Amplified and Slightly Outraged

Right. I have done it. I am now officially amplified.

For years I maintained that everyone else was mumbling. It wasn’t my hearing. It was standards. The nation had simply given up on consonants. Newsreaders whispered. My wife, apparently, had been issuing domestic instructions at a frequency only detectable by bats.

Then the audiologist produced a graph that looked like the north face of the Eiger and gently explained that I was missing rather more than I’d imagined. High frequencies, mostly. The crisp bits. The bits that make speech intelligible rather than atmospheric. Also, as it turns out, the Mem-Sahib bits of instruction. Those quiet, apparently casual remarks from the kitchen which are in fact operational directives.

A few beeps later and the world snapped back into focus.

The first shock was paper. Paper is ferocious. An envelope adjusted by half an inch now sounds like I am lighting a small fire in the study. Receipts crackle. Everything has edges.

And yes, I can hear a pin drop. Not poetically. Properly. Pins are being dropped all over Britain and I am now party to it. If MI6 are short of equipment, I am available to eavesdrop on Moscow from the Cotswolds. Provided the Russians keep the crockery down.

The aids themselves are NHS issue. Completely free. Not the softly lit, thousand pound numbers that Specsavers were tactfully recommending with the air of someone offering walnut trim and a service package. No. These are state supplied and rather clever.

They connect to my phone. Calls arrive directly in my head without troubling the surrounding air. There is an App. I can stand in a queue and adjust the volume of existence. Tone down background noise. Favour the person in front of me over the enthusiastic cutlery behind. I had expected beige compliance. Instead I have wireless firmware behind my ears.

They also come with what can only be described as a gentleman’s travelling kit. A neat little Danalogic pouch. Inside it, a tiny brush, spare batteries, and several long, slender plastic filaments for clearing wax from the tubes. These filaments are impressively engineered. Elegant. Slightly intimidating. They are, however, supplied in a zip bag that is approximately one third too short.

Which means that once you have extracted one of these delicate rods, using it with the air of a man performing microsurgery on his own ear canal, you are then required to return it to a bag that patently does not wish to accommodate it. The bag fits the outer case perfectly, you see. The outer case fits neatly in a pocket. The filaments, meanwhile, are obliged to arc like a longbow while you attempt to coax the zip closed with what would ideally be a third hand.

Why not provide a bag that actually fits the contents? Or, more radically, a slightly larger case? We can stream audio directly into my auditory cortex, but we cannot design a zip bag of sufficient length to accept its own cleaning implements. It is the sort of minor British engineering compromise that built an empire and then slightly annoyed it.

I'm not the only user who has noticed this frustration with the zip bag - by sister-in-law has the same issue.

There is also the small matter of first light. Inserting them in the morning is not the serene, dignified ritual I had imagined. It is a negotiation. Overnight ear wax, industrious and unashamed, has usually staged a minor coup. The aids must be persuaded, cleaned, adjusted, inserted, removed, wiped again, and reinserted. This can take up to fifteen minutes. I have brewed tea in less time.

Once seated properly, however, they behave impeccably for the rest of the day. Crisp, obedient, technologically impressive. Until, of course, I remove them for some reason. A shower. A quick adjustment. A moment of optimism. Replacing them can trigger another fifteen minute faff while wax and mechanics renegotiate terms. It is less plug and play, more dockyard refit.

Stepping outside was instructive. Leaves rustle with intent. Gravel announces itself. My car indicators have been ticking patiently for years and I had been ignoring them with serene confidence.

Indoors, the house has developed opinions. The fridge hums. The boiler clears its throat. The cat, previously a silent assassin, now approaches with a faint padding that feels mildly judgemental. I can hear the heating pump thinking.

Conversation has changed too. I no longer possess the useful shield of selective deafness. If someone mutters something in the next room, I am suddenly fully briefed. There are fewer tactical “sorry, what was that?” moments. I had not realised how strategically valuable those were.

Restaurants are carnage. Crockery collides. Someone laughs like a reversing lorry. The aids do their best, but I am now aware of the entire acoustic ecosystem.

Checking my pockets for keys has become hazardous. A gentle pat produces something close to a detonation. Coins clash. Receipts flare up. I still don’t know whether the keys are there.

And yet, there is something quietly marvellous about it. Birdsong is no longer a vague countryside suggestion. It is specific. Insistent.

I still maintain that some people mumble.

Unfortunately, I can now hear them doing it.

Votes at 16? Fix the Foundations First

I was originally in favour of lowering the voting age to 16. On principle, it made sense. If you can work, pay tax and are subject to the law, then representation should follow. No taxation without representation is not decorative rhetoric. It sits at the core of parliamentary democracy.

I have changed my mind, not because I doubt the capacity of 16 year olds, and not because I want to narrow the franchise, but because I think we are expanding rights in a system already showing strain without strengthening the preparation that should underpin those rights.

We have drifted into the habit of treating arithmetic as optional. We want generous public services, low taxes and fiscal credibility, and we vote as if those aims can coexist without tension. Then the bond markets clear their throat, mortgage rates rise and we call it an unforeseen shock.

The trade-off is straightforward. Tax cuts today mean spending cuts or borrowing. Borrowing means interest. Interest means future tax or future restraint. There is no fourth door marked miracle, however attractively it is painted at election time.

The NHS makes the point concrete. Even those who use private healthcare ultimately rely on the NHS backbone. Private consultants are trained in it. Emergency cover is run by it. Complex intensive care capacity is built and maintained by it. You can pay for comfort and speed, but when something serious happens the system underneath is public. If that backbone weakens too far, everyone feels it.

Yes, democratic systems contain corrective mechanisms. Markets react. Courts intervene. Elections punish excess. But those corrections still allow for damage before the lesson lands. Mortgage shocks are a brutal tutor. Pension instability is not a classroom exercise. Relying on crisis as the primary teacher is an expensive way to run a country.

Foreknowledge is cheaper.

Education will not eliminate conviction or ideological preference. Some voters will understand the trade-offs perfectly well and still prefer lower taxes and a smaller state. That is legitimate. But understanding provides a counterbalance. It shortens the gap between promise and consequence. It makes it easier to spot a design flaw in a policy before the engine seizes.

At present we send young people into adulthood able to analyse poetry and solve equations, yet many cannot explain how a Budget works, what the Office for Budget Responsibility does, how borrowing compounds or why gilt yields matter. Constitutional and fiscal mechanics are treated as peripheral knowledge, and public debate drifts accordingly.

Teaching political and fiscal literacy in the final two years of secondary school would not settle political arguments. It would not produce uniform outcomes. It would simply raise the floor. After two cohorts had passed through, a generation would enter the electorate with a working understanding of trade-offs and institutional limits. Even if that improvement is modest, modest improvements in resilience matter.

A serious civic curriculum would have to be tightly defined and politically neutral, focused on process and arithmetic rather than ideology. It would test spending fantasies as hard as tax fantasies. It would expose the mechanics behind expansive promises as well as revenue cuts. That is not indoctrination. It is maintenance of the operating system.

For that reason, if we are going to lower the voting age to 16, we should strengthen that operating system first. Not because catastrophe will follow otherwise, and not because 16 year olds are uniquely reckless, but because prudence suggests upgrading the foundations before widening the structure. Two years of reform before expansion is not obstruction. It is sequencing.

Democracy is a system of trade-offs, not wishes. We can choose lower taxes and leaner services. We can choose higher taxes and thicker institutional protection. What we cannot choose is to deny the connection between the two and hope that constraint will be gentle when it arrives.

It never is.

Lex Shrapnel: The Law, the Blast Radius, and the Opening Credits

We were sitting there watching the 2nd series of Red Eye, minding our own business, following the plot, when the credits roll up a name that detonates whatever narrative tension the writers have so carefully assembled.

Lex Shrapnel.

At that point the drama is over. Not because it is bad, but because my brain has left the aircraft and is circling the concept of nominative determinism at 35,000 feet. You cannot casually introduce a man called Lex Shrapnel and expect the audience to focus on anything else. It is not a name, it is a plot device.

“Lex” implies law, authority, Rome, tablets of stone, the cool weight of precedent. “Shrapnel” implies sudden noise, chaos, fragments embedded in places they should never have reached. Together they suggest a legal system administered by high explosive. Habeas corpus, but with a blast radius.

You half expect his characters not to enter scenes but breach them. Doors fly open. Policies collapse. Minor characters dive for cover. Even if he is playing someone entirely benign, say an earnest civil servant or a quietly competent officer, the name alone suggests that something nearby is about to go catastrophically wrong. But he was only a bit player.

What makes it even better is that it is entirely real. Not a stage name cooked up by an agent with a sense of irony. Not a post-drama-school rebrand. Just a straight-faced inheritance, handed down without mercy. Some people are born sounding like accountants. Others like dentists. Lex Shrapnel sounds like a clause in the Geneva Conventions.

And then there is the historical twist. The surname Shrapnel did not begin life as an explosive. It already existed. The family was established in Wiltshire centuries before anyone thought to pack iron balls into artillery shells. When Henry Shrapnel lent his name to a new and particularly efficient way of turning cannon fire into airborne chaos, the language simply seized the opportunity.

That is why it works so disturbingly well. The surname effectively split in two. One branch remained a perfectly respectable family name. The other escaped into the language as flying metal. Most surnames do not get that privilege.

So Lex Shrapnel is not named after an explosive device. He is named after a family whose name was later turned into one. Which is arguably worse. It means the menace was there all along, patiently waiting for the Industrial Revolution to catch up.

And yet he wears it with admirable restraint. No wink. No nudge. No attempt to defuse it. Just calm professionalism, as if everyone else is peculiar for noticing. Which, frankly, is the most British response possible.

So yes, Red Eye is very watchable. Taut, well paced, solid television. But for me it will always be remembered as the moment when the credits reminded us that sometimes the most explosive thing in a drama is not the plot, but the name quietly sitting underneath it.

Trumper, ICE and the Business of Rounding Up

I was watching Shaun the Sheep the other evening. Harmless comfort viewing. Sheep wandering about, the farmer blissfully incompetent, nothing heavier than a misplaced sandwich.

Then Trumper the dog catcher arrives. That is his actual name. Trumper. You could not make it up if you tried.

He pulls up in his van and gets on with the business of collecting anything that does not belong where he thinks it should. No grand speech, no moral struggle, just steady confidence and a system that runs without hesitation. The sheep are in the wrong place according to the rulebook. That is sufficient.

And yes, the name does rather sit there on its own.

What struck me was not villainy but conviction. Trumper believes in the net. He believes in the cage. He believes in process. Once the sheep are categorised as strays, the rest follows automatically. Their individual woolly lives are irrelevant. They become units to be gathered.

It is difficult not to see shades of ICE in that mindset. Not because claymation equals federal policy, but because of the same mechanical certainty. Label someone illegal and the conversation contracts. Context fades. Family, work, contribution, history. The apparatus does what it was designed to do and measures success by visible activity.

Recent events in Minneapolis have amplified that impression. A heavy federal presence, conspicuous enforcement, statements delivered with unwavering assurance. The display of control becomes the message. Whether the display reassures anyone seems secondary.

No serious person disputes that immigration law exists or that it has to be enforced. The issue is temperament. There is a difference between restraint and zeal. When enforcement begins to look proud of its own visibility, something shifts. Jackets emblazoned with large letters. Convoys that feel as though they are part of a production. Language that leaves little room for doubt or reflection.

In the film, Trumper is faintly absurd because he never pauses to consider whether his solution fits the situation. He has cages, so he uses cages. Children laugh because the overreach is obvious. The sheep are not masterminds. They are simply in the way.

With ICE, the laughter drains away. When the system is built around removal, removal becomes the measure of competence. The bigger the operation, the firmer it appears. Meanwhile, communities are left tense and divided, wondering whether this display of authority has solved anything at all.

Sitting in Old Sodbury with a cup of tea, it was hard to ignore the irony. A children’s character named Trumper, dedicated to rounding up anything out of place, feels less like innocent satire and more like uncomfortable commentary. When the van and the cage become symbols of virtue in themselves, judgement has quietly stepped aside.

And that, unlike plasticine sheep, does not spring harmlessly back into shape when the credits roll.

Principle or Partisanship?

It is curious how quickly the principle of responsibility becomes selective.

When Jacob Rees-Mogg advised the late Queen to prorogue Parliament, and the Supreme Court later ruled it unlawful, nobody serious suggested Her late Majesty should have abdicated. The monarch acts on ministerial advice. Responsibility lay with those who gave it. The liar, if liar there was, owned the lie.

Fast forward. Mandelson gives assurances. Vetting is sought. On current public information there were no ignored warnings, no suppressed intelligence, no red flags knowingly overridden. Later, those assurances unravel. Suddenly we are told the Prime Minister must fall because he trusted them.

So which principle are we applying?

Either we accept that responsibility for deception lies with the person who deceives, or we invent a doctrine in which anyone who relies in good faith on formal vetting must resign the moment that trust proves misplaced.

Political accountability still sits at the top. Of course it does. But accountability is not the same as culpability. The liar owns the lie. The appointer owns the decision made on the basis of it.

If further evidence were to show that Starmer ignored clear warnings or knowingly brushed aside serious concerns, then yes, he should go. That would cross the line from misjudgement into negligence.

But deciding that he must resign now, absent such evidence, is not constitutional principle. It is tribal politics dressed up as moral outrage.

Standards either apply consistently, or they are just tribal weapons swung at whoever happens to be in office.

Winter Olympics

Every four years the Winter Olympics arrives like an unexpected house guest from Scandinavia.

It stands politely at the door, wrapped in Lycra and frost, while Britain peers out from behind the curtain and says, "Do we know you?"

The Summer Games make sense. We understand running. We occasionally do it ourselves, usually for a bus, an overdue train, or an appointment we swore was at half past. We grasp swimming. Some of us even throw things, albeit normally at the recycling bin. There is a comforting familiarity about it all.

But the Winter Olympics? That is a fortnight devoted to sliding about in specialist pyjamas on terrain we normally avoid in a Range Rover. And I must confess, I do not watch it. Not a minute. Not even accidentally while searching for the news.

I can just about process skiing in theory. Man on plank goes downhill quickly. Fine. Gravity is relatable. But luge? Skeleton? Two grown adults voluntarily launching themselves head first down an ice chute at motorway speeds on what appears to be a reinforced baking tray? I struggle to see this as sport rather than an elaborate Scandinavian insurance claim.

And then there is curling. Ah yes, competitive housework. One individual gently nudges a granite kettle across the ice while two colleagues sweep furiously in front of it as if trying to erase the evidence. I am assured this is a contest of subtle angles and tactical genius. To me it looks like a domestic mishap unfolding in slow motion.

Entire nations take this very seriously. In Norway, cross country skiing commands audiences that would make a Premier League club weep. Small children there can ski before they can spell. In Britain we close the schools at the sight of a single flake and issue stern warnings about grit supplies. Our natural winter sport is peering suspiciously at the boiler.

Interest here, when it flickers, depends on whether we have a medal hope. When Lizzy Yarnold wins gold, we are briefly a nation of aerodynamicists. When Eddie the Eagle hurled himself nobly off a ramp, we adopted him as a patron saint of pluck. But once the novelty fades, so do we.

The truth is that the Winter Olympics feels like a magnificent spectacle conducted in a climate entirely alien to the damp pragmatism of the British Isles. It is impressive, certainly. Brave, undoubtedly. But compelling to those of us whose winter athleticism extends to walking briskly to the car? Not especially.

So when the snowbound fortnight rolls around, I nod respectfully at the highlights on the news, make a cup of tea, and return to pursuits that do not involve intentional contact with ice. I leave the hurtling, sweeping and airborne theatrics to the Norwegians. They seem very keen.

It's a national disgrace that there's no 'Wrong Snow on the Railway Lines' competition.

Speed vs Accuracy

I’ve developed a small domestic ritual when it comes to UK news. If something is breaking, I go to Sky News. If I want to know whether it’s actually true, I wait for BBC.

That is not a moral judgement. It is a workflow.

Sky is like the bloke who shouts “Fire!” the moment he smells smoke. The BBC is the chap who checks whether it’s the toaster before ringing the brigade. One is fast, the other cautious. Both have a role. The mistake is thinking speed and accuracy are the same thing.

We live in an age where “breaking” has become theatre. Red banners. Urgent tones. Instant outrage. Within minutes, half the country has decided who is villain and who is victim. The difficulty is that in the first hour of any big story, facts are fluid. Context is missing. Motives are guessed at.

Even something like the current lawsuit from Donald Trump against the BBC over a Panorama edit is a neat illustration. It arrives with a ten billion dollar headline and predictable outrage. The slower reality is procedural: jurisdictional arguments, motions to dismiss, and the possibility that it may be thrown out for a number of reasons. Not least because claiming reputational and commercial harm opens the door to financial disclosure, something Mr Trump has historically treated as a guarded state secret. The bang is immediate. The substance is incremental.

Sky will tell you what is being reported. The BBC will tell you what it is prepared to stand behind.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. Caution now looks like bias to people who have already chosen their conclusion. If the BBC does not instantly frame a story in the way someone prefers, it must, in their eyes, be suppressing something. If it waits for confirmation, it must be dragging its feet.

Oh, and What Do You Do?

There is one question that arrives early in almost every conversation, usually just after names and before anyone risks saying something genuine.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It sounds friendly. It’s anything but. It’s not curiosity, it’s calibration. A quick scan to work out where you sit, how carefully to listen, and whether this conversation is worth investing in beyond polite nodding.

We pretend it’s small talk. It’s actually shorthand. A way of skipping the messy business of finding out who someone is by jumping straight to what they’re for.

If you answer with a job title, the exchange resolves instantly. The mental filing cabinet slides open. Consultant. Engineer. Director of something with a budget. You are indexed, weighed, and assigned a default level of seriousness. You could say something quite stupid after that and still be indulged, because the label is doing the heavy lifting.

If you say “I’m retired”, the system hesitates.

Not in a dramatic way. Worse than that. In a quiet, barely perceptible way. Like a screen freezing for half a second before carrying on as if nothing happened.

Retired isn’t an identity. It’s a blank space. It tells people only that you no longer do something that can be printed on a lanyard. It collapses a lifetime of judgement, experience, mistakes, competence and scar tissue into a single administrative outcome. Formerly something. Now… nothing in particular.

You can feel yourself fade slightly at the edges.

Not shunned. Not dismissed. Just… de prioritised. The conversational equivalent of being gently dimmed. You’re still there, still pleasant, still welcome. But no longer central to the exchange. You haven’t said anything wrong. You’ve just removed the hook they were planning to hang you on.

This is where the follow up questions arrive, almost on autopilot. “Ah. Keeping busy?” “Doing a bit of travelling?” “Got any hobbies?” They are not really interested. They are fishing for something that looks like activity, something that can be weighed, ranked, or at least politely admired without effort.

Because we don’t really know how to talk to people without first establishing their status.

This is why many retired people develop a sudden and quite pronounced distaste for small talk. Not because they’ve become antisocial, but because small talk is almost entirely about hierarchy. Who does what. Who’s important. Who’s busy. Who’s still in the game. Once you’re out of it, the whole ritual starts to look faintly absurd, like watching people compare rank insignia from a war you’ve already left.

There are moments when you’re tempted to answer more honestly. “I’m on permanent standby.” Or “I’ve gone freelance on time.” Or “I no longer do anything that appears on a spreadsheet.” All accurate. All guaranteed to kill the conversation stone dead and possibly have you gently edged away from the canapés.

So you stick with “retired”. The socially approved shrug. And you watch yourself become slightly less visible in real time, like someone slowly backing out of a photograph without anyone quite noticing.

The darker joke is that nothing about you has actually changed. You haven’t lost your ability to think, judge, observe, or contribute. You just no longer come with a status badge attached, and without one, many people don’t quite know what to do with you.

This isn’t about ego. It’s about how thin our categories are. We have no decent language for people who are not currently exchanging time for money that doesn’t sound either congratulatory or faintly apologetic. Lucky you. Must be nice. As if the only meaningful thing a person can do is be busy on someone else’s behalf.

Once you notice this, you can’t unhear it. How often “what do you do?” is really “why should I care?” in a nicer jacket. How rarely anyone asks what you’re interested in, what you’ve learned, or what you’ve changed your mind about. None of that fits neatly into the social machinery of polite conversation.

So retirement doesn’t make you invisible. It just removes the costume that made you legible. And without it, you start to see how much of everyday conversation is less about connection and more about sorting, ranking, and quietly deciding who matters.

Which is why a lot of retired people stop bothering with small talk altogether. Not out of bitterness. Out of clarity. Once you’ve stepped outside the status game, watching others play it can feel less like socialising and more like loitering near a scoreboard you no longer recognise or are interested in.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It turns out it was never a very good question. It was just a convenient one.

Clearance Is Not Judgement

Let’s keep this anchored in how the British state actually works, rather than how it is caricatured online.

Security vetting in the UK does not change with the colour of the government. UKSV, MI5 and Cabinet Office procedures are institutional. An ambassador under Labour goes through the same clearance framework as one under the Conservatives. The machinery is designed to be politically neutral.

But clearance is not endorsement. It answers a narrow question: is this person suitable to hold access to classified material at a given level? It does not answer whether appointing them is politically wise, reputationally resilient, or strategically elegant.

That distinction is where this argument lives.

Starmer has apologised for appointing Mandelson to Washington. He says he relied on Mandelson’s account of his relationship with Epstein and now regrets the decision in light of what has emerged. That does not automatically prove anyone ignored security advice. It does, however, raise a serious procedural question. Was full disclosure made? Did the vetting process have everything it needed? Were potential vulnerabilities properly interrogated before the appointment was confirmed?

Those are institutional questions, not partisan ones.

Contrast that with Johnson’s decision to grant a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev, despite reports at the time of security concerns because of his father’s KGB background. That was not a criminal case. It was a judgement call in the face of alleged caution. If concerns were raised and proceeded past, that is a conscious executive choice about risk tolerance.

Then there is Nathan Gill, convicted of taking money to promote Russian interests. That was criminal corruption, and it rightly attracted prosecution. But it did not involve control of British state machinery or access to classified diplomatic channels. Influence is not the same as executive authority.

Mandelson sits much closer to the nerve centre. An ambassador to Washington is not ceremonial. It is one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts in the system, operating at the junction of trade, defence and intelligence cooperation.

There was, to be fair, a strategic logic to the appointment. When dealing with Donald Trump, a transactional operator who respects leverage and deal-making instinct, there is an argument for sending someone equally seasoned. Set a thief to catch a thief, as the old phrase has it. Send a political bruiser who understands power games and will not be overawed.

But that logic only holds if the bruiser has no unresolved vulnerabilities. In a world of transactional politics, undisclosed baggage is not a footnote. It is leverage. And leverage in the wrong hands becomes risk.

So the core question is not whether Mandelson was cunning enough to handle Trump. It is whether the system satisfied itself that nothing in his past could be used to handle him.

Security vetting is colour blind. Political judgement is not. Clearance assesses vulnerability. Leaders decide whether to accept or discount risk.

Starmer’s apology does not prove clairvoyance was lacking. It acknowledges that the decision did not withstand scrutiny once fuller information emerged. The issue now is whether the machinery designed to surface relevant risks was given the full picture and functioned as intended at the time.

This government was elected on a promise of seriousness and competence. That promise applies most when decisions are finely balanced and reputational risk is present. The test is not hindsight perfection. It is whether safeguards were robust, advice was properly sought, and risk was weighed with sufficient caution.

The real measure is simple: did the safeguards work as designed, or did political confidence outrun institutional caution?

Shouting Like Tribes, Governing Like Coalitions

Polarisation was supposed to simplify politics. Pick a side. Nail your colours to the mast. Stop pretending everyone can be satisfied.

Instead, in Britain, it has produced something far stranger. The louder politics becomes, the broader the winning parties have to be.

Under FPTP, you cannot govern with a faction. You need 35 to 45 percent of the country. That means stitching together voters who do not agree about very much beyond a few headline issues. The compromise happens inside the party before polling day.

That is why both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party feel permanently unstable. They are not ideological movements. They are pre - election coalitions pretending to be unified tribes.

The Conservatives after Brexit had free - market libertarians, Red Wall statists, cultural traditionalists and City pragmatists under one roof. That alliance was built around a single mission. Once that mission was complete, the internal contradictions were exposed. The leadership churn was not accidental. It was structural tension meeting poor judgement.

Labour now performs a similar balancing act from a different angle. Trade unionists, urban liberals, fiscal moderates, climate activists, socially cautious ex - Tories. The arithmetic of the electoral system forces coexistence. The culture of polarisation punishes compromise. Leaders must sound absolute and govern conditionally.

Compare that with proportional systems such as in Germany. Parties like the CDU or the SPD can be more distinct. They aim for their share. The bargaining happens after the votes are counted, in a formal coalition agreement.

The compromise is visible and contractual. In Britain it is internal and personal.

But here is the crucial point. Coalition systems do not remove compromise. They relocate it. Polarisation does not remove coalition - building. It makes it emotionally harder.

Institutional design decides where the argument takes place. Leadership decides whether it looks like governance or civil war.

We complain that modern leaders seem weak. Often they are simply operating in a system that demands breadth while rewarding ideological theatre. They must hold together uneasy alliances while activists demand purity.

Polarisation promised clarity. The voting system still demands coalition. The friction between the two is where authority now goes to die.