THE BALD(ING) TRUTH OF POLITICS

In the great British tradition of national hypocrisies, few things command more solemn reverence than a politician’s hair. We affect to despise the superficial, yet we scrutinise the scalp with the forensic intensity once reserved for the entrails of sacrificial goats. Keir Starmer, that most methodical of men, has presented us with a puzzle worthy of a particularly pedantic detective novel. Does the Prime Minister wear a wig? Or, to put it in the language of our more excitable tabloids, is the leader of His Majesty’s Government in possession of a supplementary thatch? The question has haunted the commentariat like a mild case of dandruff that refuses to yield to Head & Shoulders.

One approaches the topic with the caution it deserves. Accusing a man of artificial cranial enhancement is no light matter. It strikes at the very heart of authenticity, that elusive quality without which no modern politician can hope to survive the scrutiny of a focus group or a late-night podcast. Starmer, after all, rose to prominence as the very model of the serious professional: former Director of Public Prosecutions, knight of the realm, wearer of sensible suits and expressions of measured disappointment. His hair, in its earlier iterations, suggested the careful grooming of a man who had read too many bar exams and not quite enough poetry. It was neat, controlled, the sort of coiffure that whispers “I have opinions on sentencing guidelines” rather than “I once crowd-surfed at Glastonbury.”

Yet power, that great alchemist, works strange transformations. As the years have advanced and the polls have fluctuated, Starmer’s locks have taken on a certain defiant lustre. They sit there on his head like a well-behaved constituency that knows its place. Observers with too much time on their hands—and in contemporary Britain that category includes most of us—have noted the suspicious consistency. No errant strand dares rebel. The grey, when it appears, does so with parliamentary timing, as if scheduled for Prime Minister’s Questions. One half expects it to rise and give a short statement on fiscal responsibility before returning to its appointed position.

The satirical possibilities are almost too rich. Here is a man who spent his career prosecuting the powerful, now accused by the court of public opinion of concealing the naked truth of his own pate. The wig, if wig it be, becomes a perfect metaphor for New Labour’s long evolution into whatever this is: a careful construct, meticulously maintained, designed to project competence while hiding the inevitable thinning that comes with age, responsibility, and the slow realisation that governing is harder than opposing. Boris Johnson, by contrast, wore his dishevelment like a badge of honour—a thatch that looked as though it had been styled by a hedge fund manager in a hurry. Starmer’s alleged prosthesis suggests the opposite temperament: the control freak who cannot even let his own follicles run wild.

And yet the scalp has always been the politician’s most treacherous constituency. It rebels without warning, defects at the first sign of stress, and leaves its owner exposed to the sort of low comedy that no spin doctor can fully suppress. The rumour that the Prime Minister maintains a discreet arrangement with a wig-maker is merely the latest chapter in a saga as old as power itself: the eternal struggle between nature’s parsimony and the vanity required to rule. Baldness, that great leveller, has toppled more careers than most policy disasters, yet it has also produced some of history’s more enduring leaders—provided they had the wit, or the wreath, to conceal the evidence.

Let us begin, as all good farces must, in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar, conqueror of Gaul and occasional dictator, was famously thin on top. Suetonius records the embarrassment with the relish of a man who enjoyed watching emperors squirm. Caesar combed his remaining strands forward in the desperate manner later perfected by estate agents and minor television presenters. The Senate, in a rare moment of mercy—or perhaps simple pragmatism—granted him the permanent right to wear a laurel wreath. Not, you understand, as a mere symbol of victory, but as the world’s first recorded political comb-over. The wreath sat upon his head like an official denial, shielding the public from the distressing spectacle of a bald autocrat. One pictures the senators nodding sagely: “Yes, yes, very triumphal, and incidentally, it covers the bit that’s missing.” Caesar’s solution was elegant, classical, and thoroughly dishonest. It set the tone for two millennia.

By the 17th century, the problem had grown more democratic. Syphilis, that generous gift of the New World, was stripping the scalps of kings, courtiers, and commoners alike. Louis XIV of France, the Sun King himself, took to wigs to disguise his own premature retreat. His cousin Charles II of England followed suit, and suddenly the powdered wig became the uniform of the ruling class. What began as medical camouflage hardened into fashion. Judges, bishops, and prime ministers donned them as a matter of course, transforming the House of Commons into a sort of geriatric fancy-dress party. The wig was never merely hair; it was a declaration of status. It said: “I may be rotting from within, but at least my head looks expensive.” When William Pitt the Younger taxed hair powder in 1795 to fund a war, the fashion began its long decline—proof, if any were needed, that even governments will sacrifice vanity only when the alternative is bankruptcy.

Across the Atlantic, the American Republic offered a more puritanical approach, at least in theory. The Founding Fathers, many of them bewigged in the European style, eventually shed the habit. Yet baldness remained politically radioactive. Historians note that only three presidents have been authentically bald: James Garfield (barely seen by the electorate before an assassin settled the matter), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford (who, one might argue, was never properly elected anyway). Eisenhower, the last bald man voted into the White House, won in 1952 and again in 1956, but his victory owed more to D-Day than to his gleaming dome. After him, the television age rendered the naked scalp an electoral liability. John F. Kennedy, with his luxuriant thatch, set the new standard: hair as campaign asset. Since then, voters have consistently preferred candidates who look as though they could still appear in a shampoo commercial. Richard Nixon, whose hairline had the good sense to hold the line despite every expectation, was a rare survivor. Some suspected a pact with darker powers; others simply noted that the devil, like voters, has his standards.

In Britain the prejudice has been even more pronounced. Winston Churchill, that magnificent bulldog of a man, was the last genuinely bald prime minister, elected in 1951. He wore his baldness like a challenge, growling that “a man of my limited resources cannot presume to have a hairstyle.” After Churchill, the list of bald or balding party leaders who came to grief reads like a cautionary tale: Neil Kinnock, William Hague, Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith. Each brought formidable intellect or ideological fervour; each discovered that the British electorate, when faced with a choice between a shiny head and a tolerable quiff, will choose the quiff every time. Baldness, it seems, signals either excessive honesty or insufficient vanity—both fatal in the modern marketplace of promises.

Elsewhere the story varies. In Russia, a curious folk tradition known as “bald-hairy” has governed the succession for two centuries: leaders alternate between the follicle-challenged and the lavishly maned. Nicholas I begat Alexander II; Lenin (bald) gave way to Stalin (hirsute enough, if one discounted the moustache); Gorbachev’s famous port-wine birthmark sat atop a head that needed no further adornment. The pattern has held with the grim reliability of a five-year plan. One wonders whether the Russian voter subconsciously demands the alternation as a form of cosmic balance—bald for the hard times, hairy for the thaw. Even the great moral exemplars were not immune. Mahatma Gandhi embraced baldness late in life with the same serene indifference he brought to salt marches and imperial oppression. He cut his own hair in South Africa when barbers refused him service, producing a result that friends compared, not unkindly, to the work of enthusiastic rodents. The image of the bald ascetic became part of his power: here was a man who had renounced not only empire but vanity itself. It is a standard few contemporary politicians have the courage—or the bone structure—to emulate.

Today the battle continues with more sophisticated weaponry. Hair transplants, toupees, and the discreet services of Mayfair trichologists have replaced laurel wreaths and powdered periwigs. Silvio Berlusconi’s follicular adventures became a minor European soap opera. Donald Trump’s hair has inspired more conspiracy theories than most foreign policies. And Starmer’s wig, whether fact or journalistic fever dream, fits neatly into the tradition: the modern leader’s attempt to project competence while quietly negotiating with the inevitable. In an age of high-definition cameras and merciless social media, the scalp is no longer private property. It is a billboard for character—steady or slippery, youthful or weathered, authentic or artfully enhanced. The wig, real or imagined, serves another purpose - it distracts. While the nation argues over whether the Prime Minister’s barnet is entirely home-grown or partly imported from some discreet emporium in Crewkerne, more substantial matters—winter fuel payments, planning reforms, the small matter of how one actually runs a country in the 21st century—can proceed with slightly less immediate scrutiny. It is the political equivalent of a magician’s assistant in a sequinned dress: look over here at the shiny distraction while the real trick happens elsewhere. Starmer, the former prosecutor, knows all about misdirection. One wonders whether he appreciates the irony.

There is, of course, a certain pathos in the spectacle. Baldness, like death and taxes, comes to us all (except, apparently, to certain ageing rock stars and television personalities who can afford better lawyers). To resist it is human; to do so while simultaneously preaching the virtues of honesty and straight-talking is to invite the gentle mockery of those who notice such things. A Prime Ministerial wig, perched atop the head of a man once tasked with upholding the law, has a pleasingly bathetic quality. It reduces the grand figure to the level of the rest of us, fretting over receding prospects and wondering whether that new product on the shelf really works as advertised.

The irony, of course, is that baldness has never prevented greatness. Caesar reshaped the Mediterranean; Churchill stared down Hitler; Eisenhower presided over post-war prosperity; Gandhi humbled an empire. Their hair, or lack of it, was incidental. Yet the electorate, that fickle creature, persists in the belief that a full head signals vigour, trustworthiness, perhaps even moral fibre. We claim to elect leaders on policy, judgment, and vision, yet we still judge them by the state of their parting. In the end, Starmer’s wig—whether fact or fevered invention of the commentariat—tells us less about the man than about the age that obsesses over such trivia. We have become a culture that elevates the superficial because the substantial is too difficult, too contentious, too likely to expose our own contradictions. The history of baldness in politics is less about hair than about the lengths to which men (and, increasingly, women) will go to maintain the illusion of control. 

Starmer’s wig, should it exist, is no more ridiculous than Caesar’s wreath or Pitt’s powdered extravagance. It is simply the latest prop in the eternal comedy. The real question is not whether the Prime Minister wears one, but whether we, the audience, still require the performance. In an age that lectures endlessly on authenticity, we remain strangely forgiving of the small deceptions that make our rulers look slightly less mortal. After all, if a man cannot be trusted to manage his own scalp, how can he be trusted with the economy? The logic is flawless, in its own peculiar, parliamentary way. And so the show goes on—wigged, un-wigged, or somewhere artfully in between—while the rest of us, bald or otherwise, watch and pretend not to notice.

JAMES TOLKAN (1931 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

James Tolkan, the American character actor whose face suggested a man perpetually on the verge of issuing a parking ticket to the cosmos, died on March 26, 2026, at the age of 94. He had spent the previous six decades reminding cinema audiences that authority, like baldness, was not to be trifled with.

Born in 1931 in Calumet, Michigan, to a cattle dealer father whose idea of drama was probably a stubborn steer, Tolkan might have been expected to spend his life herding livestock rather than glowering at screen teenagers. Instead, after a brisk year in the US Navy—where he no doubt ordered the Pacific to pipe down—he drifted to New York and submitted himself to the tender mercies of Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. The Actors Studio taught him emotional truth; Hollywood taught him that emotional truth looked best when delivered at top volume by a short, bald man with eyes like two angry drill bits.

The result was a career of magnificent typecasting. Tolkan specialised in the sort of authority figure who made Al Pacino in Serpico seem evasive and Matthew Broderick in WarGames look like a truant. His signature role arrived in 1985 as Vice-Principal Gerald Strickland in Back to the Future, a performance of such volcanic disapproval that entire generations of schoolchildren learned to fear detention more than nuclear war. He repeated the trick in the sequels, proving that even time travel offered no escape from a man who could ruin your entire decade with a single barked “McFly!” In Top Gun he played Commander Stinger, the only character capable of making fighter pilots feel they had let their mothers down. And as Detective Lubic in Masters of the Universe, he literally brought a shotgun to a laser fight.

Short, wiry and permanently unimpressed, Tolkan brought to every scene the air of a man who had already read the script and found it wanting. He married Parmelee Welles in 1971 and remained, by all accounts, a model of domestic tranquillity—perhaps because he had exhausted his daily quota of outrage on set. In an industry addicted to youth, beauty and false modesty, Tolkan was a corrective: a living reminder that a well-timed scowl requires no CGI. He leaves a filmography of glowering excellence, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, somewhere, a Hollywood producer is still slightly afraid of him.

MONKHOUSE CANCELED IN THE BARN

In the sanctified barn of The Repair Shop – that weekly cathedral of televised sentiment where a chipped Staffordshire figurine is treated with the solemnity of the Turin Shroud – the experts gathered one recent afternoon around a stack of dog-eared notebooks. These were not the usual heirlooms of some dear departed auntie’s recipe for spotted dick. No, these were the handwritten joke books of Bob Monkhouse, filched in 1995 by some light-fingered opportunist, recovered after a reward the size of a small mortgage, and now, in 2026, presented for restoration by the comedian’s writing partner. The restorers flicked through the pages with the caution of bomb-disposal experts handling a suspect package. And then, horror of horrors: a gag about housewives. The segment was scrapped mid-filming. The books were handed back with the murmured equivalent of a health-and-safety disclaimer. Bob Monkhouse, dead for the last twenty-two years, had been cancelled anew – not by an angry mob with pitchforks and Twitter accounts, but by the gentle custodians of BBC comfort television, recoiling as if they had unearthed a cache of unexpurgated de Sade.

One can picture the scene with a certain dry relish. The camera crew, faces frozen in that peculiarly British expression of embarrassed moral panic, the sort usually reserved for discovering that one’s grandmother once owned a golliwog. The producers, no doubt consulting their internal risk-assessment matrix, concluded that Monkhouse’s quips – handwritten, cartoon-illustrated, dating back to an era when “inappropriate” meant “not suitable for the vicar’s tea party” – posed an existential threat to the viewing public. Never mind that The Repair Shop exists to soothe the nation with the restorative power of varnish and nostalgia; never mind that the show’s entire premise is the gentle preservation of the past. When the past turns out to have had a sense of humour that did not arrive pre-approved by a 2026 diversity officer, the past must be binned. It is, as the managing director of Ricochet productions put it with the icy politeness of a firing squad, “not appropriate for a programme.”

This is not mere editorial squeamishness. It is the latest twitch in a continuous psychopathic need – and psychopathic is the word, for there is something clinically detached about the urge to erase – that afflicts a certain strain of modern liberalism. The compulsion is not to argue with the past, or contextualise it, or even laugh at it. It is to delete it, as if comedy itself were a contagious disease best eradicated before it infects the young. Traditional comedy, the sort Monkhouse practised with the effortless polish of a man who had catalogued a million gags on index cards the way other people hoard stamps, must be airbrushed from the record. In its place we are left with the unfunny comedy of the left: the stand-up routine that is really a TED Talk with swear words, the sketch show that lectures you on pronouns before you have even settled into your seat, the satirical panel game where every punchline is pre-vetted for microaggressions. The result is not laughter but a low, compliant chuckle of ideological agreement – the sound, one suspects, of people who have forgotten what a joke is for.

To understand the scale of the loss, one must revisit Bob Monkhouse’s life and career, not as hagiography but as a corrective to the present-day caricature. Born in 1928 in Beckenham, the son of a civil servant, young Robert Alan Monkhouse was the sort of precocious child who could recite entire music-hall routines by the age of six. He served in the RAF, wrote for The Goon Show, and by the 1950s had become the smooth-faced, quick-witted fixture of British light entertainment. Game shows were his bread and butter – The Golden Shot, Family Fortunes, Bob’s Full House – but his true métier was the stand-up, delivered with a delivery so silken it made other comedians sound as if they were gargling gravel. He was, in the parlance of the time, “a pro’s pro”: a writer who supplied gags to everyone from Max Bygraves to the Queen’s Christmas broadcast, and a performer who could ad-lib his way out of a power cut.

Yet the man was never merely a joke machine. His private life was a tangle of affairs, two marriages, estranged children, and the quiet melancholy that often attends those who spend their days making strangers laugh. The stolen joke books – those very same volumes now deemed toxic – were his life’s work: a vast, cross-referenced archive that functioned as both database and autobiography. He would sit up until the small hours, scribbling, doodling topless cartoons in the margins, filing away observations on human folly with the fastidiousness of a Victorian lepidopterist. The jokes themselves were not, for the most part, the crude club-room smut his detractors now pretend. They were, at their best, miniature essays in misdirection: the setup that lulled you into complacency, the payoff that revealed the absurdity beneath. “I’ve got a wife who’s an angel,” he once said. “She’s always in heaven when I’m in hell.” The line works not because it is vicious but because it is precise; it captures the domestic truce that passes for marital bliss with the economy of a haiku.

What the cancellers fail to grasp – and their failure is total, a sort of willed tonal deafness – is the subtlety, the nuance. Monkhouse’s comedy was never the blunt instrument of the shock comic. It was the rapier of the technician who understood that laughter arrives most reliably when the audience is simultaneously flattered and gently betrayed. He could do the blue material when the occasion demanded – the after-dinner circuit of the 1970s was not a Montessori playgroup – but his public persona was one of urbane mischief. He mocked himself more than anyone: the receding hairline, the perpetual tan that looked as if it had been applied with a paint roller, the image of the lounge-lizard host who secretly knew every trick in the book. There was, beneath the sheen, a melancholy intelligence that recognised comedy as the last refuge of the civilised man in a world bent on taking itself seriously. He once observed, in a rare moment of candour, that the secret of comedy was not to be funny but to make the audience feel clever for laughing. That is nuance. That is the sort of insight a risk-assessment form cannot compute.

The psychopathic need to erase him is, of course, part of a larger pattern. It is the same impulse that has seen entire back catalogues of Fawlty Towers episodes locked away like radioactive waste, that has turned the Carry On films into objects of embarrassed academic study rather than sources of uncomplicated mirth. Liberals of the current vintage do not merely dislike traditional comedy; they experience it as a personal affront, a reminder that once upon a time people laughed without first checking their privilege. The solution, therefore, is prophylactic deletion. Better a world without jokes than a world in which someone, somewhere, might be reminded that grandad once found a gag about mothers-in-law hilarious. The endgame is inevitable: a comedy landscape populated exclusively by the unfunny. We already see it on the fringe circuit – the performer who begins every set with a land acknowledgement, the Netflix special that is ninety minutes of performative guilt, the satire that dares not satirise the side that pays the bills. It is comedy as therapy, comedy as sermon, comedy that leaves you feeling improved rather than amused. One longs for the days when the worst sin a comedian could commit was being boring.

And so we arrive, with the inexorable logic of a Monkhouse one-liner, at the death of comedy itself. For comedy, like all art worth the name, requires risk. It requires the freedom to say the unsayable, to notice the ridiculous in the sacred, to flirt with the edge without falling off. Monkhouse understood this instinctively; his entire archive was a testament to the belief that humour is anarchic, ungovernable, and therefore precious. Those who cancelled him in The Repair Shop – earnest, well-meaning, and utterly humourless – do not. They believe laughter must be earned through moral purity, that the past must be retrofitted to the present’s specifications, that a 1960s gag about a nagging wife is not an artefact of a less enlightened time but an active threat to be neutralised. In their zeal they have misunderstood not only Monkhouse but the nature of the form. His comedy was never crude; it was precise. It was never cruel; it was observant. And it was never safe; it was alive.

The notebooks have been returned to the family, no doubt to gather dust in some attic while the producers congratulate themselves on their ethical hygiene. Bob Monkhouse, meanwhile, lies in a Kentish churchyard, his epitaph no doubt already prepared in his own handwriting: something wry, something rueful, something that would have made the barn fall about laughing. The joke, as ever, is on the rest of us. In our determination to sanitise the past we have sterilised the future. And in the silence that follows, one can almost hear the ghost of the old pro delivering the perfect closer: “Well, that’s showbusiness – you can’t please everyone. Especially when you’re dead.”

A GLASS AND A HALF OF REGRET

In the grand British tradition of lamenting lost glories—much like mourning the Empire while queuing for a lukewarm cup of something that passes for tea—one finds oneself contemplating the melancholy fate of Cadbury. Once a beacon of cocoa-scented benevolence, now reduced to a discounted 'celebration' egg (woe betide we use such a controversial word such as "Easter" of course) lingering on supermarket shelves like an unwanted relative at a wedding, its foil wrapper peeling back in silent accusation. The viral photographs of forlorn, half-price confections, stacked in mute reproach amid the fluorescent purgatory of Tesco, serves as our age’s perfect emblem: Britain, that once-proud workshop of the world, unable even to safeguard its own chocolate. It is not merely palm oil insinuating itself where cocoa butter once held court; it is a symptom of a deeper national malaise, wherein heritage is flogged off to the highest bidder, quality is quietly euthanised in the name of shareholder value, and the public is left muttering into its shrinking bar of Dairy Milk that, yes, things used to be better.

Let us begin, as all proper laments must, at the beginning—before the accountants arrived with their spreadsheets and their dreams of 'synergies. In 1824, a Quaker named John Cadbury opened a modest grocer’s shop in Birmingham’s Bull Street, peddling tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate ground by hand with a pestle and mortar. Quakers, those stern opponents of frivolity and fun, had a curious knack for confectionery; perhaps the absence of ale in their lives left an embarrassing vacuum that only sugar could fill. John’s sons, Richard and George, inherited a business teetering on bankruptcy in 1861. Far from despairing, they invested in a Dutch cocoa press and launched Cocoa Essence in 1866—advertised, with admirable Quaker bluntness, as “Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best.” No adulteration, no nonsense, no palm oil pretending to be anything but what it was: a cheap lubricant for the global supply chain. 

By 1879 they had decamped to Bournville, a purpose-built factory in green fields south of the city. Here was no smoky satanic mill but a model village: houses with gardens, recreational facilities, schools, cricket pitches and—most revolutionary of all—a conspicuous absence of public houses. The Cadburys, true to their faith, believed workers deserved fresh air, education, and moral upliftment alongside their wages. George donated land for the Bournville Village Trust, ensuring affordable homes for generations. By the early twentieth century the firm employed thousands, dispatched milk to the needy during wartime, and even repurposed its factories for Spitfire parts and gas masks when the nation called. This was philanthropy not as a tax-deductible Instagram filter but as lived conviction—a chocolate empire built on the quaint notion that commerce could ennoble rather than exploit. One pictures the scene with a certain dry fondness: rows of earnest employees cycling to work through Bournville’s leafy avenues, the air thick with the honest scent of real milk and cocoa, while George Cadbury himself pondered how best to improve the lot of the labouring classes without descending into anything so vulgar as socialism.

The company rolled out icons that became woven into the national fabric—Dairy Milk in 1905 with its famous 'glass and a half' of full-cream milk, Milk Tray, Flake, Crunchie, Curly-Wurly, Wispa, Crème Eggs. These were not mere sweets; they were rituals. Christmas without a Cadbury's selection box was like Christmas without a tree: conceivable, perhaps, but faintly un-British, the sort of lapse that marked you down as the kind of person who holidayed in Bangor. The firm merged with Fry’s in 1919 and later Schweppes in 1969, yet somehow retained its soul. Even into the late twentieth century, Cadbury stood as proof that British industry could combine profit with principle, producing something genuinely superior while treating people decently. Even it's advertisements, notably it's 2007 effort starring a gorilla drumming along with gusto to Phil Collins's "In The Air Tonight", showed it could keep up with the times, whilst still being timeless. It was, in short, the sort of success story that made one almost proud to be from a nation that had once invented the Industrial Revolution and then, with characteristic modesty, civilised it with cocoa.

Then came 2010, and the great betrayal—delivered not with a bang but with the polite cough of a FTSE 100 board meeting. Kraft Foods, that sprawling American conglomerate with all the cultural sensitivity of a bulldozer in a rose garden, launched a hostile takeover. Cadbury, still a proud British stalwart, fought valiantly; the City’s short-termists, ever eager to demonstrate their sophisticated grasp of globalisation, promptly folded like a cheap deckchair. The deal was sealed for around £11.5 billion. Kraft’s executives issued soothing promises: jobs would be safe, the Somerdale factory near Bristol would remain open, British heritage would be cherished like a favourite aunt. A week after the acquisition they announced Somerdale’s closure anyway, shipping production to Poland and shedding hundreds of jobs with the breezy efficiency of men who had never tasted Dairy Milk in their lives. Parliament tut-tutted; a select committee later branded Kraft’s conduct “irresponsible.” One almost admires the cheek: it was less a takeover than a masterclass in how to promise the earth, deliver a parking fine, and still walk away with the family silver. Soon enough Kraft spun off its snacks business into Mondelez International—a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical side-effect—and Cadbury found itself another cog in a global machine optimised for efficiency over everything else, including taste, dignity, or the quaint British habit of not treating one’s cultural inheritance as a distressed asset.

Here the satire writes itself, and with a particularly acid nib. Britain, ever eager to demonstrate its sophisticated grasp of globalisation, had flogged one of its most beloved cultural assets to foreigners who promptly treated it like an underperforming subsidiary in need of a good downsizing. It was not the first such surrender—Rowntree to Nestlé, various football clubs to oligarchs—but Cadbury stung particularly because it embodied something deeper: a Quaker-inspired vision of ethical capitalism that felt quintessentially, if imperfectly, British. To sell it off was to admit that we no longer trusted ourselves to steward our own inheritance. The boardroom capitulation spoke volumes about a nation that had grown accustomed to viewing its past as a marketing opportunity rather than a responsibility. We lecture the world on soft power and heritage, yet when the cheque arrives we fold faster than a cheap umbrella in a gale. The Americans, for their part, did what conglomerates do: pursued synergies, cut costs, and introduced the sort of recipe 'optimisations' that would have left old George Cadbury reaching for his temperance tracts in disbelief—or possibly for the nearest blunt instrument.

And what optimisations they were. Post-acquisition, the chocolate that once prided itself on purity began its slow, inexorable slide toward mediocrity, like a once-proud dowager reduced to selling off the family silver for supermarket own-brand gin. Cocoa content crept downward in certain lines; vegetable fats, including palm oil, insinuated themselves where cocoa butter had reigned supreme, bringing with them the faint whiff of ecological compromise and culinary surrender. The once-creamy Dairy Milk acquired an oily sheen and a peculiar aftertaste, as if someone had decided that “glass and a half” could be stretched with the contents of a motorway service-station dispenser. Crème Eggs lost their distinctive Dairy Milk shell for a more generic chocolate coating that tasted, in the immortal words of one disgruntled consumer, “like soap left out in the rain.” Shrinkflation became an art form: bars subtly smaller, Easter eggs lighter, boxes of Roses got smaller and smaller, yet prices sneaking higher. By 2026 consumer groups were documenting hollow eggs reduced by dozens of grams year on year, with prices per gram soaring by as much as 73 percent in some markets—while shelves groaned under unsold stock offered at desperate discounts, the chocolate equivalent of a clearance sale at a failing marriage-guidance centre. 

The public noticed. Boycotts were mooted. Complaints flooded in: it tasted “not even chocolate anymore,” or worse, like the sort of confectionery one might expect from a budget airline’s duty-free trolley. Mondelez insisted quality remained uncompromised, blaming cocoa prices and energy costs. One is reminded of the Roman emperors assuring the plebs that the bread was as wholesome as ever, even as the circuses grew threadbare and the lions began to look suspiciously vegan. The disgust one feels is not mere nostalgia for childhood treats, though that plays its part like a sentimental uncle at a wake. It is the spectacle of a once-proud British institution hollowed out—much like those unfortunate Easter eggs—from within. Palm oil may be cheaper and more stable for mass production, but it carries the faint whiff of a civilisation that has decided excellence is for losers. To replace the honest labour of cocoa beans and fresh milk with industrial fats is to confess that heritage is now subordinate to the spreadsheet, and that the Bournville of the mind—those leafy avenues of decency and cocoa-scented principle—has been rezoned for a distribution centre.

This decline is no isolated misfortune. It mirrors a broader pattern in which Britain, having misplaced its manufacturing confidence somewhere between the Suez Crisis and the rise of Uber Eats, treats its cultural totems as disposable assets. We export our football clubs, our stately homes become luxury hotels for Gulf investors, and our chocolate—symbol of modest domestic pleasure—becomes just another vector for global cost arbitrage. There is a dry comedy in it: the nation that gave the world the chocolate bar now imports inferior versions of its own invention, grumbling all the while into its shrinking bar. Yet the laughter catches in the throat. When a company like Cadbury is diminished, something intangible erodes alongside the cocoa solids—a sense that continuity matters, that excellence is worth preserving for its own sake, that not everything need be optimised into oblivion by people who think “heritage” is something you put on a PowerPoint slide.

In the end, one returns to that supermarket photograph: piles of unwanted Easter eggs, reduced to clear, bearing silent witness like the last survivors of a once-mighty empire. They are not merely chocolate; they are the residue of a failed stewardship. Britain failed to respect its own heritage when it allowed Cadbury to slip away for a quick payday and a pat on the back from the City. The recipe changes are not technical footnotes but moral ones—evidence of a civilisation that has forgotten how to value the pure over the profitable, the local over the leveraged, the honest Quaker bar over the palm-oil-coated compromise. If we cannot even keep our chocolate honest, what hope for the rest? 

Perhaps the final irony is this: in an age of endless choice, the one thing we seem incapable of choosing is to keep what was once best, simply because it was ours  - and all that remains is the bitter, oily aftertaste of regret.

NICHOLAS BRENDON (1971 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Nicholas Brendon, the affable everyman who spent seven seasons as Xander Harris on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, slipped away in his sleep on March 20, 2026, in San Francisco, at the age of 54. His family announced the news with quiet dignity, citing natural causes, though one might gently observe that even the heartiest sidekick eventually finds the credits rolling without fanfare.

Born Nicholas Brendon Schultz in Los Angeles in 1971, three minutes ahead of his identical twin Kelly Donovan, he once dreamed of pitching for the Dodgers until an arm injury redirected him toward acting. He overcame a childhood stutter through performance, landed bit parts, and then, at 25, stepped into the role that defined him: Xander, the wisecracking, loyal, perpetually underpowered friend who somehow survived vampires, demons, and apocalyptic prophecies by sheer force of sarcasm and heart.

From 1997 to 2003, Brendon appeared in nearly every episode of Joss Whedon’s ground-breaking series, earning Saturn Award nominations for his portrayal of the ordinary mortal who grounded the supernatural with jokes, heartbreak, and unshakeable decency. Xander was no chosen one, no brooding vampire slayer—just a guy with a toolkit and a quip, proving that courage often arrives in sneakers rather than capes. The show’s cult following ensured Brendon remained a fixture at conventions, where fans greeted him like an old friend who’d once saved the world (again).

Later credits included recurring work as Kevin Lynch on Criminal Minds, guest spots, indie films like Coherence (with his brother), and voice roles. In recent years he turned to painting and writing, channelling sensitivity into canvases shared generously with family, friends, and admirers. He spoke openly about struggles with alcohol, depression, and health issues—a congenital heart condition among them—yet maintained an optimistic streak that endeared him further. Brendon leaves behind a legacy of warmth amid chaos: the comic relief who reminded viewers that normalcy, flawed and funny, can be heroic. At 54, he exited quietly, as if reluctant to steal the spotlight even in farewell. The Scooby Gang feels one fewer now, but the jokes—and the loyalty—linger.

CHUCK NORRIS (1940 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KENT’S PLAGUE REDUX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MANDELSON NOOSE CARES NOT FOR STARMER’S LAST GASP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STRICTLY ARMAGEDDON

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

NOT YOUR FINEST HOUR, KEIR …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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