‘Unable.’ That’s the word that’ll haunt him.

Ministerial resignation letters usually contain one sentence, buried in the text, which serves as a payload. There’s a preamble about all the great things they’ve accomplished in government, several pars of mutual congratulation, and a denouement about how honoured they were to serve. But somewhere in that letter there’ll be a sentence containing a specific criticism of a prime minister’s specific failings.

In this case, it was reduced to a single word. Defence secretary John Healey’s resignation letter, published yesterday, followed the traditional format but the payload was particularly explosive: “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” The sentence was harsh. But it was that one word which hung in the air.

‘Unable’. It is a summary of a prime minister who is defined by his absence.

This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security - one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead.

Starmer’s allies claim he is a stable force in a dangerous world. This is in fact the precise opposite of the truth. In reality, his fundamental absence of leadership makes the world more dangerous.

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The greatest humiliation of the Belfast riots is that they were not organised on Telegram. This used to be the communication app of choice for fascists: Hidden, encrypted, secure. But they don’t need to bother with that anymore. Now they just do it in the blistering light of day, transparently and without consequence, on X.

In houses in Belfast, black and brown people felt afraid. Immigrants hid and stayed silent. Shops closed. That’s the reality of what the fascists accomplished. They made them cower. They brought back historic sense-memories for all of us, terrible shudders from the past: The Kishinev pogrom, Kristallnacht, the Troubles. Horrible associatory flashbacks.

The rioters marched down the streets shouting “foreigners out” and “kill all Muslims”, looking for immigrants. The victims included Ugandans, Ukrainians and a Romani family, who all had to flee their home. X accounts in Northern Ireland and Britain called for migrants to be beheaded, kneecapped and burned alive.

They did it twice this week. Once on Tuesday night and then again on Wednesday night. This was the second week it had happened. Last week, riots took place in Southampton. And these events are the third consecutive year in which these kinds of demonstrations have been planned. There were riots against asylum hotels in 2024 and failed attempts to organise a sequel last year. It is now turning into a grotesque new summer tradition. Once the weather warms, the race riots begin.

Starmer’s government has now had nearly two years to grapple with this issue. It has done nothing to control X as an obvious out-in-broad-daylight threat to national security. The site is being used to inject far-right ideas into the mainstream, to spread violent ethno-nationalism and to coordinate pogroms.

Earlier this month, the Home Office banned two linguistically incontinent anti-Israel leftists from entering the country because of potential risk to the UK public good, but apparently allowing the full and unhindered operation of a fascist coordination website is completely fine.

Technology secretary Liz Kendall eventually announced new rules to force X to remove posts inciting disorder during crisis events through an update to the Online Safety Act. “Those who use social media to incite violence and disorder are breaking the law,” she said. “I have explicitly asked Ofcom to discuss urgently with X and other platforms how they will comply with the Online Safety Act.”

In an act of extraordinary supplication, Kendall actually said that on X. It is beyond parody. You know this government will never change by virtue of the way it announces its plan. This is junkie talk, the kind of thing someone does when they’re too weak to exercise any degree of self-control. It’s pitiful.

Legislation is not even strictly necessary. The government could wrestle control away from X simply by departing the platform and using a different one. This would help drag journalists away and reduce X’s contamination of the mainstream information space. It will not do this. Hell, it will not even use other social media sites in addition to X. It is unwilling to take even the most cursory action.

This would cost nothing economically. It would actually benefit the government politically, by pulling debate away from a site which is rigged, in its core algorithm, to subdue mainstream communication and promote extremist communication. And yet still it is too inert to do it.

The government can see a security threat with its own eyes. And yet it does nothing about it.

Unable.

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The same fundamental failure of responsibility is taking place in the international security space. We are in a new era of instability, authoritarian government, regional belligerence, strongman machismo and institutional breakdown. Even taking this moment as a standing start, it would take us a decade to get us where we need to be - six years after what is thought to be the earliest date for a Russian attack. And yet the government refuses to even limber up to the starting line, let alone sprint or even jog.

Healey’s basic financial criticism of the Starmer administration is damning. The PM agreed to increase defence spending from 2.4% of GDP to 3.5% by 2035. Healey wanted to hit three per cent by 2030. This isn’t just a halfway benchmark, it has practical implications. It would force the government to publish specific plans on where the money comes from. It would turn a hazy long-term goal into a concrete medium-term target.

After months of wrangling, the financial settlement the Treasury handed to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) amounted to 2.68% of GDP in 2030, only ever-so-slightly above the 2.6% to be achieved next year. Healey wrote: “Your [defence investment plan] financial settlement – which I was first given in full on Monday afternoon this week – falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time.”

It took a full year in power before Labour could express its plans on defence at all. When it was published, the strategic defence review was a stark warning about what we faced. “Russia, a nuclear-armed state, had invaded and brutally occupied part of a neighbouring sovereign state,” it said. “And in doing this it was supported by China, supplied with equipment from Iran and by troops from North Korea, deployed in Europe for the first time ever.”

Overshadowing the entire report but unable to be stated out loud was the absence of US leadership and its descent into Kremlin-worship and imperialist belligerence. In reality, we know it is already gone. Nato is over in concrete reality even if it remains in formal terms. For decades, defence plans were based on the assumption the US would have the central leadership role. But no-one truly believes the US would fulfill that role today. There is a strong incentive for Russia to tear down the facade and expose Nato’s weakness. The only thing that stops it from doing this are the Ukrainian people, who are punishing it daily and using up its financial, operational and human resources.

The conflict in Ukraine has become a preview of the future of warfare, in much the same way that the Spanish Civil War provided a foreshadowing of what was to come in the Second World War. It features the extensive use of low-cost drones, daily below-threshold attacks against Ukrainian allies, the systematic undermining of epistemic certainty, the corruption of information ecosystems, and the use of nuclear threats to constrain European decision-making.

Technologically and economically, it has really changed our entire assessment of what war entails. “Drawing on lessons from the war in Ukraine,” the review found, “the armed forces… should be driven by the logic of the innovation cycle - able to find, buy, and use innovation, pulling it through from ideas to front line at speed.”

This would require joined-up thinking working towards clear long-term goals. And it would require a lot more money - through borrowing, taxes, resource reallocation or private-public initiatives.

Most of all, it needs leadership from the government to take the country with it and understand what is at stake. The review said: “The government must promote unity of effort across society, leading a national conversation to raise public awareness of the threats to the UK, how defence deters and protects against them, and why defence requires support to strengthen the nation’s resilience.”

No-one wants to spend money in this way. Every penny spent on warfare is money which should have been spent on that which gives life meaning and provides joy, not that which destroys it. It is a species-tragedy that we should find ourselves in this position again, after tasting the benefits of a peace-dividend.

But this is where we are. There is no point burying our head in the sand and pretending it isn’t happening. It is not a coincidence that all the world’s populists - from Farage to Orban, Robinson to Trump - have an affinity to Vladimir Putin. He is the snake’s head. He stands at the pinnacle of the pyramid. It is now progressives and liberals who represent national security and who understand intuitively what needs to be done if we are to prevent a slide into darkness.

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In the year since the review was published nothing has happened. A full year, a tenth of the time envisioned for accomplishing preparedness, was squandered.

During that time, Healey and chancellor Rachel Reeves butted heads over and over again. The Treasury offered the MoD £20 billion extra over five years. The MoD said it needed £28 billion on top of that. It eventually reduced the ask to £18 billion. The Treasury refused to accept anything over £12 billion. Starmer eventually got the chancellor to raise it to £13.5 billion.

The Treasury is doing what it always does: Taking an issue which urgently needs to be solved and making it impossible through prevarication, penny-pinching and sheer obstinacy.

But it is too easy to simply blame the Treasury. The MoD is also to blame and so is No.10.

The Treasury does not behave this way because it is masochistic. It behaves this way because lots of very expensive things need to be done, no-one is prepared to admit that we need to pay more tax, and someone, somewhere, has to make the fucking money add up. That someone is the Treasury.

Since the Thatcher period, not one government has been willing to level with the public about taxation. Each government has insisted that they will cut taxes, only to raise them in the middle of the parliament and then try and cut them again just before the election. As long as this remains the case, you need a department that guards the purse. The Treasury is like a parent with a junkie for a child. Eventually, they put the money in a safe.

Starmer could have at the very least refused to support the tax cuts the Tories implemented as a voter bribe on their way out of office. He did not. We were therefore left with too little money to do anything of consequence in defence without borrowing, which is becoming increasingly difficult, or tax rises, which are considered politically impossible.

The Treasury is also right to be suspicious of the MoD’s track record on spending and project management. Look at the public accounts committee report into the MoD, published earlier this week. It is fuck up after fuck up after fuck up. Just a ceaseless stream of decisions which eradicate any confidence in the department’s spending decisions.

The MoD said it would replace its equipment plan with a full defence investment plan involving a zero-based review of its budgets. That plan is unpublished, because the department cannot decide which capabilities, infrastructure and people it requires.

The department is failing to provide parliament with sufficient transparency for it to see what’s going on in nuclear expenditure, even as costs spiral from 18% of the defence budget in 2024-25 to an expected 20% in 2025-26. Indeed, the MoD failed to maintain any accounting records at all for over £6 billion in assets in its 2024–25 annual report and accounts, leaving the comptroller and auditor general to conclude that they “did not provide a true and fair representation of its financial position”.

Where it does procure equipment, it is a poor customer. Take the Ajax armoured vehicle, which is extremely loud and vibrates violently, to the point where five of the 33 soldiers who reported health problems as a result of travelling in it were still under medical review five months later. The department insists that the vehicle is safe “when operated and maintained correctly within its design parameters”. What this entails in practice is a requirement that soldiers do maintenance checks every time they stop the vehicle. “That seems unreasonable,” the public accounts committee concluded, “particularly as soldiers may need to use vehicles for long periods in combat.”

Taking the Treasury side or the MoD side is for children. The reality is that they’re both right and they are also both fucking useless.

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This sort of situation can only be fixed by the prime minister. It needs someone to tell the country a story about what’s going on, take the painful decisions which secure the money, bring the Treasury into line, sort out the complacent amateur-hour bullshit going on in the MoD, and then fund and implement the defence review.

Junior defence minister Al Carns, who resigned alongside Healey, said this morning: “First of all, we could have the honest conversation. You know, 20% of the country sort of recognise that we’re in a very difficult geopolitical situation with lots of different threats. I would like to increase that 20% to… over 50% of the population”.

There is a name for the role Carns is describing. It is the prime minister. But this one is completely absent.

We are now utterly exposed. The far-right organise freely and then run rampant on our streets. British citizens are made to feel afraid on the basis of their race. Russia starts a war in Europe and America stops offering meaningful protection to the West. We bind ourselves in financial restraints and lack the will to break free of them, leaving us unable to prepare or prevent, to deter or defeat.

That is the consequence of a failure of political leadership, of a failure of vision, of bravery, of moral clarity, of operational competence. It is just not damn good enough. What’s the point having someone in this position if they’re not willing to do the fucking job? Why would you even want the bloody thing in the first place if you’re unable to embrace the decision-making opportunities it offers you? What the fuck was the point of winning an election if you refuse to do anything with your majority? What a goddamn waste of time this has been, when we have no time left to spare.

We need a prime minister who will get a grip on our enemies: foreign and domestic. It clearly isn’t this one. So we better hope it’s the next.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

This week’s i paper column was on the riots in Belfast and the global far-right network that perpetrated them. You can read it here. This week’s contribution for Late Night Live focused on the Nowak case and the vicious, cynical response from Nigel Farage. You can listen here. This week’s Origin Story was part two of Evangelicals, where we cover the TV age of the electric church and the creepy vindictive huckster bullshit they perpetrated on America. You can listen here or watch below.

This week I watched The Rip, the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck vehicle written and directed by Joe Carnahan. This one kinda slipped under the radar but it is a surprisingly good police thriller. It’s on Netflix, but it is the polar opposite of a Netflix film. Instead of repeating information three times so someone can follow along while checking shit on their phone, it demands your full undivided attention or else you’ll miss something.

The performances are all very good but the star here is the script: taut, remorseless, tense, dense, fast-paced and not a word wasted. It feels like the work of someone who got it down and then worked it, hard, until it was in its best possible state. I found the ending a little conventional - once the mystery was resolved it lost its drive and turned into a nuts-and-bolts actioner - but this is still top drawer stuff.

Right, that’s me for another week. Bit of a jam-packed week for the newsletter next week - we’ll have another guest post, hopefully a long-worked-on piece from me on the EHRC code and the implications for trans people and then the results of the Makerfield byelection on Friday morning, just in time for the regular newsletter. See you then.

Oh and fuck off, obviously.

Dreadful fucking week. Godforsaken. One of those weeks where you can feel it all slipping away from you.

When I first heard of the Nowak case, I knew instantly that it would concern a white victim and a dark skinned assailant. I didn’t know the details. I didn’t know anything about it. I just knew that it was being adopted as a political topic rather than existing purely as a crime story and therefore I knew, in my bones, that it would suit Reform. Why? Because those are the only moments which are turned into national conversations now. Moments which suit their narrative.

Last month, an Iranian man intervened to stop the anti-Jewish attack in Golders Green. “That is a Jewish guy, but I am living with them really,” he said. “They are in that flat - my family lived there. Most of them, Iranian and Jewish people, they have no problem.” This could have been a moment to celebrate the triumph of British multiculturalism, to lionise a man who stepped in to protect his neighbour, to contrast the triumph of diverse London life with the murderous insanity of those who would destroy it. But of course that would not fit the narrative, so it was barely covered.

In the tail end of last year, there were a series of physical and sexual assaults against Sikhs, all of which involved racial abuse. Two elderly Sikh taxi drivers were set upon outside Wolverhampton train station by assailants shouting racial slurs. A Sikh woman in Wallsall was raped while her assailant shouted Islamophobic abuse, wrongly believing her to be a Muslim. Another Sikh woman was raped in Oldbury while her assailants told her: “You don’t belong in this country”. This could have been a moment to acknowledge the poison that far-right politics has unleashed in this country and to ostracise those who spread it. But of course that did not fit the narrative either, so it too was barely covered.

When something does fit the Reform narrative, it will dominate the news for days on end. It will be elevated to a state-of-the-nation emergency. And that is what happened to us this week.

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Henry Nowak was murdered by a Sikh man on the streets of Southampton. When police arrived, his assailant accused him of committing a racist assault. It was nighttime and he was wearing a dark coloured hoodie, so the officers could not see the stab wounds. He spent his last moments handcuffed under suspicion of racism.

It was a tragedy. But in journalism there are different kinds of tragedy. Some are considered isolated incidents without political ramifications. These are crime stories. And some are treated as indications of a wider political phenomenon. These are ultimately politics stories, which arise from criminal events. That is what happened with Henry Nowak.

We all know what happened next. The Nowak family said: “We don’t want Henry’s murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension”. Reform leader Nigel Farage came out the next morning and called for people to respond with “pure cold rage”. The Nowak family said: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.” Farage said: “Proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.”

Do you remember when these words did not exist? You don’t have to think too hard. It was in your lifetime. Every decade had its own grim way of discussing immigration - ‘bogus asylum seeker’ in the 90s, ‘Polish plumbers’ in the 2000s, ‘illegal immigrant’ in the 2020s. But we never really mentioned race. You never heard someone in mainstream politics come out and start talking about white people as a victim group, or go out of their way to specifically mention the ethnicity of an assailant. You never thought, when you first heard of a murder, that the race of the people involved would define the manner in which it was covered.

Not so long ago, it was basically unheard of for respectable people to talk about the white race in Britain. Now we hear it every day. We hear it all the time. Just a short while ago it sounded exotic, foreign, taboo. Now it sounds normal. We are disintegrating so quickly that just a few months ago we’d have been shocked by the things we now find commonplace.

Farage got his wish, of course. The thugs came out onto the streets of Southampton on Tuesday night. The usual culprits, utter cunts, streaming in from the train station, whipped up into a drunken frenzy by Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson.

At this point, it felt like perhaps Farage had crossed a line. There was a shift in the mood against him. He is usually very good at staying just on the right side of respectability. But this time he seemed to stumble, to get the mood wrong. During PMQs on Wednesday, he tried to claim the agenda again, deploying his favoured tool of warning about riots while in fact encouraging them. The whole Chamber turned against him. He seemed isolated, disgraced.

Some people began to conclude that things were looking up. Perhaps he finally crossed the line. Perhaps things would rebalance now. But that is to underestimate how bad things are and what this week revealed. It’s worse than we suppose. We are no longer witnessing the radicalisation of the British right. It has already taken place. What we are witnessing now is how a radicalised British right behaves. And that is not a story just about Farage. It is about his relationship with those who are more extreme, like Rupert Lowe, and those who are ostensibly less extreme, like Kemi Badenoch. It is about a poison which has infected British conservatism right down at the skeletal level.

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Rupert Lowe is the most extreme MP who has sat in the House of Commons in the modern era. The Restore party, to Farage’s right, deals in explicitly ethno-nationalist rhetoric. Lowe’s campaign director Charlie Downes has said that “Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith” and called for “an ethnically homogenous Christian Britain”.

The party plans to strip all refugees from the last ten years of their status and launch a mass deportation programme - including, it seems, of British citizens and residents. When he is attempting to sound moderate, Lowe insists that he has “never said we should deport whole communities”, but even in these instances he says he wants to deport “those arriving illegally, those living here illegally, those foreign criminals in our prisons… [and] those who are not contributing economically to our country”. That last category suggests that those who are here legally would be included in deportations. Given that the party associates Britishness with ethnicity, it is not hard to imagine who he’s talking about.

The party has attracted the UK’s various far-right groups into its fold. As a Hope Not Hate investigation found: “Restore Britain has attracted the extreme right like moths to a flame. We have… exposed figures linked to an array of fascist and neo-Nazi groups now active within Rupert Lowe MP’s party, including Blood & Honour, the British National Party, the National Front, the Homeland Party and more… Members of Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s largest neo-Nazi group, were campaigning for Restore in the upcoming Makerfield by-election.”

The party is young but it is growing. Lowe is supported by Elon Musk on X.com, the far-right social media website. The algorithm and Musk’s personal interventions ensure he enjoys many millions of views, way more than Nigel Farage even though he has considerably fewer followers. The party has amassed a large membership. It may not be as large as the 130,000 it officially claims, but it is substantial. It has a sitting MP, around 30 councillors and at least 100 branches have held an inaugural meeting.

It is way too small to become a viable electoral force in Britain. Some on the left have therefore been foolish enough to welcome its presence, hoping that the percentage of votes it can peel off Reform will be enough to deprive Farage’s party of victory in knife-edge seats and perhaps even in Makerfield. But this is to confuse tactical triumph for strategic defeat, because Restore’s influence on Reform goes further than any one election result. It serves to poison our national life. It does to Farage what Farage does to the Tory party, dragging it remorselessly to the right.

Just a couple years back, Reform opposed mass deportation. Now it has a policy of going further than Donald Trump, with a goal of throwing two million people out the country.

You can see the same with Farage’s rhetoric. The Reform leader had tried to strike a more moderate tone recently, knowing that he has to attract a broad range of voters if he has any chance of getting to No.10. But his intervention this week showed that he is anxious about the loss of support on his right flank. This drove him to his statement on Tuesday morning.

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Usually, Reform’s rightward drift also pulls the Conservative party to the right. Its mass deportation programme, for instance, was met by an unbelievably extreme and under-discussed Conservative policy of deporting 150,000 people a year - that’s three quarters of a million people over the course of the parliament.

This week, Badenoch adopted a different approach. She did not join Farage in using racial language. Instead she chose to attack him for it.

She wrote a piece in the Daily Mail which outlined her position. The murder of Henry Nowak was not just an isolated crime, she argued. Instead, it “must be a seminal moment for Britain on a par with the murder of Stephen Lawrence”. Farage was wrong to talk about white people being disadvantaged. He was using “the language of the Black Lives Matter movement in reverse – inflaming tensions, emphasising difference”. She had a different view. The police had been infiltrated by progressive diversity training. This, she suggested, is what lay behind their behaviour at the crime scene.

She rejected Black Lives Matter on the one hand and Nigel Farage’s White Lives Matter on the other. All lives mattered. This was a kind of racial centrism. Only the Tory party, she insisted, believes in “universalism, equality under the law, not treating people differently based on skin colour”.

She earned glowing reviews and led the national conversation. On the Good Morning Britain programme, the hosts listened in respectful silence as she spoke. In PMQs, her adoption of a broadly respectful tone allowed the Chamber to unite against Farage. Both the home secretary and the prime minister seemed to follow her lead, offering support to a proposed review of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) anti-racism commitment. Former home secretary Jack Straw said there had been an “over-correction” in policing after the Lawrence murder. It was hard to find anyone willing to disagree with her.

There is nothing unacceptable about these views. They are just basic bog standard old school laissez-faire leave-things-be conservatism, with no curiosity about structural disadvantage and a suspicion of state interventions. Badenoch has held them consistently. It’s exactly what she used to say in government. What’s striking is that this is now considered the middle way.

When Badenoch promoted a report which suggested structural racism did not exist in 2021, she was lambasted for it. Labour’s then shadow equalities minister, Marsha de Cordova, called it “incoherent” and “ideologically motivated” and said it served to “downplay the role of institutional and structural racism”. A United Nations working group on people of African descent called it “an attempt to normalise white supremacy”.

It was recognised for what it was: a firmly right-wing political viewpoint which rejected the existence of structural racial disadvantage. Today, this view is the centre ground.

In just five years, the window of political opinion has moved so far right that what was once a classic conservative position is the centre and the left-wing view has simply been eradicated from national discourse. The language of Black Lives Matter - of solidarity, empathy and a demand for change - dominated Twitter and through it the TV and radio studios in 2021. Now the far-right dominates X.com and through it the TV and radio studios of 2026. Everything has changed.

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We should not have to celebrate Badenoch for her refusal to encourage race riots. The fact that she did not follow Farage should be a basic goddamn expectation, not some kind of accomplishment. If we start to treat it as a victory of some sort we become our own undertakers, creating the narratives which will eventually bury us.

Badenoch is wrong about the murder. She is wrong on a basic foundational level about what kind of story it is. She is wrong about the implication. And she is wrong in her entire moral universe.

It’s worth repeating what Mark Nowak said: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.” That is the fundamental error in all this - the transference of a crime story into a politics story when there is no reason to elevate it to that position.

No-one seems to care about the details of the case because they are inconvenient, but here they are anyway. The judge said:

“The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not life threatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become. It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound, tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.”

I’m not going to pretend those officers covered themselves in glory. But is this really the kind of case on which we are going to make deep and far-reaching changes to policing in Britain? Are we really certain, on the basis of a period spanning a few minutes - in the dark, amid contested claims and confusion - that this event justifies fundamental alterations to our institutional approach to race relations?

How many calls are there to the police about racial assault every day which are true? How many cases are there of people being arrested who say they have been attacked when it is false?

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Badenoch’s core political point is effectively that there is no longer a racism problem in the police force. That is false. A report in autumn 2024 by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, an independent statutory body, found that “black communities in particular feel over-policed as suspects and under-protected as victims”. This is due to the “disproportionate use of police powers, such as stop and search and use of force”. It found “clear evidence… that these systemic problems still exist”.

A Ministry of Justice Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System report published in November 2025 compiled statistics from data sources across the criminal justice system to assess the typical experiences of different ethnic groups. It found that ethnic minorities “appear to be over-represented at many stages throughout the criminal justice system compared with the white ethnic group... The greatest disparity appears at the point of stop and search, custodial remands and prison population.” Asian, black and mixed-ethnicity groups received “longer median custodial sentences than white offenders” when it came to drug offences.

A Guardian report this morning found that police officers in Hampshire, the county where the Nowak murder took place, were 5.1 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person. Across the rest of the country, they are 3.8 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person. But sure. Two-tier policing. Don’t white people have a terrible time of it.

It is simply not the case that racism - systematic or otherwise - has been eradicated from the police, or indeed from many other parts of society. It is simply not the case that racism has ceased to exist. Indeed, our national conversation barely scratches the surface of it. How often do you see British Chinese on television, for instance? What proportion of light-skinned Asians do you see represented compared to dark-skinned Asians? How many Afro-Caribbeans are there at board level? The Badenoch view is to simply close our eyes, pretend it isn’t happening, eradicate any effort to deal with it, and call it universalism.

It is not universalism. True universalism comes from making sure that everyone has the same chance in life. And that does not involve saying that you’re colour-blind and patting yourself on the back for it. It involves searching for injustice and discrimination and eradicating it. Sometimes it involves addressing racism or sexism in an institution. Sometimes it will involve a more active effort to undermine disparity in access. This is how we strive for equality: through working for it, not pretending it already happened, when it patently has not.

Also: The gall of it. The sheer fucking gall. Your non-white friends will tell you how it is now. They’ve watched as the ugly snarling things emerge from the cracks in the pavement. They’ve gazed on as Tommy Robinson marches flood central London. As racist abuse is again heard on the street, just like it was in the 70s. As the extreme right begins to display a swagger it has not had for decades. The absolute bloody gall to see that and say: racism isn’t really a problem anymore, we can scrap all those inclusion programmes now, they’re divisive. It’s downright Orwellian - the party telling you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

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The sneaky obscenity in Badenoch’s contribution lay in the comparison of Farage’s rhetoric with Black Lives Matter, as if they were moral equivalents. Black Lives Matters was an anti-racist movement, fighting to reverse decades of discrimination. It should not be mentioned in the same breath as Farage’s crybaby fantasies of white victimhood.

It was no paradise in 2020. At the time it felt pretty shitty. We’d just left the EU, Boris Johnson was in charge, the Tory government was busy wrecking the country, anyone who believed in a political perspective to the left of Ghengis Khan was labelled a ‘woke snowflake’. But back then, precious few people on the right would have dared to compare Black Lives Matter with white nationalism, which is effectively what Badenoch has done. Precious few dared to respond by saying ‘all lives matter’, which is effectively what Badenoch has said.

And yet that, today, is the centrist position. It is the supposedly reasonable middle ground. Further to the right, from the party which is still topping the polls, we have an incitement to riot. And to the right of that we have a grab-bag of fascists and ethno-nationalists supported by the richest man in the world.

We are in the fucking abyss and we are sinking so fast we barely notice how rapidly things are changing. It’s so bad that weeks like this, when things are said that sound like they’re from the Weimar Republic, are somehow taken as victories because they did not result in total moral collapse. We have quite literally reached the point where we breathe a sigh of relief when the leader of the Conservative party does not join calls for white riots.

The rightward drift in this country is now a state of emergency. It is violent. It is racist. It is motivated by some of the very worst instincts in the political condition. The first step in combating it is to treat it as the moral indignation it is, rather than another run-of-the-mill day in British political life.

The alarm bells are sounding. If we do not respond to them soon we will fall so far that it is hard to picture us emerging from the darkness.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My column for the i paper this week was on Farage’s intervention in the Nowak case. I was also on Cross Questions on LBC on Tuesday night, which you can watch in full below by skipping to the one hour mark - or there’s a clip here and here.

Origin Story this week is on the history of Evangelical Christianity, a once proud religious movement which has degenerated, in the US at least, into supporting everything it once claimed to object to. Swearing, a decline in moral standards, serial fornication, materialism, and perving on your own daughter - all absolutely OK now with evangelicals apparently. It’s a very strange story, with a motley cast of characters: John Wesley, Dwight Moody, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell (”if you gave him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox”) and Pat Roberston. You can access it wherever you get your podcasts or just watch it below.

I watched Quartet in Autumn at the Arcola Theatre this week and found it very beautiful indeed. Adapted by Samantha Harvey from the novel by Barbara Pym, it tells the story of four colleagues in London as they approach retirement. There is a lot that is profound in there about aging, loneliness and friendship. I laughed and felt deeply sad throughout. The whole thing is a triumph.

Most of all, it made me think of the sadness of colleagues. I don’t mean the people you meet at work and become firm friends with. They stay with you. I mean the people you always liked, but it was never going to last after you stopped working together. Or those friendships you have at work that are about the enjoyment of working with someone. Later, you go for a meal and you catch up and you sit across a table from each other and it simply isn’t the same. The friendship was about the doing, not the regaling. It cannot survive in any other context.

Anyway, it really is very lovely indeed and you’ve a couple weeks before it ends.

Right that’s your lot, you can fuck off mate. See you next week.

Hello and welcome to Striking 13’s latest guest post, this time from climate change expert James Murray. James is the guy I speak to whenever I need to get my head around what’s happening in Net Zero - he’s measured, independent-minded, detail-orientated and unflappable. Here, he outlines a rare areas of unqualified triumph in Labour policy, showing in detail just how ambitious and effective the party’s approach to green issues has been.

By James Murray

Where’s the vision? One of the primary criticisms of this Labour government, and the Tory administrations which preceded it, is that it has no narrative of how to improve the country and no project to accomplish it.

But what if this caricature of a narrative-free political establishment is wrong? What if an epic national project is staring us in the face? What if this project was quietly central to the governments of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak (the less said about Liz Truss the better) and is absolutely core to Labour’s mission for the country?

The UK has been quietly leading the world in the delivery of a grand project of global significance that is both hugely popular and genuinely era-defining. Governments have been pursuing one of the most inspiring and consequential endeavours in human history. But seemingly no-one in power is comfortable admitting it.

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That vision is the delivery of a net zero emission economy within 25 years. The transformation of the world’s first industrial economy into one of the first decarbonised, electrified, and genuinely sustainable economies to ever be built. It is a strategy that promises to catalyse investment, upgrade ageing infrastructure, create rewarding jobs, cut energy bills and curb the cost of living. It also promises to improve health and quality of life, enhance economic competitiveness, usher in a wave of transformational clean technologies, reverse nature loss and bolster resilience in the face of an escalating climate crisis. All that, and it will end reliance on the imported fossil fuels that have just triggered the second economy-shredding energy crisis in five years.

The net zero mission is the defining economic, technological, and industrial story of the 21st century. It will determine whether the climate crisis escalates into a borderline existential catastrophe. It will reshape the global order, as China bets on booming clean tech industries and the US gambles on becoming the last petrostate standing. Closer to home it offers the only credible route for breaking the UK out of the era of flat-lining wages, inflationary spirals, and stagnant growth that has defined the past 18 years. It is what President Joe Biden used to call ‘a big fucking deal’.

It is also a damning indictment of modern politics that this vision is treated as a political football or fatuous attack line targeted at ‘Red Ed’ Miliband, rather than as a complex and essential attempt to transform a modern economy.

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In torching the political consensus on climate action, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has repeatedly argued the UK’s target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 is “arbitrary”. To borrow the well-worn Princess Bride meme, Badenoch keeps using that word, but it does not mean what she thinks it means.

The target is a function of the Paris Agreement of 2015 and its headline declaration - still backed by all governments, bar the US - that the world should “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century”, or ‘net zero’ to give it is colloquial name. That commitment was accompanied by a separate target to limit the increase in global average temperature to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels”, while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”.

The treaty’s twin targets drew upon the most peer-reviewed scientific exercise ever undertaken from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which warned that as temperatures approach 2C of warming there is a serious and growing risk of climatic tipping points being reached. These tipping points - such as tropical forest dieback, permafrost loss, coral bleaching, and ice sheet collapse - are expected to lead to irreversible changes to the biosphere, the collapse of natural carbon sinks, and a sharply increased likelihood of runaway warming that would have truly catastrophic consequences for humanity (if you want to find out more about quite how bad things might get, David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth is the ur-text on this stuff - it is not a relaxing read).

The promise to pursue a 1.5C warming goal was then inserted at the insistence of the most climate vulnerable nations, who not unreasonably pointed out how climate models show they could face nation-destroying consequences - literally in the case of low-lying island states - well before the 2C threshold is reached.

Scientists and economists then modelled how quickly economies would have to decarbonise to stay within these temperature thresholds, concluding industrialised nations should aim to reach net zero by around 2050, with the largest emerging economies following by 2060, and the world’s lower income nations reaching the same point by the 2070s and 2080s.

The legally binding net zero target enacted by Theresa May’s government was anything but arbitrary. It was informed by one of the most rigorous scientific exercises ever undertaken and based on arguably the most impressive diplomatic achievement in decades. In recent years it has come to look like a high watermark for both post-war multilateralism.

Far from the UK being some kind of outlier, our decarbonisation efforts form part of a trend that is sweeping the global economy. Badenoch and Nigel Farage have repeatedly claimed the UK is damaging its economy by pursuing net zero goals while other countries fail to follow suit. They are wrong on both counts.

According to the Net Zero Tracker initiative, 77% of the global economy is now covered by national net zero targets. The figure rises to at least 84% if you include states such as California and New York, which have retained their own net zero goals in defiance of the Trumpian climate nihilism that took the US out of the Paris Agreement. The suggestion the UK is out on its own in pursuing net zero conveniently ignores how the whole of the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, and scores of other nations have net-zero-by-2050 targets. China and Indonesia are signed up to reaching net zero by 2060, while India is aiming for 2070. Net zero is a global project that is being pursued at pace and scale.

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Of course, setting a target is only the first step towards building a net zero economy. The number of countries on track to meet their net zero goals is vanishingly small. Global emissions are still rising and investment in fossil fuels continues. But it is too simplistic to argue the Paris Agreement is failing. It led to a series of policies and investments that sparked a global clean tech boom that has driven down clean energy costs and started to destroy fossil fuel demand.

Some of the figures are truly mind-blowing. Global investment in the clean energy transition rose eight per cent last year to a record $2.3 trillion, while fossil fuel supply investment fell for the first time since the pandemic. New wind and solar installations jumped 17% to over 800GW, making the two technologies the “fastest-growing sources of electricity generation in history”, according to think tank Ember. Fossil fuel power generation has now peaked in every OECD country. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts the global market for key clean energy technologies, such as solar panels, heat pumps, and electric vehicles (EVs), is set to grow from nearly $1.2 trillion today to around $2 trillion by 2035, surpassing the size of the global oil market. In terms of both its scale and its impact, the surge in demand for clean technologies is easily the equal of the AI boom, and yet it gets a fraction of the attention.

Clean technologies are often cheaper and better than fossil fuel incumbents. Ember reckons solar plus storage projects now cost below $60 per megawatt hour (MWh) at a global level, compared to gas-fired power plants that can cost nearly three times more. EVs are 60-80% cheaper to run than petrol and diesel models and now compete with them on sticker price in most major markets, including the UK. This long-running trend has been turbocharged in recent weeks, as households the world over have recognised how clean technologies can insulate them against the soaring fossil fuel prices unleashed by the Iran war. Demand for renewables, EVs, batteries, and heat pumps has spiked.

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One of the few genuine achievements of the previous Conservative government is that it established the UK as a world leader on climate action. Cameron backed the Climate Change Act, May put the net zero target into law, Johnson hosted the Glasgow Climate Summit and delivered a wave of clean tech investments. As a result of those signals and the policy measures that accompanied them, the UK became the first major economy to force coal off the grid, built the world’s first large-scale offshore wind industry, and established an ecosystem of pioneering green businesses, investors, and research hubs that continue to punch well above their weight. By 2024, the UK had cut its emissions by 53% against 1990 levels, delivering the deepest and fastest decarbonisation of any G20 economy.

Of course, this was all achieved while parts of the Conservative party nursed an intense loathing of wind and solar farms, and a deep ideological scepticism towards the state interventions required to catalyse clean tech markets. Such opposition often tipped over into vigorous flirtation with full blown climate denialism. As a result, successive Tory prime ministers were never able to publicly celebrate one of the few areas where they delivered some actual progress.

In contrast, Labour was handed a landslide victory by a bloc of left-leaning and centrist voters who repeatedly tell pollsters they support bolder climate action. But since then, No.10 has seemed, if anything, embarrassed by what energy security and net zero secretary Ed Miliband has achieved. Many people who supported Labour have been left feeling disappointed and even betrayed by Starmer. But the reality is that the government has spent the past two years quietly delivering on much of the green mission at the heart of its manifesto.

The tone was set within days of the election result, with the lifting of the de-facto ban on new onshore wind farms in England. Miliband then immediately pulled every policy lever he could find to accelerate the roll out of clean technologies and curb the UK’s fossil fuel reliance. Unlike many of his colleagues, he knew how to identify those levers and had the political muscle to seize them.

Guidance hampering solar farm development was axed, the budget for clean power contracts was increased, the timetable of auctions was accelerated, record numbers of new renewables projects were secured, sweeping planning reforms were unveiled to allow the accelerated delivery of those projects, grants for heat pumps skyrocketed, and a new National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) was launched. That was just the first few months. Other departments followed suit with subsidies for electric vehicles, budgets for tree-planting, and new rules to crackdown on water pollution.

All these policies were aligned with Labour’s wider economic strategy, which tweaked the UK’s fiscal rules and hiked taxes to quietly enable more investment in the modern low carbon infrastructure the country desperately needed after a decade of under-investment. This plan may have been undersold by chancellor Rachel Reeves and overshadowed by rows over taxation, but it enabled a new industrial strategy which has pumped funding into wind turbine factories, rail upgrades, EV factories, charging networks, green steel plants, carbon capture hubs, energy storage systems, sustainable aviation fuel plants, and myriad clean tech R&D projects.

Great British Energy was launched and quickly began inking deals to fund everything from solar arrays on schools and hospitals to the next generation of nuclear projects. The Conservative government talked a lot about nuclear, arguing it offered a route to decarbonising without the need for all those ‘ugly’ wind farms. But after 14 years the Tories delivered half of one nuclear power project and even that was massively delayed and over budget. The new government got the funding for the Sizewell C project over the line, secured a site for the UK’s first small modular reactors (SMRs), and appointed Rolls-Royce to build it.

In recent months, even as the Number 10 operation seems to wobble on the brink of extinction, the government’s net zero vision continued, undeterred. The £15 billion Warm Homes Plan was launched with a promise to deliver energy efficiency upgrades and clean technologies to millions of homes. The Future Homes Standard was confirmed, meaning almost all new homes will feature solar panels and heat pumps or district heating systems as standard. New rules governing the energy efficiency of rented properties were introduced. A new £115 billion water infrastructure upgrade programme was unveiled. Simpler recycling rules were introduced, alongside a new levy on packaging and plans for a deposit return scheme. Reforms to tackle the queue for grid connections and fast-track the most strategically important projects were approved. This list is not comprehensive, but you get the idea. It’s impressive stuff.

All this activity meant that when Trump’s misadventure in the Middle East triggered a fossil fuel shock, the UK was at least somewhat better protected than it would have been. Unlike after the invasion of Ukraine, there was a growing fleet of EVs and renewables projects to rely on. Further interventions will inevitably be required as the terrifying scale of the economic tsunami that is brewing in the blockaded Strait of Hormuz becomes obvious. But right from the start of the crisis, Miliband, Starmer, and Reeves have correctly diagnosed how this is a fossil fuel shock that can only be tackled by ending fossil fuel reliance. They have pulled forward the next clean power auction to this summer, fast tracked the sale of plug-in solar panels, increased heat pump grants for households reliant on heating oil, and signed off on a host of smaller policies all focused on getting the UK off the “fossil fuel rollercoaster”. Every heat pump, solar panel, or roll of insulation installed has become a patriotic act.

In this context, the row over whether the UK should permit new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea is a distraction at best. It is a debate over whether the country should double down on the declining and inherently volatile industries of the 21st century or pursue the growth model being pioneered by the ‘electrostates’ that are all but certain to dominate the 21st century. Fossil fuels will still have a role to play as the transition plays out and there may be an energy security case for some continued drilling in the UK waters, but such projects cannot reduce the UK’s exposure to soaring oil and gas prices set by international markets. They are destined to become an increasingly marginal concern as each new wind turbine and EV charger serves to destroy future fossil fuel demand. It should be obvious by now where the bulk of our attention should be.

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Net Zero is an economic triumph. Figures from the Confederation of British Industry show the green economy grew ten per cent in 2024 and delivered over £83 billion in gross value add, even as the rest of the economy flatlined. The Office for National Statistics similarly confirmed revenues across the low carbon and renewable energy economy rose almost 12% in the same year to £77 billion. The sector employs hundreds of thousands of people, often in roles with above average salaries and with employment distributed right across the country. These trends are certain to have accelerated in 2025 and have now been boosted further by the Iran war.

Meanwhile, clean energy records are being toppled every month with the UK recently coming within a whisker of operating the grid without any fossil fuels for the first time. The cost implications of running a grid that now sources over 60% of its power from clean sources are the subject of an intense and complex debate, but a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) suggested wind farms helped push down UK wholesale power prices by around a third last year, while offshore wind farms are estimated to have cut the country’s fossil fuel import bill by at least £30 billion, Spain and Portugal have demonstrated how you can massively enhance energy security and enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in Europe with a commitment to renewables and the right market design.

This is one of those situations where it doesn’t pay to overthink things. Fossil fuels are polluting, dangerous, and expensive, and their supply is controlled and constrained by some of the worst people in the world. Renewables are cleaner and cheaper. They come with their own supply chain and security challenges, but none are as severe or immediate as those faced by the oil and gas market. As the US climate campaigner Bill McKibben noted recently: “Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz”.

The assault on climate policies from the Conservatives and Reform is an attempt to curtail one of the UK’s only growth industries. They would argue that if you rolled back support for clean technologies, energy bills would miraculously fall and the UK economy would suddenly boom through a revival of fossil fuel-based technologies. But such claims stretch credulity. If you scrapped the Climate Change Act and deliberately slowed renewables, energy costs would simply end up being even more exposed to volatile international gas markets. Meanwhile, the structural decline of carbon intensive industries would only continue as global demand for clean technologies accelerates. Where is the long-term value in protecting internal combustion engine manufacturers when the rest of the world is going electric? Badenoch and Farage want to build a typewriter economy five years after the launch of the PC. They want to turn UK industry into a heritage railway.

In contrast, for all its myriad faults, the Labour government has quietly got on with delivering one of the world’s boldest climate policy and investment programmes. It is in the nature of the climate crisis that such progress is never fast enough. It is also true the government continues to make mis-steps that undermine its decarbonisation efforts - for example, the idea airport expansion can be made compatible with net zero relies on a very large dose of techno-optimism. But there is now ample evidence Labour’s commitment to climate action is starting to pay off from an economic, security, and environmental perspective.

Even now, amidst all the in-fighting and leadership challenges, ministers are poised to sign off on one of the most ambitious climate targets in the world, which would see the UK cut emissions by 87 per cent against 1990 levels. Meeting such a target would transform the UK, enabling a near complete transition to renewables, clean energy, electric vehicles, and green buildings. Our bills would be lower, our energy supplies more secure, our air cleaner, and our communities healthier - and we’d be doing our bit in tackling a climate crisis that threatens to overwhelm us all.

There is a vision. It is a proud one, involving rare cross-party cooperation between Labour and the Conservatives, combined with genuine foresight and delivery. It’s time politicians celebrated it.

James Murray is the editor-in-chief of BusinessGreen, having launched the site in 2007. He is responsible for BusinessGreen’s award-winning news, opinion, and analysis on the green economy, climate change, and the global clean technology transition. He also leads the development of the brand’s expanding events programme. You can follow him on Bluesky at: https://bsky.app/profile/james-bg.bsky.social.

This week offered us a tour inside of Tony Blair’s skull. Ostensibly, it was all about Net Zero and AI and the left of the Labour party and all that. But in reality it was about the state of his mind.

Blair was one of the best prime ministers we ever had. He was wrong on Iraq and wrong on civil liberties. He was wrong on any number of things which are less commonly mentioned, like the rhetoric around asylum seekers or PFI contracts. But he was an outstanding communicator and he delivered real results while managing to keep together an extremely broad political coalition. Last week’s piece on combining vision with policy and delivery could almost have been written about him. In a very real sense, he provided the modern template for how to do the job well.

He is also one of the worst former prime ministers we have ever had.

This is a really specific and useful role, which is underrecognised. It provides a space for someone with experience and gravitas to intervene in political life. If you get it right, you can be an elder statesman, providing continuity with the past, an articulation of national values, and an assessment of the future.

Blair is atrocious at this role. Within seconds of leaving No.10, he fixated on accreting personal wealth: an advisory role at JPMorgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, exorbitantly-priced private speaking gigs, contracts with human rights abusers. That tendency led naturally to his current situation, with the Tony Blair Institute taken over wholesale by billionaire Larry Ellison so he can use Blair as a ventriloquist dummy for his views on AI. Everyone has a price. It turns out Blair’s price was $130 million for the 2021-2023 period, and $218 million since then.

With that kind of record, there was never any chance that people would be able to take Blair’s statements seriously. At best, they were interruptions to his commercial ventures and at worst cynical mechanisms to advance them.

But the most severe problem was not financial. It was psychological. His comments were not motivated by the state of the world. They were motivated by an attempt to validate himself and the decisions he took in office.

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Blair’s 5,700 word essay this week saw commentators enter into ever-more elaborate calculations about his intentions. On the face of it, they were hard to discern. Exactly what was the purpose of all this?

He didn’t seem to be supporting anyone, it was just a scattershot attack on whoever he laid eyes on: Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham. Some people suggested he wanted to trigger a policy discussion in the Labour party. Laughable. His policy prescriptions were banal, rudimentary and utterly devoid of content. At one point, the efforts to uncover a motivation became so absurd that commentators suggested the whole essay was a ruse by Streeting, who is considered a Blairite, to be attacked from the Labour right and therefore portray himself as more left-wing. Preposterous fantasy.

The real reason Blair wrote that piece is because he needs to self-validate. The lines about the present day are not about the present day at all. They are implicit defenses of the decisions he took in office. The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that he was right about everything.

In truth, he simply has no contact with modern British political life. On issue after issue, he seemed utterly ignorant of the present reality. “It is one thing when in opposition to indulge this perennial delusion that when we lose seats to the right the country is really signalling it wants Labour to move left,” he wrote. “It is dangerous to do it in government.”

Is there anyone else who does not know that Labour is losing votes on the left to the Greens? I don’t want to get into the question of precisely how many compared to Reform. I mean on the really basic level which literally everyone accepts and is aware of, which is that many Labour votes are going to the Greens. Blair seems blissfully unaware of this, or uninterested in it. He is still fighting the old electoral battle in which you could bank on loyal Labour voters and loyal Tory voters and the election would be won by winning over the small number of swing voters in marginal seats between them.

This is the case on issue after issue: properly embarrassing rudimentary errors on statements of fact. And the reason for these errors is that he is not actually talking about the modern world. He is talking about the early 2000s. The essay was a justification. It defended his general approach to political strategy. It defended his hazy conception of the ‘radical centre’, which he has been trying to define for three decades now to no avail. And, of course, like nearly everything he has done since 2003, it defended the decision to invade Iraq, through its resolute view that Britain must stand by America no matter what she does, even if she is led by a psychopathic fascist gorilla.

We learned nothing about the world, or the Labour party, or the leadership candidates, or any particular policy area. We learned only about Tony Blair’s mind. And all we really learned about that is what we already knew beforehand: He hasn’t changed. He cannot handle introspection. He does not have the capacity for honest self-analysis. His lack of self-doubt has become a weakness rather than a strength. His confidence is fragile, the shell of a home, something so weak and vulnerable that it dare not allow in any doubt for fear the whole edifice will crumble.

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There is another former prime minister who behaves in a similar way. It is Liz Truss.

I know that this feels like an unfair comparison. Blair is sane, she is not. He is highly competent, she is not. He is the most successful prime minister of his era, she is the least successful prime minister of hers. Even morally, where Blair has experienced a very severe breakdown in his faculties, he stands like a goddamned colossus beside her.

But there is a key similarity. When Truss intervenes it is not a comment on the objective world which exists outside her head. Her commentary, like his, is unrelated to anything which is happening in reality. It is simply a way of demonstrating she is right and always has been.

This week’s edition of the Liz Truss show, which I have just spent a half hour of my life watching, features an interview with a man called Keith Gross, who is apparently the Republican candidate for Florida’s 2nd Congressional District.

He has a perfectly pleasant face, a kind of human wallpaper, which looks like it would fit in well playing football in the park with his son, or chatting outside the school gates, or perhaps serving on the local church board. Instead, because this is the period of American history that we’re living through, he spends his time expressing various forms of white nationalism. It’s like watching Ed the Duck shoot up heroin. The man has the personality of a fucking shoebox, but he can apparently rouse himself into great streams of Mein Kampf hucksterism because that is the surest route to political success in the modern United States.

At least he looks healthy. The moral disgrace he has heaped upon himself has done nothing to corrode the quality of his skin. The same cannot be said for Truss, who looks like she is beaming in from the corner of a haunted house, blank-faced, her mouth scratched into the lifeless smile of a Joker murder victim in a DC comic book. She’s barely alive really. A rudimentary stitching together of body parts, sparked into life on a low voltage - but unfinished, defective, visibly falling apart. There really isn’t a single virtuous motive left within her.

Blair’s broad political outlook has remained relatively consistent since office. Truss’ has not. In No.10 she was a creature of the Tufton Street neoliberal think tanks, selling free market fundamentalism and general economic illiteracy. Now, she is something else entirely, exploring the most exotic peninsulas of the political landscape.

“I tried to stop the plastic straw ban here in Britain,” she said, “but unfortunately we had a Conservative government that was often conservative in name only and they wanted to virtue signal”. From there it is a simple decline to the binary abandon of the paranoid mind. Everything is a conspiracy, the crisis is coming, the final emergency is here, your opponents are the definition of evil. Swap out the ‘woke left’ for Jews or the Illuminati and you’re really getting the same story we’ve seen through history. There’s a “left wing government in Spain deliberately flooding the country with migrants,” she said, warming up to her theme. “There’s a left wing cabal that is in charge in much of Europe that’s trying to do that, they work in league with the Democrats in the United States.”

Who are these people and what is the purpose of their conspiracy? They are baddies and they want to do the baddie things. “The left has evil intentions,” she said. “What they want to do is they want to destroy our civilizations through a combination of communism, Islamism, environmental zealotry.”

Truss escaped to the MAGA movement because she really had nowhere else to go. Her credibility in British political circles was non-existent so the only safe place for her was a cultural milieu in which reason itself had been relinquished as a currency in human affairs.

But this decision was also a psychological defence mechanism. Her complete failure in power meant that she had two choices. She could accept that there were flaws in her ideas and her behaviour. Or she could create a narrative in which she was blameless but had been undermined by an elite conspiracy. She chose the second option.

Her commentary on world affairs, while infinitely more deranged and despicable than Blair’s, therefore shares the same fundamental psychological motivation. She is not really talking about the world at all. She is simply insisting that she was right. That is the true meaning behind every sentence. Like Blair, she offers us no new information about the world, but reveals a great deal about the contents of her mind.

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There is another prime minister who makes regular efforts to intervene on modern affairs and influence the direction of British political thought. His efforts are not given much coverage. Hardly anyone seems aware that he does it at all. And yet his words are full of grace, fine judgement and a profound sense of public duty. His name is John Major.

Last March, Major delivered the Attlee Foundation Lecture at King’s College London. It was a profound speech, which deserved careful attention.

This is the sort of thing which an elder statesman can do. He can issue a warning. He can speak, from experience and sound judgement, about the dangers which are facing this country and the stakes of us getting things wrong.

“At my age,” he said, “I have a limited lease on the future, but let me say with all the force I can muster: if we were to cast aside our mainstream politicians - as polls suggest we may do - then a gap would open up, and that gap may not be filled by democrats. So if you rejoice at the dire polling of Labour and the Conservatives, beware of what you wish for.”

Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. “They are careless of the strife they cause,” he said. “They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.”

He was able to change his opinion based on new conditions. He acknowledged, without seeming quite fully convinced yet, that “the democratic case for examining” electoral reform “is growing”. He conceded that “logic and common decency” suggest that an MP who changes party should face a byelection. On Iran, he suggested that he would have been tempted to support the US, but he could see the insanity of the attack for what it was. “The president demanded surrender,” Major said. “He is unlikely to get it.”

Most importantly, he did what Blair could not bring himself to do. He changed his view on America. Like Blair, he had kept the US president close during his time in power. But unlike Blair, he was capable of seeing that the current US administration is completely different to what had come before. On Ukraine, on Nato, on Putin, “this is not the America we have known”.

Major’s mind was alive, it had not ossified and stayed stuck in the 1990s. But there was something more than that to distinguish him. It was his motivation.

This was not the speech of a man who simply wished to assert that he was right and always had been. He was not excavating old wounds and satisfying old grievances. He was not talking about himself at all. He was offering public service. He was talking to the country.

The trouble is the country does not listen. Major’s speech passed largely without comment. All I can find about it online are a press release by King’s University and a single piece in the FT. No wild analysis here. No convoluted strategic daydreams about right-wing candidates enlisting him to make them seem more left-wing. No tsunamis of social media commentary or assessments on the Newsnight sofa. Just silence.

And that, really, helps explain why our prime ministers are so bad at being former prime ministers. It is because we do not ask them to be better and we do not reward them when they are.

It seems strange, all these decades later, to admire Major and despair of Blair. Back then, Blair was the light that freed us from nearly two decades of Tory rule. In power, he proved hugely accomplished, fundamentally improving the way this country is run and helping some of the most disadvantaged people in it. But politics is strange and history rings with hollow laughter. Today, it is Blair who is lost in the past and Major who is engaged, gallantly, with the present. It is Blair who is lost in his own personal fortunes and Major who speaks for the country.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My piece for the i newspaper this week was on, er, the Tony Blair essay. Hypocritical? Perhaps. Although I am shitting all over it if it makes you feel better. You can read it here.

We released the second and final part of our shows on JK Rowling on Origin Story, in which we tell the tale of her descent into a myopic and brutal version of who she was before. We also step out the narrative at several points to give you a briefing on the data behind many of the issues she raises: the link with autism, male-pattern violence, assaults in bathrooms and trans people in sport. If you’ve ever felt confused by this issue and want a thorough and serious-minded assessment of the evidence-base, have a listen. You can access it wherever you get your podcasts or just watch it below.

My latest report from the UK for Late Night Live was on the failure of UK prime ministers - based largely on last week’s newsletter - and what’s going on in the Labour leadership fight. You can listen here.

I finally watched The Bone Temple - the second in a planned trilogy of 28 Years Later films - and was completely blown away by it. It is so deeply strange, so utterly committed to being itself, that there really isn’t anything else like it. This is proper red-blooded bravura auteur fucking film-making, on a vast canvass.

There is a torture scene in the film of the type which I usually detest. Pretty much the only time I’ve stopped watching horror was in that noughties period of Saw and Hostel and all that. It was to do with the directors’ view of the audience. You could tell, with those films, that they imagined a smirking guy watching at home, getting a kick out of it, satisfied by how unaffected and ironic he wa. There was something vicious and mean about them. You can see a continuation of that sensibility in the Terrifier movies, which I don’t care for.

The torture in this film comes from a completely different place. This is a movie about kindness. It is about empathy and connection and selflessness as it takes its final stand. Every moment in these two films has been precision engineered to say something about the place this country is in at the moment. This is genuine state-of-the-nation cinema.

Right, that’s the lot, I’m off to record another Origin Story. Fuck off mate.

There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken recently about the UK being ungovernable. Britain has a strong central government, a long history of liberal democracy, broad social acceptance of the law, a free press, a deep sense of national identity, robust institutions and a vibrant civic society. It is genuinely hard to think of anywhere on earth which is more governable than this place.

The problem is not that we are ungovernable, it is that we are badly governed. Acting like it’s some kind of physical law of the universe lets the people responsible off the hook.

We are now entering into a leadership contest. One way or another, it’s coming. So instead of moaning about a mythical flaw in the country’s fate we should be focusing on the kinds of qualities a prime minister should have. We’ve now seen things go wrong plenty of times and we can come to some conclusions about what we’re looking for.

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Vision

The basic approach to successful governance is really quite simple. It is composed of a vision, the policy which implements that vision, and the mechanisms which deliver it. It begins in the sky and ends in granular street-level local detail. They say that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In fact, you govern in the style of a technical manual.

The best period for this approach was during the Tony Blair administration. What was the purpose of his first term? Well he told us, over and over again: Education, education, education. This message was stated so often nearly everyone could repeat it by instinct. This meant that there was a clear sense of the planned direction of travel and a set of potential tests by which you could evaluate government performance. It also meant that there was a general mandate for the approach, secured at the election, which could justify any difficult decisions you’d take to get there.

This message was also directed inwards: to the civil service and in particular to the Treasury. When you go into an election with a clear message like that, it helps the internal machinery of government understand what is required and acclimatise itself to it. It gives people in the state bureaucracy a sense of what it is the prime minister wants and this works to increase efficiency. Many things can take place without them having to sign off on it because they are a known quantity. They’re not all left hanging around for a very busy person to pay attention to the issue.

Simply having a vision is very much at the piss-easy end of things. Of all the ideas we will discuss here, it requires the least effort. But how many prime ministers can we really say had one?

Gordon Brown? No. He found a vision when the financial crash took place, but that was just a freak accident. Before that, he had no idea what he wanted to do. He was a covetous chancellor who had long ago forgotten why he wanted the prime ministerial position by the time he secured it. David Cameron, to his credit, had a specific vision. Austerity brutalised the British economy, needlessly impoverished us, led directly to Brexit and will be a stain against his name in history, but at least everyone understood what he wanted to do. Theresa May was involved in a desperate fight for survival, which she executed ineffectively, without elegance, grace or honesty, until the final termination of her witless premiership. There was no vision for it, except ‘Brexit means Brexit’, a phrase so empty that it serves as a fitting tombstone for her record. Boris Johnson aspired to a purpose with the levelling up agenda, but it had no true meaning and he would not have had the consistency or mental clarity to deliver on it even if it had. Liz Truss was the end of human thought. Rishi Sunak tried to find a vision every four months, like a middle manager in a suburban supermarket trying to decide which microwave meal he’ll have for dinner. And Keir Starmer barely even seems aware that he does not have one. I suspect that he thinks of visions as exotic continental innovations which should be treated with suspicion.

What has been the effect? Starmer took no vision to the country and therefore had no idea-mandate. He communicated no vision internally to the civil service or the Treasury, so it has been uncertain what to prioritise. The machine cannot take decisions without him because he is such a blank slate no-one can predict what he would want. The result is inertia. Stasis.

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Delivery

Once you have a vision, it needs to be translated into reality. This will usually be through legislation, or it might involve departmental reorganisation or budgetary changes or something like that. When officials are helping a prime minister put together a king’s speech, for instance, they are essentially trying to tell a story. What is the government trying to achieve? How does each bill work towards doing that?

In New Labour’s first term, they published an education white paper called Excellence in Schools. It contained a wide range of detailed ambitions, including maximum class sizes for children under seven, ‘expected standard’ targets for English and maths for 11-year-olds, a structured hour for literacy in schools each day and the creation of a numeracy taskforce. The vision was translated into a set of really quite specific practical aims.

You then have to set up a system that ensures the delivery of those pledges. This is the hardest part. Different departments fail to communicate. Problems emerge and it’s not clear who is in charge of solving them. The Treasury becomes intransigent. Government’s become distracted - by war, by scandal, by leadership threats - and the mission stalls.

The collapse of delivery is extremely common. You can see that now, with Starmer’s ‘missions’ - once upon a time the core pledge of the government, now barely an irrelevance. I’m literally not sure whether they technically still exist. But accomplishing the vision, making it real, providing voters with proof that you will do what you said you’d do - this is how we show that democracy works. It is transactional but it is profound and at the heart of our entire way of life.

In Blair’s first term he had Michael Barber set up the standards and effectiveness unit in the Department of Education, allowing for the daily communication required to make things happen: Keeping special advisers, ministers, civil servants, the prime minister and the Treasury on the same page, executing day-to-day decision making according to established benchmarks towards the ultimate goal.

In his second term, this unit system had been refined and elevated to Downing Street, stretching across multiple departments. It was able to deliver on Blair’s election promises despite the fact that he was focused that entire time by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It insulated him against distraction. Then we got the 2005 election and people wondered how Blair could win despite how unpopular he was. Well the answer is that he had a downpayment with Barber: do the work towards the targets, no matter what else is going on out there. So education was getting better. Schools were getting better. Trains were getting better.

The frustrating thing about the Starmer government is that many of the same figures are still around. Barber himself has been involved in Starmer’s Downing Street. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, is a crucial part of the team. But without a clear direction set from the top the machine cannot start.

I don’t want to make all this sound easier than it is. Governing is hard. But this is the pattern you would expect to see if things are going to work properly: A clearly-articulated vision, the measures to implement it, and the mechanisms to deliver it. Without it, you’re fucked.

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Courage

In the current period, courage is perhaps the most important attribute a prime minister can have. This would not have been the case for Blair, who was operating in a much more generous era. It is the case for the next prime minister, who is operating in a terrible one.

There are no good choices facing a British prime minister today. The basic problem is economic. The financial crash eliminated our productivity. Austerity cut us to the bone. Brexit undermined our trading position. Covid and Ukraine played havoc with our economy. And then Truss finished us off with a shotgun to the head. No country can shrug off this series of events. It has battered the shit out of us.

Every avenue is pain. If you change the fiscal rules to allow you to borrow more, there is a chance of a severe bond market reaction. This is not a lazy right-wing scare story. It is the reality of how we have been treated since the Truss debacle. No point crying about it either. No-one owes us money. People are entitled to risk-assess a loan to us if that’s what we’re asking for. The only option then is to raise taxes, but this also carries major dangers to growth and to public trust. Alternatively, you can cut spending, but after austerity there is nothing really left to save.

It’s a grim state of affairs. The only way out is to stop pretending that the public is right. On issue after issue, the public holds an objectively wrong opinion, sometimes to the left and more often to the right. In politics, everyone knows it - pollsters know it, think tank nerds know it, civil servants know it, ministers know it. But no-one will admit it out loud.

For instance, it is objectively wrong that we can raise all the additional money we need on the back of a couple dozen billionaires. There is no mythical tax rise which can solve all our money problems but will not be felt by us or anyone we know. The public has grown to only support taxes which it will not pay, but that is not how solidarity works or how a society looks after itself. It is a form of tax infantilism.

It is objectively wrong to reduce immigration to below 100,000, as we almost inevitably will this year, and expect to enjoy a successful dynamic economy. It is simply not going to happen. You are starving the Exchequer of funds and discouraging the most productive and innovative people from coming here.

It is objectively wrong to think that you can fix Britain’s trading status outside the EU. It goes against everything we know about customs and regulatory checks and the friction placed in the way of goods and services.

But somewhere along the line, we stopped having prime ministers who were prepared to lead. Instead, they tried to work out where the public were and said whatever it was they wanted to hear. They stopped believing they could change public opinion, and restricted themselves instead to working within it. But public opinion is strangling us. And things will not improve until we can breathe properly.

I’m not expecting a Labour leadership contender to come out and do an all-singing, all-dancing pro-immigration speech. I’m not that naive. But it is worth watching candidates for small acts of bravery, things which are hard to say, or unpopular, or difficult for them, but they decide to say anyway. This suggests they may have the character to do something really brave in power.

For instance, Kemi Badenoch once nearly told the truth, almost by accident. There was a brief moment in January 2025 when she wobbled on the pension triple-lock. Clearly, she knew it was untenable, but clearly she knew it would be dangerous to say so. The reaction was instantaneous, from the press but especially from other parties. In that moment, we got a glimmer of her true leadership potential. Would she show bravery? Would she stand up, despite the intense pressure to bow to the political consensus? Fuck no. Obviously not. And now we see the kind of leadership she provides: always doing the easiest, stupidest, laziest thing. Those little moments give you an indication of how someone will behave in power.

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Decision-making

I can’t quite believe I need to write this down, but we do require prime ministers who can make decisions.

For a start, they need to be able to adjudicate between ministers. This seems so obvious that it barely needs saying but apparently it does. If the Treasury wants to rein in spending and the Ministry of Defence wants more money, someone has to actually make a call on that. That person is traditionally called the prime minister. At the moment, we have someone who refuses to do that. It would be better if we had someone who would do it.

The ability to reach decisions takes place in a specific psychological space. Years ago, I gave a speech to a group of opposition MPs and spoke afterwards to a politician who is currently a government front bencher. I was immensely impressed with their intellect. I was barely halfway through a sentence when they were completing it and asking me the next pertinent question.

It turns out this individual is a nightmare at their department. They are immensely talented at collating information and scrutinising it from every angle, but they just can’t make a decision. They become so obsessed with collating all the information that it paralyses them. The talent I witnessed actually made them ideally suited to be the chair of a select committee, but they were no good in a decision-maker role.

There is another problem where a PM is able to make decisions but is too controlling about always being the one to do so. They become zealous, insisting that everything is passed up to their desk for sign off. This was the issue with Brown and Sunak, both of whom created decision-making choke-points at the desk in No.10.

Prime ministers need to be psychologically capable of making decisions, willing to amass the right amount of information before doing so, refusing to become paralysed by it, sticking with the call once they’ve made it and deferring to other figures where appropriate.

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Curiosity

One of the frustrating things about Westminster right now is that there are so many good, thoughtful ideas floating around and yet there is seemingly no-one in a position of authority open to learning about them.

For over a year now, political scientists have warned Labour that a reactionary message on social issues will lose them voters on the left without attracting voters on the right. This month’s local elections demonstrated that proposition in extremely vivid terms. But honestly, watching No.10 react, it was as if it was the first time they’d ever encountered these ideas. They had clearly shut themselves off from all sources of information outside of their chamber.

There are brilliant ideas out there, across the political spectrum. There are dozens of think tanks, policy institutes and academic units working on policy proposals, ready to be picked up by a politician and put into practice. On tax reform alone, we are surrounded by proposals which have been refined across decades, just waiting for someone with the vision and bravery - shit, the patriotism - to pick them up. But for that to happen the prime minister needs to have curiosity about the world around them. I know this sounds crazy, but they need to actually be interested in politics, excited by ideas to make things better.

Many years ago I was in the green room with former Labour minister Alan Johnson waiting to do a debate about something or other. He sat next to a producer, then another guest, then a trade unionist, if I remember correctly. Each time, his face lit up and he started asking them questions: What do you do, how does that work, how’re things going with that, what are the problems you face, why is it done this way?

The questions didn’t matter really. What mattered was the look on his face, that enthusiasm about finding out something new, that desire to look outside of your normal experience. It means that those in power have a disposition towards finding a wide range of ideas.

One of the depressing things about politics at the moment is how self-harming it is. A politician prepared to search widely for ideas will improve their own career as well as the country. But we do not select for those sorts of people. MPs are selected by the local party for being loyal party people, parliamentary private secretaries are selected for their fidelity, ministers are selected for their loyalty. At each stage of the political process we prioritise obedience and organisational narrow-mindedness over openness to ideas. But we do not have to. We can embrace and reward curiosity.

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These are the things to look out for in a leader: vision, delivery, courage, decision-making and curiosity. The prime ministers of the last few decades have possessed few, if any of these qualities. They have been shit. This time, we could pick someone with most, or all, of these qualities. They might not be shit.

It won’t happen, obviously. We’ll likely make the decision on a series of completely unrelated points. We are fucking awful and we deserve that’s coming to us. But there is a different path available should we choose to take it.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Three pieces for the i paper this week - one on how the Labour leadership fight will drive us towards a more pro-European agenda, another on the utterly muddle-headed response to the inflationary crisis, and a third on how distant public perceptions of immigration are from reality.

The first episode of our Origin Story two-parter on JK Rowling is out. This is effectively a mystery episode, as we try to unravel what makes her tick. Has she simply been radicalised by the internet? Or was she always like this, but managed to conceal her true disposition? Or, and this is probably the most sensitive explanation, was she simply someone who refused to explore the ramifications of her political demands?

It’s a complicated story. As we lay out the narrative of her life, the birth and evolution of the gender critical movement plays out alongside it, providing a strange new alternate history of British feminism in the online era, through the medium of one very famous celebrity. As Dorian says in the clip below: “This is the first civil rights debate to play out on social media… What we’ve got here, which is incredibly unhealthy, is a sort of proxy war over a celebrity.”

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or just watch it below.

I can’t stop listening to Rosalia at the moment, in particular the album Lux, and even more in particular the track Focu ‘Ranni. I was wondering the other day exactly what genre it is and then I made what I think is a mistake. I started imagining that perhaps this was a new genre, that she had invented something so unusual that it really won’t fit into any pre-existing category and we’ll need to find a new one. And then I realised, no, fuck that, what nonsense. This is pop music. But I have become so used to boring, run-of-the-mill pop that something this ambitious, this vast in its intentions, sounds almost alien. It’s not the easiest album - there are big hooks, but she has so many ideas that none of them are given time to dig in. But then, that just makes me admire it more, and be all the more astonished for its success.

Right, that’s that cunts. Have a lovely long weekend. Do not read the news. See you here next week. Fuck off.

This week was an abattoir for dreams. Every day, the same breathless churn of opinion. Every day, more rumours and innuendo, more gossip, more unconfirmed reports and best guesses. Ceaseless baseless noise and gibberish. And then behind it all, past the cameras and the news reports and the resignation letters, just this one screaming thought in your head: You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up.

This is our one chance and you’re fucking it up.

Keir Starmer’s victory was never going to be like Tony Blair’s in 1997. He was not going to inherit a country on the road to recovery, put there by decent, responsible men like John Major and Ken Clarke. He inherited a smashed and mangled machine, an engine room that had been set on fire by a gaggle of hysterical dimwitted drunks. But it was also distinct for another reason, which was the price of failure. Blair’s failure would have turned the country over to a conservative opposition, with both a small and a large C. Starmer’s failure would hand it to the most egregious figures in British political history.

We know the price of failure. We know what a Reform government would look like. We know because they told us. Internment camps for immigrants, placed in areas which vote against the party as a kind of community punishment. The introduction of ICE thugs on the streets of Britain. A mass deportation programme. A purging of the top levels of the civil service to make it pliable to power. The dismantling of Britain’s climate change programme. The use of conspiracy theory as a core tool of communication. The creation of a British vassal state, obsequious in the face of Trump’s America, cowardly in the face of Putin’s Russia.

We are not fighting over politics. We are fighting for the soul of a country. This was our last chance to show that our way works - that liberal democracy can provide what populism never can, by being rational and evidence-based and binding voters together rather than pitching them against one another. But they’re fucking it up.

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The local election results showed a party which was about to become extinct. To continue was to accept death, to go meekly without complaint.

To their credit, Labour MPs refused to do that. For all the talk of chaos and uncertainty, we should be clear about that. Something had to be done. He can’t do the job. The only options are to change or to face annihilation.

It’s easy to sit there and say Starmer is bringing the Labour party to ruin. It’s also easy to complain when weeks like this look so chaotic. But it is harder to accept that the latter problem will necessarily follow when you address the former one. Politics is not conducted in a board room. It is composed of countless individuals and networks, semi-overlapping power centres, with their own views and their own preferred outcomes operating in conditions of information asymmetry. Things often become extremely disordered before they are resolved.

This is why the situation span out of control. Various senior figures with disparate incentives were operating with incomplete information in a fast-moving series of events. It is not because they are especially inept. I’m sure you have lots of strong views about these figures. Don’t write in and tell me, I don’t care. But whatever you think of their politics, these people are not idiots. Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband are all highly accomplished and highly intelligent political operators.

At certain points, it simply became impossible to keep up. Yesterday in particular, political fortunes achieved flight velocity, where no position held for any meaningful period of time. I had concluded that Andy Burnham had basically no chance of getting into parliament. Then Streeting failed to find support from MPs, Starmer suddenly looked briefly unassailable, soft-left support consolidated around Miliband, Rayner announced the conclusion of the HMRC investigation, Streeting’s letter blew the issue wide open again, and then Burnham found a seat he could fight in a by-election. From minute to minute, what was unthinkable became inevitable and then back again.

It was a completely insane state of affairs. I sat waiting to go live on a news channel at one point. With three minutes to go before the hour, the newsreader realised the headlines were already out of date, dismissed them, and improvised an entirely new set straight to camera. In Westminster, politicians and journalists whispered and gossiped to each other, eventually spreading so many narratives that some of them picked up momentum, grew into consensus and then subsided again, only to be replaced by something new. It was a constant churn of salty water, a storm of nothingness.

They drank and they laughed and they sneered at each other, and in the pubs in Westminster, crowds of political people congregated, slipping outside for a cigarette when the sun shone and bolting back in when it rained. Most of the journalists were in their happy place. Most of them are not really interested in political ideas. They like the sport of it, so they were emotionally unaffected. Weeks like this are really Westminster as they prefer it, the ideal form of coverage. No need to discuss policy now. Just the endless soap opera and empty tactics, Eastenders in the bookies.

Other people, the best people, looked crestfallen. Stood by a crowded bar one night, a friend lent in close, and said: “I feel like I’ve wasted my life.” He was joking, but he wasn’t. Not really. He had that terrible fear that sometimes overcomes political people. Perhaps it’s all for nothing. Perhaps we never achieve anything. Perhaps we’re powerless to stop people making the same mistakes over and over again. Perhaps we’re trapped in some terrible wheel and we would all be better off bird-watching.

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During a brief lull one evening, I walked up Whitehall to Pall Mall, where UCL Constitution unit director Meg Russell was giving a valedictory speech on her last day in the job. For decades, she’s been the UK’s chief authority on parliamentary matters. She has forgotten more about British constitutional life than most people will ever learn.

We were just a few hundred metres from parliament, but the conversation was completely different. The noise was gone. The chatter. Instead, her speech was about ideas. It was about the architecture of British politics. Sitting in that room, with the storm of gibberish going on down the road, I felt like I was watching one of the last political giants.

Russell was a full time adviser to Robin Cook when he was leader of the Commons. She served as a specialist adviser to three parliamentary committees, including the crucial Wright Committee, which suggested that select committee chairs should be elected by MPs. She has been in charge of the Constitution Unit for just over a decade. During that time, she has proposed a series of modest, rational improvements: The prime minister should be stripped of their power of appointment for the Lords. The Commons should be given back control over its timetable from the government. The kinds of things which are perfectly normal elsewhere but we consider dangerously liberal, even anarchic.

She spoke calmly, but I could feel my heart ache. During her predecessor’s time running the unit, she said, constitutional reformers thought in terms of progress. But during her tenure, since Brexit in 2016, they have thought almost entirely in terms of defence. The question is not how to make liberal democracy more effective. It is how to protect it from those who would destroy it.

Russell didn’t mention Reform by name. She is studiously non-party political. But its presence hung over that room. The people in that audience knew what ministers seemingly refuse to contemplate. If a Farage government gets into power, they will use the untrammelled executive powers of the British system to redraw this country. If they get into power, we don’t know how much of our democracy will remain.

I suspected everyone had the same thought, the same scream inside their head. They’re fucking it up. They’re fucking it up. They’re fucking it up.

She looked like she had been fighting a rearguard defence for a decade, which is precisely what she has been doing. She looked like she was fed-up with demonstrating how things should change only to have a lazy and self-interested and anaemic and complacent political system throw it back in her face.

But for all her obvious frustration, she was still practical and pragmatic and fundamentally driven by optimism about what can be achieved. She proposed convincing parties of the need for reform by exploiting their current uncertainty around the election results - a kind of Rawlesian veil-of-ignorance strategy. It's a very good idea, but I was more affected by the attitude than the proposal itself.

She is of the John Maynard Keynes tradition, in disposition if not subject matter. She is of the people who are only temporarily disheartened by opposition and then come up with practical alternatives to overcome it.

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On Thursday, things fundamentally changed. At first, it seemed like a mere continuation of the storm, but in fact it was the moment it broke. Two events cleared the rain and shone a light on the landscape. Finally, a pathway was visible, stretching into the middle distance.

First, Streeting published his resignation letter. Probably as a mark of weakness, possibly as a sign of enlightened self-interest, he tacitly acknowledged that either Burnham or another soft-left candidate had to be part of a leadership contest. “It needs to be broad,” he said, “and it needs the best possible field of candidates.” Suddenly, the Streeting and Burnham camps were aligned on their preferred process.

Second, Makerfield MP Josh Simons gave way to allow Burnham a run at his seat in a by-election. It was an extraordinary moment of near-Shakesperian narrative symmetry. Simons was a director at Labour Together, the Morgan McSweeney think tank that had laid the ground for Starmer. Now, he moved decisively to help Burnham bury him. Starmerism had produced its own gravedigger.

With these two events, there was now a clear road from the status quo to Burnham in No.10. The previous absence of this road had hindered events, keeping them stuck in place with nowhere to go. The presence of it allowed everything to move forward.

The road is long and hard. Burnham must secure the support of the National Executive Committee, Labour’s rule-making body, which until now has been under Starmer control. Then he must win the by-election, which is extremely challenging. In the 2024 general election, Labour won 45.2% of the vote compared to Reform’s 31.8%. By the time of the local elections, Reform was 50% to Labour’s 27%.

Somehow, while fighting a Reform-Labour marginal, Burnham must also orchestrate a simultaneous bid for the position of Labour leader, which involves a left-wing socially-liberal party constituency. How do you handle that? What do you say about Europe, for instance? What do you say about immigration?

It will be very difficult indeed, but people’s reactions yesterday told us more about their personality and their current emotional state than they did about his chances.

There are many reasons to think he will fail. The path is long, the seat is tough and the odds seem stacked against him. Then there is the uniquely weird situation of the by-election itself. Will voters think they were being told what to do? That he is taking their vote for granted? They’d elected one man to represent them, only to see him chuck it all in and suggest they pick another one. Perhaps they will see Burnham as desperate and cynical and entitled.

We don’t know. We don’t know because no-one has ever really tried anything like this before. It is equally possible that Burnham’s unique image in the north could turn him into a viable change candidate, a vehicle for fed-up voters to alter the status quo. Perhaps they won’t feel they’re being taken advantage of but will instead realise that they are now, at this moment, the most powerful voters in Britain. They wield a level of democratic influence that is almost unheard of, defining the future of the country.

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Burnham has flaws. He has changed his image so often it’s hard to be certain which version of him you’ll get. There’s evidence that he avoids painful unpopular decisions, which threatens to trap us in the same tax straitjacket as Starmer. He has been incautious when talking about the bond markets in a way that is now costing us, literally, as they assess the perceived risk of his premiership.

But when that seat became free, I was instantly transported back to that Russell speech. Not the doom, not even in her specific arguments about constitutional reform, but in her general sense of realistic practical ambition.

One thing is true and remains true no matter how depressed everyone seems to be. Change is hope. Under the status quo, we had nothing. Starmer had implemented no plan, so there was no point waiting for voters to feel the effect of it. He had no new ideas so there was no point hoping for them to suddenly emerge. There was only the long, slow march to electoral oblivion.

The most impressive political people ask themselves, at each stage: What is possible? What can be achieved? What are the viable proposals which reflect our ideals?

Now, today, there are more of them than there were before. Burnham is a supporter of electoral reform. Read that again, you cunt - it’s important. This is a thing that is really happening. An out-and-proud supporter of electoral reform is currently fighting to get into No.10 with a viable chance of succeeding.

Burnham is a believer in devolution. Read that again too. It matters. One of the reasons Britain stagnates is because its centralised system stifles creativity. Local power drives decision-making down to where people understand what’s needed, whether that is a tram network or a tax system.

He is politically astute and emotionally present. He is a far better communicator. He is empathetic, and he retains the political acumen that comes from being empathetic and thereby anticipating people’s reactions to events. Most of all, he is prepared to take big swings. Standing for a by-election in a Reform-Labour marginal at the height of government unpopularity in order to challenge a prime minister is a big swing. It is unprecedented. It is the kind of thing someone does when they are driven by self-confidence rather than the hesitancy and inertia which has typified the last two years.

Is it going to work out? God knows. It’s possible - likely even - that he will lose that by-election. It’s possible that in power he will be more like Burnham the health secretary of 2009 than Burnham the Manchester mayor of 2021. It’s easy to default to cynicism and despair.

I don’t say that in an accusatory way. I say it as a description of my own internal mental state, of the emotional experience of being so badly let down by a government we desperately needed to succeed, of the exhaustion of hearing that voice in your head all day, every day: You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up.

But then I think back to that Russell speech. And I remember: Despair accomplishes nothing. Cynicism is the death of radicalism. Optimism is a political act.

It has been a week of horrors, no two ways about it. But we end it with a bit of light peeking out from behind the clouds. If you tilt your head, and cover your eyes, and gaze out to the middle distance, you can just about make out a trace of hope. Might not be much, but it’s more than we’ve had for a long time.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Two pieces for the i paper this week - both on the leadership election. The first is here and the second is here. I wrote a piece for Spain’s El Pais newspaper explaining the failure of the Starmer project. The English translation is here. I bashed that one out in between tasks but it’s actually a pretty good summary of its failure. I doubt I can improve on it.

The third part of our epic Origin Story on a United Europe came out this week, starting with the development of the single market, running into the eurozone crisis and then culminating in the battle against populism. I’m very proud of it.

Europe is in trouble like never before. But it is also rediscovering something. It is the dream nurtured in the mud and barbed wire of Ukraine. It is the placard used to defend against water cannons in Georgia. Wherever Europeans fight against Putinism, this is what they aspire to. It is a reminder of what it is for and why it exists, just as one was most needed. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it below.

Also I apologise for the outfit. I was going to the gym afterwards. I refuse to dress for the video on these things.

I mostly made myself feel better this week watching Gogglebox. It’s been years since I saw this programme but coming back to it is deeply reassuring. It is a vision of Britain as benign, witty, unfathomably stupid, loving, warm and fundamentally gentle. How true is it? Well, it is at least as true as the vision of it as a snarling aggro beer-swilling thug but it is a vision we do not see so often. I am basically in love with every family you see on there and I sit there, smiling giddily, as they get on with their lives watching the telly. On the one hand, it is frothy nonsense about nothing. On the other, it is this strange little bit of patriotic medicine, which reminds me, when it is sometimes hard to remember, about the better side of this country.

Right. I am going to sleep for the entire weekend. Fuck off.

It’s going to get bloody. There’ll be many other developments today, but that’s the main take-away. He’s going to make it bloody. I suspect this was the last chance for decorum and perhaps even a bit of dignity. It’s fading fast. It’s looking like it’s going to be a pub fight.

There are two main ways for Keir Starmer to be replaced: formally or informally.

The formal mechanism is simple. Under Labour rules, 20% of the parliamentary party - 81 MPs - would need to jointly back a challenger. At the moment, plenty of MPs want a change of leader but no-one has broken ranks to say that they’re standing. So as things stand, the formal trigger has not been pulled.

The informal mechanism would really have to involve Cabinet. It can happen nice or it can happen ugly.

If it happened nicely, senior figures would encourage Starmer to step down, with an implicit threat of resignation if he failed to do so. This morning it felt like we might get to this point pretty quickly. Widespread reports suggested that the home and foreign secretary were of this view and that the deputy prime minister was of a similar one. You can’t survive the departure of figures at that level of seniority.

If it happened ugly, ministers would simply start resigning, thereby abandoning negotiation and adopting trench warfare. Each resignation would be designed to destabilise the prime minister, ideally heading up the levels of seniority until his position becomes untenable. It looked this morning like that might have already begun, when communities minister Miatta Fahnbulleh resigned with a surgical letter. “The public does not believe that you can lead this change,” she said, “and nor do I”.

Today’s Cabinet meeting was therefore a crucial moment. Would people speak out? Would the play-nicely informal option be triggered?

That clearly did not happen. They held back.

Instead, Starmer was the one that pressed his case. As is his habit, he relied on processology. The formal mechanism had not been triggered, he said, therefore he remained prime minister. Go fuck yourself, basically. Put up or shut up. If Wes Streeting wants a run at the leadership, let him go ahead and announce it.

And with that, the last glimmer of hope for an orderly process pretty much faded away.

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It’s hard to see a good outcome from here.

Let’s say that Wes Streeting breaks cover and announces a leadership campaign. Perhaps he’ll get the 81 names, in which case he might become leader. This would be bad. He would take over with a big important part of the parliamentary party - the soft left - outraged that he had done so without their preferred candidate Andy Burnham having a chance to participate.

Burnham is outside parliament and needs more time to return, given he was blocked last time by Starmer’s allies on the National Executive Committee. Streeting would take over, but without a meaningful mandate, in conditions of tribal acrimony, on the basis of a timetable stitch-up. It would be the worst possible basis to initiate a reset.

If Streeting failed, Starmer would be left as leader, but in a state of even greater weakness than he is now - bloodied, battered, half-functing, desperately stitching together Cabinet reshuffles out of those still prepared to serve under him. We would be in for months, perhaps years, of instability and chaos, with all the bond market and investment implications that entails.

Now let’s imagine Streeting does not break cover. In this scenario, we’ll never know if he would have got the 81 names. Instead, we will revert to the ugly informal mechanism - an escalating series of ministerial resignations.

Perhaps Starmer survives. If so, we’re left in the bloody and battered scenario, chaos stretching out into the middle distance.

Or perhaps he does not survive. His failure in this scenario would produce a situation of extreme volatility, because there is no agreement about the process to follow. Would there be an immediate leadership election, which would therefore exclude Burnham? Would Starmer stay on as leader while Burnham got back into parliament - a process which would take a few months, if indeed it’s even possible. What happens if Starmer refused to stay on as caretaker? Presumably someone would step in - perhaps Ed Miliband. This all sounds troubling. You should always be very vigilant about situations where people are willing to take action but do not agree on a process and do not share incentives about the decision-making structure.

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It should not be beyond the wit of man for us to emerge from this situation with a more rational and responsible process, but it involves the recognition of several things that are simultaneously true and painful for those concerned.

First, the prime minister cannot survive and is in fact already dead. It doesn’t matter what your views on his record are. It is no longer relevant. The point is that this is the settled view, probably around Cabinet, and the parliamentary party and certainly with the voting public, as evidenced by last week’s results. He should recognise this and announce he is stepping down. It will be horrible and humiliating, but it will be less horrible and humiliating than the alternative.

Like Gordon Brown, I suspect people will think him a better prime minister in retrospect than they did at the time. Unlike Gordon Brown, I do not think he deserves it, but that’s by the by. Comporting himself with dignity and grace in this moment would assist in that transformation.

Second, a leadership contest cannot take place without Andy Burnham at least having a shot at being involved. This is in the interest of the Labour right, which Streeting represents, as much as the Labour soft left, which Burnham represents. You need a proper mandate. It cannot be a stitch-up, or things will be toxic and the parliamentary party will be ungovernable.

Again, it simply does not matter what you think of Burnham. All that matters is what other people think of him and enough MPs consider him the standard-bearer for their tribe for this to be objectively the case. This means that a Starmer resignation should be followed by a universally-accepted timetable for a leadership contest to take place in the autumn, giving Burnham enough time to get back into parliament via a byelection - or at least try to.

Third, the reaction of the bond markets is very important. We have no wriggle room and have not done since the Truss debacle. They have reacted jumpily to any sign that Starmer or Rachel Reeves will go. Shit, the chancellor once cried and they went into a spasm. Labour must be very, very careful in what it is doing. A long leadership process is not ideal for that, but you can at least minimise the risks by providing clarity and universal consent.

Given that all these things are true, the best route by far is the play-nicely informal route, where Cabinet agrees on a process and Starmer accepts it.

That has not happened. It would be better for everyone - Starmer, Streeting, Burnham and the rest of us - if it did. There is still time, surely, for wiser heads to prevail and prevent this descending into open conflict. They must, or the pub fight beckons. By the end of it, things will be very ugly indeed.

Big day. We’re still very early in the process, with a minority of council seats declared. There’s lots of noise out there and very little sense. Some preliminary slapdash thoughts below.

So far, this is actually a pretty boring series of results

I know everyone’s very excited. The bond market is behaving like a child who drank too much Coke, bouncing around according to the implied probability of a Keir Starmer departure. The two party system is collapsing before our eyes - a phenomenon we’ve talked about for years but which is suddenly taking place vividly and at speed, right across the country.

And yet the results are honestly pretty boring. No surprises here. They confirm exactly what we expected. We are in an era of five party politics. Reform is out in front, currently securing around 25% across England and obviously doing particularly well in Leave-voting areas. So far - and again, everything can change - that’s basically in line with the polling. It’s impressive, they’re in the lead, but they are down from where they were a few months ago and not actually that much higher than the other parties, who are jostling around the 15-20% range.

Nothing has fundamentally altered. In fact, the story so far is a confirmation of the things we’ve said for months: Reform is leading, the Greens are doing well, the Lib Dems are chugging along, the two main parties are bleeding out, and people want change.

Most analysis at this point is basically a statement of your existing disposition

It’s far too early to get any sort of detail from the results, but of course that will not stop people insisting that it confirms their starting assumptions. This happens every election, and every election we tell people to stop it and they never do.

The crude version of this is that the Labour left will say Labour is losing votes to the Greens so it must turn left, while the Labour right will say Labour is losing votes to Reform so it must turn right. You can see this, for instance, from journalists like the Spectator’s Tim Shipman, who tweeted: “Whisper it quietly, but was Morgan McSweeney right to tell the Labour party Reform was a bigger threat than the Greens?” Incredible. That was then retweeted by Luke Akehurst on the Labour right, who wrote: “I’m shouting this as loudly as I can.”

Look at this image from Sky. When you see it, your brain will first think that Labour is losing votes to Reform. What else could explain those numbers? It is only once you think about it for a few more moments that you realise these sorts of results are possible without Labour losing a single vote for Reform. As plenty of others have now tried dutifully to explain - from John Curtis to Rob Ford to Adam Bienkov - Labour can lose seats to Reform by losing votes to the Greens, because the progressive parties cannibalise each other and Farage crashes through the middle. Was that a mixed metaphor? I suppose it was. I’m very tired.

Westminster is a very silly place indeed. People generally think it is profoundly silly but it is so much sillier than they realise. It is therefore perfectly likely that people will take away this message even though it is infantile, simplistic and demonstrably wrong.

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There is no plan to stick with

There’s a handful of ministers out there on the airwaves today - proper hospital pass, that one - insisting that Labour should stay calm and stick with the plan. But there is no plan. If there was, the party would be in a much better place.

The basic truth of the matter is that Starmer has no strategy, no vision, no agenda, no narrative, no desired outcome, nothing. Watching him govern is like watching a play staged by mannequins.

Imagine if Starmer had accepted in opposition that he would need to raise taxes. His majority would be smaller, sure. But the increased revenue to the Treasury would have helped reduce the interest rate on our debt, lessened the uniquely severe attitude towards us from the markets, provided a good breezy bit of headroom in the fiscal rules and helped stabilise the economy, providing for a more stable investment climate and all the other good stuff that comes with that.

Imagine if he had started his time in power with a big announcement on social care. Yes, all hell would have broken loose. But then, it did anyway, on stupid pointless little measures like the winter fuel allowance and welfare reform which didn’t help anyone. Right now, Labour would now be halfway through establishing that system. It could be in place in time for the next election. It would be sold as the single biggest change to our health and wellbeing since the NHS. Everyone would understand what Labour was for. It would have a story to tell. It would have something to be proud of.

Imagine if Starmer had taken one of the opportunities available to him and announced a massive expansion in our defence capacity. This could have taken place after Donald Trump attacked Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, or after the Liberation Day tariffs, or when the war in Iran broke out. At any one of these moments, he could have levelled with the British public: It’s a dangerous new world, we’re outside the EU, America is not reliable, Britain must be able to protect itself, defend its allies and project its values. This is our great national project. It will require sacrifice, but we will do it because it is necessary. Instead, he wasted every crisis, bumbling merrily along, going nowhere.

He has never taken any of these opportunities. He clearly does not have the confidence to try and convince the public of an argument. It’s not even clear if he thinks politicians have a place doing so. He is redundant. Obsolete. He secured power at a crucial moment in our national history and he squandered it. Pissed it away. It was a precious thing and a profound responsibility and he simply wasn’t up to it.

I would be much more concerned if I was Conservative than if I was Labour

Labour is having a nervous breakdown. This looks unseemly but at least it’s rational. It is a reasonable way to behave given the situation they are in. The Conservatives are equally screwed but they are calm and that is so much worse.

We read repeatedly that Kemi Badenoch is safe in her position because Tory members like her. This is in part a result of the extremely generous coverage she receives from the right-wing press, which acts as if her ability to speak in complete sentences exhibits some sort of intellectual triumph.

The Conservatives are getting hammered out there. Absolutely hammered. Badenoch has no plan to save them. In fact, the discussion around the party’s problems is so deranged that it makes the ‘Labour should break left or right’ conversation look Nobel-prize worthy.

The Tories have lost Postcard England to the Lib Dems. All those places you go to on long weekends - benign, self-satisfied areas with good tea rooms that you can’t quite work out if you want to live in or set fire to. The Lib Dems own them now. And this isn’t even really mentioned. It’s as if it isn’t happening, as if only the right-wing Reform threat is of any consequence. Half of Badenoch’s voters are Cameronite Remainers, somehow clinging on for dear life to a party which couldn’t give a damn about them. She seems as uninterested in them as she is in the voters she has already lost.

What the hell is happening with moderate Conservative MPs? Will they ever speak up? Will they ever rise from their slumber and take back their party, or will they sit there, parroting the same old tawdry crestfallen nonsense about the ECHR and leave-to-remain?

This is supposed to be the most mercenary, win-at-all-costs party in the Western world. It’s supposed to do whatever it takes, knife whoever it must, kill whomever it desires, if it will secure victory. Instead, it resembles a happy, doddery old man in a nursing home, oblivious to his surroundings, vaguely amused by what’s on the telly but struggling to follow along, going pleasantly and without much fuss into that good night.

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By the bowels of Christ, we need electoral reform

No-one reading this will be the least bit surprised by what I am saying, but these results present an immediate pressing need for electoral reform and for that reform to take place immediately. There is now no single argument against this measure, regardless of your political views or your ideological tendency. To stand against it is to stand against all sense of logic, all commitment to reason, against mathematics itself.

Look at the result in the Exeter St Loyes ward, to take one example of many. Conservatives came in third with 25.3% of the vote, Reform came in second with 25.5% and the Liberal Democrats won with 25.6% of the vote. As political scientist Rob Ford said: “Pure chaos. [First-past-the-post] fruit machine.” These kinds of results are utterly arbitrary. They remove any sense of meaning from the vote. They remove - and this should send a shiver down our democratic spines - any sense of will.

Unless we urgently change our approach, we are going to go into the 2029 election with these sorts of results all over the country. Victory on the basis of knife-edge contests decided by perhaps a few hundred people. The disenfranchisement of the vast majority of voters, with victors representing a seat on pitiful levels of public support. Thirty per cent? Twenty-five per cent? Or perhaps even less. As party support shatters, winners will pass the post with homeopathic mandates. That is a democratic abomination and a crime against maths.

It is simply not possible to support this while still maintaining any pretence of respect for the voters. Any incoming Labour leader - and I presume there will be a new one incoming - should finally accept what most other countries recognised long ago. We need electoral reform and we need it in time for the next election.

No odds and sods this week, sorry and no podcast. But I suspect there’ll be another newsletter in the next few days when the results become a bit clearer.

Hello, it’s time for another round of Ask Me Anything, the occasional series where I answer questions from readers and then save the copy on file so I have something to publish when I am ill/otherwise engaged/incapacitated by existential doubt/too hungover to write. I wonder which one of those it was this time? (Existential doubt it’s always existential doubt)

The bravest question will win a Question of the Week award, giving the lucky recipient free access to a premium subscription.

Ted Morris

How do you approach calibrating your tone for posts on the spectrum cheerleading to persuasive? I ask because for a couple of your recent ones I’ve found the tone a bit strident - on the Tommy Robinson march (where Clive Lewis was more nuanced!) and… on the BBC debacle. Are you seeking to speak to a range of opinion or to galvanise those of the same mind?

This is a really good question. The answer is neither. I try hard to never write with a practical political intention.

The danger of consciously writing to be persuasive or to galvanise is that it’s fake. It confuses the role of the journalist for the role of the campaigner. The journalist gets too far into their own head and develops a sense of self-importance. We are not important and must never think we are. We are hack cunts. We are lucky to work in the most exciting industry on Earth, but we are not leaders or politicians. We’re grubby information conduits, the water carrier, a GCSE comprehension exercise made flesh.

We have a sacred covenant with the reader which is that we will be honest. The moment we think of ourselves in these terms - ‘I’ll write this to persuade conservatives’, ‘I’ll write that to encourage left-wingers’ - we become a false version of ourselves. We become a player in the drama rather than an observer of it.

Every so often, a senior politician - sometimes very senior - has told me they read my stuff. Those were dangerous moments. In the weeks afterwards, I sometimes found myself picturing that person as I wrote and wondering how to formulate the argument to convince them. You have to kill that thought. It’s treason against your readership and a misapprehension of what the job entails.

Ted’s wariness is quite common, I think. My writing is sometimes going to be disinterested, analytical and a little cold, because that is the mood I’m in and the correct approach to the subject. This will often be the case when I’m talking about constitutional matters, say, or perhaps about trade rules or something. I really enjoy figuring out how things work and then describing them in a way that would have been useful to me before I started. Other times, my writing will be torn out of my heart. This will often be the case when I’m talking about immigration in particular, or drug policy, or authoritarian public health measures, or the decline of liberalism.

Those two approaches are not incompatible but they are not natural bedfellows either. I would be more successful if I always adopted the former voice and built up a sense of gravitas around myself, or if I always adopted the latter and built up a big passionate tribal audience. The first option would give me status and the second option would give me money.

But I am neither of those things. I am both, and sometimes neither, or some weird mixture, and other things besides. I always had the belief that there were enough people out there who were like me to make this approach tenable: Emotional but logical, idealistic but pragmatic, earnest but analytical, angry but gentle. So it’s about really committing to being yourself and trusting that you are not alone: other people share your disposition as well as your values.

Fuck me that was a long answer, I hope it’s not all like this.

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Alistair King

You often describe yourself as an ultra-liberal. Are there any issues on which you don’t take a liberal line, and why? I’m fairly liberal but have a completely illiberal view on littering, for example. In my case, the reason is that it’s a crime of laziness and entitlement, as opposed to greed or passion, and that really rubs me up the wrong way, even though other crimes are obviously far worse.

There’s basically nothing. I’m not trying to be impressive here and I’m not trying to flaunt my ideological consistency either. It’s just that my mind’s natural way of thinking is to assess how an idea impacts on the freedom of the individual. That is the default thought-path, the first place my head goes when I encounter a new idea.

Some things are simply not pertinent to liberalism. Animal testing, for instance, doesn’t really fit this format and nor does terraforming on Mars. Some things arguably override the liberal principle. When I wrote about mandatory voting the other day, I put the civic advantages over the individual restriction. But even here I would argue that those civic advantages are ultimately improvements for the liberty of the individual of a distant and elevated sort. When it comes down to it, I am ultimately quite a basic ideological bitch. I think that roughly 98% of problems can be reduced down to individual liberty, from climate change to welfare, and that the dispute is fundamentally about how you decide which approach best expresses that value.

Needless to say, when some little cunt talks or uses their phone in a cinema I turn into General Franco. But that’s perfectly consistent. Liberalism does not outlaw social judgement, it just outlaws social coercion. And anyway they had it coming.

Kevin Lee

What one thing have you been most wrong about?

Christ, where do I even start? That god exists, that it would be possible or desirable to eradicate free market mechanisms, that British euroscepticism constituted a sensible and respectable political culture, that party members should be given a say in electing leaders, that the House of Lords should be democratically elected, that Keir Starmer would make a good prime minister, that mandatory voting is a bad idea, I could go on and on.

My single biggest error was definitely the idea that you could be certain about the world - back in my Christian and Marxist period when I was young. Certainty leads to dogma and dogma is the mind killer.

Most of the other things I have changed my mind about have been political or factual. This was structural. It was about thinking in a different way, not thinking a different set of things. So I view that change as the fundamental one which took place in my life.

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Anon

I have found myself increasingly interested in comics/graphic novels (the labels are difficult). However, I have been struggling for an entry point. I listened recently to the Adam Buxton podcast (sorry) interview with Johnny Greenwood. Johnny talked about how he gave his mate, who knew about such things, £200 to go the comic book shop and buy him the things he thought Johnny needed to read. He also had some specific suggestions; Saga and Preacher are the ones I recall. I recently dove in and put some money down. I purchased, what I suspect, most would consider to be fairly obvious choices: Watchmen, Maus, Preacher vol 1. I would really love to hear what you would buy me if I gave you £200.

Graham Clarke

Preacher is the best comic I have read. Are there any comics of recent times that are anywhere near as good?

Rick Gillyon

What is your all-time favourite comic or graphic novel? And why is it Watchmen?

Pablowski8

Loved your Introduction to Superman selection of comics. Another selection of must-reads would be welcome.

First of all, Watchmen, Preacher and Saga (in that order) are very good calls. They also give you a decent overview of arguably the three of the most influential comics from the 80s to today. Plus they’re all really, really fucking good. I’m not huge on Maus, but I know people get a lot from it.

I don’t have a list for this sort of thing - I tend to make comic suggestions based on what films or books the person likes. But that being said, these are the answers that popped in my head as I was typing, in no particular order:

• Enigma by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo. A haunting, tender, achingly beautiful queer love story about the meaning of life and talking lizards.

• Judge Dredd: Trifecta by half of the UK’s top-tier talent. A crossover event bursting with creative ambition that serves as a crash course for modern British comics and their sensibility.

• Royal City Compendium Volume One by Jeff Lemire. A little indie story set in a post-industrial town, full of angst and yearning.

• The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Walta. A complex, elegiac story which is perfect for people who’ve watched a Marvel film, know the characters and want to do some further reading.

• Brink: Book One by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard. To my mind this is the single best comic being published today. A masterclass in slow-burn sci-fi world building, mystery, political intrigue and dread. When a new installment arrives I feel like I’ve won an award.

• The Invisibles Compendium by Grant Morrisson. This is one of the comics that made me who I am, so it has to go on any of these lists. I think of it more like a drug than a book. It gets inside your mind and then starts doing strange things, breaking down your sense of binary opposition.

• Wild’s End Volume One: First Light by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard. A perfect little comic, in which Culbard demonstrates complete mastery of the form. Unshowy, economical, evocative, naturalistic cartooning. Exquisitely British.

• Paying the Land by Joe Sacco. People usually rate Sacco’s book Palestine, but for my money this is the more mature complete work. This is what comics journalism looks like - open, evocative, doing things that cannot be done through strict reporting or photography, or even non-fiction writing. It’s a survey of a people who have come unmoored from the land and yet cannot seem to properly live without it. It is sad, lyrical, profound and deeply, seethingly angry at capitalism’s failures.

• Fury: My War Gone By by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov. One of the most underrated classic comics of the modern period. It serves as a comprehensive denunciation of US foreign policy, a love letter to America regardless, a cold war thriller, and - bizarrely given all that - the best Marvel character origin story you’re ever likely to read. It is a perfect unison of intellect and sentiment, with an ending that you never truly recover from.

• Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky. Simply the best writing on sex I’ve read. It’s a little bit precious, but it is also open-minded and kind and heartfelt. Outrageous.

• Assassin Nation by Kyle Starks and Erica Henderson. The funniest comic I’ve read in years. It’s unbelievably dark and surprisingly tender. A package of really wonderful fucked-up joy.

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Anon

Dear Ian, I couldn’t resist. Here goes: Many (all?) of the liberal figures you have profiled have had unconventional romantic lives (Taylor and Mill, Keynes and the Bloomsbury set, Edwina, Mountbatten and Nehru...). To what extent do you think our monogamous culture is at odds with liberalism, given that it is centred on the couple, rather than the individual?

OK this is interesting. The answer is not at all, but that the social expectation of monogamy must surely contradict liberalism in some profound way that we are only now starting to edge out of.

Plainly if people choose monogamy, which most people do, they are expressing a free choice. That choice limits their freedom, sure, but so does an employment contract. In terms of liberty our only concern is that they can leave the contract whenever they like. I don’t think monogamy demands that we treat individuals as combined units, even if we recognise the relationship in the tax system.

So our job as liberals is to say that monogamy is a choice you can make but you can make a bunch of other ones too. The question then is why so many people choose monogamy. After all, no-one believes that only one person makes them laugh. So why would we assume that only one person would satisfy someone sexually or even emotionally? Whatever else it is, it’s plainly not rational.

Most people do assume that, or at least they choose to accept monogamy as the price of some other good they desire, namely the sexual loyalty of their spouse and the reassurance that comes with that.

Why? I guess there are two possible reasons. I mean, honestly, fuck knows - I haven’t researched this at all, I’m just talking out my arse here. But I assume there are two possible reasons.

Option one: It’s because of social expectations, built up over centuries, grounded perhaps in patriarchy, or as a result of property relations, or perhaps simply as a manifestation of humanity’s bottomless capacity for envy and insecurity. I dunno. Option two: It is a biological function of our species - presumably grounded in genetic paranoia about the identity of our offspring. This means it is a deeply-built requirement in our animal behaviour which would operate regardless of the social, cultural or legal systems we impose.

If it’s option one we would expect monogamy to become less popular as society becomes more open and liberal. If it’s option two, things will always be like this.

Many questions break down on these lines: Is it socially-created or is it innate? In terms of liberalism, it doesn’t strictly matter. All liberals care about is that people make a free choice, whether that choice happens to be conceptually or philosophically sound is strictly irrelevant.

But here’s the thing: this really does mean a free choice. It’s not just that people can leave a relationship. It’s more profound than that. They must be educated as children to make autonomous choices as adults. We must raise a generation of people who can resist the pull of the crowd. We must have all the various options for romantic life freely discussed and accepted, as tenable pathways that people can pursue if the desire takes them. We should aim to reduce and eventually eradicate social ostracisation over non-monogamy. After all, someone can be free to do something, but if their family and friends will never speak to them again it becomes a technical liberty rather than a practical one.

In recent years, many young people have been exploring a new way of organising sexual relationships based on ethical non-monogamy, polyamory and all that. This is much derided by older people, including columnists. Fuck ‘em. This is exactly the kind of thing young people should be doing: messing shit up and questioning really basic social assumptions. Kicking the tires in. They’re doing good work out there.

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Anon

Is there a tipping point for you, where you think, ‘fuck this, I’m emigrating. I tried and tried and yet this entire place is insistent on throwing itself further into the abyss, and I’m off somewhere else until it gets better, maybe forever?’ If so, any idea of a personal top three countries you’d emigrate to? It’s a question I’ve given a lot of consideration, preferring to stay in Europe but my partner seems to prefer the idea of Canada. Thing is, I don’t think she knows how much driving is needed there, and she doesn’t drive…

Anon

Dear Ian, Love your articles and insights, and I don’t think AMA is self-absorbed. The question that immediately came to mind is: Where in the world would you choose to live if not London, and why? (As you said, anticipating a deep dive into politics, housing, quality of life, disability, race, etc etc...).

Yeah, I think about this all the time. There are several problems. First, I have the disadvantage of anon 1’s partner, which is that I can’t drive, don’t want to learn, fucking hate cars and don’t wish to live in a society where you have to drive one. That limits me to perhaps a dozen cities.

There is also the problem that you really cannot escape populism. It is everywhere. Even if you went to Canada or Spain, the two countries which are most proudly pro-immigration at the moment, there is no guarantee that would continue. Populism is a human problem, not that of a single country.

The place I’ve visited outside London that I love most is Bordeaux. It’s small and walkable, but bursting with life and extremely dynamic. I love it there. I would like to have a house in Guatemala but Guatemala is a hassle - the traffic is a nightmare, it’s insecure, people are very conservative and often extremely right-wing. The reality of it would likely be much worse than the dream. But it is a dream I have regularly.

Honestly though, I’ll never move. I am a creature of this place, this island. I am understood here, and I am in love with it even though I can list as many things about it that I hate. I have never wanted one of those lives where I sit in a hot country boasting about how little tax I pay or how clean the air is. I don’t want clean air. I want to choke on it. I want to watch the little children develop cancerous tumours as they go to school. I want the filth of the city. I want to speak almost entirely in ironic terms and have people comprehend me. I want that English sense of moderation and the unspoken suspicion of religion and the benign indifference that constitutes our national disposition. I am as angered by this place as I am enchanted by it, but I was made by it and I am never fully myself unless I am in it.

My dream is to spend the shit months in a nicer place, between January and March let’s say, leaving after Christmas and back for Easter. That’s what I want - to turn the word ‘winter’ into a verb. But I’ll always live here, I think, in some capacity. God help me.

Anon

LOVE the podcast - it really is a highlight of my week. A lot of that is because, despite the doom and gloom of the world, I find your lackadaisical approach (meant kindly) really normalising. Your frustrations about the interruptions and mistakes make me laugh and I feel better about getting things wrong for me too. I guess I’d just like to hear more about your recording environment. What is that crazy buzzer sound? Did you really call your dog Thanos? Do you and your partner work side by side?

Oh, the buzzer is just the front door sound. You can train dogs to not lose their shit when it goes but we failed at that, in much the same way as we failed at everything else to do with the dog. The dog is indeed called Thanos. In the comics, Thanos’ tagline is ‘The Mad Titan’, which is a) wonderful and b) suited him perfectly. When we got him, my partner, who is very much not a comics nerd, said: “We can’t call him something stupid like Thanos.” There was then a moment’s silence as we both realised that it was already too late.

We both work at the dining room table - it’s a small London flat so there’s no office/studio. There is basically one room for everything. This is actually my major life grievance. Working on dining chairs is ruining my back and it’s a pain to have to pack away the laptops and wires and everything to make things look nice when we’re going to eat. I really want a place with an extra room for an office. But we live in a nice bit of London with expensive property prices and have no intention of leaving this area so we have, quite literally, made our bed.

My partner and I have been working in the same room for about six years now. We were fairly early on in our relationship when covid struck, so it was a question of either taking the plunge together and living in the same place or not seeing each other for months. We went for the first option and it worked out. It rushed a process that would have otherwise taken place over a longer period. I know quite a few people who had to make the same decision and it didn’t work out, leaving them spending the pandemic with someone they could no longer stand. I think if you had a good time with your partner during covid you knew: this relationship can withstand almost anything. Although to be fair, we didn’t have children so we were playing covid on easy mode.

I really like working in the same room. She is a talker and wants to have conversations in the morning - something I simply cannot abide. Usually I just stare at her in mute incomprehension until she stops. Sometimes I make low grunting noises of implied assent as I drink coffee. I really do not wish to talk to anyone until around 5pm, and then only under the influence of wine. But I secretly love having someone in the room with me, working away, and even if we somehow ended up in a house with two studios I suspect we’d end up working in the same one.

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Nigel Habben

What would you say are the best and worst things about being owned by a dog?! (I am owned by 2 dogs & 20 pet rescue sheep but live in rural South Wales so it’s very different to your environment).

Simon Wilson

Why did you get a dog? Having recently succumbed to years of pressure from my immediate family we got a puppy (pure breed miniature poodle) and it was initially harder than having kids - at least you can take a baby out the house and babysitters are more abundant than dog sitters/walkers it seems. Now 6 months on the little turd has taken over our lives and hearts. I remain determined to train it which is having mixed results as I am constantly and consistently undermined by my wife and daughter who treat the dog like a spoilt cuddly toy. I often hear the same frustrated tone in your interactions with Thanos and the same thinly veiled unconditional(?) love. So why did you get a dog and has it helped keep you sane in this mad mad cunty world?

Aidan

I’m not a fan of dogs. What am I missing?

Nothing. This view that everyone needs to like dogs or it’s some sort of reflection of their inner depravity is total nonsense. Lots of very kind and well-rounded people are indifferent about dogs or actively dislike them.

Getting a dog is also extremely limiting. It makes your world smaller. A carefree life becomes impossible, because you will always need to be home for a certain time or arrange for someone to be looking after them. I thought this would have a greater impact on child-free people than parents but actually I’ve found the opposite is true. Parents are often really quite oppressed by the notion that they’re being taken back to the early days, when their freedom was severely curtailed

It is difficult to fully describe quite how much of an impact a dog has, especially in that first year when it is a ball of chaos and teeth. And if they are being honest, almost all dog owners will have had moments - regular moments - when they regret it. Yes, that’s when they’re stood in the February rain with a hangover holding a bag of wet shit. But it is also at breezier moments when they know they could have popped out for a romantic dinner with their partner and now find it to be impossible.

That said, getting a dog is one of the best things I ever did. If you are of this persuasion, dogs are basically a machine for generating delight. And they do this so persistently and so effectively that it becomes hard to comprehend what life would be like without them.

Each moment that you lay eyes on them, you feel a surge of happy chemicals pass through you. They fill your days with joy. The smell of them, the sight of them, the feel of them. The outright stupidity of the animal. They make the world without them look grey and stale.

One of the crucial things with dogs is to play with them. This is better than training for correcting bad behaviour - it knackers them out, it chills them out, it accomplishes a lot. But it also returns you to a kind of mental state that adults have precious little contact with. It is about as close as I get to existing in the moment, which is something I usually find impossible.

In my late 20s I was dating a single mum of a young teenager. One night she said to me: ‘The thing that people don’t realise is that you do actually have to fall in love with your child. It is not just a question of instinct. It’s also specific and earned.’ I think the same is true for dogs. Yes, you will naturally want to care for and protect it. But you do fall in love with it as an individual - or not, as the case may be.

I know plenty of dog owners, perfectly happy with how it worked out, who are not in love with their dog. I am, even though he is an unbelievably disobedient bad-tempered needy piece of shit. When I get pissed with Thanos I get pissed with him as a specific being who is being a dick, not as a malfunctioning species category.

This is what people get so, so wrong when they tell someone who has just lost a pet that they should get another one. Those people are not mourning the generic category of ‘dog’. They are mourning their dog. The relationship is distinct and individual and yet it takes place below the level of language, in affection, resource provision, physical contact, shared space and mutual experience. It has a simplicity which is deeply nourishing.

It’s a big, big choice. Anyone who doesn’t at least sometimes regret it is clearly insane. But for the right person - which is a lot of people - it’ll be the best choice you ever made.

Right, that’s your lot. I’m giving Question of the Week to Aidan, for having the bravery to admit in British society that he doesn’t care about dogs, which is basically a social death sentence. He will now have full access to all the content reserved for paid subscribers, which is nothing, and all the joy of his paid subscription benefits, which do not exist.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok. My whole ‘I’m going to bring moderate liberal politics to TikTok’ thing has stuttered badly on account of me not being arsed and forgetting about it but I am going to sort it out. I actually enjoy it and the response was strong. It’s just that I’m so used to simply typing a thought and having done with it that the notion of turning a camera on myself seems a pain.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one on the Morgan McSweeney evidence session on Tuesday - pitiful - and another on King Charles’ speech to Congress on Wednesday - very good but ultimately pointless.

It’s launch week for Origin Story Season 9 and we’re kicking off with a banger: the history of a United Europe, from the Roman Empire to the fall of Viktor Orban. It’s an epic, covering the shattered idealism of the post-war era, the rows of the 60s and 70s, the triumph of the single market, and the war for the soul of Europe taking place today, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the hallways of Brussels. It is the story of perhaps the most ambitious project in the history of human cooperation and of all the sacrifices and difficulties that come with that. You can listen on your favourite podcast player or just watch it below.

As ever, Patreons get access to each episode a week ahead of time, so they have part two already. You can join them by signing up here.

I had a great time watching Bait, with Riz Ahmed and Guz Khan. It’s not perfect - it kinda runs out of steam in the second half and I found the final episode a bit underwhelming. But when it’s good, it is working on a level British comedies rarely reach. The cast is great - particularly Khan and Aasiya Shah as Ahmed’s sister. But honestly most of the joy I got was from hearing Asian abuse on British TV for the first time.

There should be a word, really, for the pleasure you get from hearing terms you only know in your personal life on television for the first time. Hearing the word bhenchod come out the TV was one of the most innately enjoyable experiences I’ve had for some time. Bear in mind my partner is Scottish Asian, so I get called that word a lot. Even hearing a character naturally say ‘auntie’ or watching the minute eye-contact interactions around drinking alcohol was a delight.

It is really embarrassing that it’s left to some huge monstrous company like Amazon to put this sort of thing on British TV, rather than our homegrown channels. ITV and the BBC should really have a sit down in a dark room and think about that. But at least it’s out there now. And with a bit of luck, it’ll be the start of more like it.

Right now fuck off, for heaven’s sake. Next week it’s the local elections so I imagine the newsletter will be a lot more fraught.

Over a month in and we’re still discovering fresh new consequences to Donald Trump’s insane war.

It is as if a grenade was thrown into the heart of the world network and each day we uncover something new, some terrible item of damage that we had not previously anticipated. Even now, as peace talks take place, we are facing a cascading series of second-order effects, terrible global dominoes falling across trading ecosystems and supply chains, hammering rich and poor alike.

Trump did not foresee them or simply did not care about them. His administration is composed of extremely limited men whose minds are too narrowly defined to understand the complexity of how the world works. That is not the case for the rest of us. We have the ability to understand and the duty to care. Yet we rarely do either.

You can tell a lot about a society by its order of priorities. In the West, they are as follows: First and most importantly we care about the price of oil. Then, below that, the price of gas. Then, in a distant third, Iranian lives. Then perhaps Lebanese lives, followed by other commodities like fertiliser, helium and aluminium. And then, right at the bottom of the list, so distant it can barely be seen with the naked eye, lies the impact on food security and the potential for starvation. No-one gives a damn about this, not really. They don’t give a shit. But it is real. And the blame for it can be laid directly with the Trump administration.

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The UN Global Report on Food Crises, published this morning, paints a bleak picture. A sharp escalation in the most extreme forms of hunger and malnutrition. Acute food insecurity in places like Afghanistan and Yemen. Outright famine in the Gaza Strip.

The worst conditions are probably in Sudan, due to the ongoing armed conflict. No-one gives a damn about this either. It doesn’t fit neatly into any of the West’s culture war crevices, so there is little moral indignation from left or right. Hardly anyone even seems aware of it happening.

Nearly 25 million people - over half the population - are in Phase Three food insecurity or worse. Phase Three is a crisis state just before a formal emergency, featuring food consumption gaps leading to malnutrition, the deployment of crisis-coping strategies and the need for urgent humanitarian action. Two besieged towns - El Fasher and Kadugli - are in full-blown famine. Twenty areas across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan are at risk of following them into it.

The Iran war has worsened this situation in two ways. First, by blocking the route by which humanitarian aid reaches target countries. And second by raising the price of fuel, which then raises the price of food.

Before February 28th, humanitarian aid had a direct route from producer to consumer. The UN’s World Food Programme would purchase food on the West Coast of India, near Mumbai. It would then be exported across the Arabian Sea to the Port of Salalah in Oman, a regional hub, before travelling through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This is the chokepoint between Djibouti and Yemen, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz. The shipment then unloaded in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, changed vessels, and set sail for the Port of Sudan. Containers were put on trucks and sent to emergency programmes across the country.

Excuse my childlike MS-Paint style doodles, but the route looks roughly like this. It is fairly direct.

Once the war began, that route became impossible. Technically there shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, it did not actually use the Strait of Hormuz. But shipping lines became very cautious. They were concerned about possible attacks by Houthis in the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This then resulted in closure and the cancellation of the route.

In response, humanitarian food shipments must now sail around the entirety of Africa and into the Mediterranean - a detour the size of a continent. The new itinerary goes from the west coast of India to Port of Salalah, then all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, up to Tangiers in Morocco, then Port Said in Egypt and through the northern entrance of the Suez canal to Jeddah and Port Sudan. This route is 6,000 miles and around four weeks longer.

Similar effects can be found in other crisis zones. Getting food to Afghanistan, for instance, is becoming extremely difficult. One option would be to send it through Karachi. This is now impossible due to hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Another option would be to send it through Iran. That is now impossible because of the war. A third option would be to sail it from a supply hub in Dubai through the Gulf. That is no longer possible because of Iranian retaliation. So instead it must be driven from Dubai into Saudi Arabia and then into central Asia. Officials at the World Food Programme call this the Lapis Lazuli route - following the pathway of the beautiful blue semi-precious stone used in jewelry.

The second impact of the war is through basic price rises - the same dynamic which is hurting everyone else. The difference is that what hurts everyday consumers can devastate those in more precarious circumstances. If the price of oil stays above $100 a barrel through the end of June, it will put around 45 million more people into a state of food insecurity.

This would constitute the third major supply chain crisis in six years, starting in 2020 with covid and then 2022 with the war in Ukraine.

The impact on political stability is likely to be severe. Earlier this week there were massive protests in Kenya around the cost of fuel. Last week there were big protests in Haiti. This is just the beginning.

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These events matter on their own terms but they will also have knock-on effects in the West, no matter how firmly we try to close our ears to them.

The primary manner in which this will take place is through immigration waves. Breakdowns in food security lead to the movement of people.

Usually this involves internal displacement, with people moving around within their country, but it also turns 62.6 million people into refugees or asylum seekers, moving from their country to another. For all the nonsense talk from Shabana Mahmood about creating a ‘pull factor’ through Uber trips and GP visits, push factors are far more important. And hunger is one of the greatest push factors around. “Globally,” the Global Report says, “the majority of forcibly displaced people are in food-crisis contexts.”

Not so long ago, we gave a shit about things like this. Back in the noughties, in political circumstances that seem almost utopian now, debt forgiveness campaigns were front page news. Now the rich world has turned its back.

It has done so comprehensively and universally. Every single major donor cut assistance last year. Every single one. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last week showed rich countries cut aid spending by almost 25%, wiping out £129bn in humanitarian funds.

In the US, secretary of state Marco Rubio announced plans to end 82% of all USAID programmes. The UK is behaving with less theatrical malevolence, but the basic policy programme is very similar. In February last year, the UK government announced a reduction of aid spending from 0.5% of gross national income in 2025 to 0.3% in 2027.

This money is being rerouted to defence. That trend is being replicated around the world. We are in an era of guns, not butter. And the first budget governments raid is the one which helps people in other countries.

This is a false economy. Reduced humanitarian spending means programmes are now smaller than they were before, with less capacity and less coverage on the ground. There simply isn’t the infrastructure to scale up in order to provide support. This means food scarcity becomes more severe, which triggers a greater movement of people. Once refugees arrive on our shore, the cost rises starkly. An in-country refugee in the UK costs 74 times more to support than if we took care of them in their country of origin.

These kinds of rational arguments, rooted in enlightened self-interest, no longer have any traction. Modern governments, no matter the colour of their rosette, try to push problems away rather than adopt long-term strategies. It costs them more in the end, but they gamble on it being someone else paying.

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These are the natural consequences of US policy. It wants to carve the world into gangster domains, split evenly between Russia, China and itself. The populist demagogues it celebrates - Putin in Moscow, Netenyahu in Jerusalem, Trump in Washington - start conflicts without thinking through their consequences. The conflicts increase hunger and divert spending away from the programmes which would alleviate it. The conditions get worse, leading to refugee waves which are then used as an excuse to elect more populist demagogues. It is a cycle of despair.

These are the results you get from an administration with no interest in fixing things and no mental capacity to fix things even if they had it. They insist the world is simple because they cannot grasp its complexity. Then they interpret the after-effects of their actions as a conspiracy against them. Everything spirals towards chaos and pain because those in a position of authority are unwilling to approach problems with any degree of moral or intellectual seriousness.

The full scale of the Iran disaster is only now becoming clear. Even if it is solved today, it will be months until the pain stops and years before it is fully resolved. As always, the poorest will suffer most of all. If the world made a blind bit of sense, the people responsible would be on trial.

Odds and sods

This week’s newsletter is available as what I laughingly call a podcast up the top of the page, or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week, both on the Starmer-Mandelson scandal. The first was on the Olly Robbins testimony and the second was on the prime minister’s crumbling Cabinet support. If you use either of those links you get three months premium subscription for a single British quid, which really is quite the deal.

A recording of Origin Story Live went out this week, featuring a comprehensive demolition job on Matthew Goodwin and the creation of Origin Story film club, where we highlight the values of the podcast through our favourite movies. Mine was Empire Strikes Back, obviously. Patrons get the full Q&A at the end - which, incidentally, was a delight.

Incredibly, I watched Master and Commander for the first time this week. I remember thinking when it came out: I wouldn’t mind watching that. Then it got filed away in that part of your brain that’s vaguely keeping a list of the movies you plan to watch. I realised recently that I had been doing this with this particular film for nearly a quarter of a century. Incredible stuff.

You probably don’t need telling, but it is very, very good. It’s jingoistic bullshit of course, without the slightest cynicism about its king-and-country attitude, but I have considerably more tolerance for that type of thing than many people I know. And for all its tub-thumping, it doesn’t look away from the reality of those boats - in particular the treatment of men who don’t fit in and the use of children in war.

Honestly the thing that really struck me was just how good an actor Russel Crowe is. I always had a bit of a prejudice against him because of that interview where he loses his tits over how piss-poor his accent is in Robin Hood. But there is much more depth in that performance than you would expect. The gap between the cold hearted film this could have been and the warm hearted film which it in fact is was bridged exclusively by the micro-expressions he makes throughout and the deep internal life they betray.

Right, that’s me for the week. See you next Friday. Fuck off etc etc.

One way or another, we’re moving closer to Europe. It can happen subtly or vividly, slowly or quickly, under Keir Starmer or a successor, but it’s happening. We are no longer discussing whether we should do so. We are discussing how.

As things stand this morning, the government is in an absolute mess, with Starmer still looking like he might be dragged under by the Mandelson affair. Never has a prime minister sacrificed so much in order to achieve so little. But no matter which way it goes, the push for a return to Europe will happen. Chancellor Rachel Reeves made it a core aim of her second Mais lecture. Starmer put it front and centre of his local election campaign. Partly as a result of Trump’s attacks and partly as a result of the UK’s economic stagnation, we are looking eastward.

If Starmer is forced to resign, the movement will likely be even quicker. A new Labour leader would have the confidence that comes with a reset. The leadership contest itself would see candidates fight to prove their EU credentials to the fervently pro-European Labour membership. It could even be a bidding war.

The question is what this return to Europe should look like. Should we keep on edging closer while staying outside its ecosystem, so we don’t upset Leave voters? Should we be more radical and try to join the single market and customs union? Or should we commit to the good old cause and fight to rejoin the EU itself? Each option has advantages and disadvantages.

This is the place where the terms of the debate are set. If we make the wrong call here - coming up with a solution that is insufficiently ambitious, or commands insufficient support - we will waste the next decade of our lives. We will fail to provide solutions which can help drag Britain out of its economic stagnation. This preliminary debate is where the future of the country may be decided.

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A report out today by Best for Britain, the group run by my friend Naomi Smith, lays out polling they’ve done with YouGov on where the public sit on these issues.

There are basically four models on offer. Status quo, customs union, single market, and full EU membership.

The status quo means we continue with the government’s existing approach, which is to get as close to Europe as it can without joining the customs union or the single market. It is currently pursuing this model on agri-food, emissions and energy trading and youth mobility.

Obviously Remainers are frustrated by this approach and it makes no sense on its own terms. Once you admit Brexit is a mistake, it is hard to argue against reversing it. But it should be recognised for what it has accomplished. Labour has ended the pathological adversariality of the Tory relationship with Europe and replaced it with collegiate working relationships. The programme is pretty ambitious, aiming for full dynamic alignment in key areas of the economy. It has established proof-of-concept that a relationship with Europe can work and that we will accept European rules in exchange for trade.

Most importantly, it is popular with both Leavers and Remainers. Neither side loves it, of course. We’re not in the business of love. We’re in the business of grudging acceptance. And both sides can grudgingly accept it.

It is also important to state, and state clearly, that you cannot really go beyond this model before the next election. Starmer’s mandate involved strict red lines: no free movement, no single market, no customs union. Contravening those red lines would be a betrayal and it would be treated as one. It would be the worst possible way to start this debate. If Labour’s position changes, it can go ahead and start negotiations with the EU now, but it would have to ask the country to sign off on those plans at the next election before they are enacted.

This model has killed the Brexit issue. Even when news emerged of dynamic alignment, Nigel Farage could barely bring himself to mention it. The basic failure of the Brexit project is never more obvious than in the silence of its adherents. It’s easy to ignore this - people don’t often celebrate the active attempt to kill a national conversation - but Brexit had to go away for a while. People voted for Boris Johnson because he promised an end to the Brexit war. Pledging to reopen it in the 2024 general election would have been suicide-by-polling-booth. Starmer managed to simultaneously kill the issue and improve the underlying conditions, which was no small feat.

Europe has to look like a new idea. If this is about a retreat into the past, the pro-European movement is doomed. If it is a bright, fresh idea that offers economic opportunity, it is not. The Starmer approach created that space. No-one will ever credit it and few people will ever recognise it, but it’s true.

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This approach remains the most popular option available. Best for Britain’s poll showed 19% of people strongly support it, 42% somewhat support it, 11% somewhat oppose it and seven per cent strongly oppose it. Twenty one per cent don’t know.

You can see the pragmatic effectiveness of the policy there. It doesn’t excite people and it does not infuriate them. They tolerate it. But it has a nice solid majority.

We are now reaching the limits of what this approach can achieve - and it ain’t much. There simply aren’t that many benefits to getting close to the EU without joining the customs union and the single market. Your goods still have to go through laborious country of origin checks to ensure their tariff status. You’re outside of a large trading block during a trade war. And you are unable to achieve frictionless trade with Europe because of regulatory checks connected to the single market.

Starmer is pushing to now expand the number of areas of cooperation but this is a long slow process to secure minimal aims. Then there are the obstacles. The EU is opposed to cherry-picking access to the single market. It has begun to introduce a ‘pay-to-play’ approach where countries must contribute in order to participate in the single market. This recently demolished UK-EU talks on defence cooperation, with the UK losing the chance to access the EU’s €150 billion Safe defence fund because it objected to the price of entry.

There is also the question of free movement. Look at the insistence of the EU for a youth mobility scheme in its talks with the UK. That is a preamble to a more substantial requirement which comes with a closer relationship. Basically, sooner or later they’re going to demand free movement.

This is not about them being obsessive. It is a natural corollary of the things the UK wants. The economic success of the EU is built on the free movement of four things: Capital, goods, services and people. The trade benefits the UK desires come from the first three, but they don’t make sense without the fourth.

At some point, the existing approach is going to run out of road. It’ll simply not be worth the effort for the gains, or it’ll require too substantial a financial contribution, or it’ll demand too severe a political cost. That point is coming soon.

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The second model on offer is to join the customs union.

This is the most popular radical approach available. Speaking last December, deputy prime minister David Lammy suggested Britain would benefit fromdoing so. He caveated carefully - “that is not currently our policy, that’s not currently where we are” - but it was the first time that a senior member of the government had walked up to one of Starmer’s red lines, taken a good long look at it, and then meandered up and down a little bit before retreating back home.

Twenty-seven per cent of people strongly support this option, 22% somewhat support it, eight per cent somewhat oppose and 11% strongly oppose. This seems strong, but it’s flimsier than it looks. A very large percentage - 33% - don’t know. I worry about that percentage, because I suspect they would break anti. This is because once you get into these compromise positions the negative implications are vivid but the positive opportunities are hazy.

Joining the customs union means that we would lose the ability to do independent trade deals. We would lose control of our tariff policy in the middle of a global trade war. These are very effective arguments and they’d get lots of robust expression in the right-wing press and on the BBC, which will inevitably follow its lead. In response we’d say that it’ll be worth it for the economic benefits, but these are actually quite limited. UK in a Changing Europe estimates that they’d likely be around £15bn a year - 0.5% of GDP. It’s just an awful lot of political fighting and risk for limited gain.

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The third model is single market membership.

This is where things get serious. We would accept free movement and we would also secure frictionless trade with Europe. This is because the biggest obstacle to trade is not about tariffs, but regulations. And showing you’ve complied with regulations is what holds everything up. Once we’re in the single market our regulations would be the same so there’d be no more need for checks.

Despite the free movement element, this actually has pretty similar support to customs union membership. Twenty-five per cent strongly support it, 21% somewhat support it, nine per cent somewhat oppose it and 14% strongly oppose it. Again, there are a lot of don’t knows, on 32%. Again, I suspect they break anti, because the counter arguments to single market membership are compelling. We would be subject to single market rules which we would not have had a hand in writing. We’d be rule takers not rule makers. Boris Johnson would write columns about how we’re gimps.

I could tell you at length how simplistic this picture is, that there are ways to shape the rules within European structure and above them at the level of global standards. I could point out that we are already rule-takers without a voice simply by virtue of trade dynamics in the real world, where we will make things to the specification of a large neighbouring market. And I could bang on all night about how Jacque Delores’ old vision of a two-speed Europe perfectly suits this idea of an outer ring which should be given more voting rights on trade so that other countries can pursue closer political cooperation. I believe all these things. But what’s the point? Those arguments are never going to win in a battle with ‘rule-taker-not-rule-maker’. It’s like bringing a butter knife to a bazooka fight.

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The final model is the most intuitive. It is membership of the European Union. Rejoin. A complete reversal of the Brexit vote.

There are downsides to this. I suspect the former two options could be pursued simply by putting them in an election manifesto and treating a Commons majority as a mandate. EU membership would probably require another referendum.

People sometimes say that we would struggle to enter again on the terms we had before, with the rebate and the exemption from the need to join the single currency and all that. That’s true, but equally, things are extremely volatile and flexible in the EU right now. Council decisions are signed off without the support of the 27, all sorts of informal networks were created to sidestep Viktor Orban, many countries patently have no intention of joining the euro. Things are currently possible which might not have been possible before.

Crucially, EU membership provides effective counters against the objections we saw before. Britain would have a voice in trade deal negotiations with third parties. It would have a firm and clear-cut role in deciding on regulation. It would have judges on the European Court of Justice. It would have a seat at the table.

Of all the models, rejoin is the second most popular, after the government’s existing approach. Thirty-seven per cent of people strongly support it, 16% somewhat support it, eight per cent somewhat oppose and 24% strongly oppose. That means that the overall levels of support and opposition are broadly similar to Starmer’s current strategy, but the sense of enthusiasm and aversion are more profound. This is an idea that people love or hate, rather than tolerate. It is, in a way, the complete opposite of the existing approach. In this case, just 14% of people said they don’t know.

Rejoining the EU is the cleanest political argument and the strongest economic argument but it has a weakness. It would repolarise the electorate. Look at this graph, from the Best for Britain report. Starmer’s existing policy is up top - nice and cosy, harmless, doesn’t upset anyone, uniting Leavers and Remainers in a world of tolerability. Then look what happens when you opt for rejoin. The line expands aggressively, with Leavers very unhappy and Remainers delighted. That’s what polarisation looks like.

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This promises another big fight where the country is pitched against itself once again. No-one much loves that idea, but it is hard to see how we can avoid it. Economic suffocation is killing us. The pain is making people more likely to vote Reform, whose entire programme is based on pitching voters against one another.

The question Labour will ask itself is necessarily self-centred. It saw its electoral coalition torn apart by the Brexit vote. This is why Starmer was so desperate to stitch it back together with a compromise position everyone could broadly accept. Would that happen again? Would it be consolidated or shattered by a repolarised electorate?

The former is much more likely. The key to this lies in the way that British politics has fractured into two blocs. On one side you have reactionary eurosceptic voters and on the other you have progressive pro-European voters. The Remain-Leave split fossilised and defined our political life. Voters tend to now move around within those blocs, switching from Tory to Reform or from Labour to Green for instance, but they rarely move between the blocs themselves. The old Labour to Tory switcher is largely a thing of the past.

This means that the key to winning the next election is not about winning over ideological converts. It is to establish a monopoly over your bloc.

Labour is failing at this. It is losing votes all over the place, and particularly to the Greens and the Lib Dems. It needs an offer to bring them back. Rejoin would be a strong way to do that.

Remainers have stayed strongly united on their view of Brexit. Eighty-seven per cent of those who voted Remain in 2016 think it’s a failure. Leavers, however, have splintered. Thirty-five per cent think Brexit has been a failure, 32% neither success nor a failure, and 25% think it has been a success.

However, when you crossreference people’s 2016 vote with their voting intentions in a general election, the picture reverses. Suddenly it is the Leavers who are united, with most of them consolidating around tReform, and it is the Remainers who have splintered, with their vote going to Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems, the SNP and Plaid. This is why Farage can win. Not because he has some unassailable lead. He doesn’t. But because the reactionary voting bloc is monopolised while the progressive voting bloc is fractured.

A call to rejoin therefore gives Labour a solid way of changing this dynamic. It might repolarise the electorate, but it provides a chance to bring the progressive voting bloc under a Labour leadership.

It would also provide an opportunity to shatter the reactionary voting bloc at least a little bit. Look at how firm the numbers are within the progressive voting bloc.

Ninety per cent of Green voters think Brexit is a failure, 88% of Lib Dem voters, 86% of Labour voters. But then look at the numbers for the Tories. The party’s voters are split between Cameronite pro-Europeans and Johnsonite Purge Brexiters. You can pit Tory voters against each other. You can force Farage to talk about Brexit again, to attach himself to it, and better yet - to restate his very unpopular view that we should distance ourselves even further.

There are very few downsides to Labour from pledging to rejoin. There are considerable upsides.

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There’s no escaping this conversation. The damage that Brexit has done to this country is obvious now to everyone. We wasted years of our lives pursuing a project whose only possible outcome was to mutilate and embarrass us. Now we are poorer for it on its own terms and because we did not spend that time doing something worthwhile.

The era of detent is coming to an end. You can see the signs of it everywhere, not least in the sudden enthusiasm of the prime minister and the chancellor for change. But the aim of that change must be meaningful. If we spend the next five years debating customs union membership and then another five negotiating it we’ll have wasted another decade on something which simply does not make much difference to the economic picture. It’ll alienate those who are opposed without sufficiently galvanising those who are supportive.

We need to pursue the clearest, simplest approach - electorally, politically, logically and economically. That is the campaign to rejoin the European Union, without complication or caveat. This is the pledge that we should be pushing for in the next Labour manifesto. It would put the party in the best position to win, and it would put the country in the best position to succeed. It can be stated confidently, the case can be made easily, and it does not involve the number of complicated half-hearted technical explanations that other options entail.

It is the bravest course, but it is also the safest course. Whether it’s Starmer or his successor, Labour should grasp it.

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Odds and sods

This weeks newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, on Substack or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Two columns for the i paper this week - one on how Donald Trump’s mates have all left him and another on the crucial role of Rachel Reeves in pulling the UK away from the US. My report from the UK on Late Night Live covered the defeat of Viktor Orban, relations with the EU and Starmer’s relationship with Trump.

Thanks to anyone who came to Origin Story Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre this week. That night was a delight. It’s kind of incredible how far we’ve come really. Our first live show was in the basement of a tiny pub with a few dozen seats. Now we’re selling out theatres with hundreds. We’re cooking up another live show soon and will be - shock - leaving London at some point this year for a mini tour. Details coming shortly.

I don’t know what we did to get so lucky that we deserve The Boys, but by Christ I’m glad we managed it. The anti-superhero show, which by some absurd ironic twist is on Amazon, remains the single most powerful and clear-sighted political drama on TV, or anywhere else for that matter. It takes aim at left and right, certainly, but it fundamentally recognises that the right are the main target in the present moment, given that they have control of the most powerful country on earth and have collapsed into outright fascism.

There is nothing else out there - no music, no novel, no high quality award winning drama - which comes anywhere near to this level of insight and moral indignation. It is in a class of its own. It is also consistently the funniest and most outrageous thing you will ever see. There comes a point where you barely even clock that someone is being beaten to death with a twelve foot controllable penis.

I don’t know what we’re going to do without it. If we survive this period, they should put it in a museum as an artifact that perfectly encapsulates our age.

Right, that’s me done. So far this week I’ve written two newsletters, two columns, recorded three episodes of podcasts, and done a live show. I am beat and it’s time for a very thorough approach to the weekend. See you next Friday. Oh and fuck off obviously.

The sun is streaming through the window, the sky is a glorious light shade of blue, the birds are singing, and the tyrant king has been destroyed.

Last night, at 9:14 pm local time, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban called opposition leader Peter Magyar and conceded victory following a landslide defeat at the general election.

Some disparate thoughts below.

This is a triumph for Hungarians. There are obviously major international dimensions to what has happened here, but take a moment to think of the Hungarians who have fought for it. They have laboured for 16 years, in conditions far worse than anything we have faced here.

Orban took over everything and placed Fidesz party loyalists in key positions, maintaining a kind of institutional Gleichschaltung. He stuffed the judiciary full of his cronies. He put them in positions of local power. He inserted them into schools. He placed them in museums and opera houses. He even made sure a Fidesz puppet was put in charge of a cooking magazine. No part of social life was outside of his control or his pathological need for dominion.

And yet for all that time, many brave Hungarians diligently did their work. They kept their head down when they had to and raised it when they needed to. Countless journalists lost their jobs, or reported for every smaller independent outlets on miniscule salaries, or simply found ways to sneak objective facts and independent reporting into what had otherwise become government propaganda. In think tanks and museums, schools and music festivals, many Hungarians worked diligently despite the pressure on them. Others lost their jobs because they would not bend to authoritarianism.

Many Hungarians embraced authoritarianism. But many others opposed it through the long years in the wilderness. They are heroes and today belongs to them.

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It is almost impossible to overstate the scale of the achievement in overthrowing him. Orban controlled the media. He controlled the information environment. He had direct control of the country’s media assets: cable news, websites, newspapers, regional press, sports papers, lifestyle magazines, radio stations. He gerrymandered the electoral system, reducing the number of MPs, redrawing the constitution boundaries, and granting full voting rights to the diaspora in ways that were all intended to secure Fidesz’ power.

And yet Magyar did not just defeat Orban. He secured a super-majority of over two-thirds of the seats. For nearly a year, Orban pumped anti-Ukraine and anti-Europe messages to the Hungarian public, deploying his full-system information dominance to encourage fear and hatred. They rejected him. They committed to a European future.

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The super-majority is crucial. A slim result would have probably seen Orban try to pull off a Trump-style coup. The weeks leading up to the election saw Fidesz intimidate and bribe voters. The regime was primed to accuse Zelensky and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen of subverting Hungarian democracy. Orban would have had enough of a voice in the parliament and - crucially - complete control over the judiciary, allowing him to perhaps succeed. And then what? Expulsion from Europe? The complete destruction of Hungarian democracy? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

A few people online suggested yesterday that they were surprised Orban turned out to be honourable in his concession. That’s utter nonsense. Orban has no honour. He has no decency. He is a thug and a vandal and a wannabe despot. The man would have happily overruled democracy to get what he wants, but it was simply impossible for him to do so. The scale of the landslide was too vast.

He could feel the fear. He knows how ballot box opposition can turn to street opposition if thwarted, as it did in Ukraine, a country he detests for this very fact. He knows the yearning that lies in every democrat’s heart: To feed the tyrant to the soil. And he preferred, as one commentator put it yesterday, to retreat rather than become a street ornament.

With a super-majority, Magyar can get under the hood and repair the constitution, turning Hungary back into a modern liberal democracy. He can recreate an independent judiciary. Fidesz must be extracted by the root from Hungarian society. Fidesz loyalists must be removed from their positions of control. All of that becomes much easier with a result of this magnitude.

Magyar gets this. During his speech to the crowds thronging on the banks of the Danube yesterday, he said: “Today the Hungarian people decided to change the regime and those who are part of this regime must leave public life… I call upon all the puppets to do the same, to leave their office, those who served the Orbán regime in the last 16 years.”

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The battle against populism is a battle against corruption. Much has been made of the way that Magyar ran on an anti-corruption ticket. This makes it sound as if his campaign was not technically anti-populist, as if it were not aimed at core populist principles. But in fact, the corruption was the point. Orban did not gain control over the media by passing legislation banning free speech. He did it by getting his network of oligarch allies to buy up outlets and then turn them into Fidesz mouthpieces.

It started back in 1994, when his ally Lajos Simicska took control of the state media company Mahir alongside a large publishing company, then used tax loopholes to found Fidesz’ first daily newspaper. In these early days they perfected the strategy: buy out an entity, shift its editorial stance to a pro-Orban position, then flood it with money from their other business interests. Other loyalists were given positions in state advertising, from which they could pump advertising money into regime-friendly outlets. In the end, Orban turned against Simicska and dismantled his media empire. Then loyal oligarchs donated 476 media outlets to the government’s Central European press and Media Foundation. The job was done.

This is one of the things which people often fail to grasp about populism. They treat the corruption as an unrelated secondary narrative to the main ideological agenda. But in fact they are both elements of the same agenda. The corruption buys loyalty. It creates a closed eco-system of funding for regime-friendly voices. It secures allies in place across the constitutional landscape. Corruption is the means by which a regime can replace accountable liberal institutions with closed personal networks.

The fight against the far-right is much more compelling to voters when it is framed in the practical opposition to corruption than the ideological opposition to populism.

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The most immediate issues which arise from the election are basically financial. The first concerns the €17 billion in EU funding which has been held back as a result of Hungarian democratic backsliding. There were lots of calls last night for the EU to immediately flood Hungary with the money as a reward. That’s not right at all. It would make the EU nearly as corrupt as those who oppose it.

The funds have been withheld as a result of Orban’s corruption. Hungary was told it could secure the funds if it demonstrated fair procurement rules, an independent judiciary and academic freedom. The EU was fighting for its liberal values in the only way it knows: using money.

The retrieval of the funds therefore hinges on quick reforms to show compliance. With a super-majority, that should be fairly easy. The tough part is a ‘super-milestone’ on judicial reform which needs to be completed - or at least to show evidence of progress - by August 31st. This unlocks the first €10 billion. There will then be a series of more granular reforms around climate and digital transition which needs to be completed by 2028. This unlocks another €7 billion. The crucial point here is that wealth should be shown to come from liberal democratic reforms, not from voting the right way, or we’re just as bad as the bastards we’ve come here to bury.

Ukraine is the other key financial element. Hungary’s veto was the block holding up a €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine. Magyar is not exactly a die-hard Zelensky ally. He is critical of Ukraine joining the EU and of weapons being sent to the country. But this should not be a major problem. He wants back into the EU fold. He wants to fundamentally change Hungary’s relationship with the continent. And where desires coincide, practical solutions develop.

It will be very easy for Magyar to simply stand back and not veto the Ukraine loan. This will create huge goodwill. It is also potentially crucial in the war against Russian imperialism, finally allowing Europe to step into a funding leadership role that the US has vacated. There will then be perfectly obvious compromises on Ukrainian membership, probably by unlocking the next stage of talks while remaining initially ambiguous on when and how full membership will take place.

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Populism’s spiritual figurehead has been destroyed. Some people like to put Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi forward as the first of the modern populist leaders, but he is of a slightly different quality and vintage. He was too chaotic and clown-like to inspire many others to emulate him. It was Orban who provided the template, the proof of concept. He was the forerunner.

This was not simply about social control, democratic backsliding and the use of corruption as a political method. It was about the fundamental populist narrative: the creation of a rolling series of imaginary crises, a constantly updated fictitious enemy representing the global elite and internal minorities. It was about a storyline of grievance and victimhood, a constant attempt to pitch citizen against citizen.

Every single one of the populists who came after him learned their trade, to some extent or other, from Orban. You can see this in the far-right figures who went all-out to back him, throughout his time in power. When Orban won four years ago, Nigel Farage was quick out the gates to congratulate him. Donald Trump barely went a day during this campaign without writing long messages in support of him. He then resorted to trying to bribe, or rather blackmail, Hungarian voters with financial offers, in a grotesque demonstration of his total lack of respect for other country’s democratic processes. He sent JD Vance, a rolling catastrophe of a human being, to demand Hungarians vote the way the US wanted them to.

All the worst bastards in the world did their bit to protect the spiritual father. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, former leader of the National Rally in France Marine Le Pen, co-chair of the Alternative for Germany Alice Weidel.

Unseen, silent, but most important of all: Vladimir Putin. The man who stands at the top of the populist pyramid. The litmus test of global indecency.

He lost a lot last night. It was his worst setback for years. He has lost his client state within the EU, that he can use to block Ukrainian funds, to prevent coordinated defensive actions, to fill the zone with shit, and confuse the narrative. He lost a core strategic asset. The seeping wound which infected European solidarity. He will feel a sense of doubt, and anxiety, and in that feeling is the sentiment which will one day liberate Ukraine.

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Don’t underestimate the psychological effect of Orban’s defeat. He was the first but he was always, it seemed, the most invulnerable. He had stacked the system so thoroughly against his opponents that it seemed impossible that he would ever be deposed. He gave populists a profound sense that history blew in their direction. He would always be there, impervious, immovable, showing the way.

Now he is gone. And perhaps they’re not as safe as they think. Perhaps there is no direction to history. There is no wind of destiny for their movement. And they too will feel fear where they once felt confidence.

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Look around you and you see populism on the ropes. Trump’s approval ratings are in the toilet. He has started a war he cannot extricate himself from and becomes more visibly hysterical by the day. He looks weak and vulnerable. European figures who once looked sheepish around him now just look kind of bored. Their appetite for resistance is rising, buoyed by domestic electoral demand. Look at Vance, a figure who once arrogantly tried to humiliate Zelensky in the Oval Office - a man he is not fit to speak to, let alone berate. Now he is a global joke, a punchline, the cunt’s cunt.

Look at Meloni, who just lost a referendum in Italy on judicial reform and with it her sense of electoral immunity. Look at Spain, where the ultra-nationalist Vox party is suddenly performing under expectations against a socialist prime minister prepared to stand up to the US. Look at France, where National Rally failed in last month’s municipal elections to secure Marseille, its long-coveted prize, or other key targets like Toulon or Nîmes. Look at Slovenia, where Janez Janša was expected to be victorious and act as a secondary anti-EU saboteur in Brussels, only for him to lose to incumbent Robert Golob’s liberal Freedom Movement.

Look at Britain. Look at that Reform polling. It’s still healthy, sure, but it is clearly highly tenuous. We once used to debate where its ceiling was. We no longer debate that. It’s around 30%. We once used to debate whether it was falling. We no longer debate that. It is.

This doesn’t just matter because of the election result. It matters because it changes the political dynamic today.

Reform weaponised its polling lead to prevent any meaningful political actions being taken in the present. This was the case for Net Zero. Richard Tice attempted to threaten energy companies away from clean energy by warning of what a future Reform government would do. It was also the case for Europe. As long as Farage looked likely to be the next prime minister, there was no point in the EU meaningfully negotiating, because it could all be undone as soon as the next election happened. And it was the case for the media narrative in general. As long as Reform looked invulnerable, journalists could justify taking their talking points as narrative frames for debates. Now, it is harder.

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All of a sudden, after months of total darkness, there is hope. There is a sense that liberal democracy can still triumph against the populist threat, it can withstand the joint assault from the Kremlin and the White House.

Populism’s victory is not inevitable. It is not invulnerable. This is just the lie they tell you to kill your resistance, to make you feel hopeless, to see you lost in pessimism and despair.

They can be defeated. Bathe in the glory of their fall. Not out of malice or viciousness, but because that glory is a reminder that the war can still be won and the battles are still worth fighting.