There is something faintly absurd about the way grown adults talk about their social lives, and once you notice it, you cannot unsee it.
Women in their sixties, seventies, occasionally well into their eighties, will announce that they are “going out with the girls” as if they are about to share a bag of crisps behind the bike sheds. These are people with pensions, grandchildren and, in some cases, titanium hips. Yet off they go with “the girls”, apparently untouched by time.
Men make a partial effort with “the boys”, usually in the pub or on a golf course, where nostalgia does a fair amount of quiet work. Even then, there is a sense that everyone present understands the term is aspirational rather than descriptive.
But the real linguistic curiosity is “girlfriends”. Women use it cheerfully and without any concern for precision. “I’m seeing my girlfriends tonight” could cover anything from a quiet supper to a full audit of several marriages, complete with evidence, witnesses and a provisional verdict by pudding. Nobody blinks.
Try the male equivalent and you are immediately in difficulty. “I’m off to see my boyfriends” does not suggest a convivial evening discussing the price of diesel. It suggests either a complicated domestic arrangement or a situation that will require diagrams. At best, you will get a look. At worst, follow-up questions.
This is not a profound commentary on gender. It is simply the English language doing what it always does, evolving unevenly and then refusing to tidy up after itself. One side ends up with a useful, flexible term. The other is left with a small pile of blunt instruments.
So men fall back on “mates”, which is serviceable but carries all the charm of a label on a storage box, or else they revert to names, like a roll call. “I’m meeting John and Dave” is clear, efficient and entirely devoid of personality. One imagines it delivered with a clipboard.
In theory, this could be fixed. A determined effort to normalise the platonic “boyfriends” might, over time, take hold. Language does shift when pushed. But it would require a generation of men willing to endure raised eyebrows, pointed jokes and the occasional need to clarify that no, nothing of that sort is going on.
Most will conclude that clarity, even at the cost of mild linguistic drabness, is the better part of valour.
Going forward, when you say “the usual HTML”, I’ll give you exactly this format and skip the code block.
I had, until recently, a complete set of spanners. In this house, that’s not normal. That’s something you maintain by habit, mild suspicion, and occasionally checking the garage before anyone leaves the premises. Two fully grown sons have a way of redistributing tools without quite admitting to it, yet somehow the set had held together.
Then the mower got involved.
It wouldn’t start, so I did what you do when you’re in a hurry and slightly irritated and went straight past “check the terminals” to “remove the battery”. Out came the tools, including the 8mm, which, after the 10mm, is the most useful spanner when you’re working on lawnmowers and, as it happens, my second son’s motorbikes. In other words, exactly the one you don’t want going missing.
Two minutes later the battery was out, sitting on the grass next to the mower, and the problem was obvious. Not dead, not tired, just a bit of crud on the terminals. The sort of thing that would have taken thirty seconds if I’d bothered to look first.
Which is when the 8mm slipped.
A small tick, then nothing. Not the clatter you hope for, but that soft absence of sound that tells you it’s gone somewhere awkward. Not dropped so much as absorbed. Somewhere in the mower there was now an 8mm spanner that no longer belonged to me.
The search started sensibly. Look underneath, have a proper look underneath, then start checking places that don’t really make sense but feel like they might. When that got me nowhere, I started the mower and drove it up and down the roughest bits of the garden in the fading light, as if it might shake itself loose out of embarrassment.
It didn’t.
At that point it stopped being a search and became an activity. The sort of thing you carry on doing because you’ve already committed to it and stopping would mean admitting it isn’t working. So, since I was already there, I got the jet washer out.
That’s when things went sideways.
What came off wasn’t just dirt, it was layers. Old grass, damp clippings, general agricultural residue, all packed in as if the mower had been quietly composting itself. As it cleared, the machine started to look less like something I owned and more like something I’d inherited.
Then the rust showed up properly, and with it a hole. Not a small one you can pretend not to see, but a proper hole in the footplate, the sort that makes you stop and think, “that wasn’t there yesterday”, even though it obviously was.
By then it was getting dark, I was damp, and the mower was clean enough to be slightly worrying, so I left it. Battery cleaned, machine running, spanner still missing, and a hole waiting patiently for the morning.
Morning brought two things. Better light, and a willingness to admit I was now looking for something I couldn’t see.
So I brought in Hayley, in her official role as Spanner Finder General. No torch, no crawling about, no driving machinery over rough ground. Fifteen minutes later she pointed to the mower deck and there it was, just sitting there, exactly where I’d been looking the night before, only apparently now visible.
At that point you just pick it up and say nothing.
With the spanner back where it belonged, attention turned to the hole, which had not improved overnight. Out came the grinder, then a bit of steel, which after some measuring, cutting and general persuasion became a doubling plate. Then the welder, and a job that had started with a battery that didn’t need changing turned into patching up the structure of a ride-on mower.
It all went back together, worked perfectly, and left me with a machine that is now solid in one very specific area and questionably original everywhere else.
Which brings me, inevitably, to the paint.
Because you can’t leave a fresh bit of welded steel painted with weld-through primer staring at you every time you get on. So now I’m looking for a can of Mountfield Red, not just any red, but something close enough that it doesn’t shout at you from three feet away. I’ll probably get it wrong, and it will always look slightly different in the sunlight.
The spanner set is complete again, for now. The mower works, mostly. The repaired footplate will probably outlast the rest of it. And somewhere in the house, I suspect, my sons have already noticed that the 8mm is back.
There is a comforting theory that Parliament runs on rules, and that once a line is crossed the consequences follow more or less automatically. It is tidy, principled, and almost entirely fictitious. What we actually have is a system that runs on incentives, numbers, and nerve. A sort of constitutional improv, except the audience occasionally gets to throw things.
Take the comparison now being drawn between Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson. The argument, usually delivered with great certainty, is that Johnson “set a precedent” by surviving repeated dishonesty, and therefore Starmer must either benefit from or be judged against that same precedent. This is the wrong model. Johnson did not establish a precedent in any meaningful constitutional sense. He simply lasted as long as Conservative MPs judged him worth the trouble. Once they decided he was costing them more than he was worth, he went. The sudden collapse of ministerial support was not a constitutional mechanism, but a collective act of self preservation briskly repackaged as principle.
That points to the real hierarchy of forces, which is rarely stated plainly. First come a Prime Minister’s own MPs. They are decisive. If they decide he is still an asset, he stays. If they decide he is a liability, he is finished, usually quite quickly and with a sudden outbreak of previously undetected moral clarity. Second comes perceived electoral damage, with the media as the main delivery system. Headlines and investigations matter, but only insofar as they shift polling and the private anxieties of backbenchers. MPs are not moral arbiters so much as risk managers with a keen interest in keeping their jobs. Only then comes the opposition, which can make noise and frame the story, but does not control the outcome.
Alongside all this sits a more awkward question that is rarely voiced in public. If we push him out, who exactly replaces him? Parties do not remove leaders into a vacuum. They remove them in favour of someone, and that someone has to look at least vaguely plausible as Prime Minister. If the cupboard looks bare, tolerance for the incumbent rises sharply. It is one of the reasons Johnson lasted as long as he did. For quite a while, the alternatives looked divided or risky in their own way. Once more acceptable options emerged, his position became untenable very quickly. The same logic applies to Starmer. However irritated Labour MPs might become, they will still ask whether a successor improves their electoral chances rather than complicates them. It is remarkable how forgiving a parliamentary party can be when the alternative involves explaining a leadership contest to voters who were hoping for a quiet life.
Now consider the noise around Peter Mandelson and the pressure this is said to place on Keir Starmer. The claim, in essence, is that Starmer must bear responsibility for a flawed process. That is where the argument runs ahead of the evidence. On the facts, a negative vetting recommendation was not passed to ministers, and there is no proof that Starmer was aware of it. The attempt to pin this directly on him therefore relies on implication rather than demonstration. It has a distinct whiff of Yes Minister: the minister is formally accountable, the system quietly makes the decision, and when it goes wrong the accountability remains while the information does not.
That kind of ambiguity is harder to kill than a clean scandal. It allows critics to edge towards “misled” without having to prove intent, while also raising questions about grip and judgement. A clear cut offence can be denied or conceded; a murky one lingers. It sits in that uncomfortable middle ground where nothing is quite provable, but nothing is entirely reassuring either. Opponents will still try to collapse it into something punchy, but what actually matters is whether Labour MPs start to think the story looks slippery and is becoming difficult to defend on the doorstep.
There is no stable ratchet of standards in British politics. Each episode is judged afresh, through the same pecking order of pressures: party first, electoral fear second, opponents a distant third, and hovering over all of it the question of who comes next. Precedent, in this context, is mostly a rhetorical prop, invoked when useful and ignored when inconvenient. Which is why the question “should Starmer resign, given what happened before” tends to go nowhere. It assumes a rules based system that does not exist.
A more honest question is simpler. Do Labour MPs think he is still worth the trouble, and do they have anyone better to hand? If the answer to the first is yes, he stays. If the answer to the second is no, he stays rather longer than anyone will publicly admit. Only when both answers turn against him do events move at speed. And when they do, there will be much talk of standards and precedent. There always is. It just tends to arrive after the decision has already been made.
British politics is not governed by precedent so much as by panic, timing and whether the next lot look less alarming than the current lot. Which, admittedly, is not the grand constitutional settlement one might have hoped for.
On Sunday we came back from a long weekend in North Wales, attending an HMS Conway school reunion at what is now the Conway Centre in the grounds of Plas Newydd, the home of the Marquess of Anglesey. We spent one night on a friend’s drive, he and his lady wife being away in Italy, and another in the municipal car park in Beaumaris. Some Welsh councils now allow camper vans to stay overnight for a single night, which is very enlightened.
We then spent two nights in the grounds at The Conway Centre in our motorhome, which, set against memories of the rather Spartan accommodation of the past, felt positively luxurious. The event itself was arranged around the dedication of a Conway window at the nearby Llanedwen church, which the cadets used to attend on Sundays, it being the church of the Marquess of Anglesey. A civilised setting, good company, and exactly the sort of occasion where one might hope to follow a conversation without too much drama.
I have had my hearing aids for about two months now, which feels like long enough to have moved beyond novelty and into a more settled assessment of their merits.
Hearing aids are one of those triumphs of modern technology that leave you wondering whether the victory might have been declared a little early.
On paper, they are miraculous. Miniaturised computers, constantly analysing the acoustic environment, selectively amplifying what matters, suppressing what does not, all while discreetly tucked behind the ear like a well behaved civil servant. In practice, they are rather more like an overexcited junior who has been given too much responsibility and no supervision.
The morning ritual sets the tone. There is the delicate insertion of tiny components clearly designed by someone with smaller fingers and better eyesight. There is the ceremonial inspection for wax, which appears with the reliability of HMRC correspondence and must be cleared with tools that would not look out of place in a watchmaker’s bench. Then the battery, which will of course fail at precisely the moment one is furthest from a spare and most in need of hearing something important.
Once installed, the real entertainment begins. The devices present you with a choice. You may have the world slightly muffled, as though heard through a polite layer of felt. Or you may have it rendered in forensic detail, in which every rustle of paper, every scrape of a chair, every faint shift of a shoe on carpet is elevated to the acoustic prominence of a starting pistol. Conversation, meanwhile, occupies an ambiguous middle ground, occasionally audible but never quite confident of its place in the hierarchy.
Complicating matters further, speech itself is not a single, tidy target. The settings that make a deeper male voice reasonably intelligible are not the same as those that bring out a higher female voice. So one finds oneself in the faintly ridiculous position of being well tuned for one half of the population and slightly adrift with the other. A dinner table with mixed company becomes less a social occasion and more an acoustic experiment, with the hearing aids gamely applying a single solution to what is, in reality, two different problems.
The theory is that all of this is adjustable. In reality, the settings resemble a menu designed by committee. One is invited to choose the least objectionable compromise and proceed with a stiff upper lip.
To add a modern flourish, there is, of course, an app. One can fiddle with sliders, toggle modes, and generally behave as though one is piloting a small aircraft rather than attempting to follow a conversation about pudding. In principle, this offers control. In practice, it adds a layer of responsibility. If you cannot hear properly, it is no longer merely the fault of the device, but of your own failure to select the right setting while someone was asking you a question.
There is one clear benefit of the NHS Bluetooth-enabled variety. One can listen to videos on one’s phone with complete discretion, a small triumph of modernity that allows one to appear attentive while being quietly elsewhere.
And then there is the formal occasion, that most revealing of stress tests. In this case, a Gala Dinner on the evening of the window dedication. Several people, competing conversations, background noise, cutlery, glassware, the low hum of a room not designed with acoustics in mind. Here the hearing aids rise to the occasion by amplifying everything with admirable impartiality. The clink of a fork becomes a matter of urgency. The rustle of a napkin acquires narrative significance. Meanwhile, the person sitting directly opposite, saying something undoubtedly interesting, is rendered faintly indistinct, as though speaking from the far end of a tunnel. If he has a baritone, you may catch the gist. If she has a lighter voice, you may catch the vowels and hope for the best. My own strategy in such circumstances is simple. Nod in agreement to whatever was said and, if a frown follows, shake one’s head sagely as though condemning any implication. It usually works, although I remain none the wiser as to the gist of the conversation.
At a certain point, one removes the devices altogether. Not in defeat, but in a spirit of practical realism. It is, after all, perfectly possible to ask someone to repeat themselves. Indeed, most people are happy to oblige, especially if the request is delivered with a hint of apology and a suggestion that they might raise their voice slightly. This analogue solution, while lacking in technological glamour, has the advantage of working.
Which brings us to the unfashionable but stubbornly effective idea of direction and size. Before digital signal processing, there were ear trumpets. Large, unapologetic devices that gathered sound from where you pointed them and delivered it, without commentary, to the ear. No batteries, no menus, no firmware updates. Just physics, doing its job with a minimum of fuss.
This has led me to toy with a refinement. Not a return to the full Victorian flourish, but something along the lines of a deely bopper arrangement. A lightweight band over the head, supporting a pair of forward facing acoustic horns, discreet enough to pass as eccentric rather than alarming, but large enough to do something useful. Directional, passive, and entirely honest about what it is trying to achieve.
Modern hearing aids, by contrast, are designed to be almost undetectable. Invisible, discreet, socially polite. Which is admirable, up to a point. The difficulty is that their very subtlety conceals the problem they are meant to solve. People speak as they normally would, unaware that you are only catching half of it.
A pair of deely bopper ear trumpets, on the other hand, would make a rather more explicit statement. They would announce, with admirable clarity, that the wearer is not hearing perfectly and that a modest increase in volume would be appreciated. The social signalling may be faintly ridiculous, but it would be effective. One may look eccentric, but one would at least hear the person in front of one.
There is something slightly perverse in a modern device that hides the condition while struggling to manage it, set against an older principle that advertises it but, in doing so, quietly improves the outcome.
In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in the elegant surroundings of Plas Newydd, with all the benefits of modern technology, the simplest solutions still have a habit of working best.
I seem to have ended up with a small, slightly improvised system for dealing with the news on my laptop. Not by design, more by irritation gradually hardening into habit.
It starts with Reuters. If you want to know what has actually happened, that’s where you go. A few paragraphs, no fuss, no attempt to make you feel anything in particular. Just the facts, a quote, and a sense of what’s solid and what isn’t yet. You read it, think “right”, and move on. It feels almost old-fashioned.
If it looks like it might turn into something, you wander over to Sky News. Same story, but now it’s being performed. Banners, live updates, presenters leaning forward as if that helps. And video. Always video. You click on something that ought to take 20 seconds to read and find yourself watching two people discuss a third person’s reaction to the thing you were trying to understand. You come away knowing a bit more, but having sat through quite a lot of nodding and the occasional urgent eyebrow.
It used to be that you could retreat to the BBC for a proper write-up. Sentences. Structure. Someone had clearly taken a breath before publishing. Now you click and half the time you’re handed a video instead, as if reading has quietly become optional. And somewhere on the page there will be “Most Popular”, which turns out to mean “what people clicked on”, not “what matters”. You go looking for something serious and end up being steered towards a story about a goose holding up traffic somewhere.
That’s all mildly irritating in the daytime. At three in the morning it becomes something else.
I have got into the habit of waking up, usually twice a night, and having a quick look at what the world has been doing. I come downstairs, quietly, like I’m checking on a strange noise in the garden. It used to be straightforward. A bit of Reuters, perhaps a glance at the BBC, and back to bed with the sense that nothing too dramatic had happened.
Now I am apparently expected to watch a video.
In an open plan house.
With minstrel galleries.
There is no such thing as “low volume” in a place like that. You tap play and it feels as though the whole building is helping the sound along. So you sit there in the half-light, watching subtitles, trying to work out what’s going on without announcing it to the rest of the household. It’s like trying to follow a football match by reading the crowd reactions.
And then, for variety, you click a link on Facebook. Looks interesting, plenty of comments, people clearly have views. You click through and land on a paywall from The Telegraph or The Times. Of course. You back out.
The comments, though, carry on regardless. Confident, detailed opinions about an article nobody has read and nobody intends to read. The headline has done the job. The rest is guesswork dressed up as certainty. Someone is furious about a detail that may not even be in there. Someone else agrees. Another drags in something unrelated from years ago. The article itself might as well not exist.
Occasionally someone will cite GB News as if that settles it, which tells you roughly where things are heading.
So you end up with a routine. Reuters when you actually want to know what’s going on. Sky if you feel like watching the fuss around it. The BBC once it has decided what to show you, or what everyone else has already clicked on. The rest, when you can be bothered.
It’s less like following the news and more like keeping an eye on a workshop where one person is shouting, one is checking, one is writing it up later, and a crowd outside is arguing about instructions they haven’t read.
And all I really wanted was to know what had happened, quietly, without waking the house.
I do rather hope Trump hasn’t been reading about how Edward I effected control of Wales, because one can already see how this might go wrong.
Edward’s solution, after all, had a certain brutal elegance. Identify a troublesome periphery, move in with force, and then stitch it together with a neat chain of castles. Not decorative ruins, but hard, functional instruments of control - placed with care, supplied reliably, and intended to remind the locals, day after day, who was in charge.
It worked, in the narrow sense that Wales was subdued. It also took years, consumed vast sums, and required a level of sustained commitment that modern democracies tend to rediscover only when it is far too late to turn back. Even then, it did not produce anything so tidy as lasting contentment.
One can imagine the briefing. Iran, troublesome. Coastline, extensive. Solution, obvious. A series of well-positioned strongholds, supplied by sea, projecting power inland. A proven model, if one is prepared to overlook the intervening seven centuries and the small matter of technological change.
The difficulty, as ever, is that the Iranians are unlikely to cooperate by behaving like thirteenth-century Welsh princes. Castles, however well sited, have an unfortunate tendency to attract modern munitions. Supply lines that look admirably clean on a map tend to become rather less so when someone starts interfering with them at range.
Still, there is a certain appeal in the clarity of it all. No messy talk of strategy, no ambiguity about intent. Just stone, logistics, and the quiet assumption that what worked for Edward I might, with a little adaptation, work again.
It is, at the very least, a comforting thought. Which is usually a sign that it ought to be treated with some caution.
It has become one of the more reliable features of modern British politics that if Keir Starmer were to announce that gravity will continue operating for the foreseeable future, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage would immediately demand an inquiry into whether Britain has been over-reliant on gravity and might benefit from a more competitive alternative.
This is not opposition in any meaningful sense. It is muscle memory. Labour says something, anything, and the response arrives fully formed. No need to examine the detail, still less to concede that a proposal might be broadly sensible. The only requirement is distance. Preferably noisy distance.
Take Europe. Labour edges towards the fairly mundane proposition that reducing trade friction with our largest market might help the economy. This is not exactly a leap into federalism. Most countries manage it without surrendering the Crown Jewels. Yet within minutes we are told this is a betrayal, a slippery slope, the long march back to Brussels. The possibility that exporters might simply prefer fewer forms is treated as dangerously subversive.
Or digital ID. A problem exists, a solution is proposed, imperfect but arguable. The response is instant and absolute. Not “this needs tightening” or “here is a better model”. It is immediately inflated into a civil liberties catastrophe. One imagines the same critics would be astonished to discover that much of the developed world has somehow survived the experience.
Foreign policy, though, has provided the clearest example. When the Iran conflict broke out, both Badenoch and Farage were initially in full Churchillian mode. Stand with allies, confront the regime, why is Britain not doing more.
Then reality intruded.
The public was unconvinced. The economics looked grim. The prospect of yet another Middle Eastern entanglement landed badly. And, rather awkwardly, Labour’s cautious line - stay out, keep it defensive - began to look less like hesitation and more like basic competence.
At which point the tone shifted. Calls for a more forceful response gave way to a sudden enthusiasm for restraint. Not quite a formal reversal, but close enough that the destination was identical. Starmer did not so much move as wait, and they eventually arrived where he had been standing all along.
That is the pattern in its purest form. Opposition as reflex works perfectly well until events require consistency. At that point, the need to remain opposite collides with the need not to look completely detached from reality. The result is a hurried shuffle back towards the position that was being dismissed only days earlier.
Even where the underlying problem is agreed, the instinct remains inversion rather than thought. Labour says increase defence spending while keeping welfare intact. The reply is that the poor must be trimmed to pay for it. Not because this is the only workable answer, but because it is the cleanest possible contrast.
Tax provides the purest hypothetical. One suspects that if Labour were to announce the abolition of taxation tomorrow, the response would not be cautious approval. It would be a demand for higher taxes, collected more vigorously, on the grounds that Starmer had clearly got there for the wrong reasons.
This would all be harmless theatre were it not so limiting. Sensible policy occasionally requires the awkward admission that the other side has a point. At present that appears to be politically unaffordable. Agreement is treated less as judgement and more as a lapse.
So we get a politics in which positions are not formed but selected, like opposing shirts in a football match. Labour lines up on one side, Badenoch and Farage sprint to the other, and the detail is left somewhere on the touchline.
The Iran episode merely exposed the flaw. When events refuse to cooperate, when the “opposite of Labour” turns out to be politically or economically untenable, there is nowhere to go except quietly back towards the thing you spent the previous week denouncing.
And so we continue. Labour proposes something middling and practical. The opposition declares it absurd. Until, occasionally, reality intervenes and they find themselves, with minimal ceremony, arguing for precisely the same thing.
When a BBC sting suggests a handful of immigration advisers may have been coaching false asylum claims, the reaction is swift and theatrical. Headlines, ministerial outrage, knowing nods from the usual suspects. It does not take long before some politicians and commentators start treating it less as a specific abuse to be investigated, and more as proof that the system itself is fundamentally compromised.
Now compare that with SLAPPs, strategic lawsuits against public participation. Here we have something not alleged but well established. Wealthy claimants using English courts to intimidate journalists, bury investigations, and price critics out of speaking. Not a marginal flaw, but a predictable consequence of how the system works if you have the money. The response has been limited and carefully scoped.
One might suspect that outrage in Britain is not driven by the scale of a problem, but by its usefulness.
The asylum story, if proven, is straightforward. It is misconduct. Regulators investigate, people are struck off, perhaps prosecuted. It is a bounded problem with a clear remedy.
SLAPPs are more corrosive. They do not break the rules, they exploit them. A letter before action, backed by the prospect of ruinous costs, is often enough. No judge, no verdict, just pressure. The law functioning as designed, but producing a result that looks a lot like censorship.
We have even seen a version of this play out in British politics. Arron Banks pursued a lengthy libel case against a journalist over reporting in the public interest. Whether or not one applies the formal SLAPP label, the effect was familiar. Years of litigation, vast cost exposure, and a clear signal to anyone else tempted to dig too closely.
And yet it is the asylum story that is inflated into a national scandal, while this sort of behaviour is treated as a technical legal dispute.
Why? Because one story fits a political narrative and the other does not. “Migrants gaming the system” travels well. “The legal system can be used by the rich to suppress scrutiny” is less convenient, particularly when some of those involved move in the same political circles.
So we get the usual distortion. A small, grubby corner of the asylum process is made to stand in for the whole. Meanwhile a systemic problem affecting public interest journalism is narrowed and delayed until it is barely visible.
No conspiracy required. Just incentives. Politicians chase votes. Newspapers chase clicks. Regulators move slowly unless pushed. And the law does what it is designed to do.
There is something wonderfully British about complaining that a first class stamp costs £1.80, as if the entire edifice of the nation is teetering because Auntie Mabel now requires a small mortgage to receive a birthday card.
The assumption, usually delivered with great confidence, is that this is modern decline in action. Things used to be cheap, sensible, properly run. Then along came whoever one happens to dislike this week and ruined the Royal Mail along with everything else.
Except the numbers refuse to cooperate.
The famous penny post, held up as a kind of golden age benchmark, was not the trivial sum it sounds like. A penny in 1840 was not something you found down the back of the sofa. It was a noticeable slice of weekly income. Depending on who you were, you were parting with something like half a percent of your weekly wage just to send a letter. Not ruinous, but not nothing either.
And when the penny post arrived, unless you were a landowner with half the county to manage, the chances were that everyone you knew lived within a few hundred yards of you anyway. Family, work, gossip, the lot. You could lean over a low wall and settle most matters without recourse to the Royal Mail. Which does raise the question of what exactly you were paying for. A bit of distance, perhaps. Or the chance to say something in writing that might feel awkward shouted across the lane.
Set against today’s £1.80, which works out at a similarly small slice of a weekly wage for many people, you start to see the problem. Postage has not obviously become extortionate. If anything, it has stayed in roughly the same territory, albeit with rather less certainty about when it will arrive.
What has changed is how it feels. You stand there with a thin envelope in your hand, stick £1.80 on it, and hesitate. Not because you cannot afford it, but because it feels faintly ridiculous.
Part of that is that we were quietly lulled into a false sense of security. For years stamps were so cheap they barely registered. You bought a book, stuck them on things without thinking, and carried on. At the same time courier services crept in and made sending anything vaguely parcel-shaped surprisingly cheap. It all gave the impression that sending things was, more or less, a solved and inexpensive problem.
You really notice it at Christmas. Thirty cards, easily, and you are into £54 before you have even found a pen that works. At that point the whole thing starts to feel slightly ceremonial. You picture half the list quietly dropping away over the next few years, replaced by the odd message and a thumbs up. No great decision, no announcement, just a gradual drift into not bothering.
There is, briefly, a moment where you try to outsmart it. Put the card in a small box, call it a parcel, send it by courier for roughly the same money and with tracking thrown in. In practice you pay about the same, spend longer doing it, and the thing turns up looking like a spare carburettor.
And then there is the small matter that “first class” no longer quite means what it used to. It is still described as next day, but in practice you find yourself allowing the better part of a week if it actually matters. Which rather takes the edge off paying a premium for speed.
That is not really about the price so much as the alternatives. In 1840, if you wanted to communicate beyond your immediate field of view, this was it. You paid your penny and waited. Now you can send a message instantly, anywhere, for nothing at all. The Victorians would have regarded that as witchcraft and then set up a committee to regulate it.
So the real shift is quite subtle. The actual cost has edged down a bit, but the perceived cost has shot up because it has moved from something you had to do to something you choose to do. You are no longer paying to communicate. You are paying for paper, ink, and a slightly ceremonial version of sending a message.
Which leaves us in the odd position of grumbling about a service that is, in real terms, in roughly the same bracket as when it was introduced, while quietly letting it fade out of everyday life.
Still, £1.80 does feel a touch steep when you are staring at a stack of Christmas cards, sighing, and sending most of them anyway.
There is something quietly devastating about the way Mrs Merton used to ask a question. No shouting, no grandstanding, no attempt to win the argument by volume. Just a polite smile, a slightly puzzled tone, and a question that sounded like a compliment until you realised it wasn’t.
You can’t help thinking she would have had a field day with Trump. Not because he’s uniquely absurd, though he does make a strong case, but because his entire persona relies on never quite being pinned down by an ordinary, well-aimed sentence. He thrives in the fog of his own claims. Mrs Merton specialised in quietly switching the lights on.
“Now then, Mr Trump, you’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you, considering you started off with a small loan of several million dollars from your father?”
And there it is. No accusation. No raised eyebrow. Just a statement that forces the listener to do the arithmetic. You can almost see the gears turning as the compliment collapses under its own weight.
Then she’d move on, as if nothing much had happened.
“And when your businesses went bankrupt, was that part of the strategy, or more of a surprise?”
It’s the gentleness that does it. Anyone else asking that would sound hostile. She makes it sound like she’s checking the details for a parish newsletter.
Farage would fare no better, though he might think he would. He’s spent years cultivating the image of the bloke in the pub saying what everyone’s thinking, pint in hand, tie slightly loosened, voice full of common sense. It works rather well until someone asks him a question that sounds like it belongs in the same pub, but doesn’t quite land the way he expects.
“Now then, Nigel, you’ve been very successful at getting people to follow your advice, haven’t you. How disappointed were they when it turned out not to work as advertised?”
Again, no heat. Just that faint air of curiosity, as if she’s trying to understand how a perfectly reasonable plan produced a perfectly unreasonable outcome.
He might try to laugh it off, pivot, bring in Brussels, sovereignty, the usual greatest hits. But Mrs Merton never chased. She simply waited.
“And you’ve always said you’re on the side of ordinary working people. Do you think it helps that you’ve spent most of your career not having to rely on the consequences of your own policies?”
It’s almost kind. That’s the problem.
What both men rely on, in different ways, is motion. Constant motion. Statements, counter-statements, distractions, outrage, applause. The moment you slow it down and ask a simple question with a straight face, the whole thing starts to look a bit flimsy. Like a car that sounds impressive until someone opens the bonnet and asks where the engine actually is.
Mrs Merton’s genius was that she never tried to win the argument. She just removed the cushioning. No ideology, no counter-slogans, no attempt to outdo them at their own game. Just a question that quietly assumes the facts, and leaves the subject to wriggle against them.
You suspect both Trump and Farage would try to bluster through it. Trump would go big, as ever. Farage would go matey. Both would miss the point entirely.
Because the danger isn’t being attacked. They’re used to that. The danger is being understood.
