feat of making the previous chaotic decade look, in retrospect, almost purposeful. U-turns were executed with the solemnity of state funerals. Immigration numbers continued their determined upward trajectory while the language surrounding them grew ever more circular. The Southport aftermath revealed a government more fluent in the vocabulary of 'misinformation' than in the more awkward business of public order and public grief. Censorship, or its more fashionable cousin 'online safety,' advanced under the banner of protection, as if the British public were a collection of delicate children who might otherwise encounter an unauthorised opinion.

Personally, the portrait was hardly more flattering. Starmer projected the demeanour of a senior partner in a particularly humourless firm of solicitors who had somehow wandered into politics and decided to stay out of professional courtesy. There was the celebrated business of free spectacles and free suits, those small tokens of largesse that somehow managed to look both petty and revealing at once. Hypocrisy, when practised at this level, acquires a certain bureaucratic dignity. One did not so much dislike Starmer as find oneself increasingly unable to believe in the three-dimensionality of the figure before the cameras. He seemed less a man than a carefully briefed outline of a man, forever promising to 'deliver' while the contents of the package remained a closely guarded secret even from himself.

The satisfaction at his political demise is therefore not purely partisan. It is the quieter pleasure that accompanies the correction of a category error. Britain had, for a brief and expensive interval, mistaken managerial competence for leadership and lawyerly caution for statesmanship. The correction has now been applied, and the former Prime Minister finds himself with time on his hands and a résumé that still looks impressive on certain continents.

Here, however, the smile begins to freeze. Starmer has made it known that his future lies in 'international affairs,' a phrase that in modern political usage often translates as “somewhere with better catering and fewer voters.” The European institutions, the outer reaches of NATO’s civilian apparatus, or the more ethereal altitudes of the World Economic Forum all present themselves as natural destinations for a man of his particular gifts. One can already picture the carefully lit conference rooms, the soft-focus declarations about 'global challenges,' the quiet assumption that the British public, having proved itself insufficiently grateful, might benefit from a little external guidance.

The concern is not that Starmer will fail in such a role. On the contrary. The danger is that he may succeed in the limited, durable way that certain international functionaries do: by treating national electorates as temporary inconveniences rather than the ultimate source of legitimacy. Having been rejected by the country he once governed, he may discover a certain moral clarity in the higher atmosphere of transnational bodies, where the air is thinner and the accountability more diffuse. From those altitudes it becomes easier to regard the stubbornness of the British people as a problem to be managed rather than a verdict to be accepted. Revenge, in such circles, is rarely announced. It arrives instead as a series of well-intentioned frameworks, reporting obligations, and 'shared values' that somehow always seem to constrain the awkward island more than its more enlightened continental partners.

One hopes, of course, that this is mere pessimism. Starmer may simply settle into a comfortable sinecure, write the occasional thoughtful essay, and fade into the kind of well-remunerated obscurity that is the modern politician’s version of a country estate. Yet the pattern of the last few years suggests a residual grievance. The man who could not quite connect with the British public may find it easier to instruct it from abroad. The 'vile little man' of popular caricature may yet prove less little once equipped with the long levers of international bureaucracy.

In the end, the British have exercised their traditional right to grow tired of a leader. The question now is whether that leader, having been shown the door, will content himself with looking for another entrance or will begin designing a larger, more permanent set of keys. History is littered with rejected domestic politicians who discovered a second act in the global conversation. Few of them returned with undiluted affection for the electorates that first dismissed them. Starmer’s next chapter will tell us whether he belongs among their number, or whether, for once, the universe’s small dry smile will prove permanent.

THAT'S WHY MUMS SAY "NO" IN ICELAND

The Icelanders have spoken, and they have spoken with the blunt, brine-scented authority of a people who know the precise difference between a national identity and a regulatory annex. On a grey North Atlantic morning, while the rest of Europe was still debating the precise shade of grey required for the next Commission press release, the voters of Iceland delivered their verdict on the question of whether they should resume accession talks with the European Union. 

They said no. Not with the hysterical flourish of a continental protest march, but with the quiet finality of a fisherman hauling in a net that contains exactly what he expected and nothing he did not. The government’s clever notion of advancing the vote by more than a year, in the apparent belief that a spot of geopolitical weather might panic the island into the waiting arms of Brussels, was met with what can only be described as a giant North Atlantic cod applied vigorously to the collective official face.

One must pause to admire the economy of the gesture. Iceland, that improbable outcrop of lava, saga and stubbornness, has never been particularly interested in being told that its destiny lies in a PowerPoint presentation drafted in a glass building several time zones away. Its culture is not a regional variant of something larger; it is a deliberate, centuries-long experiment in remaining itself. The sagas were not written by committee. The language, that austere and beautiful survival of Old Norse, did not evolve in order to accommodate twenty-seven official translations of a directive on the curvature of bananas. The people who live there have spent a millennium learning how to extract a living from a landscape that regards human ambition with glacial indifference. The idea that this hard-won particularity should now be dissolved into the great bureaucratic consommé of the European project was always going to strike them as a peculiar form of self-harm.

And so they rejected it. They rejected the soft coercion of globalisation dressed up as historical inevitability. They rejected the assumption that national sovereignty is a picturesque anachronism to be retained only in folk museums and tourism brochures. In doing so they performed a small, bracing act of cultural self-respect that ought to make more fashionable capitals shift uncomfortably in their seats. Icelandic culture is not a lifestyle accessory. It is the accumulated result of isolation, literacy, volcanic interruption and an almost unnatural attachment to the idea that a free people ought to decide their own fishing quotas. The cod, in this context, is not merely a fish. It is a symbol of the proposition that some things are not for sale, and that the sea does not recognise the Common Fisheries Policy.

The European Union, of course, took a different view. For years it has regarded the remaining non-members of the north-western fringe with the proprietary interest of a landlord eyeing an empty flat. The pitch is always the same: come inside where it is warm, where the rules are harmonised, where the currency is shared and the destiny is collective. What is left unsaid is that the warmth is institutional, the rules are written by people who will never have to live under the consequences in a small open economy, and the collective destiny has a curious habit of looking remarkably like the destiny preferred by the larger members. The attempt to draw Iceland into the process was less an invitation than an exercise in administrative gravity. Assimilation was the unspoken destination; the referendum was merely the procedural obstacle.

At the centre of this project stands Ursula von der Leyen, a figure who has perfected the art of looking simultaneously earnest and slightly surprised that anyone might disagree with her. One imagines her receiving the news from Reykjavík with the expression of a headmistress who has just been informed that the prefects have voted against the new school uniform. There is something almost poignant in the spectacle: the President of the Commission, that tireless evangelist for ever-closer union, confronted by an island that has looked at the prospectus and decided the boarding fees are too high and the house rules intolerable. The embarrassment is not merely political; it is aesthetic. To be rebuffed by a nation whose entire population could fit inside a medium-sized European city, and whose principal export has historically been fish and literature, is to be reminded that scale is not the same thing as authority, and that moral seriousness does not automatically confer the right to absorb one’s neighbours.

Von der Leyen’s difficulty is structural. She embodies an institution that has come to regard national difference as a transitional inconvenience rather than a permanent feature of the human landscape. The Icelanders, by contrast, appear to regard it as the entire point. Their rejection was not a fit of xenophobia or a romantic attachment to autarky. It was a cold-eyed calculation that the unique character of their society – the language that still reads like the Middle Ages, the democratic habits forged in isolation, the economic dependence on resources that Brussels would prefer to manage from a distance – was worth more than the dubious consolations of membership. In an age when globalisation is sold as both inevitable and benign, they have insisted on the right to remain particular.

The rest of us are left with the mildly unedifying spectacle of a superstate that cannot quite believe it has been declined by a country whose most famous literary achievement involves blood feuds and poetic justice. The cod has been delivered. The face of official Europe, and in particular the carefully composed features of Ursula von der Leyen, bears the imprint. One suspects the bruise will fade. The principle, rather less so. Iceland has simply declined to be improved. In the current climate, that counts as a minor miracle of good taste.

BURNHAM'S PRIMARK SOCIALISM

There are moments in the life of a nation when the cut of a man’s cloth tells you more than any speech he might deliver from a lectern. Andy Burnham, newly elevated to the office of Prime Minister and freshly arrived in Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day, has provided us with one such moment. He stepped off the train in what can only be described as the full kit of the modern British progressive: a short-sleeved polo of indeterminate navy, dark chinos that had clearly seen better afternoons, and an air of studied informality that suggested he had just popped out for a packet of crisps and somehow found himself shaking hands with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister.

The photographs are instructive. On one side of the handshake stands a man in traditional embroidered shirt, the sort of garment that announces cultural continuity and a certain seriousness of purpose. On the other stands Britain’s first citizen, looking as if he has come to collect a parcel from the sorting office. One almost expects him to ask whether there is somewhere he can change into something more comfortable. He did, of course, later put on a suit to meet President Zelensky. The suit, we are told, is reserved for the proper occasions. Watching Everton, for instance. This is the heart of the matter. Burnham will dress with proper formality to sit among the faithful at Goodison (or wherever the Toffees are currently lodging their hopes). He will not, it appears, do the same for the symbolic arrival on the soil of a country fighting for its existence. The clothes, as the man once said, maketh the man. In this case they maketh a very particular kind of man: the Primark Socialist.

Primark Socialism is not the old-fashioned variety that involved cloth caps and genuine working-class resentment. It is something more modern, more retail, more carefully calibrated. It is the politics of the affordable polo shirt. It signals solidarity without the inconvenience of looking like one has made an effort. It is authenticity by the metre, cut to fit the average chest and available in bulk. One need not rise early to iron a collar; one simply reaches into the drawer of democratic understatement and emerges looking like everyone else, only with a security detail. There is a certain genius to it. In an age when the public has grown weary of the polished and the remote, the Prime Minister arrives looking as if he has been travelling on the same train as the rest of us. The message is clear: I am one of you. I too know the mild discomfort of synthetic fabric on a warm day. I too understand that a quarter-zip is the outer limit of formalwear for a man who does not wish to appear to be trying too hard. 

Never mind that the journey was not, in fact, the same one the rest of us take, nor that the destination was a capital city under wartime conditions rather than a Saturday afternoon in the stands. The clothes do the talking, and they speak in the reassuring vernacular of the high street. One detects in all this the lingering influence of Burnham’s long apprenticeship in Manchester, where “Manchester clothes” became a political brand of their own. The rejection of the Westminster suit was presented as a kind of moral hygiene: a washing away of the old, stuffy, southern ways. Suits, after all, were what the other lot wore. Suits were for people who had never stood on a cold platform waiting for a delayed Northern service. The polo shirt, by contrast, was democratic. It said: I have not forgotten where I came from, even if where I came from is now a rather more elevated address.

The difficulty arises when the same logic is applied to the world stage. Diplomacy has always had its theatrical side. Leaders dress not merely for comfort but for the occasion, signalling respect for the host, the gravity of the moment, and the continuity of their own office. Zelensky himself has made a political virtue of military-style informality, a choice born of wartime necessity and carefully maintained. Burnham’s version feels less like necessity and more like a lifestyle preference that has been allowed to travel beyond its natural habitat. One does not, as a rule, turn up to a funeral in the clothes one wears to the supermarket, however sincere one’s feelings may be.

There is also the small matter of consistency. A man who will put on a proper suit to watch a football match is making a statement about what he considers worthy of formal attention. Everton, it seems, still commands the full armour of respectability. The Independence Day of a nation under existential threat does not. Or rather, it does once the cameras have recorded the arrival in the preferred uniform of the people. The subsequent change into a suit for the actual meetings has the air of a man who has remembered, slightly late, that he is no longer merely the Mayor of Greater Manchester but the representative of a nuclear power. The delay is telling.

Primark Socialism thrives on this careful management of image. It is cheap in the best and worst senses: accessible, unpretentious, and ultimately disposable. It costs little in the way of genuine formality and returns a high yield in perceived authenticity. One can almost hear the focus groups approving. The public, it is believed, no longer wants leaders who look like leaders. They want leaders who look like the man behind them in the queue at the coffee shop, only with better security and the ability to authorise long-range missile assistance. Whether this is sustainable remains an open question. Clothes may maketh the man, but they can also unmake him if the occasion demands something more than the democratic polo. There is a difference between refusing the pomposity of the past and refusing the basic theatre of seriousness. The former is refreshing. The latter risks looking like a failure of imagination, or worse, a failure of respect.

Burnham has long cultivated the image of the ordinary bloke who somehow found himself in extraordinary circumstances. It has served him well. Yet there are circumstances in which the ordinary bloke is expected to rise to the occasion rather than insist that the occasion come down to his level. A train platform in Kyiv on Independence Day may be one of them. The suit that appears for Everton and vanishes for the initial diplomatic handshake suggests that the hierarchy of priorities remains intact, only inverted in a way that would have puzzled an earlier generation of socialists, for whom dignity in public life was not a bourgeois affectation but part of the point.

In the end, Primark Socialism is less an ideology than a wardrobe strategy. It is the politics of looking approachable while holding power, of signalling solidarity through the absence of effort. It may yet prove popular. The British have always had a soft spot for the unassuming. But one wonders how long the soft spot will last when the soft collar becomes the permanent uniform of the office. 

There are times when a nation needs its leaders to look as if they have dressed for the history they are making, rather than for the journey they took to get there. On the evidence of that Kyiv platform, the current Prime Minister is still working out which is which.

PETER CULLEN (1941 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Peter Cullen has died at the age of 85, which is a respectable span for a man whose most famous utterance was essentially a truck telling everyone to roll out. He passed peacefully in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, thereby denying the universe the more theatrical exit one might have expected from the voice of a robot who regularly exploded for the greater good.

Born in Montreal in 1941, Cullen trained for the stage in the old-fashioned way, which is to say he learned how to speak clearly and stand still while other people threw scenery at him. Fate, however, had other plans. Instead of Shakespeare, he was handed a script about transforming vehicles with moral philosophies, and somehow made a talking semi-trailer sound like a combination of Moses and a slightly disappointed uncle. For four decades he remained Optimus Prime, the one Autobot who never once sounded as if he had been cast by committee or overdubbed by a marketing department.

The achievement was not merely technical. Cullen invested the character with a gravity that survived Michael Bay’s fondness for fireballs the size of small countries. While everything around him detonated with the subtlety of a fireworks factory on payday, Optimus continued to intone noble sentiments as if reading the closing credits of Western civilisation. Fans heard leadership; more sceptical listeners heard a man doing heroic overtime in a recording booth while the director ordered another helicopter crash.

He also voiced Eeyore, proving that the same larynx could shift from interstellar command to mild, rain-soaked melancholy without dropping a stitch. One might say he specialised in characters who were permanently slightly put out by the universe, yet refused to abandon it. In this, Cullen was almost certainly drawing on the quieter side of his own temperament rather than pure invention.

The family asked that he be remembered by the injunction to “be strong enough to be gentle,” a line that would have fitted both the robot and the donkey rather well. In an age of voices that shout to be noticed, Cullen’s quiet authority now sounds almost antique. He leaves behind the rare distinction of having made millions of children believe that a truck could possess a conscience, and of having done so without once raising his voice. That, in the end, may be the more impressive transformation.

TIM CURRY (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Tim Curry, who has Time-Warped his last at the age of 80, spent a lifetime proving that the line between high camp and high art is thinner than a fishnet stocking. The British actor, forever embalmed in the public mind as Dr Frank-N-Furter, the sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, shuffled off this mortal coil on 25 August at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, having long since mastered the art of making the ridiculous look like destiny.

Born Timothy James Curry in Grappenhall, Cheshire, he arrived in the world with a voice that could curdle milk or seduce it, depending on the lighting. His father, a naval chaplain, departed early via stroke when Tim was twelve, an event the son later outdid by surviving his own, in 2012, with characteristic stubbornness and a wheelchair. From that point he continued working mostly by voice, which was just as well: the instrument had always been the real star, a baritone capable of velvet menace or velvet seduction, often in the same breath.

It was The Rocky Horror Picture Show that fixed him in amber. On stage and then on screen in 1975, Curry strutted about in heels and makeup as if the universe had been waiting for someone to demonstrate that gender is merely a costume change. Audiences of a certain age still shout the dialogue at midnight screenings, which must have been both flattering and faintly exhausting. He followed this with a gallery of villains and eccentrics: the devil in Legend, the butler in Clue, Pennywise the clown in the 1990 version of It, each performance suggesting that evil is best delivered with a raised eyebrow and perfect diction.

Nor did he neglect lighter fare. In Home Alone 2 he played Mr Hector, the Plaza’s haughty concierge, eyeing a credit-card-wielding child with the disdain of a maître d’ spotting a ketchup stain—comic precision in every arched brow. Four years later, as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, he swaggered among the felt and foam with RSC gravitas, singing and scheming as if the Muppets were fellow professionals of the highest order. Both roles showed his unerring instinct for the ridiculous: bureaucratic irritation made hilarious, piratical villainy oddly paternal.

Hollywood never quite knew what to do with him beyond the grotesque, and he never seemed to mind. He collected Tony nominations, voice roles by the dozen, and a memoir, Vagabond, published only last year, in which he revealed just enough to keep the curious hungry. Of his private life he remained resolutely opaque. “I have loved and been loved,” he wrote. “The rest is none of your business.” One suspects the line was delivered with a small, satisfied smile.

In an age that mistakes sincerity for depth, Curry specialised in surfaces that glittered with intelligence. He made excess look like restraint and restraint look like a missed opportunity. The world is a shade less interesting without him, and considerably less well dressed.

DOLLY PARTON (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Dolly Parton has left the building, or more accurately the mountain, at the age of eighty, after a brief and characteristically discreet engagement with cancer. The news arrived with the usual mixture of disbelief and resigned nods from those who had long suspected that even sequins and willpower have their limits. She died in Nashville, surrounded by family, having spent a lifetime proving that a girl from a one-room cabin in the Smokies could out-sing, out-write and out-charm most of the professional charmers who ever darkened a recording studio.

Her songwriting remains the least disputable of her achievements. From “Coat of Many Colors” to “Jolene” and the deceptively simple “I Will Always Love You,” she turned Appalachian plain-speaking into commercial gold without ever sanding off the edges. The songs arrived fully formed, as if she had merely transcribed conversations overheard between the washing line and the church pew. Other writers laboured for years to achieve half the emotional clarity she tossed off between hair appointments. Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” made the world weep; Parton’s original merely raised an eyebrow and suggested the tears were optional.

Then there was the blonde bombshell business, and the bosom that launched a thousand late-night monologues. Parton treated her own silhouette with the same cheerful practicality she applied to everything else: if the Lord had seen fit to equip her like a Tennessee walking horse in a rhinestone bridle, who was she to argue? The wigs grew higher, the waist stayed improbably small, and the cleavage operated as a kind of national monument, visited by photographers, comedians and the occasional startled airline passenger. She never pretended the look was accidental, nor did she allow it to become the whole story. It was stagecraft, pure and simple, and she ran the stage.

Her philanthropy was quieter only by comparison with the rest of the act. The Imagination Library has shipped well over two hundred million books to children who might otherwise have met the alphabet solely through cereal packets. She poured money into COVID vaccine research when it was still fashionable to pretend the virus was a media invention, and she kept the cheques coming long after the applause faded. Dollywood employed thousands in a region that had previously specialised in poverty and picturesque decay. She gave away money the way most people give away opinions: freely, repeatedly, and with surprisingly little regard for the tax receipts.

In the end she managed the rare feat of becoming a living trademark without ever becoming a bore. The hair, the voice, the business empire and the apparently bottomless capacity for kindness all belonged to the same improbable package. Heaven, if it has any sense of theatre, has already ordered extra storage for the wigs.