THE GREAT BRITISH GERKHIN DISPENSATION

One approaches the latest Budget not with the trepidation once reserved for the reading of the Riot Act, but with the mild curiosity of a man examining a particularly ambitious jar of condiments. Chancellor John Healey, that tireless shepherd of the national larder, has seen fit to suspend import tariffs on gherkins, marmalade, and a supporting cast of more than a hundred “family favourites.” The nation, we are assured, may now breathe more easily. Up to twenty-one pounds a year more easily, if the Treasury’s arithmetic is to be believed. One almost expects the announcement to have been accompanied by a solemn fanfare of muted cornets and the distant sound of a lid being unscrewed.

It is difficult to overstate the grandeur of the vision. While lesser governments might have busied themselves with trifles such as energy prices, housing, productivity, or the general sensation that the country is held together by hope and residual EU regulations, this administration has gone straight to the heart of the matter: the price of small, vinegary cucumbers. History will record that when the British people stood at the crossroads of destiny, their leaders pointed firmly toward the pickle aisle. Future schoolchildren will learn that the turning point of the mid-2020s was not some tedious structural reform, but the moment the state decided that no citizen should ever again pay full tariff on a cornichon.

The rhetorical packaging is itself a masterpiece of understatement. These are not tax cuts, you understand. They are “everyday fixes.” The phrase has the cosy ring of a handyman arriving to mend a dripping tap, except the handyman is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the dripping tap is the entire cost of living. One pictures him arriving with a toolbox containing nothing but a jar of gherkins and a slightly sheepish expression. “I’ve fixed it,” he says, holding up the jar. “It was the import duty all along.” The public is invited to feel gratitude of a peculiarly modern kind: the gratitude of people who have been told that the ship is still sinking, but the water in the bilge has been given a pleasant briney flavour.

There is a certain genius in selecting the gherkin as the emblem of national renewal. The gherkin is not a glamorous vegetable. It does not inspire odes. It sits in its jar like a slightly embarrassed guest at a wedding, aware that it is present mainly to provide contrast. Yet here it stands elevated to the status of fiscal instrument. Marmalade, that other pillar of the new dispensation, brings its own tragicomic resonance. Paddington Bear must be wondering whether he has somehow wandered into a particularly austere episode of The Thick of It. One half expects the next Budget to feature tariff relief on fish paste and those mysterious grey biscuits that appear only at the back of elderly relatives’ cupboards.

The opposition, with its customary lack of subtlety, has described the whole affair as an insult. This seems unfair. An insult implies intent and a certain flair. What we have here is more in the nature of a clerical error elevated to policy. The government appears to have consulted a focus group consisting exclusively of people who eat their sandwiches in reverse order and concluded that the real barrier to prosperity was the twelve per cent duty on pickled cucumbers. The resulting savings—approximately fourpence a week if one is generous with the household averages—will, we are told, provide “breathing space.” One can only hope the breathing is done slowly, lest the space prove inadequate.

It would be churlish to deny the wider cultural moment. Pickles have, of late, enjoyed a modest renaissance. Fermented foods are said to be good for the gut microbiome, that fashionable internal parliament which apparently governs our happiness more effectively than the external one. Gen Z has discovered the joys of sourness. Dinner-party hosts now present jars of homemade pickles with the solemnity once reserved for a decent Burgundy. In this climate, the government’s intervention feels almost chic. They have not merely cut a tariff; they have aligned themselves with the zeitgeist. The Chancellor is not a dry fiscal technician. He is a man of the brine. The resulting legislation will doubtless be known to posterity as the Everyday Fixes (Gherkins and Allied Condiment Relief) Act 2026, and future constitutional historians will treat it with the same grave respect currently afforded to the Corn Laws, only with more vinegar.

And yet the satire writes itself with distressing ease. One imagines the Cabinet discussion; 

“What shall we do about the cost of living, Chancellor?” 

“I know—gherkins.” 

“Brilliant. And for the second reading?” 

“Marmalade.” 

“Inspired. The public will never see it coming.” 

There is, of course, a deeper comedy at work. Britain has always specialised in the art of the small gesture dressed up as national strategy. We once ruled a quarter of the globe while arguing about the correct way to take tea. We now face stagnation, demographic headwinds, and the lingering sense that the lights are being switched off one by one, and our response is to make the accompanying gherkins fractionally more affordable. It is almost touching in its domesticity. Other nations pursue industrial strategies or technological sovereignty. We pursue cheaper pickles. There is a kind of integrity in that. At least no one can accuse the government of over-promising.

In the end, the Gherkin Budget will take its place in the long British tradition of political bathos. It will be remembered not for what it achieved—history is rarely so cruel as to measure these things accurately—but for the perfect clarity with which it revealed the governing imagination. When the nation cried out for relief, its leaders reached not for the stars, nor even for the middle distance, but for the jar at the back of the fridge. And in that small, vinegary act of faith, they told us everything we needed to know.

One only hopes the savings materialise before the jars run out. There are, after all, only so many gherkins in the world, and the British public has never been famous for its restraint once the price comes down.

WALTER KOENIG (1936 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Walter Koenig, who has died at the age of 90, spent the better part of a lifetime proving that the universe is large enough for one man to be both the boyish navigator who never quite mastered the accent and the telepathic bureaucrat who could make a space station feel like a police state with a single raised eyebrow.

As Ensign Pavel Chekov on Star Trek: The Original Series, Koenig arrived in the second season like a mop-topped afterthought designed to appease the Russians and the teenagers in equal measure. The accent wandered about the steppes of Central Casting with the confidence of a tourist who has misread the map. Yet there was something disarming in the performance: a young man forever slightly out of his depth, forever ready with a line about inventing something that had clearly been invented elsewhere. He sat at the helm of the Enterprise for three seasons and seven films, ageing only slightly faster than the special effects, and somehow turned a secondary role into a permanent fixture of popular memory. One half-expected him, in later years, to claim that the warp drive itself had been a Soviet innovation.

Then came Babylon 5, and the joke turned sharper. As Alfred Bester of the Psi Corps, Koenig shed the wide-eyed ensign like an old uniform and stepped into the role of a man who could smile while rearranging your thoughts. Twelve episodes across five seasons, and each appearance tightened the screws. Where Chekov had been the eager subordinate, Bester was the superior who never needed to raise his voice. Koenig played him with a quiet, almost bureaucratic menace, as if the real threat to free will was not some alien armada but a civil servant with a clipboard and the ability to read your mind. Fans who had grown up watching him plot courses through asteroid belts now found themselves rooting, against their better judgement, for the man who plotted courses through other people’s heads.

It was, in its way, a perfect career arc: from the navigator who always looked slightly surprised by the stars to the telepath who was never surprised by anything. Koenig understood the joke and, more importantly, never spoiled it by explaining the punchline. In an industry that prefers its actors to stay in one orbit, he simply changed ships and kept flying. The final frontier, it turned out, was range.

TOM SKERRITT (1931 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Tom Skerritt, who has died at 93 of what his family discreetly called natural causes, spent a lifetime proving that Hollywood’s idea of an everyman was usually a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of a barbershop after a long discussion about trout fishing and the weather. He was the sort of actor who made competence look glamorous and glamour look faintly unnecessary.

Born in Detroit in 1933, Skerritt did the decent American thing of joining the Air Force before anyone thought of casting him as a pilot. He then drifted into acting the way other men drift into real estate: almost by accident, and with rather better results. Robert Altman spotted him for M*A*S*H*, where he played Duke Forrest with the air of a man who had already seen the joke and decided not to spoil it for everyone else. A decade later Ridley Scott put him in charge of the Nostromo in Alien. As Captain Dallas he demonstrated that the only rational response to a chest-bursting xenomorph is a quiet professionalism that never quite survives the second act. Audiences remembered the creature; professionals remembered Skerritt’s calm.

He was Viper in Top Gun, the instructor who made Tom Cruise look like a talented intern. He was the quietly suffering husband in Steel Magnolias, the philosophical father in A River Runs Through It, and, for four seasons of Picket Fences, the small-town sheriff who treated moral complexity as if it were a parking ticket that still had to be written out. An Emmy followed, which he accepted with the mild surprise of a man who had never expected the post office to notice him.

Skerritt never chased stardom with the desperation of those who fear obscurity more than death. He simply kept turning up, looking reliable, and leaving the scenery slightly better arranged than he found it. In later years he taught storytelling to veterans and worried about rivers, activities that suggested a man who had decided the real drama was happening off-camera.

He is survived by his wife Julie, five children, and the lingering suspicion that most leading men are merely elaborately trained versions of Tom Skerritt. Hollywood will replace him with someone younger, better lit, and less interesting. The rest of us will simply miss the quiet authority of a man who never needed to raise his voice to be heard.