Sack the Fans

Sack the fans.

Why not? Everyone else gets blamed.

The manager must go. The players are useless. The tactics are wrong. The board is incompetent. The left-back is apparently a national disgrace because he misplaced a pass under pressure.

Yet the fans remain oddly untouched.

This is especially worth remembering before England play Mexico. Because if England win, we will hear all about the supporters. The noise. The passion. The shirt. The anthem. The “12th man”.

Fine. But that cuts both ways.

You cannot be the 12th man when the team wins and an innocent paying customer when it loses.

A crowd can lift a team. It can also smother one. It can turn pressure into energy, or pressure into panic. Groaning after 10 minutes, booing mistakes, abusing players online, demanding instant perfection from human beings trying to play knockout football - none of that is neutral.

It affects the atmosphere. It affects confidence. It affects decisions. It becomes part of the match. So by all means criticise the manager. Question the selection. Moan about the substitutions. That is half the fun, and without it football would be 22 men running about while sober people make spreadsheets.

But if supporters want credit for inspiring victory, they should not vanish from the accounts when things go wrong. If England are poor against Mexico, perhaps the first question should not be, “Who do we sack?” Perhaps it should be:

How well did the 12th man play?

The Keyboard That Time Forgot

The laptop keyboard is one of those bits of technology we have somehow agreed not to notice.

On a phone, we accept the obvious. The keyboard is not really a thing. It is a function. It appears when needed, vanishes when not needed, changes language, changes colour, changes size, predicts what we’re trying to say, corrects our ham-fisted typing, offers symbols, numbers, swipe typing, specialist layouts and whatever else the software people have slipped in while nobody was looking.

And it all happens on one piece of glass.

Then we open a laptop and suddenly we’re back in the age of little plastic tiles.

Not just plastic tiles, either. Country-specific plastic tiles. British ones, German ones, French ones, American ones with the @ sign wandering off to somewhere unfamiliar. Whole supply chains devoted to making sure the apostrophe is printed in the correct place for whichever nation is currently trying to answer emails while eating a sandwich.

This is called progress, apparently.

If you want a laptop in another language, you do not simply change a setting and carry on. Oh no. The manufacturer has to build a slightly different physical object, stock it, ship it, support it, repair it and eventually dispose of it. A great many tiny moving parts, all so the same letters can sit in slightly different places.

Meanwhile the phone quietly gets on with being the more advanced machine.

A phone keyboard can be whatever the user wants. Bigger, smaller, darker, lighter, themed, reshaped, rearranged, bilingual, one-handed, predictive, silent, haptic, not haptic, polite, vulgar, or apparently convinced that when I type GT6 I actually mean GTA, which at least shows enthusiasm.

The laptop keyboard, by contrast, arrives as a constitutional settlement.

Here are the keys. Here is the spacing. Here is the language we think you speak. Here is the layout you will have until the machine dies or until a child removes the letter M with a teaspoon.

Of course, the traditionalists will say they can type faster on proper keys. Fair enough. For people writing thousands of words a day, physical keys can still make sense. They give feedback. They allow touch typing. They have muscle memory on their side, and one should never underestimate the human attachment to doing the familiar thing quite quickly.

But that is not the same as saying they are the more advanced interface.

A starting handle had feel. So did a choke cable. So did winding down a car window while your elbow froze solid on the way to Preston. Some things had feel because that was what the available engineering allowed at the time. We should not confuse old limitations with timeless wisdom.

The issue is not whether a physical keyboard still works. It plainly does. So does a hammer. The issue is whether it is still the most intelligent interface for a machine that otherwise changes itself constantly.

A laptop can show films, maps, spreadsheets, design drawings, video calls and a shameful number of browser tabs. But the lower half is still a fixed little grid of manufactured compromise, pretending that every task needs the same physical alphabet bolted to the chassis.

The phone has already shown us the alternative. The keyboard should be software. It should adapt to the user, the language, the task and the moment. It should not require a warehouse full of national variants and a small prayer that nobody spills coffee into the wrong crevice.

There are moves in that direction, but they still look tentative. A few dual-screen machines, a few virtual keyboard experiments, then a detachable physical keyboard included in the box in case the villagers become restless. Manufacturers can see the future, but they keep a plastic comfort blanket nearby.

And that may be the real lesson. The future does not always arrive because it is logical. Sometimes it has to wait until people stop mistaking familiarity for superiority.

So we have not failed to invent the future. We have merely decided that, on laptops, the future can wait because some people enjoy the sound of tiny plastic doors being shut very firmly.

Which is fine, I suppose. Everyone needs a hobby.

The Cost of Chasing Every Penny

Everyone agrees that government waste should be cut. The disagreement begins when someone has to explain what, precisely, counts as waste. It is easy enough to say “Cut the waste” in a broadcast interview. It is rather harder to identify it, quantify it properly, remove it without breaking something useful, and then show that the supposed saving has not simply reappeared elsewhere wearing a different departmental badge.

There is undoubtedly waste in government: failed IT contracts, duplicated systems, consultant dependency, unnecessary property, weak fraud controls, grants that outlive their purpose, and procurement procedures so elaborate that they seem designed chiefly to employ themselves. That is where the work should start.

A sensible approach is the 80/20 rule. Not as a law of nature, because it is not one, but as a practical management discipline. In a large organisation, a relatively small number of failures often account for a disproportionate share of avoidable cost. A handful of dreadful contracts, abandoned projects, duplicated back-office systems, suppliers charging monopoly prices for mediocre work, and badly designed incentives can waste remarkable sums. Find those, fix those, and measure the result.

If an audit identifies £5 billion of possible savings, begin with the large, repeated and demonstrably useless costs. Stop projects that should never have started. Merge functions that genuinely duplicate one another. Renegotiate contracts that have become a licence to print money. Recover fraud. Stop paying consultants to map processes which everybody in the department already knows are absurd. That is real reform. It can cut costs and improve services at the same time.

But there is an important question for anyone claiming to have identified £5 million, £5 billion or any other conveniently impressive figure of “waste savings”: what will it cost to remove it? That is the question which separates the operator from the rhetorician. Anyone can circle a number in a report. The serious bit is calculating the staff time, systems changes, legal work, procurement, redundancy costs, extra controls needed to stop the waste returning, and service disruption required to achieve it. Then one has to check whether the saving has merely been pushed into another budget, or deferred until it comes back later at a higher price.

The trouble begins when politicians treat that £5 billion as though every pound of it can be extracted without cost. It cannot. There is a law of diminishing returns. The first savings may be straightforward, but the next tranche is harder. Eventually, the remaining “waste” is scattered across thousands of small decisions, local contingencies, bits of spare capacity, checks, records and safeguards. At that point, chasing the final scraps can cost more than accepting them.

You get more audits, reporting, approval stages, tender exercises, compliance officers and managers checking whether someone else has checked whether another person has saved £17.50. The system becomes so determined to demonstrate thrift that it turns into an expensive machine for measuring paperclips. That is not efficiency. It is bureaucracy doing an expensive impression of thrift.

Some inefficiency must be tolerated. Not because incompetence is endearing, nor because public money grows on a shrub behind the Treasury, but because a functioning state needs a margin of slack. It needs people who are not already working at 100% capacity when a crisis arrives. It needs proper records, basic checks, training, maintenance and enough legal care to avoid turning a bad decision into 3 years of litigation. It needs reserve capacity in hospitals, courts, local authorities and emergency services, because life has a tiresome habit of refusing to arrive in neat, predictable instalments.

The private sector understands this perfectly well. A serious company keeps spare parts, duplicate systems, insurance, lawyers, contingency funds and stock in reserve. It does not call this waste. It calls it resilience, risk management and overhead. When government does the same thing, however, the very people who would complain if the system failed suddenly discover the word “bureaucracy”.

The human body makes the point neatly enough. It does not turn every calorie into visible movement. A great deal is spent on balance, repair, temperature control, circulation and remaining alive. Nobody regards that as a design failure. A living system needs overhead to remain functional. A modern state is not a combustion engine either. It is a complex system expected to cope with error, fraud, legal challenge, surges in demand and the occasional national crisis.

Some spending does not show up as a neat front-line output because it pays for maintenance, training, proper procurement, legal checks, information security and the ability to cope when demand rises unexpectedly. The important distinction is not between efficiency and inefficiency. It is between waste and productive friction.

Waste is paying twice for the same thing, funding programmes that do not work, allowing suppliers to milk the public purse, retaining layers of administration that add no value, or paying external advisers a fortune to recommend that a department might perhaps consider speaking to its own staff. Productive friction is the modest cost of making sure public money is not stolen, contracts are checked, decisions are lawful, vulnerable people are not abandoned because a caseworker had no time to read the file, and nobody awards a £200 million contract to a mate over lunch.

There is another trap: cost-shunting. A department can meet a savings target by cutting prevention, maintenance or casework, only for the cost to arrive later in another budget. Cut support for vulnerable families and the bill may return through homelessness, policing, the NHS, schools or the courts. Cut maintenance and it may return as emergency repairs at several times the cost. Cut compliance and it may return as fraud, tax loss and expensive private contracts. Whitehall may call that a saving because the cost has moved department. The taxpayer is entitled to notice that it has not disappeared.

The serious question is not, “How large a saving figure can we announce?” It is, “Which costs can we remove, what will it cost to remove them, and will the state still be less expensive and more capable afterwards?” A credible programme would set targets based on named reforms, published evidence and independently audited results. It would show lower unit costs, fewer failed contracts, reduced fraud, shorter delays and better service reliability. It would not simply announce a heroic number and hope the public mistakes arithmetic for administration.

The test is simple: does the state cost less while delivering the same or better result? If a supposed £1 saving requires £1.20 of extra auditors, compliance staff, delay, management time and remedial spending elsewhere, then it is not a saving. It is an ideological preference dressed up as efficiency.

The aim is not a theoretically perfect state with zero waste. That would require an army of people checking the work of another army of people. The aim is more modest and more intelligent: find the 20% of failures causing most of the waste, deal with them properly, tolerate the small margin of inefficiency needed to keep a complex country functioning, and do not save pennies today by creating much larger bills tomorrow.

The Curse of Cursive

People of a certain age will remember the great educational obsession with joined-up writing. Or, to give it its proper grandiose title, cursive script. Schools treated it as though civilisation itself rested upon the ability to turn the alphabet into a sort of continuous decorative hosepipe.

An astonishing amount of time was devoted to it. Sheets of lined paper. Endless loops. Pen licences awarded with all the solemnity of a military decoration. Children who could barely explain basic grammar were nevertheless expected to produce handwriting resembling a peace treaty signed aboard a battleship in 1919.

What always strikes me is that nobody actually reads joined-up writing voluntarily.

Books are printed. Newspapers are printed. Shakespeare is printed. Even medieval monks, sitting in freezing stone rooms inhaling candle fumes for thirty years, generally tried to make individual letters distinguishable from one another. Humanity did not spend centuries developing printing presses only for schools to decide that the pinnacle of communication was making every word resemble a set of cursive hieroglyphs discovered inside a damp pyramid.

I did a little research into the history of cursive script recently, which illuminated me somewhat. Not, obviously, in the sense of illuminated script, involving gold leaf, decorated capitals and monks slowly going blind beside candles, but intellectually.

The strange thing is that cursive script originally had a perfectly sensible purpose. If you were writing with a quill or dip pen in 1720, constantly lifting the nib from the page interrupted the ink flow, caught the paper and increased blotting. Keeping the pen moving in one flowing motion was quicker and smoother. Fine. Entirely rational.

The problem is that schools carried on teaching it with near-religious intensity long after the world that created it had vanished.

By the time we were all painstakingly joining our letters in the 1970s and 80s, the country was watching colour television, flying in jumbo jets and listening to music recorded electronically, yet children were still being trained in a handwriting system optimised for a man in a powdered wig writing shipping invoices by candlelight with a feather.

Nobody ever seemed to pause and ask whether this made any sense.

Mind you, I am not entirely innocent here. In my 30s I became mildly obsessed with calligraphy and used to write entries in ship's logbooks in perfect Gothic script, which probably made routine navigational observations look as though they had been copied from a 14th century monastery shortly before the arrival of the plague.

But Gothic script, importantly, is not cursive. Quite the opposite. Gothic lettering positively revels in separating everything into sharp, formal, individually constructed characters. It takes ages to write and was never pretending otherwise. Decorative, ceremonial and faintly intimidating, certainly, but at least honest about the fact it belonged to another age.

My father, meanwhile, fully embraced cursive script. Besides owning a typewriter that produced it, he also used peacock blue ink in a fountain pen for his logbook entries. It was his mark. Beautiful flowing cursive handwriting in vivid blue ink, looking faintly as though a Victorian shipping clerk had somehow wandered into the late twentieth century and been handed radar and diesel engines.

In fact, before going to sea, he had briefly been a bank clerk and had been taught copperplate writing properly. That was still considered a serious commercial skill then. A neat hand implied reliability, competence and trustworthiness. Banks, after all, were places where one badly written figure could accidentally move the equivalent of a semi-detached house from one ledger to another.

I rather inherited that tendency myself. Until I nearly ripped my right thumb off in a motorcycle accident, my handwriting was genuinely rather beautiful. Not elegant in the copperplate sense perhaps, but neat, controlled and readable. Afterwards it deteriorated into something that looks as though a startled chicken has walked through wet ink during a minor electrical incident.

Which perhaps rather undermines the old moral assumptions surrounding handwriting. Schools treated penmanship almost as a reflection of character. Yet in reality, good handwriting often comes down to mechanics, muscle control and whether your thumb remains broadly attached to your hand.

And perhaps that is partly why the whole thing lingered for so long. There is something undeniably elegant, personal and individual about good handwriting. Mechanical printing may be clearer, but it carries none of the fingerprints of the person behind it. You can almost tell the era and character of somebody from the way they wrote.

The original technical problem behind cursive script had nevertheless been solved decades earlier. The biro existed. The typewriter existed. Photocopiers existed. Word processors were already appearing. Yet the educational system clung to cursive script with astonishing determination, as though the collapse of joined-up handwriting would somehow lead directly to barbarism.

And schools became oddly moralistic about it. Good handwriting implied discipline, intelligence and upright character. Bad handwriting suggested idleness and possible future criminality. Meanwhile the medical profession had already evolved a written language entirely incomprehensible to the human eye. Prescriptions written by hand probably accounted for a measurable percentage of accidental drug-induced deaths over the years, with pharmacists effectively working as part-time cryptographers.

That, in many ways, summarises the entire joined-up writing obsession. A society becoming so attached to the appearance of effort and tradition that it starts deliberately reintroducing the very problems technology had just solved.

Most adults eventually drift into a compromise anyway. Half print, half scribble. The natural human equilibrium between speed and legibility. Nobody, outside perhaps wedding invitations and threatening letters from solicitors, actually writes in full cursive script anymore.

And now, of course, children type.

Which means future generations will probably regard joined-up writing the same way we regard deportment lessons, hat etiquette and ceremonial sword drills. One of those strange rituals people defended fiercely long after its original purpose had quietly died.

Still, somewhere in Britain there is probably a retired headmistress who firmly believes society began collapsing the moment children stopped joining their letters properly. She almost certainly writes Christmas cards in green ink using a fountain pen that leaks slightly, and regards the self-checkout at Tesco as the first stage of civilisational breakdown.

Nigel Farage's Real Victory Was Never Number 10

Today, I find myself returning to a theory that I had previously abandoned because it seemed too cynical, too tidy, perhaps even a little conspiratorial.

What if Nigel Farage’s real purpose was never to become Prime Minister?

The real question is this: why does a politician who claims to want to govern repeatedly behave as though the standards expected of a future Prime Minister do not matter?

A £5 million personal gift from a billionaire donor. A remarkably lucrative role promoting a gold bullion company. Questions over declarations. Persistent criticism of his parliamentary attendance and engagement with Clacton. Now even talk that a standards investigation could, depending on its outcome, lead to a recall petition.

None of these episodes is, by itself, politically fatal. But together they do not look like the careful, disciplined conduct of someone methodically building public trust.

A serious contender for Downing Street normally spends years demonstrating competence, reliability and judgement. Every scandal matters because every scandal chips away at the trust needed to persuade floating voters.

Farage appears to operate under different rules.

Perhaps that is because his political capital does not depend on persuading the broad middle. It depends on retaining a sufficiently large and loyal core who treat almost every criticism as confirmation that he is challenging the establishment.

If that is true, scandal is not necessarily fatal. It becomes a running cost.

He may lose moderate supporters around the edges, but if the core remains intact he keeps exactly what makes him valuable: the ability to frighten his opponents.

That changes the calculation.

The conventional assumption is that Reform succeeds only if it forms a government. But that may misunderstand where its real influence lies.

If your objective is to reduce regulation, cut taxes, weaken environmental obligations and shrink the state, it is irrelevant whether those policies are delivered by Reform, the Conservatives or Labour. The vehicle matters less than the destination.

So a wealthy donor does not necessarily need Farage in Number 10. They simply need Labour and the Conservatives to believe that unless they move in Reform’s direction, Reform will continue taking votes from them.

In that scenario, Reform becomes less a government in waiting than a permanent pressure group with parliamentary representation.

Its success is measured not by the number of ministers it appoints, but by how far it can drag everyone else’s policies towards its own.

And to some extent, that has already happened.

The Conservatives have become Reform Lite, forever hardening their language and policies in the hope of recovering voters they lost to Farage. They present this as conviction, but it increasingly looks like panic dressed up as principle.

Labour has not been immune either. Whether by conviction or electoral necessity, Labour under Starmer has adopted tougher positions on several issues where Reform has been influential: asylum, welfare and fiscal restraint among them.

Shabana Mahmood’s stance on refugees is not merely a change of tone. It is a hardening of policy.

That matters because it shows Farage’s influence working even without power. He does not need to sit in government if government already feels obliged to answer questions framed by him.

But two things may now complicate the model.

The first is Burnham. If Labour under Burnham can speak plainly to insecure voters without accepting Farage’s premises, Labour could move out of Reform’s gravitational field.

The second is Prosper UK. A serious centre-right movement rejecting populist Toryism is precisely the fishbone in Farage’s throat. It does not need to win over his core supporters. It only needs to give respectable centre-right voters somewhere else to go.

That is the threat to Farage: not that his believers abandon him, but that everyone around them stops being frightened of him. 

Farage’s danger lies in his ability to define the battlefield. His weakness lies in the possibility that others stop fighting on it. If Burnham can reach insecure voters without parroting Reform, and Prosper UK can offer the centre right a home that is not built from grievance, Farage’s leverage shrinks.

He can keep his loyal core. He probably will. But a loyal core is not the same as national dominance, it is only powerful while others panic around it.

Perhaps I was wrong to abandon my original theory. The real measure of Farage’s success was never whether he became Prime Minister, it was whether Britain changed because he was here.

The Price of Patriotism

Kemi Badenoch has discovered a £4.7bn gap in Labour's defence investment plan and is behaving as though she has uncovered the political scandal of the century.

She hasn't. The remaining £4.7bn is not "missing". It has not disappeared behind a filing cabinet. It is a funding decision for the autumn Budget.

The truly astonishing part is the identity of the messenger.

This is the party that spent 14 years hollowing out Britain's armed forces while wrapping itself in the flag. The party that cut troop numbers, delayed procurement, presided over chronic cost overruns and left equipment programmes years behind schedule. It also left behind an economy weakened by Brexit, a tax base that grew more slowly than it otherwise would have done, and public finances under severe strain.

Having created so much of the problem, the Conservatives have now reinvented themselves as guardians of sound finance. It takes a spectacular lack of self-awareness.

Then comes the inevitable slogan: "We're spending it all on welfare."

Fine. Which welfare?

The state pension? Disability benefits? Housing support? Universal Credit? Carers? Low-paid working families?

If Kemi Badenoch wants £5bn found, she should have the courage to tell us precisely who is going to lose it. "Welfare" is not an answer. It is a convenient label designed to avoid saying "pensioners", "disabled people" or "working families".

The real question is not whether Britain needs another £5bn for defence. It probably does.

The real question is the opportunity cost.

Every pound spent on defence has to come from somewhere. There are only four options: higher taxes, lower spending elsewhere, more borrowing, or stronger economic growth. Those are the choices. There is no fifth option called "common sense".

Britain's security is a national responsibility. Defence protects our territory, our infrastructure, our trade, our supply chains, our businesses and our accumulated wealth.

So who should contribute most?

The answer is surely those with the greatest ability to contribute, those with the greatest financial stake in Britain's stability, and those least likely to bear the physical burden.

That is not class warfare. It is proportional responsibility.

Indeed, if Britain's loudest millionaire and billionaire patriots spend their lives telling us how patriotic they are, this is their moment. Patriotism is not measured by the size of the flag on your lapel, the volume of your speeches, or the frequency with which you accuse others of lacking it.

Patriotism is measured by what you are prepared to contribute when your country genuinely needs you.

Recently Badenoch accused Bridget Phillipson of being a "spiteful class warrior". Yet when Britain needs more money for defence, her instinct is not to ask more of those with the broadest shoulders, but to look down the income scale instead.

If there is class politics at work here, it is not coming from those arguing that contribution should reflect ability to pay.

It is coming from those who instinctively protect wealth while presenting cuts for everyone else as patriotism.

This is the same political trick we have seen time and again. Promise easy answers. Avoid difficult choices. Wave the flag. Hope nobody notices that the arithmetic has quietly left the room.

Serious defence policy requires serious honesty. It means telling voters what security costs and explaining, openly, how it will be paid for. Slogans about "welfare" are not a funding strategy. They are simply a way of changing the subject.

Badenoch offers none of that.

Instead, she performs the oldest trick in politics: create the mess, leave the mess, then express theatrical outrage that the people clearing it up have not yet finished.

If her answer is that the poorest should fund Britain's defence while the wealthiest remain comfortably insulated, then this is not patriotism.

It is austerity dressed in camouflage.

If others are expected to risk their lives, the very least the wealthy can risk is a little more of their wealth.

Revolving Doors

Politics used to be sold to us as public service. That was the theory, at least. A slightly noble calling in which a person gave up the comforts of ordinary life, endured public criticism, and devoted themselves to the improvement of the nation. There may even have been a brass band involved somewhere.

These days, for a highlighted few, it looks more like a conversion process. You go in with one sort of career, spend a few years acquiring contacts, status, access, ministerial language and a working knowledge of how the machine operates, then emerge on the other side as someone with a market value you did not previously possess.

Take my former MP, Luke Hall. Before politics, he worked in retail. He worked for Lidl from the age of 18, became manager of the Yate store, and later became an area manager for Farmfoods. That is a perfectly respectable career. No sneering required. Britain runs on people who can get staff rotas done, keep shelves stocked, and stop the frozen peas becoming a small inland glacier.

Then came Parliament. He became Conservative MP for Thornbury and Yate in 2015, served in ministerial roles, and left the Commons when Parliament was dissolved in 2024. Again, none of that is improper. It is how representative democracy works, or how it is supposed to work when it is not being used as a holding pen for think-tank alumni and people who say “delivery” every six minutes.

But after leaving Parliament, Hall took a role with National Grid as Head of External Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement. The official appointments advice noted that National Grid has a significant contractual relationship with government and is regulated by Ofgem, although it also said there was no direct overlap with his Department for Education ministerial brief.

And there, really, is the smell of the thing.

I am not accusing him of corruption. That would be unfair, unevidenced and legally unwise, which is a poor combination. The point is not that a rule was necessarily broken. The point is that the public can see the shape of the transaction. A man goes into politics with one kind of career and comes out with another: external affairs, stakeholder engagement, public policy, government-facing communication. Not wires and pylons. Not the engineering of the National Grid. The navigation of influence.

To be fair, quite a few Conservative MPs did not exactly discover business after politics. Many came from it in the first place: finance, law, property, consultancy, corporate management - the old familiar Westminster grazing pasture. For them, the move after office can look less like a dramatic career change and more like returning to the mothership with a better pass, a fuller contacts book and a working knowledge of which ministerial door needs knocking on.

Labour has its own risks, of course. Nobody should get too misty-eyed and imagine Labour MPs are all still emerging from pit villages with a union card in one hand and a flask of tea in the other. But Labour MPs have historically been more likely to come from public services, teaching, unions, local government, charities and political organising, while Conservative MPs have more often had business and legal backgrounds. That does not make one side morally pure and the other wicked. It simply changes the shape of the temptation.

With some Conservatives, politics can amplify an existing business network. With some Labour MPs, especially after time in government, politics can create one. Either way, the danger is the same. Public office becomes a private asset.

And yes, in recent years this has looked more Conservative than Labour. But that is partly because the Conservatives were in power for fourteen years, which gave them a much larger herd of former ministers, advisers and connected Westminster wildlife heading for the private sector. A long spell in government creates a long departure lounge. The more people you have standing near the levers of power, the more people later discover that lever-proximity has a very pleasant day rate.

But Labour should not get smug. The revolving door is not painted blue. It simply opens most easily for whoever has recently been nearest the machine. If Labour spends years in office, some of its own people will discover the same mysterious gravitational pull towards consultancies, advisory roles, public affairs firms and “stakeholder engagement”, which is often what lobbying calls itself after a shower and a LinkedIn makeover.

So this is not a party-political purity test. It is a power test. The Conservatives have supplied more of the recent examples because they supplied most of the recent government. But the temptation belongs to office itself. Power creates access. Access creates value. Value then seeks a salary, preferably one large enough to require the word “package”.

That is why Hall is such a neat local example. He did not arrive in Parliament as an energy specialist, infrastructure expert or public affairs grandee. He came from retail management. Respectable enough, but not obviously a route into the upper reaches of National Grid stakeholder engagement. Parliament supplied the missing ingredient: status, access, fluency in government, and the faint scent of usefulness to people who need to understand how Whitehall and Westminster work.

Local gossip about what people thought of him before politics may be satisfying, but it is not the foundation of the argument. People are disparaged by former colleagues for all sorts of reasons: competence, ambition, politics, personality, jealousy, or because they once reorganised a stockroom with the quiet messianic energy of a district manager on a leadership course. Anecdote is colour, not proof.

The documented career arc is stronger. Retail. Parliament. Ministerial office. Then a public affairs role with a major regulated company. Perfectly legal, by all appearances. But legality is a low bar. It is the political equivalent of saying the MOT tester did not actually fall through the floorpan.

What matters is what this does to public trust. Voters look at these moves and begin to think the whole system is built this way. They stop believing politicians are primarily there to serve. They start believing they are there to accumulate future value. And once that belief takes hold, every speech sounds like networking, every committee sounds like auditioning, and every ministerial announcement comes with an invisible LinkedIn update hovering somewhere in the background.

That is bad for democracy. Not because every politician is bent. They are not. Many are diligent, serious and probably underpaid for the abuse they take. But a system does not need universal corruption to lose legitimacy. It only needs enough examples of respectable self-advancement to convince the public that the game is rigged politely.

The modern scandal is not the brown envelope. It is the business card.

Not a bloke in a trilby leaving cash under a park bench. A former minister taking a stakeholder role, a consultancy, a directorship, an advisory post, all signed off by the correct process, all technically within the rules, all accompanied by grave assurances that no lobbying will occur.

And perhaps no lobbying will occur. Perhaps every rule will be followed to the letter. Perhaps everyone involved will behave impeccably, and the whole thing will be as pure as a freshly wiped whiteboard in a corporate awayday breakout room.

But the public still sees what has happened. Public office has created private value. That may not be corruption. But if democracy depends on trust, it is still a very expensive way of losing it.

Naughty Me

I am very naughty.

There. Best to get the confession out of the way early, before the forecourt clergy arrive with their laminated commandments.

Because I collect cars from auction sites across the UK, and auction cars are almost invariably handed over with about five miles of fuel in them. Not five miles in the reassuring sense. Five miles in the “you may reach the petrol station, provided you do not use the heater, indicators or hope” sense. 

So the first stop is usually a fuel station. I have to fill the thing up, pay with a corporate fuel card, and enter the registration number. Which, naturally, I do not know. I may have owned the car for all of twelve minutes. It is not my cherished classic. It is just that day’s anonymous lump of depreciating metal, acquired from somewhere damp beside the M6.

So I take a photograph of the registration plate.

With my mobile phone.

On a fuel station forecourt.

Cue sharp intake of breath from the forecourt priesthood.

Yesterday, inevitably, I was challenged.

Not for smoking. Not for spilling fuel. Not for juggling naked flames beside Pump Four while humming Ride of the Valkyries. I was challenged because I took a photograph of a registration number, so that I could enter it correctly into the corporate fuel card system.

Being a difficult old sod, I attempted to argue the statistics.

This went exactly as well as you would expect.

I explained, calmly and no doubt with the radiant charm for which I am justly famous, that the probability of a modern mobile phone igniting petrol vapour during a quick number plate photograph is not zero in the philosophical sense, but is statistically indistinguishable from zero in the observed world. After decades of mobile phone use and billions of refuelling events, verified examples appear to be notable mainly for their absence.

Computer said no.

I tried the distinction between theoretical hazard and practical risk.

Computer said no.

I raised the point that static electricity, smoking, distraction and driving off with the hose attached are all rather more plausible hazards.

Computer said no, possibly louder.

And to be fair, the attendant was not there to debate Bayesian probability with a man collecting an auction car with four miles of fuel range and a corporate card requiring a registration number he had owned for less time than most people spend choosing a sandwich. The attendant had a rule. The rule had a sign. The sign had management behind it. And management, as we know, is where nuance goes to be laminated.

So I lost. Not because the statistics were wrong, but because statistics are of limited use against a laminated instruction. And this is where the signage becomes faintly comic.

My phone is banned because it contains a battery and is not certified for use in a hazardous atmosphere. Fair enough, as far as the paperwork goes. But the same forecourt admits petrol cars with hot exhausts, tired wiring, relays, fuel pumps and vapour. It admits diesels, hybrids, motorcycles, elderly vans, and EVs which are, among other things, huge mobile batteries with seats, cupholders and finance agreements.

That does not mean EVs are especially dangerous. They are not. It means the forecourt is already full of managed risks. My phone is not unique because it is uniquely dangerous. It is unique because it is visible, easy to ban, and easy to blame.

That, really, is the point. The “no phones” rule is not wholly irrational. Petrol vapour deserves respect. Forecourts are not risk-free environments. Simple rules have their place, particularly where hurried customers, volatile liquids and mild stupidity occasionally gather in the same postcode. But the rule treats all phone use as though it were the same act: making a call at the pump, scrolling Facebook while the tank overflows, or briefly photographing a number plate so that the payment system can be satisfied.

That is where risk management becomes pantomime. A tiny theoretical ignition risk is elevated into a visible behavioural offence, while larger and duller risks continue their quiet careers. It is not so much safety as administrative theatre, with unleaded.

So yes, I was naughty. I used my phone on a forecourt. I took a photograph of a registration plate. I argued probability. I was defeated by procedure. I shall continue to treat petrol vapour with respect. I shall not smoke, loiter, make calls, scroll Facebook, or behave like an idiot near the pumps. I shall take the registration photo I need, use the fuel card, fill the car, and leave. And, if challenged again, I shall probably apologise politely, because arguing Bayesian probability with a forecourt attendant in a hi-vis tabard is rarely the path to enlightenment.

But I remain unconvinced that my phone is the great danger here. The forecourt is already full of ignition sources on wheels. Mine just happens to fit in a pocket, take photographs, and offend the sign.

Somewhere in the great filing cabinet of modern Britain, a compliance box was ticked, a manager slept easier, and a tiny imaginary spark failed once again to ignite a petrol station.

Robbo the Robin

This little robin, who I have called Robbo, comes to within literally inches of me.

Not feet. Not arm’s length. Inches. He's even sat on my hat.

He stands there, looking up with complete curiosity, as though he is trying to decide what sort of strange creature I am.

His parents, meanwhile, have a rather better grasp of risk. The moment a cat appears they erupt into alarm calls, while Junior appears to wonder what all the fuss is about.

For now, I seem to have passed whatever test robins apply to humans. I am not a threat. I am simply part of the garden. His parents follow me up the garden sometimes and sit nearby, even when I'm making a racket with the ride-on-mower. It's in the nature of Robins to find humans interesting.

It will not last. In a few weeks his parents will stop seeing him as a child and start seeing him as a rival. They will drive him away because that is what robins do.

I hope he settles nearby. It would be rather nice if, one day, an adult robin with a bright red breast landed within inches of me and, for reasons known only to robins, remembered that I had always been one of the safe ones.

The Law Allows Panic. It Does Not Allow Planning

I have been thinking about self-defence, which is always a mistake, because it leads very quickly from common sense into the sort of legal maze where you begin by buying kitchen knives in a supermarket and end up mentally rehearsing your statement to the custody sergeant.

The problem began innocently enough. Suppose I buy a set of kitchen knives. Perfectly legal. Useful things. One can hardly be expected to dice an onion with stern words and a disappointed glance. But then comes the question of how to get them home.

Apparently the answer is that I may carry them home, provided they remain in their packaging, preferably with the receipt, and I proceed directly from shop to house like a man transporting medical isotopes. The knives are fine because my intention is culinary. They are kitchenware. They are not weapons. They remain kitchenware for as long as my inner monologue behaves itself.

This is where the law becomes both sensible and ridiculous, which is quite a British combination. If I am taking the knives home to chop carrots, I am a citizen. If I am taking them home and happen to think, as I pass through a grim underpass, that they might be useful if some local entrepreneur in sportswear produces one of his own, I may have wandered into a different legal category.

Same knives. Same bag. Same pavement. The crucial evidence is apparently whether my thoughts were appropriately domestic.

To be fair, the logic is not stupid. The law does not want people arming themselves in public. It cannot allow every frightened person to say, “I only had the knife because this is a rough area.” If that became a lawful excuse, then every actual thug would immediately discover a deep and touching concern for his personal safety. The streets would become safer in much the same way that adding more wasps improves a picnic.

So I understand the principle. You may defend yourself if attacked. You may use reasonable force. You may use what is genuinely to hand. But you may not go out equipped on the basis that something might happen. The law allows panic. It does not allow planning.

Still, there is a certain bleak comedy in it. If I buy a baseball bat and take it home, that is fine. If I am going to baseball practice, that is fine too, though in Britain the police may reasonably ask which American airbase I escaped from. But if I carry a baseball bat because I am nervous, it stops being sports equipment and starts auditioning for Exhibit A.

The same applies to a torch. A torch is lawful because it is for seeing things. Quite useful, seeing things. Especially at night, or in a shed, or under a car, or in any British cupboard containing three dead batteries, a radiator key and a mystery cable from 2007. But a large metal torch is also a very effective club. Carry it because it is dark and you are sensible. Carry it because it would make a useful club and suddenly the beam of justice shines rather directly into your face.

Then there is the hiking pole. Entirely innocent. It helps with balance, mud, slopes, knees and the small daily humiliation of admitting that gravity is now a more serious opponent than it used to be. Yet a hiking pole is obviously dangerous. I could destroy half a china shop with one without even meaning to. Put me in a narrow aisle with a rucksack and a collapsible pole and I could do more damage than a minor artillery incident.

But again, intent rules everything. In the hand of a walker, it is equipment. In the hand of someone muttering “just in case”, it becomes a weapon with a wrist strap.

And then, inevitably, the conversation reaches the net.

Not a fishing net on a pole. That would be far too normal. I mean a proper man-sized net, of the sort a gladiator might have used while annoying someone with a trident. It is not lethal. It is not a knife, a cosh, a baton or a baseball bat. It is practically the pacifist’s weapon, if such a thing can exist. Its main function is to make the attacker look foolish, which in a better civilisation would probably be punishment enough.

Nobody is holding up a Co-op with a gladiator net unless the education system has failed in entirely new directions. “Open the till or I shall entangle you” is not, one feels, the language of the modern hardened criminal.

And yet, legally, the net is where the whole thing becomes beautifully absurd. Because a man-sized net says, “I have anticipated trouble and brought equipment.” That is the fatal phrase. The law is not only worried about blades or blunt force trauma. It is worried about preparation for confrontation.

The net exposes the problem perfectly. It is not designed to stab or smash. It is designed to inconvenience. It is aggression by laundry. But if I carry it because I fear I may be attacked, the law begins clearing its throat. The state may tolerate a torch, a hiking pole, a shopping bag and a body full of karate, but apparently draws the line at going out dressed as a Roman fisherman with trust issues.

This is the oddity. The law is not really classifying objects. It is classifying purpose. Knife as kitchenware, lawful. Knife as reassurance, unlawful. Torch as illumination, lawful. Torch as club, risky. Hiking pole as walking aid, lawful. Hiking pole as pretext for whacking someone, not recommended unless you have developed a fondness for interview rooms. Net as theatrical prop, fine. Net as emergency yob management system, suddenly less fine.

And then we get to the human body itself. Suppose I am a karate expert. Very expert. I am not, obviously. My current fighting style is probably best described as irritated semaphore. But suppose I were. In that case, I would be walking around with hands, feet, elbows, knees and years of training. In a practical sense, I would be considerably more dangerous than a man carrying a disappointing umbrella.

Yet I am not “armed” merely by being trained. The law has not yet worked out how to put a sheath on a pensioner. I may leave the house in possession of my own limbs. This is generous, and should probably not be taken for granted.

If I use that training, though, it matters. Expertise does not remove the right of self-defence, but it may reduce one’s ability to claim innocent flailing. Once you know what you are doing, you are expected not to pretend otherwise.

So there we are. You may be strong. You may be trained. You may be frightened. You may buy knives. You may carry a torch. You may own a baseball bat. You may walk with a hiking pole. You may even, in the right theatrical circumstances, possess a net.

What you must not do is join too many of those thoughts together in advance.

That is the corridor we are given. We may move through public life carrying lawful objects for lawful purposes, while carefully not noticing their secondary possibilities. If danger appears, we may defend ourselves with reasonable force, but only in the moment, and preferably with the sort of restraint that can be admired later by people who were not present, not frightened, and not being approached by someone with a blade.

I do see why the law is written this way. The alternative is worse. Once fear becomes a general excuse for carrying weapons, everyone gets to be frightened, including the people we are frightened of. Then every street argument escalates from shouting to equipment. The thug claims self-defence. The frightened citizen carries a weapon. The next thug carries a bigger one. Eventually we all need a wheelbarrow just to pop out for milk.

But there remains a gap between legal coherence and lived reality. The law can tell you not to arm yourself. It can tell you that if attacked you may use reasonable force. It can tell you that intent matters. It can tell you that a torch is fine if it is for light and a problem if it is for skulls. It can even, if pushed, probably explain why a man-sized net is not ideal pedestrian equipment unless you are late for a gladiator-themed charity event.

What it cannot do, rather inconveniently, is walk you home through the underpass.

So the official advice ends up being something like this: carry a personal alarm, keep your phone charged, use well-lit routes, avoid trouble, do not arm yourself, and if attacked, do your best to survive in a way that remains legally elegant under later review. The state’s preferred defensive strategy is apparently admin, route planning and a device that screams.

Which is all very sensible, obviously.

Though I may still take the long way round past the supermarket entrance, with my knives sealed in their packaging, my receipt in my pocket, my hiking pole behaving itself, and my thoughts fixed firmly on carrots.