I wrote this song in 1991. At the time, I was trying to write more lyric poems. I had also been reading about ancient history in Sumeria and Egypt, and how astronomer-priests were able to predict events, including eclipses, mathematically.

Later in 1994, I drove down to the outskirts of Devon at the last minute for a partial eclipse in quite cloudy conditions. I watched an amazing shadow sweep in land, preceded by flocks of birds flying overhead.

Standing outside my car, I noticed the air suddenly cooling, and the clouds above my head appeared lower and billowed dramatically as we were suddenly plunged into night. I was captivated as the temperature dramatically dropped.

The silence was palpable; then the clouds settled, and, almost as soon as it happened, the process reversed, returning dramatically to a normal overcast mid-morning. And whilst it was never as dramatic as my AI-designed image above, it did make the song more resonant, as I had witnessed, at least in part, the central image of the black and shining sun.

I think the song is about longing for the authentic, elemental, transcendent, and hyperreal in life, the places where the spirits fly and for an escape from the day-to-day, the mundane, and others’ projections, the cold material of the stone.

If you see today’s eclipse, let me know how you get on.

Heart of Stone

You can tell me that my heart is made of stone.
You can tell me that my heart is overgrown
you can tell me that my mind works in reverse.
You can tell me that I’m wasting precious time.
running away from what is mine
and you might find me.

Let’s go out into the clear light
Let our bodies greet that black and shining sun;
let’s go out to where the spirits fly
and I will hold you 
again.

You can tell me that my heart is made of snow
flowing 'tween your fingers, watch it flow
You can tell me that my mind is all a mess.
You can tell me that I have no place to hide
And that the truths lie deep inside
and you might find me.

But let’s go out into the clear light
Let our bodies greet that black and shining sun;
let’s go out to where the spirits fly
and I will hold you 
again.

There is something increasingly strange about modern authority. Turn on the television, listen to a political podcast, or browse the opinion pages, and we encounter political presenters, foreign correspondents, NGO representatives, think-tank fellows, and academics speaking as though they were generals, statesmen, and prophets. They pronounce upon wars they will never fight, economic policies from which they are well insulated and social experiments whose consequences will fall upon other people’s children, households and communities.

This is not an attack upon expertise, journalism or public discussion. Civilisation requires people who investigate difficult subjects, report events and challenge those exercising power. The problem is unearned jurisdiction: authority detached from responsibility, experience or any serious reckoning when its predictions fail.

Opinion writers disagree with one another so frequently that they cannot all possess the insight they claim. Some recommend escalation, intervention or far-reaching cultural changes, yet neither they nor their families are likely to carry the immediate consequences. There is rarely a public scorecard recording what they predicted, what followed, who suffered and whether they returned to admit that they had been wrong.

Listening to The Iliad, I became increasingly aware that Homer inhabits a radically different moral landscape. His world is brutal, unequal and frequently horrifying, but no one is entirely detached from consequence. When a warrior falls, the loss does not end where his body strikes the earth. It reverberates backwards towards parents and ancestors, sideways through wife, companions and household, and forwards into the unrealised lives of children who may never inherit, rule or even be born.

A spear does not merely kill an individual. It may terminate a lineage, expose a city, enslave a family or remove the man upon whom a household depended.

The Distance Between Speech and Blood

Modern commentary treats war through necessary abstractions: deterrence, credibility, international law, strategic necessity and the rules-based order. These terms matter, but they can conceal the bodies beneath them. Those calling for another year of conflict or rejecting an imperfect settlement may have persuasive reasons. Their judgement nevertheless carries less moral weight when they are neither answerable for the result nor intend to serve in the armed forces or likely to experience any sacrifice.

Homer does not permit this separation. His warriors speak, boast, quarrel and decide; they are eloquent, or clumsy, wise or driven by reckless passion, but eventually someone must enter the field. Hector’s choices implicate Andromache, Astyanax, Priam and the whole of Troy. Achilles’ clash with Agamemnon’s and withdrawal from hostilities causes countless Greeks he knows and others he has never met to die. Paris’s desire for Helen violates a marriage, the hospitality (Xenia) offered by Menelaus, and the network of oath-sworn protectors of their union. Private erotic appetite begets dynastic catastrophe, and exponential injury and death.

It does not follow that only soldiers may discuss war or that rulers alone may judge government. That would end democratic criticism and grant immunity to those already possessing power. The objection is not that outsiders may not judge. It is that distance should produce humility, reflection and accountability—not greater partisan certainty. Commentators should first challenge themselves on prejudices.

What will this decision require of others? Who will bury the dead? Which households will absorb the loss? What happens if the policy fails? What responsibility does the advocate accept for having urged it? Our commentators are seldom required to answer such questions. Their authority is drawn from longevity, employment, professional networks, prestigious universities, and repeated appearances before rump audiences from which contrary opinions have long since departed. Some are paid to be wrong, provided that their errors remain interesting and institutionally acceptable.

Agamemnon, Chryses and the Price of Contempt

The opening crisis of The Iliad provides our first example. Chryses, priest of Apollo, enters the Greek camp to ransom his daughter. He bears the god’s insignia, offers payment and approaches according to the recognised forms of supplication. The Greek army favours accepting the ransom, but Agamemnon humiliates him and drives him away.

Agamemnon imagines that he has merely asserted his royal rights over one captive woman. Homer shows otherwise. The insult rises towards Apollo and spreads outwards through the army. The god sends plague into the camp, and men die because their commander treated supplication, priesthood and divine reciprocity with contempt. Authority is not private temperament. A ruler’s arrogance becomes a people’s suffering.

The episode exposes what modern administration often conceals. Ministers announce, departments implement —and distant families absorb the damage. The commentators repeat the same talking points, seldom exposing anything other than their own partisan in-group prejudices. When they should at least counsel peace and compromise, they talk of endless wars. When they should step back and think about the consequences, they like Agamemnon double down.

The New Cultural Gods

There is a particular irony in cultural commentators turning to Homer and dismissing the Olympians as capricious, egotistical, inconsistent, amoral, and hedonistic. The description is not groundless. Zeus is partial, pragmatic, coercive and unfaithful; Hera can be vicious and relentless; Ares delights in bloodshed; Aphrodite protects destructive desire. The gods quarrel, deceive and often favour their own. They exceed human beings in beauty, knowledge and power, but not always in virtue.

Yet who authorised modern secular culture to occupy the position of moral judges of Olympus? The public intellectual who treats Zeus as a grotesque relic may speak from a civilisation whose own record includes the #MeToo revelations, well-documented institutional failures to protect minors, the global commercialisation of pornography and the steady separation of sex from marriage, fertility and responsibility. None of this excuses Olympus. It does weaken the modern pose of astonished moral superiority.

The same critic condemns divine pride while cultivating a personal brand, mocks partiality while serving institutions with political interests of their own, and denounces ancient sacrifice from within a civilisation adept at concealing the human cost of its appetites on the weakest and marginalised. Hypocrisy does not make every criticism of Zeus incorrect. It does call the critic’s assumed elevation into question. We may be projecting our own disorder onto the myths and then rewarding ourselves for discovering it there.

Freud and those who followed him repeatedly returned to Greek myth because the stories preserved recognisable human structures: rivalry between fathers and sons, forbidden desire, family resentment, displaced violence, pride and punishment. Modern cinema still depends upon these forms even when it removes the gods. Our culture has not outgrown Olympus. It has shifted the location of its conflicts while denying that they possess metaphysical significance.

Modern interpreters also arrive carrying their own assumptions: historical materialism, therapeutic categories, theories of gender, patriarchy and class. They decide in advance that sacrifice is superstition, divine intervention primitive psychology, masculine honour toxicity, lineage oppression and warfare simple barbarism. Once the ancient world’s understanding of reality has been removed, they announce that its stories are shallow.

Perhaps their interpretation is the shallow one.

Homer’s gods act through and around human beings. Courage may be placed into a warrior’s heart; fear may overwhelm another; a disguise may redirect an army. Human and divine causation overlap. This need not be a primitive failure to distinguish psychology from religion. It may describe a world in which the person remains porous to loyalties, powers and inspirations larger than the autonomous self. Modernity has not abolished these powers. It has renamed them: ideology, incentives, trauma, institutional culture, social contagion and unconscious bias. We congratulate ourselves upon dethroning the gods, then bow before strangely familiar shibboleths.

Zeus’s Promise to Thetis

The second example is Zeus’s promise to Thetis. Agamemnon has dishonoured Achilles by taking Briseis. Thetis approaches Zeus as a suppliant and asks him to grant the Trojans temporary superiority until the Greeks recognise how badly they need her son. Zeus hesitates because the promise will provoke Hera and bring suffering upon the Greek army. Yet once he bows his head, his word becomes binding.

This is not random divine whim. Zeus is constrained by remembered service, supplication, reciprocity and the credibility of his own promise. His nod then governs much of the poem. Hector drives the Greeks towards their ships. Patroclus enters battle wearing Achilles’s armour. Hector kills him—Achilles returns, overwhelmed by grief and rage.

The moral result is dreadful. Achilles’s honour is restored through catastrophe. Zeus fulfils one obligation without being able to reconcile it with the others in a harmless way. Nevertheless, the divine order remains intelligible. Olympus is unstable, but not lawless. Even Zeus normally rules within the allotted order of moira rather than cancelling it whenever private affection intervenes.

Modern criticism notices divine personality while overlooking divine office and the weight of responsibilities. It records appetite but neglects obligation; catalogues inconsistency while ignoring promises, alliances and inherited debts that limit action. The gods may fail morally, but they fail inside a recognisable system of reverence, repayment, offence and consequence. Their own offspring pay the price.

Sarpedon and the Limits of Power

The third example is Sarpedon’s death. Zeus sees that his mortal son is about to be killed by Patroclus and considers removing him from the battlefield. Hera warns that every god with a mortal child would then demand the same exemption. Zeus submits paternal grief to the wider rule. Sarpedon dies.

Zeus does not abandon him. He instructs Apollo to cleanse and anoint the body, then sends Sleep and Death to return it to Lycia, where relatives and countrymen can perform the funeral rites. Divine favour secures dignity, burial and remembrance, but not escape from mortality.

Sarpedon is the son of Zeus. Ascalaphus, the son of Ares, also dies. Others fall who descend from river gods, nymphs or the Trojan line of Zeus. Their ancestry may bring strength, status, divine sorrow or honourable burial, but it does not cancel moira: the allotted portion and mortal limit of their lives.

Zeus cannot overturn the common order simply to satisfy private affection without unsettling the settlement he governs. His authority enlarges rather than abolishes the consequences of partiality. He subjects himself to the restraint his office requires. The episode also exposes the limit of Olympian power. Zeus can protect a corpse, preserve honour and return a son to his household. He cannot raise him from the dead.

Today’s commentators select which war losses to magnify and which to play down; they serve a narrative, not a true journalistic code; they are oblivious to the motivations of the growing majority of the community that fails to heed their exhortations. They are robbed of the opportunity to hear opposing views because they spend more time agreeing with one another. Hence, the moral reciprocities that bind the nation together are neglected in favour of the global allegiances, and above all else, they are always right.

Who May Judge?

Who, then, may judge Zeus, Achilles, Hector and Agamemnon—or a modern president, general or electorate? The answer cannot be that rulers may be judged only by rulers or warriors only by warriors. The weak and meek have frequently seen truths hidden from the powerful, while professional expertise may be deployed in defence of institutional failure.

But moral judgement requires more than confidence and a broadcasting contract. It requires knowledge, humility, attention to consequences, acknowledgement of one’s interests, and a willingness to be held accountable for errors. The person who has never commanded soldiers should hesitate before treating command as simple. Those whose children will never be called to serve should recognise the limits of their enthusiasm for escalation. The analyst who dismisses voters as ignorant should demonstrate that his superior predictions withstand contact with reality.

Modern opinion culture possesses almost no mechanism for imposing such accountability. No enduring public record counts the predictions that proved true. These policies produced the opposite result on the occasions when professional expertise performed worse than the common sense it ridiculed.

Reputation is sustained through repetition rather than demonstrated judgement. The Homeric hero may be arrogant, reckless or wrong, but he faces the consequences of his actions. His body, household, honour and descendants remain exposed. That does not necessarily make him morally superior. It makes his authority costly. He cannot claim he was misled by misinformation and disinformation.

A World of Consequence

The great corrective offered by The Iliad is its emphasis on consequence. Its world does not permit the fantasy that ideas remain separate from blood, household and inheritance. Honour produces courage and pride. Loyalty may preserve a city or prolong a doomed war. Desire may unite two people while destroying the institutions around them. A ruler’s insult becomes an army’s disaster. A warrior’s death extinguishes futures invisible to those watching him fall.

Even the gods are implicated. They favour, punish, protect and grieve. Power does not exempt them from consequence; it enlarges the field in which their decisions operate. Modern commentators often imagine themselves outside that field. They evaluate the actors, classify the results and turn towards the next subject, wielding the language of judgement without entering the tragedy. They zealously advance the concepts of global human rights and then suppress who pays when the global criminal class exploits such opportunities,

Homer’s world is not morally clean; no such world exists, but it is morally weighted. Words create obligations and binding oaths bind. Authority exposes the ruler to judgement; the battle reaches every household; there are no leafy postcodes or gated communities. The corpse must be recovered because even the defeated remain sons, husbands and fathers.

There are no disembodied opinions in The Iliad. No lucrative contracts in publicly funded broadcasters.

Everyone eventually faces the consequences of what they believe and do.

I have never been much of an audiobook user. I think I have listened to only one complete book before: Rollo Tomassi’s The Rational Male. I became so engrossed in it on a train that I missed my stop, travelled on to the next main station and then had to change trains and come all the way back. I tried again with Andrew Klavan’s Werewolf Cop, but that is about it. Generally, I prefer to read—or at least I used to. My study, once grandly described as the man cave, is now full of gardening equipment, DIY tools, stacks of unread books, and accumulated belongings displaced from every other part of the house. I seriously need to get a skip. It is no longer an attractive place to sit with a book, although restoring it to good order remains a necessity.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, however, presented a problem. My wife, sister-in-law, niece and daughter all went to see it in one of those cinemas where the chairs shake, air blows past your ears, and water splashes into your face whenever someone crosses the sea. I declined, partly because I dislike cinema gimmickry. I want to sit approximately where the cinematographer’s eyeline would have been and watch the film as the director and his formidable assembly of talent framed it. I do not need the seat to kick me in the back to understand that a ship has struck a wave.

More importantly, I wanted to grasp Homer’s intentions and form some judgement about the original before the actors, images, music and technological magnificence colonised my imagination. The arguments over woke casting and modern sensibilities seemed to me a mixture of legitimate concern and a marketing ploy: create a controversy so all those in favour of the casting decisions turn up out of solidarity and all those opposed have to turn up to confirm they were right. Everyone else turns up because Momento, Insomnia, the Batman reboots, Inception and Interstellar were good. (I cannot comment on Oppenheimer as I am yet to see it).

But I could hardly judge an adaptation of a poem I had not read. To understand The Odyssey, I also felt I should first acquaint myself with the war that preceded it. Before Odysseus can wander, he must fight; before he can return home, there must be a home from which he has been absent and a reason. The only practical way to do this quickly was through an audiobook. I found a free LibriVox recording of Samuel Butler’s translation of The Iliad and began listening during my morning commute.

The War Before the Journey

I am now around Book XVI, so these are necessarily impressionistic thoughts. Listening is not the same as reading: you cannot easily underline a passage, write an argument in the margin or turn back three pages to see how a particular image was introduced. A single book—or chapter, as I still sometimes call it—can occupy most of my journey to work. Sometimes traffic intrudes; sometimes I realise that I have travelled half a mile while thinking about something else entirely. Yet the cumulative effect is powerful, perhaps because the poem was intended to be heard before it became a monumental object to be silently studied.

Homer’s vision of warfare is complex and unsettling. Courage matters. Physical bravery matters. To die well in battle, facing your enemy rather than fleeing from him, carries enormous moral weight. A man’s standing rests partly upon his willingness to enter the field and risk the darkness descending over his eyes; cowards and shirkers are exposed. Yet the poem is also full of the folly, brutality and happenstance of war. Men do not die cleanly. Spears enter mouths, necks, stomachs and eye sockets; bones fragment and organs spill. Warriors fall because a shield slips, a spear glances in an unexpected direction or someone pauses too long while stripping armour from a corpse.

Homer does not permit heroic warfare to remain an abstraction. Glory is repeatedly interrupted by anatomy and agony. Death is often quick because the injuries are catastrophic, while those who limp away from the battlefield may face something worse. One may admire courage without imagining that the poem is sentimental about combat. The bodies pile up too quickly, the deaths arrive too arbitrarily, and even the strongest warrior remains one badly directed spear away from darkness.

Some of the leading figures appear almost superhuman. Ajax looms over the combat zone. Hector, particularly at this point in the poem, possesses immense authority: he is not simply brave but driven and commanding, a leader whose presence gives shape to the Trojan advance. Achilles, meanwhile, remains inside his shelter, insulted, furious and refusing to fight. His absence dominates the poem almost as powerfully as Hector’s presence, since every Greek reverse reminds us of the man who might have prevented it.

What is remarkable is how rapidly the principal figures acquire distinctive personalities. Agamemnon is proud, provocative and politically clumsy; Menelaus appears wounded in more senses than one. Nestor is experienced and endlessly advisory, while Odysseus is intelligent, persuasive and useful whenever events require words rather than brute force. Paris—Alexandros in Butler’s translation—never quite escapes the suspicion that he has caused an appalling catastrophe and would still prefer to shoot an arrow from a safe distance rather than meet its consequences face to face. Homer requires only a few exchanges to make each of them visible.

Sons of Their Fathers

Even the obscure dead are briefly restored to life before Homer kills them. A man is rarely just named: he is identified as the son of another man, sometimes with his mother, homeland and ancestry added, before a spear enters his body. This repetition—X, son of X—gradually acquires enormous force because the warrior does not die alone. A whole lineage is struck. A father’s investment, a mother’s grief, a household’s expectation, a wife’s security and the future of children not yet grown collapse with him.

It made me wonder what would happen if we introduced ourselves in the same manner: Æthelstan, son of his father; my daughter, daughter of Æthelstan. Each introduction would remind us that we are not self-created individuals but someone’s continuation and someone else’s inheritance. Modernity teaches us to introduce ourselves through occupation, achievement, consumption, preference or, more recently, identity category. Homer presents a man as an extension of familial belonging, carrying the dead behind him and the unborn before him.

This is one reason the struggle over the fallen body matters so much. Warriors strip armour from those they kill partly because armour is valuable, partly because it is a trophy and partly because victory may involve the physical humiliation or obliteration of the defeated. Both sides consequently risk their lives to recover fallen comrades before their enemies can mutilate, expose or plunder them. Homer’s naming resists this obliteration: the corpse may be stripped and abandoned, but the name has entered the poem. The killer takes the armour; Homer gives the dead man posterity.

One modern count identifies 239 named deaths in the poem, the great majority of them Trojan, with Hector, Patroclus, Achilles, and Diomedes accumulating formidable totals. Yet the arithmetic alone misses the catalogue’s strange moral effect. Homer records not merely a succession of kills but a monument of interrupted households, one father’s son after another disappearing beneath the bronze.

When the Gods Take Sides

The gods are not distant philosophical principles. They possess appetites, loyalties, grudges, favourites and rivalries, so Olympus resembles a royal court, family dispute and geopolitical summit conducted simultaneously. Butler frequently gives us Jove and Juno where most modern readers expect Zeus and Hera, but whichever names we use, the alignments matter. Hera, Athena and Poseidon generally favour the Achaeans; Aphrodite, Apollo and Ares favour the Trojans. Zeus presides above them, enforcing fate while repeatedly becoming entangled in the schemes of his own household and the causes of those he favours.

Zeus appears to support Troy, then restrains him, while preserving the larger sequence he has already described. Other gods enter human affairs in disguise, assuming another person’s appearance, instilling courage in a warrior’s heart, confusing an enemy, preserving a favourite, or redirecting the momentum of battle. Human beings act, but they never act inside a spiritually empty landscape. Sometimes the warriors recognise a god’s intervention; at other times, they interpret an inexplicable change in courage or fortune as divine agency. The battlefield is never merely material.

The now fashionable claim that women are peripheral to Homer is just silly. Mortal women represent home, lineage, marriage, inheritance and the spoils of conquest. They may appear as Goddesses, queens, mothers and wives, arranged marriages that readmit defeated households and kingdoms, and yes, enslaved chattel. Still, they are among the purposes for which the men fight and the principal sufferers when the fighting is lost. Victory means returning to wives, mothers, daughters and households; defeat means dead husbands and sons, destroyed cities and the enslavement of those left behind. But they are frequently outspoken and autonomous, and the goddesses actively direct the war and defy Zeus’s sovereignty rather than sitting decorously outside the action.

Hera’s deception of Zeus is one of the most entertaining passages so far. She beautifies herself, borrows Aphrodite’s irresistible girdle and prepares to seduce her husband so that Poseidon may continue supporting the Achaeans without Zeus preventing him. Zeus responds by telling Hera, his wife, that she is more desirable than any of the other women he has had adulterous liaisons with; then lists several of them and compares their attributes, along with some of the children produced by these encounters. It may be one of the earliest surviving examples of a husband digging an ever deeper hole.

Hera, nevertheless, is deceiving her husband and is intent on completing her mission. Zeus is distracted by Olympian lovemaking, then falls asleep, and Hera temporarily rearranges the war below following her marital chicanery. The humour does not diminish the seriousness, since it reveals something fundamental about Homer’s world: the gods are greater than human beings in power, longevity and beauty, but not necessarily in restraint, fidelity or wisdom. They can easily be read as magnifications of human passions rather than their purification.

Yet their immortality also gives them a perspective unavailable to mortal beings. They remember former ages, divine rebellions, conflicts with the Titans and the establishment of the current Olympian arrangement. The world appears to contain overlapping realms: the older primordial powers, the Olympian government, the sphere of demigods and terrestrial spirits, and the mortal world. Human beings honour these powers through supplication, sacrifice and offering; the neglect of a priest or rejection of a sacrifice may release catastrophe.

The hecatomb—a public offering traditionally involving a hundred cattle—returns repeatedly, alongside drink offerings, blood sacrifice and solemn appeals to divine obligation. These passages occasionally bring the Old Testament world to mind, but at this stage I am content to notice the resemblance without trying to resolve it. I am still listening rather than constructing a theology.

Home and the Price of Glory

The war begins with a violation of hospitality. Paris enters Menelaus’s household and departs with Helen. Whether she was seduced, abducted or moved through some unstable combination of agency and compulsion, the offence is personal, dynastic and sacred. Retribution follows, yet the scale of the carnage becomes grotesquely disproportionate to the original wrong. Homer nevertheless places the attractions of home beside the claims of glory so persistently that this disproportion appears to belong within the poem rather than being a criticism imposed upon it from outside.

Wife, children, inheritance, land, servants and a peaceful old age are not contemptible alternatives to courage; they are what courage is supposed to preserve. Some warriors face the terrible choice between remaining at home, living out their years and disappearing from collective memory, or travelling to Troy, dying young and becoming immortal through fame. Achilles embodies the bargain. His conflict with Agamemnon begins over Briseis, a woman taken as war booty. She belongs to the military economy as a prize, yet Achilles’s attachment to her is real enough for Agamemnon’s seizure of her to become a public assault upon his honour.

Agamemnon later offers an enormous settlement: treasure, cities, horses, the return of Briseis and marriage into his own family. The offer is so extravagant that one suspects he asked what might reasonably persuade Achilles and then multiplied it by five. Achilles still refuses because his rage has passed beyond price. He will not return simply because the man who humiliated him now fears defeat; only the death of Patroclus, his beloved companion, will eventually draw him back into the war he already knows will kill him.

Homer’s martial code is therefore more complicated than a straightforward celebration of violence. Achilles is courageous, but his courage cannot be separated from pride, grief, loyalty, rage and a longing for fame that requires his own destruction. The poem understands heroism, but it also understands what heroism costs the hero and everyone attached to him.

There is also a scene in which a leader moves among the soldiers at night, testing morale before the next day’s fighting. It is difficult not to think of Shakespeare’s Henry V, when the king walks anonymously among his men before Agincourt and hears their fears, doubts and arguments about obedience. I would not claim direct borrowing without properly comparing the passages. Still, the dramatic instinct is recognisably similar: power learns what men say when they do not know that power is listening.

Darkness Over Their Eyes

One Homeric phrase has stayed with me more than any other: when a warrior dies, darkness descends over his eyes. The wording changes, but the image returns relentlessly. A moment before, the warrior is named, breathing, boasting, charging or pleading; then the light departs. Homer describes Echepolus being struck through the forehead, the spear driving into the bone, before “a mist of darkness” clouds his eyes and he falls like a tower. The image is physical, but it also feels like a crossing between worlds.

The Christian reader must be cautious. Homer is not a disguised Christian; Olympus is not the biblical divine council with its names rearranged, and Zeus is not the God of Abraham. Yet Christianity does not require us to imagine the pagan world as spiritually vacant. Scripture speaks of the Pit, principalities, powers, rebellious spiritual beings and nations beneath authorities that may themselves become corrupt. Idols are carved from wood and stone, but the spiritual powers sought through pagan worship are not always treated as harmless inventions.

There is therefore an imaginative resonance between Homer’s geopolitical Olympus and the biblical understanding of nations, powers and unseen conflict—an echo, not an equivalence. Christ speaks of the eye as the lamp of the body and warns of the terrible darkness that follows when the light within has become darkness. I am not suggesting literary dependence; the connection may arise simply from the permanent human association between sight, life, truth and light. Even so, the contrast is powerful. Homer’s warrior dies when darkness covers his eyes; Christianity promises a Light that darkness cannot overcome.

Meeting Homer Before Nolan

I have not yet encountered the Cyclops, the Sirens or the great sea journey. That will come when I finish The Iliad and begin The Odyssey itself. Before Odysseus can struggle home, the war must end; before the sea voyage comes the conflict that destroys households, widows, women, orphans, children and leaves even the victors morally and spiritually disordered.

That is what I wanted to experience before seeing Nolan’s interpretation: not immunity from the director’s vision, which would be impossible, but some acquaintance with the world he is interpreting. Nolan may provide the scale, spectacle, ships, storms and technological magnificence. He may make the chair shake and the water strike me in the face. Homer provides the names of the dead, their fathers, their wives, the homes they abandoned and the darkness that descended over their eyes. But the more I listened to the text, the more dissatisfied I became with the conventional retrospective view of the Bronze Age Homeric world.

I did not want Nolan to introduce me to Homer before Homer had introduced himself. The cinema can wait.

A Shocking Murder

The murder of Ann Widdecombe was an act of almost unimaginable brutality. Without speculating about the accused or his motives, we can still ask what her death reveals about political hatred, the disappearance of civilised disagreement and a political culture increasingly willing to treat unfashionable opponents as less than human.

One can spend too long talking about political violence in abstractions: radicalisation, polarisation, online harms, community tensions, dangerous rhetoric, online disinformation. Then the court hears the details of what is alleged to have happened to a 78-year-old woman eating lunch in her own kitchen, and the abstractions dissolve. Twenty-one blows to the head with a hammer.

A 28-year-old man has been charged with the murder of Ann Widdecombe. Prosecutors allege that he entered her Devon home, struck her repeatedly with a hammer and took her wallet before leaving. He was not required to enter a plea at his first appearance. Counter-terrorism police are investigating his possible motivation, including whether there was a political or terrorist connection, but he has not been charged with a terrorism offence. A provisional trial date has been set for June 2027.

That distinction matters. A man has been charged, not convicted. His motivation remains unknown. The accused is entitled to a fair trial, and Ann Widdecombe’s family is entitled to see justice done without the proceedings or any potential jury being contaminated by partisan speculation. But the population and indeed their representatives are entitled to express their opinions, grief, and alarm. To scrutinise the police press statements and public record. The regular impression of a two-tier criminal justice system flows from the perception and often real evidence that the media and police management of these events varies depending on the political affiliations or ethnicity of the victim or potential perpetrator.

But restraint regarding due process and the defendant’s rights does not mean a blanket ban on discussing what has been released into the public domain, nor does it require silence about everything else. We are entitled to discuss the increasingly poisonous climate surrounding political disagreement, and the habitual dehumanisation of public figures and the transformation of political opponents into targets for abuse and even assault. We can ask what is happening to our democracy as disagreement is no longer treated as a key to debate and argument but as evidence that the person voicing an unpopular perspective must be silenced.

A Woman from Another England

I first remember Ann Widdecombe from the John Major years. She had a severe dark bob and an unusual habit of closing her eyes, presumably to concentrate as she spoke. She was formidable without holding a senior position, implacable at the parliamentary dispatch box; later Theresa May would say the Conservatives had become the nasty party. This was the partially deserved impression that Widdercombe gave; rather joyless. But over the years, and with interviews that allowed her to express her views more generally, it became obvious that she retained that invaluable quality which modern politicians increasingly lack: she had thought carefully about what she believed before opening her mouth.

She served under Michael Howard at the Home Office and became associated with the hard and necessary doctrine that prison works. Their relationship disintegrated over Howard’s treatment of Derek Lewis, the Director-General of the Prison Service. Widdecombe subsequently delivered one of the most destructive political descriptions of the period: there was, she said, “something of the night” about Michael Howard. This did not help in the subsequent leadership challenge which he lost to William Hague. The words entered the language because they conveyed something that people thought they recognised but had not previously been able to name.

I associate Widdecombe with the belief that crime is not purely an illness produced by society. Poverty, neglect, family breakdown and exploitation may shape the conditions in which crime flourishes, but they do not eliminate moral agency. People living under similar pressures make different law-abiding choices.

Ann Widdecombe believed in punishment for crimes, the protection of the community through incarceration, and moral responsibility as the only true basis for repentance and rehabilitation. These are not contradictory ideas unless one has adopted the modern conceit that compassion requires the suspension of judgement.

The Good Egg

She eventually retired from the front line of Conservative Party politics in 2010. She had previously converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism and settled into the role of a staunch social conservative from various TV panels. Her conversion followed the Church of England’s decision to ordain women, although her Catholic instincts extended well beyond that dispute.

Then came Strictly Come Dancing, a show that caricatured the TV series of the same name that aired in the seventies and originally featured local competitions for members of the public in ballroom dancing. It had been reborn as family entertainment with celebrity contestants. Still, it slowly declined from good fun to a competition between openly gay judges to see how far they could embarrass the contestants with more smutty, flirtatious remarks.

Widdecombe could not dance to save her life. She moved around the floor like a sack of potatoes in sequins, usually transported by Anton Du Beke, her professional dancer and partner. Yet the shambles became unexpectedly endearing. She was not pretending to possess a talent she plainly lacked. She did not arrive with an invented personal journey or begin crying about discovering her authentic self.

She came out, did her best, received the judges’ mockery and returned the following week. A generation too young to remember her as a junior Government minister was introduced to an eccentric, funny, rather humble but opinionated Englishwoman who could laugh at herself. She became, if not quite a national treasure, then something almost as English: a good egg.

A Brexit Rebirth

Brexit brought Widdecombe back into mainstream politics, winning a European seat with the Brexit Party and becoming the migration and justice spokesperson for the Reform Party, a post she held until her untimely death. Widdecombe was of the era of Gillian Shephard, Virginia Bottomley, Theresa May, Mo Mowlam, Tessa Jowell, Clare Short, Margaret Beckett and Ann Clwyd.

Rare politicians that could make convincing arguments and contribute impassioned analysis from all sides of the house. The Labour Party under Tony Blair embraced all-women parliamentary shortlists and flooded parliament with “Blair’s babes”. David Cameron took greater control of the selection of Conservative candidates from constituency parties. He pushed many selection committees to approve centrists and even former Liberal Democrat candidates into safe Tory seats.

But there was also something of Tony Benn’s rhetorical method in Widdicombe’s ability to explain a position. Benn developed an almost incantatory method of political argument: on issues of democracy, Tony Benn’s five democratic questions were a test to apply to anyone exercising substantial power: What power do they possess? Where did that power come from? In whose interests is it exercised? To whom are they accountable? How can they be removed from power?

Whatever one thought of his conclusions, and he was a lifelong left-wing opponent of the European Union, the listener could follow the thought process. Widdecombe possessed a similar clarity. She stripped away the flannel, euphemism and managerial spin. She did not speak as though every question required a committee of stakeholders to produce an inclusive scheme for further discussion. She told you what she thought - and importantly why she thought it - much more bluntly than her otherwise kind social interactions.

She also reminded me of Shirley Williams MP, who also had a kind of conversational debating style. Williams could articulate the common-sense instincts of an intelligent, middle-aged woman. She was left-liberal, Widdecombe a conservative, Benn of the left. Still, all belonged to an older political culture in which women rose in influence not because of all-women shortlists but because of their formidable clarity, built not on ideological caricatures or appeals to emotion. Margaret Thatcher and Barbara Castle were obviously in this mode as well. They could disagree profoundly and still inhabit the same civil society.

The Heretic

As the Overton Window has been systematically shifted to the left by a network of funding think tanks, academia, the political class generally, and the legacy media, Widdecombe’s social views are now beyond the moral pale. Our progressive thought-police now enforce boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable views. She opposed abortion, resisted the sexual revolution and rejected many of the ideological claims and policies subsequently assembled under the LGBTQ banner. A minority of her opponents did not simply believe her mistaken. Increasingly, they treated her opinions as evidence of animus that was not there.

Abortion was and is a defining issue for any orthodox Christian. Ann Widdecombe articulated the perspective that the unborn child is not an inconvenient cluster of cells, but a soul with innate potential for realisation as a human being from the fertilised zygote, the morula, the embryo, the obvious forming baby from the moment of conception made in the image of God, eventually a full-formed baby, or even a premature one able to survive outside of the body with intensive care. Despite the use of incantations such as “reproductive rights” and “planned parenthood”, abortion to many is the ending of the most innocent, dependent and vulnerable expression of human life.

That position has become a heresy against the newly established religion of feminists’ bodily autonomy and the inverted sacraments of sexual experimentation (promiscuity) and Abortion on Demand up to and even beyond birth. Opposition is permitted only within increasingly narrow boundaries and is often regarded as especially illegitimate when expressed by a man. And a woman who rejects the prevailing doctrine risks being treated as a traitor to her sex.

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 now provides that:

“241 Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion: For the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.”

This removes another legal protection from the viable unborn child: that is, the mother can facilitate her own abortion at any time and not face prosecution. This potentially opens the debate to the possibility of ever later-term legal abortions. Widdecombe was firmly amongst the critics, stating her objections without apology and accepting the consequences.

People affected by the policies she supported do not have to sentimentalise her record merely because she is dead. Political respect does not require retrospective agreement. It requires recognition that a person may hold convictions we despise without becoming an object whose suffering is pleasing.

When Opponents Become Fair Game

Leftist activism is premised on the notion that speech is itself a form of violence. This began as an attempt to police debate in academic environments with sanctioned politically correct positions. It also reflected a deep-seated fear on the left of actual fascism and nazism. The Pinochet military coup that overthrew the democratically elected Allende Socialist Government and terrorised Trade Unions and student revolutionaries with extrajudicial killings haunted the seventies and eighties leftists.

Out of these events came the resurrection of the no-platforming of fascists policy, to counter-demonstrate against meetings and political figures that, unopposed, would dispense with democracy, trade union rights, and the foundations of free speech and political plurality. It has since mutated into something quite different: once words are defined as violence, actual violence against your enemies can be presented as self-defence. And the centre, centre-right, right, hard right, and far right are metaphorically zipped up into a file marked far right! Until everyone who disagrees with the left is fair game.

The person who speaks out against the fetishes of the progressive revolution is no longer simply incorrect. They are making others feel unsafe and even “erasing their existence”. They are even participating in “trans genocide”. Under such an inverted moral vocabulary, attacking the speaker can be transformed from an unjustified violation of their rights to free speech and freedom of conscience, etc., into a form of protection of the vulnerable.

This tendency is not confined to every person on the left, and political violence is certainly not the exclusive possession of the left. But parts of the radical left have developed an elaborate intellectual apparatus through which intolerance is redescribed as safety, censorship as inclusion and coercion as liberation.

Once the opponent becomes an obstacle to justice, equality, liberation or human survival, almost anything done to them can be excused. One begins with denunciation, proceeds to exclusion, cancellation, and eventually discovers that the disappearance of an enemy produces very little grief.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

Some of the reactions to Widdecombe’s death were appalling. There were people online who greeted the initial news with variations upon “good riddance” and “she was a bigot”. Some may not then have known that she had apparently been murdered. That explains a degree of the subsequent retreat, but it does not erase the original reaction. There is something cowardly about celebrating the death of a political enemy. The person waits until the opponent can no longer reply, then finds the courage to spit upon their grave.

There were also some appalling expressions of abuse and denunciation of Widdecombe by Peter Tatchell and other left-wing politicians. However, these were eventually drowned out by those who were politically poles apart from the late conservative elder but spoke of her generosity and thoughtfulness, how much respect they had for her and how saddened they were by her surprising death and then how appalled they were by its manner.

Yet the parliamentary tributes revealed another Widdecombe. Political opponents described an intelligent, principled and kind woman who argued fiercely but maintained friendships across political divisions. Lord Alton recalled that, after one of their many battles, she called him her “favourite bleeding-heart liberal”. Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Reform figures all recognised her devotion to public service and her capacity to disagree whilst respecting others.

Nigel Farage’s tribute was attacked even though he avoided undue speculation. He recalled their political loyalty, their private disagreements and the kindness she displayed towards drivers, servers and ordinary party workers. She had been due to campaign with Reform again within days.

Britain’s Rising Tide of Political Violence

Britain has already received several warnings. Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 by a far-right extremist. Sir David Amess was murdered in 2021 by an Islamist terrorist. The Conservative MP Mike Freer subsequently left Parliament after repeated threats and an arson attack on his constituency office by antisemites. The man who murdered Amess had previously conducted reconnaissance at Freer’s office. Parliament’s own review has concluded that abuse, intimidation and attacks upon elected representatives threaten the health of democracy. (UK Parliament)

There is no ideological monopoly upon political murder. The far right, revolutionary left, militant Islamists, and deranged individuals assembling private cosmologies from the internet are all capable of violence. That must be stated plainly, particularly in an essay concerned about violence emanating from the left. Otherwise, one reproduces the selective morality one claims to oppose.

Politicians now receive threats as an ordinary accompaniment to public life. Offices are fortified. Constituency meetings require risk assessments. Downing Street, which I remember marching past when access was far less restricted, has become physically detached from the public behind gates and armed protection.

Some security is unavoidable. But every barrier represents a small defeat. Democratic politics depends upon the governed being able to approach those who govern them. When representatives must hide behind increasingly elaborate forms of protection, politics becomes another remote digital performance, conducted through studios and social media accounts. The public figure becomes simultaneously more visible and less human.

The Necessary Argument

The law of contempt is not an establishment trick. It protects the possibility of a fair trial. Anyone accused of murder must be tried upon admissible evidence rather than upon the political atmosphere outside the courtroom. But sub judice cannot become a command that society refrain from examining itself.

We can avoid pronouncing upon the defendant’s motives while asking why death threats, fantasies of execution and the language of extermination have become normal political punctuation. We can refrain from alleging conspiracy while recognising that too many people have come to experience an opponent’s suffering as an ideological victory.

The settled question should be simple: no political programme, left or right, is made more righteous by the hammer, the knife, the gun or the bomb. Nor can we preserve freedom of speech by defending it only for those with whom we agree. A country in which Ann Widdecombe could speak, be contradicted, mocked, applauded, cheered, and invited back onto television was healthier than one in which disagreement is banned because, without disagreement, when science and policy are settled. When contrarians and whistleblowers are silenced, we prolong error and can no longer change course when it is clear we are going in the wrong direction.

She represented an England that many younger people may not realise even exists: stubborn, eccentric, Christian, patriotic, sometimes infuriating, capable of laughing at itself and still convinced that an argument could wrap up with a cheery agreement to disagree rather than any denunciation.

It was not a perfect England. Ann Widdecombe was not a perfect woman. But she stood her ground without disguising where that ground was. That is increasingly rare. Let us emulate Widdecombe’s straight talking and fearless explanation of positions. So light a candle for Ann Widdecombe. Pray for the repose of her soul, a good defence before the dread judgment seat of Christ, for those who loved her, for the proper administration of justice and, as she would want, a fair trial for the man accused of taking her life.

In elite sport, winning and losing are separated by a fraction of a second measured in three dimensions. Too high or too low; too slow or too fast; too heavy or too light; flying through the air or rooted to the ground. Football remembers the finish, but often forgets the short passes at the beginning of a defensive move that creates the opportunity for a sliver of an attacking opportunity at the other end of the pitch.

There are, of course, athletic geniuses who appear almost balletic. One instant they are here; the next, they seem to have been teleported to another part of the field, and only the replay explains how they did so. We all have our favourites: Pele, Cruyff, Pirlo, Boban, Papin, Batistuta, Brooking, Brady, to name but a few. Their gifts remind us that football can become inverse geometry, precision and breathless beauty.

Yet football has always contained another school. Rather than cultivating attacking brilliance and building a system that feeds the artist at the most opportune moment, some coaches, players and nations have made an art out of denying the vital catalyst of footballing attacking alchemy - the ball - to an opposing player.

The same fractions of a second govern defence: the perfectly timed tackle, the small adjustment of the body shape by which the defender plays the ball cleanly and removes a certain goal before the crowd has understood the danger.

The Other Half of Beauty

Italy built its reputation upon impenetrable, sometimes glorious defences. In an era moving away from a more openly physical game, with the brutal Uruguayans and, yes, the Argentinians, it was the Italians who elevated the intelligence of defending: Paolo Maldini, Franco Baresi, Fabio Cannavaro and Alessandro Nesta. Their art was not merely to recreate man-for-man marking or zonal strategies. It was to command space, anticipate movement and make violence unnecessary because they were first to seize all advantages and snuff out their opponent.

Attack and defence require a balanced midfield and dependable transitions between all three lines. A team may possess outstanding forwards and still fail because it cannot deliver the ball to them. It may possess excellent defenders and still collapse because every clearance returns possession to the opponent. The decisive quality is often not located in either penalty area but in the route between them.

That was one of the clearest lessons of this World Cup. Even lower-ranked countries with limited facilities, modest domestic leagues, and relatively few players based overseas could remain competitive for sustained periods when well-coached. The rankings did not lie, but the gaps between them had narrowed. Tactical knowledge has diffused, just as the global club game has diffused technique, preparation and athletic standards.

A Tournament of Narrowing Margins

There were surprisingly few genuine innovations and few coaches who appeared to have invented a new grammar for the game. Instead, the tournament exposed countries whose old answers no longer work. Germany requires another rethink and makeover comparable to its 2010 transformation culminating in its crushing of Brazil and defeat of Argentina in the Brazil World Cup.

The Netherlands remain caught between their historical identity and their present personnel. Portugal will now enter the post-Ronaldo era. England may reach the next World Cup without Harry Kane, or at least without the version of Kane around whom the attack has long been arranged.

England’s defeat by Argentina produced the expected convulsion. For much of the semi-final England had played with purpose, shape and attacking intent. They then scored, adopted an increasingly defensive posture and eventually endured wave after wave of Argentine pressure. Thomas Tuchel must answer for the timing of his substitutions, the loss of width, the absence of a credible out-ball and the retreat into a defence that looked risky when it began and unsustainable long before it failed.

If coaches are dismissed for failing to meet the objective for which they were appointed, there is a coherent case that Tuchel should go. He was brought in to reach the final and win the World Cup. He did neither. But some of the reaction has approached hysteria.

England have spent much of the last decade in the later stages of European Championships and World Cups. This side finished third, defeating France 6-4 in an extraordinary runners-up game, and remains a developing team rather than a finished one. I think Tuchel will need to manage the media better, and privately assess with his employers any errors of judgement.

England: Unfulfilled Promise

England have the makings of a strong first eleven and, increasingly, a credible squad. Jordan Pickford and Dean Henderson gained useful tournament experience. Ezri Konsa, Marc Guehi, Jarell Quansah, Reece James and, in particular, Djed Spence all offered evidence that the defensive succession is not barren. John Stones had more good moments than bad in what will prove to have been his final World Cup.

Declan Rice and Elliot Anderson looked capable of becoming a formidable midfield partnership, although Rice appeared below full strength and the quality of England’s set-piece delivery was uneven. Further forward, Anthony Gordon, Jude Bellingham and Bukayo Saka supplied pace, movement and goals. Kane and Bellingham repeatedly scored at vital times.

The reservation is that too many of England’s goals still emerged from moments of brilliance rather than an established attacking method. That criticism may sound excessively exacting after a tournament in which England scored freely, but it matters at the highest level. Great teams do not merely possess players capable of inspiration. They arrange the game so that inspiration is repeatedly invited.

Spain’s Tactical Dominance

France, glittering with talent, never found the structure that maximised it. Michael Olise faded after an excellent club season, and Kylian Mbappe was largely contained when Spain defeated France 2-0 in the semi-final. The problem was not a shortage of gifted individuals but the absence of a collective mechanism equal to Spain’s.

Spain’s football was a more expansive version of the old possession-based matador style. They did not keep the ball merely to sterilise the contest. They used possession to move opponents, counter-pressed when it was lost and accelerated once the correct space appeared. They won the tournament without relying upon a dominant conventional centre-forward, because their danger came from the geometry of the whole side.

The final offered the purest demonstration. Spain made 20 attempts, 12 on target; Argentina did not produce an attempt until the 117th minute and failed to register a shot on target. Ferran Torres, introduced from the bench, scored in the 106th minute. Spain were occasionally profligate, but the match remained theirs because they never surrendered control.

With Lamine Yamal, Nico Williams, Pedri and others still capable of considerable development, Spain will be the team to beat at Euro 2028 and perhaps at the next World Cup. They have discovered how to reconcile beauty with discipline: the ball is not worshipped as an end in itself but used to make the opponent run, doubt, tyre and finally break.

Argentina: Genius and the Shadow

It is fitting that Argentina should be left until last. One of the greatest centre-forwards I have seen was Gabriel Batistuta. Alfredo Di Stefano belonged to an earlier age, playing alongside Ferenc Puskás, a permanent icon of Real Madrid and international football. Maradona was on another level again: an extraordinary genius whose mythology nevertheless combined the sublime with the compromised - the second goal against England in 1986, the handball that preceded it, the failed drug test and the attempt to turn cheating into blasphemous providence by calling it “the hand of God”.

Argentina’s footballing achievements need not be denied to criticise this particular team. Throughout the tournament they repeatedly operated at the border between legitimate physicality and calculated intimidation. Tactical fouls, off-ball collisions, provocation, surrounding officials, and playing the man rather than the ball were the tactics more prominent or consistent than any tactical formation. Not every collision was sinister, and not every disputed decision was evidence of conspiracy. Referees face a difficult task in an era of simulation and slow-motion replay.

But the argument against Argentina does not require doctored photographs, viral conspiracy theories or claims that collapse under examination. It rests on what could be seen across entire matches: the accumulation of fouls, the pattern of aggression, the willingness to interrupt fouls, to push and bludgeon opponents away from the ball, and the increasing confidence that officials would treat each episode as isolated rather than recognise an obviously sustained approach. Spain contained their opponents by denying them possession. Argentina continued to intimidate their opponents by fouling and forcing them to hesitate for the same split second that otherwise could have been spent on greatness.

Bear in mind many of the Argentinian squad play in European leagues where such behaviour would not be tolerated. VAR worked efficiently on many offside decisions, but it was less convincing when judging force, intent and violent conduct. Slow motion can exaggerate minor contact and disguise the speed of a genuinely dangerous collision. This should have made firm on-field refereeing more important.

Instead, too many officials appeared reluctant to establish an early threshold, and reluctance became permission. Argentina appeared to receive unusually lenient treatment before the quarter-finals, but accumulated cards rapidly in the final three rounds, reversing the overall tournament comparison. Of course, there were also numerous occasions when a foul was not given for an Argentine tackle or an off-the-ball incident that the referee did not pick up.

When Indulgence Becomes Complicity

Football is physical. It should remain physical. The answer is not to remove hard tackling, competitive edge or the struggle for possession. But there is a difference between tackling and assaulting, between disrupting a passing lane and deliberately disrupting a player, between standing up for a teammate and attempting to intimidate the referee into abandoning a decision.

The final eventually forced the distinction. Enzo Fernández was dismissed after receiving a second yellow card in stoppage time at the end of the ninety minutes. Argentina then played extra time with ten men. By this time, all delusions perpetuated by mainstream commentators and summarisers that Argentina were a great team with great players, marred by isolated excesses, appeared as wilful collusion. If Argentina had sneaked a goal against the odds, the World Cup would have been permanently sullied.

After Spain’s victory, tempers broke out again, and the shocking post-match disorder became serious enough for FIFA to open a disciplinary investigation. Upon reflection, such conduct, primarily involving enraged Argentinian players confronting Spanish players, would not be tolerated at a Sunday pub team game, let alone the pinnacle of international elite professional football.

That ending did not create the case against Argentina; it completed it. A side that had been praised for its will to win appeared unable to accept that it had been outplayed in every area of the game. The same aggression that had been marketed as competitive character became what it had often been throughout the tournament: loss of control dressed up as passion.

There is also a responsibility upon commentators. Too many admired the edge, the cunning and the dark arts while declining to identify the point at which these ceased to be acceptable. The romanticisation of Argentina converted repeated misconduct into folklore. The attempt to exempt Lionel Messi from his teammates’ antics lacked credibility. Had a late Argentine goal arrived against the run of play, the narrative would probably have celebrated resilience rather than examined how the contest had been conducted.

Spain Dispatches the Bull

Sour grapes are not edifying. It is quintessentially English to meet triumph and disaster with the same composure, and England’s own tactical failure cannot be blamed upon Argentina. But acknowledging England’s mistakes does not oblige us to ignore Argentina’s conduct. The proper answer to bullying, provocation and uncouth behaviour is not retaliatory violence. It is a sound footballing defeat so complete that the behaviour becomes irrelevant. That is what Spain administered.

We often refer to the Spanish national team’s approach as Matador because their ball possession and passing draw out the opposition, who press to try to get the ball back. The Spanish are slow, deliberate, and relentless, so that over time they mesmerise and wear down their opponents for the final dispatch of a goal. Hence comparison with bull fighting.

The Spanish actually use the term juego de posición—“positional play,” that captures the deliberate process of:

• Circulación de balón — circulating the ball.

• Pausa — slowing or holding the play momentarily.

• Atraer al rival — drawing the opponent towards the ball.

• Fijar — pinning defenders or midfielders in position.

• Generar superioridades — creating numerical or positional overloads.

• Encontrar al hombre libre — finding the free player.

• Superar líneas — passing through or beyond the press.

• Verticalizar — suddenly playing forward once the opening appears.

• Madurar la jugada — allowing the attack to mature before forcing the decisive action.

Spain moved the Argentinian bull, exhausted it and denied it the collision it wanted. Argentina’s fury produced almost nothing in attack. Spain’s passing, pressure and patience reduced the defending champions to one late attempt and no shots on target. The final score was only 1-0; the footballing judgement was far more emphatic.

This was therefore a more-than-satisfactory conclusion to the tournament; it was a necessary one. FIFA failed to uphold basic footballing standards, and it fell to Spain and their comprehensive victory to restore a basic hierarchy: playing the ball, not the man; control above intimidation; skill above disorder; genteel style above crude, expedient explosions of thuggery. Argentina finally received their comeuppance, not from a referee, a conspiracy or an act of vengeance, but from a superior team that refused to be dragged into their gutter.

It seems apt that we conclude with Roy Keane, not a player known to pull out of a tackle, but one of the few commentators to speak up during the match on Nico Williams disallowed goal against Argentina:

“I’ve just seen the biggest robbery of this World Cup. The ball comes into the box, nobody touches anybody, everyone goes up for it, then one Argentina player starts shouting. The next thing you know, two defenders are on the floor appealing, Nico Williams has scored, and Emiliano Martinez … who wasn’t even touched… is somehow lying there as well asking for a foul. The referee blows immediately. No VAR review. No replay. No check to see if there was actually any contact. Just disallowed. Apparently if enough Argentina players fall over at the same time, that’s now considered conclusive evidence. If we’re being honest, Paredes shouldn’t even still be on the pitch after some of the tackles he’s made today. Yet somehow the only thing the referee managed to spot instantly was an invisible foul.”

Spain’s victory over France was not simply another demonstration of superior technical ability. Nor was it principally the triumph of one celebrated player over another. It was something more instructive: a victory of collective intelligence and tactics over disconnected but exceptional talent.

France possessed some of the most dangerous attacking players in the tournament. Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise, who are not short of pace, imagination or individual quality. Yet Spain rendered them peripheral. Mbappé was isolated, France’s attacks seldom developed beyond fragments, and the opportunities they created were frequently under heightened defensive pressure.

Spain won 2–0 through a first-half Mikel Oyarzabal penalty, earned by Lamine Yamal, and a second-half Pedro Porro goal. Mbappé failed to place any of his three attempts on target. Spain did not always appear, player for player, to possess a collection of overwhelming superstars. Rodri remained central to the team, and Yamal repeatedly exposed Lucas Digne, and yet the whole team played well. Even the goalkeeper, when it really mattered, played sweeper. But Spain’s real superiority lay in the spaces between the players and the excellent passing under pressure. Each man appeared to understand not only his own task but where his teammates would be before they arrived there.

The Geometry of Possession

Spain plays through triangles. When a player receives the ball under pressure, two passing options seem to appear almost automatically. The pressing opponent must either commit fully, opening space behind him, or hesitate, allowing Spain to circulate the ball away from danger. Of course, every schoolboy player and every team are taught this.

But Spain takes this short and medium-length passing to another level. They seldom clear the ball, hopefully upfield, when placed under pressure; as a rule, they pass their way out with short, precise exchanges, without visible panic or fear. It is mesmerising to watch and sits at the heart of their matador-style play.

It depends upon precision, confidence and movement. The receiver must trust that the ball will arrive; the passer must know that another teammate will make themselves available before the defensive press can close. The geometry is simple. Its execution is not.

An isolated single player press against Spain is therefore almost useless. One player charges forward, Spain passes around him, and the pressing team has merely removed one of its own from the next phase of play. To press Spain effectively requires collective timing. The whole side must move together, closing several passing routes simultaneously and accept the danger that one misjudgement may allow Spain to counterattack into the created spaces.

There was a period when Spanish possession football, the classical tiki-taka style, held the ball for long stretches without appearing particularly interested in advancing it. Opponents were physically and mentally exhausted, while many spectators wondered whether football had been reduced to an extended exercise in denying the other team possession. The Matador did eventually kill the Bull: a goal would be scored. But it could become, well, boring.

This Spain is different now. It still treats ball possession as the organising principle of the game, but it is more willing to risk losing it to create goal-scoring opportunities. It still resembles the matador torturing its opponent, but the patience has been reduced; the matador is no longer dragging the process out, the kill is more summary.

Possession is not valuable because it inflates a statistic. Spain had only 56% possession, but it matters because a team without the ball cannot score. And when France recovered the ball, it was often deep in their half as Spain also played a high bank line repeatedly catching France offside.

Purposeful possession also dictates the emotional rhythm of a match. The defending side runs, adjusts and worries. The side with the ball decides when the contest accelerates and when it pauses. When the opponent eventually gets the ball, they often surge forward, desperate to make a difference to the direction of play, only to make a mistake and concede possession again.

The Recovery Tackle

Spain’s excellence was not confined to possession. Their tackling was equally impressive. When the ball was lost, the nearest player did not merely gesture towards the referee, abandon responsibility or wait for the defensive structure to rescue him. He tried to recover the ball himself. If the immediate attempt failed, Spain rapidly returned to its positions and restored its shape.

This is Liverpool FC of the 70s and 80s: if you lose the ball, you have 6 seconds to regain it, before retreating into formation if the first recovery is unsuccessful. It converts possession from a privilege into a responsibility. The player who loses the ball becomes the first defender.

Modern tackling is a difficult craft. A defender must judge the opponent’s balance, the direction of the next touch, the position of the ball and the risk that ordinary contact will be interpreted as a foul. Timing and body shape matter as much as force.

Spain repeatedly demonstrated that individual defensive skill remains essential, even within the most carefully organised collective system. Yes, there were fouls and mistakes, but, after the opening jittery stages, the Spanish frequently recovered the ball, denying the French a sustained period of possession and therefore the opportunity to establish a rhythmic pattern of play or an opportunity to focus on a Spanish weakness.

There is also an ethical and practical distinction between tackling, tactical fouling and dishonest simulation. Elite football moves at such speed that genuine contact can look trivial on a replay, while theatrical falls can appear convincing in real time. Referees are being asked to distinguish impact from performance, often through images that flatten speed, force and balance into slow-motion fragments. But cheating and simulation do wind up the team that loses out to them and often provokes them to try harder.

Yet Spain’s defensive work rarely depended upon melodrama. They won the ball because their players read the game quickly and committed themselves to a fair challenge. Again, a later Liverpool player comes to mind: Dietmar Hamann, a ghost of a tackler who frequently failed to connect with the player in possession but still ran away with the ball.

Spain’s football was attractive because it rested upon discipline and the growing realisation that France had no answer. Olise, a vital part of the French attack and on the back of a brilliant season with Bayern Munich, was marked out of the game and eventually substituted.

France: A Team of Parts

France’s failure was not primarily one of effort. There was no obvious mutiny, collapse of morale or visible hostility among the players. They failed to function as a collective. Mbappé waited for service that rarely arrived, and when he got the ball, he was often double or triple-marked with little support.

Dembélé saw more of the ball later in the match but did little with it. Olise found himself pushed away from the areas in which he might have connected midfield and attack. France could occasionally break into open ground, but the next pass was uncertain, and the supporting movement arrived too late.

Each player appeared to be completing their own assignment without contributing to a shared solution. When Yamal began to dominate Digne, France did not reorganise sufficiently to protect the exposed defender. A full-back repeatedly left to face an outstanding winger on his own was not merely experiencing an individual problem; his teammates failed to recognise where the match was being lost and ensure he had cover and double-team support.

Didier Deschamps acknowledged afterwards that Spain had closed the available spaces and that France’s technical level had been insufficient. This could be a translation issue, as the French side is steeped in technique; the problem was tactics, both with and without the ball. The substitutions did not visibly address this problem.

Where was the midfield general: the player capable of seeing the whole field, changing the direction of an attack, moving a teammate into a different position or recognising that the original plan had failed or where it could be corrected? Strikers are rarely suited to this task. They are positioned too high, preoccupied with creating separation and naturally hungry for the final ball.

The organiser normally emerges from midfield or centre-half, where the structure of the game can be seen and altered. France had outstanding footballers, but nobody appeared able to bring them into a common rhythm. Spain were a team. France remained a selection.

England’s Test Against Argentina

England now face Argentina with a place in the final at stake. The historical weight of the fixture requires no invention. England and Argentina have met 14 times in official football matches since their first encounter in 1951, with England holding the overall edge with 6 wins, 3 losses, and 5 draws.

But you would think it were the opposite if you listened to the talk. Everyone remembers Maradona’s disgraceful “Hand of God” goal in the 1986 World Cup, Beckham’s red card and England being knocked out by Argentina in 1998. Few recall the Beckham penalty that knocked out Argentina in the 2022 group stages.

Argentina understands how to make such history present. They are skilled not only in possession and tactical control but also in the psychological contest that surrounds the football. They will slow the game, accelerate confrontation, test the referee and identify the English player most likely to react.

Jude Bellingham should expect unwanted attention. An early foul, a bruising challenge or a sequence of minor provocations may be designed not merely to dispossess him but also to ignite his temperament. England must distinguish courage from retaliation. The dark arts only work fully when the opponent becomes a participant.

Thomas Tuchel has praised England’s resilience while continuing to question aspects of their technical performance. England defeated Norway 2–1, but the journalist engineered a disagreement between Tuchel and Bellingham afterwards, revealing the tension between celebrating flashes of brilliance amid a sea of nervy mediocrity.

England has created chances throughout the tournament, but they have not, with the exception of parts of the Croatian game and the Mexico victory, consistently played as a cohesive unit. Too often, an English passing sequence carries a faint sense of impending breakdown. The ball moves across the defence, the opponent’s press advances, an option disappears, and the passing movement ends with a hurried clearance.

There have been periods of genuine fluency. England’s better goals have involved quick combinations, intelligent movement and passes delivered before the defence could reset. But these moments still appear as passages within matches rather than the settled language of the team.

Against Argentina, England cannot merely wait for a moment of individual invention. They must create connections around the player in possession. Passing is not something one player does to another. It is a collective rearrangement of space.

The Intelligence of Defending

John Stones offered an example against Norway of how to defend which many have overlooked. At one point, he was briefly confronted by two advancing attackers: Alexander Sørloth and Erling Haaland. The obvious danger was Sørloth passing to Haaland, who was momentarily unmarked, and a second goal to Norway.

But Stones did not need to win the ball immediately. His positioning altered the attacker’s options, moved Sørloth inside into the recovering defenders, and removed the option of a pass. The key thing here is that Sørloth is predominantly left-footed. To pass sharply to the left, he had a split second to deliver the ball, with the hyperdifficult outside of his foot. There was no time to swivel onto his weaker right foot. Stones knew this and positioned himself accordingly.

This is defensive intelligence: not always the dramatic tackle, but the shaping of the opponent’s decision. The defender makes one route look open while preparing to close it, delays the ball-carrier without overcommitting and buys time for the team behind him.

England will require that intelligence throughout the side tonight. Messi no longer dominates every minute as he once did, but he does not need to. He requires only one unguarded space, one defender shifting his weight in the wrong direction or one passing lane that remains open for a second too long.

Argentina have not controlled every match and has sometimes depended upon decisive moments rather than sustained dominance. They can be stretched and physically challenged. Yet they remain unbeaten because they understand how to survive the periods when they are not playing well. England must therefore impose themselves without becoming careless. Playing to one’s strengths does not mean ignoring the opponent. It means forcing the opponent to respond while retaining sufficient awareness to recognise where the danger lies.

So the battle will be tactical and partly psychological. They have Messi, England have Bellingham and Kane.

Come on, England!

Part Three is therefore the wreckage. The car had already skidded through U-turns and struck the language barrier. Now the engine was over-revving on the world stage. Welfare commitments, stagnant growth, infrastructure decay, spiralling debt interest payments, energy costs and administrative incompetence had left the government without the means to sustain its geopolitical ambitions.

The Chagos Deal

The government’s case on Chagos was that this was not a surrender dressed up as virtue, but an insurance policy for Diego Garcia: concede Mauritian sovereignty, then lease back the strategic core for 99 years, securing the UK–US base against legal and diplomatic challenge.

In that telling, the £101 million annual payment was the price of certainty, not humiliation. Yet the counter-case also has force. The deal was a national scandal, a signal of weakness to China and proof that Labour’s decolonising instincts had overridden British interests.

The criticism is not merely that Britain is paying billions to lease back territory it once controlled. It is that sovereignty was reduced to a leasehold arrangement, strategic geography to an administrative settlement and the national interest to post-imperial tidying-up. The safeguards may be real, but symbolism is statecraft too. A country that cannot distinguish prudence from retreat should not expect allies or enemies to do so.

Brexit Reset

There was an uneasy attempt to “reset” relations with Europe, while never admitting that the Brexit settlement could not easily or honestly be reversed. Labour wanted smoother relations with Brussels, a better diplomatic tone, cooperation on trade, research, migration and defence, and a post-Brexit settlement with fewer sharp edges. These may be sensible aims. But they also expressed the deeper Starmer instinct: to translate political conflict into procedure, sovereignty into negotiation and national renewal into a managed process.

The result was a foreign policy more continental than the Conservatives’, but stability was not a strategy, and internationalism did not magically create military capacity. Starmer could not resist alternating between the White House and Europe, alienating the straight-talking President who cut a beneficial tariff deal, only to see the UK wedded to Windmills and Norwegian North Sea gas.

The first duty of government may be national security, as Starmer repeatedly said, but national security is not a mood. It is money, manufacturing, energy, morale, demography, alliances, secure borders, ships, aircraft, soldiers, resilience, food and fuel supply lines and the willingness of a people to defend something more substantial than a rules-based communiqué.

The War Drags On

Politicians like Starmer may genuinely believe their intelligence briefings about an imminent Russian invasion of eastern and central Europe, while simultaneously claiming that Russia and Putin are on the brink of collapse. This contradiction is seldom explored because both arguments serve the same end: keeping the war going.

The more vulgar case for prolonging the war lies in the political and economic consequences of its coming to an end: Zelenskyy will leave office either after a crushing electoral defeat, in the wake of having to accept lost territories as part of a peace settlement, or by resigning and attempting to relocate beyond the reach of his many enemies among the Ukrainian political oligarchs.

Since Russia’s “full-scale invasion”, Zelenskyy’s government—under martial law approved by parliament—has acquired sweeping powers: military mobilisation; bans on most military-age men leaving Ukraine; curfews, searches, requisitioning and compulsory labour; suspension of elections and referendums; restrictions on assembly, strikes and communications; a unified national television news platform; and sanctions or closure proceedings against media and organisations deemed security threats.

Courts have banned a dozen parties accused of supporting Russian aggression. Ukraine has derogated from certain European human rights obligations, although some of these derogations were temporary. It has also removed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) from state-owned religious sites, notably the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, by terminating leases and repossessing state property. UN monitors have documented forcible entries into UOC churches.

The 2024 law signed by Zelenskyy permits courts to dissolve religious bodies deemed affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church. It does not automatically confiscate parish property, but the UN says its broad affiliation tests and sanctions impose disproportionate restrictions on religious freedom. It should be noted that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church historically came under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Moscow and the Russian Church in 1686.

The split in the Church saw the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) formally granted independence from the Russian Orthodox Church on 5 January 2019, when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I signed the Tomos of autocephaly in Istanbul. This caused an irreconcilable split in the Ukrainian church and among Moscow- and Constantinople-aligned churches, bishops, and laity.

This was partly evidence of an escalating civil and nationalist split between West and East Ukraine, US destabilisation and Russian anxiety and resistance to the placement of missiles on its border following the western-funded coup to remove the elected President Yanukovych and an actual civil war in the Donbas, which preceded the Russian intervention.

Ukrainian Corruption

Below are the principal independently published allegations and cases involving Zelenskyy’s administration or wider Ukrainian state institutions. Allegations are not proof unless a conviction is noted.

Operation Midas/Energoatom: Investigators allege that a network extracted 10–15% kickbacks from contractors and laundered about $100 million. Suspects include Zelenskyy’s former business associate, Timur Mindich, and senior energy-sector figures.

Andriy Yermak: Zelenskyy’s former chief of staff is accused of laundering approximately $10.5 million through a luxury housing project. He denies wrongdoing and was detained in May 2026 pending proceedings. Zelenskyy has not been charged.

German Galushchenko: The former energy and justice minister is accused of participating in the Midas organisation and laundering kickbacks; prosecutors allege that millions reached foreign accounts associated with his family. He denies wrongdoing.

Oleksiy Chernyshov: The former deputy prime minister was accused of accepting an improper discount on luxury property and later featured in the wider Midas investigation concerning illicit enrichment.

Defence food procurement: Defence Ministry officials were accused of purchasing military food at inflated prices, allegedly costing the state more than UAH 733 million. Former minister Oleksii Reznikov was criticised politically but was not personally charged in the reported case.

Mortar-shell procurement: Defence officials and Lviv Arsenal executives were accused of diverting nearly UAH 1.5 billion—about $40 million—intended for 100,000 mortar shells that were not delivered.

Vasyl Lozynsky: The deputy infrastructure minister was dismissed after investigators accused him of accepting a $400,000 bribe linked to overpriced emergency generators and heating equipment.

Mykola Solskyi: The agriculture minister was accused of participating in the illegal acquisition of state land valued at approximately $7 million. He denied benefiting and resigned in 2024; proceedings were continuing.

Vsevolod Kniaziev: The former Supreme Court president was accused of accepting a $2.7 million bribe to influence a judgment. Unlike many other cases, this resulted in a conviction and imprisonment in June 2026.

Oleh Tatarov: Zelenskyy’s deputy head of the Presidential Office was accused by anti-corruption authorities of arranging a bribe in an earlier construction case. Prosecutors closed the investigation on procedural grounds; critics alleged that he had been politically protected.

Zelenskyy’s offshore companies: The Pandora Papers reported that Zelenskyy and his associates maintained an offshore company network, and that he transferred an interest to a close associate shortly before becoming president. The reporting raised questions about transparency and conflicts of interest, but did not establish that possessing the companies was illegal.

Pressure on anti-corruption agencies: In July 2025, Zelenskyy signed legislation placing NABU and SAPO under greater control of the politically appointed prosecutor-general. Critics accused the government of attempting to obstruct investigations involving powerful insiders. Following protests and European pressure, the agencies’ independence was restored nine days later.

The evidence indicates serious and recurrent high-level corruption, particularly in defence procurement, energy and property. It also shows Ukrainian investigators at work, uncovering cases. It does not presently establish that Zelenskyy personally directed the wartime schemes.

War is Good for Profits

The next factor is the financial interest in the war:

United States: Assistance to Ukraine frequently involves the Pentagon contracting with American manufacturers. Raytheon received a $182 million NASAMS contract, while Oshkosh received approximately $202 million for military trucks. US officials explicitly describe assistance to Ukraine as strengthening the American defence-industrial base.

United Kingdom: A £1.6 billion, export-credit-backed deal provides Ukraine with more than 5,000 Thales missiles manufactured in Belfast, creating 200 jobs and supporting another 700. The UK government openly presents this as benefiting both Ukraine and British industry.

European Union: The EU’s ammunition programme has allocated over €500 million to expand production across Europe, partly to replenish member-state stocks and supply Ukraine. Its broader defence-industrial programme provides €1.5 billion to European and Ukrainian manufacturers.

Joint ventures: American and European companies have agreements to repair vehicles, manufacture ammunition and develop weapons jointly with the Ukrainian state or private defence enterprises.

Reconstruction and resources: The US–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund provides American interests with access to future investment opportunities in minerals, infrastructure and strategic industries.

Military-industrial interests benefit financially from sustained procurement, creating a potential institutional incentive against rapid disarmament. Yet much larger reconstruction opportunities depend upon peace. The scale and distribution of that future burden, therefore, matter.

Ukraine Reconstruction

The latest joint assessment by the World Bank, European Commission, United Nations and Ukrainian government estimates Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction needs at approximately $587.7 billion—more than €500 billion—over ten years. This figure covers not merely the rebuilding of destroyed structures, but also the restoration of services, the modernisation of infrastructure, demining, and economic recovery and rebuilding to higher EU-compatible standards. Direct physical damage alone was estimated at over $195 billion by the end of 2025. Because hostilities continue, the eventual figure could rise substantially.

Ukrainian EU Membership

EU membership would not transfer Ukraine’s entire reconstruction liability to the other member states. Reconstruction would still be financed through a mixture of:

• Ukrainian taxation and borrowing;

• EU grants, loans and guarantees;

• bilateral contributions from the US (Rare Earth’s) , UK and other countries;

• World Bank, IMF and development-bank finance;

• Ukrainian and foreign private investment; and

• Potentially, income from frozen Russian assets or eventual reparations.

The EU is already financing part of the recovery through the €50 billion Ukraine Facility. By comparison, the proposed arrangements for 2028–2034 envisage a Ukraine Reserve of up to €88.9 billion, alongside up to €100 billion in loans. These proposals are considerably smaller than the total reconstruction requirement.

After accession, Ukraine would become eligible for ordinary EU programmes—notably cohesion and structural funds and the Common Agricultural Policy. Some of that money could be used for reconstruction and modernisation. Since member-state contributions largely finance the EU budget, existing members would indirectly pay through some combination of:

• higher national contributions;

• reduced allocations to existing recipients;

• additional EU borrowing; and

• reforms or caps on agricultural and cohesion payments.

One static estimate, assuming present EU budget rules, suggested that Ukraine could receive approximately €18–19 billion net annually from the EU budget. However, actual membership terms would almost certainly include transitional periods, expenditure caps and negotiated reforms. This figure is therefore not an estimate of the total reconstruction bill.

But bear in mind the current net beneficiaries of EU funding: Poland, € 11.9 billion; Romania, € 5.5 billion; Hungary, € 4.4 billion; Greece, € 3.9 billion; and the net contributors: Germany, -€19.7 billion, France, -€ 10 billion, Italy, -€ 3.8 billion, and the Netherlands, -€ 3.2 billion. Neither group has anythign to gain and potentially much to lose from Ukraine joining the EU.

NATO and the Future of European Politics

President Trump has proposed conditions for NATO’s future utility: the way forward in Europe would see a compromise ending to the Ukraine conflict; some opportunity for Russia to re-enter an expanded G8; and a demand that Europe finance the continuation of its own strategic armament and war choices, while at the same time ending the rebadged purchase of Russian oil and gas through third parties such as India and Turkey. The alternative British initiative, with French and German support—the Coalition of the Willing—was essentially buying time, a delaying tactic to avoid a peace compromise and loss of territory in the hope that a future President would reverse course.

The European judgment appeared to be that President Donald Trump was illegitimate, temporary and likely to be removed from power after the midterms or at the end of his second and final term. The globalist world model, with Britain at its centre but essentially in a subordinate role to the United States, found itself at odds with the anti-globalist, tariff-based Pax Americana of the Trump White House. The administration’s critique of mass net immigration, and welfare largesse, as well as formally buying Russian oil and gas whilst claiming it was a strategic military threat, made no sense.

Those most hostile to Trump advanced the familiar settlement: a rules-based international order that was often a divide-and-rule strategy in disguise; endless negotiations and regulatory can-kicking; mass, uncontrolled immigration; zero-carbon industrial extinction; and talk of war with Russia without credible investment in defence spending to prepare for one.

Such leaders hailed Zelenskyy as the new Churchill, whether or not they grasped the oligarchic, vested, and corrupt interests surrounding the Ukrainian state. They were either too weak or too indulgent to question the propaganda victories emanating from the Kyiv intelligence and media machine.

Britain and France placed themselves at the front of a European effort to guarantee Ukraine’s future, coordinate support and prepare a reassurance or peacekeeping force in the event of a ceasefire. The stagecraft was grand: summits, declarations, photographs, military planning sessions, phrases about once-in-a-generation security and the defence of Europe.

But Starmer’s government prolonged the diplomatic and strategic fantasy of British agency while lacking the fiscal, military and industrial means to underwrite it. The claim to leadership exceeded the power behind it.

Ukraine exposed this gap by demanding munitions, air defence, drones, logistics, trained personnel, deployable formations and industrial capacity—requirements that rhetoric could not supply. The Coalition of the Willing sounded like a press conference in search of credible military participants.

This was also where Starmer misread the international moment. Donald Trump was not an incidental disturbance in the diplomatic weather. He represented the repricing of American protection. Europe had spent decades outsourcing hard power to Washington while maintaining the rhetoric of strategic autonomy.

Iran, USA and HMS Dragon

Starmer’s European initiative tried to fill the space opened by American pressure, but Britain was no longer the country imagined by its leaders. It had aircraft carriers without sufficient escorts, weak industrial surge capacity, recruitment problems, munitions shortages, too few operable frigates and a defence budget squeezed by health, welfare and debt-interest spending.

A country can choose to be a serious military power. It can choose to be a commercial state under American protection. It can choose to retrench, rearm, broker or become a heavily armed island fortress. What it cannot do indefinitely is speak like a great power, spend on an expansionist welfare state, procure like a bureaucracy, recruit like a declining society, fail to police its own borders against real threats to its populace, and then propose to grow its military to defend a foreign nation’s borders.

When the conflict between the USA, Israel and Iran moved into major bombing and then active war, the UK was unable to swiftly deploy its Type 45 destroyer, HMS Dragon, to protect RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus after the base was struck by drones in early March 2026. The major delays were due to systemic Royal Navy readiness issues, budget-driven contract changes, and maintenance backlogs. Disagreements over granting the USA access to UK air bases only added to unnecessary tensions with the White House.

Starmer’s Numbers Do Not Add Up

The underlying defence-spending debacle, therefore, punctured the claim that foreign policy was the one area many mainstream journalists believed the Prime Minister had handled well. Starmer announced his ambition: increased defence spending, a long-delayed investment plan, drones, submarines, nuclear renewal, air capabilities and preparation for future wars.

Yet the plan arrived with a huge funding gap and doubts about procurement competence. The resignation of the Defence Secretary and his junior minister became the final political flourish. The departing Secretary raised funding slightly, then left his successor with uncertain efficiency savings and the familiar Whitehall claim that a strategic emergency could be reconciled with departmental trade-offs and future fiscal events. The arithmetic remained unresolved.

The reported dispute over the cost of a proposed mission to Ukraine sharpened the symbolism. A coalition intended to project European seriousness became entangled in the oldest Whitehall question: whose budget would bear the cost? The continental rhetoric had met departmental reality.

This is why the defence episode belongs at the end of this three-part essay. It completes the pattern begun by welfare and exposed by immigration: a government able to identify genuine problems but unable to command the authority, resources, competence or consent needed to resolve them.

Foreign-policy LARPing is especially dangerous because strategic overreach can weaken deterrence. If Britain tells allies and enemies that it is ready to lead while its forces remain under-resourced and its industrial base cannot fund military expenditures, it does not look brave. It looks unserious where seriousness matters.

The Fall of the Managerial Centre

Starmer’s fall should not be made too personal. He was dull, cautious, legalistic, morally anxious, often tin-eared and strangely uncomfortable as a national communicator. But these defects became fatal because they were attached to a political settlement that had exhausted its own methods. He was not the sole author of Britain’s crisis, but the representative of an order whose methods no longer matched the scale of the crisis.

The settled question beneath his premiership was whether the managerial centre could still govern Britain by mood music: competence, decency, fiscal rules, institutional repair, public-service reform, international seriousness and carefully calibrated policy and moral language. The answer was a resounding no. Not because those words are always empty, but because they had become substitutes for decisions the governing class no longer had the courage, consensus or money to make.

The U-turns showed that the state could not correct domestic policy without alarming its own coalition. The immigration speech showed that it could not describe the nation without offending the woke ideology embedded in its institutions. Ukraine and defence revealed the same incapacity abroad.

As Keir Starmer announced his resignation, he pointed to a few overlooked successes, most of which had made things worse. He would stand down when a successor was identified, having been shunned by the electorate, the parliamentary Labour Party, much of its activist base, his Cabinet colleagues, and the media that had originally fawned over the potential of a landslide victory.

We have had seven prime ministers since 2010. Even with a 160-seat majority, Labour could not extend Keir Starmer’s tenure beyond one year, eleven months and eighteen days. The U-turns were symptoms of a government that entered office with a critique of Broken Britain’s condition but no settled programme capable of overcoming the institutional, economic and political obstacles before it. The result has been shocking, and the early soundings from the Burnhamite camp offer little hope of a new direction. The Last Double Down may yet have an encore.

This great orgy of football is approaching its conclusion. France has comfortably dispatched Morocco 2–0, Spain overcame Belgium 2-1, and tonight England face Norway, and the other surviving nations can now see their various routes to the final. Yet this expanded World Cup has already confounded many of the assumptions made before it began.

FIFA’s decision to enlarge the tournament to 48 teams was widely expected to dilute its quality. The additional qualifiers—particularly those from Africa, Asia and the smaller footballing nations—were treated as politically convenient participants who would provide picturesque supporters, agreeable human-interest stories and easy victories for the established powers. Instead, many arrived ready to compete.

Nine of Africa’s ten representatives reached the knockout round of 32: Morocco, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, Egypt, Senegal, Ghana, Congo DR and Algeria. Germany and the Netherlands did not survive the group stage, Cape Verde held Spain to a draw, and then pushed Argentina into extra time.

Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo complicated England’s passage, but they were also eliminated in the first knockout round. The expanded tournament has not abolished the hierarchy of rankings, but it has revealed that the quality of international football is now considerably deeper than many had imagined.

Tactical Competence

Almost every team is now professionally coached in the transition from defence into midfield possession, with a coordinated pressing game and the counter-attack. Even comparatively modest nations understand how to compress space, defend in units and exploit the moment when an opponent loses possession. Surprisingly, only the USA stood out as playing a decidedly more attacking, focused style.

This broad diffusion of tactical competence has changed the terms of international football. The distinction between nations increasingly lies where it should: in the quality of their players, the balance of their teams and the complementarity of their individual talents, and the leadership both on the touchline and in the centre of the park. The difference in tactics and formations seems more muted.

The distinct German and Dutch styles of play floundered, and not for the first time. Italy didn’t even make the tournament. England under Tuchel seems able to accommodate Harry Kane’s goal-scoring. And the two holding midfielders in front of their midfield and one out-and-out striker stand out particularly when Jude Bellingham takes on a striker role.

England’s early matches appeared overly reliant on Bellingham and Kane, their two proven world-class players. Kane, in particular, looked refreshed and physically formidable after another extraordinary season with Bayern Munich—nothing like the exhausted and curiously detached figure who laboured through England’s last tournament under former manager Gareth Southgate.

Whether Thomas Tuchel can ultimately surpass Southgate remains to be seen. But England’s 3–2 victory over Mexico was the first occasion on which the whole team appeared to have arrived at the tournament. Every player contributed. Bellingham scored twice over 98 seconds in the 36th and 38th minutes to silence the Estadio Azteca. Kane converted the decisive penalty, and the side survived Jarell Quansah’s dismissal to withstand Mexico’s late assault. It was not merely a victory but a demonstration of collective resilience.

Gordan Banks’ impossible save, but can you spot the ball?

The setting carried its own ghosts. This was the stadium of England’s great World Cup encounters with Brazil, Poland and Argentina: of Gordon Banks’s impossible save from Pelé (see above) and Diego Maradona’s infamous handball. England did not reproduce the elegance of 1970 or the trauma of 1986. They produced something sterner and more contemporary: a ten-man rearguard action against the host nation before a vast and hostile crowd instead.

The Remaining Powers

France remains the obvious favourite. Kylian Mbappé, Michael Olise and Ousmane Dembélé form only the glittering edge of a squad containing outstanding players throughout the pitch. Their 2–0 victory over Morocco was controlled rather than spectacular, with Mbappé scoring after missing a penalty and helping to create Dembélé’s second. France has yet to concede during the knockout phase and appears capable of reaching a third consecutive World Cup final.

Spain may be the one European side equipped to stop them. The matador system of ball retention, with goal scoring a distant second, has been modified somewhat to increase the directness of their play and the goal-scoring opportunities. Their tackling and pressing are of the highest quality.

Argentina remain dangerous because champions acquire a knowledge of survival that cannot be reproduced on a tactics board. They were forced to draw deeply upon it after falling two goals behind to an impressive Egypt side before recovering to score three.

England must now be placed immediately behind them. Players who began the competition hesitantly have found their form. Anthony Gordon has emerged from a disappointing group stage to become one of England’s most dangerous attacking outlets. Ezri Konsa has grown in authority at centre-back. The midfield is beginning to look less like a platform constructed solely for Bellingham and more like a functioning unit.

That development is essential because Norway present a serious test. Their victory over Brazil demonstrated that they are more than Erling Haaland and ten supporting players. Yet Haaland remains their great weapon: a Viking centre-forward combining size, short-distance acceleration, and technical precision in explosive proportions. England’s defensive injuries and Quansah’s suspension make that confrontation still more dangerous. Another ghost of football will hover over the game as it was the Norwegians that defeated England 2-0 in a June 2, 1993 World Cup Qualifier that prevented England from getting to the subsequent finals.

There is much more to talk about, but it will have to wait:

Come on, England! It’s only Norway.

Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair. The former master of political communication would have begun this administration with a list of the actual woes raised on the doorsteps during the election campaign. Blair would have set out the challenges, acknowledged the appeal and dangers of Reform and the Conservatives on one side, and of the Labour left and Greens on the other, before pitching his own programme as the third-way, centrist answer: stealing the best policies of both worlds and rejecting the most divisive elements of either.

Bolstered by endless opinion polls, Blair would still have spoken over the heads of his activists and warned that the landslide was, in fact, tissue-thin. It was no mandate for radicalism, but rather for good government, sensible budgeting and gradual improvements in public services that had declined under Conservative rule. Blair would have bolstered deportations and reformed the Home Office. He would have bragged about the conflict and the subsequent surge in deportations.

So the second stage of the Starmer car crash was linguistic. This sounds less important than welfare, tax, spending or defence, but it is not. A government that cannot speak coherently cannot govern coherently. Words are not the decoration of politics. They are how a government explains sacrifice, defines belonging, prepares consent, identifies enemies, honours loyalties and tells the public why pain is necessary.

Starmer’s administration did not merely communicate badly. It lacked a stable account of the country it governed. As previously argued in Toppling Middle England, the UK government had been at war with the best interests of its electorate before Starmer came to power. It was Starmer, however, who branded the mainstream voter far-right.

His immigration speech should have been the moment when Labour reconciled itself to political reality. Mass migration is not a media hallucination. It has consequences for housing, wages, infrastructure, GP lists, schools, language, social trust, local identity, criminal justice, religious cohesion and the tax base.

It also has beneficiaries: universities, landlords, employers addicted to cheap labour, social care systems that have not solved pay and status, and a political class that has used migration to postpone harder choices about productivity, training, family policy and welfare dependency.

“Let me put it this way: Nations depend on rules - fair rules. Sometimes they are written down, often they are not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.

So when you have an immigration system that seems almost designed to permit abuse, that encourages some businesses to bring in lower-paid workers rather than invest in our young people, or simply one that is sold by politicians to the British people on an entirely false premise, then you are not championing growth, you are not championing justice, or however else people defend the status quo. You are actually contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart.”

PM remarks at Immigration White Paper press conference, 12 May 2025

Here was, at last, a serious speech. When Starmer warned that Britain risked becoming an island of strangers, the phrase did what political language is supposed to do: it travelled. People heard it because it was named something many had felt but were not permitted to say in polite settings. The problem was not that the words were too strong. The problem was that the government was too weak to inhabit them. It also began to dawn on people that the vital resonant phrase had been heard elsewhere.

“For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted.”

Enoch Powell, ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Conservative Association meeting, Birmingham, 20 April 1968

The subsequent retreat was therefore more damaging than the original phrase. A prime minister may apologise for an error of fact, an unintended insult, or a poor formulation. But when a leader retreats from the central moral atmosphere of his own speech, that retreat tells the country that the government cannot bear the consequences of naming the problem it claims to solve. The phrase remained in the public mind precisely because the apology confirmed its political danger.

This was Starmer’s impossible position. If he spoke in the language of borders, national cohesion and settled obligation, he offended the progressive moral universe from which Labour still draws much of its emotional authority. If he avoided that language, he abandoned the public reality that had driven millions of voters away from the old parties and towards Reform. He tried to borrow the rhetoric of national belonging without possessing the political ecology to defend it.

The result was communication as recoil. The speech attempted to force. The party recoiled. The media detected historical echoes. Labour MPs fretted about racism. The machine clarified, softened, regretted and moved on. But the country did not move on. It had seen the Prime Minister attempt to speak as the custodian of a nation, only to remember that his own coalition did not quite believe in one.

This problem extended far beyond one speech. Southport represented a decisive turning point in public perceptions of the state and public order. The government insisted, understandably, that violence and hatred could not be permitted. Yet the deeper public suspicion was that grief and anger were being sorted into approved and unapproved categories.

Many voters believed, that some communities, some protests, some ideologies and some forms of disorder were policed, reported and morally interpreted differently from others. Other outbreaks of disorder vanished from the media without the same level of chastisement. Once that suspicion takes hold, institutional reassurance begins to sound like gaslighting.

The reversal on grooming gangs belongs in the same category. It was not only a policy change. It was a communication event about institutional trust. For years, the state had appeared reluctant to speak plainly about the failures of police, councils, prosecutors, social workers, politicians and community leaders. When a national inquiry was eventually accepted after the Casey audit, the concession did not erase the earlier hesitation. In an area where victims had already been failed by respectable silence, delay itself became a moral statement.

The gender issue revealed the same late correction. The movement from ‘trans women are women’ to the later acceptance that a woman is an adult female was not just a shift in wording. It was another example of elite language being forced back towards ordinary reality after institutions had spent years pretending that ordinary people were confused, bigoted or insufficiently educated. Again, the problem was not that governments can never change their mind. It was that the correction came only after the establishment position had become unsustainable.

The thread connecting immigration, Southport, grooming gangs, and gender is not that these issues are identical. They are not. The connection is that in each case, the government struggled to align its institutional language with ordinary voters’ perceptions. A widening gap had opened between establishment opinion and everyday reality. People felt unable to discuss sensitive issues honestly.

Earlier forms of integration through work, neighbourhood, church, family, school and local association had weakened. Housing pressure and migration had intensified social fragmentation. Yet political elites still spoke as if the public’s unease were an attitude problem rather than a description of lived experience.

This is why Blair is the unavoidable comparison. Blair triangulated not merely because he was slick, but because he understood the emotional geography of Middle England. He knew when to reassure, when to provoke, when to borrow conservative language, when to discipline Labour sentiment, and when to make his own party swallow unease for the sake of power. Starmer copied the aura of moderation but not the strategic intelligence underneath it. Blair’s adjustments usually appeared strategic. Starmer’s reversals usually appeared reactive. Blair projected direction. Starmer projected correction.

Part Two of the crash, then, is the point of impact. The domestic skid became a collision with language itself. The government could not speak plainly because plain speech required decisions. It could not speak softly because soft speech confirmed surrender. So it spoke in borrowed force and then apologised for the force it had borrowed. In politics, inept communication is rarely just bad messaging. It is usually an unresolved thought made audible.

Starmer’s immigration language failed because his political mind was divided against itself. He wanted control without exclusion, belonging without inheritance, contribution without hierarchy, border policy without civilisational confidence, and national cohesion without an account of the nation. This is not a communications grid. It is a nervous breakdown with bullet points. Soon, after huge setbacks in the polls, he would be talking mainly to his increasingly jittery parliamentary party.

“For the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability.” — Andrew Marr

“The adults are back in the room.” — Darren Jones, July 2024

Introduction

The phrase was repeated with the smug relief of a governing class returning to its natural habitat. The adults were back in the room. The grown-ups had re-entered the nursery after the Conservative years of Johnsonian vaudeville, Truss combustion and Sunak managed retreat. Britain, we were told, had once again become a haven of peace and stability. The circus had left town. The lawyers, mandarins, special advisers, institutional loyalists and permanent policy class could return to the work of serious government.

Less than two years later, Keir Starmer’s resignation turned that sentence into an epitaph. The adults had not merely left the room. The more unsettling possibility is that they had entered it without knowing what adulthood in government required. They knew the vocabulary of seriousness, but not the grammar of authority. They knew how to diagnose the broken country, but not how to repair it. They knew how to remove the Conservatives, but not how to govern the Britain that Conservative failure had exposed and Labour orthodoxy had helped to create.

Starmer’s fall should not be reduced to one bad decision, one hostile press cycle, one rebellious parliamentary party, or one unfortunate speech. There were dozens of examples, but these were symptoms, not causes. His premiership collapsed because every major episode revealed the same structural weakness in a different register. Domestic policy showed a government that could not hold a line. Political communication showed a government that could not describe the country without apologising for its own description. Foreign policy showed a Prime Minister larping as the leader of an anti-Trump, continuity-globalist project without the money, military strength or national confidence to sustain the performance.

This is why the period has the shape of an obvious political car crash. First came the skid: U-turn government, welfare retreat, winter fuel panic, stretched fiscal rules, and the modern British state revealed as both overmighty and underpowered.

Then came the impact: the misreading of the Southport murders and their aftermath, the preoccupation with punitive responses to disordered social-media commentary while managing the delayed Rudakubana disclosures, then the immigration speech, the phrase about “an island of strangers”, which resonated with a large section of the public but not with the parliamentary party, and the retreat from the very language of national cohesion the government had briefly tried to borrow.

Finally came the wreckage: geopolitical LARPing, the Coalition of the Willing, Ukraine, and the defence-spending debacle in which strategic ambition collided with empty coffers, manpower shortages, munitions shortages, frigate shortages, an unreliable aircraft carrier, and an industrial and economic base unable to generate the tax receipts required to finance serious military hard power.

There were achievements, or at least claimed achievements. Labour retained an enormous parliamentary majority. Inflation continued to ease. Financial markets did not experience another Truss-style convulsion — yet. NHS appointments increased. Workers’ rights legislation advanced. Relations with European allies became more predictable. These are not nothing. But they did not amount to a governing settlement. They were islands of administrative progress inside a wider sea of drift.

And each had its downside: contested NHS waiting-list improvements, spiralling youth unemployment as employers became more cautious about taking on inexperienced staff under new employment protections, and an unnecessary clash with a White House that wanted a workable transatlantic relationship, potential economic growth and a more favourable tariff regime. The central fact remained: Starmer correctly identified many of Britain’s problems and then governed as though naming them was a substitute for overcoming them.

Diagnosis Without Delivery

The tragedy, if tragedy is not too grand a word for this grey episode, is that he was often right about the diagnosis. Britain is overtaxed, overregulated, indebted, administratively clogged, demographically strained, energy-poor, infrastructure-poor and increasingly unable to translate political promises into material outcomes. Public services consume more and satisfy less. The state intrudes everywhere and delivers slowly.

Yet Starmer entered office still loyal to many of the same bipartisan macro-assumptions that had helped produce the crisis: high migration as economic lubricant, net zero as civilisational mission, welfare expansion as compassion, institutional process as legitimacy, and international posturing as moral leadership.

Above all, he made John Major look dynamic. Starmer’s contribution to Prime Minister’s Questions eventually consisted in not answering the question at all. He had no rapport, no connection with the public mood, and even his empathy seemed forced. From the get-go, he appeared to regard almost anything centre-right as the far Right, thereby placing much of the electorate outside the boundaries of respectable concern.

So the car did not crash because the driver failed to spot the wall. It crashed because he could see the wall, describe the wall, convene a task force on the wall, commission a review of wall-avoidance, and remain committed to the road system and policy sat-nav that led directly into it.

He had to go because the Labour Parliamentary Party eventually concluded that anyone but Starmer might give it a squeak of a chance of surviving the pending 2029 electoral reckoning. Yet this, too, was an evasion. Many of those most eager to remove him had not looked seriously at their own excesses, priorities or self-indulgence. The fault was not only in Starmer’s manner, but in a Labour coalition increasingly unable to distinguish moral theatre from political survival.

The First Skid: Government by Recoil

The first stage of the crash was domestic. A government elected to restore order managed to make even administrative corrections appear improvised, cruel, unstable and reversible. The pattern soon became familiar: announce a hard decision, present it as unavoidable, allow the moral and parliamentary backlash to build, then reverse or dilute the policy while insisting that the principle remained intact. It was not listening. It was government by recoil.

There is a legitimate defence of U-turns. Circumstances change. Evidence improves. Parliament exists to test ministers. A government that never revises policy is usually either authoritarian or stupid. But the Starmer U-turns had a different quality. They did not look like mature corrections. They looked like a governing class discovering, after the event, whether it possessed a constituency for the thing it had just announced.

Winter Fuel and Political Memory

The winter fuel payment decision was the first emblem. Here, fiscal seriousness was translated into symbolic clumsiness. A payment associated with old age, cold homes, post-war social obligation and the memory of thrift was treated as a spreadsheet item. The original cut restricted the payment to the poorest pensioners. The reversal restored it to millions, excluding only those with incomes above a much higher threshold. In policy terms, this was an adjustment. In political terms, it was the moment many voters first saw the gap between Labour’s language of compassion and the Treasury’s instinct for administrative neatness. The “black hole” spin made it look less like fiscal discipline and more like a desperate lurch.

The amounts were not vast in national accounting terms: the familiar £200 or £300 per household per year. But politics is not conducted in the neutral air of accounting. It is conducted inside memory. Pensioners do not experience winter fuel as an isolated payment code. They experience it alongside council tax, food prices, energy bills, GP access, hospital waiting lists, the cost of keeping a car on a pot-holed road, and the slow humiliation of discovering that after a lifetime of work their prudence has made them just wealthy enough to be excluded from help and not wealthy enough to be secure. The policy was an offence against the political imagination before it was a fiscal error. Other sections of the population wondered whether their own dwindling disposable income would be targeted next.

Welfare and the Party Veto

The welfare retreat was more damaging because it touched the central contradiction of Labour in power. Britain has an unsustainable welfare settlement. The long-term sickness register has swollen. The tax base is exhausted. The working population is asked to carry a benefits system that traps some people outside work while failing others who genuinely cannot work. Any serious government must confront this. But a Labour government also depends upon MPs, activists, charities, campaigners, lawyers and moral entrepreneurs for whom almost any reduction in entitlement becomes an assault on the vulnerable.

Starmer tried to split the difference and discovered there was no middle ground. The government presented its Personal Independence Payment and sickness benefit reforms as matters of discipline, compassion and fiscal necessity. Then the rebellion came. More than a hundred Labour MPs resisted. Existing claimants were protected. The most controversial eligibility changes were pushed into review or removed from immediate effect.

The legislation limped through, but the savings were shredded, and the authority of the Prime Minister was diminished. Worse, ministers, junior ministers and loyal backbenchers who had supported the government and faced down the rebellion were betrayed by the turnaround. The worst parliamentary victory is the victory that tells everyone you are no longer committed to the necessary but unpopular policy you asked them to defend.

This was not merely a problem of party management. It revealed a deeper incompatibility between diagnosis and coalition-building. Starmer wanted to say that the welfare state required reform. His party wanted to hear that the welfare state required more money. He wanted to prove fiscal credibility. His backbenchers wanted to prove moral credibility. The Treasury wanted savings. The Labour movement wanted insulation from the charge of cruelty. The result was neither reform nor reassurance, but a policy corpse dragged through the division lobbies.

The same pattern appeared elsewhere: grooming-gangs inquiry resistance followed by concession; immigration enforcement rhetoric followed by increasing small-boat arrivals; business taxation and investment language followed by National Insurance rises that pushed the economy towards virtual recession; fiscal rules altered while ministers talked of restraint; local government restructuring and election-timing proposals reopened under pressure.

Each episode was different, but the cumulative effect was the same. A large majority began to look less like an empowering juggernaut of necessary change, as it had been for Thatcher after 1983 and Blair after 1997, and more like an out-of-control acceleration towards a debt-bond market denouement.

The State Discovers Itself

“My experience now as Prime Minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be…

“We have so many checks and balances and consultations and regulations and arm’s-length bodies… Every time something has gone wrong in the past, successive Governments have put in place another procedure, another body or another consultation...”

Keir Starmer, Liaison Committee evidence session, House of Commons, 15 December 2025

The modern British state is indeed both sclerotic and self-protecting. It has quangos, regulators, courts, agencies, ombudsmen, consultation duties, impact assessments, risks of judicial review, procurement labyrinths, and institutional memories of every previous scandal. It can prevent elected ministers from moving quickly without necessarily being capable of delivering anything useful itself.

But a Prime Minister does not earn much sympathy for discovering the state after becoming responsible for it. New Labour understood preparation. Blair entered office with a governing machine, a communications doctrine, a moral vocabulary and a ruthlessly pragmatic instinct for Middle England. Starmer entered office with a critique of Tory failure and a belief that decency plus process would somehow convert into delivery. The easy bit was getting into government. The hard bit was changing the country.

The government, therefore, fell into the central paradox of the contemporary managerial centre. It believes in the state but cannot command it. It distrusts the market but depends upon it for growth. It invokes compassion but cannot afford the welfare consequences of its own language. It praises working people while taxing and regulating working conditions and stifling opportunities for entrepreneurship, small businesses and the young. It says public services are broken but remains reluctant to offend the very institutional cultures that preside over their failure.

So Part One of the crash is not simply that Starmer was weak. The more important point is that the political settlement he represented had run out of executable politics. Every serious correction required offending some combination of pensioners, disabled claimants, Labour MPs, charities, bond markets, public-sector interests, legal activists, employers, international institutions, or the regime’s own moral vocabulary. The Prime Minister had a majority, but it was trapped in a culture of vetoes. The car began to skid because every turn of the wheel met institutional resistance from the road itself.

Appendix

Starmer Government:

Key Stages, Setbacks and Turnarounds

Summer-Autumn 2024

· “The inheritance is worse than we thought” / black-hole narrative and Britain-is-broken messaging leads businesses to pause investment plans and growth to stall.

· Growing perception that Labour was talking down the economy rather than preparing the country for disciplined renewal.

· Early concerns over tax rises and the gap between campaign reassurance and fiscal reality.

· Shortly after the Chapeltown rioting, Starmer was seen as mishandling the immediate aftermath of the Southport atrocities.

· Starmer seemed unable to channel the country’s grief, fear and anger into a credible account of state failure, public safety, and national cohesion

· The government saw protests over the killings as illegitimate and “far right”, contrasted with the tolerance for the highly provocative demonstrations in London in support of Palestine and Hamas.

· And whilst condemning violent disorder forcefully, the Police in Birmingham explicitly stated that armed Muslim vigilantes were “protecting their communities”.

· The emphasis on disinformation and social-media regulation and a crackdown on social media tweets with some harsh sentences (Lucy Connolly case) and the journalist Allison Pearson case.

· Early emergence of the “two-tier justice” charge: Southport and the subsequent disorder created a durable perception that policing, public condemnation and elite moral interpretation were not being applied evenly.

· Two-child benefit cap rebellion and suspension of seven Labour MPs: an early sign that a large Commons majority did not remove internal party-management problems.

· Prisons, courts and public-order capacity pressures, including early prisoner-release measures, exposed the difference between announcing severity and possessing the institutional machinery to sustain it.

· Lord Alli / donor / freebies row, damaging because it coincided with restraint language and Winter Fuel Payment cuts.

· Sue Gray resignation and No 10 operation reset, exposing early dysfunction inside the governing machine.

· Chagos sovereignty deal began as a slow-burn sovereignty and security controversy.

· First Reeves Budget: major tax rises and a decisive shift from campaign restraint to high-tax governing reality.

Autumn-Winter 2024

· Winter Fuel Payment cuts.

· Rising concern over welfare changes.

· Business concern regarding taxation and employer National Insurance.

· Growing feeling that Labour lacked a positive economic narrative.

· Family farm inheritance tax backlash, giving rural opposition an early organising issue.

· WASPI compensation refusal, adding another pensioner grievance after Winter Fuel.

· Louise Haigh resignation as Transport Secretary, reinforcing judgment and vetting concerns.

· Private school VAT implementation concerns, including questions over pace, practicality and political symbolism.

· Indefinite puberty-blocker ban for under-18s: a medical-safety decision with wider cultural and Labour-internal consequences.

· Chagos controversy continued as a symbol of a government treating sovereignty as a managed process rather than a settled national interest.

Early 2025

· Welfare and PIP reform disputes.

· Immigration concerns.

· Continued weak growth.

· First signs of Reform UK overtaking Labour in some polls.

· Abolition of NHS England announced as a major state-reform measure: a claimed turnaround on bureaucracy but also a risky reorganisation of a strained service.

· Southport returned to the surface through questions over Prevent, safeguarding and institutional failure, sharpening criticism of the government’s initial framing.

· Grooming gangs pressure intensified before the full national inquiry U-turn, turning institutional silence into a central trust issue.

· Sex and gender retreat crystallised after legal and political pressure, with elite language being forced back towards ordinary biological reality.

· The government’s collision with the permanent state became visible: regulators, quangos, courts, arm’s-length bodies and Whitehall processes limited ministerial agency.

Spring 2025

· Temporary improvement following international statesmanship and the Trump/Ukraine diplomacy period.

· Polling briefly recovered before falling again.

· Runcorn and Helsby by-election loss to Reform, providing dramatic evidence that Reform could damage Labour directly.

· Reform’s wider local-election advance reframed the threat from Conservative recovery to populist insurgency against both main parties.

· Immigration White Paper and “island of strangers” speech: an attempt to speak in the language of borders, belonging and national cohesion.

· Retreat from the “island of strangers” wording, converting the speech from strategic repositioning into communication recoil.

· UK-India trade deal: a genuine claimed success, but politically sensitive around mobility and domestic industry.

· UK-EU reset on trade, defence, fisheries and youth mobility: a diplomatic success for supporters, but vulnerable to sovereignty and Brexit critiques.

· The government increasingly appeared to want border control without exclusion, belonging without inheritance and national cohesion without a thick account of the nation.

Summer 2025

· Grooming gangs national inquiry U-turn after months of resistance; this belongs in the main chronology, not as a minor supporting example.

· Welfare/PIP rebellion and climbdown, followed by suspensions of Labour MPs involved in organising opposition.

· Winter Fuel Payment U-turn signalled after electoral setbacks, reinforcing the pattern of policy reversal under pressure.

· Rachel Reeves appeared tearful/visibly upset at PMQs after the welfare reversal; Downing Street had to insist she was going nowhere, while market moves reflected concern that fiscal discipline might be weakening.

· The Reeves PMQs episode became a symbolic moment because a Chancellor associated with fiscal rules was visibly under pressure at the same time as the welfare savings collapsed.

· NHS 10-year plan launched: a claimed reform success, but still competing with public scepticism about whether improvements were being felt.

· Palestinian statehood decision announced under hostage controversy, exposing the government to charges that symbolic recognition was being advanced before all hostages had been released.

· Foreign-policy moral positioning began to outrun strategic leverage: Palestine, Ukraine and Iran increasingly exposed the distance between statement-making and practical power.

Late 2025

· Budget controversy.

· Record-low favourability ratings.

· Taxation concerns.

· Growing dissatisfaction among Labour voters themselves.

· Formal recognition of a Palestinian state while hostages were still being held, creating diplomatic strain with Israel and criticism from hostage families and the Trump administration.

· US-Israel-UK diplomatic strain over Palestine: this became not only a Middle East issue but a domestic political trust issue.

· After Angela Rayner is forced to resign over non-payment of tax in a housing purchase, Starmer’s cabinet reshuffle, to demonstrate grip and control, highlights the opposite when Ed Miliband refused to move from Energy and Net Zero to Housing

· November Budget tax package and continuing argument that tax rises were funding welfare expansion rather than productive growth.

· Two-child benefit cap lifted, a victory for Labour’s left and anti-poverty campaigners but fiscally awkward after earlier discipline of rebel MPs.

· Workers’ rights dilution, including retreat from full day-one unfair-dismissal protection, weakening one of Labour’s clearest ideological dividing lines with the Conservatives.

· Labour polling collapse became measurable rather than anecdotal, with Reform leads and historically poor satisfaction ratings.

Early 2026

· Reform surge.

· Welfare rebellion.

· U-turns accumulate.

· Questions over leadership authority.

· Mandelson / Epstein / vetting scandal, including questions over what Starmer and officials knew.

· McSweeney resignation and later admission that Labour had not properly prepared for government.

· Chagos ratification row continued, keeping sovereignty and consultation questions alive.

· Iran war / US request to use British bases: initial prevarication over legality and alliance obligations, followed by approval of US use of British bases for strikes on Iranian missile sites.

· Leak from the National Security Council over the US base request, exposing division inside government and raising special-relationship concerns.

· Prevarication over Iran exposed the central Part Three problem: Britain wanted to preserve American protection while avoiding clear ownership of escalation.

· Trump relationship deteriorated over immigration, energy and crime, linking foreign policy, migration and net zero to the collapse of Starmer’s international aura.

· China-policy wobble and Trump criticism of UK dealings with China added to the sense that the government’s foreign policy was steadier than Conservative turbulence but not strategically deeper.

May-June 2026

· Local election losses.

· Calls for resignation.

· Burnham leadership speculation.

· Mandelson controversy continued to corrode trust in judgment and vetting.

· Collapse in confidence among MPs.

· Defence ministry resignations.

· Makerfield by-election and Burnham’s return to Parliament, turning leadership speculation into a practical succession route.

· Starmer resignation announcement less than two years after the landslide.

· Post-resignation transition controversy: Burnham ruled out an early general election and indicated he would govern from the 2024 manifesto, giving opponents a democratic-legitimacy line of attack.

· Defence Investment Plan funding gap: the problem was not merely ministerial resignation but the exposure of a defence plan that appeared unfunded or underfunded.

· Trump’s public dismissal of Starmer over energy, immigration and crime became an external humiliation point.

· Strategic overreach: Ukraine, Iran and defence collided with fiscal reality. Britain spoke like a great power while lacking the fiscal, military and industrial means to underwrite its commitments.

· Chagos, Palestine, Iran and Ukraine converged into one sovereignty-and-capacity story: internationalism returned, but internationalism was not the same as capacity.

Having hailed Andy Burnham’s managed accession as the respectable alternative to Reform, the legacy parties and press have now turned their attention to removing Nigel Farage from the political chessboard. The assault on Farage is not merely about parliamentary standards, donors or declarations, although those questions matter. It is about whether the British electorate is still permitted to reject both legacy parties at once. Farage’s real offence is not personal imperfection but political permission: he has made it thinkable that voters may abandon the controlled alternation of Labour and Conservative failure. Burnham is therefore presented as the acceptable vessel for anti-Farage Britain, while Farage is treated as the unacceptable vessel for popular anger.

Introduction

There are moments when the political class reveals itself not by what it says, but by what it suddenly agrees must not be allowed to happen. Nigel Farage’s return to the centre of British politics has produced one of those moments. The legacy parties can tolerate protest, disappointment and theatrical discontent, provided the voters eventually return to one of the approved containers. What they cannot tolerate is a sustained revolt that threatens to escape the old alternation altogether.

There are moments when politics ceases to be a contest between competing programmes and becomes instead a contest over which possibilities the public is permitted to consider. The formal institutions continue. The broadcasts run. The polling companies publish. The columnists nod gravely. The parties issue statements about standards, decency, stability and seriousness. Yet beneath the surface, something colder is taking place. The chessboard is being rearranged before the voters are allowed to move.

Get Farage!

That is the proper context for the sudden command: Get Farage. This does not mean that Nigel Farage is above scrutiny. It does not mean that allegations about financial gifts, donors, outside earnings or parliamentary declarations should be ignored. They should not. A man who seeks to present himself as the insurgent tribune of a betrayed electorate cannot expect soft treatment when questions arise over money, influence and obligation. If rules have been broken, we must apply them. If accusations are false or overstated, they must collapse under scrutiny.

The point is not that Farage should be exempt. The point is that the timing, choreography and political use of scrutiny have become inseparable from the establishment’s wider panic. Even those charged with investigating whether he has met parliamentary standards cannot be treated as existing outside the political battlefield.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards may investigate, and the Standards Committee may deliberate. Still, the committee itself includes MPs from the very legacy parties that could be wiped out by Reform in 2029. That does not invalidate the process. It does, however, make the politics around it inescapable.

The old order knows that removing Keir Starmer is not enough. Starmer’s fall was not the end of the crisis but the exhaustion of the first containment strategy. The managerial centre tried grey competence, legal caution, institutional repair, and carefully rationed and sanctioned moral language. It failed because it could diagnose collapse without governing through it. It agreed that the country was broken while remaining loyal to many of the policies and assumptions that had broken it.

It claimed it wanted to win back those who had lost faith in the establishment process, but could not resist denouncing not just their popularist leaders but their voters as far-right racists. The result was drift, U-turns, linguistic recoil, welfare panic, immigration incoherence and the gathering demonstration of two-tier Britain.

Burnham’s containment strategy

Burnham now arrives as the second containment strategy: the emergency custodian of the centre-left state, the man who will allegedly reconnect Westminster to place, region, transport infrastructure, housing, industry and ordinary speech.

Reuters described him as Britain’s “prime minister-in-waiting”. They reported his promise to create a “Number 10 north” in Manchester as part of a broader programme of devolution, housing, utilities reform and reindustrialisation. The Atlantic put the matter more nakedly, presenting Burnham as Britain’s “last chance” before Farage, with Reform leading in the polls and Burnham given roughly three years to revive the economy before voters turn to the radicals.

There is the whole game in miniature. Burnham is not being introduced merely as a Labour successor. He is being marketed as a prophylactic against democracy taking an unauthorised form. And so Farage has to go. The discussion the elite is having about Farage’s guilt is once again a discussion with itself: its journalists, senior politicians and approved voter base.

Those likely to vote for Reform will not be impressed with the case against him - it looks like it was cooked up. Farage’s solution, a by-election precipitated by his resignation from Parliament and restanding for popular endorsement, is bold.

The Coronation-Coup

Constitutionally, Labour may replace its leader without a general election. There is nothing novel about a governing party changing prime ministers between elections. But politics is not exhausted by constitutional legality. There is also a process Labour ought to follow if it wishes to avoid destabilising its own leaders.

To avoid an internal election, all credible alternatives to Burnham had to agree not to stand. This was not difficult, where ministerial posts could be allocated as a surety for non-contesting. That left Starmer himself. He had to agree not to stand. It appears that a threatened cabinet rebellion guaranteed this.

A manoeuvre can be legal and still be politically insolent. A party elected under one exhausted managerial leader may install another, claim renewal, and govern for years without asking the country whether this new bargain commands consent.

This is the coronation element: the press, the parliamentary party, the donors, the institutional commentariat, and the progressive managerial class converging around a successor, presenting the Makerfield by-election as an endorsement when, in fact, the majority of the country has not been consulted.

The coup element is not tanks on the Mall. It is subtler and therefore more British. It is the displacement of accountability by procedure. The public did not vote for the Burnham project. It did not vote for Manchesterism. It did not vote for a Number 10 North. It did not vote for a soft-left regional state dressed as patriotic renewal.

In fact, it swung behind Reform across the country in the local council, Welsh Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections. Yet the country is now being invited to applaud the handover as though a better accent and a tram network can cure a democratic deficit.

Why Farage Must Be Removed

Farage’s offence is not that he is flawless. He is not. His offence is that he has made the forbidden connection between elite failure and popular permission. He has told voters they can reject both legacy parties at once. That is the real blasphemy.

For decades, the British electorate has been offered a controlled alternation. Labour could disappoint. The Conservatives could betray. The Liberal Democrats could posture. The press could scold. The civil service could absorb. The courts could restrain. The regulators could delay. The quangos could interpret. The Treasury could veto. The broadcasters could moralise. The public could complain, but eventually they were expected to return to one of the authorised containers.

Reform broke that arrangement not by producing a fully formed governing doctrine or a unified team, but by occupying the territory Labour and the Conservatives abandoned: secure borders, national cohesion, reductions in net migration, abandonment of Net Zero targets, lower household energy costs, action on crime, an end to two-tier justice, welfare dependency, public-sector failure, housing pressure and the cultural contempt shown towards ordinary voters.

Reform has increasingly filled the centrist vacuum, occupying the ground vacated by the old parties, and each establishment U-turn strengthens the perception that the governing class lacks conviction.

This is why the assault on Farage is not merely personal. It is structural. Remove Farage, and the establishment hopes to sever Reform’s emotional connection to the public before Reform can acquire further momentum in yet another round of council elections next May.

The purpose is to damage his anti-establishment image. Turn the insurgent leader into just another donor-funded politician. Push soft Reform voters back to Burnham, Badenoch, the Liberal Democrats or abstention. Push the true believers towards Rupert Lowe’s party, so Restore Britain takes a bite from one side and Kemi Badenoch’s talked-up Conservatives from the other. Split the revolt before it becomes a government.

The Scandal as Instrument

Again, the financial allegations matter. Reuters reports that Farage has been facing accusations of failing to properly declare millions of pounds in gifts from wealthy backers, including a standards watchdog investigation into a £5 million gift. At the same time, Farage denies impropriety and says the support was personal rather than political. The Sunday Times published an investigation alleging undeclared benefits, including staff, security and housing from George Cottrell, described in the report as a convicted criminal.

A serious polity would now do three things. It would let the standards process proceed. It would say the process must be respected and that attempting to convict Farage in public while an investigation is underway is inappropriate. It would allow Farage to answer the allegations in detail to the Standards Committee. It would distinguish between financial misconduct, poor judgment, political hypocrisy and media assassination.

Trial by Media

But it is not surprising that what has been created is trial by media, with wave upon wave of confrontations at press conferences and endless questioning of the Reform leader’s response. Not that any of the accusers are objective. Some of them have parliamentary seats to lose to Reform. Instead, the political class wants the conclusion before the process has finished.

The scandal is being used not only to test Farage’s resolve but also to test his stamina. Then comes the wider degeneration: whether his voters can be shamed out of their political judgment by a farrago of press stories, podcasts and Substack commentary, all operating as destabilising forms of campaigning. The question being placed before the country is not: did Farage breach parliamentary rules? It is: how dare you have believed in this man in the first place?

That is why the Clacton by-election is so revealing. Farage has announced that he will resign and stand again, framing the contest as “people versus the establishment”. At the same time, Reuters reports that Labour, Conservative and Burnham-aligned voices have dismissed the move as a stunt or distraction. Sky News reports that the Conservatives will not stand in what Kemi Badenoch called a “fake by-election”. In contrast, the Liberal Democrats called on parties to boycott the contest and deny Farage oxygen.

This is not just tactical caution. It is a profound confession. The legacy parties no longer trust themselves to defeat Farage in open political combat without also controlling the moral interpretation of the contest. They wish to deny him a fight because they fear that the fight itself will legitimise him.

Burnham as the Anti-Farage Candidate

Burnham’s usefulness lies in the fact that he appears to answer a problem the old order cannot quite admit. He speaks of place, region, industrial pride, buses, housing, practical delivery and the neglected North. He wears competence in a less technocratic register than Starmer. He sounds more human. He can borrow the language of “taking back control” without admitting that the original phrase belonged to Brexit.

That makes him dangerous in a different way from Starmer. Starmer’s weakness was visible. Burnham’s weakness may be concealed by plausibility. He can sound like a corrective while leaving the deeper settlement intact. He can promise a more regionally managed state without confronting the national questions of immigration, energy, debt, welfare, sovereignty, family formation, public order, and civilisational confidence.

The polling explains why the establishment is tempted. Ipsos found Reform ahead of Labour by 26% to 24% in late June 2026, while also indicating that the political landscape was shifting as Starmer prepared to step down. YouGov found Burnham beating Farage by 43% to 23% on who would make the better prime minister and noted that Burnham had just beaten Reform by 20 points in Makerfield.

Crisis? What Crisis?

So the strategy writes itself. Make Burnham the respectable vessel for anti-Farage Britain. Make Farage the unacceptable vessel for popular anger. Praise one as renewal. Treat the other as contamination. Then call the result the establishment’s response to democracy and its steadying of the ship.

Meanwhile, those further to the right who have lost confidence in Farage, believing him to be another controlled-opposition lackey of the establishment, set the agenda on social media, Rumble, and YouTube channels, insisting that only Rupert Lowe of the fledgling Restore Britain Party can be trusted.

They ignore the fact that most voters do not live inside the dystopian racial civil-war scenarios of Twitterdom. They are concerned about the grooming-gang travesty, mass migration, public order, the horrendous Henry Nowak case, and the general eroding trust in the police and the judiciary. But they are not ready to endorse Steve Laws and others who have sought to turn Restore Britain into a whites-only brand.

This split on the right was predicted at the Deep State Mixing Desk. One should not be surprised if future memoirs, leaks or disclosures show that elements of the political and security establishment understood exactly how useful such splitting would be.

The Question Beneath the Question

The settled question is not whether Farage is personally admirable. The settled question is whether the British people are allowed a corrective politics that is not pre-cleared by the institutions that produced the crisis.

This is why the establishment’s horror feels so theatrical. Britain is facing a debt crisis, a housing crisis, a migration crisis, an infrastructure crisis, a family-formation crisis, a welfare crisis, an energy-cost crisis, a public-order crisis and a legitimacy crisis. Yet the political-media class behaves as though the decisive national emergency is Farage’s continued presence on the political chessboard.

The country is not short of inquiries into Farage. It is short of houses. It is short of cheap energy. It is short of border control. It is short of prison places. It is short of functioning councils. It is short of productivity, industrial seriousness, military readiness, social trust and political courage. It is short of actual deportations of criminals who should never be here, or who have no respect for the country. Above all, it is short of a governing class willing to admit that the public’s anger is not a pathology.

Burnham may yet prove more serious than his coronation suggests. Farage may yet be damaged by the financial scrutiny now surrounding him. Reform may yet discover that protest energy is easier than governing capability. All these things can be true. But none of them alters the deeper pattern.

The old parties do not want to defeat Reform by answering the questions Reform has raised. They want to defeat Reform by removing, discrediting or exhausting the figure through whom those questions have become politically unavoidable.

That is why “Get Farage!” is not merely a slogan. It is the survival reflex of a political settlement that has run out of arguments. If the by-election goes ahead, Farage will trounce all opposition. Delay it they must, and then undermine it by not standing. That will be the legacy-establishment position, and it will discredit them more than they can imagine.

A gaggle of excited Labour MPs surrounds Burnham as he takes his seat in parliament.

Every political age has to address unavoidable, uncomfortable realities. Modern Britain, rather than suppressing awkward questions, increasingly redirects attention towards constitutional reform, administrative restructuring and regulatory revamps, whilst leaving the underlying problems largely untouched. Andy Burnham’s proposals, captured in the banner “Number Ten of the North”, provide an illuminating case study in strategic misdirection.

Two years ago, in Peering into the Labour Abyss, I predicted the following for the future Starmer Government:

“…he has had a great deal of time to think about how he will complete the Blair revolution: the goal being to wield executive power, ensuring the unaccountable Cathedral of academia, sanctioned media, public sector quangocracies, police, & courts enforce a permanent legislative revolution - making future elections irrelevant…In the end, this will be an open class war. On one side, the ruling leftist institutional leaders, with their hedge-fund globalist think tanks, and young leaders, stamping down on the aspirant, patriotic, normal, excluded working class and socially conservative-leaning middle classes. Given the array of unworkable policies, it will be a social, economic, and political car crash.”

The country has been surveying the car crash and has already issued its verdict: widespread rejection of Labour and Starmer in successive May local, Welsh, and Scottish elections. Yet rather than confronting the urgent questions faced on the doorstep, or acknowledging the Starmer policy double-downs that made matters worse, politicians are convinced it is not the policies that are wrong and need to be reversed, but their execution and location.

Rather than unpack and dismantle the legal and treaty obligations that prevent us from removing foreign illegal entrants who commit serious crimes, we are told the Government will “smash the gangs”. It is an abstraction that has not stemmed the flow, even as the number of sexual assaults and assailants rises. Even the BBC, the purveyor of acceptable opinion, appears to have noticed how porous our borders have become.

The immediate problems Starmer inherited remain as they were, or have worsened on his watch. Still, Andy Burnham now seeks to open a new conversation about the style, substance and geography of governance.

Brown, Blair and Burnham’s Solution

The governance debate inside Labour is not simply a dispute between left and right, or between old Labour and New Labour, but between rival explanations for why the British state no longer seems able to act effectively. The deeper backdrop is social precarity: debt, housing shortage, welfare dependency, failing infrastructure, unrepaired pot holes in most streets, social fragmentation, mass net immigration, sectarian tension and the collapse of confidence in public administration. These are not isolated policy failures but a collective failure, often a product of the bipartisan policy prescriptions we are still wedded to.

Gordon Brown’s answer is moral and constitutional. Britain, in his view, has become over-centralised, territorially unjust and insufficiently solidaristic. The answer is to renew the Union, disperse power, strengthen nations and regions, and restore a social settlement in which poverty, housing insecurity and regional decline are treated as failures of collective obligation. Brown wants to re-legitimise the state. He sees destitution before dependency, broken solidarity before fiscal exhaustion, and constitutional imbalance before civilisational decline.

Blair’s answer is executive and technocratic. He does not begin with the romance of devolution, nor with Brown’s moral language of solidarity, but with delivery. The state must become more capable, technologically advanced, data-driven and productive. Housing requires supply, planning reform and economic realism. Welfare requires redesign, not simply more money. Immigration requires control, though Blair remains instinctively globalist. Jihadist extremism, for him, is ideological and must be confronted as such. Blair wants to re-engineer the state.

Burnham stands between them: Like Brown, he distrusts Westminster centralisation. Like Blair, he admires visible executive action. But his real instinct is municipal: transport, housing, skills, employers, procurement and public services gathered around place and directed by mayoral authority.

Brown decentralises legitimacy. Blair modernises delivery. Burnham municipalises power.

Yet all three remain, in different ways, captured by the machinery of government. They ask how Britain should be governed, administered, digitised or devolved. The harder question is whether the underlying social, fiscal, demographic, and cultural model that they and the Conservative governments that preceded and followed them into power can even be sustained at all.

The Relocation Illusion and Administrative Class.

Burnham’s recent proposals have already attracted detailed and measured criticism. More interesting, however, is what the programme leaves untouched. The first is the need for urgent action. Moving officials from Whitehall to Manchester does not necessarily transfer power from London to the North. Hybrid working and digital government have made physical location increasingly irrelevant. Authority lies not in office buildings but in decision-making structures, and elected councillors exercising local accountability.

Moreover, house prices and disposable income have slowly segregated our cities. Christophe Guilluy, in Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, analysed these changes in Paris. In particular, he identified a traditional elite of civil servants and industrialists merging with a new upper-middle class known as bobos — bourgeois-bohèmes — professionals in media, technology, culture and higher education who thrive in the globalised economy.

They espouse cosmopolitan, progressive and multicultural values, the rhetoric of the “open society”, whilst benefiting from economic arrangements that increase inequality. Despite their inclusivity, Guilluy argues, they practise residential separatism. They gentrify city centres, drive up property prices and send their children to private or high-performing state schools, creating an educational apartheid that excludes the working class.

They rely on low-wage immigrant labour whilst remaining socially distant from both immigrant communities and the native working class. The immigrant class is trapped in social housing. In contrast, the traditional working class is gradually forced to the periphery, on long commutes into the city, competing with immigrant surplus labour that has lower transport overhead.

Consolidating, Not Devolving, Power Across the Country

This social class talks to itself via much of our media, BBC Radio 4 and its flagship Today Programme, the Spectator and New Statesman talking-head panels on YouTube, and, yes, in the Parliament speeches and regional assemblies. Dominic Cummings has highlighted genuine problems at the heart of government in the social class itself that he sees as intellectually substandard and riddled with incompetence and policy stagnation.

But it is this social class that is consolidating its power across the country rather than sharing it Even when officials are persuaded to migrate, or are replaced by newly appointed post holders, it will still be members of this administrative class and its “bobo” hangers on, the senior civil servants, legal advocates, consultants, civil servants, academics and media types — with politicians like Burnham convening them — who will exercise or rather squander power.

London’s Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Richmond upon Thames postcodes will be exchanged for Manchester’s Castlefield and Deansgate, City Centre North and Collyhurst, New Islington South and Bradford. Yes, a step down for relocators, but house prices will rise; please be patient.

Relocating departments, therefore, risks becoming little more than administrative theatre. It produces announcements, photographs and ribbon-cutting ceremonies whilst leaving the social machinery of government substantially unchanged. Nor does experience suggest that bureaucracies become smaller.

Existing institutions are rarely abolished. They are reorganised, duplicated and rebadged. Such relocations come with early retirement and redundancy settlements, relocation expenses and inducements for those who move. They will not take weeks. They will take years, cost hundreds of millions, and still barely be ready to go before the next election.

Britain is repeatedly told that elected mayors, combined authorities and regional assemblies bring power closer to ordinary people. Yet local government has itself been hollowed out by decades of financial pressure. Parish, district, borough and shire councils have been weakened, whilst another administrative layer has emerged between Westminster and genuinely local democracy. The language speaks of devolution; the institutional reality often points towards further centralisation.

The election of independent and more recently Reform Party insurgent candidates, ousting conservative and Labour council strongholds and even becoming the majority party in major councils, is usually followed by a rude awakening as they come to see that the core of the council’s business, the statutory requirements, the spending expectations and legal requirements are all determined in Whitehall.

Growth, Prosperity, and Precarity

The same strategic misdirection appears in economics. Prosperity is increasingly presented as something governments create through programmes, investment, long-term planning, stakeholder cooperation and public spending. In reality, governments can only create conditions in which prosperity may emerge.

Wealth comes from productive businesses, investment, entrepreneurship, innovation and work. Healthy economies generate tax revenues; governments do not spend societies into lasting prosperity. Strategic misdirection shifts focus from enterprise to administration, while overregulation, planning restrictions, and high costs push investors and innovators elsewhere.

Whenever politics disappoints, the answer is no longer to change, reverse, or radically reform policies, but to redesign governance: another authority, another commission, another inquiry, another independent commissioner, and another quango. Parliament may indeed have weakened, but further weakening of representative institutions is no remedy. Democratic legitimacy ultimately rests upon public consent rather than administrative expertise. The public is now increasingly living from paycheck to precarious paycheck.

An Undemocratic Establishment Coup.

The striking feature of Burnham’s proposals is therefore not what they contain but what they ignore. Hotfoot from canvassing and campaigning in his Makerfield constituency, we can now see he was not really listening to the electorate. Could he be borrowing the Scottish National Party’s tactic of claiming policy success whilst blaming failure on the Westminster system?

Voters have not, in recent elections, demanded another constitutional settlement. They have asked why taxes continue to rise, why gas and electricity bills are among the highest in Europe, why immigration remains at a historically high level, why running a business is becoming impossible, why housing has become less affordable, and why public services appear to be simultaneously more expensive and less effective.

Strategic misdirection may prove one of the defining characteristics of this political era. Failed policies are seldom abandoned; they become surrounded by constitutional redesign, managerial language and institutional innovation until public attention shifts elsewhere. Constitutional choreography cannot indefinitely conceal political failure.

When the dust has settled, and the coronation of the Burnham elevation to Number Ten takes place, it will have been an undemocratic political coup for the social class of unelected aristocrats. Keir Starmer won his parliamentary seat of Holborn and St Pancras in 2024 with a mere 18,884 votes, but was installed in Downing Street by 9,708,716 Labour voters and a deeply divided opposition.

Andy Burnham won Makerfield with 24,927 votes, but has no electoral mandate for his change agenda. If he imagines otherwise, he will face a rude awakening. Either way, there will be no honeymoon period.

The next series of policy, economic, and geopolitical car crashes is already lining up.

Since launching On The Settled Questions, I have published 158 essays and accumulated more than 200 unpublished drafts. This review reflects on the themes that have emerged—from Orthodox Christianity and English identity to British politics, Donald Trump, culture, history and memory—and considers how the blog has become an attempt to recover historical perspective in an age increasingly shaped by manufactured narratives. It is both a stocktake of the journey so far and a statement of intent for the writing still to come.

I thought it might be timely to take stock of my output since I set up On The Settled Questions, particularly as I intend to continue to work on my writing and analysis. There are now 158 published articles, some more like essays, and more than 200 drafts that did not make it or might get an outing in the future, particularly if they become topical.

I am committed to seeing personal and recorded history as a major tool in assessing the present and future. At some point, I might be able to articulate an overarching manifesto that covers all the realms I comment on.

The narrative wielders of this current age make no credible attempt to convince us of their discredited societal projects. The assumption is that they are right, factually, morally, and on the right side of history. And so, whilst I articulate a point of view, I, too, do not spend so much time convincing. I assume On The Settled Questions will find its own audience.

Some were written in one sitting, others matured over time. When I write, I construct my opinion, and sometimes I am not sure where I will end up. I'm searching for congruence, integration, and authenticity. I embrace contrarianism and often will not comment if others have already said what I have to say.

On occasion, I can write a blog post or essay in one sitting on the day when the event or idea takes me, but others require more reflection. One recent article about the film Saltburn is still being writting and re written and rewritten, who knows if it will ever make it. But this is rare. I usually start with a line or observation that I develop into a body of text in Evernote on my smartphone, and if it seems worthwhile, I expand it over time.

Sometimes I write to clarify my thoughts and feelings on a matter. There is the odd rant, the odd comedy piece, some penetrating thinking with marshalled evidence, and some evocative pieces. When I have a lot to say, there have been times I have broken up a piece into a series.

My writing isn't yet at the level of proper journalism or research; reaching that standard would require significant time and training, and I'm not comfortable simply repeating what others say. I prefer to point to something significant, as the media narrative is now so powerful, policed, and integrated. And this is increasingly the case outside the mainstream media. Perhaps I am not the only one who woke up one day to find themselves so out of accord with the mainstream manipulations that they were unable to unsee them.

Over the last 12 months, I have had a lot on at work, with my church and my father's recent illness (he's much improved, and in a rehab unit as he seeks to improve his leg muscle tone before discharge). He's now turned 86.

I have started to use ChatGPT as an editor: no changes in style or vocabulary, political views, or theme, but it does help with research and identifying repetition, and in longer essays, I can diverge into all kinds of sub-themes. And whilst this is the way my mind thinks, it can be a problem for the reader.

When I started the blog, I would spend hours honing a piece, editing, and correcting it. But I have always known my longer, rambling pieces could do with an edit. We'll see if this works with AI. The subheadings and titles are also an experiment to help the pieces be found through internet searches and attract a larger audience.

I'd appreciate your feedback on what I write. If you'd like to share an essay, a subscription would be helpful. So here are some observations looking back on the journey so far.

There are 39 pieces under Orthodox Christianity, but most are extracts from liturgical prayers and homilies, with only seven original pieces, which I think are amongst my best writing. I have always been self-conscious about writing on matters of the Orthodox Faith, as I am not a theologian and would never want to mislead anyone. The seven pieces of original writing are below, but the interview with the lady in "Lenten Reflections: We're All God's Children" is more profound than anything I can write.

The Theosis of Ignatius of Antioch
Lenten Reflections: Prodigal Detoxing
What Were the Church Fathers' Pronouns? part two
Christ, the God-Man, Illuminates The Abyss
“Our Father Who Art In Heaven Hallowed Be Thy Name…" part one
The Ever Virgin & Tarkovsky's Male Gaze
Bridegroom Mattins The Hymn of Kassiani

The 14 semi-autobiographical pieces that touch on my personal history and identity are, in my opinion, amongst the most important because they go to the heart of On The Settled Questions' notion of the insurgency of memory and therefore represent a form of resistance against attempts by the mainstream narrative to erase history and what people really experienced. There is a manifesto lurking in these writings on the black British experience.

When The LARPing* Gets Real
Good Manners and Respect
Erasing Black History Month
Abbot's Last Stand?
It Doesn't Matter
Blood Ties and Narratives
"Life is a Circle" Part One
"Life is a Circle" Part Two

At the same time, the writing about key life experiences is, in part, an attempt to reclaim and reintegrate the past into the present.

Transcendent Perspectives
School, Snow, Anarchy!
A Country With Real Men
Tell Me Another
Memory Eternal
My Own Back Pages

The 23 pieces that examine British society, history, and culture, including meditations on English history and exceptionalism, often point towards a future exploration that does not always unfold as expected. The Anonymous England and Competency Crisis series are good starting points. I also think early writing, in particular Charity Shop Epiphany, reiterates the need to recover something that is being lost.

Charity Shop Epiphany
Anonymous England Part One
The Competency Crisis 1 - Concrete Claptrap
A Dialogue With Our Forebears
Political Necrophilia.

Some pieces pertain to the Monarchy and national rituals that I think go to the heart of nationhood:

England Must Arise
The Queen is Dead. Long Live the King
A Desiccated Coronation
On The Challenge of Beauty
CLR James is a hero of mine. He saw himself as inhabiting and building on the culture of bourgeois society and turning the values of Western culture back on itself to question its moral and ethical hypocrisies during genuine periods of slavery and colonialism. Beyond the Boundary will remain his main achievement as he uses the development of Caribbean cricket and its reception on the international stage, in particular the role of race - and skin tone in the selection of team leadership and squads - as an all-encompassing exploration of societal evolution, which he expands on to consider the position in the Caribbean more generally.

This was an important reference point for me when I wrote four pieces on UK and USA football, which, by the time they had been finished, drew attention on both sides of the Atlantic to the rampant colour revolution to neuter professional and amateur competitive sport as a vehicle that channels male working-class attachment to locality, culture, nation and self-assertion.

In the UK, this is expressed through the promotion of an alternative, counterfeit woke version of the national game, in the form of the technically inferior, chronically over-hyped though occasionally entertaining female national side and leagues. I have started writing something on women's sports, it's truly great athletes, and it's a counterfeit feminist copying of the male symbols and ethos. One day, I might complete it.

I think those who claim that professional male football fans are being beguiled by "bread and circuses" seriously miss the point of the culture wars and what people value in their communities, through intergenerational transmission, social class, and, invariably, patriotism.

Flat Feet and Sodden Hankies
Football Comes Home
Football Comes Over the Pond
The BBC Football Colour Revolution
Come on, England, it’s only flippin’ Switzerland!
Why Football Matters

I occasionally post a song or poem, and should do more of this. Songs, in particular, were a way of documenting my life, particularly in my 20s and thirties. The craft of songwriting intrigues and entertains me. The more involved I have become in Church liturgy, singing and chanting over the last two to three years, as coincided with my voice dropping an octave.

How The Mighty Have Fallen (1994)

Behold David, Chastised

Sickened (1988)

Cast Iron Poem and Fable

There are 10 Film, Art and Popular Culture articles; we should have more. Normally, I write when I come across something that inspires or challenges me. But I think Art for Art's Sake hints at a manifesto for a conservative revival of the arts. Also in The Last Wolf review, I float the idea of the cascade, which features in several of the more serious attempts to understand the theopoetic nature of our reality, most ably articulated in The Ever Virgin & Tarkovsky's Male Gaze. I am suggesting that the typos in the Bible saturate our own lives and, indeed, world history. We are all involved in reenacting the struggles and the individuals of history, while we are, of course, called to model ourselves on the redeemer.

Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbád
Art for Art's Sake
The Last Wolf by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
New Dylan Biopic "Brings It All Back Home"
The Taste of Things: Art, Beauty and the Recovery of the Good Life


The 6 pieces of writing about the Middle East and, to some extent, Islam have been the hardest. The BBC piece covers a breakthrough experience for me: my former normie sensibilities clashed sharply with a witness's account of what was actually going on in the Syrian War, and it is very hard for me to write about the region. I am constantly concerned to avoid falling into the trap of adopting "the narrative" on the one hand or underestimating the threat of Islamism to Christian orthodoxy and the West on the other. I started but did not write a follow-up to Yellowstone's Occupied Territories. I am still pondering.

The BBC, a Monk & Syrian Cognitive Dissonance
Yellowstone's Occupied Territories

23 pieces on British Politics should be twice as many; it is just that every time the country takes one miserly step forward, the media, the elected government and the political class ensure that we take two giant steps backwards.

There are times when I tell people I've covered this on my blog because I can't remember what I think about a specific subject I've written about before. I'm getting tired of preparing an analysis for them. I am becoming less tolerant of those who are wedded to the various manufactures of consensus. Because it is hard to summon the bandwidth to explain the country's crises in language people are ready to accept, given the levels of ignorance and ideology where we should see intelligence and enquiry.

I think the country can be salvaged, or rather it has to be, and I have difficulty in communicating with those who see the whole thing as a cabal plan, to my mind leads them to adopt an inversion of Marxist ultraleftism, which I occasionally refer to as the Red Pill Illuminati.

But to be honest, English politics and politicians are so dreary, so substandard, the ideas on the left and right so derivative and untimely, if they ever were helpful, that it's all just a little embarrassing; it's hard to find something to comment on that I have not already done so. That said, The Last Double-Down and Toppling Middle England, Political Necrophilia and The Cathedral meets TrussVision are ambitious, worthy attempts. There are also:

New Labour II's Climate Change Car Crash
No One's Got No Money Mate
"Counting Rifles" on Remembrance Day
Peering Into the Labour Abyss

Which brings us to President Donald J. Trump. If it had not been for my joining Twitter and then Periscope in 2013, the Michael Brown shooting and a nagging feeling that something was not right in the coverage, I might never have connected with what was going on in the USA or the subsequent Trump run for the Republican nomination and later presidency.

It came as a bit of a shock to me back in 2015, as a candidate for the nomination, President Trump took the stage. I knew this was something completely different from anything I had seen before. By the time I started On the Settled Questions, President Trump had left the white house at the end of his first term. Whilst the Covid lockdowns and mRNA jabs were the final push for me to set up my Substack, much of what I have written about President Trump has consisted of debunking the convulsions of the deep state, mainstream media and Hollywood celebrities, which has led to a series of Red pill events outlined below:

The Epstein "Limited Hangout" - Plays Out
Deep State Donors back Owens and Fuentes
Trump's Success Derails "MAGA" Influencers
Is This Game Over?
Trump Blinks...Well, Not Really!
Trump Found Guilty...Of What Exactly?
Democrat Lawfare - the End Game Gets Real
The Great Big Nothing Burger
Political Panto-memes
World Wide Regime ChangeGet Trump
The Power to Communicate
Out of Control FBI Raid Mar-a-Lago

I can not be the same person I was before Trump. Every stage of his political career provides new insights into what is wrong with modern political culture. I have often reminded people that I did not care for The Donald before he announced his decision to run for President back in 2015. And after his first declaratory speech, I wondered if his comments on illegal Mexican immigrants were racist or an audacious, honest attempt to reframe the debate on mass illegal immigration.

Fortunately, I chose the latter, and consequently, I have never suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome, mainly because I have never had any problem with President Trump's varied communication styles, whether he is joking, serious, trolling the media, or exaggerating for effect.

I see the process of dispersing the mistruths hurled at the president, wiping away the remnants, misdirections and abuse of his adversaries, which I have described as the carousel, as the great gift of the President: because seeing through these lies enables us to see the same lies in my own country. This process takes up much of the time as the carousel is constantly morphing.

And this does not mean that President Trump does not have his own political and leadership failings, flaws, missteps, and moral turpitudes, of course. Still, his most vocal detractors are never far from exposing themselves. In truth, there are usually seven layers to most serious news stories. Most people engage only partially with layer one or two and are easily manipulated and commandeered.

Secondly, by mid 2015, I said I thought Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton and win the presidency. And only later, I was surprised to find that I mostly agreed with his emergent agenda, which, to recapitulate, was:

Secure the border and expand border barriers.
Reduce illegal immigration.
Lower taxes for individuals and businesses.
Reduce federal regulation.
Promote American energy independence.
Renegotiate trade agreements.
Confront China on trade.
Encourage manufacturing and reshoring.
Increase defence spending.
Support law enforcement.
Appoint conservative judges.
Protect Second Amendment rights.
Promote school choice and parental involvement.
Pursue an America First foreign policy and crush ISIS.
Reduce involvement in prolonged overseas conflicts.
Encourage election integrity measures.
Support the right to life of the unborn child.

It seemed to me that this outline of policies was, in fact, mostly mainstream political positions on either side of the pond in previous decades. The onslaught against Trump shocked me; it made me revisit my understanding of American politics and the media in the US and the UK. The agenda he articulated seemed adaptable to the post-Brexit UK as a matter of urgency. If he has a successful second term and Vance or Rubio can continue, our UK political class will be forced to reverse course or face oblivion. Which is something they are striving to resist at the moment. As things have unfolded, here are the additions to his agenda that we see in his second term:

Conduct large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.
Tighten border security further.
End birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants.
Expand domestic oil and gas production.
Use tariffs as a major economic policy tool.
Reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.
Eliminate many DEI programmes in government.
Restrict transgender policies in federal institutions.
Increase presidential control over the executive branch.
Reform or reduce commitments to some international organisations.
Combat drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl.
Challenge political bias in universities and institutions.
Defend free speech against government and corporate censorship.
Expand cryptocurrency and financial innovation policies.
Continue appointing conservative judges where opportunities arise.
Promote the MAGA brand in dealings with EU and NATO allies.
Negotiate an end to the Ukrainian war
Prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Secure a Middle East Abraham Accords-based lasting peace.

To conclude, I think you can divide the world into those people with Trump Derangement Syndrome and those without, whether you agree with him on any or every one of his policies is not really the point. Three specific Red Pill Politics essays describe what I have learned in the wake of the Trump agenda and after going down various rabbit holes and coming out the other side, hopefully wiser and more discerning.

The main lesson is don't remain down the rabbit hole, given that the principal conspiracy theory, QAnon, was a fabricated grift. On the other hand, the Covid crisis, the dangers of untested and even tested vaccines, and the Ukraine War all have elements of conspiratorial manipulation to them - as do so many other policies, understanding and cultural facts that do not stand serious scrutiny:

The Deep State Mixing Desk
Plan what Plan?
Lenten Reflections: Red Pill Gnosticism

Lastly, spare a thought for Carbon Mike - Dexter Taylor, who sits in jail in America but sets the highest standards for integrity and intellectual rigour, and helped me start On the Settled Questions with his patient advice, robust New Yorker challenge, and high writing standards.

The actual spot

On an early spring morning during Lent, a brief encounter with a homeless woman at a Birmingham junction unsettled me in a way I could not easily explain. What began as a fleeting response to a request for charity became something deeper: a confrontation with guilt, compassion, and the certainty that God still speaks through such encounters.

Some people enter our lives not merely as strangers, but as witnesses to another reality, and an opportunity for us to treat them as we would wish to be treated. Those at the very bottom of our society show us that we are, in fact, the lowest.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes, and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison, and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Matthew 25:35-46

The World We Hurry Through

Beneath the canopy of leaves in my garden, the drops of rain fall from the branches long after yet another set of downpours. We are enjoying typical English weather, cloudy and wet, following a rare couple of weeks of genuine heatwave, leaving half-finished garden work abandoned and tools littered across the nearly-cut lawn.

One moment it was Lent, then Holy Week, followed by a visit to Scotland to see my sister and former Priest and Presbytera, then back in time for Pentecost and the kneeling prayers. All in a bit of a hurry. All with changing surroundings easily passed over on our way to the next task or obligation.

Can We See Truth as We See Beauty?

Is it possible to be in tandem with the Lord? To see things as the Comforter sees them from the vantage point of an experience of spiritual indwelling? These questions arose towards the end of Lent. I was provoked by liturgy, hymnology, longing and scripture, as is the purpose of the season. Despite the sound and rush of the moment,

I started to reflect on the real and the sacred, which I assume were much more tangible in earlier eras. The weekly saints’ days, the liturgical services, the walks to and from church through all kinds of seasonal weather, the Bible passages learnt by heart by otherwise illiterate people and whispered to the newborn as they were rocked into slumber.

Lives were so much shorter, work so much more physical relationships so much more immediate and fleeting, surrounded by ever-present jeopardy, as they still are across much of the world, in many rural and urban areas to this day.

And So to the Encounter

Talking about begging and giving alms is the window into the subject of this short essay and essential to what follows. Despite the Lord’s express direction:

“So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men. Truly, I tell you, they already have their full reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Matthew 6:1-4

Yet someone was begging on the street corner during my commute to work, hoping the drivers in cars waiting for the lights to change would roll down their windows and share something of their immense wealth.

On my early morning route, I occasionally see men who appear demon-possessed: mentally tortured, deranged and drug-addled, they manically stomp through lanes of fast-moving traffic, their possessions piled upon the central island.
Where they come from and where they go, we do not know, but they require aid, perhaps exorcism, and restitution. And yet their entreaties are often intimidating - better to look away. Sometimes I have a rationale for not giving. But they are still made in the likeness and image of God.

The Angel at the Traffic Lights

Her hair was cut short, her clothes thin, yet it was her politeness, her good manners, her kind acceptance of serial rejection as she worked her way down the line of cars that struck me. I saw a ravaged young life, her body wrecked by abuse, assault, and cruel exploitations masquerading as transactions. Eventually, she was standing next to my car. The skin on her face was strangely glassy-smooth. Later, I thought this was probably the result of addictive substances.

I rolled down my window and gave her the pitiful couple of coins that I had. She said thank you, with such grace and relief, and the lights changed. As I sped away in the early hours on my way to work, I suddenly felt a wave of deep emotion: grief, or guilt, or I know not what. My eyes started to well with tears, and I fought them back. My reserve ruptured from someplace buried within. My core convulsed.

I felt.

What a pathetic response I had made. How I failed her and failed myself. But it was more than shame.

She Was the Revelation

As I drove on to work, I knew this encounter with this stranger woman was vitally important. Or rather, something within me knew, some part of my emotional centre, my conscience. She was a witness to who I was, a mirror into my state of inhumanity. She was the revelation we claim we want to see. In her awful vulnerability and predicament, her humanity had shone forth, and she represented the true underlying order of the world, a great white pill moment.

And it was I who had been exposed and woefully ill-prepared to share anything of myself with her. I carry so little money these days. There was no time with the lights changing, and I had to get to work-ish. As the day wore on, whilst I was distracted by work and even some church business, I could not forget the woman. I knew I was supposed to meet her, and what had happened was for a greater purpose.

I had not driven that way for some time. Potholes are worse in the city, the delays and traffic jams, and the impact on my car’s suspension is unavoidable. The longer motorway route often got me to work more quickly and, for a while, spared me from seeing the Angel again. I thought inflation must be hurting those reduced to genuine begging; a few coins were not going to cut it. But at the end of Lent, the Lord had shown me clearly, directly:

“Here I am.”

Her burdens marked her out as being in close proximity to God, and reminded me of how distant I am. And so I decided to carry more money and give more generously in any future encounter with someone begging. Not a couple of pounds, but a fiver or a tenner or even twenty, whatever felt as though it would remind that person that I saw them - that we are one, a private gesture of shared humanity.

And so, a few days later, I drove the potholed route through the centre of Birmingham again. I looked for her, and she was not there, and I was disappointed. The next day, I took the route again, and there she was, calmly nodding at cars ahead of me, accepting their lack of charity. Frantically, as the lights changed, I rolled down my window and beseeched her, “Come here.”

I gave her five times as much as last time.

Her face lit up.

“Oh, thank you,” she said.

And I had to move on. I should have given more.

Give to the Poor

When I think of the two encounters, I get unusually emotional quite easily. It was self-evident to me that she was an Angel, whether she knows it or not. I care not what she does with that money. I trust her to do the right thing for herself. If I see her again, I will give her more. In my heart, I know she deserves it. The things she has been through, the suffering she has taken upon herself, whether voluntary or involuntary.

People often prefer to keep poverty abstract, mediated by institutions, statistics, and campaigns, and the high taxes we are compelled to give. Still, sometimes the Gospel presents itself face-to-face at a set of traffic lights.

This is no substitute for charitable assistance for the homeless and exploited, and services that help such people off the streets and out of the clutches of demons and addiction, of course, I know this. I have previously set up a homelessness project that is still running decades later. I can do more in these areas, but that was not the revelation. That was not the gift that she presented to me. That was not what I was being shown.

A Way Into Greater Humanness

Rather, through this specific encounter, she was providing me with spiritual therapy and helping me recover my humanness by treating her as a real person in need. When Christ says, “Give to the poor,” He means give to the poor. Yes, that can mean food, shelter, encouragement, a listening ear, consoling words, and long-term assistance.

I know that if we give them money, it can be stolen from them or fuel an addiction. But at the same time, a simple gift, an act of genuine kindness, might initiate a chain of events that gives the recipient renewed strength. For in that moment of receiving a material gift from a stranger, they might be reminded that they are seen. That they have value.

The Other Kingdom

“Then one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to eat with him, and He entered the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. When a sinful woman from that town learned that Jesus was dining there, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind Him at His feet weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears and wipe them with her hair. Then she kissed His feet and anointed them with the perfume.” Luke 7:36-38

But there was something far more. Jesus is forever reversing things, upending the accepted, even commonsense ordering of things, even linear time itself is subverted. The first will be last, and the last will be first after all. She was first I was last. That was the gift. She reminded my conscience of my position in the pecking order. And that is my role, if I want to be human.

Giving in such ways is a small gesture; I’ll do much more. But that woman was an Angel, and giving her a few more pounds made a difference to her day. Her gratitude was like the greatest of blessings, for in that moment, I was inducted into a world beyond this one. I saw something of the other and ever-present Kingdom. And my subordinate, lowly, rightful place in it.

“Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” Luke 6:20-21

Forgive me

Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things is ostensibly a French culinary romance set in nineteenth-century France, yet it is in fact something rarer: a meditation on beauty, the sensual, love, grief, craftsmanship, and the lost art of living well. Few modern films explore the relationship among aesthetics, spirituality, cuisine, and the human senses so completely.

This is not merely a review of The Taste of Things, but an exploration of beauty, art, spirituality, food, love, grief and the modern loss of aesthetic depth.

The Film as a Philosophy of Living

Sometimes we read, watch, or behold great art and are entertained, delighted, or impressed, but only exceptional art reveals a different way of living; a deeper way, something rich, contemplative, and occasionally spiritual — perhaps a forgotten mode of experiencing existence itself that can nevertheless be rediscovered. The Psalms, great hymns, poetry, sacred liturgy, or natural landscapes can also achieve this.

How can we learn once more to …

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Happier Times? Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson and President Trump

As we approached Lent, I anticipated that the USA military build-up and Israeli preparation for action against Iran would dominate the penitential period. A couple of weeks into the military action, I reassured a colleague at work, concerned about the rise in petrol prices, that the hysteria was unwarranted and that we should wait a month and see how things unfolded.

As with most discussions about politics, there is a need to set aside emotionalism and our own prejudices, and to adopt a reflective view of what is actually going on. Considering the participants’ avowed motivations, rather than projecting our own views onto them.

This, of course, has passed virtually all mainstream commentators and online influencers by. Orangeman Bad! has been spewed across the internet in multi-various forms. Tucker Carlson is the highest-profile right-of-centre influencer who played a part in President Trump’s second presidentia…

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Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross

We are halfway through Orthodox Lent. The services are coming thick and fast—Sunday Matins, Liturgy (and even a special evening vespers). Two Sundays ago, Matins and the liturgy ran for four hours, as the church uses the longer Saint Basil Liturgy during Lent.

This Sunday, we tried to speed up a little during Mattins, when many Psalms are chanted. And then there is also PreSanctified Liturgy on a Wednesday evening and the Akathist Hymns to the Theotokos on Friday evening.

Sometimes I forget how many services there are, and that is not to mention the crowded arrangements during Holy Week itself. Phew. But being immersed in such services, we can get a sense of what we have lost or what we are seeking to recover.

The Triune worship, the singing and chanting, the annunciating, and tone-interpretation of hymns, the multitude of epistles and gospel passages, the many Psalms, over and over and over again.

The overlapping cycles that determine the selectio…

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The original 2019 Emily Maitlis interview during which Prince Andrew made his position untenable.

Last October I reviewed the Epstein case focusing on how it was being used in a coordinated attempt to derail President Trumps second term by making the Epstein scandal into a new Russia-gate.

President Trump eventually agreed to the release of all the files in federal government hands. The Congressional Committee charged with the Epstein inquiry has gone through them, and is requiring some of the great, and not so good, to give evidence. Already a number of people mentioned in the correspondence have either had to resign or issue apologies for their “errors of judgement”.

Larry Summers former United States Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton’s, and renowned economist, former President of Harvard, and vociferous opponent of President Trumps economic strategy has resigned his university position in disgrace after he was revealed he asked for advice from Epstein on ho…

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A diasporan Iranian demonstrates in support of family and friends back home.

2026 started with a big Maduro bang! The extraction of the Venezuelan strongman indicated the White House’s determination to establish Pax Americana in the western hemisphere. It also sent a message to all Central and Latin American leaders, as well as to Canada and even Denmark, regarding the USA’s acquisition of Greenland. The Cuban communist leaders are probably packing their suitcases and checking their Swiss bank accounts.

For this is an American President in a hurry. He has three more years before he steps down, and intends to have completely refashioned American foreign and domestic policy with his MAGA imprint, ensuring the changes he makes are lasting. His legacy secured as one of improved security, peace-making, prosperity, and a lasting feel-good factor, with economic success for his political proteges, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, to run on.

To do this, he is facing down a putative anti-ICE insurrecti…

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Odysseus and the Sirens - Marie-François Firmin-Girard

What follows is very speculative. And I trust Soul Purpose will forgive me for reproducing her photograph.

Before Christmas, I was pondering the way forward for our society, the antidote to the current unsustainable and ruinous political projects, the broken governance and the general sense of an accelerating decline, even decay.

But it can all get a little self-absorbed, even pretentious, on my part. And I was struck by how, however interesting the various political and social issues are, they in no way feed the soul, as, say, working for others, or serving the church can.

Nor does political debate, in which we invariably talk past one another, enhance or invigorate one’s life in the same way family, art, beauty, literature, friendships, or even a walk in the countryside may.

I am also deeply suspicious of the repeated claims of the inevitability of a calamitous civil war that permeates the current right-wing messaging. A key too…

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