Bingo!

The gambling industry has managed a remarkable trick. It has taken one of the most extractive, least productive activities in the country and wrapped it in soft colours, friendly jingles and a pretend sense of community. The bingo apps are the worst of the lot. They promise warmth and companionship while quietly funnelling billions out of households that can least afford it. It is community theatre designed by accountants.

You see the adverts every day. A group of smiling women having a laugh over their phones, as if tapping a screen together is the modern equivalent of a night at the hall. It is not. It is remote gambling dressed up as friendship. It is loneliness exploited as a business model. Every lost pound drifts offshore while the smiling actors tell you it is all harmless fun.

This is happening in a country where veterans sit on waiting lists for mental health treatment. Where pensioners ration heating because the choice is warmth or food. Where food banks run on donations that would not keep a bingo operator in biscuits. The imbalance is obscene. The bingo apps hoover up money at a rate that would transform the budgets of every major social charity in Britain.

Take just a fraction of the gambling spend and put it somewhere useful. A billion pounds diverted from online slots and bingo would double the resources for winter fuel support. Three billion would all but eliminate rough sleeping if spent properly. A few hundred million would revolutionise veterans mental health care. These are not abstract numbers. They are the difference between warm rooms and cold ones, between therapy and crisis, between a veteran being supported and a veteran being forgotten.

Yet the gambling industry gets to pretend it is part of the entertainment sector. It is not. It is a wealth extraction machine that presents itself as a social good. The apps mimic comfort while doing the opposite. They promise community while eroding the actual communities they claim to celebrate. And all the while the industry insists that the problem is personal responsibility, as if behavioural addiction were a lifestyle choice and not the predictable outcome of products designed to keep people spinning and swiping.

The cruelty of it is how deliberately banal it all looks. No flashing neon. No casinos. No high stakes. Just pastel colours and chat rooms. The deception is the point. People will notice a casino taking their money. They will not notice a chatty bingo app quietly draining the bank over weeks and months.

The really bitter part is that Britain has no shortage of places where this money could be put to work for the common good. Veterans. Pensioners. Homeless outreach. Youth services. Debt advice. Local clubs that stitch communities together. The things that make a society feel stable. Instead, we hand billions to an industry that produces nothing but addiction and shareholder returns.

If even ten percent of gambling spend went to social causes, Britain would look like a different country within a year. But that will not happen while the gambling giants are allowed to sell themselves as cheerful companions rather than commercial predators.

Every bingo advert should come with a simple disclaimer: this is money that could have warmed a home, saved a veteran, fed a family or kept a community alive. Instead it will vanish into a balance sheet in Gibraltar.

The irony is that those who are addicted to gambling are those most likely to end up homeless.  

That is the real game being played. And the house always wins.

Tractor Wars

Farmers are out on the lanes again, this time protesting about inheritance tax. Fair enough, nobody likes HMRC rummaging in the family silver. But it all feels like a distraction from the problem that is actually killing British farming, which isn’t tax at all. It is the prices farmers accept for their produce – prices dictated by supermarkets because farmers insist on negotiating as isolated, individual businesses rather than as a single, organised bloc with bargaining power. In other words, the enemy isn’t the Treasury; it’s the market they keep walking into alone.

For forty years we’ve been fed the romance of the rugged, independent farmer. The trouble is that rugged individualism works brilliantly for television adverts and absolutely terribly against supermarket buyers who negotiate in air-conditioned offices with spreadsheets that could run NASA. A thousand lone farmers each trying to flog milk or beef to a buyer with near-monopoly power is not a ‘market’; it’s a mugging.

And yet co-operatives – the obvious solution – continue to get the side-eye. Mention co-ops and suddenly everyone turns into Milton Friedman with a flat cap. Farmers will tell you the free market must be left to do its thing, even though the thing it’s doing is squeezing them until the only people left making a profit are Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the offshore property funds that own the distribution centres. You almost admire the purity of the ideology – starving for the principle of competition while the competition has long since been eliminated.

Look across the Channel and you see a different story. Continental farmers understand that if you want fair prices, you negotiate together. You build a marketing board or a co-op with real clout. You invest jointly in storage, processing and logistics so the supermarket buyer can’t simply shrug and say the milk can go sour for all he cares. Prices stabilise, income evens out, and rural areas stop hollowing themselves out. Funny how that works when the grown-ups take charge.

Here we do the opposite. We dismantled our old boards in the Thatcher years, never replaced them, and ended up with the most lop-sided agricultural market in Europe. The farm income graph looks like a seismograph. Farmers are asset-rich and cash-poor, endlessly borrowing against land they’d rather pass on to their children, which is why inheritance tax becomes such an emotive battlefield. But IHT is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is weak bargaining power.

A functioning agricultural system doesn’t rely on the goodwill of accountants in Holborn. It relies on producers refusing to be picked off one by one. You cannot run a modern industry on nostalgia and neighbourly pride while your customers run theirs on scale, logistics and ruthless price discipline. The supermarkets are not going to pay more out of kindness. They will pay more only if they have to – only if they face a single producer organisation with enough weight to force a fair deal.

So, yes, protest about inheritance tax if you like. But until farmers stop behaving like a collection of charming, isolated family fiefdoms and start behaving like the industrial sector they actually are, nothing will change. The power is in their hands, but only if those hands join together for once instead of waving pitchforks at the wrong target.

The Sunlit Uplands Now Have a Departures Lounge

Brexiteers spent years insisting sovereignty was the hill to die on, even though nobody had nicked it. No tanks on the Mall. No EU taxman prowling the hedgerows of Old Sodbury. But it felt good to shout about, like waving the Union Flag at passing sheep and imagining they were grateful. It was always emotion dressed up as principle.

Then came the noble declarations. They didn’t mind being poorer. They would “take the hit”. They’d “make the sacrifice”. You could almost hear the Dambusters theme swelling behind them as they explained how Brexit was worth any price, so long as it upset the French.

Fast forward and the same people are now incandescent about taxes. Public services have keeled over like a Victorian aunt after a brisk walk. The economy is staggering around like it has one shoe missing. And those fearless patriots who didn’t mind a bit of poverty now demand to know why the bill for the mess they voted for has landed back in their lap.

Meanwhile, people are leaving. Not because Rachel Reeves has rummaged through their wallets, but because Brexit took a sledgehammer to the opportunities that once kept Brits here. Once upon a time you could take your degree, hop on a ferry, and work anywhere from Lisbon to Ljubljana. Now our bright young things need visas, sponsorships and the patience of Job just to do what a Dutch teenager can do with a bike and a packed lunch.

Some are even heading to countries with Sharia Law. Imagine that. So desperate for prospects that they’re choosing Gulf states over the sunlit uplands. And here’s the killer detail: plenty are moving to countries with higher taxes than anything Reeves has floated. Denmark. The Netherlands. Germany. Even France. They’re not fleeing taxes. They’re fleeing the shrinkage of opportunity that Brexit baked in.

But try telling that to the chorus that demanded the bonfire, applauded the flames, then complained when the ashes settled on the carpet. They insisted Brexit wouldn’t make us poorer. Then said it didn’t matter if it did. Now they’re furious that governing the smaller, slower, Brexit-damaged economy requires a few extra pennies in tax.

It’s cognitive dissonance on stilts. A nation that smashed the engine, blamed the driver, and now wants a refund on the ticket.

Sovereignty, they said. Prosperity, they promised. Emigration, they delivered.

Self-Implosion

Reform’s greatest mistake was thinking power would prove their point. It hasn’t – it’s destroyng it. They were never built for governing, only for grievance. Running councils has exposed what many already suspected: they can’t translate fury into function. They’ve gone from thundering revolutionaries to floundering administrators in six short months.

Had they stayed out of local government, they could still be riding high in the polls, safely sneering from the sidelines about “waste” and “wokeness”. Instead, the public has been treated to leaked videos of councillors shouting “suck it up” at their own colleagues, five expulsions in Kent alone, and a “Department of Government Efficiency” that cannot even get access to the data it says it needs. It is beyond irony - it is parody. And now, on top of the local government clown show, along comes Nathan Gill.

Reform’s former leader in Wales, long presented as one of the “honest, decent” patriots around Farage, has pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to eight counts of bribery for taking Kremlin-linked money to pump out pro Russian lines in the European Parliament. Scripts supplied via a Ukrainian politician tied to Medvedchuk, one of Putin’s circle. The self styled party of sovereignty and British pride had one of its own effectively on the Kremlin payroll.

Farage’s response, of course, is that he barely knew the man. Which is curious, given Gill led Reform in Wales and moved in Farage’s inner orbit according to people who actually worked with them. You can almost hear the scratching of the tippex on the Reform family photo as they quietly erase another “patriot” who turned out to be very keen on Moscow’s interests.

So we now have a party that cannot run a council budget without imploding, and whose ex Welsh leader has admitted taking Russian money to push Putin friendly talking points. These are the people who want you to hand them the nuclear codes and the security services. What could possibly go wrong. Their big experiment - the so called DOGE unit - was supposed to root out corruption and excess. 

In reality it has identified little more than cancelled office moves, axed net zero schemes and a handful of “savings” so small the Institute for Government politely described them as “minuscule”. Penny cuts dressed up as revolutions. All the while, the party that set up the watchdog for waste could not spot a Kremlin cash pipeline running straight through one of its own former leaders.

And here is the beauty of it: Labour and the Conservatives do not need to lift a finger. They do not even have to run attack campaigns. All they need to do is point at the chaos in Reform run councils and then at the Nathan Gill sentencing remarks, and ask Nigel Farage two questions he cannot answer. First, what would you actually do. Second, why do the strong-on-sovereignty patriots keep ending up on the wrong side of Moscow. 

Those questions alone will sink them, because they do not have the faintest idea how to govern and they have even less idea how to vet their own “stars”. Farage thrives on noise, not numbers. Governance is about detail, trade offs and law - none of which suits a populist built for the pub, not the parliament. His “pirate ship” may terrify the establishment in rhetoric, but it is sinking under its own incompetence in practice, with a faint smell of Russian diesel wafting from the bilges.

The lesson is obvious. Opposition populism can promise the earth; governing populism cannot even empty the bins or check whether its own front men are on the take from a hostile state. Reform should have stayed mysterious, angry and unelected - because the moment they were tested, the illusion shattered and the funding trails lit up in court.

Now, as council budgets crumble, councillors are suspended in batches, Gill goes down for Russian bribes, and the DOGE “crack squad” turns out to be a press office in search of a saving, Farage’s revolution looks like a pantomime. Labour and the Tories can just stand back, smile politely, and let Reform’s own chaos write their campaign posters for them.

By 2027, this so called uprising will not have been crushed by the establishment. It will have fizzled out in a cloud of angry Facebook posts, broken promises, unpaid invoices and one very awkward entry in the Old Bailey records. In the end, nobody needed to stop Reform. Reform stopped itself.

Permanent Pause?

Trump’s latest utterance, the promise to “permanently pause” migration, is one of those phrases that tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual horsepower at work. A pause is temporary. Permanent is not. Weld them together and you do not get policy; you get a grammatical hostage note.

This is how strongman politics operates. Never offer clarity when you can serve word salad with a side of menace. Call something a pause so you can dodge the legal obligations that come with an actual ban. Call it permanent so your supporters can thump their chests about taking back control. It is the same trick Brexiteers pulled when they promised “frictionless borders” and “taking back control of our laws” while simultaneously insisting nothing would change at Dover. When opinion is given the same status as truth, nonsense flourishes.

The deeper problem is not the phrasing but the mindset it reveals. A President who cannot distinguish a pause from a ban is also one who cannot distinguish foreign policy from a bar-room rant. Two National Guards are shot, and instead of dealing with security failures or systemic issues, up pops a half baked decree aimed not at criminals but at entire nations labelled “third world”. It is collective punishment dressed up as common sense, and cheered on by people who think strong verbs are a substitute for coherent government.

What he is really saying is simple enough: he wants to close America’s doors to anyone who does not fit his preferred demographic. But like all populists, he lacks the courage to state it plainly. So we get this preposterous hybrid, a “permanent pause”, which reads like it was scribbled on the back of a napkin between golf holes.

If this is the intellectual standard of the modern right, no wonder Putin treats it as a playground. A polity that cannot even use the English language correctly should not be terribly surprised when its foreign policy ends up in the bin.

The Law of Garage Entropy

There’s a peculiar rhythm to my garage – a kind of organised anarchy that seems to pulse with its own gravitational field. Half of it is now a shrine to my Triumph GT6’s past life – the 2-litre straight-six, gearbox, and enough parts to rebuild two cars and half a Spitfire. 

They sit there, not quite relics, not quite rubbish, but in that purgatorial state reserved for things too valuable to throw away yet too irrelevant to be of any actual use. I tell myself they must be kept, just in case I ever decide to return the car to its original form. Of course, this will never happen, but it’s comforting to preserve the illusion that I could.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the workshop has evolved into a kind of archaeological dig – layers of past rearrangements marking the epochs of my ambition. There was the Plumbing Age, when everything vaguely pipe-shaped was together in one box. Then came the Welding Renaissance, followed by the brief and disastrous Period of Rational Organisation, which lasted all of 48 hours before entropy reclaimed the land.

This, I’ve realised, is the Law of Garage Entropy: any attempt to impose order on a working garage will, within seven days, result in greater confusion than existed before. It’s immutable. Like gravity, or the way 10mm sockets spontaneously migrate to another dimension.

Every time I rearrange things – usually to make more space for the new compressor, or that irresistible set of ratcheting spanners I definitely didn’t need – I break the map inside my head. Tools vanish into newly designated drawers that make perfect sense on the day of the reshuffle and absolutely none a week later. I end up hunting for a 10mm socket with the intensity of a man searching for meaning in life. And the worst part? When I finally find it, it’s not where I left it – it’s where I thought I’d moved it, which is somehow worse.

I’ve now reached the stage where I own more tools than most people do – a sort of private B&Q annex run by an absent-minded quartermaster. There are duplicates of almost everything, because the easiest way to find a missing tool is to buy another. Somewhere in the depths of a drawer, I probably have enough 13mm spanners to start a small ironmongery. I counted 31 screwdrivers. Thirty one. You’d think I was running a monastery for lost Philips heads.

The solution, I tell myself, is better organisation. Shelves labelled. Drawers categorised. Photos taken. I even drew a map once – a neat diagram showing where everything lived. The trouble is, the moment I commit to a new layout, I acquire something that doesn’t fit. Then it’s back to square one, moving everything around again, which means the map becomes as trustworthy as a weather forecast from Michael Fish.

So the cycle continues – rearrange, forget, search, curse, repeat. The garage looks immaculate for a week, then slowly reverts to its natural state of creative disarray. But I’ve come to suspect this isn’t failure at all – it’s the natural order of things. A static, tidy workshop is a dead one. Chaos, in its noisy, cluttered way, is a sign of life.

Besides, if I ever do finally find a perfect place for everything, it’ll only mean one thing – I’ve stopped building. And that would be far worse than not being able to find the bloody 10mm socket again.

Shuffling Assets

There is a special place in the Great British Hall of Hypocrisy for the people who shuffle their assets into a trust so the council pays their care fees, then go online to shriek about council tax going up. It is the financial equivalent of nicking the neighbour’s logs, burning them, then complaining that the valley smells smoky.

The glossy adverts tell you to “protect your legacy”, as if you are the final custodian of a minor duchy. What it really means is this: hide your house so the rest of the village pays your bill. Dress it up as prudence if you like. It is freeloading with better fonts.

Those who do it call themselves responsible. In reality they force the bill onto the same teaching assistants, carers, posties and bin crews they will later blame for “inflationary local taxation”. They create the shortfall, and then throw a tantrum when the council tries to fill it. The audacity could power a small English town.

And it is always the people perched on six figures of untaxed housing equity who shout loudest. They clutch the property like a holy relic, insist the public purse should bankroll their twilight years, then howl when the public purse has to be topped up. They drain the reservoir and then complain that someone ought to fix the drought.

Meanwhile, services collapse around them. Care homes on the brink. Social care staff earning less than supermarket starters. Roads crumbling. Councils declaring bankruptcy. But at least the family home is safe for little Tarquin and Jocasta to inherit, which seems to matter more than the community that keeps them alive.

And the pattern is tediously familiar. Break the system. Deny you broke it. Rage at the consequences. When opinion is given the same status as truth, the culprits always recast themselves as victims. In this case, victims of the very tax rise they engineered by playing pass the parcel with their assets.

The good news is that the fix is not complicated. It just requires honesty, which is unfortunately in short supply whenever inheritance is involved.

Assets should count. All of them. If you put your £400k house in a trust, it should still be treated as yours for means testing. The seven year rule should be reworked so you cannot hide wealth with a bit of paperwork and a wink. Councils should be able to check land records and trust registers automatically, not rely on declarations from people who suddenly claim to own nothing but a two seater sofa and a Labrador.

And if you truly want fairness, cap the lifetime care liability instead of encouraging the wealthy to dodge the system. Let everyone know they will pay, say, £70k maximum, and after that the state steps in. Predictable for families. Sustainable for councils. No incentive for gaming. Just basic fairness.

Add a simple rule: if you hide your assets, the council claws back the cost from your estate later, so the rest of us are not left footing your bill. And mandate a warning on those adverts: “Avoiding the means test shifts your care costs to other taxpayers.” A bit like the warnings on cigarette packets, but aimed at the financially pious.

Because if you want to pass the house on to the children, fine. But do not expect every other household in the parish to pay for your long term care while you protect the bricks. That is not “legacy planning”. It is feudalism with legal stationery.

And the final insult? They still think they are the responsible ones, while everyone else is subsidising their golden years.

Grok?

What fascinates me about Musk’s little AI circus is how perfectly it captures the state of his empire. Here is a man who once sold us the future, now flogging a chatbot that can’t even tell you who won an election without veering off into MAGA cosplay. Grok is supposed to mean understanding, yet it behaves like Echo Chamber AI with a head injury, confidently announcing that Trump won in 2020. It isn’t understanding anything. It is just rinsing and repeating the collective anxieties of Musk’s timelines.

And what does that say about him? Nothing good. If your own AI can’t distinguish a certified election result from a Facebook meme, it suggests you’ve lost interest in truth altogether. You’ve chosen noise over knowledge and grievance over responsibility. Musk now operates in symbols, not facts. His pronouncements read less like analysis and more like the mood swings of a man desperate for validation from the angriest corners of his own platform. He speaks to his tribe, not to reality.

The knock-on effect for AI is toxic. Every time Grok parrots a lie as if it were gospel, the public’s trust in the whole field takes a hit. One partisan toy makes the careful work look suspect. It feeds the myth that AI is unreliable by design, rather than unreliable by choice. It muddies the line between evidence and opinion and hands a gift to every politician or pundit desperate to dismiss AI as a passing fad. When opinion is given the same status as truth, everything that depends on trust gets dragged into the swamp.

And then there is the Tesla problem. If Musk is this cavalier about accuracy in a chatbot, why on earth should anyone trust him with autonomy systems that decide whether you live or die at 70 miles an hour? Regulators already treat his self-driving claims as marketing wrapped in hope. Now they will see them as part of the same pattern: truth stretched to breaking point, promises that wobble under scrutiny, and a leader who thinks reliability is optional. Investors notice. Governments notice. Ordinary drivers absolutely notice.

It is all of a piece. Grok, X, the culture war posturing, the messianic grandstanding, the self-driving fantasy world where everything is always one software patch away from perfection. Strip away the noise and you’re left with something painfully simple: a man who once built rockets now builds narratives, and he no longer seems to care whether any of them are true.

Woke History?

Woke History is the latest cultural bogeyman, apparently responsible for everything from falling exam grades to the price of a pint. If you listen to the usual suspects, you would think a cabal of sandal wearing lecturers is rewriting the national story to make Britain look like an inconsistent teenager in need of a stern talking to. In reality, Woke History is nothing more sinister than historians doing their job, which is to dig up whatever we have conveniently buried.

The problem is not the history. The problem is the people who preferred the old colouring book version. They want their kings noble, their wars glorious, and their empire bathed permanently in golden hour lighting. They want Britain as a plucky underdog who always did the right thing, helped the world, and never once had an awkward moment with a ledger full of uncomfortable figures. The trouble is that serious history is not a patriotic bedtime story. It is a record of what actually happened, good, bad and occasionally ludicrous.

What they really object to is loss of control. For generations the national narrative was written by the winners. They shaped the past to flatter themselves and reassure the present. Woke History interrupts that comfort by pointing out that the world is more complex than a Union Flag tea towel. That the empire was not all railways and cricket. That our institutions did not spring from the soil like moral mushroom crops. That women, workers and minorities did not gain rights because some kindly aristocrat had a moment of benevolence over breakfast. They fought for them, often against the very people now shouting about how unfair it is to mention it.

The irony is that those who howl most loudly about Woke History tend to be the same people who demand others face facts about everything else. They insist on personal responsibility until it comes to the nation. They lecture individuals on owning their mistakes while demanding the country never acknowledge a single one. Confront them with evidence and you are accused of hating Britain, which is a neat way of avoiding the question. It is like refusing to service your car because you prefer to remember it as reliable. Sentiment is no substitute for maintenance.

Real history is rarely flattering. That is its value. It explains how we got here, not how we would like to imagine we got here. If you start with the answer you want, you are not doing history. You are doing therapy. And badly. Nations that cling to myths end up governed by them. They make poor decisions because they are built on sand, and sooner or later the tide is coming in. When opinion is given the same status as truth, the country stops learning. It also stops improving.

So by all means rail against Woke History if it makes you feel better. It will not change a single archive, a single census, a single shipping manifest or a single court record. The past is there, stubbornly factual and often inconvenient. What the critics are really demanding is the right not to know. But that is not patriotism. It is nostalgia with its fingers in its ears.

If Britain wants to grow up, it needs a grown up history. Not a sanitised saga for the easily spooked, but a clear eyed account of what we did, why we did it, and what it cost. That is not wokeness. It is adulthood. And given the state of public debate, adulthood is overdue.

The Resurrection of the Starter – The Quince Awakening

It began, as domestic tragedies so often do, with pride, neglect, and a misplaced faith in microbial immortality. My sourdough starter – part self-made, part descended from a venerable Cumbrian strain said to date back to the reign of George V – had endured every indignity I’d ever inflicted on it. It had survived missed feedings, fluctuating temperatures, and the odd experiment that looked more like witchcraft than baking. But one autumn, I forgot it entirely. When I finally opened the jar, it resembled an archaeological dig. The smell suggested advanced decomposition and mild remorse.

That same autumn, our quince tree went berserk. The lawn was strewn with golden fruit like unexploded ordnance. Hay had made jelly, chutney, and liqueur until no one could stand the sight of them. Still they fell, luminous and taunting. Somewhere I’d read that quinces are rich in wild yeasts – their waxy bloom a metropolis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and assorted opportunists. It seemed a sign.

So, in a burst of inspiration tempered by laziness, I dropped a whole quince into the dead starter. Not sliced, not sanitised – just lowered it in, like a diver into the Mariana Trench. For a brief, shining day, it worked: bubbles rose, the surface trembled, hope returned. Then came the stench – a heady blend of cider, compost, and moral failure. The quince had summoned not yeastly salvation but bacterial anarchy: Hanseniaspora, Candida, and their lawless kin. Hay walked in, took one sniff, and declared it “biological warfare.” The compost heap took the remains, where it continues to seethe quietly under the dahlias.

Thus perished the Cumbrian line – undone by hubris and fruit.

Humbled, I sought foreign aid. On eBay I found a Latvian woman selling “authentic Baltic rye starter,” a culture said to survive any winter. It arrived in a small pot, dark, viscous, and faintly ecclesiastical in scent – somewhere between monastery beer and holy water gone rogue. Within hours it was alive, fizzing with Baltic discipline. I named her Baba Riga.

Her loaves were magnificent: dense, aromatic, faintly sour, and profoundly European. A new strain had risen – an EU starter, tolerant, vigorous, and entirely unimpressed by my earlier isolationism. A talisman against Reform voters, a bit like garlic.

Determined never to repeat my sin of neglect, I turned preservationist. Three small tubs of Baba Riga now lie in the freezer, each containing a spoonful of dormant civilisation. Freezing doesn’t kill yeast; it simply suspends it. The cells fold in on themselves like monks in contemplation, waiting for the warmth to return. The Lactobacillus strains – unflappable little philosophers – can survive decades of such stillness, dreaming only of rye.

Then I made the dried edition. A thin film of starter spread on a silicone mat and left to bask on the underfloor heating at a steady 28 degrees – the microbial Riviera. Once brittle, I broke it into flakes and sealed them in an airtight bag. Dehydrated and frozen, it could outlast Parliament.

So now, in Old Sodbury, my kitchen houses a quiet miracle of European cooperation: Baba Riga, risen from the East, holding the line against entropy and xenophobia alike. Should civilisation collapse under its own slogans, I’ll still have bread – risen anew, fragrant with reason, and entirely untroubled by Reform.

Black Friday

It started with Black Friday. Then someone in marketing had a bright idea, or possibly a stroke, and now we have Black Week, Black Weekend, Cyber Monday, and, inevitably, Black November. The only surprise is that we have not yet reached “Black Fiscal Year” with a loyalty card and a counselling hotline.

In America, Black Friday at least has the fig leaf of being after Thanksgiving. A day when people supposedly give thanks for what they have, then batter each other into the frozen food aisle to acquire what they do not. Hypocrisy, yes, but at least coherently themed hypocrisy.

Here, we do not even have that. We have simply taken a random American shopping spree, stapled it onto our calendar, and let it metastasise. Black Friday means nothing in Britain except “the day in late November when the inbox dies”. Yet bit by bit, it has spread from a single day to a long weekend, then a week, and now a month. You half expect the email to read: “BLACK NOVEMBER! One last chance, every day, for 30 days, until we do it again in December.”

There is an unmistakable stench of desperation about it all. You can feel the boardroom conversations. “Sales are flat. We need something bold.” “What if we make all of November a sale?” “Brilliant. Bonuses all round.” No one stops to ask whether people actually need any of this stuff, or whether they are just being emotionally blackmailed into hitting “Add to basket” because the button is flashing red.

The language is always the same. “Unmissable.” “Once in a lifetime.” “Final reductions.” You see it every single year, from the same retailers, on the same products, often at the same price as last week. There are factory recalls with more genuine urgency. But people still pile in, because the entire thing is designed to create that thin film of panic over the brain: if I do not buy this air fryer today, at this exact discount, my life will somehow be diminished.

You can almost see Reform UK getting in on the act. Give it five minutes and there will be some solemn press conference about “banning divisive woke terminology” in retail. Black Friday, Black Week, Black November, all to be scrapped and replaced in the next manifesto with “White Wednesday” or “Proper British Savings Month”, wrapped in a Union Flag and sold as a vital stand against cultural Marxism and half price toasters. They will not touch the consumerism, of course, just the colour palette.

Then there is the environmental angle. Endless lorries, vans, and planes moving a mountain of tat that will be landfill in 18 months. Extra packaging. Extra plastic. Extra journeys. All so someone can feel briefly triumphant that they saved 12 per cent on a TV that was already cheap because the manufacturer has quietly removed half the features.

Meanwhile, warehouse staff and drivers are the invisible collateral. Long hours, tight targets, miserable conditions. The adverts never show that, of course. Black November is always sold as a cosy family event, with a soft focus couple in loungewear clicking “Checkout” while sipping hot chocolate in a house lit like a John Lewis commercial. No one shows the picker sprinting down an aisle at 3 a.m. scanning barcodes so Gary in Swindon can get his Bluetooth egg boiler by Monday.

What amuses me most, in a bleak sort of way, is the sheer inflation of the hype. We have normalised the idea that a product’s value is not its build quality, longevity, or usefulness, but the size of the red cross painted over the “previous price”. That figure may have existed for roughly 14 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon in October, but never mind. “Was £299, now £249” is all people see. Whether they needed it in the first place is a secondary question, usually postponed until the credit card bill arrives.

Black November, in that sense, is a perfect symbol of our times. A permanent, rolling “limited time offer”. A month long emergency that repeats every year with clockwork predictability. The consumer equivalent of those politicians who declare every election “the most important of our lifetime”, including the last five.

Personally, I think the safest approach is to treat any email shouting “BLACK” at you that is not from your energy supplier as a sort of public health warning. If a retailer needs four weeks of neon graphics, countdown timers, and fake urgency to shift their stock, perhaps the stock is not the thing you are actually buying. What you are really purchasing is the tiny dopamine hit of “winning” in a game that has been rigged from the start.

Still, look on the bright side. At least when Black November finally gives way to “Christmas Event” and then “Boxing Day Sale” and then “New Year Mega Deals”, we can enjoy the warm glow of knowing that we have saved hundreds of pounds by spending thousands we did not have on things we did not need.

Bargain.

Not My Cup of Tea

I read the Zack Polanski interview in yesterday's Observer so you don’t have to. It left me with the distinct feeling that the Greens have become the political equivalent of those artisanal bakeries that refuse to sell you a loaf unless you first applaud their ethical commitments. Perfectly charming, but no use whatsoever if you actually want to feed a country.

Polanski huffs that he “wouldn’t touch Starmer with a barge pole”, which is a curious line coming from someone whose party will never have to touch the levers of power at all. It is easy to condemn caution when you’ve no responsibility for the consequences. It is even easier to deliver moral purity when you know you’ll never be asked to deliver a Budget. The Greens do a roaring trade in both.

His entire pitch is that Labour is cowardly, compromised, too managerial, too sensible. That’s because Labour is trying to govern a very real country with very real fiscal holes, not an imaginary republic where every tax raises billions and every public service magically expands the minute you “demand it”. Polanski talks about a 1 per cent wealth tax raising 14 billion a year as though billionaires have no accountants and will politely stand still while he relieves them of it. In the real world, avoidance is as predictable as rain in October, although not as widespread as the Daily Mail predicts.

What’s striking is how the hard constraints never appear. No mention of Brexit’s impact on growth. No recognition that public services are crumbling after 14 years of Tory neglect. No acknowledgement that Starmer must keep the bond markets calm after Truss set them on fire. Instead we get the usual Green comfort food – NATO is questionable, Gaza requires absolute clarity, landlords are the root of all evil, and somehow, through a process never fully explained, all of this will be solved by voting Green.

The foreign policy stuff is airy to the point of levitation. Question NATO membership in 2025? Really? Most voters took one look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and quietly concluded that alliances might actually matter. But again, the Greens can say these things with a straight face because they will never have to handle an Article 5 phone call.

Then there’s the performative authenticity. Polanski tells us he is gay, Jewish, proud of who he is, and therefore anyone who wants to attack him will have to “find some other way to hurt me”. It’s honest and vulnerable, but it also floats just above the political substance like a personal footnote looking for a purpose.

The truth is simple. The Greens offer purity without power, certainty without consequence, and criticism without cost. It’s all very Stoke Newington – immaculate principles, sustainably sourced, and entirely divorced from the dull, grinding realities of governing a medium sized European nation with a flatlining tax base.

So no, it’s not really my cup of tea. More like a lukewarm herbal infusion sold by someone who insists you admire the mug before being allowed to drink it.

Mind you, Polanski could be my cup of tea if Putin were a Green. In that alternate universe, where the Kremlin was run on quinoa, composting and moral incantation, his brand of weightless idealism might actually look hard headed. If the world were governed by men who plant trees instead of tanks, then fine - give me all the ethical signalling you like. But in a world where the real Putin is busy rewriting borders with artillery, I need my politicians to operate on something sturdier than vibes. Polanski is charming enough, but he’s playing the recorder while the rest of us are trying to stop the brass section marching through the wall.

Never Launch An Inquiry If You Fear The Truth

Boris Johnson has responded to the Covid Inquiry in exactly the way you would expect from a man who crashed the car, reversed over the wreckage, then demands a refund because the accident report is “totally muddled”.

This is the inquiry he himself set up. He wrote the terms of reference. It has gone through years of evidence, witnesses, documents and WhatsApp messages, and reached a very simple conclusion: the UK response was too little, too late. February was a lost month. The culture in No 10 was toxic and chaotic. An earlier lockdown could have saved around 23,000 lives in the first wave alone. Faced with that, Johnson’s instinct is not to reflect, but to shout at the judge. In the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby, “Never launch an inquiry for which you don’t already know the outcome.” Johnson plainly assumed he could defy that rule. He has now discovered why Sir Humphrey was right.

So he pops up in the Daily Mail to tell us the inquiry has failed to answer the “big questions”. Not questions like: why did you ignore your own scientists, why was No 10 a clown car, and why did you spend the crucial early weeks faffing about with herd immunity and cheery guff about “taking it on the chin”. No, the “big questions” are where the virus came from and whether lockdowns were worthwhile. Things that are either outside the inquiry’s scope, or already answered in painful detail.

He complains that Baroness Hallett has relied on “hysterical predictions” about deaths. Those “predictions” are based on the same modelling and data his own advisers showed him at the time. If they are hysterical now, they were hysterical then. Yet at the time he was quite happy to stand behind the lectern, flanked by the very people producing those numbers, and tell the country to trust the science. Now that the numbers are attached to a verdict on his own performance, suddenly the science is unreliable and the judge is “hopelessly incoherent”.

Then we get the familiar Johnson flourish about cost. “The thick end of £200m” on an inquiry, he splutters, as if that is the real outrage here. This from the man whose government burned through similar sums on duff PPE contracts through the VIP lane, and signed off on Test and Trace at £37bn. Spending a fraction of that once to find out how tens of thousands died unnecessarily is, apparently, the extravagance that really sticks in his craw. It is the old trick: make the price tag the story so people stop looking at the bill in lives.

He also tries a sort of legalistic sleight of hand on timing. A week before lockdown, he says, he told people to self-isolate, work from home and avoid inessential contact. As if that were some devastating rebuttal. It is exactly the timeline the inquiry cites as the problem. Those measures should have come earlier. By the time he finally dragged himself to a full lockdown, the virus was already everywhere and a gentler approach was no longer enough. He is literally repeating the evidence against himself and hoping no one notices the punchline.

Underneath the bluster is something more basic. The inquiry’s message is unforgiving but clear: if you are in charge during a crisis, your job is to take it seriously, listen to the people who know what they are talking about, and act fast. Johnson did none of that. He treated the early months as another political game, staffed No 10 with people who thrived on chaos, and only moved once the walls were already on fire. He now calls the written record of that behaviour “muddled” because his entire political survival depends on muddying the water.

What really irritates him is that Hallett has refused to play the old Westminster game. She has not wrapped her language in comforting euphemisms. She has not pretended that “difficult trade offs” and “balancing the economy and health” are some kind of exoneration. She has done the unforgivable thing: written down in plain English that people died who did not need to die, because those in charge wasted time and treated exponential growth like a PR problem.

Johnson’s article reads less like a serious critique and more like a man addressing the jury inside his own head. The rest of the world can see what has happened. A former prime minister, confronted with a sober, detailed account of his failure, reaches for the only defence he has ever really had: charm, distraction, and a wounded sense of entitlement. The trouble is that Covid was not a column for the Telegraph or a funny speech on after-dinner rates. It was real, it was deadly, and the decisions he made – or ducked – are written in the death statistics.

“Too little, too late” is Hallett’s verdict on his government. His reaction to that verdict only confirms it. Faced with responsibility, Johnson is once again exactly what he was in office: not a grown-up statesman, but a man frantically rifling through his own script for a line that lets him dodge the blame. Sir Humphrey would at least have had the grace to tell him, in private, that launching an inquiry without a pre-cooked whitewash was an act of sheer, world-class stupidity.

Trump’s Loaded Deck: Playing Poker With Ukraine’s Borders

Trump loves a card metaphor. Ukraine, he tells us, “does not hold the cards.” What he omits, of course, is that he is the one sitting there with the deck in his lap, both jokers up his sleeve and his foot on the table so nobody else can reach the pack.

 

Ukraine does not lack cards by accident. Washington has been slowly closing the tap on weapons and ammunition, hinting that support is conditional on swallowing a “peace plan” that hands Russia almost a fifth of the country, including land it does not even occupy. Then Trump points at the battlefield situation and announces that Kyiv is not in a strong position. It is like strangling someone and remarking how very breathless they sound.

If the US chose to, it could transform Ukraine’s hand in short order: long range missiles in sufficient quantity, serious air defence, guaranteed resupply over years rather than months, and a clear message to Moscow that this war ends when Russia goes home, not when Ukraine gives up. Instead we have a protection racket: nice little country you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to your arms shipments. Sign here.

And this is where the second, even more awkward question comes in, the one nobody on his home turf seems keen to ask: would Trump accept this deal for the United States?

Spell it out in plain numbers. His “peace” requires Ukraine to sign away close to 20 per cent of its land, much of it already occupied but some still under Ukrainian control, in return for the promise that the man who invaded them might stop doing it for a bit. Now imagine the same proposal framed in American terms.

“Mr Trump, if a foreign power invaded, would you hand over, say, the entire north east seaboard and a slice of the Midwest, including some areas that are still fighting, and then call it a historic deal?”

Of course, his stock response would be that “such a situation would never happen” to America. Which is perfectly true, and completely damning. It would never happen because the United States sits under an enormous deterrent umbrella, backed by alliances, nuclear weapons, and a very simple rule: touch one inch of our soil and we will go berserk. America does not live next door to a revanchist petro state that denies its right to exist. Ukraine does. The whole reason Putin thought he could get away with this is precisely that Ukraine did not have the sort of security guarantees America takes for granted.

So that little dodge - “it would never happen here” - is not an argument for carving up Ukraine. It is the reason Ukraine wants NATO style protection so it is not carved up again. America’s entire defence posture is “we will never accept what you are now telling Ukrainians to accept”.

If he says yes, he would hand over American land, he brands himself an appeaser. Not a strategic genius, not a realist, just a man willing to carve up his own country to flatter his ego and get a photo on the White House lawn.

If he says no, he admits that what he demands from Ukraine is something he would never tolerate for the US. One rule for them, another for expendable allies on the edge of someone else’s empire. That is the core obscenity here. This is not some impartial doctrine of “ending wars” or “saving lives”. If that were the principle, it would apply to everyone. Instead it mysteriously applies only to small countries being dismembered by larger ones, never to the larger ones themselves.

You can see the hypocrisy from orbit. When a few rocks in the South China Sea are involved, Washington thunders about freedom of navigation. When a hostile power merely thinks about putting missiles in Cuba, it is a world crisis. But when it is Ukraine losing cities, ports and farmland, suddenly the great negotiator discovers a taste for compromise and creative map redrawing.

So when Trump says Ukraine does not hold the cards, the honest reply is very simple. No, it does not. Because you picked them up, locked them in your briefcase, and are now offering to give a couple back if Kyiv agrees to sign over a fifth of its land to the man who started the war.

Call it what it is. Not peace. Not realism. Just a property developer treating someone else’s country as a distressed asset in need of “rationalisation”, and assuming nobody will be rude enough to ask whether he would ever accept the same bargain at home.

1066 and Culture Wars

If you listen to some of the flag shaggers on social media, you would think British history started in 2016 with a referendum and a bus. In reality our first proper culture war was 1066, when a bunch of heavily armed French property developers turned up and told the locals they were doing sovereignty wrong.

On one side you had the Saxons. Sunburnt, suspicious of anything foreign, convinced that their way of doing things was the only proper English way, even though half of their grandparents were Danes who had arrived earlier and set fire to everything. On the other side you had the Normans, essentially Viking descendants who had gone on an Erasmus year to France, discovered wine and feudalism and came back with a new accent and strong views on planning permission.

It was the original clash between Somewheres and Anywheres. Harold was the bloke down the pub, born within the sound of the local pig, who thought the foreigners should stay on their own side of the Channel. William was the metropolitan elite who arrived with consultants, a rebrand and a firm belief that the answer to everything was a castle and a steep new tax.

The Bayeux Tapestry was the GB News of its day. A long, tendentious strip of propaganda commissioned by the winners, explaining that actually the invasion was completely legal, Harold had it coming and anyone saying otherwise was basically unhinged. If you look closely you can almost see the caption: BREAKING – LOCAL MAN SHOT IN EYE – FIND OUT WHY HE DESERVED IT.

Imagine Saxon Facebook the morning after Hastings:

HAROLD123: Country ruined. Normans have stolen our freedom.
LEOFWINE_WARRIOR: This all started when we let the Danes in.
EDITH_LOSTCAUSE: It's the woke monks. You cant even burn a monastery these days without being called a bigot.

Meanwhile Norman Twitter is busy insisting that nothing has really changed except for the total replacement of the ruling class, the legal system, the language of power and who owns all the land. Take back control, but with more chain mail and better horses.

Then along comes the Domesday Book. The first great British data grab. One enormous medieval GDPR breach. Some monk turns up at your door, writes down your name, your livestock and how much swamp you own, and a few months later you discover that your council tax has gone up and William has "levelling up" plans involving a keep on your best field. Today it would be outsourced to Capita and cost three times as much, but the principle is the same.

What makes it funny - in a dark way - is listening to modern culture warriors wail about "our ancient Saxon freedoms" as if the Norman Conquest was a minor administrative tidying exercise. For the Saxon gentry, 1066 was the ultimate Great Replacement. They really were pushed out of power and replaced by French speaking toffs who behaved like they owned the place because, well, they did.

Fast forward a thousand years and you have people called Smith and Brown - surnames that came out of that Norman feudal system - shouting about pure Anglo Saxon heritage while waving a flag whose very heraldry is a mash up of Norman, Celtic and later political bodging. The same crowd who tell you "we want our country back" while standing in front of architecture built by Normans, Tudors, Georgians, Victorians and a bloke called Kevin with a van.

If you tried to tell an actual Saxon peasant living knee deep in pig and plague that his descendants would one day be furious about Polish plumbers, he would stare at you blankly and then ask whether they know how to thatch a roof properly. His culture war involved not being boiled alive for poaching the Norman kings deer, not whether Starbucks printed the right slogan on a red cup.

The irony is that everyone in this island is already a remix. Saxons, Normans, Celts, Romans, Vikings, Huguenots, West Indians, South Asians, Europeans of every flavour - history is basically one long people traffickers timetable with added paperwork. Yet here we are, solemnly pretending that letting in a few thousand refugees is an existential threat, while shrugging at seven centuries of French aristocrats running the place and writing the laws.

And just like the Bayeux Tapestry, our modern media sells you a heroic story where your lot are always the plucky victims and the other lot are always scheming villains. When opinion is given the same status as truth, you can convince yourself of anything. In 1066 the story was that God had backed William. In 2016 it was that Brexit would be easy and sunlit uplands would appear on demand. Same trick. Different horse.

If we really wanted to end the culture war, we would put up a big sign at Dover saying:

"Welcome. Please note: the queue for invading elites with an eye on your land started in 43 AD and is still moving. Take a ticket."

Instead we get red faced Saxon reenactors yelling at imaginary Normans on Twitter, while actual modern barons quietly buy up the housing stock, privatise the utilities and ship the profits offshore. The names have changed, the helmets are less stylish, but the basic story is the same as 1066. While you are busy shouting at foreigners, someone closer to home is writing you into the Domesday Book again.

So yes, by all means fly your flag and shout about "our" culture. Just remember that your ancestors lost the original culture war nearly a thousand years ago, and then promptly intermarried with the victors. That is Britain in a nutshell. We lose, we grumble, we make a joke, and then we stick the new lot in a sitcom.

If the Saxons and Normans could see us now, they would probably stop fighting, look at GB News, Twitter and the comments section, and agree on one thing at least.

"Blimey. They will believe anything, wont they."

Letting Go at 125

The Bullit Hero 125 went for its MoT last week – No.2 Son’s, not mine. He’s twenty-five now, and that modest little bike represents something much larger than its certificate. After a couple of months of coaxing it into life – cleaning contacts, fettling carburettors, tightening bolts that seem to loosen out of boredom - I realised I wasn’t just recommissioning a machine. I was preparing to let go.

It’s a Chinese-built Bullit, with all the quirks that implies. The metal’s a bit soft, the paint’s more enthusiasm than quality, and the fasteners seem to be made from compressed tea biscuits. But for all that, it does look the part - chunkier than most 125s, with a stance that flatters its modest displacement. It’s not quite what it pretends to be, but then, neither are most of us at twenty-five.

He’ll be commuting on it this winter - from Old Sodbury down to Bristol for his PGCE lectures, and over to Chippenham for his teaching placement. Through the rain, the wind, the frozen mornings – all the character-building misery I once took for granted and now regard as lunacy. He insists he doesn’t want a car. So be it. I suppose this is what independence looks like: brave, slightly daft, and dressed in cheap waterproofs.

At some point, he’ll take his full test and move on to something faster, heavier, infinitely more dangerous. I can’t say a word. I did the same, and my Triumph Daytona 955i returned the favour by putting me in hospital. I’ve lost friends to scooters and motorbikes – too many. Those memories don’t fade; they idle quietly somewhere between the ribs.

Still, one has to let go. Independence doesn’t arrive quietly – it comes with noise, exhaust fumes, and the faint whiff of petrol in cold air. So I watch the Bullit head down the lane, its tail light shrinking to a red pinprick, and feel that peculiar blend of pride and dread. Every parent reaches this point – the moment when your role is no longer to steer but to trust the work you’ve already done.

I put the spanners away, close the workshop door, and listen to the fading growl. It’s the sound of freedom, of youth, of daft courage – and of growing up. For both of us.

Right Wing Press & Covid Inquiry

The right wing press has finally got what it always said it wanted from the Covid inquiry: a clear, forensic verdict on what happened. And having demanded it, they are now frantically misreporting it.

The report itself is not complicated. Hallett says the governments of the UK were late, complacent and chaotic. Too little, too late. An earlier lockdown could have saved tens of thousands of lives in England in the first wave alone. February 2020 was a lost month while Johnson’s No 10 stewed in its own toxic juices. Decision-making was shambolic, women’s voices were sidelined, and all four governments failed to grasp the scale of the threat until it was too late. There are a pile of recommendations about how to avoid repeating the fiasco. That is the spine of the thing.

Now watch what the Mail, Telegraph and Express do with it.

The Daily Mail screams “betrayal of our children” and turns one section on school closures into the whole story. You would never guess from that splash that the report explicitly says lockdowns were necessary, and that the problem was delay, denial and incompetence. In Mail-land, the inquiry has magically become an indictment of the very idea of lockdown, perfectly aligned with the columnists who spent four years insisting that asking people not to breathe on each other was Marxism in a mask. The fact that a timely lockdown could have meant a shorter one, or even avoided a full national shutdown, is quietly parked out of sight, because it ruins the libertarian morality tale.

The Telegraph, naturally, goes for cost. The front page frets about the inquiry “nearing £200m” and “facing a backlash”. After over 200,000 deaths and a documented chunk of those that need not have happened, the real outrage, apparently, is spending money finding out why. The comment pages moan that the report tells us “nothing new” and peddle the idea that lockdowns themselves could have been avoided, as if Hallett has finally vindicated the pub bore who spent 2020 tweeting about Sweden in between photos of his banana bread.

But again, this is simply the inverse of what the report actually says. It does not argue “if only we had never locked down”; it says “if we had acted when the warning lights were flashing, we could have locked down earlier, shorter, or possibly not at all, and saved tens of thousands of lives.” That is an indictment of sloth and magical thinking in No 10, not a love letter to the “let it rip” brigade.

Then there is the Daily Express, which has gone full pantomime villain: “Covid ruined Britain and shattered trust forever – one man is to blame.” There is a certain grim comedy in a paper that spent years cheerleading Johnson and Brexit now discovering, with horror, that the man they sold as a Churchill tribute act was actually in charge when all this happened. So the systemwide failure the report describes is repackaged as a simple whodunnit: one bad apple, guv. Pay no attention to the party that put him there, the ideology that sneered at expertise, or the media that treated public health as a culture-war game.

And lurking behind all this is a piece of recent history they would rather you forgot. When Covid was already ripping through the population, the great national dilemma, as framed by this lot, was not “how do we stop people dying”, but “will the Cheltenham Festival go ahead”. The Telegraph ran soothing pieces about the races “escaping suspension” and praised “defiant racegoers” putting a brave face on things. The Times tutted politely at the “panic” and leaned towards letting the show go on. The Sun trumpeted that the Gold Cup “WILL go ahead” despite “coronavirus fears”, with a bit of hand-sanitiser boilerplate at the bottom to keep the lawyers happy. Not one of them led a crusade to shut it down. Quite the opposite: they wrapped the whole thing in the language of Blitz spirit and national character, as if standing in a packed crowd shouting at horses were a public duty.

What unites all of them now is the desperate need to avoid the obvious conclusion. The people who ran Britain in 2020 – and the ecosystem that flattered them, excused them and put them there in the first place – failed catastrophically in a real crisis. They were too late to lock down, too chaotic to plan, too arrogant to listen, and too wrapped up in their own games to grasp that exponential growth does not care about focus group lines or racecourse hospitality.

You can see why that makes some editors uncomfortable. If the story is “we were governed by unserious people, in no small part because unserious newspapers helped make them”, then a few awkward questions start to follow. About years spent turning scientists into punchbags. About endless indulgence of “lockdown sceptics” whose numbers never added up. About the gleeful promotion of culture-war chancers whose only consistent principle was that any collective restraint is tyranny. About the fact that, when the virus was already seeded, their big contribution to national debate was to cheer on the crowds at Cheltenham and then pretend later that they had always been on the side of caution.

So the report must be reframed. It is not about tens of thousands of avoidable deaths; it is about “betrayal of our children”. Not about a state that reacted too slowly; about an inquiry that “costs too much”. Not about national institutions that rotted under the weight of party games; about one conveniently disposable former prime minister. The man who used to be paid hundreds of thousands a year by the Telegraph to knock out a weekly column, and is now on another fat contract with the Mail. No one outside his accountant knows the exact current figure, but it is not exactly minimum wage.

 If you are generous, you could call this spin. In practice it is a second dereliction of duty. The first was in 2020, when much of the right wing press behaved like a fan club rather than a check on power while a lethal virus tore through the country and the bookmakers stayed open. The second is now, faced with a sober account of what went wrong, choosing again to protect the story rather than the public.

Hallett has done something newspapers used to believe in: she has looked at the evidence and written down what it shows, even though it is politically awkward. “Too little, too late” is not just a verdict on Johnson’s government. It is starting to look uncomfortably like a verdict on sections of our press.

1939 All Over Again: Peace at Any Price, War on Instalments

If you sketch the most likely route from here in Ukraine, it is not a grand chess move or a dramatic collapse. It is something far more familiar in Western politics: a slow, grubby drift towards a bad compromise, wrapped in fine words about “peace” and “pragmatism”.

On one side you have Russia, a centralised security state that knows exactly what it wants. On the other you have a loose coalition of democracies that know what they do not want - a wider war with Russia - but are rather less clear on what they are actually prepared to pay to avoid one. Into that gap steps Trump, blundering about with a “deal” that looks suspiciously like Putin’s wish list with the sharp edges shaved off.

Start with Moscow. Putin’s strategy at this point is not subtle. He is grinding forward a few kilometres at a time, burning through men and ammunition to push the line west, while the West argues with itself about whether to send artillery shells this month or next. He does not need blitzkrieg. He needs the clock. Every village taken is another reality on the ground, another bargaining chip, another depressing headline in Kyiv.

Meanwhile the White House is pushing its own “peace framework” that boils down to this: Ukraine hands over more land it does not currently control, cuts its army to something Russia can live with, swallows restrictions on what weapons it can field, and in return gets some rather hazy “security guarantees” from the same people who cannot even guarantee their own commitment to NATO from one election cycle to the next. It is not hard to see why Putin is in no hurry to compromise. If your opponent is slowly edging towards your position on your behalf, why rush?

Overlay that with the democratic constraint. We have established that NATO cannot and should not copy Russian tactics in the grey zone. Western governments cannot fly anonymous drones over Russian airports and then pretend to know nothing about it. So we are stuck in the responsible lane: proper air defences, careful rules of engagement, lawyers crawling over every strike list. It is the right thing to do, but it also means the repertoire of cheap stunts is largely left to Moscow.

Democracy does not just keep us out of the moral gutter. It also makes big, decisive choices hard. It is far easier for leaders to muddle along with half measures than to tell voters: “This will cost you money and it could be risky, but the alternative is worse.” So we get just enough support to keep Ukraine alive, but not enough to change the fundamental balance, and certainly not enough to break Russia’s grip decisively. Long wars of attrition suit autocracies better than democracies, because autocracies can pretend nothing is happening. Democracies eventually have to go back to the electorate and explain themselves.

Enter Trump, who manages to be both the purest expression of that democratic weakness and, perversely, a threat to it. His great contribution so far has been to persuade half of America that Ukraine is a drain, NATO is a racket and allies are a protection racket that should pay up or be left to their fate. From Putin’s point of view, this is priceless. The one country that gives NATO its credibility is being led by a man who openly questions whether he will turn up at all.

At the same time, Trump is not a reliable Kremlin asset. He is transactional and vain, and that is dangerous to everyone, including Putin. If he smells applause in “ending the war” with a lopsided deal, he will lean on Kyiv to sign. If he smells applause in suddenly being “tough on Russia”, he could just as easily lurch into some theatrical sanctions package or a noisy intelligence operation to prove he is no one’s puppet. Policy is whatever polls well with the base this week. That is precisely the unpredictability generals hate.

So when you map the road ahead, three paths appear, none of them particularly attractive.

The most likely is the weary trudge. Russia keeps creeping forward, Ukraine keeps bleeding, and Western governments keep sending enough support to prevent collapse, but not enough to reverse the tide. Hybrid attacks continue in the background: suspicious anchors “accidentally” cutting cables, drones skimming NATO airspace, mysterious outages that always seem to happen near something important. NATO responds with more patrols, more sensors, more strategy documents, all carefully calibrated not to cross the red line into direct confrontation.

In this version, Trump spends the run up to the midterms talking about “peace” while Ukrainian cities are still being hit. His peace plan never quite lands, because neither Zelensky nor Europe can swallow it outright, but it never quite dies either. It sits there as a constant pressure - a reminder to Kyiv that the chequebook has a political price, and to Moscow that time is still working in its favour. By 2027 we have what is effectively a frozen war with occasional bursts of offensives, and a Ukrainian state that is independent on paper but economically and militarily half starved.

The second path is the Munich option refurbished for the 21st century. Here the sheer grind becomes too much. A particularly bad Russian offensive, a spike in energy prices, a few dramatic cable incidents in the Baltic, and suddenly “pragmatism” begins to sound tempting in Berlin and Paris. The Trump plan, or something close, is rebranded as the only grown up option. Ukraine is told, politely and behind closed doors, that the West will not bankroll a forever war, and that if it wants to keep what is left, it must sign.

This would let Western leaders return home waving bits of paper about “security guarantees” and “end to hostilities”, while Russia keeps a fifth of Ukraine and the strategic initiative. It would be sold as realism. It would, in practice, be a dressed up capitulation. We have seen this film before, and it does not end with peace. It ends with the aggressor deciding that the people he has just humiliated are unlikely to cause trouble next time either.

The third path is the outlier, which is why it will get the least airtime. Either something goes badly wrong - a hybrid attack kills people in a NATO country and triggers a sharp response - or Western politics unexpectedly stiffen. Trump is weakened or contained after the midterms, European governments decide they really cannot live for the next decade with a revanchist Russia parked on their border, and a serious effort is made to rearm Ukraine properly. Not tinkering at the margins, but a conscious decision to treat 2027 as the year the balance must shift.

That path requires something we are not famous for at the moment: strategic patience and honesty with voters. It means telling people that yes, this will be expensive, and no, there are no guarantees, but if you let Putin bank this war as a win, you will be buying more trouble later at a higher price. It also means facing down the Trumps and Farages of this world, who will scream that every shell sent to Ukraine is “money stolen from our own people”, while happily ignoring how much of our economic misery is already the price of their last bright idea.

If you want the punchline, it is this. We are not short of options. We are short of political courage. Authoritarians have a simple strategy: keep pushing until someone stops you. Democracies have a bad habit of waiting until the bill is unpayable before they admit what is happening.

From this point, the most likely route is not heroic defeat or heroic victory. It is a slow slide into a shabby peace that rewards aggression and teaches every would be tyrant watching that if you are brutal and patient enough, the “rules based order” will eventually negotiate with your tanks. Russia knows this. Trump, consciously or otherwise, is helping to prove it.

The question is not whether our system is capable of better. It is whether anyone in charge is prepared to explain to their own voters that “peace at any price” is not peace at all, it is layby on the route to the next war.

Pet Sounds

I was watching a documentary on the making of Pet Sounds, the era-defining album by The Beach Boys.

If there’s ever been a bigger mismatch between sound and sight than Pet Sounds and its album cover, I’ve yet to see it. Here we have Brian Wilson, crafting one of the most sublime, emotionally layered works in popular music – a cathedral of harmony and heartbreak – while the record company sends the lads off to a petting zoo to feed goats. Goats. As if someone at Capitol Records took the title literally and decided the theme should be “suburban family day out.”

The result looks like a promotional leaflet for the Los Angeles Parks Department circa 1965. Five wholesome American boys in sports jackets, awkwardly smiling as they dangle handfuls of hay at livestock who, frankly, seem as unimpressed as the band. One imagines Brian muttering, “I’m writing symphonies to God,” while a handler shouts, “Mind the goat, Carl!”

It’s almost performance art in unintentional irony. While the music reinvented what pop could be – emotional depth, dissonant beauty, orchestral ambition – the cover screams “junior school field trip.” You can hear “God Only Knows,” “Caroline, No,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but you see damp hay, muddy shoes, and Al Jardine wondering whether he’s about to be bitten.

And yet, in a perverse way, it’s perfect. Because it shows exactly how misunderstood Brian Wilson was. While he was hearing choirs of angels, the record execs were hearing… farmyard ambience. It’s like handing Da Vinci a tin of emulsion and saying, “Knock us up a quick mural, mate.”

Still, it does have a certain charm. There’s an innocence about it – a kind of accidental visual metaphor for the chasm between genius and the machinery that markets it. One of the greatest albums of all time, dressed up like an advert for goat feed. Proof, if ever you needed it, that art departments should never be allowed to name or theme albums. Otherwise you end up with Abbey Road featuring Paul McCartney at the till of a Tesco Express.

Political Misdirection

I was listening to the Today Debate on R4 about who should pay more tax. Zack Polanski pointed out that Spain, Switzerland and Norway all have wealth taxes in place. That was the cue for Jeremy Hunt to glide in with a neat bit of political conjuring. With great solemnity he announced that Spain’s wealth tax does not raise much, and he left it hanging in the air as if that settled the question – a tidy little economic full stop.

Spain does not raise much because Spain does not have much at the very top. It is not a global financial centre. It does not have a City packed with hedge funds, private equity barons, non dom wealth and billionaire family offices stitched into every expensive postcode. Spain’s wealthy are a light scatter. Britain’s are a dense cluster.

Using Spain’s yield to imply a UK wealth tax would be pointless is like sounding the depth of a paddling pool and declaring the Atlantic must be the same. The argument only works if you pretend the UK looks like Spain. It doesn’t. Britain has one of the highest concentrations of ultra wealthy individuals anywhere. London is effectively a global vault with buses.

And while Hunt was busy dismissing tax rises, he revealed the real intent: welfare reform. In other words, take it from those who have nothing left to give, because his party long ago positioned itself as the parliamentary arm of the wealthy. Protect the fortunes at the top, squeeze the support at the bottom. Dress it up as “tough choices”, but the direction of travel is always the same.

Which is why honesty matters. If politicians cannot be straightforward about the basic facts of the country they claim to govern – who holds the wealth, who carries the burden, who can afford more and who cannot – then they should not be in politics at all. Public life demands clarity, not sleight of hand.

So Spain was waved about like a stage prop, in the hope nobody would notice how little it proves. Spain raises little because its wealthy population is small. Britain’s wealthy population is enormous.

Hunt was not offering analysis. He was offering cover. And once you follow the sequence, the trick becomes obvious.