Daily Mail Desperation

It is hard not to admire the sheer acrobatic desperation of the Daily Mail. Only they could look at Keir Starmer, the man who has delivered the most right-wing Labour government since Ramsay MacDonald, and decide he is a sleeper cell for international communism. According to the Mail, the KGB must have had astonishing foresight. They allegedly groomed a young law student in the mid 80s, then patiently waited forty years for him to become Prime Minister and promptly govern like a moderately anxious accountant terrified of spooking the bond markets.

You would think Moscow might feel short-changed. After all, if this is the outcome of decades of deep cover, someone at Lubyanka needs a performance review.

The game is obvious. Farage is under pressure for racist behaviour at school, then racist behaviour as an adult, then racist behaviour as a political strategy. So the Mail needs a diversion from their hero. Ideally one involving red ink, Cyrillic typefaces, and a grainy photograph of a young Starmer wearing a rucksack. In their telling, a forgotten student pamphlet becomes a Marxist front. A cheap work camp trip becomes a StB operation. A few earnest essays about Thatcher morph into a Kremlin plot. It is political taxidermy. Stuff the narrative first, then add the glass eyes.

Meanwhile, the Farage story is treated with the delicacy of a priceless vase. Dozens of former classmates describing antisemitic taunts? Mere gossip. The party he leads accepting money from men linked to Putin? A regrettable misunderstanding. The steady use of racism as a political tool? Only speaking plainly. And this from a paper that once cheered Hitler on and told us to look kindly on the Blackshirts. The moral authority here is somewhat less than overwhelming.

The real reason for the Mail’s panic is simple. Starmer is not the socialist bogeyman they need him to be. He is a small c conservative in all but rosette, governing within fiscal rules the Tories themselves shredded, terrified of being portrayed as soft on anything. There is nothing remotely Bolshevik about him. If the revolution is coming, it forgot to tell the Treasury.

Farage, on the other hand, is precisely what they dare not confront. A man who thrives on racial tension. A man whose party is knee-deep in dubious funding. A man who flirts openly with authoritarian strongmen while claiming to represent the common man. A man who thinks shouting into cameras is a political programme. But he is their creature. He punches the right targets. He serves the right interests. So the Mail must loop the tape back and pretend the real danger is a former DPP who spent years putting terrorists in prison, not man who gets his support from the tax dodgers and hedge fund managers.

This is why the piece is so hysterical. They are trying to turn an accountant into Trotsky and a demagogue into a misunderstood schoolboy. It is theatre for voters who need a pantomime villain because the real one keeps appearing on GB News grinning like a man who has just stepped off a yacht paid for by someone with a very thick accent and very deep pockets.

The country is drifting. Public services are shot. Growth is flat. The far right is being nudged into the mainstream. And the Mail thinks the real emergency is a student magazine from 1986.

It is a distraction, and a shabby one. The danger to Britain is not that Starmer once wrote about common ownership at university. It is that Farage still peddles racism for profit, still surrounds himself with shady money, and still enjoys newspapers willing to twist themselves into knots to protect him.

If the Mail wishes to warn us about foreign influence, perhaps it should start with the party that keeps taking donations from friends of the Kremlin. Not the Prime Minister who is about as revolutionary as a lukewarm cup of tea.

Trigger Warning

Dyrham House. A fine piece of English baroque, carefully restored, immaculately landscaped, and now armed with that 21st-century accessory no country estate is complete without: a trigger warning. Not, you understand, for low ceilings or slippery steps, but for an ornament – a couple of black boys in chains. The sign was tastefully worded, of course, warning that the item “may cause distress.” Which, naturally, it should. That’s rather the point. 

What’s odd is that the warning presumes distress is somehow an error to be avoided rather than the proper response to an artefact of cruelty. The thing was made to display domination as decoration – a trinket of subjugation in bronze or plaster. We should feel something when we see it. The mistake lies not in showing it, but in pretending we need padding before the truth.

This modern mania for trigger warnings began with good intentions – to shield the genuinely traumatised from shock. Fair enough. But research after research has found they don’t work. They don’t soothe trauma, they don’t reduce distress, and for some they even increase it. They’ve become a polite ritual – a social fig leaf signalling sensitivity while accomplishing nothing measurable. And those determined to take offence aren’t the wounded, but the indignant – the ones who bristle not at the artefact of cruelty, but at the mere acknowledgment that cruelty existed. They’ll stand before a chained child in bronze and complain about “wokeness” instead of the slavery it depicts.

What Dyrham and the National Trust are really wrestling with isn’t psychology but morality. You can’t scrub Britain’s past with lemon juice and elbow grease. Much of this splendour was financed by sugar, rum, and human misery. To remove the evidence would be sanitisation; to leave it unmarked would be complicity. So the little sign stands there – half apology, half explanation – trying to thread an impossible needle between honesty and sensitivity.

But here’s the thing: history isn’t safe. Nor should it be. We can’t learn from a past we’ve bubble-wrapped. The ornament is offensive because the act it represents was offensive. Seeing it, unmediated, is uncomfortable precisely because it forces recognition – that the people who built and maintained these grand estates did so while others were bound, bought, and sold.

So by all means keep the sign, but let’s call it what it is – a curatorial note of conscience, not a trigger warning. The former confronts; the latter infantilises. If we’re serious about remembering who we were, we must accept that discomfort is the price of honesty. The alternative is to drift into the sort of genteel amnesia where slavery becomes “commerce,” empire becomes “enterprise,” and the only thing left polished to perfection is our self-deception.

The Debt Trap

Debt is one of those things everyone hates and no one can live without, like Microsoft updates or the bloke in HR who insists on “circling back”. It has been with us for as long as people have wanted something now and only had the means to pay for it later. Which is to say: since the first goat changed hands on the promise of “I’ll bring the grain after harvest, honest”.

At heart, debt is just time travel. You drag future wealth into the present and hope future you is still speaking to past you when the bill arrives. The whole of civilisation is built on that trick. You cannot build a road, a ship, a cathedral or a rail network by passing a hat round payday by payday. At some point someone has to front the money and trust that tomorrow will exist, the taxman will still be extracting, and the king will not have died in battle leaving a 12 year old in charge.

In the early days, the arrangement was admirably simple. The king needed money for a war, some pointless dynastic quarrel, or new bling for the palace. He went to whoever had cash - Jews, Lombards, rich merchants, early bankers - and borrowed it. If things went well, he paid them back with interest. If things went badly, he blamed them, defaulted, and occasionally expelled or executed them for good measure. From the king’s point of view this was an excellent risk management strategy. Heads I win, tails I confiscate your house.

This is the first phase of debt: rulers as apex predators. If you lent to them you were not just taking credit risk, you were taking “might wake up in the dungeon” risk. The balance of power was entirely with the sovereign. He had the army, the gallows and, if he really wanted to hurt you, the power to ban you from court banquets.

Over time, however, states developed an awkward habit: they became expensive. Gunpowder, standing armies, navies with real ships rather than leaky tubs, colonial expeditions, Versailles and its imitators - all of it costs money, and not just once. You can rob a minority community or a single bank only so often before you run out of victims or credit. If you want to fight wars every decade and keep a huge bureaucracy in wigs, you need people to keep lending to you despite your appalling personality.

Enter phase two: the rise of the great banking families. The Fuggers, the Medici, the Genoese financiers and their friends. These people were not just lenders. They controlled mines, traded spices and metals, handled international payments, and generally knew how to make the early modern world go round. If you were the emperor of somewhere grandly named but perpetually broke, you held your cap in your hand when you visited their counting house.

Here the power balance begins to shift, but only a little. If you defaulted on the Fuggers, they might not have an army, but they had something just as useful: connections, information, and the ability to quietly tell every other major investor that you were a walking bad debt. They could also gently “suggest” policies in return for their help. Appoint this bishop. Grant that monopoly. Hand over those mining rights. In the small print of early loan contracts you can almost see the birth of lobbying.

Even so, it was still a world of big personalities. The emperor might owe the Fuggers a fortune, but he still sat on a throne and had an annoying habit of believing in divine right. The balance of terror ran both ways. He needed their money; they needed his legal system and soldiers to protect their businesses. It was not yet the tyranny of the spreadsheet.

The real revolution in debt came when states stopped relying mainly on single families and started borrowing from everyone and their aunt. Italian city states had made a start with public debt held by their own citizens, but the Dutch and then the English really industrialised the idea. You create tradable government bonds, you sell them widely, and you pay the interest on time so people trust you enough to buy more. Simple, dull, and utterly transformative.

Now, instead of owing money to one powerful banker who might end up dangling from a hook, the state owed money to a broad class of investors: merchants, landowners, professionals, foreign financiers. The debt itself became a kind of political constituency. If you threatened default, it was not just “old Jakob the banker” who got upset, it was half the people in the coffee house and a good portion of Parliament.

This is where power really starts to tilt. Once you have a big pool of tradable public debt, you have something new: the bond market. A permanent, twitchy Greek chorus of investors deciding whether they believe your promises. If they do, you can borrow cheaply, build your navy, fight your wars, and congratulate yourself on your “sound money”. If they do not, your borrowing costs spike, you face a funding crisis and suddenly you are giving long speeches about “difficult but necessary decisions”.

Kings still defaulted occasionally, of course, but the cost of doing it rose sharply. A serial defaulter finds that lenders demand much higher interest rates, or they simply stay away. You can chop off one banker’s head and call it a day; you cannot decapitate the entire investor class without rather spoiling the tax base.

By the 19th and 20th centuries, the relationship had turned almost inside out. Debt had become not just a way for states to get money, but a way for investors and creditor countries to discipline states. Gunboats turned up in harbours to “encourage” repayment. Later, international institutions took over the job - issuing loans in return for “structural adjustments” that somehow always seemed to involve cutting public services, privatising assets and making life more agreeable for foreign capital.

Domestically, you can see the effect every time a government solemnly announces that “the markets would not wear” this or that policy. You will notice nobody voted for “the markets”. They are not on the ballot paper. Yet they sit in every minister’s head, like an invisible whip. The fear of a bond strike does more to shape fiscal policy than most manifestos.

This is the modern paradox of debt. The original justification still holds: you need it to build things, to smooth shocks, to stop every war, pandemic or recession turning into complete collapse. Without debt we would have fewer hospitals, fewer schools, fewer railways and far more fires. Paying as you go is all very well until you want a bridge that will still be there in 50 years.

But in giving ourselves that flexibility, we have also given creditors enormous leverage. In the old days it was at least clear who held the whip. Now it is a diffuse mix of pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, overseas central banks and institutions with names like a minor character in a Le Carre novel. No single lender can imprison the king. Instead, the whole lot can quietly mark your bonds down a notch and watch your chancellor sweat.

And yet, states have not entirely surrendered. They still have nuclear options: inflation, capital controls, selective default, and plain political defiance. Argentina has made a career out of irritating bondholders and is still there. Russia has defaulted more than once and continues to have flags, borders and rather too many missiles. Even within Europe, there has been a tug of war between creditor orthodoxy and democratic impatience.

You could say we have moved from “absolute monarchy with hostages” to “constitutional monarchy with a sullen, heavily armed landlord”. The state can still act, but only within a corridor of what its creditors deem tolerable. If politicians try to sprint outside that corridor they discover, usually within days, that gilt yields have become very interested in their plans.

The irony is that most ordinary people are on both sides of this. Through pensions and savings they are, in a small way, the creditors. Through taxes and public services they are also the debtors. When governments cut spending to “reassure the markets”, what they are really doing is sacrificing their present selves as citizens in order to soothe their future selves as bondholders. It is a very British compromise: everyone loses, but in a nicely balanced way.

So yes, debt began as a brutal personal relationship between king and lender, backed by swords and dungeons. It evolved into a structural dependency between states and markets, backed by spreadsheets and credit ratings. The balance of power shifted from the throne to the ledger, but not in a clean, once-and-for-all way. It is a continuing argument over who gets to control time: politicians, electors, or those who can move billions at the click of a mouse.

In the meantime, the basic lesson remains what it was when some Mesopotamian farmer scratched an IOU on a clay tablet. Credit lets you live a bit ahead of yourself. Just do not be surprised when the future, eventually, wants a word.

Strategic Incoherence

You really ought to read the thing and try to make sense of it. That is my advice before you take anyone’s word for what is in the November 2025 US National Security Strategy. Sit down with a cup of tea, turn the pages slowly, and marvel at how a country once capable of producing Marshall, Kennan and Brzezinski has ended up with something that reads like the minutes of a particularly fractious parish council meeting.

The document begins with the usual chest thumping about America First. Fair enough if you are revving up a rally crowd, but rather less impressive as the supposed blueprint for a superpower’s place in the world. Then the real theatre starts. Europe, we are told, faces “civilisational erasure”. Not from Russia’s imperialism, not from climate-induced instability, not from the economic drag created by global shocks, but from the EU not organising itself in a way pleasing to the current administration’s cultural anxieties. According to this masterpiece of clarity, Brussels is simultaneously too weak to function and too powerful to tolerate. It is both in terminal decline and somehow the chief threat to Western civilisation. Good luck plotting a policy chart out of that.

While lecturing Europe for its sins, the document demands that Europeans step up, spend more, defend more, and take on far greater security responsibilities. This, while Washington openly cheers on the very nationalist wreckers whose aim is to break the institutions that allow Europe to defend itself in the first place. It is a bit like telling someone to run a marathon after you have set fire to their trainers.

The Russia section manages to be even more contradictory. NATO, we are assured, must remain strong. At the same time, Ukraine is encouraged to wrap things up quickly because the war is proving inconvenient. Russia is a threat, naturally, but also a potential partner in certain spheres, and perhaps deserving of a sphere of influence, depending on which paragraph you read. Strategic coherence has left the building.

China is nominally the great rival of the century, yet receives less focused attention than the EU’s approach to migration policy. Instead of outlining a serious Indo-Pacific strategy, the document prefers to lecture allies about “identity” and “civilisation”. It feels less like a strategy and more like a frustrated columnist shaking his fist at a passing cloud.

The Western Hemisphere section revives a triumphalist Monroe Doctrine while simultaneously decrying past American “imperial overreach”. One might say the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, except that both appear equally confused. And climate change – the largest driver of future instability and migration – is waved away as an ideological distraction. Migration itself is presented as both existential threat and necessary bargaining chip, depending on the mood of the page.

The overall effect is not strategic thought, but strategic incoherence. Allies are scolded for disloyalty, adversaries are offered mixed messages, and the entire post-war order is treated as disposable furniture in need of clearance. What is missing is any sense of hierarchy: what matters, what matters less, and what requires compromise. Instead we get a cultural grievance pamphlet pretending to be grand strategy.

It does not project confidence. It projects insecurity. It reads not like a superpower thinking about the next fifty years, but like a government obsessed with next week’s poll numbers. A nation that once set the terms of global order is now producing documents that can barely set out a linear argument.

If this is what passes for strategic thinking in Washington now, the conclusion writes itself. Great powers do not fall because they are defeated. They fall because they lose the ability to think clearly. This document is not a sign of American strength. It is a neon-lit warning that the United States is drifting, mentally and institutionally, towards the exit.

Britain Has Gone Mad

I have finally reached the point where I can no longer pretend this country is functioning. Every morning we get a new rule from a quango nobody remembers creating. You cannot park here unless you attend a webinar. You cannot put your bin out unless you have downloaded the app. You cannot get a GP appointment unless you solve a riddle on the surgery website. Britain is now governed by laminated notices and software updates.

Meanwhile the NHS has so many managers that there are managers to supervise the managers writing notes about the managers. You go into a hospital and find four fluorescent jackets timing each other while one nurse sprints about looking for a bed that has technically been abolished. And yet the nation’s angriest voices insist the real problem is ten dinghies a day, as if the asylum seekers are sneaking round our houses at night unplugging MRI machines.

The energy system does not escape blame either. We have wind turbines sprouting from the countryside like oversized dandelions, yet our bills mysteriously float upward whenever an algorithm feels capricious. France, meanwhile, pays less and manages not to hold a national investigation into why gravity works differently for them.

And still, still, nobody will accept the obvious truth. Britain has been taken over. Not by Brussels or migrants or elites no, by consultants, app designers, LinkedIn gurus, middle managers, and people whose job titles sound like rejected band names. The country is run by dashboards, drop down menus, and automated emails telling you not to reply. Confusion is now our primary export.

So I have devised a set of policies that would sort the country out overnight. Nobody in Westminster will admit they are needed. That is how you know they would work.

First, scrap GDP and replace it with a national efficiency rating based on how quickly people can order at Costa. Anyone taking more than 14 seconds pays a surtax. This alone would raise enough money to rebuild every school and repair every roundabout that has been awaiting consultation since 2014.

Second, immigration. Forget points based nonsense. Forget work visas. We need something simple. Impose a height limit. Only people between 5 foot 6 and 5 foot 10 allowed in. Not discriminatory scientific. Think of the savings on public transport alone.

Third, conscription. But not for the young they are already exhausted. Conscript the over 60s. They enjoy complaining, they have perfected queuing, and they can hold their ground like no other demographic. Deploy them to the Channel. Nobody is getting past a wall of pensioners armed with travel kettles and thermos flasks.

Fourth, abolish Parliament entirely and replace it with a televised obstacle course. The party that completes it fastest forms the government. At least we would know our leaders can climb a rope, which is more than we can say for most Cabinets of the last decade.

Fifth, and I stand by this despite the abuse I will receive, sell Wales. Beautiful scenery, wonderful people, but nobody outside Britain can pronounce the towns and Netflix would pay a fortune for the filming rights. The proceeds could be used to abolish kettle safety switches and restore the nation’s backbone. After all, things only went downhill once kettles became idiot proof.

This is the future Britain deserves. Not more excuses, not more forms, not more webinars about bins. Real leadership. Bold thinking. Policies that would terrify the consultants running the place.

So if you disagree, explain who is running the country. Because from where I am sitting, the only consistent policy we actually have is making things slightly worse every year and then blaming someone else for it usually someone in a dinghy.

I am tired of pretending this is normal.

The Willow That Walks With Me

Every summer, the willow arbour tries to reclaim the garden like something out of Day of the Triffids. You turn your back for five minutes and it stops being a charming leafy tunnel and starts auditioning as jungle training for the SAS. Fortunately, it has one weakness. It needs pruning. And once you realise that pruning means an effectively inexhaustible supply of long, straight poles, it stops being a problem and starts being a raw material.

So this year, instead of just hacking it back and dragging the branches off to the bonfire like usual, I looked at a couple of the longer, straighter stems and thought, “You know what, you’re not firewood. You’re gear.”

A bit of trimming, peeling and tidying up the knobbly bits, and suddenly I had the beginnings of two rather elegant walking poles. No carbon fibre, no “aerospace grade” nonsense, no brand, no logo, no influencer discount code. Just willow that had been shading part of the garden a few weeks earlier and will obligingly grow back again next year, ready to be turned into the next batch.

Naturally, I could have gone online and ordered some over-engineered trekking poles made of unobtainium, with shock absorbers, built-in selfie mounts and probably a subscription service. But there is something deeply satisfying about walking with a stick that has never seen a factory. It was alive in my garden, it tried to invade the washing line, and now it is being taken on walks as penance. That feels about right.

Finishing them was half the fun. A bit of judicious scorching with the blowtorch to bring out the grain and add a touch of “weathered Highland guide” to what was, in truth, a pair of ex-hedge prunings. A rub down, a touch of oil, and they started to look suspiciously like I had bought them at some artisan craft fair at three times the price.

Then we come to the rubber tips.

Yes, they do look slightly “zimmer frame on tour”. I am fully aware that, at first glance, it appears I have simply stolen the feet off a mobility aid and rammed them onto the end of a couple of sticks. There are probably style guides somewhere declaring this a tragic admission of advancing age.

But here is the unfashionable truth: they work.

On tarmac, wet rock or polished stone, those rubber ferrules grip like a limpet with anxiety issues. They stop the sharp ends from chipping paving slabs, they do not skitter on manhole covers, and they spare the ears from that delightful “clack-clack-clack” of bare poles on hard ground. They also mean I am vastly less likely to plant the tip between kerbstones and perform an unscheduled flying lesson. At my age, anything that reduces the probability of meeting the NHS at ground level is to be cherished.

There is, of course, a whole industry devoted to making us feel that unless our outdoor kit looks like it has been tested on K2 by a man called Bjorn, it is not fit for a stroll up the local hill. Matching poles, matching jacket, matching hydration system, and an app to tell you how heroic you are for walking where actual people live. Consumerism dressed up as “adventure”.

Meanwhile, I have two walking poles that cost nothing, bar a bit of time, a small amount of gas in the blowtorch and the princely outlay on two rubber ferrules. The willow came free with the property and insists on regenerating every year anyway, which means I now have a sustainable, annually renewable walking-stick factory disguised as an arbour. Even the wrist loops are made from rope that was lying around in the shed, left over from some forgotten maritime bodge.

Once you start walking with something you made yourself, you look after it. You notice how the oil is wearing in, where the grain is rising, which knocks and scrapes tell the story of which walk. You cannot say that about a mass-produced telescopic pole whose main achievement is being available in four different shades of neon.

So yes, the tips look a bit zimmer frame. Good. Let them. If the choice is between image and not falling over, I will take “pensioner chic” every time. Besides, there is a certain mischievous pleasure in striding along with what appears to be mobility hardware, only to overtake a much younger, fully branded walker who is busy fiddling with the adjustment collar on his carbon poles.

Out of one over-enthusiastic willow arbour, I now have shade in summer and two very serviceable walking companions for the rest of the year, with the next generation already sprouting. No landfill, no marketing, no faff. Just wood, a bit of fire, some oil, and two rubber feet that refuse to slip.

Call them primitive if you like. I call them progress.

The Billionaire Backing the Man Who Only Profits by Losing

Reform UK has just banked a £9 million cheque from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto investor whose portfolio runs from aviation to defence tech and enough offshore finance to make a Bond villain blush. It is the largest political donation ever made by a living donor in Britain. And it landed suspiciously soon after Nigel Farage publicly plugged Harborne’s crypto company and told the industry: “I am your champion.” British politics appears to have entered its product-placement era. Coming soon, Prime Minister’s Questions, brought to you by a decentralised blockchain asset of your choice.

This is the reality behind the “party of the ordinary bloke.” Five MPs funded like a hedge fund experiment. Farage has spent years railing against globalist elites, yet his biggest backer is a global financier whose tax footprint spans several time zones. If Harborne were any more global he would need a set of maritime charts. The voters get the flag waving; the donors get the deregulation.

And what does this money buy? Not policies that will ever be implemented. Farage has no intention of governing. Governing would kill the business model stone dead. You can’t stand at the sidelines screaming that everything is broken if you are suddenly responsible for fixing any of it. The real money is in shouting, not doing. His income streams depend on perpetual outrage: media gigs, speaking tours, brand deals, GB News eruptions, and whatever fresh side-hustles the algorithm demands. Farage is wealthier losing than he would ever be winning.

That is why Reform’s policies are so extravagant. They are not written to be enacted. They are written to create noise, shift the Overton Window, and make the established parties panic and follow his lead. He drags the political centre to the right while staying safely outside accountability. It is exactly what his backers want: a Britain softened up for radical deregulation, weak public institutions, and a tax regime that smiles warmly on capital.

Lee Anderson has simply enrolled in the same finishing school. Ashfield’s part-time MP, full-time pundit, and Farage’s most diligent apprentice. His GB News contract pays roughly £100,000 a year for a few hours of weekly bluster, more than many Ashfield families see in two years. It is the natural extension of Farage’s method: use the constituency seat as a prop, then spend your actual working week under studio lights.

And his constituency work? Ethereal. No steady trail of surgeries or local engagement. No visible presence unless you stumble across him during election season. A few locals have noted the pattern: he was everywhere when he wanted votes and nowhere when he was needed. Meanwhile the camera lights stay warm and the studio chair is always occupied. Outrage travels well. Casework does not.

Reform has therefore become less a political party than a talent agency for the aggrieved. It identifies individuals who perform indignation reliably, monetises them, wraps them in the Union Flag, and then sells the whole package as “authenticity.” The voters are the audience, not the stakeholders. The donors are the real clients.

Farage perfected this model years ago: never win, never govern, never be accountable. Just keep the show running and the cheques arriving. Anderson is the apprentice mimicking the master, possibly dreaming of his own upgrade from constituency to camera if Ashfield eventually wises up.

This is the modern political racket: present yourself as the voice of ordinary people, funded by men who would struggle to point to Ashfield on a map. Promise the unachievable. Blame everyone else when it fails. Bank the money. Stoke the culture war. Repeat. Britain grows poorer, angrier and more distracted, while a handful of performers grow richer by pretending to represent the very people they barely bother to visit.

Follow the money and the illusion collapses. Reform UK is not a people’s uprising. It is a very well-financed performance — starring men who would rather be in the studio than in their constituencies, and funded by a crypto billionaire who expects a return on investment. The voters get the slogans. The donors get the influence. And the country gets played.

Shouldn't Have Gone to SpecSavers

I have used Glasses Direct varifocals for decades without a hiccup. They arrived by post, I put them on, and the world behaved itself. No drama. No geometry experiments. No unexpected gradients. The only real drawback was the obvious one. Being a postal service, there is no fitting phase. No nudging frames. No marking pupil height. No making sure the lenses sit where your eyes expect them to be. Eventually that small irritation persuaded me to switch to SpecSavers for a proper fitting and what I assumed would be an upgrade.

What I received was not an upgrade. It was an adventure.

From the moment I put the new glasses on, the ground appeared so close that I wondered whether someone had lowered the entire village by a couple of feet while I was in the shop. Visually, the world now rises to meet me. Every corridor seems to slope upwards. Every pavement feels like a gentle incline. Even my kitchen floor appears to have taken early retirement and moved to the Lake District.

But then come the legs. Because the ground looks nearer, my stride adjusts. My balance recalibrates. My body tries to compensate for the imaginary hill my eyes insist is there. And suddenly the tactile feedback is the polar opposite of the visual cue. My legs have decided I am walking downhill. Not slightly. Properly downhill. As if gravity has chosen a new direction to amuse itself.

So here I am. A man both climbing and descending at the same time. Schrödinger on a stroll. My eyes shout uphill. My legs shout downhill. My brain stands in the middle trying to negotiate a ceasefire while I wobble across the room like a tourist three pints into their first cider festival.

This is the inevitable outcome when the corridor height in a varifocal lens is a few millimetres north of correct. Instead of looking through the distance zone when I walk, I plunge straight into the intermediate zone. The world tilts up. My legs stick to the truth and insist there is no hill at all. My senses, usually such cooperative creatures, are now engaged in a daily turf war.

I shall return to SpecSavers and explain all this calmly. What I need is not a topographical reinterpretation of Old Sodbury. I need lenses that permit eyes, legs and gravity to agree on the general layout of the landscape.

Until the correction is made, I remain a walking optical paradox. A man traversing a perfectly flat floor while simultaneously going uphill and downhill. Proof that even a tiny measurement error can turn a simple stroll into a philosophical problem.

Any Colour, So Long as it's Black

I nipped into Kwik Fit for a tracking job and was lured by a carpet display that promised every shade under the sun. Beige, grey, taupe, something that looked suspiciously like wet Labrador. A veritable rainbow of options. You could practically taste the choice.

So I scan the QR code, like a dutiful modern motorist, and tap in the registration and postcode. Up pops the grand total of my personalised, tailored, luxury options.

Black.

Just black.

It was like watching a conjuror whip the cloth off a banquet table only to reveal a single Pot Noodle. And the thing is, my 1993 Mercedes 500SL left the factory in beige. The leather is beige. The carpets were beige. The whole interior is a stately procession of beige. You could lose a digestive biscuit in there and never see it again.

But Kwik Fit’s mystical database had other ideas. In its mind, the R129 clearly only ever came in one interior: coal mine chic. Never mind the actual car. Never mind the colour samples literally hanging on a hook ten inches from their till. The computer had spoken.

It was Henry Ford all over again. Any colour you like, so long as it’s black.

You can almost picture the programmer, somewhere in a distant office, deciding that every Mercedes built before the millennium must have been upholstered in the same shade as a Victorian funeral.

The absurdity, of course, is that the beige I wanted was sitting right there on the sample board. I held it in my hands. I could feel the beige. I could commune with the beige. But ask the QR code, and suddenly I’m only allowed to order something that looks like a bin liner with stitching.

The truth is simple. The car knows it is beige. I know it is beige. The sample board knows it is beige. Everyone knows it is beige except the one thing that claims to know what I need.

The system.

And so the only way to get what the car actually came with is to march up to the counter, point at the colour I want and inform them that my SL did not, in fact, roll out of Sindelfingen as a small obsidian cavern on wheels.

In short, the computer says no, but the carpet says yes.

Beige forever. Black only when you’re Henry Ford.

Banter, Denial and Blind Panic on Radio 4

The Radio 4 interview just now with Richard Tice should be bottled and sold as a diagnostic tool for political evasiveness. Within thirty seconds he managed to tie himself in a knot so tight it could have moored a tanker.

Pressed about Nigel Farage’s schoolboy antisemitic comments, Tice opened with the classic minimisation routine. It was “playground banter,” he said, as if racism somehow becomes charming when delivered in short trousers. That line only works if the story is true, which of course he realised a heartbeat too late. Cornered, he lurched into the opposite argument entirely. Suddenly the accusers were lying. The interviewer, to their credit, skewered him on the contradiction and let him flounder in it.

This is the Reform method in miniature. Start by brushing it off, then pivot to denial, then attack the messenger. It is the same tired routine whenever Farage’s past pops up. If any Labour MP had this hanging over them, Tice would already be marching up and down College Green screaming about moral decay. But for his own leader, the standards evaporate on contact.

The telling moment was the panic in his voice when he realised what he’d said. You could almost hear the gears grinding as he tried to reverse course without admitting he’d just confirmed the allegation. He couldn’t. So he lashed out instead. That is not a defence. It is a flustered man trying to keep the cult intact.

And that is the deeper truth here. The entire Reform brand relies on Farage being the great untouchable. Question him and the edifice cracks, so they twist themselves into ever smaller shapes to protect him. But a movement that demands this level of contortion from its lieutenants cannot be taken seriously. If they cannot hold a consistent line on a schoolyard slur, they are hardly fit to run a parish council, never mind a country.