SORRY URSULA, BUT THE ADULTS ARE TALKING

Even as the European Union congratulates itself on being the world’s most sophisticated exercise in self-administered tedium, a voice has lately drifted across the Atlantic with the calm, dispassionate authority of a man who has already abolished several impossible things before breakfast. Elon Musk, part South African wizard, part Bond villain who forgot to apply for the licence, has publicly recommended that the entire EU be abolished. Not reformed, mind you; not trimmed around the edges like an overweight hedge in a Versailles side-garden. Abolished. The word lands in Brussels with roughly the same charm as a grand piano dropped through the roof of a Michelin-starred restaurant during the fish course.

One pictures the scene in the Berlaymont press room: spokesmen clutching their reusable coffee cups, eyes widening like rabbits who have just read the menu and discovered they are the plat du jour. Musk, speaking from the comfortable distance of several billion dollars and an even larger number of kilometres, offered no detailed roadmap, only the serene observation that the EU has become a regulatory blob that smothers enterprise faster than a wet duvet smothers a candle. Coming from a man whose companies are regulated by entities that still use fax machines for light entertainment, this counts as almost touching concern. Yet the suggestion hangs in the air like cigarette smoke in a post-war Paris café: impossible to ignore and guaranteed to annoy everyone who believes the continent’s problems can be solved by another 400-page directive on the curvature of bananas.

In an age when the European Union resembles nothing so much as a vast, overfed bureaucracy suffering from existential indigestion, it is refreshing—nay, exhilarating—to contemplate the one figure who might finally administer the necessary emetic. That man is Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, fence-builder extraordinaire, and the living embodiment of what one might call true Europeaness. Not the watery, Brussels-approved version served lukewarm in Strasbourg canteens, but the full-blooded, paprika-spiced variety that still believes nations are allowed to disagree without first filing Form 27B/6 in triplicate.

The distinction, as any discerning observer must now acknowledge, is between Europeaness and Euroness. The former is the glorious chaos that gave us Roman ruins, Renaissance swagger, Bach, bratwurst, Proust, patisseries, Fellini, fettuccine, the siesta, the sauna, and the peculiar British conviction that their language is the only one worth speaking properly. It is the continent’s genius for arguing over borders the size of a suburban lawn while producing wine that makes angels weep. Euroness, by contrast, is the grey sludge brewed in the Berlaymont building: a monochrome dream of “ever-closer union” enforced by regulations so numerous they require their own bureaucracy to catalogue the bureaucracy. It is the euro that turned Greece into a debtor’s prison, the Common Agricultural Policy that pays French farmers to grow nothing while ensuring tomatoes taste of wet cardboard, and the starry blue flag that nobody asked for and fewer still salute unless a subsidy is attached.

The European Union, in its current incarnation, has become the world’s most ambitious exercise in herding cats with PowerPoint presentations. Its founding myth—that without a federal superstate, the continent would immediately revert to flinging trebuchets at one another—is touching in its naïveté. Europe has enjoyed eighty years of peace not because Jean Monnet had a particularly persuasive slideshow, but because NATO parked a great many tanks on the Elbe, because Marshall Plan dollars rebuilt the rubble, and because even the most enthusiastic nationalist eventually grew tired of total war. Yet the Eurocrats press on, dreaming of a United States of Europe that would require another American Civil War just to agree on the spelling of 'catalogue.'

Enter Viktor Orbán, stage right, wearing the expression of a man who has read the Lisbon Treaty and found it wanting. Orbán understands that Europe’s strength has never lain in conformity but in its magnificent, quarrelsome variety. He looks at the Brussels machine—currently attempting to fine Hungary for refusing to turn itself into a migrant transit camp—and sees not a noble project but a sausage factory with a fetish for red tape. Where lesser leaders tremble before the wrath of the Commission, Orbán builds a fence, vetoes a sanction, and pockets an exemption with the serene confidence of a card-sharp who knows the deck is marked in his favour.

Imagine, if you will, Orbán elevated to the presidency of the European Council (or whatever grandiloquent title they invent next). The first act would be symbolic yet devastating: the quiet retirement of that circle of gold stars on a blue background. In its place, perhaps nothing at all—because real Europeans do not need a flag to tell them who they are. The second act would be the Great Unravelling: Maastricht reversed, Lisbon shredded, the euro gently euthanised and replaced by a polite arrangement whereby each country prints whatever currency best matches its national character. The third act—ah, the third act—would see the European Union transformed back into what it was always meant to be: a benign association of sovereign nations who cooperate when it suits them, trade enthusiastically, argue incessantly, and otherwise leave one another alone. A continent of checklists replaced by a continent of cafés.

One envisions the scene in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen, pale beneath the studio lighting, demanding 'solidarity' in the tone of a disappointed headmistress. Orbán, leaning back, orange tie glowing like a Carpathian sunset, murmuring something about national sovereignty in the soothing cadences of a man who has never felt the need to apologise for existing. The translators would give up in despair; the simultaneous interpretation booths would fall silent; and for the first time in decades the European Parliament might actually hear itself think. Of course, there are risks. The Eurocracy does not surrender power gracefully. When confronted with a leader who refuses to accept that “European values” are whatever the Commission declares them to be on a Tuesday afternoon, the response is predictable: Article 7 procedures, frozen funds, sanctimonious editorials in Der Spiegel, and—when all else fails—the discreet funding of “civil society” groups whose commitment to democracy is curiously selective. One need only glance at the treatment meted out to Poland’s Law and Justice government, or the sudden discovery of “corruption” whenever a troublesome nationalist wins an election, to see the pattern. 

Orbán, having survived more coup attempts than a Latin American colonel in the 1970s, is harder to shift than most. But the machinery is patient. Give it time, a pliable opposition leader, a few well-timed leaks to the international press, and even the Magyar Magyarbuster might find himself replaced by a photogenic globalist who promises to “bring Hungary back into the European family”—which is to say, back onto the leash. Thus the warning, dear reader, delivered with the weary cynicism of one who has watched too many good rebellions end in focus groups: enjoy the spectacle of Orbán tweaking the dragon’s tail while it lasts. The Eurocrats play a long game, and their weapon of choice is not the tank but the NGO, the grant, the “independent” judiciary, and the slow drip of manufactured scandal. One day we may wake to discover that Hungary, too, has been returned to “normality”—a colourless, borderless, flag-free normality where the only permissible patriotism is the kind that salutes twelve gold stars and apologises for its carbon footprint. 

Until then, let us savour the glorious anomaly of a European leader who still believes Europe is something worth defending from its own supposed guardians. Viktor Orbán may not save the continent—he may only delay the inevitable—but in an era of managed decline, delay itself is a kind of victory. And if the price of that delay is the permanent outrage of the bien-pensant commentariat, then all I can say is: pass the popcorn, comrade. The show is just beginning.

STEVE CROPPER (1941 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Steve Cropper, the guitarist whose riffs were so understated they made minimalism look ostentatious, has finally laid down his Telecaster at the age of eighty-four, presumably after checking it was in tune one last time. He died peacefully in Nashville, surrounded by amplifiers that still worked and a family who had long ago accepted that 'just one more take' was a lifelong commitment.

Cropper never sought the spotlight; he merely stood in it by accident while everyone else was busy falling over. As the house guitarist at Stax Records he supplied the backbone to more soul classics than most people have functioning vertebrae. Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” whistles because Cropper’s little guitar figure the way a bored man whistles while waiting for a bus that will never arrive; Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” struts because Cropper refused to strut himself; and Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” only reached the midnight hour because Cropper counted it in at exactly the right tempo, which is to say, not too fast, not too slow, just fast enough to remind you that life is short but grooves can be eternal.

He co-wrote many of these songs yet insisted his name appear in smaller type, a humility so extreme it bordered on the subversive. While other guitar heroes of the era were busy inventing new ways to look as if they’d been electrocuted, Cropper stood stage right in a short-sleeved shirt, playing chords so clean you could have performed surgery on them. Jimi Hendrix set fire to his instrument; Eric Clapton informed us that he was God; Steve Cropper simply made the drummer sound better, an act of generosity that should have earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. In later years he joined the Blues Brothers Band, where his reward was to wear a black suit and dark glasses indoors while Dan Aykroyd shouted. He endured this with the serene expression of a man who has seen every possible futures and concluded this one will do. Film buffs will remember him as the only musician in that enterprise who appeared to have met actual Black people.

Cropper outlived the Stax building, the original Muscle Shoals rhythm section, and most of the hair in Memphis. He is survived by a wife who still laughs at his jokes, several children who can actually play, and millions of listeners who never knew his name but can hum his licks in the shower. Somewhere tonight, a bar band is murdering “Green Onions.” Steve would have winced, corrected the tempo, and made it immortal. He has now, with typical restraint, left the stage without an encore.

THE POSTPONEMENT OF DEMOCRACY

One has to hand it to Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and, by coincidence, Britain’s Chief Postponer-in-Ordinary. When the great dictators of history wished to cancel an inconvenient election, they at least had the conscience to do it with panache. Stalin staged a show trial first, then shot the defendants; Hitler burned the Reichstag and blamed the Bulgarians; even Nicolae Ceaușescu waited until the crowds were chanting before he had them machine-gunned from helicopters. Crude, certainly, but one respected the forthrightness. One knew where one stood—usually against a wall, blindfolded, listening to the click of reloading.

Sir Keir, by contrast, cancels elections the way a nervous suburbanite cancels a dinner party: with a politely worded memo about “ongoing local government reorganisation” and the faint suggestion that everyone will have a much nicer time in 2028 once the canapés have been properly consulted upon. Four new mayoral elections—Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Hampshire and the Solent, Sussex and Brighton—were meant to occur in 2026. They will now occur, we are reassured, “when the time is right,” which in Starmerese translates roughly as “once Reform has been declared an illegal organisation and its voters safely re-educated in tasteful community gulags located in former Premier Inn conference suites.”

The excuse, delivered with all the solemnity of a man discovering a new species of damp in his downstairs loo, is that local councils need more time to merge, split, re-brand and generally faff about with new logos before they can be trusted to hold a vote. One pictures the Minister for Levelling Up, Ms Angela Rayner, standing atop a cardboard box in a village hall, earnestly explaining to the peasantry that democracy must be postponed until the new unitary authorities have agreed on a typeface. The peasants, being British, nod politely and go home to put the kettle on, which is precisely how the Starmer revolution works: not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with the soft rustle of yet another consultation document.
Compare this to the classics. When Pol Pot wanted to abolish elections, he abolished the electorate along with them—radical, yes, but at least he committed to the bit. When Kim Jong-un postpones a vote, he does so by promoting the ballot box to the rank of three-star general and then executing it for treason. Sir Keir merely sends it on gardening leave for two years while a task force of highly paid consultants decides whether 'devolution' is still inclusive enough for people who identify as spreadsheets.
And yet, in its bloodless, beige way, the Starmer method is more sinister than any of the old monsters. Dictators of yore were at least embarrassed by their own authoritarianism; they draped it in red flags, gigantic portraits—something, anything, to hide the naked power-grab. Starmer does it in broad daylight, wearing a [donated] suit that cost more than most people’s cars, and with the serene confidence of a man who knows the BBC will describe any criticism as 'populist noise.' The postponement is not announced by goose-stepping stormtroopers but by a press release quoting something called the English Devolution White Paper, which sounds less like a policy document and more like the title of a particularly depressing Morrissey album.
One remembers that this is the same Sir Keir Starmer who, as Director of Public Prosecutions, once pondered aloud whether jury trials might be a bit too much bother for complex fraud cases. Nothing to see here, merely the quiet euthanising of eight hundred years of common law because some accountants in the City found 12 citizens from the Clapham omnibus a touch déclassé. One trial at a time, one election at a time, one ancient liberty at a time, the whole edifice is put on hold “until the conditions are right,” which is Starmer-speak for “until I am certain of winning.” The beauty of it—the sheer, dazzling, North Korean brilliance—is that he believes he will never be caught in a lie. There will be no tanks in the streets, no midnight knock on the door. There will only be another delay, another review, another urgent need to 'build capacity.' The British people will wake up in 2030 to discover that elections have been postponed indefinitely because the climate emergency requires a permanent technocratic stewardship, whereupon they will shrug and ask whether the postponement qualifies them for a council-tax rebate.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. Starmer can’t even manage that, but he has ensured that democracy itself will arrive precisely two years late, and only after it has filled in the correct equality-impact assessment in triplicate. History will record that Britain’s first truly post-democratic leader was not a ranting corporal or a psychopathic peasant general, but a mild-mannered knight of the realm who cancelled elections the way other people cancel Amazon Prime—quietly, bureaucratically, and with the vague promise that the new season will definitely drop eventually. There is, of course, a pattern here, and it is the pattern of a frightened little boy who has been told he is in charge of the sweet shop and must on no account let the bigger children have any. Every time a jury acquits a climate protester or a pro-Palestine activist (as juries, being composed of human beings rather than party whips, have a tendency to do), Keir experiences the political equivalent of a bed-wetting incident. The solution, in his fevered imagination, is not to examine why ordinary people keep refusing to convict other ordinary people for crimes of conscience, but to abolish the ordinary people from the process altogether. It is the legislative equivalent of a child stuffing his ears and screaming “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” whenever reality threatens to intrude.
Let us be clear: this is not the behaviour of a Prime Minister. It is the behaviour of a prefect who has been given a whistle and a clipboard and told to keep the lower fourth in line while the headmasters are at lunch. Starmer does not stride the stage like a Caesar; he scuttles across it like a supply teacher who has just realised the little darlings have discovered he can be made to cry. His terror of the public (real, grubby, unpredictable Britain) is so palpable that one half expects him to govern from inside a fortified crate labelled “Handle With Care: Contents Fragile Ego”. And the tragedy, the exquisite, almost Greek tragedy of it all, is that he actually believes this makes him tough. In his mind’s eye he is Churchill, brooding over the maps while lesser men quail. In reality he is Miss Trunchbull, swinging the judiciary like a shot-putter whenever a child dares to suggest that cake might belong to everyone. The difference being that even Roald Dahl’s monstrous headmistress had the courage of her cruelties. Starmer cannot even muster that. He outsources the cruelty to civil servants and then affects sorrowful puzzlement when the public objects. “Why are they so angry?” he asks the mirror, adjusting the knot of a tie that has never known the stain of honest sweat. “I only wanted to be loved.”
Well, Keir, here is a newsflash from the world you have spent your life avoiding: love is not something you extract by removing ancient rights and replacing them with efficiency reviews. It is not secured by declaring paint-wielding idealists to be the moral equivalent of people who fly planes into buildings. And it is most certainly not achieved by a man whose every political instinct is to run, trembling, for the nearest bunker the moment twelve citizens threaten to think for themselves.
History, which you affect to respect while busily dynamiting its foundations, will not remember you as the stern but necessary realist who modernised Britain. It will remember you as the timid little technocrat who, when faced with the first moral test of his premiership, reached for the statute book and began frantically crossing out centuries of liberty in the margin. A man so paralysed by the possibility of being disliked that he preferred to be feared (and even then, only by proxy, through the police baton and the magistrate’s gavel). One almost wants to pat him on the head and send him back to the comfortable obscurity of North London dinner parties, where the greatest threat to civil liberties is the host running out of quinoa. Almost. But the damage is real, and the hour is late, and there comes a point when sympathy for the architect of one’s own imprisonment must give way to something colder.
So let us say it plainly, in the calm, surgical language you pretend to admire: Keir Starmer is unfit for any office higher than assistant under-secretary for paper clips. He is a small man presiding over the shrinkage of a large country, a moral vacuum in a suit so expensive it has to be dry-cleaned of any residual principle. If Britain still possessed the self-respect of a serious nation, the resignation letter would already be written (not in the usual oily prose of political departure, but in the blunt terms a weary people might finally force from his trembling hand): “I discover, to my surprise and sorrow, that I am simply not brave enough for this job.”
Until that happy day, we are left with the spectacle of a prime minister who governs like a man perpetually checking under the bed for the bogeyman. It would be funny, if only the bed were not our own. Compared to the vulgar theatrics of the old tyrants, Sir Keir’s bloodless little coup is a masterpiece of the genre: the first dictatorship to be run entirely on Microsoft Teams, where dissent is dealt with not by firing squad but by muting the participant and pretending the connection dropped.
Bravo, Sir Keir. Even Lenin would have been forced to admit: that’s style.