DAME PENELOPE KEITH (1940 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Dame Penelope Keith, who has died at the age of 86, spent much of her career perfecting the sort of cut-glass accent that could frost a greenhouse at twenty paces. In an era when British comedy still believed suburbia was worth satirising, she became its undisputed queen, a woman who could make the word “ghastly” sound like a royal decree. 

Born Penelope Anne Constance Hatfield in 1940, she arrived with the sort of respectable English vowels that suggested centuries of careful breeding, even if the actual pedigree was rather more modest. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early Sixties, where she no doubt learned that the best way to survive classical theatre was to wait for the sitcom that would actually pay the mortgage. That deliverance came in 1975 with The Good Life, in which she played Margo Leadbetter, the woman who believed that self-sufficiency was all very well provided one’s neighbours did it without lowering the tone of the avenue. Keith’s performance was a masterclass in majestic disapproval; she could convey the moral weight of a dropped aitch with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a slight tightening of the jaw. Britain, still pretending it hadn’t quite lost the Empire, adored her for it. 

To the Manor Born followed, confirming what we already suspected: Keith’s genius lay in portraying women who regarded the rest of humanity as charmingly déclassé. She brought to these roles a glacial dignity that made the jokes land like well-aimed cricket balls. While lesser performers might have camped it up, Keith understood that the funniest thing about snobbery is its absolute sincerity. She played it straight, which is why it remains devastatingly funny decades later. One half-expected her to address the nation on the correct way to fold a napkin during the three-day week.

Later honours arrived, as they tend to for national treasures who have never quite embarrassed the middle classes: a BAFTA, an Olivier, and eventually a DBE in 2014. She became Dame Penelope, a title that suited her as naturally as a Barbour jacket suits a Labrador. In her later years she presented television programmes about villages, those bastions of Englishness where everyone knows their place and the scones are never dry. It was the perfect coda: the woman who had spent her career gently mocking the Home Counties now toured them with the air of a benevolent duchess.

She leaves behind a body of work that reminds us how much sharper British comedy was when it trusted its audience to understand irony without neon subtitles. In an age of performative outrage and anxious egalitarianism, Penelope Keith was a reminder that hauteur, properly done, is an art form. The nation will be the poorer for her passing, though doubtless she would have observed that the flowers at the funeral had better be properly arranged. One shudders to think what Margo would have said otherwise.

THE UTTER DISPAIR OF THE RANTING BRUMMIE

One reaches a certain age, or at least I have, where the spectacle of public life no longer surprises but merely confirms the gentle, inexorable slide into absurdity that the gods, in their infinite sporting malice, have arranged for our entertainment. Yet even by those lowered standards, the latest wheeze from Shabana Mahmood, our Home Secretary, leaves one groping for the appropriate expletive. "I fucking despair" will have to do. It has the virtue of honesty, if little else.

Ms Mahmood, with the air of a woman who has studied the polling data more closely than the shipping forecasts, has announced reforms to the asylum system. These come billed as the most significant changes in modern times, which is rather like describing a fresh coat of paint on the Titanic as a bold navigational initiative. On the one hand, we are to have temporary protection for new refugees—thirty months, renewable, with the cheerful prospect of being packed off home the moment some junior civil servant in the Foreign Office decides that, say, Damascus has become 'safe enough' for a family with three small children and a history of having opposed the regime. On the other, shiny new 'safe and legal routes': community sponsorship schemes, university places, work visas, all modelled on the Homes for Ukraine programme but expanded, like a particularly ambitious virus, to conflicts the world over. Numbers will start small, they assure us. They always do. Then they grow. Like waistlines after Christmas.

The genius of the thing is its exquisite symmetry. With one hand the government tightens the rules just enough to sound stern on the doorstep in marginal seats; with the other it flings open new doors through which hundreds of thousands may eventually pass, each one clutching the sacred biometric ID that says 'genuine' in the soothing bureaucratic dialect. It is the political equivalent of promising to lock the stable door while simultaneously installing a revolving one, complete with welcoming committee and complimentary halal catering.

One admires the sheer brass of it. Here we are, a nation already straining at the seams with record net migration, housing shortages that make Victorian rookeries look like spacious executive apartments, an NHS waiting list longer than the M25 on a bank holiday, and schools where English is effectively a second language in several classrooms. And what is the solution? More of the same, but better marketed. The Ukraine scheme, we are reminded, was a success. Indeed it was, if your metric for success is the importation of large numbers of people who, through no fault of their own, have no intention of returning even when the shooting stops. Now we are to globalise that particular triumph. Every warlord, every failed state, every ethnic dust-up from the Sahel to the South China Sea will have its own bespoke British welcome mat. Splendid.

The satire writes itself, which is fortunate because reality has outpaced the satirists. We are told these new routes will be 'capped' and 'sustainable.' One wonders what the cap is measured against. The capacity of the housing stock? The tolerance of the native population? Or merely the ability of the Home Office to process the paperwork without the servers melting? Past performance suggests the latter. Sustainable, in Whitehall parlance, means "we'll keep doing it until the electorate revolts or the money runs out, whichever comes first."

And the voters—ah, the voters. One cannot help noticing, with the cold eye of the detached observer, that importing large numbers of people who tend to vote in predictable ways for the party that imported them has certain electoral advantages. It is not, of course, that anyone would be so crude as to say this aloud. Instead we get sonorous speeches about our 'international obligations' and 'generosity of spirit.' Generosity is a wonderful thing when exercised with other people's neighbourhoods, other people's schools, and other people's tax receipts. The middle classes, safely ensconced in their Islington terraces or Cotswold boltholes, can virtue-signal to their hearts' content while the consequences land elsewhere. This is not policy; it is moral cosplay with real-world victims.

One might even compare this particular chapter of national self-harm to one of those Japanese game shows where contestants are dared to endure ever more inventive forms of discomfort. Except here the discomfort is not for the participants but for the audience—the great British public, expected to applaud as their country is rearranged around them. We are assured that strict checks will be carried out: biometrics, criminality screening, health assessments. One is reminded of the man who, having lost his keys in a dark alley, searches for them under the streetlamp "because that's where the light is." The real problems—cultural cohesion, integration that actually works, the maintenance of a recognisable society—lie in the shadows, unexamined.

What we are witnessing is not so much reform as ritual. The government must be seen to be doing something. The something in question must simultaneously appease the human rights lobby, the business lobby that likes cheap labour, and the voters who are growing restive. The result is this baroque compromise: temporary status that will prove as temporary as a Scottish Conservative majority, and new routes that will prove as expansive as the human imagination when it comes to claiming persecution.

So yes, I despair. I absolutely fucking despair. Not because compassion is wrong—compassion is essential—but because it has been nationalised, bureaucratised, and turned into a growth industry that devours the very society it claims to improve. We have forgotten that a country is not an hotel with infinite rooms, nor a charity with infinite funds. It is a home. And you do not keep adding extensions to the house until the foundations crack, all the while lecturing the original occupants that they must learn to love the renovation. Ms Mahmood and her colleagues will no doubt press on, convinced of their own moral superiority. History, that merciless satirist, will deliver the punchline. 

One only hopes the rest of us are still around to appreciate it when the bill arrives.

THE UNGOVERNABLE KINGDOM

One hears it everywhere now, murmured in the pubs of what remains of England, whispered like a password in the comment sections, and occasionally shouted from the back benches by some poor soul who still believes in elections: Britain is ungovernable. The phrase has acquired the weary glamour of a terminal diagnosis. Six prime ministers in a decade, or thereabouts; the economy performing like a one-legged man in a three-legged race; and a political class that treats the electorate’s wishes with all the reverence a teenager shows his parents’ vinyl collection. 

Yet here we are, on the cusp of another coronation—this time for the Honourable Andy Burnham, lately of Manchester and now, by some miracle of by-election mathematics, MP for Makerfield and presumptive saviour of the realm. One feels the urge to applaud, or perhaps to reach for the sherry and the revolver.

The people, in their stubborn, bovine way, keep voting for things the actually want. Lower immigration, they said. Proper Brexit, they added, with the air of someone ordering a pint that actually tastes of beer. Biological single-sex spaces, because the species has managed for several million years without pretending otherwise. And equal opportunities regardless of race—meaning, one naively assumed, that no one should be excluded on the grounds of melanin content, least of all the native population. 

These are not exotic demands. They are the sort of modest requests one might make of a functioning democracy. Instead, our political masters have delivered the opposite with the tireless enthusiasm of a zealot handing out leaflets. More immigration, closer ties to Brussels in all but name, men in women’s refuges and changing rooms (because fairness, apparently, requires pretending biology is a social construct invented by the patriarchy on a slow news day), and job schemes and diversity initiatives that treat whiteness as an original sin best atoned for by exclusion. 

It is a spectacle of almost heroic perversity. One is reminded of those Roman emperors who, faced with a restive Senate, simply declared themselves gods and carried on. Our own emperors do not bother with divinity; they have focus groups and civil service briefings instead. The result is the same: the governed are treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a sovereign whose consent must be renewed. 

Brexit was supposed to restore parliamentary sovereignty. Instead, it restored the sovereignty of the permanent bureaucracy and the NGO complex, those tireless guardians of the progressive conscience who know better than the oiks in the red wall seats. The oiks may vote, but they are not consulted. Their role is to provide the raw material for policy—taxes, soldiers in past eras, and nowadays net contributors to a welfare system that somehow never quite reaches the bottom of the list. 

The elite gaze upon the native working class much as Victorian explorers once regarded the natives of distant lands—quaint, superstitious, in need of civilising. Where once we sent missionaries with Bibles, we now dispatch diversity coordinators with training modules. The effect is broadly similar: resentment, followed by quiet withdrawal, followed by the occasional explosion at the ballot box that is then solemnly diagnosed as “populism,” that dread disease which only afflicts those insufficiently grateful for their betters’ wisdom. 

And now cometh Burnham. One must admire the man’s timing, if nothing else. Fresh from his by-election triumph, he stands ready to inherit a Labour Party that has already demonstrated, under Starmer, a remarkable capacity for disappointing everyone simultaneously. The public, we are told, is exhausted by chaos. Burnham will bring stability. Stability, in this context, appears to mean continuing the same policies that produced the chaos, only with a more reassuring regional accent and better hair. One pictures him in Downing Street, sleeves rolled up in that carefully cultivated “man of the people” manner, announcing yet another review into immigration while the small boats continue their daily shuttle service across the Channel. The reviews will be thorough. The conclusions will be nuanced. The numbers will keep rising.

The despair one feels is not (yet) for Burnham personally. He is, by all accounts, a competent enough administrator, the sort of figure who once made the trams run on time in Greater Manchester—though even there, the superlatives were delivered with the caution of a man walking on thin ice. No, the despair is for the pattern. Here is a country that voted clearly, repeatedly, and often against the preferences of its educated classes, only to watch those preferences reimposed through administrative fiat, judicial creativity, and European alignment by other means. Single-sex spaces? The Supreme Court has nodded towards biology, but one senses the civil service treating the ruling as a regrettable suggestion rather than the law of the land. Equal opportunities? Only if “equal” is understood in the Humpty Dumpty sense: whatever diversity targets require. Brexit? We are not rejoining, perish the thought. We are merely harmonising, aligning, converging—euphemisms for the slow surrender of what was won.

Britain is not ungovernable. It is governed, relentlessly, in defiance of its governors’ mandate. The people reject the offer at every opportunity, as the man on X so pithily put it, and the machine grinds on. Reform UK polls strongly; Nigel Farage hovers like Banquo’s ghost at the feast. The establishment warns darkly of extremism while pursuing policies that make extremism inevitable. Andy Burnham’s government, when it arrives, will be presented as the last bulwark against the barbarians. In reality, it will likely be another chapter in the long book titled "How to Lose a Country Without Really Trying" . 

One can already write the obituary. There will be earnest speeches about “healing divisions.” There will be new strategies for integration that ignore the basic arithmetic of numbers. There will be more of everything the public has said it does not want, delivered with the serene confidence that this time, surely, the natives will be grateful. And when they are not—when the polls shift again and the next crisis arrives—the explanation will be the same as ever: the voters have failed to understand. Not the politicians. Never the politicians.

In the end, perhaps that is the most British thing about it all. We do not revolt. We grumble, we vote against, we watch as our wishes are filed under “considerations noted,” and then we queue patiently for the next disappointment. It is a form of constitutional masochism that would impress even the Stoics. God save the King, and deliver us from our representatives. They seem quite beyond saving themselves.

BREXIT @ 10: THE REFERENDUM THEY NEVER FORGAVE

Ten years on from that shimmering June morning in 2016 when the British people, in a fit of what the bien pensants still insist on calling collective madness, voted to leave the European Union, one is tempted to raise a glass of something suitably flat and warm—perhaps a pint of warm bitter, the national drink of a nation that has specialised in lukewarm compromises. Here we are in 2026, and the anniversary feels less like a celebration than a coroner’s report on a patient who briefly showed signs of life before relapsing into the familiar coma of managed decline. Brexit was not the disaster, dear reader; it was the last time the electorate was permitted a proper democratic victory. Everything since has been a masterclass in how to snatch defeat from the jaws of self-determination, administered by a procession of prime ministers whose collective inadequacy made even the average EU commissioner look like a titan of vision. 

Let us first dispense with the polite fictions. On 23 June 2016, 17.4 million souls—more than had ever bothered to turn out for a general election in living memory—looked at the supranational pudding and decided they had eaten enough. They did not do so because they hated foreigners, or because they had been mesmerised by a bus with a dubious slogan, or because they secretly yearned for the return of rationing and powdered egg. They did it because, in their bones, they sensed that sovereignty had become a polite euphemism for “please consult Brussels first.” 

It was, in its clumsy, sunburnt, English way, a genuine assertion of democratic will—the sort of thing political theorists used to write misty-eyed essays about before they discovered that actual voters were distressingly deplorable. Christopher Hitchens, had he lived to see it, might have observed that the British public had finally done what the commentariat always urged in theory but recoiled from in practice: they had exercised agency. And like a man who has ordered the steak and then been presented with the bill, the establishment spent the next decade trying to send it back to the kitchen. 

Teresa May, poor soul, inherited the china shop and immediately set about proving that a vicar’s daughter could negotiate with the EU like a maiden aunt haggling over a church fête. Her red lines were drawn in watercolour. She spoke of “Brexit means Brexit” with all the conviction of someone reading the small print on a dodgy insurance policy. The result was a Withdrawal Agreement that managed to leave Northern Ireland half-in, half-out, and the entire country wondering whether sovereignty was now measured in millimetres. 

May’s failure was not merely technical; it was spiritual. Here was a woman who had campaigned to remain (quietly) and then tried to deliver leave with the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a prepared statement. One almost felt sorry for her, until one remembered that sympathy is the emotion reserved for those who do not hold high office while demonstrating why it should not be held by them. 

Then arrived Boris Johnson, the great blond hope, the man who could charm birds from trees and, apparently, majorities from hitherto safe Labour seats. For a brief, chaotic moment, it seemed as though Brexit might actually mean something. “Get Brexit Done” had the merit of brevity, if not intellectual depth. 

Johnson delivered the formal exit, waved the fish-and-chips flag, and promptly discovered that governing without the EU’s scaffolding required rather more than a few Latin tags and a talent for dishevelment. One might charitably say his administration was distracted by events—parties during lockdown, wallpaper scandals, and the eternal circus of his own appetites. Less charitably, one notes that the man who had once written columns about the absurdity of Brussels bureaucracy now seemed oddly comfortable with the machinery of globalist entanglement elsewhere. Trade deals were signed with fanfare, yet the lorry queues at Dover and the paperwork for exporters suggested that sovereignty, like charisma, has its limits when confronted with spreadsheets.

Liz Truss, bless her lettuce, lasted approximately as long as a snowflake in a sauna. Her crime was not so much ideological as existential: she attempted actual Conservative economics at speed, and the markets, those delicate flowers, reacted as if she had proposed sacrificing virgins to the bond gods. Her brevity was almost poetic. Britain briefly had a prime minister who seemed to believe in something, and the system promptly ejected her like a malfunctioning vending machine returning the wrong crisps.

Rishi Sunak, smooth as a technocrat’s conscience, arrived promising competence and stability. He gave us the appearance of adulthood—suit, haircut, spreadsheets—while continuing the stately drift towards whatever fashionable global consensus required the least confrontation with reality. Net Zero targets, endless migration pressures, and the quiet realisation that “global Britain” often meant Britain as a polite adjunct to everyone else’s priorities. He was, in many respects, the perfect post-Brexit manager: someone who could administer the estate without ever questioning why the estate no longer felt quite like home.

And then Keir Starmer—ah, the man who promised to make Brexit work while looking as though he would rather it had never happened. His tenure, cut short amid the usual revolts and disappointments, exemplified the Labour Party’s approach: treat the referendum result as a regrettable outbreak of plebeian opinion that must be sanitised, regulated, and aligned with the greater European project in all but name. Under Starmer, as under his predecessors, the great insight of 2016—that nations might still wish to control their borders, laws, and destinies—was quietly reclassified as a problem to be managed rather than a principle to be upheld.

What unites these administrations, from May’s dutiful misery through Johnson’s fireworks, Truss’s brevity, Sunak’s spreadsheets, and Starmer’s managerialism, is a common thread of inadequacy dressed up as sophistication. Each prime minister, confronted with the raw fact of democratic instruction, felt the gravitational pull of globalism not because they were evil masterminds of Davos, but because it was easier. 

Globalism, in its current form, offers the political class what they crave most: the ability to outsource difficult decisions to technocrats, markets, international forums, and the great swirling vortex of “rules-based international order.” It absolves them of the need to confront their own electorates, to make hard cultural choices, or to admit that running a country requires more than good intentions and a compelling LinkedIn profile. Brexit exposed their limitations; rather than rise to the occasion, they chose the comfortable exile of transnational pieties. 

Cameron himself had called the referendum out of party management, not conviction—a classic case of a man using democracy as a tactical tool only to discover it had ideas of its own. His successors merely continued the pattern, each more convinced than the last that the voters had been a momentary aberration. The economic numbers, those dreary companions of anniversaries, will be marshalled by both sides. Some will speak of GDP losses, trade frictions, and the usual regressions. 

Others will point to sovereignty regained, regulatory freedom exercised (if not always wisely), and the quiet satisfaction of no longer pretending that ever-closer union was destiny. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the spreadsheets and the soul. Nations are not balance sheets. The real cost of the last decade has not been measured in basis points but in the evaporation of trust—the sense that even when the people speak with unprecedented clarity, the system will find ways to muffle, dilute, reinterpret, and ultimately neuter their voice.

Ten years after Brexit, Britain finds itself in that most English of conditions: muddling through, slightly poorer on paper, considerably more confused about its identity, and still possessed of that strange, stubborn refusal to admit that the project was entirely misconceived. The electorate’s victory in 2016 was real. The failure since has been almost total. It is not the fault of the 17.4 million who voted Leave. It is the fault of those who were meant to implement their decision and instead treated it as a problem of public relations.

One can only hope that somewhere, in a quiet corner of the shires or a forgotten corner of Westminster, the lesson is still faintly audible: democracy is not a suggestion box for the clever classes. It is the sovereign speaking. The rest of us—politicians especially—should have the decency to listen, even when it inconveniences our dinner invitations in Brussels, Davos, or wherever the next global consensus is being lightly brokered over canapés. 

Happy anniversary Brexit, the cake, like so much else, tastes faintly of regret. But at least we baked it ourselves.

THE RESINGATION OF SIR KEIR STARMER: A STUDY IN MANAGED MEDIOCRITY

It is with the sort of restrained satisfaction one reserves for the removal of a stubbornly persistent stain that one greets the news of Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation. After two brief, blundering years in office—years that felt, to the suffering electorate, rather more like a prolonged hostage situation—he has at last decided to fall on his sword. Or, more accurately, to allow the sword to be gently pressed into his unresisting abdomen by colleagues who had grown tired of watching him fumble with it. The man who arrived promising renewal has departed as the most spectacular confirmation that New Labour’s final mutation was not a renaissance but a quiet surrender. 

Let us be precise about the scale of the under-achievement. Starmer inherited the largest Labour majority in a generation, a historic mandate handed to him not so much by popular enthusiasm as by the exhausted revulsion at fourteen years of the other lot. The country was placed in his hands like a delicate antique. He proceeded to use it as a coaster. Illegal immigration soared, taxes spiralled up, promises dissolved faster than a Temu bath bomb, and the cost-of-living crisis was met with the sort of sympathetic head-tilt one might offer a dying relative one has already written out of the will. Unemployment climbed to historic levels while the Prime Minister maintained the expression of a man who had just remembered he left the gas on. 

His government’s greatest innovations were largely repressive. Crackdowns on protests, particularly those concerning immigrants committing rape and murder, revealed a man uncomfortable with any dissent that might disturb the smoother functioning of the establishment consensus. He backed conflicts with the unblinking loyalty of a junior civil servant who has spotted which way the wind is blowing. Digital IDs rolled out with the quiet inevitability of parking restrictions. Young people were to be shielded from the perils of social media—presumably so they might better concentrate on the approved curriculum of managed disappointment. All the while, leasehold reform, that modest sop to the property-owning aspirations of the middle classes, was abandoned with the alacrity of a man spotting an awkward acquaintance across the room. 

The personal dimension is where the true comedy, if one may call it that, resides. Here was a figure who had spent years presenting himself as the decent, methodical lawyer who would restore competence to government. In practice, he resembled nothing so much as a senior partner in a provincial firm who had been elevated far beyond his natural ceiling and was now quietly terrified that someone might notice. The face—earnest, slightly pouchy, forever arranged in an expression of pained forbearance—suggested a man who had discovered the difference between being trusted with the petty cash and being trusted with the national finances. His speeches achieved the rare feat of sounding both scripted and extemporaneously dull. One imagined him practising them in the mirror, adjusting the tie, and still failing to convince his own reflection.

The electoral verdict was merciless and, in its way, rather beautiful. Labour haemorrhaged nearly 1,500 council seats in a single set of local elections. The net approval rating sank to minus sixty-six, a figure that places him in the exalted company of history’s more enthusiastically disliked prime ministers. Yet the real sting lay in where those votes went. Only a handful defected to Reform. The bulk migrated leftward, to the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Starmer, the great triangulator, the man who had neutered the Corbynite left with the ruthless efficiency of a party apparatchik securing his own advancement, had succeeded only in alienating precisely the constituency he was meant to have pacified. He was never there to represent them. He was there to neutralise them. Mission accomplished, as the post in question so dryly observed. Sort of. 

One searches for mitigating qualities and finds the cupboard embarrassingly bare. There was no grand vision, no memorable phrase, no moment of genuine moral courage that might redeem the record. Instead, there was the careful cultivation of the appearance of seriousness while the substance leaked away. Peter Mandelson’s early elevation—Epstein’s man in Britain, as the sharper tongues had it—set the tone. This was not renewal; it was the restoration of the same old revolving door between power and the more discreet forms of influence. Starmer governed as if the primary duty of office was to avoid frightening the horses. The horses, unimpressed, bolted anyway. 

Nowhere did the pinched soul of the man reveal itself more completely than in his response to the Southport murders, that pitiless slaughter of three little girls—Bebe, Elsie, and Alice—stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift dance class by a known quantity the state had repeatedly declined to restrain. Here was a Prime Minister confronted with raw, unbearable horror, the sort that should have cracked even the most lacquered political carapace. Instead, Starmer offered the nation the spectacle of a man auditing his own decency in real time. While the country reeled, he pivoted with the alacrity of a cornered accountant: swift condemnation not primarily of the killer but of the “far-right” disorder that followed, as though the true outrage were not the butchered children but the inconvenient eruption of public anger. 

No visible flicker of paternal grief disturbed those lawyerly features; one half-expected him to bill the parents by the hour for his condolences. He spoke of “terrorism has changed”—loners, misfits, bedroom radicals—as if the atrocity were a fascinating policy brief rather than the blood-soaked consequence of institutional cowardice and open-borders dogma he had done nothing to challenge. The families received platitudes; the rioters received a violent disorder unit. In that moment, Sir Keir Starmer stood exposed not merely as incompetent but as something colder: a functionary so thoroughly marinated in the preservative fluids of establishment self-preservation that the screams of murdered infants registered only as a threat to narrative control. A smaller, meaner man is difficult to conceive; one who could gaze upon such innocence destroyed and calculate first how best to spin it deserves not the pity of history but its permanent contempt.

In the end, Sir Keir Starmer will be remembered not as a tragic figure but as something smaller and more contemptible: a technician who mistook caution for wisdom and obedience for leadership. He entered Downing Street with every advantage and left it having proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the centre cannot hold when it has nothing at its core but the polished vacancy of ambition. Britain, poorer, angrier, and rather more cynical, waves him off without affection. The establishment, one suspects, will find a suitable sinecure. There is always the Lords for those who have served it faithfully, however incompetently.

Good riddance to a man who was, in the final analysis, one of the most thoroughgoing disappointments in modern British political history. Not evil, perhaps—just irredeemably small. And in politics, smallness, when dressed up in the robes of high office, is its own special form of insult to the public. One awaits the next with suitably lowered expectations.

AND ON THAT BOMBSHELL …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAKERFIELD DRAGS BRITAIN INTO BURNHAM'S BODY BAG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PLUCKY PLUMBER & THE PROFESSIONAL DRIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STARMER'S DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROGER COOK (1943 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

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

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

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

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

ROY HATTERSLEY (1932 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

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

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

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

DAVID HOCKNEY (1937 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

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

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

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

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

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

THE DOCTOR WILL HEAR YOU NOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BELFAST'S NEW (IMPORTED) TROUBLES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STARMER FALLS OFF HIS SILICON HORSE

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