Who Cares What He Says?

It always amuses me when Gary Lineker posts something mildly political on Facebook.

Within seconds, the comments fill up with furious men called Steve demanding to know why anyone should care what he thinks. “Who cares what Gary Lineker thinks?” they type, with the urgency of someone reporting a house fire, as if they’ve stumbled upon an unauthorised thought in progress.

And yet there they are. Reading it. Reacting to it. Commenting on it. Returning later to see who agreed with them.

If nobody cared, the comment section would be empty. Gary would be posting into the digital equivalent of a windswept lay-by somewhere off the A46. But he isn’t. He’s posting into a packed stadium, and the Steves have all turned up early to boo.

This isn’t new, of course. Human beings have always been oddly susceptible to endorsement by familiar faces. For decades, we’ve happily bought aftershave because a man with excellent bone structure emerged from the sea in slow motion. We’ve purchased watches we can’t pronounce because a retired racing driver frowned meaningfully while wearing one. At no point did anyone stop to ask whether being good at driving a car very fast conferred any special insight into timekeeping. It did not matter. The association was enough.

It’s the same mechanism. Familiarity creates trust. Trust creates influence. Influence creates behaviour. It’s not complicated. It’s barely even conscious.

The funny part is that the people most offended by Gary Lineker having opinions are often the same people who have been quietly influenced by celebrity endorsement their entire lives without noticing. They’ll happily buy trainers because a footballer wears them, eat crisps because a television personality - it used to be Gary at one time - smiles reassuringly while holding the packet, and vote for politicians because they present themselves like minor celebrities on daytime television. But Gary expressing an opinion on refugees is apparently where they draw the line. That, they tell us, is manipulation.

What they really mean is that it’s influence they disagree with. Influence they agree with is simply common sense.

Psychologists call this authority bias, or sometimes the halo effect. We assume that competence in one domain spills over into others. Someone who was reliable on Match of the Day must therefore be reliable about everything else. Or, conversely, someone who was reliable on Match of the Day must shut up immediately and never speak again, depending on whether we like what they say.

The irony is that the Steves are part of the process. Their outrage amplifies the message. Every angry comment pushes the post further into the algorithm, exposing it to more people. They are, in effect, unpaid members of Gary Lineker’s publicity team, working tirelessly to ensure maximum reach.

If they truly didn’t care, they would scroll past.

But they don’t. They never do.

And Gary, somewhere in his kitchen, probably with a cup of tea, presses “post” and wanders off to make a sandwich, leaving hundreds of middle-aged men arguing with each other in his living room without supervision.

Which, when you think about it, is an extraordinary level of influence for someone who once persuaded half the country to eat crisps.

Trouble At Mill

Hayley and I have a habit of lapsing into Monty Python scripts when ordinary conversation starts looking suspiciously like one. We wait for the correct sketch to appear, then wander into it like people who ought to have more sense.

This one began when Hay came in from a swim in the pond, through the French doors, dripping slightly and wearing the expression of someone who had reached several practical conclusions in cold water.

“Badger,” she said. “Trouble at mill.”

That was my warning. In our house, “trouble at mill” is not a report of industrial unrest. It means the conversation has found a Monty Python sketch and is now backing carefully towards it.

I should explain that Badger is me. It’s not a title I applied for, nor one I remember being formally awarded. It just seems to have stuck, like a maritime rank, but with more rummaging.

“What sort of trouble?” I asked, already unwisely engaging with the witness.

“Three things,” she said.

At this point I should have known. Nothing good starts with three things. Three things is not a list. It’s a threat with numbering.

“The first thing,” she said, “is that the pond steps are slippery, and also the water level is a bit low.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Was that the first thing, or was that 1a and 1b? Because there appear to be two things smuggled into the first thing.”

“No,” she said. “That was all the first thing.”

“Right.”

“The second thing,” she continued, “is that the French doors are still letting in a draught, and also the handle sticks.”

I felt obliged to intervene, purely on procedural grounds.

“I think,” I said, “you should switch to four things in total.”

There was a pause. Not a long pause. More the sort of pause you get when someone realises you’ve noticed the quiet bit of cheating in the system.

She looked at me with the calm authority of a woman who had recently been immersed in cold pond water and was therefore operating beyond ordinary domestic logic.

“No,” she said. “There are three things.”

“There were three things when we started,” I said, “but we’re now up to four, possibly five, depending on whether the door handle is part of the draught issue or a separate constitutional crisis.”

“I didn’t expect a kind of domestic Spanish Inquisition.”

“Nobody expects the domestic Spanish Inquisition.”

At that point, against my better judgement, I found myself cast as Cardinal Ximenez, arriving with terrifying confidence and then immediately losing control of my own list.

“Our chief weapon is three things. Three things and a towel. Our two chief weapons are three things, a towel, and a slightly accusatory tone from someone standing on the kitchen tiles leaving small puddles.”

Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as slippery pond steps, low water level, draughty French doors, a sticky handle, one damp towel, and an almost fanatical insistence that these are still only three things.

At this stage I made the tactical error of trying to impose structure. This is never wise in marriage. It gives the impression that one is more interested in the filing system than the actual complaint, which is usually true, but seldom helpful.

I suggested that if the first thing contained two things, and the second thing also contained two things, then the third thing might need to be handled with some care, possibly under the supervision of a clerk.

This did not help.

Because of course the third thing turned out to contain an introductory observation, a practical recommendation, and what I can only describe as a retrospective criticism of my earlier approach to something I hadn’t realised was still under review.

So now we had three things, seven sub-things, one implied failing, a towel, and Cardinal Ximenez in the kitchen, trying to maintain doctrinal control over a list which had already escaped.

At this point I suggested she might like to go out and come in again, so we could restart the conversation properly.

This was not received in the constructive spirit intended.

In fairness, asking a woman who had just got out of a pond to re-enter through the French doors for the sake of sketch discipline was always likely to test the marriage vows. But standards are standards.

The annoying part is that she was probably right about all of it. The steps are slippery. The water level is low. The French doors do let in a draught. The handle does stick. I have no defence on the facts, only on the numbering.

But I still maintain that once a list has been announced, there should be at least some attempt to respect the declared architecture. Otherwise civilisation crumbles. First it’s three things becoming seven, then it’s a quick job becoming a weekend, then it’s me standing in the kitchen in my slippers, holding a towel, trying to work out whether I’ve agreed to adjust the pond, repair the doors, restart the scene, or simply apologise for having counted.

Anyway, I’ve added it to the list.

Under one heading.

Dear Nigel: Just a Few Questions About Your Record

Dear Nigel,

Firstly, do you mind if I call you Nigel, or would you prefer Mr Farage? Or perhaps Nigel Farage MP, although, looking at your Commons voting record and your rather novel approach to constituency surgeries, the MP part can occasionally seem more honorary than occupational.

I am repeatedly told by your supporters that you hold the secret of Britain's success. This is intriguing, because your record suggests that your economic advice has generally consisted of supporting whichever version of low-tax, deregulated Conservatism is currently being sold as a cure for everything.

You supported Brexit, of course. That was sold as liberation from bureaucracy, a revival of sovereignty and a route to prosperity. Instead, independent research based on comparisons with similar advanced economies estimates that, by the end of 2025, Brexit had left UK GDP 6 to 8% lower than it would otherwise have been. That is not a temporary wobble. It is an economic drag built into the machinery, while the country tries to regain ground it need not have lost in the first place.

Then there was Liz Truss's mini-Budget. You called it the best Conservative Budget since 1986. That is quite an endorsement for a package which helped send sterling down, borrowing costs up and pension funds into A&E, while the Government lurched into a panic-stricken reverse gear. The fact that the policy lasted roughly as long as a lettuce did not make it less economically illiterate.

You also backed Boris Johnson's Brexit settlement, despite the extra friction it created for British exporters, and spent years supporting the wider Conservative faith in tax cuts, deregulation, smaller government and the idea that growth will appear if enough safeguards are removed and enough public assets are offered to the private sector.

So when you now present yourself as the fresh alternative to the Conservatives, it is worth asking: alternative to what, exactly? You backed their biggest constitutional gamble, their most reckless fiscal experiment and much of the economic thinking that produced stagnant wages, failing public services and a country where repairing a pothole is treated as an ambitious infrastructure programme. In fact, much of the very pickle we are now in.

Your own 2024 proposals were not markedly different. Reform promised very large tax cuts, including cutting corporation tax to 15%, lifting the personal allowance from £12,570 to £20,000, and abolishing inheritance tax for estates under £2 million. The Institute for Fiscal Studies described the broad approach as very large tax cuts financed by very large spending cuts.

The higher personal allowance is the clever bit. For an ordinary basic-rate taxpayer earning at least £20,000, it would put up to about £1,486 a year back in their pocket. Nice enough, as far as it goes. But what is it worth if the cuts needed to fund it mean longer waits for treatment, more pressure to buy private medical insurance, poorer local services, and a fiscal position which sends mortgage rates upwards?

That is the double-edged bribe. You give people a modest sum through the front door, then risk taking it back through the side entrance in private costs, higher interest payments and services they must either pay for themselves or do without. Meanwhile, the really substantial gains go to those with large estates, property portfolios, profitable companies and accountants clever enough to find the favourable corners, and who are far better placed to buy privately what everyone else loses publicly.

Then there is the immigration offer. Deportation commands, detention centres, removal flights, withdrawing benefits from foreign nationals and barring them from social housing may make for a sturdy headline. They do not constitute an answer to weak productivity, poor housing supply, low wages, NHS waiting lists or the long-term failure to train enough British workers.

If the policy is aimed only at people with no right to be here, explain what new power or capacity it adds beyond enforcing the laws already on the statute book. Deportations do not happen merely because a British minister announces them. They require identity documents, lawful detention, functioning courts and, above all, return agreements with the countries expected to take people back.

Britain cannot simply put people on aircraft and declare the destination obliged to accept them. Airlines will not carry passengers whom the receiving country may refuse, because the carrier can be liable for the cost and responsibility of bringing an inadmissible passenger back again. That is why deportations require return agreements, verified identity documents and the co-operation of the destination state, not merely a ministerial press release and a row of flags at an airfield.

If it reaches lawful workers and settled families, explain who replaces them in care homes, hospitals, food processing, construction and hospitality, and at what cost. Making their lives more precarious does not build houses, train nurses or repair public services. It merely gives the public somebody to blame while the people writing the cheques get on with the real business.

There is also a wider question about the company you keep. Your party is increasingly funded by millionaires, billionaires, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs and people with a fairly obvious interest in lower taxes, lighter regulation and fewer awkward public constraints on private wealth.

We are apparently expected to believe that these men have developed a sudden and touching enthusiasm for the democratic institutions which regulate them, tax them, constrain monopolies, protect workers, police markets and provide some protection for the average citizen when things go wrong. Perhaps they have. But it would be reassuring to hear why they are so keen to finance a party proposing to weaken precisely those institutions while cutting the taxes which pay for them.

There is also the small matter of the reported £5 million personal gift from Christopher Harborne, now being examined by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. You may say it was private and unconditional. But when a politician who presents himself as the scourge of the establishment, and who at the time owned Reform UK Ltd outright, receives millions from a wealthy crypto businessman, people are entitled to ask questions.

Not because it proves wrongdoing. It does not. But because the distinction between a private gift and financial support for the owner of a political party becomes rather less clear-cut in those circumstances. You cannot spend years denouncing cosy arrangements in Westminster, then treat public curiosity about a £5 million arrangement around your own party as bad manners.

So, to use one of your own stock phrases, I am only asking the question, Nigel, because your record to date gives me no confidence whatsoever.

Which taxes would you cut? What would replace the revenue? Which public services would be cut, privatised or allowed to decline? How would you fund defence, the NHS, social care, councils, courts and prisons while cutting taxes and holding down borrowing?

And, when the personal allowance has gone up, the services have gone down, mortgage rates have risen and the people needed to staff the country have been driven away, who exactly will you blame then?

Presumably not yourself. That has never seemed to be the business model.

Yours sincerely,

Chairman Bill

The Incredible Shrinking Menswear Department

You can tell a civilisation is in decline by the shrinking size of the men's department in charity shops. Not the economy. Not politics. Not even the disappearance of proper bank branches. The real sign is walking into a charity shop and discovering that the entire male section now occupies roughly the same floor area as a modest airing cupboard.

Women's clothes still dominate the premises, obviously. Rails everywhere. Dresses. Shoes. Handbags the size of emergency lifeboats. Strange floaty garments that seem to require their own engineering standards. Half the shop looks like somebody's exploded wardrobe after a difficult divorce in Cheltenham.

Then, somewhere near the back, usually beside a shelf containing three golf annuals from 1987 and a breadmaker without a paddle, sits "Menswear". All of it. Two rails and half a shelf. One rail for shirts nobody wanted even when they were new, and another for fleeces with embroidered logos from agricultural suppliers, regional plumbing firms and IT consultancies that collapsed during the Blair years.

Which is ironic, because most of the men's clothes in charity shops didn't arrive there through male initiative in the first place. Men rarely stand in front of a wardrobe thinking, "I shall now donate these garments for the benefit of the community." No. Men's clothes leave the house because wives quietly decide the process has begun.

A bloke will come downstairs wearing a perfectly serviceable fleece he's owned since the Cameron years and hear the fatal sentence:

"You're not still wearing that, are you?"

That's it. The decision has been made. A week later the fleece disappears into a black sack despite still having at least another decade of useful life left in it. The husband searches mildly for a few days, asks once whether anyone's seen his blue fleece, then eventually starts wearing an even older one from the garage instead.

Women donate clothes aspirationally. Men donate clothes accidentally. Which may also explain why the menswear department keeps shrinking despite this constant stream of surrendered garments. Women's clothes often arrive at charity shops because somebody's reinventing themselves. "I've gone off linen." "I don't really wear this colour now." "It doesn't suit who I am anymore."

Men's clothes leave circulation only after complete mechanical exhaustion.

A man's jumper doesn't become donation-ready until it's survived DIY, oil changes, decorating, several garden projects and at least one encounter with expanding foam. By the time his wife finally drags it towards the charity sack, the elbows are translucent, one cuff has gone strangely rigid and the whole thing smells faintly of petrol, damp shed and quiet resistance.

So perhaps the mystery isn't why the men's section is small. Perhaps most male clothing simply never makes it onto the rails because the sorting volunteers take one look and quietly redirect it into the rag bag.

"Another polo shirt, Margaret."

"Good Lord. Look at the collar."

"Workshop cloths."

Mind you, I once went into my local charity shop and spotted a polo shirt that had mysteriously vanished from my own wardrobe several months earlier. There it was, hanging on the rail for £3.50, looking slightly confused but otherwise perfectly healthy. I recognised it immediately. Tiny paint spot near the hem. Slight fade on the collar. Mine.

So I bought it.

Which means I effectively paid to recover my own property after it had completed some sort of unauthorised domestic recycling loop. I can only assume the volunteers thought I was very keen on Next polo shirts. I didn't explain. It felt awkward.

I brought it home wearing an expression of quiet triumph, like a man who's recovered stolen artwork.

Hay looked at it for about two seconds and said, "Oh God, not that thing again."

Which rather confirmed my theory that men's clothes are not donated because they're worn out. They're donated because somewhere, eventually, a woman reaches a limit.

That would also explain the strange survivors still hanging in the men's department. Untouched funeral shirts. Waterproof jackets bought for one wet holiday in Wales. Golf jumpers belonging to men called Keith. Trousers with creases sharp enough to slice ham.

The sizing doesn't help either. Charity shops appear to believe men come only in Small or Recently Deceased Enormous. You hold up a jacket labelled Medium and it would comfortably fit a child trumpet player. Then beside it hangs a XXXL blazer capable of covering a Mondeo and half the driveway.

Meanwhile the women's section stretches off into the distance like a textile-based nature reserve. Men get one wire basket labelled "Belts", usually containing three cracked fake leather specimens and something woven that no human being has voluntarily worn since 2004.

Still, we browse them. Hope springs eternal. Every now and then you find treasure. A proper Barbour. A Harris Tweed jacket. An almost new pair of Loakes that clearly belonged to a man who died before he'd fully worn them in. That possibility keeps you going through the endless polyester disappointment.

Then you leave having bought none of those things, but somehow carrying a chipped mug, a hardback biography of Montgomery, a sandwich toaster missing one plate, and apparently your own polo shirt.

The Death of the Postcard

I was trying to enter a classic car competition the other day. One of those "Win This Beautifully Restored Jaguar E-Type" things that appear between adverts for erectile dysfunction tablets and miracle lawn feed.

Now, being me, I naturally ignored the £12.50 online entry route and went looking for the free postal entry option buried somewhere in the terms and conditions, because there always is one. Usually hidden in six-point font between "employees may not enter" and "the judges' decision is final". Sure enough, there it was.

"Free entries accepted by postcard only."

Excellent, I thought. Outsmarted the system again. The old ways endure.

Except they don't, because apparently Britain no longer has postcards. Not scenic postcards. I wasn't after a picture of Blackpool Tower at sunset or a startled donkey on Weston-super-Mare beach. I just wanted an actual plain postcard. A rectangle of card. Roughly A6. The sort of thing Victorian people managed to acquire while simultaneously building railways across India.

I tried the Post Office first, naturally enough. No postcards. Which feels a bit like discovering Halfords no longer sells car parts but has an excellent range of scented candles and mortgage advice.

Then Ryman. No postcards there either, despite apparently selling them online, suggesting they now occupy the same mythical retail category as affordable housing and competent government IT systems.

Then The Works. Now, The Works can supply you with an astonishing range of items nobody has ever consciously decided to buy. Want a felt owl? No problem. A motivational sign saying "Gin O'Clock" in distressed lettering? Entire aisle devoted to it. A cardboard 3D Chinese temple requiring 14 hours of assembly and the patience of a neurosurgeon? Absolutely. Several, in fact.

But postcards?

No.

At this point the entire thing became strangely fascinating. I found myself driving around South Gloucestershire asking increasingly confused teenagers whether they stocked "blank postcard stock". You can actually see the panic in their eyes. They've been trained for vape juice, printer cartridges and parcel returns. Suddenly some ageing bloke in a fleece is demanding Edwardian communications technology.

One assistant suggested I "print something from Canva". Another pointed me towards birthday cards. A third looked at me with the cautious expression normally reserved for men who collect carrier bags full of damp clocks. Eventually I discovered that what I actually needed to ask for was "300gsm A6 card stock", because postcards apparently no longer exist as a recognised concept within British retail.

And somewhere around this point I started to suspect the competition companies knew this perfectly well. The free postal entry exists because legally it has to, but they've quietly chosen the one object modern Britain can no longer actually supply. You can still buy artisanal Korean face serum at midnight from a petrol station, but try obtaining a plain postcard and suddenly you're recreating the supply chain problems of the Napoleonic Wars.

And that's oddly revealing, because postcards used to matter. People sent them from holiday because international phone calls cost roughly the GDP of Belgium and because nobody wanted to hear your entire holiday in real time anyway. You got one small rectangle.

"Weather lovely. Hotel terrible. Dad sunburnt. Back Tuesday."

That was enough.

Now people bombard each other with 400 photographs of tapas before they've even finished chewing it, and somehow we know less about each other than we did in 1978. There was also something gloriously democratic about postcards. No apps. No subscriptions. No passwords. No verification emails. No QR codes leading to another QR code. Just card. Write on it. Stick stamp on. Done.

The competition companies know most people under 40 would rather rebuild a carburettor blindfolded than locate an actual postcard. Frankly, by the time I'd finished searching for one, I felt I'd earned the bloody Jaguar anyway.

Though knowing my luck, if I do eventually find a postcard, Royal Mail will probably classify it as a small parcel.

A Coronation in All But Name?

The talk of preventing a Burnham coronation is mostly Westminster theatre.

Al Carns and Darren Jones may be capable men, but Burnham has the public profile, the Makerfield win and the momentum. A contest could prevent a literal coronation. It is unlikely to prevent the practical one.

That does not make a contest pointless. Anyone about to become Prime Minister should have to explain what he intends to do about tax, Europe, defence, borrowing, immigration and the rest of the things that become awkward once the photographs outside Number 10 are over.

But there is a difference between proper scrutiny and pretending that every able politician must throw his hat into the ring simply because the hat happens to be available.

Darren Jones is one to watch. I have said before that, from the interviews I have seen, he knows his brief, is never visibly flustered and does not look as though the question has arrived from another planet. That is rarer than it ought to be.

He has also had a serious political apprenticeship. He has been MP for Bristol North West since 2017, chaired the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, served as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and now sits at the centre of government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations. That is a fairly formidable route through the machinery of government for someone still relatively young.

He has the look of future Chancellor material. Possibly, after that, future Prime Minister material.

But this may be the wrong contest and the wrong moment.

The next general election will not turn on who can give the tidiest answer on the medium-term fiscal forecast. It will be won or lost on whether Labour can stop Reform turning accumulated frustration into a vote for national self-harm.

Burnham is probably better placed for that immediate task. He has the profile, the political instincts and a way of talking that makes Labour sound as though it understands why people are angry, rather than merely being slightly disappointed by the volume at which they are expressing it.

Jones may be better placed for the work that follows: making the figures add up and turning industrial strategy, investment, tax reform and public capacity into something that survives contact with the Treasury, the bond market and the depressing discovery that enthusiasm is not a recognised funding stream.

That could be a very useful division of labour.

Burnham could be the political figurehead who stops Labour being swallowed by the Reform mood. Jones could be the Chancellor who ensures that Labour’s answer is not simply a more articulate version of fantasy economics.

There is a temptation in Westminster to use people up too quickly. Someone performs well in a few interviews, gets described as a rising star, and is then expected to march straight into a leadership contest before they have built enough authority, experience or public recognition to withstand the national ritual of having their life turned into a tabloid pinata.

Jones does not need to do that now.

A Burnham victory would not end his prospects. It could improve them. A serious stint at Number 11, helping to make a Burnham government work rather than merely sound hopeful, would give him the record and credibility that no hurried leadership bid can provide.

Burnham may be the man Labour needs for the election it has to win.

Jones may be the man Labour needs once the speeches are over and somebody has to make the machinery work.

£19

£19 - that’s the bit that really lifts it from mere disappointment into the foothills of comedy.

Hayley bought me a pair of flip flops. Not complex machinery. Not something with Bluetooth, firmware, a warranty card and a small man in Shenzhen monitoring my gait. Just flip flops. The sort of thing mankind more or less perfected once someone realised feet were at the bottom and beaches were gritty.

They took almost a week to arrive, which is an impressive gestation period for two bits of plastic and a toe strap. I was half expecting a midwife to knock on the door with them wrapped in a towel.

Then I put them on.

Now, I’m not a soft-footed aristocrat who needs velvet underfoot and a footman scattering rose petals ahead of me. I’ve walked on ships’ decks, gravel drives, garage floors, and the occasional Lego brick left by children who are now grown men and therefore have no excuse. But these things have little raised bobbles all over the sole, presumably intended to provide therapeutic stimulation.

Therapeutic, in this case, seems to mean being interrogated through the soles of your feet.

After about ten steps I’d had enough. They weren’t flip flops. They were budget acupressure sandals designed by someone who’d heard of comfort but regarded it as a bourgeois weakness. It was like walking across a tray of drawing pins while being told it was good for circulation.

And again, £19!

For £19 I don’t expect Italian leather, ergonomic brilliance, or a faint scent of Amalfi lemons. I do, however, expect to be able to cross the kitchen without developing the expression of a man walking barefoot across a medieval battlefield.

So back they went, immediately. Hayley’s intentions were kind, which is why I’m still married and the flip flops aren’t. They may suit someone with feet made of teak, or perhaps a retired fakir who feels his life has become too easy. How they make any money from them is beyond me.

For everyone else, I’d suggest ordinary flip flops. Or shoes. Or simply staying where you are.

A Design Failure

There are certain objects from history that people insist on treating with reverence simply because they are ancient. The amphora is one of them. Museums display them with solemn lighting as though they represent the apex of practical design. Historians stroke their chins about Mediterranean trade networks. Archaeologists lovingly catalogue fragments of them by the thousand.

It is, however, a clay bottle that cannot stand up. That seems quite an important design flaw to have overlooked for several centuries.

The ancient Greeks gave us philosophy, geometry and democracy, then apparently looked at a storage container continuously falling over and thought, "Yes. This is the future." The thing has a pointed bottom like a ceramic artillery shell. You cannot just place it on the floor. It has to be wedged into sand, slotted into racks, or supported by other amphorae in some sort of giant wine-based game of structural engineering.

The usual defence is that they stacked well in ships. Fine. So do shopping trolleys, but I would not want to drink from one.

Meanwhile somewhere in prehistoric northern Europe, the so-called Bell Beaker culture people, who were basically wandering about in skins dragging bits of bronze through muddy forests, had already stumbled upon the revolutionary insight that containers should preferably remain upright when unattended. You can almost picture the exchange.

"Behold, our advanced Mediterranean civilisation."

"Very impressive. Why does your bottle need scaffolding?"

The Romans eventually began shifting towards barrels, particularly in northern Europe, and you can see why. A barrel can be rolled, stacked, repaired, stood upright and generally treated like an object intended for actual human use. The amphora, by contrast, feels like something optimised entirely around galley cargo density by an early logistics consultant who had never personally carried one.

And this is the thing about civilisations. Intelligence is rarely evenly distributed. One society invents abstract mathematics but cannot design practical kitchenware. Another masters durable storage but lives in round huts. Human progress is less a majestic march forwards than a drunken shopping trolley veering between brilliance and absurdity.

I suspect a lot of ancient dockworkers privately hated amphorae. You do not carry a two-handled clay torpedo full of olive oil down a hot quay without occasionally muttering that there must be a better way of doing this. Somewhere there was probably an Aegean equivalent of a man in a tavern saying, "You know what this needs? A flat bottom."

At which point everyone ignored him for another five hundred years because tradition, civilisation, and cultural heritage are often just expensive ways of saying, "We've always done it like this."

The UniParty Has Failed Us - Allegedly

There is a phrase doing the rounds now: people feel they have been failed by the UniParty. 

The term UniParty is a political descriptor used to suggest that two or more dominant political parties in a democracy function in practice as a single entity. It implies that despite outward disagreements, they share a core set of elite interests and operate as a unified establishment.

What they actually mean that the escalator has stopped.

The UniParty is largely a misunderstanding of what government is. It is not a secret club of politicians meeting in Westminster to agree that nothing can be improved. It is what politics looks like when it runs into facts, circumstances, arithmetic, demographics, international markets and commitments made years before the current lot arrived.

As any system matures, the number of available levers reduces. It develops around its existing pensions, housing market, tax base, public services, debt, trade relationships, infrastructure and labour force. Each part becomes tied to the others. Pull one lever sharply and something else moves, often expensively.

That is why parties begin to look more alike once they reach government. Not because they have all joined the same secret club, but because they are operating inside the same structural scaffolding. The more mature and interconnected the system becomes, the less room there is for radical exits without causing damage somewhere else.

Different parties can still decide who pays, who benefits and what gets protected. Those choices matter enormously. But they cannot simply step outside the framework they inherit, abolish the trade-offs, or restore an earlier version of Britain by force of personality and a few shouted slogans. Government is not a wish-fulfilment service with a Treasury card attached.

A government cannot abolish an ageing population, conjure skilled workers overnight, build houses without land or consent, provide Scandinavian public services on bargain-basement taxation, borrow indefinitely without consequences, or make trade barriers disappear by shouting at Brussels. Different parties can make different choices about who pays, who benefits and what gets protected. But they cannot repeal the basic constraints of the country they govern.

That is why the phrase is so useful to Reform. It turns every difficult trade-off into evidence of betrayal. It implies that there is an easy route back to security and prosperity, held back only by cowardly politicians and the wrong sort of people in Westminster. There are choices, but none of them allows the country to have more while contributing less.

Their parents got a better house, a better job, a better car, a better pension and a generally more comfortable life than their own parents had enjoyed. They assumed the escalator would continue upwards, with every generation stepping off on a higher floor.

For a while, that was a reasonable expectation. Britain did become markedly more prosperous in the post-war decades. Cheap energy, expanding trade, rapid productivity growth, a growing workforce, mass housebuilding and North Sea oil all helped. There were more decent jobs, more homes, more public investment and a greater sense that ordinary people might share in what the country produced.

But the gains were not simply left at the top and allowed to dribble down by some mysterious law of economics. Stronger unions ensured that some of the proceeds reached wages. Higher taxation on high incomes and profits ensured that part of what was created was recycled into homes, schools, hospitals, roads, transport, pensions and public services.

Higher taxes did not create the factories, the trade or the productivity growth. They helped turn economic growth into broader security and shared living standards, rather than allowing the gains to remain concentrated in private wealth. That is rather different from saying prosperity appeared because someone in Whitehall moved a tax lever.

Then Britain began to rely less on productive growth and more on a weaker model. Rising house prices made homeowners feel richer, while cheap credit let people spend future income now. Governments could promise more while postponing the bill. Councils sold assets, infrastructure was deferred, investment became expendable, and rising property values were increasingly treated as evidence of national success.

The house could be remortgaged, the kitchen financed, the newer car bought on credit and the holiday paid for later. Some of it was genuine improvement. Much of it was tomorrow's money being spent today, while the foundations of future prosperity were quietly neglected.

There is also an awkward generational point here. We have had a cohort which did substantially better than its parents. It bought homes when they were cheap relative to income, saw them become valuable, benefited from more secure employment and more generous pensions, and then understandably wanted to protect what it had acquired.

The difficulty came when protecting those gains made the same route harder for those following behind. Fewer homes were built because development threatened property values or views. Pension promises became politically untouchable, while the tax base needed to sustain them was narrowed. The general instinct was to preserve existing comfort, even where that made it harder for younger people to buy, save, rent securely or build any comparable stake in the country.

None of that requires malice. It is simply what happens when a generation treats its own success as an entitlement to be frozen in place.

The result is that younger people now face high rents, high house prices, weaker wage growth, insecure work, expensive childcare and far less chance of accumulating wealth in the way their parents did. They are expected to finance an ageing society while being told that any attempt to rebalance housing, wealth or taxation is an assault on common sense.

So the complaint that people have been failed becomes muddled. Some people have been badly let down, particularly younger people trying to establish a secure life. But some of the expectations now being voiced are unrealistic because of the choices made to get here.

You cannot vote for lower taxes, privatisation, selling council houses without replacing them, opposition to development, weaker unions, cuts to public investment and withdrawal from your largest trading market, then expect better services, cheaper homes, secure pensions, lower debt and no disruption to anything you already own.

Those choices were repeatedly popular. They were voted for, applauded and defended as common sense. But they were also promoted and amplified by wealthy interests with money, media access and a direct stake in the outcome. Lower taxes, weaker regulation, privatisation and a smaller state were not abstractions to them. They were very good business.

The public were sold the comforting idea that lower taxes, rising house prices, better services and fewer obligations could all coexist indefinitely.

Now people want the benefits of the old settlement while refusing the costs, trade-offs and collective obligations that made it possible. Better public services, secure pensions, cheaper housing, lower taxes, low debt and no threat to accumulated wealth. It is not a programme. It is a shopping list written without looking at the bank balance.

And this is where Reform comes in.

Reform offers an even sharper version of the same bargain: lower taxes for those who can afford them, weaker institutions, fewer protections at work, and the promise that the old security can somehow be restored without anyone wealthy contributing more. It asks people to believe that the answer to a country with insufficient public capacity is to reduce the means by which public capacity is paid for.

You do not need a PhD in economics to see where that leads.

If wealthy people pay less tax, public services have less money. If public services have less money, ordinary people either receive less or pay privately for what was once collectively provided. If assets are sold, someone will charge rent for using what used to belong to everyone. If workers have fewer rights, the risks move downwards while the gains move upwards.

That is not freedom. It is a transfer pump.

The people at the top get more. The people below are told to wait patiently for the proceeds to trickle down. And when they do not, they are told there was not enough deregulation, not enough tax cutting, not enough flexibility, and not enough faith in the very people who have been doing rather well all along.

Trickle-down economics is one of the great cons of the last fifty years. It did not work for most of human history, when wealth and land were concentrated in a small class while everyone else survived on what remained after rent, tithes and the landlord's share. There is no obvious reason why reviving the same arrangement with hedge funds and private equity should suddenly make it fairer.

People are angry because the ladder has been pulled up behind a generation that climbed it when the rungs were still there. Reform's answer is not to put the rungs back. It is to make the people already at the top even more secure, and tell everyone else that this time the proceeds really will trickle down.

A Change of Mind

I have changed my mind about Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham.

That is not a phrase one writes lightly in politics. Normally you pick a side, build a small fort out of opinions, and spend the next five years firing stale beans at anybody who points out that the roof has fallen in. But changing your mind is not always weakness. Sometimes it means you have listened to an argument and noticed that your previous one, while perfectly logical, was not sufficient.

I had something of an Epiphany after listening to a Vlad Vexler podcast. I rate Vexler very highly as a political philosopher, and he put his finger on something I had missed.

I had been inclined to support Starmer against Burnham. The argument seemed straightforward enough. Starmer has the mandate, the majority and the job. He has inherited weak growth, public services held together with cable ties, the long economic drag of Brexit, a Treasury that can smell an unfunded promise from three counties away, and a country which expects miracles by Thursday teatime.

Burnham, I thought, might be warmer, more fluent and better at looking as though he has just been told something infuriating outside a bus depot. But unless he had materially different levers, what was the point of changing leader? Public ownership, rent controls, devolution, tax changes and a tougher line on Thames Water may all be worthwhile, but none makes the public finances magically generous or repairs public services overnight.

That is still a rational argument. It is just not, I have come to understand, a complete political argument.

I was asking whether Burnham had more money, better institutions, a faster route through the same problems, or some large red lever hidden in the Manchester tram depot which Starmer had inexplicably failed to notice. If not, replacing Starmer risked doing nothing except raising expectations, changing the mood for six weeks, and leaving Labour with the same hard choices plus a more expensive set of curtains.

All perfectly valid. The trouble is that electoral politics is not a rationalist exercise. Most people do not vote after carefully comparing fiscal rules, borrowing costs, productivity forecasts and the likely implementation timetable for a regional transport settlement. They vote because they are angry, frightened, poorer than they expected to be, and tired of being told that things will improve later.

They have watched their towns get shabbier, their local services get worse, their wages fail to move, their children struggle to buy homes, and the high street fill up with vape shops, betting shops and businesses called something like Urban Living. They do not necessarily want a lecture on why the repair programme is technically demanding. They want somebody to acknowledge that the bridge has been shut for twenty years and that nobody seemed remotely bothered until they started shouting.

Starmer speaks to the electorate as though it were a room full of politically engaged children who have already read the briefing papers.

Burnham speaks to the same children as an adult should, in language they recognise and without pretending that Westminster is ordinary life.

Farage speaks to them by becoming one of the children himself and urging them to burn down the school.

That, I think, is the difference.

This is where the idea of the metropolitan elite comes from. It is not really about where people live, whether they own nice spectacles, or whether they know what an aperitif is. It is about speaking to voters as though they already understand the language of Westminster, then appearing faintly baffled when they do not. I have discovered that I am a member of the metropolitan elite, despite living in the Cotswolds.

Reform understands the emotional mechanics almost perfectly. Its answer is poisonous, but emotionally legible. Yes, you have been cheated, it says. Here is who did it. Migrants. Judges. Civil servants. Brussels, somehow, despite the fact that we left. Wind turbines. Whoever happens to be standing nearest the dartboard that morning.

That is why Reform is dangerous. It does not need to win every argument. It needs people to feel that nobody else is listening.

Starmer can explain why Reform is wrong, and he is usually right. Burnham may be better at explaining why Reform is tempting. That matters.

Burnham’s communication style seems to start with voters as they are: suspicious, impatient, weary of being patronised, and fed up with feeling that their own lives have become a footnote to somebody else’s economic model.

That is a form of populism, but it need not be the destructive sort. Not the populism of smashing things, but a constitutional populism: recognising anger, naming failure, and offering democratic repair rather than scapegoats. Not contempt for institutions, but a demand that institutions remember whom they are there to serve.

That is potentially useful, but it is not a substitute for delivery. Burnham would still face the Treasury, the markets, weak growth, battered public services and financial limits. He would not make years of underinvestment vanish by force of personal warmth.

Indeed, there is a risk. A more emotionally fluent leader could raise expectations faster than government can meet them, then turn hope into a worse sense of betrayal. That is the serious case for Starmer. Politics cannot repeal arithmetic.

But arithmetic is not enough either. People need to believe that constraints are being fought, not merely explained to them. They need to feel that somebody is on their side in the argument, rather than simply managing their disappointment with a better spreadsheet.

That is where Burnham may have an advantage. Not because he has found a hidden route around the constraints, but because he may be better at turning restraint and repair into a shared political purpose.

The target is a general election. By then, even measurable improvements may not save Labour if people have spent four years feeling talked at rather than spoken to. Inflation can fall, waiting lists can shorten and growth can return, while voters still feel poorer, less secure and ignored.

That is the space Reform occupies. It does not need a workable programme. It merely needs to persuade people that nobody else has noticed the bridge is still shut.

Burnham may be better placed to close that space. Or he may simply raise expectations and discover that warmth, like policy, has to survive contact with the Treasury.

Starmer explains why the bridge must be repaired properly.

Burnham understands that half the country is already standing in the rain, shouting that it has been shut for twenty years and asking who nicked the bloody toll money.