The Engine That Purrs While It Fails

There is a particular type of man who can say something quite alarming in a tone normally reserved for explaining how to descale a kettle, and half the room will nod along as if they’ve just heard a sensible bit of household advice.

Take Netanyahu or Putin. They speak in complete sentences, pause in the right places, and look as though they’ve read the briefing notes and, crucially, understood them. It all feels reassuring, like a pilot calmly explaining a delay. Then along comes Trump, who sounds like a man assembling flat pack furniture without the instructions while narrating the process. He starts a point, abandons it, returns to it from a different angle, and occasionally discovers a new one halfway through the sentence. Because we are human and slightly lazy in our thinking, we conclude that the first pair are believable and the second is not.

Which is where it all goes wrong. A well delivered argument is not the same thing as a true one, it just feels like it is. The brain hears fluency and quietly ticks a box marked probably correct, which is rather like assuming a car is mechanically sound because the engine note is smooth at idle. You can have an engine that purrs beautifully while quietly eating its own bearings, and you can have one that sounds a bit agricultural but will run forever if you leave it alone. The noise tells you something, but not the thing you actually need to know.

Putin in particular has turned this into a system. Calm voice, neat narrative, no visible hesitation. It creates the impression of inevitability, which is very useful if what you are saying would look rather less convincing if anyone stopped to pull it apart. Netanyahu is cut from a similar cloth, albeit with a different audience and a different set of arguments. Very polished, very controlled, very certain. You may agree or disagree with him, but he rarely sounds as if he is guessing. Trump, meanwhile, sounds exactly like someone guessing in real time, which makes people uncomfortable even when he stumbles onto something broadly correct, because it doesn’t come wrapped in that reassuring layer of polish.

So we end up judging the message by the smoothness of the delivery, which is a bit like buying a car based on how nicely the salesman closes the door. It shuts with a satisfying thunk and you think, well, that feels solid, and then a week later the gearbox falls out somewhere near Swindon.

Culinary Misidentification

We’d done the sensible thing before we set off in the motorhome and I’d made a proper hachis Parmentier, the sort of slow cooked beef dish that sits there quietly proving you are, in fact, a competent adult. Something rich, deliberate, unmistakably beef. The kind of meal that does not invite debate about what species is involved.

Which is just as well, as it turns out.

Because one night is always given over to a Charlie Bigham. We call it a treat, which is a polite way of saying we’ve decided not to bother. Hay cooked one in the motorhome in Portesham, and it came out exactly as they all do. Golden lid, creamy interior, the visual equivalent of a reassuring nod.

I ate it quite happily. No complaints at all. And when I’d finished, I sat back and, with the calm authority of a man who clearly understands what he has just consumed, announced that it was a very nice fish pie.

It was not a fish pie. It was chicken and ham hock.

Now, that would be bad enough on its own. Confusing fish with poultry and pig is not a minor slip. It is a full category error. But the detail that really ought to concern everyone involved is this: I hadn’t just mislabelled the dish. I had actually eaten pieces of chicken and calmly registered them as prawns.

Not vaguely prawn-like. Not “something a bit fishy”. Proper chunks of chicken had gone through chewing, consideration, and whatever passes for analysis, and emerged in my mind as seafood. At that point we are no longer dealing with a simple mistake. That is a complete breakdown in quality control.

It is rather like lifting the bonnet, pointing at something entirely at random, and declaring the alternator has gone, only to discover the car is missing a wheel. The process has not just gone wrong, it has gone wrong with confidence.

And that, I think, is the interesting bit. The certainty. There was no hesitation. No cautious probing. My brain took a quick look at the situation, decided it recognised the pattern, and shut down further enquiry. Creamy pie, pale protein, eaten in a motorhome - close enough, move on.

Which does make you wonder how often this happens elsewhere. A familiar outline, a quick assumption, and then a firm conclusion delivered with just enough authority to discourage anyone from asking whether you’ve actually checked. Details become optional once the general idea feels about right.

In fairness, those Bigham’s pies do encourage this sort of thinking. They all arrive under the same polite golden lid, each one a variation on a theme of middle class reassurance. Once you’ve decided what it probably is, the rest of the evidence seems to be treated as an administrative inconvenience.

Hay, to her credit, handled this with admirable restraint. There was a pause, a look, and then the quiet correction. No fuss, no lecture, just the gentle dismantling of my entirely misplaced confidence.

Which leaves me with the slightly awkward conclusion that, given enough sauce and a pastry lid, I may no longer be able to distinguish between land and sea. A worrying development for someone who prides himself on knowing what he’s looking at.

I shall stick to the hachis Parmentier in future. At least then, if I insist it’s something else, we can all agree the fault lies with me rather than the evidence.

No Off-Ramp for Trump

Trump is not operating a normal presidency. He believes his own judgement is sufficient, treats advice as optional, and sees any form of restraint as personal weakness.

He has been pushed into confrontation with Iran by Netanyahu, whose objective of decisive action aligns neatly with Trump’s instinct to escalate. The result is not a considered strategy but a reinforcing loop. One pushes, the other amplifies, and neither has an incentive to pause and ask where it leads.

His stated military aims are straightforward enough on paper. Degrade Iran’s capabilities. Reassert deterrence. Stop the threat. But they are not being met. Iran has not collapsed. It continues to absorb strikes and respond. Deterrence has not been restored in any meaningful sense. If anything, the exchange has broadened and hardened.

And now we have the added wrinkle of his own counterterrorism chief resigning, stating there was no imminent threat. If that reflects the internal intelligence view, then the public case for war was, at best, stretched and, at worst, something else entirely. The subsequent FBI investigation rather suggests those concerns may have touched something the administration would have preferred to keep quiet.

From that starting point, escalation is not a choice, it is the default. Each strike invites retaliation. Each retaliation justifies a larger strike. And because stepping back would look like losing, the only available move is to go further. In practical terms, he has no off-ramp, because taking one would contradict the image he is trying to maintain.

That dynamic widens the conflict. Iran absorbs the blows and responds, as states under attack tend to do. It does not collapse. The exchange spreads. Targets expand. And before long, the conflict begins to reach beyond military assets into the infrastructure that underpins the regional and global economy.

That is the point at which his actions introduce a second dimension. Not just war, but economic disruption. Energy infrastructure comes into play. Shipping lanes become uncertain. Insurance rises. Prices move. What began as a military escalation starts to spill into the systems that keep the global economy functioning.

And that part is spiralling.

The Gulf states feel it first and most directly. Energy production, ports, shipping lanes, all exposed. They did not choose the war, but they bear its consequences. Economic damage builds, and with it pressure to act, not out of ideology but necessity. The line between staying out and being drawn in begins to disappear.

Europe follows for the same reason. It does not want involvement, but it cannot absorb sustained disruption to energy flows. So it edges in, step by step, through protection of shipping, defensive support, and political alignment. Each move limited, each one justified, but together they amount to participation driven by economic survival.

At the same time, a further, rather uncomfortable truth is exposed.

There are Iranians who want regime change. That is not in dispute. The protests were real, large, and brutally suppressed.

But escalation shows no real concern for them at all. Bombing a country does not empower its civil society. It does not create safe conditions for protest. If anything, it strengthens the regime’s grip and justifies further repression.

And on the ground, the reaction is telling. Many Iranians want change, but reject war as the means of achieving it.

There is also a darker edge to this. If an uprising were triggered under these conditions, protesters could simply be slaughtered. Which suggests that, while regime change is spoken of, the human cost of how it might happen is not the limiting factor. Netanyahu’s priority is the removal of the threat, not the welfare of the people living under it. If that requires Iran to be battered into submission, that is a price he appears willing to contemplate.

So the people most likely to suffer from “liberation” are the ones it is supposedly for.

And through all of this, a very clear lesson is being learned. If you are a state in that region, conventional strength does not guarantee safety. Alliances are uncertain under pressure. States without ultimate deterrence remain vulnerable.

In that environment, Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons becomes rational. Not admirable, but logical. And once that logic takes hold, it does not remain confined to Iran. Other states will draw the same conclusion and begin moving in that direction.

That is how nuclear proliferation starts, not with a declaration, but with a series of decisions that all point the same way.

Meanwhile, the same escalation that drives the conflict outward begins to erode support at home. Strength without clear results starts to look hollow. Costs rise, outcomes remain uncertain, and even core supporters begin to question it.

Which creates a second loop. To maintain the image of strength, escalation continues. That escalation deepens the problem. The deepening problem further weakens support. And so the cycle reinforces itself.

So you end up here.

A personality-driven escalation with no usable off-ramp. A widening conflict failing on its own stated military terms. An economic dimension now spiralling beyond control. Allies being drawn in by necessity rather than choice. And a steady, rational drift towards nuclear proliferation as more states conclude that the only reliable insurance is one we spent decades trying to limit.

And the final irony is this. The more force applied to achieve the stated objectives, the further away those objectives become. Each step taken to increase security reduces it. Each escalation makes resolution harder. It is not just a war without an off-ramp. It is a war in which every turn of the wheel drives further away from the destination.

A catastrophe set in motion by Netanyahu, and enabled by Trump, who lacks the wit to see he has been played.

The Quiet Disappearance of Songs of Praise

The other day Hayley and I somehow ended up talking about Songs of Praise. Not exactly a cutting edge cultural discussion, I admit, but it was a Sunday morning and the conversation had already wandered through the weather, the garden and whether we had any decent tea bags left.

At some point I confidently announced that Songs of Praise had been cancelled years ago. Quietly dropped by the BBC, I said, probably after someone noticed that the average viewer remembered the Coronation the first time round. It sounded entirely plausible and I delivered this verdict with the sort of authority normally associated with people who have not checked anything at all.

It turns out, of course, that this was complete nonsense. The programme has not been cancelled. It is still alive and well on BBC One.

They have simply moved it to Sunday lunchtime.

Now for decades Songs of Praise occupied what broadcasters used to call the “God slot”. Early Sunday evening, just as the weekend was gently winding down and people were beginning to contemplate Monday morning. The roast had settled, the washing up was done, and somewhere across Britain a choir in sensible cardigans was warming up to sing Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer.

Even people who never watched it knew exactly when it was on. It sat there in the schedule like a sort of national punctuation mark at the end of the weekend. You might not tune in, but you knew it was there, humming away politely in the background.

Now apparently it goes out around Sunday lunchtime.

Sunday lunchtime is not a time when the British public is sitting quietly contemplating Anglican hymnody. Sunday lunchtime is when people are arguing about the timing of the roast potatoes, or standing in the kitchen wondering why the oven isn’t hot yet despite being on for twenty minutes. Half the country is trying to peel carrots and the other half is in the garage looking for a screwdriver they were holding five minutes earlier.

Which rather explains my mistake. I assumed the programme had been cancelled because, in any practical sense, it has been.

Somewhere in Britain a choir from Shropshire is still singing its heart out to the nation. The nation, meanwhile, is elbow deep in gravy looking for the vegetable peeler.

Half Term: The Sentence You Didnt Know You Were Serving

For roughly twenty years of your life, half term and end of term are not merely dates. They are the skeletal framework around which your existence is assembled. You do not plan holidays according to weather, price, or inclination. You plan them according to permission. The school calendar becomes your Admiralty chart, and you sail where it allows, when it allows, and at whatever ruinous cost the season demands.

You begin each year with optimism, telling yourself you will book early and outwit the system. This confidence lasts until you open the first travel website and discover that every flight, hotel, and cottage in Britain has already increased in price by an amount normally associated with organised crime. The same hotel room that sits neglected in early June suddenly commands triple the price in August, simply because your children are temporarily not required to attend maths. You stare at the figure, experience a brief moment of moral resistance, and then click confirm, because the alternative is remaining at home with young people who regard boredom as a form of injustice.

You join the great migration. Airports fill with families moving in dense, purposeful clusters, all of them bound by the same invisible timetable. Service stations become holding pens. Aircraft cabins acquire the atmosphere of a mildly controlled riot. You endure it because there is no choice. Half term is not an opportunity. It is an obligation.

As the children grow older, something subtle shifts. You remain subject to the timetable, but your importance within it declines. You are still required to organise, fund, and transport, but your presence itself becomes negotiable. Conversations take place around you rather than with you. Your suggestions are received politely and then ignored. You begin to suspect that you are no longer essential to the holiday itself, only to its financing and execution. You are still serving the timetable, but your rank has been reduced.

Then, without announcement, your commission expires.

The children leave, and the school calendar releases its grip on your life. Retirement completes the process, and with it comes a freedom so unfamiliar it takes time to recognise. For the first time in decades, there is no external authority dictating when you must travel, when you must stay home, or when you must pay extortionate sums for the privilege of existing elsewhere. The entire structure that governed your movements simply dissolves.

What replaces it is not dramatic, but it is profound. You discover that the world functions differently when schools are in session. Flights are cheaper. Hotels are calmer. Roads are quieter. Cafes contain adults speaking at normal volume. Campsites, in particular, acquire an unexpected serenity. When you arrive in the motorhome now, you find yourself surrounded not by frantic young families wrestling with collapsible furniture, but by people unmistakably of your own vintage. Chairs are unfolded with quiet competence. There is no shouting, no frantic negotiation, no plastic catastrophes unfolding in real time.

As evening settles, small campfires appear, and with them comes the gentle leakage of music into the dusk. It is never random. Within seconds you recognise it. A guitar phrase, a bassline, a voice that takes you straight back to a long-forgotten deck, a cheap record player, or a car with more optimism than horsepower. The late 60s or early 70s return without effort. Nobody announces it. Nobody needs to. You are among your own cohort now, and the soundtrack confirms it more clearly than any birth certificate.

Half term itself undergoes a complete transformation. Once the fixed point around which your life revolved, it now becomes something you deliberately avoid. You see it approaching on the calendar and instinctively schedule everything around it, ensuring you travel before it arrives or after it has passed. You are no longer compelled to participate, and the absence of compulsion is quietly exhilarating.

There is an additional, unexpected dimension to this liberation. Your children, now adults, no longer require your logistical support, and your presence in their plans becomes optional rather than assumed. They are fond of you, certainly, but they have their own lives, their own timetables, and their own reasons for not wanting their retired parent hovering nearby. You have moved, gently and irreversibly, from necessity to embarrassment. It is not hostile. It is simply the natural order completing its work.

This, in the end, is retirements true reward. Not merely freedom from work, but freedom from half term itself. The timetable that once governed your finances, movements, and sanity has lost all authority. You are free to travel when it makes sense, when it is affordable, and when it is peaceful.

And so, when you next pull onto a quiet campsite in the middle of term, kettle on and chairs out, and hear the unmistakable opening bars of something released before your children were even born, you realise with quiet satisfaction that you are exactly where you belong, at exactly the right time, and entirely by choice.

The DOGE DODGE

It turns out the great American experiment in slashing the deficit with a machete borrowed from Silicon Valley has achieved something rather more modest. It has managed to annoy a lot of academics, trigger a flurry of lawsuits, and leave the $2 trillion deficit sitting there, entirely untroubled.

There is something almost endearing about the scale mismatch. You take a problem driven by pensions, healthcare, defence and debt interest, and you go after humanities grants with a keyword search and a sense of moral purpose. It is a bit like tackling a knocking engine by removing the radio because it looks fiddly and vaguely unnecessary. Very decisive. Entirely irrelevant.

The best part is the candour. Under oath, no less. Yes, the aim was to get the deficit down to zero. No, we did not achieve that. No, I do not regret people losing their incomes. One almost admires the honesty. It saves everyone the trouble of pretending this was ever about fiscal arithmetic rather than ideology in a high-vis vest.

And the arithmetic really is the awkward bit. About $100 million in grants here, a few hundred million there if you are feeling generous. Against a $2 trillion deficit. You start with a number like that, you go hunting for arts grants, and at no point does anyone stop and ask whether those two things are even in the same postcode.

What they actually seem to have done, if you read the depositions, is sit there running keyword searches, leaning on ChatGPT, and trying to work out what counts as DEI after the fact. Which is one way of allocating public money, I suppose. Not one that would normally fill you with confidence.

Still, it has a certain theatre to it. Young operatives, light on subject knowledge, sweeping through institutions with the confidence of people who have never had to run one. It is all very modern. Data driven, in the sense that there is a search box involved.

And now we have our own version being trailed over here. A British DOGE, no less. Teams of bright outsiders parachuted into councils to uncover the hidden treasure apparently buried in municipal budgets. One waits with interest to see which dusty vault they imagine exists between adult social care swallowing most of the money and the weekly argument about whether the bins will still be collected.

The early returns are not promising, and in some cases they are quietly rather awkward. In Kent, one of the flagship Reform councils, senior figures have already admitted they went looking for “craziness” in the books and did not find it. Not hidden reserves, not vast waste, just the same tight budgets everyone else has been dealing with. Warwickshire has told a similar story, albeit with slightly more polite language.

What you do get instead is a bit of rearranging. Projects paused or cancelled, some of which were going to save money later. Existing efficiencies rebadged as new ones. The odd consultant brought in to help identify savings, which is a nice touch given the campaign rhetoric. And, in at least one case, a council tax rise to keep the whole thing on the road.

Which is roughly the point at which reality tends to intrude. Councils are not sitting on piles of discretionary spending. Most of the money is tied up in adult social care, SEND transport, and other statutory obligations that do not disappear because someone has arrived with a spreadsheet and a sense of purpose.

But that does not quite kill the idea, because it was never really about the numbers. It is about the feeling that somewhere there must be waste, and that someone suitably brisk can go in and sort it out. If the savings do not appear, well, that can be put down to obstruction, or the wrong people still being in place, or not having gone far enough.

Meanwhile the deficit carries on, serenely indifferent to the removal of arts grants and council consultants, like an engine that continues to knock while someone triumphantly waves a detached radio aerial.

And if you are wondering what it all cost to run, the answer is suitably vague. Tens of millions here or there, lost in departmental budgets, plus the lawyers now circling. One suspects the final bill will be one of those small ironies where the exercise designed to save money ends up costing roughly the same as it saved.

The ashtray has gone. The radio might be next. The engine is still knocking, but at least everyone can say something decisive has been done.

Civil Service Reform

I see Reform is planning, if it wins the next election, to sack most of Whitehall’s senior civil servants and replace them with political appointees and outside experts. The theory seems to be that the civil service is bloated and obstructive, so the obvious solution is to remove the people who actually know how the departments function.

It has a certain pub logic to it. If the engine is not running well, clearly the mechanics must be the problem, so remove them and the machine will presumably spring into life.

The American comparison gets mentioned quite a lot in this discussion. In the United States thousands of senior officials change when a new president arrives because cabinet secretaries, agency heads and their deputies are political appointments that come and go with the administration.

What tends to get skipped over is that underneath those political appointments sits a large permanent civil service that actually keeps the machinery running. Britain simply built the system the other way round, with ministers changing while the senior civil service stays in place and keeps the administrative system functioning.

Permanent secretaries are not just bureaucrats pushing paper around. They are the people who know how departments actually work, how the legislation fits together, where the budget pressures are and which procurement contract is about to explode at an inconvenient moment.

Some of them are running organisations with tens of thousands of staff and budgets that would make most private companies blink. Remove them all at once and you have not merely cleared out a few obstructive mandarins, you have removed the institutional memory of the state, which tends to become noticeable fairly quickly when the new arrivals start asking how things actually work.

There is also the slightly awkward matter of money. Permanent secretaries earn roughly £160k to £200k, which sounds generous until you remember they are effectively running organisations the size of large corporations.

Anyone capable of doing that in the private sector would normally command several times that. So if you replace them with “industry experts”, you either pay market rates or recruit people willing to take a substantial pay cut for ideological reasons, neither of which usually results in smaller government.

The Trump comparison that keeps being made is also a little selective. Even in the United States the controversial part of Trump’s agenda has been the attempt to remove career civil servants by reclassifying them as political staff so they can be dismissed more easily.

That proposal has caused quite a row in America because it undermines the long standing idea of a politically neutral administrative state. So when people here talk about copying the American model, they are not copying the routine part of it, they are copying the bit Americans themselves are arguing about.

There is also the small matter of unintended consequences. Once one government decides it can purge the senior civil service and replace it with loyalists, the next government inherits exactly the same power, which means the precedent applies in both directions whether anyone likes it or not.

Before long the senior layers of the state get rebuilt after every election. The Americans actually tried something rather like that in the nineteenth century, when public jobs were handed out as political rewards under what became known as the spoils system.

It produced chaos, corruption and some fairly spectacular incompetence. The Americans then spent the next century dismantling it and building a professional civil service instead, which is a lesson Britain quietly absorbed along the way.

None of this means the civil service is perfect. Anyone who has dealt with Whitehall will know it can be slow, cautious and occasionally baffling, although dismantling the entire senior layer because you suspect they might disagree with you is not really reform.

It is more like smashing the dashboard because the car will not start, which might feel satisfying for a moment but rarely fixes the underlying problem.

Still, if a future government does decide to sack half of Whitehall on day one, the consultancy firms will be quietly delighted. Someone will need to explain to the new arrivals how the departments actually work, and judging by the size of some of them that could keep a few consultants busy for quite a while.

The Racist Gardener

You discover interesting things about people once you have lived with them long enough. In my case it turns out that the woman I married is, in gardening terms, a fairly uncompromising nationalist. I had always thought of gardening as a fairly relaxing hobby involving lawns, the occasional flowerbed, and the quiet satisfaction of a job reasonably well done. It turns out there are people who approach it more like border control.

My own tastes are simple. I like a neat lawn, properly cut and preferably striped. Something that suggests civilisation has at least briefly passed through the area and imposed a bit of order on proceedings. A lawn you can stand and admire with a cup of tea while feeling faintly competent. It does not need to win prizes. It merely needs to look as though someone cares.

Hayley, however, has other ideas. Hayley is a passionate believer in what she calls “native wildflowers”. Which sounds charming until you realise that in practice it means the garden operates a stricter immigration policy than most countries. Only plants that can prove their ancestral right to be here are truly welcome. British lineage, deep roots, and preferably something that has been quietly minding its own business in a hedgerow since about the time of Agincourt.

Anything with continental ambitions is treated with deep suspicion. I once suggested planting a few cheerful Mediterranean flowers, nothing too dramatic, just something with a bit of colour that actually seems pleased to see the sun. The look I received suggested I had proposed opening the borders and abolishing passport control at the same time. Clearly this was not a policy that would gain approval from the domestic authorities.

So the garden has slowly evolved into a sort of botanical citizenship test. A daisy from Dorset passes immediately without questions. A tulip from Turkey is clearly some kind of infiltrator that needs careful watching. Plants, it turns out, can be surprisingly controversial once you start asking where they originally came from.

I have therefore taken to referring to Hayley as The Racist Gardener. It seems only fair under the circumstances. I am not aware of any other domestic environment where a plant’s passport is examined quite so closely. If there were a small desk by the gate I suspect paperwork would be involved.

Meanwhile my lawn exists under constant pressure from these native insurgents. Hayley carefully cultivates wild patches which spend the summer quietly expanding their territory while claiming to be extremely good for the bees. They advance politely but relentlessly. The bees, I notice, rarely help with the mowing.

By September the place looks less like a garden and more like a rehearsal for the Somme. The mower advances slowly across terrain that has been allowed to become strategically inconvenient. Stems appear that are thick enough to require a moment of reflection before engaging the blade. It is less gardening at that point and more a slow mechanical campaign.

The great irony of wild gardening is that it sounds delightful in April. Bees, butterflies and nature flourishing are all mentioned in reassuring tones. By October it has become a waist high jungle full of fibrous stems that laugh openly at lawnmowers. At that stage the word “wild” begins to sound slightly less romantic.

I did manage one small act of horticultural smuggling about ten years ago. A stone pine slipped quietly into the garden before the border authorities noticed. It now stands there looking faintly Mediterranean and rather pleased with itself. Hayley tolerates it in the way one tolerates a slightly embarrassing foreign relative at a family gathering.

It is there and everyone can see it, but drawing attention to it seems unnecessary. Best just let it stand quietly in middle of the tump and hope nobody asks too many questions about its origins. Still, harmony in a relationship requires compromise. Hayley gets her native wildflower sanctuary and I get one small, fiercely defended patch of lawn where the stripes are straight and immigration control is conducted with a very large mower.

Churchill on a Fiver and Other Culture Wars

I have been watching the latest banknote row with mild amusement. Apparently Britain is now facing a constitutional crisis because Winston Churchill might one day disappear from the back of a fiver.

A few details tend to get lost in the shouting. For a start, there is no “pound note”. That vanished in 1988 when the £1 coin arrived. Churchill sits on the £5 note, and he has only been there since 2016. If the Bank of England had simply carried on rotating historical figures, he would probably have been replaced by someone else in the next redesign anyway. That is what normally happens. Dickens disappeared. Darwin disappeared. Adam Smith disappeared. No one marched in the streets.

The new wrinkle is that the Bank is considering wildlife instead of historical figures. Cue outrage. Suddenly this is presented as some sort of national amnesia. Churchill, we are told, is being erased from British history by bureaucrats armed with puffins.

The thing that makes me smile is the spectacle of politicians rushing forward to defend the presence of a politician on a banknote. One almost expects a whip to be issued. “All members must attend the division to ensure the continued polymer representation of Members of Parliament.”

Of course the real reason the story has taken off is identity signalling. It is a neat little stage on which people can perform their views about Britain. The banknotes themselves are merely the stage props. On one side are those who see defending Churchill as proof of patriotic virtue. On the other are those who think wildlife might be a pleasant and politically neutral alternative.

But the loudest outrage is really nothing more than tribal signalling by those who worship at the altar of populism. It is a simple story that can be shouted from the ramparts. “They are taking Churchill off our money.” No nuance required. No history needed. Just a reliable way of telling your followers which tribe you belong to.

There is also a certain historical irony here. The tradition of putting historical figures on Bank of England notes only began in 1970. Before that it was Britannia and the monarch. So the furious defence of this supposedly ancient custom is in fact a defence of something barely half a century old.

And if the principle were really about defending national heroes on banknotes, we would have seen this drama before. The Duke of Wellington appeared on the £5 note from 1971 until 1991. This was the man who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and ended one of the great wars of European history. Yet when Wellington disappeared from the note and was replaced by George Stephenson, the father of the railways, there was no national meltdown. No headlines about erasing British history. The country quietly carried on.

Churchill himself is an interesting case. His reputation rests almost entirely on one extraordinary moment in 1940 when Britain faced defeat in the Second World War and he gave the country the language and determination to keep going. He was brilliant at that. But the idea that only Churchill could have done it is doubtful. Britain still had a functioning state, armed forces, and a coalition of politicians committed to continuing the war. Someone else would almost certainly have fought on.

He was also, like many politicians of his era, a bundle of contradictions. The same man who later became the embodiment of national defiance had earlier voted against extending the vote to women. That tends to get skipped over when people treat him as a kind of secular saint carved in granite.

Which brings me to another Churchill entirely. The first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. Now there was a leader whose achievements really did depend on his own ability. His campaigns in the War of the Spanish Succession, particularly Blenheim, required strategic imagination and operational skill of the highest order. Remove Marlborough and those campaigns might have turned out very differently.

So it is slightly amusing that the modern Churchill has become a kind of national mascot on a piece of polymer while the earlier Churchill, arguably the more exceptional leader in pure military terms, barely features in these discussions at all.

Meanwhile the Bank of England is simply trying to design the next series of anti-counterfeiting banknotes, while somewhere in Britain a badger, an otter or possibly a puffin is wondering how on earth it ended up in the middle of the culture wars.

Which does make one wonder how all this will end. Perhaps after the Great Culture War is finally won, Nigel Farage will appear on a future fiver, gazing heroically into the middle distance, having saved the nation from the terrible menace of decorative wildlife. Until then, the badger and the puffin will have to remain on standby.

Slaughter

I was standing in the kitchen the other morning, slicing bacon with the sort of quiet reverence normally reserved for religious artefacts, when it occurred to me that the pig in question had not died voluntarily. There had been no retirement plan. No farewell speech. No quiet move to the countryside to write its memoirs. It had been killed. Efficiently, professionally, and with the clear intention of ending up in my frying pan.

This, I accept.

Which is why I find the sudden outbreaks of moral outrage about specific slaughter methods faintly theatrical. The animal is not attending a wellness retreat. It is being killed. Whether by stunning bolt or by cut, the outcome is identical. The distinction lies not in whether death occurs, but in how competently and humanely the process is carried out.

I am not an absolutist. I am a realist. If one accepts the premise that animals may be killed for food, then the logical focus must be on minimising suffering, not engaging in ritualistic handwringing over labels. Death itself is not avoidable in this equation. Only distress is.

And distress, inconveniently for those who prefer simple slogans, does not begin at the moment of slaughter. It begins hours earlier. In transport. In noise. In confusion. In unfamiliar surroundings. An animal handled calmly, transported a short distance, and dispatched competently experiences less suffering overall than one subjected to prolonged stress, regardless of which approved method is used at the end.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the outrage is not about animal welfare at all. It is about symbolism. Cultural discomfort dressed up as ethical principle. People who happily consume sausages without hesitation suddenly discover deep philosophical objections to the manner in which the sausage’s previous owner met its end.

The pig, one suspects, would not recognise the distinction.

There are only two intellectually coherent positions. One may refuse to eat meat entirely, in which case the objection is absolute and logically consistent. Or one may accept that animals are killed for food, and therefore support practices that reduce suffering as much as possible. Everything else occupies the foggy middle ground of selective sensitivity.

I inhabit that middle ground quite comfortably, armed with a frying pan and an absence of self-deception.

The bacon, I am pleased to report, was excellent.