Everything I got wrong this year
One big, one small, one tragic and very painful.
It’s a good time of year for some intellectual disinfection - assessing what you’ve said, weighing up predictions you made, and seeing if anything can be learned from it all. This year, I got three things wrong: One big, one small, one tragic and very painful. Let’s dig in.
I was wrong about Keir Starmer
I first encountered Starmer when he became shadow Brexit secretary. I’d been following Brexit closely for months by that point, looking into the contorted legal reality of what it entailed. That now sounds like a perfectly normal description of the issue, but at the time there was a ferocious resistance to any recognition of complexity. Brexit had to be treated like some kind of religious mission. To suggest otherwise was to acknowledge that the laws of logic and causation still applied, which would be ruinous to the whole endeavour.
Then Starmer was made shadow Brexit secretary. And suddenly there was someone on the frontbenches who rejected the shouty generalised bollocks of it all. Instead, he buried himself in the detail. There was a lot of mockery. David Davis jeered at him for providing forensic analysis. The Chamber laughed at him for being a stuck up lawyer instead of a politician. Starmer didn’t seem to care. He just got his head down and went to work. And I thought: Blimey.
We never usually get this type of guy in British politics. Someone who lacks the usual tribal pathology of Westminster. Someone who is prepared to embrace the details. Someone who actually knows what the hell they’re talking about. Someone from a civil service background, who understands how the system operates. From that moment on I wanted him to succeed. I admired him.
Then I noticed something else about him. There was this sense of decency. He lied, sure, but politics without some degree of deception is basically unheard of and probably not strictly possible. What mattered was that at certain key moments you could see flashes of real moral character. This was what we saw when Rishi Sunak made a joke about “defining a woman” when the parent of a murdered trans teenager was visiting parliament: a flash of anger from Starmer, a sense of authentic moral personality.
And now here we are, in a very different world. Trans women are barred from even attending Labour’s women’s conference. Starmer insists that a trans woman is not a woman, although he prefers to do this through his spokesperson because he does not have the confidence to do so personally. He has joined the vicious assault on immigrants, wheeling out a new atrocious policy every week, doing his part from the centre-left to drag the Overton window towards the far-right abyss.
Instead of providing detail and expertise to British politics, Starmer has governed in a cack-handed manner. There is now a child poverty strategy, a net zero strategy, an industrial strategy and some decent ideas on children’s social care. Elsewhere, there is a sense of vacuum and lack of preparation. Constitutional reform, prison reform, health reform, higher education, adult social care, economic policy - in all these areas, the government looks like it came to power with no idea what it wanted to do and then took its sweet time finding out. Even when it does know what it wants, its pledges on tax and its own instinctive sense of caution prevent it taking action.
Is Starmer a vast improvement on what came before? Yes, obviously. But it is clear now that he is morally, politically and temperamentally ill-suited to the job of prime minister. I thought he’d be very good at it. I was wrong.
Why did I make these mistakes? The first and most obvious reason is hope. It’s hard to live without hope so you are primed to read into an incoming opposition politician the best possible attributes. Starmer corresponds to many of the qualities I like. I don’t have much time for political parties, or tribal identity, so I was not fussed - and in fact was positively attracted to - the fact he was technocratic and apolitical. He had the skills I value in politics, and of which we see so little - namely specialist knowledge, an interest in detail and the capacity to deal with specific issues rather than retreating into generalisation. I believed what I read in Tom Bladwin’s Starmer biography about his commitment to people’s dignity, even though this was probably just Starmer’s self-image being projected through the text of a friendly writer. I should have been more critical.
All these views could be fairly held until about one year before the election. At that point I should have been looking for concrete proof of some thorough work on policy. This piece from September 2023 is a good case in point. I highlighted the areas Labour had a coherent policy - net zero and labour markets, basically - but I was far, far too generous about the dearth of ideas elsewhere. This piece from May 2024 is much better, highlighting that there really was no clear thinking on constitutional reform. The lesson is to demand high standards from the people you admire. Do not give them an easy ride.
Another useful lesson is about putting the right person in the right role. I was attracted to Starmer’s forensic mind and his non-tribal nature. But perhaps those are not quite the right qualities for the person at the top. Perhaps those are ideal qualities for someone at ministerial level, but the prime minister themselves needs a broader, managerial, storytelling approach. They are the poetry, not the prose - the person that can bring disparate individuals in siloed departments together, ensure they’re walking in the same direction, and can tell the public a story about what the destination is. Without that, the government has a hole at its centre.
The thornier problem is about decency. I saw a flash of decency in Starmer in that moment in the Commons and was reassured by it. But in truth, flashes are not enough. The thing that is hard for us to grasp, that is frightening, is that people can be decent and indecent and that they can be this way over the course of a single day as well as a single lifetime. Someone in our personal life can genuinely care for us and betray us. They might even do so at the same moment. Someone can be kind and cruel, selfless and solipsistic. People are complicated.
I had a driving instructor when I was a kid. He was the nicest, gentlest man, full of warmth, constantly smiling, never judging anyone, a fountain of good, hearty human qualities. Wherever we drove into town, you’d see people stop and say hello - generations of drivers who’d been taught by him and clearly felt the way I did about him. Then one day a black woman was driving the car towards us. This was not a common occurrence. We were in Winchester. There weren’t a lot of black people around. And he said: “Oop, look at that. A Smartie. You know what they say. Coloured on the outside, black on the inside.”
He was a racist. And he expressed his racism in the same warm, Worthers Original way he expressed everything else. I realised then that the world was not as clear cut and comprehensible as I imagined, that villains would not always be identifiable and that that which was villainous within someone would mingle with what was benign.
Some people will tell you that this is all you need to know. He was a racist. A bad man. You must never think warmly of him again. Others will tell you that he was still a good man, with flaws, and that you should accept his goodness. But the honest truth is that neither of these options provides a default rule for the future. You can’t go through life always rejecting someone for a moral failure, or always giving them the benefit of the doubt. You have to make case by case judgements. There is no answer.
A quarter of a century later and I’m still learning this lesson. I’m still working it out. But I suppose the best I can do is this: I will be particularly alive to people adopting an unpopular position. It’s easy to be moral when it’s popular. That’s why Starmer took the knee and said trans women were women and stood up for Ukraine. It’s why his morality crumbled when anti-immigration rhetoric was considered popular and it became useful to dump on trans people. The best indication of someone’s moral character is how they behave when it’s unpopular, or where the popular preference is unclear. It’s still not proof. But it is top-drawer material for forming moral judgements.
I was wrong about disposable vapes
The UK recently banned single-use vapes. I didn’t make a massive deal about this, but I did see it as part of an illogical counter-attack against vaping and sneered at it.
My views of vaping centre on two principles. First, my central all-abiding political conviction, which is that you should fuck off and mind your own business. And second, my subsidiary principle that you should follow the evidence and aim at harm minimisation.
Vaping is a triumph of public health. It may turn out not to be safe - who knows? - although there is currently no strong evidence for us to believe that. But it is definitely, without doubt, safer than smoking. The growing anti-vape coverage, particularly from the BBC, is therefore infuriating. It is serving to make people believe that vaping is more dangerous than smoking and discouraging people from switching.
The proposals for single-use vapes came alongside a barrage of other ideas - banning flavoured vapes and so on. And here, I made a mistake. I constructed a firm rule in my head. It was that vapes should be as easy to secure as possible for people considering giving up smoking. I want those vapes right there, by the counter in the newsagent, colourful and attractive and as easy to use as possible. Because every time one of those guys tries it, we have a chance of getting them off cigarettes. If we banned single use vapes, I figured that would be harder.
I was completely wrong. Those disposable vapes were an obscene object of waste - a battery wrapped in plastic that lasts for a few hours of heavy use. If this was the only way to get smokers onto a safer alternative, it might have still been worth it, but it wasn’t. With that law in place, the disposable vape manufacturers quickly designed a replaceable cartridge, where users kept the body of the vape, with the battery inside it, and then replaced the cartridges.
Two errors here. First, I allowed a principle to get in the way of specific proposals. I adopted the general rule of ‘make vapes as easy and attractive to smokers as possible’, then I failed to properly assess the proposals below that level for their validity and the harms they would address. This sounds like a minor error, but it’s an entry level drug for tribalism: a worldview where your assessment of an issue is decided not on its own terms but on the basis of your pre-existing loyalties.
Second, I forget another of my principles: that good, well-written regulation can make the world a better place. It does so by being modest and practical and aimed at specific achievable outcomes. The regulation created an obvious incentive for manufacturers to do the thing they should have been doing in the first place. I should have spotted that and pushed for it more aggressively.
People overwhelmingly wanted a single-use vape ban. I was almost alone in opposing it. I was wrong.
I was wrong about ‘See It Say It Sorted’
Nothing hurts more than this. Nothing is harder for me to express. No other sentence struggles so violently against my act of public admission, as if it must be wrenched from my guts with pliers in order to be expressed at all. But I was wrong about the ‘See It Say It Sorted’ campaign.
The first time I heard the announcement on a train, I turned to my companion and said simply: “They should be shot.” I didn’t know who commissioned it. I didn’t know who came up with it or approved it. But it was so annoying, so banal and infuriating and representative of our modern cultural ruin, that it obviously deserved punishment of the utmost severity.
Why precisely is it so annoying? Why does it scratch its way down the spine rather than float in through the ears? Is it the mock-slang of ‘sorted’? The way that the sentence structure makes no sense and betrays you at the end? The false rhyming? The grammatical violence? Whatever it is, that slogan has committed a crime against the human mind. It is a classic example of the mediocrity of the contemporary era, a ubiquitous form of deadened advertising bullshit which poisons the public square and treats us all like delinquents. It is patronising, it is unbelievably stupid, it is grating, and it drives me towards murder.
But it works. God help me, it works. From the first moment I heard it, I never forgot it. If I had heard it once, all those years ago, and never again, I would still remember it now, word for word, because of how deeply annoying it is. In that moment it buried itself in my brain, never to be extracted. I will probably still remember it the day I die.
The other day I saw a piece of luggage in the aisle of a train carriage and the words sprung from within my mind, unbidden, as if summoned by my very essence. “See It,” I thought, and then a shudder, a terrible moment of apprehension, as if some part of me was already grappling with the realisation of what I was about to think. “Say it.” As if I am nothing but a drone, a receptacle for whatever tawdry communication strategy the authorities wish to inflict on me, a part of the beehive, a cog in the machine, without an internal life of my own or any functioning resistance against that which would make me conform. God damn me, I thought. God damn me to hell. And then, trembling, fully aware of the vandalism I was inflicting on my soul, knowing the shame I brought to my family name but powerless to stop it, reduced to the tiniest and most inconsequential version of myself: the final indignity. “Sorted.”
What is there to learn here, except that I have found a new reason to hate myself and everyone around me? It is that public messaging can be effective not by being well meaning, or practical, or well designed, or concise, but simply by being very annoying. That you can infuriate people into doing what you want. What a terrible realisation.
Has it stopped a single act of terrorism? Almost certainly not. Has it made British rail travel an almost unbearable experience? Yes. But my point is not whether the campaign was necessary or sensible. It is whether it was effective. It was. I was wrong about that too. And by Christ I wish I wasn’t.
Right, that’s enough self-castigation. I’ll be back next week with my usual theme, indeed the most consistent theme of this entire newsletter, which is that I am right about everything.
Fuck off.
Starmer: I agree with the first section - the Tories were out, he had a stonking majority, and he had 5 years to at least begin to show he could turn the country into something better.
He shoulld have gathered his cabinet and senior members, and said: "We have 5 years. We know we're going to get hit from Left and Right. We know we're always going to get bad headlines from the right wing media. But we're going to ignore all of that. We'll begin campaigning in 4 years, but for now, let's do what we know is right."
But he didn't. He was been swayed by the PPE wonks, desperate to garner good headlines (and failing). And you're right - the government messaging has been AWFUL, and that comes from him. He seems in thrall to whoever it is who's in charge of that, because so many of us have been shouting about it for months. The country of "Take Back Control" and "Get Brexit Done" need simple messages, a straightforward narrative. They'll take the increases in tax if they know where it's going, if people can see the clear destination. What they need is an Alistair Campbell controlling the comms.
And who the hell thought it was a good idea to give Mandelson the US Ambassador job?????
On 'See it. Say it. Sorted': I agree with all the criticism, and I have another. It's quite rare to actually read the slogan – you more often hear it as an announcement. And, as an announcement, it *sounds* like: 'See it. Say it. Sort it.' (I was stunned the first time I saw it written down.) The intent of the slogan is that, in the event you 'see it,' you should only 'say it,' and your responsibility ends there ('sorted'). But what you *hear* is that, having 'seen' the threat, you should now 'sort' the threat – in other words, get involved somehow, neutralise it or something. It communicates almost the precise opposite of what it intends to. I hate it so very deeply.