Meetings, Agendas, Topiary and Hands

I was in London a few days ago, at a meeting with people of my age and older. We all knew each other, essentially, as we were all at the same school, though I wasn’t there as one of the Committee. I had been invited to explain a report I’d been commissioned to write, which is the sort of phrase that makes a morning sound much more purposeful than it often feels while waiting for the coffee to improve.

To be fair, it progressed better than most meetings. Many of those present had spent years in full employment attending meetings, chairing meetings, surviving meetings and watching meetings turn feral if allowed to roam free. They knew perfectly well how quickly a simple item can become a swamp, and how a discussion intended to last ten minutes can stretch itself beyond reason while everyone pretends this is still a productive use of life.

It was a familiar sort of gathering: decent people, old experience, a proper agenda, and the faint sense that everyone had once been rather busier than this. There were the usual signs of age, of course. Slightly cautious knees. Spectacles being moved about with increasing urgency. People leaning forward not because they were especially interested, but because modern speech has somehow been designed for people with the hearing range of a bat.

But the real giveaway was above the eyes: eyebrows.

At a certain age, the body seems to abandon any sensible allocation of hair. It removes it from places where it was once useful, then reassigns it to ears, nostrils and eyebrows, as if managed by a tiny department of vindictive clerks. Young eyebrows lie down obediently. They know their place. Older eyebrows develop opinions. Left alone, they begin to look as though you have a couple of small ferrets pasted above your eyes.

They thicken, stiffen and turn sideways. A single grey hair, once trimmed, doesn’t disappear. It becomes more obvious, sticking out horizontally with a blunt end, like a tiny bit of fencing wire. You can see the tell-tale signs of intervention. Someone has had a go at them, but not entirely won.

I should say at this point that I do trim my own eyebrows. No. 3 on the trimmer. This sounds controlled and purposeful, but it’s really just hedging. No. 2 feels reckless, No. 4 feels like appeasement, and doing nothing would allow the outer edges to start communicating with passing aircraft. So No. 3 it is: the middle way between grooming and topiary.

No one mentions any of this, naturally. We are civilised men. We discuss the subject in hand - whether a clarification to a rule makes it a new rule - while politely ignoring the fact that half the room has small grey aerials above its spectacles. This, I suppose, is one of the remaining purposes of civilisation: allowing men to debate constitutional nuance while pretending not to notice that several participants appear to be receiving weather reports through their eyebrow antennae.

Then there were the hands. Because we mostly knew each other, the hands were not revealing entire hidden lives. They were doing something subtler. They were confirming the post-retirement biographies in a way words never quite do.

Some were smooth, clean and unmarked, with nails so immaculate they looked as though they had spent their later years signing things, turning pages, holding a glass properly and occasionally moving a paperclip from one side of the desk to the other. Useful work, no doubt. Necessary work, even. The world would probably stop without forms, authorisations and men who can look at a report and say, “I think we need a further report.” But those hands had not been in much direct combat with reality lately.

Other hands were different. Gnarled, scarred, creased, with the permanent memory of tools. Hands with old cuts from rust, solder, paint, a GT6, a couple of ride-on mowers, and the general bloody-mindedness of objects. Hands with traces of oil or primer still under the nails, not because the owner was careless, but because some substances enter a man’s life and take up residence.

Those hands had not just pointed at problems. They had had to persuade them, usually with a spanner, heat, paint, bad language, or all four. Faces can be arranged. Jackets can be chosen. Shoes can be polished. Hands are harder to edit.

By a certain age, hands become a sort of logbook. Not complete, not always flattering, but usually honest. They record what sort of life you have had contact with since the official one ended. Paper leaves one sort of mark. Machinery leaves another. A stubborn bracket under a GT6 leaves a mark that is both physical and spiritual, usually accompanied by the loss of a small washer into a place Triumph never intended a human hand to reach.

And then there is retirement, which reveals another fork in the road. Some people devote themselves to cruises. This is fair enough, provided one has developed a taste for being processed politely through carpeted corridors with 3,000 other people also pretending this is adventure.

I have nothing against ships. Quite the reverse. But there is a difference between going to sea and being stacked on a floating hotel with a buffet, a theatre, and a daily programme telling you when to be delighted. A European river cruise, possibly. That at least has banks, towns, bridges and the faint hope that one may get off without being summoned by public address to Deck Seven for line dancing.

But a large cruise ship? No. I have spent enough of my life around vessels to know that being aboard one doesn’t automatically make the experience nautical. Sometimes it just means you are trapped in a shopping centre that has lost sight of land. I’d rather take a quick plane flight between destinations and use the saved days for something more useful, like losing a washer under the GT6.

So there we were, in London, discussing whether a clarification to a rule is still merely a clarification, or has quietly become a new rule, while the real biographies sat on the table and bristled above the eyes.

The eyebrows said: time has been at work here.

The hands said: yes, but so have I.

Burnham’s Narrow Door

There is something rather odd about the Andy Burnham story.

He is being talked about as the man who can rescue Labour from its current misery, which is fair enough up to a point. He has profile, he has northern credibility, he can speak human better than quite a lot of Westminster people, and he does not always sound as though he has been put together by a public affairs department after a long lunch.

But the route back is not exactly Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It is Andy Burnham trying to get through Makerfield without Reform taking a lump out of his ankle.

And that matters.

A leader needs authority. Not just a launch video, a few sympathetic columns and various people in lanyards quietly measuring up for offices. He needs a seat that says he is secure. Blair had Sedgefield. Brown had Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. Starmer has Holborn and St Pancras. These were not seats where the party leader had to spend election night staring at the returning officer as though waiting for a mechanic to come back from under the car and say, “Well, I’ve found something.”

Makerfield is different. Burnham can stand while still Mayor of Greater Manchester, but if he wins he loses the mayoralty. So he would be swapping a strong regional platform for a Westminster seat which looks competitive rather than fortress-like. That is quite a gamble.

And that is before you get to the career risk.

Starmer, whatever one thinks of him politically, had a life outside elected politics. He was a barrister, became QC, and later served as Director of Public Prosecutions. That gives him a professional identity separate from Parliament. If politics spits him out, he still has an identity outside the machine.

Burnham’s background is different. Before Parliament he was already in and around politics: researcher for Tessa Jowell, parliamentary officer at the NHS Confederation, Football Task Force administrator, then special adviser to Chris Smith. Nothing wrong with that. It is useful experience. But it is not like being a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer or even a half-competent plumber. You cannot just put the sign back over the door.

So for Burnham, politics is not just the arena. It is the trade. If he gives up the mayoralty, gets into Westminster through a narrow seat, and then fails to become Labour leader, or becomes leader while sitting on a vulnerable majority, he has not just taken a risk. He has sold the lifeboat to buy a ticket for a rowing boat.

That changes the psychology. If Starmer lost office, he would become a former prime minister with a legal career behind him, a knighthood, inquiries, lectures and the soft upholstered afterlife of the British establishment. Burnham has fewer obvious exits. He is much more dependent on politics continuing to provide the next room.

Which makes Makerfield more than a by-election. It is a career hinge.

Of course, there is one possible escape hatch. If Burnham wins Makerfield narrowly and later becomes leader, Labour could try to move him to a safer seat. A loyal Labour MP in a safer constituency could suddenly discover a desire to spend more time with their consultancy, a by-election could appear, and the party machine could gently announce that the obvious candidate was, by complete coincidence, the leader of the party.

But that would stink.

Voters do not generally enjoy being treated as furniture in a party headquarters reshuffle. Nor do local members usually appreciate being told that their constituency has been turned into a political panic room for someone more important. It would look exactly like what it was: a powerful politician being moved away from electoral danger because ordinary voters had become a bit inconvenient.

And Reform would dine out on it for months.

They would not need a clever argument. They would simply say Burnham nearly lost the seat chosen for his big return, then Labour moved him somewhere safer because the voters of Makerfield had become a bit too lively. That sort of attack does not need to be entirely fair. It just needs to fit on a leaflet.

It would also damage the whole Burnham pitch. His appeal rests on authenticity, rootedness and being able to speak for places Labour has stopped understanding. If the first serious test of that argument is followed by a quiet move to a safer constituency, the authenticity starts to look a little shrink-wrapped.

The awkward question asks itself. If he is the man who can reconnect Labour with its old heartlands, why does he need relocating away from one?

That is not fatal. It does not mean he cannot lead. But it changes the feel of the thing. He would not be standing on a mountain. He would be standing on a stool, in a draught, while people argue about who borrowed the spirit level.

His opponents would barely need to sharpen the pencil. Here is the man who says he can win back Britain, and his first act was nearly losing the seat chosen for his return.

That may be unfair, but politics is not a magistrates’ court. It does not need to be fair. It only needs to be repeatable.

Burnham may well win. He may even win well enough to make this look overdone. But if he scrapes in, the awkward fact remains: Labour’s great northern hope will have entered Westminster through a narrow door, having given up the mayoralty behind him, with his own electoral vulnerability following him in like a damp dog that nobody quite knows how to mention.

GDP Catches the Bruise

One of the mistakes in discussing Brexit is that we keep arguing about it as if it were only a trade policy.

Even that argument is now largely settled, except among the true believers, for whom evidence is just something to be driven round on the way to the next slogan. The OBR, most serious economic analysis, and the lived experience of exporters all point in the same direction: putting new barriers between yourself and your nearest major market reduces trade, investment, productivity and therefore tax revenues. That is not a Remainer mood swing. It is basic economic gravity.

Nor is it answered by saying Britain’s GDP has grown since Brexit, which has become the Leavers’ favourite last bastion of defence, usually delivered as if read from a Reform briefing sheet. This is unwise. Reform briefing sheets are not evidence; they are often evidence-shaped objects. The comparison is wrong. Growth after a shock does not prove the shock did no damage. If you take a substantial hit to trade, investment and productivity, later growth does not erase the loss. It may simply mean you are climbing from a lower ledge.

Leavers often try to set sovereignty against GDP growth, as if a rising GDP proves the price was worth paying. But sovereignty has to be measured against the loss caused by the decision, not against the fact that time has continued to pass. The relevant test is not “are we richer than in 2016?” It is “are we richer than we would have been?” On the available evidence, the answer is no.

And that’s before we get to the more awkward point, which is that sovereignty itself is not a magic object. It’s not a ceremonial mace kept in a glass case. It’s the practical ability to act effectively in the real world. If you gain the formal right to make more decisions alone, but lose influence over the systems that shape your trade, research, energy, data, security and regulation, then the gain is not quite as magnificent as the brochure suggested.

And even that still leaves out the deeper injury.

Brexit also weakened some of the less visible systems that sit behind a modern country: research collaboration, medicines supply, clinical trials, university networks, student exchange, policing, data, energy co-operation, professional mobility, regulation and cultural exchange. These don’t always appear neatly in GDP, but they matter enormously.

A delayed research partnership doesn’t turn up on the evening news as a national crisis. Nor does a lost place in a European research consortium. Nor does a clinical trial that quietly goes somewhere else. Nor does a medicines shortage that results in pharmacists ringing round suppliers while patients wait. Nor does the slow loss of influence over the rules governing AI, digital platforms, data and competition.

Yet these are real losses.

Britain rejoining Horizon Europe was welcome, but it rather gave the game away. If being part of European research networks didn’t matter, there’d have been no need to spend years trying to repair the damage. Science is not just a grant cheque. It is trust, habit, shared infrastructure, doctoral networks, clinical expertise and people knowing who to ring.

The same applies to health. Brexit didn’t single-handedly cause medicines shortages, because the world is rarely that obliging to tidy arguments. But it did make Britain more separate from European supply chains and co-ordination at the very moment when resilience mattered. If a patient can’t get an epilepsy drug, the problem is not less real because it fails to sit politely inside a GDP table.

There is an even sharper irony on asylum and small boats.

One of the practical systems Britain lost after Brexit was the Dublin Regulation. It was not a magic answer, and it didn’t allow Britain simply to bundle every Channel arrival back to France before tea. But it did provide a recognised mechanism for returning some asylum seekers to EU countries responsible for their claims. After Brexit, that route largely disappeared, and Britain was left trying to rebuild partial bilateral arrangements from outside the club.

Which is quite something, when one remembers who now complains most loudly about small boats. Some of the very people who demanded Brexit helped remove one of the legal mechanisms Britain had for dealing with asylum claims linked to other European countries. They then looked at the result and blamed everyone except the policy they voted for. This is rather like sawing the handle off a spanner and then complaining that no one can undo the nut.

Regulation is another one.

Brexit was sold as taking back control, but control is not just the legal right to write your own rules. It is the practical power to make other people obey them. Britain can still regulate Big Tech, AI companies and digital platforms. Of course it can. But it now does so as a medium-sized country facing corporations with colossal money, legal departments the size of small villages, and a touching belief that democracy is best when it doesn’t inconvenience them.

Inside the EU, Britain was part of a regulatory bloc big enough to make those companies take notice. Outside it, we still have sovereignty, but rather less leverage. That is a trade-off, not a conspiracy.

You can see the pattern by now. Brexit gave Britain more formal autonomy in some areas, but less weight where weight actually matters. Less scale in regulation. Less embedded influence. More friction. More duplication. More time spent rebuilding partial versions of arrangements we used to be inside.

That does not mean the EU is perfect. It can be slow, bureaucratic, pompous and quite capable of producing a document that looks as if it has been translated from Flemish into committee. But the central point remains: in a world of giant markets, giant companies, giant research programmes, giant security risks and giant energy systems, scale matters.

Brexit’s defenders often say Britain is now free to make its own choices. In one sense, that is true. But freedom to act alone is not the same as power. A man standing by himself in a field is also free. It doesn’t follow that the tractor will negotiate with him.

Yes, Brexit damaged trade. That argument should now be regarded as settled by anyone not treating 2016 as a sacred text. But it also damaged the connective tissue of the country. It made us poorer in the visible sense, and thinner in the institutional sense. Less plugged in. Less influential. Less able to share risk, return responsibility, shape rules or act with weight.

GDP catches the bruise.

It doesn’t capture the whole injury.

From Verandah to Art Space - A Saga

The trouble with trying to improve your house is that it begins as a calm, sensible conversation about outdoor living and ends with you apparently commissioning a small leisure complex on the back elevation.

We started, innocently enough, with the idea of a verandah. Nothing too ridiculous. Just a pleasant raised deck off the back of the house, somewhere to sit with a cup of tea, look across the garden, and pretend one lives in a lifestyle supplement rather than in a country where most outdoor furniture spends nine months of the year looking damp and faintly ashamed under a cover.

The AI was brought in to help, which is always the first mistake. AI design tools are marvellous in the same way that an enthusiastic Labrador is marvellous. Full of energy, occasionally impressive, but fundamentally unable to understand the phrase "do not touch that". You ask it to add a modest verandah and it decides the existing house would be much improved if it were replaced with a boutique corporate retreat. You say, "Keep the roofline exactly as it is," and it hears, "Please invent three new gables, move the windows, and make it look like a wellness centre outside Cirencester."

After much mucking about, two days, repeated corrections, and what I can only describe as digital shouting, it eventually produced three plausible options. Not because it had suddenly developed humility, obviously, but because it had been wrestled into submission like a spaniel with a stolen sausage. Even then, you get the strong impression it would still quite like to put a curtain wall on the west side and turn the kitchen into a reception area.

The first design was elegant, open, and made of wood. And, if I am honest, it is the one most naturally suited to the house itself. The place is not some glass-and-zinc modernist statement perched above a vineyard in southern France. It is a timber-clad house, and a timber verandah feels as though it belongs there rather than having arrived with a marketing brochure and an attitude. It has warmth. It has sympathy with the building. It looks as though the house might have quietly grown it for itself. 

Then there is the steel one. Cleaner, sharper, more modern. Slightly less cuddly, perhaps, but very appealing in its own way. I have a weakness for mix and match styling, and that version scratches the itch rather nicely. There is something satisfying about combining the traditional and the contemporary, provided one stops short of making the place look like a gastro-pub with underfloor finance. The steel design has that crisp, engineered look which suggests somebody measured things properly and owns a pencil that never breaks.

The trouble is that steel has its own little personality disorder. It has to be measured to the millimetre, fabricated off-site, delivered, lifted, offered up and then, in theory, fit. This is all very impressive when it works. When it does not work, it can become a financial reconstruction of the Battle of Passchendaele, but with more swearing and fewer horses.

There is also the problem of third-party contractors. With steel, you are very quickly in the world of drawings, fabrication slots, delivery dates, crane access, bolt holes and people telling you that the beam is exactly right even though it is clearly sitting six inches away from where the actual house is. One tiny error, one hidden irregularity, one wall that turns out not to be quite where the drawing thought it was, and the whole thing stops being a verandah and becomes a meeting.

A wooden structure is more forgiving. Wood comes with a certain amount of mercy built in. If something is slightly out, it can usually be accommodated on site by Colin and his chop saw, there and then, without a conference call, a revised CAD drawing and a man in a branded fleece explaining that the tolerances were within specification. There is something deeply reassuring about a building material that can still be persuaded by a competent bloke standing next to a pile of sawdust.

Then, inevitably, practicality stuck its head round the door wearing muddy boots.

Because the problem with a verandah is that the space underneath it is just sitting there, doing nothing. And once you have noticed that, you cannot unnotice it. It becomes like the awkward gap behind a sofa or the bit of garage wall that could, in theory, take another shelf. It starts whispering. "You could enclose me. You could insulate me. You could put windows in me. You could turn me into an actual room."

And that is how a pleasant outdoor platform slowly becomes an extension.

The fully enclosed version is, without much doubt, the most practical of the early options. It makes proper use of the footprint. It turns space into room rather than shadow. It gives you something usable in all seasons, which in Britain is a serious point in its favour.

Unfortunately, it also looks a bit clunky and expensive. It has that faint air of a project which begins as "a bit of extra space" and ends with structural drawings, building control, mysterious invoices and somebody saying the word "foundations" in a tone that makes your wallet sit down. A beautiful open structure may be less useful, but at least it does not look as though it has been quietly attending evening classes in mission creep.

And then, just to make matters worse, I had another idea. Not a full room in the heavy, obvious sense, and not a completely open verandah either. Something in between. A steel frame, perhaps, with a very open, glass-enclosed lower section. Still light. Still transparent. Still allowing the verandah to look like a verandah, rather than the roof of a small municipal visitor centre. But with the lower part turned into a usable room by glass rather than by masonry and regret.

The irritating thing is that this might actually be the cleverest compromise. It keeps some of the elegance, keeps the sense of openness, and still makes use of the space underneath. It could be done in steel, which would satisfy the crisp modern itch. It could also be done in wood, which would suit the house better, suit Colin better, and reduce the risk of the whole thing becoming an exercise in millimetre-perfect off-site fabrication followed by on-site disappointment.

There is also the awkward little fact that we have a structural problem. Naturally. There is always one, because houses are not built to assist future bright ideas. They are built to remain standing, keep the weather out, and then sit there quietly waiting to make your next improvement more difficult.

In this case, the top lintel of the French doors downstairs is not aligned with the upper storey floor. So the dreamy idea of stepping gracefully from the bedroom onto the verandah immediately runs into the less dreamy reality of needing a step down. And not a charming little threshold, either, but the sort of thing that turns a romantic architectural gesture into a trip hazard with views.

It gets better. The upstairs bedroom also has a minstrel gallery at either end, because of course it does. That means any internal access would require some sort of sloping bridge over one end of the living room, which sounds wonderfully theatrical until you imagine actually building it. At that point it starts to look less like a clever design solution and more like the Bridge of Sighs in a medieval visitor attraction with heating problems.

So the only sensible answer is an external staircase. Not because one set out wanting one, but because the house has quietly folded its arms and said, "No, you may not simply walk through the wall there." That is the joy of working with an existing building. It has opinions. It does not express them early. It waits until you have fallen in love with a drawing.

There is also the awkward matter of who is going to build the thing. I do not mean this in the abstract sense favoured by architectural programmes, where some immaculate couple in spectacles speak vaguely of "the contractor". In our case, the obvious choice is Colin, the same bloke who built the house in the first place, who also happens to be a neighbour and a friend.

That immediately introduces a different sort of logic. One starts thinking not just about aesthetics and cost, but about what would suit his skills, what would sit comfortably with the house as built, and what would not involve months of trying to explain to somebody else why that beam is there, why that floor is not where a drawing thinks it ought to be, and why the roofline is not to be molested under any circumstances.

There is another advantage to Colin, which is that he does jobs for us at mates' rates. This is not quite the same as saying he appears in a flash of light, builds an oak-framed wonder in a fortnight, and then vanishes to polite applause. There is a trade-off. Colin appears for a few days, does useful and competent things, and then disappears for a month on a contract that actually makes him a profit.

This is, broadly speaking, why the house took five years to build. Not that this was a particular problem for us. We were not sitting in a caravan in February, eating beans with a teaspoon and sobbing into a roll of insulation. The arrangement worked because we understood the deal. We accommodate Colin's fleeting appearances in exchange for a reasonable cost, which seems a fair exchange in a world where builders' quotes can now sound like ransom demands with VAT.

So now we have the real problem. Not whether a verandah would be nice. Not whether the house can carry it. Not even whether the garden can survive several weeks of men in boots walking over it while looking thoughtful. The real problem is that each design makes a different kind of sense, but not an equal amount of sense.

The full room version is plainly the most practical. It gives you proper usable space, turns dead ground into something valuable, and makes the strongest grown-up argument. But it also looks a bit heavy, a bit costly, and a bit too much like the start of a project that will acquire extras in the night.

The steel version looks very nice and scratches the mix-and-match itch, but it still carries all the millimetre-perfect fabrication risk already mentioned. Beautiful, yes. Forgiving, no.

The wooden version, by contrast, suits the house, Colin's skills and our wallets. It is the option most likely to be adjusted in real time rather than escalated into a formal incident.

Which means the open wooden verandah is probably still the sensible answer, unless the glass-enclosed version can be made to behave itself visually and financially. That is the catch, although we could leave the enclosure for a year or more. Build the verandah first, live with it, and only then decide whether the space underneath deserves glass, lighting and delusions of cultural importance. It must still look like a verandah with a light room beneath it, not a conservatory that has started going to the gym.

And then, some time later, just when the whole matter has almost become sensible, a genuinely brilliant idea arrives.

If there is going to be any enclosed space at all, why not make use of it properly?

Not as a utility room. Not as one of those vague "garden rooms", which is estate-agent language for a place where wicker furniture goes to die. No. The extra room could be used as a display cabinet for a Triumph Rocket 3.

At which point the entire project suddenly acquires moral clarity.

A Triumph Rocket 3 is not merely a motorcycle. It is a 2.3 litre piece of mechanical theatre. It is what happens when somebody looks at a motorbike and thinks, "Very nice, but could it have the engine capacity of a harbour tug?" It does not belong tucked away behind paint tins, old extension leads and a half-bag of compost. It deserves lighting. It deserves glass. It deserves, if we are honest, a slightly reverential pause when entering the room.

And when I eventually tire of the Rocket 3, which is always possible because novelty is a treacherous little beast, I could replace it with the Triumph GT6. That is assuming, of course, that I ever get round to completing it, which already gives the project a generous archaeological timescale.

The GT6 would make an excellent conversation piece, but not merely as a stationary exhibit. I would still intend to drive it, obviously. The problem is that by the time it is finished, my knees may have issued a formal notice of retirement from low-slung sports cars. I am intending to fit a Webasto sunroof, so there is at least a theoretical solution. Attach a hoist to the roof of the extension room, lower me through the open roof into the cockpit, and off I go, heroically, until my bladder screeches and I have to return to the glass case and be winched out again.

That may sound absurd, but only because it is absurd. Still, it has a certain elegance. The car gets displayed. I get to drive it. Visitors get a talking point. And nobody has to watch me trying to fold a retired human frame into a Triumph GT6 using only hope, momentum and mild profanity.

So the glass-enclosed version, previously just the latest dangerous thought, suddenly becomes visionary. Yes, it may give away a little of the airy elegance of a purely open verandah. But it gives you a room, and a room gives you options. In fact, call it an Art Space and the whole thing immediately sounds less like a domestic extension and more like a cultural intervention, complete with red rope cordon, artistic lighting, and visitors being invited to contemplate the emotional relationship between horsepower and poor impulse control.

First an illuminated Triumph Rocket 3 display space visible from the patio and the house, then perhaps a GT6 in its dignified afterlife as sculpture between outings. I could probably charge admission, although I suspect the gift shop would mainly consist of old gaskets, used sanding discs and whatever GT6 part I bought twice by mistake. That is no longer mere practicality. That is culture, with a faint smell of petrol.

This is how domestic improvement gets out of hand. You begin by wanting somewhere nice to sit in the evening. You end up weighing timber against steel, friendship against budget, elegance against usable floor area, and whether your future motoring life requires a roof-mounted hoist next to a red rope cordon.

I should probably start by asking Colin what timber costs this week. Or investigate a turntable....

When Terrorism Becomes an Upgrade Package

There is something wonderfully revealing about the way the word terrorism behaves in British public life.

When Palestine Action activists broke into a defence factory, caused serious damage, and one of them was later convicted of GBH without intent, the word suddenly became very available. It was taken down from the legal shelf, dusted off, and applied with great solemnity. This was not just criminal damage and a serious assault conviction, we were told. It had a political purpose. It was ideological. It had a terrorist connection.

And here is the odd bit. They were not charged with terrorism. They were not convicted by a jury of terrorism. They were convicted of ordinary criminal offences, and then the terrorism label arrived at sentencing, after the verdict, like an especially sinister after-dinner mint.

That may be what the law allows. In fact, that is rather the point. Sometimes the problem is not that someone has broken the law, but that the law has been written with enough elastic in it to fit whatever the state finds convenient.

And that is chilling.

There is a statutory threshold, of course. This is not a judge wandering into court with a hat full of adjectives. But it is still broad, fact-sensitive, and applied after conviction by the sentencing judge. One judge may call it terrorism-connected offending. Another may call it serious politically motivated criminal damage and violence.

That is not arbitrary in the pub sense. It is not someone tossing a coin. It is worse than that: a huge label depending on one judge’s view after the jury has gone home.

Because when the state thought Irish republican or loyalist violence was terrorism, it did not usually convict people of ordinary offences and then discover the terrorism bit at sentencing. The terrorism machinery was there from the beginning: arrest powers, proscribed organisations, explosives offences, membership allegations, scheduled offences, Diplock courts, the whole grim cupboard. Whatever one thinks of that machinery, it was not slipped in afterwards like a surprise service charge.

So apply the same eye to Belfast. Masked mobs. Homes thought to house migrants. Minority-owned businesses. Cars and buses burned out. Police attacked. Local families terrified in their own streets.

That is not community concern. It is not ordinary people pushed too far. To my untrained eye, it looks rather a lot like terror. If terrorism law can reach a sledgehammer in a factory, it can surely notice a petrol bomb near someone’s home.

And yet, oddly enough, people who were not charged with terrorism can acquire the label at sentencing, while people whose alleged conduct looks much closer to ordinary ideas of terrorism are discussed as rioters, thugs, protesters, or angry locals.

The language does a little curtsy depending on who is standing in the dock.

Of course terrorism law should be used carefully. That is precisely the point. The proper answer is not to prosecute every rioter as a terrorist, which would be absurd, and absurdity already has quite a busy schedule. The proper answer is to restrain the law so that terrorism means what ordinary people think it means: serious violence, threats to life, organised intimidation, and attempts to terrorise a population or section of it.

But if the state insists on using a definition wide enough to cover politically motivated property damage and serious violence, then it cannot pretend not to see politically motivated arson, mob violence and racial intimidation when they arrive wearing a different badge.

And if the state wants to attach that label to someone, it should have to prove it properly. Not by slipping it in at sentencing after a jury has convicted on ordinary criminal offences, but by charging it, arguing it, and having it tested before a jury.

An appeal may yet test this. I hope it does.

Because if the most serious word in criminal law can arrive after the verdict, by way of a sentencing exercise, then it is no longer quite a verdict. It is an upgrade package.

The Crocodile and the Nursery Paddling Pool

 Starmer’s proposed under-16 social media ban has produced the usual festival of certainty.

On one side are people shouting dictatorship, as if preventing children from being fed into TikTok’s behavioural mincer is the first step towards a police state. On the other side are the more respectable critics, including the NSPCC, who say the real answer is not a ban but making platforms safe by design.

And that sounds admirable. Of course it does. Safe by design is what everyone wants. Nobody sensible wants children wandering through algorithmic slot machines, stranger contact, cyberbullying, eating disorder content, self-harm material and whatever fresh little sewer the attention economy has decided to monetise this week.

The trouble is that safe by design may also be a bit like asking a crocodile to redesign the nursery paddling pool. You do not throw out the imperfect while waiting for the perfect, especially when the perfect is currently being promised by the same companies that built the problem.

The NSPCC’s argument is not stupid. In fact, it is the right long-term destination. Platforms should be made safer. Algorithms should be regulated. Addictive features should be curbed. Adults contacting children should be easier to detect and stop. Companies should carry the burden, not parents sitting at the kitchen table trying to outwit a multinational corporation between packed lunches and the school run.

But safe by design assumes the platforms can be made safe quickly, honestly and reliably. That is quite a large assumption to place on businesses whose entire model is to keep people looking, scrolling, reacting and coming back for another little dopamine biscuit.

This is where the politics gets rather revealing. The protect our women and children crowd do have a habit of falling over their own slogans.

When immigration, asylum or street crime is being discussed, the precautionary principle is suddenly sacred. One unknown adult is too many. One risk is too many. One failure by the state is unforgivable. They do not ask whether protection is too statist, too interventionist, or a slippery slope towards tyranny. Protection, at that point, is apparently the first duty of government.

But put the risk inside a phone, attach it to a private company, and suddenly the same people discover a touching new enthusiasm for parental responsibility, limited government and thirteen-year-olds managing their own exposure to predators, algorithms and strangers on Snapchat.

It is a curious sort of child protection that becomes passionate only when it can be aimed at foreigners.

That does not make Starmer’s proposal perfect. Far from it. Age verification has obvious dangers. Privacy matters. Mission creep matters. A general digital checkpoint for the internet would be a rotten idea, and anyone who waves that concern away as paranoia has not been paying attention to how governments and corporations behave once a useful little lever has been installed.

But a ban being crude does not automatically make it wrong. We do not let children into betting shops because Ladbrokes has promised a gentler carpet. We do not let children buy cigarettes because the packet has a warning on it. We do not say pubs should simply be redesigned so that thirteen-year-olds can drink in a safer, more inclusive and stakeholder-approved way.

At some point society draws a line and says: below this age, you do not get the customer.

That is not dictatorship. It is the ordinary business of protecting children from markets they are not equipped to navigate. And social media is very much a market, however much it dresses itself up as connection, community and little hearts floating about under someone’s breakfast.

Nor is the phrase VPN quite the devastating point some people seem to think it is. Yes, some children will evade it. Some children get alcohol. Some children smoke. Some children carry knives. We do not therefore abolish alcohol laws, cigarette laws or knife laws because enforcement is imperfect.

The point of age restrictions is not perfection. It is changing the default. It shifts responsibility away from millions of individual parents fighting a private war against addictive design, and puts it where it belongs: on the companies making money from children’s attention.

There is a valid civil liberties objection here, but it needs to be made properly. If this becomes a back-door digital ID system for every adult using the internet, it should be opposed. If it creates a state database of browsing habits, it should be opposed. If it becomes a convenient mechanism for deciding which political material adults are allowed to see, it should be opposed loudly and without apology.

But protecting children online does not automatically mean tyranny. That is the leap being made, and it is doing a lot of work.

The Planning Brief Nobody Read

There is something very modern about the way people now react to planning proposals.

Nobody reads them. Or at least not before commenting.

A headline appears announcing 1,550 homes near Woolavington and within minutes social media fills with declarations that there will be “no infrastructure”, “no schools”, “no roads”, “no doctors”, despite the awkward fact that several of those things are explicitly mentioned in the planning brief people have not opened.

We seem to have developed a national habit of reacting first and informing ourselves later. Somewhere in Britain, a planning officer has spent three years assembling environmental reports, traffic studies, drainage assessments, biodiversity calculations, school projections and transport modelling, only for Facebook to collectively conclude, after reading half a headline, that it is all a conspiracy by Persimmon and the Illuminati.

Now, to be fair, some scepticism is entirely justified. Britain has a long history of building housing estates first and only later discovering the local infrastructure is under strain. People have learned not to trust glossy artist impressions full of smiling couples wandering past ornamental grasses carrying artisan bread while not a single parked Vauxhall Astra is visible anywhere.

And the distrust is not irrational. We have all seen developments where the promised surgery never quite materialises, the roads remain clogged, and the local GP appointment becomes something requiring NATO-level planning.

But there is still a difference between scepticism and simply making things up.

The Woolavington plans already include a primary school, commercial space, sports facilities, open space and transport links tied to the wider Gravity development. Healthcare provision is also referenced within the broader Gravity framework, although whether it proves sufficient is a perfectly fair question.

That last bit is the important distinction.

The adult argument is whether the infrastructure will genuinely keep pace with the scale of growth. Whether roads, healthcare and public services will be adequate. Whether the phasing is realistic. Whether the jobs materialise. Those are sensible concerns.

But that is not the same as claiming there are “no plans”.

There is another irony buried in all this too. Nationally, pupil numbers are actually beginning to decline in some areas, particularly at primary level. Yet people discuss school provision as though Britain is permanently short of classroom space everywhere at all times. The real issue is often not absolute numbers, but whether infrastructure ends up in the right place at the right moment.

And beneath all of it sits the larger contradiction Britain never quite wants to face.

We say we want investment outside London. We say we want modern manufacturing, battery factories, skilled jobs and economic growth. We say younger people cannot afford homes. But every actual proposal to build houses near new employment immediately triggers demands that everything should instead be built in a vague alternative location known only as “somewhere else”.

Because it is never enough simply to say “build in towns”. Which towns? Which land? Near whose house? At what density? Every real proposal eventually becomes unpopular with the people living nearest to it.

There is also a slightly romantic idea that villages should somehow remain frozen forever in the exact form people first encountered them. But most English villages changed repeatedly over centuries. Farming changed them. Railways changed them. Industry changed them. Postwar housing changed them. Many places now considered picturesque and traditional were themselves once controversial expansions.

What has really changed is not that places grow. It is that public trust in institutions managing growth competently has collapsed.

Frankly, sometimes with good reason.

But if we have reached the point where people will not even skim the planning brief before declaring civilisation finished, then we are no longer really debating development. We are participating in a national reflex panic conducted entirely through angry emojis and shared headlines.

Meanwhile, many of the same people opposing every new housing proposal are also wondering why their adult children cannot afford to live anywhere near them.

Apparently the next generation is expected to arrive through some sort of housing immaculate conception.

Labour’s Ladder Problem

Labour is often accused of abandoning the working class, but part of the truth is more awkward. Labour helped change the working class.

For generations, the promise was not that the miner’s son must become a miner, the docker’s daughter must marry a docker, and the factory worker’s children must file obediently into the same factory. The promise was that they might have choices their parents never had.

Better schools. Grants. Colleges. Universities. Council housing. The NHS. Employment rights. Public-sector careers. Decent pensions. The slow, imperfect but real widening of opportunity.

And then, when some of it worked, Labour got blamed for no longer representing the old world it had helped people escape.

There is something faintly absurd about that. You spend decades trying to give working-class children a ladder, then get denounced because some of them climbed it. The pit closed, the grammar school opened up, the daughter became a nurse, the grandson works in IT, buys a small house with a horrifying mortgage, and then complains that Labour no longer understands people like him.

But Labour did not change in isolation. It came increasingly to reflect some of the people it had helped create: educated, socially mobile, public-sector, professional, graduate, managerial, mortgaged and fluent in the language of policy.

Many of them still clung to Labour, not because they were pretending to be miners or factory workers, but because Labour was part of the family story. It was the party of the school, the grant, the NHS, the council house, the union card, the first secure job, and the belief that your children might not have to live exactly as you had lived.

Of course, the reverse also happened. Some of the people Labour helped did not cling to Labour at all. They moved up, bought houses, accumulated a bit of wealth, and quietly discovered that their politics had acquired a driveway. The party that had helped their parents get security now looked less attractive once they had something to protect, something to pass on, and a suspicion that taxes were aimed specifically at their new kitchen extension.

None of this is a conspiracy. It is what happens when a movement built around aspiration sees some of that aspiration succeed.

It is a bit like accusing a car maker of betraying its customers because it no longer builds a 1970s Mini. The whole point of industry is that products evolve because customers, roads, safety rules, expectations and technology change. People wanted better brakes, less rust, safer structures, heaters that did more than breathe faintly on the windscreen, and engines that did not treat motorways as a personal insult.

So car makers stopped building the old Mini in its original form. Not because they hated Mini buyers, but because the world had changed and the buyers had changed.

Labour’s mistake was not modernising the model. Its mistake was sometimes forgetting the people who still needed basic, reliable transport and could not afford the showroom version.

Because not everyone climbed the ladder. Some did. Some moved sideways. Some stayed exactly where they were, in towns where the industry went and the decent jobs went with it. Those people did not need nostalgia. They needed decent wages, secure housing, reliable transport, affordable energy, working public services and a bit of dignity at work.

That leaves room for a new working-class politics. But it would have to be genuinely pro-worker, not just anti-migrant, anti-London or anti-everything.

Otherwise it is just a protest vote pretending to be a programme.

When a Swimming Pool Becomes a Shrine

David Hockney has died, aged 88, and the tributes have arrived with the usual solemn procession of reverence, adjectives and cultural incense. He is being described as one of the great British artists, a national treasure, a genius, an original, and all the other phrases that get brought out when a famous painter dies and everyone suddenly remembers they once stood thoughtfully in front of a swimming pool.

David Hockney was plainly a talented artist, according to many people whose opinions on art are taken seriously, sometimes even by themselves. I should probably say that early, before anyone starts clutching the pearls and accusing me of wanting to burn the Royal Academy to the ground, which I don’t, if only because the traffic round Piccadilly is bad enough already.

He could draw. He could compose. He had a recognisable eye. That much seems fair. But the jump from there to all the incense is where I start to lose patience.

Because his paintings leave me cold.

That is not quite the same as disliking them. Dislike would suggest an energy they rarely provoke in me. I can see the confidence. I can see the design. I can see the bright colours, the Californian light, the clean lines, the spectacles, and the whole carefully arranged theatre of tasteful admiration. What I can’t honestly say is that I see much cleverness. Perhaps it’s there. Plenty of serious people insist that it is. But to me the paintings often look flat in both senses: visually flat, and emotionally flat.

And that matters. Not every great painting has to make you sob gently into the exhibition guide. Some art works through wit, structure, invention or intelligence. But if the emotional temperature is permanently low, then the claim for greatness has to work rather harder. A painting can be cool. It cannot merely be chilly and expensive.

His paintings often seem two-dimensional to me. And yes, before the Hockney defence league arrives in matching spectacles, I realise that may be the point. He was often deliberately flattening space, pushing colour and pattern forward, refusing the old trick of making a canvas behave like a window.

Fair enough. Flatness can be powerful. Matisse knew that. Japanese prints knew that. Byzantine painters knew it too, although in their case the flatness was bound up with theology, iconography and the fact that mathematical perspective had not yet become the standard Western party trick. Long before anyone in a catalogue used the word “interrogate” near a chair, artists had worked out that a picture did not always have to pretend to be a window.

But deliberate flatness does not automatically make the result profound. Sometimes a painting rejects depth and gains intensity. Sometimes it rejects depth and merely becomes flat. With Hockney, too often for me, the visual flatness becomes emotional flatness. I can see the intention. I can see the confidence. I can see the market value. I just don’t feel the charge.

Hockney often seems to me like an artist of surfaces. Bright surfaces. Recognisable surfaces. Sometimes stylish surfaces. But surfaces all the same. Swimming pools, glass walls, furniture, bodies, patterned rooms, bright landscapes, and people carefully placed near one another without ever seeming quite joined.

To me, too much of it has the feel of art you’d find in an Omaze house. Expensive, cheerful, carefully chosen, not offensive to anyone, and exactly the sort of thing that tells you the kitchen has an island, the windows are enormous, and nobody has ever had a difficult emotion within planning permission. That may be his strength. It may also be the limitation.

The problem is that fame is not the same as greatness. That is the bit the art world is always oddly reluctant to admit, possibly because too many people in expensive spectacles have spent too much money pretending otherwise.

An artist can become famous because the work is good. He can then become more famous because the fame itself becomes useful. Museums need names. Dealers need confidence. Collectors need reassurance. Critics need a position. Auction houses need drama. Before long, everyone has a shared financial and cultural interest in agreeing that the famous thing is not merely famous, but important.

That may be true. Sometimes it is. But it is not proved by the size of the room, the thickness of the catalogue, or the number of people in black polo necks nodding as if they’ve just detected a major shift in human consciousness near a blue rectangle.

Charles Saatchi more or less demonstrated the mechanism with Damien Hirst. He bought early, displayed the work, and the fact that Saatchi had bought it became part of the reason everyone else decided it mattered. That is how the machine works. Patron buys early, patron’s prestige inflates reputation, reputation inflates price, and the patron can exit profitably.

This is the bit the art world never likes to discuss. The market does not merely discover value. It can manufacture value, certify the value it has manufactured, then sell the certificate. In Hirst’s case, it sometimes looked less like art history and more like a confidence trick with formaldehyde, a glass tank and a small army of people pretending the smell was intellectual difficulty.

Now, Hockney is not Hirst. That should be said as well, before someone tries to report me to the Yorkshire Tourist Board. Hockney was a real painter with a long career, a recognisable eye and actual skill. But the same machinery still matters. Once an artist becomes an institution, the institution begins defending itself. The galleries, museums, collectors, critics and auction houses are no longer simply responding to the work. They are responding to the reputation, and to their own investment in having been right about it.

In the modern art world, the brand matters enormously, and Hockney’s art was certainly recognisable as a brand. The pools, the colours, the flatness, the spectacles, the Yorkshire landscapes, the brisk little iPad trees - you knew what you were looking at before anyone told you. That is a real achievement. But recognisability is not the same as greatness. It may just mean the product has excellent packaging.

The history of art is littered with artists who were celebrated in their own day and then faded into the respectable cupboard of period taste. It is also full of artists who were ignored, mocked or barely known, only to become central later. Van Gogh did not need a Sotheby’s dinner to become Van Gogh. Vermeer had to be rediscovered. Blake spent much of his life regarded as a crank. Posterity can be slow, but it has a useful habit of not caring who was fashionable at lunch.

That is the bit the art world prefers not to dwell on. History and time decide whether an artist is important, not current adulation. Not private views. Not auction records. Not critics performing reverence in public. Not collectors reassuring one another that the thing they bought for the price of a small hospital is not merely expensive, but significant.

Had Hockney been alive in Vasari’s time, would he have earned one of the grand central chapters of The Lives of the Artists? I doubt it. He might have got a polite mention in a footnote about decorative brightness and a successful line in swimming pools, but I cannot see Vasari clearing space between Leonardo and Michelangelo for a man whose greatest gift may have been making flatness expensive.

Current fame tells us that an artist mattered to the present. It does not prove they will matter to the future. The future, annoyingly for dealers, cannot be invited to dinner and softened up with champagne.

That is what makes Hockney interesting. Not the question of whether he had ability. He did. The question is how much of the enormous Hockney industry will still look necessary when the personality, the interviews, the prices, the national-treasure glow and the institutional scaffolding have fallen away.

My suspicion is that some of it will last, because posterity usually keeps a few samples from each large reputation, if only to justify the storage costs. The best portraits, perhaps. Some of the California work. The sharp, clean, emotionally chilly paintings where sun, water, glass and money somehow make loneliness look very well designed.

But a lot of the rest may shrink. The late iPad works may come to look less like profound reinventions of seeing and more like evidence that an old artist was still curious and astonishingly productive, which is admirable, but not automatically immortal. The Yorkshire landscapes may remain loved, but love is not the same as importance. Plenty of things are loved. So are Labradors and crumble.

The art world hates this sort of doubt because doubt is bad for valuation. Once a painting is worth tens of millions, scepticism becomes socially awkward. Nobody wants to be the chap at the private view saying, “Yes, but is it actually that good?” That’s how you stop being invited to rooms where the wine is free but somehow still morally expensive.

Brian Sewell, for all his faults, was useful because he understood the racket. He could be unfair, snobbish and gloriously overcooked, but he did not confuse applause with judgement. He knew that the art world is not a pure temple of beauty. It is also a market, a club, a status machine, a language factory and, occasionally, a very efficient laundry for rich people’s certainty.

So perhaps the sensible position on Hockney is neither worship nor dismissal. He was famous. He mattered, at least to his time. Some of the work may last. But the full halo should be treated with caution. Fame is not proof. Price is not proof. Public affection is not proof. They are evidence that a culture has decided to gather round an artist and keep warm.

Whether future generations still see fire there is another question. What do I know?

Britain’s War Against Practical Innovation

You step outside to reattach a plug to a cable that has been violently tugged loose by a passing ride-on mower, thinking, naively, that this is a five minute task. Strip wires. Tighten screws. Tea afterwards. Simple.

But no.

The original plug, before the mower performed its little act of agricultural sabotage, was at least honest about its age. It was flathead throughout. Case screw, terminal screws, the lot. A proper old plug. Probably made when men still wore ties to mend lawnmowers.

The trouble was that no single screwdriver could actually deal with it. The terminal screws needed one tiny flathead screwdriver, while the main clamshell screw required a much larger one. So even this supposedly simple old plug still demanded two entirely different screwdrivers, as though the designer feared the terrible consequences of standardisation.

Naturally, because every screw on Earth is now crosshead these days, every decent flat blade screwdriver in the house vanished sometime around 2014. What remained was one tiny electrician's screwdriver that could just about loosen the E, N and L terminal screws, but which merely bounced out of the large clamshell screw like a cocktail stick attempting heavy engineering.

So you rummaged through the drawer and found a replacement plug.

This one was worse, because it was modern enough to be awkward but not modern enough to be helpful. The clamshell screw was crosshead. The terminal screws were flathead. A hybrid design apparently created to ensure no single screwdriver could ever complete the job. One assumes there was concern about unemployment in the screwdriver sector.

The really depressing thing was that this wasn't even a genuinely modern plug. It was technically a "new" replacement plug bought sometime in the 1980s and then left unused in the drawer for forty years, quietly ageing alongside dead AAA batteries, curtain hooks, mystery fuses and keys to doors demolished during the Thatcher years.

Eventually you located the Lidl precision bit set. It unfolded like a surgical kit for robot neurosurgery. There were approximately 700 bits in there, covering every screw standard ever devised by mankind, including several apparently intended for Soviet submarines and Japanese cassette players from 1978.

Yet getting the bits out of the holder required more force than undoing the actual plug.

Then came the screw drop.

No human being has ever successfully fitted a 13A plug without dropping at least one screw into another dimension. The moment it leaves your fingers it achieves escape velocity and disappears into gravel, grass, floorboards or the quantum realm. You spend ten minutes crawling around muttering "it was just here" while holding the cable between your knees like an amateur bomb disposal technician.

All this because fitting a plug fundamentally requires three hands. One to hold the cable. One to hold the plug body. One to tighten the screw while simultaneously preventing the copper strands from exploding sideways like a burst wire brush.

Which raises the obvious question.

Why, in the name of all that is holy, has nobody invented a proper screwless 13A plug?

Well, they did.

Back in the 1980s there was a British-made thing called the TL screwless plug. Spring clamp terminals. Slide-off cover. Hand tightened cable grip. No screwdrivers required. It even had a little red locking disc you turned with a coin. Somebody briefly looked at the normal British plug fitting experience and concluded that crawling around patios searching for microscopic brass screws was perhaps not the apex of civilisation.

I'd never heard of them either.

Which is probably the whole problem with plugs. Once one is fitted, it disappears behind a sofa or under a desk for twenty years until somebody trips over the flex, drags it with a mower or vacuums it into oblivion. At which point nobody thinks, "I must seek out that advanced screwless marvel of British electrical engineering." You simply rummage through the drawer containing electrical artefacts from three governments ago and continue the national tradition of screwdriver based misery.

The really clever move would have been persuading appliance manufacturers to fit TL plugs as standard in the first place. Then millions of people would have quietly discovered that rewiring a plug no longer required the dexterity of a brain surgeon and a toolbox resembling RAF ground equipment.

But obviously nobody did that.

Presumably the TL plug added three pence to the manufacturing cost of a kettle, whereupon some procurement department declared the entire concept economically impossible and condemned future generations to crawling around patios looking for brass screws the size of fruit flies.

Then again, Britain has always had a talent for strangling good engineering ideas in exchange for immediate savings of roughly four pence.

So the screw terminal plug survived.

Partly because it genuinely is a brilliant design. The British 13A plug is probably the safest in the world. Solid pins. Proper earthing. Individually fused. Sensibly shuttered sockets. Somewhere buried beneath the irritation is a beautifully engineered device.

But also because Britain has a strange relationship with engineering progress. We will happily trust screwless Wago connectors hidden inside walls carrying mains current for decades, yet apparently cannot emotionally cope with a plug that doesn't require three screwdrivers and a nervous breakdown.

We built radar and Concorde, yet attaching three wires to a plug still resembles maintaining military communications during the retreat from Burma.

And, naturally, just as you've finally finished, you discover you've forgotten to put the cable grip on first and have to dismantle the whole bloody thing again.