BALKAN BACKLASH: ANOTHER EUROCRAT BITES THE DUST

In the grand opera of European politics, where the chorus of Brussels functionaries intones hymns to fiscal rectitude and ever-closer union, one can always count on the Romanians to provide a touch of Balkan colour. On this fine May day in 2026, the Romanian parliament has done the unthinkable: it has toppled Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, that most impeccably pro-European of leaders, in a no-confidence vote that passed with the sort of thumping majority usually reserved for motions praising the weather. Two hundred and eighty-one votes, if memory serves – well above the threshold, and delivered with the gleeful opportunism of a family reunion that has finally decided the old uncle's inheritance should go elsewhere. 

One pictures Bolojan now, packing his ministerial briefcase with the quiet dignity of a man who has always known his place in the great scheme of things: a reliable steward of EU funds, a faithful executant of austerity measures demanded from afar, and a living embodiment of that curious modern faith which holds that the path to national greatness lies in obeying one's betters in Strasbourg and Frankfurt. His crime? Leading a minority government that dared suggest Romania might trim its heroic budget deficit – a mere 9% of GDP, the sort of figure that would make a Greek finance minister blush with professional envy. The Social Democrats, those stalwart guardians of the people who had lately been his coalition partners, took one look at the proposed cuts and remembered that they quite liked being popular. They walked out and, in a plot twist worthy of a Restoration comedy, made common cause with the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) to bring the whole edifice crashing down. 

Ah, the PSD-AUR axis. History does have a sense of humour, even if it tends toward the dry and sardonic. Here were the heirs of Ceaușescu's more presentable successors clasping hands, however temporarily, with George Simion's nationalist firebrands. Simion, that tireless champion of "family, nation, faith, and freedom," emerges as the day's clear victor, beaming like a man who has just discovered that the European Union is not, after all, a vending machine that dispenses euros without occasional mechanical failure. One can almost hear the gnashing of teeth in the better salons of Brussels. Another Eastern European leader – pro-European, reform-minded, thoroughly house-trained – dispatched to the political wilderness. How satisfying. How refreshingly ungrateful of the Romanians.

The backstory only adds savour. Recall the 2024 presidential election, that awkward business with Călin Georgescu. The man had the temerity to win the first round, buoyed, we were solemnly informed, by the dark arts of Russian interference via TikTok – some eight hundred accounts or thereabouts, a digital army apparently more persuasive than the combined might of European Commission press releases. The election was duly annulled, Georgescu barred from the rerun, and the whole democratic exercise sent back to the drawing board with the firm instruction that the people had got it wrong the first time. 

One wonders, in one's more cynical moments, whether the real interference was the sort that arrives in nicely wrapped structural adjustment programmes rather than viral dance challenges. But such thoughts are, of course, unhelpful.Now the wheel turns once more. With Bolojan reduced to caretaker status and President Nicușor Dan scrambling for a new pro-EU majority, the door stands ajar for early elections or, whisper it gently, some role for the sidelined Georgescu himself. Simion talks of national reconciliation and future governance. The leu trembles, credit ratings wobble, and some €10 billion in EU funds hang in the balance. The usual suspects warn of instability, populism, and the eternal return of the 1930s. One has heard it all before.

Yet there is something almost touching in this recurring Eastern European habit of disappointing their Western tutors. For decades now, the former Warsaw Pact countries have been treated as wayward pupils who must be taught the catechism of open borders, green transitions, and the ineffable wisdom of supranational bureaucracy. Poland had its flirtation with defiance. Hungary persists in the sin of Orbán. Now Romania joins the awkward squad. One begins to suspect that these peoples, having endured actual totalitarianism within living memory, possess an instinctive allergy to new varieties of it – however benignly packaged, however garnished with subsidies.

The globalist project has always rested on a charming contradiction: it celebrates "diversity" while demanding uniformity of thought, particularly on matters of sovereignty and economics. Bolojan was the perfect vessel for this vision – competent, Atlanticist, willing to wield the scalpel on Romania's bloated spending at Brussels' behest. His fall is more than a parliamentary procedural. It is a small but vivid reminder that nations are not NGOs. They have memories, interests, and, occasionally, the bad manners to assert them.

One should not, of course, get carried away. Romanian politics has a habit of producing more twists than a Carpathian mountain road. The PSD may yet discover that dancing with AUR brings its own complications, and the EU has many subtle ways of reminding recalcitrant members where their bread is buttered. Yet for today, at least, one may permit a quiet, thoroughly undiplomatic chuckle. Another globalist Eastern European leader down. The scriptwriters of history, it seems, have not yet exhausted their supply of ironic reversals. Romania, in its messy, contradictory way, has reminded us that sovereignty, like poetry, is best when it refuses to follow the syllabus. Pass the popcorn. The next act promises to be entertaining.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN (AND HAND OVER YOUR PAPERS...)

In the grand British tradition of moral panics, where every generation discovers that the latest amusement might corrupt the young and promptly demands that the state do something about it, we have arrived at the social media age limit. The government, ever obliging when it comes to expanding its own prerogatives, has committed to raising the barrier to sixteen. Parents, teachers, health professionals and sundry concerned parties cheer this as a victory for the children. One pictures them linking arms and singing hymns of deliverance, much as the villagers once did when the witch was safely ducked.

It is a touching spectacle. One is reminded of Sheila Broflovski in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, that tireless crusader whose rallying cry—“Think of the children!”—launched wars, censorship campaigns and quite a lot of gratuitous musical numbers. The comparison may be unfair; Sheila was at least cartoonishly direct in her hysteria, whereas our modern parental lobbyists cloak their demands in the soothing pastel tones of safeguarding and evidence-based policy. Still, the family resemblance is hard to deny. The impulse is the same: protect the innocents by restricting everyone else’s access to the dangerous toy. And, as in South Park, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and funded by the taxpayer.

The ostensible problem is real enough. Endless scrolling, algorithmic outrage, and the peculiar social dynamics of platforms designed to maximise engagement have not, on the whole, produced a generation of stoic philosophers. Mental health statistics for adolescents flicker with warning lights; grooming and exploitation lurk in the darker corners. No sane observer denies that unlimited smartphone access at age eleven has its drawbacks. The old solution—family computer in the living room, a sturdy Nokia brick for emergencies, and the gentle art of saying “no”—has been unfashionable for years. It required actual parenting: supervision, boundaries, the occasional row. Far easier, it seems, to outsource the heavy lifting to Whitehall.

Yet herein lies the quiet comedy of our age. In their zeal to shield little Timmy and Emily from TikTok’s siren song, campaigning parents have lobbied for measures that necessitate robust age assurance. “Highly effective” is the regulatory euphemism. In practice, this means identity verification: facial scans, biometric estimation, digital wallets, government-issued credentials, perhaps even linkage to NHS numbers or Open Banking data. What begins as a polite request to keep the under-sixteens off Instagram swiftly mutates into infrastructure capable of checking every internet user’s credentials before granting passage. The state does not build such systems for one narrow purpose and then politely dismantle them once the children are safe. Bureaucracies are not known for their minimalist aesthetic.

One almost admires the sleight of hand. Parents animated by left-leaning ideals—those who instinctively reach for collective solutions, who view private restraint as insufficient and state intervention as enlightened—have helped midwife a mechanism of universal surveillance. They did not set out to erect an Orwellian apparatus, of course. They merely wanted the harms mitigated. But good intentions have a habit of arriving at unintended addresses. The same cohort that once tut-tutted at CCTV creep and data retention now finds itself applauding the digital equivalent of an ID card for the entire online realm. The children were the Trojan horse; the surveillance state slipped in behind them while everyone was busy virtue-signalling concern.

Compare this with the low-tech alternative so unfashionable among the digitally anxious: place the family computer in plain sight, hand the offspring a device incapable of infinite doom-scrolling, and accept that raising humans involves some friction. It worked tolerably well when the greatest online peril was a dodgy Geocities page. It requires no national database, no facial recognition middleware, and—no small mercy—no new quango to oversee compliance. Yet such measures lack the grandeur of legislation. They cannot be announced with fanfare in the Commons or celebrated as a “huge win.” They demand responsibility from actual parents rather than the comforting abstraction of society.

Instead, we march toward the logical terminus: every citizen presenting digital papers at the gates of the internet. Refuse, and access is denied or throttled. The infrastructure, once built for the protection of minors, will prove irresistibly useful for other purposes—content moderation, behavioural scoring, the quiet expansion of what constitutes “harmful” material. Today it is social media for sixteen-year-olds; tomorrow the definition of acceptable discourse may tighten further, always in the name of safety, always with the most compassionate rhetoric. The censors of yesteryear at least had the decency to be obvious about it. Our modern variant prefers to arrive wearing the concerned frown of a safeguarding officer.

The irony is particularly rich for those parents steeped in progressive instincts. Many who would recoil at old-fashioned authoritarianism have cheered measures that hand the state potent new tools of control. They imagined a gentle nanny state gently patting errant algorithms on the head. What they are helping construct is something closer to a panopticon with better branding. The state, ever hungry for legitimacy, gratefully accepts the mandate: “You asked us to protect the children; we shall require certain assurances from everyone.” Slippery slopes are dismissed as paranoid until one finds oneself halfway down, clutching a biometric token and wondering how it came to this.

There is, naturally, an antidote more elegant than regulation. It is called parental responsibility, exercised in the analogue world before the digital one consumes it entirely. It is the willingness to endure the mild social awkwardness of saying your child does not have the latest device. It is the dull, unglamorous business of conversation, example, and occasional confiscation. Supplement this with a cultural commitment to free expression—something like the ASI Freedom of Speech Bill, which seeks to push back against the creeping censorship apparatus—rather than layering ever more rules atop the existing ones.

In the end, Britain risks sleepwalking into a peculiarly polite dystopia: not the jackboot of classic totalitarianism, but the soft, data-driven embrace of perpetual verification “for the children.” Sheila Broflovski would recognise the script, even if the accents have improved and the musical numbers are now delivered via algorithmic recommendation. The tragedy is not that parents care; it is that they have been persuaded to care in the manner most likely to empower the very forces least suited to genuine guardianship. The state makes a poor surrogate parent. It is, however, an excellent custodian of power once granted.

One can only hope that enough citizens retain the wit to notice the swap: the promised shield for the young quietly reforged into chains for all. Otherwise, we shall find ourselves, in a few short years, logging on with our digital papers in order, murmuring the updated mantra: “Think of the children”—while the state smiles indulgently and tightens the net.

ALEX ZANARDI (1966 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Alessandro “Alex” Zanardi, the Italian racing driver who treated speed as a philosophical argument and then spent the rest of his life proving that even physics could be negotiated with sufficient charm, has finally been overtaken. He died in Bologna on 1 May 2026 at the age of 59, having spent the better part of six years in a state best described as “persistently inconvenient to the Reaper.”

Born in the motor-mad city that also produced Ferrari’s headaches, Zanardi charged into Formula One in the early 1990s with the sort of optimism usually reserved for lottery tickets. He was quick, flamboyant, and Italian enough to make the paddock feel under-dressed. Yet F1, that merciless sorting office of talent, decided he was better suited to America, where CART rewarded his bravado with two championships in 1997 and 1998. There he perfected the art of winning while looking as if he had just remembered a better joke elsewhere. 

Then came Lausitzring, 15 September 2001. In one of those baroque horrors that open-wheel racing occasionally stages for the gods’ amusement, Zanardi’s car spun into the path of that of Alex Tagliani, who had no chance to avoid him, and was bisected at speed. He lost both legs and most of his blood, yet contrived not only to survive but to return to the same circuit two years later and complete the remaining laps on hand controls. The stunt was pure Zanardi: part defiance, part PR, and wholly theatrical. Critics called it inspirational. He probably called it Tuesday. 

Thereafter he discovered that wheels need not be attached to a racing car. As a handcyclist he collected Paralympic gold medals with the casual air of a man picking up dry-cleaning. The prosthetics he helped design were so efficient that rival athletes began to suspect witchcraft. Fate, never one to let a good story rest, delivered a final satirical flourish in 2020: a handbike collision with a lorry that left him with catastrophic brain injuries. For nearly six years he hovered in that grey zone where medicine meets metaphysics, a living punchline to the joke that nothing could stop him—except, eventually, everything. 

Zanardi’s career was a masterclass in refusal. Refusal to stay average in F1. Refusal to stay broken after amputation. Refusal to stay ordinary even when ordinary would have been forgivable. He treated disability less as tragedy than as a design flaw to be engineered around, preferably at 200 mph. In an age of professionally sensitive athletes, he remained cheerfully unapologetic about risk, speed, and the Italian compulsion to turn every endeavour into opera.

He is survived by his wife Daniela and son Niccolò, who must now endure the world’s well-meaning condolences. One suspects Alex would have greeted his own obituary with a raised eyebrow and the observation that, having already been cut in half once, dying in one piece was something of a promotion. The chequered flag has fallen. The crowd, as ever, is on its feet applauding.

STARMER'S REARGUARD ACTION ...

In the great British tradition of maintaining a stiff upper lip while the rest of the anatomy quietly combusts, the Old Bailey has been staging one of those dramas that the newspapers have elected to treat as though it were a minor outbreak of dry rot in a provincial vicarage. Here we are, in the spring of 2026, with a Prime Minister whose very name once promised a certain forensic tidiness—Keir Starmer, the man who was going to sweep the Augean stables of British politics with the calm efficiency of a senior barrister—and yet the public prints have fallen strangely mute on the subject of three gentlemen currently on trial for attempting to turn several of his former residences, and an associated motor vehicle, into something resembling a Guy Fawkes bonfire out of season.

The defendants are a study in demographic poetry. Roman Lavrynovych, twenty-one years of age and possessed of the sort of cheekbones that might once have graced the cover of a Milanese fashion catalogue, is described in the scant initial reports as an “aspiring male model.” One pictures him arriving in these isles with the sort of portfolio that opens doors—or at least the sort of doors that influential gentlemen keep ajar for private viewings. Beside him sits Petro Pochynok, thirty-five, a man of more settled years whose face suggests he has already learned that life’s catwalks are not always lit by flattering gels. Completing the trio is Stanislav Carpiuc, twenty-seven, Ukrainian by birth but carrying a Romanian passport in the way a man might carry a spare umbrella: useful when the weather turns political. All three have been enjoying the spartan hospitality of Belmarsh since their arrest, a facility whose reputation for quiet contemplation is exceeded only by its indifference to interior design. They have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, a charge whose gravity is somewhat undermined by the fact that the intended victims appear to have been absent at the time. One is left with the impression of a plot whose theatrical timing was, shall we say, imperfect.

It is the silence surrounding the proceedings that tickles the satirical palate. Sub judice, the lawyers intone, as though the phrase were a sacred incantation capable of gagging every editor in the land. Fair enough; we must protect the jury from prejudice, even if the jury in question is composed of citizens who have spent the past decade marinating in 24-hour news cycles and conspiracy podcasts. Yet one cannot help noticing how selectively that principle is applied. When a minor celebrity stubs a toe in public, the airwaves fill with the sort of forensic detail normally reserved for a Royal Commission. Here, however, where the properties in question once sheltered the very apex of the Labour government, the coverage has been as sparse as a vegan buffet at a fox-hunting supper. The BBC and Sky News offered the obligatory paragraphs at the first hearing, the sort of dutiful stenography that reads like an obituary written by someone who has already moved on to the next corpse. Since then: nothing. A hush so complete one almost expects to see the trial conducted in mime. 

One is driven, in the spirit of pure intellectual mischief, to wonder what sort of prior acquaintance might exist between the accused and the gentleman whose doorsteps they allegedly doused with petrol. After all, young Mr Lavrynovych’s chosen profession is not one that flourishes in a vacuum. Aspiring models, particularly those of a certain striking aspect, have been known to secure private engagements in the better quarters of London—engagements that require discretion, a certain flexibility of schedule, and an understanding that the client’s appreciation may extend beyond the purely photographic. It is not beyond the bounds of speculation that such a young man, together with his slightly older companions, might once have found themselves invited to discuss matters of mutual interest in the very properties now under forensic examination. The sort of discussion that takes place after the official minutes have been filed, the security detail has been dismissed, and the lights have been dimmed to that flattering half-glow favoured by gentlemen who prefer their diplomacy conducted at close quarters. One imagines the conversation flowing easily, perhaps even warmly; the exchange of certain personal courtesies that, in the right hands, can feel almost like an act of statesmanship. And then, for reasons known only to the participants, the relationship appears to have cooled rather more dramatically than any of them anticipated. Hence the matches.

It is a delicious irony, is it not? The Prime Minister, whose public persona has always been that of the meticulous prosecutor, the man who dots every i and crosses every t with the precision of a man defusing a bomb, now finds himself the unintended subject of a case that hinges on the possibility that someone once close enough to warm his hearth decided instead to set it alight. One does not, of course, suggest anything so vulgar as motive. Motives are for juries and novelists. We are merely observing the curious geometry of events: three gentlemen from the East, one of them a model whose professional assets include a face that could launch a thousand private commissions, and a set of addresses that, until recently, were part of the Prime Ministerial real-estate portfolio. The flames that were lit were literal; the ones that preceded them, one suspects, were of an altogether more discreet temperature.

The broader comedy lies in the political choreography. Here is a government elected on a platform of competence and moral clarity, now presiding over a trial so discreetly handled that it might as well be taking place in a witness-protection safe house. The Ukrainian connection adds a further layer of farce. We have spent years being told that the brave defenders of Kyiv are the moral equivalent of the RAF in 1940; now three of their countrymen stand accused of treating a former Prime Ministerial residence like a barbecue pit. One almost feels sorry for the spin doctors. How does one square the circle of “our gallant allies” with “alleged arsonists who may once have enjoyed rather more intimate forms of alliance”? Best, evidently, to say nothing at all and hope the story expires quietly in a Belmarsh cell. Christopher Hichens, were he still with us, might have observed that British public life has always run on a mixture of embarrassment and understatement, and that the greater the embarrassment, the deeper the understatement. This case is a masterclass. The Old Bailey will grind on, the jury will deliberate, and the verdict—whatever it may be—will be reported in the sort of six-paragraph brief usually reserved for planning disputes in the Home Counties. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to contemplate the small, exquisite pleasure of watching the machinery of power attempt to smother a story that refuses to stay buried. The properties may have survived the fire. The reputations, one fears, are still smouldering. And somewhere in the quiet hours, one can almost hear the faint, sardonic chuckle of history itself, lighting another metaphorical cigarette and wondering what on earth these people thought they were playing at.

DINNER WITH A SIDE ORDER OF LEAD

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has long been one of those ritualistic American spectacles that contrives to make democracy look like a black-tie cocktail party with an open bar and a side order of self-congratulation. On the evening of 25 April 2026, the usual suspects—journalists in rented tuxedos, cabinet secretaries in borrowed gravitas, and a president who had finally decided to grace the proceedings—gathered at the Washington Hilton to celebrate press freedom, roast one another with the ritual barbs, and pretend that the republic was in rude health. Then a 31-year-old Californian named Cole Tomas Allen, armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, decided to audition for the role of uninvited guest. He charged a security checkpoint, exchanged fire with the Secret Service, and was subdued before he could reach the ballroom. No one in the main party was harmed, though one agent took a round to the vest. The evening’s theme—press freedom—suddenly acquired a more literal, if unintended, resonance.

Blaire White, never one to let a cliché pass unexamined, had posted the day before: “All you hear about is right wing violence, and all you actually see is left wing violence.” It was the sort of epigram that lands with the dry thud of an unfashionable truth. In the hours after the Hilton incident, the usual chorus of commentators could be heard rehearsing the standard libretto: isolated, mental health, rhetoric poisoned by the other side. One veteran pundit, interviewed live while the champagne was still cooling, managed to blame the whole business on Donald Trump’s “poisoning of the discourse,” as though the president had personally handed Mr Allen his manifesto and a map of the Hilton’s service entrance. The manifesto, when leaked in dribs and drabs, revealed the gunman styling himself a “friendly federal assassin,” railing against Christians, Trump officials, and assorted grievances that would have fitted neatly into any number of campus seminars on systemic injustice. He had donated, modestly, to Kamala Harris’s campaign; he had attended a “No Kings” protest; he was, by the polite metrics of our age, a man of the left. Yet the narrative machine, that vast and tireless contraption, continued to hum its accustomed tune.

One is reminded of Clive James’s old observation that the British press could be relied upon to report the same story in two different keys depending on whose side was playing the villain. Here the American variant is even more refined. Right-wing violence is never merely violence; it is a symptom, a metastasis, a dark flowering of the national id. Left-wing violence, by contrast, is a regrettable aberration, the work of a lone eccentric whose politics are incidental, like a man who happens to collect stamps and also shoots at presidents. The data, of course, have been behaving most disobligingly. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, that sober temple of think-tankery, reported last year that 2025 marked the first time in more than three decades that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots outnumbered those from the far right. One might have expected a modest editorial footnote or two. Instead, the coverage maintained the serene poise of a dowager aunt refusing to acknowledge that the family black sheep has just set fire to the gazebo.

Consider the recent precedents. In 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a university event in Utah; the perpetrator, still at large when the first reports broke, was widely assumed (and later confirmed by the tenor of the manhunt) to be operating from the progressive end of the spectrum. The reaction in certain quarters was a masterclass in studied ambiguity: thoughts and prayers, certainly, but also a gentle reminder that Kirk had been “polarising.” A few months later, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered in their home by Vance Boelter, a man whose anti-abortion views and conservative leanings placed him squarely in the right-wing column. That crime received the full treatment: wall-to-wall condemnation, solemn editorials on the rising tide of MAGA extremism, and the inevitable invocation of January 6 as the original sin from which all subsequent evils flowed. The asymmetry was almost poetic. One dead conservative influencer: a tragedy with footnotes. Two dead Democrats: proof that the republic teeters on the brink.

Mr Allen’s little adventure at the Hilton fits the newer pattern with almost embarrassing neatness. A Caltech-educated engineer turned part-time teacher and video-game developer, he was not some toothless Appalachian militiaman nursing grievances against the federal government; he was the sort of chap who might once have been invited to speak at a TEDx event on innovation and empathy. His social-media trail, before it was scrubbed or memory-holed, showed the familiar blend of anti-Trump animus and anti-Christian spleen that has become the house style of certain corners of the resistance. Yet within hours the framing shifted. Pundits spoke of “trauma,”, “a nation divided,” and “the need for “dialogue.” Dialogue, in this context, usually means the right agreeing to be quiet while the left explains why its violence is really the fault of the right’s existence.

The dinner itself was meant to be a celebration of the First Amendment, that sturdy old document which guarantees everyone the right to say what they like—provided, of course, that what they like aligns with the prevailing consensus. The correspondents had spent the evening poking fun at power in the approved manner: witty enough to raise a chuckle, safe enough not to risk cancellation. Then reality, in the form of Mr Allen’s arsenal, intruded like a drunk uncle at a wedding. The guests dived under tables in their gowns and dinner jackets, Secret Service agents shouted “shots fired,” and for a brief, clarifying moment the gap between the narrative and the observable world became visible to the naked eye. One almost expected a voice from the dais to murmur, “This is not who we are,” before realising that, on the contrary, this is increasingly who we are—on both sides, but with the media’s selective hearing tuned only to one frequency.

Satire, James once noted, is the last resort of the civilised mind when confronted by the incorrigible. The incorrigible fact here is that political violence has become a bipartisan pastime while the commentary class insists on treating it as a unilateral franchise. The right produces its share of cranks and cruder operators; no one with an ounce of honesty denies it. But the left’s contribution—targeted assassinations of conservative figures, attacks on immigration facilities, and now an armed incursion into the very gala where the press corps congratulates itself on its fearless independence—has been growing in both frequency and theatricality. Yet the official story remains that the real danger skulks in the shadows wearing a red hat and muttering about stolen elections. It is as though the press, having spent years warning of wolves, cannot quite bring itself to notice when a sheep in wolf’s clothing starts biting.

One suspects James would have appreciated the absurdity. He had a gift for spotting the moment when solemnity collapses into self-parody, when the guardians of truth reveal themselves as custodians of a preferred fiction. The Hilton ballroom, with its chandeliers and its hors d’oeuvres and its sudden rattle of gunfire, was that moment made flesh. The correspondents will reconvene next year, no doubt, to toast press freedom once more. Mr Allen will face the courts, his manifesto will be psychologised into irrelevance, and the great American narrative will trundle on, serene in its conviction that the violence it sees is never the violence it fears. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us—those who still prefer evidence to incantation—will continue to note, with the driest of smiles, that what we hear and what we see remain stubbornly at odds. The dinner may have been disrupted, but the script, alas, was not.

FOOTBALL LOSES IT'S FOCUS

The announcement that Football Focus, that sturdy old warhorse of the Saturday lunchtime schedule, has at last been put out to grass after 52 years comes as no great surprise to anyone who has watched the BBC's long, slow surrender to the modern age. Audiences, we are told with the sort of pained sincerity usually reserved for a minor royal's minor scandal, have simply changed their habits. They nibble at highlights on demand, graze on podcasts, and scroll through social media while the kettle boils. Linear television, that quaint relic, has been declining since 2018, and the figures tell their own melancholy tale: from nearly 850,000 viewers in 2019 to somewhere around 564,000–600,000 by 2023. The corporation, ever the responsible guardian of the licence fee, must evolve or perish. Or at least pretend to evolve while quietly axing the bits that no longer pull their weight.

One feels a certain dry sympathy for the show's final host, Alex Scott. She has already declared, with the graceful pre-emptive strike of one who has seen the writing on the autocue, that she herself had planned to depart. No blame attaches to her personally. Scott is a former professional footballer who knows the game from the inside, and she has conducted herself with the sort of composure that suggests she could read the shipping forecast without causing a riot. The fault, if fault there be, lies not in the presenter but in the packaging — and in the peculiar modern compulsion to wrap every last scrap of sport in the bright, brittle cellophane of entertainment.

Sport, once content to be itself, has increasingly been asked to play the role of lifestyle accessory. Consider Formula One, that roaring cathedral of noise and money. Under the stewardship of Liberty Media, it has been transformed from a niche pursuit for petrolheads and engineers into something closer to a Netflix soap opera with very expensive cars. Drive to Survive did for motor racing what The Crown did for the Windsors: it turned insiders into characters, rivalries into plotlines, and the paddock into a catwalk. The result? A younger audience, a markedly higher proportion of women (now around 40% or more in some surveys), and a global boom in casual fandom. The actual racing — those long afternoons of tyre strategy and aerodynamic nuance — still happens, of course, but it is now flanked by celebrity cameos, glossy drama, and enough interpersonal tension to keep the gossip columns fed. The sport itself has not become worse; it has simply been asked to sing for its supper in a key more pleasing to the streaming gods.

Football, that great English obsession, has undergone a similar cosmetic overhaul, though with rather less success on the traditional front. The beautiful game remains, at root, twenty-two men (or women) chasing a ball and a referee chasing both. Its appeal to the traditional male viewer — the sort who once settled down with a pie and a pint to hear Bob Wilson or Jimmy Hill talk tactics — was never primarily about glamour or representation. It was about the game talking to itself: the geometry of the pitch, the sudden flash of genius, the tribal roar. When the packaging begins to shout louder than the contents, the old audience quietly reaches for the remote.

Here one must acknowledge an awkward truth that the BBC, in its institutional wisdom, would prefer to treat as an optical illusion. The increased prominence of female presenters on programmes covering men's football has coincided with a noticeable drift away from the traditional male demographic. This is not, as some fevered online commentary would have it, because such presenters are inherently incapable - the mere thought of the World Snooker Championship without the indomitable Hazel Irvine would be enough to cause one to snap one's cue - it is because a large slice of the core audience experiences a subtle but persistent sense of cultural displacement. They switch on expecting the familiar rhythms of the Saturday ritual and instead encounter a tone that feels, to them, imported from another conversation altogether: one heavy with the vocabulary of inclusion, equity, and the quiet implication that the old way of watching was somehow problematic. The result is not rage so much as indifference. They simply stop watching. Numbers fall. The show is quietly retired. And everyone involved expresses polite bafflement.

Yet one must not fall into the opposite error of imagining that women's sport requires artificial life support. Quite the contrary. Women's football, women's rugby, women's cricket — these have been enjoying genuine growth in popularity, including among male viewers. The Lionesses' triumphs, the rising attendances at Women's Super League matches, the record audiences for major tournaments: these are not figments of a diversity report, we watch because the sport itself is worth watching — the skill, the commitment, the narrative arc of underdogs and breakthroughs. No amount of political correctness or virtue signalling is required to achieve this. Indeed, the heavy-handed application of such things often proves counterproductive, breeding resentment where organic interest might have flourished. The lesson is as old as entertainment itself: let the thing be good on its own terms. The audience will find it, or it will not. Forced admiration is the surest way to kill affection.

Ultimately, sport should do the talking. The ball, the bat, the engine, the athlete's body in motion — these are eloquent enough without endless overlay of messaging. When Football Focus began in 1974, it understood this. It was a simple programme about the weekend's football, presented by people steeped in the culture. That it has now been deemed surplus to requirements is less a comment on Alex Scott than on the broader confusion of our age: the belief that every institution must be remodelled in the image of the moment's approved sensibilities, even if that means alienating the very people who once sustained it.

The BBC will doubtless replace the old slot with something shinier, more digital, more inclusive. One wishes them luck. But one also suspects that the game, in all its stubborn, unscripted glory, will continue to outlast the packaging. Sport, like literature or music at its best, has a way of surviving the people who try too hard to improve it. The audience may fragment, the formats may shift, but the ball keeps rolling. And in the end, that is all that ever really mattered.

A CENTURY OF QUIET MAJESTY

If one were to stage a birthday party for a monarch who had the impertinence to die four years short of her century, the British establishment would doubtless rise to the occasion with all the solemnity of a Whitehall committee deciding on the colour of a new passport. Yet here we are, in the spring of 2026, celebrating what would have been the hundredth birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, and the national mood is less a firework display than a low, sardonic chuckle at the gods for arranging matters so inconveniently as to avoid her having to send a telegram to herself. The bunting is out, the television schedules are clogged with archive footage of her waving from Land Rovers, and the newspapers are full of those solemn editorials that manage to sound both reverent and slightly relieved she is not around to read them. One almost expects her to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in spectral form, give that trademark half-smile of mild amusement, and remark, in the voice of a slightly disappointed headmistress, that really, one had hoped for better.

She was, of course, the last monarch who understood that the job was not to do things, but to be there while things were done. Born in 1926 into a world still recovering from one world war and about to plunge into another, she spent her girlhood learning the difference between duty and drama. By the time she ascended the throne in 1952, the British Empire had already begun its long, polite retreat into the history books; she simply refused to turn the retreat into a rout. Seventy years of it: the Suez fiasco, the Profumo scandal, the decolonisation that turned half the map from pink to various shades of embarrassed beige, the divorce of her own children, the death of Diana, the rise of the internet, and still she never once looked as though she might be enjoying herself too obviously. That was her genius. She made boredom into a constitutional art form. While prime ministers came and went like guests at a particularly tedious garden party—Thatcher with her handbag, Blair with his grin, Johnson with his hair—she remained the fixed point, the woman who could make a state banquet feel like tea with the vicar. Her contribution was not policy; it was presence. She held the monarchy together by the simple expedient of never appearing to notice that it was falling apart.

One thinks of her wartime service, driving an ambulance in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, getting her hands dirty with engine oil and refusing to make a fuss about it. Compare that with the modern royal who feels the need to lecture us on carbon footprints from the back of a private jet, and you begin to see the scale of the loss. Elizabeth understood that the Crown’s power lay in its invisibility. She never gave interviews, never wrote memoirs, never once suggested that her opinions on anything—from the weather to the Common Market—might be of the slightest interest to anyone except her corgis. The result was a reign that felt less like government than like weather: sometimes overcast, occasionally stormy, but always, reliably, there. She survived the abdication crisis of her uncle, the wartime Blitz, the swinging sixties, the punk seventies, Britpop, the Diana years, and the social media age without once appearing to break into a sweat. In an era when every minor celebrity feels obliged to “share their truth,” she kept hers to herself and thereby became the last public figure whose silence carried weight. The nation, in its perverse way, loved her for it. We grumbled about the cost of the Civil List, we mocked the hats, we speculated endlessly about what she really thought of Tony Blair’s shirt-sleeves or Boris Johnson’s bicycle, and all the while she simply got on with being Elizabeth the Unflappable. It was, in its quiet way, heroic.

Her contribution to the national character was subtler still. She embodied a particular kind of Britishness that has since been declared obsolete: the belief that one’s highest duty is to keep the show on the road without drawing attention to the fact that the road is crumbling. She presided over the transformation of Britain from imperial power to middling European archipelago without ever sounding like a mourner at the funeral. The Commonwealth, that improbable club of former colonies who somehow decided they quite liked the old lady in the hat, was her personal triumph. She kept it going by the same method she used on everything else: showing up, smiling faintly, and refusing to acknowledge the awkwardness. When she danced with Nkrumah or chatted with Mugabe or welcomed the latest batch of prime ministers to Balmoral, she did so with the air of a woman who had seen worse and was not about to let it spoil the scones. It was, one suspects, the last time the British monarchy felt remotely necessary to anyone outside its own press office.

And then, of course, came the succession. Poor Charles. One feels almost sorry for him, which is the most damning thing one can say about a king. He had waited longer than any heir in history—decades of patient, slightly petulant preparation, writing letters to ministers, talking to plants, and designing buildings that looked like the offspring of a Victorian prison and a municipal swimming pool. At last, in 2022, the throne was his. The nation held its breath, expecting the seamless continuation of the Elizabethan style. What it got instead was a man who appeared to believe that the job description had changed to “activist monarch with strong opinions on organic farming and the built environment.” Where his mother had mastered the art of dignified silence, Charles seemed determined to fill every available silence with speeches. The result has been four years of slightly embarrassed national wincing.

It is not that he lacks qualities. He is, by all accounts, a well-meaning fellow who genuinely cares about the environment, architecture, and the spiritual health of the nation. The trouble is that caring visibly is precisely what the monarchy was never meant to do. Elizabeth’s genius was to make the institution feel eternal and slightly dull; Charles’s misfortune is to make it feel contemporary and slightly embarrassing. One pictures him at state banquets, earnestly discussing biodiversity with some bemused head of state while the footmen try not to roll their eyes. The coronation, that glorious piece of medieval pageantry, somehow managed to look both expensive and slightly apologetic. The public, having grown used to seventy years of glacial continuity, now finds itself with a monarch who appears to be auditioning for the role of national therapist. The Camilla question, long since resolved in the only way such questions ever are in royal circles—by sheer persistence—still hovers like an awkward guest who refuses to leave the party. The less said about the tampon phone call and the various other youthful indiscretions the better; they were, after all, the sort of thing that happens to princes who have too much time and not enough discretion. But they have left their mark. Where Elizabeth was the embodiment of restraint, Charles sometimes feels like the embodiment of having tried rather a little too hard.

One watches the current royal operation with the same melancholy fascination one reserves for a vintage car that has been handed over to an enthusiastic amateur mechanic. The engine still runs, but the suspension is shot and the paintwork is starting to flake. The younger generation—William and Kate, Harry and whoever is currently advising him—appear to be doing their best to modernise the brand, which is precisely the problem. Monarchy does not modernise; it endures. Elizabeth understood this in her bones. Charles, for all his undoubted sincerity, appears to believe it can be improved. The result is a reign that feels less like a continuation than a slightly awkward sequel with patchy special effects. The polls, those blunt instruments of public sentiment, suggest the monarchy remains popular enough, but the affection is no longer automatic. It has to be earned, and earning it requires precisely the sort of effort Elizabeth never bothered with. She simply was.

So on this, her hundredth birthday—celebrated in her absence with all the sincerity a grateful nation can muster—we are left with the uncomfortable realisation that the golden age of the British monarchy may have ended not with a revolution but with a perfectly pleasant, slightly bumbling transition. Elizabeth II did not save the institution; she made it irrelevant in the best possible way. Charles III, bless him, seems determined to make it relevant again, which may yet prove its undoing. One can almost hear her, somewhere in the great beyond, giving that small, dry cough of disapproval and murmuring, “One does hope they’re not overdoing it.” In the end, that was always her greatest gift: the ability to make the rest of us feel, however briefly, that we were the ones who were overdoing it. 

Happy birthday, Ma’am. The country misses you more than it quite knows how to say.

AUTHENTICITY VS AUTOCRATS: IN APPRECTIATION OF THE ANGRY VIDEO GAME NERD

In the grand tradition of governments that have long since forgotten what it means to govern rather than to manage perceptions, the United Kingdom’s present administration has decided, with all the solemnity of a focus-grouped epiphany, to launch its very own central YouTube channel. This, we are told, will serve as the single source of truth—featuring not the grey-suited ministers who actually run the show, but paid influencers and “everyday people with real voices.” The aim, according to Sky News, is to reach those pesky voters who have wandered off the reservation of traditional media and fallen into the clutches of conspiracy theorists and keyboard warriors. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief in Whitehall: at last, the plebs will be spoken to in the demotic tongue of the algorithm. Trendy and down wiv the kids, as the young people no longer say.

It is the sort of initiative that only an out-of-touch autocracy could devise while convincing itself it is being progressive. Here is the state, that lumbering, tax-funded behemoth, suddenly keen to cosplay as a content creator. Imagine it: civil servants in lanyards, briefed by consultants who charge more per hour than most families spend on groceries in a month, earnestly discussing “authentic engagement metrics” and “narrative resonance.” They will hire influencers—those glittering sprites of the attention economy—who will, one presumes, be carefully vetted to ensure their “real voices” do not stray too far from the departmental script. The channel will not, of course, be called the Ministry of Truth; that would be far too honest. Instead it will lurk behind some anodyne title like “UK Together” or “Real Voices, Real Britain,” the sort of branding that makes one long for the bluntness of Orwell. Control the information, as the wag on X put it, and you control the speech. And they said it was just a conspiracy theory. Ah, the delicious irony: yesterday’s paranoid fantasy is today’s government press release.

One cannot help but admire the sheer cheek of it. This is not communication; it is colonisation. The government, having watched its traditional platforms wither under the withering gaze of an electorate that prefers unscripted rants to polished soundbites, has decided the solution is to invade the very medium that exposed its shortcomings. It is as if the Vatican, alarmed by the success of TikTok theologians, had responded by commissioning a series of influencer cardinals to explain papal infallibility in bite-sized chunks with trending audio. The desperation is palpable. Labour under Keir Starmer has spent its time in office demonstrating that it can win an election but cannot, for the life of it, tell a story that anyone outside the Westminster bubble finds remotely compelling. Policies arrive not as grand visions but as focus-grouped press releases, each one more earnestly inoffensive than the last. So now they will try to be cool. They will be “relatable.” They will speak the language of the youth, or at least the language that consultants imagine the youth still speak. One pictures Starmer himself, that man of a thousand rehearsed expressions, attempting a cameo—perhaps a light-hearted skit about fiscal responsibility set to a viral sound. 

The mind recoils, and yet it will fail, as such ventures always do, for the simplest of reasons: it lacks authenticity. The phrase has become a cliché, I grant you, but only because it remains the one quality no amount of spin can manufacture. The government’s YouTube channel will be plastic in the way that a political smile is plastic—polished, symmetrical, and entirely without warmth. Its influencers will be chosen not for passion but for compliance. Its “everyday people” will be everyday in the way that a scripted vox pop is everyday: carefully diverse, impeccably on-message, and about as spontaneous as a tax return. Viewers, those cynical creatures who have spent years marinating in the unfiltered chaos of the actual internet, will smell the contrivance from the first frame. They will click away, muttering the modern equivalent of “bread and circuses”—except the bread is stale and the circuses are PowerPoint presentations.

How different, how gloriously, defiantly different, is the example set by James Rolfe, better known to the world as the Angry Video Game Nerd. This year marks twenty years since Rolfe launched his YouTube channel—first as the Angry Nintendo Nerd in 2006, later evolving into the full-throated AVGN we know and, if we are honest, occasionally wince at. Two decades of a man in a dirty white shirt and thick glasses sitting in what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, surrounded by cartridges and controllers, unleashing torrents of profanity at games that dared to disappoint him. The miracle is not that it has lasted; it is that it has never once felt like an act.

Rolfe is the genuine article, the platonic ideal of the authentic content creator in an age of synthetic personas. He did not set out to build an empire; he set out to vent. The rage is real—born not of market research but of a childhood spent loving games that frequently betrayed that love. When he screams at the E.T. cartridge or eviscerates some forgotten Nintendo disaster, there is no consultant in the background whispering about brand alignment. There is only the man, the game, and the unvarnished truth that most of us, deep down, recognise: some things are simply terrible, and pretending otherwise is for politicians and focus groups. Over twenty years he has resisted every temptation to soften, to rebrand, to chase the next trend. He has collaborated, yes—most notably with the equally irascible Mike Matei—but the core remains untouched. No sponsored segments hawking energy drinks. No sudden pivot to “positive content” for the algorithm. Just the Nerd, swearing at pixels, year after year, like a monk of the old school who refuses to update the liturgy for the streaming era.

It is impossible not to feel a surge of something like gratitude when one contemplates Rolfe’s career. In a world increasingly populated by avatars and AI-generated sincerity, here is a fellow who has remained stubbornly, gloriously himself. He has built an audience not by pandering but by refusing to pander. Millions have watched him not because he is “relatable” in the focus-group sense, but because he is real in the only sense that matters: he means what he says, even when what he says is unprintable. There is a lesson here for the mandarins of Whitehall, though one doubts they are capable of learning it. Authenticity cannot be commissioned. It cannot be briefed into existence by a cabinet minister keen to “show up where people are getting their news.” It is the product of obsession, of long nights spent alone with one’s craft, of a willingness to look ridiculous for the sake of something that feels true. Rolfe has never pretended to be anything other than a nerd with a grudge and a microphone. 

That, as it turns out, is enough, contrast this with Keir Starmer, the very model of the modern inauthentic. Here is a man who has spent his political life being whatever the moment requires: human rights lawyer, opposition leader, prime minister, and now, apparently, aspiring YouTube sensation. His every appearance feels like a performance in search of an audience that has already left the theatre. The suits are too well cut, the smiles too calibrated, the language too carefully triangulated between the focus groups of Islington and the red wall. He is plastic in the way that a museum exhibit of a politician is plastic—lifelike, yet somehow less alive than the waxwork. When his government announces a YouTube channel to counter “conspiracy theorists,” one cannot help but suspect the real target is anyone who notices the gap between promise and delivery. The channel will not persuade; it will only confirm what the public already senses: that this is a regime more interested in narrative control than in the messy, authentic business of governance.

So let us raise a glass—perhaps a slightly warm can of lager, in true AVGN spirit—to James Rolfe on his twentieth anniversary. May his rants continue, unfiltered and unrepentant. And let us watch, with the dry amusement of the connoisseur, as the government’s shiny new channel flops into irrelevance. For in the end, the internet remembers. It forgives many sins, but it never forgives the sin of being fake. The Angry Video Game Nerd has spent two decades proving that truth, however sweary, endures. The Ministry of Trendy Truths will learn the same lesson, only rather more quickly, and rather more humiliatingly. As Evelyn Waugh might have observed, with that characteristic blend of weariness and wit: the state, like the worst sort of dinner guest, has gatecrashed the party and is now trying to tell the jokes. The audience, one suspects, will be elsewhere—watching a man in a dirty shirt lose his mind at a Nintendo. And quite right too.

ANDY KERSHAW (1959 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Andy Kershaw, the broadcaster who spent a career dragging the British listening public by the ear into the sonic badlands of Tuareg rock and Haitian meringue, has died at 66. Cancer, displaying the sort of grim efficiency Kershaw himself once reserved for a 45-minute Malian guitar solo, finally achieved what successive BBC controllers could not: it turned the volume down.

Born in Littleborough in 1959, the sort of Lancashire town that made Rochdale look like Monte Carlo, Kershaw arrived with the fixed expression of a man who had just discovered Bob Dylan and intended to make it everybody else’s problem. He began as Billy Bragg’s driver and roadie, a role that combined heavy lifting with light diplomacy, before blagging his way onto The Old Grey Whistle Test. By 1985 he was co-presenting Live Aid on television, looking for all the world like a sixth-former who had wandered into the wrong studio and decided to stay. For fifteen years on Radio 1 he played records so obscure that even the needle seemed embarrassed. Listeners who tuned in for a quick fix of chart pop were instead treated to the musical equivalent of a gap-year sermon on global injustice. He called it world music. Critics called it punishment.

Later he reinvented himself as a foreign correspondent, filing from Rwanda during the genocide and Haiti during one of its more optimistic coups. In 97 countries he proved that a man with no off-switch could still find places where the off-switch had never been invented. His autobiography, the similarly-titled "No Off Switch", was less memoir than public health warning. The turbulent personal life that followed—two children with Juliette Banner, a brief but memorable entanglement with Carol Vorderman, and a 2007 spell in prison for violating a restraining order—was handled with the same cheerful candour he once applied to Senegalese trip-hop. He never pretended to be easy company.

Sacked by Radio 1 in 2000 to make way for yet another dance programme, Kershaw returned sporadically, still evangelising, still impossible. In the end he outlasted most of his playlists. The world music he championed is now everywhere, which is to say it has become background noise. Kershaw himself was never background. He was the interference that made the signal worth hearing.

THE GREAT HUNGARIAN FEINT: DID ORBAN CON THE EU?

When I filed my previous report on the Hungarian elections – that melancholy dispatch titled “The Fall of Hungary,” in which Viktor Orbán, after sixteen years of stubborn resistance, delivered the political equivalent of a pub darts defeat with the weary dignity of a man who knows the referee has been nobbled – I rather thought the story was over. Hungary had, at last, been brought to heel. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party had swept to a two-thirds majority, the EU’s collective bosom swelled with relief, and the usual suspects in Brussels, Davos, and the more expensive bits of Manhattan could be imagined cracking open the good champagne while murmuring about “European values” and “democratic renewal.” It all had the satisfying finality of a sandcastle succumbing to the tide.

Yet, as is so often the case with these continental dramas, the tide has a way of receding again, revealing not driftwood but the faint outline of a rather more elaborate sandcastle. A theory has been doing the rounds on the wilder fringes of social media – one so deliciously baroque that it demands, if not belief, then at least the sort of respectful attention one gives to a well-crafted conspiracy yarn. The suggestion, in essence, is that Orbán did not lose at all. He merely staged the most elegant handover in modern European politics: a controlled opposition so controlled that the opposition itself barely noticed it was being controlled at all.

The notion originates, as these things often do, from a single tweet that has acquired the quiet authority of a rumour whispered in the right cafés. Its author, observing the post-election landscape with the narrowed eye of a man who has seen too many Hungarian political operas, cannot shake the feeling that Orbán and Magyar have together given the EU – and all those other left-wing, green, woke worthies – the most comprehensive political kicking since the Treaty of Trianon. Orbán, the theory runs, spotted the trap early. The international commentariat had him in their sights; the NGOs were sharpening their spreadsheets; George Soros was, one assumes, already drafting another memo. So what does a wily Orbán do? He sends in his best friend. Péter Magyar, once Orbán’s own man, a former insider with the sort of credentials that make Brussels salivate, was despatched into the electoral lists like a Trojan horse wearing a very convincing centrist smile.

The beauty of the scheme, if scheme it was, lay in the arithmetic. Hungary’s left-wing opposition parties, those plucky little outfits that had spent years positioning themselves as the authentic voice of anti-Orbán resistance, all failed to clear the 5% threshold. Poof – gone. Vanished like so many well-meaning manifestos into the Budapest fog. What remained was a binary choice that was not, on closer inspection, binary at all: Orbán or Magyar. Or, to put it in the slightly more conspiratorial vernacular of the tweet, Orbán or Orbán. The only complication was linguistic. Nobody outside Hungary speaks Hungarian, least of all the people in Strasbourg whose job it is to understand these things. The EU, Soros, Obama, Clinton – they all swallowed the bait whole, convinced they had witnessed the long-overdue liberalisation of a stubborn little Central European redoubt. One can picture Hillary Clinton in some well-appointed drawing room, glass in hand, declaring the dawn of a new era while a Hungarian waiter, polishing the silver, permitted himself the tiniest inward smirk.

It is, of course, the sort of theory that sensible people are supposed to greet with a raised eyebrow and a pinch of salt the size of Lake Balaton. After all, the personal animus between Orbán and Magyar has been well documented: the former ally turned sworn enemy, the allegations of abuse of office, the very public falling-out that would have done credit to a Renaissance court. Hungarian voters, one is reliably informed by those who actually live there, loathe one another with a sincerity that no amount of backstage choreography could fake. And yet… there was Orbán’s concession speech. Not the furious howl of a man robbed of power, nor even the stoic growl of a defeated boxer. Just that quiet, unfussy acknowledgement – the verbal equivalent of shrugging off a coat and hanging it neatly on the hook. No claims of fraud, no midnight rants, no desperate appeals to the constitutional court. Just a man who has lost a game of darts down the pub, as I rather uncharitably put it last week, and is now buying the next round. One begins to wonder. Could it be that the grizzled holdout, who spent sixteen years blocking EU directives with the cheerful obstinacy of a man parking a tractor across a motorway, had calculated that the only way to preserve Hungarian sovereignty was to appear to surrender it? That by installing a successor who looks and sounds sufficiently Brussels-friendly, he could unlock the frozen funds, quiet the NGOs, and still keep the actual reins in reliable hands? It would be the political equivalent of the old Hungarian joke about the man who sells his soul to the devil and then discovers the devil is on his payroll.

The satisfaction one feels at the possibility – and let us be honest, it is only a possibility – is not, I hasten to add, the crude glee of seeing one’s own side win. It is the pleasure of watching the great and the good of the European project being taken for the sort of ride that usually requires a very large expense account and a rented yacht. For years they have lectured Budapest on “values,” on “solidarity,” on the moral imperative of opening borders to whoever happens to be passing with the right paperwork. Now, if the theory holds, they have been handed precisely the government they demanded – only to discover, too late, that it may not be quite the government they thought they were getting. The EU’s heart, as Ursula von der Leyen so memorably declared on election night, beats stronger tonight in Hungary. One wonders whether it is beating with triumph or with the first faint flutter of suspicion. 

Of course, one must take all this with the aforementioned pinch of salt. Hungarian politics has a habit of being more Shakespearean than conspiratorial; the personal hatreds are real, the policy overlaps fewer than the theorists would like. Magyar’s voters speak of hope and change with the same earnestness one once heard in Britain before the Brexit vote, and they will not take kindly to being told they were merely extras in someone else’s long game. Nor should we underestimate the genuine appetite for a fresh face after sixteen years of the same one. Politics, even in its most theatrical moments, is rarely pure puppetry.

And yet the image lingers: two men who once worked in the same political stable, now apparently on opposite sides, exchanging the sort of courteous congratulations that suggest the rivalry was, if not scripted, then at least performed with a certain professional courtesy. Orbán felicitating his successor without the usual grumbling about stolen elections. The left-wing parties conveniently evaporating below the threshold. The EU breathing a sigh of relief that sounds, on second hearing, suspiciously like the exhalation of a man who has just been relieved of his wallet. If it is a con, it is a magnificent one – the sort of slow-burn satire that Thomas Hobbes himself might have appreciated in his prime, watching the Brussels bureaucracy congratulate itself on its own cleverness while the Hungarians, with that quiet Central European cunning, simply changed the labels on the bottles. If it is not… well, then we are back where we started, watching another small nation fold itself neatly into the European consensus, complete with the usual helping of guilt, diversity targets, and the slow erosion of anything that once tasted distinctly of paprika and poetry.

Either way, Hungary remains a splendid spectacle. One only hopes the next act reveals whether the curtain came down on a tragedy or a particularly deadpan comedy. In the meantime, I shall be watching Budapest with the same mixture of affection and scepticism one reserves for an old friend who has just announced he is giving up drinking. It may be genuine. It may be tactical. But one rather suspects the hangover, when it comes, will be felt most acutely in Strasbourg.

MOYA BRENNAN (1952 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Moya Brennan, who has died at 73, was the voice that made Irish traditional music sound like the wind complaining in several languages at once. Born Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin in 1952 in the Donegal Gaeltacht, she emerged from a family so musical that their local pub, Leo’s Tavern, must have felt like a perpetual ceilidh with occasional licensing hours. As the eldest of nine, she helped form Clannad in 1970 with siblings and uncles, a group that took the ancient sorrows of Ireland and polished them until they gleamed just enough for the 1980s charts. 

Their breakthrough came with the theme to Harry’s Game, a brooding, Gaelic lament for the Troubles that somehow reached Top of the Pops—a feat roughly as likely as a Gregorian chant troubling the disco floor. Clannad sold millions, won Grammys and Baftas, and soundtracked everything from Robin of Sherwood to the misty longings of a generation that discovered Celtic mysticism via television. Moya’s harp and crystalline vocals became the signature: ethereal yet sturdy, like Donegal granite wrapped in silk. Her sister Enya later floated away on a cloud of multi-tracked serenity to even greater commercial heights, but Moya remained the anchor, the one who remembered the words in the old tongue. 

Solo work followed—albums under her own name, collaborations with Bono (who called her voice one of the greatest the human ear had experienced, a compliment so lavish it risked causing structural damage to modesty), Mick Jagger, and others. She collected an Emmy, a lifetime achievement award from Michael D Higgins, and the quiet satisfaction of never quite abandoning her roots. Diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2020, she carried on with the stoicism of someone who had spent decades making fog and rain sound romantic. Her final album appeared in 2024; Clannad’s farewell tour had already drawn the curtains in 2023. 

She died peacefully in Donegal, surrounded by family, on 13 April 2026. Tributes spoke of her generosity, her peaceable presence, and how she never forgot where she came from. In an industry fond of overblown mythologies, Moya Brennan was the genuine article: a woman whose voice suggested the Atlantic had learned to sing, albeit with a sardonic undertow. The mists will sound a little thinner now.

IRELAND'S DIESEL DEFIANCE

In the grey, sodden expanse of a Belfast bypass on an April morning that felt less like spring and more like a municipal reprimand from the weather gods, a procession of tractors moved at the pace of a funeral cortege for common sense. Green John Deeres and red Massey Fergusons, some trailing loaders and rollers like medieval siege engines repurposed for the 21st century, crawled along the Sydenham Bypass, bound for the vague direction of George Best Belfast City Airport. Behind them, a snarl of white vans, family hatchbacks and articulated lorries stretched into the misty distance, their drivers no doubt contemplating the existential void between the cost of diesel and the promise of net-zero nirvana. This was not some picturesque rural idyll captured for a tourism board; it was the Irish farmer, in all his diesel-scented glory, declaring that enough was, at long last, enough.

The post that captured it – terse, almost laconic in its understatement – nailed the mood with the precision of a well-aimed silage fork. “What the Irish skinsuit regime doesn’t realise,” it observed, “is that the farmers and hauliers increasingly have nothing left to lose. They’re already drowning under the fuel taxes. As things stand, their businesses are toast anyway, so they may as well protest with everything they’ve got.” One pictures the author typing this with the weary detachment of a man who has seen too many official pronouncements delivered in the tone of a headmaster explaining why the school hamster must be sacrificed for carbon neutrality. The “skinsuit regime” is a phrase of genius, evoking not merely suits but the sort of hollowed-out husks that once contained actual humans before the civil service and Brussels filled them with regulatory ectoplasm. These are the same functionaries who lecture us from heated offices about the virtues of public transport while the rest of us calculate whether the next tankful of fuel will require selling a kidney or simply the family silver.

Let us be clear, in the manner of a man clearing his throat before delivering an uncomfortable truth: the Irish farmer is no revolutionary firebrand with a manifesto and a beret. He is the last honest link in the food chain, the chap who gets up before the rest of us have remembered how to spell “latte,” who coaxes life from soil that has been taxed, subsidised, hectored and hectored again into reluctant obedience. For decades he has been the butt of every urban sophisticate’s joke – the slow-talking rustic whose tractor is worth more than his house and whose politics are presumed to stop at the parish pump. Yet here he is, not storming barricades but simply refusing to vanish quietly into the spreadsheet of some green technocrat’s five-year plan. The fuel taxes have done what centuries of invasion, famine and partition could not: they have pushed him to the point where protest is no longer a choice but a form of economic self-defence. When your margins are thinner than the average politician’s grasp of reality, and every litre of diesel is another brick in the wall between solvency and the food bank, then blocking a bypass becomes less an act of civil disobedience and more a statement of continued existence.

One cannot help but admire the sheer, unadorned pragmatism of it. The hauliers are in the same leaky boat, of course – those unsung heroes who keep the supermarket shelves from resembling the aftermath of a particularly enthusiastic student raid on the off-licence. They too have watched their costs balloon while the rewards shrink, all in the service of an energy policy that reads like it was drafted by someone who has never had to warm a barn in February. The European Union, that grand experiment in bureaucratic overreach, has spent years telling its member states (and the United Kingdom’s slightly embarrassed Northern appendage) that the future is electric, or hydrogen, or perhaps just a collective holding of breath until the wind blows in the right direction. Meanwhile, the farmer stares at the price board and wonders why the same officials who subsidise his neighbour’s solar panels cannot grasp that his tractor does not run on good intentions and a favourable exchange rate.

This is satire, yes, but the sort that writes itself. Imagine the scene in some Brussels conference room: earnest young graduates in ethically sourced knitwear debating “just transition” frameworks while outside, in the real world, a man in wellies is deciding whether to sell the herd or sell the farm. The skinsuit regime – whether in Stormont, Westminster or the European Parliament – specialises in such abstractions. It specialises, too, in failing to notice when the abstractions have begun to bite. The protesters are not asking for the moon; they are asking for the basic arithmetic of survival. Fuel taxes that treat diesel as a luxury good rather than the lifeblood of an island economy are not policy; they are a slow-motion mugging with added virtue-signalling.

And yet, from this muddy, rain-lashed standoff, one begins to sense the faint stirrings of something larger. These tractors are not merely clogging a bypass; they are the opening bars of a tune that has been playing, sotto voce, across these islands for some time. The farmers of Ireland – north and south, for the distinction grows increasingly academic when the price of red diesel is the same on both sides of an invisible line – have become the canary in the coalmine. Or perhaps the tractor in the bypass. Their protest is the visible symptom of a deeper malaise: the realisation that the people who grow the food, drive the lorries and pay the bills have been politely ignored for too long by those who dine out on the proceeds.

Here, then, is the hope – and it is a hope expressed without the usual frothy optimism of the true believer, but with the dry, sardonic satisfaction of a man watching the first crack appear in a particularly pompous dam. This Belfast convoy, modest as it appears, is the prelude to something grander: the forthcoming “Unite The Kingdom” rally, that gathering of the disaffected, the over-taxed and the thoroughly fed-up, which promises to do what polite petitions and focus groups have signally failed to achieve. One can already picture the scene: banners fluttering like laundry on a bad drying day, speakers who actually know the price of a pint and a packet of fags, and a crowd that includes not just farmers but teachers, nurses, small-business owners and the occasional retired colonel who has finally had enough of being told his generation ruined everything.

Should that rally deliver on its quiet promise – should it force the resignation of Keir Starmer and the entire Labour government, that curious coalition of metropolitan manners and provincial mismanagement – then the dominoes may at last begin to topple. Starmer’s administration, with its curious blend of fiscal incontinence and green zealotry, has managed the rare feat of alienating both the countryside and the corner shop. Its departure would not be mourned in the shires, nor, one suspects, in many a Belfast housing estate. From there, the contagion of common sense could spread, as it so often does when people remember that sovereignty is not an abstract noun but the right to decide whether your tractor can afford to leave the yard. And if the spirit takes hold across the continent – if the French gilets jaunes find common cause with the Dutch nitrogen farmers, if the Poles and the Hungarians decide that Brussels edicts taste better when served with a side of self-respect – then the European Union itself may finally achieve the dignified dissolution it has so long avoided. Not with fireworks or fanfare, but with the quiet, inexorable logic of a system that has forgotten its own founding principle: that people, not paperwork, are supposed to be in charge. 

The skinsuit regime would, of course, protest that this is all terribly regressive, terribly populist, terribly un-European. One can only reply, in the driest possible tone, that when the alternative is watching the continent’s breadbasket turn into a subsidized car park for wind turbines, a little populism may be the only sane response. The tractors will eventually move on. The bypass will clear. But the memory of that slow, deliberate crawl through the rain will linger – a reminder that when ordinary men and women conclude they have nothing left to lose, they tend to find a great deal to gain. The Irish farmer, bless his stubborn heart, has always known this. The rest of us are only now catching up.

THE FALL OF HUNGARY

In the grand theatre of European decline, where the scenery is forever being repainted in the confirmative beige of Brussels bureaucracy and the audience has long since nodded off into a complacent stupor, one small but stubborn spotlight has finally flickered out. Viktor Orbán, that grizzled Hungarian holdout who for sixteen years played the role of the last man in the EU parliament with his arms folded and his veto finger twitching, has conceded defeat. “I have lost the election,” he announced, with the air of a man who has just lost a game of darts down the pub. It is the sort of moment that calls not for tears, exactly—tears are for optimists—but for the drier, more sardonic mourning that Christopher Hitchens once reserved for the collapse of empires and the rise of television game shows. Hungary, it seems, has voted for progress. Which is to say, it has voted for the usual.

One pictures the scene in Budapest: the cafés still serving goulash with a side of defiant nationalism, the Parliament building glowing under floodlights like a wedding cake that has survived one too many ideological anniversaries. And then the concession speech, delivered with the weary dignity of a boxer who knows the referee has been paid off. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party—centre-right in the same way that a mildly reformed pickpocket is centre-honest—have secured their projected two-thirds majority. The man who once positioned himself as Orbán’s successor in all but name has instead inherited the keys to the kingdom and promptly handed them over to the very forces his predecessor spent a decade and a half fending off. It is the political equivalent of locking the fox in the henhouse and then congratulating the fox on its democratic mandate. The globalists, those tireless architects of a borderless utopia where every culture is equally welcome and therefore equally diluted, must be popping the champagne corks in their sleek offices overlooking the Place Luxembourg. Ursula von der Leyen, never one to miss a photo opportunity in the ruins, has already declared that “Europe’s heart beats stronger tonight in Hungary.” One wonders if she means the heart that pumps blood, or the one that merely circulates directives from Strasbourg.

For Hungary itself, the transformation will be swift and, one suspects, advertised as “enrichment.” Those migrant projects that Orbán kept locked in the bottom drawer since 2015—gathering dust alongside the EU’s more imaginative fantasies of compulsory relocation quotas—are now, presumably, being dusted off with the enthusiasm of a maiden aunt rediscovering her old recipe for cultural suicide pound cake. Population exchange, they used to call it in the more candid briefings; today it arrives gift-wrapped as “solidarity” and “diversity targets.” Budapest, that pearl of the Danube with its Habsburg grandeur and its stubborn refusal to become another Malmö, may soon find itself hosting the same vibrant street scenes that have made Paris and Berlin such delightful case studies in social cohesion. One can already imagine the tourists of 2035: arriving to photograph the Chain Bridge, only to discover that the folk costumes in the souvenir shops have been quietly replaced by a more inclusive range of keffiyehs and knock-off designer hijabs. Hungarian culture, that peculiar brew of paprika, poetry, and a healthy suspicion of outsiders, will not vanish overnight. It will simply be outvoted, out-bred, and out-manoeuvred until it becomes the charming relic that polite Europeans mention in the same nostalgic tone they once reserved for the dodo.

And what of the Hungarians themselves? The ordinary citizens who, until yesterday, could walk their streets without the nagging sense that their grandchildren might speak a different language at home. They have chosen the path of Western normalisation, which is to say they have chosen to become like everyone else: prosperous, guilt-ridden, and demographically doomed. The essayists of the future—those few who still bother with such quaint pursuits—will no doubt describe it as a triumph of the ballot box. In reality, it feels more like the quiet capitulation of a people who have grown tired of swimming against the current and have decided, with a shrug, to let the river carry them wherever it pleases. The river, of course, leads straight to the open borders and the demographic arithmetic that has already turned much of Western Europe into a polite experiment in reverse colonisation. One almost admires the efficiency: sixteen years of resistance undone in a single election cycle. It is the political version of building a magnificent sandcastle and then inviting the tide in for tea.

Nor is the damage confined to the cultural sphere. There is the small matter of the economy, that unglamorous but essential engine which once allowed Central Europe a sliver of independence. Under Orbán, Hungary had the temerity to block the more deranged EU sanctions packages and to treat the Ukrainian adventure with something approaching scepticism rather than the mandatory flag-waving hysteria. Now the brakes are off. The war machine in Kyiv—eternally hungry, eternally noble in the eyes of its Western patrons—will find the Hungarian treasury a newly compliant donor. Funds that might have repaired roads, schools, or pensions will instead be siphoned northward to prop up a conflict that shows every sign of becoming Europe’s forever war. Central European citizens, those sturdy burghers of the old Hapsburg and Ottoman fringes, will discover what their Western counterparts have known for years: that the price of being “good Europeans” is measured not only in cultural erosion but in the slow, grinding transfer of their wages into the bottomless pit of someone else’s battlefield. It is a form of economic vassalage dressed up as solidarity, and the humour in it is of the blackest sort—the sort that makes one laugh lest one weep.

This, then, is the victory for the forces of evil, if one may be permitted so unfashionable a phrase. Globalism has never announced itself with horns and pitchforks; it arrives instead with spreadsheets, NGOs, and the gentle insistence that resistance is both futile and rather gauche. It is the ideology that smiles while it erases you, that speaks of “human rights” while it engineers the replacement of one people with another, that lectures on democracy while it ensures that the only permissible outcome is convergence toward the same bland, borderless monoculture. Orbán’s outreach to Trump and Netanyahu—those desperate handshakes with the strongmen of the moment—proved, in the end, to be no shield. Selfies with the powerful, it turns out, do not immunise you against the electorate’s deeper appetites for illusion. The transatlanticists and the Israel enthusiasts among the European right have received their little shock; one hopes they enjoy it. It is the kind of irony Hitchens would have savoured: the right, forever convinced that a well-timed alliance with the powerful would save them, discovering too late that the powerful have their own calendars.

And so Hungary joins the club. Visit Budapest while it still retains its flavour, the advice runs—like a travelogue for a city on the brink of aesthetic euthanasia. In a few short years it may resemble Vienna or Berlin: polished, diverse, and spiritually vacant. It is, as the original post so aptly noted, both sad and a wake-up call. Though one fears the alarm has already been snoozed into irrelevance. The people, as ever, sleepwalk toward the precipice with the contented smile of those who have been told the drop is only a gentle slope. If there is any consolation in this downbeat tableau, it is that even in the midst of civilizational surrender, one may still observe the absurdity with a raised eyebrow and a dry martini. The forces of evil have won another round. They always do. The question is not whether the rest of us will wake up, but whether there will be anything left worth waking up to when we finally do.

YE SHALL NOT PASS

In the annals of British cultural self-sabotage, few episodes have achieved the exquisite absurdity of the Wireless Festival’s cancellation last week, in the spring of 2026. One pictures the promotional poster—Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, looming like a slightly deranged colossus in his trademark Yeezy camouflage, the festival dates emblazoned beneath him in optimistic sans-serif, the whole thing promising three days of urban glamour and overpriced cider in a London park. That photograph, that glossy promise of revenue and mild civic disorder, has now been quietly interred. The Home Office, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Mr West’s presence would not be “conducive to the public good,” and the promoters, having consulted every stakeholder short of the ghost of Enoch Powell, folded the tents and issued refunds. Millions lost, reputations dented, and the only thing left intact is the government’s reputation for moral fastidiousness of a peculiarly selective kind.

One ought to begin, as Clive James might have done, with a gentle, almost affectionate mockery of the man himself. Kanye West—or Ye, as he now prefers, like a Bond villain who has downsized his ego to a single syllable—is, let us admit, a walking compendium of eccentricities. His music, once a thrilling collision of soul samples and wounded bravado, has long since curdled into the sonic equivalent of a man shouting at clouds while wearing sunglasses indoors. The auto-tune that once masked technical shortcomings now sounds like a cry for help from a malfunctioning robot. His image? The oversized clothes that appear to have been designed by a committee of avant-garde toddlers who had just discovered felt-tip pens; the boots that look engineered for lunar exploration rather than the streets of Finsbury Park; the endless carousel of ex-wives, presidential campaigns, and tweets that read like the diary entries of a man who has mistaken his own reflection for the Second Coming. He is, in short, the sort of celebrity who makes one nostalgic for the days when rock stars merely wrecked hotel rooms instead of entire geopolitical alliances.

And yet, for all that soft ridicule, the cancellation feels less like justice than like a particularly British form of bureaucratic overreach dressed up as virtue. The man has said vile things—anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi-adjacent pronouncements that no civilised person should defend. One does not have to admire the chap to recognise that barring him from these shores on the strength of old interviews and social-media eruptions sets a precedent more ominous than any Yeezy sneaker. Music has always been the refuge of the difficult, the deranged, and the occasionally dangerous to know. We let Wagner be performed despite his views; we tolerated the Rolling Stones when they were peddling Satanism by the kilo. If the criterion is now that an artist’s opinions must pass a Home Office decency test before the amplifiers are switched on, we shall soon be left with a playlist consisting entirely of Ed Sheeran and the collected works of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts.

The real sting, of course, lies in the selectivity. While Ye was being politely escorted to the departure lounge, another act was not merely permitted but actively celebrated on these islands. Step forward Bob Vylan, the Ipswich punk-rap duo whose Glastonbury set last summer provided the sort of entertainment usually reserved for revolutionary tribunals. There they were, on the West Holts Stage, with the BBC cameras rolling live, leading thousands in chants of “Free, free Palestine” followed, for good measure, by the rather more pointed “Death, death to the IDF.” The Israel Defence Forces, in case the acronym needs spelling out, being the military of a nation with which Britain maintains cordial diplomatic relations. The BBC slapped on a warning label faster than you could say “public apology,” the Prime Minister himself described it as “appalling hate speech,” and the corporation later confessed it should have pulled the plug. Police investigated. No charges resulted. The festival carried on. Bob Vylan, far from being declared non-conducive to the public good, were allowed to finish their set, crowd-surf, and depart with their visas intact—at least until the Americans, in a rare display of transatlantic decisiveness, revoked theirs.

Here, then, is the true divisive figure in contemporary music: not the erratic American in his moon boots, but the home-grown duo whose idea of a sing-along is a direct call for the demise of a foreign army. Kanye’s sins, however grotesque, were largely confined to interviews, tweets, and the occasional album track that sounded like a cry for attention. Bob Vylan’s were performed live, on a major stage, broadcast to the nation, and met with the sort of institutional shrug that suggests certain forms of divisiveness are simply more fashionable than others. One is reminded of those Victorian moralists who could overlook a gentleman’s adultery provided he kept it within the right social circle. Today’s arbiters of public taste draw the line at Ye’s vintage antisemitism while extending the velvet rope to a chant that, in any other context, would have had the tabloids baying for deportation. The lost revenue from Wireless is, naturally, the least of it. What has been cancelled is not merely a festival but a certain idea of consistency. 

If the test is whether an artist’s words might incite hatred or division, then Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance—cheered by a crowd waving Palestinian flags while the BBC’s iPlayer viewers were treated to an on-screen health warning—ought to have triggered the same exclusion order. Instead, we have the spectacle of a government that can welcome individuals with far more troubling histories while drawing the line at a rapper who once wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt and called himself a genius. The photograph of that cancelled festival poster, with its promise of headliner glory, now stands as a small monument to selective outrage: a reminder that in contemporary Britain, the right to perform is not a question of artistic merit or even criminal record, but of whether your brand of provocation aligns with the prevailing political weather. One can almost hear the sigh of relief in the corridors of power. Another potential embarrassment averted, another awkward conversation with stakeholders avoided. Yet the public, ever contrary, may notice the pattern. 

Kanye West, for all his flaws, was at least a known quantity: a man whose eccentricities had been on public display for two decades. Bob Vylan’s chant was something sharper, something delivered in the moment, to a live audience, with the full weight of a festival stage behind it. If the Home Office truly fears division, it might start by applying the same standard to both. Until then, we are left with the melancholy spectacle of a festival poster that will never be hung, a photograph that has been cancelled not because the image was offensive, but because the man in it had the temerity to be unfashionably offensive in the wrong direction. In the great British tradition, we have once again chosen principle over pragmatism—provided, of course, that the principle is the one currently in vogue.