I have developed a logic chain that anyone can follow.
A billionaire living in Thailand does not pour millions into British politics because he is worried about waiting times at Scunthorpe Jobcentre or the condition of a road in Grimsby.
Extremely wealthy people generally fund political movements aligned with their economic interests.
Of course, some billionaires are genuine philanthropists. So the obvious question is:
- what is Christopher Harborne’s public track record?
The visible pattern is overwhelmingly:
- Reform and Brexit funding - Conservative donations - support for deregulation - crypto and investment interests
What is far less visible publicly is:
- major anti-poverty philanthropy - large charitable foundations - public health campaigns - educational philanthropy - major community investment projects
That does not prove private philanthropy does not exist. But the public evidence points far more strongly toward political and economic influence than social philanthropy.
That usually means support for:
- lower taxes on wealth and capital - weaker regulation - smaller government - reduced welfare spending - privatisation - weaker labour protections
Opposition to Green policies fits naturally into this because serious decarbonisation usually requires:
- state intervention - public investment - infrastructure change - constraints on some industries
So anti-Green politics becomes politically useful:
- frame net zero as elite interference - turn climate policy into a culture war - weaken trust in institutions and expertise - protect existing economic interests
So if such a movement gains power, the logical direction is:
- public services cut in the name of efficiency - welfare reduced in the name of incentives - deregulation in the name of growth - more economic risk pushed onto ordinary individuals
The consequence is predictable:
- economic gains flow disproportionately upward - inequality widens - public services deteriorate - pressure increases on local economies and infrastructure
And when economic frustration grows, attention must be diverted elsewhere:
- migrants - small boats - “wokeism” - Europe - net zero - culture wars
Because if voters examine the actual mechanics for too long, they may notice something awkward:
- they are being persuaded to dismantle their own protections by people wealthy enough never to need them.
The fortunes made during the Brexit chaos should have been the warning sign. Reform increasingly looks like the continuation of the same project.
I have developed a theory that many pedestrian crossing buttons are not actually connected to anything meaningful at all, beyond perhaps a small yellow light and the fading optimism of the British public.
Take the temporary roadworks crossings. You march up to them with purpose, jab the button and are rewarded instantly by a glowing WAIT sign, which I increasingly suspect is the electrical equivalent of a nurse saying, “The doctor will be with you shortly,” before disappearing for three hours.
The lights then continue exactly as they were going to anyway.
You stand there watching completely empty roads while nothing whatsoever happens. Then somebody else arrives and presses the button too, as though your earlier attempt perhaps lacked authority. Soon there are four of you taking turns to prod the thing like Victorian villagers attempting to contact the dead through a table in a village hall.
I joined in myself yesterday, despite already suspecting the whole apparatus was a fraud. That is how powerful the conditioning is. The button lights up, so you feel you have achieved something. British people are especially susceptible to this sort of thing because we were raised on queues, forms and implied authority. If a metal box on a pole tells us to WAIT, we obey automatically. Half the population would stand politely beside a sign saying “Press button to continue being ignored”.
What convinces me the whole thing is psychological is that nobody merely presses the button once. They hammer at it repeatedly with growing indignation, as though the crossing is a recalcitrant photocopier from 1987. You even see people arriving after the button has clearly already been pressed and immediately pressing it again, just to make certain the request has really gone through to Central Crossing Command.
In fairness, some crossings genuinely are demand-responsive, particularly late at night when pressing the button can produce an almost magical instant green man. Which only deepens the confusion because it keeps alive the national belief that all the others are also listening.
I suspect many temporary systems are simply running fixed timing sequences designed to optimise traffic flow while giving pedestrians the comforting illusion of participation. It is a bit like democracy, really. You are invited to press the button, your request is acknowledged with reassuring lights and noises, and then the system carries on doing exactly what it intended to do from the outset.
It is rather like those “close door” buttons in lifts which, according to persistent rumours, are often disconnected entirely. Millions of people solemnly pressing a button whose real function may simply be to occupy the human urge to interfere.
You see the same philosophy elsewhere. Self-service checkouts requiring staff authorisation to buy a cucumber. QR code menus in pubs that managed perfectly well with laminated paper for half a century. “Smart” motorways apparently making decisions by consulting damp tea leaves.
The pedestrian crossing button has clearly joined this great British tradition. A ceremonial interface. Something to keep the public occupied while the machinery gets on with its own priorities.
Still, we all keep pressing them.
Partly out of hope, partly superstition, and partly because if you do not press it, someone arriving thirty seconds later will immediately march up, stab the button theatrically with one finger, and look at you as though you are the sort of idiot who had been standing there all day without thinking of it.
The votes are in, the tally has been made and the media frenzy has started.
Radio schedules abandoned. Giant touchscreen graphics wheeled into studios like NATO command systems. Earnest correspondents standing outside leisure centres in Doncaster at 2am speaking in hushed tones because a district council in Lincolnshire has changed political control by four seats.
Britain increasingly covers local elections as though civilisation itself is hanging by a thread attached to a returning officer’s clipboard. And yet, when the excitement subsides and the caffeine wears off, what these elections actually reveal is something both simpler and more complicated than the headlines suggest.
Brexit never really ended. It merely changed clothes.
You can see it immediately when you place the map of Reform gains beside the old Brexit map. The overlap is almost comically obvious. It is practically tracing paper.
The strongest Reform areas are, broadly speaking, the old Leave strongholds. Lincolnshire. Essex. Hartlepool. The old industrial north-east. Bits of the Midlands. Coastal towns where the high street consists mainly of vape shops, empty banks and a charity shop specialising in mobility aids. The same places that were told Brexit would bring renewal, investment and sovereignty now appear to have concluded that, since none of that happened, the answer must be an even more concentrated form of Brexit.
It is a bit like somebody whose home-made wine exploded in the airing cupboard deciding the solution is to buy a larger demijohn.
And the strange thing is that everybody involved seems desperate not to mention this obvious continuity. Reform presents itself as something thrillingly insurgent and fresh. Labour talks as though this is all merely about immigration messaging. The Conservatives pretend voters have simply misunderstood how brilliantly Brexit went. The BBC solemnly analyses every council by-election as though decoding Bronze Age pottery fragments.
But the political geography has barely changed. The Brexit coalition was always unstable. Some wanted lower immigration, some deregulation, some simply wanted to kick Westminster in the shins after decades of feeling ignored and economically stranded. Europe became the bucket into which every national frustration was emptied.
That is why Brexit survived its own disappointments. It was never just about Europe in the first place. Europe was simply the visible target onto which wider frustrations were attached. Now much of that emotional infrastructure has transferred directly to Reform.
The irony is that many of these areas are still suffering from precisely the structural problems Brexit was supposed to solve. Weak local economies. Poor transport. Hollowed-out town centres. Lack of skilled employment. None of which were caused by Brussels bureaucrats hiding in Belgian basements regulating bananas.
And yet the emotional logic remains intact because Brexit was psychologically satisfying even where it was economically damaging. It offered clarity, villains and rebellion after decades of managerial politics in which every answer involved a consultation document and a PDF nobody read.
What makes local elections particularly volatile is that, deep down, most people suspect the actual practical differences between councils are fairly marginal anyway. Labour councils, Conservative councils, Liberal Democrat councils - they are all trapped inside much the same financial straitjacket.
So turnout collapses because people conclude, often reasonably, that changing the colour of the rosette does not magically refill the potholes or reduce the council tax. Local government increasingly resembles the management of decline with different logos.
That is why protest parties thrive there. A local election is one of the few opportunities voters have to kick the political system in the shins without accidentally ending up with Liz Truss moving into Number 10 again.
A general election feels different because it carries consequences. People may happily vote Reform for district council dog-waste policy, then become rather more cautious when choosing who controls interest rates, defence policy and whether the bond markets start sweating visibly.
And this is where the media frenzy becomes actively distorting.
Only parts of England even voted, and disproportionately the sort of places where Reform was always likely to do well anyway. Yet within minutes of the results arriving, parts of the media began speaking as though Britain had collectively packed a suitcase for Clacton and was preparing Nigel Farage for coronation.
Modern political journalism increasingly survives on emotional escalation. A nuanced explanation of fragmented local voting patterns under low-turnout conditions does not produce excitement. “Political earthquake” does. Politics is now covered less like governance and more like a mixture of sport, weather forecasting and psychological crisis.
The irony is that this style of coverage may itself help fuel protest politics. If voters are constantly told the system is collapsing, corrupt, broken and illegitimate, eventually some of them will decide they may as well vote for whoever promises to kick the furniture over.
Meanwhile, actual local government remains stubbornly mundane underneath all the hysteria. Somewhere in a village hall, a newly elected Reform councillor whose previous political experience consists mainly of shouting at a parking meter is about to discover that local government chiefly involves sewage contracts, social care budgets and deciding whether the Christmas lights can be repaired for under eighty quid.
And perhaps that is no bad thing. Britain may be about to receive a second practical demonstration that slogans are considerably easier than governing. Brexit already collided with reality once the campaign buses had gone home and the customs paperwork arrived. If Reform councils now spend four years discovering that potholes do not fear patriotism and social care cannot be repaired with Facebook comments, the country might finally absorb a useful lesson before the next general election.
Reality, as ever, waits patiently in the background with a clipboard.
I have been engaged on quite a bit of motorhome maintenance over the last few weeks; however, there are moments in life when one is forced to confront the limits of human understanding. Black holes. Quantum mechanics. The enduring appeal of certain politicians. And now, I must add, the rubber seal on a 24 year old motorhome door.
The presenting problem was banal enough. The bottom section of the habitation door seal had gone soft, ragged and faintly disreputable, like an ageing civil servant who had stopped bothering with meetings. Sensible action followed. Remove seal. Cut out offending section. Refit remainder. Accept a small gap at the bottom as the price of progress. Move on with one’s life.
Except that is not what happened.
What happened was that, having removed a measurable length of rubber, there remained… enough rubber. Not approximately enough. Not nearly enough. Enough. The seal went back in, traced the entire perimeter of the door, and met itself at the end with the quiet, smug competence of a thing that has always known it would.
No gap. No compromise. No apology.
At this point, one must choose between two explanations. The first is that rubber, over time, develops elastic properties that are not merely physical but philosophical. It expands when unobserved, contracts when measured, and rearranges itself to undermine human confidence. The second is that the entire motorhome industry has, for decades, been engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the fact that seals are dimensionally optional.
Both are plausible.
What we can say with confidence is that the seal, when installed, had been under tension. Corners stretched. Edges compressed. Twenty four years of door closures had persuaded it into a shape that bore only a passing resemblance to its natural state. Freed from its duties, it relaxed, lengthened, and returned with a faint air of reproach, as if to say that it had always been this size and any suggestion to the contrary was user error.
This is, in its way, a quiet rebuke to modern engineering. We like tolerances. We like specifications. We like the comforting fiction that if one removes 50 millimetres of material, one will end up with 50 millimetres less material. The seal has demonstrated, with admirable clarity, that this is merely a suggestion.
Had a replacement been ordered, it would of course have been 30 millimetres too short. This is not conjecture but law. The universe does not permit the straightforward completion of small domestic repairs. It insists on irony.
So where does that leave us. With a door that seals perfectly. With no draughts, no visible gaps, and no obvious explanation. A successful outcome, which is deeply unsatisfactory.
Because success without understanding is unsettling. One prefers one’s victories to be earned, explained, and preferably invoiced. Instead, we are left with a functioning seal and the uneasy sense that reality has, briefly and without warning, taken a day off.
I shall not be investigating further. Some things are better left unexamined. The door is shut, the seal is sound, and the laws of physics can, for once, manage without supervision.
There was a time when journalism at least pretended to follow facts wherever they led. Now it increasingly resembles a dog obedience class where inconvenient details are quietly dragged back onto the approved narrative leash before they wander off and confuse the public.
Take the Golders Green stabbings. The headlines rapidly settled on "antisemitic twin stabbing". Except the suspect was apparently charged with three attempted murders, not two. The earlier alleged victim was a Muslim acquaintance. The suspect also appears to have had a significant history of mental illness and violence. Those details existed, but somehow became background scenery once the cleaner, more emotionally satisfying version of events emerged.
Now, none of that proves antisemitism was invented. The later victims were visibly Jewish men in Golders Green, which rather increases the statistical likelihood of Jewish victims in any random attack there to begin with. But that is precisely why nuance matters. Was this ideological targeting? Chaotic violence by a mentally unstable man? A mixture of both? Those are serious questions. Yet before most people even knew there had allegedly been a third victim, the country had already reached the solemn phase of televised national anxiety.
The Prime Minister addressed the nation. Counter-terror language appeared almost immediately. Yet the earlier Muslim victim and the suspect's psychiatric history were quietly pushed into the margins because they complicated the cleaner morality play.
Even Rabbi Herschel Gluck appears uncomfortable with the increasingly selective way these issues are framed. Which matters, because Gluck is not some random activist with a megaphone and a Substack account. He is a senior Haredi Jewish figure, founder of interfaith initiatives, president of Shomrim in Stamford Hill, heavily involved in Jewish community security, and very much part of the communal establishment.
In his interview with Owen Jones, he essentially argued that criticism of Israeli policy is not automatically antisemitism, while also insisting antisemitism itself is very real and dangerous. More awkwardly still, he openly acknowledged there is pressure from strongly pro-Israel factions to suppress or delegitimise pro-Palestinian marches and activism in Britain.
Perhaps Zack Polanski touched a nerve when he questioned the atmosphere surrounding the incident. Not because everything he said was correct - some of it plainly was not - but because the looming council elections had already turned public fear, antisemitism and community tension into political currency for almost everybody involved. Once that happens, nuance tends to get trampled somewhere beneath the campaign literature and urgent television graphics.
What also made Polanski awkward was that, like Gluck, he could not simply be dismissed as hostile to Jews. Both are Jewish. Both were, in different ways, questioning whether every aspect of the public framing matched the underlying complexity of events. Modern political discourse struggles badly with dissenting insiders. It is much easier when everyone stays in their assigned tribal box.
Then there was the Whitehall stabbing outside Downing Street itself. Rival Iranian factions. A man allegedly stabbed. Independent journalists claimed the victim, a pro-regime demonstrator, was arrested despite knife wounds and later released outside a police station rather than taken directly to hospital. They also claimed to possess video evidence from the scene.
Double Down News ran with the story and openly questioned both the police handling and the lack of mainstream interest. According to the journalist involved, major outlets simply were not interested in either the footage or the wider political context. Which is curious, because one might imagine that a politically charged stabbing outside Downing Street involving rival Iranian factions would normally qualify as news.
According to the independent reporting, the Whitehall victim had allegedly been specifically targeted because of his political affiliation. Oddly enough, that somehow remained classified largely as a "clash" between rival groups rather than a terrifying assault on democracy itself.
Curiously, had the political identities been reversed, one suspects every current affairs programme in Britain would still be discussing it between lengthy panels featuring retired police officers, terrorism experts, and somebody from a think tank with "Institute" in the title.
And this is where the framing starts to smell political rather than merely journalistic. Because once institutions become sensitive to organised pressure, whether from governments, lobby groups, activists or communal organisations, the temptation is always to frame events in ways that reduce political friction. The Met may insist its classifications are purely operational and evidence-based, but people are increasingly noticing that some narratives receive immediate terrorism language, moral urgency and national attention, while others are quietly downgraded into "clashes", "disorder" or "community tensions".
The irony is that this sort of relentless apocalyptic framing may not even help ordinary British Jews in the long run. Quite the opposite. If every ugly or ambiguous incident is immediately elevated into evidence of an existential national antisemitic emergency before the full facts are established, people become simultaneously more frightened and more sceptical. Communities start living in heightened anxiety, while outsiders increasingly suspect they are being emotionally managed rather than informed.
The difficulty for institutions is that awkward people like Gluck refuse to cooperate with the script. He is deeply involved in Jewish community protection, interfaith work and security, yet simultaneously resists reducing every political disagreement into an ethnic loyalty test. That sort of nuance causes visible distress among people who earn a living from outrage.
This is the problem with modern institutional framing. It is not usually outright lying. It is something subtler and, in some ways, more corrosive. Certain facts receive floodlighting. Others are left sitting quietly in the dark like embarrassing relatives at a wedding.
The Met do it. The media do it. Politicians do it. Everyone insists they are merely "providing context", which increasingly appears to mean removing whichever parts make the story awkward.
And eventually the public notices.
That is the danger here. Not that every mainstream report is false, but that people can now practically predict in advance which details will be amplified, which will be softened, and which will quietly disappear altogether. Once that happens, trust drains away. People stop believing institutions are describing reality and start assuming they are managing perception.
Which, to be fair, they often are.
People are not stupid. Once they can predict in advance which facts will receive floodlights and which will be quietly left in the dark, trust does not collapse all at once. It leaks away a little bit each time.
I've written abou tthis before, but from the aspect of adding sugar to tea.
It started, as these things often do, with a low level domestic irritation that gradually became absurd. For years I found myself bleaching perfectly good porcelain mugs, initially now and then, then weekly, and eventually with a frequency that suggested the mugs were ageing faster than I was.
The received wisdom, confidently recycled, is that “milk first” is a relic of inferior china and nervous Georgians. Owners of proper porcelain, we are assured, can pour tea first with the easy assurance of social and material superiority. A pleasing story, rarely troubled by evidence.
After yet another session at the sink, contemplating a mug that had stained itself with a single teabag, I decided to test it.
The experiment was hardly elaborate. Same porcelain mugs, same teabags, same kettle. The only variable was the order of operations. Tea first, as tradition insists, versus milk first, as tradition patronises.
The result was not delicate. Tea first produced the usual effect. A rapid, almost eager staining, as though the mug had developed a memory of every previous cup and was keen to add another layer. Worse, as the mugs aged, this happened faster and more aggressively.
Milk first, by contrast, left the porcelain looking entirely civilised. No brown ring, no creeping discolouration, no need to reach for the bleach like a man admitting defeat.
At this point, the Georgian crockery story begins to look less like explanation and more like folklore. Whatever our ancestors were protecting, it was not a modern mug facing down a teabag of industrial efficiency.
The explanation, inconveniently for the traditionalists, is chemical. Teabags extract hard and fast. Porcelain, after years of honest stirring, acquires microscopic wear. Introduce hot, tannin rich liquid directly to that surface and it stains with enthusiasm. Introduce milk first, and a good deal of that tannin is neutralised before it ever gets the chance.
Just to remove any lingering doubt, I accidentally ran a rather more brutal trial. One morning I made a cup with milk first, then disappeared for an hour to give a mate a lift, having left the teabag in the cup. This is precisely the sort of extended contact time in which a mug usually betrays you. On returning, there was not a single stain. I fished out the teabag and reheated the tea in the microwave, more out of curiosity than optimism, and still nothing. At that point the tannins have had their chance and failed.
So the much mocked habit turns out to have a practical advantage. Not a badge of class, but a small act of defensive housekeeping. It may just be that the milk reduced the temperature in the cup, lessening the tannin extraction, rather than the lipids having an effect on the tannins. I don't know.
None of this will end the argument. The “tea first” camp will continue to cite history, and history will continue not to wash their mugs. Those of us who have watched the problem worsen with age may quietly take the hint.
The porcelain, at least, has reached a conclusion.
There was a time when local council elections occupied roughly the same space in the national consciousness as a damp parish newsletter announcing a new treasurer for the bowls club. You woke up the next morning to discover Labour had gained six seats in somewhere called North East Fenland Rural, the Conservatives had lost control of a district council nobody could locate on a map, and a man dressed as a traffic cone had won in Ashington on a platform of reopening the public toilets.
Then everyone moved on.
Now apparently we require full DEFCON 1 election coverage because Swindon has elected three Reform councillors and a Lib Dem with a beard made entirely from sourdough starter.
The BBC has been treating these local elections like the fall of Saigon. Radio 4 schedules vanish. Normal programming disappears. Suddenly there are sombre graphics, giant touchscreen maps and presenters speaking in hushed tones about “voter realignment in the outer commuter belt”. You half expect a retired brigadier to appear beside a digital map of Lincolnshire moving little coloured arrows around while explaining the collapse of the traditional vote in Kettering South East Drainage Ward.
The oddity is that many of the country are not even voting.
Large parts of Britain are carrying on entirely unaware that democracy is apparently hanging by a thread in Dudley. Most people are still mostly concerned with the cost of food, energy bills, whether the car passes its MOT, and why their WiFi drops out every time somebody uses the microwave. In our case the microwave also causes the kitchen lights to flicker slightly, which probably says more about British infrastructure than another six hours of election graphics.
Yet Westminster media has decided these elections represent the final battle for civilisation itself.
Part of this is structural. Continuous news requires continuous drama. “Council maintains broadly competent waste collection service” does not really justify a six-hour special. But “Starmer Faces Existential Crisis After Bin Collection Swing In Basildon” can fill an entire afternoon without anybody needing to leave the studio.
And poor old Keir Starmer has apparently been on the verge of political death continuously since about mid-2025.
Every week there is another article suggesting his authority has collapsed. Another “mounting pressure” piece. Another “Labour panic”. Another anonymous backbencher claiming “colleagues are concerned”. If Westminster journalists were medical staff, Starmer would have been declared clinically dead eighteen months ago, only to sit up every morning asking whether anyone had seen his briefing papers.
Yet here he still is.
That is because political journalism now operates like football punditry mixed with Love Island. Nobody reports politics as a slow institutional process anymore. It is all swings, momentum, humiliations, comebacks, body language, “optics”, and anonymous MPs “warning” things. Cabinet ministers are discussed like underperforming midfielders. Polling movements of about 2% are treated like the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
Brexit did not help. For several years prime ministers genuinely did collapse at absurd speed. Theresa May staggered from crisis to crisis. Boris Johnson eventually exploded in a cloud of cake crumbs and ethics investigations. Liz Truss managed to crash the bond markets before some people had even located the downstairs lavatory at Number 10. After that, Westminster started behaving like a man who had one genuinely catastrophic gearbox failure and now interprets every faint rattling noise as imminent mechanical destruction.
The media became addicted to collapse.
Now every wobble is treated as the opening scene of another execution. The problem is that most governments are not actually that dramatic. Unpopular governments can survive for years provided MPs fear the alternative more. Labour MPs may grumble about Starmer, but they have also spent years watching the Conservatives cycle through leaders like a man desperately trying random fuses in a broken lawnmower while insisting he definitely understands electrics.
There is also the small matter that Westminster political discourse increasingly confuses social media with the country itself. Spend too long on political Twitter and you would think Britain was entering the closing days of the Weimar Republic. In reality, most of the population are making tea, arguing with their energy supplier and wondering why the dishwasher now requires software updates. Half the country probably could not name their local councillor even after accidentally voting for him.
The rise of Nigel Farage has amplified all this because he generates attention in the way a small kitchen fire generates attention. The media cannot resist him. Every Reform gain becomes either the death of Labour, the death of the Conservatives, the death of liberal democracy, or occasionally all three before lunchtime.
Some of these trends may indeed matter long term. British politics probably is fragmenting. Traditional loyalties probably are weakening. But modern political coverage no longer distinguishes between “important gradual shift” and “imminent collapse of the regime by Thursday teatime”.
So we end up with council elections being presented like D-Day, Starmer being politically pronounced dead every fortnight despite continuing to attend Cabinet meetings, and Radio 4 abandoning normal programming because somebody in Warwickshire has elected an independent candidate angry about cycle lanes.
Meanwhile the bins still need collecting, the roads still resemble the surface of the moon, and somewhere in Britain a newly elected councillor is discovering that his first actual responsibility is not saving the nation, but chairing a tense subcommittee meeting about the opening hours of the recycling centre.
There was something rather admirable about the original Nissan Leaf. It knew what it was. It did not pretend to be a sports car, a luxury lounge, or an extension of your digital identity. It was essentially a large domestic appliance with headlights. You plugged it in overnight, it wafted you about quietly the next day, and that was that.
I drove one years ago and quite liked it. It was basic, honest and faintly odd, like a Japanese fridge that somebody had accidentally registered with the DVLA. At the time it genuinely felt as though we might be entering a new era of simple, practical electric motoring for ordinary people.
I have just driven the latest version and the first thing that strikes you is that somewhere along the way the industry lost confidence in the entire idea of the electric car. Instead of refining the concept, simplifying it and making it cheaper, they appear to have concluded that what pensioners really want is an expensive rolling electronics package with a battery attached.
Everything now beeps. Everything flashes. Everything has a submenu. The dashboard resembles a failed attempt to recreate the flight deck of a 787 using two televisions and a gaming laptop. There are sensors monitoring your lane position, your speed, your eyelids, your parking, your reversing angle and, for all I know, your cholesterol. You climb in and the thing greets you by name. The seat glides backwards electrically like Captain Kirk preparing for departure. A touchscreen larger than my first television asks whether I would like to synchronise my wellness settings. Somewhere deep in the software a small animated leaf is probably congratulating me for regenerative braking while the car updates itself over WiFi.
Yet despite all this technological theatre, the actual useful range seems barely different from years ago. Worse still, the thing greets you with a wildly optimistic range estimate apparently calculated under laboratory conditions involving no heater, no air conditioning, no headlights and perhaps no passengers. The moment you turn on the climate control because you would quite like to survive winter with functioning toes, the projected range begins collapsing in front of your eyes like a badly managed pension fund.
Which is psychologically the wrong way round entirely. Why not calculate the range assuming normal use from the start? Heater on. Lights on. Actual human comfort permitted. Then, if you drive gently on a mild day without the climate control running, the range quietly increases instead. People like pleasant surprises. They do not like watching numbers fall while trapped in traffic on the A417.
It is rather like somebody taking a perfectly good kettle and deciding the problem with it was insufficient software integration. So now it glows blue, connects to WiFi, issues firmware updates, monitors your hydration levels and costs four times as much, while continuing to boil exactly the same amount of water.
And this is where the car industry is quietly missing an enormous market. Retired people are almost ideal electric car owners. Most have driveways. Most do fairly predictable journeys. Most are not attempting a high-speed assault on the Autobahn while towing a jet ski to Croatia. They want something comfortable, simple, cheap to run and easy to get in and out of. In other words, they want precisely what the first Leaf more or less was.
Instead, manufacturers keep adding weight, complexity and gizmos because somewhere in a boardroom somebody decided that a basic EV might not justify a £40,000 price tag. So the cars become ever more elaborate while ordinary people quietly keep their old petrol hatchbacks going for another decade out of sheer irritation.
The tragedy is that established manufacturers already knew perfectly well how to build simple, practical little cars. They spent decades refining exactly that formula. Then electrification arrived, handing them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to simplify the motor car mechanically, and they responded by turning it into a consumer electronics platform with wheels.
For much of the twentieth century, car makers understood perfectly well that the real breakthrough was not luxury motoring, but accessible motoring. What we actually need now is an electric People's Car. Not a luxury statement. Not an autonomous mobile wellness pod. Not a two-tonne techno-barge capable of reaching sixty in four seconds while displaying a map of nearby vegan coffee outlets. Just a simple, affordable electric car.
Plastic wheel trims. Physical buttons. Cloth seats. A heater that works. Enough range for ordinary life. Easy access. A proper spare wheel would be nice. A battery that can be replaced without requiring a second mortgage. Something that can survive ten years of supermarket car parks, garden centre excursions and mildly incompetent reversing.
The original Volkswagen Beetle succeeded because it gave ordinary people affordable transport they could understand and maintain. The Citroen 2CV did much the same by reducing motoring to the bare practical essentials. The original Mini squeezed remarkable usefulness into a tiny footprint, while the Smart Fortwo at least recognised that many people simply needed a compact urban runabout rather than a leather-lined command centre.
All of them started with the same basic question: what do ordinary people actually need? Modern EVs often feel designed around an entirely different question: how many expensive features can we add before the monthly finance payment becomes visible from space?
And then the industry wonders why so many people are hanging on to fifteen-year-old Hondas and Toyotas like survivors of a vanished sensible age. The industry does not need another electric spaceship. It needs the electric equivalent of a good cardigan.
There is something magnificently absurd about an administration that resurrects the “Department of War” while simultaneously insisting America is not actually at war.
That takes a special level of brass neck. It is like opening a chain of brothels called “The House of Passion”, then insisting under oath that no sexual activity is taking place because technically everyone is merely engaged in “horizontal negotiations”.
For decades the United States rather self-consciously called it the Department of Defence. That wording came out of the post-war era when America wanted to present itself, at least rhetorically, as a reluctant superpower. A nation that fought when necessary, not because it fancied a scrap after breakfast.
Then along comes the Trump administration, apparently having watched too many films involving Patton, aircraft carriers and slow-motion flag waving, and decides that “Department of War” sounds much tougher. Which, admittedly, it does. It also creates a small practical problem. If you rename the building after war, people will eventually assume you intend to use it for war.
Pete Hegseth positively revels in it. You can almost hear the excitement. Secretary of War. Splendid stuff. Probably practised saying it in the mirror while tightening a tactical waistcoat before marching off to brief journalists about how America is definitely not fighting one of those vulgar old-fashioned wars.
Yet the moment anyone asks awkward constitutional questions, the entire performance folds faster than a garden marquee at a village fete. Suddenly the language changes completely.
“War? No no no. Nobody said war. This is merely a conflict. A military operation. A strategic freedom event.”
You can almost picture the White House communications meeting.
“Sir, American bombers have struck Iranian targets, the Gulf is full of warships, oil prices are climbing, shipping insurers are panicking, and Congress wants to know whether this counts as war.”
“Right. We need something softer.”
“How about kinetic liberty management?”
“Excellent. Get Fox on the phone.”
The trouble is that Trump himself keeps forgetting the script. One moment he is proudly talking about “winning the war”. The next moment aides are sprinting behind him with dictionaries trying to replace the word with “disagreement”. Hegseth does the same thing. He lapses into normal English whenever he stops concentrating, which rather suggests they both know perfectly well what this is.
Because ordinary people are not idiots. If missiles are flying, warships are mobilising, people are dying, and oil tankers are being rerouted around half the planet, then calling it a “conflict” fools nobody except perhaps the sort of man who thinks renaming Twitter “X” was a masterstroke of civilisation.
And there is a deeper irony here. Trump built much of his political identity around attacking “forever wars”. Iraq. Afghanistan. The endless interventionist machine. That message resonated because many Americans were exhausted by decades of blood, debt and strategic chaos dressed up as democracy promotion.
But now the same movement wants the aesthetics of war without admitting to war itself. They want the swagger, the uniforms, the martial rhetoric, the dramatic maps on television, the “Department of War” branding, the chest-thumping speeches about strength and victory. They just do not want the legal scrutiny, congressional votes, casualty counts, rising petrol prices, or awkward historical comparisons that come with the actual word.
Trump insists he wants peace. Which naturally raises the awkward question of what the opposite of peace might be.
It is politics as rebranding exercise. Like a man repainting “Titanic” on the side of the ship and insisting it now counts as a coastal leisure experience while the band is already tuning up behind him.
And somewhere in all this sits the Constitution, quietly gathering dust in the corner while everyone pretends not to notice it. One suspects James Madison did not envisage future presidents solving war powers disputes by simply crossing out the word “war” with a marker pen.
There is something faintly surreal about the phrase “the passengers are now self-isolating in the UK” being delivered as though it should instantly reassure anyone who lived through COVID.
Five years ago “self-isolation” theoretically meant remaining indoors while avoiding human contact. In practice it often meant someone posting on Facebook about “doing the responsible thing” before being spotted outside the pub having a quick pint because “it doesn’t really count if you sit near the heaters”.
So now we are told that passengers from a ship carrying a rare and rather nasty virus have been repatriated and are responsibly isolating themselves at home. Which may well be true. Most people probably will follow the guidance. But Britain rather used up its reserves of unquestioning trust on this subject during the pandemic years.
COVID revealed an awkward truth about public health messaging. A sizeable proportion of the population interpreted guidance the way medieval theologians interpreted fasting rules. Technically forbidden, but perhaps a crafty exemption could be arranged for a Tesco run, collecting a parcel, or meeting friends because “it’s outdoors”.
To be fair, hantavirus is not COVID. The transmission risk appears vastly lower, and health authorities are not suggesting it spreads casually through passing contact or supermarket queues. Rationally speaking, the danger is probably limited.
Psychologically, however, the phrase “self-isolating” now lands rather differently. The authorities still use it with the calm confidence of a phrase retaining moral authority. The public hears it more like “replacement bus service” or “your call is important to us”. Technically meaningful, perhaps, but heavily worn by experience.
Part of the problem is that COVID quietly demolished the assumption that sensible rules would automatically be widely followed. The public watched politicians bend restrictions, celebrities reinterpret them, and ordinary people construct elaborate loopholes involving Scotch eggs, garden furniture and “essential” social visits that somehow lasted six hours and required prosecco.
That erosion of trust matters because public health systems rely far more on voluntary cooperation than coercion. Britain is not about to establish armed quarantine compounds every time somebody arrives carrying an exotic virus from abroad. The entire system depends on most people behaving sensibly most of the time.
Which, to be fair, they usually do.
It is just that the phrase “self-isolating” no longer quite carries the reassuring tone officials imagine it does. It now sounds more like a gentleman in a hi-vis jacket at Swindon station announcing that the 14:32 service has been cancelled, but passengers should remain confident because “alternative arrangements are in place”.
