NEIL SEDAKA (1939 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

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

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

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

ROB GRANT (1955 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OF SHOVELS AND SOCIALISM …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JESSE JACKSON (1941 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

ROBERT DUVALL (1931 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Robert Duvall, the actor who spent seven decades convincing audiences that a man could be both granite-faced and profoundly human, has died at the age of ninety-five. He passed away peacefully at his farm in Virginia, reportedly after a final, perfectly delivered line to his doctor: “I’m not done yet.” The doctor, perhaps wisely, disagreed. Duvall never looked like a movie star, which was the point. While Hollywood busied itself manufacturing pretty boys with the emotional range of a parking meter, Duvall arrived looking as though he had been carved from the side of a mountain and then taught to speak in complete sentences. 

He could play a Mafia consigliere with the calm of a man ordering coffee (The Godfather), a surf-obsessed colonel who loved the smell of napalm in the morning (Apocalypse Now), or a broken-down country singer who finds redemption in a motel room (Tender Mercies), for which he finally collected the Oscar that had been hiding from him since 1972. Each time, he did it without once raising his voice above a murmur or resorting to the histrionics that lesser actors mistake for depth. Critics called him 'authentic.' Duvall, who served in the US Army and studied at the Neighbourhood Playhouse with people who took Stanislavski seriously, probably filed the compliment under 'obvious.' 

He did not do glamour; glamour would have been embarrassed in his presence. He did truth, or at least the version of it that could survive on a film set without being laughed off the screen. Off-screen, he married four times, the last union—to the luminous Argentine actress Luciana Pedraza—lasted longer than most Hollywood studios. They tangoed together in Buenos Aires, which must have been a sight: the sternest face in American cinema gliding across a floor as if he had been born wearing patent leather shoes instead of cowboy boots. One suspects the tango suited him; it is, after all, a dance that rewards restraint and impeccable timing.

Duvall outlasted nearly everyone he started with. Brando went mad, Nicholson went cartoon, Pacino started shouting for no reason. Duvall simply kept turning up, quieter and better, in everything from Lonesome Dove to Days of Thunder and Falling Down, reminding younger actors that acting is not about volume but about listening. In an industry that mistakes noise for significance, his silence was revolutionary. He is survived by his wife, a great many horses, and a body of work that will not date because it was never fashionable in the first place. Somewhere, Tom Hagen is still advising caution, Colonel Kilgore is still waiting for the wind to change, and Mac Sledge is still singing about broken hearts and second chances. Robert Duvall has left the stage, but the smell of napalm lingers on.

PADDINGTON, PINTS & PATRIOTISM: IN APPREICATION OF HIROSHI SUZUKI

In an age when British politicians treat the United Kingdom as little more than a departure lounge for the next international summit, it is refreshing—nay, borderline miraculous—to encounter a diplomat who actually seems to enjoy being here. Hiroshi Suzuki, Japan’s Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, has achieved something that eludes most of our native leaders: he has fallen in love with Britain, and he is not ashamed to show it. 

While Sir Keir Starmer racks up air miles at a rate that would make a budget airline blush—forty foreign jaunts in barely eighteen months, with Beijing, Shanghai, and the inevitable COP circus still fresh on the itinerary—Mr Suzuki is to be found in a Glasgow pub, raising a pint of Tennent’s and declaring, with the earnest delight of a man who means it, that he is having “a wee swally.” One watches the clip, filmed mere days ago before he cheered on Celtic’s Japanese contingent against Livingston, and feels a pang of something suspiciously like national pride. Or perhaps it is just embarrassment that a visiting Japanese diplomat appears more at home in Scotland than our own Prime Minister does in the entirety of the British Isles.

Mr Suzuki’s enthusiasm is not the calculated bonhomie of the professional charmer. It is the real thing, the sort that cannot be faked without looking faintly ridiculous. He has been coming to Britain since the 1990s, long before it occurred to anyone that he might one day represent his Emperor here, and the affection shows. Where others might dutifully sample a fish supper out of diplomatic obligation and then hurry back to the embassy for a restorative cup of green tea, Suzuki dives in with the abandon of a man who has waited decades for the privilege. Boddington’s in Manchester: “gorgeous.” A full English breakfast: cause for wide-eyed rapture. Haggis, neeps and tatties in some Glasgow establishment only yesterday: presumably another triumph, though one awaits the inevitable video with the resigned pleasure of a nation that has found, in a Japanese diplomat, its most persuasive tourist board.

This is not mere performance. Suzuki travels with a stuffed Paddington Bear—yes, really—as a prop for his social media posts, a gesture so disarmingly whimsical that it would look contrived on anyone else. On him, it works, because the delight is palpable. He attends Celtic matches, tours landmarks he describes as “amazing,” and posts clips of himself mastering regional dialects with the solemn concentration of a scholar deciphering ancient scrolls. The British public, starved of uncomplicated enthusiasm from its own leaders, laps it up. Newspapers that normally reserve their praise for visiting rock stars or retiring footballers now proclaim him the most popular ambassador Britain has ever had. One suspects even the French ambassador is quietly seething with envy.

Meanwhile, back at Downing Street—or rather, somewhere above the Atlantic—Sir Keir Starmer pursues the higher calling of global statesmanship. One understands the necessity, of course. There are trade deals to be chased, climate pledges to be reiterated, and photographs to be taken shaking hands with presidents who may or may not still be in office by teatime. Yet there is something touching about the Prime Minister’s apparent conviction that the cost-of-living crisis at home can be solved by yet another trip to Brasilia or Beijing. One pictures him boarding the government jet with the weary determination of a man who has realised that the only way to escape the latest polling catastrophe is to put several thousand miles between himself and the electorate. “Never Here Keir,” the wags call him, and the nickname sticks because it contains an uncomfortable truth: the Labour government, having promised to fix Britain, seems keener to admire it from a safe distance.

It is not that foreign travel is inherently suspect. Diplomacy requires it, and Britain’s place in the world demands a certain amount of globe-trotting. But there is a difference between necessary engagement and compulsive absenteeism. Starmer’s predecessors at least pretended to enjoy the odd domestic photo-op—Blair grinning beside a pint, Cameron hugging huskies, Johnson brandishing a kipper. The current incumbent gives the impression of a man who views the United Kingdom primarily as a launchpad for more important destinations. When he does touch down briefly, it is to deliver a speech reminding us that his latest summit will, in some mysterious way, put money back in our pockets. One awaits the evidence with the same patience one reserves for the arrival of fusion power.

Suzuki, by contrast, practises a form of diplomacy so old-fashioned it feels revolutionary: he turns up. He stays. He drinks the beer, eats the food, learns the phrases, and posts the evidence with the guileless joy of a tourist who has stumbled upon paradise. In doing so, he achieves what armies of spin doctors and trade envoys cannot: he makes Britain look appealing again, not as a reluctant participant in global forums, but as a place where a cultured Japanese gentleman can find happiness in a pint of lager and a football match. Soft power, we are often told, is the art of attraction rather than coercion. Suzuki understands this instinctively. Our own government, one suspects, has read the memo but filed it under “pending.”

There is, of course, a gentle irony in all this. Japan, a nation not exactly renowned for extrovert exuberance, sends us an ambassador who embraces British pub culture with the zeal of a convert. Britain, meanwhile, elects a government that seems to view the domestic scene with the mild apprehension of a vegan invited to a barbecue. One does not wish to overstate the case—Suzuki is, after all, paid to be charming, and Starmer is paid to govern a fractious G7 economy through turbulent times. Yet the contrast is instructive. In an era when political leadership increasingly resembles a perpetual airborne seminar, there is something profoundly grounding about a diplomat who would rather be in a Glasgow boozer than a Brussels briefing room.

Perhaps we should knight him. Or make him Poet Laureate. Or simply leave him alone to continue his one-man campaign to remind us what we have. Hiroshi Suzuki, with his Paddington Bear and his unfeigned delight in our eccentricities, has become an unlikely national treasure. Long may he remain among us, raising a glass to the gorgeous, the amazing, and the occasionally incomprehensible pleasures of British life. One rather suspects he will still be here long after the Prime Minister’s jet has taxied off to the next indispensable summit. And when that happens, the rest of us will know exactly where to find him: in a pub, somewhere between the Tennent’s and the tatties, having the time of his life.

ANTI-VALENTINE'S DAY RANT 2026: THE MYTH OF THE "SOULMATE"

Ah, Valentine's Day – that glittering commercialised shrine to human delusion where we persuade ourselves that, amid the teeming billions of inadequates, there lurks a single flawless specimen destined to mend the unpatchable rents in our souls. Plato started the rot, of course, with his fanciful yarn about Zeus bisecting us like overripe melons because we were getting above ourselves. Ever since, we've been stumbling about, four-limbed and half-witted, in search of the missing piece that will finally make us whole. 

A touching thought, if you can overlook the implication that we're all, by divine decree, incomplete wrecks. History, never slow to pile on the misery, refined the torment. Medieval troubadours turned it into courtly love – knights mooning over unattainable ladies, proving their devotion through exquisite self-denial. Lancelot and Guinevere: a template for every doomed affair since. Shakespeare added cosmic cruelty with his star-crossed lovers, fated to adore each other while the universe conspires to keep them apart. And then Hollywood arrived, peddling the fairy-tale ending where passion conquers all, provided the lighting is soft and the soundtrack swells at the right moment. Science, bless its cold, dispassionate heart, has finally weighed in to confirm what any honest observer already suspected: the whole edifice is a house of cards built on wishful thinking.

Take the psychologists. One traces our modern obsession back to those chivalric tales that first insisted we pick one person and stick to them for life – a notion that apparently arrived just as industrialisation was ripping communities apart and leaving individuals lonely, alienated, and desperate for a saviour in human form. Enter dating apps, the apotheosis of relation-shopping: swipe through dozens, hundreds, thousands of profiles until the soul itself goes numb. You're not searching for love; you're auditing inventory. Another academic draws a helpful distinction between the soulmate (pre-fabricated, effortless, handed down by destiny) and the "one and only" (something two people cobble together through years of adaptation, apology, and occasional dental damage). The soulmate fantasy, he warns, is a trap. Believe in it, and the first serious row prompts the inevitable thought: if this were meant to be, it wouldn't hurt so much. Better to bail out and resume the search for the real thing – which, naturally, doesn't exist.

Then there are the love coaches who point out that the electric "spark" so often mistaken for destiny is frequently just trauma in a party dress. That intoxicating push-pull, the hot-and-cold routine that keeps you hooked? Your nervous system recognising a familiar wound and gamely trying to reopen it. The strongest attachments, apparently, form not with consistent partners but with those who alternate charm and cruelty – a pattern with a pedigree going back to abusive relationships studied decades ago. What feels like fate is often just the echo of an old injury, dressed up as romance. Biology chimes in with its own dampener: hormonal contraceptives can subtly rewrite attraction, flattening the natural cycles that once guided mate choice. Change the pill, change the feeling; suddenly the person who once seemed perfect looks merely tolerable. If chemistry can be so easily meddled with by pharmacology, the idea of a single pre-ordained match begins to look decidedly shaky.

Mathematicians, never ones to miss an opportunity to crush hope, have run the numbers. Their algorithms reveal not one soulmate but many viable candidates – second-order, third-order, fourth-order – all perfectly adequate provided neither party can do better. Comforting, isn't it? Plenty of fish in the sea, each marginally less disappointing than the last. And what sustains the rare couples who endure? Not grand gestures or cinematic passion, but the small, grinding kindnesses: a cup of tea in bed, a warmed car on a winter morning, wildflowers jammed in a jam jar. The mundane choreography of shared life, performed daily amid money worries, family demands, and the quiet management of each other's frailties. It turns out the most "soulful" relationships are not those that feel fated but those that survive the realisation that they aren't.

So there we have it, courtesy of science: soulmates are a mirage, love is maintenance work, and the happiest endings are the ones that haven't ended yet – usually because both parties have run out of energy to leave. Happy Valentine's Day. May your illusions hold just long enough to get you through your poncy, overpriced dinner this year.

JAMES VAN DER BEEK (1977 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

James Van Der Beek, who has departed for the great unkown at forty-eight after a courageous and unflinchingly public fight with cancer, leaves behind a legacy that is equal parts poignant and preposterous. He will forever be the man who taught an entire generation how to cry on television—properly, operatically, with the kind of commitment that made strangers on the internet decide this was the only acceptable response to minor inconvenience. The Dawson’s Creek crying scene, now a digital artefact older than most of its users, remains his most enduring contribution to culture. It is mercilessly reused, yet somehow never feels cruel when directed at him; the tears were too honest for that.

In his prime he embodied a very specific American fantasy: the sensitive, articulate teenage boy who quoted Spielberg and treated heartbreak like a graduate seminar. Dawson Leery was, by any rational standard, insufferable. Van Der Beek played him with such disarming sincerity that the character became lovable in spite of himself, and the actor emerged as the rare teen idol who seemed genuinely surprised to be one. Hollywood, unsure what to do with earnestness once puberty ended, sent him to football fields in whipped-cream bikinis and later to the thankless terrain of straight-to-video thrillers. He accepted the demotion with good grace and kept working.

His later role as FBI agent Elijah Mundo in CSI: Cyber—an enterprise whose very name sounded like a prank on the audience—offered steady employment and the quiet dignity of not having to emote quite so extravagantly. He brought to it the same unshowy competence that marked most of his post-Creek career: reliable, watchable, never bitter. In his final years he spoke openly about illness and family, displaying a wry, self-aware humour that suggested he had finally located the joke everyone else had been laughing at for decades. He appeared, at long last, entirely at ease with the absurdity of his own myth.

He is survived by his wife, Kimberly, and their children, who will inherit a father’s gentle decency and the eternal challenge of explaining to the world that the crying man on the internet was, in real life, rather good company.

EVERYBODY HATES KIER

In the long and dishonourable history of British political disappointment, few figures have managed to unite the nation quite like Keir Starmer. Tories loathe him because he exists; the Labour left loathe him because he exists while refusing to be Jeremy Corbyn; the centre loathe him because he sounds like a man reading out the terms and conditions for a pension plan; and the apolitical majority loathe him for the simple reason that he is now the face that launches a thousand sighs whenever the news comes on. It is a rare and almost admirable achievement: a hatred so universal that it feels almost churlish to question it, like complaining that rain is wet. 

One says 'hatred,' of course, in the mild, British sense of the word—the way one hates the new postcode lottery rules or the price of a pint. It is not the full-throated, pitchfork-and-torch hatred once reserved for Margaret Thatcher or, in more innocent times, for traffic wardens. It is a low, background hum of resentment, the sort of feeling that makes you change channel when his face appears, then change back again because the other side is Rishi Sunak doing his best impression of a man who has just discovered he is overdrawn by several billion pounds. 

Starmer hatred is democratic. It crosses class, region, age group, and—most impressively—political affiliation. Even people who voted for him seem to do so in the spirit of a man choosing the least uncomfortable chair in a waiting room full of nails. The beauty of the phenomenon is its sheer irrationality. Nobody can quite put a finger on the original sin. He has not (yet) started any unpopular wars. He has not been caught snorting the ashes of the Queen. He has not even, as far as we know, accepted a free suit from a donor who turned out to be a pop star with strong opinions about Israel. His crimes are subtler. He is competent, which is unforgivable in a country that still half-believes its leaders should be lovable rogues or grand visionaries. He speaks in whole sentences, without shouting, which feels suspiciously like taking the public for adults. Worst of all, he looks like a man who files his tax returns early and enjoys it.

There was a brief, shimmering moment—roughly between July 4 and July 5, 2024—when some of us thought we might learn to love him. The exit poll came in, the Tories were obliterated, and for one glorious evening the pubs rang with the sound of people saying “Well, at least he’s not Liz Truss.” It was the political equivalent of the morning after a particularly bad breakup when you wake up next to someone perfectly pleasant and think, “This could work.” Then he started governing, and the national hangover set in. He promised change, naturally. All politicians promise change; it is the political equivalent of “I’ll call you.” What he has delivered so far is the sort of change you get when you move the furniture around in a room that still desperately needs redecorating. The winter fuel allowance is trimmed, the rhetoric on immigration toughens, the green investment plans are scaled back, and suddenly half the Labour Party is gazing at him the way vegetarians regard a friend who has quietly ordered a steak. 

Meanwhile the right-wing press, which spent years insisting he was a Marxist sleeper agent, now complains that he is betraying socialist principles. It is the ultimate compliment: both sides hate him for letting the other side down. One must admire the economy of it. In the old days a prime minister had to work hard to alienate everybody. Tony Blair had to invade Iraq. Gordon Brown had to lose an election he was supposed to win. David Cameron had to call a referendum. Theresa May had to dance. Boris Johnson had to—well, exist in three dimensions. Starmer has managed the same result simply by turning up on time, wearing a tie, and declining to set anything on fire. It is efficiency taken to the level of art.

Part of the problem, if we are being charitable, is that he looks like the actuary he might have been in another life. There is something inescapably actuarial about the man: the neat hair, the tidy suits, the faint suggestion that he has already calculated your life expectancy and is quietly disappointed. One watches him at the dispatch box and waits for the spark that never comes. He is fluent, certainly; he is clear; he is occasionally ruthless. What he is not is alive in any way that registers on screen. Television, that cruel medium, requires a flicker of mischief, a hint of danger, even a touch of derangement. Starmer offers the viewer the mild reassurance of a man who has never in his life lost his temper in public, and possibly not in private either. It is like watching a very expensive watch tick: admirable, precise, and utterly devoid of soul.

And yet—and this is where the hatred becomes interesting—there is something almost heroic in his refusal to pander. Most modern politicians treat the electorate like a nervous date, forever checking their phone and wondering whether to lean in for the kiss. Starmer behaves as though the relationship is already settled and he is now explaining the joint mortgage. It is bracing, in its way. After years of leaders who grinned too much, shouted too much, lied too much, here is a man who seems to regard charisma as a form of moral weakness. One suspects he would rather be caught shoplifting than telling an anecdote about his childhood. 

The irony, of course, is that we asked for this. For years we complained about showmen, about bluster, about leaders who treated politics as performance art. Be careful what you wish for: we have ended up with a leader who treats politics as a job. The complaints now are the same ones we once directed at civil servants: too cautious, too incremental, too fond of process. We wanted a manager; we got one. The national mood is that of a child who asked for a bicycle and received a very sensible pair of shoes. There is nothing to Starmer. He is a sphinx without a riddle, a pudding without a theme, a late middle-aged human rights lawyer that had done sufficiently well for himself that he fancied a career change. Most blow their mid-life crises on affairs with au pairs or fancy sports cars. He decided to become Prime Minister, despite having no obvious interest in politics, policy or improving the country. We are all victims of his viciousness.

Perhaps in the end the hatred is not really about Starmer at all. It is about us. We do not know what we want, only that whatever is on offer is not it. We want vision but we do not want ideology; we want competence but we also want excitement; we want change but we become hysterical the moment anything actually changes. Starmer is merely the latest mirror held up to our confusion, and mirrors are rarely popular with people who do not like what they see. So we go on hating him, quietly, politely, in the way only the British can hate. We hate him when he speaks, we hate him when he is silent, we hate him when he wins, and we will almost certainly hate him even more if he starts losing. It is a hatred born not of passion but of disappointment, the slow realisation that politics, like life, rarely delivers heroes. The best it can manage is someone who keeps the lights on and the trains running approximately on time, and even that feels like a swindle.

Poor Keir. He will never be loved, and he probably knows it. In a saner world that would be the beginning of wisdom. In this one it is just another reason to change the channel.

GENERATION GAMES Pt III: THE REVENGE

Nine years ago, in the immediate aftermath of yet another British general election that left everyone claiming victory while secretly nursing a hangover, I penned a modest manifesto on behalf of my fellow travellers in Generation X. We were, I declared with the breezy confidence of a man who had just discovered that his mortgage was slightly less ruinous than expected, the overlooked middle child of history: industrious yet playful, cynical yet optimistic, the generation that invented the internet only to watch everyone else monetise it. 

We had, I argued, the best of both worlds — the Boomers’ work ethic without their nostalgia for ration books, the Millennials’ tech-savviness without their conviction that a strongly worded hashtag constitutes civic engagement. While the old and the young squared up to each other like rival stag parties in a provincial nightclub, we — Generation X — would quietly get on with saving the world. And, I added with a flourish, we would do so without expecting anyone to pick up the bill for both sides’ mistakes. How young I was then. How touchingly naïve. I return to the subject now, in the chill opening weeks of 2026, prompted by a post on what we must still call Twitter — or X, if one wishes to sound like a failed Bond villain — from a Canadian observer who has articulated, with admirable economy, the quiet despair that has settled over my cohort like a damp North Atlantic fog. “Gen X lived, and will die, in the shadow of the Boomers,” he wrote. “We’ll never really get our turn. They’ll still outvote us for another 10 to 15 years, and when they’re gone, Millennials and Gen Z will take over right where they left off. Gen X will never truly have a say. That’s why we’re pissed.” 

One does not need to be Canadian to recognise the sentiment. One merely needs to be alive, solvent, and born between, roughly, 1965 and 1980. The numbers, those remorseless actuaries of human ambition, are unambiguous. The Baby Boomers — that vast, echoing cohort born in the afterglow of victory and penicillin — continue to dominate the electoral rolls with the serene implacability of a herd of elderly elephants refusing to yield the watering hole. Higher turnout among the over-55s, a phenomenon as predictable as the tide, ensures that their preferences — lower taxes on pensions, higher spending on healthcare, and a vague suspicion of anything invented after the compact disc — remain the default setting of democratic politics. 

Meanwhile, the Millennials and their younger siblings in Gen Z, armed with the megaphone of social media and the moral certainty of people who have never known a world without Wi-Fi, are already queuing impatiently at the stage door. And there we stand, Generation X, in the wings, clutching our dog-eared scripts and wondering whether the director has forgotten we exist. It is not merely a matter of demographics, though demographics are cruel enough. In Britain, as in Canada and much of the Anglosphere, the Boomers’ numerical advantage, combined with their enthusiastic participation in the democratic process, has kept the political conversation anchored in the late twentieth century. We are governed, to a remarkable degree, by people who came of age when the Berlin Wall was still standing and the threat of nuclear annihilation lent a certain urgency to one’s choice of hairstyle. Even when the faces change, the assumptions remain: property is the only reliable store of wealth, the welfare state must be preserved in amber, and the young should jolly well stop complaining and get on with it, just as we did.

Yet the young, bless their cotton socks, have no intention of getting on with it. They have discovered the novel expedient of voting in large numbers for parties that promise to redistribute the remaining assets of the middle-aged downwards, ideally before the middle-aged have finished paying off their student loans from the 1990s. The result is a pincer movement of rare elegance: the Boomers guarding the past, the Millennials seizing the future, and Generation X compressed in the middle like a forgotten slice of processed cheese in a gourmet sandwich. One might have expected, back in 2017, that our moment would arrive naturally. After all, we were entering our prime earning years, our cultural references were suddenly retro-chic, and our leaders — Trudeau in Canada, Macron in France, even our own fleeting experiments with middle-aged competence — were beginning to appear on the world stage. Surely, I thought, the Boomers would eventually retire to their cruises and their conservatories, leaving us to impose a sensible, ironic order on the proceedings.

Alas, biology is not so accommodating. Advances in medicine — many of them, ironically, developed by Gen X scientists who grew up watching too much Star Trek — have extended Boomer lifespans to the point where actuarial tables now resemble optimistic science fiction. They are not merely living longer; they are voting longer. And when, eventually, the inevitable actuarial correction arrives, the stage will not be cleared for us. It will be occupied by a generation that has grown up believing that disagreement constitutes violence and that the primary function of government is to validate one’s identity. 

There is, I confess, a certain comic symmetry to our predicament. We who prided ourselves on our independence — latchkey children who learned to microwave our own dinners while our parents pursued self-actualisation — now find ourselves permanently supervised. We who mocked the Boomers’ nostalgia for the post-war consensus are now nostalgic for the 1990s, when house prices were merely extortionate rather than hallucinogenic. We who once dismissed Millennials as fragile now watch them reshape institutions with the serene confidence of people who have never been told no. Some insist that we have only ourselves to blame: we raised Gen Z, and must therefore accept responsibility for their more exotic pronoun preferences. A few cling to the hope that longevity research will keep us around long enough to enjoy the fruits of our own ingenuity, like elderly rock stars refusing to leave the stage after the encore.

All of which is true, yet none of it alters the central fact: we are the intermission generation. Our cultural contributions — grunge, Britpop, the first tentative steps toward a digital world — have been absorbed and commodified by others. Our political leaders, when we produce them, are swiftly co-opted into the prevailing orthodoxies of left or right. Our characteristic stance — sceptical, self-deprecating, allergic to ideology — is precisely what renders us unfit for power in an age that demands absolute conviction. There is, perhaps, a bleak consolation in this. While the Boomers and Millennials engage in their interminable culture war, each convinced of their own moral superiority, we remain free to observe the spectacle with the detached amusement of the true cynic. We know how these stories end: the Boomers will eventually depart, taking with them their encyclopaedic knowledge of the Beatles’ B-sides; the Millennials and Gen Z will inherit a world they believe they invented; and somewhere in the middle, a small cohort of middle-aged people will continue to fix the Wi-Fi, pay the taxes, and occasionally permit themselves a wry smile at the absurdity of it all.

In 2017, I concluded with the hopeful assertion that Generation X had this in hand. Today, with the wisdom of added years and subtracted illusions, I revise that verdict. We never had it in hand. We were merely passing through, briefly illuminated by the stage lights before the next act began. And yet, in our quiet, sardonic way, we endure — the only generation capable of laughing at its own irrelevance. That, at least, is something the others cannot take from us.

THE PEN-IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SKI

In the annals of human sporting endeavour, few spectacles have matched the Winter Olympics for their blend of poetic grace and brute athleticism. The ski jumper, for example; hurtling down a ramp at speeds that would make a Formula One driver blanch, then launching into the void like a particularly elegant exoset missile. It’s the closest thing sport has to ballet performed at terminal velocity. One watches, transfixed, as these lithe figures soar, arms outstretched, bodies perfectly aligned with the merciless dictates of physics. And one thinks: here, at last, is purity. Here is man in harmony with the elements. Or so one thought, until the International Ski Federation (FIS), in its infinite wisdom, decided to measure the athletes’ crotches.

I read the report in the BBC with the sort of slow, dawning incredulity usually reserved for discovering that a trusted friend has taken up taxidermy. Apparently, the regulations governing the tightness of ski suits are now so precise that a mere extra centimetre of fabric in the groin area can confer a decisive aerodynamic advantage. And how, pray, does one acquire that extra centimetre? Why, by the judicious application of hyaluronic acid – the very same substance that keeps certain Hollywood actresses looking permanently astonished – injected directly into the penis. Temporarily, of course, you wouldn’t want a permanent handicap when the season ends and you return to civilian life.

The mind reels. One pictures the scene: a clinic in Ljubljana or Zakopane, all tasteful Scandinavian pine and soft lighting, where the elite of Nordic combined queue in dignified silence. “Just the usual winter top-up, doctor,” murmurs the Norwegian champion, lowering his tracksuit bottoms with the stoicism of a man facing a tax audit. “Make it the full Olympic package this year – I’m feeling patriotic.” Naturally, the authorities are shocked – shocked! – to learn that anyone might exploit this loophole. The president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, a Pole (which feels somehow appropriate), promises to “look into it.” One suspects he will look into it with roughly the same urgency that the College of Cardinals once applied to Galileo’s heliocentric nonsense. Meanwhile, the FIS continues its solemn ritual of scanning athletes in tight underwear, measuring “crotch height plus three centimetres,” as though they were tailors fitting a particularly demanding aristocrat for morning dress.

There is, I suppose, a certain grim logic to it. Sport has always been about finding an edge, however marginal. Cyclists shave the hair from their bodies; swimmers wear suits that cost more than a small car; bobsleigh teams employ aerodynamics engineers to reduce drag by fractions of a second. Why, then, should the male appendage be exempt from the march of progress? In an age when every bodily function is optimised, monetised and Instagrammed, it was only a matter of time before the penis entered the realm of performance enhancement. One simply didn’t expect it to happen in ski jumping, a discipline previously associated with stoical Scandinavians and the occasional plucky Brit who finished last but became a national treasure.

Still, one can’t help feeling a pang of nostalgia for the old days, when cheating was cruder and more honest. A bit of cork in the baseball bat, a dab of Vaseline on the cricket ball, a sly blood transfusion in the motorhome – these had a certain artisanal charm. Now we have entered the era of boutique genital modification, administered by qualified cosmeticians between training sessions. Next year, no doubt, the women will discover some equivalent tweak – perhaps a subtle mammalial adjustment for improved airflow – and parity will be achieved. The Olympic motto will need updating: Citius, Altius, Fortius… et Crassius. I confess I shall watch the Milan-Cortina Games with a new, slightly queasy fascination. Every time a jumper achieves extraordinary distance, one will wonder: is this the triumph of human spirit, or merely the triumph of hyaluronic acid? When the medals are handed out, will the podium feature the traditional bouquet, or a discreet voucher for a top-up before the next World Cup?

Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps this is simply evolution in action: man adapting to the rules he himself has written, pushing the boundaries of what the human body – and the human imagination – can achieve. All the same, I find myself longing for the simpler pleasures of sport. Give me a rugby match in the rain, where the only injection is a painkiller in the backside, or a Test cricket series where the greatest scandal is a bit of sandpaper in the pocket.

As for ski jumping, I fear its days of innocence are over. From now on, when those graceful figures soar through the alpine air, a small, treacherous part of the viewer’s mind will whisper: nice technique, but how’s the girth? And the poetry will be gone, replaced by something altogether more prosaic. Ah well. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – only with better needles.

JOHN VIRGO (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

John Virgo, who has left the green baize aged 79, was the snooker professional whose greatest talent lay not in potting the black but in impersonating those who could. In a sport that prides itself on monastic silence and geometric certainty, Virgo brought the music-hall tradition of the cheeky interjection, and for that alone the gods of baize should be grateful.

Born in Salford in 1946, at a time when the city’s chimneys still outranked its crucibles, Virgo discovered snooker in the kind of smoky working-men’s clubs where the air was thick enough to cushion a miscue. He turned professional comparatively late, at thirty, and promptly announced himself by winning the UK Championship in 1979, dispatching Terry Griffiths in the final with the calm assurance of a man who knew the table better than his opponents knew their own nerves. That same year he reached the World Championship semi-finals, only to be halted by Dennis Taylor. Thereafter the major titles eluded him, as they elude most, but Virgo never allowed mere statistics to cramp his style.

His true métier emerged when the cue was laid aside and the microphone taken up. On Big Break, that improbable 90's confection hosted by Jim Davidson, Virgo performed trick shots and impressions with the timing of a born comedian. His Alex Higgins was uncannily wild-eyed; his Steve Davis a study in robotic precision. Viewers who had never previously cared about snooker found themselves oddly charmed by a man who treated the green baize as a stage rather than an altar.

As a BBC commentator he became an institution, his voice a mixture of Lancashire vowels and delighted astonishment. “Where’s the cue ball going?” he would cry whenever physics took an unexpected holiday, a question that summed up both the drama of the shot and the essential absurdity of human endeavour. For thirty years he supplied the soundtrack to countless Crucible epics, never quite impartial, always unmistakably himself.

Off the table, life was less straightforward. Gambling took its toll; marriages came and went; a house was repossessed. Yet Virgo retained the performer’s instinct for recovery, emerging with an autobiography whose title, Say Goodnight, JV, carried the wistful shrug of a man who had learned to live with the rebound. In the end, snooker owed him a debt it can never fully repay: he reminded a solemn sport that laughter is not a foul but a safety. The table is quieter now, though somewhere, the cue ball is still going – and we know exactly who is asking where. 

WHY DO OUR HEDGEROWS NEED DECOLONISING?

One of the minor consolations of growing older is that one becomes increasingly difficult to surprise. Governments waste money; politicians posture; consultants prosper. Yet even a seasoned observer of human folly must occasionally pause and marvel at the sheer inventive uselessness of certain public expenditures. The latest gem from the Starmer administration is a £108,000 taxpayer-funded report entitled—brace yourself—Improving the Ethnic Diversity of Visitors to England’s Protected Landscapes. Yes, dear reader, while businesses shutter along the high street and energy bills climb to heights that would make Edmund Hillary blanch, the government has identified the pressing national emergency: not enough ethnic minorities are picnicking in the Lake District.

The report, produced with all the solemnity of a papal encyclical, informs us that Black Britons visit the countryside at roughly half the rate of their white compatriots. This disparity, we are assured, is a problem demanding immediate and expensive intervention. Suggestions include “inclusive outreach,” staff training in cultural sensitivity, and—my personal favourite—making rural pubs less intimidating to people who have never set foot in one. One pictures the consultants descending upon some ancient coaching inn in the Yorkshire Dales, clipboard in hand, explaining to a fourth-generation landlord that the absence of quinoa on the menu may constitute a micro-aggression. It is, of course, entirely possible that certain ethnic-minority citizens simply do not wish to spend their weekends trudging through mud in pursuit of a view of some sheep. This possibility is not entertained. To suggest that people might have differing recreational preferences would be to commit the cardinal sin of treating them as individuals rather than demographic categories. Far better to assume that the countryside itself is quietly racist and must be re-educated.

The deeper absurdity lies in the unspoken premise: that the English countryside, that patchwork of hedgerows, drystone walls and quiet villages, is somehow incomplete without a government-approved quota of urban visitors. Middle England—those unassuming towns and rural parishes that have somehow survived Cromwell, the Industrial Revolution and the Blitz—is now deemed in need of improvement by a cadre of metropolitan civil servants who regard anything beyond Zone 3 as anthropological terra incognita. One suspects that the true objection is not to the ethnic composition of ramblers but to the lingering suspicion that the countryside remains stubbornly resistant to progressive refurbishment. It is still possible, in some forgotten corner of Dorset, to enjoy a pint without being lectured on one’s carbon footprint or unconscious bias.

And so we have Keir Starmer’s Britain: a country in which the urgent task of national renewal apparently begins with ensuring that every National Park reflects the demographic mosaic of London SW1. Meanwhile, the actual inhabitants of rural England—farmers, publicans, small shopkeepers—watch their costs soar and their margins vanish, untroubled by any comparable outpouring of official concern. One begins to understand why the Prime Minister, a man whose facial expression seems permanently fixed in the mild disappointment of a vegetarian offered a rare steak, inspires so little enthusiasm. He embodies the modern liberal mindset in its purest form: a boundless confidence that every aspect of national life can and should be managed from the centre, provided the management is sufficiently well-meaning and expensively credentialed.

There is, naturally, no suggestion that the £108,000 might have been better spent on, say, keeping a rural post office open or subsidising a bus route that actually exists. Such measures would be vulgarly practical. They would lack the ennobling sheen of moral grandstanding. Far preferable to commission a report whose recommendations will gather dust on a server somewhere, its authors safely returned to their consultancies, while the government can claim to be “taking action” on an issue that affects precisely no one who has ever had to choose between heating and eating.

Clive James once observed that the problem with political correctness is not that it is politically incorrect to say so, but that it is simply dull. This initiative is dullness elevated to policy. It is the administrative equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while insisting that the real problem is the insufficient diversity of the deckchair fabric. Middle England, already battered by net-zero zealotry and planning liberalisation, now finds itself the target of yet another well-intentioned assault upon its quiet, unassuming way of life. One almost longs for the blunt incompetence of previous administrations; at least it lacked the sanctimonious gloss.

In the end, the report will change nothing. The countryside will remain gloriously, stubbornly itself—wet, windy and indifferent to government targets. A few more consultants will have paid their mortgages. And Sir Keir Starmer will continue to preside over a nation that increasingly wonders whether the chief qualification for modern leadership is the ability to identify new and inventive ways to spend other people’s money on problems that do not exist. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the real protected landscape in need of preservation is not the Peak District, but the dwindling remnant of common sense.

THE CHILL WIND OF COMPLIANCE

There is a sense of terror hanging over the UK, or so Alice Smith assures us in one of those terse pronouncements that X specialises in delivering. People, she says, are scared to say what they see, scared to voice their true opinions, scared to lose their jobs, their pensions, their liberty. And it’s only getting worse. This, she concludes with the crisp finality of a guillotine falling, is what socialism does to a country. One pictures Miss Smith – great-great-great-granddaughter of Adam Smith, no less, a lineage she wears like a badge of hereditary indignation – typing these words in a dimly lit room somewhere in the Home Counties, pausing only to glance over her shoulder in case the Thought Police have already installed a webcam in the teapot. It is a vivid image, and one that invites us to consider the peculiar British talent for turning existential dread into a polite whisper. Terror, of course, is a strong word. In the old days we reserved it for the Blitz, or the prospect of a nuclear winter, or – if one were particularly sensitive – the arrival of a restaurant bill in a foreign currency. 

Nowadays it seems to describe the sensation of wondering whether that perfectly reasonable remark about immigration levels might cost one the annual performance bonus. The terror is not of tanks rolling down the Mall but of an email from Human Resources, phrased in the soothing tones of corporate pastoral care: “We would like to invite you to a conversation about inclusivity.” How did we arrive here? The journey has been gradual, almost courteous, like a butler easing a guest towards the door while insisting that it is entirely the guest’s idea to leave. There was the Online Safety Act, that magnificent piece of legislation which promised to make the internet a safer place for children and promptly set about making it a safer place for ministers’ reputations. Platforms must now remove 'harmful' content or face fines large enough to make even a tech billionaire blink. 

And who defines 'harmful'? Why, the same people who brought you the equality impact assessment and the net-zero target – civil servants with clipboards and a profound faith in the redemptive power of bureaucracy. The beauty of the Act, from the government’s point of view, is its elegance. No need for midnight knocks on the door when the platforms themselves will do the knocking – or rather, the muting, the shadow-banning, the quiet disappearance of inconvenient opinions into the digital equivalent of a locked filing cabinet. Self-censorship is so much more efficient than state censorship. It enlists the victim as accomplice. One does not need a Ministry of Truth when the citizens are willing to edit themselves in real time, like overzealous sub-editors trimming their own prose for fear of offending the style guide.

Keir Starmer, that most lawyerly of prime ministers, presides over this transformation with the serene expression of a man who believes due process is something that happens to other people. He speaks of kindness, of building a Britain where no one is left behind, and one detects the faint echo of every well-meaning authoritarian since time immemorial. The kindness is compulsory, you understand. The inclusivity is non-negotiable. And if you object – well, there are procedures. Forms to fill out. Investigations to endure. The slow, patient grinding of gears that leaves the complainant wishing they had never complained in the first place. And now, fresh from his triumphant jaunt to Beijing – the first by a British prime minister in eight years, no less – Sir Keir returns with tales of pragmatic engagement and sophisticated relationships. One imagines him strolling through Shanghai's Yuyuan Gardens, sipping tea in historic pavilions, while back home the citizenry practises the art of saying nothing at all. He met President Xi, of course, for hours of frank dialogue, emerging with agreements on visa-free travel (how generous: Britons may now visit the People's Republic for up to thirty days without the bother of paperwork), reduced tariffs on whisky, and assorted pacts in green tech and finance. All very grown-up, very realistic. One must engage with the world's second-largest economy, after all; pragmatism demands it.

Yet there is something touchingly ironic in the spectacle of a leader who oversees the quiet stifling of dissent at home rushing eastward to court a regime that has elevated censorship to an industrial art form. In China, the Great Firewall blocks inconvenient truths with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine; social credit systems monitor and punish deviation; and the Party's grip ensures that terror is not a whisper but a shout, albeit one that echoes in empty stadiums. Starmer, ever the lawyer, speaks of "meaningful dialogue on areas where we disagree," which presumably includes human rights, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs – subjects raised, one supposes, with the delicate firmness of a man negotiating the price of Scotch. Meanwhile, even Donald Trump – not known for subtlety – pipes up from across the Atlantic to call the whole affair "very dangerous," prompting Sir Keir to shrug it off with the mild suggestion that the President was probably thinking of Canada.

The visit, we are told, is in the national interest: jobs, growth, opportunities for British business. Fair enough; one cannot eat principles, and the Treasury is not famed for its vegetarianism. But the timing adds a certain piquancy to Miss Smith's lament. As pensioners huddle in the cold and citizens weigh every word for potential offence, the Prime Minister demonstrates that engagement with authoritarians is fine when there's trade on the table. The chill wind of compliance blows stronger than ever, now seasoned with a hint of oriental pragmatism. Meanwhile the country carries on, because that is what Britain does best. Queues form politely outside food banks. Pensioners turn down the heating and tell pollsters they are 'managing.' Immigrants arrive in numbers that would have made previous generations gasp, and the subject is discussed in the careful euphemisms of people who have learned that certain words are radioactive. The economy creaks under the weight of taxes that rise like the tide, relentless and indifferent. And through it all runs the quiet terror of which Miss Smith speaks – not the terror of revolution but of repercussion.

One is reminded – how could one not be? – of Orwell, that prophet who understood Britain better than most Britons ever have. Orwell knew that the English variety of totalitarianism would not announce itself with jackboots but with clipboard-wielding officials and a smothering solicitude. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In modern Britain we are encouraged to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears not by brute force but by the gentle pressure of social conformity and the threat of professional ruin. It is softer, more civilised, and therefore infinitely more difficult to resist – though perhaps Sir Keir picked up a few pointers on making it firmer during his Eastern excursion.

There are, of course, those who insist that nothing has changed. Free speech is alive and well, they say; one may still criticise the government, provided one does so in the correct tone and with due regard for the feelings of others. One may still notice patterns in crime statistics, as long as one prefaces the observation with a ritual disclaimer about the essential goodness of humanity. One may even vote for alternative parties, though one should be prepared for the subsequent media scrutiny of one’s character and associations. Freedom, in this view, is not the absence of consequences but the presence of guidelines – guidelines that, coincidentally, align rather neatly with the preferences of those in power.

And yet the chill is real. One senses it in conversations that trail off when certain subjects arise. One sees it in the careful phrasing of public statements, the sudden proliferation of phrases like “I’m not saying all…” and “Some of my best friends…” One hears it in the silence that follows a controversial remark – not the silence of agreement but the silence of calculation. People are weighing risks. They are performing the mental arithmetic of modern British life: Is this opinion worth the potential cost? Socialism, Miss Smith declares, does this to a country. The word is flung like a hand grenade, and in certain circles it explodes with satisfying force. Yet the phenomenon is larger than any single ideology. What we are witnessing is the convergence of managerial progressivism and corporate risk-aversion, seasoned with a dash of old-fashioned British busyness-about-other-people’s-business – and now, apparently, a splash of realpolitik imported from the East. 

The result is a society that polices itself with an efficiency that would have made the Stasi weep with envy, though perhaps they would have preferred the Chinese model for its scale. There will, one supposes, come a reckoning. History suggests that people will endure a great deal before they push back, but endurance has limits. The British are slow to anger, yet when they do finally stir they tend to do so with a certain methodical thoroughness. One thinks of the Chartists, the suffragettes, the poll tax rioters – movements that began with quiet grievances and ended with the established order discovering, to its surprise, that the worm had turned.

For now, though, the terror persists. It is a quiet terror, a middle-class terror, a terror that apologises for itself even as it grips the heart. It is the terror of a nation that has traded the robust vulgarity of genuine disagreement for the polished veneer of enforced consensus – a consensus lately burnished in Beijing. And in the evenings, as the lights dim and the heating clicks off early to save money, one can almost hear the ghosts of older, freer Britons – Johnson, Mill, Orwell himself – turning in their graves with the weary sigh of those who warned us, all those years ago, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and that the alternative is a silence so complete it can be heard across an entire island, perhaps even as far as the Great Wall.