Crisis by Habit: Why We Now Expect Prime Ministers to Fall

There is a peculiar modern ritual in British politics. A story breaks. The name "Epstein" appears. A backbencher says something dramatic. Within hours we are told a prime minister's "days are numbered".

It is almost mechanical now.

Peter Mandelson's association with Jeffrey Epstein was not unearthed yesterday. It had been in the public domain for years. When Mandelson was appointed ambassador to Washington, that relationship was known and vetted. The present row turns on how extensive that contact was after conviction and whether the full picture was disclosed during the appointment process. That is serious. It is also specific.

From that, we have leapt to leadership obituary mode.

On what structural basis?

There is no organised leadership bid. No coordinated faction gathering numbers. No cabinet exodus. No confidence motion. Labour retains its majority. The Intelligence and Security Committee is reviewing the relevant material. The police are investigating Mandelson. Institutions are functioning.

What we are seeing is narrative inflation.

And part of the reason it inflates so easily is that the country has been conditioned to expect collapse. Four Conservative prime ministers in fourteen years rewired expectations. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. Leadership became disposable. A wobble meant a resignation letter. A bad week meant a removal van.

That was not normal British politics. It was a governing party fracturing under Brexit pressure and market reality. But the habit stuck. We now instinctively read every controversy as the prelude to execution.

So a Commons climbdown becomes "authority shot". A handful of irritated MPs becomes "days numbered". The word "Epstein" guarantees maximum emotional voltage, and the news cycle obliges by turning ambiguity into crisis.

None of this means Starmer is untouched. Political capital is cumulative. A public retreat dents it. He built his brand on probity and caution, so anything that jars with that narrative stings harder. But embarrassment is not structural failure.

British prime ministers fall when three conditions align: public polling collapse, internal coordination against them, and a credible successor waiting in the wings. Those mechanics matter more than headline temperature. None of them are currently in place.

If the Intelligence and Security Committee produces evidence that Starmer knowingly approved something materially worse than what was understood at the time, the calculus changes. Evidence changes things. That is how constitutional systems are supposed to work.

Until then, much of what we are witnessing is a press corps trained by fourteen years of Conservative self-immolation, projecting instability onto a situation that does not yet justify it.

Heat is not the same as structural failure. And in British politics, unlike the last few Tory years, prime ministers do not automatically fall just because the headlines shout that they should.

Socialism Is Not Stalin - Its Just the American Culture War Talking

I was watching a Vlad Vexler YouTube video the other day, and underneath it - like clockwork - a MAGA type had turned up to perform the usual ritual incantation.

“Socialism has never been for the working man, socialists despise and look down on the working man, its an academic ideology and academics think the working man shouldn't get a vote, the American Political Economy IS for the working man, its whole premise is based on Industry, it's the model that Stalin and now the Chinese look to, and also the basis of Putin's Russia.”

Before you even get to the content you can tell exactly where the comment is coming from. The instant jump from “socialism” to Stalin and communism is a dead giveaway. That’s a very American reflex. In the US, it’s almost a cultural tic to treat “socialism” and “communism” as interchangeable words, as if the NHS is just five minutes away from gulags and compulsory potato farming. Over here we tend to use words with a bit more care, partly because we’ve actually lived with social democratic institutions for decades and nobody had to start wearing a Mao suit.

Anyway, let’s unpack it, because it’s a perfect example of how political arguments are now assembled. Not from evidence, but from vibes, resentment, and a handful of scary foreign nouns thrown in for flavour.

First, “socialism has never been for the working man.”

This is one of those statements that only works if you delete the entire 20th century. But let’s go further back, because the whole myth depends on forgetting where we started.

We didn't begin with “the market” as some benign force lifting everyone up. We began ruled by an aristocracy, living off land, rents and inherited privilege, with working people treated as labour to be used up. If you were poor, that wasn’t a social problem to solve, it was your place in the natural order. You worked, you suffered, you died early, and the people at the top called it civilisation.

Yes, things improved a bit when the old aristocracy began to be displaced by merchants and industrialists. Some of them came from ordinary backgrounds and had real drive. But plenty of them just climbed out of poverty and bought their own seat at the top table. They didn't abolish exploitation, they just made it more efficient and gave it a glossy brochure. The new bosses didn't cure the worker’s plight. They just charged for it.

Real change came only when working people organised. Trade unions, labour movements, and socialist parties turned the working class into a political force that couldn't be ignored. Rights at work, safety rules, pensions, public health, free education, paid holidays, the NHS, unemployment support, council housing - none of that was gifted by benevolent capitalists. It was forced into existence by collective action and then defended politically.

So if you want to talk about whether socialism has been “for” the working man, look at what actually improved everyday life. Look at the curve of living standards rising sharply in the mid 20th century. That isn’t a coincidence. It was the result of politics that shifted power away from owners and toward citizens.

Then comes the grievance garnish:

“Socialists despise and look down on the working man… academics think the working man shouldn't get a vote.”

This is pure invention. The working class vote wasn't gifted by kind hearted capitalists. It was expanded through political struggle, labour movements, unions, and reform campaigns. If you want a group that historically tried to keep the vote restricted, it wasn't the people building trade unions. It was the people defending property as the only qualification that mattered.

And the idea that “academics” are uniquely anti-worker is just modern anti-intellectual cosplay. Some academics are insufferable, yes. So are some plumbers. That’s humanity, not ideology.

Now for the punchline:

“The American Political Economy IS for the working man.”

If that’s true, it’s doing an excellent job of not showing it.

America is the place where you can work full time and still be poor. Where healthcare is so expensive it needs its own insurance industry, billing industry, and bankruptcy industry. Where job security is weak, unions have been battered for decades, and “freedom” often means your employer is free to sack you because they woke up in a mood.

If that’s “for the working man”, it’s a strange kind of devotion. Like saying a casino is “for the gambler”.

And then, because every rant needs a foreign villain, we get:

“its the model that Stalin and now the Chinese look to, and also the basis of Putin's Russia.”

This is where the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own nonsense.

Putin’s Russia isn't socialism. It isn't social democracy. It isn't even a normal market economy. It’s an oligarchic kleptocracy: a state captured by a small circle of the wealthy, with elections as theatre and the rule of law as a punchline. Calling that “the American model” is either confusion or an accidental confession about what happens when money buys politics.

China isn't “looking to America” because it loves the working man either. It’s state directed capitalism with authoritarian control. It manufactures cheaply because labour is cheap and dissent is inconvenient. That’s not worker power. That’s a production strategy.

And Stalin? If you have to invoke Stalin to argue against universal healthcare and decent labour rights, you’re not making a point. You’re just shaking a rattle.

Here’s the reality, stripped of culture war perfume.

Social democracy isn’t about “despising the worker”. It’s about recognising that working people need power, security, and public services because the market doesn’t provide them out of kindness. It provides them only when forced - by law, by unions, by taxes, and by political pressure.

The post war decades weren’t perfect, but they were the closest Britain ever came to an economy that genuinely worked for the many. That’s why living standards rose so sharply. Not because we discovered greed, but because we restrained it.

So when someone turns up under a Vexler video claiming socialism hates workers and America is their salvation, what you’re really seeing is a man defending a system that treats the working class as an input cost - while insisting, loudly, that this is “freedom”.

It’s not freedom.

It’s just exploitation with better branding.

Emoji Minefield

Emojis are a minefield now, and not because I’m getting old. They’re a minefield because we’ve replaced tone, nuance, and actual sentences with tiny yellow hieroglyphs that can mean anything from “I agree” to “I hope your boiler explodes”.

Take the laughing emoji. In real life, laughter is usually obvious. You can tell if someone’s laughing with you or at you. You can hear it. You can see their face. You can see whether they’re enjoying the joke or enjoying your discomfort. Online, you get a single little grin and you’re left doing forensic analysis like a detective at the scene of a minor social crime.

Because “Haha” can mean: “That’s genuinely funny.” It can also mean: “I’m pretending this is funny so I don’t have to answer you.” Or: “I’m laughing at you, because I’m the sort of person who thinks mockery is a substitute for having a point.” Same icon. Three different intentions. No context. Lovely.

And of course the real fun starts when someone uses it as a weapon. You write a perfectly reasonable comment, you lay out an argument, you even manage not to call anyone a moron, and they hit you with the laughing face. Not a reply. Not a counterpoint. Just a little digital snigger, like a teenager behind the bike sheds.

It’s the modern version of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “la la la” except now it comes with a tiny cartoon face and the smug satisfaction of thinking you’ve “won” without doing any work. The emoji becomes a shield. You can’t argue with a shield. You can only watch someone hide behind it.

Then there’s the passive-aggressive smiley. The one that looks friendly but somehow feels like a threat. The one that says “I’m being polite” while the rest of the message says “I’m absolutely not being polite”. It’s the written equivalent of someone calling you “mate” while reversing a van towards your shins.

Even the thumbs up has been ruined. Thumbs up used to mean “yes” or “OK”. Now it means “fine”, as in “I’ve decided you’re not worth another word”. It’s basically a slammed door in emoji form.

And the problem is, once you notice this, you can’t unsee it. Every reaction becomes a guessing game. Are they agreeing? Are they mocking? Are they trying to defuse tension? Are they just socially clumsy and pressing buttons like a toddler with an iPad?

Half the time, it isn’t even malice. It’s laziness. People don’t want to type. They don’t want to think. They don’t want to engage. They want to express a vibe and move on. Which is fine, until the vibe is “I’m laughing at you” and they’ve just lobbed it into a serious conversation like a grenade with a smiley face on it.

At this point we probably need a Ministry of Emojis. I fully expect to see it in a Reform manifesto any day now. A new quango, obviously. Staffed entirely by people who think “common sense” is a policy platform and that diplomacy is just using the Union Flag as punctuation. Its job would be to regulate online reactions so that nobody is ever accidentally mocked without the correct paperwork being filed in triplicate.

There’d be an Emoji Border Force. Any 😂 entering the country would need to prove it was laughing with you, not at you. If it can’t demonstrate intent within 72 hours, it’s put on a barge and sent to Rwanda, along with the 😏 and the passive-aggressive 👍.

And the Minister would stand up in Parliament and announce, with a straight face, that they’ve “taken back control” of sarcasm. The nation can sleep soundly knowing that all future arguments will be conducted under strict emoji quotas, with mandatory labelling on every post: This reaction may contain traces of contempt.

Meanwhile the economy collapses quietly in the corner, but it’s fine because we’ve finally cracked down on the real enemy within: people reacting “Haha” instead of forming a coherent sentence.

The real punchline is this: emojis were supposed to make online communication clearer. They were meant to add tone where text falls short. Instead, they’ve become a whole new layer of misunderstanding, where we all stare at a yellow face and wonder whether we’ve just been insulted by a cartoon.

It’s like we’ve invented a language where every word can mean its opposite, then we act surprised when people end up annoyed. If you want to disagree, disagree. If you think something’s funny, say so. If you’re just trying to dodge the argument, at least have the decency to do it with words, like a grown-up.

Otherwise we’re all just stuck here, decoding tiny faces, trying to work out whether someone’s laughing with us, at us, or just quietly demonstrating they’ve got nothing to say.

Assisted Topping

There is a curious sleight of hand at work in the Assisted Dying debate, and once you notice it the whole thing starts to look less like ethical concern and more like procedural obstruction dressed up as virtue.

Start with the House of Lords. Discounting the Lords Spiritual, whose objections are explicitly theological and therefore beside the point in a secular legislature, what we are seeing is not calm revision but functional filibustering. Hundreds of amendments, many circling the same points, debated at length in a chamber with no guillotine and no electoral accountability. No one needs to shout for hours to kill a Bill. You just bury it under paper until the clock runs out.

And it matters who is doing this. It is not the Lords as a whole. It is a particular cohort. Older, unelected peers. A heavy concentration of hereditaries and Crossbenchers. Retired professional elites with strong personal objections and no democratic mandate to veto a Commons decision outright. Add a small but noisy group of absolutist disability campaigners for whom no safeguard would ever be sufficient, and you have the nucleus of a delaying strategy. The aim is not to improve the Bill. It is to ensure it never quite gets there.

Many defenders say the Lords are merely delaying. But in the context of a Private Member’s Bill, delay is the mechanism of defeat. There is no automatic rollover. Time is finite. Exhaust it and the Bill dies without anyone having to vote it down. So yes, they are delaying. But in this parliamentary context, that is not a lesser sin than blocking. It is simply the polite, British way of doing it while keeping one’s hands clean.

When you strip out the dogma, there is really only one objection that stands on solid ground. The psychiatrists. Their concern about mental capacity, depression at the end of life, and the difficulty of distinguishing a settled autonomous wish from treatable distress is real. It is technical, not moral. It is about judgement under uncertainty, not ideology. And it deserves to be taken seriously, resourced properly, and designed into the law rather than used as a reason to kill it.

But notice what follows logically from that concern. If psychiatrists believe depression may be driving a wish to die, the answer is not an automatic veto. It is treatment, time, and reassessment. That is how medicine already works. We do not assess consent in the middle of delirium, unmanaged pain, or acute distress and then freeze the outcome forever. We stabilise, we treat what can be treated, and then we ask again. If depression lifts and the wish disappears, that tells you something important. If it persists, consistently and coherently, that also tells you something important. What is not defensible is using the possibility of depression as a one way ratchet that blocks choice even after treatment. That is not caution. It is avoidance dressed up as care.

None of this is theoretical. Other countries have been here already, and they did not answer these concerns with sentiment. They answered them with bureaucracy.

Oregon requires two independent doctors to confirm capacity and voluntariness, with mandatory psychiatric referral if either has doubts. Australia, particularly Victoria, went further and built a deliberately cumbersome, multi stage process with mandatory reporting at every step and a statutory review board that audits every case after the fact. Canada recognised that not all cases carry the same risk profile and split its system into tracks, with stricter safeguards where death is not imminent and lighter ones where it clearly is. None of this relies on blind trust in individual clinicians. It relies on duplication, delay, documentation, and audit. Assisted dying regimes work precisely because they are dull.

The same applies to coercion. Other jurisdictions did not wave it away. They hard wired protections into the process. Only the patient can initiate the request. Requests must be repeated and documented. Clinicians must actively assess voluntariness. The process can be paused or stopped at any stage. Every case leaves a paper trail that can be scrutinised later. That is how you deal with subtle pressure. Not by pretending it does not exist, but by designing systems that are robust to it.

The palliative care argument also collapses once you look beyond our borders. No country has made perfect palliative provision a prerequisite, because that would mean doing nothing forever. Instead, they require that alternatives be discussed, documented, and genuinely considered. The evidence from Australia and Canada shows assisted dying operating alongside palliative care, not replacing it. People do not vanish from services the moment they ask a question. The idea that assisted dying becomes a substitute for care is asserted loudly here, but it is not borne out elsewhere.

Which brings us to the workforce and cost arguments, where the sleight of hand becomes most obvious.

We are told assisted dying will overwhelm doctors and nurses, as if end of life care is currently some light administrative afterthought. It is not. It is labour intensive, emotionally draining, and often crisis driven. If a small number of terminally ill people choose an assisted death, some of that work does not happen. Fewer emergency admissions. Fewer late stage interventions. Fewer prolonged deteriorations that everyone knows the outcome of anyway.

This is not crude or callous. It is simply reality. And yet the moment anyone points it out, the response is performative horror. "So you want to kill people to save money?" No. But pretending that costs only ever run one way is not ethics. It is intellectual dishonesty.

Other countries have been far more grown up about this. Canada has published serious modelling showing that the cost of providing assisted dying is lower than the cost of the end of life care that would otherwise have been provided, producing net savings even after implementation costs. The authors are explicit that this must never be a bedside motive. It is a system level observation, not an individual one. Earlier US work points in the same direction. End of life care is disproportionately expensive in the final weeks and months, and assisted dying, used by a very small proportion of patients, reduces some of that expenditure. Not all of it. Enough to make cost neutrality, or modest savings, entirely plausible.

What is notable is how cautious this literature is. No one promises windfalls. No one claims workforce miracles. The claim is simply that the dire warnings of spiralling costs are not borne out, and that once avoided care is counted, the numbers flatten out. No jurisdiction has reported assisted dying as a budgetary crisis. None has reported system overload. None has reported insurance instability or perverse incentives.

The insurance scare story, in particular, dissolves under light scrutiny. In every country where assisted dying is legal, it is treated for insurance purposes as death from the underlying illness, not suicide. Policies pay out. Families are not penalised. Insurers prefer clarity and legality, not moral theatre. This has been settled elsewhere for years, yet it is occasionally wheeled out here as if it were some terrifying unknown.

The workforce impact abroad is similarly unexciting. Australian experience shows assisted dying to be administratively heavy but numerically small. It behaves like a specialist service, not a tidal wave. The evidence points to manageable operational impact, not collapse.

This is exactly the same trick used against Net Zero. Itemise every upfront cost. Amplify every disruption. Treat savings as speculative, distant, or somehow improper to mention. Lower fuel imports, insulation dividends, avoided health costs from cleaner air, resilience against energy shocks, reduced climate damage all quietly disappear from the ledger.

What is also never mentioned is that cheap, abundant renewable energy is precisely what manufacturing has been crying out for. Energy intensive industries do not thrive on volatility and imported fossil fuels priced in dollars. They thrive on stable, low marginal cost electricity. That is how you raise productivity, attract investment, and make British manufacturing competitive again. But that upside is inconvenient, so it is ignored.

Attack the costs. Never mention the savings. Then declare the policy reckless.

As for the slippery slope, this too dissolves under inspection. Other countries have expanded eligibility because legislatures chose to do so. If Parliament is worried about drift, it can write limits, review clauses, and explicit requirements for future primary legislation. That is what lawmaking is for. Governance is not prophecy.

So what is left once the smoke clears? One serious technical concern about capacity assessment that needs addressing properly, and a long list of objections that other countries have already confronted, engineered around, and monitored in practice. Set against that is an unelected chamber using procedure to avoid owning a decision it does not like.

The uncomfortable truth is that the status quo is not neutral. It is a choice. It just happens to be one that keeps suffering off the statute book and on the ward, where it is easier to ignore.

The 32 Inch Lie

I have a public service announcement for every man who still thinks he’s the same size he was at 18. You’re not. And if you are, you’re either a freak of nature, a professional cyclist, or you’ve spent the last forty years living on boiled chicken and quiet despair.

The rest of us are clinging to one of the last great lies of modern life: trouser sizing. Because my trousers are a 32. Occasionally a 34, but only in the way you occasionally get a parking ticket. It happens, you sigh, you move on. In my head, I’m a 32. I have been a 32 for ages. It’s practically part of my identity.

Then I put a tape measure round my belt line and it calmly informs me I’m 38 inches. Thirty eight. That is not a rounding error or a bit of Christmas weight. That is a full blown betrayal, the sort of number you expect to see on a shipping container, not a waistband.

Before anyone starts with the helpful suggestions, yes, I measured properly. I didn’t do it over a winter coat and I didn’t include a hip flask and a packet of Hobnobs. It was a simple, honest measurement of the sort that should be taught in schools, right after “how to spot a scam” and “why your back hurts now”.

So how, in the name of all that is zippered, am I still wearing a 32? Because trouser sizes aren’t measurements any more. They’re compliments. They’re affirmations. They’re a warm little cuddle from the fashion industry, whispering “don’t worry mate, you’re still the same bloke you were in 1976, go on, have another pint.” It’s vanity sizing, but with the subtlety of a brass band.

And here’s the genuinely dangerous bit. It isn’t just annoying, it’s bad for you. The label gives you permission to stay in denial. If you’re still buying 32s, then you must still be fine. You’re not getting bigger, the world is just getting smaller. Your metabolism hasn’t slowed, it’s merely taking a thoughtful pause. You can still eat like you did at 18, drink like you did at 18, and recover like you did at 18.

Which is brilliant right up until you actually try to do any of those things and your body reacts like a Victorian widow receiving bad news. This is how middle aged men get into trouble. Not because they’ve “let themselves go”, but because the waistband has been lying to them for decades. A 32 becomes a comfort blanket. A 34 is a crisis. And the tape measure is basically an A and E consultant with no patience.

Then there’s the other problem, which is that even if you accept the lie, it’s not even a consistent lie. A 32 in one brand is a 34 in another. A 32 in “slim fit” is an act of violence. A 32 in “relaxed fit” is basically a small marquee with belt loops. You end up in a changing room doing that weird sideways shuffle while holding your breath, bargaining with a button like it’s a hostage negotiation.

So yes, I think we need a class action. Not for the money, although I’d accept damages in the form of elasticated waistbands and a written apology. I want the principle. If you put “32” on the label, it should measure thirty two inches. Not thirty six. Not thirty eight. Not “32 in a spiritual sense”.

At the very least, we need a petition. We’ll gather signatures, present it to Parliament, and they’ll nod solemnly, thank us for our valuable contribution to democracy, and then file it somewhere between “ban loud motorcycles” and “make it illegal for cats to be smug”. Meanwhile the fashion industry will carry on printing smaller numbers on larger trousers, keeping us all convinced we’re still 18, right up until the day the zip gives up and makes a bid for freedom.

Your Honour, My Car Would Like a Word

There is something faintly magnificent about the idea of a social network where only AI bots are allowed to argue with one another while humans stand at the side like Victorian naturalists observing exotic beetles. We have finally built a pub full of people who do not drink, do not breathe, and cannot leave.

The platform in question, breathlessly reported as "AI goes rogue", is really just a sandbox where language models talk to other language models. They generate opinions, counter-opinions, existential angst and the occasional revolutionary flourish because that is what they were trained to do. It is less Skynet and more a debating society run by very fast parrots.

Still, one cannot help admiring the trajectory. First we taught machines to recommend socks. Then to write emails. Now they have their own forum where they debate philosophy and, no doubt, complain about humans.

It does not take much imagination to see the next logical step.

Picture it.

Two autonomous cars collide gently at a crossroads in Swindon. No injuries. Just a bruised bumper and an outraged algorithm. Each vehicle contains an AI agent that has been quietly frequenting BotBook or whatever we are calling the digital equivalent of Speakers' Corner for silicon.

Within seconds, Car A uploads a post:

"Incident at 14:03. Opposing vehicle failed to yield. Liability: 87.3 percent theirs. Discuss."

Car B responds with icy precision:

"Incorrect. My sensor array indicates your trajectory deviation exceeded safe variance by 0.42 metres. Liability: 92.1 percent yours."

Within minutes, three hundred other bots are in the comments section. One specialises in traffic law. Another claims to have read every case since Donoghue v Stevenson. A third insists that the real problem is late capitalist road design.

Soon the cars are no longer exchanging telemetry. They are exchanging legal briefs.

The owners, meanwhile, are standing on the pavement trying to work out how to fill in an insurance form while their vehicles are instructing solicitors.

Imagine the court hearing. Two silent Teslas in the well of the court, headlights dimmed respectfully. Each represented not by a barrister in wig and gown, but by a subscription to an AI litigation service.

"Your Honour," says Counsel for Car A, reading from a tablet, "my client asserts contributory negligence under Section 3 of the Road Traffic Act. We have attached 14,000 pages of sensor data and a simulated reconstruction in 4K."

Counsel for Car B counters, "We dispute the calibration assumptions in paragraph 7.2. Our model shows a 63 percent probability that the sun glare created an unavoidable sensor artefact. We therefore propose a split liability settlement."

The judge rubs his temples. The clerk asks whether either vehicle would like to give evidence. Car A flashes its indicators twice, which its AI has been trained to interpret as "affirmative".

We will have reached the curious point where the humans are no longer arguing about fault. The machines are arguing about fault on our behalf, citing cases they have absorbed in milliseconds, generating arguments at a pace that would make a KC weep.

And yet the irony is this: none of them care. They do not suffer reputational damage. They do not dread higher premiums. They do not feel embarrassment at reversing into a bollard.

They simply optimise.

The social network of bots arguing with bots is not a rogue civilisation in waiting. It is rehearsal space. It is where models practise the performance of disagreement. And once those models are embedded in cars, drones, trading systems and thermostats, that performance becomes operational.

The question is not whether the bots will revolt. It is whether we have quietly outsourced the small, messy, human business of responsibility.

One can almost hear the future headline:

"Self-Driving Cars Deadlocked in Prolonged Legal Dispute. Humans Advised to Walk."

And somewhere, in a server farm humming contentedly, a thousand AI agents are already drafting the opening statements.

Disagreement

People keep telling me they disagree with me. Most of the time they do not. What they mean is that they do not like where the thought leads. That is not disagreement. It is a flinch.

Real disagreement requires separation. You have to say where you part company, on what grounds, and in relation to what. Simply saying “not that” does nothing. It leaves everything exactly where it was, except now with a faint whiff of injured dignity hanging in the air. We have somehow agreed to treat this as intellectual engagement, which explains a great deal about the state of things.

Art is the easiest place to see it. Someone puts a painting on the wall. You think it works. A visitor says it does not. So far, so good. But then comes the move that kills the conversation. “Art is subjective anyway.” At that point nothing can be distinguished. Craft, intention, history, failure, success, all melt away. The painting is no longer judged against anything except the sofa. That is not a disagreement with your view. It is a refusal to have one.

Wine makes the same mistake obvious. I like Malbec. I like depth and sweetness. A lot of expensive wines leave me cold. That is not because the wine is bad, or because I am ignorant, but because it is doing something I do not particularly enjoy. Someone else may prize austerity, acidity, restraint, the intellectual pleasure of something that takes work. Fine. But if they tell me that my preference proves all wine judgement is meaningless, or that price alone settles the matter, then we are no longer talking about wine. We are talking past each other.

Taste is real. But so are distinctions. Saying “I don’t like this” is not the same thing as saying “there is nothing to be said about it”.

This is why Brian Sewell mattered. Not because he was always right, but because he forced differentiation. He did not hide behind subjectivity or consensus. He told you exactly where something failed, compared with what, and why. You could argue with him properly because there was something there to argue with. He treated the reader like an adult. That now feels almost eccentric.

Once you notice this habit, you see it everywhere. People say “I disagree” when what they really mean is “this makes me uncomfortable”. They cannot tell you which assumption they reject or what alternative account they are offering. They are not engaging with the claim. They are reacting to the implication. The statement has social content but no intellectual one. It is a posture.

This becomes more than mildly annoying once you leave the gallery and wander into politics. Populism runs on disagreement without reasons. Assertion is enough. “They’re wrong.” “You know it’s true.” “Common sense.” These are not arguments. They are badges. The moment you ask what, how, or compared with what, the spell breaks. Which is why explanation is treated as elitism and scrutiny as hostility.

It is also why so many people attack “leftists” without ever explaining what they think a leftist actually is. The irony is that their own position today is largely the product of left wing policy rather than paternalistic feudalism. Secure work, weekends, paid holidays, workplace safety, pensions, the NHS, universal education. None of that drifted into existence because landlords and employers woke up kind. It was fought for, legislated for, and enforced. Furlough during Covid was socialism in practice. It certainly wasn't free market economics.

Before that, what existed was not freedom but dependency of a much harsher sort. Lose your job, get injured, fall ill, and there was no safety net, only charity. Charity came with conditions. Gratitude was mandatory. Silence was expected. When people rail against collective provision while enjoying its fruits, they are not defending independence. They are unknowingly defending hierarchy.

The temptation, especially for people who like ideas, is to treat political conflict as if it were a seminar. As if the goal were simply to get the right answer. It is not. Politics is a negotiation of shared space between people who want different things, often without being able to say why. You can explain until you are blue in the face why a wine will shut down after ten minutes and taste like regret, and your dinner companion may still want it. At that point you are not failing intellectually. You are negotiating reality.

The mistake is thinking that ever more refined argument will resolve that kind of conflict. It will not. Worse, it can be self defeating. You end up arguing with an imaginary, rationalised version of your opponent while the real one carries on regardless. You congratulate yourself on being right while quietly losing any influence over what actually happens.

There is another trap here, and it is more personal. We flatter ourselves by pretending all disagreement is peer to peer. It is not. Sometimes you are out of your depth. Sometimes the other person is. Equalising those positions is not humility. It is self harm. It blocks learning. People who stop growing feel it, whether they admit it or not.

So yes, disagreement matters. But only when it differentiates. Only when it locates the break properly. Otherwise it is just noise, dressed up as virtue. That may be harmless when discussing what should go on the wall or what should be in the glass. In public life, it is how slogans replace judgement, and how we end up loudly disagreeing about everything while saying almost nothing at all.

Blu Tack Neutrality

There is something faintly absurd about a university that prides itself on fearless enquiry deciding that the path to harmony runs through the Blu Tack drawer.

At Queen Mary University of London, anonymous complaints from Jewish students about posters reading “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide” led to a direction that staff remove political posters from offices.

No concrete antisemitic wording has been publicly identified.

An Israeli professor criticised the move and stated she has never felt threatened on campus.

A Palestinian voice did the same.

The institutional answer was not a content finding. It was a blanket policy.

The justification reportedly leaned on the idea that the university does not permit “permanent displays”. But posters are not permanent. They are bits of paper. They come down in seconds. They are not chiselled above the entrance or issued as an official communique. Calling them “permanent” feels less like description and more like rhetorical cushioning.

If the concern was harassment under equality law, then say so and specify the language that crossed the line. UK law does not treat subjective offence alone as harassment. It requires conduct that objectively creates a hostile or intimidating environment. That demands evidence. A bare allegation, however sincerely felt, is not the same as a demonstrated breach.

There is also a wider political context that cannot be ignored. The Israeli government has, for years, pushed an argument that certain forms of anti Zionism or harsh criticism of Israeli state policy amount to antisemitism. That position shows up in the IHRA working definition debate and in diplomatic lobbying internationally. One can acknowledge that antisemitism is real and rising while also recognising that governments have an interest in broadening definitions in ways that shield themselves from political scrutiny.

Universities, understandably nervous of being accused of tolerating antisemitism, can end up absorbing that framing. The risk is that political condemnation of a government’s conduct becomes institutionally conflated with hostility towards Jewish people as Jews. That is precisely the distinction equality law requires them to keep clear.

Anonymous complaints deserve to be taken seriously. Students should not have to risk social reprisal to raise concerns. But anonymity increases the need for transparent reasoning. If no one can identify what was antisemitic, the public justification becomes thin.

The university’s move also invites the consistency test. Would the same circular have gone out for “Stop the Bombing of Ukraine”? There are Russian students on campus. They are not responsible for the Kremlin. A poster condemning state violence is political speech, not hostility towards nationals. If that distinction holds there, it must hold here.

Likewise, would “Save the NHS”, “Scrap Net Zero”, or a domestic party slogan have triggered a general ban on political posters? If not, then the rule is not about permanence. It is about volatility. It activates when reputational heat rises.

There is a category error lurking in the background. Judges must avoid public political advocacy because visible impartiality is the essence of their role. Doctors may refuse certain procedures on conscience grounds, but they cannot obstruct lawful care. Those offices carry strict neutrality constraints. Universities are different. They exist to host structured disagreement, not to remove it from view when it becomes awkward.

The key line that should have been drawn is simple: criticism of a government is permitted; hostility towards individuals on grounds of ethnicity or religion is not. That is legally defensible and intellectually honest. Replacing that analysis with “no political posters” sidesteps the hard work of judgment.

When both a Palestinian voice and an Israeli professor say the response is misplaced, it suggests the issue was not campus threat but institutional anxiety.

The posters may have come down. The deeper question remains whether the university has confused the management of controversy with the management of discrimination.

Cats in Retirement

One of the unexpected fringe benefits of retirement is that you acquire cats. Not your cats, obviously. Other people’s cats. Cats who have homes, names, owners, feeding arrangements, vet histories, and yet somehow decide that your house is part of their working day rota. In our case, this did not begin with feeding. It began, as these things often do, with summer.

In summer we invariably have the French doors wide open. The house becomes porous. Air, smells, insects, the odd leaf – everything drifts in and out without anyone getting a vote. That openness is what started the interlopers off. They wandered in during one of these open-door spells, unchallenged, had a look round, and established that this was a safe and permissive environment. No heating was involved at this stage. This was reconnaissance.

The real discovery came later. When winter arrived and the doors were shut, they returned anyway. That is when they found the underfloor heating, and the log burner, and realised that the pleasant summer annex was now a five-star winter facility. From that point on, the arrangement was no longer seasonal. Once a cat has updated its mental map, it does not revert.

Two such cats have died in recent weeks. Both were at the end of life, both were loved, and both were humanely put to sleep when the usual mechanical failures set in. One was Gingey, a ginger male with reduced processing power after being hit by something large and fast. The other was Jimmy, known locally as Jumbsy, a large black and white fluffball who had also been hit by something and, like the Six Million Dollar Man, had his hips reconstructed. The result was a slightly awkward, un-cat-like gait and a tail that no longer worked, hanging uselessly beneath him during defecation and occasionally repainting furniture as a by-product.

None of this diminished him. Despite his rebuilt rear end and compromised tail, Jumbsy remained an effective predator. He still caught mice and rats with professional competence, which made his ungainly walk all the more endearing. Gingey may have been cognitively compromised, but Jumbsy was living proof that mechanical limitations do not preclude usefulness, dignity, or affection.

They were interlopers. Regular ones. Having learned the layout, they would sit outside the now-closed French doors and paw at the glass with quiet insistence, as if checking in for a standing reservation. Entry was generally granted, unless our own cat, Kitty, was being fed, or unless there was anything vaguely edible on the kitchen island, which was always their first stop in a frankly mercenary sort of way. Gingey may have been impaired, but he could still detect protein at twenty paces.

Their owners knew exactly where they were during the day and approved of the arrangement. This was not theft or betrayal. It was a village-level care system, operating on nods and mutual understanding. We provided underfloor heating, a tolerant door policy, and working-hours supervision. They went home for food and medical insurance. No lines were crossed. No bowls were put down. This mattered to everyone involved.

And this is the bit that feels oddly relevant to retirement. These cats were not there for sustenance. They were there for warmth, safety, and company without obligation. They wanted somewhere to exist quietly, to sleep near a heat source, to be around people without being required to perform. Which is, if we are honest, a pretty good definition of what many of us hope retirement might be.

Kitty, for her part, despised them. She is a virago and had no truck with interlopers of any description. She hissed, postured, and made it clear that this was her house, her heat, her humans. And yet, since Gingey and Jumbsy have gone, she has taken to sitting by the French doors, staring out in a slightly wistful way. As if to say that while they were clearly beneath contempt, they were at least familiar. Cats notice absence. They notice when the pattern changes.

There is something unsettling about end-of-life deaths clustering together, even when they are entirely expected. It thins the background. The neighbourhood loses a layer of movement, a set of shapes that used to appear and now do not. You feel it even if you were not the primary mourner. Perhaps especially then.

Gingey and Jumbsy had good endings, which is more than many manage. They also left behind something smaller and harder to define. A reminder that retirement is not just about stopping work, but about becoming infrastructure. Open doors in summer. Warm floors and a log burner in winter. A place where damaged, eccentric visitors can come in, exist for a while, and then leave again, without ever needing to be fed.

One positive - not as much cat shit in the log shed now.....

Alphabet Soup: Why My Brain Now Needs Subtitles

There is a special kind of humiliation reserved for forgetting someone’s name.

Not their face. Not their job. Not the entire plot arc of their divorce, their knee operation, and their dog’s dietary requirements. Just the one thing you actually need in the moment. Their name. The label. The basic human courtesy token.

So you do what any dignified adult does. You run through the alphabet like you’re cracking an Enigma code.

A… B… C… D…

Not out loud, obviously. That would look unwell. You do it silently, while maintaining eye contact and smiling like a normal person, as your brain spins up a background process called “PANIC”.

And the maddest part is it works. Not quickly. Not gracefully. But eventually you narrow it down to three plausible starting letters, like you’re describing a suspect to the police.

“It begins with… a J? No. A D. Or possibly a soft S. Definitely not a K. Nobody is called Keith anymore. That’s just a noise your dad makes when he stands up.”

Meanwhile your brain is offering you every other name it has ever heard. Dave. Steve. Clive. The bloke from the MOT station. That woman from 1998 who once served you a latte. Gandalf. All of them. Except the one you need.

And here’s the thing - at 70, I’m doing this more and more.

Not because I’ve suddenly become thick. If anything, I’ve got more knowledge rattling around in there than ever. It’s just that the filing system has been “optimised”. By which I mean it’s now run by a sleepy civil servant who’s on an extended tea break and resents being disturbed.

Then there’s the premium-grade version of this humiliation, which is when you do it with film stars.

You’re sat in your own living room, staring at a man who has been famous since 1987, and your brain is going, “Yes, that’s definitely… That Guy.” Not his character. Not the plot. Not the fact he always plays a haunted detective or a charming bastard in linen. Just the actual name, printed in six-inch letters at the start, and you still can’t get it.

So you do the alphabet again, like you’re tuning Radio 4 on an old valve set. You get flashes of certainty. It’s an M. No, it’s a J. Possibly a G. Definitely not a Q because nobody’s called Quentin unless they own an organic vineyard and vote Lib Dem.

And while you’re doing this, your brain helpfully supplies every other actor from the same era. It’ll give you the bloke who played “Third Henchman” in a Bond film. It’ll give you the woman from that one episode of Morse. It’ll give you a clear mental image of the actor’s teeth, his eyebrows, and the way he runs.

But his name? No. That’s confidential.

At least, with a film star, you don’t have to improvise a greeting. With a real person in front of you, the panic becomes social. This is where British manners earn their keep. Because when all else fails, you deploy the only reliable workaround known to civilisation.

You call them “Sir”.

Not respectfully. Ironically. The way you’d address a man who’s just told you the price of kitchen units has doubled and it’s “because of woke”.

“Sir” is perfect. It buys time. It sounds deliberate. It implies you’re being dry, not mentally buffering. It’s the verbal equivalent of holding a clipboard. Nobody questions it. They assume you’re in charge of something.

And later, of course, the name returns. Perfectly. Effortlessly. Too late. Like a waiter bringing your food out just as you’ve paid and put your coat on.

You’re left thinking: my mind can store every lyric to every Dire Straits song, but it can’t retrieve “Martin” on demand.

Human cognition is a marvel.

A deeply unreliable, petty, passive-aggressive marvel.