Capital is Mobilising

Get ready for a very long read.

I have been developing a little theory about modern politics. It began as the vague feeling that when one reads the news, the argument always seems to be taking place on the wrong floor of the building. Downstairs everyone is shouting about migrants and dinghies. Meanwhile upstairs, rather quietly, the real rearranging of furniture is going on with tax rules, regulation, media ownership and the movement of capital.

For much of the twentieth century British politics operated with a rough balance between organised labour and organised capital. Trade unions mobilised millions of voters and exercised real political influence, while business interests supplied investment and economic power. The arrangement was not elegant, but it functioned as a counterweight. From the end of the Second World War through the 1970s inequality narrowed and living standards rose rapidly. For ordinary households it produced the fastest sustained rise in living standards since the industrial revolution first pushed incomes off the flat line they had occupied for centuries.

But that prosperity produced an unexpected political consequence. Rising wages, expanding professional employment and widespread home ownership created a large new asset-owning middle class. People who had benefited from the post-war settlement now had houses, pensions and savings to protect. Once voters acquire assets, their political priorities often change. Concerns about inflation, taxation and economic stability begin to matter more than the collective institutions that helped produce the earlier prosperity.

In that sense the political shift of the 1980s did not come from nowhere. Margaret Thatcher did not simply impose a new settlement from above. She mobilised a coalition of voters whose economic position had been transformed by the post-war boom. Many professionals, homeowners and skilled workers had climbed the ladder that the earlier system built, and once they had done so they became more receptive to dismantling parts of it. In effect, a generation that had benefited from the ladder helped pull up the drawbridge behind it. I know this because it was my generation and my parents' generation.

From the 1980s onwards that equilibrium steadily eroded. Union membership declined sharply and political parties became professional campaign organisations rather than mass membership movements. As labour’s organisational power weakened, the political system did not become neutral. The space was filled by concentrated wealth and donor networks capable of funding parties, think tanks and campaign infrastructure on a scale that would once have been unusual.

This shift coincided with wider structural changes in the economy and the media system. Financial markets were liberalised, capital became far more mobile and media industries underwent waves of consolidation. The result was an environment in which large pools of private capital could exert greater influence over both economic policy and the channels through which political narratives reached the public.

At the same time the structure of the information system narrowed. Around eighty to ninety percent of national newspaper circulation is controlled by a small number of wealthy proprietors. The BBC still exists as a public counterweight, but it now operates in a permanently politicised environment where governments lean on it, newspapers attack it and senior appointments pass through political filters. The result is not a propaganda outlet but a cautious broadcaster aware that one perceived misstep can unleash a week of hostile headlines.

Meanwhile the economic foundations of journalism have been quietly eroded. Advertising migrated to digital platforms, local newspapers collapsed and national newsrooms shrank. Investigative reporting is expensive and slow, and it has been one of the first casualties. When fewer journalists are available to challenge claims and follow complicated stories, the political environment changes. It becomes easier for politicians to say almost anything and correct the record later, if at all.

The same tension is visible in debates about education. Some political movements now advocate a more “patriotic” national curriculum focused on national pride and identity. Teaching national history is not the problem. The revealing point is what tends to disappear. A curriculum centred on critical thinking trains citizens to question evidence and test political claims. One centred primarily on patriotic narratives trains them to absorb and repeat them. In an era that increasingly rewards simple stories over careful analysis, the distinction matters.

At the same time a different media culture has developed around what might be called client journalism. Some politicians now prefer outlets that repeat narratives sympathetically rather than journalists who interrogate them. When challenged, the response is often to attack the source rather than the claim. A poll becomes invalid because of who commissioned it. A journalist becomes biased for asking an awkward question.

This environment suits populist politics extremely well.

One of the most important discoveries made by modern insurgent movements is that winning power is not always necessary to reshape politics. Control of the agenda can be enough. If one issue dominates public attention, the rest of the political landscape recedes.

Immigration performs this function almost perfectly. Migration is a real policy issue, but it also produces vivid images and emotionally powerful narratives. Boats arriving on beaches create a story that can be repeated endlessly.

Once immigration dominates the political conversation, other subjects quietly retreat from view. Tax structures, regulatory frameworks, capital mobility, media ownership and donor influence begin to look like technical details compared with the daily theatre of borders and boats.

It is the political equivalent of everyone crowding downstairs to argue about the noise while the furniture upstairs is quietly being removed.

What is really happening is that three different political systems are operating at once. Cultural issues such as immigration supply the political energy. Donor economics supplies the policy agenda. And the modern media environment supplies the narrative infrastructure that allows the two to reinforce each other.

The deeper irony is that the same political ecosystem that obsesses over human mobility pays remarkably little attention to capital mobility. Immigration dominates political debate, yet the movement of wealth across borders rarely attracts sustained scrutiny. A billionaire relocating to Monaco for tax reasons can cost the Treasury far more revenue than thousands of migrants entering the labour market. Yet one produces months of headlines while the other is treated as a sensible financial decision.

In some cases the contradiction is almost comic. People who denounce migrants for crossing borders in search of opportunity will enthusiastically defend a billionaire doing exactly the same thing for tax reasons. Cultural rhetoric about immigration mobilises voters so effectively that it obscures far larger economic decisions being made elsewhere.

At the same time new forms of financial power have entered politics. Parts of the populist right have developed close relationships with cryptocurrency entrepreneurs and technology billionaires who see themselves as outsiders to the traditional political establishment. Wealth from these sectors increasingly funds media platforms, campaign organisations and political movements.

Alongside this sits a growing network of think tanks and advocacy groups shaping policy debates from outside formal party structures.

The modern right itself is not a single ideological project. Populist mobilisation around immigration now sits uneasily alongside more traditional centre-right economic thinking, a tension illustrated by initiatives such as Prosper, which seek to pull Conservative politics back toward a more conventional pro-business centre-right position.

Meanwhile other powerful interests have long understood the value of narrative control. Fossil fuel companies have spent decades funding lobbying, think tanks and media campaigns aimed at delaying climate policy. The strategy has shifted over time from outright denial to economic alarmism, framing climate action as a threat to jobs, growth or household bills. Delay becomes extremely valuable if your business model depends on selling fossil fuels.

This creates a comfortable position for political movements that operate primarily through agenda setting rather than governance. They can dominate headlines and mobilise supporters without demonstrating how their promises would survive contact with reality.

Governments operate under constraints that opposition movements rarely acknowledge. Laws exist. Courts intervene. Budgets impose limits. Bureaucracies move slowly. The populist narrative assumes that political will alone can sweep these obstacles aside.

In practice it cannot.

The moment an insurgent movement actually holds power, the gap becomes visible. Rhetoric collides with institutions and promises encounter fiscal arithmetic. Donald Trump’s war with Iran illustrates the problem in real time. What began as decisive campaign rhetoric has turned into the sort of complex regional conflict governments always discover once the missiles start flying.

Which brings me to a personal suspicion about Nigel Farage. I increasingly suspect that he understands this dynamic perfectly well. The optimal position for a populist insurgent may not be inside government at all. It may be just outside the door, close enough to influence the agenda but far enough away to avoid responsibility.

From that vantage point the insurgent can steadily pull the political centre of gravity in a particular direction. Mainstream parties adjust their rhetoric to compete and gradually the entire conversation shifts.

The insurgent wins without governing.

The consequences eventually show up in everyday life. Deregulation leads to rivers filled with sewage because dumping waste becomes cheaper than fixing infrastructure. Tax cuts without replacement revenue hollow out public services until hospitals, courts and councils struggle to function. Delaying Net Zero leaves economies dependent on fossil fuel markets and therefore hostage to geopolitical shocks.

Foreign policy decisions have consequences too. Wars destroy infrastructure, destabilise regions and displace populations. Most of the world’s refugees come from a relatively small number of conflicts in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Ukraine. The vast majority remain in neighbouring countries, but the pressures created by those conflicts inevitably ripple outward and eventually reach Europe.

In other words, some of the same political forces that promise to stop migration can end up helping to create the conditions that drive it.

And while the argument downstairs continues about migrants and borders, the furniture upstairs continues to move quietly out of the window.

By the time anyone notices, the removal van will already be halfway down the road, with a surprising number of voters still arguing about the dinghy.

An Arch in Search of Something to Celebrate

I dug out Peter York’s Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots the other day. Probably shouldn’t have. It’s one of those things that seems harmless enough until you start noticing it everywhere, and then you can’t really stop. York’s point, more or less, is that powerful men all think they’re expressing themselves, and somehow all end up buying from the same catalogue.

Which is how you end up looking at Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch and being told it’s to mark 250 years of American independence. And yes, fine, 250 years is worth marking. No argument there. It just doesn’t obviously call for quite so much… stone.

The arch doesn’t really sit on its own either. It turns up alongside the White House ballroom idea, all chandeliers and gilt and that slightly breathless feeling that if something’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing. You start to get the sense this isn’t a one-off, it’s more of a direction of travel. Once you’ve decided gold works, you tend to keep going back to it.

The awkward bit is the arch itself. It’s not a neutral form you can use for anything, like a statue or a plaque. It comes pre-loaded. The Romans didn’t build them because it had been a good 250 years. They built them because they’d just beaten someone and wanted to make sure nobody forgot. You marched through it, job done, story fixed in stone.

So when you borrow that shape, you borrow the voice as well. You’re not just marking time passing, you’re announcing a win. Loudly. It feels a bit like the car that’s been back to the garage three times and still isn’t quite right. It runs, but you wouldn’t build a monument to it.

None of that means you don’t celebrate 250 years. It just makes the tone feel off. Like turning up to an anniversary dinner in full military dress, only to find the dining room has been refitted in gold leaf while you were parking. You can’t say no one’s made an effort, but you do start wondering who it’s actually for.

And this is where it gets slightly more interesting, because there’s a bit of psychology lurking behind the taste. Call it narcissism if you like, but not in the pub sense. It’s the need to have importance made visible, just in case anyone was in danger of missing it. A plaque can be overlooked. A 250-foot arch rather less so. Add a ballroom full of chandeliers and you’ve covered the indoor market as well.

Timing doesn’t help. These things usually appear when everything feels settled, when alliances are solid and you don’t have to keep checking who’s still on side. At the moment it feels a bit more like everyone’s quietly doing the maths and keeping a few options open. Not collapse, nothing dramatic, just not quite the relaxed centre-of-the-room feeling you’d expect for this sort of architectural confidence.

Which is where York’s point comes back in. If the reality’s a bit messy, tidy up the signal. Make it big enough and shiny enough that it carries the message on its own. No need to get into the detail if you can just build something that says “important” from a distance.

You can picture how it got there. Someone suggests doing something for the anniversary. Perfectly sensible. Then it needs to be noticed. Then it needs to be significant. Then someone says it needs to be really significant. By the time the lions and eagles have turned up, along with another layer of chandelier somewhere else, the original idea has quietly left the room.

Washington hasn’t usually gone in for this. The existing monuments are serious but they don’t nag. Lincoln sits there and lets you get on with it. The Washington Monument just stands there, not trying to sell itself. They assume you’ll work it out.

This one doesn’t really leave you that option. It does the working out for you, in fairly large letters, and then adds a bit more just to be safe. It may never get built. There are committees for that sort of thing, and budgets, and the odd outbreak of common sense.

Still, if nothing else, it does solve the problem of how to mark 250 years. Not by explaining it, or reflecting on it, but by making sure you can see it from a long way off.

The Photographs History Forgot

Every so often a photograph surfaces that makes modern viewers sit up and blink. One of those shows cadets from the Britannia Brigade at Dartmouth standing alongside members of the Hitler Youth in 1936. It looks astonishing now. Future Royal Navy officers smiling politely beside boys in brown shirts.

I am 71 and, until a television documentary the other night, I had never heard of these exchanges at all. Which in itself is interesting. One would think such an image would have lodged somewhere in the national memory, yet apparently not.

Cue the inevitable modern reaction. Someone posts the photograph online and within minutes a few confident voices declare that this proves Britain was secretly rather fond of the Nazis. The photograph becomes Exhibit A in a tidy moral drama.

Except that is not what it shows.

The first thing to remember is that 1936 was a very different moment. Hitler had been in power only three years. The worst horrors of the regime were still largely hidden from the outside world. Diplomacy had not yet collapsed. Britain had just signed the Anglo German Naval Agreement the year before. The basic idea, misguided as it proved, was to keep Germany inside the tent rather than outside it kicking the furniture.

So youth exchanges happened. Military academies visited one another. Sports teams travelled abroad. It all sat inside the rather hopeful belief that if nations kept talking, marching and playing football together they might avoid repeating 1914.

From our vantage point the images look painfully naive. Within three years those cadets would be junior officers in the Royal Navy fighting the very regime whose youth organisation they had politely paraded beside. History has a habit of doing that. It makes yesterday's ordinary behaviour look absurdly innocent once tomorrow arrives.

What fascinates me is how these photographs are used today. They tend to be waved around as if they prove some hidden sympathy for Nazism in Britain. That tells you more about modern political habits than about the 1930s. People like tidy moral stories where everyone either knew exactly what was coming or secretly approved of it.

Real history is rarely that tidy.

In reality the picture simply captures a moment when Britain and much of Europe still hoped Germany could be handled through diplomacy and normal contact. They were wrong, catastrophically wrong, but they were not collaborating with Nazism. They were trying to avoid another continental war only eighteen years after the last one had ended.

Which, given what eventually happened in 1939, makes the photograph less scandalous and more quietly tragic. Those polite boys on both sides would soon be on opposite sides of a war that would kill tens of millions. And somewhere in a Dartmouth photo album there is probably still a neatly labelled page that reads something like "Visit to Germany, summer 1936".

Speaking for Everyone From a Safe Distance

I heard a British Iranian on the radio the other day, calling into a phone-in, very calm, very sure of herself, explaining that the bombing should continue. Not as a grim last resort, but more as if it were simply the next sensible step. Then she added that all expat Iranians agreed with her and welcomed what Trump was doing.

That was about the point where I stopped following the argument and started noticing the framing.

“All expat Iranians”. It sounds convincing if you don’t stop to think about it. As if someone has gone round, asked the question, and tallied the results. In reality it just nudges the awkward bits out of view. Which expats. Who disagrees. Who exactly is being spoken for.

Because the reality is not tidy. The Iranian diaspora is not a bloc, it’s a spread. Monarchists who would quite like to wind the clock back. Republicans who want something entirely different. Secular liberals, left-leaning groups, people who still support the regime, and plenty who have no interest in any grand project and are simply trying to keep track of family. They don’t agree on the destination, never mind the route.

And in fact, over the past few days, you could hear that plainly enough if you listened. Plenty of British Iranians have been calling into the same sort of programmes saying the opposite - that it’s a disaster for ordinary Iranians, that it will make things worse, that Trump shows little interest in what happens to the people on the receiving end of it. Not a unified chorus, but certainly not silence either.

I did find myself wondering who she had actually spoken to, if anyone. Or whether this was one of those private consensus exercises where the dissent never quite gets invited.

None of that, on its own, is especially troubling. People generalise all the time, especially on the radio. It’s a phone-in, not a policy seminar.

What caught slightly was the ease with which “the bombing should continue” was said from here.

Living here does have its advantages. You can speak plainly, you’re not filtering yourself, and you’re not trying to piece together events from patchy information or wondering if the connection will drop. You can say the regime is oppressive and should go, which plenty inside Iran would agree with if they could say it safely.

But it does shift the feel of what you’re saying.

Saying “keep going” from a call-in line in Britain is not quite the same thing as saying it from a flat where the windows have already been taped up and there’s a bag by the door in case you need to leave quickly. The words are identical, but they don’t carry the same consequences. One is a view. The other is a judgement call you may have to live with the same afternoon.

War, at a distance, tends to arrange itself into something more orderly than it really is. It becomes about pressure, leverage, what comes next. On the ground it’s more immediate. Is there fuel. Is the road still open. Do you go now or wait and see if it settles. That sort of calculation.

None of this makes her position mad. There are Iranians, both inside the country and outside it, who think the regime won’t shift without force, and you can see how they arrive there.

But moving from that to “we all agree” does something else. It smooths over the disagreement and, with it, the uncertainty about how this plays out. It quietly drops the people who are less keen on being on the receiving end of it.

I found myself thinking about the call afterwards, not because it was unusual, but because it wasn’t. You hear that kind of certainty quite a lot once you start listening for it.

And meanwhile, somewhere else, someone is deciding whether to stay put for another night or get in the car before dark, which doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that lends itself to neat agreement.

5kW of Electricity, Please, in a Jerry Can

I had one of those small adventures the other day that reminds you why the internal combustion engine has not quite packed its bags and shuffled off into the museum just yet.

A colleague and I were dispatched to BCA Bridgewater to collect two vehicles. He drew the Land Rover Evoque. I drew the Nissan Leaf. The Evoque had a quarter of a tank of diesel. The Leaf, proudly, declared that it had 77 miles remaining. Our journey back was under forty miles. Even by modern standards that seemed a comfortable margin.

Two miles later the Leaf had clearly changed its mind.

By the time I reached the M5 the miles remaining were disappearing like biscuits in a meeting room. Heating off. Eco mode on. I settled into a stately 55 mph, the automotive equivalent of walking gently across thin ice while pretending everything is perfectly normal.

The situation deteriorated steadily. Every slight incline shaved miles off the prediction. The car began to look at me in the accusatory way computers do when they know they are about to ruin your afternoon.

Then the phone rang.

My colleague had broken down at Junction 16. The Evoque had stopped and now sounded, in his words, like a bag of nuts. So I peeled off the motorway and went to investigate, clutching the jump pack I keep in my rucksack when collecting auction cars. The jump pack revived the Evoque well enough, although the engine continued to sound as though several internal components had recently resigned.

Before I performed the roadside mechanical triage, the Leaf's remaining range dropped to three miles. Three. Then something curious happened. When I got back into the car the display now said 15 miles remaining. Apparently the electrons had been having a little lie down while I was helping the Land Rover. Happy days, I thought.

My happiness was, of course, premature. By the time I reached Tytherington the display was on zero miles remaining with five miles still to go. At this point I was driving downhill slopes using the e-Pedal like a Victorian miser shaking coins out of the upholstery. Every hill became a negotiation. Every mile felt like a personal insult.

Miraculously, I made it back to base.

The whole episode did rather underline the practical difference between the old world and the new one. If you run out of petrol or diesel, you can at least walk to a filling station, buy a can, and return with five litres of hope. With an EV, once the numbers start going theatrical, you are reduced to prayer, light throttle inputs and a growing intimacy with the topography of South Gloucestershire.

I am sure electric motoring has its place. Quiet, smooth, efficient, very worthy. But auction collections, unexpected detours and a colleague stranded on the hard shoulder in a dying Evoque are perhaps not its natural habitat. There is something faintly absurd about living in an age of astonishing technology, only to discover that what you really need is the electrical equivalent of a man in a layby selling emergency watts out of a can.

As an aside, I subsequently went to BCA Enfield and collected an electric VW ID3 with 176 miles remaining for a 136 mile journey. Made it with 12 miles remaining, after having driven for about 30 minutes at 55 MPH on the M4 to conserve energy.

What is NATO?

It is quite a thing to watch Trump complain that NATO “wasn’t there”, as if the last twenty years can be quietly mislaid like a set of car keys.

NATO invoked Article 5 after 9/11 and spent years alongside the United States in Afghanistan. That is not a debatable point. It is the central fact of the alliance in the modern era. Yet we are invited to ignore it and pivot instead to Greenland, which turns out to be the real grievance.

At which point the argument stops being wrong and starts being confused. Greenland belongs to Denmark, Denmark is in NATO, and Article 6 makes it perfectly clear that the alliance is about external threats, not helping one member acquire bits of another.

What is being presented, in effect, is NATO rewritten to suit the complaint. A treaty that behaves differently, applies differently, and obliges allies in ways it never has. Then, when the real one refuses to play along, it is accused of failure.

It is like insisting Pride and Prejudice is about a scientist creating a monster, and then criticising it for not having enough electricity and laboratory equipment. You are not analysing the book. You are confusing it with Frankenstein.

The difficulty is that this only works if nobody opens the cover. A single, basic, journalistic question would do. Which part of Article 5 was not honoured, and where does Article 6 support this idea about Greenland?

There is a long pause after that, because there is no clean answer.

Instead, we carry on as if this is a serious disagreement about policy rather than a basic mix-up about what NATO is. The alliance has not changed. The text has not changed. What has changed is the willingness to pretend that words mean something else when it is politically convenient.

A Law, Not a Metaphor

Israel has passed a law introducing a mandatory death penalty for certain terrorism offences, to be applied in military courts and, in principle, carried out within 90 days. That is the story. It is serious enough on its own without anyone reaching for historical fancy dress five seconds later.

Yet almost immediately the conversation drifts. Someone declares it proof of some grand historical parallel, someone else counters with a different one, and before long we are arguing about the 1940s instead of the rather pressing question of what has just been passed by the Knesset.

The fallback comparison tends to be the French Resistance, which has a comforting air of moral clarity about it. Brave resistance, clear villains, tidy conclusions. The sort of thing that makes a messy present feel more manageable.

But it only works if you ignore most of the detail. The French Resistance largely targeted infrastructure and occupying forces. Civilian attacks were contentious then and remain so now. Modern conflicts are not nearly so obliging. Rockets into towns, bombings, reprisals, and the familiar cycle that follows. One side calls it resistance, the other calls it terrorism, and both can produce examples that complicate the story.

Meanwhile, the law itself is doing its quiet, inconvenient work. It is framed around specific offences, not ethnicity written into statute. But it operates in a system where those prosecuted are overwhelmingly Palestinian, which is where the charge of discrimination arises. It has been passed, but it will be challenged. And it marks a sharp break from a country that has, in practice, avoided using the death penalty for decades.

Those are the points that matter. Capital punishment, due process, the structure of military courts, and whether the law will be applied evenly or not. You can make a strong case on any of those without borrowing a narrative from another time.

Because once you drop the analogies, you are left with the harder question. Not who this reminds you of, but whether it is justifiable, how it will be used, and who will actually end up on the receiving end.

Less dramatic, perhaps. But rather more to the point.

The Bipolar Defence

This all feels a bit familiar. On one side you have Kanye West popping up again to explain that the last lot of unpleasant nonsense wasn’t really him, just a self-diagnosed medical episode. On the other, Donald Trump has managed to get himself into a war with Iran and is now explaining it in a way that seems to change depending on which sentence you catch.

You can almost see where this is heading. A press conference at some point, a bit of throat clearing, and then something along the lines of the bombing being a mood swing that got a bit out of hand. Once you clock the pattern, it’s hard not to keep seeing it.

West says something appalling, walks it back, then does it again a few weeks later and carries on filling venues. Trump says the war is basically done, then authorises something else, then says talks are going well, then hints they might not be. It isn’t so much a plan as things happening and explanations arriving afterwards.

Consistency hasn’t just gone missing. It’s been shown the door. No forwarding address.

The Iran situation has that feel you get when something mechanical isn’t quite right but you keep driving anyway and turn the radio up to drown it out. The explanation shifts depending on the day. One briefing leans on nuclear risk, the next on stability, then something vaguer about sending a signal. You listen to it and think, that sounds fine on its own, but it doesn’t quite join up with what was said yesterday.

There was a line the other day about “longer term outcomes”. You hear that sort of thing in meetings when nobody wants to say how long something is actually going to drag on. It’s not a reassuring phrase. Meanwhile, everything is apparently going well. Or nearly finished. Or just getting going. Depends who you catch and when. Feels less like updates and more like people trying to keep up with whatever just happened.

And yet none of it seems to matter much. The rallies carry on. The audiences are still there. The contradictions don’t really stick. They just sort of get folded in.

That is the bit that nags.

You end up coming back to the same question, or something like it. Is this deliberate, is it just how they operate, or is it something else entirely? West has an answer ready to hand. Trump doesn’t, although you wouldn’t completely rule out him trying it if things got awkward enough.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the Strait of Hormuz situation was a manic phase. We’ll be releasing a statement shortly, possibly with a soundtrack.”

The difference is scale, really. One of them trashes sponsorship deals. The other moves oil prices, drags allies along behind him and leaves a trail that doesn’t disappear when the news cycle moves on. So it isn’t really about personality. It’s what happens when that sort of behaviour sits somewhere it can do actual damage. And you do start to wonder how long the two can be kept separate. Because if erratic behaviour plus a loyal following is enough to keep the show on the road, there’s a certain logic to leaning into it.

Though I suspect the apology tour becomes a bit more complicated once tankers stop moving and the petrol price creeps up to the point where even a short trip starts to feel like something you ought to think about first.

I sense one of Baldrick's Cunning Plan......

The Death of Stalin

Trump is starting to run things like "The Death of Stalin", and meanwhile the Iran war has begun to follow the same script.

Not in scale or consequence. People are dying, oil markets are twitching, and everyone involved is trying to sound more certain than they really are. But in tone, in sequencing, in that faintly absurd sense that nobody is quite sure what the plan is today, let alone tomorrow.

One day the war is “nearing completion”. A few days later it needs escalation. Then there are talks. Then an ultimatum about the Strait of Hormuz. Then a suggestion of taking Iran’s oil. Then a hint of withdrawal. Then back to threats of hitting infrastructure.

It is less a strategy than a sequence of moods.

In the film, they are all trying to interpret Stalin’s last instruction, except the instruction keeps changing depending on who last spoke. Here, the objective appears to move in real time. First it is nuclear capability, then regime change, then freedom of navigation, then something involving oil revenue, then all of them at once.

You can almost picture the room. Someone says “we’re nearly done”, everyone nods. Someone else says “we need to hit harder”, the nodding continues. A third suggests talks, and suddenly everyone recalls they were always in favour of diplomacy. It’s not disagreement, it’s synchronised improvisation.

Meanwhile, reality carries on regardless. The Strait is still disrupted, prices are still edging about, and allies are looking on with the sort of expression usually reserved for a driver who insists he knows a shortcut while heading steadily into a ditch.

And like any good farce, there is a growing gap between what is said and what is happening. Victory is declared while the conflict expands. Deadlines are issued, missed, and replaced with slightly more urgent deadlines. The story advances, but not in a straight line.

The risk is not that it becomes comic. It is that it becomes incoherent.

Wars, rather inconveniently, reward consistency. They require clear objectives, stable signalling, and a chain of decisions that add up to something. If instead you get a rolling series of reactions, filtered through personality and timing, you end up with exactly what we are starting to see: movement without direction.

Which is very entertaining in a film. Less so when tankers stop moving and people start getting shot at.

Constitutional Crisis

Trump has managed to turn geopolitics into a farce, but back home we are doing something arguably more British, which is having a mild constitutional crisis over marmalade.

Not the price of energy, not housing, not whether we are drifting into a trade cul de sac. Marmalade. A jar of orange preserve has somehow been promoted to the front line of national sovereignty, as if Paddington is about to be stopped at Dover and asked to declare his sandwiches.

The claim, breathlessly repeated, is that "they" are renaming marmalade. That this is the thin end of the wedge. Today marmalade, tomorrow the Magna Carta, presumably by teatime.

The reality is rather less stirring. The EU has relaxed its definition so that "marmalade" can cover a wider range of fruit preserves. The horror. To cope with this outbreak of definitional flexibility, British producers may have to say "orange marmalade" or "citrus marmalade" on the label. One imagines shoppers collapsing in confusion, wandering the aisles muttering, "But what is this citrus substance?"

The slightly awkward detail, which has been quietly left in the airing cupboard, is that we did this in the first place. In the 1970s, Britain insisted that marmalade should mean citrus only. We drew a line in the sugary sand and told Europe, quite firmly, that marmalade was not to be trifled with. It was one of those moments of national clarity, up there with decimalisation and flared trousers.

And just to make it all a bit more absurd, the word itself is not even British. "Marmalade" comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste made from marmelo - quince. In other words, the original marmalade was not orange at all, but a sort of firm quince jelly eaten in slices. We imported the word, changed the meaning, enforced it on Europe, and are now affronted that Europe has stopped following our instructions quite so obediently.

And yet the reaction has been predictably operatic. You can almost hear the violins as commentators speak of heritage, tradition, and the quiet dignity of the breakfast table, as though a jar of marmalade were the last line of defence against continental chaos.

Meanwhile, in the real world, most jars already say "Seville orange marmalade", because producers quite like telling you what is in them. This has not, to date, triggered social collapse.

What makes this oddly revealing is how neatly it fits the pattern. A small, technical adjustment becomes a cultural grievance. A labelling tweak is inflated into an existential threat. And the fact that we wrote the original rule ourselves is treated as an inconvenient footnote, rather than the entire story.

It is a bit like insisting your classic car must only ever run on a particular grade of fuel, arguing about it for decades, and then becoming furious when the rest of the garage shrugs and says, "Fine, use what you like."

So here we are. A country that once ran a global empire now reduced to arguing about the wording on a breakfast spread we defined ourselves half a century ago.

Still, I suppose it is progress of a sort. At least this time, the argument is unlikely to end in a referendum. Or, more worryingly, it might.