Jim Ratcliffe III - the Art of the Non-Apology

Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Or so Elton John would have it. In modern public life, however, it has acquired an even more elusive cousin. The apology that apologises for absolutely nothing.

You will recognise it immediately. It arrives dressed in solemn language, accompanied by a grave expression and the faint rustle of a communications team hovering just out of sight. "I apologise for any offence caused." There it is. Perfectly formed. Immaculate. And entirely hollow.

Because offence is not an independent weather system. It does not drift in from the Atlantic and settle unexpectedly over a remark. Offence is the entirely predictable consequence of saying something offensive. It has a cause. And that cause is the speaker.

Apologising for offence is therefore a subtle act of linguistic evasion. It shifts the burden from the act to the reaction. The offence becomes the regrettable event. Not the words themselves. The implication is clear enough once you notice it. The problem is not what was said. The problem is that people reacted to it.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of standing on someone's foot and saying, "I apologise for your pain," while continuing to lean on their toes.

A real apology does something very simple. It acknowledges agency. "I said this. It was wrong. I regret saying it." That is an apology. It identifies the act and accepts responsibility for it. There is no ambiguity. No smoke. No mirrors.

The modern non-apology, by contrast, is an exercise in reputational risk management. It exists to neutralise consequences without conceding error. It reassures sponsors, calms shareholders, and creates the impression of contrition while preserving the original intent intact beneath the surface.

It is not remorse. It is maintenance.

And everyone understands this. The speaker understands it. The audience understands it. The journalists understand it. Yet the ritual continues, as though we are all participants in an elaborate theatre production whose plot has long since ceased to convince anyone.

The result is that the apology itself has been quietly hollowed out. It no longer serves its original purpose of acknowledging wrongdoing. It has become instead a form of linguistic insurance. A tool for containing fallout rather than confronting truth.

Which leaves us in the curious position where the rarest thing in public life is no longer honesty. It is responsibility.

Not the offence. The cause.

The Tyranny of the Decimal Place

Politics now runs on decimal points.

A quarterly GDP figure lands at 0.1 per cent and the country reacts as if a referendum result has just been announced. Government ministers beam. Oppositions howl. Commentators lean forward with furrowed brows. All because of a number so small it is often within the range of later revision.

The Office for National Statistics publishes early estimates that are, by its own description, provisional. Data are incomplete. Surveys are still coming in. Seasonal adjustments are applied. Assumptions are made. Then, months later, revisions quietly follow. A heroic 0.1 becomes 0.0. A supposed contraction disappears. The drama evaporates.

Yet the performance repeats every quarter.

The problem is that we confuse weather with climate.

A quarterly figure is weather. A warm December boosts retail. A wet summer dents construction. A strike, a one off defence contract, a shift in car production timing - any of these can nudge output by a tenth of a per cent. That tells you something about the quarter. It tells you almost nothing about the direction of the economy.

Annual growth is closer to climate. It smooths out the storms and heatwaves. It captures whether output is persistently rising, stagnating or shrinking. It begins to reveal structural issues such as weak productivity, falling real incomes or chronic underinvestment. It is slower, less exciting, and far more meaningful.

That said, even climate data can lag. Quarterly numbers can be early warning signals. The mistake is treating them as verdicts, rather than indicators that need confirming over time.

But climate is dull. Weather is dramatic.

So we obsess over the gust rather than the prevailing wind. A single quarterly uptick is hailed as a recovery. A single downtick is framed as collapse. Both interpretations are usually nonsense. If the annual trend remains anaemic, a good quarter is not salvation. If the annual trend is solid, a soft quarter is not doom.

There is also the small matter of scale. A 0.1 per cent quarterly move, especially once rounded, is barely distinguishable from noise. It is often revised. It may reflect timing quirks rather than real underlying change.

This obsession is not accidental. It feeds narrative. “Growth up” or “growth flat” fits neatly into partisan scripts. “Annual productivity remains weak despite short term volatility” does not. The first wins clicks. The second requires patience.

The result is a public conversation about economics conducted at the level of a barometer reading taken in a gusty courtyard.

Quarterly data matter, but they are indicators, not verdicts. If we want to know whether the economy is genuinely improving, we should look to annual growth, real wages over time, business investment trends and productivity per head. That is climate. Everything else is just a passing shower dressed up as a hurricane.

Until we learn the difference, we will continue to panic at drizzle and celebrate brief sunshine, all while ignoring whether the seasons themselves are changing.

Growth, Illness and Political Arithmetic

We keep talking about growth as though it lives entirely in tax policy, trade deals and planning reform. Meanwhile, around 2.7 million working-age adults are economically inactive because of long-term sickness. That figure rose sharply after 2020. Mental health accounts for a large share. Musculoskeletal illness remains significant. Post-viral conditions are now part of the increase.

This is not monocausal. But it is structural.

ONS estimates have at points suggested around 2 million people reporting Long Covid symptoms, with several hundred thousand describing daily activities as limited “a lot”. Many have not left work entirely. Some reduce hours. Others fluctuate. But labour supply is not binary. A sustained reduction in working capacity across hundreds of thousands of people accumulates economically.

Run the arithmetic conservatively and you are quickly into billions of pounds in foregone earnings and tax receipts each year.

Now compare political treatment.

Dementia research attracts tens of millions annually from NIHR alone. Alzheimer’s and related conditions are unquestionably serious. But they predominantly affect older people, many of whom have already left the labour market. Their economic impact is felt through care costs and family labour displacement rather than direct loss of taxable earnings.

Yet dementia commands sustained funding and strategic framing.

That is not an argument against dementia funding. It is an observation about political salience. Pensioners are numerous, politically engaged and economically powerful as a voting cohort. A condition that affects them carries immediate electoral weight across parties.

Post-infectious illness is different. It affects working-age adults more heavily. Its impact shows up directly in labour supply and productivity. But it lacks a cohesive constituency. Its sufferers are dispersed. The costs appear gradually in GDP figures rather than dramatically in hospital wards.

That contrast matters.

The deeper issue, however, is not simply research funding. It is institutional alignment. Health policy treats chronic illness clinically. Labour policy treats inactivity statistically. Welfare assessments remain largely binary. You are fit for work, or you are not. That structure works for permanent incapacity. It works less well for fluctuating conditions.

Post-infectious illness often behaves variably. Someone may manage limited hours for a period and then relapse. The current Universal Credit and work capability framework is not designed around that pattern. It can create friction between attempted partial recovery and benefit stability.

A system concerned with growth would treat variable capacity as a predictable feature rather than an anomaly. That means aligning NHS rehabilitation plans with DWP case management and allowing graded returns to work without resetting entitlement or triggering repeated reassessment cycles.

This is not a question of generosity. It is a question of design. If partial capacity is administratively discouraged, labour supply contracts unnecessarily.

Dementia shows that political urgency can override biological uncertainty when the constituency is powerful enough.

The question is whether labour supply erosion commands equivalent urgency when its constituency is diffuse.

That is not left or right. It is political arithmetic.

And arithmetic, eventually, intrudes.

Jim Ratcliffe - Continued

Jim Ratcliffe declared that Britain is being “colonised”, and Nigel Farage and others applauded. It is a heavy word, the sort that suggests foreign control and decisions taken elsewhere. It sounds as though sovereignty has slipped away. But when you examine what is actually meant, the claim becomes less geopolitical and far more visual.

Because how, exactly, is this alleged colonisation detected?

Not through ONS migration tables. Not through visa criteria. Not through fiscal data. It usually comes down to what people say they can see when they “look around”.

And that is where the logic begins to wobble.

If “colonisation” is left undefined and treated as visible demographic concentration, then it logically extends to long-established communities such as the Haredi in Stamford Hill, Irish enclaves in west London, Australians in Clapham, French clusters in Kensington, or even me quietly minding my business in Dutch West Old Sodbury.

The instinctive clarification, “Oh, I don’t mean that group,” reveals the instability of the term. It suggests that the trigger is not cultural distinctiveness, not religion, not communal clustering, and not even foreign birth.

Of course, some may insist they do mean every concentrated community, including Stamford Hill and the French in Kensington. But if that is the case, then Britain has been in a permanent state of colonisation for centuries. Huguenots in Spitalfields, Irish in Liverpool, Jews in the East End, Americans in Surrey. The word ceases to describe foreign control and becomes shorthand for visible pluralism.

I was born in the Netherlands. By definition, I am an immigrant. Yet nobody has ever looked at me in the Co-op and muttered about demographic takeover. Why not? Because I look and sound familiar. I blend in.

Now consider a second-generation British citizen of Pakistani heritage, born here, educated here, speaking with the same regional accent as his neighbours. Legally British. Culturally British. The only obvious difference is skin tone.

If the concern were purely about scale or integration, it would apply consistently regardless of colour. When it does not, the remaining variable becomes clear. The conclusion is difficult to avoid. At that point the metaphor stops being about sovereignty or demographic arithmetic and becomes about who looks different. Europe has travelled that road before, and it did not end well.

That is not an accusation. It is a logical fork.

Now add the arithmetic.

Britain is ageing. Pension liabilities rise year after year. Health demand rises with them. Since 2020, economic inactivity due to long-term sickness has increased materially, with hundreds of thousands of working-age people out of the labour market because of chronic illness, including Long Covid and related conditions. That shrinkage has nothing to do with borders and everything to do with health.

Working-age migrants tend to be younger and economically active. Remove large numbers of them and the fiscal pressure does not disappear. It shifts. Fewer workers paying tax means a smaller revenue base. If you still want to fund existing pensions and public services, either tax rates rise, spending falls, or borrowing increases. Those are not ideological choices. They are accounting outcomes.

And here lies the contradiction. The same voices warning of colonisation are often demanding lower taxes at the same time. Fewer workers, lower inflows, reduced tax rates, and unchanged pension promises do not add up. That is not a moral point. It is simple arithmetic.

Some reply that automation will replace labour. Perhaps. But automation replaces payrolls, not necessarily tax receipts. It shifts income from labour to capital. Unless you tax capital more heavily, you risk shrinking PAYE revenues while increasing welfare claims from displaced workers. Robots do not automatically pay National Insurance.

Then there is sovereignty. Colonisation historically meant foreign political control. Britain sets its own immigration rules. Legal migration flows are determined by criteria established by British governments, usually linked to labour demand. If numbers are high, it reflects domestic policy choices about workforce needs. That may be wise or foolish, but it is not foreign domination. It is self-government.

And the economy has adjusted around those choices. The NHS recruits overseas because vacancies exist. Care providers look abroad because the shifts still need covering. Universities depend heavily on international fees. Employers search wherever skills can be found when domestic supply falls short. You can argue that this reliance should be reduced, and that is a legitimate debate. But it is the result of policy interacting with labour demand, not external occupation.

So here is the honest fork in the road.

If the argument is for lower overall migration, say so plainly and accept the trade-offs: tighter labour markets, higher wages in some sectors, slower growth unless productivity improves, and potentially higher taxes if pension promises and service levels are to be honoured.

But if the objection rests primarily on visible demographic change while also insisting on lower taxes and unchanged services, then the numbers simply do not reconcile. You cannot shrink the workforce, shrink the tax take, expand pension obligations and keep everything else the same. Something will give.

If the test of colonisation is what the country looks like rather than who writes its laws or funds its pensions, then this is not about sovereignty.

It is about comfort. And comfort, however understandable, still has to be paid for.

Expendable Today, Rival Tomorrow

I have long suggested – and I make no apology for pattern recognition – that Nigel Farage’s real talent lies in getting close enough to power to shape events, but never so close that he has to shoulder the grind of governing. Build pressure, dominate the airwaves, then pivot before the Treasury tables arrive. Influence without responsibility. I have watched the cycle repeat often enough to recognise it when it comes round again.

Which makes his embrace of former Conservative Party MPs rather revealing.

These are the same Conservatives he has spent years condemning as cowards and Brexit saboteurs. Yet once they defect to Reform UK, they are rebadged as people of principle who have suddenly located their courage. It is less a conversion than a reclassification.

The opportunism is mutual. Many defectors are not seized by ideological revelation. They read the polling. They see their associations thinning. They sense the brand decay and calculate that standing still may be worse than jumping. Political survival instinct is rarely dressed up honestly.

History is not kind to them. The Social Democratic Party split from Labour with Cabinet rank and vast excitement. Most were gone at the next election. Change UK briefly filled studios and then disappeared. Under first past the post, personal reinvention rarely defeats party machinery.

Defectors have a habit of becoming footnotes. I have seen that pattern before as well.

Farage knows this. He is not naive about electoral mechanics. So welcoming them is unlikely to be an act of long-term institutional planning. In the short term they are useful. They generate headlines. They pad out Commons numbers. They wound the Conservatives. They create the impression of gathering force. They reassure donors that momentum is building.

But they are not durable parliamentary capital.

And here is the sharper edge. If some of these defectors understand the odds, if they suspect they are being used for short-term theatre, then their incentives change. An MP who believes he is on borrowed time has little reason to be cautious. In a small parliamentary party, the only serious prize is leadership.

If office is unlikely, control of the vehicle becomes the goal.

That is where pattern recognition starts to matter. Insurgent movements built around a dominant personality can look cohesive until ambition compresses inside a small caucus. Loyalty becomes transactional. Survival becomes competitive.

Farage may be using defectors as accelerants. But accelerants do not always burn in neat, predictable lines.

Westminster has seen defectors fade before. It has also seen small parties turn volatile once the spotlight grows brighter. Whether this cycle repeats exactly remains to be seen. The outlines, however, are familiar.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has decided that Britain has been “colonised”. Strong word. Loaded word. The sort of word that normally appears in YouTube thumbnails next to arrows and red circles.

This from a man who lives in Monaco for tax efficiency while lecturing the rest of us about the burden on British public services. One might admire the financial prudence. One might even admire the candour. But it does rather undercut the moral thunder. It is difficult to warn about national strain while arranging one’s own fiscal lightness.

Then there is the small matter of the football club.

Manchester United is not a parish team from Saddleworth. It is a global corporation in red shirts. It scouts in Africa, South America and Europe. It files work permit paperwork as routinely as it files transfer bids. Its broadcast revenue comes from Jakarta as much as Salford. Its shirt sales depend on Lagos, Seoul and Sao Paulo. The modern Premier League is global labour mobility with floodlights.

And yet we are told that demographic change is somehow an existential trespass.

Let us be clear. No one is obliged to support high levels of immigration. One can argue about housing supply, GP capacity, wage compression, planning failures, or visa design. Those are policy questions. They require numbers, trade-offs and grown-up language.

“Colonised” is not grown-up language. It is cultural alarmism. It suggests displacement rather than management. It implies invasion rather than administration. It trades in emotion, not arithmetic.

Footballers, we are reminded, are temporary. They will not necessarily settle. Quite so. But that rather proves the point. The entire Premier League model rests on temporary immigration. Work visas. International contracts. Global recruitment pipelines. Short-term presence is still immigration. If mobility is good for balance sheets but bad for Britain, that is not an argument. It is a contradiction.

There is also a deeper irony. The Premier League is one of the most successful export products this country has. It projects British soft power across the world. It is diverse, multilingual and commercially ruthless. It thrives precisely because it is open. If that is colonisation, it is a curious form of self-harm that seems to pay remarkably well.

The uncomfortable truth is this: global integration is profitable when it fills stadiums, but politically toxic when it fills classrooms and surgeries. That tension is real. Infrastructure planning has been poor. Housing supply has lagged. Governments of both stripes have failed to align migration with capacity. That is an administrative failure, not a civilisational one.

If you wish to argue for lower net migration, make the case in those terms. Talk about numbers. Talk about absorption rates. Talk about fiscal contribution and local strain. Do not reach for the language of siege while cashing cheques from a globalised enterprise built on exactly the flows you condemn.

Because when the rhetoric turns apocalyptic but the business model remains international, people will notice. And they are entitled to ask whether this is policy seriousness or simply political theatre with a Monaco postcode attached.

As for Farage getting in on the act, it's only yo be expected.

The 5:30am Firelighter Tea Ritual

There is something quietly heroic about a man creeping round his own house at dawn like an amateur cat burglar.

I rise between 4:30 and 05:00. Not because I am virtuous. Not because I am disciplined. But because at that hour the world has not yet started shouting, and it feels like borrowed time.

Our place is open plan, with minstrel galleries at either end, so any sound travels as if announced by town crier. If I drop a teaspoon in the kitchen, it echoes like a musket shot at Trafalgar.

So I pad about, silent as a mouse with a pension pot, and begin the ritual. Half an hour on Flipboard, digesting the decline of Western civilisation. Occasionally I will compile a blog post while the rest of the house remains blissfully unaware that it is being intellectually improved.

The cat is fed, and reacts as if I personally engineered Brexit. The fire is lit. Firelighters are deployed with the sort of calm deliberation normally associated with naval gunnery.

Then comes the tender domestic act. I make Hay her morning tea and around 05:30.

This is where the confession lurks.

I squeeze the teabag. Yes, I know the spoon would suffice, but no. I go in with fingers and determination, extracting every last drop of flavour like a Victorian mill owner determined to maximise output.

And those fingers, moments earlier, have often handled firelighters.

Paraffin. Kerosene. A suggestion of rural forecourt.

I present the mug and announce, with the confidence of a man who has never read a toxicology report, “Your morning cup of firelighter.”

Over the winter I have probably been running a low level domestic experiment. Not enough to trouble the NHS. Just enough, perhaps, to give the tea a faint aftertaste of camping weekend in 1978.

The science suggests the risk is negligible. The theatre of it, however, is magnificent. We agonise over seed oils and air quality while quietly introducing a hint of petrochemical character to breakfast.

Hay remains alive, lucid, and fully capable of dismantling my arguments before 7am, which suggests either the dosage is minimal, or she has developed resilience worthy of the Royal Navy.

If she ever acquires the ability to self ignite during a particularly heated political discussion, I shall accept responsibility.

Until then, I continue my dawn patrol. 4:30. Silence. Cat. Fire. Tea. A Regency gentleman with a box of firelighters and a slightly questionable approach to beverage hygiene.

When Truth Became Optional

There was a time when a lie at least had the decency to blush. Now it books a studio slot and accuses its critics of censorship.

“Post-truth” is the tidy label for a grubby condition in which objective facts carry less weight than emotion, identity and grievance. Truth still exists. It has simply been demoted. Whether something is accurate matters less than whether it feels right. Evidence becomes optional. Loyalty does not.

This is not a complaint about losing arguments. Nor is it confined to one ideology. Whenever identity outruns evidence, the same erosion begins. The problem is structural, not partisan.

Trust in institutions took repeated knocks - Iraq, the financial crisis, expenses, bailouts. Some scepticism was earned. Institutions are imperfect and should be scrutinised. But scrutiny is not the same as dismissal. Demanding evidence is how institutions are corrected. Declaring them corrupt whenever they deliver unwelcome conclusions is how they are hollowed out.

Economic stagnation widened the crack. When wages stall and official graphs show recovery, people assume the graphs are fraudulent rather than incomplete. That gap between lived experience and aggregated data became fertile ground for louder, simpler explanations.

Then social media industrialised human bias. Platforms optimise for engagement, not accuracy. Anger travels faster than nuance. Repetition inside algorithmic echo chambers begins to feel like proof. Corrections arrive late and limp. This is not conspiracy. It is incentive design.

The UK press operates within a concentrated ownership structure - a handful of proprietors control most national circulation - and commercial pressure rewards provocation. Serious journalism survives, but outrage is efficient. The incentives align again.

In that environment, politics shifts. Bold assertion outperforms careful qualification. Institutional pushback becomes sabotage. Judges are activist. Regulators are partisan. Markets are hysterical. The referee becomes the enemy.

Boris Johnson should have been a warning. The £350 million Brexit claim was widely challenged and widely effective. Constitutional limits were tested. Criticism was reframed as obstruction. His fall showed that arithmetic and law still matter. Yet for some, the lesson absorbed was not caution but method. Narrative stamina can win.

This dynamic is not uniquely British. Donald Trump demonstrated at scale how repetition, dismissal of unfavourable facts as “fake”, and framing legal scrutiny as persecution can sustain loyalty even when claims collide with verified outcomes. Once narrative and identity fuse, correction feels like attack.

Science feels the strain. Proper science is cautious and self-correcting. That nuance is weaponised as weakness. The existence of uncertainty becomes proof of conspiracy. A meme with a chart outruns peer review. Courts feel it too. They are not flawless, but they operate through evidence and procedure. Undermining that framework because an outcome is unwelcome is different from reforming it.

Where does this lead?

At first, to dysfunction. Policies unravel on contact with arithmetic. When fiscal claims ignore basic sums, borrowing costs rise. When court rulings are framed as partisan, compliance weakens. These are measurable consequences, not rhetorical ones.

Further on, to institutional fatigue. Expertise becomes suspect. Elections are framed as existential contests in which defeat must mean fraud. The system still operates, but less reliably and at greater cost.

Who benefits? In the short term, political opportunists untroubled by contradiction. Media actors who monetise outrage. Wealthy interests who prefer distraction to scrutiny. Foreign adversaries who thrive on division.

Who does not? Citizens who rely on functioning services, predictable rules and enforceable law. In other words, most people.

Post-truth is not destiny. It is an incentive structure. It persists only if rewarded. Voters can demand proof. Media can privilege verification over provocation. Institutions can defend evidential standards without claiming infallibility.

Truth is not glamorous. It is inconvenient and often dull. But it is structural. Remove it, and everything still looks impressive for a while.

Until it doesn’t.

Protect Women - Unless They Complicate the Story

A Reel drifted across my Facebook feed the other night. As usual, my first instinct was scepticism. Most Reels are flim-flam designed to provoke before anyone checks the facts. This one was labelled Hull, 27 September 2025 and showed a woman at a “Protect Women and Children” rally being booed and having her microphone taken from her.

So I checked whether there was actually a protest in Hull that weekend. There was. Humberside Police logged a planned demonstration in the city centre on 27 September. The location in the clip matched Queen Victoria Square. So the setting was real.

In the footage, the woman says she was groomed at 11 years old. Not 16. Not 18. Eleven. She speaks about abuse. She speaks about what happened to her. And then she says the men who abused her were white.

She is booed. Someone shouts, “Fuck off, bitch.” The microphone is taken from her.

Pause there. A rally branded around protecting women and children has just silenced a woman who was abused as a child.

Now, could the clip have been trimmed? Possibly. Social media edits everything. But the reaction was not synthetic. It was not a caption added later. It was a crowd responding in real time to the fact that her abusers did not fit the preferred storyline.

If safeguarding were the true purpose, the ethnicity of her abusers would have been irrelevant. She was 11. That should have been the only morally salient fact in the square that day.

Instead, her value in that space depended on whether she confirmed a racial narrative. The moment she did not, she ceased to be a victim to be protected and became an inconvenience to be removed.

That is where racism and misogyny begin to overlap. Both are hierarchical ways of sorting people. Both decide whose voice counts and whose does not. A movement that claims to defend women, but only when those women reinforce a chosen ethnic villain, is not centring women at all. It is centring grievance.

Child sexual exploitation in Britain is a serious, multi-layered problem. It has involved offenders of different ethnic backgrounds across different regions. It has involved police failures, social services gaps and institutional cowardice. It does not reduce neatly to a single demographic storyline.

But rallies do not thrive on complexity. They thrive on clarity. They require a defined villain. And when a woman stands up and complicates that clarity, the crowd shows you what really matters.

You can argue about immigration policy. You can argue about policing. You can argue about whether the Reel was curated for effect. But this is harder to evade: a rally claiming to protect women turned hostile to a woman when she disrupted the script.

The boos answered the question.

Tea, Coffee and the Permanent State of Manufactured Crisis

I’ve come to the conclusion that we now measure national stability by beverage selection.

“Prime Minister, tea or coffee?”

“I think I’ll have tea… actually, coffee.”

BREAKING NEWS: Downing Street in turmoil as PM flip-flops on hot drinks. Senior aides locked in emergency talks. Pound wobbles. Democracy trembles.

You can almost see the banner now: CAFFEINE CRISIS.

The modern political “emergency” often turns out to be a human being thinking aloud. A leader walks six feet from car to door while a flock of journalists jog backwards in front of him.

“Prime Minister, will you resign?”
“Prime Minister, is this the end?”
“Prime Minister, are you clinging on?”

If he says nothing, it’s stonewalling. If he says “No”, it’s defiance. If he says he’s focused on the job, it’s refusal to deny speculation. If he adjusts a policy after consultation, it’s a humiliating U-turn.

Politics used to involve negotiation. Now it involves headline choreography. A minor amendment becomes civil war. A polling dip becomes terminal decline. A shouted question down a pavement becomes evidence of collapse.

I’ll be frank: I’ve largely lost faith in journalists. Not all of them, but the pack behaviour and breathless framing. Every tremor is inflated into an earthquake because drama sells and context doesn’t.

Of course governments wobble. Of course leaders misstep. But there’s a difference between volatility and implosion. The news cycle barely recognises it.

Which brings us to the alleged “crisis”.

Starmer inherited tight fiscal constraints and a very broad political coalition. Labour’s majority was built largely on a shared desire to eject the Conservatives. That creates a broad church. Broad churches win elections, but they are unstable in government. Internal factions and competing priorities mean there is constant pressure to dilute policy. Drift is the default risk.

So beyond fiscal restraint, there is a deliberate positioning tactic.

He sets out reforms slightly beyond the minimum outcome he ultimately needs. That isn’t recklessness. It’s anchoring. In sales you open high knowing negotiation will bring you down. In legal strategy you plead broadly expecting trimming. Politics works the same way. If you want to end at B, you open at C. Pushback from Parliament, the Lords and internal factions is anticipated. If you opened at B, you would likely finish at A.

What critics call a “U turn” is often a controlled landing. The direction of travel remains. The settlement is still further than the old baseline because the overreach was leverage, not the destination.

The first two years aim to push through those structural changes, stabilise credibility and rebuild fiscal headroom. In parallel, he improves relations with the EU through practical friction reduction and regulatory cooperation. That lowers business uncertainty and supports growth at the margins.

If that creates headroom, the second phase follows: more popular, visible policies from year two onwards, funded by the improved position created earlier. Pain first, dividends later.

Mid-term council losses may sting and cause PLP jitters; however, any leadership challenger would face exactly the same structural constraints, so they must hold the line with Starmer.

If opposition parties win councils on bold promises, governing exposes the arithmetic. Over two years that can work to his advantage and is a calculated tactical sacrifice. Current Reform councils are already proving the point.

In reality, given the constraints, there isn’t a credible alternative strategy. The other options are overpromising, overborrowing or deep immediate cuts. All carry greater risk. This approach is slower, but structurally safer.

Meanwhile, somewhere outside No.10, someone is still shouting about tea.