Labour has stormed home in Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras, easily holding off a challenge from Green party leader Zack Polanski. Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali secured 12,292 to Polanski’s 8,928, with the Tories coming in third on 1,922. A few disparate thoughts below.

It’s time for Polanski to fuck off now

The electoral reality of what happened in London last night pales in comparison to the moral reality. In all likelihood, the result would have been the same regardless of what happened with the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion at the Green party conference earlier in the week. But the combination of these two events - one about leadership, the other about electoral success - provides a clear conclusion. Polanski has to go.

In the year or so that Polanski has been leader of the Green party he has removed any sense of seriousness or good judgement from the organisation. But he could, to his credit, point to significant polling progress and to electoral success.

That is no longer the case. The Politico poll of polls tells the story of his polling.

Under his leadership the party increased its vote significantly but it has been in decline for months and this result confirms it. Nor is this just a Burnham bounce, although that’s undoubtedly part of it. The Green decline was already underway before Burnham became prime minister.

The Green party leadership will now make all sorts of excuses. They will say that the result was tight and suggests the Greens are making headway. That’s not true. In fact, the Green vote is weaker than it first appears. In the 2024 general election, the Greens were competing for the left-wing vote with Andrew Feinstein, a radical film-maker and author from South Africa. He finished second, with 7,312 votes to Labour’s 18,884. This time around, Feinstein did not run.

Putting the Green and Feinstein votes from 2024 together gives you a better impression of the left-of-Labour position. In 2024, it got 29.3%. This time around, Polanski monopolised the left-of-Labour position and secured 32.8%, an increase of just 3.5 percentage points.

On the face of it, that seems understandable. Holborn and St Pancras is a very safe Labour seat. It’s always been Labour. Perhaps it always will be. But things are not quite as simple as that. Until recently, we’d have expected the Greens to probably win this seat. After all, that’s why Polanski ran in it.

Labour struggles to defend its seats from left challengers when it is in government, as this post by Peter Kellner outlines. The average swing against Labour in these circumstances is 24%.

We are now at that point where sensible Green members must come to their judgement. The party will not thrive under this leader. Honestly, they should not have flirted with him in the first place. He had no intellectual substance, no real commitment to green issues and no sense of moral seriousness. He’s a simple-minded populist for the social media age. But having done so, this is the moment at which the party should conclude that he is not even credible on an electoral level. There is no reason left to keep him.

Once he is gone, this period will be considered an aberration. This party used to have Caroline Lucas as leader, for heaven sake. Someone who was thoughtful, charismatic, conscientious, principled, multifaceted, profoundly progressive and highly intelligent. It is used to a higher calibre of person and it can damn well return to having that calibre of person once it undoes this current period of ill-advised experimentation.

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Polanski richly deserves this failure

This last week has been a moral atrocity.

Polanski’s biggest flaw is not the Zionism motion itself, or his individual policies, or his lack of leadership - although every single one of those things disqualifies him. It is that he is a populist.

This is not a slur. It is how he himself defined the approach. When he secured the leadership he said he wanted to “reclaim” populism from the right. He then went on to demonstrate how you might do this, by adopting a people-vs-the-elite frame, but filling it with progressive imagery.

This is always wrong, no matter whether it is left or right wing. It is false, as a basic way of seeing the world. The elites-vs-the-people framing is a lie. There is no one homogenous ‘people’ and there is no one singular ‘elite’. The moment you adopt this form of reasoning, you encourage conspiracy theories, because your whole framework for viewing the world is inherently conspiratorial. The people are all-good, so how can we explain our problems? Well the shadowy behavior of the elite, who invariably control the media and the levers of power.

So - surprise, surprise - out the conspiracy theories come. Those creeping tentacles of conspiratorialism, out in the open, plain for all to see. Some Greens told the Statesman that Starmer had timed the byelection so that Polanski would come under double assault in one week through the conference and the election campaign. This is what happens once you ingest conspiratorial thinking: no idea is too stupid for your brain to hold.

It’s completely unsurprising that the party has crumpled into anti-semitism. You can have conspiracy theories without anti-semitism, but it’s relatively rare. Usually, when this sort of thinking takes over, anti-semitism will find its way in. The old story of the Jews in history - hidden away, full of money, handling the secret levers of power - is too common and seductive to be resisted for long by minds that have become adept at this type of thinking.

What we saw this week was effectively a repeat of the Jeremy Corbyn years. One by one the party’s newfound campaigners came out, to excuse the Zionism-is-racism motion, or misrepresent it, or sidestep it, or enter into tortured definitional or historic debates, or simply to dissemble. Each excuse more craven and self-interested and desperate than the last.

The whole thing was bullshit. If the promoters of the motion wanted simply to criticise the behaviour of the Israeli government, they could have just written it that way. It’s not hard. It’s very fucking easy in fact. You do not need a PhD in rhetoric to criticise a murderous racist government run by some of the most heinous and immoral leaders of our lifetime.

If they wanted to make the delicate but entirely respectable point that Zionism itself serves to radicalise the Israeli government because of its ethnic dimension, they could have written that too. But they don’t want to do that. They want to say something lurid and vicious and divisive and tribal. Something which extends past any legitimate argument you might have into the much more satisfying emotional world of treating Jewish people like shit. That’s the reality. We should judge people not by the most generous interpretation of their writing, but by their actions. And in this case, they acted to be as brutal towards British Jews as they could get away with.

It felt like Corbynism 2.0 because, in many cases, these were literally the same people. This rump of hateful puritans, moving to whichever party is stupid enough to host them, monomaniacle in their obsession and impervious to any notion of restraint or moderation. Unless they are removed, they will fuck the Green party the same way they fucked the Labour party.

There is nothing progressive about them. They undermine and discredit progressive movements. There is nothing compassionate about them. They behave with hate in their heart and act only to raise their own sense of moral self-worth.

But it also felt like Corbynism 2.0 because the thought process is the same. Corbyn adopted a left-populist position in which the people are all good and the elite all bad. Naturally, this meant that he could only explain bad press reports by reference to some kind of conspiracy. The same is happening now online, brains melted by the crude binaries of Polanski’s narrative frame.

This is why he should go. He has brought a primitive political structure to a party with a long and proud heritage. He has created the intellectual conditions for conspiracy theory and anti-semitism to take root. Most seriously, he has gone fucking AWOL when the threat reared its head, prevaricating and blathering away when what was required was a strict, firm, moral response. I mean, he fucking abstained on the motion. What a fucking coward.

Starmer, for all his many faults, at least demonstrated how you do this: zero tolerance. Once the poison has taken root, you have to adopt a harsh policy to handle it and clean things up. If the party did this now, it could be dealt with relatively easily. If it allows the problem to take root over the next couple of years, they will make it much harder. And god knows how many progressive British Jews will be made to feel afraid and unwelcome in the meantime.

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We need a strong Green party

What’s gutting about this is that we need a strong party to the left of Labour.

On the face of it, that shouldn’t be true. A weak Green party allows Burnham a monopoly over progressive voters, reducing the chance of a tit-for-tat battle between Labour and the Greens that right-wing parties can use to slip through the middle. This is particularly beneficial because Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now effectively partners. The types of seats they target are so distinct that they no longer get in each other’s way. But the right, as we saw during Badenoch’s speech this week, are bitterly divided between the Tories, Reform and Restore.

Things aren’t that easy though. As Stephen Bush argued this week, voters may well look at the two blocs - progressive and reactionary - and evaluate each party by what they think of others in their group. More pressingly, a toxic Green party could be damaging to Labour in an election, allowing the Tories to raise the alarm that Burnham would be in the pocket of Polanski in the event of a hung parliament. Most seriously of all, it would make it impossible for Labour to form a coalition with the Greens.

A strong Green voice also makes sure that there is a threat to Burnham from the left. Without it, he can fixate, as Starmer did, only with the Reform threat to his right.

All of these things are bad, and all of them are perfectly avoidable, if you didn’t have a bunch of useless tankie cunts passing anti-semitic motions. The Greens were on the verge of being involved in the serious business of politics, with decent enough polling in the right historic circumstances to potentially establish a foothold in government. Now they are pissing it away.

And quite apart from any electoral consideration, progressive voters deserve a party that is willing to speak openly and without embarrassment about progressive values. Labour will not unequivocally stand up for immigration. It is continuing a campaign against trans people. The Lib Dems are marginally better, but too embarrassed and lacking in confidence to show any kind of resolution on these issues. The Greens had the freedom and the incentives to do so. And now - boom - the only credible and unapologetic progressive voice is once again taken over by anti-semitism. Abysmal. A fucking embarrassment.

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The Burnham bounce is real

It’s best not to conclude too much from a seat like this. Holborn and St Pancras is weird. As Rob Ford pointed out in this very good primer:

“The seat has exceptionally high shares of twentysomethings, single person households, full time students, graduates, middle class professionals, social renters, private renters, residents born abroad. It has exceptionally low numbers of car owners, home owners, white residents, old residents, working class residents, and families with children. Eighty percent of the England & Wales population live in houses; ninety percent of the Holborn & St Pancras population live in flats.”

But even just as a local it’s a weird constituency, which includes two really rather disparate bits of London. The south of the seat includes places like Holborn & Covent Garden, King’s Cross, Bloomsbury and so on. Hardly any normal people live there. It’s very rare to meet a Londoner who lives in central. The north part of the seat includes places close to where I live - Camden Town, Haverstock, Kentish Town - where people do live and commute in. I’m not going to say it’s normal exactly, but it is more normal than central London.

You don’t want to conclude too much about national politics on the basis of a seat like this. It’s too unusual. But the fact remains that under Burnham, Labour has now won in Makerfield and Holborn, bringing together two seats on very different sides of the culture war divide. Burnham has proof of concept for his appeal. The party is now comfortably leading in the polls.

The basic picture is now quite settled. Some people want to call this a honeymoon. I think that is to understate the appeal of Burnham. Barring a sudden financial shock or an unforced error, this should remain the state of play for some time. This byelection provides further corroboration of that idea.

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This is a beautiful, beautiful place

During the election campaign, Abdi-Wali was subject to precisely the kind of attacks you would expect. Her family came to London in the early 90s, fleeing war in Somalia. She moved to Gospel Oak, just round the corner from where I lived until just recently. She rose to become the chair of Camden Council. Now she is the local member of parliament. That is a fine, beautiful story of which we should be proud.

But that, of course, is not the reaction on the far-right. When her name was first mentioned, Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusef wrote that a Somalian was being “foisted” on the people of the area. “Do you understand what’s happening?” he added. I can’t imagine how much racist abuse she was subject to online during the campaign, but I imagine it was considerable.

This is what she said during her victory speech last night:

“I want to talk about the experiences that I have had over the last few weeks. In Camden, our diversity is a strength and our cohesion has been too hard won to take for granted. Since I was a child I’ve watched people across Camden work to build communities where difference is not something to fear but something to value. We cannot allow that work, built over generations, to be causally undone.”

As so often, I felt a great swell of pride in my city and my local area.

You very rarely hear a good word said about London. Broadcasters seem increasingly embarrassed to admit they’re based here. The Tories and Reform hate it as a kind of cultural aberration. The Burnham government likes to use it as a scapegoat. The lies told about it by the far-right online have spread around the world. Wherever you go now, you will meet people who instinctively ask of this really very safe city: ‘London, isn’t it dangerous?’

Despite this constant denigration, a central fact remains. London is the greatest city on the face of the earth. It is the single greatest living experiment in multicultural living. Travel to Paris or New York and you will find a great metropolis with people from all over the world, but you will also find a much greater degree of racial separation. London’s multiculturalism is granular and diffuse.

I am proud of precisely that aspect of the city which Abdi-Wali refers to: That in this place, you will not face the abuse or discrimination you will elsewhere. In this place, diversity is considered beautiful. Here, you can be loved and find belonging no matter who you are, no matter where you’re from. This is why they hate it. They hate it because it is beautiful, and it works, and that success provides a comprehensive refutation of their worldview.

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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 i paper column this week was on the Kemi badenoch conference speech. You can read it here. Our Origin Story Revisited episode was on Ayn Rand, the lunatic author who defined US libertarianism. You can listen to it here. And I also did a podcast with my pal Roland Smith, talking about liberalism, identity and Brexit. You can listen to it here.

This week I watched the Standard of Living, the new play about John Maynard Keynes by James Graham, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I will undoubtedly get more joy out of this than most people because I am infatuated with Keynes. Perhaps for a civilian it would be a bit dum-de-dum-de-dum, a series of vignettes compromising a life, rather than a focused treatment. But I thought it was well done, succinct and very funny, touching, and with a firm understanding of what made Keynes a great man and a great economist. I had a wonderful time.

It is important to mention that I went to a restaurant called Fowl beforehand and had what I think would be one of my top ten chips experiences. All the food was good, but the chips. Fucking hell. They put chicken salt on them, but there was also some kind of lime thing going on. It was special. The burgers were good too, but the chips were something else. Also a strong recommendation on the smashed cucumber salad, which is a sentence I have never written before nor ever thought I would write.

Right, that’s it for now - fuck off cunts.

Something fundamental changed this week. Andy Burnham has weaknesses - we’ll come to those in a moment - but he has accomplished something which we have not seen for decades. He has reset the terms of British public debate in a progressive direction. With a little luck, this week will mark a fundamental rupture with what came before.

The far-right has been defenestrated

For two years now, we have witnessed a resurgent far-right. We know the storyline. The burning demand for change alighted on Keir Starmer, then when Starmer failed it had nowhere to go but Nigel Farage. The election of Donald Trump made right-wing populism look pre-destined. Elon Musk rigged X to favour far-right content and enough mainstream journalists stayed on the site to drag those debates into people’s living rooms. Suddenly the world felt as if it were crumbling around us, as if we were trapped in a reenactment of the Weimar Republic.

What were once ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’ have now mutated into promises of mass deportations. What was once an anxiety about national identity now translates into an insistence that brown people cannot be English. A national consensus on climate change has crumbled. It was uncanny how effectively the far-right controlled the framing, how it dictated what would be talked about and the manner in which it was discussed.

Now look at what happened this week. Burnham’s speech was well received, but more importantly, it wrestled control of the news agenda. Suddenly we were discussing the issues Burnham wanted to talk about in the terms Burnham wanted.

He did this not by challenging Farage, but by ignoring him.

Some party leaders have emulated Farage by adopting a skimmed-milk version of his anti-immigrant policy. Others have attacked him by issuing a stark warning of the threat to come. And some have done both these things in sequence, seemingly unaware of how patently ineffective such an approach would be. But Burnham just acted like he wasn’t there. Instead of chasing after him, he established his own agenda, which was utterly disconnected from the Reform message: On the triple lock, on care, on electoral reform, on Brexit, on public control of utilities.

Doing so wrestled editorial control from Reform. If Burnham had simply spoken about these things it would have made little difference. But instead, he treated the news like a fucking machine gun, spewing out searing bullets of major newsiness every minute or so from the stage. It was unavoidable. It was unignorable. And by the end of the week, carefully selected progressive issues dominated the news agenda, discussed according to Burnham’s preferred framing.

The economic situation remains grim. But Burnham has shown how to tackle the other problem we face, which is the far-right’s death grip on the national conversation.

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Defeating populism is a cost-of-living measure

This is not just crucial to defeat a resurgent fascism. It is also crucial simply as a way of helping people with the cost of living.

Wherever populism wins, it makes conditions worse. Look at the track record: Brexit destroyed our trade relations, punished our exporters, hit our importers, pulverised British businesses. Trump’s trade wars knocked the global economy for no discernable gain and his war in Iran is driving up prices. Wherever they take power, they make the underlying situation worse, because their political arguments have no bearing on objective conditions.

Reform insists that it would solve our economic problems by deporting immigrants and stripping people of benefits. In fact, this will make us poorer and more chaotic. No great economic miracle follows from it.

The most important cost-of-living measure Britain can take is to prevent the emergence of a Farage government. By reducing the likelihood of this eventuality, Burnham is helping protect the pound in people’s pocket. He won’t get any gratitude for it, of course - voters do not reward political counterfactuals - but he deserves it. Those who might otherwise have voted Reform have been saved from the poverty which would have been inflicted on them as a result of their own folly.

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The left no longer looks haunted

British progressives are like the English football team: undone by their own deep-seated historic neuroses. As you grow up, you’re educated in the various tragedies of the past. The ‘longest suicide note in history’, the terrible timing of the Falklands, the incomprehensible emotional toll of the 1992 election, the grotesque injustice of a bankers financial crisis followed by austerity, the bleak irony of ‘chaos with Ed Miliband’.

Even when we think of progressive leaders who set out a clear set of principles, their position seems instinctively defensive. Tony Blair put forward a Third Way in the late 90s, but his ideological position was ultimately an attempt to find progressive space on redistribution within the Thatcherite consensus. Miliband put forward a genuinely forward-thinking and credible left-wing position as Labour leader in the early 2010s, but his approach was undermined by his own visible lack of confidence in the leadership position.

Watching Burnham this week was like that second half England performance against Croatia at the World Cup. It was as if all the nerves had gone, all the self-doubt. It was brimming with confidence and gusto and utterly free of the timidity we’ve associated with progressive politicians for generations.

What we saw this week was a facing down of the left’s internal insecurities. Perhaps it’ll be a flash in the pan - to be followed by the political equivalent of a nil-nil draw between England and Ghana. But perhaps, just perhaps, this is the new way of doing things. And by doing things this way, Burnham will create an example which progressive politicians in future can follow. For now at least, that sense of inevitable progressive defeat feels very distant. Like a bad dream we once had.

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Finally, someone is willing to lead

The core distinction between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer is not charisma. It is that he is willing to lead.

This is not the case on every issue. He is evidently not prepared to lead on immigration or on trans rights, although I think you can hear in his appeals to care workers a thwarted desire to speak comfortingly to immigrants, made impossible by his perception of present conditions.

But in certain key areas, where he has decided that he can make progress, he is setting a destination and running towards it. Watch him on social care. He has progressively built the case, deploying as much political skill as he can. He has built an emotional framework, a narrative framework, a political framework and the start of an economic framework. He has put his own prime ministerial authority behind it. And now he is trying to take hold of public opinion and lead it.

The last time I remember seeing anything like this was Tony Blair with the case for liberal intervention. Certainly Starmer didn’t have it. He seemed unable to conceive that a politician might challenge the public view. Before him, a long line of Tory prime ministers tried endlessly to mould themselves into whatever the public’s perception was - from Theresa May’s desperate contortions over the border in Ireland, to Boris Johnson’s outright lies on the same issue, to Sunak’s search for a personality. The only one who showed any real sense of leadership was Liz Truss and she was insane.

Now here is someone who is prepared to try and usher public opinion in a particular direction. It is important for the Labour party, sure. But it is also important for bigger, deeper reasons.

The public is often wrong. People don’t like admitting this because it sounds elitist, but it remains true nonetheless. Watch a vox-pop about an issue you know about and you will be staggered by the degree of confidently-expressed ignorance which you are exposed to. This is why we need a sense of leadership in politics and the political class generally - to peel the public away from objectively wrong opinions and towards ones grounded in reality, to open up the space for the necessary conversations we require if we are to solve the problems which affect us. Burnham’s demonstration of leadership is a significant step towards rejecting the tyranny of public opinion.

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Burnham’s economics are potentially a bit shit

There is a shadow here. The author and professional uber-nerd Jonn Elledge mentioned it as we were enthusiastically WhatsApping about the speech. “I worry his economics might be shit,” he wrote.

It’s a valid concern. For a start, Burnham’s 40-years-of-neoliberalism argument feels a bit dated. We’ve been done with neoliberalism since at least 2016, as you can tell by the role of state aid rules in the Brexit debate, or Labour’s active programme of state intervention under Starmer. Few people now seriously claim, for instance, that the free market will solve climate change. The era when regulation was a dirty word and competition was the great virtue is over and has been for a while. Only Blair and Truss still believe in it.

Burnham speaks a lot about reindustrialisation. This is not, as some of his detractors claim, a return to coal. But it is nevertheless quite telling, when you consider how little he speaks about services.

The university sector, for instance, was one of the crown jewels in Britain’s cultural and economic life. It has been left to wither and die by successive governments, first in order to prevent a rise in tuition fees and then as a way of reducing immigration numbers.

I was speaking to a group of academics this week and they told me that their university had cancelled its cleaning contracts. From now on, the academics would be given a vacuum cleaner and told to clean their own offices. It seemed a fitting symbol of a sector going into terminal decline.

What does Burnham have to say about that? Very little. But we are, it’s worth remembering, a services economy. Britain is perhaps unique in having a political class that seems to hate the way it makes money. During Brexit, the Conservatives never really thought to mention services. During the Starmer government, so-called post-liberals like Maurice Glasmann became obsessed with the ‘lanyard class’. The broader Labour party kept trying to hark back to a time when it represented the real working class - hard lads covered in soot doing a man’s job, instead of the clean, effete management duties undertaken by a typical Labour voter now.

Ironically, this fetish for manual labour took hold of the political class precisely as manual labourers themselves disappeared from it. In 1979, 16% of MPs had done manual jobs and just three per cent were professional politicians. By 2015, those figures were reversed, with just three per cent having done manual jobs while 17% were professional politicians. Some 14.2% were lawyers and just over 30% were business people. In other words, the yearning for manual labour is a fetish by people who have never done it, like Second World War dads from the Home Counties watching the History Channel and daydreaming about how accomplished they’d have been in a Spitfire.

Burnham’s frame for talking about the economy suggests he is part of this dispiriting trend. It’s troubling, a cloud on the horizon. It is hard to imagine the British economy succeeding until we are governed by people who are interested in it as it actually is, not how they wish it to be.

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Burnham’s manner can help repair the British state

I am increasingly fascinated by how Burnham presents. He is more confident than any of his immediate predecessors - arguably than any prime minister since Blair. But his vibe is modest, self-deprecating, humble, with a distinct sense of vulnerability.

This is a really specific form of charisma. Demonstrating vulnerability allows you to bring the audience onto your side, to get them behind you, rooting for you. Look at the way the hall reacted when Burnham struggled to speak before he spoke about his father. I’m not saying this is cynical. I think it’s genuine. I’m just trying to explain it.

Usually, vulnerable people lack confidence and self-belief. But there are many human mixtures available and Burnham seems to have stumbled on one which combines it with a big ego and buckets of personal conviction. It’s a powerful combination.

It is also very rare in politics. There are lots of people with no vulnerability at all in politics - people like David Cameron, hyper-confident, sociopathically thick-skinned, domineering, entitled, a bit broken when the spotlight isn’t on them. And there are many who are extremely vulnerable and lack the confidence to get on. But we rarely see this specific personality type which combines them both.

I have seen many little tyrants in my life. The general manager, the ticket inspector, the ward sister, the teacher. Humans are often so desperate for status that they will go mad with what little power they are given. It is to Burnham’s credit that he has been given the ultimate power but seems largely unaffected by it, at least so far. It is a properly commendable demonstration of character.

One of the rare effective periods of governance in this country came during Blair’s second term, when he put Michael Barber in charge of the policy unit. One of the reasons for that was Barber’s personality. Instead of the usual shouty-crackers bullshit, we finally had someone with a sense of academic curiosity, someone who wanted to know how things worked, someone who wished to invest prime minister authority rather than spend it. Unsurprisingly, he got things done.

Burnham is naturally more ideological than Barber - obviously, he’s a politician - but his openness and susceptibility suggests that he will mould a state in this direction. That would be very welcome.

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If not now, when?

As this week made clear, we are now lumbering up for a vast battle. Over the next ten years, some of the biggest issues in British politics will either be resolved or lost forever.

Electoral reform has the ability to rationalise a voting system for an era of multi-party politics and to create incentives which reduce tribalism and encourage political cooperation. It would change the operating system of British politics. It would do more than perhaps any other measure to improve British public life.

Reversing Brexit gives us the chance to put the populist genie back in its box, repair economic damage, restore our place in the world, and create a united European front against Russia and a US teetering on the edge of becoming a rogue state. It will ensconce us alongside like-minded nations.

Once Burnham signalled the opening stages of these debates, you could see the usual suspects try to bully him away from them. Anonymous trade unionists and Cabinet ministers started to chat to journalists about how electoral reform would make a future Labour majority impossible. Brexiters like Andrew Neil took to the airwaves to warn Burnham that “he’ll come to regret” bringing the Brexit issue back. Farage smiled woolfishly and said that talking about Brexit again would give him a “career boost”.

Most of this analysis is in fact a cynical way of expressing a political viewpoint. Brexiters don’t want the debate opened up again for various reasons, chiefly its utter failure and their personal culpability in that. They use these arguments to try to put fear in progressives. It’s a warning: remember how badly you got mangled up last time? Remember what it felt like to have us all call you traitors to your country? Do you want that again? Do you want to go back to that vicious old world where it felt as if the most vicious and brutal reactionaries were always in the ascendant? Because we are prepared to act that way again.

This is quite effective. Most progressives feel that fear, that anxiety. But let me put this simply: If not now, then when?

We are right now in the vanishingly rare situation of having a radical prime minister who is extremely competent. Until this week, ending the triple lock was considered politically unsayable, a toxic commitment that would ruin whichever party was foolish enough to propose it. Now look at the polling Survation undertook after Burnham’s conference speech.

When the triple lock and social care proposal were laid out to respondents, 64% supported it and 15% opposed, providing a net favourability of +49. Support outnumbered opposition in every age group, including those most affected. It won 61% support among the 55-64 age group and 55% support among the 65+ age group. You know what that is? That’s called competence. I know, it’s been so long since you last saw it you forgot what it looked like. It’s a competent fucking communication strategy. It’s a political leader who can frame a message and deliver it.

Now look at his opponents. Farage is accomplished at exacerbating division, but he looks increasingly thin-skinned and tetchy, unable to conceal the sense of entitlement at his core. Kemi Badenoch is a laughably ineffectual politician. Her interview with the Express today saw her promise that “badass Kemi” would face the prime minister down. This is just not a very formidable opponent.

They are beatable. And even if they were both more accomplished, the right-wing parties are competing with each other for hundreds of seats, cannibalising their own vote, while Labour and the Lib Dems aim for different seats and the Greens look subdued.

And underneath all that, there are the fundamental political and demographic conditions. People can see that Brexit failed. Many of the older voters who wanted out of the EU have died while many of the younger voters who want to be in the EU are now of voting age, especially now we have extended it to 16.

Yes, the debate will be difficult. Brexiters will say we are reopening a period of division. They will warn that we will have to join the euro and Schengen. They will issue apocalyptic predictions about the consequences of a return to free movement. Those arguments are hard to challenge but they are not impossible to defeat, with competent political leadership. They can be neutralised and then overpowered.

If we lose, we lose for a generation. But how is that a worse position than the one we were in before? Trapped in poverty by the demands of right-wing populists, who then trade off the ensuing misery to demand that we must follow their agenda to an even more extreme destination and insist that we cannot fix it because they might get upset again. Fuck that and fuck them.

This is a moment of opportunity. The stars are aligned, in a way that they almost never are - in terms of the quality of leadership, the radicalism of the ideas it is prepared to embrace, the weakness of our opponents and the underlying demand for change. A chance like this might not come along again for a generation or more.

It feels strange to suddenly be presented with a range of possibilities rather than the usual portfolio of despair. But it is not a dream, it is really happening, and we will never forgive ourselves - nor deserve to be forgiven - if we do not take advantage of it.

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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.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one on John Healey’s speech as chancellor and another on the return of the Brexit debate. We’re also rereleasing Origin Story episodes with a new intro for the next four weeks as we build up to Season Ten. This week it’s the Battle of Cable Street, which was not a battle and did not happen on Cable Street. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been playing the updated version of Starfox - one of my favourite games on the N64, now available and looking all pretty on the Switch 2. It’s such a strange experience to play something you played to death 30 years ago. You remember almost nothing and yet occasionally you’ll find your finger braking just in time to avoid an asteroid, demonstrating a muscle memory that has somehow sat unused in your brain all this time.

It is a delight to play a simple arcade game, without an open world or endless skill trees, and almost no complexity whatsoever. And it is nice to remember that rail shooters are just objectively very fun. There is precisely zero reason for this genre of game to have disappeared. I’m having a blast.

Right, that’s it for this week. I know it’s all troublingly optimistic at the moment, I don’t feel comfortable about it either. But be that as it may: fuck off.

No point messing about. That was the best conference speech I’ve ever seen. At one point I lost all ability to speak and simply sat there mute, unblinking, wondering if I’d had an episode and this was all some kind of hallucination. I’d rub my eyes and stare closer and yet it was all still really happening. It was all real. The prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was speaking honestly about our problems and committing to the solutions.

For a long time now, we have been stuck in a conspiracy of silence. Privately, in whispered conversations in the corners of Westminster bars, people will acknowledge the world as it really is. They will nod wisely and with weary resignation as they acknowledge that the electoral system is broken, social care is in a state of decay, the pensions triple-lock is unaffordable and Brexit has damaged us economically. But they will not do so publicly.

These truths are considered unsayable. You can’t go into an election promising a reduction in spending for the elderly - they’re the one demographic which is most likely to vote. They’ll murder you out there. You can’t suggest that we might return to Europe - you’ll open up that whole populist can of worms again. And most of all, you cannot entertain electoral reform, because it means you’ll never govern alone again. To speak these truths is to commit political death.

And now here is this guy, Andy Burnham. And he is just going to straight-up break those rules one by one. Mother of god, you think, what am I watching. How is this happening. What on earth is going on.

Simply put, he is acting with a degree of courage I never dared hope a prime minister would demonstrate. The commitments he made today would make Britain a kinder, wealthier, better country. But more than that, they would serve as a demonstration: that mainstream politics still has the strength to grapple with the problems Britain faces and solve them.

And now, inevitably, they all come out to play, teeth flashing in the dark. All the small politicians, doing exactly as predicted, a clockwork voice from a mechanised throat. “It’s frankly outrageous that Burnham is considering scrapping the triple lock,” Reform’s Robert Jenrick said. Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham told the Times it would be “almost electoral suicide”. An anonymous Cabinet minister told Politico: “I would like to actually win the next election.” The Express front page read: “Scrap triple lock and you will face voter revolt.”

There’ll be more of them. Expect weeks of anonymous Labour MPs stressing the dangers. They are exactly the type who got us into this mess: unwilling to lead, unwilling to recognise reality for fear of offending voters, unwilling to solve long-term problems if it presents the slightest short-term risk.

Perhaps they’ll win. Probably they will. Perhaps all these ideas will be badly formed, or mutilated by compromise, or, more likely, become the latest victims of an attention economy in which there’s always something more immediate for a prime minister to focus on. Or perhaps the bond markets will take fright at the ambition and spiral badly, killing this glimpse of a better way of doing things.

But today felt different. Burnham could clearly see the dangers. He could spot precisely how he would be attacked. He knew just how exposed it left him. And he did it anyway.

“I accept I may pay a political price,” he said. “But someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off.”

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Burnham made several commitments today, some more meaningful than others. Personally, I find the anti-neoliberalism stuff a bit simplistic. Neoliberalism’s hold over this country ended with Brexit, when the right turned its back on free trade and austerity economics, almost as an afterthought. That opened up a space for much more interventionist policy from Labour that it has eagerly inhabited ever since.

It was when Burnham turned away from his favoured topic of public ownership of services that he became more compelling. The prime minister promised a National Care Service: universal, free at the point of use, to which everyone contributes. It would be funded by the end of the triple lock - to be replaced by a double lock. The earnings leg has been kicked out, with the state pension rising by the higher of inflation or 2.5% from 2030, but with periodic adjustments if earnings in the economy are rising higher.

I caught my breath as he said it. Christ alive I thought, he was actually doing it. He was doing the thing they swore could never be done, because the electoral consequences were too severe.

Would that raise enough money? No, certainly not, no matter what he claims. There’ll be further painful decisions to make which Burnham did not mention today. A care service will be very expensive and savings from ending the triple lock will be modest in the short term, only building up over the long term.

But announcing the two measures in this way, side by side, provided the best possible way of convincing older voters to accept the change. It provided a moral foundation for what was taking place. It delivered a narrative and a mission, a comprehensible moral pathway. And just as importantly, it offered a signal to the markets that the government is prepared to take the big decisions necessary to get spending under control, even as it unveils one of the most ambitious spending proposals in recent years.

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One of the most noticeable aspects of Burnham’s personality is his sense of emotional presence. He really does look as if he is listening to people, as if he is present in the moment rather than going through the motions, doing the politician-kisses-baby thing.

This has stood him in good stead. I suspect that the manner this policy is being presented comes from countless conversations on the doorstep, from an intuitive understanding of what it takes to win people over to your position.

That doorstep conversation is very easy to visualise. The deal is clear: A move from a triple to a double lock, but a guarantee that the state pension rises every year. And in exchange, guaranteed free care.

He presented this idea by speaking about his grandmother. When she went into the care home, someone pocketed her engagement ring. The care she received was “not worthy of the name”. And despite all that, they’d had to sell her house to pay for it. “What an indictment of my generation of politicians,” he said. “Too cowardly to fix something as basic as the care we give each other”.

Then he spoke directly to care workers themselves, and noted the way they had been ignored by politicians for decades, working on pitiful wages in terrible conditions. “You are not invisible to me,” he said. “I see you. I thank you. And I am sorry that my profession has let down yours for so long.” He either believes this stuff or he is one of the best actors I have ever seen.

I think he believes it. For what it’s worth, I think the bloke we see on that stage is the same bloke he is with the cameras off. There’s a killer in there, of course. You don’t get to this level without being a killer in some way. And there is obviously a massive ego hiding behind that unassuming demeanour. But the basic effectiveness Burnham demonstrates comes, I suspect, from a sense of authenticity and a connection with his feelings.

Until recently, I thought Nigel Farage was the most effective communicator in modern politics. Now, the Reform leader seems angry, thin-skinned, self-pitying, whiny, absurd. What we witnessed today was a masterclass in political communication which makes Farage look like an amateur. Look at how he did it: A personal story, an appeal to the emotions, a radical proposal, an explanation of why it is fair, a push for voters to back him. The heart and the head operating as one.

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Shortly afterwards, he spoke about his father, who died a couple of weeks ago. You could tell that he was about to address it because suddenly he stopped talking. There was silence. And that silence expanded for what felt like a very long time - perhaps 30 seconds, aeons in the world of public speaking. Eventually the audience got nervously behind him, applauding, cheering him, getting to their feet. He thanked them and finally found a way of continuing.

In the minutes that followed he delivered probably the most effective defence of the United Kingdom over Welsh and Scottish nationalism that I have witnessed, one which casually dismissed the usual transactional statements for a heartfelt expression of a shared history and the endless advantages of combining many nations in one.

“Whatever its flaws, this country gave my dad a good life,” he said. He fought through the tears, he battled his way through the words, trying to get them out. But around this point, he seemed in genuine danger of actually breaking down on the stage.

If I was on his staff I think I would have advised against this section. The feelings were just too raw, too exposed. It was too dangerous to allow yourself to feel them at an event like this, in the white light of the cameras, at one of the key political moments of the year. This country now accepts men crying, but I am not sure it can handle a leader literally breaking down in front of a large audience. But obviously I would have been wrong. In fact, I sat there and realised with some embarrassment that I was myself crying.

“Britain is not perfect,” he said. “It could be better and we will make it so. But it still stands for something worth saving and worth fighting for.”

Imagine his opponents watching this. Badenoch. Farage. Swinney. All the way through the speech, they’ll have noticed the opportunities he offers them. Attack line here, vulnerability there. Death tax, dementia tax, whatever. We know how that old turgid game plays out. But deep down, in their bones, they would surely think: fuck.

How do you fight this? How do you take on someone who is able to speak with this degree of commitment and emotional intelligence, this ability to bring people with him?

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On Brexit, Burnham promised to lay out options for a long term relationship. He framed this as a break, which means that he clearly intends to go further than Starmer’s vision of inching alignment. I suspect the options will involve associate status (whatever that is, very much tbc), customs union membership, single market membership and full membership.

There is now a clear battleground for pro-Europeans to enter and an administration which seems open to listening to what they have to say. The idea of Labour going into the next election with a commitment to Rejoin is unlikely, but it is not fanciful. There is much to play for here.

On electoral reform, the commitment was much firmer: a national commission, with whatever proposals emerge from it in the Labour manifesto at the next election.

Sometimes when you write these things and you feel years of history weighing down on each key as you touch it. For how long have reformers fought this battle? How many decades of thwarted hopes and aspirations? And each time we would torture ourselves with the same seemingly unsolvable riddle: How can you ever get a prime minister to implement reform when any party in government will by definition benefit from the system as it is?

And now here he is, this guy, and he is doing it. Perhaps it had to be someone like him - someone from inside the system who saw what was wrong with it, left, and could return as an outsider. Regardless, it is actually happening. Things which reformers have hoped for their entire lives are now tantalisingly close. In touching distance.

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I am slightly baffled by what is going on here. I am not used to being happy. It does not suit my disposition. But what we saw today was a masterclass in how politics should be done: a man who was prepared to tackle problems rather than avoid them, prepared to raise solutions even though they leave him exposed, prepared to defend radical causes his predecessors would have run a mile at. And more than that, we saw it done with a level of verve and skill which is practically unheard of in modern politics.

There’s not a lot of times like this. Not a lot of times when the stars align and things that previously seemed impossible become tenable.

It would be easy to be on a face of studied cynicism at this point. It is obviously true that plenty can go wrong, the plans are plainly very sketchy, and the obstacles facing him are immense. You always look more sensible by being guarded than you do by being impressed. But we have to be able to recognise and celebrate the things we’ve always called for when they finally come to pass. And today, they came to pass.

What thing to witness.

I pity Suella Braverman. Once upon a time I merely disliked her, but we’re well past that now. Today, I just feel this sense of sorrow for her. I’m not sure I have ever seen someone debase themselves to this extent in the name of ideology.

This week, Braverman - who was born in Harrow, educated at Cambridge, and lives in Hampshire - took to the internet once again to insist that she is not English - ostensibly because of her ancestry, but in reality because of her race. It’s like watching a wounded animal feast on its own intestines, a grotesque parable about confusing short term and long term incentives.

Over just two years, race has returned to British political debate, in a way that has not happened since Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. We see the poison everywhere - on the streets, on the English Channel. But we also see it in the hideous contortions it is imposing on right-wing ethnic minority politicians. It is mangling their identity out of all recognition.

Something very strange and disturbing is happening in this country, of which Braverman is just the most pitiful example.

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When Rishi Sunak became prime minister, his ethnicity was barely mentioned. Unlike Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House, say, the emergence of the UK’s first ethnic minority prime minister was met with complete indifference.

“Whatever issues people had with me as PM - and there was no shortage of those - neither my race nor my religion was among them,” Sunak wrote recently in the Sunday Times. “I was often struck by how foreign leaders would assume these things must have been major symbolic moments. Yet for the vast majority of Brits they just weren’t that big a deal.”

In so far as race was mentioned in this period, it tended to be by the left rather than the right. On the left, there was an army of hyper-online campaigners for racial justice, who would quickly highlight any failure to abide by their progressive standards. On the right, debate was almost completely deracialised. Brexit, for instance, was the great conservative victory of the last ten years. It was reactionary, sentimental, anti-immigrant, jingoistic, occasionally xenophobic, obnoxious and deeply, deeply stupid. But it wasn’t racist. Great care was taken by anti-immigrant politicians to make sure they never crossed that line.

The reason they took great care was because a firm enforcement arrangement was in place. There were strong social norms against racism. And there was an army of eager progressive types who really, really wanted to call conservatives racists. Was it great? No. Online progressives were very annoying in the early 2020s. But at least they were motivated by decent ideals and it worked to keep racism in check.

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This relatively benign state of affairs continued until the second Trump administration, at which point all hell broke loose.

When Trump returned to the White House, two things happened simultaneously. The first was that things could be said which previously would never have been said. The Trump victory was seen as a comprehensive triumph over the forces of woke in every country. It was as if he had won an election for world president. Why? Why did Trump’s political victory in the US expand into a cultural victory across the Western world?

The reason was not strictly electoral. It was about social class. Many commentators - from prominent social media accounts to newspaper columnists to radio presenters - saw an opportunity. Until Trump’s return, they had been under threat of social ostracisation and abuse for being insufficiently careful in their use of language. Perhaps they said Latino instead of Latinx, or failed to ask someone’s pronouns. Whatever. Everyone in this period was trying not to be the main character on Twitter on any given day.

For a prominent commentator, this posed a not-insubstantial threat to their career. Certainly, it constituted the political issue which most affected them on a day-to-day basis. It was far more pertinent to them than ICE immigration raids or abortion. So they jumped eagerly on the new cultural moment. And they did this not really as political supporters of Trump’s overall agenda, but as representatives of their social class, as commentators.

The second thing that happened was that more extreme content was now purposefully spread on X, under Elon Musk, whereas centrist or liberal content was downgraded. Many progressive commentators emphasised this trend by leaving X, but most mainstream political reporters stayed on. This therefore created a two-fold dynamic. The incentives against using racial language collapsed and the incentives to use racial language increased. In many cases, that incentive was flatly financial. Rupert Lowe, for instance, is said to have earned £105,000 from his rants on X.

The outcome was depressingly predictable. In February 2025, Triggernometry podcast co-host Konstantin Kisin started asking questions about Sunak which had not been raised when he was prime minister. “He’s a brown Hindu,” Kisin said. “How is he English?” He later denied this, and then confirmed it, and has basically been a bit all over the place on it, but the basic fact is that he said it and it authorised plenty of other people on the right to start voicing their opinions on whether people of other races or religions can be English. Right-wing thought has now radicalised to such an extent that the question ‘can a brown man be English’ was this week the hottest subject of debate.

Sunak’s response, which he clearly hates having to articulate, has been very good. He correctly spotted that this test was much more primitive and restrictive than that which was applied by the most extreme figures of his childhood. When he was growing up, there was the Tebbit test, basing identity on which cricket team you supported. “For all the criticism it received,” Sunak said, “this was a test that anyone could pass. If you supported England because you now saw it as home, you were part of the team regardless of the colour of your skin. Ten-year-old me passed the test without even knowing about it.”

This is way too kind. Most Asians I know support England in the football but revert to the team of their heritage in the cricket - the choice of cricket specifically is designed to make it very difficult for people to belong. But whatever - Sunak’s fundamental point is that you can at least choose to satisfy that test. Kisin’s test is far harsher. “In this world, if you’re not white it doesn’t matter who you support at the cricket: you can never be English. This reverse Tebbit test is impossible for any non-white person to pass.”

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Once this debate emerged, Braverman was presumably caught between her desire to secure attention and her own identity. She chose the former and denied her own Englishness.

This week she was at it again. “As I’ve said before, I’m not English,” she said. “I’m proud to be British. My family and ancestors have a link to Britain which spans centuries. But in no way are we English. Yes, I was born in England, speak English and support the England football team. And indeed, I love England and the English people. But to say I’m English is to take a ‘laissez-faire, anything-goes’ attitude to ethnicity, citizenship and identity. It also denies me my Asian heritage.”

It’s rare to watch so many things die at once: logic, dignity, self-regard. Her mind is a death cult, a collective suicide pact against cognition.

I don’t want to break this down too much, because to do so gives her too much credit. This is fundamentally a psychological issue not a political one - she is intriguing as a pathological case study, but not as a meaningful set of intellectual propositions.

That being said, you simply cannot follow the sentence ‘in no way are we English’ with ‘I was born in England, speak English and support the England football team’. I mean, no matter how restrictive a view you have of national identity, being born in a country, speaking its language and supporting its sports teams has to have some impact. And of course Braverman is very English. You can tell by her accent, her manner and her concerns. I wish she weren’t. I despise the kind of Englishness she represents - small-minded, thin-skinned and jealous. But she is clearly the product of it.

Similarly, you cannot hold these views and support the England football team, because most of that team are, according to those views, not English. In fact, if you follow Braverman’s system the whole national story starts to dissolve. Off the top of my head, we lose Disraeli, Churchill, Eliot, Dahl, Mercury, the King. Obviously our origin as a nation collapses, with each wave of Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans contradicting her muddled criteria. Our political leadership falls away, our literature dissolves, our music ceases, the royal family falls, the whole bundle of political, social and cultural English contributions unravels.

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Zia Yusef, Braverman’s unhinged Reform colleague, evidently feels the same way as her. When Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former child refugee and leader of Camden Council, was made Labour candidate in the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras byelection, he wrote: “The front runner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour to replace the former prime minister Keir Starmer in our parliament was born in Somalia. Do you understand what’s happening?”

Abdi-Wali’s story is a profoundly beautiful one of someone arriving here in the 90s with no English and now running one of the largest councils in the country, on the verge of entering parliament. Only a truly shattered personality would think this ugly.

I don’t know what goes on in the screaming, bloodied corridors of Yusef’s mind. But it is extraordinary that he thinks he can attack a Muslim from Somalia without undermining his own position in our society. He, unlike Abdi-Wali, was born here, to Muslim parents from Sri Lanka. But does he truly believe that the type of people targeted by this message will appreciate the difference between these two positions? Does he really think he can stoke hatred against Muslims who came here as children without stoking hatred against Muslims who were born here? What an irresponsible naive chump.

At this point, you could see the cogs start to turn in the brains of even the dumbest right-wing politician. Laila Cunningham, Reform’s candidate for mayor of London, has all the intellectual heft of a puddle in the autumn. But she is the daughter of Egyptian immigrants and she could tell what dangers lay in wait if this type of logic were followed to its conclusion. “I don’t know what he meant by that comment,” she told the Standard. “I read it a few times.”

Obviously she does, she just doesn’t like the implications. But that at least displays a greater capacity for self-awareness than Yusef himself possesses.

As Jacob Ress-Mogg said this week: “I’m very surprised at Zia Yusef, who I would have thought would want to be English. If he doesn’t want to be English, why would he want to govern this country?”

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This is the situation among ethnic minority politicians on the right. But there are signs that this corrosion of our standards is seeping into the Labour party leadership too. It has turned progressive language for racial justice into a mutilated, debased, unholy parody of itself.

In April, home secretary Shabana Mahmood was doing an event with podcast host Matt Forde when a man in the audience accused her of “out-Reforming Reform”. She told him to fuck off.

What came out of her mouth next was a kind of word salad which proved very difficult to understand. Criticism of her immigration policy, she said, was “a way of delegitimising the perfectly valid, legitimate views of millions of people in this country, including ethnic minorities in this country… You’re trying to put me in a box, which includes a lot of people who think I don’t even belong in my own country. That’s why I said this individual can just fuck right off, because I know I belong in my own country. You’re not going to be able to do that to me.”

What in God’s name does this mean? It’s very hard to parse. Things become clearer when we listen to what she said last November in the House of Commons, when Lib Dem home affairs spokesperson Max Wilkinson said she was “stoking division by using immoderate language” on immigration.

“I wish I had the privilege of walking around this country and not seeing the division the issue of migration and asylum system is causing in this country,” she replied. “Unlike him, unfortunately I am the one who is regularly called a [P-word] and told to go back home…. I do not think it is acceptable or appropriate for people in this place to not acknowledge the real experience of those who sit outside of this House.”

Suddenly Mahmood’s view becomes much clearer. She has taken the language of online progressives from the early 2020s and twisted it to suit her purpose. It’s all there - the idea that white people do not recognise their ‘privilege’, the notion that brown and black people have ‘real experience’ of racial issues which gives them epistemological priority over white people. But here they are both being co-opted for a right-wing anti-immigrant agenda and weaponised against progressives.

Mahmood’s argument is that racists must be given exactly what they want because it’s the only way they’ll stop being racist to her. It seems much more likely that they will continue to be racist given that she is explicitly saying it helps trigger political change in their preferred direction. The idea that outright racists who shout slurs at brown people in the street can be placated by lowering the number of small boat arrivals this quarter is absurd. It’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of what racism is. It is not a rational retail-politics response to new arrivals. It is hateful obscurantist poison.

But the practical implications of Mahmood’s position are even more alarming. Her response to Wilkinson indicates that white people are not entitled to question her on it. She has created a racial test by which her position cannot be challenged. She is dividing critics by race and giving them different rights to question her policy. At the top of the Labour party, a horribly mangled form of racial politics is beginning to emerge.

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The return of race to British political debate is a disaster, a regression into the ugliest aspects of our past. It is the moral equivalent of someone forgetting how to walk. Across the right, you can see it doing something poisonous and terrible, something truly frightening, providing a kind of class leadership to the balaclava-wearing thugs on the street.

This piece is about the way that ethnic minority politicians have responded to this moment. Some of them, like Sunak, have adopted precisely the right approach: principled, cautious, moderate, intelligent, insightful. Others, like Braverman and Yusef, have given us a demonstration in self-hatred and deep-seated psychological collapse. And others still, like Mahmood, have demonstrated how cynically the return of racial politics can be used to counter those who oppose it.

I write this to take stock, really. I want something to demonstrate where we got to, after just two years of a return to race politics. I want to record how quickly we are slipping into the worst of what we once were, into the gutter viciousness and paranoia of race politics. You can see it contorting everything. But there is probably no more disturbing thing to witness than what it has done to the minds of ethnic minority politicians on the right.

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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 column for the i paper was on Andy Burnham’s meeting with Donald Trump, which was covered in the most baffling way. Read it here. There was an extra addition of the newsletter on Tuesday on Ed Davey’s conference speech. Read it here.

This week’s Origin Story was on John Rawls, the great liberal political philosopher of the post-war period. One of the hardest things about being progressive is knowing the limit to inequality. For communists, it’s easy. There’ll be no inequality. For neoliberals, it’s also easy. There’s no limit to inequality. But most people live somewhere between these positions, never sure where to draw the line. We accept that you need inequality to encourage invention and productivity, but we know there’s something deeply wrong with a world where people scrape by on shit contracts while tech billionaires earn more than many countries. Rawls is the guy who shows you how to draw the line: a systematic account of why inequality exists and what its limit should be. It’s through understanding him that you finally get to clarify your own instincts on how the world should work. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.

I read Heat Wave by Penelope Lively, a dense, introspective, unsentimental novel about a mother watching her daughter make the same mistakes in her marriage that she made in her own. It’s sun kissed and pleasant, but you spend your entire time within the mind of a woman suffering wordlessly, claustrophobic. I particularly enjoyed the way that no actual conflict takes place. Hell, they barely even speak. Instead, the daughter will occasionally glean what her mother is thinking and change behaviour without anything being said. Profound moments of solidarity, empathy and alienation all take place wordlessly, in glances and micro-movements. It is very, very English and therefore a suitable choice for this particular edition of the newsletter.

Right now fuck off you cunts.

I hate writing all this. I really like Ed Davey. He is a civilised, decent, humane man. He is genuine and he is sincere. He has good values. But it’s just not good enough. None of this is good enough. And everyone in this conference knows it. Deep down in their bones, they fucking know it. But they’re Lib Dems, so they grumble, and they mutter a bit and they shrug their shoulders, and they toddle off home having done nothing, tottering amiably towards the end of their world.

You can break down the sense of low-level background anxiety around the Liberal Democrat conference several ways - it’s about stubborn polling, disappointing local election results, a leader without much charisma, the lack of ideas, the modesty of the strategy. But get past all that, and it comes down to that one central fact: It’s not damn well good enough.

What we are seeing around the world today and in this country in particular is the attempted murder of liberalism. That’s the story we’ve watched over the last ten years: a sustained attack on the principles of reason and freedom. Now the fascist ghoul is everywhere, unmistakable: on the street, in Westminster, in Silicon Valley, in the White House, in German elections, the European parliament. The ancient terrible darkness is upon us again.

Davey claims to get it. He started his speech today with a stark warning about the gangs in Dover and Portsmouth. “Every generation we have these men who pretend to be patriots… and every generation the real Britain refuses to accept it,” he said. At the end of the speech, he roused himself into what passes for passionate delivery. “This is the fight of our lives,” he said “and we are going to win it.”

The words look better written down than they sounded out loud. Davey doesn’t really have it in him for this type of thing. He’s too nice. He’s too - urgh I don’t feel great about this - but he’s too average. He can communicate decency and warmth. But there’s no fire to him. Even when he came on the stage to applause, he looked like a genial uncle settling down for lunch in a Toby Carvery.

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His diagnosis was completely unrelated to the cure. His speech unveiled an income policy which would increase the tax free allowance to £15,000 and raise the 40p rate by £6,000. This is basically the same as Reform’s income tax policy, except that Davey would fund it not through cuts to disability benefits but through increased growth as a result of rejoining the single market and customs union. It would therefore happen around 2034 and even then only if negotiations with the EU were as easy and uncomplicated as possible. In terms of content, the policy is basically the same as the other parties. In terms of effectiveness, its timeline makes it basically redundant.

Elsewhere, there was a very silly policy calling for an immediate 10p cut to fuel duty and a treaty to halt the development of AI - basically the same idea raised by the AI developers themselves last week. There’s just nothing there to distinguish the party or its leader. When it comes down to ideas, Lib Dems are now broadly identical to other parties. Even where their approach is more studious - like on care or sewage - there is little there which makes it specifically liberal. At best, it’s a patchwork of unrelated nice things. At worst it’s cynical electioneering.

It’s all just so very fucking meh. There aren’t many people here. Numbers are well down. The energy levels are negligible. I met a lobbyist the other evening and thought: Why in god’s name are you here? She didn’t seem certain herself. The party feels irrelevant.

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Every so often, people at the conference talked about who would replace Davey if there was a challenge. There are plenty of decent options, but none of this is really said seriously. The Lib Dems will never change a leader in this type of scenario. They’re all too nice.

Even if they did, it probably wouldn’t change anything. Davey is not a solution, but he is not the problem either. The Lib Dem issue is fundamental. It is that there is a discrepancy between their values as a party and the structural incentives available to them under the electoral system as the third party.

They have always needed to maintain a certain element of mercuriality to their approach. They can’t ever be too decisively one thing, because they’re never sure where the next opening will be at which point they’ll have to be something else.

During New Labour, the opening was to the left, particularly on Iraq and tuition fees. Now it is on the moderate right - disillusioned Cameronite Tories in picture postcard towns who want a sound hand on the economy but think climate change is real, would accept a fair amount of immigration and think you should treat people with respect.

Davey targeted that vote hard. It was remarkably successful. In terms of the popular vote, the Lib Dems actually slipped from 3,696,419 votes in the 2019 general election to 3,519,143 in 2024 but they won many more seats. The difference was that the former campaign was poorly targeted and the latter campaign was well targeted. First-past-the-post doesn’t give a damn how many votes you get, it rewards you for the most efficient distribution of your vote. And that is what the party secured.

He won 72 seats at the general election and ending the party’s stint in the post-Coalition abyss. They could probably pick up a few dozen more in the next election, if Kemi Badenoch, clown that she is, keeps pushing those voters away. The fear of alienating these voters with batshit ideas or an excess of passion hangs like a shadow over the leader’s shoulders and explains why he is so reluctant to put forward a red-blooded liberal vision.

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The Lib Dems will do fine at the next election. The trouble is that this all they have - a decent electoral strategy and no articulable values. They have left liberalism without a defender.

Throughout this conference, Lib Dems have sat and yearned for a sense of vision, of a leader able to say what they believe in, to speak confidently about ideals. Davey’s response is to say that racism is bad and suggest he’ll solve it by cutting income tax. He has created a situation where it is functionally impossible for someone to vote passionately for the Liberal Democrats. It’s impossible to even imagine someone who would. Who would they be? What the fuck would be wrong with them?

This is tarnishing the name of liberalism. It is associating the name of the most liberating idea in the history of mankind with a kind of nervous, flustered, faceless vanilla blather. It is contributing to the sense that liberalism is complacent and unthreatening, ineffectual and self-satisfied.

Davey evidently feels he cannot square the circle between those small-c conservative voters and the ideals of liberalism, but he is wrong. His failure to do so is a failure of his imagination. You simply need to link the resistance to fascism to the iconography which is most reassuring to Middle England.

On the small boats issue, that is currently the RNLI: properly, undeniably, quintessentially British, with a very British sense of duty and universality and practicality. They are currently being targeted by fascists. Davey could put a defence of the RNLI at the very core of what he is doing - proposing laws to protect them, statues to valorise them, events to appear alongside them, measures to bolster them - whatever it takes to highlight their plight and link the Lib Dems to them. This is the cosy, moderate way to fight the balaclava wearing thugs.

Instead, there wasn’t a word in defence of immigration from Davey today. Earlier this week he was repeatedly asked if asylum seekers were more of a threat to women than average members of the public. He would not deny it. He just doesn’t have the courage - as Charlie Kennedy and Paddy Ashdown did before him - to make the case for immigration.

Again, people will say it cannot be done while still retaining Tory seats. Again, that is simply not true. You can make the economic case for immigrants quite easily with Tory voters, especially once you provide reassurances on borders. He could start now by attacking the government for doing so little to attract young high-skilled Americans fleeing Trump’s America. That’s the sort of approach which makes the immigration issue as safe as possible. But he does not have the vision, or the courage, or perhaps simply the motivating emotional outrage at the state of the world.

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People have been walking around this conference with tote bags emblazoned by the preamble to the Liberal Democrat constitution: “No-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity”. I love that line. I have lost track of how many Lib Dem MPs over the years have told me that they first joined the party after reading it.

I suspect the key is the word ‘conformity’. It is a fundamentally liberal word. It is not one you would find in the constitution of the other parties. It is precisely this which the party is missing, something that is unmistakably its own.

You want to shake it sometimes and tell it to wake the hell up. The liberal world is being shaken to its foundations and here they are, speaking its name, claiming it as their own, and refusing to articulate anything even resembling a coherent liberal world view. It’s just not fucking good enough. And deep in their hearts, they fucking know it.

It should be a moment of reckoning for British journalism. It’s said almost as an aside - an offhand comment, issued with a self-satisfied smile - but its implications are devastating.

Nigel Farage is sitting outside, eating oysters and drinking champagne with a potential donor from the US. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is the victim of an undercover sting operation by Channel 4 News and Verbatim. The donor, played by an actor, comments on how cheaply and effectively he can use his money to influence UK newspaper coverage, through the clandestine funding of polls. “£30,000,” he says, as if startled by how cost-effective it all is. “Amazing,” Farage confirms. “Front page of the Times.” They’re boasting about how easy it is to hack the British press in favour of a political party. They’ve put a price tag on it.

In the weeks since the Channel 4 sting, we have rightly talked a lot about how it reflects on Farage and Reform. But we have spoken much less, or not at all, about how it reflects on the British polling industry, British journalism, and the space in which they come together. The sting revealed that for a relatively small sum of money a PR campaign - political or otherwise - can secure the front page of a leading national newspaper with their chosen message.

The polling industry at least had the decency to be mortified. The newspapers involved - the Times and the Telegraph - barely even mentioned it. They deleted the stories they once carried, buried all mention of their role in the ensuing scandal, and then acted like it never took place. Didn’t learn a thing. Didn’t apologise for a thing. Didn’t change a thing.

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Here’s what happened in the Channel 4 sting. Undercover reporters posing as donors reached out to Reform and were quickly introduced to figures high up the hierarchy - first James Orr, a supposed theologian, and then Dan Jukes, a young Farage aide. Both of them acted like the consigliere of an incoming Farage government.

They are caught on camera enacting a plan in which they take donations from the foreign donor and effectively launder them through the purchasing of various opinion polls, which are then used to spread Reform’s message in the press. They do this through James Johnson, cofounder of polling company JL Partners.

In the secretly-taken videos, Johnson clearly states that he took the contract from Reform, kept the identity of his client secret, and then promoted the polls himself to a newspaper without revealing that they were commissioned and paid for by the very people the polling benefitted.

“I think there’s a little bit of informal rule bending that we did with our last one,” he says. He then goes on to describe something that is not rule bending, but in fact the shattering of basic principles. “When we published those results we should have disclosed who the client was. Basically the way that that worked…. was Dan [Jukes] gave me a call and said: ‘Look we want to do this polling of councils to show X’... We came back and then we just went and did it.”

This poll was later reported by the Telegraph on its front page, without any mention of the fact that it was funded by Reform. In fact, the copy, which has now been deleted by the newspaper, read: “according to polling for the Telegraph”. The undercover reporter asks Johnson about this. Why did they claim it as their own? Johnson replies: “It’s classic right? It’s that kind of like: ‘I’ve got a good story for you here.’ For them, it’s copy… ‘Can we call it an exclusive’?’ Yeah, brilliant.”

The undercover reporter replies: “And it’s better than them going and saying ‘commissioned by Dan Jukes’.”

“Yeah well indeed. I mean, that’s never going to happen, because we’d never let that happen.”

“And in fact they don’t even know that right?”

“No, no, exactly. They would never know that. God no.”

From this we learn several things. First, that Johnson is confessing to keeping the identity of the person who funded the poll secret. This contravenes Section 2.1 of the British Polling Council’s Objects And Rules, which states that: “All data and research findings made on the basis of social or political polls conducted in the United Kingdom by member organisations that enter the public domain, must include reference to the… client commissioning the survey”.

It is also against the pretty much entire motivating spirit of the Market Research Society’s Code of Conduct, which demands that members “ensure that their professional activities can be understood in a transparent manner”.

His comments about the Telegraph reveal two things. First, that it did not know that the polling was funded by Reform. So the newspaper is not guilty of assisting in the alleged deception, but in fact seems to have been deceived itself. However, it did participate in a little deception of its own, telling readers that it was “polling for the Telegraph”.

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The polling technique seems to have two purposes. First, it allows foreign donations to reach Reform through the funding of opinion polls. Secondly, it turns British opinion polling into a political weapon.

The undercover reporters later speak with Dan Jukes, after another poll has been published in the Telegraph without any mention of who funded it. He describes his relationship with Johnson as “a really, really discreet one”. What does that mean? Anonymity. “If you read it, it was completely hands off, fingerprints off. And yet… it was a big story in the Telegraph on page six, on the top left of the Telegraph as well, which stood up the public support for our slogan”.

That last part is key. This type of polling is being designed to corroborate Reform messaging. There is no suggestion it is inaccurate or even sloppily conducted - as far as we can tell the polls were methodologically sound and accurately reflected public sentiment at the time. It’s just that they were selected and pitched in the most useful way for Reform. No-one would trust a poll funded by Reform itself, but they will trust one by a polling company or a newspaper.

“Those little clandestine projects are so valuable for the sake of four and a half grand,” Jukes said. “I can’t tell you how useful they are.”

Even when polls are not specifically tailored to a Reform campaign, they help the party by providing a sense of electoral inevitability. For nearly two years, Reform was soaring at the top of the polls, averaging results in the low 30s. This allowed them to make a compelling case that they were a government in waiting. Farage started doing weekly press conferences, surrounded by the mock-up gravitas of government, as if poised to enter Downing Street. Journalists covered the party with breathless abandon.

This was not just useful to Reform in terms of its future success, it allowed it to try to change policy in the here and now, despite only having a handful of MPs. In July last year, deputy Reform leader Richard Tice wrote a letter to energy company bosses. “Reform UK is now leading in the national opinion polls,” he said. “A future government led by Nigel Farage is now more likely than not.” He then warned them not to take part in clean energy auctions. “I am writing to put you and your investors on formal notice,” he said, before making it clear that a future Reform government would rip up contracts signed under the existing Labour government.

The letter was an attempt to use Reform’s polling advantage to destroy the Net Zero agenda.

What’s being revealed here is a complex network of financial and political aims. Sure, the polling served to conceal funding streams. But it also acted to secure concrete political outcomes away from any kind of transparency or democratic oversight. This dual financial and ideological role is very common to populist movements. As I wrote back in spring after the fall of Viktor Orban:

“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.”

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We know how Reform operate and we know what they want. But we have spent very little time looking at what this story reveals about polling and journalism. It is now very clear that they are vulnerable to populist manipulation. They are exposed.

How has this happened? As usual, the internet is to blame.

First, it removed barriers to entry. Until relatively recently, polling was a difficult business to get into, because it involved a lot of capital. You needed banks of people on the telephone doing research, or to send out knocking on doors. Now it doesn’t really take any capital at all, just a laptop, some software, and a little bit of money to buy respondents from a third party. All sorts of little bespoke companies now pop up, some of them with questionable credentials.

Simultaneously, the internet destroyed journalism’s financial model, because it made the product free and slashed advertising revenue. This meant that newspapers had less money to commission polls themselves and instead began to rely on other organisations to fund the polls which they would cover.

It also had a broader effect on the quality of polling coverage. Journalists who used to write one story a day now write half a dozen. Specialist editors were gradually let go and replaced by generalists. Most journalists now simply have no idea how to intelligently appraise a poll. They don’t understand, or do not care, about how certain questions can prime a respondent to answer in a particular way. They do not know the difference between sampling, where you try to control the demographic mix of respondents ahead of a poll, and weighting, where you get a mass of results and then weigh them to be demographically representative after a poll.

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Political polling also has a weird financial tension within it. Clients come asking for polls and they usually have something they want those polls to conclude. Take the Brexit era. If a Remain organisation came up to you, they would prefer a poll that says that the public have changed their mind about Brexit and want to stay in the EU. If a Leave organisation comes up to you they want one that says the opposite. The same for charities and pressure groups - they want a poll that chimes with their goals, whether it’s about rent controls, animal cruelty, assisted dying or whatever else.

So the client would ideally like the methodological discipline of the polling company to be as lax as possible. Good rigorous methodology is also more expensive than bad methodology. So there are two specific financial incentives which act to lower standards.

Given that this is the case, why haven’t polling standards collapsed entirely? Part of the reason is cultural. Pollsters - especially for the big companies like YouGov or Ipsos Mori - are generally serious conscientious people, the type of person who loses sleep at night about defects in their weighting models. Generally speaking, they care that they are doing a good job. They want to provide utility. They base their professional and personal pride on the quality of the work they produce.

Another part of the reason is economic. The clients who want shoddy data are usually the ones who contribute the least financially. They want four questions on whatever policy they support showing that the public love it so they can wrap it into a press release. It’s probably worth a couple of grand. You can’t base your business strategy on clients like that.

The real money in polling comes from clients who want decent data. This is primarily commercial clients - pension funds, major companies releasing consumer products, and so on. But it also includes public sector bodies, academics and think tanks. It’s no use to a toothpaste company if you give them crap data - they need solid research so they can market their product effectively. It’s no use to researchers if they cannot guarantee the quality of the empirical base they are resting their study on.

If pollsters did what pressure groups wanted, they would eventually undermine their credibility, which would make it harder for them to secure the contracts which pay the serious money.

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What concerns me about this arrangement is that this funding situation may now change. And the reason it could change is because of these new megawatt Reform donations.

Reform is now awash with money, on a scale well beyond anything we have seen in British politics. It has secured massive donations from hyper wealthy figures in crypto, like Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, who last week donated a total of £72 million to the party, on top of their previous contributions.

In policy terms, the effects are obvious. Reform has hardly any fleshed out policy, but on crypto it has a strikingly detailed set of very specific ideas - abandoning work on a digital pound, cutting tax on crypto profits, establishing a bitcoin reserve fund, and so on. This all comes from a party which literally does not even have a defence spokesperson.

In electoral terms, it means that Reform now has more money than any party in the history of British democracy. In the last full quarter alone, Reform received four times as much as all the other political parties combined. And that provides a dangerous new incentive in the polling industry.

There is a limit to the damage, in that there’s only so much national polling you can do. But the party could start funding constituency polling and focus groups - there’s more than enough cash to do so and they both cost quite a bit of money. Gradually the incentives on polling companies could start to change. We know how this works, because it has happened in the US. Across the Atlantic there are very wealthy pollsters who service only Democrat or Republican clients.

When we say that American levels of money will create American style politics, this is the kind of thing we’re talking about.

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How do we stop it?

Polling currently operates according to two codes with separate enforcement procedures. One lies with the British Polling Council and the other lies with the Market Research Society.

The British Polling Council was a kind of pact which pollsters entered into because they wanted long term transparent rules for their own industry. It became a mark of respectability. This is mainly because its former president was John Curtis, who has this odd and - let’s be honest - really rather silly messiah reputation in news broadcasting, like a kind of psephological Gandalf. Journalists therefore learned to look out for a polling company’s membership of the British Polling Council as proof of its credibility. The current president is professor Jane Green, who is also held in very high regard.

But actually the British Polling Council code is pretty limited. It covers transparency, but not methodology. You could write your poll in crayon and frame the question ‘Andy Burnham eats children, do you support Andy Burnham’ and you will still be OK under the code as long as you release the data transparently. As the Council itself states: “We do not have a remit to police polling methodology, and for this reason members are not allowed to use BPC membership as any form of quality accreditation.”

The Market Research Society, on the other hand, has a more thorough set of requirements. It does have rules on methodology and wording, albeit fairly vague. Rule 28 insists that “participants are not led toward a particular point of view” and that responses are “capable of being interpreted in an unambiguous way”. Rule 64 insists that if a client “incorrectly or misleadingly” reports a poll, the polling company must “refuse permission for the client to use the member’s name further in connection with the incorrect or misleading published findings” and “correct any incorrect or misleading reporting”.

The most important thing that can happen now is firm action from these two bodies. Both of them have undertaken an investigation into Johnson. It really is important that cases like this are handled quickly and decisively.

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Polling at least has a community of people who are fiercely committed to maintaining standards. See for instance this very good newsletter by Mark Pack in the wake of the scandal. Journalists, on the other hand, are seemingly incapable of asking searching questions about their own industry.

JL Partners polls in the Channel 4 sting were published by the Times and the Telegraph, in extremely prominent positions. There is no indication that these newspapers knew the polls were funded by Reform. In fact it seems very likely they did not, given that Johnson said: “They would never know that.”

Both newspapers leapt on this to defend themselves from any kind of blame. In its statement to Channel 4, the Times said: “The Times was not made aware of Reform’s involvement in commissioning and arranging payment of the poll.” The Telegraph said: “We are reviewing our future relationship with this polling company as we believe we have been misled.”

But when it came to discussing their own role in the story, the newspapers suddenly became coy. As Private Eye pointed out this week, the Telegraph mentioned it on the 34th paragraph of a story on page four - a world away from the prominent front page position it gave the poll itself last January. The Times at least put the scandal on the front page, but the news story did not mention its own role at all - it was left to a Fraser Nelson column on page 21 to reveal the paper’s involvement in what went on, followed by a brief furtive mention in a leader column. Both papers deleted all evidence of the original stories from their websites.

If this had been about the BBC promoting polls secretly funded by the Labour party, all hell would have broken loose. It would have triggered weeks of damning coverage by the papers, dominating the news agenda to the exclusion of all other matters, and probably leading to the resignation of the director general. But when it concerns the right-wing press, they just bury it like nothing had happened. No-one ever speaks about it again.

The fact that the papers were misled is entirely true. But it is also true that they do not seem to have asked about the funding of the poll.

In one sense, this is entirely normal. I’m not a reporter - columnists are basically tourists in the world of current affairs - but for what it’s worth I wouldn’t have asked about the funding either. If someone from a polling company called me up to tell me about a poll and did not mention who had funded or commissioned it I would have assumed that it came from the pollster themselves, because that is literally always the case. It’s likely that this is what the Times and Telegraph did.

Fair enough. But we can evidently no longer trust in that to be the case and will have to be more careful in future. The burying of the press’ involvement means we will not learn those lessons.

We need a much better understanding about how journalists should evaluate the validity of polls. We need to ensure we know who funded and commissioned the poll before publishing it. We should only treat a pollster seriously if it is a member of both the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society. And we should have some kind of basic grounding in polling methodology, including leading questions, priming, order effect, the role of ‘don’t know’, sampling, weighting, and so on.

We are in a uniquely dangerous position here. By and large, polling has an honourable track record. Fundamentally, it is conducted by decent people trying to do the right thing with a financial model that rewards their best instincts. But now the Reform money is coming. A great wave of it. And the party has demonstrated that it is prepared to use money to corrode the basic standards of the society it operates in.

Pollsters and journalists should be alive to that threat. Seeing the response of many polling experts in the last few weeks suggests that they are nervous about what is happening and keen to mitigate against it. Seeing the response of journalists, which has been basically non-existent, suggests the precise opposite.

That moment in the Channel 4 video - “£30,000… Front page of the Times” - should haunt everyone in this industry. The fact it has been barely mentioned is damning.

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 column for the i paper was on the good people of Piddington, who voted to leave the UK, and why we should robustly encourage them to do precisely that. Read it here.

Our Origin Story Live at the Union Chapel is out now as a podcast, where we tell the story of the Daily Telegraph and the general intellectual and editorial decline of the British conservative press. You can listen to it here.

This week’s report to Late Night Live in Australia is about Ed Miliband’s decision to bar trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Donald Trump’s halfwitted intervention in Ireland. You can listen to it here.

While I was away I read The North Waters by Ian McGuire - a mean, vicious, bleak little literary thriller about a Victorian whaling ship in the Arctic and the absolute copper-bottomed bastards who populate it. It’s stark and brittle, with a proper viciousness to it. If you took out all the sections talking about bodily fluids you could fill 20 pages. I loved it.

Right, that’s your lot folks - see you next week. Fuck off.

Andrew Winfield

What 5 books were landmarks in your reading history and why?

This list is definitely not right, but off the top of my head:

Two Cheers for Anarchism, James C. Scott

Many anarchist writers are abstract, esoteric and weirdly unconcerned with people’s natural behaviour, but I find Scott to be a completely different kind of animal. He’s funny, humane, utterly averse to dogmatism of any kind, and full of wisdom. Several of his ideas in this book have stayed with me indefinitely. The first was the need to regularly practice non-conformity, training your resistance to the crowd almost like a muscle. The second was his celebration of the petite bourgeoisie, the class which is patronised by capitalists and detested by socialists but which shows a fierce determination for freedom, for instance through shop owning. And the third was for an ‘anarchist squint’ - a way of looking at the world and history that resists hierarchical power relations. It’s short and very brilliant.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

Sorry, I know it’s obvious. The political impact is patent - I suspect that it is so far-reaching that I am unable to know where it begins or ends. But what I want to mention here is that it had a massive influence on how I write. I’m not talking here of Orwell’s rules on writing, but about the style he deploys in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the fake book within the book. Something about the style of those sections completely overcame me in my 20s and now I emulate that voice when I am writing books in the real world - especially How to be a Liberal and How Westminster Works. I want it to feel as if you’re picking up an artifact which explains the mysteries of the world. I find it a really thrilling and pacy way to ground a long piece of writing. So yes, my literary career, such as it is, is really just copying O’Brien.

A Room with a View, EM Forster

Forster is my favourite writer but this is not my favourite of his books. It was just the first. It delved into my mind and started reorganising the furniture in there. The central idea in any Forster novel is that people are complicated and lovable. He very rarely takes against one of his characters or condemns them. In this case, it is Charlotte Bartlett who made the greatest impression on me. She is presented at first as a scold and a snob, but gradually he reveals much greater depths and sensitivities. Forster is in love with humanity and reading him makes you a better person. That process started for me with this book.

Levels of Life, Julian Barnes

Barnes wrote this after the death of his wife. I can’t make head or tail of the first two sections, but the third, when he spends perhaps 50 pages talking of grief, is perhaps the most beautiful contemporary writing I’ve ever read. Barely a week goes by without me thinking of it. As you get into your 40s, you deal with death a lot, sometimes weekly, usually through the passing of your friends’ parents. I became much better at being the friend of a grieving person because of this book. This means being able to confront the topic of death: do not try to escape it, never ignore it if they want to talk about it, do not try to make it practical or break it down into operational tasks. Sit with your friend as they face the void. There are many terrible things about getting older, but one of the good things is the chance to be there for the people you love. Barnes really helped me with that.

A Useful History of Britain: The Politics of Getting Things Done, Michael Braddick

Ignore the terrible title and front cover. Braddick’s book fundamentally changed the way I see history and politics. In any normal world it would be considered one of the grand works of historical theory. It is essentially the application of path dependency to political history - the Viking invasions lead to the danegeld which establishes regular taxation which contributes to a centralised state and so on. Reading it felt like you’d been presented with a truth so obvious you couldn’t believe you hadn’t recognised it before - the mark of a truly groundbreaking idea. I realised afterwards I had entrenched it deep in the way I look at history.

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Anon

Hi Ian, political parties aside, do you think Scotland has a right to be an Independent country?

Obviously. Everyone does. That’s what the referendum was - a demonstration of the self-determination of Scots and their right to form an independent state. But the thing is: independence campaigners lost. I personally have a pretty low bar for when there should be another referendum - I think it’s been satisfied by having pro-independence parties secure a majority. But there is a strong counter-argument that you cannot simply relitigate this decision every four years until you get the result you want - those votes have to be a once in a lifetime moment.

Something fucking weird has happened to supporters of Scottish independence online. They act as if that vote never took place. They talk about Scots the same way that gender critical activists talk about women - as if they represent all of them as a homogenous mass. But in fact, many women support trans rights and many Scots - a majority - voted against independence. Those who want an independent Scotland would do better preparing the ground with those who rejected them last time rather than inventing some imaginary tyranny in London keeping them in bondage. The only reason Scotland is still part of the UK is because most Scots wanted it to remain that way. There should perhaps be a little more effort to respect their wishes as well as those of the other side.

Anon

Do you think it’s possible to drive charisma out of politics? (Assuming its a benefit) Lewis Goodall recently on the News Agents described Farage as having ’sparkle’. Commentators lament the lack of a Thatcher or a Blair. Personally I’d like my politicians to be totally boring - but very committed to public service and really really good at doing it.

I am also suspicious of charisma but I think the last few months have been a comprehensive demonstration that it is an undeniable part of what makes a successful political leader.

It’s such an obvious point, isn’t it? Leaders must be charismatic. But sometimes political obsessives spend so much time thinking about the subject that we forget the most basic conclusions.

We went from a leader who could not communicate with the public to one who could. That is a basic distinction. Starmer looked like he was desperate for the camera to go away, like he feared it. Burnham looks like he wants it on him, like he is basking in it. Starmer was emotionally distant, unknowable, somehow false. Burnham is emotionally present, empathetic, seemingly authentic.

Charisma isn’t everything. If you secure the right to be heard but have nothing to say, or say the wrong thing, then it is pointless. It is a necessary but insufficient condition of successful political leadership. I’ve made a bit of a silent commitment to myself not to forget this lesson in future, no matter how much I want to pretend that a candidate I like can work out.

CapriPAN

Are we seeing a pattern develop from the Burnham government, small limited actions that are not likely to effect the major change promised. Headline grabbing but no real change and Growth Britain oh dear!

I don’t accept this at all and I wish people had a little more patience. What we are seeing is a combination of restraint, preparation, sequencing difficulties and genuine ambition. Calling for the moon on a stick within weeks of Burnham getting into power is just counter-productive.

On restraints: Burnham has many of the same restraints as his predecessor. Some of these exist independently of the Labour party. The bond market is at our neck - it’s at everyone’s neck, but ours looks the most vulnerable. There’s lots of reasons for that, but it is real and it has not changed simply because there’s a new PM. Other constraints are imposed by Labour but are not really Burnham’s fault. Promising no rise in income tax, national insurance or VAT makes this situation much harder. But having made that pledge at the last election, I can see why Burnham feels he is still stuck with it now.

This is why chancellor John Healey made a speech this week which was virtually indistinguishable from those made by Rachel Reeves - because he needs to reassure the bond markets. They trusted Reeves - just about - and he needs them to trust him too. It must be this way until the situation improves. And depressing as it is, it is far less depressing than seeing Labour trigger a bond market massacre, which will see them out of power for decades. If you want a Reform government, fucking this up would be the quickest way to get it.

Burnham also needs time to put together a set of proposals for how to change the country - the ten year plan. It is better that this is done carefully and diligently, with proper input from friendly think tanks, than that it is done fast and sloppy only to fall apart upon contact with reality. He used fairly superficial minor pledges - taxes on pubs, bus tickets - in order to create a narrative that bought him time for that preparation.

In some cases, time itself makes certain policies impossible. This is the sequencing problem. Take stamp duty. Everyone hates this tax - right, left, centre, economists and politicians. It would be much better to replace it and council tax with a land-value tax. But it takes time to prepare for how you would do that. It’s really fucking complicated. And during that time you cannot say that you are doing it. If Burnham announced that he was scrapping stamp duty now, he would single-handedly kill the property market. Why would anyone buy a home when they might be able to do so in a few months time for much less money? So he has to deny it, and by denying it, he kills his chance to do it - or can only do it by explicitly lying to the public. It’s a mess and one which it is hard to solve.

Finally, there are areas where Burnham is making major ambitious commitments. He has made a commitment to end rough sleeping. He has made a commitment to fix social care. And he has said that he will present a bundle of political reforms which include electoral reform. That is fucking massive. If he did these three things alone it would be considered one of the most consequential administrations of the post-war period. And yet still people are yawning and pretending he’s just more of the same disappointment. It’s mad.

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Steve Tilley

There are 120 comments now so apologies if this appears earlier. Matthew D’Ancona wrote a thought-provoking piece in The New World last week about the importance of being a reader. I am a reader but have to ‘curate’ what I read carefully to balance challenge and comfort. Roughly speaking I manage a book a week, a daily paper and two weeklies. What’s your regime like?

Stephen Long

You write a lot. What’s that process like for you? Do you have a routine? Do you focus well? How do you begin a piece and how do you finish it? That’s four questions. Is that ok? (Now it’s five.)

I think the main thing for work - whatever that work entails - is finding a time that works for you and preserving it at all costs. For me that is between 6am and lunch, which I can stretch out to 2pm if I snack thoughtfully. This is the period that I write or read, and do so intensely. After I eat, it’s game over. I am useless. And by that I mean useless for anything. I’m too knackered to do admin. If I try to read, I fall asleep. My writing is uninspired. I’ve spent years trying to do something useful with this time. My current solution is to go to the gym - it feels awful, but at least it’s useful and you can grind your way through it. I then get another modest burst of energy around 4pm, which lasts a couple of hours.

Obviously this is the kind of thing you can do as a freelancer. Before you feel jealous, bear in mind that there are many penalties to being a freelancer - permanent anxiety around work, effectively paying double for holidays, no employer help with pension etc. So we are entitled to the good bits, which are control over your timetable and the literally invaluable quality of not having a boss.

Almost all my useful reading for work - either Origin Story or research for a book - takes place in that early morning period. The number of books is irrelevant. At the start of a topic for Origin Story, I read very slowly - one book can take weeks. This is because I don’t know what the narrative is yet or what I want to focus on. Once I do know that, I start ploughing through books, because I’m able to scan the bits I don’t need looking for the bits I do.

I also read several newspapers, magazines and newsletters - the i paper, the Guardian, the FT, the Times, the Politico newsletter, Substacks by Sam/Lawrence Freedman, Jonn Elledge, Christina Pagel, Paul Mason and Marie le Conte. The magazines are mostly for fun: the TLS, What HiFi (this gives me more joy than you might sensibly imagine), Edge, Private Eye, Empire. It’s mostly nerd stuff, but I learn more about writing good, clear, precise copy from What HiFi and Edge than I do most newspapers.

My reading for pleasure is made up almost entirely of comics and takes place on the weekend. This is my favourite part of the week and I think it’s important, as a form of self-care. I get through between one and three trades per weekend - each takes between one and five hours. If I don’t like the comic, I read it quickly. If I love it, I read it very slowly. Comics reading is very different to novels in that way. But the really key thing about this is that my phone is another room and I am entirely present in the moment, for a good long period of several hours, reading without purpose except my own sense of joy and relaxation.

I know it’s hard - with kids and work and partners and admin and all that. But I do think that people who enjoy reading should have at least one moment in the week when they do so, for hours, without distraction, for their own pleasure and no other reason.

James Harris

We’re a similar age, and you’ve written very nicely about the adjustment to middle age and its attendant losses. But, putting your optimist’s hat on, what have you found to be the positive sides of that particular transition?

I’m flattered by this, because James is very brilliant on this subject. My answer is basic, but I think it is basic because it is a great fundamental truth of successfully getting older which has therefore faded into cliche. It’s to be comfortable with yourself and therefore with not being liked by everyone.

I’ve always had a lot of friends and I have always had a lot of people who really dislike me. In school and at work, I was usually popular with the people immediately around me and unpopular with the people in my vicinity who were not immediately around me - in other classes or years, at other desks in the same office.

In particular I am reliably disliked by a certain type of man. I suspect that this is because I am socially confident but would probably lose in a fight. There’s a kind of guy who cannot get past that and who feels affronted by a world in which both these things could be true at the same time. One of the best things about getting older is having enough social proof of who you are to be genuinely unbothered by this kind of guy. You clock them pretty quickly - it’s in the eyes.

Another part is knowing when to draw the line. One of the great struggles of life is finding the right balance between being open and welcoming while still maintaining the confidence to be rough with someone who is being rude. When you are in a happy open state, it can feel utterly unnatural to suddenly pull someone up. It’s like you have tempted yourself into a position where you cannot draw a line.

People who want to bring you down will often use this to slowly chip away at you with disparaging comments, or by using the cover of friendly piss-taking to diminish your status. But the older you are, the better you are at holding a space, looking them in the eye and making it clear that you know what they are doing. It is boring, it is tiring and it should not be necessary. Confident men do not undermine the social status of others. But it is a thing that happens and it is important not to let them do it to you.

It is really hard to find the middle ground between sociopathy and being afraid of conflict. The people who hate conflict let people walk all over them. Those who love conflict basically turn into bullies. Being an empathetic person who nevertheless will stand up to a bully is difficult. It is a skill. You are not born with it. You have to learn it. Maybe you never perfect it, but it is what you strive to become. I’m much better at it now than I was in my 20s when I kind of bounced between being too generous and too mean.

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Ben R

Best train station to waste time waiting for a 45min connection in?

The objectively correct answer to this question is Gare de Lyon, because it has Le Train Bleu in it, which is hands down the most beautiful restaurant anyone ever put in a train station and perhaps the single best demonstration of the virtues of the French personality.

Ian Miles

Why does beer taste better from a cold bottle?

I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it’s because beer is not really one drink but many, and that the way this drink operates depends on the context in which it is drunk. I do not want to sit down with a mate after work and drink lager in a bottle. But I am currently on holiday in a hot country and I do not want a pint of a session IPA. I want something crisp and light and refreshing in a cold bottle. Actually, I might order one right now.

Beer, more than whisky or wine, is context specific. But I think the moments we drink it in a bottle stay with us because they are when we are at our happiest - on holiday, with family, in the sun, in the middle of a day that stretches into forever.

Anon

What’s the most important lesson you’ve taken away from the Origin Story podcasts and books?

I think the core lesson for me is about extent of sympathy - both for people and ideas.

When I was in university, we were taught to learn about an idea sympathetically. To open yourself up to it, try to understand it, want to be convinced by it. Then later you would read criticisms and tease it apart and look for flaws.

In my career, there is necessarily a very different approach. Partly that is a result of how fucking dreadful our opponents have become. There is no point adopting this generous approach to a welfare policy by Reform, for instance. It is not meant to work. It is not serious. So opening yourself up to it hands them a degree of legitimacy they do not deserve. It allows them to manipulate mainstream debate towards hatred and ignorance.

But it is also a product of the fact that I am basically a professional opinion-haver. When you write a column you are asked to hold a firm opinion on a subject often very soon after an event. You can obviously caveat, you can dilute, you can balance out competing arguments, but the reality is that no-one buys newspapers to read opinion writers who say: ‘well, on the one hand this and on the other hand that’. So my natural instinct is towards decisive appraisals.

Dorian is a much more generous human being than I am. He is less interested in judging people and ideas and much more interested in understanding how they reached their views - what happened to them in life, who were they debating with, what were the arguments in their time period, what were their loyalties and anxieties?

If Origin Story had two versions of me, it would be hectoring and dull - two bald men calling everyone a cunt. The reason it is more intellectually nutritious than that is because Dorian has stamped his personality onto it and made it much more empathetic and less judgemental. But hopefully my preference towards judgement and showing clear moral lines prevents it from becoming too wishy-washy, or BBC-like, or academic. It maintains a firm editorial voice, even if that voice is open to the motivations and complexity of the people who populate the stories we tell. The podcast is a combination of two approaches and that is why it works.

My main lesson is to constantly try to find that line - between empathy and judgement - when all I really want to do is call everyone a cunt.

Right, that’s it for this third edition of Ask Me Anything. No odds and sods today, or podcast, but normal service resumes next Friday. Question of the Week goes to James Harris, because I had to think about it really quite hard. He now gets a year’s free paid subscription to Striking 13. This gives him access to all the content which is reserved for paid subscribers, which is nothing, and to the full range of my paid subscription benefits, which do not exist.

Now everyone fuck off. I’m going to drink that beer.

On three separate occasions this week, Kemi Badenoch proved herself to be of insufficient stature for the era in which she operates. Perhaps, in some other distant time, when circumstances were more benign, she would have been a tolerable continuation of the conservative political heritage. But then, if times were really more benign, I doubt she would ever have become Tory leader in the first place. Her presence in our political culture is suggestive of a deep national malaise.

These three occasions each represent different kinds of failure - of management, comprehension and policy-making. But fundamentally they are all basically about being a halfwit. If Badenoch was smarter, and if British conservatives in general were more astute, none of these events would have occurred.

Badenoch behaves like a woman presented with the novel Ulysses after years of watching Paw Patrol. Maybe she would have been able to decipher it once, but that period has long since passed. She has muddled her brain terribly. What was once solid has been turned to mush and now she can only blink, mute and uncomprehending, at the front cover.

It’s been so long since British right-wingers thought clearly and specifically about economic policy that they have literally forgotten how to do it. So instead they cross their fingers and hope for financial armageddon - a swift transfer into power on the back of the country’s ruin. Or they hand senior roles to people with a proven track record of failure because they’re good on X. Or they put together fictitious bric-a-brac economic policy, composed of units which they know have no true mathematical bearing, in a furtive demonstration which they hope will convince the public of their rectitude.

A fucking embarrassment really. A humiliation. And a particularly pernicious one, because this Labour administration, like the last, shows signs of crucifying itself on the gap between what is politically sayable and what is objectively required. We really do need an official opposition which can be surgical, pragmatic, and reality-based. But that is not the opposition we have. We have a moron and her little moron circus.

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On Monday, Badenoch reshuffled her top team. Some choices were welcome - it’s good to see Tom Tugendhat in a front bench role, I suppose, although at this point it is impossible to raise any excitement for supposed Tory moderates. They are so morally lethargic that an expression of hope would be an exercise in faith rather than optimism.

Most choices were terrible. Badenoch replaced Mel Stride, a perfectly competent fiscal conservative who largely avoided culture war attacks, with Andrew Griffiths, who was a junior Treasury minister during the Liz Truss mini-Budget debacle.

Most of the commentary around this appointment - mine included - centred on the presentational incompetence. Badenoch has effectively handed a Labour minister a no-effort-required victory every time they debate her chancellor. It really doesn’t matter what they do. They could burn kittens on Whitehall but they’ll still beat him in the ensuing Newsnight debate. All they have to say is that they’ll ‘take no lectures’ about economics from the man who broke the British economy. Job done.

Griffith’s role was not coincidental, as Badenoch tried to imply. The Budget was the consequence of the ideology he has promoted throughout his adult life. Before becoming a minister, Griffith was chairman of the advisory board at the Centre for Policy Studies, a free market think tank. He made the case for shrinking the state, aggressive tax cuts and supply-side growth. This was precisely what the Budget aimed to achieve. He has never disavowed this economic philosophy

Sure, you can say that the ensuing gilt crisis was less the result of ideology than it was of methodology, and perhaps you’d be right. The mini-Budget was implemented through a series of maneuvers which seemed almost calculated to remove market confidence: sacking the permanent secretary to the Treasury, excluding the Office for Budget Responsibility from preparation, and cutting taxes at scale without a credible funding plan.

The trouble is that Griffith has never offered a single procedural lesson from what went wrong. There is no single piece of writing or spoken commentary I can find in which he shows a lesson learned from those torrid days in 2022. There is not one admission of failure or suggestion on what to improve next time. In fact, if anything, his commentary has become more aggressively laissez faire. The man fucked us all, learned nothing, apologised for nothing, changed nothing, and has now been invited right back into the shadow Cabinet to hopefully do it again.

This is the Badenoch approach further down the ministerial pecking order. Her only motivating force seems to be the promotion of anyone who proves popular with right-wingers online. That, after all, was how she secured her own position. It is now how she has structured the party’s incentive structure, from the top to the bottom. It’s how she ended up defending a former neo-Nazi as a Tory councillor - because he made popular right-wing AI slop videos online. And it’s how she made Katie Lam shadow housing minister.

Lam is another hero to the online right, because she makes unconscionably tedious videos about immigration using beans in jars, like some sort of wehrmacht primary school teacher. You’ll notice that the online right is no longer even any good at spotting what makes a good video. The deadened quality of her voice is matched only by the soulless gaze of her eyes, like someone trying to gaze out through a brick wall.

In 2025, Lam told the Sunday Times that “a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so” would “need to go home” and that this would ultimately leave behind “a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people”. Evidently she’d left her dog whistle somewhere in the other room and couldn’t be bothered to find it. It was very clear what she meant, something not much less than a racial mass deportation programme - and one based on retrospective application of the law rather than any kind of orderly legislative process.

Badenoch fell apart. It’s sometimes hard to notice because her every action is so foolish, but here you could see the accident taking place quite vividly right in front of your eyes. First the Tories said Lam’s statements were”broadly in line” with party policy and then that she had spoken “imprecisely”. Badenoch clearly had no idea what her own policy was. Instead of learning from the incident, she committed to it and promoted Lam. It’s hard to imagine what she would have had to do to win a demotion.

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In the background of events this week, bad things were happening. It was barely noticed by most British commentators, but the world had a wobble.

There was a global bond selloff, an international expression of a fundamental lack of confidence. Why was it happening? Not entirely clear. There are fears around the latest round of violence between the US and Iran, with associated concern around the Strait of Hormuz and the impact on energy prices. There are also worries around US financial authority, in particular with Fed Reserve chair Kevin Warsh, and gathering evidence of a more hawkish approach to inflation. Most troublingly of all, in an oh-fuck-we’re-in-the-shit-now-boys kinda way, there seems to be general anxiety around the levels of debt being sustained by developed economies.

It hit a lot of countries: Ten year gilt yields surged in the US, France, Italy, Australia, Germany and particularly Japan. But just because something is global does not mean it hits all countries equally. Each time this sort of thing happens, the UK seems to experience the pain in a particularly acute form.

UK ten-year gilt yields hit nearly 5.2%, the highest level since 2008. Why? Because we remain reliant on foreign energy, we have a wrecked fiscal status-quo as a result of Brexit and Truss, and there is a market recognition that the government’s promises on tax cannot be aligned with its promises on spending.

Certainly it’s a symbol of British governance failure over several decades. But what it isn’t is a response to Andy Burnham walking into parliament. And yet this - madly, inevitably - was how British conservatives tried to present it. They were hoping for a market panic when he entered Downing Street and didn’t get it. Now, they hoped that his return to Westminster after recess would somehow trigger a bond market.

The Telegraph front page headline read: “Bond markets turn on Burnham”. The rest of the article is borderline sensible, although arguably more cynical. It is the product of people who know exactly what they’re doing. Look at how they go to work: “Andy Burnham’s Commons debut as prime minister on Tuesday was overshadowed by a market rout that sent borrowing costs to their highest in decades,” the first paragraph read - carefully associating the bond market moves with Burnham without actually stating that there is a causal relationship.

“Government borrowing costs around the world have climbed sharply in recent weeks, amid concerns about unsustainable debts and persistent inflation,” it admitted, “however, Britain suffered the biggest increase in bond yields in the G7 on Tuesday and economists warned that investors were nervous ahead of Mr Burnham’s first Budget”. Look closely and you can almost see the joins. First, an admission of the global economic reality, then a highlighting of the UK’s uniquely exposed position and finally a surreptitious attempt to suggest culpability by innuendo. Not one word in that piece could possibly justify the headline.

But to get lost in the tortured logic of the copy is to miss the point. The purpose of the article is the headline, in huge letters, to be displayed in supermarkets and newsagents: “Bond markets turn on Burnham”. Doesn’t matter if it’s true. Just slap it on the front of the paper and hope for the best.

The Conservative lept on this. “The markets are clearly worried that we now have a spendthrift prime minister,” Badenoch announced at PMQs. Tory MP Jack Rankin joined in. “Over the summer, the markets were clearly anxious when he failed to articulate the fiscal rules... In his statement yesterday, he waxed lyrical about a decade when we had a three-day week and blackouts - presumably because he liked the music. But we now know what the international capital markets have made of that.” The Tory benches were practically salivating at the possibility of bond market trouble.

There is just no seriousness here at all. No even vaguely sensible commentator - in the press or in parliament - would look at what is happening in the world and conclude that it is the result of Andy Burnham. No even vaguely sensible commentator would be prepared to say so without dying of embarrassment. And yet they do - loudly, unashamedly, and with no sense of risk to their personal reputation.

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Same applies to Badenoch’s ‘costed’ plans on defence, laid out yesterday, which aim to hit three per cent of GDP on defence by cutting welfare.

I’ve come to truly despise the word ‘costed’. This is partly because it suggests an element of gravity which the policy itself rarely deserves. The Conservatives say the £14 billion cost of the plan would be funded through reform of housing benefit, the restoration of the two-child benefit cap and increased investment from the National Wealth Fund. But Badenoch already announced the restoration of the two-child benefit cap back in April and spoke about the National Wealth Fund approach in December. It wasn’t a new announcement, it was just a new press conference.

The policies themselves are obscene. The two-child benefit cap was a morally repugnant piece of financial engineering when it was introduced by the Coalition and it remains so now. It was unjust on a near-Biblical level, penalising children for the sins of their parents - namely the sin of procreating while poor. We might not love the idea of people having children when they are unable to support them, but whatever else that decision entails it is not the child’s fault. No just society could ever be formed by sabotaging the life chances of children in order to change the reproductive behavior of their parents. And of course, as hardly needs saying, this type of policy simply stores up much greater government spending for ten or twenty years time, when the penalised child is either failing in school or failing to find work

The greatest crime here isn’t moral though, or even presentational. It is a basic lack of seriousness. Yes, we need to increase defence spending. There is a necessary debate about how we find that money. But the best way to tell if someone is an outright cunt is if they say: ‘We’ll fund the defence rise by cutting welfare’.

The politics are attractive obviously. People hate welfare, they like defence spending. And that right there is about the sum total of the mathematical calculation the Westminster mind is prepared to engage in. A bright light goes off in the 20-something mind of an adviser in Tory HQ and - boom - they have a policy. ‘I’ve got it,’ he’ll say. ‘We’ll swap the bad thing for the good thing.’ Look at fucking galaxy brain over here, look at the big brains on this cunt.

Politically it is a very dangerous idea, because it turns an issue on which there is some degree of national consensus - the need to rearm in the face of the Russian threat and a rogue US - into a battering ram to attack the left. The more this idea takes hold, the more progressive voters will see defence spending not as a necessary evil but as a way of hurting the poor. It encourages and validates the instinctive leftist disposition towards pacifism.

Also, and it would be nice if people mentioned this occasionally, it would not work. As the Institute for Government reported, OBR estimates put the money required to hit 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035 at an additional £40 billion. That’s a lot. It’s the Home Office and Ministry of Justice budget combined. It’s two-thirds of the total schools budget. To say the fucking obvious: You are not going to achieve it by restoring the two child benefit cap, no matter how rhetorically appealing it is.

There are two really big pots in the welfare budget that you’d want to use if you were serious about this. The first is the state pension, standing at £146 billion. Then there’s health and disability benefit, standing at £77 billion. Obviously you’d need to take money from both to make it work. Neither the Tories nor Labour have the determination to do so.

It doesn’t really matter, because Badenoch’s plan is not intended to work. It is not even really intended to be implemented. It is intended to give the impression that she has a plan, which corresponds to people’s pre-existing prejudices. It is emblematic of a political culture that values advertising over products, political fixes over practical solutions, and announcements over delivery.

The travesty of this type of announcement is that it infantalises the public. You can see them now, standing by the bar, talking bollocks to their mates, saying that it ‘stands to reason’, that all the government has to do is take the money from those benefit scroungers and use it on defence instead. There you are - problem solved, job done. They’ll never experience the refutation of their argument which a brief contact with reality would entail.

Instead of trying to talk realistically about the trade-offs facing us, Badenoch takes the easier path and reassures voters that all their ignorantly held assumptions are true, as long as they prove useful to her. By doing so, she helps to detach our politics even further from reality. And so our problems continue, unresolved.

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In each one of these instances, you find a British conservatism which has simply given up. It’s not the morality or the ideology really. It’s the basic standards. It’s childlike, utterly simple-minded, transparently self-interested, needy and lacking in any substance.

There is a total lack of productive political ideas coming from the British right. We’re surrounded by genuine problems - bond market volatility, defence instability - and yet there’s no reasonable conservative argument about them, just some piss-stained blather and hyperventilating bullshit. It leaves Labour - whose own economic record frankly leaves a lot to be desired - as the only party with anything halfway interesting to say. But there’s no dialogue, no challenge, no true opposition.

The British right makes plenty of noise. It has no shortage of TV channels and radio stations and magazines and websites and newspapers. But on an intellectual level, it’s fucking AWOL. A space where a body should be. Vacant.

Odds and sods

Sorry, no odds and sods this week - I’m dashing off on a much-needed break, literally writing this sentence on a plane. Also no podcast, apologies. Normal service resumes week after next. Thanks for your understanding. Now fuck off.

Vaping is one of the most successful public health products of the last decade.

It is the single most effective way to get people to stop smoking. It has the ability to save millions of lives and may have already done so. And yet it is maligned, mocked, scolded, restricted and and sometimes banned. Even in a relatively tolerant regulatory environment like the UK, vaping is so unpopular that politicians will attack it to boost their popularity. “Who actually asked for this?” Andy Burnham said on Instagram recently. “Another vape shop… another dodgy business opening where something useful used to be.”

The social disdain towards vaping is not just foolhardy, it is actively harmful to public health. I have listened many times, grinding my teeth, as smokers tell me that they wouldn’t dare switch to vape because it’s too dangerous. A madness. I have visited several countries which literally have a tougher regulatory regime against vapes than they do against cigarettes. Insanity.

In spring, I went to Australia. I travelled via Doha in Qatar on my journey out and then, because of the Iran war, via Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia on my way back. Throughout that trip, I did not touch foot in a country where vaping is fully legal and accepted. In Qatar, vapes are banned. In Australia, they can only be sold in a pharmaceutical setting. In Malaysia, they were very heavily restricted and the government recently approved a full nationwide prohibition. And yet in every single one of these countries, cigarettes are freely available. That is a lunatic state of affairs. No-one with even a cursory grasp of the science would ever propose such a thing.

People will give you all sorts of reasons why they dislike vaping. They don’t like the sickly sweet smell of it when someone unleashes a cloud on the street. They worry about it introducing a new generation to nicotine addiction, they worry about the waste, they worry that vaping allows tobacco companies to access a new consumer base. These are all valid, to various degrees. But the real reason vaping is unpopular is much simpler. It is because it is pleasurable.

Somewhere deep in our minds is an inflexible Protestant assumption that quitting an addiction must be painful. We imagine the raw-dog sobriety, the empty flat with a mattress on the floor and hallucinatory images of horror-babies crawling across the ceiling, the tension and suffering, the virtue that comes from purity and denial.

We imagine suffering and assume that suffering must be a core part of the cleansing process provided by abstinence. This is because we project onto drugs many of our own neuroses about our lack of discipline and gluttony.

This is a problem and not just because it is puritanical and quasi-religious and utter fucking nonsense. It’s a problem because it is ineffective. As I’ve written before, the best first step to draw someone away from a drug is not to demand that they stop doing it. It is to get them to change the delivery mechanism. This separates their simple addiction to the substance from all the associations which they have with it - the ritual, the social scene, the smell, the connected physical effects.

For many people, abstinence provides salvation. But for most, the best way to break an addiction is to transition to a close approximation of the thing they like while removing as many of the harmful effects as possible. In the case of nicotine this is actually fairly easy to achieve, because the drug itself is harmless - it is the associated effects of smoking that are dangerous.

Vaping is therefore a tremendously helpful invention. It heats a liquid - usually comprising propylene glycol, glycerin, nicotine and flavouring and the resulting aerosol is inhaled by the user. This closely replicates the cigarette experience, but without the toxins or the combustion. No tar, no known carcinogens, no carbon monoxide.

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The history of vaping is essentially the history of trying to replicate the act of smoking as closely as possible, initially visually and ultimately through the bodily experience. There have been three waves. The earlier models were called cig-a-likes, and were typically designed like fake cigarettes. They looked the part, but had very low nicotine levels. Later, vapes were primarily sold with tanks, which users could fill with a liquid of their choice - mixing flavours and nicotine strengths. This was much more effective, but aesthetically and sensually it pulled them further from the cigarette experience. It was also very DIY, a techie hobby with notes of wine tasting.

Then came nicotine salt. This was the holy grail. The salt allowed for the delivery of higher nicotine levels with an instant impact on the brain, replicating almost exactly the pharmacokinetic profile of nicotine delivery from cigarettes. They felt like a cigarette: in the draw, in the throat, in the mind, in the blood. And they could do so with small batteries, meaning they were light and small. This is when brands like Lost Mary took off and vapes began to move from specialist shops to the till at the newsagent.

Naturally they became popular with teenagers as well as adults. This is not good. Vaping should be for people quitting smoking, not for people looking for fun. But we need to remember that teenagers often smoke. Less so than before, and in often dwindling numbers, but they do. We are therefore not starting at a baseline of zero. Many of these kids would have otherwise started smoking, but now they start vaping, which is much safer. Should we be complacent about it? No. Should we try to stop it? Yes. But also we should not adopt the naive but seemingly very popular view that this is some fresh new epidemic, rather than a partial substitute for what would have been happening anyway.

The success of vaping triggered an associated moral alarm about colourful packaging and flavours. A recent Mirror article, for instance, stated without the remotest critical assessment that vapes were “being targeted at children with bright colours and fruit flavours”. Then-health secretary, Wes Streeting, who really is quite staggeringly foolish on this issue, said that kids were “no doubt enticed by bright packaging, sweet flavours and aggressive promotion”.

The packaging of vapes is garish and ugly. I would actually welcome some kind of modest regulation in this area because it might lead to more sophisticated packaging. But there is something a bit weird about the idea that coloured packaging and fruit flavours appeal only to children. Look at the other products on a supermarket shelf. Look at the magazine rack. Look at the list of TV shows on a streaming service. They have colours.

The same is true for fruit flavours. I am 44 years old. I eat mangos. They are nice. Mangos are not the preserve of pubescent children. Fruit flavours are enjoyed by adults and children alike. The government will likely ban fruit flavoured vapes soon, but this is a testament to the growing hysteria around this issue rather than any kind of rational analysis.

In 2019 there was a health scare. Some 2,800 people were hospitalised and 68 people died in the US from severe lung injury connected to vaping. At the time, experts were baffled. None of the data pointed to this kind of immediate severe health risk. Eventually it was discovered that there were rigged black market drug vapes - cannabis products adulterated with vitamin E acetate. But the popular impact was severe, around the world. This is the point where people started believing that vapes were much more dangerous than they really were. I remember vaping next to a woman outside a bar in the US. “You should be careful,” she told me, as she put her cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “Those things will kill you.” I felt as if I was losing my mind.

There’s been a raft of anti-vaping legislation around the world. Bans, sure, but also pointless prohibitions. The EU Tobacco Products Directive, for instance, does not allow sales of liquids with nicotine content higher than 20 mg/mL. This is simply a very silly thing to legislate for. Nicotine itself is not harmful. Upping the nicotine level is precisely what helps smokers make the switch. It’s the kind of thing you do if you adopt an Old Testament view towards the horror of addiction as a concept, rather than embrace the goal of harm minimisation.

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This week, the Cochrane Library released its latest review of vaping as a method to help people quit smoking.

Cochrane reports are the gold standard, they are Christmas for nerds. Cochrane provides arguably the highest tier in evidence-based medicine. This is because it is a systematic review - a synthesis of all available evidence using randomised controlled trials on a specific clinical question. It therefore escapes the problems with single studies - a defect there, a lack of data here. Instead, it brings the existing quality evidence base together for an overview.

Cochrane has been running this review since 2014. The latest update includes an additional nine studies, bringing it to a total of 80, representing 29,861 participants. Forty studies were conducted in the USA, 16 in the UK, six in Australia, five in Greece, and then a smattering from Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Turkey.

The core purpose of the project is to find out what is most effective to get people off cigarettes: Vaping with nicotine, vaping with no nicotine, nicotine replacement therapy like the traditional patches or gum, or no help at all except for behavioural support - the raw dog approach. It also aims to see whether there are any negative health effects from vaping.

The introduction to the report highlights the specific point on the role of pleasure and why we might try to replicate it rather than condemn it. It is rational, clear-sighted and concerned truthfully about reducing smoking rather than enforcing a purification ritual.

Until vapes were invented, smokers were handed these little packs of nicotine-replacement-therapy-hell by the NHS: gum, patches, and in my case, back in the day, a stress ball. It was that final item which let me know, with utter certainty, that the person who devised this pack had never smoked. It was like trying to cure someone’s loneliness by giving them a photo of a human face.

“One of the limitations of traditional nicotine replacement therapies,” the Cochrane review found, “is that, apart from providing nicotine more slowly and at lower levels than smoking, none adequately addresses the sensory, behavioural, and/or social aspects of smoking that people who have smoked miss when they stop (e.g. holding a cigarette in their hands, taking a puff, their enjoyment of smoking, and feeling part of a group).” In other words: the pleasure.

Interestingly, qualitative studies found that vapers shared a sense of identity with other users and report pleasure and enjoyment of use. This, the authors found, suggests that electronic cigarettes “may be viewed less as medical cessation aids but rather as acceptable alternatives to tobacco smoking”.

That right there is the sweet spot. That’s exactly where we want to be: with someone who wants to give up smoking, wondering if they’ll ever be able to do it, looking at one of these devices in the newsagent and thinking - fuck it, might as well give it a go. Someone thinking of this act not as denial but as alternate pleasure.

There was never any moral panic about nicotine gum. Why? Because it never gave anyone any pleasure. But this, of course, was also why it was ineffective. There is a panic about vaping, because it does give pleasure. But the very variable which makes it so objectionable is precisely why it is so effective.

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The results of the review are strong. It found that nicotine vapes were more effective than nicotine replacement therapy, increasing the success rate by about 60%, from around six in every 100 managing to quit smoking to one in every ten.

For what it’s worth - and I appreciate this is me shooting my mouth off rather than science - I suspect even this is an underestimate. Anyone who knows smokers would report that vaping helped more than one in ten get off cigarettes. You get a sense of why that might be when you delve into the individual studies in the Cochrane review. Twenty‐three studies, for instance, exclusively recruited participants who were not motivated to quit smoking. That’s a harsh dataset. One study provided users with a vape that had nicotine levels so low the researchers just went ahead and incorporated it into the non-nicotine vape studies. That’s unlikely to be particularly effective to help someone off cigarettes.

This is not a flaw in the Cochrane review, it is an advantage. It’s the kind of thing which makes the results so convincing, by showing how tough the system is to game. With that breadth of data, any positive result shows really strong signs of validity. And what we can now say with a very high degree of certainty, on the basis of the Cochrane review, is that vaping is hands down the most effective method of getting people off cigarettes.

How harmful is vaping? There are three basic conclusions. First, that it is safer than smoking cigarettes. Second, that we do not yet know the long-term effects. And third, that we need more data.

Levels of toxicants are substantially lower than in cigarettes. A report by the Royal College of Physicians found, on the basis of existing knowledge of liquid constituents and patterns of use, that vaping is likely to be much safer than smoking. It concluded: “The hazard to health arising from long-term vapour inhalation from the e-cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed five per cent of the harm from smoking tobacco.” The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reached a similar decision. It said: “Laboratory tests of e-cigarette ingredients, in vitro toxicological tests, and short-term human studies suggest that e-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes.”

This is a new consumer product and the findings are therefore necessarily uncertain. “Moderate‐certainty evidence does not show a difference in serious adverse effects for the nicotine electronic cigarette compared to nicotine replacement therapy comparison or in adverse effects for the nicotine electronic cigarette compared to non‐nicotine electronic cigarette comparison,” the Cochrane review concluded. “For all other outcomes in this category, evidence is of low or very low certainty. Imprecision remains a key issue for these outcomes.” Ultimately, we need more time and more data. “Longer‐term health effects are unknown,” the report said. “This uncertainty should reduce as more studies become available.”

Vaping could well turn out to be dangerous. There is some tentative evidence of elevated respiratory risk and impaired blood vessel function. We should be clear though: An absence of evidence does not mean that we can treat all outcomes as equally likely. This need for further data has let opponents of vapes insinuate a degree of risk which is unreasonable given the existing evidence base and to produce excessively high thresholds for satisfying that risk assessment.

Here’s Streeting again: “While we do not know the long-term effects of many vape ingredients or the harms inhaling the contents and flavouring of vapes, given their widespread use is relatively recent, the expert advice is clear they are unlikely to be beneficial.”

That is simply not a sane test of how we should evaluate this product. No-one is claiming vapes are beneficial. And anyone looking at this area aiming for benefit rather than harm prevention has lost the right to act as a decision-maker, because they clearly have no idea what they’re saying.

Simply because we cannot yet say something with any certainty does not mean that we know nothing. We can come up with expectations of risk by virtue of what we know about the substances and use-patterns. That is why there is a strong expectation that the danger levels are so much lower than for cigarettes: Because of our existing knowledge about carcinogens, tar, and the impact of liquid constituents.

Some countries have decided it is not worth the risk and banned vapes until we know for sure they are safe. This would make sense if vaping were taking place in a vacuum or if it functioned as a replacement for something harmless. If this were a new kind of raisin, for instance, or a different type of tea then it would make sense to take a precautionary approach. But it is not. It is a replacement for a product which we know is harmful. And not only that, it is the most effective replacement for that product. In that context, taking a precautionary approach is a kind of madness, a fundamental inability to weigh risk.

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There is now a ruinous gap between the science and the media debate on this issue. We have a technology here that can save millions of lives, but countries around the world are regulating it out of existence, or restricting it so aggressively that it is kept out of reach of the people who need it. The UK is a comparatively enlightened regulatory environment in this area and even here the media debate is overwhelmingly critical.

At the heart of this discrepancy is our view of pleasure and our refusal to accept arguments about harm minimisation rather than moral judgement. It is our reluctance to accept the following proposition: A slighter safer pleasure is often the best way to address a dangerous one.

People will look at vapers, exhaling their great big cloud of smoke, and subconsciously clock that they are enjoying it, and thereby conclude that this is dangerous. In fact, it is precisely the fact that they are enjoying it which makes it an effective way of reducing that danger.

Odds and sods

This is your last call for Origin Story Live on Tuesday night - there’s still a few tickets left as I write this - where we will chart the decline of the right wing press through the story of one newspaper: the Daily Telegraph. It’s the story of how journalistic standards were betrayed, readers’ comments dictated the editorial agenda, and reporters lost their autonomy. Come drink some wine and revel in the complete epistemological breakdown of British conservatism in one of the most beautiful venues in London. Little taste below. Tickets available here. See you there.

We’ve got a new Origin Story this week on Section 28: the law which halted progress on gay rights and drove it into reverse. Nearly every moment in this story - the moral panic, the press hysteria, the bad actors, the political cowardice - resembles what is happening now to trans people. But it is ultimately a story of hope and how you organise resistance. As someone on BlueSky said: “Genuinely got quite emotional listening to this. I’m 34. I can remember the Section 28 debate and that cursed shite lasted in spirit for some years after it had been repealed. However we won. We fucking won.” Also there’s a bloke in it called Viscount Buttmaster.

My column in the i paper this week was on Andy Burnham’s policy towards Israel and the need for a tough response to the E1 settlement programme. You can read it here.

Cultural highlight of the week, without competition, was seeing Jack White in Hammersmith. Before we went in I told my partner that he is the last true rock star. This was a mistake, because I think she was imagining someone who looked very different. But what I really meant was that this man has a complete and unshakable conviction in the guitar. His gigs are basically a crunchy, snarling, sweaty act of worship towards this one musical instrument, a form of mass devotion.

The whole thing was thrillingly old-fashioned - no phones allowed, paper tickets - but really there is something timeless about him, as if he operates in a continuum between the 1950s and today. And to watch him perform is kind of to get lost in time.

I’m celebrating the missus’ birthday next week with a short trip away, so it’ll be an Ask Me Anything, then back to earth with a crash for the proper return of the political season. I’ve got plenty of left-over questions from last time but if you’ve any extra, send them my way by replying to this email. State if you want your name to remain anonymous.

Right, off we go kids - fuck off etc.

My main memory is misery. That’s what I think whenever I see the image of celebrating teenagers getting their GCSE results. What a horrible, stressful, bludgeoning experience that really was.

People tend to forget their GCSEs once they finish them. They matter a lot as they’re happening, then not at all afterwards. No-one will ever ask you about them. You will never be required to include them in a job application. You will never talk about them at a party. It’s like they never happened.

The whole thing was for nothing really. It lacked any real purpose. And yet, I still have deep memories of the process, of the merciless perpetual misery of the revision period, the drudgery, the workload. And that’s because GCSEs actually mark a number of weird turning points in life which no-one really talks about - the point between childhood and adulthood, between generalisation and specialisation, between forced information processing and genuine curiosity.

I’m not under the impression that any teenagers read this newsletter. They don’t - I’ve seen the stats, it must be like 1% of the readership. But let’s imagine that they do. This is what I would say.

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That was the worst fucking thing on earth, but there is plenty more terrible shit yet to come

GCSEs are the first moment I can remember working hard. I’d had exams before of course, but that revision period clearly did something to me because I remember it well, even now.

Until that point, there’s been a concerted effort by the world to pretend that everything is alright. You know what I mean. You do it too. You see a kid and you smile at them, or you try to make them laugh, you ruffle their hair. The adult world conspires to convince children that the world is a great place full of lovely happy people. It’s only later that we admit a series of foundational truths: Everyone dies, everything ends, you are born alone and will die alone, there is no natural justice, life is arbitrary, rewards are not distributed fairly, the fundamental conflicts of the human condition are insolvable, all propositions are vulnerable to doubt.

We try to keep this shit from children for as long as possible, relying on brief glimpses of tragedy in Disney films, like the death of Bambi’s mother, to hint at a future existential crisis that parents are too cowardly to address themselves.

One of life’s tragedies, which we keep from young people, is that it involves a tremendous amount of work and that this work is often very boring. It doesn’t really matter what field you’re in or what level of seniority you achieve. Even someone at the absolute peak of their career will have to do lots of very boring work.

For a minister it will be box work, pounding their way through a red box full of documents that need signing. For a junior assistant in an office somewhere, it’ll be the avalanche of things which more senior people have dumped on your desk so they don’t have to do it themselves. There’s just lots of work to do in a life, and GCSEs are the first point at which this becomes truly clear. It’s like someone lifts a curtain and suddenly all the rainbows and unicorns are replaced by a torture chamber.

I am therefore grateful to GCSEs. Not because they taught me anything - I learned absolutely nothing - but because they instructed me on how to work. And in particular they taught me how to work for sustained periods of intense activity.

This comes in very useful. The final six months of writing a book are very painful indeed. There are no weekends. If you write best in the morning, as I do, you have to get up at 5am to maximise your time. I tend to finish at 8pm, then find myself asleep on the sofa by 10pm out of sheer mental exhaustion. You’re stressed about the quality of the work, the accuracy of the work, the reception, whether anyone will buy it, whether anyone will even notice it’s been published. It’s hard. Seasons of Origin Story are like a minor version of the same process, culminating in a crescendo of work in which you lose much of your spare time.

Writing is particularly bad for this. The big difference between a writer and all the people who say they want to be writers is that writers write. That’s really all there is to it. They sit and they write and they fucking do it. They do it on good days and bad days, they do it without immediate promise of gratification and in the absence of any meaningful sense of competition, lacking in any of the incentives which usually stimulate human activity.

Writing is a particularly egregious example but most jobs require bursts of intense activity requiring full concentration. You need to be able to do it and to do it you need to be trained in it. That really is the chief achievement of GCSEs. Someone has unveiled the bleak reality of a working life - which is that it is full of tedium, and hard labour, and intense periods of activity in which leisure time ceases to exist.

It’ll always be this way. No matter how clever AI gets or how successful Universal Basic Income becomes, big important things will always be accomplished by people working really fucking hard. It is good for individuals and for the species. Kids therefore have to learn it at some point and that point may as well be GCSEs.

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You’re still not really educated

The core of GCSEs - English, maths, science, language, humanities - suggests a kind of full renaissance education, as if it is supplying the base materials of a universal human knowledge. But actually, it has severe gaps.

The biggest gap is drama, or theatre studies. No-one ever thinks this, of course, they think drama is just acting. But in fact it is much more than that. It is about being able to speak in public, to have the glare of a spotlight on you and feel nervous and wonder how you’re going to breathe, and then perform anyway. Most of all, it is about learning how to own a space: to see a platform, stand on it, and think: I belong here, I am entitled to be here. To have the confidence to inhabit that space and make it your own.

Most jobs, especially white collar jobs but not just them, require performance in some way. In my case, I need to be able to do TV, or private speaking, or panels, or book promotion, or even podcast recording. There is actually an awful lot of performance given that my job basically is writing. But other jobs require it too. What is a presentation to the board? It is a performance. What is a barrister in court, a doctor speaking with a patient, an IT worker convincing their colleagues on the best way to proceed? A performance.

The responsibility for teaching confidence in performance should not rest with drama, but this is the only space left to dump it.

This is actually unusual in western history. Until relatively recently, the art of rhetoric was the core component of education - not just part of it but arguably the central aspect. And this was not just about structuring an argument or breaking down a logic sequence. It was specifically about performance: Voice, gesture, timing, pace, real-time responses, delivery as a perfectable skill. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle’s rhetoric aimed to guide those speaking in a legal case, or arguing proposals in an assembly, or acting as a speaker in a civic ceremony. In Rome, pronuntiatio taught the art of delivering speeches. In early modern England, rhetoric tailored how you structured a speech but also how it was delivered, either in scholastic disputation or in the Commons.

This great educational discipline - the art of persuasion, of convincing people, in person - has been lost from education. And yet it remains as fundamental to a working life as it ever was. For some reason we have decided that no training is required in this area when in fact it requires a great deal. Some people will be good at it and we should make them great at it. Others will be bad at it and we should make them competent, so they do not fear it and are not held back by it.

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Education will never be this empty again

My memories of GCSEs are not just about hard work through labour. They are also about the brutality of having to work without any real intellectual content at all, the horror of being processed through a system which has forgotten what it was originally for.

Early in my education, between around eight to 13, school was about learning. Don’t get me wrong, the school experience was horrific. Several of the teachers were sadists. It was a prep school, designed to get pupils into public school, so the whole process was designed to mould these children into die-cast representations of the English upper middle class: Athletic, self-confident, sexually petrified and emotionally barren.

But that period had something which the later period did not, which was a desire to teach for its own sake and without the pressure of exams.

I vividly remember one teacher telling us that the purpose of school in this period was to learn how to learn. That teacher - technically a maths teacher but in reality a kind of human Wikipedia who was motivated by his desire to encourage curiosity in children - could be kept permanently off topic by pupils asking how something worked. It became a kind of game. One would ask how TVs worked, he would explain in detail. Another would ask how rivers worked, or why people did certain things, or where football came from. Evidently he believed that answering these questions, and nurturing the desire to ask them, took precedence over whatever was supposed to be happening that morning.

Another teacher - ostensibly the English teacher - took time out to teach us TV and film. He showed us how the actor’s shadow was sharply outlined, unlike his own blurry shadow on the classroom wall. This was because of the powerful lighting used on set. He played us a scene of a film that went from comedic, to perilous, to awe-inspiring and explained how the music had guided our emotional reaction. In short, he taught us how to watch TV, how to recognise the ways in which we were being affected, to be critical and self-aware of the things we were seeing in this little box, in front of which we would spend much of our lives.

I know that others will have had different experiences. This is about a very particular education at a very particular time and place. But my main memories of this period were of education before examination and of the freedoms that were available by virtue of exams having a fairly limited role in what was going on. It was a period in which curiosity was encouraged and the fact that something was interesting was reason enough to dwell on it without asking any further questions about its utility.

Once GCSEs started, that all ended. Education stopped being about learning and started being about passing exams. In fact, it barely counted as education at all. It degenerated into little more than a memory exercise. Can you take information from Source A - your revision notes - retain it, and then input it into Source B - the exam paper. This system produced very reliable exam results, which were used to promote the school to the next set of parents, but it did not produce, did not even aim to produce, people with a love of knowledge or a natural curiosity about the world. It was actually completely indifferent to curiosity. Speaking about it in that context would be like trying to insert Smarties into a slot machine.

At the point of GCSEs, we really do lose that greater educational virtue. We gain things - the work ethic, the need to perform - but we lose things too. And that loss, the complete absence of any genuine intellectual endeavor, is why GCSEs are often such a harrowing period.

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You are now finally free to enjoy one of the most under-discussed pleasures in adult life

The good news is that, once GCSEs are over, a curtain rises on one of the great pleasures of a post-educational world. This is the pleasure we derive from finding out about things outside of our area of expertise.

Almost the second I finished GCSEs I fell in love with reading about science. Obviously I was never going to do it for A-Levels. I was shit at it - especially shit at chemistry, which was just an unfathomable jumble of gibberish to me, like being asked to translate Hieroglyphs - but also shit at physics and biology. I had no natural aptitude, I resented being asked to study them immensely, I was completely uninterested.

And then, almost the second they were no longer mandatory, I was fascinated. I still remember the first popular science book I bought - The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose. It was like this whole world was opening up in front of me. I loved reading Stephen Hawkings on black holes, Richard Dawkins on evolution. Throughout my life, I have gained an immense amount of enjoyment reading popular science books or listening to popular science podcasts - all concerning a subject I am objectively shit at.

It’s impossible to really enjoy these things when you are being forced to do them. Something in the human spirit resists the idea that it can find something hedonistic and mandatory at the same time. We can only really discover the pleasure of something organically, through our wishes rather than our duties. But also, the structure of the learning, and the stakes of the exams, makes it a fundamentally unpleasant experience.

Teenagers often expect that A-Levels will be more enjoyable because you can pick subjects you’re good at. It’s true, but perhaps the greatest joy to be found after GCSEs is specifically in the subjects you’re bad at, which you can now approach through curiosity rather than coercion. This is one of the most exquisite kinds of intellectual joy. It can stay with you through the rest of your life.

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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 Reform’s decision to suspend Tim Mont­go­merie. You can read it here. My contribution to Late Night Live touched on Count Binface, Jason Arday and how the Labour party has wasted a perfectly good crisis when it comes to the summer heatwaves. You can listen here.

Tickets are still available for Origin Story Live: The History of the Daily Telegraph. I’ve spent much of the week buried in memoirs by editors of the newspaper and doing off-the-record chats with people who worked for the publication as it went mad - slowly at first, then at speed. It’s going to be quite a fucking night. You can buy tickets here.

This week, I am finally saying goodbye to Cyberpunk 2077, the game that I have now surely played more than any other. This is my third playthrough and I must now stop, but I will miss it dreadfully. I will miss my chooms and my chrome, the corpos and the eddies, the edgerunner life, and all the gonks I met on the way.

I keep asking myself why I return to it and I think it’s this: The game is the product of people who took a task really seriously. The key is in the depth of what they have done. Each vehicle handles slightly differently, each weapon has a learning curve, every part of the city has been designed and refined as if it were real, each character you meet has a personality, every song you hear on a passing radio suits the world, and the vast web of cyberware, skills and modifications is the product of a game that has thought very hard about satisfying progression.

It is the most deeply textured virtual world I have played in. This is because it works to a set of themes, the most obvious of which is corruption under capitalism. There are never good choices. You try hard to make decent calls, to find the best result, but the basic incentives of the society reduce everything to the worst possible outcome. It is a tragedy in the truest sense of the word, which haunts you long after you finished playing.

It is a dank, depressing world, a cynical world, but one with a real sense of vision, with something to say. It’s a properly complete work of art, expressing itself through the unique mechanisms of video games. And the way I will miss it is completely unlike the way you would miss something else - a novel, say, or a film. I will miss it as a world I used to inhabit. What a weird wonderful thing that is. It’s the kind of cultural reward which is only available to gamers and one only they understand.

Right that’s your lot cunts, see you next time. Now fuck off.

Reform leader Nigel Farage has won the Clacton byelection. Some disparate thoughts below.

On the face of it, this was about as good a result as Farage could hope for. He was never going to lose this seat, so the key tests centred on whether turnout would drop or his vote share would crumble. That didn’t really happen. The Reform leader won by 22,239 votes to Count Binface’s 9,455. That’s actually an increase on his vote from 21,225 in 2024. Turnout was down from 58.4% in 2024 to 44.37% today, but it’s at a perfectly respectable level for a byelection, especially during school holidays.

At the Reform party, Farage announced that “it’s a convincing win”. The room burst into applause and chants of ‘Nigel’.

But no matter what he says, Farage knows he’s in trouble. Incredibly, he did not attend the count. This is basically unheard of. I can’t think of a single other instance of it happening. Even sadsack losers like Matthew Goodwin turn up before going off in a strop complaining about conspiracies by Muslims.

Farage claimed this was because of a threat against him. “I’ve been advised tonight by Essex police that there is an organised campaign to corrupt and degrade the result which will take place in a few hours time,” he told supporters, who needless to say whipped themselves into a state of outrage and started shouting “shame”.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. The Press Association reported that Essex Police did not tell Farage, or any other candidate, not to attend the count. The acting returning officer for the byelection said: “It is a candidate’s decision whether or not to attend the count. However I want to reassure people we have no reason not to proceed with the count process at this time.”

So why wasn’t he there? His other comments hint at the reason. “I’m not scared of these people, far from it,” he told his supporters. “But I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory, a ringing endorsement of all that I’ve tried to fight for, and you’ve tried to fight for, and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.

Ah yes. Humiliated by nobodies. That makes things a little clearer.

The announcement of the results in Clacton was a carnival of eccentric tosh. Dozens of candidates, each of them sillier than the last. On TV, you got a strange atmosphere of sullen mirth, with proper prizes-for-everyone sports-day vibes, as the names of obscure candidates were read out. “Nick the incredibly blik,” the returning officer said, then hesitated and corrected himself. “Brick.” No, that wasn’t right either. “Nick the incredible flying brick,” he concluded. And on and on it went, for another 33 candidates.

It’s obvious why Farage avoided this event. Its charming preposterousness refuted the anti-elitist narrative he had tried to create.

He thought he would own the summer news months on the campaign trail. He thought he could spread his man-of-the-people conspiracist storyline about the inquiries into his financial arrangements, which, incidentally, are murky as hell. He imagined it would culminate in this moment, when he stood alongside the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates and trounced them before his adoring voters. Instead, he would have stood next to Count Binface and Marcus White, the sole representative of the Everyone is God party.

His supposed night of victory would only diminish him. Not so long ago, he was expected to be our next prime minister. Now he looks like a laughing stock. Presenters on news programmes have often struggled to hide their smirk when Reform guests claim Binface is a member of the establishment.

This is the reason he wasn’t at that count. It’s got nothing to do with security. It’s because he’s made a fool of himself and he knows it.

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He might have won Clacton, but this byelection sunk Farage nationally. There are many sensible well-meaning people in the Clacton constituency but there are also 22,239 other people there who are either happy to be lied to or unable to spot when it’s happening, no matter how egregious it is. We’re not supposed to speak ill of voters of course, but if you can’t spot the self-interest and mendacity of this man, at this moment, then I don’t know what to tell you. My one piece of advice is: Be wary of emails from Nigerian princes.

Clacton, however, is not the country. In the nation at large - which, let’s remember, is where general elections are decided - Farage is in serious trouble. His decision to hold this byelection has made that situation worse.

This time last year, Reform was soaring. We had to keep asking the very worst question: Is there a ceiling on the party’s support? No matter what happened, it seemed to keep pushing upwards, past the 30% mark, to the mid-30s. That was the moment of true fear, the icy fingers down the spine, where it became increasingly difficult to imagine how a Farage government could be avoided.

Then the party plateaued. This is because there is ultimately a limit to how many British people will back this type of politics by this type of man. Hold that thought close, because it is reassuring. Shortly afterwards, the support fell. It did so slowly. Because of Keir Starmer’s lack of popularity, Reform was often still coming top of the polls, which muddied the coverage. But the trend is now clear and undeniable: Reform saw a rise in support during late 2024 and 2025, then hit a ceiling, plateaued, and entered a state of decline. The question now is not about its ceiling, but about its floor.

Just 22% of Brits have a favourable view of Farage according to YouGov. It’s the lowest recorded by their tracker this decade. Sixty-eight per cent see him negatively and 56% very unfavourably. He is currently on -46, equivalent to Boris Johnson after partygate (-42) and Starmer just before his resignation (-45). He is in the death zone.

The decline in Reform’s fortunes worsened significantly over the course of this byelection. Polling by BMG Research for the i paper showed his net approval rating collapsed by ten percentage points in the last month, putting him at -49%. More in Common have similar results, with Farage’s approval ratings collapsing ten points in two weeks to -32%.

Farage kept his support in Clacton, but the campaign - self-interested, cynical, sleazy, desperate and ultimately preposterous - hurt his chances across the UK.

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Paradoxically, this is actually pretty good evidence of the strategic danger to Reform. It should be impossible to take a local result this strong for Farage and turn it into a demonstration of his weakness, but actually even the Clacton numbers hold worrying signs for his party.

What do we know about Reform, after several byelections? We know that non-Reform voters are highly motivated to vote tactically in order to beat them. In other words, they are not really non-Reform voters, they are anti-Reform voters, who will back almost anyone to stop them.

In Caerphilly in October 2025 tactical voting handed the victory to Plaid. Labour, Green and Lib Dem support collapsed and went to Welsh nationalists. The BBC even reported some Tory voters backing the party. In Gorton and Denton last February it handed the victory to the Greens. Ahead of the vote, 77% Labour voters said they’d vote Green to stop Reform, as did 73% of Lib Dems and 24% of Tories.

We saw a similar pattern towards Labour in Andy Burnham’s Makerfield contest, although it’s obviously complicated by how unusual that byelection was. The ensuing Manchester mayoral byelection last month, on the other hand, provided unusual degrees of clarity. This is because it uses a supplementary system, where voters pick the candidate they most want to win but can express their preferences even if they lose. It allows us to see clearly the kind of thinking which we usually have to interpret from vote share.

Labour’s Bev Craig won 47.1% in the first preference votes against Reform’s 21%. When supplementary voters were distributed, she won 66.3% to Reform’s 33.7%. More in Common polling showed 66% of Green voters backed the Labour candidate as their second choice. They were supported by a sizable minority of Conservative voters.

So that’s the background. Now let’s see what happened in Clacton. This is the most right-wing seat in the country. In 2024 it had the highest combined right vote of any constituency. And that, of course, is why we all expected Farage to win. But even here, in the deepest heartland, there was significant tactical voting. After all, what the hell else is a vote for Count Binface? The normal parties aren’t standing, so he became the default vehicle by which you’d try to stop Reform. This secured him 9,455 votes. For a satirical space alien whose main policy proposal is about the height of a hand dryer in a pub toilet.

Tactical voting is alive and well. This pattern, repeated across the country, is what should trouble Reform. Will it ever stop Farage in Clacton? No. But it’ll ruin him nationally, especially if the Conservative vote holds up.

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Farage is caught in a pincer movement. He surely gets the tactical voting problem. He’s not an idiot. But he is now trapped by the X.com eco-system.

Elon Musk has worked diligently to give the ethno-nationalist Rupert Lowe and his Restore party all the momentum, biting Reform’s ankles from even further to the right. Meanwhile, Farage’s own people are degenerating into ever more extreme and angry rhetoric. Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuv branded former defence secretary and member of the armed forces Ben Wallace a “traitor” recently, earning only a mild rebuke from his party leader.

Across the Atlantic, Democrat politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prompted thousands of think pieces this week when she said that “woke 1 was crazy” - a reference to the period of ‘defund the police’ and online pile-ons in the early 2020s. There is a general sense that Twitter’s progressive edge during that period pushed left-wingers into adopting radical positions which turned the electorate against them.

I’ve no idea if that’s true or not, but I think we can clearly see that X.com, which now has an ethno-nationalist edge, is pushing right-wingers to adopt radical positions which turn the electorate against them.

Farage is therefore in the worst of all worlds. He is seeing concerted tactical voting against his candidates in diverse areas of the UK - from Wales to Manchester to Clacton itself. His best way of defusing those tactical votes is to moderate the rhetoric of his colleagues, to try to upset people a little less and therefore play less of a role in their voting calculations. But he cannot do so, because the remorseless logic of the X radicalisation algorithm pushes his party towards becoming more severe, or else it loses its activist base and its most highly-engaged voters to Restore. He’s trapped.

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Farage is no Trump. This was a real test case for Farage’s brand of politics. He wants to create the same conditions in the UK which apply to Donald Trump in the US. He wants to dismiss any allegations against him by branding it a conspiracy of the elites. He wants to undermine and eventually eradicate independent scrutiny processes, like parliamentary standards inquiries. He wants to take a mindless question-nothing hero-worshipping support base and equate it with the will of the people, so that he can amass unlimited executive power. He wants to abolish the entire notion of objective truth as a currency in political discourse. We know what the plan is because we can see it in its advanced stages in the US.

That’s what this tragicomic byelection was really about. Farage wanted to use it to swipe away all the sleaze stories around him. He wanted to own the news agenda over the summer months. He wanted to capture the political momentum once again.

In Clacton, electorally, it worked, as he knew it would or else he’d never have tried it. But the plan was never really for Clacton. It was for the country. And there it failed. Journalists wouldn’t take the bait. Politicians wouldn’t take the bait. And the public wouldn’t take the bait.

Why? Because Farage is no Trump. The Reform leader does not posses that ineffable blood-magic, the link between leader and follower, that Trump enjoys. He can secure the support of between a fifth to a quarter of voters, absolutely. But he cannot convince enough Brits to submit their conscience and their independence of thought to his will.

I don’t think this is Farage’s fault. He is really very effective as a political communicator. I think the reason he struggles is because Brits are not Americans. We are basically incapable of sincerity. We are averse to idealism, positive or negative. We do not do religion, and therefore lack a pattern of behaviour in which we relinquish our minds to a spiritual leader. The whole muscle-memory of evangelism, from pulpit bashers to TV preachers, means nothing to us. We do not have a pattern of historic racial politics which slots political debates into a pre-existing us-vs-them narrative.

We are too cynical, too jaded, too keen to mock. These are usually ugly qualities. They prevent us from having serious political discussions and reduce politics to a permanent state of listless pragmatism. But in this particular area it is actually quite healthy. It’s really very difficult to imagine any figure who is able to do here what Trump does in the US.

That’s not to say we’re immune to populism or the extreme right. We absolutely demonstrably are not. But we may be immune to the unquestioning hero-worship and epistemological collapse that we see across the Atlantic. This was a test case for that type of politics. It showed that there was some support for it in his support base, but none outside of it.

Farage will, of course, claim today as a victory. But in reality, as almost anyone can see, it was anything but.

Still, at least he’s got the standards inquiry to look forward to.

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Odds and sods

I’m going to say this once, and only once, unless I decide to say it again later: Buy tickets to our live show. Buy them you fucking cunts.

I am inexplicably spending the summer reading about the history of the Daily Telegraph while everyone else is frolicking in the park and I think I therefore deserve all the support I can get. We’ll tell the full story of Britain’s most batshit newspaper, from a Fleet Street institution to howling godforsaken bedlam, on September 1st at the Union Chapel. Buy the fucking tickets.

I take the lead in this week’s episode of Origin Story as we tell the story of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham - favourite to King James I and King Charles I. We’ve always had these figures who act as a deflecting mechanism for leadership - like Dominic Cummings or Morgan McSweeney. When critics can’t attack the leader directly, they go for The Favourite. What worked for kings works now for prime ministers.

The story of Buckingham is extremely dramatic - it’s crammed with queer history, love affairs, courtly romance, adventures on horseback, war, a shitload of dysentery, terrible deaths and the early embryonic years of parliamentary resistance to royal power. But the core role and dangers of the Favourite are the same in the early 17th Century as they are today. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

My culture pick this week is Widow’s Bay. It’s such a glorious combination of Stephen King nostalgia, good solid laughs and proper nasty chills. It’s a show that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, in no small part because of the effortless performance of Matthew Rhys. Exactly as good as people told you it was. Well worth a watch.

Right, off you fuck mate. Cheerio.

Christopher Nolan is the director of our era. He’s not necessarily the best. He’s not even necessarily that good. But he’s the director who most reflects our period and what it yearns for.

He’s a genuine auteur. He follows a singular vision of how to make a film, from the way it is lit, to the way the soundtrack is incorporated into the body of the story, to the almost indecipherable way that character speech is handled, to the crammed patchwork stitching of the narrative structure. Nolan directs like Nolan.

The difference between him and other auteurs is that his films do not play to tiny empty cinema screenings, but become global phenomena - the kind of things people travel hundreds of miles for so they can see it on IMAX in 70mm. His films are an event, a phenomenon. And the reason for that is not because he makes mainstream films - he doesn’t and never has. It’s because he is the auteur director whose instincts are most in tune with what audiences want right now. He just kinda fits.

Why is that? What is he doing that makes him such a perfect emblem for our time? I don’t think it’s about his themes, which are hazy, lightly held and rarely discussed. I think it is his technique. What do you hear when you catch an interview with Nolan? What are they discussing? The technique. Specifically, his preference for analogue: How to wield a massive IMAX camera. Why he won’t email scripts, but insists people read them in person. Why he opts for film. Why he has an aversion to digital effects.

This is why Nolan is so loved: because he is an analogue director in a digital age. He represents our anxieties and concerns. Our self-hate when we close the social media app on our phone and briefly see our image reflected back at us in the darkness of its screen, feeling emptied-out and wasted.

Nolan represents nostalgia for a previous world. One of tactility, physicality, time, craft and shared experience. Before AI, before the internet, before digital.

You can see this yearning for the pre-internet age all around us. Vinyl sales in the UK increased by 19.9% last year, hitting their highest level for three decades. CD sales - traditionally the poor cousin of vinyl - also crept up by 3.1%. Overall, physical releases of films are in decline, but Blu-Ray - the top end of the market - increased by three per cent. 2024 saw a 23% increase in live music attendance - either concerts or festivals. Theatre was experiencing a similar phenomenon, with a 3.16% increase in West End attendance last year. People want to hold a piece of media in their hands rather than rely on streaming. They want to attend an event live and be part of a shared moment, not stuck isolated in the algorithm’s digital cul-de-sac.

We sit atop a great engine of nostalgia. The Oasis reunion, Stranger Things, 90s fashion, retro games consoles, disposable cameras. Even lava lamps are coming back. Online, you see the words ‘look what they took from us’ above almost any post mentioning the past, whether it’s images of Blockbusters video rentals or 70s documentaries about Margate.

We all seem to be yearning for the past. We need greater texture in our lives, the feeling and affirmation of physical objects, the reassurance of collective experience, the bucolic urban idyll of a life before modems.

Nostalgia for the analogue age feels like a kind of resistance, an act of rebellion against the blandness of the modern world, with its banks of computer screens, none of which feel like anything. None of which have texture, none of which has a sense of smell, or place, or meaning.

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I am one of these people. I buy vinyl and Blu-Rays and physical books, although I draw the line at 90s fashion which was a travesty then and remains so today. But we need to carefully disentangle meaningful choices about our consumption from the tyranny of our emotional narrative about a perfect past.

Nostalgia is a trap and it contains within it a terrible lie. I’m so desperately tired of watching my generation talk about the 90s in exactly the same way the previous generation talked about the 70s. Here’s a typical Instagram post about films released in 1999. It is the same as countless others, posted every day, whose undercurrent is that things right now are terrible but things back then were obviously much better - “back before the suits screwed it all up with corporate slop, back when movies were good”.

In reality, there were lots of suits in Hollywood in the 90s making terrible films. There are many great films being released now. But nostalgia convinces us that things were always better in the past and at their worst in the current moment.

The top ten box office films of 1999 contained some proper bangers, including The Matrix, Toy Story 2 and The Mummy. It also contained some execrable dirge. The top film of the year was Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, for heaven’s sake. This year’s top ten includes films which will probably go on to be classics, including Obsession, Project Hail Mary and The Odyssey itself. There is also, inevitably, some dirge, including The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Toy Story 5. Yes, the arc of the artistic universe is strange, and therefore contains a franchise which can represent an artistic peak in 1999 and a nadir in 2026.

Music plays a particularly weird role in nostalgia about the past. For some reason, you will never fully recover from the music of your formative years. Whatever came out between the age of 13 and 23 will forever hold a place in your heart above all others.

About a third of the music I buy comes from this period, but I am aware that there is no credible cultural reason to own so many albums by Shed Seven or Gene. If I really wanted to, I could construct an argument for this being an objective assessment of musical quality over a subjective expression of my youth. I could say that the Britpop era was the last gasp of music before the internet and that it therefore represented the final coherent moment in musical evolution, before everything stagnated into a generic morass without clear cultural signposts.

And it’s true that the velocity of musical development was much greater in the 20th Century than it has been in the 21st. Someone living through the 60s, 70s and 80s would have experienced great big jolting musical shocks every few years, from pop to punk to electronic, the Beatles to the Clash to the Pet Shop Boys. Someone living through the opening three decades of the 21st Century has not. It’s been a less exciting time to be into music.

But the same pattern remains. There is loads of great music coming out at the moment and loads of crap back then that we now forget. Those who grew up in the late 90s all remember Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Radiohead. But we forget Dodgy, Ocean Colour Scene, Space and Kula Shaker. That which was great comes to define an era. That which was average fades from memory, as if it never existed.

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We like to tell ourselves that things were simpler back then, but it’s a lie. We all suffer from a temporal condition in which the past feels reassuringly solid and the present unprecedentedly chaotic.

The world of today would seem obviously insane for someone in the 90s. There is a war in Europe in which the most important military developments are conducted by drones. There is an AI technology which in the last few days alone has created viruses unknown in nature and used fake profiles to hack targets and then hide the evidence. There is a siloed information sphere online which has robbed us of a shared empirical reality.

But back in the 90s, people spoke in precisely the same way. Nowadays, we remember this period as a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace. The Berlin Wall had fallen, liberal democracy was triumphant, the dreary industrial relations of the 80s were over and the economy was doing gangbusters.

This is not how it felt at the time. At the time, we were embroiled in several wars and foreign interventions. Security analysts would gravely warn that the end of Communism had in fact dispersed and multiplied the threats against us - a warning which came true when September 11th opened the 21st Century. The dot-com bubble crashed the economy. Our cultural diet - from the X-Files to the Truman Show to the Matrix - was paranoid and ill at ease.

No matter what era you read about, the same process is taking place. People spoke warmly about the past and worried about the present. The 1950s now function as the reassuring golden age in America, a time when the country was at its peak and everyone had two cars. For Donald Trump, the 1950s are the ‘again’ in ‘make America great again’. They are the time he promises to return people to, one which - oh-what-a-coincidence - came before President Johnson’s race equality legislation. But when they were actually taking place, the 50s were a time of paranoia and anxiety. Most people expected a Third World War. Russia had developed a nuclear bomb. The Soviet economy was considered superior to the American market economy. The USSR had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Joseph McCarthy was carrying out his witch hunts against liberals and leftists.

Similarly, each period of English history you study sees the major political actors hark back to the past. The Luddites of the early 19th Century demand a return to the paternalist protection measures of the previous era. The Levellers of the 17th Century demand the rights guaranteed to them by ancient English history. The best period was always the period beforehand. The current era is always one of unprecedented uncertainty and tumult.

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The same is true in our personal lives. Things were not really better for us when we were 16. We had good days and bad days, moments of bliss and moments of despair. The emotions were heightened of course - that’s what it’s like to experience romantic feelings for the first time under a heavy dose of hormones. But the endless summers we remember were full of boredom and disappointment as well as heartbreak and euphoria. We edit out the parts that were uneventful and fixate on those which marked us.

The truth about the past is this: A day can only be perfect once it’s ended.

As you experience a day, it is full of uncertainty. Will it rain? Will that person call me? Will I be able to buy the thing I want? Do they fancy me? How will this party go? Will people like me? Do I look good in this? The tumult and atom-level chaos of our expectations and insecurities. Most days are a score draw. Some are a net loss. And every so often you get a day which was unimprovable. Everything fell into place. The needle drops. The opening bars kick in. Lou Reed starts singing. Oh what a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you.

But if you could travel back to that day, you would feel the same uncertainty you feel right now, about today. Will it work out? Will this be OK? What do I have to do before I go out? If you could travel back and experience it all over again, you would be surprised by how many moments of boredom or humdrum timekilling it involved. You have sliced these moments from your memory, in the same way that I have edited out the band Space from the 90s or a Trump supporter edits out Soviet technological triumph in the 50s.

Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same degree of certainty, because they are still happening. So we live with this constant defect where we over-emphasise the innocence of what has gone and we underestimate the quality of what is happening.

Nostalgia is a terrible drug: it is a fiction which serves to undermine you at the point of experience and pile all the enthusiasm into whatever has already passed. If it is allowed to grow without restraint, it will suck all the joy from you, turning you into a passenger in your own life. If it is allowed to conquer a country, it will lead to viciousness and self-harm, Trump and Brexit.

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For all that, we clearly need nostalgia. Obviously we do, because none of us seems able to operate without it. It gives us a sense of continuity with our past. It is what we use to create the idea of an authentic self with a coherent life story.

It need not trap us in the past. Properly managed and understood, it provides a foundation which allows us to manage the future. This is who I am. These are the people and events that made me. These are my desires and my principles, the qualities which inform the things I do next.

If it is properly harnessed it can help us navigate the present. It is partly nostalgia for instance, which lets me decide to prioritise physical media over streaming, the tactile over the digital. But we can make those sorts of decisions without falling into the myth that the past was always golden and the present always doomed. Nostalgia can help us select the bits of the past which we preserve, rather than simply isolating us from the future.

The same applies to countries. It’s no coincidence that English radicals have always harked back to the semi-mythical ancient liberties of their ancestors. It’s no coincidence that American reactionaries hark back to the supposed glory years of the post-war era. Nostalgia is what we use to give coherence to our national story, just as we do to our personal story.

How can this be healthy, rather than corrosive? The trick is two-fold. First, we have to make sure that the past the country harks back to provides a decent guide to how it should behave in the future. And second we have to prevent the guidance of the past becoming a prison - the locked-in thought that only that which is over can ever be good and that which is to come must surely be bad.

We can exploit nostalgia without being exploited by it. We can own our past without being owned by it.

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Odds and Sods

Important announcement: We’ve now confirmed the theme for our Origin Story live show on September 1st. We’ll be doing The History of the Daily Telegraph: How a reassuringly traditional newspaper lost its fucking mind.

Over the course of the evening, we’ll take you from the Telegraph’s staid and respectable origins to the hysterical bedlam it has become today, and then delve into our favourite moments of shit-your-pants lunacy from recent issues, at least half of which will probably involve Allister Heath.

Tickets are available here. No-one will get out alive.

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 Kemi Badenoch, who I really do detest more and more with each passing day. Just an absolute political atrocity in human form. We also had a Patreon-only Q&A edition of Origin Story for our loyal backers.

The cultural highlight of the week was Spider-Man: Brand New Day. We did it in a double-bill with The Odyssey, which makes a surprising amount of sense - they have lots of the same actors, both tell the story of a man trying to get back home in some way, and have several scenes which echo one another, particularly around our closest friends and family not knowing who we are. It’s charming to see the oldest story and then the newest story, both dabbling in the same ideas.

Spider-Man is a much better film. It has a more coherent theme and is more disciplined in how it develops it, it is more beautiful to look at, it is more emotionally rewarding. I know, I know - you want to send me hate emails now and to cancel your subscription. But I am a professional journalist and it is my job to tell the truth, without fear or favour.

Seriously though, I mean it. It’s outstanding - certainly the best Marvel film since No Way Home. I sat there crying and laughing throughout, full of joy and nutrition. A euphoric, meaningful cinematic experience.

Right that’s me done you cunts - fuck off and have a lovely weekend.