When Truth Became Optional

There was a time when a lie at least had the decency to blush. Now it books a studio slot and accuses its critics of censorship.

“Post-truth” is the tidy label for a grubby condition in which objective facts carry less weight than emotion, identity and grievance. Truth still exists. It has simply been demoted. Whether something is accurate matters less than whether it feels right. Evidence becomes optional. Loyalty does not.

This is not a complaint about losing arguments. Nor is it confined to one ideology. Whenever identity outruns evidence, the same erosion begins. The problem is structural, not partisan.

Trust in institutions took repeated knocks - Iraq, the financial crisis, expenses, bailouts. Some scepticism was earned. Institutions are imperfect and should be scrutinised. But scrutiny is not the same as dismissal. Demanding evidence is how institutions are corrected. Declaring them corrupt whenever they deliver unwelcome conclusions is how they are hollowed out.

Economic stagnation widened the crack. When wages stall and official graphs show recovery, people assume the graphs are fraudulent rather than incomplete. That gap between lived experience and aggregated data became fertile ground for louder, simpler explanations.

Then social media industrialised human bias. Platforms optimise for engagement, not accuracy. Anger travels faster than nuance. Repetition inside algorithmic echo chambers begins to feel like proof. Corrections arrive late and limp. This is not conspiracy. It is incentive design.

The UK press operates within a concentrated ownership structure - a handful of proprietors control most national circulation - and commercial pressure rewards provocation. Serious journalism survives, but outrage is efficient. The incentives align again.

In that environment, politics shifts. Bold assertion outperforms careful qualification. Institutional pushback becomes sabotage. Judges are activist. Regulators are partisan. Markets are hysterical. The referee becomes the enemy.

Boris Johnson should have been a warning. The £350 million Brexit claim was widely challenged and widely effective. Constitutional limits were tested. Criticism was reframed as obstruction. His fall showed that arithmetic and law still matter. Yet for some, the lesson absorbed was not caution but method. Narrative stamina can win.

This dynamic is not uniquely British. Donald Trump demonstrated at scale how repetition, dismissal of unfavourable facts as “fake”, and framing legal scrutiny as persecution can sustain loyalty even when claims collide with verified outcomes. Once narrative and identity fuse, correction feels like attack.

Science feels the strain. Proper science is cautious and self-correcting. That nuance is weaponised as weakness. The existence of uncertainty becomes proof of conspiracy. A meme with a chart outruns peer review. Courts feel it too. They are not flawless, but they operate through evidence and procedure. Undermining that framework because an outcome is unwelcome is different from reforming it.

Where does this lead?

At first, to dysfunction. Policies unravel on contact with arithmetic. When fiscal claims ignore basic sums, borrowing costs rise. When court rulings are framed as partisan, compliance weakens. These are measurable consequences, not rhetorical ones.

Further on, to institutional fatigue. Expertise becomes suspect. Elections are framed as existential contests in which defeat must mean fraud. The system still operates, but less reliably and at greater cost.

Who benefits? In the short term, political opportunists untroubled by contradiction. Media actors who monetise outrage. Wealthy interests who prefer distraction to scrutiny. Foreign adversaries who thrive on division.

Who does not? Citizens who rely on functioning services, predictable rules and enforceable law. In other words, most people.

Post-truth is not destiny. It is an incentive structure. It persists only if rewarded. Voters can demand proof. Media can privilege verification over provocation. Institutions can defend evidential standards without claiming infallibility.

Truth is not glamorous. It is inconvenient and often dull. But it is structural. Remove it, and everything still looks impressive for a while.

Until it doesn’t.

Protect Women - Unless They Complicate the Story

A Reel drifted across my Facebook feed the other night. As usual, my first instinct was scepticism. Most Reels are flim-flam designed to provoke before anyone checks the facts. This one was labelled Hull, 27 September 2025 and showed a woman at a “Protect Women and Children” rally being booed and having her microphone taken from her.

So I checked whether there was actually a protest in Hull that weekend. There was. Humberside Police logged a planned demonstration in the city centre on 27 September. The location in the clip matched Queen Victoria Square. So the setting was real.

In the footage, the woman says she was groomed at 11 years old. Not 16. Not 18. Eleven. She speaks about abuse. She speaks about what happened to her. And then she says the men who abused her were white.

She is booed. Someone shouts, “Fuck off, bitch.” The microphone is taken from her.

Pause there. A rally branded around protecting women and children has just silenced a woman who was abused as a child.

Now, could the clip have been trimmed? Possibly. Social media edits everything. But the reaction was not synthetic. It was not a caption added later. It was a crowd responding in real time to the fact that her abusers did not fit the preferred storyline.

If safeguarding were the true purpose, the ethnicity of her abusers would have been irrelevant. She was 11. That should have been the only morally salient fact in the square that day.

Instead, her value in that space depended on whether she confirmed a racial narrative. The moment she did not, she ceased to be a victim to be protected and became an inconvenience to be removed.

That is where racism and misogyny begin to overlap. Both are hierarchical ways of sorting people. Both decide whose voice counts and whose does not. A movement that claims to defend women, but only when those women reinforce a chosen ethnic villain, is not centring women at all. It is centring grievance.

Child sexual exploitation in Britain is a serious, multi-layered problem. It has involved offenders of different ethnic backgrounds across different regions. It has involved police failures, social services gaps and institutional cowardice. It does not reduce neatly to a single demographic storyline.

But rallies do not thrive on complexity. They thrive on clarity. They require a defined villain. And when a woman stands up and complicates that clarity, the crowd shows you what really matters.

You can argue about immigration policy. You can argue about policing. You can argue about whether the Reel was curated for effect. But this is harder to evade: a rally claiming to protect women turned hostile to a woman when she disrupted the script.

The boos answered the question.

Tea, Coffee and the Permanent State of Manufactured Crisis

I’ve come to the conclusion that we now measure national stability by beverage selection.

“Prime Minister, tea or coffee?”

“I think I’ll have tea… actually, coffee.”

BREAKING NEWS: Downing Street in turmoil as PM flip-flops on hot drinks. Senior aides locked in emergency talks. Pound wobbles. Democracy trembles.

You can almost see the banner now: CAFFEINE CRISIS.

The modern political “emergency” often turns out to be a human being thinking aloud. A leader walks six feet from car to door while a flock of journalists jog backwards in front of him.

“Prime Minister, will you resign?”
“Prime Minister, is this the end?”
“Prime Minister, are you clinging on?”

If he says nothing, it’s stonewalling. If he says “No”, it’s defiance. If he says he’s focused on the job, it’s refusal to deny speculation. If he adjusts a policy after consultation, it’s a humiliating U-turn.

Politics used to involve negotiation. Now it involves headline choreography. A minor amendment becomes civil war. A polling dip becomes terminal decline. A shouted question down a pavement becomes evidence of collapse.

I’ll be frank: I’ve largely lost faith in journalists. Not all of them, but the pack behaviour and breathless framing. Every tremor is inflated into an earthquake because drama sells and context doesn’t.

Of course governments wobble. Of course leaders misstep. But there’s a difference between volatility and implosion. The news cycle barely recognises it.

Which brings us to the alleged “crisis”.

Starmer inherited tight fiscal constraints and a very broad political coalition. Labour’s majority was built largely on a shared desire to eject the Conservatives. That creates a broad church. Broad churches win elections, but they are unstable in government. Internal factions and competing priorities mean there is constant pressure to dilute policy. Drift is the default risk.

So beyond fiscal restraint, there is a deliberate positioning tactic.

He sets out reforms slightly beyond the minimum outcome he ultimately needs. That isn’t recklessness. It’s anchoring. In sales you open high knowing negotiation will bring you down. In legal strategy you plead broadly expecting trimming. Politics works the same way. If you want to end at B, you open at C. Pushback from Parliament, the Lords and internal factions is anticipated. If you opened at B, you would likely finish at A.

What critics call a “U turn” is often a controlled landing. The direction of travel remains. The settlement is still further than the old baseline because the overreach was leverage, not the destination.

The first two years aim to push through those structural changes, stabilise credibility and rebuild fiscal headroom. In parallel, he improves relations with the EU through practical friction reduction and regulatory cooperation. That lowers business uncertainty and supports growth at the margins.

If that creates headroom, the second phase follows: more popular, visible policies from year two onwards, funded by the improved position created earlier. Pain first, dividends later.

Mid-term council losses may sting and cause PLP jitters; however, any leadership challenger would face exactly the same structural constraints, so they must hold the line with Starmer.

If opposition parties win councils on bold promises, governing exposes the arithmetic. Over two years that can work to his advantage and is a calculated tactical sacrifice. Current Reform councils are already proving the point.

In reality, given the constraints, there isn’t a credible alternative strategy. The other options are overpromising, overborrowing or deep immediate cuts. All carry greater risk. This approach is slower, but structurally safer.

Meanwhile, somewhere outside No.10, someone is still shouting about tea.

The Thorn Crocs

There are moments in a man’s life when he realises that irony is not a literary device but a gardening implement with a point.

Yesterday I fell foul of what I call my “safety boots”. This generous category includes flip-flops, Crocs and anything with the structural integrity of a sponge pudding. They provide precisely zero protection, which is why I reach for them whenever a job plainly requires something heavier, reinforced and vaguely adult.

On this occasion I was wearing the Crocs. Not the flip-flop welding boots, which are a separate chapter in my risk management portfolio. The Crocs are for horticultural engagements and light mechanical optimism.

I was outside, “just fixing something”. Those three words should trigger an insurance premium increase. I stepped on a thorn of heroic ambition. It went straight through the base of my Lidl Croc facsimile and embedded itself in my foot with the confidence of a planning application in a conservation area. There was hopping. There was language. There was a short but heartfelt attempt to blame the shrub.

Foam, it turns out, is not armour. It is a rumour.

Extraction required a dignified limp indoors and a rummage through Hayley’s drawer of precision implements. Nothing restores humility like standing in the kitchen, one foot raised like a mildly ashamed flamingo, asking which tweezers are the “good ones”. The thorn was removed from my hoof with due ceremony.

Then came phase two. The base of the thorn had snapped off and remained lodged inside the Croc itself, like shrapnel in a war memorial. Escalation was required. Needle-nosed pliers were deployed. There is something faintly absurd about performing delicate mechanical surgery on footwear that cost less than a sandwich. I stood there gripping the fragment like a bomb disposal technician, easing it out of the foam carcass while contemplating the immaculate steel-toed boots in the garage.

For clarity, the flip-flops are reserved for welding. Yes, welding. Molten metal descends in cheerful orange droplets while my toes consider their life choices. There is a particular choreography to shaking a glowing bead out of a sandal before it makes permanent contact. It is not covered in the training manuals.

And yet, the actual safety boots remain untouched. Heavy. Sensible. Built to withstand both thorns and physics. I shall probably use them for a wedding. Or when going out to dinner. One mustn’t waste good footwear on something as trivial as personal safety.

The thorn has been evicted. The Crocs have been debrided with needle-nosed pliers. My pride has taken a light sanding.

The proper boots still sit in the garage, pristine and judgemental, waiting for an occasion suitably formal. In the meantime, Hayley’s tweezers and a set of pliers remain the true backbone of domestic health and safety.

Hearing Aid Update

Right. There is an audiology development.

It turns out I am no longer merely amplified. I am now tethered.

Because these NHS marvels are Bluetooth enabled, they do not simply pipe the world into my head. They maintain a relationship with my phone. A watchful, slightly clingy relationship.

If I wander too far from it, say by stepping out of the house having left it on the kitchen table like a reckless Victorian, my ears inform me. A discreet alert arrives directly in my skull. Not a ring. Not a buzz. A quiet, internal notification that I have strayed beyond acceptable range.

It is less “man with hearing aids” and more “officer leaving perimeter”.

The first time it happened I stopped in the driveway and looked around, mildly alarmed. I half expected a small drone to rise from behind the hedge and request my intentions. Instead it was simply my ears reminding me that my phone and I had become a bonded pair.

On the other hand, if I lose the phone somewhere in the house, which is not infrequent, the system reverses the process. As I wander from room to room, the connection re-establishes itself and I am subtly alerted. Warm. You’re close. Colder. No signal. Hot. There it is, under a newspaper I can now hear rustling.

I have effectively become a human tracking device for my own possessions.

There is something faintly dystopian about receiving proximity alerts inside one’s own head. I can hear birdsong, the heating pump, the cat’s disapproval, and now the digital reassurance that my communications hub is within range. If I’d been told in 1974 that I would one day be wirelessly linked to a small glass rectangle and warned if I strayed too far from it, I would have assumed either espionage or lunacy.

Instead, it is Tuesday.

The great irony is that these are NHS hearing aids. Free. Issued without ceremony. Yet they quietly outperform the thousand pound retail alternatives that were presented to me with the solemnity of a luxury upgrade. Mine not only restore my treble, they supervise my wandering.

I now receive alerts about distance from my own telephone directly inside my head.

This feels like a small but definite step towards being monitored by my ears.

On the bright side, I am far less likely to leave the house without my phone. On the less bright side, if the phone battery dies, I imagine I shall feel briefly abandoned.

I used to worry about losing my hearing.

Now my hearing worries about losing my phone.

Career Politicians & Direct Participation

I heard a debate on R4 about career politicians and direct participation, and I'm currently undecided. Which is annoying, because I prefer my opinions to arrive fully formed, like a well made cabinet door, rather than wobbling around in public like a newborn foal.

The anti-career-politician side made a decent point. Politics can become a sealed ecosystem where people spend so long climbing the internal ladder they forget the rest of us don’t live inside Westminster. They start talking in acronyms, moving from think tank to SPAD to ministerial office, and before you know it they’re announcing “bold reforms” that look suspiciously like a PowerPoint slide with a human haircut.

But the pro-career-politician side also has a point, and it’s the bit everyone skips because it’s less satisfying than a rant. Parliament is a trade. Most MPs arrive knowing how to campaign, how to do media, and how to survive the constant noise. They do not arrive knowing how the state actually functions. They don’t understand the rhythms of legislation, the dead weight of procedure, the silent power of the Treasury, the legal limits, the international constraints, or the fact that every “simple solution” has three unintended consequences and a bill attached.

That knowledge doesn’t drop into your lap on day one. It comes from the grind.

And the grind is not glamorous. It’s endless reading, briefings, Select Committees, constituency casework, and learning the hard way that government is mostly about saying “no” to things you’d love to say “yes” to. It’s dealing with civil servants who know more than you do, stakeholders who want something for nothing, and a media environment that treats complexity as a personal failing. It’s learning to spot the difference between a policy that sounds good and a policy that survives contact with law, budgets, and physics.

This is also where the PPE thing matters. A few MPs have done PPE, which at least suggests they’ve had formal exposure to politics, economics, and the basic idea of trade-offs. Plenty of new entrants haven’t even got that. They’re not stupid, but they’re arriving with enthusiasm and opinions, then being handed a department, a red box, and a problem that hasn’t been solved since 1978.

Which brings me to the comparison nobody likes because it’s too obvious. You wouldn’t trust a brain surgeon who didn’t have experience. And you’d trust him even less if he didn’t have a medical degree. Yet in politics we do this odd thing where we sneer at experience, sneer at training, and then act amazed when the results look like an amateur dramatics society trying to run an airport.

And if you want a case study in why the grind matters, look at Boris Johnson.

Johnson didn’t just have a talent for chaos. He had a talent for promoting people too early, for the wrong reasons. Loyalty and message discipline were treated as qualifications. Competence and experience were optional extras, like heated seats. People were moved up the ladder fast because they were useful to him, not because they were ready to run anything.

That has consequences. Departments aren’t debating societies. If you put someone in charge who doesn’t understand the brief, doesn’t know how to interrogate advice, and is terrified of contradicting the leader, you don’t get “fresh thinking”. You get paralysis, blunders, and policy made by headline.

It also poisons the culture. If everyone can see that the route to promotion is flattery rather than ability, you select for the wrong personality types. You get courtiers, not administrators. You get people who never say “this won’t work” because they’re trying to stay in favour. And you lose the one thing government needs most: internal honesty before the public humiliation arrives.

Somebody on the direct participation side said the answer is “expertise on tap, ordinary citizens on top”. It sounds marvellous. Like ordering a new kitchen. You pick the colour, and a team of professionals quietly makes it all happen behind the scenes.

The problem is that “expertise on tap” only works if the person doing the tapping knows what questions to ask, can judge competing advice, and can accept trade-offs. Otherwise expertise becomes a buffet. You pick the expert who tells you what you wanted to hear, and you call the others “the establishment”.

And there’s another awkward truth: ordinary citizens on top doesn’t get rid of elites. It just changes which elites win. You end up with organised activists, lobbyists, donors, and media operators doing the steering, while the citizens provide the decorative seal of approval. It’s democracy as a showroom model.

On the other hand, I do get the anger. It’s hard to watch people regulate an industry one minute and then pop up the next in a well-paid “strategic advisory” role in the same sector. Even if nothing illegal happened, it looks like the job was an extended audition. And if you were on a fairly normal salary before politics, the temptation is obvious. Parliament pays decently, but it doesn’t pay “private sector redemption arc” money. After years of being shouted at in the street and having your life turned into a headline, a cushy job offer starts to look like compensation.

So yes, I’m undecided. Not because I can’t see the flaws in career politicians, but because I’m not convinced direct participation fixes them. It might just swap one set of problems for another, with fewer safeguards and more shouting.

At the moment I’m leaning towards a dull conclusion, which is usually a sign it’s true: we need representative democracy, but with tighter rules on lobbying, longer cooling-off periods, proper enforcement, and a bit more direct citizen involvement where it actually works, like citizens’ assemblies and local decisions with real information and time.

In other words, keep the engine, improve the brakes, and stop pretending the steering wheel can be handed to the loudest bloke in the comments.

Amplified and Slightly Outraged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I still maintain that some people mumble.

Unfortunately, I can now hear them doing it.

Votes at 16? Fix the Foundations First

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreknowledge is cheaper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never is.

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

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

Lex Shrapnel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trumper, ICE and the Business of Rounding Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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