AND ON THAT BOMBSHELL …

One learned the news of Jeremy Clarkson’s prostate cancer diagnosis with the sort of resigned amusement that greets any minor reversal in the fortunes of a man who has spent decades reversing expensive German saloons into ditches for our entertainment. Here was the human equivalent of a V8 engine—loud, inefficient, gloriously unnecessary—being told by his own plumbing that it might, after all, have limits. The prostate, that most undignified of organs, had apparently decided to stage its own farmers’ protest. One pictures the offending gland, red-faced and tweed-clad, waving a placard that reads “No to Woke Waterworks.”

For years Clarkson has been the last unapologetic roar in a culture that prefers the polite electric hum of virtue. He has offended vegetarians, cyclists, Germans, the Welsh, the Scots, civil servants, Remainers, climate activists, and anyone who has ever uttered the phrase 'sustainable development goals' without laughing. Now his own body has joined the protestors. It is the ultimate Clarkson moment: even his internal organs have turned out to be reactionary.

The response from the usual quarters has been predictably exquisite. There were the ritual expressions of sympathy from people who have spent the previous decade wishing him dead in interestingly detailed ways on social media. One can almost hear the grinding of teeth behind the Hallmark-card condolences: “Thoughts with Jeremy and his family at this difficult time,” typed by hands that only yesterday were composing threads about how Clarkson’s very existence was a form of violence. Cancer, it seems, is the one thing capable of briefly silencing the baying of the online hounds—though not for long. Already one senses the hedged bets: yes, cancer is bad, but has he considered the carbon footprint of chemotherapy? Perhaps the NHS could treat him with thoughts and prayers generated by wind power.

This is where one must declare an interest, or at least an affection. I have always enjoyed Clarkson in the way one enjoys a particularly belligerent old pub bore who happens to be right about most things. He is not subtle. Subtlety is for people who write think-pieces about the semiotics of the flat white. Clarkson is the man who looks at an Alpine road and sees not an opportunity for quiet reflection on climate change but a chance to discover whether a Lamborghini can achieve flight. His genius—and it is a genius, however unfashionable—lies in understanding that most people secretly want to drive too fast, eat too much, and say the unsayable without first checking with Human Resources.

His farming programmes, those gentle masterpieces of curmudgeonry, revealed the man more truly than any of the motoring shows. Here was Clarkson discovering that agriculture is not a moral failing but an actual job performed by actual people who must contend with weather, bureaucracy, and the fact that half the population thinks food grows in Waitrose. One watched him struggle with sheep and subsidies and felt the warm glow of recognition: at last, a television personality prepared to admit that expertise might occasionally reside outside Islington.

The cancer diagnosis, like everything else in Clarkson’s life, will no doubt be turned to account. One awaits the inevitable Clarkson’s Cancer special with something approaching glee. There will be a track day at some unsuitable location involving chemotherapy patients in high-performance wheelchairs. There will be a monologue about how the NHS waiting list is longer than the M25 on a bank holiday. There will be an expensive bottle of something unsuitable drunk in defiance of medical advice, followed by a segment in which he attempts to race a prostate cancer awareness ribbon against a Bugatti. The man is incapable of solemnity, which is precisely why we need him.

Modern Britain has developed an almost erotic relationship with solemnity. We have solemnity about the climate, solemnity about identity, solemnity about pronouns, solemnity about everything except the things that actually matter. Into this festival of earnestness strode Clarkson, all six-foot-five of him, complaining that the coffee was cold and the car was German. He was never going to win awards from the Broadcasting Standards people. He was too busy winning the affection of people who still remember that entertainment should sometimes be entertaining.

There is a peculiar English pleasure in watching a man refuse to be improved. The therapeutic culture demands that we all become better versions of ourselves—more mindful, more sustainable, more in touch with our feelings. Clarkson’s response has always been to buy another Aston Martin and drive it through a river. Now the river has come to him, in the form of rogue cells with ideas above their station. One suspects he will treat the disease with the same mixture of irritation and dark humour he applies to everything else. “Not now, I’m trying to harvest beetroot,” he will mutter, before writing another column about how the NHS has all the organisational efficiency of a Top Gear production meeting.

The wider point, which the solemn ones will miss, is that Clarkson represents something increasingly rare: the right to be wrong in public. Not wrong in the sense of being mistaken about facts—though he has been that too, gloriously—but wrong in the sense of holding opinions that offend the prevailing consensus. In an age when deviation from the script can end careers, here was a man who treated the script as something to be used for kindling. That he did so while becoming enormously successful only compounded the offence. The chattering classes could forgive poverty; they could not forgive popularity achieved without their permission.

Cancer, of course, doesn’t care about any of this. It is the great equaliser, the ultimate reminder that biology has not read the Guardian. Even the mighty Clarkson, conqueror of caravans and critic of cycle lanes, must now contend with the frailty of meat. One hopes—fervently, if not solemnly—that he beats the bastard thing. Not because he is a saint (he isn’t) or because his views are correct on every point (they aren’t), but because a world without him would be marginally more boring, marginally more frightened of its own shadow.

In the meantime, one raises a glass—something full-blooded and inappropriate—to the man himself. May his prostate prove as stubborn as its owner. May his recovery be swift, his complaints loud, and his subsequent television output even more politically catastrophic than before. The forces of dullness have enough on their side already. They don’t need to claim this scalp too. Godspeed, you magnificent, impossible sod.

MAKERFIELD DRAGS BRITAIN INTO BURNHAM'S BODY BAG

In the damp, dispirited terraces of Makerfield, where the ghosts of pitheads still murmur grievances to the wind, one beheld last night a spectacle as quintessentially British as warm beer and cold feet: a by-election. 

Andy Burnham, that genial Mancunian mayor who styles himself the King of the North (a title one suspects he awarded after a particularly successful session with the focus groups), sauntered into Parliament with 24,927 votes—54.8% of the turnout, no less. Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon trailed some 9,231 votes behind, a result greeted in certain quarters with the sort of hollow cheer usually reserved for a football team that has avoided relegation by the skin of its teeth. Turnout, at a giddy 58.8%, represented the highest by-election participation since the days when Maggie was still terrifying the unions. One almost expected bunting. 

Yet beneath the modest statistical uplift lurks the true story of our benighted polity: voter apathy so profound it makes a Trappist monk look like a gossip. Thousands of of eligible souls simply could not be roused from their sofas, even with the prospect of sending a message to the Westminster circus. They stayed home, these noble abstainers, presumably to binge-watch box sets or contemplate the rising cost of central heating while muttering that “they’re all the same.” One feels a certain dry admiration for their consistency. At least they are reliably useless. 

This, dear reader, is where the Australian model beckons like a stern but fair-minded relative. Compulsory voting. Yes, the very notion sends shudders through the libertarian wing—those delicate flowers who prize their 'freedom' to do nothing above all else. But imagine it: every citizen frog-marched to the polling station under pain of a modest fine. The ballot boxes would overflow not merely with ticked boxes but with the glorious effluvia of a truly engaged electorate. Millions of comedic cocks and balls, exquisitely rendered in biro. Crude caricatures of party leaders. Shopping lists. The occasional heartfelt poem about the price of bread. Democracy, in short, laid gloriously bare. Far better this riot of vulgar self-expression than the silent, sullen void we currently endure. At least the nation would be heard, even if in the language of the urinal wall. 

The centre-right, meanwhile, continues its time-honoured tradition of self-immolation. Conservatives scraped a pitiful 997 votes. The right-wing vote, such as it is, splinters like a cheap wine glass at a wake: Reform here, some Restorationist splinter there, a few lonely Lib Dems wandering in the wilderness. One pictures a dozen well-meaning chaps in tweed arguing over doctrinal purity while Labour’s machine simply hoovers up the disaffected. It is less a political strategy than performance art for masochists. If the right wishes to win again, it might consider ceasing to treat electoral politics as an exercise in purist fragmentation. But old habits, like bad hangovers, die hard. 

And what of the victor? Burnham, the change candidate who promises—oh, how he promises—to be the final chance for Labour to alter course. The irony is thicker than a Wigan pie crust. Here is a man who has long positioned himself as the authentic voice of the North, the antidote to metropolitan slickness, the fellow who actually gets the post-industrial heartlands. Yet one suspects the change he delivers will be largely cosmetic: fresh slogans, perhaps a more northern accent in the dispatch box, but the same creaking machinery of high taxes, open borders, net zero zealotry, and cultural lectures from people who have never changed a fuse. No fundamental reckoning with the failures that produced Reform’s strong showing. No serious course correction. Just more of the same, served with a side order of regional pride. 

One watches the prospect of Prime Minister Burnham with the queasy fascination of a man observing an oncoming bus. The country, already wearied by one set of managerial progressives, may soon exchange them for another who knows the words to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The blind Labour voters—those tribal loyalists who would support a lamp-post if it carried the rose—will cheer. The apathetic will continue not voting. And the rest of us will be left pondering whether compulsory voting, cock-and-ball doodles and all, might at least force the polity into something resembling honest confrontation with itself. 

Makerfield has spoken, after a fashion. The question is whether anyone in Westminster is capable of listening through the fog of their own complacency. One rather doubts it. The circus rolls on.

THE PLUCKY PLUMBER & THE PROFESSIONAL DRIP

In the damp, dog-eared corners of British public life, where politics has long since traded the honest sweat of the workshop for the synthetic sheen of the focus group, one occasionally stumbles upon a figure so refreshingly unvarnished that he seems to have wandered in from an Ealing comedy that somehow survived the Blair era. Enter Robert Kenyon, plumber, Army Reservist, ex-NHS hand, and now Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election. A man who, according to his supporters, has already weathered the ritual scourging of modern democracy: those awkward social media posts from yesteryear, exhumed and brandished like medieval relics by the righteous. Cancel culture, they call it. More like the political equivalent of your mother finding your teenage diary and reading it aloud at Christmas.

One looks at Kenyon—rifle in hand in his reservist uniform, the very picture of a man who has fixed boilers and served Queen and country—and feels a pang of nostalgia for the species of politician that Britain once produced without thinking. The Mr Smith Goes to Westminster type: local, rooted, slightly rumpled, possessed of the dangerous notion that representing one’s neighbours might involve understanding how their drains work and what time the buses actually run. These were men (and occasionally women) who had done something before they did politics. They had calluses, not just position papers. They had met a payroll, or missed one. They knew the price of a pint and the weight of a grievance.

Alas, that sturdy breed has largely been culled. In its place we have the professional politician: smooth as a Teflon-coated conscience, fluent in the dialect of the think-tank, and about as connected to the daily realities of Makerfield as a management consultant is to the concept of honest toil. They glide from student union to special adviser to safe seat with the effortless grace of a ballroom dancer who has never had to worry about the electricity bill. Their idea of working-class authenticity is remembering to drop their aitches during the local radio interview.

And here lies the deeper irony, for while we in Britain lament the disappearance of the authentic local candidate, it has somehow become even harder to find one across the Atlantic. America, that great noisy republic once famed for sending farmers, shopkeepers, and the odd war hero to Washington, now finds itself largely governed by a different sort. The bored urban housewife who decamped to the countryside for 'the lifestyle' discovered that parish council seats were available, and decided public service would make an amusing hobby between Pilates and sourcing the right shade of Farrow & Ball for the guest cottage. One pictures her arriving at the town meeting with a reusable coffee cup and a sheaf of notes about 'community cohesion', while the local mechanic quietly wonders who will fix the potholes that have been swallowing his customers’ suspensions since the last ice age.

Britain has not quite sunk to that level of genteel amateurism, though we are trying our best. Our own version tends toward the career activist or the quangocrat who has spent decades being paid by the taxpayer to worry about the taxpayer. Andy Burnham, the opponent in this particular bout, is a polished specimen of the breed: telegenic, articulate, the sort of man who can deliver a soundbite about 'levelling up' without once betraying the suspicion that he knows what a spirit level actually looks like. He has the professional politician’s greatest gift: the ability to look deeply concerned about problems he helped create, or at the very least, failed to notice until the focus groups rang the alarm.

Against this backdrop, Robert Kenyon stands as a minor miracle of the sort that gives one cautious, qualified hope. Not because he is perfect—perfection in politics is usually the first warning sign of a coming tyranny—but because he is gloriously, defiantly imperfect in all the right ways. A man who has wrenched pipes and worn the uniform. Someone who might, just possibly, view a constituent’s complaint about housing or jobs through the prism of lived experience rather than the latest briefing paper from the Institute for Sounding Plausible. One hopes his working-class credentials prove more durable than the inevitable barrage of metropolitan sneers that will come his way. The commentariat will no doubt dismiss him as 'populist', that favourite slur of people who believe democracy should be restricted to those with the correct opinions and the right accent.

Whether the voters of Makerfield will choose the plumber over the professional remains to be seen. But in an age when politics has become a branch of performance art for the credentialed classes, the mere presence of a candidate who looks like he could unblock your sink while discussing defence procurement is something approaching revolutionary. It may not be Mr Smith Goes to Washington. But in today’s Britain, Mr Kenyon Goes to the By-Election feels like the closest thing we have to a plot worth following. One can only hope the audience still has the good sense to cheer for the man with the wrench rather than the man with the script.

STARMER'S DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP

In the grand tradition of British political theatre, where the appearance of doing something must always substitute for the substance of achieving anything, Sir Keir Starmer has alighted upon his masterstroke. With the quiet desperation of a man who has watched his poll numbers sink faster than a lead balloon at a children’s party, the Prime Minister has announced that the nation’s under-16s shall be banned from social media. Age verification, he assures us, will be rigorous. Facial scans, presumably. One pictures the scene: some spotty adolescent, hormones raging, forced to present his acne-ridden visage to the benevolent gaze of the state before being permitted to post a meme. The nanny state has rarely looked so literal, or so creepily intimate.

This is not governance; this is the reflex of the control freak who, having failed at every tangible responsibility of office, decides instead to police the daydreams of the young. While Britain’s housing stock moulders, while NHS waiting lists stretch into the next geological epoch, while schools limp along on goodwill and sellotape, and while the streets exhibit all the civic order of a particularly unambitious riot, Starmer has fixed his beady eye on the real enemy: TikTok. It is the sort of bold, decisive leadership that makes one wonder whether the man ever met a problem he couldn’t solve by inventing a new form of paperwork and a fresh layer of bureaucracy.

The timing, of course, is pure coincidence. The Makerfield by-election looms like an awkward family obligation, and what better way to distract the punters than by wrapping oneself in the flag of concerned parenthood? Starmer, that great moralist, has discovered that social media can be addictive and occasionally ghastly. One gasps at the originality. Next he will reveal, with furrowed brow and trembling voice, that chips contain calories and that rain is, on balance, somewhat wet. The consultation—over 100,000 responses, 90% of parents in favour—sounds impressive until one remembers that frightened parents will endorse almost any measure that promises to keep their offspring from becoming the next cautionary tale on the evening news. Politicians have always been adept at harvesting parental anxiety; Starmer merely does it with the added frisson of biometric data collection.

Let us be clear about the man. Keir Starmer is not a bumbling incompetent who means well. That would be forgivable, even endearing in a peculiarly British way. No, he is something rather nastier: a spiteful authoritarian with the soul of a middle-management enforcer who has finally reached the top floor. Having spent years presenting himself as the reasonable, suit-wearing antidote to the excesses of his predecessors, he now reveals the iron fist inside the Islington gauntlet. Ban this. Regulate that. Scan the faces of children because the state knows best. One half expects him to announce that teenagers will henceforth require a licence, countersigned by two responsible adults and a representative of the local constabulary, before being allowed to experience unmediated boredom.

The policy itself is a masterpiece of performative futility. Australia tried something similar; the results, like most Australian exports, have proven noisy but of mixed nutritional value. Social media does indeed harbour predators, pedlars of nonsense, and algorithms engineered by people who understand dopamine the way a medieval torturer understood joints. Yet the notion that the British state—currently incapable of deporting failed asylum seekers or keeping the trains roughly on time—will elegantly thread the needle between protection and surveillance is the sort of touching faith one usually associates with children or cult members. The same government that cannot house its citizens or heal its sick now proposes to become the final arbiter of what the young may see and say. The mind boggles at the sheer cheek of it.

There is, naturally, a deeper comedy here. Starmer’s Labour Party, once the tribune of the working class, has become the party of the lecturer, the diversity officer, and the anxious metropolitan parent who wants the state to perform the parenting they find too exhausting. The working-class child in a post-industrial town, already failed by schools that teach everything except how to read, will now be shielded from the algorithmic wasteland by facial recognition software administered by the same people who turned those schools into therapeutic playgrounds. It would be satire if it were not already policy.

One admires the sheer brass neck required to stand before a nation groaning under the weight of Labour’s failures and declare that the urgent priority is banning Jimmy from scrolling. It is as though a doctor, having botched the surgery, lost the patient’s notes, and set fire to the waiting room, should then gravely inform the relatives that the real problem was the patient’s choice of reading material. The sheer spite of it: when your record on housing, health, education, and public order lies in ruins, attack the one area where private enterprise has undeniably created problems—and do so in a manner that expands state power. Authoritarianism dressed as compassion is the oldest trick in the progressive wardrobe, but Starmer wears it with the self-satisfaction of a man who believes his own press releases.

Future historians, thumbing through the records of this unhappy period, will pause at Starmer’s digital crusade and recognise it for what it was: not leadership, but displacement activity by a man who discovered that actually running the country was rather harder than criticising those who tried. In the meantime, the rest of us are left to contemplate the exquisite irony of an administration that cannot secure the borders or the balance sheets now proposing to secure the smartphones of the young. One almost pities the man. Almost. But then one remembers the facial scans, the by-election timing, and the unctuous certainty, and pity evaporates like dew under the withering gaze of reality.

Keir Starmer: saviour of the nation’s timelines, scourge of the nation’s problems. A dictator for our times, not with jackboots but with login screens and a pious expression. God save us from men who know what is best for other people’s children.

ROGER COOK (1943 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Roger Cook, the Antipodean inquisitor who turned the doorstep into a theatre of ritual humiliation, has filed his final report at the age of 83, peacefully, which must have come as something of a surprise to a man who spent half his working life being punched, kicked, bitten by dogs and occasionally hospitalised by people who preferred their secrets unminced. 

Born in Auckland in 1943 and raised in Australia, Cook arrived in Britain in the late Sixties with the air of a man who had already decided that the world was full of villains and that it was his job to introduce them to the concept of accountability, usually at close range with a microphone. He invented the doorstep interview the way other people invent excuses: it just seemed the natural thing to do. Where lesser reporters sent letters or waited for press releases, Cook preferred the ambush, preferably with cameras rolling and a film crew trying not to trip over their own ethical qualms. 

The Cook Report, which ran for sixteen series and attracted audiences of up to twelve million, was less current affairs than medieval morality play with better lighting. Villains, con-men, protection racketeers, baby-traders and the occasional Balkan war criminal were lured into the open, only to discover that the small, determined New Zealander in the leisure shirt was not there to exchange pleasantries. Cook took his bruises like medals. Broken ribs, dog attacks, the occasional threat to his life—he collected them the way other men collect wine. One almost expected him to produce a vintage fracture and offer tasting notes. 

His genius lay in making the pursuit of justice look like an extreme sport. Other journalists might expose corruption; Cook preferred to ring the doorbell and ask the corrupt gentleman why he was such a swine, ideally while the gentleman’s neighbours were watching. It was tabloid in method, Reithian in intent, and endlessly watchable. He won a BAFTA special award for a quarter-century of outstanding investigative reporting, an honour that probably felt inadequate to a man who had once been hospitalised nearly thirty times in the name of public service broadcasting. 

In private he was, by all accounts, rather more civilised than the average episode of his programme suggested. He leaves a wife, Frances, a daughter, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that a generation of journalists grew up thinking that real reporting involved getting shouted at in several languages while trying not to drop the recording equipment.

ROY HATTERSLEY (1932 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Roy Hattersley, that indomitable pillar of the Labour Party who spent decades polishing his credentials as the thinking man’s Yorkshireman, finally shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 93, proving that even the most durable political lard can eventually melt. Born in Sheffield in 1932 into the sort of solid Labour household that regarded socialism as both birthright and hobby, young Roy ascended the greasy pole with the unhurried certainty of a man who had already composed his own footnotes. 

As MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook for more than three decades, Shadow Cabinet stalwart, and Deputy Leader under Neil Kinnock from 1983 to 1992, Hattersley embodied the respectable face of the soft left—or was it the hard centre? Even he seemed occasionally unsure. He railed against Militant with the righteous fury of a man who knew a good purge when he saw one, yet retained enough old-fashioned eloquence to make one wonder whether he secretly preferred the sound of his own voice to the prospect of electoral victory. In the great struggle to make Labour electable, he played the reliable second fiddle, sawing away gamely while the orchestra tuned up for Tony Blair’s more ambitious concerto. 

Television, that merciless leveller, granted him two immortal cameos. On Spitting Image, his puppet became a glorious fountain of expectoration, lisping and spraying with every sibilant in a performance so vivid that Hattersley himself graciously conceded it put the 'spit' into the programme. One almost felt the latex version had more expressive range. Then came the sublime Have I Got News for You moment in 1993 when, having cancelled for the third time, he was replaced by a tub of lard credited as The Rt Hon. Tubson of Lardon MP. It was, the producers noted with forensic deadpan, “liable to give much the same performance and imbued with many of the same qualities.” The lard, along with Paul Merton, won. Politics rarely produces so perfect an epitaph. 

Away from the Commons he churned out more than twenty books—biographies, histories, memoirs—like a one-man municipal library with opinions. A journalist, broadcaster, and Sheffield Wednesday loyalist to the end, he combined pomposity and self-deprecation in proportions that kept him just the right side of insufferable. In an age of slick soundbites, Hattersley remained defiantly prolix, a reminder that politics once rewarded men who could talk at length without quite saying very much. He is survived by his second wife and a legacy that, like the famous tub, sits there solidly: substantial, slightly ridiculous, and oddly impossible to ignore.

DAVID HOCKNEY (1937 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

David Hockney, who has finally downed his brushes at the age of 88, spent a long lifetime proving that provincial origins were no barrier to swimming in the shallow end of international glamour. Born in Bradford in 1937, he emerged from the woolly north like a splash of primary colour in a sepia photograph, destined to make the art world look at itself in the mirror and wonder why it had bothered getting dressed. 

Hockney’s early work announced him as one of the brighter sparks of British Pop Art, though he was always too interested in actual draughtsmanship to be mistaken for a mere ironist. While others were busy silkscreening soup cans, he painted boys, swimming pools, and the occasional double portrait that suggested domesticity might be tolerable if the lighting was right. A Bigger Splash (1967) captured the essence of Californian hedonism: all surface, no regret, the perfect metaphor for a man who understood that life, like acrylic paint, looks better when it dries quickly. He decamped to Los Angeles in the Sixties and stayed long enough to make the place seem almost cultured, commuting between palm trees and the damp moors of Yorkshire with the cheerful inconsistency of a man who refused to be pinned down by geography or critical theory. 

His portraits were mercilessly accurate without ever quite becoming cruel, a rare achievement in an age when most figurative painters were either sentimental or sneering. He drew his mother with the tender exasperation of a son who knows exactly how many times she has asked about the central heating. Later, he embraced technology with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a retiree discovering emojis, producing iPad drawings that somehow made the tablet look like a serious artistic tool rather than an expensive distraction. The art market, never slow to recognise a living legend with a decent PR sense, rewarded him handsomely: Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) fetched $90 million in 2018, proving that even in late capitalism, a well-placed diving board retains its value. 

Hockney chain-smoked, wore loud jackets, and maintained the air of a mildly amused provincial who had somehow conquered the world without ever quite believing it mattered. He designed opera sets, argued about perspective with the ghosts of the Renaissance, and painted vast Yorkshire landscapes that made the English countryside look almost as vivid as his Californian fantasies. Through it all he retained the air of a man who had gate-crashed the party of modernism and decided to rearrange the furniture.

In an era of conceptual fog and performative despair, Hockney simply kept looking and kept painting. The results were frequently beautiful, occasionally repetitive, and never boring. He leaves behind a body of work that suggests pleasure is not the enemy of seriousness, and that even the most sophisticated eye might occasionally enjoy a decent view. The art world, which he both charmed and quietly mocked, will miss him more than it cares to admit.

THE DOCTOR WILL HEAR YOU NOW

Doctor Who has been vanishing and reappearing with the reliability of a cheap magic trick since 1963, usually just as the public has begun to forget why it ever cared. The latest pause—announced with all the solemnity of a BBC press release that promised a Christmas special in 2026 while the rest of the calendar yawns emptily—is merely the show doing what it does best: taking a breather so that someone, somewhere, can work out what on Earth it is supposed to be this time. In its absence, the heavy lifting will once again fall to the unsung heroes of the medium that dare not speak its full name on television: audio drama. Specifically, Big Finish Productions, that modest outfit which has been quietly producing more Doctor Who than the BBC itself for a quarter of a century. 

It is a situation rich in irony, the sort that would have delighted the more melancholy sort of Time Lord. While the Corporation frets over ratings, Disney partnerships, showrunners, and the eternal question of whether the sonic screwdriver has become too silly, a company operating out of a few rooms in Hampshire has been getting on with the job of telling proper stories. They have done so with the full participation of almost every actor who has ever worn the scarf, the question mark jumper, or the leather jacket. Tom Baker, still sounding as if he has just swallowed a particularly mischievous planet, continues to record. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann have all kept the flame alive with a diligence that borders on the heroic. Even the newer incarnations such as Tennant, Whittaker and Eccleston have dipped in, proving that the call of the TARDIS is stronger than any television contract. 

The sardonic observer might note that this is precisely what one should have expected. Television Doctor Who has always been at its most fragile when it tries to be important. Big Finish, by contrast, has the luxury of not mattering in the eyes of the wider world. No focus groups, no international co-production notes, no anxious executives wondering if the latest monster will play in Peoria. Just writers, actors, and a sound booth. The result is often gloriously free. You can have a four-hour epic about the consequences of a single temporal paradox without worrying about the budget for exploding spaceships. You can explore the moral ambiguities of the Doctor’s lifestyle in ways that would make a family audience shift uncomfortably on the sofa. And, crucially, you can let the performers act.

There is something almost indecent about how good some of these audio performances are. Listen to McGann’s Eighth Doctor, that beautiful, doomed romantic, and you realise what a waste it was that his television movie never quite worked. Or hear Nicola Bryant’s Peri finally given material worthy of her considerable gifts rather than the shrieking that television occasionally reduced her to. The chemistry between old companions and new threats crackles in the dark in a way that no amount of CGI can replicate. Your imagination, that cheapest and most powerful of special effects departments, does the rest. One begins to suspect that the best Doctor Who has always been the one that leaves room for the listener to fill in the gaps. 

This is not to say that Big Finish is flawless. Like any long-running series, it has its share of duds—stories that sound as if they were written during a particularly slow afternoon on the bus. But even the weaker entries possess a certain honest charm. They are not pretending to be the Next Big Cultural Event. They are simply getting on with it, month after month, year after year, like a reliable provincial repertory company that somehow keeps attracting the best talent. Compare this to the television version’s periodic nervous breakdowns, when it tries to reinvent itself with the desperation of a fading celebrity. 

The revival has had its moments, to be sure, but one senses the strain: the need to be diverse, relevant, mythic, funny, scary, and emotionally devastating, often in the same forty-five minutes. Big Finish can do all those things too, but it spreads them out. It has the luxury of time. A box set can build a world over several hours. A single story can afford to be quiet. The best of them—The Chimes of Midnight, Spare Parts, The Natural History of Fear, to name a few classics—achieve a depth that television, with its terror of losing the remote-control surfer, rarely risks. And then there is the sheer volume. Guinness World Records has already acknowledged the achievement: the longest-running science fiction audio drama series, with hundreds upon hundreds of stories. While the BBC debates whether to make another series or simply show old episodes with new introductions, Big Finish keeps producing. The First Doctor rubs shoulders with the Eighth. The Sixth gets redemption arcs that television never quite managed. New companions arrive, old ones return, and the universe keeps expanding in your headphones. It is less a cottage industry than a quiet empire.

Here is where the sardonic humour meets cold practicality. If you have not yet begun collecting Big Finish, the time has come to develop a mild but manageable addiction. Not because it is your cultural duty—perish the thought—but because the alternative is to sit around waiting for television to remember what it is for. Life is short, and the gaps between Doctor Who seasons have a habit of stretching like a particularly vindictive time corridor. Start with the obvious: the Eighth Doctor adventures if you loved McGann’s brief flicker on screen. Move on to the Fourth Doctor box sets, where Tom Baker’s voice alone is worth the price of admission; it is like having a favourite eccentric uncle tell you bedtime stories about cosmic horror. Sample the lost adventures of the earlier Doctors, lovingly reconstructed with the original actors where possible. And do not neglect the Companions series, which often give the supporting players their best material in decades.

The beauty of it is that these stories improve with repetition. Unlike a television episode you can binge in a weekend and forget by Monday, a good Big Finish audio rewards careful listening. You notice the layering of sound design, the precision of the performances, the way a seemingly throwaway line in Part One pays off devastatingly in Part Four. They are, in the best sense, literature for the ears. One should, of course, approach the enterprise with a certain wry detachment. Collecting audio dramas in the twenty-first century has the faint air of eccentricity, like maintaining a collection of wax cylinders or insisting on listening to the wireless. But that is rather the point. In an age when everything screams for your visual attention, there is something quietly rebellious about closing your eyes and letting the mind’s eye do the work. The Doctor, after all, has always been at his best when slightly out of step with the prevailing fashions.

So stock up. Assemble your range as one might a collection of single malt whisky: not for immediate consumption, but for the long, cold nights when the BBC has once again misplaced its sense of wonder. Let the shelves groan under the weight of those distinctive covers. When the next television revival arrives—trumpeted with all the usual fanfare and inevitable slight disappointment—you will be able to greet it with the calm superiority of one who has not been idle in the interim. You will have been travelling, you see. While others waited, you were already out there in the vortex, having adventures. Big Finish will keep the TARDIS flying through the long nights. 

The least we can do is go along for the ride. After all, in the words of a wiser head than most television executives, the universe is a big place. Best not to explore it empty-handed. Or, in this case, empty-eared.

BELFAST'S NEW (IMPORTED) TROUBLES

Northern Ireland, that small but densely packed laboratory of grievance, has spent the better part of three decades in the 1970s and beyond, testing the proposition that men with strong tribal loyalties and ready access to explosives might, under the right conditions, learn to live together. The Troubles, as they were euphemistically called—rather as one might describe a mild case of food poisoning that lasts twenty-five years—left thousands dead, entire districts scarred, and a peace process that required the sort of patient diplomacy usually reserved for a farmer trying to evict New Age Travellers off his land with nothing more than a shepherd's crook and wishful thinking. 

And yet, here we are in 2026, on Kinnaird Avenue in north Belfast, where a man was set upon with a knife in what onlookers described, with the sort of understatement the Irish have perfected, as an attempt to saw off his head. Bystanders intervened; one suspect was arrested; the victim was hospitalised with serious injuries. The cordons went up, the cameras clicked, and the usual rituals of official concern were observed. All very familiar. Only this time, the accents and the grievances were not the old, comforting, almost folkloric ones of Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Republican. Something newer had been imported, and with it, a different flavour of barbarism. 

One pictures the scene with a certain dry inevitability. The police tape fluttering like bunting at a particularly grim fête. The forensic officers in their white suits, picking over the debris of yet another evening that failed to live up to multicultural expectations. The post that drew attention to this unhappy affair put the matter with commendable bluntness: after decades spent coaxing a fragile peace from the wreckage of the Troubles, why import an 'alien culture' into Belfast? It is the sort of question one is not supposed to ask in polite society, lest one be accused of noticing things. Governments, after all, have their reasons. They speak in the lofty language of enrichment, diversity, and the demographic refreshment that ageing European populations apparently require. What they mean, of course, is that someone must do the jobs that natives find tedious, pay the taxes that sustain generous welfare states, and—crucially—vote in ways that keep the current managerial class in office. The cultural consequences are treated as minor footnotes, to be managed by community liaison officers and stern editorials in the Guardian.

Northern Ireland, however, has form when it comes to footnotes that explode. For all the ink spilled on the sectarian divide, the province developed, over time, a certain grim expertise in managing its own divisions. The paramilitaries knew one another; the security forces knew the paramilitaries; everyone knew the rules of the game, however bloody. There was, beneath the horror, a perverse sort of local knowledge. The new arrivals arrive with no such shared history. They bring their own codes, their own conceptions of honour, their own enthusiastic interpretations of ancient texts that recommend vigorous use of the blade against the unbeliever. The result is not dialogue. It is not fusion cuisine and street festivals. It is a man on the pavement in north Belfast having his head worked on with a knife. 

Here the satirist’s temptation is almost irresistible. One imagines the policy meetings in some brightly lit Whitehall office, where earnest young graduates with first-class degrees in PPE and second-class degrees in reality sat around declaring that what post-Troubles Belfast really needed was a fresh injection of cultural vibrancy. Perhaps a few honour-based violence workshops. Maybe some workshops on female genital mutilation awareness, to balance the books. The Troubles, after all, were terribly white. How provincial. How lacking in global perspective. What better way to broaden horizons than to introduce practices honed in rather warmer climes, where the rule of law has a more flexible relationship with scripture?

And yet, for all the knowing smirks one might direct at such folly, there is a deeper irony at work—one that even the most jaded observer might find almost touching. For all that Northern Ireland endured in the 1970s, mass, unlimited third-world immigration may yet prove the issue that finally unites the Irish people ideologically, if not politically or geographically. Protestant and Catholic, north and south, Unionist and Nationalist: suddenly they find themselves staring at the same phenomenon. Not the old enemy across the border or across the street, but something imported from afar, alien in custom, expectation, and temperament. The very diversity that was meant to dilute old hatreds has, in a twist worthy of the blackest comedy, provided a new focus for a shared recognition: this is not working.

One can already hear the spluttering from the usual quarters. How dare you reduce complex migration patterns to crude generalisations? As if the spectacle of repeated attempts at impromptu surgery with a kitchen knife were merely a matter of statistical outliers. As if the reluctance of certain communities to integrate were a myth invented by tabloid editors rather than a daily observable fact on the streets of London, Malmö, Paris, and now, apparently, Belfast. The Irish, of all people, with their long memory of invasion, famine, and cultural erosion, might have been expected to spot the pattern. Instead, many embraced the rhetoric of open borders with the enthusiasm of converts to a new and fashionable faith—only to discover that the new faithful do not always return the compliment.

There is something almost poetic in this development, the grand narrative of European self-effacement reaching its absurd conclusion in a province that once specialised in absurd conclusions. The peace process, painstakingly assembled like a fragile piece of modernist sculpture, risks being knocked over not by the old tribal cudgels but by the newer, sharper implements of an imported intolerance. And the people who once divided themselves so meticulously over whether to salute the Queen or sing Amhrán na bhFiann may yet discover that, when it comes to basic questions of physical security and cultural continuity, they have more in common than the bureaucrats ever allowed.

Whether this unity will express itself in any coherent political form remains to be seen. Geography and history still weigh heavily; the border is still there, the old slogans still echo. But ideology is a subtler thing. It moves in the realm of recognition—what people know in their bones, even if they dare not say it aloud at dinner parties. In that realm, the knife on Kinnaird Avenue has spoken more eloquently than any diversity consultant ever could.

One can only hope the lesson is absorbed before more cordons go up and more victims go down. Because peace, once lost, is devilishly hard to regain. Ask anyone who lived through the 1970s. Or, better still, ask the man who very nearly lost his head trying to enjoy a quiet Monday evening in Belfast.

STARMER FALLS OFF HIS SILICON HORSE

In the great tradition of British political leadership, one occasionally encounters a figure so perfectly suited to the role of national disappointment that it seems almost cruel to mock him. Almost. Then one remembers that this particular specimen, Keir Starmer, has appointed himself the nation’s nanny-in-chief, determined to shield the youth of Britain from the terrible peril of TikTok while leaving them perfectly free to inherit his own masterclass in mediocrity. One pictures the man now: that permanently startled expression, like a provincial solicitor who has just discovered his filing cabinet has been infested with something progressive, peering out from behind the curtains of Downing Street as if the electorate might at any moment storm the gates demanding actual governance. Instead, they receive a social-media ban. How very Starmer. How very, pathetically, him.
Let us be clear from the outset. This is not the action of a serious statesman weighing evidence and public mood. This is the reflexive spasm of a weak-willed authoritarian who has spent his adult life confusing the removal of civil liberties with moral seriousness. Starmer, that hollow man with the face of a disappointed supply teacher and the political instincts of a weather vane in a hurricane, has reversed himself yet again. Two years ago he was dismissing the very idea of age-appropriate smartphone edicts. Now, with the polls sagging like his own jowls on a Monday morning, he is suddenly the valiant protector of the nation’s teenagers from the horrors of short-form video. One wonders what particular blend of focus-group despair and parental sob-story finally penetrated that thick skull of his. Probably the same blend that convinced him Brexit was both a good idea and a bad idea simultaneously, depending on which way the wind was blowing through Islington.
The timing, of course, is exquisite in its cynicism. Days before a by-election, with the vultures already circling his leadership, Sir Keir decides his legacy shall be the state telling parents they are too stupid to manage their own children’s screen time. This from a man whose own offspring, one gathers, navigated the digital world without apparent catastrophe. But then consistency was never Starmer’s strong suit. The fellow flip-flops with such elegant regularity that one half-expects him to announce a ban on political consistency itself, lest some dangerous principle take root in the Labour Party.
What a pathetic creature he is, when you look at him squarely. There he stands, the very picture of out-of-touch bewilderment: a knight of the realm who achieved his highest office by promising everything to everyone and then looking wounded when reality proved uncooperative. His idea of bold leadership is to ban the very platforms where the public mocks him most effectively. One can almost hear the internal monologue in that nasal, lawyerly whine: “The people are saying mean things about me on the internet. Quick, pass a law. Make it look caring. Something about the children. The children are always a winner.” Never mind that the evidence for such a sweeping prohibition is about as robust as Starmer’s spine. Correlation, hysteria, and a handful of tragic anecdotes dressed up as causation will do nicely when one’s primary concern is not truth but the desperate preservation of one’s own floundering authority.
Here is a man who rose to prominence by presenting himself as a decent, moderate sort—only to reveal, in office, the soul of a minor bureaucrat convinced that every social ill can be solved by tighter regulation and a sufficiently stern expression. Social media makes teenagers anxious? Ban it. Never mind the evidence that suggests the causal link is, at best, tenuous. Never mind that previous moral panics over everything from penny dreadfuls to video nasties eventually looked ridiculous. Never mind, above all, that British parents might just be capable of exercising judgment without the Prime Minister inserting his clammy handshake into their domestic arrangements.
No, Starmer knows better. Starmer, who looks as though he has never had an original or dangerous thought in his life, has decided the nation requires his personal intervention to prevent the young from encountering unapproved opinions, unflattering memes, or—God forbid—laughter at his expense. One imagines him in the small hours, pacing Number 10 in his sensible slippers, muttering about 'harmful content' while ignoring the rather larger harm inflicted on a nation's personal liberty by his own government’s incompetence. The economy stutters, the borders leak, the public services groan, and the Prime Minister’s big idea is to stop sixteen-year-olds from doom-scrolling. Magnificent. The ship is listing badly, the captain is rearranging the deckchairs on his phone, and the passengers are to be denied access to the shipping forecasts.
This is authoritarianism for the terminally timid. The sort of man who needs facial recognition technology and age-verification schemes to feel safe in his own skin. The sort of man who believes the state should play the role of disappointed parent to an entire generation because he himself lacks the courage to address genuine problems. Starmer does not lead; he manages decline with the anxious fastidiousness of a man who has never quite recovered from being mildly unpopular at school. His entire bearing screams “please don’t shout at me.” Unfortunately for him, the British public has rather a lot to shout about, and the louder they shout on X and elsewhere, the more frantically he reaches for the off-switch.
The unintended consequences, naturally, will be vast and hilarious. Teenagers, being teenagers, will circumvent the ban with the effortless ingenuity that Starmer himself so conspicuously lacks. The law will be mocked, evaded, and ultimately discredited—teaching the young an excellent lesson in the futility of official edicts, if nothing else. Meanwhile, the real issues—family breakdown, educational failure, a culture that has lost confidence in itself—will remain untouched by this pathetic gesture. But never mind all that. Sir Keir will have his legacy: the man who tried to save Britain’s youth from Instagram while presiding over their inheritance of a diminished nation.
One almost feels sorry for the fellow. Almost. Then one remembers the expression on his face whenever he is required to answer a difficult question—the slight pursing of the lips, the hunted look in the eyes, the air of a man who wishes the whole business of democracy could be conducted via pre-approved talking points and a reliable majority. This is not leadership. This is the last refuge of a political nonentity who has run out of ideas and is now reduced to banning other people’s ideas instead.
In the end, Keir Starmer’s social-media panic reveals him perfectly: a hollow, authoritarian lightweight, terrified of public opinion, contemptuous of parental autonomy, and utterly adrift in a country that increasingly sees him for what he is—a temporary embarrassment with delusions of moral grandeur. The teenagers will be fine. It is the adults who inflicted this man upon them who should be seeking therapy. Preferably offline.

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE" (2026)

One approaches a new Masters of the Universe film with the wary optimism of a man entering a revival meeting who has already been saved once, in 1987, and remembers the collection plate. Travis Knight’s version arrives clad in $170–200 million of shiny new armour, yet somehow contrives to look like the most expensively produced meme yet committed to celluloid.

The casting, one must concede, is mostly splendid. Nicholas Galitzine makes a perfectly serviceable Prince Adam/He-Man: broad of shoulder, square of jaw, and possessed of that slightly bewildered sincerity required when one is obliged to deliver the line “I have the power” without audible inverted commas. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is the sort of baroque, eye-rolling villainy that keeps supporting actors in caviar; one half-expects him to demand a close-up on his exposed cranium. Idris Elba brings gravitas to Man-At-Arms as if he had wandered in from a better film, while the supporting Heroic Warriors are competently represented by a roster of faces one is vaguely pleased to see again. In short, the players do what they can with the material, which is rather more than the material does with them.

Knight directs with a certain visual brio; the action sequences, particularly the set-pieces around Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain, possess a chunky, Saturday-morning-cartoon grandeur that occasionally approaches the sublime. When He-Man swings that power sword, the screen knows it has been swung. And then there is the contribution of Brian May, who has lent his guitar to Daniel Pemberton’s score. One feels the spirit of Flash Gordon nodding approvingly from the asteroid belt. When those familiar riffs crash in over a climactic battle, one is briefly transported to a purer, more innocent age of heroic nonsense. For these mercies we should be grateful.

Yet the film’s virtues are repeatedly undone by its desperate need to be liked. The humour is pure Marvel house style: quippy, self-referential, and fatally convinced of its own adorableness. One half-expects Rocket Raccoon to wander through demanding a share of the royalties. The pacing lurches like a man trying to dance at two weddings simultaneously - one on Eternia, one in a focus-grouped boardroom. And the nostalgic tone is ladled on with the subtlety of Skeletor’s Havoc Staff. The nadir arrives when the film itself stages the dreaded “Hey, ey, yeah, what’s going on?” meme, complete with dancing supporting cast. At this point one realises the picture is not merely winking at the audience; it is doing that awful modern thing of elbowing them repeatedly in the ribs while shouting “Do you get it? Do you ?, Do you get it?”. 

Compare this, unfavourably if you will, to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. Those pictures understood that the secret to making cosmic absurdity work is not to apologise for it but to commit. They balanced sarcasm with sincerity. Knight’s Masters cannot decide whether it wants to be a knowing pastiche or a sincere myth, and so ends up achieving neither. It is the cinematic equivalent of a man wearing a vintage He-Man T-shirt under an ironic Hawaiian shirt.

Even more damning is the comparison with the much-derided 1987 Cannon film. That picture was low-budget, cheesy, and corny, yes. But it had the courage of its own ridiculous convictions. It took itself relatively seriously, drew on the darker undertones of the original MOTU mini-comics, and memorably gave us Frank Langella’s towering, Shakespearean Skeletor - a performance of such lip-smacking grandeur that one almost believed the character might actually conquer the universe if only the special effects budget would allow. Langella understood that the only way to play a skull-faced tyrant is as if he were Richard III with better lighting. The new film’s Skeletor, for all Leto’s scenery-chewing, feels like a supporting act in his own origin story.

Then there is the inevitable messaging about toxic masculinity—a weary hangover from the 2023 Barbie film, as if every children’s property must now submit to the same corporate sensitivity seminar. He-Man, once the unapologetic beefcake saviour of Eternia, is now obliged to deliver lectures on emotional intelligence between sword fights. One almost longs for the days when the greatest ideological threat was simply having 'the power.'

In the end, this new Masters of the Universe is perfectly competent corporate entertainment: loud, colourful, intermittently thrilling, and hollow at the core. For He-Man and his friends to be taken seriously as a modern retro property, it must first take itself more seriously. Irony is easy. Earnestness, properly handled, is revolutionary. By the power of Grayskull, perhaps next time they will remember. 

ANTHONY HEAD (1954 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Anthony Head, that unflappable purveyor of tweedy gravitas and instant-coffee seduction, has finally staked his last demon at the age of 71. Or perhaps he simply stepped through a hellmouth for one last research trip. Either way, British television lost its most reliably unruffled uncle figure, the man who could make demonic apocalypses feel like overdue library fines.

Head’s career was a masterclass in quiet competence dressed up as mild eccentricity. To a generation raised on American teen drama, he was Rupert Giles, the Watcher in Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a librarian who fought evil with obscure texts, sarcastic asides, and the occasional reluctant sword. Where lesser performers might have camped up the role, Head played it with the bone-dry exasperation of a man who had seen the end of the world and still worried about filing. He brought Oxbridge gravitas to a show that cheerfully mixed Valley Girl slang with ancient Sumerian prophecies, proving that a well-timed “dear lord” could deflate even the most operatic forces of darkness.

Later he popped up in Doctor Who (having lost out on the role of the Doctor himself to Paul McGann in 1996) as the sort of authority figure who made Time Lords seem vaguely irresponsible by comparison. Then came Ted Lasso, where he embodied the genteel English foil to American optimism with such precision that you half-expected him to apologise to the football for any inconvenience caused by being kicked.

Yet for all these cultured accomplishments, Head’s most culturally indelible performance may have been in those interminable 1980s Nescafé Gold Blend advertisements. There he smouldered across the fence at his neighbour with the brooding intensity of a man advertising not merely coffee, but sophisticated continental longing. If his character was as smooth, rich, and devastatingly handsome as the product he was flogging, one wonders why it required five long years—and several million jarred pauses—for him finally to get his leg over. Romance in advertising moved at the pace of a particularly cautious kettle.

Head never quite became a household name in the Hollywood sense, which suited him. He was too intelligent, too wry, too fundamentally English to surrender to the louder demands of stardom. In an age of screaming superheroes and franchise fatigue, he represented something rarer: the quiet dignity of simply turning up, glasses slightly askew, ready to catalogue the end times. The world is a touch less civilised without him.

RETURN OF THE RACK

In the long, flickering pageant of human folly that we dignify with the name of fashion, few spectacles have offered quite so much inadvertent comedy as the recent decades’ campaign to persuade us that the female form reaches its aesthetic zenith somewhere around the dimensions of a particularly undernourished gazelle. One grew used to the sight of young women striding down catwalks like elegant coat hangers, their chests as flat as the collective conscience of the industry that employed them. “Body positivity,” they called it, though the positivity seemed strangely selective. It celebrated every contour except the ones that had launched a thousand ships, or at least a respectable flotilla of calendars, since the Bronze Age. 

Enter Penny Lane - British, thirty-one, and possessing of the sort of gravity-defying proportions that make one suspect God has been reading old National Geographics and decided to have another go at the Venus de Milo, this time with arms and a sense of humour. Her appearance at the 2026 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit runway show during Miami Swim Week has, according to the excitable denizens of the internet, “ended the era of celebrating ‘mid’ models.” One hesitates to declare any cultural shift definitively over; these things have a habit of twitching like roadkill. Yet there is something undeniably refreshing, even quietly revolutionary, about the moment. 

What makes Lane’s triumph worth a longer essay than the usual froth of Instagram captions is not merely the optics—though the optics, one must admit, are formidable. It is the manner of the victory. This is no cringing concession to the male gaze, that spectral entity blamed for everything from war to the decline of the West. Quite the reverse. Lane’s story, for those who have followed it, carries the distinct tang of defiance. The modelling industry, in its infinite wisdom and love of occupational anorexia, once suggested she might like to lose weight and perhaps consider a breast reduction. One pictures the meeting: some pinched creative director waving a tape measure like a papal bull, explaining that 32GG was, aesthetically speaking, surplus to requirements. Lane, to her eternal credit, told them where they could file their unsolicited surgical advice. 

Here, then, is the sardonic pleasure of the spectacle. After years of lectures about how true empowerment lay in minimising, flattening, and apologising for secondary sexual characteristics—lest some passing gentleman experience an unauthorised thought—we witness a woman simply owning the full architectural splendour of her inheritance. The bountiful bosom returns not as a desperate sop to leering construction workers, but as an act of proprietorship. These are her breasts, thank you very much. They have been hiked, swum with, photographed in Botswana and Switzerland, and paraded down a Miami catwalk with the serene confidence of a duchess inspecting her estates. If they happen to draw the eye, that is the eye’s business, not hers. She is not dressing for the cheap seats; she is occupying them.

One savours the irony. The same cultural apparatus that spent the best part of a decade insisting that all bodies were beautiful—except, apparently, the ones that looked like classical sculpture with better tailoring—now finds itself confronted by a model who is beautiful in the most unfashionably obvious way, and who achieved it without issuing a single manifesto about decolonising the décolletage. There is something almost Austenian in the quiet subversion. While others were busy redefining beauty downwards, Lane simply refused to be edited. The result is less rebellion than restoration: a reminder that the female form, in its more generous manifestations, has always been a source of power, not merely an object of appetite. Cleopatra did not conquer with boyish hips. Titian’s women were not hiring personal trainers to shed their Rubens.

Of course, the puritans will mutter. They always do. Some will detect the dread hand of patriarchy in any appreciation of curves that cannot be hidden beneath an oversized hoodie. Others, more sophisticated, will lament the return of 'objectification,' as though a woman confidently inhabiting her own skin is somehow more objectified than one airbrushed into androgynous abstraction. Both miss the point with a precision that would be admirable were it not so predictable. What Lane represents is not a regression but a refusal. A refusal to let other people’s neuroses dictate the terms of her physicality. A refusal to treat her body as a public works project requiring constant ideological renovation. In short, a very British insistence on minding her own spectacular business.

The photographs from Miami, circulating like samizdat literature among the culturally starved, capture something beyond mere physical allure. There is poise, certainly. There is the easy athleticism of a woman who treats her body as a capable partner rather than an enemy to be starved into submission. But above all there is ownership. These are not assets deployed for approval. They are facts, presented without fanfare or apology. In an age of performative fragility, the effect is bracing, almost shocking. One half expects a health-and-safety officer to rush the stage demanding hazard tape and a trigger warning.

The era of the mid, if indeed it is ending, departs without much mourning. In its place we glimpse something older, more honest, and—dare one say it—more interesting: women deciding for themselves what parts of their anatomy they wish to celebrate, and doing so without first consulting the focus groups of ideology. Penny Lane has not brought back the big, beautiful, bouncing bosom. She has simply reminded us that it was never hers to surrender in the first place. The rest of us, male and female alike, are merely fortunate spectators at the restoration. Pass the sunscreen. The future looks rather well-endowed.

YOUNG, BRITISH, AND INVISIBLE

In the grand tradition of British official inquiries, which have long specialised in discovering that the obvious is illusory and the painful truth is merely a matter of perspective, Alan Milburn has delivered his interim thoughts on the vexed question of why so many of our young people are neither working, nor learning, nor, one suspects, terribly bothered about either. The report, with all the solemnity of a minor prophet announcing mild weather, declares that there is simply no evidence linking the arrival of millions of low-skilled migrants with the stubborn refusal of native youth to fill entry-level jobs. Instead, the fault lies, as it so often does in these enlightened times, with the young themselves, their schools, their health, the welfare system, post-pandemic ennui, and a mysterious shortage of starter positions that no one can quite explain. 

One pictures Milburn at his desk, pen poised like a surgeon's scalpel, delicately excising the awkward statistical tumour that is the Centre for Social Justice's analysis of HMRC payroll data. For while the report wrings its hands over nearly a million NEETs—costing the nation a cool £125 billion a year, or roughly the annual defence budget multiplied by existential despair—the CSJ notes something rather more indelicate: since 2020, the number of non-EU migrants under 25 on UK payrolls has surged by 355 per cent. Young British nationals? A risible increase of just 11,000. Twenty-seven migrants hired for every one local youngster. In the hospitality sector, in retail, in those humble supermarkets where the British teenager once learned the ancient art of stacking shelves and resenting customers, the new face of British entry-level labour speaks with accents from rather further afield. 

This, we are assured, is coincidence. Correlation, that tiresome pedant, has once again failed to prove causation. One might as well observe that rain frequently follows the appearance of umbrellas and conclude that brollies cause precipitation. The young Briton, apparently, suffers from a complex interplay of mental health issues, inadequate training, and a welfare system that makes idleness more appealing than the minimum wage. The migrant, by contrast, displays a touching eagerness for zero-hours contracts and night shifts in warehouses—jobs, we are delicately given to understand, that our own youth find beneath them. Or perhaps they simply lack the requisite "work readiness." Employers, poor lambs, report that native applicants require more hand-holding than their imported counterparts. One wonders whether this has anything to do with the latter's urgent need to justify their presence and send remittances home, but such vulgar economic realities are best left to the accountants.

The Milburn document performs a rhetorical feat of which only seasoned New Labour hands are capable: it acknowledges a crisis of biblical proportions—one in eight young people NEET now, potentially one in six soon—while politely declining to notice the elephant not merely in the room but tap-dancing across the welfare budget. Mass low-skilled migration, we learn, is not a factor. Indeed, the expected future decline in net migration might even present an "opportunity" for British youth to fill the resulting vacancies. This is rather like a doctor telling a patient with a broken leg that the good news is the cast will come off eventually, provided no one else uses the crutches in the meantime. 

One must admire the intellectual dexterity required. Supermarket checkouts across the land swarm with first-generation arrivals performing tasks of no great technical complexity. Are these roles, then, suddenly requiring advanced degrees in applied logistics? Or is it simply that the new arrivals will work the awkward hours, accept the conditions, and display fewer expectations of a career path that does not involve eternal shelf-stacking? The left's traditional defence—that migrants take the jobs "Brits won't do"—has always carried a faint whiff of the Victorian workhouse overseer complaining that the lower orders lack moral fibre. Now it is dressed up in the language of systemic failure and generational fault lines.

The satire writes itself, as satire so often does when reality grows sufficiently absurd. Here we have a nation that once prided itself on sturdy yeoman stock and industrious apprenticeships, now reduced to importing its shelf-stackers from across the globe while its own young languish in a "hopeless Catch-22" of no experience, no opportunities, and no apparent incentive to acquire either. Meanwhile, the political class maintains the solemn fiction that none of this has anything to do with the deliberate expansion of the labour pool at the bottom end—a policy that conveniently supplies both cheaper workers for business and a more "vibrant" (read: less cohesive) society for the multiculturalists. Everyone wins, except the people who actually live here.

The Milburn report, for all its charts and concerned prose, ultimately offers the same comforting narrative Labour has peddled for years: the problem is complex, structural, and requires more intervention, better funding, and deeper understanding. What it does not require, apparently, is any serious reckoning with the most visible change in the British labour market since the millennium. To notice that would be indelicate. It would suggest that policy has consequences. It might even imply that the emperor's new diversity is rather scantily clad.

In the end, one is left with the image of British youth staring through the plate-glass windows of their local Tesco at the cheerful activity within, while officials inside explain, with exquisite politeness, that the issue is not the composition of the workforce but the character of those outside. The gaslighting continues, steady and relentless, delivered with the smooth assurance of men who have never had to choose between Universal Credit and the night shift. The young, meanwhile, are left to contemplate a future in which the entry-level rung on the ladder has been quietly occupied by others, and the official explanation is that they simply weren't reaching high enough.

One can only applaud the ingenuity. In a country once famous for its common sense, we have achieved the rare distinction of making mass youth unemployment into a problem of personal development. The migrants keep coming, the NEET figures keep rising, and the reports keep landing with all the force of a feather duster on a marble floor. Business as usual, in other words. God save the King, and pass the clipboard.