My family loves animals. Especially cats. Being Greek, that’s a life sentence. Greece’s stray animal problem is notorious. Summer holidays- breeding season- is an emotional landmine. In my family, we are condemned to worry not only about our own children and elders but also about those of the feline world, which means our concern is never quenched.

Mom says Cretans are the worst animal abusers. They treat them like chattel. Big, muscular dogs are kept on short chains for days; nobody walks them; nobody lets them run in the fields. Donkeys and horses are left tied in olive groves under the August sun with no water in sight. Cats, we fear in our worst nightmares, are used for skopovoli: target practice.

At the pan-village fete, Mom contributed her homemade cheese filo pie. Someone had built a makeshift mid-twentieth-century tableau: a bedding of hay, villagers in traditional costume, and a live donkey in the middle. We know that donkey well; it’s kept in the house next door, and we can hear him when he complains. Mom always tuts at the sound, reminded of what she’s certain is his fate. At the fete, a young man in a black T-shirt and aviator sunglasses brought a plastic cup of water to the donkey’s lips. The man running the scene, dressed as a 1930s patriarch, let out a guttural sound and shooed him away. “Do you think you’re the only one who loves animals?” he said.

Since Grandad died, Mom stays in the village longer and visits in the winter months too, to water the plants and feed the cats. We host about twenty in our yard. None of them is particularly beautiful; they are mostly sickly, skinny island cats. We are filled with sorrow every time we lock the house and drive home. “Who will feed them? The people here hate them. They’ll kill them if they get the chance. Remember what they did to Grandpa’s kitten?”

Grandpa’s kitten was a feral baby I’d rescued from a nearby village on one of my walks, when I was twenty or so. I brought it home, taught Grandpa how to mix formula and bottle-feed it, and ordered him to love it. Love it he did, in my absence. It outgrew its miserable start and became a regal Chungus, which the villagers promptly associated with my Grandad, himself a regal figure: a towering Greek Orthodox priest, never seen out of his robes or with his Gandalf beard trimmed. As such, he had enemies. Wild and angry as the island is, his cat made an easy target. So someone killed it. We’re not sure who, but Grandad had theories.

Since he died, our suspicion of the village’s heart of darkness has only grown. This summer, more than half the strays seem to have the same disease. It starts as black marks around the mouth and spreads into the lungs. Walk around at siesta time, when the whole village is asleep or hiding from the aggressive sun, and you can hear anxious panting coming from somewhere too small to be a dog. The kittens aren’t spared. Their tiny muzzles are stuffed with black gunk. If you can catch them, if the village hasn’t yet instilled the fear of God in them, you can soak cotton balls in lukewarm chamomile tea and wipe them clean. They’ll start purring.

Mom has become a feline drug dealer, ever since her own cat, Toulouse, started having problems and she realised she could keep him alive past his fifteenth year by pumping him full of cortisone (the cat kind) and B-vitamin IV drips. She has a vet in the city on speed dial. Her village friends think she’s mad, so she keeps her voice low when she calls to discuss which medicine to buy, and where, and how to administer it to the feline beasts.

One cat has given her particular grief: a scrawny white male with black marks, his ribs showing, every extremity caked in black dirt. His entire front and back legs, his tail, ears, face and neck look like he just returned from an adventure, passing through a river of mud, maybe Hades, to arrive in our yard.

The other cats are pitiful too, of course. Many have visible wounds, missing ears and eyes, painful limbs, the common village cough. But at least they can eat and drink. This one’s defining feature is his mouth. His lower jaw hangs open, motionless like the Scream mask. He can move his tongue, just about, but you can tell his mouth is in agonising pain.

He gets animated when you bring out food. Cans and sachets of wet food, bags of dry food, the fatty bits from lamb chops, half-eaten meatballs, leftover chicken. We have tried everything, spreading it across the concrete yard like a five-star breakfast buffet; who cares about the oil stains when someone is starving? But the sickly cat can’t eat cause he can’t close his mouth. He falls headfirst into the feeding pans, but can’t pick it up, can’t even drink the food when we liquefied it in bowls. Yet he tries, over and over again. He tries to eat with his whole, motionless face. In between bumping his dirty head on slices of cat pate and pieces of chicken, he leaves breathless, hitch-pitched cries of anguish, like he is saying to God himself, “let me have it! let me have it! let me have it!”.

Mom took extensive video evidence and sent it to her trusted city vet for assessment. He gave us the list of medicines and told us to give him kitty cortisone until the pharmacy delivered our antibiotic order.

Only problem is, how do you feed pills to a cat who can’t eat? We smashed it with a bit of wet food mixed with water and inserted it in a large 50ml syringe. I wore mom’s garden gloves, and we chased him around the house’s enclosed periphery. I got hold of him once under the Orange blossom tree and once tangled in mom’s zucchini plant. We managed to give him about half a syringe worth of cortisone-laced slurry. Nowhere near enough nutrition, but enough cortisone to tame some of the inflammation. He didn't forgive us. He let out a scream that sounded like a grave injustice had been done to his weakened body, and he didn't come back the next night, or the one after.

Unusually for this island at that time of the year, dark clouds had gathered above our village. Normally the temperature is over 30 degrees, scorching heat and relentless sun. That Saturday, it was 18 degrees, which felt cooler than in London, as the village is up on the mountain.

The sick cat's whereabouts remained a mystery. Mom grew desperate. "I'm haunted by that cat," she told me. "He's passed out somewhere, hidden, alone, starving to death. He'll die of dehydration and pain. Or some villager will see him drooling from that hanging jaw, too filthy to clean himself, and finish him off."

Torrential rain covered the hills; lightning cracked, frightening Toulouse. "There are kittens out in this rain, you know, you should be grateful," I told Mom's spoiled elderly feline as I cleared another bout of diarrhoea from his litter pan.

When the rain stopped, I went for a walk to clear my head. I went back to a spot in the olive groves where I'd once found eight puppies and their feral mother, to check they were being looked after; if they seemed neglected, I'd go to the shop and bring back puppy food. I couldn't find them, and some old people congregating on a balcony next door had begun to stare, so I feigned indifference to their territory and moved along. A few metres down the road, I passed an older woman in a nightgown who looked as if she could use a walking stick, peering into the drains along the main road. I paused my audiobook and doubled back.

“Did you lose something?” I asked.

“No, my child, I don’t think so. Thank you,” she said, still staring down, balancing her flip-flops on the drain rails, steadying herself against a road sign.

“Are you sure?” I stepped closer and joined the examination of the drain, though I didn’t yet know what I was looking for.

“Well, I thought I saw a puppy’s tail in the pipe. There were eight of them here yesterday. I called the municipality to come and rescue them and neuter the mother, but they only took four. A fifth was hit by a car on the side of the road. The others are still around here somewhere, and now I’m growing paranoid they’ve trapped themselves in this drain, I’m sure I saw a tail. They could have got in through the opening in the olive groves.”

“Oh, they took the puppies? I’ve been looking for them, getting worried. I’m glad someone came to help.”

“Help, sure,” she said. “The municipality is useless, their facilities are farcical, but you’d hope they could at least follow instructions. They were too lazy to wait around and find the other four. And now look, one’s already dead, hit by a speeding car. Who knows with humans, maybe even on purpose. The people on this island, especially in this area, you should know, have no education. They don’t care for animals. They treat them like insects.”

“I’ve heard that, I’ve noticed that. It’s our constant complaint with my mother.”

“I feed a bunch of them in my house; I am not from this village. I moved here ten years ago and spend around 10 euros a day just to feed all the strays. I even have a duck in my back garden. She came over one day; who knows where she escaped from? I asked the vet what to feed her, and I keep her there. The cats don’t touch her; they are pals now. She is the luckiest duck on the whole island.”

We bonded over our common trials. I told her about the sick cat, and about Grandad's kitten. She'd known my Grandad; everyone had; old or young, he was that distinctive. She told me about her grief over the chained dogs, and about how expensive her love for animals had become. She takes them to the vet in the next village the moment they get sick; a young vet, inexperienced but warm-hearted. Better than nothing. It's all better than nothing.

A middle-aged man on a motorbike pulled up and asked her what had happened to the puppies. She scolded him for not helping sooner, and then for suggesting the mother dog be kept at the municipality. "What are you talking about, you illiterate peasant! A grown dog should be sterilised and returned to her environment, not locked in a cage. There are no humane facilities to hold her. It's different with the puppies; they might still find a home on this wretched island. For the adult, that's a death sentence." He took the lecture, and she sent him off.

I walked her home; it wasn't far from Mom's. She showed me her house, and it’s one I pass every day. It’s been half-finished for as long as I can remember. Plain concrete, a front yard that looks perpetually mid-construction. I realised that in all these years she’d must have never saved enough to paint it, to tile the staircase, to put up a fence. Since she said she moved here a decade ago, the houses around her have had extensions built and fancy outdoor stone ovens. Her yard didn’t even have a door.

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“It was because he was so talented he was able to behave so badly and write so (it has to be said) abhorrently on many occasions,” he said. “And he knew this. It was his essence. RIP Rod.” The Guardian

I want this written on my tombstone.

Do I want this written on my tombstone?

Could I… have this written on my tombstone?

Rod Liddle passed away yesterday. His main career highlights where before my time. I’ve been on his Times Radio panel but otherwise do not know the man. It’s not for me to do the tired tally of whether he is being greeted by St Peter or Satan. The Human Carbohydrate is a God-fearing and death-respecting newsletter. Overall, I think more people liked him despite his flaws than because of them. I hope he rests in peace.

He built his career on political controversy, but his personal life also made excellent copy. I feel compelled to go over it for the Americans.

Liddle met Rachel Royce, a television presenter working for the BBC, in 1993. They became a couple soon after, but only officially got married in January 2004. They married in a £20,000 do in Malaysia. They already had two sons.

Six months after the fairytale wedding, he left his wife and moved in with Alicia Monckton, who at the time was a 22-year-old working as a receptionist at The Spectator, where he was an associate editor. I feel a pang of guilt typing this sentence, because 22 feels too young to be the final form in which a woman is forever etched on a nation’s memory, regardless of her hand in it.

Liddle had, it emerged, cut short the honeymoon to be with her, and told the Telegraph she was “his true love.” At the same time he had released his book of short stories about middle-aged men and adultery. When his wife found packets of Viagra in his pockets (with pills missing), he explained them away as research for his book. He was a staunch propagandist for the international terrorist campaign “Men’s Rights to Affairs are Human Rights.”

Royce did not go quietly. She sent ten sacks of manure to him at The Spectator, sold her side to the Daily Mail for £5K, and wrote a piece headlined “My cheating husband Rod, 10 bags of manure and me the bunny boiler. As for The Slapper... she’s welcome to him.” He called her a “total slut and slattern.” The divorce came through in 2007.

Wikipedia says that the whole thing made Irish television history. On RTÉ, discussing Roy Keane’s abrupt exit from Manchester United and a Liddle column attacking him, Eamon Dunphy dismissed the author out of hand: “I’ll tell you who wrote it... Rod Liddle. He’s the guy who ran away and left his wife for a young one.”

The worst incident that everyone remembers about him took place in May 2005 when he was arrested for common assault on his new girlfriend, who by then was 20 weeks pregnant. He accepted a police caution, which he later claimed was the quickest way out, insisting he’d never touched her. Their daughter was born that October. He married his girlfriend in 2008. They were still together when he died, I think.

I always wonder whether men like that die happy. Whether, at the end, they’re any less bitter than the women they tend to leave behind, women who aren’t always faultless saints, but who do, to the naked eye, appear to have got the wrong end of the stick.

Is the sting of it, the kids who hate you, the public renouncements à la Brad Pitt, worth it for getting to have sex with young pussy again in your ripe middle age?

I’ve been turning this over more since I hit 30. Now that I have access to the 25-year-old six-pack buffet without the hang-ups of my twenties, I make earnest attempts to empathise with the men who torch their lives to relive it. I still don’t get it. The shame and the guilt outlast the pleasure by decades. I couldn’t enjoy a thing knowing I’d left behind my broken husband, his body ravaged by the two pregnancies I’d planted in him, and my children fixed forever in their hatred of the woman who abandoned their daddy.

The trouble with some of these men- and I couldn’t comment on whether Liddle fits the category as I don’t know him- is that they aren’t in honest relationships to begin with. Westminster is littered with sexless marriages of convenience, heterosexual power couples nursing dead-bedroom syndrome. Because Westminster is full of addicts, full stop, people who always need the next hit and never wait long enough for the dust to settle.

So what I envy isn’t the self-inflicted drama, which bores me; I prefer deep intimacy to physical novelty (I promise the next 25-year-old is the last one). And it isn’t quite as simple as saying men are allowed to be more controversial than women.

In 2012, in a Spectator column about a teacher who’d run off to France with a 15-year-old pupil, Liddle wrote that the one thing that had kept him out of teaching was that he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids.” Nearly a decade earlier, in the Guardian, he’d asked in a headline whether it should “really be a crime to look at child pornography,” building the case around Pete Townshend, who’d claimed he accessed the material as research. The columns resurfaced every few years; each time an editor waved the outrage away, once with a joke about the magazine’s constant struggle to stop Rod, and each time he kept his column.

In 2009, a Spectator article about Harriet Harman, then deputy leader of the Labour Party, opened like this: “So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober.”

What did I think when I first read it? Did I flush with feminist indignation? Did I worry that language like that would eventually come for me, as it comes for every woman in politics?

No, reader. I thought: where is the editor who’ll let me write that exact sentence about some English rose’s husband?

He claimed to have regretted it in 2014, in an interview in the Guardian by Simon Hattenstone:

If he could apologise to one person he's offended, who would it be? "Harriet Harman," he says instantly. "It was a Spectator piece. 'Harriet Harman – would you?' I was trying to parody laddish sexism. I didn't think how it would affect her. For the first four days after, I was in a state of denial. 'I'm just joking, don't you understand?' I try to get away with things too often by saying that. It's a flaw.

Meanwhile, I always have mean sentences vanish from my copy by magic. I’ve been ordered to delete a joke tweet in which I quote-tweeted Farage doing something right-wing and offensive and simply wrote “Gay.” The person who complained about that one was not a boomer who sincerely mistook it for homophobia. It was someone acting in bad faith, or someone genuinely that thick. I’ve eaten pile-on after pile-on for politics that are, frankly, boring and milquetoast.

And all the while, what am I doing in my personal life? Spending time with my elderly parents and educating the male masses. It should be ME who gets to write with true impunity. Not these sinners. Why not me? When will it be MY TURN?

I’m not getting any younger. Let my pen draw blood while there’s still fire in my loins and collagen in my breasts!

Anyway. If anyone knows if Rod Liddle died happy, let me know. I am curious.

Will Self, whom I’ve only discovered and started reading in earnest last month, was hired by Liddle in the BBC in the beginning of their careers. Watch them debate side by side that the UK never had it so good.

He reviewed his book in 2014 and tried to explain the peculiar case of Liddle’s racism, which the latter denied till his final breath:

Liddle should be aware of the anecdote Martin Amis once told about his father. Bamboozled by Kingsley's shameless antisemitism, son asked father what it was like to be such a creature, and the Great Bigot answered: "When the titles come up at the end of a film, you just sort of … notice them." It's this "noticing them" that marks Liddle out as a bigot, and like all bigots his prejudice is rooted in fear. It's conceivably a dereliction of the reviewer's duty to concentrate so much on this issue, but if you want to know what Selfish, Whining Monkeys is like, and if you should dob up 15 quid to immerse yourself in Liddle's spleen, then it is fairly important. There's much to enjoy in this book: Liddle's heart is indeed in the right place when it comes to the poxes of neoliberalism, democratic emasculation, commodity fetishism and globalisation on our body politic. For a work of straitlaced commentary, Liddle's prose style is in a teasing state of dishevelment; his favoured words being F-ones: "fatuous" and "faux" adjectivally, and "fuck" in all its forms. I counted up to four "fucks" on a single page, and while the use of the epithet is entirely literarily defensible – if, for example your fictional character is of the fucking-this and fucking-that persuasion – its presence in a social commentator's first-person diatribe rather raises the questions: what is he so fucking angry about, and why?

[…]

As to why Liddle is so feared up, a whole gamut of possibilities suggests itself: he provides enough personal information in this book to keep a gang of Hampstead psychotherapists hard at it for years. But on balance I'd opt for a Marxist perspective, purely on the basis that it will wind him up the most: Liddle is a typical petit bourgeois, afraid of either being absorbed into the proletariat he champions, or destroyed by the capitalist bogeyman he excoriates but depends on for his wonga. The cultural cringing of the squeezed intellectual middle is creased into every line of this baggy diatribe, in the form of scores of French loan words, pasquinades poorly aimed at intellectuals he regards as pretentious, and of course that plethora of fucks. The peculiar thing is that I can't find it in my heart of hearts to dislike the man, I think there's good in him and that he can change his bilious complexion – whereas it's altogether impossible for people to change the colour of their skins

From Fraser Nelson’s obituary on the man, which was suspiciously bare:

Good writing seeks to inform, to entertain, to make people think – but not convert anyone to a particular point of view. Anyway, writers tend not to change anyone’s opinion and I’ve never met a columnist who thinks otherwise. Readers tend to know their own minds. Editors can hire or fire columnists; steer them towards a topic (or away from one). But no editor tells a columnist what to say. And if what they write causes a stir, our job is to defend to the death their right to say it. Even if we fervently disagree with it.

That’s why, when I became editor, I told my wife that the job was certain to last only last a few years. I thought I’d go down with Rod Liddle, that he and I would drive like Thelma and Louise over the cliff in the name of free speech. We’ve come close a few times, but stayed (just) on the right side: the issue you’re reading is my 500th as editor. Over the past ten years, I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting many readers, and their most common plea is ‘Don’t tone down Rod’. It’s just as well: I’m not sure anyone could.

I find all this so interesting. I found his later columns dull and predictable. But there were clearly hordes of Gen Xers and boomers out there who lapped them up.

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Day 4 in mom’s village in Crete

Every word my retarded mother utters within earshot of me has an agenda behind it.

Mom’s agenda:

1. Marriage + children > literally anything

2. Greece + Greek people > anywhere else in the world + any other nationality

3. Crete > any other part of Greece

“You will never believe what they do in England!!”

Mom is talking to her favourite village friend, who is also the local Mayor (population: 200). The friend was married off to the 30-something-year-old Mayor of the village when she was 13 (that’s not why they elected her Mayoress now). She divorced him later and remarried, but they are still on good terms. She brings him with her to dinner parties sometimes, like your favourite nanny taking you out for a drink once you turn 18. He is a tiny old man who barely speaks. Her current husband is an extremely loud former police officer. She also has three gregarious adult sons, all married.

I am sitting nearby trying to read a book over 300 pages.

“They invite people out on their birthday and DON’T PAY FOR THEM,” she hisses. Her friend’s face distorts in disgust; It’s a bonding ritual for Boomer Greeks. We may not be a rich country, but at least we are a generous one.

We are getting ready to go to my second cousin’s wedding. The pre-wedding party had 1500 people. The wedding today will only have 800. His fiancée studied for her master’s and PhD in Oxford. My cousin is a doctor, a specialist radiologist of sorts, and will be doing a fellowship in Oxford in the autumn too, but they will return to the island after. My mom salivates when she listens to the bride reciting her decision to return to her motherland.

“In weddings abroad, they only give you one portion of food per guest! And if you are still hungry, there is no more!” says my mom, who has never been to a wedding abroad. She may as well have been saying, “In Africa they sew their daughters' vaginas so that they never feel pleasure.”

Speaking of Africa, when they describe how much Cretans spend on weddings, it reminds me of that post about how African countries’ status obsession with expensive funerals keeps them impoverished.

“Kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction.”

My mother and her friend are practically spitting in each other’s faces describing how weddings abroad only serve one steak per guest and then tourists from those countries (Germany and Switzerland for example) visit Greece and stuff their faces with our aboundant calories, lick the plates of the free desserts they are served in tavernas, and are so shocked by how lavishly Greeks host them at their homes that they offer to pay!!!

Moments later they describe how Greek guests go to weddings and funerals to eat for free and bring bags with them to fill them with food.

Mom is grumpy because I forgot my jewellery in London and I will not wear any at the wedding. She offered hers for me to wear, but they don’t match my red dress. She also offered to buy me something from the city, but I detest buying things that will only be worn once, especially when they are cheaper versions of what I already own. Most of all, I detest her misguided insecurity and peasant aesthetic with accessorising. Wearing a lot of bling bling looks fun on my ageing mother and her ageing colourful friend. I, however, do not need metals distracting attention from my perfect skin. I am the Greek and gorgeous version of Steve Jobs. I could wear the same crop top on repeat, and my power would only expand. That’s right, luteal phase or fertile window, my stomach is flat, and my rectus abdominis is visible.

On our drive to the wedding, my mom is in her happy place. Confined in a tiny space, there is nowhere to hide, and it is impossible not to listen to her. Whether she speaks to my dad, the phone or the winged satan on her shoulder, unless I throw myself into the moving traffic, I am her captive audience.

“Cretans are extremely rich and happy people, Stella.” She explains to me how it is impossible to find workers in Crete because even the Albanian immigrants are now too well off to want to get paid 80 euros a day to pick olives or grapes. I hold myself back from telling her the Libyan asylum seekers on the boats are probably still just about poor enough to accept it.

She checks off all three of her agenda items within one topic, by bringing up the Cretan weddings again. How happy the plum brides look, she sighs and pinches my sculpted bicep hard enough that when she returns her hand on the stirring wheel, her bingo wing audibly flaps on her gigantic bazookas.

The day before, she was telling me about her grandmother who was married off when she was 13 and had 14 kids, out of which only 7 survived into adulthood. She had a lot of energy, Mom says, and was always very happy. Her grandfather, however, was a cruel, cold man. One of the daughters, my mom’s dad’s sister, was ugly and had a defective arm. She was also very mean as a woman for that reason. To make sure they married her off, they picked a random goat herder from another village on the mountain and promised to give him a house and money, in the favour of having deeply unpleasant sex with and eating the food cooked by the ugly daughter. He accepted after some haggling.

Problems ensued straight away as he was an alcoholic and gambler. He had one child with her, and once he got her pregnant with a second one, he abandoned her and moved to Athens with another woman. My grandfather, a very tall, broad-shouldered, bearded priest, arrived at the port as he was about to board the ship to Pireaus to manhandle him back to the village, his sister’s bosom and God’s path. But to no avail. The ugly sister gave birth to their second child and shortly after got news that her husband got involved with a prostitute, murdered said prostitute and then killed himself. She was a very bitter woman, the widow, Mom says judgementally.

This is what I think about when trad-brained people on the internet fantasise about bringing the non-violent parts of The Handmaid’s Tale to life.

It’s a blessing in disguise that most women can’t have sex if they don’t really like someone. Our vaginas snap close like a flip phone. We should trust them unreservedly. Men’s genitalia lead them to ruin. I am convinced women’s will lead us to Valhalla.

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Everyone in London is looking for a job. They won’t admit it, but it’s obvious. It’s part of the game to act like you don’t want anything from other people. Even in business, the British act coy. It could always be worse. In San Francisco, everyone is looking for a funder or a founder.

I go to networking events to poach potential clients/gigs and get introduced to people selling more or less what I am selling. Every politician has asked politicians they think are more in the in-group than them for ministerial jobs, before in turn being asked about staff jobs with themselves. Every unpublished writer wants a byline, every byline wants a staff job, every reporter wants a column, every columnist wants a better editor and an agent. Every agent wants a client that sells.

We show up to events in our Zara co-ords and look for ways to get money out of each other. We pitch into blank stares. We have awkward conversations where we ask people visibly older than us how we get the short of thing they have been trying their whole career to get.

A younger man I know beat an older woman who is more experienced than him for a high-profile job. The younger man is happily newly married and tastefully posh. His even younger wife is hot and going places. The older woman had her eggs frozen in her late 30s. You are a fool if you pity her; she could afford to.

A young journalist texts to ask if a place that gives me crumbs of paid work would let him do the same work I do but for free. I tell him, “Just don’t work for free.” He is a middle-class boy still at uni, does very well, doesn’t need the ‘exposure.’ “Why not?!” He protested. I contemplated what to tell him for a second. His question gave me the ick. I understand those writers training AI to do our jobs, contributing helplessly to the global race to the bottom. They are starving artists. But this young man has sponsorships and healthy parents. The only pressure he feels is from his foolish ego, which the manosphere has repackaged as virtuous hustling. While I encourage everyone to write from as young as possible, at 19, do you need to be published? Indeed, should you? Maybe you need to get better first before you compete in the slopesphere for eyeballs and clicks?

“Because I would lose respect for you,” I told him, the truth.

I didn’t used to clock the inherent insecurity in London, especially media and politics. I was always just happy to be here, but once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

It’s a brutal city. Immigrants stay with gritted teeth. I know Greek girls whose fathers could buy a backbench politician with their hotel franchise, but they couldn’t hack London. The insecurity was too much. I know people on silly six-figure salaries who live pay cheque to pay cheque. What demon convinces them to sign those 7-figure mortgages? I will never know, I hope. I know people from Sri Lanka who commute to another city every day to work, people from Pakistan so desperate to stay they uncomplainingly drain every last penny from the family coffers to pay the Visa fees. I know people who would rather die alone than die at home. I might be one of them.

I just landed in Crete, where my mom is from. The village she spent the first decade of her life in has become her safe space since the Greek financial crisis, the deaths, the illnesses, the bitterness, the sunk costs and the frustrated great expectations. She is jealous of her fellow villagers, those she used to look down on, or, more fairly, those whose pre-written destiny used to scare her.

She begs me to come back. London is too difficult, she observes; come home, she pleads; live with us for free, she promises. There are jobs for you in Greece; there are men who will love and understand you, who won’t recoil when you cry, who will stand still when you shout, who will run after you when you storm out. There is us, aren’t we enough?

All rhetorical questions; she didn’t raise a quitter.

In her old age, my mother has rediscovered her love for humans. One of the many things we share. She spends hours at her village’s coffee shops and around friendly dinner tables heaving with grilled meats and local vegetables. She listens to the minutiae of their tiny peaceful lives. Lives which she understands so much better than the one her daughter leads.

If I learnt one thing from the last two decades observing the demise of the Greek middle class, it is that people’s shame and bitterness over money keep them from enjoying the things people on their deathbeds warn are most important.

In London, it’s not just lack of money that the socially downward-mobile middle class is suffering from; it’s also loss of status that feels so irrevocable once you become another forgettable middle-aged face. But money is certainly making everything worse. I always observed in Greece that even the poorest people have the sun, the sea and very cheap tavernas or coffee shops that will let you congregate for hours for a couple of euros. The Greek simple life is expansive: more time with your friends and family, more time resting and sunbathing. The British simple life is limiting: smaller flats, moving houses every other year, staying inside, letting people grow old and out of your contact book.

I will start writing a more observational diary here, behind a paywall. I hope that the price and length will dissuade people I don’t like from staying around. I don’t want hate readers. I want you all rooting for me.

I will continue posting free essays on more relatable topics, so stick around for those. But my pervert diaries will be sealed.

That’s all for ze freeloaders - for less than the price of a London pint, you can continue reading what I have been up to. In this one I talk about the cesspit of dating in London.

Or just read on if you’re already a committeed human carb, with thanks from me for your loyalty:

Read more

Dispatch from the Great British CPAC, 16- 18 July.

The same safe words kept appearing like an omen: “immigrants, Islam, woke, brainwashing, grooming gangs, socialism, children, our culture, Judeo-Christian.”

The American speeches were just like their food: slop.

The woman on stage looks like a post-woke Marks and Spencer model. A generous gold cross hanging on her covered breastbone. A simple white pencil dress in a comfortable fabric frames tastefully tanned, shapely legs. Honey-blonde hair, barely-there makeup. She doesn’t need it. She has truth on her side, and truth is beauty.

“You are the great change-makers of your great country that we, erm, so cherish in America.”

She is warming up. The audience is not playing ball, but she is used to a tough hearing. She is, after all, Mercedes Schlapp, former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications, and wife of a man who settled a 9.4 million lawsuit with one of the 3-4 men accusing him of sexual assault.

“Are you afraid to speak? We have to speak up loud! We have to be brave! And on this panel, this is what we have right here, isn’t that right??”

The British journalist on stage next to her, side by side with Lucy Connolly, is used to this. Foreigners coming to her country. Imposing their way of life on polite, quiet-speaking Brits. Hogging their resources (public sector contracts, media establishments), disrespecting their values (understatement, secularism, self-loathing, shame), committing the most anathema of sins (eye contact, earnestness, self-regard). But as I said, she is used to it; she is a columnist for the Telegraph. A commentator on GB News.

I am sat in the media-designated area of the hall- the only full one. I want to wrap my arms around my battered Brits. You don’t have to do this, I want to tell them. You don’t need these loud, vulgar monsters. Tell them to fuck off back to where they came from!!!!!!!!!!!!

CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) USA is a great success for the Americans. For us Europeans, it’s a great nuisance.

Like all franchise models, its goal is to 1) make money and 2) spread the brand- MAGA.

CPAC has invariably been described by investigative journalists as a cash cow and pay-for-play scheme, in which sponsors pay to spend time with politicians and have their topics of interest discussed on stage. That’s nothing new.

What’s unusual about many of the myriad right-wing conferences metastasising from DC to the rest of the world is how inorganic they feel.

They must have struggled to secure their speakers, as we were not given the final agendas and speaker lists until the night before each day. Reform people have long been nervous about Nigel Farage’s association with Liz Truss. My sense is that it’s far too awkward not to show up and Farage needs to appease his American sponsors.

Matt Schlapp, chair of the American CPAC and husband of the formidable Mercedes, tells me he has been trying to set up a British CPAC for a decade. The stars only aligned now. The problem, he says, was finding people willing to make it happen, meaning sponsor it, since this is not a self-funded venture. Farage and Reform presumably mean a critical mass of rich men now think it makes sense to drop a few hundred thousand on a conference venue, so that hacks like me can make polite chit-chat with other hacks, Xitter personalities, and the same five politicians we see at every right-wing grift event. This is why I love the private sector. No penny wasted.

To his credit, when I asked the head organiser who sponsors them, he didn't flinch: they welcome business involvement, because they think it is good for politics. This is excellent spin; far more sophisticated than whataboutism or flat denial. It is also a capitulation to forces that degrade public life. But as we will establish, they believe exactly that about Soros money.

Being poor is a big problem for British politicos. The left perhaps can withstand it because of our Christian interpretation of suffering.

But British Conservatives are now summoned regularly to take part in ritual humiliations: forced to sit in medium-sized hotel conference halls lit by Christmas lights, blasting action movie soundtracks and lectured by rich, fat Yanks in identical off-the-rack suits about how weak and feeble the UK is for not standing up to the Woke Mob who prevents us from spending the billions of extra cash we have lying around to kill the children of America’s enemies like… China???? Yes, you heard that right, they want us to pick a fight with China.

A British male is, metaphorically, twerking on stage for the Yanks, explaining that when Europe wrote its refugee laws, we all assumed the refugees would turn out like the Jews, well-behaved and grateful. False. Europeans were not remotely welcoming to the Jews; they saw them as culturally and morally incompatible, a people who could never really belong. It is because of our understanding of our prejudice that protection for refugees was written into law in the first place, so that we don’t get to stand at the border deciding, on the spot, whether we like the look of someone. You may not like that fact, or its consequences, but it is a fact. And when he’s asked how Britain should confront Islamism, he delivers his mic-drop answer with total conviction: go to church.

Another panel opens with Alex Phillips saying that Ann Widdecombe died for her beliefs in the values expressed there that day.

Anti-woke money investigator Charlotte Gill talks about how the left is funded. She has previously 'exposed' me on Xitter for working at a frontline youth charity, one that pulls children out of the hands of drug cartels and grooming gangs, while doing political commentary in my own time. I blocked her after she started screenshotting my colleague's work to mock it: a single digital comms manager who grafts like a dog producing material for an organisation of over a thousand people. She didn't sign up for that. I left the job shortly after Charlotte's brave journalism.

Her main focus is public funding going into charities which have clear ideological goals. An honourable cause; I think its insane thatthe Hungarian taxpayers have been bankrolling CPAC, or that American taxpayers are paying British right-wingers.

They talk about the Fabians, the Open Society Foundations, and the various APPGs (All-Party Parliamentary Groups), which sound innocent because they are simply groups of MPs, but are in fact bastions of leftism. That’s hardly the case, see footnote for political leaning split of APPGs1.

Open Society, through the Athena Foundation, funds just two APPGs: Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax (£165,000) and Fair Banking (£163,500). Both groups have Tory co-chairs. Agnew is the peer who resigned from the Treasury over the government’s handling of Covid loan fraud.

Every argument they make about left-wing money can be made twice back about right-wing money, in objectively more sinister ways. Lobbying for a war is surely more sinister, and more expensive to the taxpayer, than lobbying for pronouns in email signatures.

Soros’s foundations have an agenda: liberalism (note: not socialism). Private corporations have an agenda too: profit maximisation. Which of those has the bigger body count?

Or take the unions funding Labour. What else would you have the Labour Party funded by, if not the individual contributions of thousands of workers? A single Thailand-based billionaire?

George Soros, a Jewish refugee and self-made billionaire, built a philanthropic portfolio so sprawling it even seeded , a populist right leaning magazine that would be the natural home for some of Charlotte’s thoughts, in their more intellectualised form.

Charlotte and I finally meet in the flesh. We exchange a kiss on the cheek. She is not in the mood for debating. We’ll have to take it on Xitter.

The ritual humiliation of Brits continues. Liz Truss, Former Prime Minister of the UK, is back on the cuck chair on stage. In veneer white heels and a tight magenta dress, she is made to watch a bearded Yank defile her country. I doubt you’ve heard of him; his name is Brad Parscale, and he is the Chief Strategy Officer of Salem Media Group. Presumably one of the bigger sponsors of this event. I get it.

The Left said ‘sex work is work!’

The Right responded, hold my beer.

“ALL work is sex work!!”

Machiavelli teaches you to see everyone in the room as an instrument. Then they notice they’re in the room too. If they are not the predator, they are the victim.

That makes ambient socialising very anxiety-inducing.

The month is July, and London is experiencing a prolonged heatwave. The government is undergoing a changing of the guards, and everyone is feeling extra nervous about their place in it. Every event shuffles the same pack of faces. But there are only two groups of people: those you want to talk to and those who want to talk to you. Never shall the two collide.

• The BNOC MPs who complete precisely one lap of the room and leave. Seen, and therefore finished.

• The bored backbenchers fluttering their eyelashes at the hacks. Making friends and influencing people.

• The Hacks buttering up contacts, watering the MPs, praying one of them says something, ANYTHING.

• The “I were important once” ones, making sure you clock the face card. It expired in 2019. They're still trying to swipe it.

• The interns whose bosses like them enough to bring them. The real winners of the season, and the only people in the room having fun.

• The SpAds: savouring the one stretch of their lives in which they will ever be wanted.

• The former SpAds: in hell. They want back in. Failing that, a book deal. Failing that, a podcast.

• The ThinkTankers: pretending to be SpAds. They met the minister once. Please make them SpAds.

• The Public Affairs Directors from firms and brands with pockets deep enough, finance departments lax enough and corporate interests politically topical enough to have a PR firm on retainer.

• The Lobbyists from said PR firms, with their company credit cards ready to pick up the after-party tab, performing sincere friendship at staffers, politicians and hacks a decent few months before they'll need the favour.

• The guy from Xitter: their day job is irrelevant, but in the year of our Lord 2026, everybody can be politically relevant for ten minutes.

• The alcoholics. They don't need to be here. But then they don't need to be anywhere, and that's the problem.

• That bitch memoirist harping on about her Substack and her Josh Simons profile.

• Morgan McSweeney, joining only for a little while, purely to tease me, a sea of hacks and lobbyists closing in between us every time I catch his red top across the room.

You may scoff at our little bubble, you plebian prude you. But believe me, it wasn’t always this diverse. It used to be that the Westminster Summer party was the remit of the Aristocracy, because politics was at first limited to, and then still dominated by, them. The Westminster Summer Party season was very much the Goodbye drinks of the elite class returning to their stately homes in the countryside. And even later on, after the UK had its fake revolutions, modernisations, and whatnot, the humble Westminster Summer Party used to attract a far snobbier crowd. There was a time, believe it or not, when politics was considered high status. You wanted to be photographed at the Spectator Summer Party. Now being in politics is shameful. You are terrified some Xitter anon will hyperzoom in the background of a photo of Nigel Farage clinking champagne glasses with Kevin Spacey and spot your unmissable cleft chin locking horns with one Peter Mandelson or another.

The rich and the powerful don’t need to attend. Why buy politicians when you can just buy social media platforms? The beautiful and the famous don’t care to. Your fans are more likely to hate you no matter who you photograph with. Have you looked at politicians’ popularity ratings? Kiss of death, the lot of them.

Nobody with the slightest sense of personal branding beams with delight at the prospect of night after night of being sardined with the people who pretend to run the country (politicians), the people who pretend to report on it (media), and the people who believe both (corporates). The last lot pick up the tab, and deserve no pity for it: nobody forced them to become the cash cow of the politics-industrial complex.

So it’s tragic, isn’t it? That we are trying to compete for standing in the one industry that promises to destroy any you may have.

And me? Your humble servantress of FOMO, what do I do during that time? Why do I go? Habit and compulsion certainly. Duty, also. I must remain relevant for my art.

But it comes at a cost. By osmosis, the status obsession that saturates every invite list, every round of mudslinging, and every snab eventually penetrates your own dendrites and metastasises into status anxiety, gripping your vital organs: your free brain, your unbought heart.

I told a skinny, posh friend about my quarterly loss of confidence. I use quarterly for appearances; the truth is, after a certain age it's continuous, one panic melting into the next. She laughed when I said I felt like a loser. The day before, she'd admitted to someone else that she was feeling "fat and poor."

I revealed my strategy for keeping the black dog at bay, and my fear that it's outlived its usefulness. The strategy is honesty: if asked, I try to say how I feel and why. If something bad happened and I feel sad about it, I say so. Plainly, with no justifications. I let it hang there. My theory is that saying it out loud relieves you of the shame and guilt. But my problems haven't changed much, and I've started to worry that people will tire of a friend who never answers "how are you?" with "great, actually."

As a result, I am now feeling anxious about everyone knowing I am anxious because I tell them I am anxious and then I look more anxious.

But before I pull the Boomer emergency cord with the “just stop being woke” tag attached to it, which rarely helps as all it does is release from the Heavens a bunch of Culture of Narcissism hardbacks till one knocks me out for good and I finally get a full night’s sleep, I remind myself who benefits from my self-centeredness, which is distinct in its generosity, purity and beauty to the one felt by other animals in the Westminster kingdom.

It’s my readers.

Because I am not a journalist chasing ‘scoops,’ yikes. I am a cult leader leading God’s children to salvation. An artist recreating Westminster in His image, in these very online pages. If a journalist does their job well, reporting what is happening accurately, her readers suffer. They are confronted with ugliness they are ill-equipped to change. My readers must thrive.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe went through that phase of self-absorption himself, before he wrote Faust, one of the most famous Devil deals. His art thanked him for it. His first book of raw personal anguish catapulted him into literary fame.

At just 24, a sensitive young Goethe spent a frenzied five-and-a-half weeks writing his first success, The Sorrows of Young Werther. He was blinded by lust and pain after a romantic rejection. The fruits of that experience revolutionised the ‘bildungsroman’ novel.

This is how my best Substacks were made, too, which is why I understand his frustration at people taking his word too literally. The silly youths reading about young Werther killing himself after the woman he was obsessed with married another man saw him as a romantic hero and started copying him, committing suicide in droves. Please, ladies, do not imitate my Substatacks; do as I do, not as I say.

Goethe’s lesson was not that Werther was honourable for dying for his love, but that he was a self-obsessed fool who could not see past his own feelings to the rest of the world. It’s the same meaning that got misunderstood in the Hollywood film ‘500 Days of Summer’ where everyone thought the girl was the bitch for dragging the protagonist along and he is the victim for being in love with a woman who ignores him. But really, he is just being self-centred and incapable of seeing past his own short-term interests and feelings.

Goethe learnt to focus on the outside world. That is what saved him from being subsumed by his own feelings. In Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, he flips the Werther script. Having spent years working as a bureaucrat in Italy and prolifically publishing scientific papers, which were mostly inaccurate, Goethe learnt what all great artists eventually need to. Extrospection.

Despite his adventures, the protagonist is allowed to settle into a life of matrimony and fatherhood. He never reaches the heights of ecstasy he craves, just like young Werther. But unlike Werther, he doesn’t let his desire for more subdue him.

Goethe, at 71, is quite old by the time he writes Wilhelm. He has already lived through a lot of life, especially in love. He did not himself marry the mother of his children until 20 years after he met her. He left many women broken in his path, their dignities forever tainted by the self-described conservative who needed to fulfil his own urges more than he cared to fulfil his external obligations.

And that is how Faust was born. My pick for replacing Machiavelli’s The Prince as Westminster’s canonical power study.

Faust’s biggest sin, like Goethe’s, is his ambition. He has lived a pious life of academic knowledge and societal duty. He has served his God well. But he is still unsatisfied. He wants more. He makes a deal with the Devil, Mephistopheles, in exchange for a life lived with the full spectrum of mortal joy and suffering.

The most heavenly pursuit afforded to Faust is earthly love. He falls head over heels in love with a young virgin, Gretchen, whom he defiles and then abandons, just like Goethe did with women in his life. Gretchen, in total agony over her loss of love and social status, kills their illicit baby and is then imprisoned and executed. Only then does Faust realise what he’s done.

There are two interpretations and endings to Goethe’s Faust, and they both illuminate Goethe’s most useful philosophical lessons.

In one interpretation, he is not redeemable because he has committeed what for Goethe was the gravest sin: solipsism. The inability to recognise other people as equally bestowed with humanity as yourself. Like the man in 500 Days of Summer, too busy administering his own feelings to notice the woman having hers. Or like Josh Simons handing the Russian-spy smear to CCHQ, seeing only the career it would build- his own- and not the careers it would end - the journalists’. Faust could see how badly he wanted Gretchen. He could not see what wanting her would cost her: pregnant, disgraced, destitute, and mad.

Which, in the end, is what I do too. I bully people with my writing. I fly like a dove, gentle and soft, into underused ballrooms, reeking of polyester on its second and third wear. But catch me my way out and what’s that thing hanging from my beak? My Gretchens are neither defenceless nor innocent, but I submit to the room; I am a bird of prey too; I let its status obsession "penetrate my dendrites"; in exchange, I receive material- the full spectrum of Westminster joy and suffering. The invite list is my Mephistopheles. Faust doesn't sell his soul for money. He sells it for experience, because a life of pious scholarship left him unsatisfied and he wanted to feel everything. So do I.

But in the happy ending interpretation, Faust is saved. He is saved because, despite his very human flaws- his lust, his greed, his vanity -he never stops striving. Whoever strives ever onward, him we can redeem.

In these three books we see Goethe’s three phases. The juvenile infatuation phase, where the writer is blinded by their raw emotion and bleeds onto the page, which is a popular genre. Then the ‘eat your vegetables’ phase, where he learns a lot about the world and subjects he can never excel in, but is prolific nonetheless, and tries to stir people to live virtuous and intentional lives. And finally, the shadow integration. A year after he published Wilhelm, the book about rowdy men needing to wisen up and lead lives of virtue, at the ripe old age of 72, Goethe was smitten with a 17-year-old girl he met at a spa resort. She rejected his marriage proposal, and a decade later, Goethe published Faust. In it, he accepts the Godly aspirations that suckle his human meat suit. He, too, never stopped striving.

But the Prince in Machiavelli never grows up. The ideal Prince never faces accountability for his machinations because he always lets one of his underlings take the hit. He is happier feared than loved. He wants ultimate power on Earth and doesn’t answer to any higher authority because the ends justify the means.

But that’s not real life. That’s why you should prefer writers who bled emotionally early in their careers, like Goethe. They can lead you to Valhalla more honestly.

The Prince is a thin, flimsy book, written out of fear. It can barely stop a door from shutting, let alone nourish an ambitious mind into greatness. It turns people into nervous wrecks when they realise that, in their desperate attempt to make people fear them, they are left with no one to love them.

I intuitively prioritise taking care of people over anything else, including businesses and the environment. It’s a stupid and short-termist way to think, and ultimately the most human too. This is why I am a populist.

Net Zero’s worker betrayal

, a left-wing climate change campaigner, has written a book about how Net Zero betrayed workers because the promise was for a revived industry with well-paid, secure jobs. Instead, we got more privatisation, more insecure, atomised jobs of one-off gigs rather than permanent employment. For example, independent contractors fitting heat pumps. Green jobs have also not been delivered at the pace expected and needed, or with similar remuneration. He is in the Jacobin this week, arguing that unionised workers in the UK oil industry consistently receiving pay rises above inflation explains unions turning against Net Zero.

Beuret argues that unions are misguided because it is not climate policy that is responsible for dwindling jobs in the North Sea, but geology and automation. He says there is not much oil left in the North Sea to make it a viable investment and automation has been eating away jobs for decades. But since fighting automation is much harder, unions grasp at what they can reach, i.e., a Labour Party environment secretary.

I am in favour of drilling in the North Sea because I prioritise the short-term economic needs of the people who work there versus the diminishing environmental benefit of the UK stepping back from drilling. I agree that the North Sea is not the golden goose it once was, but it’s something. This is where I struggle with Green campaigners. As well-intentioned as I believe them to be, I don’t think this argument cuts it with a father whose kids are in school now and who is about to lose his well-paid job for the sake of potential green jobs in 2032. Nor do I think it should. I feel the pain of angry dads more than those of scared environmentalists on this one, even if both have material concerns rooted in fact.

If our oil daddys would be losing their jobs anyway and this is all a clever ploy by big Gas & Oil and their media allies, then I would like to see the evidence that automation is responsible for job losses rather than, or more than, lack of new licenses, government delays and (less of a problem for me) high taxes, which is the right-wing argument. Can one of you energy nerds do the definitive analysis and let us know?

No perfect solutions for our energy crisis

The other point about North Sea oil is that even if we achieve our renewables goal in the short term, we will still need some gas and oil for a very long time. At the moment, we are importing it from Norway (fine), the USA (hmmm), and the Middle East ( fuuuuuck ). The green argument is that allowing more drilling will still be expensive, because companies will need subsidies to be incentivised, and it will be politically unpalatable.

I think all options are politically unpalatable.

When Green energy people start telling me the policy tweaks we can make to increase our output by this tiny bit or decrease prices by that tiny bit, my mind drifts into dystopian visions of masses with pitchforks and torches descending on Westminster looking for the “woke.” Their kids will be sent down the coal mines, and I will be deported long before current green energy policy is satisfactory for the dire economic pressure British people are feeling.

The hungry don't distinguish between the crumb you withhold and the loaves others hoard.

Which is why they would vote for Farage, who would privatise the shit out of everything. The worst-case scenario is Reform gets in next time around, scraps all the current energy policies, DOGE-style, and the UK suffers the same reputational damage the USA has under Trump. Only the UK is not the USA; we don’t have their deep capital pockets, natural resources and industrial base, so our reputation is really all we have to attract investment.

Left-wing pro-growth koolaid

Dale Vince, the renewables investor/climate activist/Labour donor, has also come out against Net Zero in recent days, saying how the branding has become toxic. He is right.

I was at the ARC (Alliance of Responsible Citizenship) conference last week, where some of the right-wingers on stage were saying that Davos is, in fact, the far left, and that there you can see how truly powerful the left is (rejoice, comrades!! we won!!). They were referring to all the government regulations and international organisations that impose top-down costs on consumers with their ESG requirements. It is a stroke of genius for the right to paint all these whitewashing, greenwashing, rainbow-washing corporate capital actors as the far left. The problem is not capitalism but over-regulation, they said. Ok, sure, but who benefits and who loses out? Capital benefits; the workers lose.

I put an adjacent question to at Arguably event last night. The left criticism of pro-growth social democrats is that there is often no ideological project or vision behind it. It feels like a lot of cope in a capitalist world where you still want to be a left-winger because that’s your political identity, but your ambition and action-oriented nature make you make peace with our feudal system where the price for ‘doing things’ is being nice to rich people. Because, like Beuret’s argument against the unions, you don’t have the power to actually confront capital’s hooliganism. How is a pro-growth lefty different from a socially liberal, politically correct, thoughtful right-winger?

I rarely hear the pro-growth left in the UK at least answer that in a satisfactory way. David gave a good rebuttal to the argument that Davos is far-left. He said that under capitalism, scarcity and profit are in conflict, and capital is very good at exploiting scarcity to make profit. You see this in action in the housing market where, David said, leaseholders in the UK have to pay consultants for anti-terrorist protection. These are private companies using state regulation for profit.

I add to that that it is because liberal capitalist ideology is so hegemonic that they get to frame this as a problem of socialist overregulation, rather than the natural end state of an exploitative system. But the people most equipped to make these arguments rarely do so to avoid scaring the hoes (displeasing rich people, i.e. donors and powerful owners of stuff we need for politics, like media).

I am all for being strategic, and I 100% agree with David that growth needs to be the number one priority for a country with the UK's stagnant economy. You need money for nice things, and a rich liberal, right-wing biased state is more pleasant to live in than an socialist poor one. But when all is said and done, what are we doing differently than the last time? The market will take care of the market; who is taking care of the people? If we are embracing the AI revolution, what lessons are we taking on board from the industrial revolution on the deal we gave workers and our living environment?

I want the UK to build state capacity, not let privatisation cannibalise it. The claim that private entities always beat the public sector because competition sharpens them is simply not true and must be challenged from the pro-growth left.

South Korea built a world-leading steel industry out of sheer stubbornness. The World Bank refused to fund it. They called steel economically irrational for a country whose GDP per capita was then lower than Ghana's. The Koreans went ahead anyway, as a state-owned enterprise, paid for with Japanese colonial reparations. They put a former army general in charge, a soldier rather than a steel man. Korea had no iron ore and no coking coal; every raw material was shipped in from the other side of the world. Within a decade, it was among the most efficient producers on earth, and the World Bank cited it as a success story. The circumstances were considerably less helpful than the ones Britain finds itself in today.

Many like to say British culture is defective in comparison to Koreans; that is why we needed Thatcher and those after her to whip the state into shape by handing things over to disciplined private hands. But even under her premiership, the British state used to pull off beautiful public projects. On time and on budget.

pointed me to Brian George, the man behind Sizewell B, was employed by the state. He attributes their success to fostering strong relationships among the workforce and to a culture of radical honesty, where being transparent about mistakes did not make you feel punished but glad, because it meant being responsible for improving the project.

Nuclear could benefit from more state intervention if the state were willing to fight. If Great British Energy shoulders the funding, which will be extra but small fry in comparison to what is spent now, and the project management of the Rolls Royce sites, it would mean more institutional knowledge kept in-house. The workforce could be paid a share of the savings if the project comes in under budget, as an incentive to remain competitive. Ed suggested to me that the cost could be manageable for such a project in the long term if the state builds, then sells the de-risked project, and repeats the process.

In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping asked the Japanese to build him a copy of Korea’s steel mills. He was told the mills were the easy part; he would still need a manager like the general. Maybe, instead of watching our most talented people flock to the private sector, we make it easier for them to be visionaries in the public one. Maybe then more ambitious people will attempt to solve our Net Zero and growth conundrums without donors and shareholders sitting in the back seat of their mind.

If you want to support my writing but don’t want to subscribe, then feel free to:

buy me a coffee :-)

The more she appeared on TV and radio, the more she was filled with disgust at the transatlantic oral-culture tsunami threatening her literary island heaven. But outsiders think it’s a sweet deal. And I am no gatekeeper. So I will tell you everything I know about getting into political commenting and then, God help you.

I have asked dozens of TV and radio producers, journalists and fellow commentators to give me their tips and tricks of the trade.

This is a UK version. A lot of these will apply in the US and other countries, but details such as whether and how much you get paid obviously won’t. For example, CNN doesn’t pay me because they say that it’s morally dubious to get paid to comment on TV if you are from a political party. I wonder what they’d make of a potential future PM/Leader of the Opposition, and current member of Parliament, and leader of the second-most-popular party in the UK having his own nightly TV show on a national, regulated channel.

In over 4K words, I cover the following topics:

1. Who gets to be a commentator?

2. Apart from career, what else matters?

3. Will I get paid, and how much for each channel?

4. Can I do this full time?

5. How do I get my foot in the door?

6. How do I get better at it?

7. What do producers actually want to keep booking me?

8. Is it worth my time?

9. What are the risks?

10. Casestudies

Who gets to be a commentator?

1. Subject experts

   If you have a PhD and work for a Think Tank or charity or service or business focusing on one specific issue, producers can cast you easily based on your expertise. The more specific your niche, the better your chances of getting booked. The more topical and current your subject, again, the better your chances.

2. Party Establishment apparatchiks

   Former MPs, former staffers, major influencing figures - think Tim Montgomerie previously of the Tories. If you worked for a mainstream political party, like myself, you can immediately be cast as a “former Labour aide.” It is helpful if this is either the Government party or the main opposition because presenters will have questions about how your party got to do as it does, which you will be uniquely placed to answer. They will also expect you to defend your party and castigate the enemy parties. You don't have to if you don’t agree with something; you are free to say so, but your usefulness is based on your intimate inside knowledge of your party machine. You will know, for example, the political journeys of cabinet members: from where they were fresh-faced backbenchers, or what happened the last two times the new PM tried to run for his party’s leadership, what the different factions within your party are, and who is close to them.

3. Think Tankers. The Tufton Street lot do media well: IEA, Adam Smith Institute, TaxPayers' Alliance, Centre for Policy Studies, Policy Exchange etc. They train up and pitch their young. IPPR does the same a bit, and we have NEON (New Economics Organisers Network), which trains and pitches new left-wing voices, but apart from that, you are battling the left-wing self-sabotage virus if you want more exposure.

4. Journalists (and not just columnists)

   As long as you are willing to take a position on either the left or right, you can be a commentator even if you are a mere reporter in your outlet. That’s if your boss allows you, obviously. They mostly do because of the exposure. If you write and tweet about politics, that means you will have knowledge of the comings and goings of Westminster and context to draw on when commenting on the stories of the day. Or one would hope so anyway. I know even some publicly neutral journos who write for places like the Times who get cast on panels despite steering clear of showing their political colours. The way they do it is that they will say, “Some people think that blah blah blah.” Newsflash: they are some people.

5. Influencers

   If you have a very big following online, you can pitch yourself, and they will have you. Especially if it means bringing your audience traffic to their own social media clips. Where you are on the respectability spectrum will dictate which channels will have you.

6. Fluent or funny or endearing girl/boy next door figures

   There are some media figures whose background doesn’t make sense. Broadcasters who are doctors, former police officers, farmers, whatever. They were cast because they speak fluently or are interesting in some way.

7. Authors

   If you are an author, you will have tried to peg yourself in daytime shows at some point or been pegged there by your agent. It’s not a long shot from there to becoming a commentator, as so many of the issues are cultural. But you would need to be good at it AND want it. If you are a full-time author, I don’t think you should want it. I explain why in number 8.

8. Reality TV Stars. Love Island, Big Brother, The Apprentice, they are all good. Just don’t become too much of a hateful figure.

Apart from your career, what else matters?

If you are a middle-aged white man, there are probably 1000 like you, with exactly the same expertise and possibly more impressive credentials who may be available to do the same. The good news is that very successful people are often busy producing great work, so they don’t have time to go on TV and radio unless their agent is haranguing them and they just got a book out. Some of the richest writers you know rarely do media.

If you are young, that’s a massive advantage. Young people look better on camera, and people are more eager to look at them. There aren’t a lot of young people competing for those slots because they don’t know how to pitch themselves or get found, or just don’t have the level of confidence and self-possession needed. I wouldn’t say they don’t have enough knowledge because, believe me, the knowledge bar for some programmes is very low.

If you are female, that may be to your advantage just because, again, there simply aren’t as many women. Once you start having babies, it is very hard to keep up with TV appearances, which require you to travel at the last minute, do early mornings and late nights, and generally be available at the drop of a hat, prepped and up to date.

If you are a centrist and want to do pure political commentary rather than a subject specialist doing analysis, you will struggle. Political panels on OFCOM-regulated channels have equal numbers of right-wing and left-wing guests. The more neatly you fit into one of these categories, and are willing to bat for that political side, the easier producers will find it to place you.

If you are willing to argue for extremes with the certainty of Saint Peter on bouncer duty at the pearly gates, then congratulations. You will eat. I think you’ll also go to hell, but that’s between you and your maker.

Will I get paid, and how much for each channel?

Read more

I am posting an earlier, loooong draft below, which includes some backstories I have never written before.

If you are a non-Brit, this is the politician who resigned his seat in Parliament to make way for Andy Burnham, the politician we are about to coronate as Prime Minister. Do read on to understand the context of some of the scandals and toxic culture that plagued the Labour Party.

It’s the first profile I’ve ever published, and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had writing for a publication that isn’t my own Substack. My favourite person to write about used to be myself. I have so much information about myself, and I frame my life as an adventure and a struggle, so there’s always something to write about. By my own selfish logic, Josh Simons was the perfect subject.

Which could have been awkward, because Simons and I are from the same party. When I write about right-wingers, I cross every T and dot every I like my life depends on it. Last week, I was at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a right-wing conference, interviewing young people for a feature in The Nerve. I wrote down exactly what they said as they said it while they watched me do it. No quotes pulled out of context. Especially as they were young, I did not ask any leading questions to trap them into incriminating themselves. If I’m quoting a right-winger I ring them to check they meant it, even the former Tory Chancellor who should have known better. Same for the Greens.

But with Labour? Law of the jungle. I know that if I start asking Labour people, “Are you ok with me writing this?” they will stupidly get scared and stop me from writing things that are ultimately beneficial for them. They can’t help themselves; they are raised this way by our party elders. To believe that success comes from being present and as boring as possible. Simons, however, is not like that. The man has a death wish.

Simons gave me his best lines when he, or I, didn’t know I was writing about him yet. After I told him, he told me a bunch of clunky stuff which I could have written up into a hatchet job that would make the left hate him even more. I didn’t call him to check he was ok with me writing about how he met his wife or his reaction to my accusation about his ruthlessness toward the left-wing journalist Paul Holden. Had I done so, he would have just given me something boring to put in the piece that would make him look even worse, but because he would feel in control, he would think the piece was less likely to slay him.

Politicians do this all the time, especially in the Labour Party. They avoid journalists like the plague, acting wooden and awkward around them. The result is that journalists never get to know them as people and only have sterile lines from their staffers to work off of when writing about them. Labour HQ likes it that way! Silly losers!

People don’t know what makes them remarkable and redeemable, so you should not let politicians decide how to present themselves. If you put Simons on the stall, he will idiotically say he was naive. But people don’t forgive him because they think he doesn’t know what he is doing. They forgive him because they like his courage, cleverness and openness. Goethe’s Faust, not Machiavelli’s Prince. A sinner and a striver, not someone who covers their back and lets other people do the dirty work and take the blame for it.

I have zero evidence of this from him personally, but my sense is that Simons must be a super-briefer. He is always communicating. But, unlike some other super-briefers, he does so in a social way, giving ambient information that feels like it’s flowing. Unlike the other super-briefers, though, he does it socially, ambient stuff that feels like it's just flowing out of him rather than being placed. If Starmer's lot had done more of this, they'd have survived, because they'd have read as real people, and you can defend a real person.

Who should I write about next? I want to find a politician who will let me follow them around and just observe them. Ideally, let me look through their trash, too.

Anyway, read the very long piece below and let me know what you think.

Note: this was written before Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election. We now know he is definitely becoming PM.

Labour’s Makersfield campaign headquarters were, ideally, a pub.

When I walked into the Stubshaw Cross Labour club in Ashton, the week before the by-election, two young female staffers were comparing notes on heartbreak. Josh Simons was doing what he does best. A stark contrast to the man whose career he’s trying to end, one Keir Starmer, and much like the man he’s lining up to replace him, Andy Burnham, Simons is pathologically likeable. He offers up his own humiliation to the young staffers. When he first met his wife, she rejected him, he says, leaning in, elbows on the table. They met in Harvard, where they both got their PhDs. She mildly bullied him - he is four years younger than her. That did the trick. Heartbroken, he decided he was done with Boston and paid £2,000 to ship all his belongings back to the UK. Then, on the eve of his departure, she changed her mind. He paid another £2,000 to ship it all back. Compulsive, certainly. But also, decisive. No time for sunk cost fallacies.

His former leader, on the other hand, is having his Joe Biden moment. Even as his most loyal cabinet ministers resign, Sir Keir Starmer insists he is going to lead Labour into the next election. If Morgan McSweeney eased Starmer into No. 10, then Simons is the one to drag him out of it.

But unlike McSweeney, Josh Simons is more Faustian than Machiavellian. He got the safe seat and the ministerial position. Then we found out the sin. Why has his party not sent him to hell?

I have spent the last two months asking that question. I spoke to MPs, special advisers, people who worked with him when he was a policy advisor in Jeremy Corbyn’s office, in the think tank world and during his Labour Together days, his former constituents, and Labour campaigners.

Josh Simons, who describes himself on his x account as Burnham’s “Crown steward,” was one of the people who was helping the Greater Manchester mayor find a parliamentary seat when one offended backbencher asked “Why doesn’t he give up his own?” Then Simons did just that. The natural retort was that Simons was doing this to secure a position in Burnham’s No. 10. But if that is such a rewarding prize, why didn’t anyone else go for it?

When Simons first worked for Labour in 2015, in the first flush of Corbyn’s leadership, things were different. He says he was fat. Others remember him as lanky. In photos, he has an ear piercing, longer hair and an untidy beard; He blended in.

By the time I first met him, this May, there was none of that. Clean-shaven, white shirt, field jacket. Lean, tan, 6’4”. Is this man even in the Labour Party?

Like Obama at Columbia, he supposedly spent his undergraduate years at Cambridge smoking roll-ups and reading Marxist theory, and had little patience for people who disagreed with him. That would be news to Michael Portillo. The former Conservative cabinet minister was interviewed in 2013 by a twenty-year-old Simons for the student newspaper Varsity. When I mention it to Portillo, he is both apologetic that the interview ended up happening over the phone rather than in person and generous about the boy who conducted it. Competent, clever, polite: hardly the portrait of a hard-core ideologue.

The 2024 crop of Labour MPs is widely accused to have been selected for timidity and, like Blair’s Babes before them, loyalty to the leader who ushered them in. “Starmtrooper” has curdled from badge of honour into a slur — but there was a time when Simons was considered the quintessential one. He claims he wasn’t a Starmerite any more than Starmer was a Corbynite. Yet, parachuted into the once ultra-safe seat of Makerfield after his stint as Director of Labour Together, he rose quickly to become a junior minister at just 31, tasked with pushing through the government’s Digital ID policy.

In February, it emerged that during his time running Labour Together, he had commissioned APCO, a private consultancy, to investigate journalists looking into the organisation’s funding. One of the members of Labour Together’s board at the time, Kate Forrester (the wife of Starmer’s then Head of Communications, Paul Overden), was working for APCO. Simons passed the resulting dossier, which falsely suggested the reporters had links to Russian influence operations, to GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre and, to the Guardian itself, too, which could report that GCHQ was investigating it. By handing it to a newspaper, the allegations could be publicised before any wrongdoing had been established.

His name was trending for a couple of weeks, for all the wrong reasons. Some of his parliamentary allies were quietly pleased. Icarus, they felt, had finally flown too close to the sun.

There were some curiosities to the reaction to the report. Companies regularly hire private firms to investigate journalists who investigate them. The moral standards are higher for a future minister than they are for corrupt business elites. But, there was no follow up reports on Steve Reed — currently Keir Starmer’s Housing Secretary and a director of Labour Together for seven years — when Inside Croydon revealed his connection to criminally hacked data, stolen from a local independent journalist’s email server, used to expose three confidential sources which were then used by Labour Party officials in disciplinary proceedings against Reed’s factional opponents, instead of reporting the stolen material to the police. In Westminster, not all journalists are created equal.

Another facet that those who know him agree about Simons that’s rare in Westminster, is he is genuinely interested in policy. It is what he spent most of his time doing during the Makerfield by-election. “He will often just lock himself in a room to do focused work on a policy,” says one of his staff members. Even a former senior adviser from his time in Corbyn’s office I spoke to, admitted he never thought he was a Blairite plant because “He was too focused on researching policy”. Any Labour deep-state spy worth their salt would save their energy for power struggles.

He was not without guile. For a while, he told people he was 26, when he was 22. When he left Jeremy Corbyn’s office, after a bitter demotion caused by suspicions about his allegiances, he was already in contact with the type of paternalistic Labour figures that take bright young things by the side and explain to them what they have to do to go far. First rule of a safe seat is, don’t act like a potential liability, i.e., don’t be too left-wing. He was encouraged by one of the bigwigs of the anti-Corbyn resistance to leak his submissions to the Chakrabarti anti-semitism report, which he felt were not taken seriously enough once the final report was published in June 2016. He didn’t, so they did it for him.

Shortly after, a preliminary version of the defence review was leaked to Newsnight. The document was politically toxic: the wider review had been put on ice following the Brexit referendum, and Emily Thornberry’s team — she was then Shadow Defence Secretary — had already committed Labour to retaining Trident. The leaked version contained a notably cooler formulation, and its emergence was damaging for Corbyn.

One of those involved at the time never believed the 22-year-old’s pleas of innocence: “Josh knew where we stood policy wise, and we’d worked closely with him to reach that point. So to leak a draft which told a different story was a deeply shitty thing to do, and even worse was that he denied point-blank being responsible. Our feeling was: ‘If you’re going to act that way, at least own it’, but he wouldn’t. I think the truth was he revelled in the whole double dealing thing, and he’s never grown out of that.”

That was a strange time for the party. Slowly, we were all turning into the paranoid meme. Bloodshot eyes, a wall covered in screenshots of social media posts, red thread connecting them all together. That same year, I was running for the Young Fabians executive committee. To defeat the slate running against us, one of my “Blairite handlers” (people looking out for my career, making sure I don’t stray too leftwards) devised a plan for us to leak a private Facebook message by one of the people on our opponents’ slate, which exposed him as a bully. Other reports ensued. The organisation spent the next two years completely engulfed in internal squabbles and consultations over safe space policies. We had opened Pandora’s box of cancel culture, but hey, we won the election, and that’s what matters, right?

Like Burnham taking refuge in Manchester, America saved Simons. He didn’t have to get his hands dirty while his future Labour benefactors orchestrated their internal witchhunt. That Labour, and the broader left, has had anti-semites comfortably nesting in it is no secret. And thanks to multiple books written about the Starmer project, neither is the fact that Morgan McSweeney astroturfed both the framing of the problem and the solution to the Labour anti-semitism crisis.

The first time Simons reached out to me, I had spent two months immersed in the various books on the Starmer project and Morgan McSweeney’s scheming. I met him like a sleeper cell who survived the Cold War.

Is it right that Simons “never grew out of that?” He told me he was a pluralist; that he abhorred the stifling of intellectual curiosity and ideas. I’d heard all that before. It was what McSweeney told every Labour faction before funnelling them into a project that gripped the party like an electric collar. Even Wes Streeting is rebranding as a social democrat now. I had to test whether he had reckoned with the psychic trauma inflicted on the party by the Starmer project.

In his resignation letter, Simons apologised profusely to the two establishment journalists targeted by the investigation, Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke of The Times, but referred to Paul Holden, a left-wing freelancer who investigates fraud in South Africa and who would be far more vulnerable to such smears, as a deserving target. Is he blind to this unfairness? He feels bad, he says. He drops his tone; he sighs; he looks at his hands. He is good at this. He mentions the baby shoes left on Starmer’s porch, where his kids walk by, which signified Palestinian children’s deaths. That stuff got to him then, but he is sorry now. He wanted to write a letter to Holden- who has threatened to sue him- but says he was told to ignore him by one of Labour’s attack dogs.

“He’s genuinely open to feedback,” one Labour SpAd tells me. “More than most.”

David Littlefair, founder of Blue Collar Parliament, an initiative to get more people from working-class professions into elected office, can attest to that. He was surprised when Simons reached out to him. Littlefair doesn’t mince his words. He had spent the previous two months being publicly caustic about the Labour Together scandal and the practice of parachuting candidates into safe northern seats, sometimes even mentioning Simons by name as an example of everything wrong with the system. Simons asked to meet him anyway. Blue Collar Parliament exists, in essence, to produce fewer Josh Simonses. He offered to help regardless.

The day after the Brexit referendum, Simons was at a drinks reception for Harvard Kennedy scholars in London. He had just about voted Remain; his former Cambridge supervisor Helen Thompson had just about voted Leave. A man approached them, a barrister, top QC, at the time. In the confident detail characteristic of his rank and profession, he explained exactly how he and his colleagues would use a judicial review to reverse the result voted for by people in places like the towns Simons would one day represent. Patronising and facile, the archetype of what people had had enough of. It was, Simons tells me, the moment he found his populist streak.

His name recognition on the doorstep in Makerfield bears this out. He had been there less than two years, and locals are already writing letters mourning his departure, his personal touch.

Westminster was less forgiving, and back in Labour’s Makerfield HQ pub, a journalist friend is baffled by Simon’s redemption arc. In the event of Burnham not only winning the by-election but going on to become Prime Minister the reward for Simons is expected to be a senior policy role in Downing Street. How do you forgive someone like that? And why would you trust him?

A few people have used the word “psychopath.” The Peter Mandelson type who’ll run over their own grandmother for a safe seat. But Peter Mandelson types don’t make themselves vulnerable. They don’t march first into the battles they encourage others to fight. They look over your shoulder when you speak to them. Simons has somehow managed to leave even some Corbynites from those early days unable to be mean about him. People who have long since left Labour for the Greens still carry a residual warmth. “It’s like he speaks to you and you only,” says the journalist at my table, moments after Simons stopped to introduce himself. He was smirking when Simons walked over. Now the smirk softened into a giddy smile. “I see it,” he says.

So why is Simons forgiven? Like Goethe’s Faust, he never stopped striving. He is bold in a party that is scared of its own shadow. Morally flawed, but also morally ambitious. A product of his time, and of his party. If Keir Starmer’s assumed professionalism was the antidote to Corbyn, Andy Burnham is the antidote to Starmer because of his warmth. If, sooner or later, Burnham makes his way to Downing Street, and if Simons is duly rewarded, could his pluralism be the antidote to McSweeny’s McCarthism; his policy seriousness the cure to his policy philistinism?

The elder brothers are furious, of course. Why is the prodigal son welcomed back? But whatever becomes of Burnham’s leadership challenge, Simons will be fine. For Westminster standards, he is already extraordinarily powerful: He has nothing left to lose.

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I want my misery party (Labour) to take note.

In the UK, we argue about whether MPs need to be linked to a local area to be desirable candidates for it. Some look longingly at Singapore with its CEO-style cabinet and reckon that if we had Dominic-Cummings-handpicked emperor Secretaries of State, we would have better governance.

The Americans, burned by Trump, are asking a different question. Would you rather have a politician who is:

1. safe, or

2. charismatic.

In short, they are looking for attention grabbers.

If the Labour Party wants to defeat Reform, they need to start doing the same.

The boldest example is Graham Platner, now the Democratic Senate nominee for Maine. A year ago, he was an unknown oyster farmer whose only political involvement was donating to Bernie Sanders.

A couple of independent activists sifted through thousands of online videos looking for someone outside politics who sounded authentic and charismatic. They found him and talked him into running. He launched his primary campaign in August 2025, and within 24 hours, the launch video, made by Zohran Mamdani’s ad-man, had 2.5 million views. In its first nine days, the campaign raised $1 million and signed up more than 2,700 volunteers.

Platner is a populist lefty spin doctor’s wet dream. A former Marine who served on active duty during the “war on terror.” He’s 41, full-bearded, with a fit dad-bod, a politico Pedro Pascal. He wears plaid flannel shirts, hoodies and battered baseball caps embroidered with logos like “Maine Outdoor Swimming Pool.”

The activists who approached him were hunting for a left-populist candidate who came across as a “normal” person. The question they posed to themselves was: what kind of person should represent Maine? It’s a small state. The incumbent senator probably knows a fair share of residents by name. They decided to look into lobstermen, oyster farmers and other types of fishermen. Then they filtered their data for those who’d donated to populist candidates. Platner stood out.

In the UK, where money is scarce and ambition even scarcer, parties do a bit of shoulder tapping, but I have never heard of that kind of active recruitment.

And I am jealous.

I want to go out there and drag charismatic people into politics. Labour has various women leadership schemes, and for BAME people, I think. The ‘class first’ slate I am running on for the NEC (National Executive Committee) is called Restoration, and my friend who started it founded ‘Blue Collar Parliament’ to encourage more people from a blue-collar background to run for Parliament (if you want to fund us, do get in touch).

But I don’t want to just encourage people, I want to ARM TWIST THEM.

My wise and unmistakably fair subscribers are rightly questioning why I accepted Josh Simons back into the fold after we found he was making DEALS WITH THE DEVIL. I have written a four-page profile of him for the Critic, which is coming out in the print magazine this week, but the short answer is that I met him and thought, nah, fuck it, we are not letting the other team have him. I will expand on this when I post the profile (subscribe so you don't miss it).

Platner may eventually backfire on the Democrats, because he may be an unwise bloke. But what gave me pause was that the people who scouted him are a grassroots left-populist outfit with links to the Democratic Socialists of America. They are not Morgan McSweeney, Blue Labour or Blairite types. They are socialists. Whose top issues are corruption and getting moeny out of politics (same as us in the Restoration slate).

They didn’t baulk at backing him even after the firm they’d hired to vet him turned up some of his uglier posts. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, they insisted they hadn’t known about all the sexist/racist Reddit comments. He also had a nazi symbol tattoo, which he claims he didn’t know at the time was a nazi symbol. Ezra Klein says he doesn’t believe he was unaware of it, but did it as a trolling thing. It sounds like he is the kind of man who would do things like that. If he were a genuine antisemite, argues Klein, surely there would be Reddit posts showing that; he has offended every other group. I am happy to defer to our MasterLib on this.

Platner managers argued in return that if you want normal people in politics, you can’t expect a squeaky-clean online footprint. I agree on this and think the left misses out on people who are worthy of a platform when we become too rigid on our speaking/conduct codes. The question of exactly where to draw the line is up for debate when picking a political candidate.

I am worried that last week’s UK by-election victory for Labour may have emboldened some of our internal speech and conduct puritans.

Reform should have taken the seat, but their candidate was found to have posted a bunch of rude, creepy stuff online and generally came across as a thoughtless bloke. As Stephen Bush said on the FT’s podcast, he is the kind of person who “would be the first one to get kicked out of a tour of the Willy Wonka factory.” Non-partisan activists printed his old sexist Facebook posts and mounted them on a totem pole in the middle of one of the constituency’s towns; there were repeated reports of women raising them on the doorstep. Even Gawain Towler said that Reform needs to think harder about its appeal to women. I doubt many of the women who voted against Kenyon would have been Reform voters even without the Facebook posts.

So to recap: the left in Makerfield just beat a right-winger, undone partially by the same kind of posts that haven't yet sunk Platner in Maine. So please, Labour, don't let the fact that it sank Reform's man put you off importing the American left's appetite for populism, and its newfound Christian attitude to forgiveness of a messy past.

What do I want from my populist-left candidates?

Presence

Can this person make you stop scrolling and watch for more than 3 seconds?

Jon Ossoff telling me “what small men like Donald Trump, JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand” certainly makes me lower my thumb.

Obama is the quintessential example. It feels like American politicians have it more because they are telegenic, but the British are underestimated for their in-person charm. My ideal is someone who is expressive, with deep-set sun wrinkles (which the Brits get at 25). Sorry, but back in his heyday, when I first saw Nick Glegg live on stage before the 2015 election… This man was a rockstar. I totally get how the LibDems did as well as they did with him at the helm:

And while we are at it, if you can be 5’2” or however tall Emily Thornberry is and still have the gravitas of Michelle Obama, the telepresence of Oprah, and the sex appeal of Gillian Anderson, and your party still fails to give you a prominent position, well, they deserve to lose.

For my LabourList column this week, I wrote about political fandoms and how to get young people invested. My argument was about “brand loyalty” - and why, even though we dislike the way consumerism turns everything into a product, fandom also has older, more benign roots that predate capitalism: idolatry, our need for idealised versions of people, magical thinking. In The New Statesman, Anoosh Chakelian also argued that branding now wins elections. Starmer’s deliberate blankness helped finish him; Burnham was “effectively running on a cult of personality.”

I may be in danger of writing the same essay, over and over and over again.

But I feel vindicated by the results in Makerfield and the countless Andy anecdotes of warmth.

Code Switching

The ability to address different niche audiences and hold both their attention and respect without alienating their core base.

Can they give a speech on the floor of Parliament/Senate one day and be on a panel on GB News/Fox News the next?

Can they do both long-form podcasts and 2-minute answers on the radio?

Can they go into their local pub and have a drink with anyone? Can they make the security guard laugh?

Can they speak to both an audience of woke liberals and an audience of resentful right-wingers and make both feel heard without losing sight of their values?

For example, a Labour MP who can speak about immigration without making the left feel they are being racist or the right feel like they are being meally mouthed.

Sadly, most Labour politicians can’t. I want to change that.

That’s what Platner does so well: he speaks with authority and gravitas while also coming across as the guy next door. I agree with Ezra Klein that AOC does not do that as well as you’d think. You can’t imagine her going on a fully heterodox podcast like Lex Freedman, for example, which Bernie Sanders excelled in.

That’s an attribute Simons could eventually excel in. We have a handful of MPs, almost exclusively men, who go on riskier alternative media, but they are not intellectual speakers. Mike Tapp or Jonathan Hinder, for example, are good media performers, but their arguments are blunt. I can’t imagine someone like Tapp in a long, long-form interview with a host who reads. Simons got in trouble before he became an MP for off-the-wall remarks on live TV debates, but he clearly has intellectual curiosity. And he is a fast reader, I have observed.

Ed Miliband is a wonderful podcast guest, and I know people will question this, but I bet you he could pull a Joe Rogan-style interview.

Andy Burnham has shown us a good range over his career, and his 9 years away from Parliament probably helped him develop his register range. Bernie Sanders did the same as the Senator of Vermont. He didn’t always have such broad appeal; he refined his socialist message over the years to not intimidate the median American voter who is allergic to the ‘s’ word. Being the Mayor of Manchester has deprogrammed Burnham from Westminster; see, for example, people making fun of him for having a stronger northern accent again. I screamed when I read that Philip Larkin is one of his favourite poets. I would love to know why, but regardless… that’s one stealthy code switcher right there.

An insatiable appetite for risk

I am forgiving of mistakes and impulsiveness, not in spite of what I am looking for, but because of it. I am looking for people with passion and hunger.

Institutions like the Democratic Party or the Labour Party reward safety. They see raw expression as a liability. They can’t appreciate humour, warmth, vulnerability and rage. The classic Young Labour to Labour MP pipeline doesn’t have social media apart from an austere Facebook profile to post on their CLP (Constituency Labour Party) page, where they will be running for officer roles from their teens, and an X account that they use only to watch what others are posting, never to post themselves. They never write under their own name, so they never learn to speak in their own voice.

Chris Hayes calls this the ‘Company man’.

I love this comment from the Maine Reddit forum talking about Planter getting a kicking in liberal media:

“Good Lord, he has not lived a life of moral virtue and piousness? How will we defeat the Republicans with such a man as a candidate?”

Ugh. Democrats. We’ll do anything to lose.

Wes Streeting is one of the few who escape this binary. He is 100% an institution kid, but his charisma lets him transcend that, and so despite the countless politically correct National Union of Students speeches he gave in his life to become an MP, he can still speak off the cuff and take rhetorical risks. And they pay off. The proof is me being nice about our arch Blairite!

Fortune favours the bold, my loser comrades.

Moral Ambition

In a way that’s authentic, can you say who has failed us, and why?

In the UK, they are all getting obsessed with policy again. They think they don’t have enough policy papers. They have TONS OF THEM. They just can’t do shit because of vested interests, corporate capture and bureaucratic inertia. They know all this.

They are not lacking professional ambition. They are lacking moral ambition.

Here is Jon Ossoff again:

“And when members of Congress aren’t begging for money from lobbyists, they’re trying to dodge getting carpet bombed by these super PACs. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people. It’s not because of woke college kids or trans students or because there are interracial couples in cereal commercials.

It’s because the people’s elected representatives don’t represent the people, they represent the donors.”

Ezra Klein points out that Ossoff always does what Obama did: include an argument from the other side. That’s what makes it different from pure moralising.

Do God

I am mesmerised by James Talarico, a member of the Texas House of Representatives. He has milquetoast liberal/social-democratic politics but connects them beautifully to Christian teaching.

Ezra Klein’s interview with him is a masterclass in pushing back against Christian ethnonationalism:

And the ways in which the Bible’s emphasis on helping the poor and the needy had been perverted by those who wanted to use religion as a tool of power and even greed.

Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves, Christian nationalism kills.

And here:

“You know, I fought the bill to require the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom. And I’ve often wondered, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don’t they post, money is the root of all evil in every boardroom? Why don’t they post, do not judge in every courtroom?

Why don’t they post, turn the other cheek in the halls of the Pentagon? Or it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. This is the inconsistency I’m trying to call out, because they’re using my tradition, they’re speaking for me.”

Andy has a personal vote, but just one guy people love isn’t enough. We need more and we need a pipeline.

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I took part in this debate at UnHerd yesterday. The essay below is my opening statement. I was arguing against Ango-Gaulism. You can watch the opening statements here from tomorrow, and the full debate if you are an UnHerd subscriber.

I have a rule with dating apps. If someone admits to being French, I swipe left immediately. Life is too short.

I am baffled, then, by the lack of judgment in my opponents tonight and hope to civilise their tastes by the end of this debate.

There are different versions of Anglo-Gaullism. But what they all agree on is that De Gaulle had a certain idea of France.

And that that is what the UK is lacking today.

A strong man. To give it back its national identity.

But the UK had one such man, too, whatever you think of him.

He was called Tony Blair, and his idea of Britain was of a country that is open-minded, ambitious, tolerant, cooperative and educated.

In the political battle for Britain’s soul, English conservative intellectuals often complain that “British values” are a fake, Blairite construct that suffocates rather than clarifies.

In that sense, British people have already rejected Anglo-Gaullism.

But if you think Tony Blair was a charlatan for creating Cool Britannia, what the hell do you think De Gaulle was up to with his certain idea of France? He was doing the same thing — constructing a national myth, willing it into being through sheer force of personal conviction and rhetorical genius.

How do you think the rest of us dispassionate Mediterranean nations went about nation-building? The difference between Greek and British patriotism is not that the former is based on a more accurate historical basis, nor that Brussels gave countries like Greece more breathing room than it did the UK.

No, the difference between Greek patriotism and British patriotism is temperament.

Anglo-Gaullism then- English people seeking guidance from a man who detested them - is another form of English self-hate. The gold medal winner of your national sport of never feeling good enough.

The root of British problems lies in the essence of British character and British virtue. The same understatement that makes British culture sophisticated and nuanced makes British patriotism impossible to perform without feeling ridiculous.

You never got a country that could accommodate a De Gaulle, because you never had a revolution as bloody as the French. Your elites were cleverer — they knew when to give way, when to take one step backwards to propel themselves forward.

You were first on so many things, and for that, you were both rewarded and punished.

Your working class were the first proletariat to go through brutal industrialisation.

Your Parliament, the mother of all Parliaments.

Your Kings and Queens, the first ones to survive with their heads firmly screwed on their shoulders.

You were the first capitalist power, the workshop of the world; The rest of the world got to learn from your mistakes.

Your hubris was thinking you would always dominate. But the free trade doctrine you indoctrinated others into eventually came back to haunt you.

De Gaulle, like all Frenchmen, was a bit full of shit. De Gaulle’s idea of France was not nationalist in the crude sense some repressed elements of the English psyche seem to fantasise about, but unifying.

It embraced both the French Revolution and the institutions said revolution tried to annihilate. In that sense, he brought together the different power structures of French society — military, Church, republican left, Catholic right.

Who holds power in modern Britain? Obviously not the Crown, not the Church, not the armed forces, not Parliament in any meaningful sense, although it is designed to.

Some of the new Anglo-Gaullists would have you think it’s civil society, the charity industrial complex and the bureaucrats. These may well have vested interests and the ability to obstruct now and then, but the most accumulated and largely unaccountable power lies with finance, property, and inherited wealth.

The people behind these are the most enthusiastic about being seen to talk up national sovereignty. They are also the same people who sold British national sovereignty.

It is the same Eton-Oxford class that has consistently used nationalist rhetoric to protect its own position.

Anglo-Gaulism being fashionable now is nothing more than the British elite doing what it’s always done: sensing the mood to adapt its tone. Appeasing the revolution to avoid the guillotine.

They are so clever. No wonder British people put up with them for as long.

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I just came back from two weeks in China.

On my right outside the window, a spider has caught a bumblebee in its web. Bees don’t make pleading sounds like puppies or kittens, and insects have hardly been selected for cuteness, but this one’s frantic movement and chubby, fluffy legs do something to me. On the windowsill under the web, there are four corpses of mummified bees. I climb on my chair and attempt to put my hand down the window to release her. The spider needs to eat, too, I know. But must I witness it? I can’t reach the bee because the window is one of those woke safety ones that only open at the very top.

In China, even the window on the 37th floor of our hotel opened, but the Chinese famously don’t care about bees as much as we do. In the wet markets we visited, many animals destined to be eaten weren’t dead yet either. There were cages of live chickens, doves, rabbits, ducks, and frogs. Puppies and kittens, too, but those were for pets.

Unable to save the bumblebee, I take my laptop elsewhere. If I can’t stop its suffering, at least I can avoid mine. A child of Europe, I’ve gone soft.

Everyone is Chinaxxing now, not just ageing millennials.

I went there with three journalists and a fellow writer (derogatory). One American, two Brits, a Jew (he insists) and a Greek. Liberal, Tory, Fascist, Lefty, Socialist. Patriot, patriot, patriot, patriot, patriot.

We aaah-ed and ooooh-ed at China's infrastructure and manufacturing miracle. We’d look outside our high-speed train like Victorian orphans sticking their noses on their workhouse windows. Instead of glaring at plump babies in velvet carriages, we pointed out San Francisco-worthy bridges to each other in the middle of nowhere. Infrastructure that, in any Western country, would be put on postcards here is as special as the disposable plastic toothbrushes replenished daily in our hotels.

“China has poured more concrete since 2008 than the US has done in its entire history. We are the equivalent of taking native Americans on a boat to see Versailles,” said . When we stay in skyscrapers, the views from our windows are scenes Europeans only see in science fiction movies.

The left, or rather, socialists like myself (any odd freak claims to be ‘a lefty’ these days without any conception of economic policy bar “gimme gimme gimme”) are attracted to China for its rapid industrialisation, full employment and planning capacity. The right is attracted to it for all those reasons, plus the brutality with which the Chinese government pursues its plans. There is no woke in China; they had the Cultural Revolution. If only the Western government would allow Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to have their way! Our version of communist dictators who demand billions in subsidies for their businesses and preferential government intervention. Sure, millions must die, but look at Hong Kong! That could be CORFU within the decade if we *unleashed* *the power* *of authoritarian rich people*.

Curiously, the power of the state evades them, but that is what is in full display throughout China.

On day 4, we visited the Three Gorges Dam. It is a massive hydroelectric gravity dam on the Yangtze River. It’s the world’s largest power station by capacity.

It was a controversial mega-engineering feat from the beginning. A NIMBY genocide. Construction flooded over a dozen cities and hundreds of villages. Gemini tells me it displaced at least 1.3 to 1.4 million residents. CNN says upwards of 3,8 million. Now, it is one of the few man-made structures on Earth that’s visible to the naked eye from space.

The Three Gorges project was officially launched in 1994- the same year Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, and the year I was born. The year of the Dog. The Chinese government borrowed heavily for the project. The total estimated cost, including resettling displaced people, was $37.23 billion (254.2 billion yuan). Construction was completed in 2008, the year after Blair resigned as Prime Minister, leaving behind a massive expansion of private funding for the public sector (PFI). The Three Gorges project now generates around $7.5 billion in annual revenue. PFI projects with a total capital value of around £60bn will cost the taxpayer £306 billion in total repayments by the time they are paid off. China finished paying off the Three Gorges Dam within three years of completion.

Britain’s HS2 (our SECOND high-speed rail) cost soared from £33 billion in 2012 to between £67–83 billion at 2025 prices, with some now saying it may cost over £100 billion. £44 billion in its 17-years, and the first trains will not run before 2036 at the earliest.

And yet, Tony Blair’s 5000-word essay this week was about how we need to lie down and let AI defile us, among other things, and not a single word about what privatisation and underinvestment in public infrastructure have done to the country he once led.

It is astonishing how Blair will allow himself to simplify and zoom out when it comes to foreign policy to defend the Transatlantic partnership, the Iraq war, and criticise Starmer for not being more cooperative with the Americans on Iran, but could not possibly see the bigger picture of his mistake in accelerating neoliberalism. If Blair can take the long, hundred-year view on foreign policy, aligning with the US as the most culturally compatible superpower through thick and thin, he can apply the same lenses to economic policy. He just won't. Privatisation was catastrophic; London is not a country; and the service sector's productivity ceiling is reached sooner than in manufacturing or other heavy industries. He knows this, but he won't say it because it would mean shitting on his own legacy.

Chongqing, the most populous city in the world, has upwards of 32 million people, as many as three Greeces. To get all the skyscrapers into a single panorama shot, you need to pirouette your iPhone. In London, we treat our skyscrapers like children. We take a long time to plan around them, and when we have them, they are so special we name them. Despite having fewer than we thought we would by now, we swear we want more of them. We even claim that having lots of them is part of our political identity. But having is evidence of wanting, or in this case, not wanting enough. In China, they treat skyscrapers like viruses. They let them take over.

During a boat tour around Chongqing's skyline, I complained to Will about the FT headlines praising Greece's economic growth. That growth is tourism and services, with a minuscule industrial base. Tourism is a leeching sector. It keeps the people working in it poor and subservient, and it eats the place alive in the process. If I were a powerful Greek politician, I would identify the seaside towns most beloved by British tourists who have pints of lager instead of plates of food for dinner and open a national fracking enterprise there. Corfu first.

“Eventually, we will all be working in the tourist industry, giving tours for Chinese tourists” said Will.

If Blair gets his way, which he often does, by 2046, there will be no more “journalists” or “writers.” These will be relics of a decadent age, no more rooted in reality than ze/zem gender pronouns.

The main role for weak-limbed vanity professionals, like yours truly and my friends, and for people of extraordinary natural beauty (the Venn diagram rarely overlaps) will be entertaining people with more money than we have. In Greece, we have a saying about tables turning: the wheel will turn, the poor will fuck again.

Chinese tourists visiting “London” will be able to walk into the Guardian’s headquarters and pay for the “political journalist” experience. They will be taken to an open-plan office filled with trash, where former hacks will explain to them the western equivalent of Chinese torture: hot desking.

People like my friends will be sitting on desks, typing gibberish into empty documents. For a premium, tourists will be able to sit down with one of the “Political Journalists” for an interview. The jobber will then pretend they are on a deadline and perform stress by pulling out their hair, huffing, puffing, and refilling their coffee cup. The Chinese tourists will be filled with suspense as they watch the British jobber toil. Will the lad make it, or will his tough editor fire him for being late? At the end of the tour, they will be handed a printed, handmade copy of the paper, complete with a full cover photo of the premium tourist payer. Now, where is the recycling bin?

Then they will visit a TV studio. Packed on a viewing platform, they will watch a panel of political commentators battle it out like MMA fighters. Not unlike how we do it now. The tourists will be given remote controls for ratings. Every time the ratings dip bellow an acceptable level of entertainment a jolt of electricity will run through a clip-on device on our fingers to remind us we are there to awaken the capitalist spirit, not put the cash cows to bed. At the end of the ‘debate’, the tourists will come into the studio to take selfies with the ‘celebrity’ jobbers.

These tours will, among other things, work as a precautionary tale for starry-eyed, newly minted middle-class Chinese people. This is what happens when the desk people overtake the factory people.

The Chinese, at the tip of their empire rising, still have time to prevent the fall of their own Rome. They clearly know that: they’ve already banned unrealistic romance movies where poor girls elope with rich guys, because they agree with that Disney does to marriage what porn is said to do to sex: raises your standards unrealistically and keeps you from doing the real thing. If the UK were a proper country, we would treat Tony Blair's essays like violent incest porn. His perception of the world is so disgusting, it makes me lose the will to live.

But I think the Chinese should not drop their guard just yet. On the flight home, I watched a worryingly desk-job-glorifying Chinese movie. The film is about financial crime and corruption in, you guessed it, the third sector. The police are unscrupulous. The legal profession is unscrupulous. But charities? “The original purpose of the non-profit ordinance was to facilitate tax exemptions,” says the protagonist’s father. The biggest mistake is the protagonist. He is a barrister. A criminal defender, not least. They need to get rid of these heroic portrayals of Chinese Keir Starmer, and fast. The second biggest mistake is the sister: an unwed 30-something career woman. Given that there are no other women speaking in the entire film, I think they are already onto correcting that.

I think of my parents when I travel. We’ve never been abroad. Our holidays were always about being with family. My world is divided into two: the one I share with my parents, that’s Greece, and the other 99% of it, which I scale alone. But that they can’t read the language I write in is a gift for a writer; that’s how God makes it up to me.

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It’s not just Starmer’s politics or policies that make me not want him as leader. I can’t stand the guy.

When Joe Biden stepped back to let Kamala Harris run, wrote that praising him for it was a good strategy. The best way for a commentator to have a constructive influence on politics is to praise people when they do something good, especially if it is against their self-interest, and to criticise them when they act selfishly (Matt brings RBG not resigning from the Supreme Court as an example).

But ultimately, Biden should be criticised for delaying and dithering to resign. His main aim was to avert the Trumpian threat to American institutions, and in that, Matt tells us, he failed catastrophically.

The Original Sin

How are we then to judge the Starmer project?

The project’s aim was to make the Labour Party a party of government, extinguish the threat of Nigel Farage’s illiberalism and neutralise the far left.

How did it go?

The Starmer project has ushered in Labour’s historic unpopularity, after winning power on an extremely thinly spread majority. They did this by picking a figurehead, Keir Starmer, who lacked the political hinterland and human touch required of a Labour leader. His weaknesses were apparent to anyone with emotional intelligence and intellectual honesty.

I came across Starmer many times before he became leader, when I was working in Parliament during the Corbyn years, and I remember thinking I could never work for him. He came across as cold and impersonal. MPs often complained about how he was simply not interested in getting to know any of them. He probably wouldn't recognise some Labour backbenchers. He proved his coldness by throwing under the bus every single person he ever worked with, from Jeremy Corbyn1, to literally all of his staffers both junior and senior from before he became leader, all the way to finally not hesitating to fire a civil servant for a situation (appointing Mandelson without passing security vetting) which was entirely out of his hands and entirely within Starmer’s own responsibility.

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I went to stay with my friend Lucy in a work-ation (work + vacation) community for tech/start-up/ artsy types in a gorgeous château in the French countryside.

Lucy is a diamond of a girl. Californian with the good-vibes/new age personality that you’d normally expect a Westminster cynic like me to recoil from. That was impossible with Lucy. Her brain power is like a fucking Ferrari. You give her the most random thing to read, and before you know it, she will have absorbed it, understood it, and memorised it. She reads my British politics articles and picks up insights I bury between the lines that even Westminster natives miss.

She went to Stanford and founded an AI startup, but left that world behind her a year ago to soul-search (go on adventures with beautiful men). I would call her from my London rathole, and she would describe her exotic, beachy escapades. I was perplexed. Yes, Lucy, I get it, papaya in Whole Foods is no match for picking the thing fresh off the tree, but “WHAT WILL YOU DO NOW?????" My late-stage capitalism brain could not comprehend how she was more or less just being, month in, month out? I am a year and a half into freelancing and have no idea where my career self stops, and anything else begins. My ‘work’ is writing, reading, debating, and talking to people. I am someone who would do that even if it meant sleeping under a bridge to sustain it, so calling it work confuses me.

Stella, you sound stressed. What do you do for pleasure?

I work.

And pick one beautiful man every quarter to throw into the meat grinder of my Substack kiss-and-tell masterpieces.

I get intense pleasure out of all of that. I thought hippies were open-minded people, why must BDSM always involve whips and chains damnit!!!!! Let a girl enjoy her productive fetish in peace!!!!!

The château community was full of positive, open, sparkly people like my friend Lucy. Everyone was up for a chat. They were very into ‘embodiment,’ which is something hard to explain in words, and easy to make fun of in words too, but revelatory in the flesh. The British mind cannot comprehend that there is another reality apart from the one language captures. “I thought there was nothing that could not be known,” wrote William Waldegrave, former Conservative minister, in his memoir, reflecting on his childhood hunger for reading.

In the spirit of experiencing everything I plan on legislating on, I agreed to try LSD with Lucy.

Lucy found an adorable, secluded green spot surrounded by vegetable patches, flower beds and fruit trees. The weather was glorious, sunny enough for a Greek, but not too hot for a Brit.

We sat opposite each other on two cyan-blue-painted wooden chairs. My beautiful Lucy smiled at me. I was in my grumpy cat mood. I had done a quick TV debate over Zoom earlier and was ruminating about political gossip that would not matter the next day, let alone at any other point in my life.

“What is your intention for this trip, Stella?” asked Lucy.

I don’t know, what’s yours?

“I want to connect deeply with this beautiful nature, the garden, the forest and just feel ..” I started grimacing, and my not-convinced-by-your-dark-magic city-rat energy took over. I questioned why all our intention-setting before workshops at this place has to be so woolly and unspecific.

I want TASKS and GOALS. A list of items I can tick off as I become more and more ENLIGHTENED!

My hope for this hippy drug was that it would make me stop ruminating about Government Guy (a guy I wrote about here who may well hate me for it). On my way to France, I found out he unfollowed me on Instagram. Presumably, it was an attempt to get people off the scent of connecting the dots and realising he is the one I am talking about. It made me sad nonetheless. It was also unnecessary. I doubt people would suspect him just by reading my paywalled post. People are more likely to know, for a fact, because I am worried about his reaction, and so have told them to comfort me. Men always take the path of most resistance.

But do you see the problem here? I am about to do a strong hallucinogenic drug, which requires you to be in a good mood to have a non-terrifying time, and here I am challenging my good-natured friend about why she is not flogging herself harder like I am.

Earlier, a Swiss guy who worked in international development asked me, “What triggers you most about this place?”

I could tell he was a fellow cynic. I told him that everyone here says they’re political, that they live their life according to their political principles, but what they often mean is they’ve checked out of the rest of the world.

I shared all that with Lucy, who frowned as my mood spiralled but continued peeling her grapefruit. She removed the white stringy bits and even the membrane with surgical precision to reveal fleshy citrus that shone like a jewel under the French sun. She handed me a chunk of clean fruit.

“Let’s have it, Stella.” It was time to take my medicine.

Our LSD was in spray form. A pal lent us a shiny red bottle and told us to spray it in our mouths 7 times for a full trip. We settled for 2.5.

Lucy brought her watercolours with her and spread them on the green grass. I blocked my social media apps for 24 hours.

I wanted to continue yapping. One of my recurring frustrations with men is that when we are alone, I feel like it is finally an opportunity for me to speak and connect with them, whereas for them, it is an opportunity to have sex. I always feel like I want to talk for longer and go deeper, but people always change the subject. I have observed my mom feeling the same.

It started kicking in after about 20 minutes. The first effect was heightened senses. I could hear the bees from across the garden. I could count the bulbs in the yellow eyes of the daisies on the ground. I could feel my temperature fluctuations moment by moment. Everything looked beautiful, almost too beautiful. But this is what life often feels like to me.

About an hour or so in, the hallucinations became stronger. I started seeing kaleidoscopic shapes in the sky. Lucy was in a fabulous mood, braiding daisies into necklaces, waltzing around the flower beds, and climbing up scaffoldings that scared me. I just wanted to continue talking to (with?) her. I didn’t want to connect with nature; I’ve always wanted to connect with humans.

Lucy, I need to pee, I shouted at her from across the garden.

Ok, let’s go pee then. I told her I don’t want to go back to the château like this, even though it's a very safe space, and everyone will be understanding. We left our stuff on that patch and walked into the ancient forest holding hands, looking for an alternative loo.

We walked and chatted and giggled. Time was hard to quantify; it felt both too slow and too fast. We started going in and out of consciousness, the ‘waves’ people describe.

I started sharing details about my family with Lucy, the hurtful bits that burden me. I told her why I write and how I feel everything intensely. I am always on the cusp of intense pleasure or intense pain, and my writing lets me cross the barrier from pain to pleasure. I torture myself by getting into intense situations that most people shy away from. I go into hostile environments, and I open myself up to difficult people. I tolerate uncertainty and risk that would crumble others. I preserve my contradictions even though I am punished for them.

She encouraged me and fed my greedy brain with information, as she always does, because her brain is massive. She told me that what I described sounds like a biography of Michelangelo that she had read. It describes ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ of his creative process.

Michelangelo was in agony painting the Sistine Chapel, lying on his back on scaffolding for four years, paint dripping in his eyes, his body destroyed, fighting with the Pope, never satisfied, always seeing the gap between what he imagined and what he could execute. He was physically torturing himself but also psychologically, with self-doubt.

But then, what kept him at it was faith in the eventual moment when it would work. When the marble reveals the form he saw inside it. When a figure comes alive under his hand, and he’s touched something transcendent. The spiritual high of creation, the feeling of channelling something bigger than yourself. The ecstasy.

Online essays about a woman’s infatuations are a poor comparison to one of the 7 wonders of the world, I hear you critics scoff. But who are you, mortals, to opine on how I speak to God?

We are finally deep enough into the forest that I feel comfortable relieving myself in public. I untangle my fingers from her palm and leave the path to go into the woodlands. I jump around bushes and mosses, almost tripping to find a sufficiently covered spot.

“It’s ok, Stella, you don’t need to struggle, nobody can see you here”

I NEED TO REMAIN DIGNIFIED, I shout at her from behind an obese tree.

Lucy is wearing a onesie, which means she has to take it off to pee. Completely naked, she squats on the side of the path, giggling.

“REMAIN DIGNIFIED FOR WHO?”

“THE TREES?”

“THE BEARS?”

“ME???”

I am very high by this point, but the profound revelation in what my wise, butt-naked Lucy says hits me like a tsunami.

Who am I trying to impress?

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The first Devil Wears Prada movie was my career coach throughout my teens and early 20s.

Stanley Touchy saying “let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke. Means it’s time for a promotion” is up there with Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire soundtrack and Britney Spears’ Work Bitch for its motivational value.

I have re-watched the first 2/3 of the film at least 10 times since it came out in 2006. I don’t care much about the bit where Andy realises there are more important things in life than work, leaves the dreamjob of hundreds of girls and goes back to her cute but ultimately low effort boyfriend. The Andy I love is the one in the Channel thigh-high boots, who even Gisele turns to look at. The Andy who attracts the malevolent gays to her rescue, but ultimately realises that no one can save her but herself. Two feet in both worlds. Grounded and yet a high flyer.

I miss that period in time, the early naughties. When we glamorised the hustle and believed in redemption through work. Private equity and the cloud economy cannibalising the economy has put an end to that fantasy.

In the 2026 sequel, the time of the grafter is over. We are well and truly in the time of grifters.

In the old world of the first film, Miranda’s cruelty had a purpose. You were trading your mate’s birthday drinks for a door-opening line on your CV and your boyfriend’s grilled cheese toastie for the aesthetic redemption of high fashion. Exploitative, but honest. In the new world where the sequel takes place, you may dedicate your entire life to an institution, sacrificing your personal life and children, and yet you will still be dethroned by the sugar baby of a super-rich idiot who tells you with a straight face that we could replace real-life models and designers with AI.

I loved it, by the way. Great crowd-pleaser movie. The writing was chef’s kiss. The acting was 10/10, no notes. The plot was serviceable too.

We pick up where we left off, 20 years later, Miranda Priestly is still running Runway, but the world has shrunk around her. HR doesn’t even let you make fun of fat people now, the hell?! Magazines are poor, and even media royalty brands are chasing clicks. At some point, Miranda is even forced to fly coach. However, we don’t get any pleasure out of watching this guardian of taste see what life is like for the rest of us plebs. It makes us sad that even the mighty have fallen.

She now hangs up her own coat. The era of throwing it on interns' desks is now a titillating office story, part of her lore. I personally still dream of a boss who’ll throw her Burberry trench on my face in exchange for some crumps of power. Would pick that over a boss who coddles me and lets me stay powerless any day.

The film opens with Miranda at a gala, looking fantabulous in a blood-red gown that feels as heavy as a baby elephant. She made an editorial mistake about some woke stuff, and she is getting cancelled online. The advertisers are not happy, and the CEO is looking for a saviour.

Our beloved Andy Sachs gets sacked from her newspaper job via text message, along with all her colleagues, a la Washington Post, just as she is about to receive an award for her investigative journalism. She goes viral for her impassionate speech defending journalism's value for journalism's sake, regardless of profit. The next day, Runway’s CEO, Miranda’s boss, calls her up and offers her a job as features editor.

Andy walks into Miranda’s office the next day like a southern belle of the ball walking into her high school reunion. Miranda doesn’t remember her and warns her that she is waiting for her to fail. The power dynamic is similar to the first film, except Andy’s got more spine this time. My late-stage capitalism brain is still envious of the opportunity to prove yourself to a bitchy, prisy boss who represents excellence, even if you have to suffer. Or maybe, especially if you have to suffer.

The villain isn’t Miranda’s anymore (although we have long established the villain was never her to begin with, it was the unimaginative boyfriend, or capitalism at the very least). The enemy now is the rich people who own the media and don’t care about media quality or integrity. In the movie, these are personified in a media-dynasty tycoon and a tech bro who want to gut Runway for parts. They’re the kind of men who think art is “content” that should be “optimised.” Like fat, clueless Andy in her cheap cerulean sweater in the first movie, but dump, rich, male and narcissistic. And now they're the ones with power over Miranda, which we all know can’t have been God’s intention when designing power-hungry matriarchs.

We get delicious scenes of Harvard McKinsey consultants spouting gibberish at Miranda. Are these scenes over-indulgent? Flogging the stereotype of the Ivy League know-nothing recruit too hard? No, they are perfectly realistic. Flogg them harder.

The stakes aren’t Andy’s soul this time, but whether an institution that makes beautiful things can survive people who only know how to extract value from them. We no longer hate the establishment with adolescent passion. We now cling to its reassuring stewardship in a time of grift and drift.

Emily Blunt’s back, now running luxury retail at Dior. Runway depends on it for advertising income, so she enjoys the occasional power move on her old boss. Though she is done dirty later, exposed as vacuous and lacking integrity.

Behind every great woman is a loyal gay man. Stanley Tucci’s Nigel is still there, subtle and wise.

There are glamorous surroundings too, a villa in Vermont, a retreat in the Hamptons, Milan Fashion Week and the film is stuffed with cameos (Gaga, Donatella, the entire New York media elite who apparently begged to be included).

Miranda has a new handsome husband who seems to care for her, genuinely. That’s nice, if maybe unrealistic. But what do I know about that world? Andy gets a bland boyfriend who works in real estate. I guess it is appropriate given Andy’s approachable character. I still dream of the on-screen chemistry Anne Hathaway is capable of (anyone remember Jake Gyllenhaal in Love and Other Drugs?). Would it kill her to get a man who challenges her for once?

By the end of the film, we are no longer mad at Runway‘s ridiculous excess. We are fired up to defend them against the billionaire vulgarians.

The end scene is mesmerising for those of us addicted to the mission.

They’re in the car, like at the end of the first movie. Miranda tells Andy she should take the book deal.

Andy had been offered a biography. $350,000 for the full story, life-changing money given she is a poor peasant, like us viewers. She didn’t go looking for it because she has integrity, but one of her interfering friends told her to cash in while Miranda’s name was still a hot commodity. She’d already said no because by this point in the film, she’s crossed back over into caring about Miranda as a human being. She both is and isn’t cut out for this high-stakes world.

Of course, Miranda found out about it. She tells Andy to take it. Write everything, she says. Write about how I am a terrible boss, obsessed with my job, and how I missed my children growing up. All the ugly bits. The $350K is good money; you should do it.

Andy’s stunned that Miranda even knows. Miranda knows the contradiction in Andy’s soul and takes pleasure in her inability to cash in. Have you learned nothing from me, young grasshopper?

How did you find out? Asks Andy, shocked. “People run to tell you this kind of thing”, says Miranda with her usual coolness, no hint of betrayal or bitterness. It’s so true. If you are a powerful person, people never miss an opportunity to make themselves useful to you. She insists that Andy should write the book. “People should know there is a cost,” she says.

But, she can’t help it. “I love working,” she tells us, looking straight into the camera, almost tearing up with delight. No, not delight. Ecstasy. Pure pleasure.

Like monkeys watching monkey porn in a lab, every workaholic in the cinema felt their pulse spike. On screen, the most mythic specimen of our species was getting the hit again, right in front of us. Is it capitalism? Calvinism? Patriarchy dressed up as liberation, or just wires crossed in our survivalist brains? Who cares. Whatever it is, you can pry it out of our cold, dead hands, and even then, we'll probably try to answer one more email.

Context for my American audience: the Machiavellian former chief of staff of the Prime Minister was summoned to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee yesterday to answer for his sins on appointing his close confidant, and friend of sex pest financier Jeffrey Epstein, as Ambassador to the US.

I have a soft spot for gingers. As a left-winger, I root for the underdog. Morgan McSweeney must be relieved that the rumours that he used the ‘f’ word to rush Foreign Office officials into vetting Mandelson have been refuted this morning by Sir Philip Barton.

Without a hint of irony, Labour’s Dark Princeling confides to the committee: “it has caused me a great deal of stress for a number of months, I don’t know why people do this in politics, put around false rumours. They phone lots of journalists, and those journalists then phone around politicians. That’s how rumours get around. It is very corrosive. It damages people’s reputations; a lot of people in No. 10 get that, and it is unfair to staff. I am grateful to the journalists who did not cover that.”

Whole books have been published about how McSweeney did exactly that to his political enemies. Does his newfound lived experience mean he now regrets any role he may or may not have allegedly had in destroying the careers, reputations and mental health of staff members in Corbyn’s office during his time as Leader of the Labour Party, or does having the wrong politics mean you are fair game for rumour-based character assassinations?

McSweeney is being questioned by Emily Thornberry. She is chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and one of the women who most objectively embodies the character traits the party and country missed in the man he picked out to lead us. Charm, charisma, joie de vivre. A functioning sense of who she is and what she believes.

Allies of Thornberry say McSweeney met with her during the 2020 Leadership election. Her political profile was similar to Keir Starmer’s at the time, hers possibly greater. Both were Europhile barristers who remained in Corbyn’s cabinet. But something about Thornberry triggered McSweeney, those allies claim. He couldn’t trust her. She was a star, and he was looking for loyal troopers: future cannon fodder. No matter how much she tried to signal discipline, his opinion never changed.

Even when, in the aftermath of the October 7th massacre, she betrayed her deepest values to carry the muffled no10 line that “Israel has a right to defend herself.” The spectre of the 2014 ‘white van man’ story was still looming over her, when Ed Miliband, then leader, panicked and fired her on the spot, lest he looked any less flag-loving than his New Labour legacy spinners instructed. And so, in what was likely her last chance to be a minister in a Labour government, Emily Thornberry was once again left without a frontbench brief by men who don’t feel they can control her. She ran for chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and here we are now.

McSweeney is wearing the Labour man uniform. Polyester blue suit. Burgundy tie. White shirt. He looks young and small, even though he is 49. Some men grow up slowly. He began his testimony with a land acknowledgement to the women and girls harmed by Jeffrey Epstein, and with that behind him, he proceeded to never mention them again.

“Wasn’t Mandelson an indispensable confidant for you?” says Thornberry. McSweeney says he was 44 by the time he sought his advice. In no need of mentors, thank you very much. They brought in some extremely experienced people, such as Liz Lloyd and Jonathan Powell. He politely rejects the New Statesman reported quote about him from February, “not even breathing without asking Mandelson first.”

This is not a hearing about Lord Mandelson’s security vetting. It is a hearing on whether Peter Mandelson was the man behind Morgan McSweeney, given that Westminster has already long established that Morgan McSweeney was the man behind Keir Starmer.

Thornberry casts McSweeney’s mind back to happier times. The beginning of the millennium, 2001, when he was an intern on Excalibur, the New Labour attack unit. “One of its functions was to keep an eye on MPs seen as disloyal.” What she means is, who taught you to be ruthless with people in your own party? When did the cancer of Labour factionalism and obsession with staying on message first take root?

A few months ago, outside a pub in Westminster, I found out the backstory to Thornberry’s most fateful political moment. I met the man, a UKIP spin doctor, who framed her by screenshotting her post of the flat with the St George’s flags and sent it to the right-wing tabloids: “Labour frontbencher sneering at the English working class.” It was an incredibly successful hit job. But he told me he now realised the punishment didn’t fit the crime. Almost a decade later, his mother died. Blinded by grief, he went to a tiny chapel inside Westminster Abbey, lit a candle, and posted a photo of the moment. Thornberry, who had never met him, messaged: “A year ago, my mum died, and I went to the same chapel. I hope you are alright x.” This is a man whom a mainstream Labour politician would never want to be seen associating with. But Thornberry treating him like a human made him realise she wasn’t the smug caricature he’d created of her.

***

McSweeney rejects the claim that Mandelson was given access to a secret, off-the-books Google spreadsheet listing potential Parliamentary candidates. Any Labour insider worth their salt will tell you spreadsheets are a tried-and-tested method for Labour puppet masters. (And who can forget the Tory equivalent document, suspected to be the creation of Grant Schapps.) “We did everything on the books,” McSweeney reassures us. By books, presumably, he refers to the four tomes written with direct testimonials from him and his allies about how Starmer’s entire leadership project was a secret off-the-books operation.

Of course, it was Keir Starmer who decided to appoint Mandelson. There is no record of the decision or the discussions that led Mandelson from not even being a suggestion for the American Ambassador (it was Mandelson himself who put himself forward, McSweeney claims) to being the preferred appointment. Despite Trump’s people telling McSweeney they were happy with the previous Ambassador.

As for Matthew Doyle, his time at No.10 was coming to an end, so the search began for suitable alternative roles, positions he would, claims McSweeney, need to apply for like everyone else. This is not what Olly Robbins told the committee a week ago, who said that Doyle would have been a political appointment and therefore would have expected to be appointed without pushback, just like Mandelson. Doyle wasn’t interested anyway, so nothing progressed.

Except for his peerage.

McSweeney frames it as “a duty of care to someone leaving.” Have you heard of the phrase ‘jobs for the boys’, asks Thornberry, who presumably received no such care package when she was replaced by Keir Starmer’s personal close friend Richard Hermer.

“It’s the opposite of jobs for the boys, he was losing his job!” says McSweeney. “Don’t you think this is a little odd, a little shameful?” she asks him.

“Well, we said the same to senior women”, he responds. “Like Sue Gray, what job was she given, for example?” says Thornberry.

McSweeney is 49. Like Mandelson, he has plenty of time to seek redemption. Emily Thornberry showed compassion and grace to a UKIP spin doctor who tried to destroy her. Has McSweeney learned anything from his paranoia and hubris? Can he see that his control-freakery emasculated his colleagues to the point where Starmer now presides over the Labour party he deserves: defanged, timid and insincere.

Did people love McSweeney, or were they afraid of him? Was he a political genius who made the Labour party government ready, or was he just allegedly able to connect his political allies with donors and rat his political enemies to the press?

I, for one, believe Morgan McSweeney. Peter Mandelson did not control him. The Irishman has no one to blame but himself.

Mahmood is having a similar effect on Labour’s internal immigration debate as Enoch Powell did on the national conversation. I am by no means comparing their rhetoric, hear me out. Right-wingers like Jacob Rees-Mogg have always argued Powell was terrible for the Conservatives’ immigration policy because his ‘rivers of blood’ speech inflamed the debate. From then on, any right-winger to keep on carbing immigration could be compared to him, or that’s the right-wingers’ argument anyway.

Because of Mahmood’s aggressive media stints, any attempt to have a serious conversation about Labour’s immigration policy will now get sucked into comparison with her tough talk. The Times reports that Angela Rayner’s allies (strongly rebutted by her spokesperson) say the price of her returning to the Cabinet would be sacking Mahmood. They also said Steve Reed, the Housing Secretary, would need to go too.

Mahmood, being a female Muslim Labour Home Secretary, could easily get the attention of the mainstream and right-wing papers and channels that Morgan McSweeney’s strategy said Labour needed to woo. Other cabinet members had mostly boring policy announcements to make, and opportunities for lurid footage for viral TikToks were limited. Mahmood, on the other hand, has the kind of brief where she could put on her ankle-length cloak and red lipstick and stare menacingly at stripped detention centre beds.

In January this year, the Home Office launched a TikTok channel called “securebordersuk” modelled on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation videos. They published videos with titles like “Illegal migrants arrive at newly expanded detention facility before being returned”, explicitly copying the American practice of broadcasting enforcement actions as deterrence. Mahmood defended this by saying, “There is no place for illegal working in our communities. That is why we have surged enforcement activity to the highest level in British history so illegal migrants in the black economy have nowhere to hide.”

Mahmood has routinely invoked the Danish model, which involves things no Labour minister should even contemplate, even though she has not adopted its most restrictive elements. The temptation to dominate the media was too good to pass up and too easy to execute. But was that helpful? and for whom? Left-leaning announcements like free school meals got completely overshadowed. Labour’s natural voting base was embarrassed. Even though Labour voters’ views on how immigration should be dealt with are mixed, most agree that the Boris wave made no sense. But that’s a policy question, not a referendum on the people who uprooted their lives to come take care of British grandparents, in the hopes of settling. This is why immigration rhetoric must never be aggressive. It’s an ugly sight that inflames and divides. No good comes of it.

She also has baggage from her Labour Together days, where she wrote an article reassuring Labour members that Labour Together is not connected to any of the leadership campaigns and that the data gathered by their all-member surveys would not be shared with any of the campaigns. She also reaffirmed that all of Labour Together’s funding was submitted to the Electoral Commission, which we now know Morgan McSweeney had not done, presumably so that Labour members still primed by Corbyn don’t get spooked. This makes her a toxic vector for ‘right-wing’ policies. I have read several times that privately, she expressed concerns during the height of the war in Gaza about Labour’s stance. Had she spoken up about it, she could have softened her image, shown that she cares. Had she connected her asylum reforms with foreign policy, saying if you don’t want refugees, not carpet bombing their towns is a great first step, there could have been more goodwill.

Her immigration reforms are strict, and some, I find, are cruel for no reason (e.g., cancelling student visas, even for scholarship students? Come on). But the one Labour’s soft left and the unions are having the most trouble with is that she is extending the period a social care worker must wait to apply for indefinite leave to remain from 5 years to 10 years. This is not at all unusual compared to other countries, indeed it is still generous, but she is applying it retroactively to those already here. That’s a bad precedent for whoever could come next. The soft left and unions also argue this offends their sense of natural justice- and it is the quality of British people to object to things like that that makes me so loyal to them. But as a third-world Greek, I was confused about why THAT one, specifically, was so controversial. Extending the waiting time does not mean people on social care visas have to return - as I understand it, though correct me if I am wrong. It means they have to continue working as social care workers for that time- a good thing as we need them. Now, you may say this is unfair because they don’t want to have to be restrained, and I get that, I have friends from commonwealth countries here too who are on social care or similar visas and they are counting down the days till they can do another job, but that kind of defeats the purpose of granting visas for a specific profession that we are lacking to begin with. Some of the quotes I read in the Guardian were not helpful in that regard because they were interviewing people with degrees and master’s on social care visas who were saying they just want an opportunity to live the life Mahmood lived, which again defeats their argument because it makes, or shows, social care visas to be a low barrier entry to migrating to the UK.

To stop that, someone from the top would need to take the reins of Labour’s narrative, and as we already established, no one who could do that was allowed to, and those allowed to simply could never.

Shabana Mahmood may be having the opposite effect on immigration policy than the one she intended, and it is a lesson campaigners across the political spectrum refuse to take. Controversial policies should be done and not heard, and never boasted about. Trans rights and Palestine are two other issues where campaigners make the mistake of indulging in attention-grabbing over substantive concession-building.

Like many policy issues, people struggle with the inherent injustice of the world, which means no good solutions exist, only more or less bad ones.

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Children, children, children. You’ve been putting up with my esoteric substacks like champs. Thank you for your continuous loyalty. I’ve been back home for Greekster for the last week, and I am currently on my way to France to stay at a château that’s a community for start-ups, tech, and arts-type people.

My week in Greece has been calm and pleasant. Mom was fresh out of emergency surgery, which meant she was too weak to be difficult. It was also Easter, so whenever she acted like she needed an exorcism, I could joke about fasting, praying, or “it’s a holy day!!” to make her shut up. I made the grave error of letting her take me to the ear doctor for a routine check-up, and one of the graphs showed the exact same pattern that had led to my dad’s brain tumour and eventual surgery and disability. It’s only present in 0,5% of the population, so the doctor asked that I do an MRI scan of my brain in the next year or so. My mother, of course, took that to mean I must cancel my tickets and stay in Greece forever. Not to worry, dear reader. I hear the UK has splendid disability benefits for immigrants, so I shall be doing no such thing!

The New Statesman cover story this week is all about British young women’s opinions on politics and men. There is an excellent reported long piece by Emily Lawford, coupled with data from Scarlett McGuire’s Merlin Strategies.

The headline poll is that women in the 18-30 age bracket represent the UK's most left-leaning demographic group by a significant margin. They express 26% lower positive sentiment toward capitalism than their male counterparts, and are considerably less confident that the economic systems operate to their benefit. Their outlook on what lies ahead, personally and collectively, is bleak (presumably not much difference with ze boys here). Their attitudes toward young men are substantially more negative than the attitudes young men hold toward them.

Aaron Bastani on X pointed out that this basically still says that even women under 25 are overwhelmingly NOT negative about men. I would add that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to still look at the opposite gender as a different species unworthy of compassion, so we can chill our tits.

Emily spoke to a number of young female lefty influencers and consumed their content. Some on the Xitter left commented that the descriptions were gleeful, but I don’t think they were. I think that it’s just that we have culturally demonised the way young left-wingers dress, speak and behave, when the youth of any other generation would have seemed just as gratuiously self-righteous and decadent.

Apart from said left-wingers, who were right in detecting that some right-wing or manosphere adjacent people would rejoice in the descriptions of the young ‘radicalised’ women, both feminists and feminism sceptics found the article and the research enlightening, if not confirming of their pre-existing biases (in which case, they found it orgasmic).

In particular, the rightoid twiterati loved this bit:

But, strikingly, the polling done for the New Statesman suggests more privileged women are the most pessimistic of all. Women in middle-class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society, and are less likely to believe that if they work hard, they will succeed in life when compared with their working-class counterparts. Young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women, yet young women are far more financially cynical: they are 21 points less likely than young men to believe they will ever out-earn their parents. White women are more likely to feel the country is racist than non-white women.

I get it. Posh white women can be annoying sometimes, sure. They snark at me too, with my feral Greek manners and self-pleased audacity. But this is hardly a conclusive damnation of white girls who were raised in comfort. But let me play devil’s advocate: on the one hand, believing the country is more racist than non-white women, maybe could be because they are too woke, but maybe its because they have the social education to know that’s what expected of them to respond, or because posh white women get to actually listen to what posh white men say when nobody is recording them. At the après-ski in Verbier, in the early hours of the morning after their college May ball, at the Harligham Club’s spring BBQs, their civilised sensibilities are repeatedly assaulted by their redpilled male counterparts.

In another excerpt, a girl complained that men are “not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic; they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot. If a man is attracted to you, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny. If he doesn’t fancy you, he won’t bother. “I feel like a lot of it is quite sexually motivated with men.”

I have a high tolerance for non-PC jokes, because I think satire requires you to offend the sacred, and that includes our rightful virtues of tolerance and equality. But on the toxic misogyny lectures, the girl is on the money. As I am writing this, one such man is sending me a reel on Instagram about George Orwell’s observations of feminine authoritarianism: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” He is trying to provoke me because he doesn’t know how to say “I am lonely, and you are beautiful”. The guy in question is a public school boy my age. Tall, very handsome, nerdy. He has a sense of humour and a dry charm. Yet he is single, because he just cannot stop himself. He has tried dating me twice, and both times I extricated myself once he started saying things to me that were not just rude but potentially harmful to my long-term confidence and mental health. Lest people unfamiliar with my game accuse me of exaggerating (you have to hit on the head with a flip-flop before I realise you are bullying me), I will share some of the things he said the second time, when presumably he has matured. He would say, and I sincerely believe he means it, that I am an impressive woman who would be an asset to someone like him. He said he can see why I’ve been successful as a political commentator despite being a foreigner. I carry and express myself with gravitas. He also has repeatedly tried to make me agree that people prefer being with people of their own nationality and that being white English is obviously preferable. He has also told me of previous girlfriends who were white English and well to do in all the ways we have covered here I am not, and how this is something that’s important to him. He believes denying that would make him a hypocrite. He admits it himself that he’s been exposed to incel content online, and he believes that most women hate men and are trying to manipulate him. I’ve been patient with him because I am no stranger to the unfortunate combination of being both sensitive and prickly. It makes for an undeservedly lonely existence. But there is too much barbed wire to get to him, and why should I bleed for a man who would look down on my parents?

It also makes sense that young women are more financially cynical. At a time when a double income is absolutely vital, but salaries are stagnating, these women are told that their gender is gold diggers who don’t want to see men’s inner worth. Despite data showing that it is men who, in fact, may be the hypergamous ones. pointed out a study which compared income levels of couples from 2001 to 2021. We talk about these poor men who won’t be picked by snooty middle-class women, as if there aren’t poor women who would like a partner as long as they don’t have to provide for him alongside providing for their children. The study found that while poor and rich men are getting married less, proportionally the same for women, those earning the most are getting married more than they used to, while it is poorer women who are getting married at significantly lower levels. I would argue that it was never the case that a woman’s net worth was not an issue in marriage. Dowries were, and still are, present in many cultures. Studies from previous decades, which show ‘hypergamous’ women do not always take into consideration the family dowry of women, only their income and education level, in which case, yes, obviously, many men got married to women with lesser careers than them, as most women did not have careers. Kate suggests that this shows that men do marry for money, and my anecdotal observations of my male friends confirm that.

The Xitter mandem was delighted to see what they believed was confirmation of their suspicions that women are weepy losers:

Ash first noticed that men felt the impact of the war less keenly when she lived on the 2024 encampments outside the Student Union. One May evening, Israel struck a Palestinian camp in Tel al-Sultan in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack caused a blaze that set tents alight and killed 45 people. Ash remembered watching videos of the attack, feeling cold and hopeless. Several women began openly weeping. The male students, meanwhile, were preoccupied with planning the next day’s protest. “I feel like sometimes men don’t feel the gravity of the thousands of people that have died,” Ash told me. “Men have to take a step back to actually see the situation and empathise with the person, but they don’t. If the system is set up for you to benefit, it doesn’t really matter.”

Again, this description is only offensive if you think there is anything bad with what the young gal is expressing. I can see how Ash comes across as slightly miserable but I can also totally see her point. It is exhausting being a sensitive woman amongst goal-oriented men. You can say that makes you more dysfunctional in an environment with competing stressors and deliverables because it paralyses you, but it also makes you a more empathetic and creative person. Isn’t the complaint by the meninists that schools teach young boys and don’t let them express their innate aggressiveness and sense of adventure? With the same logic, why penalise women for leaning into their feminine mystique and feeling deeply?

did an excellent piece on female hysteria according to Zizek and Paglia, both of whom said that rather than a mental dysfunction, it is a symptom of women’s brains and sensory systems overfunctioning:

Hysteria, he claims, is a sign of human subjectivity—self-awareness—at its purest and most intense. The woman is driven to hysteria not by her lack of intelligence, but by the overflowing of her intelligence. The woman is so aware of the human dynamics at play, of her own emotions, that the information overload causes her to short-circuit and explode.

What men call our “rationality” is really a cover for our limited scope of knowledge. Bare facts, dry objectivity—tunnel vision. It may be easier for the man to hone in on the details and get the job done without letting his emotions get in the way. But this doesn’t mean he’s more “intelligent.”

Hysterical women are geniuses, destined to feel sad and anxious around emotionally underfunctioning men who cannot pick up on the nuances that make women’s internal lives so much more textured. Sure, not all men, not all women, but if the right gets to revel in stereotypes, then so can I.

Women and men are diverging just as so much of society is fracturing because we are consuming completely different media. We grow up in shared spaces but in completely separate and algorithmically pre-ordained information ecosystems- separate by necessity, as our demographic is first and foremost what determines what we see on our screen, so by definition, men and women cannot see the same information because they also don’t consume the same products. We have fewer and fewer common institutions, traditions and notions to bring us together.

I asked a couple of weeks, whether men have inner lives:

Men’s interiority is my God. Looking for it is my religion. I battle doubt. He tests my faith. Does he really exist, or does my desperation for him to exist make me see evidence of it where there is none? I pore over this man’s scribbles on the margins of this wholesome book, like a medieval scholar deciphering biblical texts.

And my delight when I realised a date had an interest in women’s rich interiority:

I kneel in front of his bookcase and start testing him. I am intrigued to find Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, a millennial woman’s romantic bible. He loved it, he says, his ex gave it to him to read on holidays. He was amazed at the depth of women’s interiority. I was taken by his motivation to grasp it. Women who like men are a dime a dozen. Men who like women are rare.

I get into men-hating trances sometimes too, and having beloved male relatives does not necessarily protect you from feeling gloomy about them. If anything, it reaffirms that even the best men (my dad and brother) are guilty of some of the usual sins of the male sex. For example, I can see how my ever-patient and loving Dad would make my mother feel lonely with his inability to articulate himself in more than one sentence at a time. My mother, being a quintessentially hysterical woman with a brain and nervous system that travels at the speed of light, must have always craved a partner she could connect with more deeply. I think they connected eventually by staying alongside each other as they fought through life. But mom lectures and dad listens. I know Mom craves to have the kinds of rambling, animated conversations I get to have with my intellectual British boys.

What helps me overcome feelings of desperation that, as a straight woman, I am forever tethered to the asshole gender is my immense fondness for men, and bottomless desire for them. Not heteropesimism. Heteromasochism, if you will. Rather than being bitter, I try to feel curious. Who hurt you, my sweets, before I graced you with my healing presence? I am forever a student at a university that promises no degrees, no employment, and to make me none the wiser should I submit myself to its punishing curriculum. I do it anyway, for the love of cocks books.

And for when I feel shortchanged because men do not show the same curiosity and patience I believe I show them, I remember Ethan Hawke (immemorable star of the best trilogy in the world: Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, After Midnight) on the red carpet, asked to give advice to those of us suffering from chronic unrequited love:

The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken; you’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive.

I’ve now arrived in Paris and missed the last train to the château. I happened to know that one of the right-wingers I harass on Xitter is here, we have a para-professional relationship, and I am staying with him. And no, I shall not be paying with my dignity, but it’s funny, isn’t it? Despite my believing he should not get the vote, we manage to hang out civilly twice a year, and tonight he is kind of saving me? I woke up at 6:00 am this morning for the radio, did an interview recording in Greek (!) for a Greek online media outlet, then took two different flights and did another radio shift just after I landed at Charles De Gaul and was informed that the literal Satan, Peter Mandelson, did not pass vetting and was nonetheless handed the Ambassadorship role. Now I am on the train to D’Orsay, eating the meatball sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs my dad packed in my suitcase for exactly this unlikely situation. Men, hey? Not that bad when you need them.

Donate to my British citizenship fund!

Where I am from, calling someone names is a sign of intimacy. The word ‘malaka’, the Greek equivalent of ‘asshole’ ( the direct translation is ‘masturbator’), is used like Brits use the word ‘mate’.

Oi mate, what’s up?

Ela malaka! ti kaneis;

Same thing.

In my culture, we never grow out of teasing those we fancy. We pull the ponytails of our crushes waaaaay past primary school. Shouting is very common and appropriate for a range of emotions. We shout when we joke (to make sure the whole table hears you and, in turn, makes fun of your target with you). We shout when we argue, and it is perfectly possible, indeed most likely, that a shouting match is followed by breaking the ice with a ‘Malaka’, and then we move on with our day/meal like nothing happened.

I was never told it explicitly, but something in the way I was raised makes responses that do not seem to match the tone or to grasp the severity of what they address feel threatening. I found that out the hard way, through my English boyfriends. English men never match my tone. My first boyfriend, who declawed me for all the future ones, would even apologise for upsetting me sometimes, which felt therapeutic. Stonewalling is what terrifies me. My Brits let me down so badly when they do that. I am taken by their onion-like personalities. I adapt to their layered exteriors because I preach to anyone who’ll listen that their cores are worth the trouble. And this is how they repay me! I have spent over a decade training my wit like a show pony- my trump card when I sense their pulse quickening. But when my charm fails me, and they leave me hanging, I feel like a clown.

I am writing this at the airport in Athens, waiting for my connecting flight to my hometown, Thessaloniki. I am surrounded by angry Greeks shouting at each other, themselves, the ether. They used to barely register when I was a teenager, but now their presence slaps me in the face. It’s like they are shouting at me, personally, saying, “You sound like this, too”

I avoid fatigue because when I’m tired, I can’t hold the British society mask in place. I slept less than an hour last night. I did my first TV grift shift from midnight to 3 am, Uber home, closed my suitcase, two hours snuggling with the cat, then back out for two more media shifts on opposite sides of London before catching the train west to Heathrow. I started running on the platform and stopped immediately when I clocked how disturbed the people around me looked. I’m more afraid of being rude to strangers than I am of missing my flight. I live life haunted by the embarrassed faces of my English ex-boyfriends, when my voice hit one decibel too high, or I skipped the golden word (please). Is that why they left you? My mom used to ask before I stopped sharing my personal life with her.

British people get angry too, but they won’t tell you about it. They like it that way, the idea that you live in fear of their judgment. Your punishment for speaking up, out, or over is that you will never really know what they made of it. Guessing is terrifying. The possibilities are endless. What did you actually say, you stupid whore?

Brits argue, too, but strictly in private. They sound like wild animals that escaped captivity when they do. You think Greek women are angry? Try a Pauline girl with bulimia. British people see it as their civic duty to control their emotions at all times. The so-called ‘stiff upper lip’. I don’t think that ‘woke therapy culture’ has done much to ameliorate it. I think it has led to more British people faking expressing their emotions, but if you are not in touch with them to begin with, what are you even expressing?

Is their method preferable to my method? Emotions flow through me at all times. I sense that it makes Brits scared of my reactions, because they feel they can’t predict them. But the beauty of being in touch with your feelings is that you don’t have to control them. Your friends and partner don’t have to either. I don’t need people to know how to make me stop crying. I am not trying to stop crying; my pipes need regular unblocking. I just want them not to think less of me when I spend fifteen minutes in the bathroom in the middle of dinner.

Being as sensitive as I am to my own emotions, I pick up on those of others effortlessly. My heart breaks into a million little pieces when my Brits withdraw from me, and I sense fear emanating from their averted gaze (fear of what? of me? ok then :( ).

On this, I put my foot down. Brits, I’ve adapted to your ways on so many other aspects of life. I take your lead where you’ve produced results. But Greeks are thousands of years ahead of you when it comes to our dramas.

I don’t worry about dying without having ever been known. I am an open book, a generous writer, a patient narrator. But what of all those special humans I’ve collected who claim to want nothing more from me than to be allowed to collect dust somewhere in my universe? What a waste. Imagine meeting millenial Homer, looking for her Helen, her Paris, her Hector.

Send her your drunken voice notes IMMEDIATELY; she wants to know about your wooden horse.

donate to my British citizenship

You see, despite my extreme survivorship privilege, I am a total mood slut. I find mood swings absolutely irresistible. I need a chastity belt for my tear glands. A coil fitted on my heart. A keen GP would put me on antidepressants or mood stabilisers. But I know better. I am a reader of history, a woman of letters. I recognise my demons in the hollowed cheeks and piercing eyes of people who, in previous centuries, burned out early. Children crying in public don’t repel me. They are my clarion call. I can’t get over roadkill, and why should I? I mourn people decades before they die. I am proud of them well before they earn it. I never manage to stay angry at anyone, including myself.

I reach my low points at night, immobilised under duvet and cat. I relax my grip on reality, and demons jump in to push their propaganda. What is it this time? Fear and pain are universal; the details are inconsequential. There is always more where this came from. Your hopes are crushed, your people are dead. You are a member of the human race.

On earth, we mostly suffer, but sometimes one of us writes a very good book, and then millions of us feast on it for centuries. Tens of thousands of years ago, a literal Neanderthal mixed crushed wheat with water, and look at us now tucking into napolitanas.

Unblock yourself with this one weird trick: say that you did kill yourself. You killed the part of you that wants to be beautiful, the part of you that wants to be rich, famous, to be chosen, to be loved. Now what’s left? You are free.

The options are limitless. Put on shoes, leave the house. Don’t worry about how you look- remember you are dead! And therefore, invisible. You are an observer of the world’s marvels. Unburdened by the expectation that you need to participate, you can lie on the grass and look at the sky. Turn your cheek to the mud. Don’t worry if there are bugs; they can’t hurt the already dead. Buy a pristine chocolate cake. Push your index finger into the ganache. Lick it clean, repeat. It’s your cake, ruin it, kill it, it’s already dead too. You are the worms feeding on its rotten flesh.

Maybe you are convinced you are a lost cause. You will never be happy. Your impediments are too many, the world is too harsh. You will never have a lover, a family, or a house. But you will always have us. The other humans who played and lost- that’s most, if not all, of us. Your pain is our pain, your loss is our loss, your fear is our fear. Lonely, yes. Alone; never. The final boss of don’t kill yourself? If you are convinced you can’t be helped, help someone else. Share my extreme confidence to think I can compel you to not kill yourself, despite having never even wanted to harm my mother’s child.

Bad pizza is still pretty good.