Straight from the Horse's Mouth

Trump has been circling the Chagos Islands like a man trying to remember why he walked into the room. When Britain first agreed to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius while leasing back Diego Garcia, he called it weakness. Later, he conceded it might be the best deal available. Now, once again, it is a catastrophic surrender. Meanwhile, the United States government itself - the part staffed by admirals, diplomats, and people with maps - has formally backed the arrangement because it guarantees continued military access. The base remains. The runway does not dissolve simply because the paperwork changes hands.

Faced with this latest presidential lurch, Karoline Leavitt stepped forward and delivered what sounded like a clarifying statement but was, in reality, something far more revealing. When Trump posts on Truth Social, she said, it is “straight from the horse’s mouth.” In other words, this is not commentary. It is not impulse. It is policy. The President is speaking directly, and the world should listen accordingly.

This was not a casual remark. It was an attempt to elevate Trump’s latest Chagos pronouncement above the inconvenient fact that his own State Department had already endorsed the deal. It told allies to ignore the formal machinery of American foreign policy and focus instead on the President’s personal feed. The signal was clear: the post outranks the paperwork.

But this presents an obvious difficulty, because earlier this month the same “horse’s mouth” posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. At that point, the White House’s enthusiasm for direct authorship cooled noticeably. Now there was talk of staff. Of process. Of material that had somehow slipped through. The pure, unfiltered presidential voice became, briefly, a shared administrative responsibility.

Yet Leavitt herself had already defined the terms. If Truth Social is the direct voice of the President when criticising Britain’s handling of Diego Garcia, then it is the direct voice of the President at all times. You cannot promote it to an instrument of state authority when it suits your geopolitical argument and demote it to a staff-managed accident when it becomes embarrassing. The mouth cannot be presidential on Monday and clerical by Friday.

What this reveals is not merely inconsistency, but function. Truth Social serves as both amplifier and shield. When the message projects strength, it is presented as authentic presidential leadership. When the message creates discomfort, it becomes a misunderstanding, a technicality, a staff matter. Authority is claimed when useful and diffused when necessary.

And that leaves allies in an impossible position. When Trump declares Starmer is making a historic mistake over Chagos, are they hearing US policy, or are they watching performance? His own government continues to support the base lease. The strategic reality has not changed. Only the rhetoric has. Yet his press secretary insists the rhetoric itself is the true signal.

The result is a communications system that asserts absolute authority while retaining absolute deniability. It is designed to sound definitive without ever being binding. The President speaks directly, except when he does not. The platform carries the full weight of statecraft, except when it suddenly carries none at all. Truth Social, it turns out, is straight from the horse’s mouth only when the horse likes the sound of its own voice.

A Winter Olympic Apology

I owe the Winter Olympics an apology.

This is not a sentence I expected to write, and certainly not one I intended to write voluntarily.

A couple of weeks ago, I dismissed the entire enterprise as a niche festival of sliding about in specialist sleepwear, observed mainly by Norwegians and the sort of Britons who own breathable base layers. I regarded it as an athletic sideshow conducted in temperatures normally associated with freezer burn and poor life choices.

This position remained intact until it was undermined by an administrative error. While attempting to locate the news, I watched it accidentally.

This was the beginning of the problem.

Because once you actually see it properly, stripped of commentary and preconception, you realise that winter sport is not theatrical. It is contractual. Gravity makes an offer. The athlete accepts the terms.

Take downhill skiing. A human being voluntarily accelerates towards frozen ground at motorway speeds, balanced on two narrow planks, relying entirely on reflex and nerve to remain upright. There is no negotiation available once committed. Only competence.

Biathlon is worse. An athlete arrives at the shooting line in a state of cardiovascular revolt, lungs and heart conducting a private argument, and is then expected to shoot with microscopic precision. And somehow they do. Five shots. Five quiet demonstrations that control can be reimposed on chaos.

And then there is Big Air, which I had previously assumed was a recreational miscalculation. It is not. It is deliberate. A skier accelerates towards an enormous ramp, launches into open space, and rotates repeatedly with such calm authority that the act appears briefly to suspend consequence itself. Four spins. Sometimes five. The body behaves as if gravity were a guideline rather than a law. Then comes the landing. Clean. Final. Undeniable.

There is no panel to persuade. Only physics to satisfy.

Even curling, which I had categorised as competitive tidying, reveals itself to be something colder and more exact. It is not about effort. It is about inevitability. Once the stone leaves the hand, the future has been decided. All that remains is to watch it arrive.

What makes the Winter Olympics so compelling is its indifference. The environment does not care who you are. It responds only to what you do, and whether you do it correctly.

Britain, naturally, remains better suited to observation than participation. Our national winter discipline continues to be switching on the heating and issuing cautious statements about road conditions. We do not negotiate with ice. We avoid it entirely.

And yet, by accident, I witnessed something precise, unforgiving, and completely absorbing.

I regret the experience and will take greater care when operating the remote control in future.

As an amusing aside, I saw a Facebook reel where someone had set their circular, robotic vacuum cleaner off on their kitchen and started sweeping furiously in front of its path with a broom as an homage to curling.

A Moral Decision for You

There is a decision to be made here. Not by politicians, but by you.

£15 - 25 million of public money will now be spent electing councillors to authorities that are already scheduled to disappear, only for another election to be held a year later. The money will be spent. The only question is what it buys.

So ask yourself what you would rather have.

Would you prefer ballot papers, count halls, and councillors serving briefly in transitional bodies, or the funding to recruit and employ 100 - 200 qualified nurses on three-year contracts, many of whom would need to be recruited from abroad because Britain does not currently train enough of its own?

Would you prefer a duplicated election cycle, or the ability to recruit and retain 40 - 75 fully trained GPs on three-year contracts, again, many recruited internationally, delivering hundreds of thousands of appointments and reducing waiting times where it actually matters?

Would you prefer another set of polling stations, or sustained funding for 110 - 240 border officers and immigration caseworkers on three-year contracts, strengthening processing capacity and enforcement year after year?

These professionals do not appear by magic. They must be recruited, often from abroad, integrated into the system, and retained. That requires stable contracts and sustained funding. This money would have provided exactly that.

This is not theoretical. The money will be spent. It can only be spent once.

In Dorset. In Buckinghamshire. In North Yorkshire. Elections were postponed during council reorganisations because Parliament had completed the legal groundwork first. Councils were being replaced, and holding elections to bodies about to cease existing was recognised as administratively pointless. Nobody declared democracy dead. Nobody launched legal crusades. The system moved forward, and public money was not spent twice for the same outcome.

This time, a different decision was made. A legal challenge ensured elections must now happen twice instead of once.

Nigel Farage made his decision. He chose the performance. He chose the headlines. He chose the political spectacle of claiming victory. Those things generate attention. But they do not recruit nurses on three-year contracts. They do not bring in trained doctors from abroad. They do not employ border officers. They do not fix the very problems he says are broken.

You may believe that was the right course. You may believe strict adherence to electoral timing outweighs administrative efficiency. That is a legitimate view. But it has consequences. The money will now be spent on process, not personnel.

So the real question is not whether elections should happen. They will.

The question is simpler.

If you had £25 million in your hand today, would you spend it on a second set of elections, or on three-year contracts for the trained professionals, from Britain or abroad, so often said to be missing?

That is the decision.

Trump's Ideological and Geopolitical Enemies - a Paradox

We used to think the map was straightforward.

Friends were liberal democracies. Enemies were authoritarian rivals. Values and interests broadly aligned, even if trade rows flared from time to time.

Under Donald Trump, that alignment has shifted, because the friend–enemy divide is no longer driven only by geopolitics. It is also driven by ideology and by the sort of politics he rewards.

On raw power, some things remain constant. China is the principal strategic competitor because of its economic scale and military reach. Russia still collides with NATO’s security architecture. Iran opposes US influence in its region. Those realities do not depend on personality.

Yet the loudest quarrels often involve allies.

Trump’s governing instinct is executive heavy and impatient with institutional restraint. He pushes against courts, challenges media legitimacy and tests federal authority. Liberal democracies are built around those restraints. When you treat constraint as obstruction, you end up arguing with the countries that treat rules as non-negotiable rather than optional.

Consider Canada. It is not a threat to US power. It shares a border and defence commitments with the United States. But it also operates within binding trade agreements and domestic legal limits. When Washington demands rapid concessions, Ottawa cannot simply override its own system. What follows looks like defiance, but it is often just process doing its job.

Now add the part that is plainly ideological. Trump does not merely clash with liberal governments abroad. He amplifies movements that are trying to weaken liberal constraints at home. He gives oxygen to European populist insurgents who campaign against supranational governance, independent institutions, and the rules-based order itself. That is not neutral diplomacy. It is taking sides in other democracies’ internal arguments, and it inevitably poisons relations with the mainstream governments those movements are trying to displace.

In that light, friction with core European partners is not just about trade or burden sharing. It is about legitimacy. Liberal governments see a US president backing forces that treat courts, regulators and independent journalism as enemies. They hear the message: the alliance is conditional, the rules are optional, and the people shouting loudest get rewarded.

By contrast, more centralised systems can move quickly because internal veto points are weaker. Leader to leader negotiation becomes more direct. That does not turn adversaries into friends, but it changes the texture of engagement, which can create a dangerous illusion that the relationship is healthier than it is.

The consequences are practical.

American strength depends on predictable alliances. When partners begin to doubt predictability, they hedge. The language of strategic autonomy stops being theoretical. Procurement decisions start to shift, intelligence cooperation becomes more cautious. None of this requires a treaty to collapse. It requires uncertainty to become normal.

Uncertainty weakens deterrence. If allied trust declines, coordinated pressure on China becomes harder to sustain and NATO’s credibility looks less automatic. Rivals do not need to win a battle if they can encourage a slow, quiet unravelling of the coalition that would otherwise oppose them.

The difficulty is that America’s geopolitical advantage still rests on liberal democracies. They extend its reach and anchor its influence. Yet those same governments embody the institutional limits that executive-heavy populism resents, and Trump’s habit of boosting the European versions of that populism makes the strain worse, not better.

When ideological comfort diverges from strategic necessity, the friend and enemy map no longer aligns cleanly. The result is not immediate rupture. It is gradual loosening. And gradual loosening is how stability erodes.

In Search of the Lost Crisp

Plain, salted crisps. You simply can’t find them. Not in a proper large bag anyway. You can find them in those six-packs of mini packets, each one wrapped like it’s carrying state secrets, which is handy if you’re planning a crisp-themed expedition and need to leave trail markers, but less handy if you just want - you know - crisps.

Walk into any supermarket and it’s a riot of flavours. Prawn cocktail. Chilli something. “Sour cream and black peppercorn with a hint of smugness”. Cheese and onion still hanging on like an old pub regular. There’s probably one now that tastes of “Sunday roast” or “Thai street food” or “Grandma’s disappointment”. But plain salted? The crisp equivalent of a white shirt? Apparently too boring for modern life.

I don’t want whisky drizzle. I don’t want truffle essence, harvested from the tears of an Italian count. I don’t want a crisp that’s been “crafted” or “curated” or “inspired by”. I want potato, oil, salt, and a bag large enough to get you through a film without having to open six separate packets like you’re doing a shift at a crisp-distribution centre.

And the packaging waste is the best bit. One decent large bag would do the job. Instead, you get six small ones, each with its own glossy branding, its own seam, its own crinkle, its own contribution to the plastic apocalypse. Somewhere, a product manager is congratulating themselves for “portion control” while the bin fills up with enough empty wrappers to upholster a Fiesta.

Retail logic says “plain” doesn’t sell. It doesn’t signal personality. It doesn’t suggest you’re an adventurous eater. It just sits there being crisps. Which is precisely the point. Salted crisps are the control group of snacking. They’re the baseline. They’re the thing you eat when you want a crisp, not an edible press release.

Every so often you do spot a large bag of plain salted, tucked away on a bottom shelf behind “Flame Grilled Peri Peri Chicken” and “Mature Cheddar and Vintage Port Reduction”. It’s like finding a sensible person at a party. You grab it quickly, check nobody saw you, and head to the till before someone offers you “limited edition” something with lime.

This is not nostalgia. It’s not being difficult. It’s basic practicality. Less waste, less nonsense, more crisps. A big bag of plain salted crisps should not feel like a rare artefact from a better civilisation, like Roman concrete or a government that can run a railway.

Anyway, I’ll be in the corner with my six tiny packets, opening them one by one, making a small mountain of plastic, and wondering which part of this was meant to be an improvement.

From Bent Spoons to Bristol Referrals

There was a time when seeing a doctor on a ship required either a passenger liner or a convenient outbreak of appendicitis in mid-Atlantic.

On a cargo ship you were the medical plan. If something ailed you, you consulted the First Mate’s locker, a dog-eared manual, and whatever unguent looked vaguely medicinal. A wipe down with boiled linseed oil was considered bracing. A strategic dam of Swarfega dealt with anything dermatological, mechanical or moral. If you survived, you called it resilience. If you didn’t, well, burial at sea was straightforward paperwork.

To be fair, anyone who has done a Master Mariner’s Certificate of Competency has effectively spent a week in A&E. The medical training is brisk, practical and faintly alarming. You learn how to suture, how to splint, how to inject, and how not to faint. It is all very admirable in theory. In practice, the prospect of allowing the First Mate to operate on you on the chart table with a bent spoon, while the ship rolls in a moderate swell, is not to be relished. Self-reliance has its limits.

And then there was Dhobi Itch. The name itself is a relic of empire. A “dhobi” is a washerman in the Indian subcontinent, from the Hindi word for one who launders clothes. British sailors and soldiers, stationed in hot climates, noticed that communal washing and damp kit encouraged a persistent fungal rash of the groin. The condition acquired its nickname accordingly. Officially it was tinea cruris. Unofficially it was Dhobi Itch, spoken in lowered tones as if naming it might encourage it.

The tropics had their own ideas about personal dignity. Hot steel decks, salt sweat and kit that never quite dried. Sooner or later something itched with intent. It was endured with stoicism, a dusting of antifungal powder if the slop chest happened to carry it, and a great deal of pretending it was merely “a bit of heat.” No one volunteered for a bent-spoon intervention in that department.

That sort of upbringing leaves a mark. You learn that most things pass. Cuts knit. Coughs rattle on and then retreat. Ankles swell and then forgive you. The human body, like a decent marine diesel, will usually keep going provided you don’t poke it too much.

Then I entered commercial life and discovered the modern miracle of the GP appointment. Not for the medicine, you understand. For the half-day off. A faint twinge in the elbow became a strategic diary intervention. “Medical,” I would say gravely, as if I were about to undergo exploratory surgery rather than sit in a waiting room leafing through a 2017 copy of Country Life. The NHS became, in a modest way, a form of sanctioned absenteeism.

Retirement has altered the calculus. Time is now my own. Pottering is sacred. The moment you book a GP appointment, it colonises the week. You must remember the day. You must remember the time. You must remember where the surgery has moved to since last Tuesday. It will, without fail, be at 10.40 on the one morning you had mentally reserved for reorganising the garage, or contemplating the metaphysics of a Triumph wiring loom.

And that is before the referral.

At our age, a GP rarely says, “It’s nothing.” They say, “Let’s just get that checked.” Which is code for Bristol. A city whose charms are much celebrated by those who do not have to drive into it. Parking is theoretical. The Clean Air Zone looms like a municipal tollbooth. Twenty mile an hour limits appear in places where even a milk float would feel constrained. One emerges from the experience not cured, but fined.

So the old sea-going instinct reasserts itself. A cough? Salt air would have sorted it. A twinge? Walk it off. A rash? There’s probably something in the workshop that will sting convincingly and therefore must be working. I find myself eyeing the Swarfega with renewed medical respect.

Being married to a PhD biochemist does not help. In her world, a cough is not a cough. It is an early signal in a complex cascade of pathological doom. The female body, she reminds me, is magnificently complicated. Layers of regulation, feedback loops, hormonal choreography. Compared with that, the male version is apparently a stripped-down edition. It is said that the default setting for a foetus is female and that becoming male requires the activation of certain genes and hormones. My wife summarises this more economically. In her view, maleness is what happens when something fails to develop fully, usually the brain.

Her concern, therefore, is not hysteria but projection. If one has spent a career navigating the biochemical labyrinth of female physiology, one naturally assumes that any organism emitting an unexpected cough is on the brink of systemic collapse. I, meanwhile, operate on the maritime principle that if the engine is still turning, we are broadly seaworthy.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere between boiled linseed oil and tertiary referral in Bristol. The sea taught self-reliance, but it also quietly relied on luck. Modern medicine is miraculous, but it has a talent for turning minor inconvenience into a logistical campaign.

So I compromise. Anything that interferes with pottering for more than a fortnight is escalated. Anything that bleeds excessively, glows, or produces a new and interesting smell is negotiable. Everything else is monitored with the seasoned eye of a man who once treated minor ailments with industrial cleaning products and called it character building.

If I do eventually succumb, I hope it is not in a multi-storey car park in Bristol, searching for a payment machine that only accepts an app. That, frankly, would be a poor end to a life at sea.

Ownership

I have been thinking about ownership.

Not in the playground sense of “that’s mine”, but in the more awkward philosophical sense. What does it actually mean to own something? Do we own matter, ideas, patterns, or simply a legally enforceable right to exclude other people?

At school it sounded simple. You buy a thing. It becomes yours. End of story. But ownership turns out not to be a solid block. It is a bundle of rights, carefully sliced.

Most of what we own are copies. I own my copy of a novel, not the novel itself. I own my particular car, not the model in the abstract. I cannot decide to print more books or manufacture another dozen cars just because I paid for one. I own the token, not the type.

Even uniqueness does not solve this. If I buy an original painting, I own the canvas and paint. I do not automatically own the copyright. The artist may still reproduce it. Physical singularity does not eliminate intellectual ownership.

Which brings me to my house.

This is not a production-line semi replicated down a cul-de-sac. It is a one-off. Designed for this plot, for our habits, for our slightly particular tastes. The architect designed it to my specifications. My brief. My insistence on light, proportion and a few maritime flourishes that probably caused discreet eyebrow movement. I walked the land. I described what I wanted. The architect translated that into drawings.

The Land Registry confirms I own the land and the building. When the roof leaks, it consults me directly. In every practical sense, this house is mine.

And yet.

Although I own the only physical instance of it, I may not automatically own the design. The architect, as author of the drawings, typically retains copyright unless it is expressly assigned. Paying for the design gives you the right to build this house on this site. It does not necessarily give you the right to build another identical one elsewhere.

So if I were seized by an entrepreneurial twitch and decided to construct a second version in a neighbouring field, I might discover that I cannot legally replicate my own house without permission. I own the bricks, the glass, the hinges and the heating bills. I can repaint it, extend it, sell it. I control the physical reality. But the architectural pattern that produced it may sit, in law, elsewhere.

That is the quietly comic discovery.

Even when you stray from owning copies into owning something unique, ownership remains layered. You can possess the only example in existence and still not possess the right to reproduce it.

So I remain master of my castle, firmly in the singular.

The plural, it seems, requires paperwork.

The Revolution Was Never Entirely Sober – Or Entirely Successful

I was listening to The News Quiz on Radio 4 when they asked: what are older people doing more of now that teenagers used to do in the 60s and 70s but no longer seem to?

On their own. In groups. And, apparently, with people they have never met before.

I thought the answer was protesting.

It seemed obvious. The teenagers of the 60s and 70s are today’s pensioners. Our generation marched against nuclear weapons, apartheid, Vietnam, Thatcher, the poll tax. If there was a banner to hold, our generation was underneath it. If there was a chant to learn, our generation was slightly off key but entirely convinced.

We knew the words to Blowing in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin by Bob Dylan. We could bellow Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon with more enthusiasm than pitch control. Some preferred the righteous snarl of The Clash. Others waved lighters to Joan Baez. Either way, the soundtrack came ready made.

And our generation still is at it. Go to almost any demonstration now, whether about climate, sewage in rivers, or the latest arrests linked to Palestine Action, and you will see a respectable showing of grey hair and sensible coats.

The difference is structural. At twenty, a night in the clink can derail a career. At seventy, with the mortgage paid and the pension guaranteed, it becomes a mildly inconvenient anecdote. There is a certain liberation in knowing that an employer cannot sack you because there is no employer. The worst they can do is confiscate your thermos.

But that was not the answer.

The answer was drinking.

Which, on reflection, is entirely consistent.

Because our generation did that with equal enthusiasm. Alone with a record player and something alarming in a bottle, Dylan crackling in the background. In groups in parks and pubs. And with complete strangers at festivals or after marches, bonded instantly by shared indignation, a borrowed guitar and a loosely supervised crate.

Young people today drink less. They are more health conscious, less inclined to wake up on unfamiliar upholstery wondering why there is a traffic cone in the kitchen. Sensible creatures.

Our generation, meanwhile, has not so much abandoned the habit as carried it forward.

Which raises an awkward possibility. Perhaps our generation protested, and still protests, because it has always been slightly marinated. Not incapacitated. Not incoherent. Just gently fuelled by a lifetime of mild indignation and moderate alcohol content. It would explain the stamina. It would explain the willingness to argue with strangers. And it would explain why a few hours in a police cell is less a deterrent than an interruption.

In youth our generation marched and then drank. In retirement it drinks and then marches. The order has shifted. The instinct remains.

The revolution, it seems, was never entirely sober.

Jim Ratcliffe III - the Art of the Non-Apology

Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Or so Elton John would have it. In modern public life, however, it has acquired an even more elusive cousin. The apology that apologises for absolutely nothing.

You will recognise it immediately. It arrives dressed in solemn language, accompanied by a grave expression and the faint rustle of a communications team hovering just out of sight. "I apologise for any offence caused." There it is. Perfectly formed. Immaculate. And entirely hollow.

Because offence is not an independent weather system. It does not drift in from the Atlantic and settle unexpectedly over a remark. Offence is the entirely predictable consequence of saying something offensive. It has a cause. And that cause is the speaker.

Apologising for offence is therefore a subtle act of linguistic evasion. It shifts the burden from the act to the reaction. The offence becomes the regrettable event. Not the words themselves. The implication is clear enough once you notice it. The problem is not what was said. The problem is that people reacted to it.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of standing on someone's foot and saying, "I apologise for your pain," while continuing to lean on their toes.

A real apology does something very simple. It acknowledges agency. "I said this. It was wrong. I regret saying it." That is an apology. It identifies the act and accepts responsibility for it. There is no ambiguity. No smoke. No mirrors.

The modern non-apology, by contrast, is an exercise in reputational risk management. It exists to neutralise consequences without conceding error. It reassures sponsors, calms shareholders, and creates the impression of contrition while preserving the original intent intact beneath the surface.

It is not remorse. It is maintenance.

And everyone understands this. The speaker understands it. The audience understands it. The journalists understand it. Yet the ritual continues, as though we are all participants in an elaborate theatre production whose plot has long since ceased to convince anyone.

The result is that the apology itself has been quietly hollowed out. It no longer serves its original purpose of acknowledging wrongdoing. It has become instead a form of linguistic insurance. A tool for containing fallout rather than confronting truth.

Which leaves us in the curious position where the rarest thing in public life is no longer honesty. It is responsibility.

Not the offence. The cause.

The Tyranny of the Decimal Place

Politics now runs on decimal points.

A quarterly GDP figure lands at 0.1 per cent and the country reacts as if a referendum result has just been announced. Government ministers beam. Oppositions howl. Commentators lean forward with furrowed brows. All because of a number so small it is often within the range of later revision.

The Office for National Statistics publishes early estimates that are, by its own description, provisional. Data are incomplete. Surveys are still coming in. Seasonal adjustments are applied. Assumptions are made. Then, months later, revisions quietly follow. A heroic 0.1 becomes 0.0. A supposed contraction disappears. The drama evaporates.

Yet the performance repeats every quarter.

The problem is that we confuse weather with climate.

A quarterly figure is weather. A warm December boosts retail. A wet summer dents construction. A strike, a one off defence contract, a shift in car production timing - any of these can nudge output by a tenth of a per cent. That tells you something about the quarter. It tells you almost nothing about the direction of the economy.

Annual growth is closer to climate. It smooths out the storms and heatwaves. It captures whether output is persistently rising, stagnating or shrinking. It begins to reveal structural issues such as weak productivity, falling real incomes or chronic underinvestment. It is slower, less exciting, and far more meaningful.

That said, even climate data can lag. Quarterly numbers can be early warning signals. The mistake is treating them as verdicts, rather than indicators that need confirming over time.

But climate is dull. Weather is dramatic.

So we obsess over the gust rather than the prevailing wind. A single quarterly uptick is hailed as a recovery. A single downtick is framed as collapse. Both interpretations are usually nonsense. If the annual trend remains anaemic, a good quarter is not salvation. If the annual trend is solid, a soft quarter is not doom.

There is also the small matter of scale. A 0.1 per cent quarterly move, especially once rounded, is barely distinguishable from noise. It is often revised. It may reflect timing quirks rather than real underlying change.

This obsession is not accidental. It feeds narrative. “Growth up” or “growth flat” fits neatly into partisan scripts. “Annual productivity remains weak despite short term volatility” does not. The first wins clicks. The second requires patience.

The result is a public conversation about economics conducted at the level of a barometer reading taken in a gusty courtyard.

Quarterly data matter, but they are indicators, not verdicts. If we want to know whether the economy is genuinely improving, we should look to annual growth, real wages over time, business investment trends and productivity per head. That is climate. Everything else is just a passing shower dressed up as a hurricane.

Until we learn the difference, we will continue to panic at drizzle and celebrate brief sunshine, all while ignoring whether the seasons themselves are changing.