When You Can't Trust the Leader of the Free World

There’s something faintly ridiculous about the position I find myself in, and I suspect I’m not alone in it. You watch events unfold, listen to what was said on Friday, then what’s being said now, and before you know it you’re thinking something you really ought not to be thinking. “Good on you, Iran.” Which is not a sentence you expect to find yourself uttering unless you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

On Friday we had the full performance. Deadlines, ultimatums, talk of flattening infrastructure if compliance was not forthcoming. It was delivered with that familiar certainty, the sort that suggests the decision has already been made and we are simply being informed of it in advance.

A few days later, same voice, entirely different tune. “Productive conversations”, “major points of agreement”, and a neat five day pause on the bombs to let diplomacy run its course. Diplomacy that, slightly awkwardly, the other side says does not exist. At which point you do start to wonder whether someone, somewhere in the administration has been having perfectly cordial conversations with entirely the wrong country. Given past performances on geography, it would not be the greatest surprise.

Now, one does not normally lean on Tehran as a reliable narrator. Quite the opposite. But if one side says talks are well underway and the other says there have been none at all, and meanwhile the strikes that were imminent have been quietly shelved, you don’t need to be terribly clever to notice that something has shifted.

And when things shift that quickly, you start to notice who is at least sticking to a line, however disagreeable, and who is rewriting theirs as they go along.

There was a time when the word of a US President carried weight. Not infallible, not saintly, and occasionally derailed by the odd episode like Nixon’s, but broadly speaking if the White House said something, people assumed it bore some stable relationship to reality. That was rather the point.

It does not feel like that now. This has the faint air of the boy who cried wolf about it. You can only issue so many ultimatums, announce so many imminent actions, and then quietly step back from them before people stop taking you at your word. When the wolf is apparently back again, the reaction is no longer urgency, it is a raised eyebrow.

And that is where it becomes self-inflicted. If your story moves from threat to pause to “we’re nearly there” over the course of a weekend, you don’t just lose credibility on that one point. You make yourself unreliable on anything. Markets notice, allies notice, opponents certainly notice, and it has a habit of coming back to bite you in the bum at precisely the moment you would quite like to be believed.

Which is how you end up in this slightly awkward place. It’s not admiration for Iran. It’s that old underdog reflex. The smaller chap taking a punch and still standing there. You don’t approve of him, you wouldn’t trust him as far as you could throw him, but there is a moment where you find yourself thinking, well, at least he’s not changing his story mid sentence.

Then you remember who he is, and the moment passes. This is an authoritarian state with a long record of suppressing its own people and throwing its weight around the region. There is nothing admirable about that, and pretending otherwise would be self-indulgent nonsense.

But none of that rescues the credibility problem on the other side. If you threaten action, then delay it, then describe the delay as progress, and the people you claim to be negotiating with say there are no talks at all, you don’t get to be surprised when people start taking what you say with a pinch of salt.

It’s not that Iran has become trustworthy. It’s that the White House has made itself difficult to believe. And that leaves you in the mildly absurd position of watching a murderous regime hold its line, while the leader of the free world adjusts his, and finding yourself checking the clock afterwards, because if someone now says 3:23, you’re not entirely sure whether that means 3:23, 3:30, or whenever the story changes again.

Cliff With a View

There are places along the English coast where you can feel time passing in a civilised, almost courteous way. Eype is not one of them. Eype is where the land quietly packs its bags and leaves, usually taking a few human assumptions with it.

We set off from West Bay under the impression it was “a short stretch”. The South West Coast Path, it turns out, has its own view on that sort of language. It doesn’t do distance so much as gradients. You begin with a pleasant walk and within minutes you are hauling yourself up a slope that feels less like a path and more like a polite challenge to your cardiovascular system.

Mine, for the record, is now a meniscal matter, which is the sort of condition one invokes to preserve dignity while still limping slightly and making thoughtful noises. It’s not an injury as such, more a running commentary from the knee suggesting that this was all avoidable.

The beach route, sensibly, is closed. Not because anything dramatic has happened, but because something might. A sizeable portion of cliff has recently decided it preferred life at a lower altitude and has relocated accordingly. The sort of decision that rather spoils a walk if you happen to be underneath it at the time.

Up on the cliff top, things feel calmer. Not stable, exactly, but calm in the way that something can feel calm while quietly failing. The official path has simply edged back a bit, like a man in a pub giving a wide berth to someone explaining their latest investment strategy. It will edge back again when required. No fuss, no ceremony.

And then there’s the summer house.

It sits there with a breezy optimism that suggests it was put up in the late 50s or early 60s, when one could build on a cliff and assume the cliff would remain where it was put. It probably once had a proper garden, a decent margin from the edge, perhaps even a washing line turning gently in the sea breeze. Now it has a front-row seat to its own eventual absence.

The giveaway is the pipe. A length of plumbing protruding from the cliff face with a sort of resigned honesty. At some point it was buried, planned, part of a system. Now it simply empties into open space, which is also roughly the future of the building it serves.

Nobody is fixing that. Nobody is rerouting it or shoring anything up. The place has entered that very British phase of managed neglect, where you continue to use something while fully accepting that one winter it may simply cease to exist. There is no drama, just a quiet understanding between owner and geology.

The return journey, of course, is worse. Descending a steep, uneven path with a mildly irritated meniscus is a very particular form of entertainment. Each step is a small negotiation. The knee doesn’t refuse outright, it simply offers commentary. Persistent, slightly aggrieved commentary.

It reminds me of a worn suspension bush. Perfectly adequate on smooth surfaces, but introduce a bit of irregularity and suddenly every minor imperfection is transmitted directly through the system. By the bottom, my knee had formed a fairly robust view of Dorset.

Still, it was bracing. That’s the official line. We observed a cliff in the process of rearranging itself, a building in quiet retreat from existence, and a footpath that appears to have been designed with only a passing interest in cartilage.

We will, inevitably, go back. Probably with a flask. Possibly with a walking pole. And with the faint suspicion that the house may not be there next time, but the climb, somehow, always will be.

Same God, Different Rules

Nigel Farage wants to ban mass Muslim prayer near historic British sites, on the grounds that it amounts to intimidation and domination of public space.

It started, as these things often do, with a solemn declaration about “protecting historic British sites”. Perfectly reasonable on the face of it, until you stop and ask what exactly we’ve been doing at those sites for the last few thousand years, because Britain has never been short of people turning up at old stones and doing something faintly mystical.

Take Stonehenge. Every summer solstice, thousands gather in robes, greet the sunrise and commune with forces that, one suspects, are not especially concerned either way. Nobody calls this domination. It’s heritage, possibly with sandwiches. Over at Avebury, you can wander about inside a stone circle while various forms of spiritual activity unfold that would have baffled the original builders, and again it is all entirely acceptable, adds a bit of colour, tourists take photos. And on Glastonbury Tor, there is a steady trickle of people engaged in pursuits best described as spiritual with a hint of improvisation, and the nation copes.

So the principle seems straightforward enough. Large groups gathering at historic sites for religious or quasi religious purposes are either a charming expression of continuity or a problem, and the interesting question is what turns one into the other. We are told, in this case, that the issue is not mere presence but something more serious, words like intimidation and domination doing the rounds, which are strong words and suggest a clear, observable problem rather than a vague unease.

So you go looking for it, because if something has crossed that line there ought to be a moment you can point to. What actually happened, which rule was broken, who was obstructed or prevented from using the space, where is the point at which an ordinary public event became something more coercive. And this is where it all starts to drift, because no specific mechanism is ever quite identified. It is a bit like declaring a car unsafe without pointing to the failed brake or the snapped cable. You are given the conclusion, but not the fault.

If the concern were genuinely about crowd size, disruption, or public order, we already have rules for that and they apply to everyone, regardless of religion, costume, or choice of incense. And that is where the proposal runs into a more awkward problem, because Muslims and Christians are, in fact, worshipping the same God. “Allah” is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Christians as well. The disagreement is about the nature of that God, not about which God it is, which makes the distinction rather curious. Large groups worshipping the same deity are apparently acceptable in one case and a problem in another.

Meanwhile, similar gatherings continue elsewhere without fuss. The Druids will be back at Stonehenge, the spiritualists will drift up Glastonbury Tor, and nobody will reach for the word domination, which leaves you with the slightly awkward observation that the same basic activity produces entirely different reactions depending on who is doing it.

And while all this is going on, something else quietly slips past. The economic programme attached to all this cultural theatre is not especially mysterious, lower taxes tilted in a particular direction, a relaxed attitude to regulation, and a willingness to revisit the sort of fiscal experiments that, not long ago, sent gilt yields sharply upwards and forced a rapid retreat. It is not complicated, if you reduce revenue while maintaining spending pressures, the gap is made up somewhere, and it is usually not by the people being encouraged to feel aggrieved about events in public squares.

So the debate ends up tilted. We spend our time discussing who is standing where, and rather less time asking who is paying for what, which is convenient if you would prefer the second question not to be examined too closely. It is not that people are being told what to think so much as what to notice, and once that choice is made for them the rest tends to follow without much effort.

In the end, it is not really about protecting historic sites, nor is it about responding to a clearly evidenced problem. It is about directing attention, pointing at one thing, describing it in sufficiently loaded terms, and letting the rest of the conversation rearrange itself around it, which works perfectly well right up until someone looks somewhere else, usually at their wallet, and wonders how that got lighter while they were busy worrying about stone circles and Trafalgar Square.

The Ghost in the Machine

I was watching a programme the other evening about people creating AI versions of dead relatives. Husbands reconstructed from text messages, mothers rebuilt from old emails, voices pieced together from recordings. The idea is that you can keep talking to them. The programme treated this as something startlingly new. I am not entirely convinced.

I sometimes catch myself having imaginary conversations with my father. He has been gone a long time, but the mental map of him is still there. I know the tone he would use when he thought I was talking nonsense, and the small pause before he explained why. It is obviously not him. It is my memory of him, built from years of experience, but it can still be a useful reference point when I am thinking something through.

Which is when the penny dropped while watching the programme. Humans have always done this. The real question is simply where the conversation happens. Sometimes it happens inside the skull and sometimes it is pushed outside it.

Take prayer. Many people pray to saints, ancestors or deceased relatives. They speak to them, ask for guidance, sometimes imagine the reply. Imaginary conversations with someone you once knew work in much the same way. In both cases you are consulting a mental model built from memory. The voice is internal and you know it ultimately comes from your own reasoning. That internal version has a natural constraint because it is a mental map built from real experience. It cannot easily wander far beyond what you actually knew about the person.

Now consider the Victorian seance. People gathered around a table while a medium tapped out messages from the dead. The voice, of course, was the medium's. The dead relative was only being interpreted through someone else's words. Which brings us to the modern twist, AI relatives. Here the conversation is external again, like the seance, but with one crucial difference. The voice of the machine can be trained to sound exactly like the dead person, their phrases, their cadence, even their manner of argument.

So the structure ends up looking rather simple. Seances and AI relatives externalise the conversation. Prayer to the dead and imaginary conversations keep it internal. In all four cases the human brain is doing the same thing, modelling another person's mind. The difference is where the reply appears to come from.

The AI version, however, introduces something the Victorians never had to contend with. The medium never sounded like your father. The AI can. That similarity creates trust. When the reply arrives in the recognisable voice of someone you loved, the brain is far more inclined to treat it as authentic. Yet the machine is not recalling anything. It is extrapolating, generating sentences the real person never spoke.

The internal voice you carry from memory is limited by the map you built from real life. The external machine is not limited in that way. It can extend the pattern indefinitely. Which is where the danger lies. The technology does not resurrect the dead. It produces a persuasive imitation of them, a voice that feels familiar but which can now say things the real person never said.

The Victorians dimmed the lights and waited for the table to move. We sit on the sofa and wait for the typing bubble to appear. The instinct is the same, but the modern version sounds much more like the person we lost, and that makes it far easier to trust a voice that ultimately belongs to a machine.

Performative Pins

It starts innocently enough. A small badge on a lapel, barely visible unless you go looking for it. Then, once you’ve noticed it, you realise it’s everywhere.

In America it’s the flag, of course. Tiny stars and stripes pinned to otherwise identical suits, like a uniform accessory issued with the job. You begin to suspect that somewhere in Washington there’s a drawer marked “Patriotism - standard size”, and woe betide the man who forgets to pick one up on the way out. Turn up without it and you half expect a quiet word. Not an accusation, nothing so crude, just a gentle enquiry as to whether you’ve perhaps misplaced your country.

Over here, we’ve had a cautious go at the same thing. The Union Jack makes occasional appearances, usually at party conferences, looking faintly as if it’s been added at the last minute. You can almost hear the internal dialogue. “This feels a bit American.” “Yes, but we should probably have one.” And so it sits there, slightly self-conscious, like a novelty tie that no one quite knows how to carry off.

Most of Europe sensibly ignores the whole business. The French manage to run an entire state without pinning it to their jackets, which suggests the Republic is more robust than a bit of enamel. The Germans appear similarly confident that their national identity will survive a day at the office without visible reinforcement.

Then you notice the more deliberate users. Netanyahu with his flag, worn with practised ease, part of the overall presentation. Putin too, though there it feels less like a choice and more like it arrived pre-approved along with the rest of the staging. In both cases, it’s not accidental. The symbol is doing a job.

And that, really, is where it starts to grate. Because once the symbol is doing a job, it stops being expression and starts being costume.

Which brings us neatly to the British variation, the seasonal edition. The poppy.

Now, the poppy itself is not the problem. It began, quite properly, as a quiet act of remembrance. A small, unobtrusive marker. You wore it if you wished. You didn’t if you didn’t. Nobody kept a ledger and nobody asked questions.

Then, as ever, we got organised. The poppies appeared earlier. They became more substantial. You started to see them in places where you rather suspected the wearer hadn’t given them a moment’s thought beyond “better put that on”. Newsreaders, politicians, the lot, all pinned up on cue, as if remembrance had a start date and a dress code.

And then the question arrived. It always does. “Why aren’t you wearing one?”

At that point the whole thing tilts. The moment you have to account for the absence of a symbol, the symbol has ceased to be voluntary. It’s now a test. Not an official one, nothing written down, but understood all the same.

It reminds me of those car recalls where a perfectly serviceable component suddenly becomes a matter of urgent compliance. The car worked perfectly well yesterday, but now there’s a note on file and a suggestion that you ought to get it sorted. The difference is, of course, that the car doesn’t care. People do.

And you start to see the underlying pattern. The more secure a country feels, the less it needs to advertise itself on a lapel. The more uncertain it becomes, the more it reaches for symbols, just to reassure itself that everything is still intact.

So you end up with this curious situation where something intended as private reflection becomes a mildly policed public performance. Not because individuals are insincere, but because the system gently nudges everyone in the same direction until deviation starts to look like dissent.

And once you get there, the meaning drains away rather quickly. The flag pin, the poppy, the lot of them. Small objects trying to carry rather a lot of weight, until they collapse into routine.

In the end, you’re left looking at a room full of identical lapels and wondering whether anyone has forgotten anything important. Not the pin. The reason it was there in the first place.

The 13mm Nut That Launched a Shopping Expedition

There is a particular sort of confidence that only appears when a tap is loose. Not a flood, not a burst pipe, just a gentle wobble that suggests mild contempt every time you wash your hands. So naturally I did not check my tools. I did not measure anything. I ordered a tap backnut spanner.

What arrived could have serviced the cooling system of a small destroyer. It was vast. Heroic. The kind of tool you would use to tighten a Victorian water main. I offered it up under the wall hung basin and it laughed at me. The nut was about 13 mm. The spanner was clearly designed for something north of 30 mm, possibly agricultural.

Return number one.

Undeterred, I moved into what I told myself was analysis mode. The stud looked about 8 mm. That implies M8. M8 usually means a 13 mm nut across flats. Excellent. Progress. I bought a deep socket set to do the job properly, feeling faintly professional about the whole thing.

When it arrived in the post it only went up to 11 mm.

At this point the tap was no longer wobbling. It was observing. Quietly. Patiently. Like a cat watching you attempt DIY.

So I bought a 13 mm deep box spanner from Amazon. Decisive. Surgical. The correct size for an M8 stud. I felt vindicated by mathematics and just a trace of spite.

Then, in a moment of idle rummaging through my old box spanner tin, I found it.

A 13 mm deep box spanner. Mine. All along. It had been sitting there quietly for years. Through house moves, garage reorganisations, and previous plumbing victories. Waiting for me to complete a small retail pilgrimage before revealing itself like some metallic punchline.

There is a universal domestic law at work here. The moment you press Buy Now, the missing tool materialises in the very box you definitely checked. Usually under something irrelevant, like a Jubilee clip from 2003.

Naturally I cancelled the Amazon order immediately, hoping it had not reached that ominous status of Preparing for Dispatch, which translates roughly as it is already in a van but we enjoy the suspense.

The tap was be tightened. The wobble ceased. Order was restored. But the real lesson is not about torque or thread sizes. It is about the strange human instinct to shop before we look. Somewhere in that garage, I suspect, is also a 14 mm deep socket. And I will probably find it the day after I need it.

The Engine That Purrs While It Fails

There is a particular type of man who can say something quite alarming in a tone normally reserved for explaining how to descale a kettle, and half the room will nod along as if they’ve just heard a sensible bit of household advice.

Take Netanyahu or Putin. They speak in complete sentences, pause in the right places, and look as though they’ve read the briefing notes and, crucially, understood them. It all feels reassuring, like a pilot calmly explaining a delay. Then along comes Trump, who sounds like a man assembling flat pack furniture without the instructions while narrating the process. He starts a point, abandons it, returns to it from a different angle, and occasionally discovers a new one halfway through the sentence. Because we are human and slightly lazy in our thinking, we conclude that the first pair are believable and the second is not.

Which is where it all goes wrong. A well delivered argument is not the same thing as a true one, it just feels like it is. The brain hears fluency and quietly ticks a box marked probably correct, which is rather like assuming a car is mechanically sound because the engine note is smooth at idle. You can have an engine that purrs beautifully while quietly eating its own bearings, and you can have one that sounds a bit agricultural but will run forever if you leave it alone. The noise tells you something, but not the thing you actually need to know.

Putin in particular has turned this into a system. Calm voice, neat narrative, no visible hesitation. It creates the impression of inevitability, which is very useful if what you are saying would look rather less convincing if anyone stopped to pull it apart. Netanyahu is cut from a similar cloth, albeit with a different audience and a different set of arguments. Very polished, very controlled, very certain. You may agree or disagree with him, but he rarely sounds as if he is guessing. Trump, meanwhile, sounds exactly like someone guessing in real time, which makes people uncomfortable even when he stumbles onto something broadly correct, because it doesn’t come wrapped in that reassuring layer of polish.

So we end up judging the message by the smoothness of the delivery, which is a bit like buying a car based on how nicely the salesman closes the door. It shuts with a satisfying thunk and you think, well, that feels solid, and then a week later the gearbox falls out somewhere near Swindon.

Culinary Misidentification

We’d done the sensible thing before we set off in the motorhome and I’d made a proper hachis Parmentier, the sort of slow cooked beef dish that sits there quietly proving you are, in fact, a competent adult. Something rich, deliberate, unmistakably beef. The kind of meal that does not invite debate about what species is involved.

Which is just as well, as it turns out.

Because one night is always given over to a Charlie Bigham. We call it a treat, which is a polite way of saying we’ve decided not to bother. Hay cooked one in the motorhome in Portesham, and it came out exactly as they all do. Golden lid, creamy interior, the visual equivalent of a reassuring nod.

I ate it quite happily. No complaints at all. And when I’d finished, I sat back and, with the calm authority of a man who clearly understands what he has just consumed, announced that it was a very nice fish pie.

It was not a fish pie. It was chicken and ham hock.

Now, that would be bad enough on its own. Confusing fish with poultry and pig is not a minor slip. It is a full category error. But the detail that really ought to concern everyone involved is this: I hadn’t just mislabelled the dish. I had actually eaten pieces of chicken and calmly registered them as prawns.

Not vaguely prawn-like. Not “something a bit fishy”. Proper chunks of chicken had gone through chewing, consideration, and whatever passes for analysis, and emerged in my mind as seafood. At that point we are no longer dealing with a simple mistake. That is a complete breakdown in quality control.

It is rather like lifting the bonnet, pointing at something entirely at random, and declaring the alternator has gone, only to discover the car is missing a wheel. The process has not just gone wrong, it has gone wrong with confidence.

And that, I think, is the interesting bit. The certainty. There was no hesitation. No cautious probing. My brain took a quick look at the situation, decided it recognised the pattern, and shut down further enquiry. Creamy pie, pale protein, eaten in a motorhome - close enough, move on.

Which does make you wonder how often this happens elsewhere. A familiar outline, a quick assumption, and then a firm conclusion delivered with just enough authority to discourage anyone from asking whether you’ve actually checked. Details become optional once the general idea feels about right.

In fairness, those Bigham’s pies do encourage this sort of thinking. They all arrive under the same polite golden lid, each one a variation on a theme of middle class reassurance. Once you’ve decided what it probably is, the rest of the evidence seems to be treated as an administrative inconvenience.

Hay, to her credit, handled this with admirable restraint. There was a pause, a look, and then the quiet correction. No fuss, no lecture, just the gentle dismantling of my entirely misplaced confidence.

Which leaves me with the slightly awkward conclusion that, given enough sauce and a pastry lid, I may no longer be able to distinguish between land and sea. A worrying development for someone who prides himself on knowing what he’s looking at.

I shall stick to the hachis Parmentier in future. At least then, if I insist it’s something else, we can all agree the fault lies with me rather than the evidence.

No Off-Ramp for Trump

Trump is not operating a normal presidency. He believes his own judgement is sufficient, treats advice as optional, and sees any form of restraint as personal weakness.

He has been pushed into confrontation with Iran by Netanyahu, whose objective of decisive action aligns neatly with Trump’s instinct to escalate. The result is not a considered strategy but a reinforcing loop. One pushes, the other amplifies, and neither has an incentive to pause and ask where it leads.

His stated military aims are straightforward enough on paper. Degrade Iran’s capabilities. Reassert deterrence. Stop the threat. But they are not being met. Iran has not collapsed. It continues to absorb strikes and respond. Deterrence has not been restored in any meaningful sense. If anything, the exchange has broadened and hardened.

And now we have the added wrinkle of his own counterterrorism chief resigning, stating there was no imminent threat. If that reflects the internal intelligence view, then the public case for war was, at best, stretched and, at worst, something else entirely. The subsequent FBI investigation rather suggests those concerns may have touched something the administration would have preferred to keep quiet.

From that starting point, escalation is not a choice, it is the default. Each strike invites retaliation. Each retaliation justifies a larger strike. And because stepping back would look like losing, the only available move is to go further. In practical terms, he has no off-ramp, because taking one would contradict the image he is trying to maintain.

That dynamic widens the conflict. Iran absorbs the blows and responds, as states under attack tend to do. It does not collapse. The exchange spreads. Targets expand. And before long, the conflict begins to reach beyond military assets into the infrastructure that underpins the regional and global economy.

That is the point at which his actions introduce a second dimension. Not just war, but economic disruption. Energy infrastructure comes into play. Shipping lanes become uncertain. Insurance rises. Prices move. What began as a military escalation starts to spill into the systems that keep the global economy functioning.

And that part is spiralling.

The Gulf states feel it first and most directly. Energy production, ports, shipping lanes, all exposed. They did not choose the war, but they bear its consequences. Economic damage builds, and with it pressure to act, not out of ideology but necessity. The line between staying out and being drawn in begins to disappear.

Europe follows for the same reason. It does not want involvement, but it cannot absorb sustained disruption to energy flows. So it edges in, step by step, through protection of shipping, defensive support, and political alignment. Each move limited, each one justified, but together they amount to participation driven by economic survival.

At the same time, a further, rather uncomfortable truth is exposed.

There are Iranians who want regime change. That is not in dispute. The protests were real, large, and brutally suppressed.

But escalation shows no real concern for them at all. Bombing a country does not empower its civil society. It does not create safe conditions for protest. If anything, it strengthens the regime’s grip and justifies further repression.

And on the ground, the reaction is telling. Many Iranians want change, but reject war as the means of achieving it.

There is also a darker edge to this. If an uprising were triggered under these conditions, protesters could simply be slaughtered. Which suggests that, while regime change is spoken of, the human cost of how it might happen is not the limiting factor. Netanyahu’s priority is the removal of the threat, not the welfare of the people living under it. If that requires Iran to be battered into submission, that is a price he appears willing to contemplate.

So the people most likely to suffer from “liberation” are the ones it is supposedly for.

And through all of this, a very clear lesson is being learned. If you are a state in that region, conventional strength does not guarantee safety. Alliances are uncertain under pressure. States without ultimate deterrence remain vulnerable.

In that environment, Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons becomes rational. Not admirable, but logical. And once that logic takes hold, it does not remain confined to Iran. Other states will draw the same conclusion and begin moving in that direction.

That is how nuclear proliferation starts, not with a declaration, but with a series of decisions that all point the same way.

Meanwhile, the same escalation that drives the conflict outward begins to erode support at home. Strength without clear results starts to look hollow. Costs rise, outcomes remain uncertain, and even core supporters begin to question it.

Which creates a second loop. To maintain the image of strength, escalation continues. That escalation deepens the problem. The deepening problem further weakens support. And so the cycle reinforces itself.

So you end up here.

A personality-driven escalation with no usable off-ramp. A widening conflict failing on its own stated military terms. An economic dimension now spiralling beyond control. Allies being drawn in by necessity rather than choice. And a steady, rational drift towards nuclear proliferation as more states conclude that the only reliable insurance is one we spent decades trying to limit.

And the final irony is this. The more force applied to achieve the stated objectives, the further away those objectives become. Each step taken to increase security reduces it. Each escalation makes resolution harder. It is not just a war without an off-ramp. It is a war in which every turn of the wheel drives further away from the destination.

A catastrophe set in motion by Netanyahu, and enabled by Trump, who lacks the wit to see he has been played.

The Quiet Disappearance of Songs of Praise

The other day Hayley and I somehow ended up talking about Songs of Praise. Not exactly a cutting edge cultural discussion, I admit, but it was a Sunday morning and the conversation had already wandered through the weather, the garden and whether we had any decent tea bags left.

At some point I confidently announced that Songs of Praise had been cancelled years ago. Quietly dropped by the BBC, I said, probably after someone noticed that the average viewer remembered the Coronation the first time round. It sounded entirely plausible and I delivered this verdict with the sort of authority normally associated with people who have not checked anything at all.

It turns out, of course, that this was complete nonsense. The programme has not been cancelled. It is still alive and well on BBC One.

They have simply moved it to Sunday lunchtime.

Now for decades Songs of Praise occupied what broadcasters used to call the “God slot”. Early Sunday evening, just as the weekend was gently winding down and people were beginning to contemplate Monday morning. The roast had settled, the washing up was done, and somewhere across Britain a choir in sensible cardigans was warming up to sing Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer.

Even people who never watched it knew exactly when it was on. It sat there in the schedule like a sort of national punctuation mark at the end of the weekend. You might not tune in, but you knew it was there, humming away politely in the background.

Now apparently it goes out around Sunday lunchtime.

Sunday lunchtime is not a time when the British public is sitting quietly contemplating Anglican hymnody. Sunday lunchtime is when people are arguing about the timing of the roast potatoes, or standing in the kitchen wondering why the oven isn’t hot yet despite being on for twenty minutes. Half the country is trying to peel carrots and the other half is in the garage looking for a screwdriver they were holding five minutes earlier.

Which rather explains my mistake. I assumed the programme had been cancelled because, in any practical sense, it has been.

Somewhere in Britain a choir from Shropshire is still singing its heart out to the nation. The nation, meanwhile, is elbow deep in gravy looking for the vegetable peeler.