Vaping is one of the most successful public health products of the last decade.

It is the single most effective way to get people to stop smoking. It has the ability to save millions of lives and may have already done so. And yet it is maligned, mocked, scolded, restricted and and sometimes banned. Even in a relatively tolerant regulatory environment like the UK, vaping is so unpopular that politicians will attack it to boost their popularity. “Who actually asked for this?” Andy Burnham said on Instagram recently. “Another vape shop… another dodgy business opening where something useful used to be.”

The social disdain towards vaping is not just foolhardy, it is actively harmful to public health. I have listened many times, grinding my teeth, as smokers tell me that they wouldn’t dare switch to vape because it’s too dangerous. A madness. I have visited several countries which literally have a tougher regulatory regime against vapes than they do against cigarettes. Insanity.

In spring, I went to Australia. I travelled via Doha in Qatar on my journey out and then, because of the Iran war, via Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia on my way back. Throughout that trip, I did not touch foot in a country where vaping is fully legal and accepted. In Qatar, vapes are banned. In Australia, they can only be sold in a pharmaceutical setting. In Malaysia, they were very heavily restricted and the government recently approved a full nationwide prohibition. And yet in every single one of these countries, cigarettes are freely available. That is a lunatic state of affairs. No-one with even a cursory grasp of the science would ever propose such a thing.

People will give you all sorts of reasons why they dislike vaping. They don’t like the sickly sweet smell of it when someone unleashes a cloud on the street. They worry about it introducing a new generation to nicotine addiction, they worry about the waste, they worry that vaping allows tobacco companies to access a new consumer base. These are all valid, to various degrees. But the real reason vaping is unpopular is much simpler. It is because it is pleasurable.

Somewhere deep in our minds is an inflexible Protestant assumption that quitting an addiction must be painful. We imagine the raw-dog sobriety, the empty flat with a mattress on the floor and hallucinatory images of horror-babies crawling across the ceiling, the tension and suffering, the virtue that comes from purity and denial.

We imagine suffering and assume that suffering must be a core part of the cleansing process provided by abstinence. This is because we project onto drugs many of our own neuroses about our lack of discipline and gluttony.

This is a problem and not just because it is puritanical and quasi-religious and utter fucking nonsense. It’s a problem because it is ineffective. As I’ve written before, the best first step to draw someone away from a drug is not to demand that they stop doing it. It is to get them to change the delivery mechanism. This separates their simple addiction to the substance from all the associations which they have with it - the ritual, the social scene, the smell, the connected physical effects.

For many people, abstinence provides salvation. But for most, the best way to break an addiction is to transition to a close approximation of the thing they like while removing as many of the harmful effects as possible. In the case of nicotine this is actually fairly easy to achieve, because the drug itself is harmless - it is the associated effects of smoking that are dangerous.

Vaping is therefore a tremendously helpful invention. It heats a liquid - usually comprising propylene glycol, glycerin, nicotine and flavouring and the resulting aerosol is inhaled by the user. This closely replicates the cigarette experience, but without the toxins or the combustion. No tar, no known carcinogens, no carbon monoxide.

Subscribe now

The history of vaping is essentially the history of trying to replicate the act of smoking as closely as possible, initially visually and ultimately through the bodily experience. There have been three waves. The earlier models were called cig-a-likes, and were typically designed like fake cigarettes. They looked the part, but had very low nicotine levels. Later, vapes were primarily sold with tanks, which users could fill with a liquid of their choice - mixing flavours and nicotine strengths. This was much more effective, but aesthetically and sensually it pulled them further from the cigarette experience. It was also very DIY, a techie hobby with notes of wine tasting.

Then came nicotine salt. This was the holy grail. The salt allowed for the delivery of higher nicotine levels with an instant impact on the brain, replicating almost exactly the pharmacokinetic profile of nicotine delivery from cigarettes. They felt like a cigarette: in the draw, in the throat, in the mind, in the blood. And they could do so with small batteries, meaning they were light and small. This is when brands like Lost Mary took off and vapes began to move from specialist shops to the till at the newsagent.

Naturally they became popular with teenagers as well as adults. This is not good. Vaping should be for people quitting smoking, not for people looking for fun. But we need to remember that teenagers often smoke. Less so than before, and in often dwindling numbers, but they do. We are therefore not starting at a baseline of zero. Many of these kids would have otherwise started smoking, but now they start vaping, which is much safer. Should we be complacent about it? No. Should we try to stop it? Yes. But also we should not adopt the naive but seemingly very popular view that this is some fresh new epidemic, rather than a partial substitute for what would have been happening anyway.

The success of vaping triggered an associated moral alarm about colourful packaging and flavours. A recent Mirror article, for instance, stated without the remotest critical assessment that vapes were “being targeted at children with bright colours and fruit flavours”. Then-health secretary, Wes Streeting, who really is quite staggeringly foolish on this issue, said that kids were “no doubt enticed by bright packaging, sweet flavours and aggressive promotion”.

The packaging of vapes is garish and ugly. I would actually welcome some kind of modest regulation in this area because it might lead to more sophisticated packaging. But there is something a bit weird about the idea that coloured packaging and fruit flavours appeal only to children. Look at the other products on a supermarket shelf. Look at the magazine rack. Look at the list of TV shows on a streaming service. They have colours.

The same is true for fruit flavours. I am 44 years old. I eat mangos. They are nice. Mangos are not the preserve of pubescent children. Fruit flavours are enjoyed by adults and children alike. The government will likely ban fruit flavoured vapes soon, but this is a testament to the growing hysteria around this issue rather than any kind of rational analysis.

In 2019 there was a health scare. Some 2,800 people were hospitalised and 68 people died in the US from severe lung injury connected to vaping. At the time, experts were baffled. None of the data pointed to this kind of immediate severe health risk. Eventually it was discovered that there were rigged black market drug vapes - cannabis products adulterated with vitamin E acetate. But the popular impact was severe, around the world. This is the point where people started believing that vapes were much more dangerous than they really were. I remember vaping next to a woman outside a bar in the US. “You should be careful,” she told me, as she put her cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “Those things will kill you.” I felt as if I was losing my mind.

There’s been a raft of anti-vaping legislation around the world. Bans, sure, but also pointless prohibitions. The EU Tobacco Products Directive, for instance, does not allow sales of liquids with nicotine content higher than 20 mg/mL. This is simply a very silly thing to legislate for. Nicotine itself is not harmful. Upping the nicotine level is precisely what helps smokers make the switch. It’s the kind of thing you do if you adopt an Old Testament view towards the horror of addiction as a concept, rather than embrace the goal of harm minimisation.

Subscribe now

This week, the Cochrane Library released its latest review of vaping as a method to help people quit smoking.

Cochrane reports are the gold standard, they are Christmas for nerds. Cochrane provides arguably the highest tier in evidence-based medicine. This is because it is a systematic review - a synthesis of all available evidence using randomised controlled trials on a specific clinical question. It therefore escapes the problems with single studies - a defect there, a lack of data here. Instead, it brings the existing quality evidence base together for an overview.

Cochrane has been running this review since 2014. The latest update includes an additional nine studies, bringing it to a total of 80, representing 29,861 participants. Forty studies were conducted in the USA, 16 in the UK, six in Australia, five in Greece, and then a smattering from Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Turkey.

The core purpose of the project is to find out what is most effective to get people off cigarettes: Vaping with nicotine, vaping with no nicotine, nicotine replacement therapy like the traditional patches or gum, or no help at all except for behavioural support - the raw dog approach. It also aims to see whether there are any negative health effects from vaping.

The introduction to the report highlights the specific point on the role of pleasure and why we might try to replicate it rather than condemn it. It is rational, clear-sighted and concerned truthfully about reducing smoking rather than enforcing a purification ritual.

Until vapes were invented, smokers were handed these little packs of nicotine-replacement-therapy-hell by the NHS: gum, patches, and in my case, back in the day, a stress ball. It was that final item which let me know, with utter certainty, that the person who devised this pack had never smoked. It was like trying to cure someone’s loneliness by giving them a photo of a human face.

“One of the limitations of traditional nicotine replacement therapies,” the Cochrane review found, “is that, apart from providing nicotine more slowly and at lower levels than smoking, none adequately addresses the sensory, behavioural, and/or social aspects of smoking that people who have smoked miss when they stop (e.g. holding a cigarette in their hands, taking a puff, their enjoyment of smoking, and feeling part of a group).” In other words: the pleasure.

Interestingly, qualitative studies found that vapers shared a sense of identity with other users and report pleasure and enjoyment of use. This, the authors found, suggests that electronic cigarettes “may be viewed less as medical cessation aids but rather as acceptable alternatives to tobacco smoking”.

That right there is the sweet spot. That’s exactly where we want to be: with someone who wants to give up smoking, wondering if they’ll ever be able to do it, looking at one of these devices in the newsagent and thinking - fuck it, might as well give it a go. Someone thinking of this act not as denial but as alternate pleasure.

There was never any moral panic about nicotine gum. Why? Because it never gave anyone any pleasure. But this, of course, was also why it was ineffective. There is a panic about vaping, because it does give pleasure. But the very variable which makes it so objectionable is precisely why it is so effective.

Subscribe now

The results of the review are strong. It found that nicotine vapes were more effective than nicotine replacement therapy, increasing the success rate by about 60%, from around six in every 100 managing to quit smoking to one in every ten.

For what it’s worth - and I appreciate this is me shooting my mouth off rather than science - I suspect even this is an underestimate. Anyone who knows smokers would report that vaping helped more than one in ten get off cigarettes. You get a sense of why that might be when you delve into the individual studies in the Cochrane review. Twenty‐three studies, for instance, exclusively recruited participants who were not motivated to quit smoking. That’s a harsh dataset. One study provided users with a vape that had nicotine levels so low the researchers just went ahead and incorporated it into the non-nicotine vape studies. That’s unlikely to be particularly effective to help someone off cigarettes.

This is not a flaw in the Cochrane review, it is an advantage. It’s the kind of thing which makes the results so convincing, by showing how tough the system is to game. With that breadth of data, any positive result shows really strong signs of validity. And what we can now say with a very high degree of certainty, on the basis of the Cochrane review, is that vaping is hands down the most effective method of getting people off cigarettes.

How harmful is vaping? There are three basic conclusions. First, that it is safer than smoking cigarettes. Second, that we do not yet know the long-term effects. And third, that we need more data.

Levels of toxicants are substantially lower than in cigarettes. A report by the Royal College of Physicians found, on the basis of existing knowledge of liquid constituents and patterns of use, that vaping is likely to be much safer than smoking. It concluded: “The hazard to health arising from long-term vapour inhalation from the e-cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed five per cent of the harm from smoking tobacco.” The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reached a similar decision. It said: “Laboratory tests of e-cigarette ingredients, in vitro toxicological tests, and short-term human studies suggest that e-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes.”

This is a new consumer product and the findings are therefore necessarily uncertain. “Moderate‐certainty evidence does not show a difference in serious adverse effects for the nicotine electronic cigarette compared to nicotine replacement therapy comparison or in adverse effects for the nicotine electronic cigarette compared to non‐nicotine electronic cigarette comparison,” the Cochrane review concluded. “For all other outcomes in this category, evidence is of low or very low certainty. Imprecision remains a key issue for these outcomes.” Ultimately, we need more time and more data. “Longer‐term health effects are unknown,” the report said. “This uncertainty should reduce as more studies become available.”

Vaping could well turn out to be dangerous. There is some tentative evidence of elevated respiratory risk and impaired blood vessel function. We should be clear though: An absence of evidence does not mean that we can treat all outcomes as equally likely. This need for further data has let opponents of vapes insinuate a degree of risk which is unreasonable given the existing evidence base and to produce excessively high thresholds for satisfying that risk assessment.

Here’s Streeting again: “While we do not know the long-term effects of many vape ingredients or the harms inhaling the contents and flavouring of vapes, given their widespread use is relatively recent, the expert advice is clear they are unlikely to be beneficial.”

That is simply not a sane test of how we should evaluate this product. No-one is claiming vapes are beneficial. And anyone looking at this area aiming for benefit rather than harm prevention has lost the right to act as a decision-maker, because they clearly have no idea what they’re saying.

Simply because we cannot yet say something with any certainty does not mean that we know nothing. We can come up with expectations of risk by virtue of what we know about the substances and use-patterns. That is why there is a strong expectation that the danger levels are so much lower than for cigarettes: Because of our existing knowledge about carcinogens, tar, and the impact of liquid constituents.

Some countries have decided it is not worth the risk and banned vapes until we know for sure they are safe. This would make sense if vaping were taking place in a vacuum or if it functioned as a replacement for something harmless. If this were a new kind of raisin, for instance, or a different type of tea then it would make sense to take a precautionary approach. But it is not. It is a replacement for a product which we know is harmful. And not only that, it is the most effective replacement for that product. In that context, taking a precautionary approach is a kind of madness, a fundamental inability to weigh risk.

Subscribe now

There is now a ruinous gap between the science and the media debate on this issue. We have a technology here that can save millions of lives, but countries around the world are regulating it out of existence, or restricting it so aggressively that it is kept out of reach of the people who need it. The UK is a comparatively enlightened regulatory environment in this area and even here the media debate is overwhelmingly critical.

At the heart of this discrepancy is our view of pleasure and our refusal to accept arguments about harm minimisation rather than moral judgement. It is our reluctance to accept the following proposition: A slighter safer pleasure is often the best way to address a dangerous one.

People will look at vapers, exhaling their great big cloud of smoke, and subconsciously clock that they are enjoying it, and thereby conclude that this is dangerous. In fact, it is precisely the fact that they are enjoying it which makes it an effective way of reducing that danger.

Odds and sods

This is your last call for Origin Story Live on Tuesday night - there’s still a few tickets left as I write this - where we will chart the decline of the right wing press through the story of one newspaper: the Daily Telegraph. It’s the story of how journalistic standards were betrayed, readers’ comments dictated the editorial agenda, and reporters lost their autonomy. Come drink some wine and revel in the complete epistemological breakdown of British conservatism in one of the most beautiful venues in London. Little taste below. Tickets available here. See you there.

We’ve got a new Origin Story this week on Section 28: the law which halted progress on gay rights and drove it into reverse. Nearly every moment in this story - the moral panic, the press hysteria, the bad actors, the political cowardice - resembles what is happening now to trans people. But it is ultimately a story of hope and how you organise resistance. As someone on BlueSky said: “Genuinely got quite emotional listening to this. I’m 34. I can remember the Section 28 debate and that cursed shite lasted in spirit for some years after it had been repealed. However we won. We fucking won.” Also there’s a bloke in it called Viscount Buttmaster.

My column in the i paper this week was on Andy Burnham’s policy towards Israel and the need for a tough response to the E1 settlement programme. You can read it here.

Cultural highlight of the week, without competition, was seeing Jack White in Hammersmith. Before we went in I told my partner that he is the last true rock star. This was a mistake, because I think she was imagining someone who looked very different. But what I really meant was that this man has a complete and unshakable conviction in the guitar. His gigs are basically a crunchy, snarling, sweaty act of worship towards this one musical instrument, a form of mass devotion.

The whole thing was thrillingly old-fashioned - no phones allowed, paper tickets - but really there is something timeless about him, as if he operates in a continuum between the 1950s and today. And to watch him perform is kind of to get lost in time.

I’m celebrating the missus’ birthday next week with a short trip away, so it’ll be an Ask Me Anything, then back to earth with a crash for the proper return of the political season. I’ve got plenty of left-over questions from last time but if you’ve any extra, send them my way by replying to this email. State if you want your name to remain anonymous.

Right, off we go kids - fuck off etc.

My main memory is misery. That’s what I think whenever I see the image of celebrating teenagers getting their GCSE results. What a horrible, stressful, bludgeoning experience that really was.

People tend to forget their GCSEs once they finish them. They matter a lot as they’re happening, then not at all afterwards. No-one will ever ask you about them. You will never be required to include them in a job application. You will never talk about them at a party. It’s like they never happened.

The whole thing was for nothing really. It lacked any real purpose. And yet, I still have deep memories of the process, of the merciless perpetual misery of the revision period, the drudgery, the workload. And that’s because GCSEs actually mark a number of weird turning points in life which no-one really talks about - the point between childhood and adulthood, between generalisation and specialisation, between forced information processing and genuine curiosity.

I’m not under the impression that any teenagers read this newsletter. They don’t - I’ve seen the stats, it must be like 1% of the readership. But let’s imagine that they do. This is what I would say.

Subscribe now

That was the worst fucking thing on earth, but there is plenty more terrible shit yet to come

GCSEs are the first moment I can remember working hard. I’d had exams before of course, but that revision period clearly did something to me because I remember it well, even now.

Until that point, there’s been a concerted effort by the world to pretend that everything is alright. You know what I mean. You do it too. You see a kid and you smile at them, or you try to make them laugh, you ruffle their hair. The adult world conspires to convince children that the world is a great place full of lovely happy people. It’s only later that we admit a series of foundational truths: Everyone dies, everything ends, you are born alone and will die alone, there is no natural justice, life is arbitrary, rewards are not distributed fairly, the fundamental conflicts of the human condition are insolvable, all propositions are vulnerable to doubt.

We try to keep this shit from children for as long as possible, relying on brief glimpses of tragedy in Disney films, like the death of Bambi’s mother, to hint at a future existential crisis that parents are too cowardly to address themselves.

One of life’s tragedies, which we keep from young people, is that it involves a tremendous amount of work and that this work is often very boring. It doesn’t really matter what field you’re in or what level of seniority you achieve. Even someone at the absolute peak of their career will have to do lots of very boring work.

For a minister it will be box work, pounding their way through a red box full of documents that need signing. For a junior assistant in an office somewhere, it’ll be the avalanche of things which more senior people have dumped on your desk so they don’t have to do it themselves. There’s just lots of work to do in a life, and GCSEs are the first point at which this becomes truly clear. It’s like someone lifts a curtain and suddenly all the rainbows and unicorns are replaced by a torture chamber.

I am therefore grateful to GCSEs. Not because they taught me anything - I learned absolutely nothing - but because they instructed me on how to work. And in particular they taught me how to work for sustained periods of intense activity.

This comes in very useful. The final six months of writing a book are very painful indeed. There are no weekends. If you write best in the morning, as I do, you have to get up at 5am to maximise your time. I tend to finish at 8pm, then find myself asleep on the sofa by 10pm out of sheer mental exhaustion. You’re stressed about the quality of the work, the accuracy of the work, the reception, whether anyone will buy it, whether anyone will even notice it’s been published. It’s hard. Seasons of Origin Story are like a minor version of the same process, culminating in a crescendo of work in which you lose much of your spare time.

Writing is particularly bad for this. The big difference between a writer and all the people who say they want to be writers is that writers write. That’s really all there is to it. They sit and they write and they fucking do it. They do it on good days and bad days, they do it without immediate promise of gratification and in the absence of any meaningful sense of competition, lacking in any of the incentives which usually stimulate human activity.

Writing is a particularly egregious example but most jobs require bursts of intense activity requiring full concentration. You need to be able to do it and to do it you need to be trained in it. That really is the chief achievement of GCSEs. Someone has unveiled the bleak reality of a working life - which is that it is full of tedium, and hard labour, and intense periods of activity in which leisure time ceases to exist.

It’ll always be this way. No matter how clever AI gets or how successful Universal Basic Income becomes, big important things will always be accomplished by people working really fucking hard. It is good for individuals and for the species. Kids therefore have to learn it at some point and that point may as well be GCSEs.

Subscribe now

You’re still not really educated

The core of GCSEs - English, maths, science, language, humanities - suggests a kind of full renaissance education, as if it is supplying the base materials of a universal human knowledge. But actually, it has severe gaps.

The biggest gap is drama, or theatre studies. No-one ever thinks this, of course, they think drama is just acting. But in fact it is much more than that. It is about being able to speak in public, to have the glare of a spotlight on you and feel nervous and wonder how you’re going to breathe, and then perform anyway. Most of all, it is about learning how to own a space: to see a platform, stand on it, and think: I belong here, I am entitled to be here. To have the confidence to inhabit that space and make it your own.

Most jobs, especially white collar jobs but not just them, require performance in some way. In my case, I need to be able to do TV, or private speaking, or panels, or book promotion, or even podcast recording. There is actually an awful lot of performance given that my job basically is writing. But other jobs require it too. What is a presentation to the board? It is a performance. What is a barrister in court, a doctor speaking with a patient, an IT worker convincing their colleagues on the best way to proceed? A performance.

The responsibility for teaching confidence in performance should not rest with drama, but this is the only space left to dump it.

This is actually unusual in western history. Until relatively recently, the art of rhetoric was the core component of education - not just part of it but arguably the central aspect. And this was not just about structuring an argument or breaking down a logic sequence. It was specifically about performance: Voice, gesture, timing, pace, real-time responses, delivery as a perfectable skill. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle’s rhetoric aimed to guide those speaking in a legal case, or arguing proposals in an assembly, or acting as a speaker in a civic ceremony. In Rome, pronuntiatio taught the art of delivering speeches. In early modern England, rhetoric tailored how you structured a speech but also how it was delivered, either in scholastic disputation or in the Commons.

This great educational discipline - the art of persuasion, of convincing people, in person - has been lost from education. And yet it remains as fundamental to a working life as it ever was. For some reason we have decided that no training is required in this area when in fact it requires a great deal. Some people will be good at it and we should make them great at it. Others will be bad at it and we should make them competent, so they do not fear it and are not held back by it.

Subscribe now

Education will never be this empty again

My memories of GCSEs are not just about hard work through labour. They are also about the brutality of having to work without any real intellectual content at all, the horror of being processed through a system which has forgotten what it was originally for.

Early in my education, between around eight to 13, school was about learning. Don’t get me wrong, the school experience was horrific. Several of the teachers were sadists. It was a prep school, designed to get pupils into public school, so the whole process was designed to mould these children into die-cast representations of the English upper middle class: Athletic, self-confident, sexually petrified and emotionally barren.

But that period had something which the later period did not, which was a desire to teach for its own sake and without the pressure of exams.

I vividly remember one teacher telling us that the purpose of school in this period was to learn how to learn. That teacher - technically a maths teacher but in reality a kind of human Wikipedia who was motivated by his desire to encourage curiosity in children - could be kept permanently off topic by pupils asking how something worked. It became a kind of game. One would ask how TVs worked, he would explain in detail. Another would ask how rivers worked, or why people did certain things, or where football came from. Evidently he believed that answering these questions, and nurturing the desire to ask them, took precedence over whatever was supposed to be happening that morning.

Another teacher - ostensibly the English teacher - took time out to teach us TV and film. He showed us how the actor’s shadow was sharply outlined, unlike his own blurry shadow on the classroom wall. This was because of the powerful lighting used on set. He played us a scene of a film that went from comedic, to perilous, to awe-inspiring and explained how the music had guided our emotional reaction. In short, he taught us how to watch TV, how to recognise the ways in which we were being affected, to be critical and self-aware of the things we were seeing in this little box, in front of which we would spend much of our lives.

I know that others will have had different experiences. This is about a very particular education at a very particular time and place. But my main memories of this period were of education before examination and of the freedoms that were available by virtue of exams having a fairly limited role in what was going on. It was a period in which curiosity was encouraged and the fact that something was interesting was reason enough to dwell on it without asking any further questions about its utility.

Once GCSEs started, that all ended. Education stopped being about learning and started being about passing exams. In fact, it barely counted as education at all. It degenerated into little more than a memory exercise. Can you take information from Source A - your revision notes - retain it, and then input it into Source B - the exam paper. This system produced very reliable exam results, which were used to promote the school to the next set of parents, but it did not produce, did not even aim to produce, people with a love of knowledge or a natural curiosity about the world. It was actually completely indifferent to curiosity. Speaking about it in that context would be like trying to insert Smarties into a slot machine.

At the point of GCSEs, we really do lose that greater educational virtue. We gain things - the work ethic, the need to perform - but we lose things too. And that loss, the complete absence of any genuine intellectual endeavor, is why GCSEs are often such a harrowing period.

Subscribe now

You are now finally free to enjoy one of the most under-discussed pleasures in adult life

The good news is that, once GCSEs are over, a curtain rises on one of the great pleasures of a post-educational world. This is the pleasure we derive from finding out about things outside of our area of expertise.

Almost the second I finished GCSEs I fell in love with reading about science. Obviously I was never going to do it for A-Levels. I was shit at it - especially shit at chemistry, which was just an unfathomable jumble of gibberish to me, like being asked to translate Hieroglyphs - but also shit at physics and biology. I had no natural aptitude, I resented being asked to study them immensely, I was completely uninterested.

And then, almost the second they were no longer mandatory, I was fascinated. I still remember the first popular science book I bought - The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose. It was like this whole world was opening up in front of me. I loved reading Stephen Hawkings on black holes, Richard Dawkins on evolution. Throughout my life, I have gained an immense amount of enjoyment reading popular science books or listening to popular science podcasts - all concerning a subject I am objectively shit at.

It’s impossible to really enjoy these things when you are being forced to do them. Something in the human spirit resists the idea that it can find something hedonistic and mandatory at the same time. We can only really discover the pleasure of something organically, through our wishes rather than our duties. But also, the structure of the learning, and the stakes of the exams, makes it a fundamentally unpleasant experience.

Teenagers often expect that A-Levels will be more enjoyable because you can pick subjects you’re good at. It’s true, but perhaps the greatest joy to be found after GCSEs is specifically in the subjects you’re bad at, which you can now approach through curiosity rather than coercion. This is one of the most exquisite kinds of intellectual joy. It can stay with you through the rest of your life.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My column for the i paper this week was on Reform’s decision to suspend Tim Mont­go­merie. You can read it here. My contribution to Late Night Live touched on Count Binface, Jason Arday and how the Labour party has wasted a perfectly good crisis when it comes to the summer heatwaves. You can listen here.

Tickets are still available for Origin Story Live: The History of the Daily Telegraph. I’ve spent much of the week buried in memoirs by editors of the newspaper and doing off-the-record chats with people who worked for the publication as it went mad - slowly at first, then at speed. It’s going to be quite a fucking night. You can buy tickets here.

This week, I am finally saying goodbye to Cyberpunk 2077, the game that I have now surely played more than any other. This is my third playthrough and I must now stop, but I will miss it dreadfully. I will miss my chooms and my chrome, the corpos and the eddies, the edgerunner life, and all the gonks I met on the way.

I keep asking myself why I return to it and I think it’s this: The game is the product of people who took a task really seriously. The key is in the depth of what they have done. Each vehicle handles slightly differently, each weapon has a learning curve, every part of the city has been designed and refined as if it were real, each character you meet has a personality, every song you hear on a passing radio suits the world, and the vast web of cyberware, skills and modifications is the product of a game that has thought very hard about satisfying progression.

It is the most deeply textured virtual world I have played in. This is because it works to a set of themes, the most obvious of which is corruption under capitalism. There are never good choices. You try hard to make decent calls, to find the best result, but the basic incentives of the society reduce everything to the worst possible outcome. It is a tragedy in the truest sense of the word, which haunts you long after you finished playing.

It is a dank, depressing world, a cynical world, but one with a real sense of vision, with something to say. It’s a properly complete work of art, expressing itself through the unique mechanisms of video games. And the way I will miss it is completely unlike the way you would miss something else - a novel, say, or a film. I will miss it as a world I used to inhabit. What a weird wonderful thing that is. It’s the kind of cultural reward which is only available to gamers and one only they understand.

Right that’s your lot cunts, see you next time. Now fuck off.

Reform leader Nigel Farage has won the Clacton byelection. Some disparate thoughts below.

On the face of it, this was about as good a result as Farage could hope for. He was never going to lose this seat, so the key tests centred on whether turnout would drop or his vote share would crumble. That didn’t really happen. The Reform leader won by 22,239 votes to Count Binface’s 9,455. That’s actually an increase on his vote from 21,225 in 2024. Turnout was down from 58.4% in 2024 to 44.37% today, but it’s at a perfectly respectable level for a byelection, especially during school holidays.

At the Reform party, Farage announced that “it’s a convincing win”. The room burst into applause and chants of ‘Nigel’.

But no matter what he says, Farage knows he’s in trouble. Incredibly, he did not attend the count. This is basically unheard of. I can’t think of a single other instance of it happening. Even sadsack losers like Matthew Goodwin turn up before going off in a strop complaining about conspiracies by Muslims.

Farage claimed this was because of a threat against him. “I’ve been advised tonight by Essex police that there is an organised campaign to corrupt and degrade the result which will take place in a few hours time,” he told supporters, who needless to say whipped themselves into a state of outrage and started shouting “shame”.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. The Press Association reported that Essex Police did not tell Farage, or any other candidate, not to attend the count. The acting returning officer for the byelection said: “It is a candidate’s decision whether or not to attend the count. However I want to reassure people we have no reason not to proceed with the count process at this time.”

So why wasn’t he there? His other comments hint at the reason. “I’m not scared of these people, far from it,” he told his supporters. “But I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory, a ringing endorsement of all that I’ve tried to fight for, and you’ve tried to fight for, and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.

Ah yes. Humiliated by nobodies. That makes things a little clearer.

The announcement of the results in Clacton was a carnival of eccentric tosh. Dozens of candidates, each of them sillier than the last. On TV, you got a strange atmosphere of sullen mirth, with proper prizes-for-everyone sports-day vibes, as the names of obscure candidates were read out. “Nick the incredibly blik,” the returning officer said, then hesitated and corrected himself. “Brick.” No, that wasn’t right either. “Nick the incredible flying brick,” he concluded. And on and on it went, for another 33 candidates.

It’s obvious why Farage avoided this event. Its charming preposterousness refuted the anti-elitist narrative he had tried to create.

He thought he would own the summer news months on the campaign trail. He thought he could spread his man-of-the-people conspiracist storyline about the inquiries into his financial arrangements, which, incidentally, are murky as hell. He imagined it would culminate in this moment, when he stood alongside the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates and trounced them before his adoring voters. Instead, he would have stood next to Count Binface and Marcus White, the sole representative of the Everyone is God party.

His supposed night of victory would only diminish him. Not so long ago, he was expected to be our next prime minister. Now he looks like a laughing stock. Presenters on news programmes have often struggled to hide their smirk when Reform guests claim Binface is a member of the establishment.

This is the reason he wasn’t at that count. It’s got nothing to do with security. It’s because he’s made a fool of himself and he knows it.

Subscribe now

He might have won Clacton, but this byelection sunk Farage nationally. There are many sensible well-meaning people in the Clacton constituency but there are also 22,239 other people there who are either happy to be lied to or unable to spot when it’s happening, no matter how egregious it is. We’re not supposed to speak ill of voters of course, but if you can’t spot the self-interest and mendacity of this man, at this moment, then I don’t know what to tell you. My one piece of advice is: Be wary of emails from Nigerian princes.

Clacton, however, is not the country. In the nation at large - which, let’s remember, is where general elections are decided - Farage is in serious trouble. His decision to hold this byelection has made that situation worse.

This time last year, Reform was soaring. We had to keep asking the very worst question: Is there a ceiling on the party’s support? No matter what happened, it seemed to keep pushing upwards, past the 30% mark, to the mid-30s. That was the moment of true fear, the icy fingers down the spine, where it became increasingly difficult to imagine how a Farage government could be avoided.

Then the party plateaued. This is because there is ultimately a limit to how many British people will back this type of politics by this type of man. Hold that thought close, because it is reassuring. Shortly afterwards, the support fell. It did so slowly. Because of Keir Starmer’s lack of popularity, Reform was often still coming top of the polls, which muddied the coverage. But the trend is now clear and undeniable: Reform saw a rise in support during late 2024 and 2025, then hit a ceiling, plateaued, and entered a state of decline. The question now is not about its ceiling, but about its floor.

Just 22% of Brits have a favourable view of Farage according to YouGov. It’s the lowest recorded by their tracker this decade. Sixty-eight per cent see him negatively and 56% very unfavourably. He is currently on -46, equivalent to Boris Johnson after partygate (-42) and Starmer just before his resignation (-45). He is in the death zone.

The decline in Reform’s fortunes worsened significantly over the course of this byelection. Polling by BMG Research for the i paper showed his net approval rating collapsed by ten percentage points in the last month, putting him at -49%. More in Common have similar results, with Farage’s approval ratings collapsing ten points in two weeks to -32%.

Farage kept his support in Clacton, but the campaign - self-interested, cynical, sleazy, desperate and ultimately preposterous - hurt his chances across the UK.

Subscribe now

Paradoxically, this is actually pretty good evidence of the strategic danger to Reform. It should be impossible to take a local result this strong for Farage and turn it into a demonstration of his weakness, but actually even the Clacton numbers hold worrying signs for his party.

What do we know about Reform, after several byelections? We know that non-Reform voters are highly motivated to vote tactically in order to beat them. In other words, they are not really non-Reform voters, they are anti-Reform voters, who will back almost anyone to stop them.

In Caerphilly in October 2025 tactical voting handed the victory to Plaid. Labour, Green and Lib Dem support collapsed and went to Welsh nationalists. The BBC even reported some Tory voters backing the party. In Gorton and Denton last February it handed the victory to the Greens. Ahead of the vote, 77% Labour voters said they’d vote Green to stop Reform, as did 73% of Lib Dems and 24% of Tories.

We saw a similar pattern towards Labour in Andy Burnham’s Makerfield contest, although it’s obviously complicated by how unusual that byelection was. The ensuing Manchester mayoral byelection last month, on the other hand, provided unusual degrees of clarity. This is because it uses a supplementary system, where voters pick the candidate they most want to win but can express their preferences even if they lose. It allows us to see clearly the kind of thinking which we usually have to interpret from vote share.

Labour’s Bev Craig won 47.1% in the first preference votes against Reform’s 21%. When supplementary voters were distributed, she won 66.3% to Reform’s 33.7%. More in Common polling showed 66% of Green voters backed the Labour candidate as their second choice. They were supported by a sizable minority of Conservative voters.

So that’s the background. Now let’s see what happened in Clacton. This is the most right-wing seat in the country. In 2024 it had the highest combined right vote of any constituency. And that, of course, is why we all expected Farage to win. But even here, in the deepest heartland, there was significant tactical voting. After all, what the hell else is a vote for Count Binface? The normal parties aren’t standing, so he became the default vehicle by which you’d try to stop Reform. This secured him 9,455 votes. For a satirical space alien whose main policy proposal is about the height of a hand dryer in a pub toilet.

Tactical voting is alive and well. This pattern, repeated across the country, is what should trouble Reform. Will it ever stop Farage in Clacton? No. But it’ll ruin him nationally, especially if the Conservative vote holds up.

Subscribe now

Farage is caught in a pincer movement. He surely gets the tactical voting problem. He’s not an idiot. But he is now trapped by the X.com eco-system.

Elon Musk has worked diligently to give the ethno-nationalist Rupert Lowe and his Restore party all the momentum, biting Reform’s ankles from even further to the right. Meanwhile, Farage’s own people are degenerating into ever more extreme and angry rhetoric. Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuv branded former defence secretary and member of the armed forces Ben Wallace a “traitor” recently, earning only a mild rebuke from his party leader.

Across the Atlantic, Democrat politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prompted thousands of think pieces this week when she said that “woke 1 was crazy” - a reference to the period of ‘defund the police’ and online pile-ons in the early 2020s. There is a general sense that Twitter’s progressive edge during that period pushed left-wingers into adopting radical positions which turned the electorate against them.

I’ve no idea if that’s true or not, but I think we can clearly see that X.com, which now has an ethno-nationalist edge, is pushing right-wingers to adopt radical positions which turn the electorate against them.

Farage is therefore in the worst of all worlds. He is seeing concerted tactical voting against his candidates in diverse areas of the UK - from Wales to Manchester to Clacton itself. His best way of defusing those tactical votes is to moderate the rhetoric of his colleagues, to try to upset people a little less and therefore play less of a role in their voting calculations. But he cannot do so, because the remorseless logic of the X radicalisation algorithm pushes his party towards becoming more severe, or else it loses its activist base and its most highly-engaged voters to Restore. He’s trapped.

Subscribe now

Farage is no Trump. This was a real test case for Farage’s brand of politics. He wants to create the same conditions in the UK which apply to Donald Trump in the US. He wants to dismiss any allegations against him by branding it a conspiracy of the elites. He wants to undermine and eventually eradicate independent scrutiny processes, like parliamentary standards inquiries. He wants to take a mindless question-nothing hero-worshipping support base and equate it with the will of the people, so that he can amass unlimited executive power. He wants to abolish the entire notion of objective truth as a currency in political discourse. We know what the plan is because we can see it in its advanced stages in the US.

That’s what this tragicomic byelection was really about. Farage wanted to use it to swipe away all the sleaze stories around him. He wanted to own the news agenda over the summer months. He wanted to capture the political momentum once again.

In Clacton, electorally, it worked, as he knew it would or else he’d never have tried it. But the plan was never really for Clacton. It was for the country. And there it failed. Journalists wouldn’t take the bait. Politicians wouldn’t take the bait. And the public wouldn’t take the bait.

Why? Because Farage is no Trump. The Reform leader does not posses that ineffable blood-magic, the link between leader and follower, that Trump enjoys. He can secure the support of between a fifth to a quarter of voters, absolutely. But he cannot convince enough Brits to submit their conscience and their independence of thought to his will.

I don’t think this is Farage’s fault. He is really very effective as a political communicator. I think the reason he struggles is because Brits are not Americans. We are basically incapable of sincerity. We are averse to idealism, positive or negative. We do not do religion, and therefore lack a pattern of behaviour in which we relinquish our minds to a spiritual leader. The whole muscle-memory of evangelism, from pulpit bashers to TV preachers, means nothing to us. We do not have a pattern of historic racial politics which slots political debates into a pre-existing us-vs-them narrative.

We are too cynical, too jaded, too keen to mock. These are usually ugly qualities. They prevent us from having serious political discussions and reduce politics to a permanent state of listless pragmatism. But in this particular area it is actually quite healthy. It’s really very difficult to imagine any figure who is able to do here what Trump does in the US.

That’s not to say we’re immune to populism or the extreme right. We absolutely demonstrably are not. But we may be immune to the unquestioning hero-worship and epistemological collapse that we see across the Atlantic. This was a test case for that type of politics. It showed that there was some support for it in his support base, but none outside of it.

Farage will, of course, claim today as a victory. But in reality, as almost anyone can see, it was anything but.

Still, at least he’s got the standards inquiry to look forward to.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

I’m going to say this once, and only once, unless I decide to say it again later: Buy tickets to our live show. Buy them you fucking cunts.

I am inexplicably spending the summer reading about the history of the Daily Telegraph while everyone else is frolicking in the park and I think I therefore deserve all the support I can get. We’ll tell the full story of Britain’s most batshit newspaper, from a Fleet Street institution to howling godforsaken bedlam, on September 1st at the Union Chapel. Buy the fucking tickets.

I take the lead in this week’s episode of Origin Story as we tell the story of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham - favourite to King James I and King Charles I. We’ve always had these figures who act as a deflecting mechanism for leadership - like Dominic Cummings or Morgan McSweeney. When critics can’t attack the leader directly, they go for The Favourite. What worked for kings works now for prime ministers.

The story of Buckingham is extremely dramatic - it’s crammed with queer history, love affairs, courtly romance, adventures on horseback, war, a shitload of dysentery, terrible deaths and the early embryonic years of parliamentary resistance to royal power. But the core role and dangers of the Favourite are the same in the early 17th Century as they are today. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

My culture pick this week is Widow’s Bay. It’s such a glorious combination of Stephen King nostalgia, good solid laughs and proper nasty chills. It’s a show that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, in no small part because of the effortless performance of Matthew Rhys. Exactly as good as people told you it was. Well worth a watch.

Right, off you fuck mate. Cheerio.

Christopher Nolan is the director of our era. He’s not necessarily the best. He’s not even necessarily that good. But he’s the director who most reflects our period and what it yearns for.

He’s a genuine auteur. He follows a singular vision of how to make a film, from the way it is lit, to the way the soundtrack is incorporated into the body of the story, to the almost indecipherable way that character speech is handled, to the crammed patchwork stitching of the narrative structure. Nolan directs like Nolan.

The difference between him and other auteurs is that his films do not play to tiny empty cinema screenings, but become global phenomena - the kind of things people travel hundreds of miles for so they can see it on IMAX in 70mm. His films are an event, a phenomenon. And the reason for that is not because he makes mainstream films - he doesn’t and never has. It’s because he is the auteur director whose instincts are most in tune with what audiences want right now. He just kinda fits.

Why is that? What is he doing that makes him such a perfect emblem for our time? I don’t think it’s about his themes, which are hazy, lightly held and rarely discussed. I think it is his technique. What do you hear when you catch an interview with Nolan? What are they discussing? The technique. Specifically, his preference for analogue: How to wield a massive IMAX camera. Why he won’t email scripts, but insists people read them in person. Why he opts for film. Why he has an aversion to digital effects.

This is why Nolan is so loved: because he is an analogue director in a digital age. He represents our anxieties and concerns. Our self-hate when we close the social media app on our phone and briefly see our image reflected back at us in the darkness of its screen, feeling emptied-out and wasted.

Nolan represents nostalgia for a previous world. One of tactility, physicality, time, craft and shared experience. Before AI, before the internet, before digital.

You can see this yearning for the pre-internet age all around us. Vinyl sales in the UK increased by 19.9% last year, hitting their highest level for three decades. CD sales - traditionally the poor cousin of vinyl - also crept up by 3.1%. Overall, physical releases of films are in decline, but Blu-Ray - the top end of the market - increased by three per cent. 2024 saw a 23% increase in live music attendance - either concerts or festivals. Theatre was experiencing a similar phenomenon, with a 3.16% increase in West End attendance last year. People want to hold a piece of media in their hands rather than rely on streaming. They want to attend an event live and be part of a shared moment, not stuck isolated in the algorithm’s digital cul-de-sac.

We sit atop a great engine of nostalgia. The Oasis reunion, Stranger Things, 90s fashion, retro games consoles, disposable cameras. Even lava lamps are coming back. Online, you see the words ‘look what they took from us’ above almost any post mentioning the past, whether it’s images of Blockbusters video rentals or 70s documentaries about Margate.

We all seem to be yearning for the past. We need greater texture in our lives, the feeling and affirmation of physical objects, the reassurance of collective experience, the bucolic urban idyll of a life before modems.

Nostalgia for the analogue age feels like a kind of resistance, an act of rebellion against the blandness of the modern world, with its banks of computer screens, none of which feel like anything. None of which have texture, none of which has a sense of smell, or place, or meaning.

Subscribe now

I am one of these people. I buy vinyl and Blu-Rays and physical books, although I draw the line at 90s fashion which was a travesty then and remains so today. But we need to carefully disentangle meaningful choices about our consumption from the tyranny of our emotional narrative about a perfect past.

Nostalgia is a trap and it contains within it a terrible lie. I’m so desperately tired of watching my generation talk about the 90s in exactly the same way the previous generation talked about the 70s. Here’s a typical Instagram post about films released in 1999. It is the same as countless others, posted every day, whose undercurrent is that things right now are terrible but things back then were obviously much better - “back before the suits screwed it all up with corporate slop, back when movies were good”.

In reality, there were lots of suits in Hollywood in the 90s making terrible films. There are many great films being released now. But nostalgia convinces us that things were always better in the past and at their worst in the current moment.

The top ten box office films of 1999 contained some proper bangers, including The Matrix, Toy Story 2 and The Mummy. It also contained some execrable dirge. The top film of the year was Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, for heaven’s sake. This year’s top ten includes films which will probably go on to be classics, including Obsession, Project Hail Mary and The Odyssey itself. There is also, inevitably, some dirge, including The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Toy Story 5. Yes, the arc of the artistic universe is strange, and therefore contains a franchise which can represent an artistic peak in 1999 and a nadir in 2026.

Music plays a particularly weird role in nostalgia about the past. For some reason, you will never fully recover from the music of your formative years. Whatever came out between the age of 13 and 23 will forever hold a place in your heart above all others.

About a third of the music I buy comes from this period, but I am aware that there is no credible cultural reason to own so many albums by Shed Seven or Gene. If I really wanted to, I could construct an argument for this being an objective assessment of musical quality over a subjective expression of my youth. I could say that the Britpop era was the last gasp of music before the internet and that it therefore represented the final coherent moment in musical evolution, before everything stagnated into a generic morass without clear cultural signposts.

And it’s true that the velocity of musical development was much greater in the 20th Century than it has been in the 21st. Someone living through the 60s, 70s and 80s would have experienced great big jolting musical shocks every few years, from pop to punk to electronic, the Beatles to the Clash to the Pet Shop Boys. Someone living through the opening three decades of the 21st Century has not. It’s been a less exciting time to be into music.

But the same pattern remains. There is loads of great music coming out at the moment and loads of crap back then that we now forget. Those who grew up in the late 90s all remember Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Radiohead. But we forget Dodgy, Ocean Colour Scene, Space and Kula Shaker. That which was great comes to define an era. That which was average fades from memory, as if it never existed.

Subscribe now

We like to tell ourselves that things were simpler back then, but it’s a lie. We all suffer from a temporal condition in which the past feels reassuringly solid and the present unprecedentedly chaotic.

The world of today would seem obviously insane for someone in the 90s. There is a war in Europe in which the most important military developments are conducted by drones. There is an AI technology which in the last few days alone has created viruses unknown in nature and used fake profiles to hack targets and then hide the evidence. There is a siloed information sphere online which has robbed us of a shared empirical reality.

But back in the 90s, people spoke in precisely the same way. Nowadays, we remember this period as a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace. The Berlin Wall had fallen, liberal democracy was triumphant, the dreary industrial relations of the 80s were over and the economy was doing gangbusters.

This is not how it felt at the time. At the time, we were embroiled in several wars and foreign interventions. Security analysts would gravely warn that the end of Communism had in fact dispersed and multiplied the threats against us - a warning which came true when September 11th opened the 21st Century. The dot-com bubble crashed the economy. Our cultural diet - from the X-Files to the Truman Show to the Matrix - was paranoid and ill at ease.

No matter what era you read about, the same process is taking place. People spoke warmly about the past and worried about the present. The 1950s now function as the reassuring golden age in America, a time when the country was at its peak and everyone had two cars. For Donald Trump, the 1950s are the ‘again’ in ‘make America great again’. They are the time he promises to return people to, one which - oh-what-a-coincidence - came before President Johnson’s race equality legislation. But when they were actually taking place, the 50s were a time of paranoia and anxiety. Most people expected a Third World War. Russia had developed a nuclear bomb. The Soviet economy was considered superior to the American market economy. The USSR had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Joseph McCarthy was carrying out his witch hunts against liberals and leftists.

Similarly, each period of English history you study sees the major political actors hark back to the past. The Luddites of the early 19th Century demand a return to the paternalist protection measures of the previous era. The Levellers of the 17th Century demand the rights guaranteed to them by ancient English history. The best period was always the period beforehand. The current era is always one of unprecedented uncertainty and tumult.

Subscribe now

The same is true in our personal lives. Things were not really better for us when we were 16. We had good days and bad days, moments of bliss and moments of despair. The emotions were heightened of course - that’s what it’s like to experience romantic feelings for the first time under a heavy dose of hormones. But the endless summers we remember were full of boredom and disappointment as well as heartbreak and euphoria. We edit out the parts that were uneventful and fixate on those which marked us.

The truth about the past is this: A day can only be perfect once it’s ended.

As you experience a day, it is full of uncertainty. Will it rain? Will that person call me? Will I be able to buy the thing I want? Do they fancy me? How will this party go? Will people like me? Do I look good in this? The tumult and atom-level chaos of our expectations and insecurities. Most days are a score draw. Some are a net loss. And every so often you get a day which was unimprovable. Everything fell into place. The needle drops. The opening bars kick in. Lou Reed starts singing. Oh what a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you.

But if you could travel back to that day, you would feel the same uncertainty you feel right now, about today. Will it work out? Will this be OK? What do I have to do before I go out? If you could travel back and experience it all over again, you would be surprised by how many moments of boredom or humdrum timekilling it involved. You have sliced these moments from your memory, in the same way that I have edited out the band Space from the 90s or a Trump supporter edits out Soviet technological triumph in the 50s.

Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same degree of certainty, because they are still happening. So we live with this constant defect where we over-emphasise the innocence of what has gone and we underestimate the quality of what is happening.

Nostalgia is a terrible drug: it is a fiction which serves to undermine you at the point of experience and pile all the enthusiasm into whatever has already passed. If it is allowed to grow without restraint, it will suck all the joy from you, turning you into a passenger in your own life. If it is allowed to conquer a country, it will lead to viciousness and self-harm, Trump and Brexit.

Subscribe now

For all that, we clearly need nostalgia. Obviously we do, because none of us seems able to operate without it. It gives us a sense of continuity with our past. It is what we use to create the idea of an authentic self with a coherent life story.

It need not trap us in the past. Properly managed and understood, it provides a foundation which allows us to manage the future. This is who I am. These are the people and events that made me. These are my desires and my principles, the qualities which inform the things I do next.

If it is properly harnessed it can help us navigate the present. It is partly nostalgia for instance, which lets me decide to prioritise physical media over streaming, the tactile over the digital. But we can make those sorts of decisions without falling into the myth that the past was always golden and the present always doomed. Nostalgia can help us select the bits of the past which we preserve, rather than simply isolating us from the future.

The same applies to countries. It’s no coincidence that English radicals have always harked back to the semi-mythical ancient liberties of their ancestors. It’s no coincidence that American reactionaries hark back to the supposed glory years of the post-war era. Nostalgia is what we use to give coherence to our national story, just as we do to our personal story.

How can this be healthy, rather than corrosive? The trick is two-fold. First, we have to make sure that the past the country harks back to provides a decent guide to how it should behave in the future. And second we have to prevent the guidance of the past becoming a prison - the locked-in thought that only that which is over can ever be good and that which is to come must surely be bad.

We can exploit nostalgia without being exploited by it. We can own our past without being owned by it.

Subscribe now

Odds and Sods

Important announcement: We’ve now confirmed the theme for our Origin Story live show on September 1st. We’ll be doing The History of the Daily Telegraph: How a reassuringly traditional newspaper lost its fucking mind.

Over the course of the evening, we’ll take you from the Telegraph’s staid and respectable origins to the hysterical bedlam it has become today, and then delve into our favourite moments of shit-your-pants lunacy from recent issues, at least half of which will probably involve Allister Heath.

Tickets are available here. No-one will get out alive.

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

This week’s i paper column was on Kemi Badenoch, who I really do detest more and more with each passing day. Just an absolute political atrocity in human form. We also had a Patreon-only Q&A edition of Origin Story for our loyal backers.

The cultural highlight of the week was Spider-Man: Brand New Day. We did it in a double-bill with The Odyssey, which makes a surprising amount of sense - they have lots of the same actors, both tell the story of a man trying to get back home in some way, and have several scenes which echo one another, particularly around our closest friends and family not knowing who we are. It’s charming to see the oldest story and then the newest story, both dabbling in the same ideas.

Spider-Man is a much better film. It has a more coherent theme and is more disciplined in how it develops it, it is more beautiful to look at, it is more emotionally rewarding. I know, I know - you want to send me hate emails now and to cancel your subscription. But I am a professional journalist and it is my job to tell the truth, without fear or favour.

Seriously though, I mean it. It’s outstanding - certainly the best Marvel film since No Way Home. I sat there crying and laughing throughout, full of joy and nutrition. A euphoric, meaningful cinematic experience.

Right that’s me done you cunts - fuck off and have a lovely weekend.

The problem with Robert Jenrick is not that he is venal, although he is. It is that he is banal. There’s something stupefying about him, a unique recipe of tone, manner and predictability. For all the faults of populism, it is not usually so boring. And yet he has somehow made it so. He has managed - it’s a feat in a way - to combine the manner of a technocrat with the aims of a demagogue.

He is not just boring because he has a boring face, although he does have an incredibly boring face. It looks like it was mass-moulded and used as a prosthetic. He is not boring because he has a boring voice, although he does have an incredibly boring voice. It’s like listening to an old engine finally succumb to age. He is not boring because of his language or his ideas or his manner, although these are also all incredibly boring. He is boring because it is always so obvious what he is doing.

At any given moment you could ask yourself: What’s the most cynical, self-interested, irresponsible and yet also incredibly basic thing you could do now, and that’s precisely what he’ll do - whether it’s making anti-immigration videos or joining Reform. And yet, despite the obviousness of the action itself, he will always pursue it with this look of deep seriousness, as if he were Napoleon devising the Italian campaign.

This week Jenrick did his thing. A situation arose, it asked questions of him, and his answers were, of course, shit. But perhaps for the first time, he did us a service. He laid out what populism is in really very clear terms. And he allowed us to compare it, meaningfully and in a fair fight, with the vastly-improved politics coming out of Downing Street.

Subscribe now

Andy Burnham’s social care announcement this week was the best thing I have seen from a British prime minister in a very long time. It was a complete vindication of those who wanted him in No.10 and their reasoning.

He came out, announced a shortening of the Casey review, put social care at the heart of his agenda, and petitioned the country to have a big expansive debate about it - not just on cost but also on provision and its absence.

As he spoke, you got this weird memory - distantly familiar but exotic. It was political leadership. This is what it looks like, what it sounds like. Burnham had found an issue he wanted to fix - a tough one, which most thought impossible - and he was going to try to get it done. He was not just going to lead a government machine to push it through. It was much bigger than that. He was going to talk about it in a way that might bring people with him.

This requires a unique bundle of talents, including those which rarely go together. Burnham spoke emotionally about his father, who has Alzheimer’s, and the failures of the system. You can tell while watching him that this ability to be emotionally present is the most important quality he has and that, without it, politicians are lost. But he also operated with old-school professionalism of the type we haven’t seen in decades.

He was pitch rolling. Some critics attacked him for not having a policy. It has been so long since they saw professional politics being conducted that they’d forgotten what it looked like. He was behaving consciously - laying the ground for when the policy emerges, trying to get public opinion into the most favourable place for it to land, aiming the shot not at where the target is but where it will be.

This is something we once saw a lot but now rarely do, because politicians - particularly on the left - lost faith in their ability to lead public opinion or convince people of an issue. Burnham aimed his criticism at politicians, who had failed to grasp the nettle, and the media, who had failed to provide a meaningful debate.

“I do ask colleagues in the media again, can we not let the country look at this in a quite clear-eyed way, without all of the hype and the overwriting of some of these issues? I just ask it again, on this issue please can we have a factual debate… I think the public will give us their view, they’ll make it really clear what they feel they can accept and what they can’t, but we won’t get to that point if there’s all of this stuff swirling around and everyone’s frightened about everything.”

The media response was actually pretty good. TV broadcasts about the speech were often accompanied by packages with people’s stories about the care system. You know these stories. If you haven’t been through it yourself, someone you know will have: a parent within dementia, the minutiae of what it takes to sell the house to pay for care, the uniquely horrible combination of emotional trauma and admin.

Of course, it’s easier for people to be supportive when they can imagine the positive outcome - security about old age, property passed on to your kids - but have not yet been presented with the downside, which is inevitably going to be some form of taxation. Any really ambitious plans for social care, Burnham said, “will require difficult decisions”. This is code for tax. “But we will be honest with people about those. We will put them before the country at the right time, and we will hopefully proceed with people’s consent.”

You get a pretty decent picture of where we’re going with this. Hold cross-party talks, bring as many parties as you can with you, see what the review publishes, have a big fact-based national debate, then come to a decision and promise to implement after the next election. This would allow any tax rise to be explicitly accepted by voters and outside of the existing manifesto headlock.

It’s not impossible to show political leadership. You can tell the story of policy choices through the much more emotional narrative of individual lives. You can bring the public into a debate and have that debate conducted in an adult way. And when we do it through one policy area, we naturally find ourselves doing it for another one, because none of them exist in isolation.

Discussing social care, for instance, naturally led to a better discussion of immigration. “Many people from other countries have been caring for my dad,” Burnham said. “I want those carers to know: we appreciate you. We appreciate what you are doing to support people here and that really matters that I say that.”

I can’t remember the last politician who praised a group of immigrants without caveat. I think it might have been Boris Johnson after he came out of the hospital from covid. It was a relief and I felt moved. But this followed logically from the discussion of social care. Reason in one part of the policy portfolio can infect the others, like petri dishes left too close in the lab.

Just warm words? Possibly. It is hard to square with the fact that he kept Shabana Mahmood as home secretary. And yet there is a policy implication. It is hard to imagine her leave-to-remain proposals, which would put anyone on mid-skill standards of RQF Level 6 on a 15 year pathway, surviving in their current form if he is really serious about social care.

This was anti-populism. Burnham was acknowledging trade-offs. He was suggesting that we wanted two good things - low taxes and good social care - and effectively saying that we could not have both and would have to find some compromise between them. He was trying to build a public debate which could handle that kind of adult conversation. And he was attempting to do so by throwing everything he could at it: a realistic but ambitious timetable, his emotional intelligence, his political capital.

Perhaps it will all fall apart. But imagine if he succeeds. Imagine what it will demonstrate. Yes, it would help solve the social care problem, which makes a misery of later life and has severe knock-on consequences for the NHS. But just as importantly, by grappling with and solving this issue, which has been a seeping wound on British politics for so long, he would demonstrate the core promise of liberal democracy: That it can solve problems. It can design and deliver practical solutions. It can improve lives.

Starmer talked this talk, with decent speeches, early in his tenure, about populist “snake oil”. But he did not walk the walk. He refused to engage in trade offs and in the end mostly denied they existed. He did not solve problems and so he allowed populism to thrive, eventually adopting its own language and thought process to undermine his leadership.

Subscribe now

Jenrick’s response for Reform came on Thursday. He rolled out the classic populist handbook. Once upon a time it would have seemed perfectly normal. Now it seemed unremittingly dark, a remonstrance against the whole notion of hope. An empty coastal cave as the tide rose.

There were three prongs to his attack. First, he invented an imaginary policy and then attacked Burnham for it. Next, he tried as hard as he could to sabotage any chance of an adult conversation. And finally, he engaged in the most extreme form of scare-mongering available to him.

The plan he invented involved a ten per cent levy on all estates when people die to pay for a new care service. Burnham did once propose this, although it was 16 years ago - Jenrick was still searching around constituencies to try to get into parliament as a centrist Conservative at the time. That seems terribly long ago, but time only applies to other people.

Next he raised the implication of that policy. Jenrick imagined a nurse in Makerfield who had a house worth £200,000 and a pension worth £100,000 - her children would pay £30,000 when she died.

This was his way of providing a flat rejection of Burnham’s appeal to facts and fairness, a careful debate in which people held two thoughts in their head at one time. It is perilous for Reform to allow people that degree of complexity in their thoughts, because once they have it they will notice how simplistic and ineffective the party’s own policies are. So instead you just come up with the scariest number possible, ignore what it is meant to achieve, ignore the downsides of not spending it, and try to spread it like wildfire.

Finally, he dove right into the scare-mongering. “Imagine the scene,” he said, like some kind of coin-operated cryptkeeper in an old EC comic. “A loved one – a parent or a grandparent – has passed away. You’re grieving. At the same time, you’re trying to sort out all the things that follow a death. Going through belongings. The paperwork. Then. A knock on the door. Not from a well-wisher but HMRC. ‘Hello. We’ve come to value your relative’s estate’.”

Obviously the notion that HMRC would have the desire or more importantly the resources to personally visit everyone they assess is ludicrous. But he didn’t let that get in his way. Instead, he got lost in his tale of horror and woe. “Everything goes in. The family heirlooms. Your mother’s wedding ring. If you’ve got a watch to hand on and nothing else, it’s taxed. A couple of pieces of jewellery, taxed. Even clothes - taxed.” The man’s a madman. On and on he went, fear fear fear - nothing more. No rationality, no logic, no caveats, no alternative proposals. Just stoking the anxiety, reaching into those deepest recesses of the human brain, where the paranoia and the jealousies live, where they churn away at three in the morning, and encouraging it to take over the whole.

“An official standing in your late mother’s bedroom with a clipboard. Pricing up her engagement ring. Totting up her coats. Itemising an entire life – a life of work, of thrift, of love – so that the Treasury can take its cut.”

Just a preposterous little man, with a brain so limited, in moral and cognitive terms, that it can do nothing but churn out the same tired bullshit over and over again.

Subscribe now

Things are rarely so clear-cut. We now seem to be gearing towards a straight up-and-down fight between populism and liberal democracy. None of the weird filters and proxy battles of previous years - Brexit, Putin, Covid, or Starmer’s half-arsed paint-ourselves-like-Reform strategy. This is about as clean a clash as you can imagine.

On the one hand: properly executed, broad-based, emotionally intelligent policy making intended to solve a problem, treating the public like adults. On the other: Fear-mongering, with no rational critique or alternate proposal, encouraging the public’s most jittery and hateful instincts.

This time though, it’s a fair fight. Over the last ten years, populism’s advocates have been far better at communication than their opponents. Experts in trade or epidemiology would go on TV and explain the evidence base with all the hesitancy of those who work in academia, only to have a smiling know-nothing shit-stirrer go on and wave it all away, countering with emotion what they presented empirically.

Mainstream party leaders, from Theresa May to Starmer, lacked any confidence in their own leadership. They did not dare to challenge public opinion, they had no sense that they might guide it in any way. Their own faces seem to betray them. May’s eyes would look startled by her own words as they were uttered, as if her mind was in a perpetual state of panic about what her mouth was doing. Starmer just looked desperate for it all to be over, so he could retreat into the safety of his office.

Now the roles are reversed. It is the populists who are having a breakdown in communication. Farage is unable to contain his anger as he faces weekly allegations about corruption. Jenrick doesn’t have it in him and nor does Richard Tice. Suddenly, it is mainstream retail-offer politics which has the strongest and most accomplished advocate.

The most dangerous thing for Reform is if the national conversation settles on problems and their solutions. That is their Kryptonite.

Burnham is addressing the greatest weakness of the mainstream system - that it has stopped delivering for people, it has stopped fixing the things that are ruining their lives. Once people believe that it might improve things, the focus naturally changes to whether populists have any solutions of their own. And that is a deadly place for them to be. It is where they are utterly exposed.

This isn’t just about social care. It’s about whether liberal democracy can provide the goods. We thought we were witnessing this final battle in 2024, when Starmer won. Instead, he got a convictionless muddle, neutralised by the weakness of its own strategy. But now, after two years, we are in the unusual position of getting a second chance. Thank god for that. And thank god that, so far at least, it is being delivered capably.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My column for the i paper this week was on Farage as he drifts into something that looks really quite a bit like obscurity. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

No Origin Story this week, but I did Sky News Wednesday night. There was an unfortunate incident where my fellow guest - former Conservative special adviser Salma Shah, who is brilliant by the way, in an old-school Cameronite Tory way - got her super heroes wrong. At that point I heard noises come out my mouth and watched as I accidentally revealed the indignant nerdery that lies at the core of my personality. A friend messaged me afterwards: “You’ve let your normie mask slip.”

Tickets are still available for the next Origin Story Live - you can buy them here. You get a sense of what these events are like in this cute little video where we get roasted by a member of our audience.

I’m late to this - about half a decade late - but I’ve started watching Ted Lasso and it’s a delight. In the first season at least, there’s none of the long, overly-drawn out writing that makes you wonder if you’re wasting your time, or the mediocre churn that emerges when American shows become so profitable that they have to run and run. Each short episode feels like a movie, with a beginning, a middle and an end, providing a really satisfying emotional experience. Most of all, it is a pleasure to watch someone succeed by being nice, rather than by being a vicious snarling cunt. Very against the spirit of the times.

Right, that’s your lot. Fuck off. Oh and have a pleasant weekend.

This is a chess game and we are watching someone move pieces across the board. Their behaviour is rushed, they’re clearly learning on the go, and their work will be strewn with errors. But it is deliberate. And God help me, being deliberate might just be enough. The standards of political leadership in this country have declined to such an extent that someone acting in a deliberate manner may actually be sufficient to earn them my confidence.

What we have seen this week is a professional political operation. Nothing more. Not a triumphant one, not one that is sure of victory, not one that is insulated against mistakes. But a professional political operation operating in a professional fucking way. Andy Burnham has a diagnosis and a proposed cure - in short, he has an argument, and he has a communication strategy to deliver that argument.

It is a delight simply to see someone operate with a degree of political competence. The basics are there, for the first time in what seems like decades, as if a restaurateur just discovered that you can put potatoes, vegetables and meat in one meal.

The diagnosis is sound. It is not perfect - you could quibble, certainly it’s simplistic, but it is valid. It is that since the Thatcher period we have centralised power and economic benefit. The centre has not functioned adequately or even at all, the economic benefits have been too restricted and have now stopped altogether. The cure is to fix Westminster, devolve power and reindustrialise.

The point on centralisation and the pathology of Westminster is unarguable and I’ve banged on about it at length so I’m not going to repeat it here. If you think Westminster works well I would encourage you to check yourself in for professional help and then afterwards buy my book on why you are wrong.

The point on industrialisation is a bit more TBC. There is something disturbingly backward looking about Burnham’s rhetoric - the nostalgia about manufacturing jobs, the old Labour tribute act, which ignores the fact that most party supporters, like most of the country, work in white collar jobs.

We are a services economy. It is good to be a services economy. It is nice that people can make money in nice, clean, safe jobs. There is this pervasive sentimentality to British politics, a perpetual harking back to the past - Brexiters with a desire to revert back to the days before Europe, Corbyn with his complete lack of interest in any development after 1980, Blue Labour with its men-down-pit-listening-to-Bernard Manning-on-the-weekends tribute act. And all this is of course combined with a kind of paranoia about feminisation - of society and of men themselves, of lanyards as some kind of impotence injection. Burnham’s mood music corresponds to that baseless nostalgia.

The key really is what he ends up pouring into that bucket marked ‘industrialisation’. If it means a return to the pits then it’s obviously insane. But if it includes all sorts of economic activities - tech and Net Zero, for instance - it is not. It’s just a nostalgic strategy for selling a modernisation project.

Subscribe now

The early organisational moves have been very encouraging.

This week - in a decision which was barely covered by journalists but could prove one of the most consequential of his premiership - Burnham created a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (OPMC). This is the kind of thing which almost anyone who has looked into No.10 ends up suggesting.

The centre of British government is weak, sclerotic, neurotic and far too underpowered to function effectively. It does not have enough people and those people it does have are organised in an irrational way, stuffed randomly into various floors of a 17th Century townhouse. It is then surrounded by the Cabinet Office, which is a kind of management swamp, with no clear function, stuffed to the gills with all the different functions which didn’t fit in a specific department. It is the government equivalent of that drawer in your house with all the old adaptors and USB cables.

As the Institute for Government argued in its 2024 Commission on the Centre of Government, No.10 is “underpowered but compulsively involved in detail, with ambiguous structures that undermine the clarity of instruction from the prime minister and encourage in-fighting. There is an inward-looking bunker mentality, too closed to the external expertise and outside perspectives that are necessary to make the best decisions.”

This seems to be the report that Burnham and Cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo have used to model their own proposals. The OPMC will contain teams in the centre of government and the bits of the Cabinet Office facing the prime minister - including crucially the Cabinet secretariats. The parts of the Cabinet Office which relate to the whole civil service will be spun out into a new body called OneGov. I hate the name too, obviously - why can’t we give things proper names anymore? - but we have to accept the modern world and its utter inability to use words properly. At least it’s not called Cabinet Office 2.0, although I bet they fucking considered it.

The function of government is also likely to be improved by the establishment of No.10 North, which Burnham opened this morning. It’s based for now at Heron House in central Manchester, because it could provide the security required. They’ll be looking for something permanent in the meantime. The advantage is a question of basic spatial arithmetic. No.10 is too small to fit the kind of team needed to run a country of any size, let alone a major European state. Having more space means you can increase staff.

There are two primary dangers with No.10 North. The first is that this team will become irrelevant. Governments often found that staff in the Cabinet Office - just five minutes walk away - would be forgotten by the No.10 operation and become irrelevant. The same is obviously much more true for people on the other side of the country. The second is that a pointless competitiveness and tribalism will develop between the two No.10. I know this is stupid and childish but it is exactly what always happens in these sorts of scenarios, because humans are so very basic.

The first problem is solved by a regular prime ministerial presence and a large staff. Burnham is spending a day there a week - although whether this survives the crisis-politics era of Donald Trump is another matter. The think tank Re:State estimated that the government should aim for 300 staff within 18 months.

The second is solved by a set of distinct functions. Devolution and the economy are the focus at No.10 North while classic Downing Street functions - special advisors, private secretaries, press officers, hopefully policy and delivery units - remain in the traditional building. Burnham has put serious people with relevant experience and proven track records in charge of both No.10’s, with James Purnell in London and Caroline Simpson in Manchester.

This is an impressive move. It’s not just that Burnham is making organisational changes. It’s that the organisational changes reflect the diagnosis. One of the Burnham team’s arguments about dysfunction at the centre is that No.10 lacks the economic brains to challenge the Treasury. This has led to a split personality problem in British politics with a mighty Treasury - crammed with staff, with a strong institutional personality, a firm view of the world and control of the purse strings - competing against a thinly-staffed and economically undereducated No.10.

Louise Haigh, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and first secretary of state - so basically the deputy prime minister - stated the argument explicitly to the BBC. The government needed a “proper beefed-up economic unit in Number 10 that both the prime minister and the chancellor have access to”. A source familiar with Burnham’s plans told the FT that “No.10 hasn’t been set up to be strong enough to drive through priorities” but that it will now be “much more activist in the economic space”.

These are concerted changes. Diagnosis, proposed cure, a plan for implementation. A controlling intelligence to the government’s actions.

Subscribe now

The same is true for policy. This week saw four big announcements: an initiative to end homelessness, a cut to energy VAT, a reduction to bus fares, and a lowering of pub business rates.

Of course, most of the debate focused on where the money would come from. It is utterly absurd to see the fixation of the press on this issue when it is unable, or unwilling, to ask this question when it comes to something like immigration. The cost of the policies this week is probably around £1.74 billion. The cost of reducing immigration from the Office of Budget Responsibility’s assumption of 235,000 a year to the expected 130,000-150,000 a year for the next three years is £12 billion. This is why so much of the political reporting we get is unserious. It has such a tenuous grasp of the objective world.

Anyway, the much more interesting element of these policies is that they reflect an argument and that they transmit a message.

Burnham has repeatedly stated that people need some financial breathing space. They can’t afford a night at the cinema, they can’t afford a Friday night fish and chips. He knows that unless he is seen to be acting on that, he will not win people’s confidence.

Then it’s bam-bam-bam. Each item selected to corroborate the message, so that everything people are hearing and seeing corresponds to it. Breathing room, breathing room, breathing room.

This communication strategy is not an empty volley, a splatter of plastic buckshot. It is part of a structured approach to getting the public onside and keeping them onside. Eventually, we will see the ten-year plan. This is where the meaningful substance of what the government will do is contained. But while Burnham’s team gets to work on it, it needs to communicate a sense of urgency and values so that it can get people onside. ‘Yes: we know we need to work quickly to help. The things we prioritise are those that will help people as quickly as possible.’

Asserting this message buys goodwill. And that goodwill buys you the time over the summer to bring together your ten-year programme for the long term. A concerted change. A controlling intelligence to the government’s actions.

Subscribe now

It almost feels shocking, at this point in British political history, to see a government operate in this way. It’s been so long. Which previous government actually had a diagnosis, a proposed cure, an argument at all? Which government finessed its organisational changes, its public utterances and its policies so that they all satisfied that argument, then broadcasted them until they were entrenched in the public mind? Which prime minister had the intellectual self-confidence we see on show here?

The honest answer is horrible: none since David Cameron.

Cameron was a cynical empty prime minister who mutilated the country with austerity then launched a referendum on the EU which obliterated his career and the nation’s material and political wellbeing. But the man had a diagnosis - too much state, spending too much money. He had a proposed cure - cut everything. And he had a communication strategy which sold it magnificently - as a way of damaging Labour, as a moral mission, as proof of the government’s seriousness. Every word of it was a lie, or imbecilic, or an act of self-harm. But it was a professional political operation.

Theresa May didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing. She operated outside of the realm of meaning. “Brexit means Brexit” was, to this day, the most vacuous piece of political communication any post-war British government has constructed. Liz Truss was mad and could barely articulate what she wanted because she was too busy eating the carpet. Rishi Sunak was horribly confused and constantly shifting, desperately fishing for something - anything - that might save him. Maybe it was cancelling HS2? Maybe it was conspiracy theories about 15-Minute-Cities? Who knew? Not him.

Boris Johnson came closest to this kind of status - “Get Brexit Done” was hammered home until everyone understood it. But it wasn’t a diagnosis of real world conditions. It was a plastering over of extreme technical and legal problems with lies - “no border in the Irish Sea” - in order to secure an electoral aim. His levelling up agenda, which is superficially not that different to Burnham’s aims, could have been the basis for a thoughtful change to UK geographic inequality, but the man himself was too empty-headed to see it through, so it degenerated into an auction to secure funding through political fealty.

Starmer - and it gives me no joy to write this - was just as bad. There was no diagnosis, no cure, no argument. There seemed to be no thought on even the barest bones of a communication strategy. Take his statement that Israel could legitimately cut off water to Gaza. It’s ridiculous that he ever said this. The man was a human rights lawyer for Christ sake. But having said it he needed to correct it and yet he failed to do so for weeks on end. In the months that followed, Labour eventually adopted a more justifiable policy towards Israel, but the damage was done. It hemorrhaged votes on this issue alone.

The same could be said for countless other topics. Last autumn, Starmer called Farage’s deportation policy racist, then just as quickly briefed that he would take jewelry from refugees. What was the diagnosis? The cure? The argument? That strategy? Who was it meant to appeal to? It was a communication abattoir.

Now, after just five days, things have dramatically improved.

Lots can change. But on the face of the evidence before us right now, this is a professional political operation. It is getting the pieces in place. It has an assessment of what has gone wrong. It has a series of preliminary proposals intended to buy time for the ultimate solutions. The choices it makes help to substantiate the message. The policy and the communications are mutually-supporting.

It all makes sense. I know that seems a pathetically low bar to set for government behaviour, but it’s where we are right now. Beggars can’t be choosers.

On the early evidence, this is an effective operation. And by Christ it’s not before time.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

I’m on holiday this week. I think I’m in Kent, or perhaps Sussex, it’s unclear, but I can confirm that this little cottage has terrible fucking wifi and that everyone who lives here seems terribly happy with themselves. That means no podcast this week - sorry. I’m honestly not sure how I’ll even upload this newsletter.

Given I’m on holiday, it’s been inconvenient in the extreme for there to be a new government and you will appreciate quite how annoying it is that I have published four fucking pieces: One for the new progressive substack Arguably on the role of positivity, one extra piece for Striking 13 on Mahmood being kept at the Home Office (FFS), one for the i paper on the weird emotional space of the new government, and this one right here that you’re currently reading. It’s a wonder that I can be this positive about an administration that has sabotaged my time off.

The wonderful Naomi Smith, who needs no introduction, took over my correspondent duties on Late Night Live for the holiday that never happened. You can listen to that here.

I’ve been reading Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, which is one of those exquisite novels which zips along, making you laugh out loud every few pages, full of trenchant insights, and then you suddenly realise you just read 150 pages without even noticing. It is written by someone who hates things which can rightly be hated and loves things which can rightly be loved, and has all the right measurements of guilt and pride and hope. The commentary is sharp enough that it feels as if the book might cut your fingers, but it is informed by tender human feelings. A cracking read.

Right, I’m off to try and salvage what’s left of this holiday - fuck off.

That final appointment is canny and appealing: a smart, unshowy operator, who can work well with a prime minister, with a strong track record on defence and housing - two key areas where the Treasury will need to unlock funds. It was also utterly discombobulating to the lobby, wrong-footing countless journalists who all assumed we knew who was destined for the role. Until this afternoon I’d have said there was no doubt about this appointment. Governments kill rumours they do not like. The fact it was such a shock really made it feel like we were in a new era where the old rules did not apply.

It came at the end of a sunny, encouraging day. Burnham announced that his first instruction as prime minister would be to end homelessness. It was pleasing to hear someone talk about instructions rather than missions or aims. It had the ring of concrete action rather than vague managerial aspiration. It was reassuring that it was singular rather than plural and that it was morally meaningful - homelessness is a tragedy for those who experience it but also a broader sign of national decline for those who encounter it. It is also deliverable. Homelessness was basically eradicated under New Labour as a result of the work of the homelessness unit. It can be done again, if it is approached with seriousness.

All good vibes, with fresh hope, as we basked in the summer’s warmth. But then there was that one nasty cloud. No.10 announced that Shabana Mahmood would remain as home secretary.

Subscribe now

It was a travesty. She is literally the last person I would have kept in post and yet she seems to be the only person to have remained in their position. It raised serious questions about Burnham’s judgement.

She is an anti-immigration ideologue when we urgently need decent-minded, level-headed people to take the poison out of this issue. She engages in a performative form of cruelty which robs immigrants of their dignity, delegitimises those who defend them, validates the far-right and damages our reputation as a country. Her policies are shallow, unworkable and economically harmful. And her spat with Home Office minister Mike Tapp recently showed that, even on a basic managerial level, she cannot competently not run her department.

The decision to keep her is, at best, weakness in the face of the anti-immigrant right and at worst an active endorsement of her behaviour in the Home Office. It suggests Burnham will continue to lose votes to the Greens, when he has only just learned in Makerfield what can be accomplished if you unite progressive voters. It is electorally, economically, politically and morally foolhardy.

However, it’s worth keeping this in context. It’s not good, but it need not be a complete disaster.

Mahmood ran rampant under Keir Starmer because his administration decided that it needed to wake up every day and punch liberals in the face. This was a specific strategy and it was eagerly, even gleefully, pursued - for instance in her repeated attacks on “white liberals”, a weird Bizarro form of racialised anti-immigration rhetoric.

Burnham’s administration is likely to be very different. Punching liberals is not his strategy and it does not reflect his temperament.

Subscribe now

The new prime minister is perhaps best understood as a product of the Labour party. Unlike the Corbynites, who despised the centre and right of the party, or the Starmerites who despised the left and liberals in the party, he wants a place for everyone. This suggests he will keep a sceptical view on immigration, but not seek to alienate and needlessly offend liberals. Basically park it as an issue rather than pursue it. You’ll notice that he did not mention immigration once in his speech outside Downing Street today.

He is serious when he said that he wants to replace “point-scoring” with “problem solving”. He is serious when he says that he wants a more collegiate, workmanlike culture in parliament. This strongly suggests that he wants to find compromise positions between the Mahmood approach on the right and the soft-left opposition to her plans, particularly on changes to indefinite leave to remain.

This policy is currently in a disastrous state. It would throw out thousands of care workers, give children of immigrants national status on the basis of their parent’s wealth, and prevent many people who arrive here from ever integrating. Burnham wants it watered down.

This is what he told Radio 4:

“I do have a concern about leaving people without the ability to settle, one of the concerns being that if there’s a need to constantly check up on the status of countries where people have come from, that might limit the ability of the Home Office to deal with the backlog. And it also may leave people in a sense of limbo and unable to integrate. I’m not going to say that the home secretary is wrong to call for this level of change...What I would say is it’s really important, on the back of the measures that she’s announced, that there is a considered debate, time is taken to see if consensus can be built around it. Because that would be hugely valuable to the country if that could be secured.”

You can hear something similar in his ITV interview in December on rough sleeping targets, where he focuses on the brutal and self-harming process whereby those granted refugee status are thrown into homelessness due to the speed by which their accommodation is taken away.

“The task that we have faced has not been made any easier by the actions of the Home Office in recent times, evicting people with very, very short notice… People who’ve been given status but are then just literally evicted the next day and unsurprisingly haven’t got anywhere to go. It does feel to me as I kind of look back on my old workplace, Westminster…. what I’ve seen in my role when those decisions are taken, it just builds the number of families who present as homeless.”

It’s likely that Burnham’s homelessness pledge - his first as prime minister - will therefore take into account the way anti-refugee policy has distorted homelessness numbers. And that suggests someone who is alive to the weird self-harming manner in which this issue can damage other parts of the government agenda.

Subscribe now

Burnham was never going to be an all-singing-all-dancing pro-immigration prime minister. He has stated clearly that he wants a firm policy. That left us with two possible outcomes, which we should carefully distinguish from each other.

One, he does what Starmer did - fresh new draconian policies every day, lurid headlines, vitriolic briefings, all of that. You lose progressive voters, you lose your moral standing, you lose the unity of the parliamentary Labour party. Maybe he’s into that but there is nothing to suggest it and everything to suggests otherwise.

Two, he uses what’s been done already to park the issue, let the old Starmer administration have played the bad cop, plays the good cop, and then rather cynically lays claim to the lower immigration numbers for this year. This remains the most probable outcome. It means that those who support immigrants and want them to be treated with dignity have the strength to affect change if they are sensible about the way they lobby Labour MPs.

The Mahmood re-appointment is obviously terrible. It is a big loud warning sign flashing above this project. But the most realistic interpretation is not that Burnham will pursue the ‘fuck-liberals’ agenda. That runs contrary to nearly everything we know about him. It is that he thinks Mahmood has become talismanic of Labour’s reliability on immigration to more socially conservative voters and must therefore be retained, but that her proposals should be softened and moderated.

The key test will come when we see what comes of those indefinite leave to remain plans. Then we’ll have a better indication of his approach to this issue. In the meantime, we’re left with beautiful rays of sunshine - and that one troubling cloud on the horizon.

I first noticed football during Italia 90. This is back in the distant past when Fifa used to hold the tournament in countries that cared about the sport - it was crazy, you had to be there.

I woke up one morning and everyone was talking about the same thing. They spoke about it at home, my friend’s father spoke about it on the way to school, the teachers spoke about it in the classroom, the other pupils spoke about it in the playground. All of a sudden, the various disparate conversations you had in different places solidified into one conversation, which everyone seemed to be having, whoever they were, everywhere. And I loved it.

Everyone wanted the same thing. That was what stood out to me. Everyone very intently and passionately wanted one thing to happen, which was for England to win. The primary feeling was of joint desire and shared emotion. When England won, we all felt happy together. When England lost, we all felt sad together.

The semi-final against West Germany was the perfect introduction to what the next few decades would entail. Paul Gascoigne crying, the last minute hope, the penalty shoot-out, the crushed dreams. The drama, the structure of the defeat, the sense that victory was always tantalisingly close to hand, but kept out of reach by some sort of almost mystical force, something which could not quite be described in words - a curse perhaps, or a psychological flaw in the national personality, or a fundamental lack of will. I had no idea at the time, but I was being ushered into this house of pain, a neverending story about failure and frustrated self-belief.

In another sense, it was actually a terrible introduction, because England very rarely do well enough to get into a World Cup semi-final. It didn’t actually happen again for 18 years. This actually, was as good as it got. And it was fucking terrible.

Subscribe now

Over the last few weeks, I have consumed football insatiably. I’ve gulped it down - several matches a week, then podcasts, analysis from the sports pages, endless Instagram videos of cute mildly homoerotic moments between footballers. I’ve decided on my preferred journalists - Barney Ronay, Lars Sivertsen - and the ones I’m less keen on. I have developed an interest in watching videos of first-touches in slow motion and marvelled at how beautifully they combine grace, speed and spatial logic

Football is a hobby. People don’t call it that because it is too ubiquitous and because the word ‘hobby’ is nerd coded, whereas football is anti-nerd coded. But that’s what it is. It’s a hobby that’s so successful, so good at being a hobby, that it broke free of the definition. It has all the qualities that are required for something to be satisfying as a hobby: it is fundamentally very simple, but it spreads out to extreme degrees of complexity. It has purity and it has breadth. If you wanted to, and unfortunately many people do, you could talk about it forever.

I’ll miss listening to those podcasts and reading those articles. To be clear: I absolutely will stop listening to them as soon as this is over. But I’ll miss them. I love hobbies. I love being into things and listening to people talk about them as I potter around in the kitchen. I like the sense of shared time that comes with a hobby - that big events happen, or important new developments, and then you want to rush to a podcast or a website to see what your favourite commentators have to say about them. This is how I feel about comics and films and it’s how I’ve felt about football the last few weeks.

After one of the international tournaments, I decided to try following club football. I really enjoyed all this and I didn’t want to wait another two years. So I picked the club which was closest to where I lived at the time - Chelsea - and chose to support them. It didn’t work and it wouldn’t last. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to give a fuck about Chelsea. As a place, I don’t particularly like it. As an organisation, I didn’t like it either. I didn’t like it as an identity, or a brand, I didn’t like the men on the pitch, I didn’t particularly like the men off it either. It all just felt cold and brittle, not like supporting England at all.

I’d misunderstood clubs. The local area is only a part of their constitution. Far more important is the sense of identity cultivated by childhood experience. What, really, is the meaningful local difference between Tottenham and Arsenal? There isn’t one. What is the great fundamental distinction between Haringey and Camden, Enfield and Barnet? It does not exist. The clubs are only meaningful in so far as they provide a shared history in which people have embedded a sense of belonging. I didn’t have that. And if you don’t have it, you can’t escape how preposterous it all is. The same is true for countries, of course, but the basic fact is most people do have a sense of attachment to their country and only some people have a sense of attachment to a club.

Club football could not give me that same sense of joint sentiment which international football offered. In fact it provided the opposite - a rivalry, a splintering. When I was going to school in Southampton, people liked nothing better than slagging off the Portsmouth team. No-one ever called them Portsmouth, of course. They were Pompey scum. It was all baffling. How can you not see that both our cities are exactly as shit as each other, I thought. Not only that, they are shit in precisely the same barely distinguishable way. You’ve gone mad in the gutter of our lives.

I could keep listening to the podcasts now, keep reading the sports pages. Just like that time I tried to get into club football, I would quite like to have this new hobby chattering away in the background. But when you don’t have a fundamental loyalty, all the delightful hobbyism breaks down. You lose the wellspring, and all the analysis and gossip and debate just becomes irrelevant. I’m sure there are people out there who follow football without supporting a side, but it’s rare. There has to be this beating heart to the whole thing, it has to spring from a kind of identity.

Subscribe now

I missed the first half of the game against Croatia and came in for the second. What the fuck is this, I thought. This isn’t England. Look at how confident and positive and attacking they are. Look at how imaginative. I felt the same during the Mexico game, this bundling new sense of commitment and passion and energy. And last Wednesday, for one brief beautiful moment, roughly two-and-a-half minutes long, we saw it again. It lasted from Anthony Gordon’s goal to Djed Spence’s last-second tackle. Afterwards he got up, looked at the crowd and roared at them like a fucking lion. And for a few seconds it was possible to believe that the ghosts of the past have been vanquished, that we were now full of a confidence that previous generations could not muster.

It lasted two and half minutes and then it was gone, replaced by very familiar feelings, old psychological contours, sentiments which at this point feel like ancient texts found on the bottom of the ocean. All those old haunted dreams came flooding back. All those old anxieties in the bathroom mirror.

National football teams are a story that we tell ourselves. People talk about an England team, or an Argentinian team, but obviously that’s nonsense. There’s no continuity, no ship of Theseus puzzle. It’s a completely new set of people - three generations of them in my time alone. But the actions of the team and their fate become part of the formative experience of the next generation of players, who then tend to display the same neuroses and broadcast them out to those below them, and so on and so on.

The Argentinian football team has a distinct sense of identity. Unlike England, they do not have a crippling sense of self-doubt. They believe they can win. Even when they are two-nil down, as they were against Egypt, they believe they can win. And so they often do. They are powered by this intense intuitive confidence which is almost impossible to learn. They are also shameless, graceless, dishonourable fucking cheating bastards. I don’t say that as a joke or as a bit of good natured banter. I don’t even say it to excuse the result this week - they were clearly the better team. It’s just an objective assessment of what they are. Absolute copper bottomed cunts and I mean that in a really authentic genuine way. It’s not surprising that Fifa loves them, as it loves Trump.

The politics of the team are also plainly Trumpist. After the match they gathered around a placard which read ‘The Malvinas are Argentinian’ - it rhymes in Spanish but remains just as stupid on rational grounds. There’ll be a few leftists who approve of this sort of thing, but it’s pure imperialist bullshit. The people on the Falklands want to be British. It’s no more complex than that. If they wanted to be Argentinian, it would be right to give it to them. But they don’t, so we won’t. This is because it is people that matter, not geography, not distance from a fucking landmass. Progressives do not struggle to understand the right to self-determination when it comes to Palestine, and they should not struggle with it here.

This is the third quality the Argentinian team demonstrates: a desperation to translate footballing prowess into political validation. And it is here that the self-confidence they show on the pitch leaves them, because no self-confident nation would behave in this way. I loved Argentina when I was there - they have great meat and great wine, they like to sit on the street talking until the early hours of the morning, they like all the things I like. But politically they have been driven insane by various strands of ideologically-vacuous Peronist glamour-tyranny over many decades, and now exist in a state of frustrated victimhood, which can only be processed through football.

The character of the national side is not really connected to the character of the nation. Argentina’s football team demonstrates a confidence the country cannot achieve. There is no mystic link.

It’s tempting to say that England’s crisis of self-confidence on the pitch is a product of Britain’s search for a post-imperial role, but it’s so pat and superficial, a last-minute late-night thesis for a GCSE humanities student.

Subscribe now

There is, however, a meaningful emotional story which we tell ourselves through the national team. It is a prism through which we understand ourselves. That’s what Argentina is doing by processing military loss through footballing triumph. And it is what England does too.

Sometimes that is as ugly as it is in Argentina. This is the dark part of the national psyche that the Mirror’s 1996 “ACHTUNG! SURRENDER” front page comes from. It’s where the hysteria over the team taking the knee came from. There was plenty of this type of behaviour when I was growing up, with angry sexually frustrated football fans tearing through continental towns, bringing national shame: impotent on the pitch, impotent off it. In my twenties, this was probably the dominant image of the English in Europe.

But the England story now is a much more positive one. It is a story of sadness, sure. Of frustrated dreams and lost chances. It is not a coincidence that the songs England embraces have a sense of melancholy: Three Lions, Sweet Caroline, even Wonderwall. There is something wistful and lilting about them, either in the words or the music, a sense of nostalgia and yearning. This suits us.

But it is also a story about a country becoming more comfortable with its diversity. This is a tentative, fragile story. We saw that when Bukayo Saka missed a penalty in the Euro 2020 final. Weeks of pride and positivity collapsed instantly into a racist backlash. But each time, we seem to move further away from that era and towards something better. How many people this summer questioned the England team on race? Really very few. Even now, as racism is adopted by mainstream politicians and pumped out by the far-right, there is a sense of ease and confidence about the multi-racial character of the team.

That was the vision of England which was broadcast overseas during this tournament. It was the one that we broadcast back to ourselves. It is the story underneath the one of penalties and tears, overconfidence and inevitable defeat, a story which spans from Italia 90 to today, from rioting thugs to crowds singing Hey Jude.

And perhaps there’s something similar going on with men and their feelings. Sure, Gazza cried, but the England football team of the 90s had that tight, slightly suffocated look to them, as if feelings had to be quelled and emotions had to be neutralised. In the 2010s, during the John Terry era, it went further backwards, towards sneering machismo. But look at it now. Look at the affection with which the team treat each other. Look at Jude Bellingham the precise second the final whistle blows in the Mexico game: all that emotion and physical effort come crashing down, his knees buckle and he briefly starts to cry. These men are the heroes of a new generation of kids. And they seem so much healthier, gentler, kinder, softer than what came before.

Subscribe now

Two years ago, during England’s quarter-final victory against Switzerland at Euro 2024, Harjap Bhangal was filming Pakistani and Indian cricket fans at Edgbaston. But no-one seemed to remember why they had gone there. “No-one’s actually watching the cricket,” he said. “Everyone’s just come in to watch the football. And everyone here, regardless of whether they’re supporting India or Pakistan, is supporting England.”

That felt like a crucial moment of national identity formation. It felt like a final and complete ruination of Norman Tebbit’s reputation. It showed the kind of stories which countries can tell themselves through football: Of everyone wanting the same thing, or everyone having, for a brief period of time, the same fear, the same hopes and the same memories. Of an ever wider and more expansive understanding of ‘us’.

We’re out, we’re done, it’s over. On the pitch, England’s story feels much the same as in 1990: crushed dreams and disappointments. But off the pitch, it feels completely different. It’s a story of change and of progress. And to that extent at least, it feels like a kind of victory.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week, one on Nigel Farage’s predictably cynical response to the Ann Widdicomb murder and another on Keir Starmer’s last PMQs.

If you’re in the market for more political obituaries, we’ve a new episode of Origin Story on the Keir Starmer administration. We take a listen to our initial episode on him and try to work out how and why it all went so wrong. We’ve also a Patreon exclusive AMA where we take on questions from our subscribers. You can listen by becoming a Patreon and get lots of other goodies besides - sign up here.

No culture this week, it was all football. Normal service finally returns next week. There’s a good chance I’ll be doing a piece during the week on Cabinet announcements, policy initiatives etc as Andy Burnham kicks off as PM.

Now fuck off.

Journalists have a thing they do which irritates me a lot. They go to speak to young people - on a media course or fresh off of one - and give them this very depressing story about how journalism’s finished, it’s over, there’s really no point trying, you’ll never make any money, escape now while you can. They apparently consider it their constitutional duty to discourage people from entering the industry.

It doesn’t have anything to do with journalism. It’s entirely to do with themselves. It works to make them seem more impressive than they really are, because they somehow managed to succeed despite the industry’s decline.

Needless to say, it’s all absolute bollocks. People have been proclaiming the death of journalism my entire career, but it’s still here. It’s still possible to have a career in it. It’s still possible to make money in it. Will you be rich? No. But you will work in the most exciting job in the world. And you’ll be able to make the world a slightly better place, if you do your job properly.

I do quite a lot of mentoring to young journalists - basically as a fuck you to all the people who came in to speak to me when I was young and and told me it wasn’t possible. There’s loads of people who want to kill their dreams, so I figure it’s helpful if at least some people try and support them.

I know this seems laughable - I have a middling career at best - but the aim is to be helpful. So here is some of the advice I typically give on a first meeting with a young journalist, just in case it’s useful to someone else. Also me writing it here means I can just point people to it and don’t have to keep repeating it.

It’s not universally applicable and wouldn’t be universally accepted. I can imagine loads of journos disagreeing with it. It probably reflects the pathway I took at the time I was working. But it’s my view and I offer it regardless.

Subscribe now

Own a patch

This is the most important piece of advice I have to offer. Find a subject area you find interesting and become an expert in it.

It could be a literal geographic patch - a city you love, the area you’re from - or it could be a subject area: climate change, education, crime, welfare. The broader and more newsy the better. If you have a passion for something which rarely gets press attention, then fuck it, do it anyway. But if you are trying to decide between things you find interesting, then pick the one which provides the most news opportunities. Similarly, if one of those is well populated by lots of journalists and another isn’t, do the one with the least amount of competition.

Don’t worry if nothing springs to mind. Most people don’t know what they want to specialise in when they start. And don’t worry if you never had that one burning passion. As long as you’re curious, it’ll come. Just being interested in the world is enough. If you’re not curious about the world, you can just go ahead and fuck off now. This career is not for you.

Don’t think that this choice has to last a lifetime. That’ll just freeze you up, the same way that people freeze up when they decide somewhere must be a ‘forever home’. Nothing is forever, it just needs to be good for now.

Become an authority on this subject. Start by going to the relevant Commons select committee page - education, home affairs, women and equalities etc - and then read their reports. Select committee reports are usually excellent. At this stage, you might struggle to secure interviews with experts, so instead click through to experts giving testimony to the committee. They’ll have a transcript and a video. Read or watch it. Look at the names of organisations which have contributed to the inquiry. Click through, read their reports. Read the whole report, not just an executive summary. Then sign up to as many of these groups and individuals as you can - get on the mailing list, follow them on social media, set up alerts.

Read the trade press. Fight your way into events and conferences. Meet people and build a list of sources. Drink with them - drinking is an underrated way of establishing and consolidating professional relationships. Do not think of this as some exotic technical process. I did that at first and I acted weird, got in my own way. It’s just a question of becoming friends with someone - literally no more and no less than that. There is no mystery to it. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

This domain expertise will give you a flow of ideas for stories that you can pitch to editors. There’ll be a new development which has only been reported in the trade press. Or you’ll have been watching a select committee hearing and a comment by an expert can be repackaged into news. That kind of thing.

You’ll hopefully be sat on a news desk doing shifts, and be able to mention this to an editor during a quiet moment. Or perhaps you’ll need to pitch online. Or maybe, failing all that, you just decide to write this up for yourself and put it on a blog or a substack. These are all good options. You want to start gradually creating a name for yourself in relation to this subject area. You want people to associate your name with it.

As you do this, you will learn the chief journalistic skill, which is to take complicated subject matter and make it comprehensible to an average reader who is pressed for time and wishes to be entertained as well as informed. It takes ages to learn this skill - to get an intuitive feel for exactly how much information people want, how to properly understand something, how to explain it to others.

This is why you should be writing on your patch regardless of whether anyone takes the piece. Start a blog or a newsletter, research a piece, write it, start again.

Subscribe now

Get a job

Young journalists often ask whether they should try freelancing or try to get a job. Freelancing sounds much more romantic and allows you to focus on what really interests you, whereas an early job in journalism is often a heart-sapping affair on a business-to-business publication, more often than not in financial services. Back in my day, when half the industry was engaged in trying to fool Google, it often involved writing nine articles a day about concrete, or fencing, or some other godforsaken fucking subject matter. Companies would pay a journalism factory to produce these stories and publish them at speed because it was the best way to rise up the results page.

Grim, morale-breaking stuff. I remember those days, when the only thing that got you into work was the knowledge that the people on your desk would say something funny and the only thing that got you through the week was the thought of the weekend.

Nevertheless, my advice is to take the job. Financially, the benefits are obvious. It’s a regular steady income - low but survivable. Emotionally, the benefits are less obvious but very important. Freelancing with no contacts in the industry is horrendous. You spend days perfecting a pitch - discover the story, research it, hone the pitch, find the right person at the right publication to send it to, trawl through the internet to get their email, send it and then… nothing. It’s a day or two later before you give up. Just soul-destroying, firing off these beautiful ideas into the void, hearing nothing back, wondering if you definitely exist, feeling like a fraud. Having a job sidesteps this nightmare until you are in a position in your career to make freelancing viable.

Practically it is also invaluable. Having a job gives you practice. Perhaps you’ll have nine stories a day - horrific. Or perhaps nine a week - less bad, still a lot. Regardless, you will be writing and publishing, writing and publishing, honing skills. Eventually, the structure of a news story will be second nature to you. You’ll be able to do it in seconds. You’ll develop eyes which scan information for the headline.

These will not be good years. You’ll get fuck all money and you’ll be nervous a lot of the time and the work will be boring and stressful. But you’ll develop the skills of the job. In future, you’ll forget how miserable it all was and remember only the friday nights in the pub or that office flirtation you had, or how good your skin was. But at the time, it’s a bit fraught and tenuous.

Obviously jobs are not easy to come by and plenty of people do make it through freelancing. But my advice is to keep looking for one, to lower your expectation as to what that job entails, to take basically any job which is even remotely connected to journalism, and then to carry on working on your patch in the meantime.

This is the crucial thing. Having a job does not mean you stop working on your patch. You will follow a twin track approach - paying the rent and honing your skills with the job, then working on your patch in your free time. You will not have weekends - sorry. I still rarely take weekends and I almost never take bank holidays.

Most employers will not let you publish in other publications. If your employer is one of them, try to convince them to let you do a substack or a blog. Some of them won’t even allow this - it’s pitiful and absurd, but the world is full of sexually-frustrated hyper-controlling cunts who misdiagnose themselves as common-sense alphas. In this case, publish anonymously. It’s sub-optimal - it gets in the way of you establishing a name for yourself - but it still builds your knowledge base and your skills. If the blog is successful you can always quit your job and identify yourself.

Subscribe now

Write headlines

Everything is a headline. I am shit at headlines. I hate writing them. So believe me when I tell you this, because I wish it were otherwise.

Everything is a fucking headline. You cannot escape them. You cannot leave them to the subs. You must learn this skill.

You are watching an expert give evidence at a select committee. But in fact you are scanning their words for headlines. That point that they say something, often buried in a long answer, which can be turned into a headline. Perhaps they’re talking about hospitals - lots of stats and analysis - and then they say something about how one patient came in for an operation and was kept in a side room for nearly 24 hours. That’s it. That’s your headline.

You are listening to a source talking in a cafe. But in fact you are scanning their words for a headline. You are reading a report, but in fact you’re scanning for headlines. You are checking social media, you are listening to a debate in the local council, you are attending a press conference. In fact you’re scanning for headlines. This is not all you’re doing, but it is a radar that must be switched on the whole time.

This does not mean that you simplify. In the body of the article, you should include all the nuance and the detail. But you need something to hang it on. You need a shop window, a Harrod’s-at-Christmas display, which gets people’s attention and gets them reading. And then you have them, and you can give them the more detailed information about what’s going on in the world. Headlines are not a substitute for deep information, they are a prelude to it.

Headlines are not just the way we structure stories. They are how we describe them to our bosses. When an editor asks you about a story, you should be able to answer in one sentence. That is the headline. ‘Man X was given Y million pounds by Z donor’ and so on.

This serves two functions. First, it lets you sell the story internally - not just to readers, but to whoever has to give you the OK. Second, it gives you clarity about what you are doing. I used to get really bogged down if things became complicated, and would need my editor to sit me down and just say: ‘OK, stop gibbering. What is the story?’ Being able to summarise it in seven or eight words clarifies what you are doing and helps you organise the research - it provides a test of what is relevant. Does this bit of information substantiate that headline? No. Therefore you can ignore it for now.

This applies to five par news-in-briefs and four-hundred page books. When I was writing How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t, I used that title whenever I started to get lost. It was like a lighthouse. I’m quite liable to get seduced by some tangentially related bit of information, so being able to think - ‘Stop, is this actually about things going wrong in Westminster?’ - was actually very useful.

You do the same thing with columns. I guess everyone has their own relationship with editors, but every column of mine starts with an email which outlines a proposed headline. ‘Top line: It’s time for Starmer to go’ or ‘Top line: Farage is a dwindling rat-faced cunt’. The subs may or may not use your headline. That’s not the point. It’s a way of selling it to the editors, who will want to be able to use it at the morning editorial meeting, and of clarifying your own thoughts and what the purpose of the column is.

If you are freelancing and you are pitching to editors who do not know you, this becomes much more important. In fact, it is the single most important thing you will do. The headline is the difference between an opened email and an unopened email.

In this case, the headline is the subject line of the email. It will be seen, if it is seen at all, by someone who is very busy and under a lot of stress. So that subject line must do several things. It must jump out. But also it should make the editor’s day as easy as possible. They should be able to take that sentence and use it unchanged as the headline in the publication. It will explain the article to them instantly, and it will demonstrate why the article will be attractive to readers.

Successful social media also relies on headlines. Look at the videos which do well on TikTok or Instagram. They start with a headline: ‘England are going to lose against Norway and here’s why’, ‘This is how to get 40g of protein with just 200 calories’, ‘This moment in Succession was peak TV’, ‘These are the funding tricks politicians use to evade scrutiny’. They’re all headlines, the same old techniques reporters have used for decades in a new context.

Our job is fundamentally about headlines - internally in how we sell our ideas to editors, externally in how we sell the story to readers and personally in how we organise our work. Headlines are the beating heart of the whole fucking thing. You need to be good at them. You need to learn to distill what you are saying into one sentence.

Subscribe now

The main piece of advice I have is that it is possible to have a career in journalism. It seems vanishingly unlikely in your 20s and many people will try to convince you that it cannot be done. It can. There is a tremendous appetite for good journalism. People want to know how the world works. And it is a civic fucking duty to do that job in the best and most honourable way that you can.

Obviously plenty of journalists have no interest in reporting responsibly. As an evidence base, I would point you to the front page of the right-wing newspaper any day you go to the supermarket. But I believe most journalists - on right and left - go into it with better intentions.

We are in the midst of a war against objective reality. Look at the things populists denigrate: Universities, NGOs, expertise, institutions, standards inquiries, parliaments, science, objective reporting. They despise truth because truth holds them to account. And that, ultimately, is what journalism is about: Establishing the truth, spreading the truth, as best as we can grasp it at that moment in time. It’s an honour to be part of it and we need more people doing it, and doing it well. You can do it too.

If you’re a young journalist and you’re struggling you can email me at ianduntmedia@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can help. I will fail to reply to most emails - I know how this shit goes, they flood in and if there’s just too many to deal with - but I’ll check in whenever possible and answer when I think I can be remotely useful.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one on Nigel Farage looking like he might be a bit fucked and then another, post-Binface, in which I conclude that he definitely is a bit fucked. My Late Night Live segment was on the same topic, as you can imagine. A good time was had by all.

We released the season finale of Origin Story this week. It’s on the Luddites, the much maligned and misunderstood workers who smashed machinery in the early 19th Century. The libel against them was first inflicted in their own period and has lasted until our own, completely intact, through popular usage. They were the final squeal of irrational resistance to modernity, anti-progress, bashing their head against the inevitability of history.

In fact, the Luddites did not hate machines, or technology, or progress. They hated the use of machines to undermine the position of the worker. Their story is about fighting capitalism, the desperation of men whose legitimate grievances are ignored, the secret social history of Britain, and our moral relationship to technology. It is told through a mad cross-dressing, highly disciplined secretive political movement, operating on pain of capital punishment, organised by a mythical character. And from that story, we see the early seeds of British working class consciousness and popular resistance to power.

If you’ve never heard Origin Story, this is as good a place to start as any. And if you have and you want to see it live, come to the beautiful Union Chapel in September. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch below.

The cultural highlight of my week, and probably the year, was the aftermath of the England Mexico game. I’ll never forget the experience of the game itself. It’ll stay with me forever. But the days afterwards were more important.

As a British-Latino, I’m pretty invested in the relationship between Latin America and Britain, which is generally not a good thing to be invested in. Latin America never thinks about Britain and Britain never thinks about Latin America. But in the aftermath of the game, Mexico and England developed what looked like a new relationship.

I glugged down social media videos: England fans emerging with disbelief at what was happening - first the fiesta friendliness of Mexico on their arrival, then the frenzied cut-your-heart-out-hostility of that stadium, and finally the warmth and respect which came after the match. They literally formed a guard of honour to applaud England fans as they left the stadium. Who does that, as bona-fide World Cup hosts, after your dreams have been dashed?

Have we ever seen better losers than Mexico? I know how that reads, but it is meant in the most flattering way imaginable. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a country which is so gracious in defeat. What a contrast to Donald Trump’s lazy corruption, wiping away any honour from his national side, blundering in without a damn bit of thought to eradicate any goodwill the US has built during the tournament.

In the end it was summarised in just three words: “Gordon, fuck you.” I have watched this five second clip of Mexico manager Javier Aguirre perhaps a hundred times now. I know every second off by heart. His chat with Jude Bellingham asking for his shirt, the way he sees Anthony Gordon, who has just run his full-back down the line and is making a mess of Mexico’s defences, looks him up and down, then instantly tells him “fuck you” and starts laughing.

The clip is glorious. It is a testament to a kind of humour - to a manner - which Latinos and Brits share, to a joking abuse that forms the primary social currency in both cultures.

Big week for British Latinos. And if we can get past Norway, England will have the additional support of every single Latin American country against Argentina.

See you then.

Let’s give it a go. The Reform leader is going to run a ‘people vs the establishment’ campaign over his right to receive undisclosed gifts from a man who calls him daddy and writes books called ‘How to Launder Money’. No, that sounds mad. Let’s try again. The Reform leader has triggered a vote in his constituency on the principle of whether there should be scrutiny of his finances. No that’s fucking crazy, that can’t be right. The Reform leader is going to sidestep a highly damaging news story by elevating it to the most important narrative in politics for the next six weeks. No, that doesn’t work either. It can’t done. You cannot make it make sense.

Subscribe now

A lot of very stupid things were said just now in Farage’s announcement, so let’s take them in turn.

First, he insisted that he is the most threatened politician in Britain. In fact, two MPs have been assassinated in the last decade. One of them was killed during the Brexit referendum, by an assailant who used the type of rhetoric which had become alarmingly common during this period. It takes an astonishing degree of myopia, bordering on sociopathy, to not even mention this.

Just weeks ago, Farage was trying to stoke race riots on the streets of Britain. Now he has the gall to try and take the high ground about his personal safety because the Sunday Times did an investigation into his finances. He really is an abomination, a slimy self-absorbed little toad.

He then went into a long defence of his various financial arrangements which culminate with the question: “Do we want leaders who know how to make money”?

Farage did not become wealthy by his industry or his ingenuity. He became wealthy by reading out whatever he was told to say by punters on the Cameo app, shilling for gold, hosting for his mates on GB News and accepting gifts from shady Thai based crypto billionaires. He is not some kind of entrepreneurial genius. He’s a living embodiment of how an establishment figure embedded in the global far-right ecosystem gets funnelled cash on a scale that very few other people can possibly imagine. He now claims that £5 million gift was like winning the lottery. No it’s not mate, because anyone can enter the lottery. But very few people enjoy the level of largesse you are the recipient of.

Subscribe now

The Reform leader presumably thinks this is a daring wheeze, the kind of gamble which only a charisma powerhouse like himself can achieve.

His reasoning will have gone like this. He’s under investigation by the standards commissioner for the £5 million Christopher Harborne gift and probably will be again for his various links with ‘Posh’ George Cottrell. If the commissioner finds against him, which seems likely, he can be suspended from the Commons. If that suspension is long enough, which seems likely, it can trigger a recall petition, and that would force him into a byelection anyway. So he might as well do it now, on his terms, dodge the bad press of the investigation, and try to define the narrative of the contest. After a string of byelection defeats by motivated anti-Reform voters, he has a decent chance in Clacton, where Reform got 46.2% of the vote in 2024.

There are a few problems with this. The first is that the parliamentary investigation is not neutralised by the byelection. It is merely suspended. Paragraph 40 of the Procedural Protocol to the MPs’ Code of Conduct states that it will restart if he returns to parliament. So even if he wins the byelection, that process will begin all over again, possibly leading to another byelection. How much patience will the good people of Clacton really have for these pointless self-interested theatrics? And how long will that patience last?

Farage’s narrative for this byelection fight is basically incomprehensible. It cannot be forced into a rational shape. He wants to convince voters to support him as a man of the people versus the establishment, in a constituency with some pockets of real deprivation, while defending a £5 million gift from a billionaire and the use of a five-story house near Buckingham Palace from a man who is literally called ‘Posh George’. Is that definitely a good idea? Because it doesn’t sound like a good idea.

Farage evidently thinks it is. To be clear, he would not have done this if he thought there was a chance of him losing. Reform really owns that seat. For all the online mockery of how rarely he goes to the constituency, people there don’t seem to mind. And a progressive alliance is difficult to achieve here. No party other than the Conservatives really has a chance against him.

Are local people really so into Farage that they’ll ignore how weak and self-interested his arguments are? Maybe. Populism and conspiracy theories are strong drugs.

But equally, to put it mildly, they might not. On any objective level, this is a weak position to stand on. Farage has picked a very damaging story, one which undermines his whole I’m-just-a-regular-guy shtick, and elevated it to the core issue in an election which will decide his political fate.

Subscribe now

It may be tough to unseat him, but it is not impossible. We are in a slightly different place to 2024. Voters who don’t like Reform now know that they have to consolidate around an alternate candidate - this is the lesson of Gorton & Denton and Caerphilly. So the key question becomes who the candidate is and what the Tory approach will be. That seat becomes winnable if the candidate is an anti-corruption type in the Martin Bell mould, or a Tory selected to appeal to progressive voters.

Obviously, Kemi Badenoch is probably too mad to make that sort of decision. She has never met a tactical argument which did not defeat her. But she has a chance here to beat the man who is killing her party. There is at least a fleeting hope that she might do the sensible thing.

Farage also faces a newfound threat from the right from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party, with his batshit Elon Musk online propaganda infrastructure. It is an altogether different and more challenging situation than the one the Reform leader faced a couple years back.

It comes with his relationship with the press in the toilet. Farage doesn’t know how this works yet, so he’s not used to it. He’s used to the media eating out his hand. But much of his speech today was dedicated to how mean they are, how they are putting him and his family in danger, how they’re part of a conspiracy against him - and all of that with references to individual editors. He is seething with anger. It is not the most conducive circumstance in which to launch a battle for your political life.

Neither is his emotional state. The man simply cannot get his shit together. At certain points in the announcement today, he looked unhinged. A few days back he basically barked at a series of interviewers - including the line “none of your business” about a £5 million donation. I don’t know if he focus-grouped that phrase but I doubt it would perform well. Last night he looked like he was falling apart completely when he was doorstepped in Heathrow airport. Today, he was almost shaking with rage. He’s not well. He’s lost that magic touch. Who knows what will happen during the campaign.

There’s no point being complacent about this. Farage has basically called a referendum on the concept of objective reality. But just because he has chosen his battleground well, does not make it any less pitiful, solipsistic or inane. Nor does it mean he is immune to defeat. People are not idiots and only an idiot could accept the argument that Farage is making.

The spotlight is really on him now, and you can see the cracks in the personality very clearly.

It’s not going well. There are many definitions of failure, but Vanilla Ice has historically been the most widely accepted. In cultures across the world and in different eras, Vanilla Ice has functioned as one of the key metrics for decline, the gold standard measurement for what happens when you’re a gurning cunt.

The ancient Egyptians used to feature him on the inside of a Pharaoh’s tomb. The Normans stitched images of him looming over the battle scenes in the Bayeux Tapestry. It is a rule as old as time: If your country is relying on Vanilla Ice to save its national reputation, then something has gone horribly wrong.

Now he has come again, like Halley’s Comet, to inflict a devastating moment of humiliation on America’s 250th birthday. The problem began when the artists who had been booked to perform at the celebrations realised what was happening. What had been presented to them as an event for the country as a whole was in fact a piece of idol-worship for an insane president.

Seven of the nine musical acts pulled out. “What? What are you talking about?” Freedom Williams said, in a post filmed in a bathroom. “I don’t fuck with Trump… I know where I stand. I know who the fuck I am.”

In the end, and with the lamentations of history, there was just Vanilla Ice and one other act. He posted an Instagram video insisting he was still up for it, circling a pool while trying to quell a sense of growing existential terror. “I’m super honoured to do this concert with everybody,” he said plaintively. But in the end, even this was not possible. The concert had to be cancelled because of the weather.

America’s 250th celebration is a disaster. It is so bad that it has even failed to hold a Vanilla Ice concert.

A Trump speech on the mall last week was sparsely attended. The Great American State Fair, which has taken over downtown Washington, is a debacle. There’s hardly anyone there. Several states declined to send representatives, leaving their booths empty. The air conditioning in several booths stopped working in the middle of a heat wave, forcing them to close down.

Attendees are not allowed to bring food or water and the only shaded space to sit is in a food tent, where visitors can buy a bottle of water for $5, or the Phorm energy drink by Ultimate Fighting Championship president and Trump ally Dana White. On the fair’s first full day, a man was arrested after witnesses saw him filming female performers while vaping, with one hand down his pants.

Subscribe now

The US Semiquincentennial stopped being about American history the moment Trump returned to office. At that point it became about corruption. This followed the standard populist pattern, established by Vladimir Putin and VIktor Orban and then replicated across the world. The corruption feeds the political narrative, which then assists with the corruption, in a closed circle of mutual advantage.

A report this week by the Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee documented how this was done.

In 2016, Congress established an independent, non-partisan Semiquincentennial Commission to organise the celebrations. It established America250, which was intended to lead celebrations for everyone, regardless of their political views or the character of the current administration. Financially, it was grounded in the Congressionally chartered National Park Foundation - the official philanthropic partner of the National Park Service. These are old, reliable organisations with heritage and a long-earned sense of public trust.

Then Trump got into power and naturally tried to turn it into a form of emperor worship towards himself. When America250 kicked back against his demands for political propaganda and personal fealty, the White House established Freedom 250 LLC as a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation. It allowed Trump and his allies to operate under the credibility and reputation of the brand but avoid any requirement for accountability or transparency.

Funds were surreptitiously diverted, leaving America250 starved of cash. Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said prospective America250 donors were actually provided with Freedom 250’s bank details. This would be wire fraud, if America still had a functioning legal system. Sponsorship packages were turned into a classic corruption racket, with people paying $10 million for guaranteed time with Trump, complete with a “historic photo opportunity”.

It then worked to steer funding towards campaign loyalists, in much the same way that Orban would direct funding towards his supporters. Event Strategies, which planned the January 6th rally which preceded the attempted coup, was awarded 18 federal contracts and an indefinite master contract, worth a combined $140 million.

Perhaps the most gauche last-days-of-Rome moment came when an Ultimate Fighting Championship event was held on the South Lawn to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looked down on the spectacle below and it honestly felt as if his face would twist into disapproval, the nation’s father turning in his grave as his children squandered the constitutional riches he left them.

Quite apart from the sense of cultural degeneracy, it was an act of blatant corruption, run without any sense of shame or concealment. The event was sponsored by companies facing federal regulation. Fighters received bonuses in a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by Trump’s children, which he holds stocks in.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” the Congressional report concluded. “The machinery built for a national commemoration was converted, deliberately and over a period of months, into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the president’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

Subscribe now

This is the anniversary that America deserves.

I was talking with a friend the other day about the celebrations. He loves America, is fascinated with it, knows its history well, adores its music and its films. His reaction when the subject came up was instantaneous. “They haven’t got a thing to be proud of. They don’t have anything to celebrate.”

We rarely speak about the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping the world. News reports still operate as if America has an assumed leadership role - not just militarily or economically, but culturally. Yet its reputation is tanking. Global polling found that the proportion of people who believed it had an overall positive influence on world affairs fell in 26 out of 29 countries in the six months leading to April. In Britain, one of America’s most reliable allies, just 39% believe it has a positive influence. In France, its oldest ally, it’s 30%. In Canada, its closest ally, it’s 19%.

Four million fewer foreign visitors went to the US in 2025 compared to 2024, with total spending decreasing by more than $8 billion. It’s the worst single-year decline in two decades outside of covid. “We used to be a country that others wanted to emulate,” Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said forlornly. “That narrative no longer exists.”

It is easy to blame Trump, to say that this is not the real America and that he is some a horrible contorted version of its true face. Perhaps it was still possible to hold that view between 2016 and 2020. But by the time he was elected a second time, it was clear that many Americans either approved of what he represented or were sufficiently ambivalent to wave him through.

This point is usually made in relation to the US’ domestic politics. But it is also true about the way that America sees the world. We now have a pretty good impression of how many Americans see us and what they truly think of us. We know that, because Trump is commendably clear. He and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and the others seem to resent the rest of the world. They admire strongmen leaders, sure, but their allies are there to be bullied, mocked, disparaged and humiliated. When it came to election day, most American voters either approved or didn’t object.

It is hard to square this version of America with the one you experience when you’re there: the nice lady in the queue at the airport who wants to talk about her son-in-law, the eccentric wiseguy taxi driver, the bloke who sits down next to you by the bar and starts up a conversation, the great social openness of the American personality. But we have to accept that this is obviously a core aspect of what the country is. If it wasn’t, it would not be happening.

It is particularly vexing to find that America’s core message to the world is now one of victimhood. Every day, Trump has some new sob story he wants to tell, about how unfair trade is, how much money America spends on the military, why everyone has taken advantage of them. This would be grating from anyone but it is particularly irritating from the US.

This is a country that committed genocide against its indigenous population, enslaved black people, fought a civil war to avoid freeing them, secured superpower status by its late entry into two world wars, sponsored murder and tyranny in some of the poorest countries on earth, and has enjoyed the outrageous benefits of its own global order and world reserve currency. It has vast natural resources and a level of material wealth which is without precedent in the history of man. And what has it done with it? Banked it, enjoyed it, and now complained about what a hard time it’s having.

When Trump imposed his Liberation Day tariffs he took time out to complain about how unfair Vietnam had been to the US. Vietnam, for god sake. I might just keep writing it again and again. Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam. Is there a better example of the state of complete moral myopia which the nation has descended to?

It felt for a while, when I was growing up, that America might occasionally feel a bit of guilt over what it did in Vietnam. We had all those years watching films about the war, some of them among the greatest films of the 20th Century.

But perhaps those films told us something else. Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter. I love many of these films, but none of them were about what happened to the Vietnamese. They were about how massacring Vietnamese people was really difficult for young American men and hurt them very much. There was no real moment of introspection, except that which was pertinent to its own countrymen. And that is how you come to this orange crybaby saying how mean the Vietnamese are to America because the Americans want to buy their stuff.

There’s a better part to the American personality, but you wouldn’t want to rely on it. The horrible reality, and it is one which we shouldn’t shy away from out of mere politeness, is that this is the anniversary which America deserves. It is corrupt, tawdry, embarrassing, a failure. It perfectly encapsulates this moment in the country’s history.

Subscribe now

For a long time, Trump imagined this summer would be the pinnacle of his second term. The semiquincentennial would take place at the same time as the World Cup - split between the US, Mexico and Canada - and turn the world’s eyes toward the US, with him upon the throne. He has been building towards this for years.

And yet Trump has not attended any World Cup games. He has not gone to any of the stadiums. And there is, of course, a very good reason for that. It is not safe for him.

He can’t even safely attend basketball matches. When he attended the NBA finals in Madison Square Garden last month, he was loudly booed by the fans. If he went to a World Cup game, things would be much worse. The world has none of the vestigial respect for his head-of-state position which Americans might retain. He would be met by any of a variety of songs. These include, but are not limited to, Australia’s “Aussie boys, we’re on a bender, Donald Trump is a sex offender” and England’s “He’s fat with piles, he’s in the Epstein files, Trump the cunt, Trump the cunt.”

Trump has been completely excluded from the World Cup. What initially felt like an event which would be tainted by his participation has been saved by the fact that he cannot safely attend. His fear of an international crowd has prevented him from securing any reflected glory. All that obsequious boot-licking from Giovanni Infantino, with his imaginary Fifa Nobel peace prize, was for nothing. The moment that the fans became involved, it was clear that they would annihilate Trump’s dignity the moment they were given the chance.

Subscribe now

And then the World Cup did what it does. It took the sad, tawdry reality that constitutes it and made it beautiful.

There is no other event like this, in its emotional breadth or its depth. For one brief moment, the world is united in one storyline, which is about how to beat each other by kicking a ball. Absurd, but there we are. During the World Cup, I can message my cousins on the other side of the world and know for a fact that they will be watching the same thing I am watching. There is no other time that this is the case. There is no other moment in which so many countries become fiercely, passionately involved in one narrative. It is the greatest unifying spectacle on earth. And no amount of Fifa corruption or cynical ticket pricing can contradict that.

Then, just for a moment, there was a little ray of hope, a shaft of light: a reminder of a better America.

It came on social media, flowering out from online videos to news reports on TV channels. The people of Boston were evidently delighted by Scottish football fans, who literally drank the city dry. They discovered the mystical Scottish need to steal traffic cones and put them on the heads of statues. Their baseball games - usually genteel family affairs - were turned into raucous singalongs, as Scottish fans just kept on belting out the tunes, indifferent to the usual way of doing things. They mixed with a level of enthusiasm and gregariousness that makes you suspect that, in nine months’ time, a wave of Scottish-American children will be born, constituting a new demographic subgroup in the nation’s patchwork identity.

It wasn’t simply that Boston was delighted by Scotland. It was how delightful it was to watch Boston be delighted. There is something so satisfying and healthy about watching a country enjoy the culture of another country, about watching a country host well. Suddenly the visa requirements and the airport security checks and the threats of ICE agents in stadiums seemed very far away, replaced by the joy of cultures mixing together under the life-affirming influence of beer.

Then visiting fans started posting videos reacting with wonder at American food, and in particular one of the greatest American cultural inventions of the 20th Century: the free refill.

Obviously, it was all highly questionable. Many of these videos were made by people playing a persona, or had been released before the World Cup, or were a bit contrived. But none of that mattered. The medium and the subject matter and even the veracity were unimportant.

All that really mattered was that people from one culture were enjoying something from another culture. America experienced the joy of watching someone arrive and like you. The magic is not in the initial delight, but in our delight at people’s delight. Regardless of how authentic those videos were, America enjoyed seeing itself through another’s eyes. This was a better place than the one we’d seen recently, somewhere that still wanted to be open and welcome and charming.

For a moment, you wondered if it might have some effect. Isn’t it pleasant, being liked rather than being hated? Isn’t it far better to treat other countries nicely and have them treat you nicely in return? Isn’t there a better, more dignified and joyous way to behave, than the manner in which you have been recently? What happened to the version of America that was open to the world? The America the world wanted to visit?

We can’t pretend that the World Cup will fix these problems, or that this is any more than a passing glimmer of light. But it is a reminder, at least, that there is a better America in there somewhere, underneath all that vicious victimhood and unconcealed aggression.

Its return can’t come quickly enough.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one on Nigel Farage’s insatiable fucking greed and how it’s starting to properly hurt him and another on Morgan McSweeney’s childlike realisation that it’s better when you actually do some work to prepare for government. Thanks Morgan, great stuff, really appreciated.

This week’s Origin Story is on Paranormal Investigators. It’s a weird spooky story of people running around claiming to have discovered proof of the afterlife and being unable to replicate their findings.

We start in the Victorian period, with an intoxicating blend of outright hysterics and some rather more somber empirical types and end up in 21st Century America, where a bunch of out-and-out charlatans exploit some very fucked up people for money. It’s a tale of hard cash, horror films, the Catholic church, evidence-based beliefs and things that go bump in the night. You can listen to it here or watch it below. And you can buy tickets to our next live show at London’s beautiful Union Chapel here. Buy the fucking ticket you cunt.

If you want some more podcast action I was also on Fast Politics with my friend Molly Jong-Fast, in which I try to explain Starmer and Burnham but really just sit there being abused by her breezy dismissal of my nation.

This week I read The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, by C.Thi Nguyen. It suffers from the problem you often get with books like these, which is that it has one idea and the book unnecessarily expands to turn that idea into a viable commercial proposition in the publishing industry. It would be better as a 10,000 word article. However, it is saved by the fact that this idea is, I think, of tremendous importance. It is potentially life altering.

It concerns the gap between the utility we get from an activity and the scoring system society projects on it. Nguyen paints a portrait of a world which is lost in metrics: protein intake, academic research scores, house prices, arrest targets, waiting times, social media likes, technical specs, sporting stats. His argument is that our attachment to these metrics as a way of evaluating our level of success takes us away from the benefit of the underlying activity.

The core concept is called value capture: “When you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them”.

I think this is profound. It is one of those ideas that you start to see everywhere. It can be tremendously liberating when you apply it to your own life.

The book is available here and you can watch him chat about it below.

Right, that’s it this week. Fuck off. I’m off for some non-metric fun.

We’ve not seen anything like this before. That doesn’t mean it’ll work. It just means that finally there’s a chance - a fragile, tentative chance - of reform.

This is not about policy. At its core, it is about personality and experience. It is about a man who does not like Westminster, does not feel comfortable there, thinks something is deeply wrong with it, and is I think, on some level, haunted by the version of himself that he became there.

When Andy Burnham was a minister in the Gordon Brown government, he was a very different guy to the one you see now. He sounded robotic, like one of those politicians you get direct from the factory floor, with a button that you press for them to read out lines-to-take from party command. He wasn’t particularly striking in this respect, there were plenty more like him. But he was indistinguishable from them.

It was in Manchester that he changed. He found his voice and he found his manner: easy going, enthusiastic, authentic, self-effacing, articulate. And he then began to layer political convictions onto this change. First, a commitment to local politics. Second, a critique of the Westminster system. A lot has been said about the first. Very little has been said about the second.

“It’s a silent process,” Burnham told me for How Westminster Works. “You arrive in Westminster. You’re full of the joys of spring. And that is slowly sucked out of you. I woke up to that in 2016, after 16 years of being in parliament: voting the way you’re told to vote, taking the line you’re told to take. I realised people’s impression of me was not really me. It’s that silent Westminster effect. It does it to everyone.”

People don’t seem to have quite clocked it yet, but Burnham has a really rather radical critique of Westminster. He wants to change the entire culture of the place. And he is entering the estate as a complete outsider: with no power base, no loyalty to it, no tribal commitments, and a fairly limited degree of association with the party. Someone who really wants to change the Westminster system is finally in a position to do it.

Might he fail? Yes, absolutely. Might he not even really bother trying? Sure. We’re all well versed in the most cynical and depressing possibilities. We’re living in them and have done for years. But honestly: when was the last time we saw a scenario like this? The answer might be never. We are in an unprecedented situation.

Subscribe now

The vast majority of prime ministers come up through the Westminster system. Before standing as an MP, they’re often a special adviser to a minister, then they enter parliament, hope to be made a parliamentary private secretary, then a junior minister, maybe spend some time in the Treasury, then become a secretary of state, move around the Cabinet table, and eventually go for the top job. No matter how they started, by the time they get to No.10 they are creatures of the system.

Burnham is different. He’s an outsider, but of a very specific sort. He’s not just some guy who has never been in government railing at it from outside, shaking his fist from College Green. He’s someone who went through the system and then rejected it. He was thrown into the machine, munched up, spat out, and then reinvented himself. He knows how the system works, in granular detail. He has had a lot of time to think about who he was when he was a minister, how he behaved and spoke and thought. His sense of political reform is therefore wrapped up in his sense of individual development. It is not abstract or procedural. It is personal. It is a part of his identity and a core element in the story he tells about himself.

He is a Labour man, but the party has a weak hold over him. He did not win the mayoralty because of Labour. He did not win Makerfield because of Labour. He is not firmly embedded in one of the Labour tribes.

There is also something specific to his manner which might be pertinent in the days to come. He is humble. He projects modesty. I am not naive enough to think that these qualities are completely genuine. They are obviously part of a public persona and they are balanced by the fact that he is capable of acting in a highly mercenary way. There is obviously a massive ego there. But it is possible to have an ego and be modest - sounds weird, but it is. And anyway, it is simply not possible to get anywhere in politics without an ego.

Burnham’s manner is relatively rare among men in Westminster, whether it’s special advisers, or MPs or staffers in Downing Street. You see it much more with women, for the obvious reason that we live in an impossible dark reality where men succeed by demonstrating their tendency to psychopathy and women try their best to remain relatively normal in a work environment made insane by the other gender. Don’t get me wrong, many female MPs are completely batshit, but psychologically normal female MPs are not rare, whereas psychologically normal male MPs kind of are.

Many Westminster men are thrusting competitive types, quite shouty-crackers, with very little curiosity and limited emotional intelligence. This emotional temperament is closely related to the constitutional temperament: Winner takes all, the assertion of dominance, all issues reduced to triumph instead of cooperation, the fierce demand for tribal loyalty, the insane hatred for opponents, the obsessive need to project strength at all times. Our political system is toxic masculinity in constitutional form and it therefore attracts people who share those values.

It’s telling that the one time Downing Street really worked in recent decades was during Tony Blair’s second term, when Michael Barber was running the delivery unit. His approach was academic, curious, understanding, collegiate. His principle was that you spoke honestly but left the relationship in a better place than you found it, that shouting at people in the normal British political way wastes prime ministerial authority, whereas working with them invests it.

It is not surprising to me that someone with Burnham’s personality has taken so against the Westminster system. I suspect it had to be someone like that - an unaffected doesn’t-touch-the-sides macho political type would never have had the introspective ability Burnham demonstrated in Manchester. And now, after a decade away, he’s back and in a position to change things.

Subscribe now

Why is Westminster the way it is? Three issues stand out above the others. One is the candidate selection process, whereby local parties pick who they want to represent them at the election. Another is the first-past-the-post electoral system, which is designed to hand one party a massive majority. And a third is the whips’ office which functions as a political parties’ surveillance and discipline enforcement operation.

The first selects conformist, obedient politicians. The second allows the government to do whatever it wants. The third discourages independent thought from MPs or practical cooperation between parties. As Burnham said on Question Time the other day: “It’s the point-scoring isn’t it? The whole set-up of Westminster, people go to point-scoring before they go to problem-solving.”

Things can be improved relatively easily. Open primaries would mean party candidates have to appeal outside of the ideological rank-and-file, to the public at large. Institutional assistance to MPs, with a dedicated cadre of civil servants, would help understand what they are voting on and highlight dangers in legislation.

Most important is electoral reform. Under proportional representation, parties have to work together to form a government. Their slim majorities mean they need to convince other parties to accept their legislation through addressing their concerns rather than just railroading through them. This makes for much better law.

Subscribe now

A guy came up to me once in the street in Soho, basically just wanting a fight. It was all very random and threatening and strange. He put his forehead right up against mine, eyes inches from my own, and started shouting. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. I always imagined I would step back from this kind of situation and try to talk someone down. But instead I found myself, almost involuntarily, responding in kind. Without thinking, I pressed my forehead into his, acting like I was John Terry. It was absurd and pitiful but completely and utterly intuitive, like some monkey bit of your brain just activated and grabbed the controls: ‘It’s alright lads, I know what to do here.’

Westminster culture will try to destroy Burnham. It doesn’t matter how many people want change. It doesn’t matter what his mandate is. It doesn’t matter how friendly he is. Having a more independent-minded, pragmatic approach to politics is completely anathema to the way it does things. It will try to kill it in the crib.

I suspect it will do so in the same way that I responded that day in Soho. Machismo is a default setting. And the behaviour of other people will remorselessly push Burnham towards reciprocating in kind.

The media is a major part of the problem. It will interpret any issue about contrary views as a test of his authority. It does not know any other way. So if an MP has a different opinion on some matter - Heathrow expansion, rewilding, benefits, whatever - it’ll ask them about it every time they do an interview, then Burnham will be asked what he’ll do about it. If several MPs vote against the government, it’ll be treated as a challenge to his leadership. On and on it goes: the forehead pressed against the forehead, shouting in his face. Fight fight fight. And it’s really hard not to respond in a macho way - disciplining MPs, enforcing the whip - even though that will ultimately undermine the project he is pursuing.

The same will happen with the opposition. Burnham wants a more practical working environment in Westminster - more productive adversariality rather than the pathological adversariality we’re presented with now. This will be considered counter-cultural and insane.

Party leaders reflect the culture in which they became party leader. That’s how they succeeded. No political culture that wanted intelligent, practically-minded opposition would have made Kemi Badenoch leader of the Conservative party. If we’re lucky, Ed Davey will live up to it, perhaps the Greens. It’s hard to imagine the SNP doing so. It’s impossible to imagine Badenoch being anything but belligerent and inane.

The very people Burnham wants to bring in will probably react venomously to his attempt at doing so.

Subscribe now

The press will then come for him just like they went for Starmer. He’ll be portrayed as weak, or naive, or hypocritical.

Starmer’s way of dealing with this was to emulate the New Labour techniques of the 2000s: Attend Rupert Murdoch’s parties, write op-eds for the Telegraph, send out ministers on the broadcast round. Perhaps Burnham will do the same, but there was a hint of a cannier approach this week.

At PMQs, Kemi Badenoch called him “a pair of eyelashes and black T-shirt”. He responded with a cute video online - depressingly on X, no change there - saying “it’s dark blue actually”.

I’m not going to pretend that this is some brave new era in online communication, but the mere fact Burnham can use social media with some basic degree of competence provides a potential way of sidestepping the press attack. This is where most people get their news, this is where minds are made up. And he is able to operate in it in a way that no previous prime minister has done, with the possible exception of Boris Johnson.

There is a chance here - no more than that, but a chance nonetheless - to neutralise the press attack. It is coming regardless, it doesn’t matter what he does. But Burnham can change the way the game is played.

Subscribe now

When individuals try to take on a system, the system usually wins. It is the system which sets the incentives. It dictates the pressures, which establish the behaviour, which creates a web of actions dedicated to sustaining itself. It is extremely difficult to alter, especially when the system is as old and as firmly established as this one.

But then, we’ve never quite been in this situation before. It would be unusual enough to see someone who believed in electoral reform reach Downing Street - it literally hasn’t happened since 1997. For that person to come from a completely different power base, with independence from the Westminster culture, is stranger still. What’s happening right now is the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime.

Obviously there will be disappointments - he has plenty of flaws and has already retreated on important liberal issues - but there is more opportunity here for radical constitutional change than there has been in a very long time indeed. I keep trying to think of a moment in democratic British history which is comparable to it and I fail.

The next few years are going to be undeniably fascinating. Perhaps it’ll fall apart instantly, or his more virtuous instincts will be corroded over time. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he will actually accomplish something. Perhaps finally, when the system is failing so badly that a figure as pitiful as Nigel Farage is threatening to win, it’ll finally see the need to change itself.

We should be clear what’s happening here. This is populism without the populism. Burnham has not made the Zack Polansky mistake and tried to copy the people-versus-the-elite narrative into a progressive framework. Instead, he is channeling the demand for change, for a new way of doing things, and directing it towards a better set of goals.

Who knows? Maybe when he unveils his agenda it’ll be bitterly disappointing. But he represents the best chance to change Westminster in decades. Reformers haven’t had this good an opportunity for a very long time indeed. It’s the kind of moment you bide your time for, and try to make the best of when you have it.

Just a few weeks to go.

Subscribe now

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one on the hysterical briefings from left and right trying to stop Ed Miliband becoming chancellor and another on the publication of the royal finances.

The latest episode of Origin Story came out this week, with the second part of our history of think tanks. I take the reins, as we show how right-wing organisations started to congregate around Tufton Street, pumping out some properly horrible crap. We trace the secretive money flows from the US to the UK and demonstrate how even respectable organisations, like the Tony Blair Institute have been corroded by it.

But I spend much of the show talking about think tanks that work - the really valiant, important groups like the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UCL Constitution Unit, the Hansard Society, the Institute for Government, Chatham House and others. It’s a story of bastards, yes, but also of many hard-working, highly intelligent people behind the scenes who improve our political life.

Tickets are now on sale for our next live show, in September, at London’s beautiful Union Chapel. This is by far the biggest show we’ve ever done. The fact we’re even operating at this level honestly kinda breaks my mind. Origin Story started as a hyper-nerd operation with two non-celebrity hosts. We have built it episode by episode, season by season, with a really loyal, engaged and witty audience, to the point where we’re now knocking on the door of some of London’s biggest venues. Come along - it’s going to be amazing. Tickets are available here.

This week I did CBS News, which I gather is an American news channel. Watch out for the moment that I use the word ‘spanked’ and then try to press ahead while thinking: Did I just say spanked on breakfast TV? I also did my usual Late Night Live segment immediately after Starmer’s resignation. Last week I did the Making Money podcast on British political dysfunction. The hosts are great, but the stream of outraged comments on YouTube suggests that the audience is pretty right wing. So enjoy the fact that I spent most of it calling for higher taxes and talking about the need for more action on climate change.

This week I have exclusively watched the World Cup. I struggled to get into it at first - Trump antipathy, hatred of Fifa, the fact the whole thing is a grotesque corrupt monstrosity. But the videos of Scottish fans in Boston pulled me in. In the end you cannot make it ugly, because it involves people from different cultures mixing together in a shared love of something. That is, at base, such a beautiful thing that it cannot be mutilated, no matter how hard they seem intent on trying. Now I’m in that World Cup space where you no longer think ‘what am I going to watch tonight?’ You just turn on the TV and watch whatever match is on. Oh and: Ecuador. You fucking beauties.

See you next week you bastards.