Siphoning the Tank and Calling It Strategy

I was listening to Kemi Badenoch yesterday, explaining her energy policy in an interview, and I had one of those faintly unsettling moments where everything sounds confident, brisk, and entirely untethered from how the thing actually works.

The pitch is wonderfully simple. Drill more oil and gas, collect the taxes, and use that to bring down bills. If that is not quite enough, trim a bit off welfare and redirect that as well. Cheap energy sorted. One can almost hear the satisfying click as the pieces fall into place.

Except they do not.

What you actually have is a neat little loop. Gas prices spike, household bills follow, and tax receipts from producers rise with them. The government then hands some of that money back to consumers. Round we go. It feels like action, but it never touches the price-setting mechanism. The cost of energy remains exactly where it was determined in the first place.

And the scale matters. UK households spend on the order of £70 to £90 billion a year on energy, depending on prices. North Sea tax revenues, even in strong years, are a fraction of that. You are trying to steady a very large ship with a rather small rudder.

The North Sea element is the bit that sounds most reassuring. We will produce our own energy, keep the money here, take control. It has a pleasingly Churchillian ring to it. The awkward detail is that oil and gas are sold into global markets. The UK produces about 1% of global oil and a bit over 2% of global gas. That does not move prices. We are a price taker. Even Badenoch now concedes this will not directly lower bills, which rather leaves the whole exercise doing something other than what it is being sold as.

And even before you get to that, there is the small matter that the North Sea is not what it was. It is a mature basin, roughly 90% depleted. What is left is harder to extract and more expensive. New projects are marginal and tend to need higher prices to make sense. Which is an odd route to "cheap energy".

Then there is the time horizon. Once you build a platform, you are in for decades. You do not casually switch it off because the economics turn awkward. Add in decommissioning, where the bill is expected to run to roughly £40 to £45 billion in total over time, with billions already being spent each year, and the picture starts to look less like energy independence and more like a long-term financial commitment with a sizeable exit fee.

Now, to be fair, there is nothing remotely controversial about squeezing more out of existing licences. In fact, Labour's government is doing exactly that. The infrastructure is there, the investment is sunk, and it would be perverse not to use it. The curious twist is that once Labour is doing something sensible, it suddenly becomes suspect.

Hovering over all of this is the phrase "net zero", used as a sort of all-purpose villain. The difficulty is that a large slice of the public has been sold a cartoon version of it. Many seem to think it means abolishing fossil fuels entirely and immediately, which it does not. It means balancing emissions with removals over time, and in practice still involves oil and gas during the transition. It is much easier to knock down that misunderstanding than engage with the actual policy.

At which point we arrive at the welfare twist. She said in the interview that welfare would be cut, with the implication that the savings help fund cheaper energy. Which sounds tidy until you look at who pays and who benefits. You take money from those most in need, then spread relief across everyone, including plenty who were never in difficulty to begin with. It is a curious redistribution that starts by tightening the belt of the poorest and ends by loosening the collar of the comfortable.

And all the while, the underlying machinery remains untouched. Gas still sets the electricity price in the UK. Global markets still drive gas prices. When they spike, we all feel it. None of this changes that. It simply moves money around after the damage has been done.

What is striking is not that there is a critique of current policy. There is plenty to criticise. It is that the proposed alternative never quite gets beyond reacting to it. Less net zero, more drilling, fewer subsidies here, more subsidies there. It has the feel of someone determined to steer away from Labour without first checking whether they are still on the same road.

In the end, you are left with a system that depends on high fossil fuel prices to fund relief from high fossil fuel prices, tied to a declining and expensive basin, locked into decades-long commitments, and carrying a decommissioning bill measured in tens of billions. It sounds decisive. It feels robust.

Then the quarterly energy bill lands, and nothing about it has changed.

The Gas Regulator

There is a particular moment on any motorhome trip when you realise you are not, in fact, the master of a finely engineered travelling residence, but the temporary custodian of a collection of mildly resentful components waiting to let you down.

Ours came when the gas simply stopped. Not tapered off, not a gentle warning. Just... nothing. No heating, no oven, no reassuring hiss of civilisation. A sort of silent, judgemental absence where warmth used to be.

At this point you go through the usual rituals. Check the bottle. Check it again, in case it has reconsidered. Wiggle things that ought not to need wiggling. Peer at the regulator as if it might confess. Eventually, with mounting reluctance, you accept that the smallest and cheapest part of the entire system has decided to end the holiday.

The regulator. A device roughly the size and visual importance of a doorstop, now revealed as the single point of failure for heat, food, and basic human dignity.

What follows is a rapid descent into improvisation. Tea, for example, becomes an engineering problem rather than a cultural constant. I found myself making it in the microwave, which felt faintly illegal. The mug rotates, the water heats, and you stand there knowing you have crossed some invisible line. It works, technically. But so does eating beans cold from the tin.

Heating was handled by two 250W electric heaters, each about the size of a small book. Very neat, very portable, and about as effective as trying to heat a sitting room with a pair of hardbacks. They did their best. Not enough to make you comfortable, but just enough to suggest that something, somewhere, was vaguely in charge. Handy in emergencies, which is to say, entirely inadequate but better than nothing.

All of this, of course, hinged on being on hookup. Without that, it would have been less "quirky inconvenience" and more "Victorian hardship with better upholstery".

The hunt for a replacement regulator then began, which is where the motorhome world reveals its other great truth: somewhere, always, there is a caravan shop that looks like it hasn't changed since decimalisation and yet contains precisely the obscure item you need.

In our case, Charmouth. An establishment that appears to run on instinct rather than inventory. You walk in, describe your plight, and a man disappears into the depths before returning with exactly the right part, as if summoned.

I bought two, obviously. One to fix the problem, and one to sit in a locker for the rest of its life, radiating quiet smugness and ensuring that this never happens again. Or at least that when it does, it will be a different obscure component, just to keep things interesting.

Regulator fitted, gas restored, civilisation resumes. Heating returns, the hob lives again, and tea is once more made in a manner that would not alarm your grandparents.

You do, however, come away with a quiet respect for that small, unassuming regulator. And a slightly louder intention to carry a spare next time, because if there is one thing a motorhome will teach you, it is this: the trip is not governed by the big expensive bits you worry about, but by the cheap, anonymous ones you barely noticed until they stopped everything.

The Banana

You would think, on first principles, that a banana peel ought to be the same shape as the thing it contains.

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Nice, clean cylinder. Logical. Consistent. The sort of tidy solution that would get approving nods in a design meeting and a small note in the margin saying “elegant”.

Instead, what you actually get is a five-sided object pretending, at a glance, to be round. A fruit that has clearly decided that geometric integrity is for other people and that it has places to be.

Except it isn’t even reliably five-sided, which rather undermines the whole notion that there’s a plan. Some come in at four, some at six, and occasionally you find one that looks like it was finished on a Friday afternoon with whatever sides were left in the box. You start out assuming there’s a standard. There isn’t. There’s a range.

At first you assume this is just botanical sloppiness. A lack of discipline. The sort of thing that would have a project manager pacing about asking why the outside doesn’t match the specification of the inside, and why the specification appears to be optional.

Then you try to imagine the alternative. A truly cylindrical banana. Perfectly smooth. No ridges, no seams, no clues. Just a polished yellow tube with all the helpful accessibility features designed out of it.

And suddenly it becomes clear that this would be a terrible idea.

You’d stand there, holding it, rotating it like a confused archaeologist. Where do you start? There’s no edge, no weak point, no hint. Just a continuous surface resisting all attempts at entry. You’d dig a thumbnail in, fail, escalate to a knife, and end up performing what feels like minor surgery on a piece of fruit.

The current banana, with its faintly pentagonal - or occasionally hexagonal if it’s feeling adventurous - peel, is quietly admitting something rather important. It is not there to satisfy your sense of symmetry. It is there to be opened without fuss.

Those ridges are not a failure. They are deliberate lines of weakness. Pre-installed access points. The equivalent of the little notch on a plastic packet that saves you from chewing through the corner like a Labrador.

Which does rather undermine the initial complaint. The peel doesn’t match the inside because matching the inside would make it worse.

It’s an inelegant solution to a practical problem, which is probably why it feels so familiar. Anyone who has ever added a slightly ugly bracket, cut a slot where a neat hole would have done, or left a panel a bit proud just so it can be removed again, will recognise the thinking.

The banana is not badly designed. It is designed by someone who has actually tried to open one.

I still check how many sides mine has before eating it. No idea why. It hasn’t changed the outcome so far.

Truth Social - A Brand Name in Search of a Product

There was a rather eye catching story this week about Meta being fined after a jury decided it had not exactly covered itself in glory over what happened on its platforms. Not a regulatory wrist slap, but an actual finding of liability, which is a slightly different kettle of fish. Real consequences, real money, and the faint suggestion that, at some point, someone might be expected to take responsibility for what is said and done under their roof.

Which does make you wonder, idly, what would happen if the same standard were applied elsewhere.

Take Truth Social, for instance. A name that sets out its stall rather boldly. Not "Possibly Accurate Social". Not "Depends What You Mean Social". No, straight in with "Truth", as if the thing had been personally blessed by a panel of philosophers, judges and disappointed schoolmasters.

Now, in law, of course, this is what they call puffery. A bit of marketing flourish. The sort of thing that allows "Best Coffee in Town" to be served lukewarm in a chipped mug without anyone summoning the authorities. No reasonable person is supposed to take it literally.

The trouble is that Donald Trump has spent so long treating facts as optional that the platform name no longer looks like branding. It looks like a joke that got out of hand. Not because everything he says is false. That would be too sweeping, and unlike him we should try to stay on speaking terms with reality. It is worse, in a way. Truth is never the standard. It is just one contestant among many, and usually not the one he backs.

That is the real problem. He does not merely get things wrong now and then, like the rest of us. He asserts things without evidence, repeats them after they have been debunked, and says the opposite later without the slightest sign that this should trouble anyone. Accuracy, in his world, is not a duty. It is a decorative extra, like chrome on an old American car.

So there is something deliciously absurd about a man with that relationship to truth presiding over something called Truth Social. It is a bit like opening a restaurant called Fresh Fish and serving Findus from the back of a freezer. Or launching a garage called Precision Engineering and attacking an engine with a lump hammer and misplaced confidence.

Legally, of course, nothing much can be done about the name. Courts are not going to sit there solemnly considering whether the word "Truth" created a binding obligation to tell it. They have enough to be getting on with. And so the law shrugs, quite reasonably, and says that branding is not a warranty.

Fair enough. But it does leave us in the faintly ridiculous position where Meta can be hammered for what happens on its platform, while Truth Social can carry on under a title that bears roughly the same relation to reality as "All You Can Eat" does after the third Yorkshire pudding.

So no, Trump does not lie every time he opens his mouth. Sometimes he says something true by accident, in the way a stopped clock manages a little moment of glory twice a day. The point is not that falsehood is literally constant. It is that truth is plainly not in charge.

And that, really, is the joke. It is called Truth Social, when "Reckless Assertion Depot" would be nearer the mark. But I suppose that did not test as well with the focus groups.

The Campsite Shower Block

The campsite shower block is one of those places that ought to be marketed honestly.

Not as "modern facilities" or "heated amenities", but as a sort of damp holding pen for people whose bodies now come with terms and conditions. You shuffle in carrying a towel, a washbag, and a level of quiet determination usually associated with polar expeditions. Around you are your peers, also elderly, all pretending this is still a simple business of having a shower and getting dressed, rather than a daily re-enactment of the decline of the West.

The first difficulty is the changing. There was a time when putting on underpants involved no planning at all. You simply stepped into them. Now it is a manoeuvre. A calculated operation involving balance, grip, and a brief internal negotiation with whichever knee has lately decided that lifting itself six inches is an unreasonable demand. One foot goes in, then the whole enterprise pauses while you steady yourself against a damp cubicle wall and hope not to die with one trouser leg round your ankle in a public shower block in Dorset.

All around you, others are engaged in similar acts of muted heroism. Nobody speaks of it. Nobody says, "I appear to have become too old to put my socks on standing up." That would be vulgar. Instead we carry on in silence, wobbling gently, with the grave dignity of men trying not to topple over while naked from the waist down.

Then there is the gathering at the sinks, which has the air of a pharmacists' convention held in a bus station lavatory. Out come the pill organisers, the foil packets, the little bottles with childproof lids that no child could open, but nor, frankly, can we. And of course nothing is ever straightforward. You do not take one tablet. That would be far too elegant. No, your dose has to be assembled like a small chemical puzzle from a selection of 4mg and 1mg pills, with the concentration of someone balancing the books at PwC, except in slippers.

After that comes hearing aid maintenance, which is a task no younger person ever imagines featuring in their future. Yet there we are, lined up under strip lighting, excavating yesterday's ear wax with tiny brushes and solemn expressions, as if servicing precision instruments. Which, in this case, are Danish. GN, no less. I used to work for them in a previous life, which adds a certain professional pride to the whole exercise. There is something magnificently undignified about standing in a Dorset shower block, maintaining Scandinavian micro-electronics while trying not to drop a wax guard down the plughole.

And still, oddly enough, there is a sort of fellowship in it. A quiet recognition that we are all in much the same state. Knees shot, backs stiff, hearing intermittent, digestive systems maintained by committee. Nobody says much, but everyone knows. We are the generation that once marched briskly into communal washrooms with a towel over one shoulder and emerged ten minutes later fully dressed and ready for the day. Now it takes half an hour and a pharmaceutical supply chain.

You come away from it all feeling clean, approximately assembled, and faintly triumphant. Not because you have conquered anything very grand, but because you have managed a shower, your pills, your Danish hearing aids and your trousers without requiring outside assistance. Which, in the motorhome world, counts as a very decent start to the morning.

A Few Centuries Late, With No Receipt

It’s one of those ideas that sounds entirely reasonable at first pass. Slavery was a grotesque crime. No argument there. So naturally, someone should compensate someone.

Then you start asking the awkward follow-up questions and the whole thing begins to wobble.

Take Ghana. Perfectly respectable country, relatively stable, doing better than quite a few of its neighbours. Not a basket case, not a war zone, not uniquely impoverished. Yet here it is, front and centre making the case for compensation on behalf of history.

And that’s where it gets a bit slippery.

Because the history isn’t as tidy as the modern narrative would like it to be. The slave trade wasn’t a simple story of Europeans arriving, grabbing people, and sailing off. It was a system. European demand, yes, but also African intermediaries, local conflicts, capture, sale. Unpleasant all round, and not exactly a one-sided ledger.

None of that excuses the scale or brutality of what followed, but it does make the idea of a clean victim and a clean perpetrator rather harder to maintain.

Then there’s the present-day claim. The argument runs that slavery created structures that still disadvantage people today. That may well be true in some places, at some levels. But it’s rarely demonstrated with any precision. It’s more often asserted in broad strokes, as if 200 years of subsequent history politely stood still.

If you look across Africa, outcomes don’t line up neatly with exposure to the slave trade. Some of the most affected regions have muddled through reasonably well. Others with very different histories have struggled more. Governance, resources, policy, sheer luck - they all seem to matter rather a lot.

Which raises the slightly uncomfortable question. If Ghana is owed compensation, on what basis exactly? Not because it is uniquely poor. Not because it alone suffered. And not even because it was entirely a victim in the first place.

At this point you hear the line that keeps popping into my head. People who were not enslaved demanding reparations from people who never enslaved anyone. It has a certain brutal clarity to it, even if it slightly oversimplifies what is being argued.

Because the argument has quietly shifted. It is no longer about direct harm. It is about inherited advantage and inherited disadvantage, carried across generations. That is a much broader and far more slippery claim, and one that is rarely nailed down with any precision.

All perfectly reasonable in tone. Less so in detail.

Once you attach a price tag, it turns into something else. A financial claim made by a modern state, on behalf of people long dead, against other modern states whose citizens had no part in it. And with no clear way of working out who owes what to whom, or why Ghana rather than, say, somewhere poorer with a different history.

Which is why this will likely end where these things usually do. A few solemn statements, perhaps an apology or two, some polite movement on returning artefacts, and a carefully worded fund that looks suspiciously like the foreign aid we already have, just with a different label on the tin.

Justice, it turns out, is much easier to agree on in principle than it is to invoice.

Insulated Windscreens

Every motorhome owner, sooner or later, arrives at the same crossroads.

It usually happens on a slightly chilly evening, somewhere unremarkable, with a cup of tea in hand and a faint sense that one ought to be doing something sensible about the windscreen.

Do you put the insulated covers on the outside, like a serious person who understands thermodynamics, or do you stay inside and put them up from the comfort of your own socks, like someone who has grasped the true purpose of a motorhome?

This is presented, in certain corners of the internet, as a technical question. Heat loss. Condensation. Dew point. The sort of language that suggests clipboards and a mild interest in spreadsheets.

The external camp will explain, patiently at first, that insulation belongs outside. Stop the cold at the glass, keep the interior warm, avoid condensation. It all sounds terribly grown up.

And they are right. In exactly the same way that a workshop manual is right about how long a job should take, assuming no bolts have rusted, rounded off, or developed a personal grudge.

Because the theory ends the moment you open the door. Outside, in Britain, at night, the air has that damp, slightly resentful quality it specialises in. You step out, realise you are still in your socks, go back in, find shoes, go out again, and begin the process of attaching what is essentially a padded sail to the front of the vehicle.

It flaps. It resists. It needs to go round mirrors that were not designed with your convenience in mind. There is always one corner that refuses to behave. By the time it is secured, you are mildly wet and no longer entirely convinced this is the pinnacle of human progress.

Still, you go to bed feeling virtuous. Proper insulation. Best practice. A man in control of his environment. Then morning arrives.

You open the door and are confronted not with a clever piece of kit, but with a large, wet object that has spent the night collecting every available form of moisture. Rain, mist, a bit of low cloud for texture. It now has the density and attitude of a damp sheep.

This is where the real dilemma begins, because now it needs drying. You cannot put it away wet. You can, once, and then it becomes a travelling biology experiment. So you look around for options.

The campsite offers none. The sky suggests it has no intention of helping. Draping it over the motorhome makes you look like you are signalling distress. Bringing it inside turns your neatly contained living space into a humid conservatory.

So you fold it. Or attempt to. It does not fold so much as collapse into a resentful bundle, which you then wedge into a locker with the quiet knowledge that you have not solved the problem, merely hidden it. Next time you use it, there will be a smell. Nothing dramatic. Just a faint reminder of previous optimism.

Meanwhile, the internal covers sit there, dry, cooperative, and entirely untroubled by the weather. They go up in two minutes, come down in two minutes, and require no drying strategy, no storage plan, and no emotional resilience. Yes, the windscreen will be damp. You wipe it. It takes less time than putting your shoes on. So the great dilemma resolves itself in practice rather than theory.

On one side, perfect insulation, achieved at the cost of wrestling a wet, uncooperative slab of fabric in a car park and then trying to dry it in a country that does not believe in drying things.

On the other, a slightly damp windscreen and a life free of damp sheep management.

We choose inside.

Not because we have failed to understand the physics, but because we have understood everything else.

Toy Influencer Kit

It’s hard not to admire the speed with which we can now manufacture a moral panic out of a £15 bag of bits of wood.

Argos puts a toy tripod and a pretend microphone in a box, labels it “influencer”, and suddenly we’re in a full-blown existential crisis about the fate of childhood. You can almost hear the hand-wringing. “Are we teaching toddlers to chase fame?” As if the average two-year-old needs a nudge in that direction.

Children have always been attention-seeking. Not in a pathological sense, just in the entirely normal, slightly exhausting way that involves being summoned repeatedly to watch the same jump, the same dance, the same “look at me” performance with only minor variations. If anything, the influencer kit is simply formalising a role they had already cast themselves in.

We’ve had generations of this dressed up in more comforting language. Dressing up boxes were not about “identity formation”, they were about putting on a show. Toy kitchens were not about “developing life skills”, they were about presenting you with an inedible plastic banquet and expecting applause. Toy microphones, karaoke machines, plastic guitars - all perfectly acceptable ways for a child to hold the room hostage.

The only thing that has changed is the label. Call it “performer set” and nobody blinks. Call it “influencer” and suddenly it becomes a commentary on late capitalism, digital identity, and the collapse of innocence. The toy itself hasn’t moved an inch. The adults have simply wandered off into a thicket of their own anxieties about social media and dragged the toy along with them.

There is also a quiet sleight of hand in some of the criticism. The kit does not connect to the internet. It does not upload content. It does not come with a brand manager or a monetisation strategy. It is, at heart, a wooden camera and a stick with a pretend microphone on the end. The idea that this is grooming toddlers for a life of algorithm chasing requires a fairly heroic leap.

What it does do is reflect the world children already see. Just as toy laptops appeared once offices filled with screens, and toy cash registers followed the supermarket, this is simply a child’s-eye version of what adults do with their phones. If anything, it is a slightly quaint, analogue take on a very modern habit.

And there’s the slightly uncomfortable truth underneath all this. The real “influencer culture” that worries people is not coming from a wooden toy bought in Argos. It is coming from the actual phones in parents’ hands, the endless scrolling, the casual filming, the small rituals of being seen. Children notice that far more than they notice what is written on a cardboard box.

So yes, there is something faintly ridiculous about the outrage. Not because the questions about attention, identity and technology are invalid, but because they have been pinned onto entirely the wrong object. It’s like blaming a toy steering wheel for bad driving habits while ignoring the actual car.

In the meantime, the most likely outcome is that a small child will set up their wooden tripod, announce something incomprehensible to an audience of one, and insist you watch it three times in a row. Which, come to think of it, is exactly how it has always worked.

The Day I Cancelled Nothing and Triggered the Machine

While going through my bank account the other day, performing the sort of archaeological dig that passes for financial management in retirement, I noticed something curious. A direct debit to British Gas was still sitting there. Nothing had been taken from it for about a year. I had left them long ago.

Naturally I cancelled it.

At this point I assumed absolutely nothing would happen. After all, nothing had been happening for twelve months.

This was a grave misunderstanding.

Within hours the emails began arriving. Apparently I had just committed a serious administrative offence. I had removed my direct debit and therefore lost my "special discount", and the system was now very concerned to inform me of my newly calculated estimated annual bill.

For energy they were no longer supplying.

This, I suspect, is the modern corporate algorithm in its natural habitat. The system does not know whether it supplies you with gas. It does not know whether you are even a customer. But it does know, with immense confidence, that a direct debit has changed somewhere in the universe and that corrective action must therefore be taken immediately.

At this point one attempts the traditional British remedy, which is to telephone someone. Finding the number required navigating a series of websites apparently designed by people who believe humans should never speak to other humans again.

Eventually I found it.

To be fair to the lady who answered, she was perfectly sensible. She cancelled the account within about thirty seconds, which raises the awkward question of why the machine had been threatening me with imaginary bills in the first place.

I asked her to log a complaint.

Not because I expect anything dramatic to happen. No one is going to storm the server room and shout "stop the algorithm". But somewhere, in a quiet spreadsheet in a quiet office, a tally will go up by one under the heading "system behaving like a confused Labrador".

If enough of those accumulate, some poor IT engineer will eventually be told to adjust the rule that says:

Direct debit cancelled - panic - invent bill.

Until then, the machine will continue doing what machines do best. Confidently misunderstanding the world and sending emails about it.

The Far Right's Christian Values

There is a certain type of political bore who bangs on about "Christian values" as if he has just returned from a personal briefing with the Almighty, when in fact the last time he crossed a church threshold was for a wedding buffet and a quick moan about the parking. He likes to present the far right as the last line of defence for Christian civilisation, all solemn duty and moral backbone. The trouble is that the evidence says otherwise, which is always awkward when a whole identity has been built on sounding certain in the comments section.

Across Western Europe, researchers have found no positive relationship between religiosity and voting for populist radical right parties. None. In some cases, regular church attendance is linked to lower support. Practising Christians are often under-represented among far-right voters. So the grand army of churchgoing patriots exists mostly in the imagination of men with flags in their profile pictures and very little else going on. The people actually sitting in pews every Sunday are apparently not queuing up for the politics of grievance and scapegoating.

This does rather spoil the theatrical nonsense. Because the far right absolutely loves Christianity, provided it can be kept safely at the level of branding. It likes churches as scenery, not as institutions full of inconvenient teachings about loving thy neighbour, showing mercy, feeding the poor and generally behaving in a way that makes xenophobic ranting look a bit cheap. Christianity, in this mode, is not a faith. It is a badge. A logo. A bit of heritage trim bolted onto a rather nasty machine.

And that is the real joke in all this. The loudest defenders of "Christian civilisation" are very often not defending Christianity at all. They are defending a tribal identity dressed up in religious language. They want the architecture, the hymns at Christmas, the vague sense of civilisational superiority, and none of the moral obligations. It is Christianity with the engine removed and the bonnet polished. All showroom shine, no mechanical content.

Political scientists even have a name for the mismatch - the "religion gap". Far-right parties talk incessantly about Christianity, yet practising Christians tend not to flock to them. One explanation is almost comically simple. If you actually belong to a church, you are more likely to be embedded in a real community, exposed to actual moral teaching, and less susceptible to the sort of bilious nonsense that blames foreigners, liberals, Muslims or Brussels for every irritation from potholes to damp weather. It turns out that meeting actual human beings may be bad for ideological hysteria. Who knew.

So when some chap starts droning on about how the far right is the natural home of Christian Europe, what he usually means is that he likes the cultural packaging. He likes crosses on war memorials, nativity scenes, old cathedrals and the general smell of inherited legitimacy. He does not mean he is off to evensong, helping at the food bank, or wrestling seriously with the Sermon on the Mount. That would be a different matter entirely, and a good deal less useful to the politics of permanent resentment.

In short, the far right does not so much represent Christianity as cosplay it. It borrows the costume, waves the props about, and hopes nobody notices that the congregation has gone elsewhere. Which, according to the research, it largely has. The whole thing is a bit like one of those "fully restored" classics advertised by an optimist. Lovely paint, sparkling badges, a lot of talk about heritage, and underneath it all, not much evidence that anyone has opened the bonnet in years.

Sources include comparative research published in Party Politics on Western Europe, LSE analysis of the "religion gap", and European Social Survey-based work in Social Science Research showing Christians are often less likely to back the populist radical right.