Labour’s Ladder Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When a Swimming Pool Becomes a Shrine

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

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

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

Because his paintings leave me cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain’s War Against Practical Innovation

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

But no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the screw drop.

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

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

Which raises the obvious question.

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

Well, they did.

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

I'd never heard of them either.

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

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

But obviously nobody did that.

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

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

So the screw terminal plug survived.

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

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

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

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

Flags, Frigates and the Invoice

John Healey’s resignation is one of those political moments that pulls the dust sheet off the furniture and reveals the woodworm underneath.

The Defence Secretary has walked out because, in his judgement, the government’s defence spending plan does not provide enough money to keep the country safe. Armed Forces Minister Al Carns then followed him out of the door. This is not the usual Westminster pantomime, with someone resigning because they did not get the nicer office. This is the man responsible for defence saying the numbers do not match the danger.

And there, sitting in the middle of the carpet, is the great British contradiction.

The electorate wants protection. Of course it does. It wants Russia deterred, shipping lanes kept open, cyber attacks dealt with, ammunition in the cupboard, service housing repaired, recruitment sorted, veterans looked after, and Britain taken seriously by allies who must occasionally wonder whether we are still a serious country or just a heritage brand with aircraft carriers.

But it also wants tax cuts.

This is especially obvious on the right, where the performance is all flags, firmness and Churchillian wallpaper. They want Britain defended. They want sovereignty protected. They want the borders controlled. They want the Royal Navy visible and the Army ready.

Then someone asks how it should be paid for, and suddenly everyone develops a deep interest in efficiency savings.

You cannot defend a country on slogans. You cannot rearm with a podcast. A missile does not become cheaper because someone has put a Union Jack in their Twitter biography, although I suspect that will not stop someone trying.

Of course the Ministry of Defence will embroider the threat. Every department does this in its own way, but the MoD has better music and more alarming maps. It wants more money, and like any large institution it knows how to present its case in the language of urgency, capability gaps and grim-looking arrows. That does not mean the danger is imaginary. It does mean we should distinguish between the actual risk and the sales brochure attached to it.

Russia is not ten feet tall. It is failing to defeat Ukraine, a much smaller country, after years of war, appalling losses, exposed incompetence and obvious strain. The idea that Moscow is poised to roll across NATO like a Soviet remake of a bad 1980s war film is overblown. Even without the United States fully engaged, a conventional Russian war against European NATO would be a vastly more dangerous undertaking than the invasion of Ukraine.

But that is not the same as saying there is no threat.

Russia may not be able to occupy Warsaw, Berlin or Tallinn, but it can still cause serious trouble. It can sabotage, hack, jam GPS, prod at undersea cables, intimidate, fund useful idiots, stir up disinformation, test airspace, rattle its nuclear tin, and generally behave like the sort of neighbour who cannot actually buy your house but can still reverse into your wall and deny all knowledge of it.

So the argument is not panic. It is competence.

Britain does not need to bankrupt itself preparing for a Russian tank charge through Europe in fancy dress. But it does need ammunition, drones, air defence, cyber resilience, ships that work, aircraft with spares, barracks that are not quietly rotting, and armed forces that are not treated as a ceremonial backdrop for politicians who like flags but dislike invoices.

This is the bit the tax-cutting right never wants to discuss honestly. Defence is one of the few things even small-state people are supposed to accept the state has to do. Ships, aircraft, ammunition dumps, barracks, engineers, radar, spares, fuel, training. None of it arrives because someone has written sovereignty in capital letters.

The Reform-ish answer is always that there are vast savings somewhere else. The list is familiar enough by now: foreign aid, asylum hotels, diversity officers, quangos, net zero. The usual travelling circus of imaginary treasure chests. But serious defence spending is not paid for by cancelling a leaflet and selling a few rainbow lanyards on eBay. The gap is too large, the commitments too long, and the world too untidy.

Britain has spent years enjoying the psychological comfort of believing that defence was something other countries worried about. The Americans would turn up, NATO would somehow exist in the abstract, and global trade would continue as if escorted by fairies.

That world has gone, or at least it is looking rather less reliable than it did when everyone was still pretending the 1990s had never ended.

There is a perfectly honest argument that Britain should not spend 3% of GDP on defence. Fine. Make that argument. Say which risks we are prepared to accept, which commitments we are prepared to abandon, and which allies we are prepared to disappoint. What is not honest is demanding the posture of a great power while funding the armed forces like a reluctant household repair.

And the same applies the other way. There is no need to pretend Russia is about to invade Surrey by Tuesday in order to justify better defence. Exaggerating the threat weakens the argument. It turns a serious question into theatre. The honest case is simpler: Russia is not strong enough to conquer NATO, but it is hostile enough, reckless enough and damaged enough to test weakness wherever it finds it.

So we have to decide whether we want the country defended, or whether we just want the warm feeling of saying we do. Those are not the same thing, irritatingly.

Labour has its own problem here. Starmer cannot go around sounding grave about global threats while allowing the Treasury to treat defence as if it were a regrettable departmental hobby. If the threat is real, the funding has to be real. If the funding is not real, the rhetoric is just camouflage netting over a spreadsheet.

But the Conservatives and Reform do not get to preen either. The armed forces were not hollowed out last Tuesday. This has been going on for years. Too many of the people now thumping the table about defence also spent years applauding low tax, small state, public-sector restraint and magical efficiency savings. Well, here is the result. The cupboard is thinner than the speeches.

That is the fraud. They want the emotional reward of a strong state and the fiscal pleasure of a weak one.

They want aircraft carriers without tax. Border control without administration. Prisons without staff. Courts without judges. Defence without procurement. Security without cost. It is government as pub talk: everything should be better, nobody should pay more, and the answer is apparently obvious to the chap who has never had to make the numbers add up.

Healey’s resignation matters because it drags the question into the open. If Britain wants to spend 3% of GDP on defence, fine. There is a case for that. There may now be quite a strong case for that. But then say what follows. Higher taxes, more borrowing, cuts elsewhere, or some fairly grim mixture of the lot.

What we cannot keep doing is demanding a serious military while voting for people who pretend the bill can be met by cancelling asylum hotels, sacking a few imaginary bureaucrats and discovering £40 billion behind the Downing Street sofa.

A serious country pays for what it claims to value.

A less serious country wraps itself in flags, exaggerates the danger when it wants applause, minimises the bill when it wants votes, and then looks faintly wounded when the invoice arrives.

The joy of restoring old bolts

I needed to find the bumper irons for the GT6. They’re required to mount the rear of the car to the rotisserie, so I can swivel the car and attack the underside without lying on the floor like a stranded walrus with a wire brush.

So I searched through the first of many boxes of bits, the cataloguing of which could charitably be described as experimental. Totally unrelated parts in the same box, obviously, because order is for people with labelled drawers, free time, and an unhealthy belief in the future.

By some miracle I found the bumper irons in the first box, but only one of the eight bolts that go with them. So I did the sensible modern thing and ordered twenty on eBay for a tenner. I placed the one original bolt in the required captive nut on the car for safekeeping.

This will become important later, because apparently I like leaving myself clues and then ignoring them.

Naturally, a second rummage in the same box during a period of ennui recovered the lot. Or so I thought. They were badly corroded, but they looked plausible, and in classic car restoration plausibility is often all you have before the swearing starts.

At which point the problem appeared to be solved twice. I had the rusty originals, and I had twenty replacements on the way. A rational person would have put the kettle on, congratulated himself on a successful outcome, and moved on to the next unnecessarily awkward job.

Instead, the next day, I spent four hours cleaning the originals by soaking them in citric acid.

The task no longer needed doing. The replacement parts were already on their way. The economic argument had collapsed completely. But the old bolts were sitting there, looking reproachful, and some small deranged part of my brain said they came off the car, so they ought to go back on the car.

There is a strange Zen to it, though. You start off thinking you’re restoring bolts, but after half an hour you realise the bolts are restoring you. Mostly by removing impatience, hope, and any remaining belief that your time has a market value.

Then it becomes a competition.

The new bolts are in the post, somewhere in the vast logistical digestive system of eBay, Royal Mail, and a man with a padded envelope. So the challenge is clear. Can I renovate the old ones before the new ones arrive?

I did. And they were gleaming.

The observant among you will notice there are nine bolts, six of one type and three of another. Don’t ask me why. They’re all the same thread, which was enough to give me a false sense of competence. Perhaps there was an off day in the Triumph factory in 1972. Perhaps I had found bolts belonging to another artefact entirely. Perhaps, and this is the painful one, I should have compared them with the one actual correct bolt sitting in the captive nut on the car.

Naturally, I did not.

I then tried fixing the bumper irons into the car with my beautifully renovated bolts.

They were too small.

So there we are. Four hours restoring a set of completely unrelated bolts. Any sensible person would first have compared them to the known correct one. But any sensible person probably wouldn’t be restoring a GT6 in retirement, so we can park that line of enquiry before it becomes hurtful.

When you’re a pensioner restoring a classic, time is an awkward thing. Time left to live is the enemy, because every seized bolt, missing bracket and mysterious previous-owner bodge is quietly eating into the available supply. But time is also something that has to be filled, preferably with something more absorbing than watching daytime television and developing strong opinions about the neighbour’s bins.

So you clean the bolts. The wrong bolts, as it happens.

Not because it makes economic sense. It doesn’t. Not because anyone will ever see them. They won’t. You clean them because they belong to something, because they’re still usable, and because for a few hours the world has narrowed itself down to citric acid, rust, threads and a small achievable improvement.

Having never dismantled the car in the first place, I then thought I should inspect the box for other treasures. This is how classic car restoration works. You start by looking for eight bolts and end up conducting an archaeological survey of someone else’s dismantling decisions.

I found some brackets, the purpose of which completely eluded me. So I did what any self-respecting restorer does in a moment of uncertainty. I asked a chat group full of other saddos.

Within five minutes, the answer came back.

They were for the old seats. As I’m replacing those with custom-covered Mazda MX-5 seats, they are now superfluous to requirements, which is restoration language for I’m not brave enough to throw them away.

So they went into a box marked “To sell at a later date”, which is where car parts go to consider their future in silence.

Some parts get restored. Some get fitted. Some are identified, declared surplus, and put in a box for a future eBay listing that will almost certainly never happen.

This is one of the strange comforts of old cars. Somewhere, at any given moment, there is a man who knows exactly what an obscure pressed-steel bracket does on a Triumph GT6, and he is only waiting for someone to ask. He may not know where his reading glasses are, but he knows that bracket.

One correspondent advised me to get a parts catalogue from eBay, which seemed sensible. So I searched, found one for £25, pressed Buy, and only then noticed it was in what my brain still insists on calling Czechoslovakia, or at least somewhere with postage rates suggesting it was being delivered by mule through the Carpathians.

Total cost: £46.

Immediate cancellation.

So the day’s progress was this. I restored bolts I didn’t need to restore, ordered replacements I probably did need after all, identified brackets I didn’t need to identify quite so urgently, and nearly imported a parts catalogue at a price that made me briefly reassess the value of knowledge.

This is classic car restoration at its purest. Not fixing things economically. That would be vulgar. It’s spending hours doing something unnecessary because the original part might have been there, it might have come off the car, and some small part of you insists that if it did, it should probably go back on.

Unless, of course, it turns out to be the wrong bolt entirely.

The replacements will probably arrive tomorrow, gleaming, cheap and faintly judgemental. By then I’ll have a lovely clean set of unrelated bolts, which means I can put them carefully into a box of totally unrelated parts, where they can mature undisturbed until someone else starts swearing at them.

The Fork in the Road

Americans are a great people. They put men on the Moon, built aircraft carriers the size of counties, invented jazz, and can turn a minor sandwich into a cultural identity.

And yet, give them a knife and fork and civilisation begins to wobble.

Most people notice the first part immediately. The knife is used briefly, almost apologetically, then put down after every cut as though it has become too dangerous to continue holding. The fork is swapped from left hand to right. A mouthful is conveyed. Then the whole process begins again.

It is not eating so much as a sequence of administrative procedures.

But there is another layer to it which creeps up on you over time. The grip itself.

The American knife grip often resembles somebody holding a biro while filling in customs paperwork. Not firmly, not purposefully, but delicately, as though the knife’s main role is to sign for the chicken rather than cut it.

My father hated it. Certain things simply triggered quiet disappointment in him. Shoes on furniture. Tools left in the rain. Knife held like a pen.

“Knife properly.”

That was not a discussion in our house. It sat alongside all the other invisible rules of British upbringing. Elbows off the table. Don’t shovel food. Don’t hold cutlery as though you are sketching a diagram of it.

The strange thing is that the Americans may actually have preserved the older system. Historically, early Europeans often did transfer the fork to the dominant hand after cutting because forks arrived relatively late to everyday dining. America inherited the habit before Britain and continental Europe gradually evolved towards the more efficient “knife stays in hand” method.

So technically, Americans may not be doing it wrong. They may simply be frozen in an earlier version of civilisation, like a behavioural time capsule from somewhere around 1773.

Which somehow makes it even funnier.

And yet the pen grip slowly colonises you anyway. It slips in through convenience. You start using it merely to push peas onto the fork or corner a mushroom escaping across the plate. Years later you suddenly realise you have partially Americanised yourself without consent.

The illusion only collapses when actual cutting force is required. A steak exposes the fraud instantly. The wrist twists awkwardly, the fingers begin protesting, and the hand instinctively reverts to the proper grip because the body remembers that knives are tools, not writing instruments.

It is rather like picking up a spanner daintily with fingertips. Fine for positioning it. Less convincing when confronting a rusted suspension bolt on a twenty-year-old Fiat Ducato.

I suspect these things are deep cultural fossils. The British system evolved around continuity and efficiency. Knife in right hand, fork in left, both remaining employed throughout the meal like experienced dockworkers who know their jobs. The American system feels more like a committee restructuring.

Of course, Americans will say their approach is more relaxed. Possibly. But so is eating chips out of the paper while leaning over a bin, and we do not pretend that is a triumph of etiquette.

Still, one has to admire the confidence. A global superpower armed with stealth bombers, nuclear submarines and enough satellites to monitor cloud formation over Swindon, sitting at dinner putting the knife down every twenty seconds like it is a live explosive.

And now, of course, standards are collapsing everywhere anyway. Half the Western world eats while staring at phones. Restaurants serve chips in miniature shopping baskets. Burgers arrive skewered through the middle with what appears to be a roofing dowel. Somewhere, millions of dead British fathers are watching people grip steak knives like crayons while consuming Korean fried chicken from roof-slate serving boards.

Quietly disappointed.

Common Sense

I was listening to Kemi Badenoch explaining her proposals on the Today programme, and she had used “common sense” three times before I had properly finished being annoyed by the first one.

At that point, something odd happens. You don’t listen more carefully. You listen less. The phrase is supposed to reassure you that sensible thought is taking place, but it now has the opposite effect. It makes me switch off to whatever follows, not because the proposal must be wrong, but because the sales pitch has already started to smell focus-grouped.

That is a pity, because “common sense” used to be a perfectly useful expression. It meant not putting a metal spoon in the toaster, not reversing a trailer downhill into a wall, and not appointing your brother-in-law treasurer after he once lost the Christmas club money in 1987. Ordinary judgement. Practical wisdom. The mental equivalent of checking there’s oil in the engine before setting off for Aberdeen.

Now it means something else entirely.

“Common sense” has become the phrase politicians reach for when they would rather not produce an argument. It arrives just at the point where evidence should be. It wanders in, puts its feet on the table and says, “Well, we all know what’s going on here, don’t we?”

That is the little trick. It flatters the listener. It says you, sensible person that you are, already understand the issue. Only the usual suspects could disagree: experts, judges, civil servants, academics, lawyers, and anyone else who has committed the grave democratic offence of reading the small print.

Nigel Farage and Reform have made an art form of it. Not because they invented the phrase, but because they have turned it into a kind of verbal crowbar. Insert it under a difficult problem, give it a heave, and apparently the whole rotten structure comes away in your hand. No need to worry about the wiring, the load-bearing wall or what falls down afterwards.

And this is where Badenoch managed to irritate me. She is now reportedly framing changes to equality law as “common sense”. That tells you something, not because the law should be immune from reform, but because she has reached for Farage’s vocabulary while trying to pretend she is offering something more grown-up.

Badenoch may well have a serious argument. She may produce the defect, the consequence and the safeguard. She may even be right on some of it. The problem is not that reform is automatically wrong. The problem is that she has chosen to trail it behind a phrase already worn smooth by Farage and Reform.

Once a politician says “common sense” in that register, my scepticism arrives before the policy document has even opened. Not because the proposal must be bad, but because the sales pitch has been borrowed from people who use the phrase to avoid detail, not illuminate it. It is the parroting that grates. Badenoch may think she is sounding plain-spoken. What she risks sounding like is Reform with the buttons done up.

Then, in the same Today programme interview, she moved on to language about “one shared identity” and “one shared culture”. And there it was again: culture-war language wearing a sensible coat. Britain does have shared laws, shared institutions and plenty of shared habits. But one shared identity and one shared culture? Between the pit village and the country estate? That is not history. That is a brochure. Real common sense might notice that Britain has never been one culture with a few decorative variations. It has always contained different cultures of class, region, nation, occupation and ancestry, while also borrowing and absorbing from elsewhere as it went along.

But political “common sense” rarely does. It prefers the neater version, the one where a complicated country is flattened into a slogan and everyone is invited to nod before anyone asks what the words actually mean.

That is the bind Badenoch is in. Reform has set the emotional weather on the right. Farage says “common sense” and it usually means: knock it down, scrap the lot, blame the blob, and worry about the small print later. Badenoch says “common sense” and wants us to hear discipline, clarity and administrative reform. But once a phrase has been used that way often enough, it stops sounding neutral.

The real world, being tiresome, rarely cooperates. Borders need systems. Policing needs evidence. Energy needs physics. Budgets need arithmetic. But “common sense” lets you skip all that. It is a way of saying “surely” instead of “therefore”.

Proper common sense is sceptical. It asks how something works, who pays, what happens next, and what gets worse. Political “common sense” just wants you to nod along.

So Badenoch may think she is reclaiming the phrase. She may even be using it in good faith. But this particular phrase has Nigel Farage’s fingerprints all over it. If she wants to be taken seriously as a reformer rather than a follower, she needs cleaner language. Otherwise the slogan gets to the podium before the argument does.

Common sense used to mean looking both ways before crossing the road.

Now it often means stepping into traffic because someone on the radio has assured you the collision will be someone else’s fault.

The Postman Speedo Event

People often wonder why climate change arguments become so emotionally lopsided. The answer, I suspect, is that human beings are not actually experiencing “average temperature”. We are experiencing whether we slept properly and whether our thighs have fused themselves to a leather chair.

A British winter can rise from 2C to 8C and most people simply think, “Oh good. Fewer mornings scraping ice off the windscreen while questioning every life decision that led to this point.” You still wear a coat. You still put the heating on. You still complain constantly because we are British and atmospheric dissatisfaction is basically our national sport. The winter remains recognisably winter-shaped.

But move a British summer from 22C to 32C and civilisation itself starts to wobble slightly.

Suddenly the nation discovers that every building constructed since the Norman Conquest was specifically engineered to trap and preserve heat like an industrial casserole dish. Modern flats become air fryers with USB sockets. Offices turn into slow-cookers populated by damp accountants. People who happily sit beside a log burner in December wrapped in two jumpers and a Labrador suddenly behave as though 31C represents the collapse of organised society itself.

You hear things like:
“I can’t sleep.”
“The rail tracks are melting.”
“The dog refuses to move.”
“The butter has become theoretical.”

And somewhere in the background there is always a man from Surrey standing shirtless beside a barbecue saying, “Lovely weather. Stop moaning,” moments before quietly dehydrating beside a burnt Cumberland sausage.

The problem is that humans are extremely adaptable to cold. We invented coats. Hats. Houses. Fire. Thermal socks. Entire Scandinavian countries. In winter, if you are cold, you simply add another layer. Then another. Then perhaps a fleece lined thing with a zip that makes you look like a retired geography teacher inspecting estuaries.

Heat, however, eventually corners you.

There comes a point where you cannot remove any more clothing without becoming either illegal or deeply unwelcome in Waitrose. Cold is adjustable. Heat eventually becomes personal.

Which is why one cold May no more disproves climate change than one warm day in February proves Britain has become the Costa del Sol.

Humans are spectacularly bad at distinguishing weather from climate because we experience weather emotionally and climate statistically. A chilly bank holiday weekend immediately produces:
“Global warming? Pass me my fleece.”

As though decades of atmospheric data have just been overruled by Dave from Swindon needing socks in the garden.

The strange thing is that exactly the same people will happily treat a single warm afternoon in March as definitive proof that summer has arrived permanently and immediately wheel out the barbecue like excitable medieval villagers celebrating the end of plague.

Britain especially confuses people because our climate has always behaved like a slightly drunk man trying to carry soup across a trampoline. We can have frost in April, 28C in May, floods in June and hosepipe bans in July, all while somebody in Tesco continues wearing shorts throughout the entire sequence.

Which brings us to the one genuinely reliable climate indicator available to modern science.

The British postman.

At some point in the late twentieth century, Britain quietly crossed a climatic Rubicon when posties collectively decided that trousers were no longer required for winter. Nobody formally announced it. There was no Royal Mail press release stating:
“Henceforth Kenneth from Wolverhampton shall expose his knees to sleet indefinitely.”

It simply happened.

One year postmen wore trousers in winter like ordinary mortals. Then gradually, without discussion or public consultation, they moved to permanent shorts. At first perhaps in spring and autumn. Then during mild winters. Then eventually during conditions normally associated with Antarctic documentaries.

And somehow, without anybody really noticing, Britain accepted this as perfectly normal.

Because the British postman occupies a unique place in the national ecosystem. He is not merely a delivery worker. He is effectively a mobile atmospheric measuring device powered by tea and low-level stubbornness.

A regular office worker experiences weather in 90 second bursts between:
- house
- car
- Tesco
- pub

A postie actually inhabits weather. They spend six hours a day inside the atmosphere itself carrying takeaway menus and water bills through conditions that would normally require specialist Norwegian equipment.

For decades now, the postman has represented the absolute lower limit of human thermal sensitivity. Men who regard sleet merely as “slightly enthusiastic rain”. Men whose knees have developed the weather resistance of harbour walls.

I once saw a Royal Mail bloke delivering letters during weather severe enough to make local sheep reconsider their life choices. He had shorts, a polo shirt and the expression of a man mildly inconvenienced by perhaps needing a second cup of tea later.

Meanwhile I resembled a failed Arctic expedition wrapped in enough layers to survive a crossing of Greenland.

Which means climate scientists may have overlooked the single most important future tipping point.

The Postman Speedo Event.

Because if the move to all-year-round shorts marked one stage of British climate adaptation, there must logically come another threshold where even the traditional exposed-knee doctrine becomes thermally insufficient.

And when that day arrives, Britain will know things have become serious.

Not because of scientific papers or satellite data. Not because southern Europe resembles the inside of a fan oven. But because a postman in Swindon walks past wearing Speedos and nobody even laughs because we all instinctively understand that the old world has ended.

There would still be British understatement, obviously.

BBC Breakfast:
“Temperatures expected to remain slightly above average this week.”

Outside, a Labradoodle bursts quietly into flames beside a wheelie bin.

The Met Office issues increasingly strained statements about “seasonal variation” while a postman dressed like a retired Ibiza nightclub owner continues his round carrying a handful of takeaway leaflets fused together by atmospheric moisture.

And even then, I suspect, some bloke on Facebook would still comment:
“Hot summers happened in Roman times.”

Just Asking Questions, Obviously

Nigel Farage does not ask questions at random. He asks them when he knows what answer he wants people to supply for themselves.

That answer is not simply that immigrants are dangerous. That is the surface performance, the bit designed to get the blood up. The deeper answer is that the institutions are hiding the truth from you. The police are timid. The courts are captured. The media are suppressing facts. The politicians know more than they are saying. The state is not being careful because a live criminal investigation requires care. It is being careful because it is against you.

That is the real game.

A serious crime occurs. The facts are incomplete. The motive has not been established. The police are cautious because they have to be. Into that gap steps Farage, asking why we are not being told the identity, why we are not being told the background, why the authorities seem reluctant, and why the public is not being trusted with the truth.

He does not have to say the rest out loud. In fact, it works better if he does not. He just leaves the sentence unfinished and lets the audience complete it for him. Borders. Elites. Cover-up. Two-tier Britain. Ordinary people betrayed. The usual grim little hymn sheet.

That is why these cases are so useful to him. The individual crime becomes a wedge. It is pushed into the small gap between what is known and what has not yet been established, and then leaned on until the crack widens. First uncertainty becomes suspicion. Then suspicion becomes proof that the institutions themselves are rotten.

That is a hallmark of authoritarian politics. You do not start by abolishing institutions. You start by rotting public trust in them. Courts are against you. Police are compromised. Journalists are covering it up. Civil servants are part of the plot. But there is a simpler test conspiracy merchants hope you will forget. It is far more likely that one politician is gaming public suspicion than that every institution in the country has secretly joined the same plot. A grand conspiracy needs a lot of moving parts. One ambitious man exploiting fear needs rather fewer.

And that also explains the apparent contradiction. Farage can have immigrants in his senior team without contradiction, because immigrants are not the final target. They are the ammunition. The institutions are the bullseye, and the racists ready to be manipulated are the weapon.

Once you see that, the pattern becomes harder to miss. This passion for urgent disclosure does not descend evenly from the heavens. It tends to arrive when the alleged attacker can be attached to immigration, asylum, minority identity, or the broader story that Britain is being taken from its rightful owners while the police, politicians and media hide the truth.

That is not neutral curiosity. That is political staging.

And it raises the obvious question. Why is Farage so often the senior politician who rushes towards these cases before motive has been established? It smells of something nasty, and no amount of “just asking questions” quite gets the stain out.

The selectivity gives the game away. When Wayne Couzens murdered Sarah Everard, Farage warned against turning one man’s crime into an attack on men or the police. In that case, restraint was suddenly available. One bad man did not condemn the group. One murderer did not become a national diagnosis. One appalling crime did not require every man in Britain to answer for him.

And he was right.

Which is precisely why his selective fury matters. If restraint is right when the murderer is white, why does it evaporate when the attacker is foreign, non-white, Muslim, Sikh, or simply capable of being dragged into the immigration story? Why does one kind of criminal remain an individual, while another is promoted into proof of national collapse?

That is why he cannot apply the same method evenly. If he used these questions on white crime, the effect would dilute. There is no convenient outside group to turn into a national threat, no ready-made story about borders, asylum or cultural replacement, and no obvious cohort to rile up. The weapon only works when the suspect can be made to stand for something larger than himself. A white British criminal is just too inconveniently ordinary for the performance.

It is not really about transparency. Proper transparency would ask the same questions every time: what happened, who was responsible, were there warnings, did the state fail, and what does the evidence actually show?

That is how the trick works. He does not have to say, “This is immigration’s fault,” while the police are still investigating motive. He can ask why we are not being told the suspect’s immigration status or shoe size, and the absence of either can be made to look sinister if you lower your voice enough. Then he just keeps tapping the glass and looking grave.

And this is not accidental. Farage is not some bloke in the pub blurting things out after three pints and a packet of dry roasted. He knows where the line is. He judges his language carefully enough to stay just inside it, as if there is a small lawyer standing at his back with a tape measure and a damp cloth. He says enough to set the reaction going, but not quite enough to be held responsible for where it goes next.

It is the politics of insinuation dressed up as public concern, and it has a purpose. It tells angry people they were right to be angry. It tells the suspicious that they are not being paranoid, just perceptive. It gives frightened people permission to treat fear as evidence. It turns a police investigation into a theatre for national grievance before the basic facts have even put their boots on. And for the thugs already looking for permission to riot, it is close enough to a nod.

The victim becomes useful. That is the ugliest part of it. Their suffering is real, immediate and human. But in this performance, the wound is quickly lifted out of the actual case and stapled to a campaign leaflet. The individual horror becomes raw material for a larger story Farage was already telling before the attack happened.

The get-out clause will be obvious enough. He will say serious crimes should not be hidden, immigration decisions should be scrutinised, and the public deserves answers. All true. But true in the same way that saying “mind the step” does not help much if you have just nudged someone towards the stairs.

Farage is not merely asking for answers. He is inviting a conclusion. And the conclusion is always waiting in the same place. Britain betrayed. Borders broken. Elites lying. Minorities protected. Ordinary decent people ignored until they finally erupt.

Then, when the atmosphere worsens, he can say he was only asking questions. Of course he was. A man can pile up the kindling, point at the matches, mutter about how dry the shed is, and still insist he never actually struck the flame.

That is the game. It is not a demand for truth. It is an agenda with a victim stapled to the front.

When a Shake-Up Becomes a Spiral

I heard a voter in Makerfield say he was fed up with two-party politics and might vote Reform because the system needed a shake-up. There’s a certain logic in that.

We've all stood in front of a vending machine that has swallowed our money. After a while, giving it a shake starts to seem entirely reasonable. Sometimes the chocolate bar drops. Sometimes the machine falls over. But of course a vending machine is a harmless example. If it falls over, the worst outcome is embarrassment and a dented Twix.

Politics is not a vending machine. It is more like shaking a ladder because you are annoyed the gutter still leaks. You may get movement. You may even get the attention of the person at the top. But you may also bring the whole thing down, injure the person doing the job, smash the greenhouse underneath, and still have a leaking gutter when everyone has finished shouting.

That is the part of the shake-up argument that tends to get skipped. Movement is not the same as repair. Disruption is not the same as progress. And once things start falling, they do not always fall neatly in the direction intended.

When the same two parties take turns managing disappointment, people stop treating politics as a choice between programmes and start treating it as a means of punishment. The vote becomes less "I believe in this" and more "I no longer believe in you." That is a serious moment for the two-party system.

But not every shake-up has to arrive wearing the clothes of an insurgency. One of the more interesting recent developments has been Prosper UK, an attempt by centre-right figures to rebuild a serious, pragmatic conservatism around competence, economic realism and governing rather than grievance. Whether it succeeds is impossible to know. New political movements fail more often than they flourish. But Prosper UK may go nowhere and still serve a useful purpose: it shows there are different kinds of shake-up. One tries to repair the system. The other tries to frighten it into working.

"Burn it down and start again" has the faint smell of Dominic Cummings about it: thrilling in theory, expensive in practice, and somehow always leaving someone else to find the dustpan. Countries are not usually improved by theatrical demolition. They are maintained by the duller work of repair, competence and restraint.

But there is another question sitting underneath it, and it is not entirely comfortable. If someone feels they are not being listened to, they also need to ask what exactly they are asking politicians to hear. Are they asking for better government, less waste, more competent administration and a clearer sense of direction? Perfectly reasonable. Are they asking for decent wages, affordable housing, functioning public services and economic security? Also perfectly reasonable. Or are they asking for something no government can realistically deliver?

Because many of the complaints one hears today are accompanied by demands that simply don't fit together. Lower taxes and better services. Higher pensions and lower government spending. Higher wages and lower prices. Less immigration and faster economic growth. More healthcare, more social care, more defence spending and no increase in taxation.

It sometimes feels as though voters have come to believe government has access to some vast hidden pot of money, sitting somewhere in Whitehall, entirely unconnected to tax, borrowing or economic growth. A sort of magic fiscal biscuit tin, kept for emergencies, election campaigns and moments when somebody on a phone-in demands Scandinavian public services with American tax levels. At some point the problem may not be that politicians aren't listening. It may be that voters are asking for arithmetic to take a day off.

That matters because the desire for a shake-up is a two-edged sword. It can force renewal. It can remind Labour and the Conservatives that loyalty is earned rather than inherited. It can expose complacency, punish incompetence and force old assumptions to be re-examined. But it can also encourage something much less healthy.

If the lesson politicians learn is not "govern better" but "promise harder", then the entire political system starts to change. Parties stop competing on competence and start competing on fantasy. The question ceases to be who can solve problems and becomes who can construct the most attractive version of reality. And then, inevitably, disappoint.

Because fantasy is wonderful in opposition. It survives speeches, interviews, slogans and doorstep promises. What it does not survive is contact with budgets, staffing levels, trade-offs, interest rates, courts, markets, councils, hospitals, demographics and the irritating persistence of arithmetic. That is how populism spreads through a political system. Not necessarily because populists win, but because everyone else starts talking like them.

The result is that Labour and the Conservatives don't disappear. Instead, they adapt. They become more reactive, more theatrical and less willing to explain difficult trade-offs. They discover that telling uncomfortable truths loses votes while offering painless solutions gains them. That is a dangerous lesson for any democracy.

So yes, there is logic in the argument for a shake-up. If people feel ignored, frustrated and increasingly detached from the political class, it is hardly surprising that they start looking for ways to rattle the cage. But a mature democracy requires something from voters as well as politicians. It requires the willingness to distinguish between what is desirable and what is possible.

Because if enough voters demand the impossible, politicians eventually stop offering the possible. And at that point the two-party system may indeed change. Not because it has been repaired. Because it has learnt to fail in a louder voice.