No need to bomb it or ban it. Just move it to Hampstead.

I don’t think that the late Rod Liddle was in favour of dropping a small nuclear weapon on the Notting Hill Carnival. That was, you might remember, his suggestion for the Glastonbury Festival but only as part of a wider strategy to remove “all the really irritating people” from the country.

Morality aside, there is a logistical difference between these two celebrations of the cult of the self. Unlike Glastonbury, the Notting Hill Carnival is a distributed obscenity in that it takes place in a built-up area. This gives it some cover – think about Hamas launching missiles from hospitals (usually at themselves, but that’s another piece).

Not to put too fine a point on it, no matter how discriminating the device, there would be collateral damage possibly including the Gold bar on Portobello Road, of which I have fond memories.

Different problems; different solutions. There is no need to go nuclear in the first instance.

I wouldn’t even ban it, actually. Not because it isn’t awful, but because it is. Uniquely so. And such monstrosities are best observed. I think it might be the only cultural event which celebrates public defecation. When this happens in my small Wiltshire town, we are told that it is in truth the fault of the owners. I don’t think that “it’s not his fault you should blame his dealer” works as a similar excuse.

The Carnival is perhaps the high point of the casual doublethink which the Cultural Marxists practise so well and prescribe so intolerantly. This annual humiliation of that part of West London isn’t a “carnival” at all. It’s actually –and we need to make this word popular again- an invasion. There is no decent anthropology which explains how the day-to-day customs and practices of Kensington residents must be expressed every August by the arrival of people with a less than diligent attitude to life and property.

Just to be clear I don’t want this thing to be bombed or even to be banned. For the same reason I don’t want “problematic” statues to be pulled down. Societies need to be reminded of their mistakes. NHC if it’s a celebration of anything is the practical and logical end point of the religion of unconstrained self-expression.

And of relativism too. It is hard to see, in normal circumstances, how the proposition “it is acceptable for a completely innocent bystander to be stabbed to death” can be true. But to “contextualise” it by wrapping it in a bit of Carnivalspeak somehow makes it at least workably true to a certain mind – one captured by the ersatz exotica which come with real-time multiculturalism.

Or “complete leftist moron”, if you prefer the shorter version.

And then there’s the aesthetics. If some person or event looks ugly then there’s probably something spiritually wrong with it because hatred and beauty rarely co-exist. The Carnival looks ugly because its moving parts –the stabbings, unconventional toilet etiquette, hypersexualised dancing, drug dealing, annihilation of personal space etc- are microaggressions against tested decency. There is no mereological principle which can make something beautiful out of such base elements.

Am I being curmudgeonly? I hope so. The Invasion is one of those things that you are required to enjoy as a rite of entry. Whether or not you do so is beside the point. It’s the pretending to enjoy it that matters. It’s like a Nish Kumar set with nudity and random murder. It’s quite reasonable to be suspicious of fake or enforced fun.

And there’s no denying that in terms of policing it serves a useful intelligence purpose. By about Day Two we get to see which officers have been irredeemably corrupted by the College of Policing novus ordo as they drop the custodian disguise and begin to twerk with the best of them.

No, I would neither ban it nor even attack it with a small nuclear device. Because who would be doing the banning? The local and national politicians who are already addicted to the banning of things and who shouldn’t be encouraged in that respect.

But I’m sympathetic to the suggestion that it should be moved. Not to Hyde Park, where wealthy progressives can ignore it, but to somewhere more left wing where they can’t. Hampstead, possibly. I don’t make a habit of imagining these things, but there are more unpleasant thoughts than Emily Thornberry’s Saturday evening salon being disrupted by a Carnival enthusiast relieving herself on her doorstep while singing along to whatever it is they play at these things.

It would be nice to see the people who approved the multicultural experiment be made to live with its consequences.

Because the greatest injustice in this country is that the people who design, condone, and even valorise the system aren’t required to live within it. “Not in my back yard” has a cultural form as well as a geographical one. There is a deep political, intellectual and moral error in play when people who formulate or influence social policy are detached from its effects.

Hyde Park would therefore be a missed opportunity. If someone dumps rubbish on your doorstep why respond by taking it to the tip? Why not dump it back on theirs? For their sake, naturally.

It’s been at least a week since The Guardian ran a “why the countryside is racist” piece. Next time they do, remember these are the regime hacks who would be happy if it looked more like Ladbroke Grove in late summer. Then, if you are dumb enough to have bought a hard copy, keep it for distribution at next year’s public orgy, for purposes of you know what.

The OG post-truther: don’t be like this guy

The people who are coming to Britain using innovative entry practices from cultures which are just as good as ours are being given government booklets recommending against sexual assault and casual noncery. At least while they’re here. This is because there seem to have been some misunderstandings, and it’s always good to clear these things up.

Please don’t draw a negative inference about the cultures these creatives are abandoning. They are, I repeat, just as good as ours. It just so happens that these places have different habits of courtship.

When you think about it, it’s just like when you go to another country where their culture is to drive on the other side of the road.

So, if you are new to how things are done here, you can take a moment to rewire your whole psychology with some guidance written in a language that is appropriate for you. Then, when your application to remain has been nodded through, you can make your way to Birmingham and “drive” just how you would back home.

And you can do so in certain knowledge that the authorities will be looking the other way, and that if you happen to get caught “crashing your car” then Jess Phillips will be there to say that’s the fault of all young men, especially the ones in Poland.

The main thing is, from the point of view of the government lawyers, all relevant boxes will have been ticked.

The morons in government who are obliged to defend this, along with the media morons who are paid to defend those morons, are trying to persuade us that this booklet provides helpful clarification for people who might otherwise be unschooled in basic human decency. We might reply that they are right on the latter point, but naive when it comes to the first.

For these “progressives” it’s a sort of Highway Code for sexually aggressive young foreign men, a document they most definitely will cherish now that they’ve entrusted all other documentation to the care of the Channel.

If only Fred West had been sent one, might have saved a bit of bother.

In fairness this guidance has been put out by the Home Office, so it hasn’t really got anything to do with the government at all, given that this department has now de facto seceded from Whitehall and stands in relation to it much like Rotherham does to the rest of Yorkshire.

It’s all very amusing to watch. The politicians, on the progressive Left most especially, have put themselves in a bind. They can’t tell the truth about the multicultural experiment (that nobody has ever agreed to be part of) because that truth is that it has failed, and quite likely has taken Britain down along with it.

So, because the truth is inconvenient, they again ignore it and reach for the usual comfort blankets of shallow anthropology and lazy relativism.

And having grabbed those blankets they try to smother us with them.

Progressivism and relativism don’t really get on with each other, no matter how much they seem to at first glance. If relativism is true across cultures, then it must also be applicable across time. If it’s wrong to say that the Common Law is self-evidently better than sharia, then it’s also wrong to say that the society the progressives are working towards is better than the one we have now.

You can of course argue these things but not if you’ve caught the disease of relativism, because that’s an illness that targets the brain.

This is the thing that connects the Arday controversy to the booklet comedy routine: the abandonment of truth in favour of power.

When Lord Woolley, an activist masquerading as an academic, says that Jason Arday, also an activist masquerading as an academic, was lynched he is telling a lie to cast a spell.

When the government tells you that the unconditioned sexual and violent impulses of young men can be neutralised by a piece of paper, it is, literally, using words in the hope that this will be enough to make the whole thing go away.

The race grifters, sexual perverts, transactivists, and the generally godless have had a good run by selectively and opportunistically deploying the relativist heresy. I wonder if they’re sensing that for them it’s getting to be “end of times” as more of us wake up to the fact that it’s fun to believe in contradictory and absurd stuff. But only while you’re still able to think your way back out again

If you need convincing that cultures can be brought into contact always and necessarily without causing a disaster, then can I refer you to what’s happened at Cambridge itself where an imported culture of DEI orthodoxy has extinguished any interest in truth? And where at High Table the exquisite traditions of bitchy gossip have, one suspects, been cancelled by the suspicion that the person to your left could be an HR mole or sleeper agent.

Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor through classes, nor between political parties neither – but right through every human heart”. That line will not be held in place by a piece of paper written by a Home Office official. In a way it’s a bit insulting to the migrant to assume otherwise.

Born and raised in Liverpool, no traceable criminal record.

The philosopher and former Catholic priest Sir Anthony Kenny died recently aged 95.

Kenny was born in Liverpool in 1931 and spent his formative years there, although there is no evidence that he was ever a young offender and there is no record of him having any criminal convictions, not even joyriding. It’s possible of course that strings were pulled, given his later prominence.

Kenny was a seminarian at the Venerable English College in Rome and was ordained there in 1955. He served as a priest in Liverpool for some years before contracting agnosticism and returning to the lay state in 1963.

His stated reasons for this crisis of faith were intellectual. Agnosticism is contracted very easily by intelligent people who insist on definitive answers to questions which can hardly even be properly stated (dumb people tend to move straight to atheism unreflectively).

In Kenny’s case, the grounds for his deconversion are said to be the familiar ones and most specifically the problem of evil: how can an all powerful God, perfect in kindness, permit the existence of pain and the exercise of evil?

The theological response to this is to ask under what obligations can the Abrahamic God be placed without ceasing to be God? God, goes the reply, is under no obligation to prevent evil because, being God, he is under no external obligations at all.

And if this seems too much like word-play, then there is the free will defence.1 Freedom comes with the possibility of misuse, and whilst it is possible that God’s continuous moment-to-moment calibration of Creation could preclude people doing bad things, how is that a situation in which genuine freedom is present?

Other theodicies are available, of course. And then there is revelation and scripture and so on and so on, all of which discussion one would have assumed was on Kenny’s intellectual radar before he decided on a life dedicated to the distribution of the sacraments.

I put it this way not to be unkind. Kenny was open about his loss of faith and wrote movingly and lamentingly about it in his autobiographical A Path From Rome. Which is emphatically not the “I discovered science, realised that faith is superstition, and became spiritual not religious” treatment that haunt too many intellectual memoirs. Yes, Bertrand Russell, I very much am thinking of you.

Kenny’s work as a philosopher, and historian of philosophy, was formidable. He was an architect of analytical Thomism, a philosophical system which seeks to rehabilitate teleology and final cause metaphysics, concepts which had become refugees from the Enlightenment dispensation with its emphasis on causation-as-mechanism.

He also did important work in the philosophy of mind in which he was influenced by the iconoclasm of Ludwig Wittgenstein, on whom he wrote a still-celebrated introductory textbook.

Inevitably, therefore, he interacted with Wittgenstein’s former pupil and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe with whom he failed to actively feud in spite of her best efforts to drag him into one. Kenny’s failure to seek a papal dispensation prior to getting married (as a former priest he was under an obligation to do that) annoyed the Catholic Anscombe.

(As did many things, to be fair. Anscombe’s biography could be written up as a sequence of fallings out and (usually one-sided) moments of performative ostracism. Possibly illustrated using one of those story boards the FBI use in the crime films.)

As well as a writer and philosopher Kenny was a gifted academic administrator, and went on to become Master of Balliol College which must be the most sought after and personally dangerous job in Oxford, if Inspector Morse is anything to go by.

I only met Kenny once. In Liverpool2 as it happens, when he came to give a talk to the staff in the philosophy department. I have no recollection of this event, which is no reflection on him. Also present was my doctoral supervisor Howard Robinson, who didn’t believe in the existence of his body but was an active and vocal hypochondriac nevertheless; and my dear friend the late polymath John Williamson who had written a beautiful book rebutting Hume’s theory of causation, which he’d then lost somewhere in his office (it was never seen again).

In this company it would have been hard for a visiting speaker to particularly stand out. Even one as celebrated as he was.

I want to end by saying something about Sir Anthony Kenny’s loss of faith. His agnosticism was tempered by an acute theistic sensibility. He had no time for the antagonism which came to be all that the New Atheists had in the end to offer.

I think of it as an Augustinian agnosticism. A yearning for God, or a constant hope for the invasion of grace.

He continued to pray. It was reasonable to do this, he argued, just as it is reasonable for the stranded mountaineer to cry for help even though he knows that none is at hand.

That mountaineer knows, of course, that help exists somewhere.

Sir Anthony Kenny 16th March 1931 - 3rd August 2026.

Requiescat in pace.

His “jokes” were crap.

“A prevalent malady of our age is to think of the mind as a computer” - Professor Sir Anthony Kenny.

The late science editor of The Daily Telegraph, Adrian Berry used to get a laugh by telling the following apocryphal anecdote.

An AI is asked to write a short story with the popular themes of religion, aristocracy, mystery and sex:

“Good Lord!” screamed the Duchess, “I’m pregnant! Whodunnit!?”

First time I heard this I was working on my PhD on the metaphysics of consciousness and the viability of conscious machines. I wondered at the time if the hypothetical silicon wordsmith would understand why she’d been so inadvertently and very mildly amusing.

Can a machine, even in principle, ever get a joke? Not tell one, for clearly it can do that, but get one?

Jokes have not been taken seriously enough by the philosophers. Neither have the deeper essences of amusement, humour and laughter more generally, come to that. There is an entanglement of distinctive concepts to be tidied up there, it’s strange that we haven’t had more fun doing just that - conceptual housekeeping being very much our thing.

Which is not to say these things have not been discussed at all. Kant offers us a theory of the joke in his Critique of Judgement. Other thinkers, not all of them philosophers, have written about their moral and political significance. C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters has his elder devil explaining how certain jokes encourage disorder in the psychology of humans and thereby generate entry points for the opportunistic younger demon to walk through at leisure.

Kant is interested in the phenomenology of jokes, Lewis their moral anthropology. What is the relevance of all this to the issue of whether Claude knows what it is up to when we think that he (?) is thinking? Perhaps this: taken together they show (a) that jokes don’t work without consciousness of self; and (b) that if machines can’t banter along with the rest of us then they are not integrable into the moral order and cannot therefore be persons.

Kant suggests that we laugh at a joke because it causes “an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing”. To put it simply, we laugh because of distraction or because there is incongruity between set-up and punch line.

If I had the space, I’d give you an example of a Kant “joke” all of which by their awfulness accidentally corroborate the theory he is proposing. We expect the joke to be funny; we get tumbleweed; we laugh at the thwarted expectation.

It’s enough to notice, for our purposes, that Kant is suggesting as a theory of the joke a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for laughter. He is, if you like, giving us an algorithm.

But the algorithm leaves out or does not capture the most important thing about jokes: what it feels like to find them funny. Algorithmic accounts of consciousness are reductionistic, and it is the way of scientific reductionism to ignore or eliminate the subjective character of human experience.

I’ll make the point in a more contentious way. The AI ascendancy is technologically and scientifically bewildering and yet metaphysically insignificant. The arguments against the possibility of machine consciousness are a priori: an algorithmic system, no matter how complex, is syntax, processing and speed. A simulated consciousness does not become conscious just because it simulates in more impressive ways.

And if machines are not conscious then, a fortiori, they cannot be self-conscious.

Claude’s cleverer descendants will no more get a joke than an abacus could a century ago, and Berry’s early AI lacks the perspective to realise that “she” is the object of whatever humour there is in his staple quip.

Which brings us to Screwtape.

Lewis uses a disputable demonology to make the point that there are jokes and there are other jokes and that there is an ethics (and perhaps even a theology) of humour. If laughter is the universal language of empathy (a truth familiar to anybody who attends AA Meetings or Catholic wakes) then jokes are more culturally and socially contextual.

What they have in common, that said, is that they compel us to relate to each other not as centres of consciousness but as moral agents. The joke assumes capacities for empathy, sympathy and the suspension of belief. It reminds us that we are composed not just of intellect and appetite but also of will.

Here’s the question, then. Are the defenders of strong AI (the theory that machine intelligence or consciousness is philosophically plausible and practically inevitable) focusing on the wrong set of competencies when trying to convert the rest of us?

Instead of trying to persuade that the systems are conscious like we are should they be aiming to persuade us that they understand the “in joke”, genuinely find it funny, and know when to repeat it and when not?

And if Claude learns in the end to turn the joke on himself, the most ingratiating thing a human being can do after all, wouldn’t even the most incorrigible Platonist begrudgingly concede that this hunk of metal really is “one of the lads”?

A proposal then. The Turing Test should be rewritten to consider that laughter and jokes aren’t add-ons to the consciousness but rather are constitutive of it.

Human beings are moral agents. Amusement and humour are conduits of that agency. For a machine to be conscious he or she must be in on the joke, which requires further that he or she is “in on” himself or herself. Which I doubt can ever happen.

And I haven’t even mentioned the specific complexities of slapstick.

Just to be clear, it is not the people who brought the truth to the Arday situation who are responsible for his death. That is an absurd, back to front claim. It is like blaming the specialist who spots the cancer for not saving the patient, even though he’s the only one who tried to.

But precisely because it is an absurd and back to front claim, the usual suspects were always going to make it. And quite possibly believe it, given they are fellow travellers in the fantasy culture which made this tragedy possible and some version of it inevitable.

They do these things because the nonsense of their position is of no interest to them. They do these things because they care only for the consolidation of their place in the hierarchy, and not for the truth, the truth being too much for them now that they are so embedded in clever sounding make believe.

They do these things because they are diversity junkies always on the make for another fix.

They gave it a few minutes –what counts as a pause for decency to these people- before turning Professor Arday’s passing into an opportunity to rail against the people who had exposed the Cambridge sociology scam in which he was a diligent and energetic participant.

In less time than it takes to crush a vulpine cranium the likes of Jolyom Maugham were patching in from their alternative universe (the one they insist we must live in as well) to claim that the reporting of academic malfeasance –not the existence of it- had hounded a misunderstood conman into taking his own life.

Swiftly came the false equivalences and confected empiricism so favoured by the sociologists themselves (real and fake, if there’s a difference). “Look at the number of articles about poor Jason, compared with another plagiarist who happens to be white!”.

In the virtual Broadmoor that is social media space it has now become racist to call a lie a lie when it is spoken by a black academic. The reliably moronic Narinder Kauer even referred to a “lynching”.

The dark art of grievance alchemy always uses distraction as a base element.

The truth can be put quite simply. The ideology which uses DEI as a delivery mechanism is largely responsible for the death of this young man and for the hollow fantasy life he was living beforehand.

There’s that word then, truth. For the secular philosopher “truth” is such a dull thing, amounting to no more than a relation between sentences and world or, even more drearily, sentences and other sentences.

Who can get worked up about that? What’s wrong with lying or linguistic manipulation if that’s all that truth is?

For those of us blessed with a supernaturalist disposition, and that should include all Christians, “truth” is more exciting, more active and more dangerous than that.

Sometimes truth is inconvenient, often it’s cruel, frequently it’s not nice but rarely is it unkind.

It is always redemptive.

The “disciplines” of the social sciences aren’t interested in truth, but they are obsessed with words, what you can do with them, and the things you can get with them.

Power and prestige are two of those things. Along with an astonishing arrogance that the rest of us must share in their cognitive dissonance and be forced to believe patently absurd and demonstrably contradictory things.

If you are an academic who does not agree that a man can imagine away his penis then you can forget about tenure; if you are a public speaker who wishes to question the assumptions of the multicultural experiment (or even to use the term “multicultural experiment”) then you will be cancelled; if you are a parent who has “old fashioned” views on the sacramental character of marriage, then expect to be referred to “safeguarding”.

The DEI machine has been running psychological operations against the public for decades now, using weaponry put together in the publicly funded but intellectually contaminated social science laboratories of our most respected universities. And we aren’t supposed to get to comment when the whole thing is shown to be fraudulent?

Jason Arday was good with words but not with truth. This is a bad combination. It allows you to create a fake or fantasy life and at the same time to indemnify yourself against most attempts to rescue you from yourself.

Addiction is much like this. It feeds off a need to recreate day-to-day fantasy vignettes, sometimes the more outlandish the better, because that way the agony that truth brings can’t prevail against it.

Jason Arday’s fantasy life traced a pattern of addiction, and the DEI universe in which he thrived failed to spot that he was spiritually unwell. It therefore did the worst thing you can do to an addict: it indulged him.

When he was revealed to be a fantasist that was a kind of intervention. Those are brutal, painful and yet, when conducted in the right way and with love, purgative. The problem in his case was not that the intervention was too harsh, but that it came too late.

It is never wrong to expose a liar; however painful the truth might be. The manner of that exposure was uncomfortably public. We need to remember, though, that Arday had been aggressively litigious in the silencing of enquiries into his antecedents by people who have every right to ask those questions.

I believe that the way Arday was living is at least as much of a tragedy as the way his life ended. In the end it was only the truth that could have embarrassed or shamed him into a spiritually healthy way of being.

Let’s not fall into the trap of moral determinism by swallowing the line that he was “hounded” to his death. That wouldn’t be fair on him, when you think about it.

He removed himself from this earth and left behind two children. What stories was he telling himself that made that sound like the unselfish option?

I think that Arday’s fantasy life traced a pattern of addiction and that his colleagues and the wider DEI universe failed to recognise the nature of his spiritual disease and did the worst thing that you can do to an addict: indulge him.

What Arday needed was an intervention which was always going to involve being confronted by truth and consequently shamed and embarrassed out of the make believe world he’d built for himself - with help.

Arday blagged his way into an academic fantasy world, the cultish social “sciences” which borrow a version of the scientific language but only so they can fake up their results thereafter.

I don’t say this unkindly. I have my own issues with addiction and always will. I see in this man a fellow sufferer. I got lucky - people were willing to say and do some prima facie harsh things to draw me out of that life. Arday was less fortunate, instead of help he was offered validation.

The manner of his death was tragic. As was the manner of his living for the years before. The urgent thing now, for Christians, is to pray for him. The final destination of his soul might be something we can do something about.

More tomorrow here and at Country Squire Magazine.

Functional virtue jewellry.

I’m going to claim that I came up with the expression lanyard fetishism because I used it before seeing it anywhere else and once I’d used it the phrase seemed to pop up everywhere.

Now, I know that someone reading this will start shouting “correlation not causation”, so I will ask that person to refer their objection to David Hume who had views on this metaphysical issue.

Let’s put that to one side for the moment. We don’t want to get into an unnecessary and time consuming genealogical dispute, like when Newton and Leibniz duked it out over who came up first with the word “calculus”.

The lanyard is, currently, the most prominently displayed item of virtue jewellery. It’s also relatively recent. It wasn’t that long ago that the lapel badge was the normal way that somebody told you that he is better than you. Then it was wristbands, to indicate support for some cause that nobody in their right mind has any objection to. Colour coded, if I remember correctly, like the baddies in Reservoir Dogs.

Now it’s the lanyard.

These developments in the merchandising of what used to be private opinions has come with an increased confidence on the part of those who now announce how they think and feel. The lapel badge was understated, subtle. That was its flex, in a way. It invited a query along the lines of “what’s that for?” as the unwitting prey would walk blindly into the ambush.

The lanyard is more “in your face”, a monopoliser of the shared space. Less about announcing the personal convictions of the lanyardee, than about demanding that you share them.

There are three things wrong with lanyard fetishism. The first is that it’s a fetish. Enough said.

The second is that it gets things the wrong way round. You don’t become moral by attaching yourself to an opinion. That’s not ethics it’s shopping. QVC morality, if you like.

The third thing wrong with LF is related to the second but is slightly different: it is the shallow public indicator of a soul too lazy to do the hard work of interior formation. Aristotle is right about this: to flourish is to be active in the cultivation of habits ordered to the good. Virtue is not a matter of attaching yourself to a cause, but of doing the hard work on yourself so that you can discern which causes are worthy of your attention.

I understand the attraction of the lanyard in a way. I wear one myself in the form of a crucifix. Other Christians prefer the cross, which is up there as the second or third lanyard of choice for the progressive Anglican priest or layman.

So, if I find the lanyard intrusive and offensive then couldn’t the non-believer reply that he thinks the same thing about my crucifix? Just as you see the NHS project manager lanyarded up in the supermarket after a shift saving projects, so you will see in the next aisle the Catholic worshipper wearing his crucifix even though the Mass has clearly ended.

And that person would be correct. But to this the Catholic should reply that yes, his crucifix is offensive to the non-believer. Just as truth is offensive to those who have no use for it. The Christian faith, practised correctly, is intended to acknowledge the secular order and then to absorb it. The offence is part of the point.

Is the lanyardee willing to make a similar admission? That the virtue necklace is an attempt to coerce or convert the uninitiated into the evolving rites of public sector secular theology? Will he similarly concede that the offence is part of the point?

The lanyard is a semiotic shorthand for all manner of fashionable and therefore transient identitarian positions and faked up sympathies. The cross and the crucifix announce that a single historical event -sacrifice under one description, murder under another- made an intersection of timelessness and time.

Lanyard fetishism has a pleasing anthropology attached to it, not least because these people are often such narcissistic tossers. But it’s culturally interesting as yet another bad secular imitation of the deeper way.

Screwtape writes bawdy joke to capture a human soul.

In the Critique of Judgement, as part of his analysis of the aesthetic experience, Immanuel Kant offers us a theory of laughter, which he suggests is “an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing”.

To put it less sententiously, we laugh at incongruity crafted from distraction.

Kant writes specifically about jokes. Bad ones, as it happens. Perhaps that’s all they had back then. They include this zinger:

“The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’(said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!’ “

The tumbleweed rolling through your mind right now is just what tends to happen when German Idealists try their hand at open mic.

Kant redeems himself with the next sentence though:

“When we hear this story we laugh out loud…”

No, we really don’t, but we do now. The joke itself is not funny, but the “strained expectation” that we would laugh at it most definitely is. Kant corroborates his theory of the joke by inadvertently becoming a part of it.

At least he has a go, and for that he is a sport. The philosophy of the joke is strangely underdeveloped within the Western tradition. It is regrettable that the philosophers have not understood that humour is no laughing matter. The phenomenon of amusement should be very interesting to thinkers who think about thought.

Kant is a system builder, so he was always going to have a theory of the joke, or at the very least to integrate it into a wider theory of the human mind.

But philosophy is as much about drawing distinctions as building theories. When it comes to humour, there is no better take than that of the philosopher-devil in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters who distinguishes between the joyful, the fun, the jocular and the flippant. He suggests, with casual racism (if demons are capable of such) that the joke and the lazy quip should be cultivated as potential entry points for demonic invasion:

“The real use of Jokes or Humour…is specially promising among the English who take their “sense of humour” so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency of which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame.”

Kant and Lewis give different but compatible analyses of laughter, joking, humour and amusement as features of (human) experience. Kant’s concern is phenomenological. Lewis’s demons offer an anthropology of amusement and locates it as an aspect of moral-spiritual psychology.

Which, as is usual now, takes us into AI and invites the following questions: can a machine, no actually could a machine, get a joke? And what obligations towards them are activated in us if we concede that they can (or could)?

Kant gives us some activating or “necessary and sufficient” conditions for when we laugh at a joke. But this doesn’t tell us what it’s like to get the joke, any more than a sheet of musical notation tells us what it feels like to hear the music it represents. There is, if you like, an inadvertent reductionism to Kant’s aesthetic of amusement When these conditions obtain then laughter will happen. The “what it is like” accompaniments (philosophers call this the qualia) seem to drop out of consideration.

This isn’t intentional. Kant is, after all, an analytical phenomenologist. It does show, however, that there are features of experience which are abstracted away as soon as we attempt to theorise about them.

(Much like, there are features of a joke which are abstracted away as soon as we attempt to explain it - the funny ones.)

You could say that Kant is proposing something like an algorithmic account of “getting a joke” and that the algorithm, complex though it is, necessarily omits how the “getting a joke” feels. And that this is just the way that algorithms are when applied to or derived from the ragbag of elements that comprise a human mind (or soul).

This is the fundamental objection to artificial intelligence when it takes seriously the possibility of machine consciousness: that complexes of algorithms conjoined with very quick processing are in the end just very fast abacuses. There is no reason to concede that they spark into a distinctive phenomenology, unless we already assume that phenomenology (consciousness) is just behaviour.

There is, if you like, more to “getting a joke” than acting like you do.

Which brings us to Screwtape and his moral anthropology. Lewis writes with a questionable demonology, but a real understanding that the joke (and therefore “getting a joke”) is part of the moral order or that there is an “ethics of laughter”.

When we relate to each other through jokes and humour we respond to each other as moral agents and not just as conscious animals. Jokes are woven into the fabric of the moral order.

If machines become like persons it will not be just because they have passed some Turing Test for consciousness but also because they will become relevant to that order. Either they will have integrated into it, or they will be at odds with it. Nietzsche’s superman built with silicon not created from God’s usual chemical resources.

I propose, seriously, that jokes should be the basis of a new Turing Test, because the “getting of a joke” is a far more complicated cognitive event than philosophers seem to think. Don’t try and catch Claude out with some dumb questions; take him to a Nish Kumar gig. If he doesn’t pretend to laugh then we’ll know he’s genuinely one of us.

Did anyone check his CV?

I think we need to get a sense of proportion and concede that utterly shocking as it is the Jason Arday affair is not the worst thing to have ever come out of Cambridge University. Can we agree that Kim Philby’s circle of traitors, which came close to handing the country over to Stalin, was worse, even if marginally?

Although these days that probably counts as a divisive comparison to make.

We must now and with regret question the antecedents of the more highly regarded Cambridge alumni. Did Wittgenstein really fight on the Eastern Front during WW1? Or was it a grift to get some sympathy with the Fellows some of whom, like G.E. Moore, were said to have had reservations about his early work?

My view on this is that Arday is neither victim nor villain but inadvertent whistleblower, and that we should be grateful to him for bringing the academic discipline of “sociology” into disrepute - which is where it should have been for quite some time. Since around the time it started to be taken seriously.

With some exceptions – Weber, Durkheim, (arguably) Girard – sociologists do little to advance the sum of our knowledge.

And these thinkers count as exceptions in part because they interacted with other disciplines. Girard, for example, was a first-rate philosopher of human nature.

Sociology is usually just political activism masquerading as scholarship. True, it thinks of itself as a science, but has been humoured in that fantasy for quite long enough. A bit like the trans lunacy that it has been so eager to shunt into mainstream life.

Sociology, in its contemporary practice, wants to replace normal and evolved ways of thinking with jargon. It is a recidivist offender when it comes to flooding the economy of academic discussion with the currency of false equivalence. A man, it affirms, is most certainly a woman if we use the right form of words and your terrorist is my revolutionary under a different description.

It does not occur to the sociologist that some descriptions are true and others are false; nor that the logical law of non-contradiction cannot be violated even by the God at whom they are furious for not existing.

The social sciences work according to what Paul Ricoeur calls a hermeneutics of suspicion – i.e. by assuming that all claims to objective truth are no more than disguised ways of acquiring or securing power. Think Marx, think Freud and then please, please think again.

Sociology will therefore always be relativism disguised as science, because it looks for structures of power and not revelation. It is Nietzsche minus the poetry and the plausible, if depressing, moral psychology.

It is amazing that any academic papers in sociology are published at all, since most of them could be written off as AI or as jokes, or possibly jokes written by AI.

I was trying to think of an analogy for the “peer review” process when it comes to an Arday academic submission, and the only thing I could think of was one of those “ghost hunts” in which two fake psychics agree that there is a “presence” in the room while trying not to laugh at anyone stupid enough to fall for the scam.

But at least those guys know they are charlatans.

Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say it was the maths department that got played, and not sociology. Suppose having blagged his way to becoming the successor to Newton and Hawking, Arday had published a brilliant monograph setting out a new proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Would he still count as a fraud?

No because in that situation, he’s genuinely Good Will Hunting. And his CV would hardly matter, save as an amusing thing to talk about at High Table.

In mathematics, and any decent discipline, there are standards of good and bad reasoning. Along with ways of interrogating, reappraising, and possibly ditching assumptions on which the discipline is founded. Which, when you think about it, is what makes them disciplines.

Sociology had no way of detecting the Arday fraud using the internal thought-practices, exchange of ideas, discourse etiquette and standards of argument available to the subject itself. And had to rely on Arday’s own creative overreach to bust open the whole fiction.

Truth matters. If a discipline doesn’t care about truth, then neither, in the end, will those in charge of it. And that is why, in the end, they failed to spot the bullshit.

They don’t care about truth, but they do care about credentials. You can fake the results of your social “experiments” (or perhaps not bother to have any) but don’t offend the credential-fetishists of the Academy with a falsifiable CV.

I don’t care about his career playing alongside Babe Ruth. It doesn’t even bother me that his rhythm guitar solo on Gimme Shelter wasn’t great on that last tour. I’m grateful to Jason Arday for showing that sociology is as good now as it’s ever been.

There was always going to be a Burnham Bounce. The guy he replaced was Starmer. There would have been a Shipman Bounce. It probably would have been bigger, actually.

As part of his improbably successful and quite dastardly Kind Hearts and Coronets scheme to coup his way into Downing Street Andy Burnham decided to return the gift given to him by the people of Manchester and stepped down as Mayor.

This wasn’t as kind as it sounds because it meant that those very people would need to vote in a a new contest with new rules. Complicated rules. Rules so complicated in fact that a Cambridge University Professor of Sociology might struggle to understand them. Rules put together according to an established left-wing logical sequencing: choose which candidate you want to win and work backwards from there.

So it’s no surprise that Labour have just won that contest, but it is quite ironic that the voter turnout has collapsed to just 25%. Those people who were asked to vote in a new contest for Mayor understandably took to wondering what the point was. So didn’t.

So far the Burnham Red Coat entertainment slot premiership has accomplished two things: the overt sentimentalisation of the need for social care reform; and the strengthening of local democracy by collapsing the number of people who want to participate in it.

But no problem, because the background mood music is softer than the high-volume dirge pumped out under the Starmer regime.

It’s beginning to look like that’s what the Burnham era will come to be known for: vibes and dancing. The embarrassing dad at the wedding or it seemed like a good idea at the time administration.

Perhaps this is just the way things are now, when it comes to not-so-elected government. It used to be that the Monarchy were there to cheer us up while the government got on with the serious stuff. Now because of the legacy Blair constitutional reset the Monarchy is best not mentioned, the government is there to get us dancing, while the deep state gets on with destroying Britain from within.

And maybe people are OK with that. Many years ago the philosopher Robert Nozick asked his students the following question. Imagine there is such a thing as a happiness machine. You step into it and you get an artificial but very pleasant simulated life. What would you do?

When he first asked that question the majority insisted that they would decline. A real life, they replied, with all its pain and loss would be better over all than a pleasurable fake one.

But that was before the introduction of fat jabs and the culture of lazy solutions and welcome distractions.

Chief among which has to be Number 10 North. Some might think it’s a touch narcissistic -rude even- to transplant the traditional mechanisms of the State to your own patch. I can see the appeal.

I live in Wiltshire. If, and I get that this is unlikely, I ever become Prime Minister I might bring the government to me. There could be photo-ops of cider tastings and pictures of me astride a tractor. All to a Wurzels background accompaniment. I could be filmed at Stonehenge as I courted the peripatetic druid demographic. Got an awkward question about adult care or dinghy invasion? Why are you bothering us with that when the Devizes Ghost Walk is about to start?

Does anyone remember that scene in Carry On Up the Khyber where the aristocratic higher-ups are having “tiffin”, pretending that everything is normal as the bombs go off and the chandeliers in colonial building start to shake?

That scene’s funny because they kind of pull it off, their stoicism is touching.

But there is a difference between being stoical and being irresponsibly complacent. In one afternoon the EU’s model of “secure external borders will guarantee looser internal ones” was blown apart by a performatively socialist Spanish political class of identical ideological and psychological complexion to Burnham’s recycled Brown era nomenklatura.

What your hearing right now is the sound of those colonial chandeliers starting to tinkle, as the invasion of this country gets ramped up.

At least in that film those responsible for the disaster don’t get to pass on the consequences of it to those who aren’t.

Burnham might be a “nice guy” down the pub; but the guys who hang around the bar are probably far wiser. And more serious.

If they have it it’s automatically a rubbish idea.

I guess the thing about being in a mid-life crisis is that you don’t realise how ridiculous you appear to other people. Andy Burnham, who arrived in office having been voted for by nobody I know, is thinking about making it compulsory to vote in the general election he has pretended to rule out.

Before we start having some fun with this, let’s be clear what he is up to. The new Prime Minister and First Dork of the Treasury has no political legitimacy and he knows that we know that. All he can boast of is a brief courtship of Miss Makerfield after which, having had his way, he dumped her in favour of a more attractive mistress.

Since entering Downing Street he has therefore established a pattern of announcing “initiatives” intended to distract the rest of us from that fact in the (quite possibly realistic) hope that his coup will recede from its current position front and centre of the national consciousness.

That’s what his “decentralisation” agenda is about and that’s what this compulsory voting pitch-rolling is about. Not political accountability, or improvement in the democratic structures of the country, but camouflage.

It is the sort of strategy that a Matthew Stadlen or Jon Rentoul type would think is brilliant but which intelligent people will see as the political equivalent of Compo, Clegg and Foggy converting a bathtub into a recumbent bicycle before crashing it at the bottom of a hill.

Let’s be quite clear. It is the duty of any government to respect the right of its citizens to have absolutely no interest in the grubby, personality-driven, substance-lite, shenanigans that these days passes for the electoral process. And to legislate otherwise is to introduce conscription, not increase participation.

I have no idea how successful or otherwise voter conscription has been in Australia and, frankly, have no idea also how you could use mathematics to evaluate such an outcome. The fact that Australia has it should be enough to put us off it, something which is true of most things come to think of it. Australia also has snakes, bad sportsmanship, minute beer glasses, and a history of energetic hatred of the English. Only the last of these works in the UK climate and we probably invented it anyway.

Here’s two of the more idiotic things that defenders of this addition to the list of “things we have to do” will start to say. First, they will suggest that every ballot paper can have a “none of the above” box, so that the morons will have that as an option. Second, and this is a doozy, they will say that if people will need to be forced to vote so that they can then, and only then, complain when everything turns to shit.

I will address these fascinating points in turn.

A “none of the above” option will require the more conscientious sceptic to sully himself with the awful business of reading manifestos, attending hustings, and all the rest of the ghastly apparatus that surrounds a decision about whether there is one career charity worker, lanyard fetishist, or former special adviser who is slightly less crap than the others. Or else he could not bother to do any of those things in which case presumably any box is just as good as any other.

And as to the second point, anybody who thinks that it is part of the British, and in particular the Scottish, character to feel the need to earn the right to complain is not a particularly astute anthropologist. Unreasonable complaining is what we Brits do. Along with the Common Law it’s something to be proud of.

The political system in this country is busted. We don’t get what we vote for, no matter how those votes are cast, and how the outcome plays out. If anyone can show me a path from my ballot choice to the halting of invasion-by-boat or the re-introduction of knowledge into the classroom then I’m happy to listen.

The real injustice in Britain has nothing to do with people choosing or not choosing to vote. It has to do with a rent-seeking political class whose nomenklatura is able to introduce petty and not-so-petty tyrannies which affect the rest of us but not them.

There are some of us who think that the nation has been replaced by something else and that it’s too late to do anything about it. To compel us to watch this is bad form. Like forcing the condemned man to smoke a final cigarette.

The experienced devil in C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters is very smart. He understands that a good way to capture a man’s soul is to convince him that materialism is true - that the universe is a closed causal system and that the book titled all that there is is a dry technical manual written in the jargon of naturalistic science. Perhaps with an appendix written in Jung.

If that is too ambitious then a naturalised Christianity will do just as well, which means that Screwtape must be pretty pleased with the way things have turned out, given the reluctance of Christians to believe seemingly impossible things.

It’s perplexing to me that people can believe in God and yet be sceptical about or indifferent to the existence of angels and demons, Eucharistic miracles, Marian apparitions, and the literal truth of sacramental physics.

Catholics surely should celebrate our traditions of supernatural witness which at the very minimum remind us that whilst naturalism makes sense in a universe that is contingency, change and measurement, it cannot be all there is to say if there is Creation.

To put it another way, it seems just very odd to think you can have God without the supernatural accompaniment - like thinking you can have material things minus their physical and chemical composition.

Let’s agree there are three modalities of truth: that it is presented via the axioms and conclusions of natural theology, from revelation, or from personal encounter.

There is nothing in natural theology which is inconsistent with Catholic supernaturalism. Aquinas, for example, wrote that we can reason from our (apophatic) understanding of God’s essence to the conclusion that angels exist: if it is good that Creation includes purely spiritual beings then He will have willed that they be so included.

Which is to say that Catholic reasoning at its most exquisite leads you away from naturalism.

Revelation (scripture and the deposit of faith) argues for an ontology of the usually concealed beings. We read of the existence of angels and demons in, among other passages, Genesis 6; Matthew 25; Hebrews 1 etc. In Jude 1:9 the Archangel Michael chastises Satan by invoking the name of Our Lord:

“But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’”

So what of personal encounter, by which I mean those supernatural experiences which are so numerous, so well documented, and which surely constitute a body of plausible witness testimony?

This third modality interests me, because it raises questions about the limits and propriety of scepticism. Ours is a faith given shape by Gospel testimony. So what are the necessary and sufficient conditions which should determine whether or not we accept that this or that miracle, intercession or demonic possession is something that actually took place?

This is one of many questions asked by Carlos Eire in his They Flew, a history of the accounts of witnesses to “impossible” things including the levitations of St Joseph of Cupertino in the 17th Century. The degrees of separation are deliberate. You cannot have a history of the impossible which goes beyond a history of claims made by people to have witnessed events outside the comfort zone of comfortable naturalism, events which were baffling even at the time.

Do we believe these accounts or not? And if not why not, given that they were investigated by the Inquisitors with all the energy, scepticism and attention to records management for which they are renowned?1

On what grounds can we refuse to assent that these must have been genuine moments when the supernatural broke into the natural order, without giving up on the belief that God will use witnesses as a medium of instrumental causality?

If you were to ask ten people to name one person or relic that points to evidence for the miracle of the resurrection at least one would mention the Shroud of Turin which, if it is a miracle, is unusual in being an ongoing one (if that makes logical sense).

We are now at a point in Shroud research where the defenders of its authenticity will argue that it is more miraculous if it’s a medieval forgery.

If this is true, does that mean that Shroud sceptics are being anti-science?

Yes, but that might not make them wrong. Because what these examples show is that there can be no “calculus of required assent” when it comes to the miraculous and the supernatural.

The person who refuses to believe accounts of St Joseph of Cupertino’s raptures (which are said to have gone beyond “moderate hovering”) or who insists that there must have been hologram technology in the 14th Century is not “guilty” of misreading the evidence. It could just be that they are not yet ready for the transformative experience - the metanoia - that would be the inner accompaniment to outward assent.

We need to recalibrate programs of spiritual formation, and to recover and curate habits of Christian thought which have more in common with Pascal’s “heart” than with the hyper-rational Cartesianism which sees the supernatural as theologically inconvenient.

Mysteries are God’s way of giving us no more than we can handle, cognitively speaking. Safe spaces and shelter from Screwtape and his understudies.

Instead of just being a regular guy and buying a motorbike, getting a tattoo, or doing the American Beauty thing, Andy Burnham had to include all of us in his mid-life crisis by becoming prime minister.

It’s still shocking to think that the constituents of Makerfield hate the rest of the country so much that they would impose this on us. But it is what it is, as we are all supposed to say these days. And now Mr Burnham must find ways of turning platitude into policy, of “bringing hope to every postcode”.

Beginning with bringing hope to those who currently lack one. Or have too many, depending on how you look at it.

Top of his wish list of (impossible) things to get done is a laudable but forlorn ambition to “end rough sleeping” armed only with the failure of his attempt in Manchester to do the same and some £350 millions which, in terms of government largesse, is the change so loose that you can’t even be bothered to retrieve it from the back of the couch.

It is good that he is proposing to spend so little of our money on his vanity project. Burnham will not solve the problem of rough sleeping for the good reason that there is no single “problem” here to solve but many.

I was a rough sleeper, then hostel homeless, then a rough sleeper (again) and then hostel homeless (again) for two years between 2015-2017. I bilked hotels, stole from shops and worse.

What I can say is that there is a distinctive anthropology of street homelessness. It has its own culture, idiom, etiquette and hierarchies. Street living can be “nasty, brutish and short”, but there are unexpected kindnesses and certain expectations about how you should conduct yourself, should you be intending to survive. I knew a few who did not.

Rough sleeping is a condition as much as a situation. People who are “out” do not experience time in quite the same way. This is important. When your relationship to time becomes disordered then your assessment of the connection between action and consequence is similarly distorted. Minor slights tend to escalate very quickly.

I was in that life partly because of addiction but also because I deserved to be.Other people are pitched into it for reasons of mental and spiritual health. By which I mean that for many rough sleepers street life is the saner option, if it minimises interaction with a system whose controllers –the political and commentator classes- have immunized themselves against the worst of its effects.

It is the “normal” world that seems to many people to be the Matrix.

We have a political culture which expects us to celebrate untruths and absurdities, transgenderism being only the most obvious example. You cannot impose logical contradiction onto the pattern of human thought without in the end making the thinker go mad.

People sense this. Is it a surprise if some prefer to go off the grid?

And then there are the criminal gangs for whom rough sleeping is a workable business model. A relatively recent addition to the character of street life, if you get my drift.

Most people who are surviving on the streets neither want to nor should be in that crisis. But the truth is that it is government, national and local, that is keeping them there. The escape routes that were available to me ten years ago have been choked off by the consequences of the failed multicultural experiment.

When it comes to social housing allocation the hierarchy of need has been reinterpreted –most relevantly at local level – in ways which unapologetically favour the stranger.

It is likely a mistake to look to government to “solve” this crisis because governments never “solve” anything, and it is only a disordered (which is to say “socialist”) mind that would think otherwise.

The new prime minister is being frivolous about this complex of problems, and we know this for two reasons. Firstly, he is proposing to make this an issue for central government while simultaneously proposing to strengthen the powers of local authorities (which is perilously close to prescribing another of those contradictions).

Second, to do what needs to be done he would have to go up against lanyard orthodoxy and the ambient culture of asphyxiating, fake niceness. Labour politicians are quite capable of the most extreme cruelty but must at all costs at least seem to be nice about inflicting it.

But the people who have chosen the countercultural lifestyle have a point and should be left alone. And the addicts and the mentally ill who haven’t need harsh kindness rather than ineffectual niceness.

Burnham’s only political asset is an ability to come over as a “nice bloke”. He won’t be spending that political capital on hobo snatch squads or the dismantling of tented cities.

The best way to address the crisis of rough sleeping is to get people interested in it. That should not be hard, for reasons adduced above. The problem here – and this one is genuine- is aesthetic. Street homelessness is ugly and unattractive and therefore difficult to engage with.

That said, from the perspective of Heaven so are all of us. That doesn’t stop Him trying.

Iago - jolly nice bloke.

“Good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart. That’s the vision I set out in my speech today” - Andy Burnham, June 2026.

They say that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Andy Burnham didn’t have to campaign to become prime minister, which explains the neo-Hallmark quality of that pre-government “uplift” line.

The reference to postcodes is an interesting tell, one which speaks to the municipal shape of Mr Burnham’s mind. Normal people when asked about where they live do not reply with a sequence of letters and numbers (unless they are in Milton Keynes). They prefer to give the name of a town or road, and if asked for more precision, describe its proximity to this pub or (in the case of Devizes) this or that collection of mysterious, prehistoric stones.

But the old language of local attachment isn’t the preferred way of speaking for the New Globalist class. Names of places and pubs remind too many people that those same places and pubs are tied into history. We can’t have that, far better to have the universalism that goes with efficient municipalism.

What should really worry us about the upcoming administration is this routine assurance that Mr Burnham is a “nice bloke”. Because I don’t know about you but this culture of nice isn’t really doing it for me anymore. I’ve heard good things about Joe Pasquale, but I wouldn’t want him to fly my plane. The actor who played Phil Mitchell in Eastenders is said to be a generous tipper, but I wouldn’t want him to head up my open heart surgery.

Niceness is the prison in which the unkind confine the kind. There’s too much of it about, with its depressing lanyard semiotics and ubiquitous announcements of “zero tolerance” policies. Too many people have internalised the precautionary principle and now think that’s safest and best to speak in the depressing idiom of lanyard orthodoxy.

Am I the only person who thinks the country would be a kinder place if people were a bit less concerned with being nice to each other?

Roger Scruton used to argue that the difference between imagination and fantasy is that the former centralises truth whilst the latter centralises self. I think a similar point can be made about kindness (which is other-centred) versus niceness (which is too often superficial, easy and intended to generate in you a certain impression of me).

There is also, I suspect, a conceptual connection between niceness and hypocrisy. People often misunderstand what hypocrisy is, by confusing it with inconsistency over time or with more general moral failure. But we all are guilty of those ethical shortcomings. Hypocrisy is something worse and more specific.

The hypocrite draws you into a fantasy world by convincing you that he is something he is not. The hypocrite is an actor. His moral offence isn’t that he acts as if he’s good when he isn’t; it’s that he invades and possesses his victims’ ways of thinking.

Hypocrisy is psychologically abusive and niceness is the current delivery mechanism of choice.

So, yes, Burnham is a nice bloke, that’s what enables the hypocrisy. I for one don’t find that consoling.

And it’s the niceness that meant he could pull off the Makerfield con, by persuading the constituents there to agree to an arranged marriage with a 48 hour sunset clause.

To be fair to Burnham, as well as the negative qualities of niceness and hypocrisy this coup has also shown him to have a ruthless side. He’s not all dork. Ruthlessness is an essential attribute of any successful politician. That said, it’s only an instrumental virtue.

Is Burnham ruthless only when he’s playing those internal, factional power games that the Labour people love so much? Will he use it to remove benefits from the feckless, shaft the French, or take a sledgehammer to an aesthetically obscene solar panel farm?

Somehow I doubt it.

The kindest people are rarely the nicest, and most of the Saints when alive would try the patience of a saint.

As for me, I’d trade niceness in a politician for a sense of humour or irony. And despite the presence in the immediate Burnham orbit of wags such as the ever-fragrant Lucy Powell, I’m yet to see many grounds for optimism there.

Wanted for unhelpful speculation which hindered the official investigation.

There is a (vanishingly small) part of me that feels sorry for Dan Hodges and other members of the political-media class who look at a human tragedy and then assess it using, exclusively, the categories and idiom of quotidian, transactional politics.

Hodges is unique in his oddness, and his regular oscillation between astute commentator and total mentalist is one of the more amusing perma-features of contemporary political neo-journalism. In a way he’s beyond help and therefore insensitive to reproach. The normal mechanisms of moral correction don’t work on the very insane. Perhaps we should just pray for him?

Others should know better. Politicians are people, people have friends, friends will mourn when one of them is brutally murdered in her own home. It seems strange to me that people can look at these quite natural human responses and interpret them according to the hermeneutics of political advantage or disadvantage.

Sometimes laying a wreath is just what it seems to be an inadequate expression of a broken heart. Not a symbol, an expression.

And if there are television cameras present then the most anyone is entitled to conclude, surely, is that this is the public form of a private sorrow. To infer and then assert that this is fake is surely to move into the realm of speculation.

But speculation about the circumstances of Ms Widdecombe’s murder, and the motive and identity of her killer is exactly what these same people would very much rather the rest of us not be permitted to do. Which is one very good reason for doing it.

We are entitled to speculate about what happened to Miss Widdecombe if only because nobody is entitled to insist that we mustn’t. Speculation happens when we look at the evidence that is presented and think about possibilities that whilst not logically implied by that evidence are nevertheless consistent with it.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Evidence is always of something which goes beyond the evidence - that is what makes it evidence. Provided it is relevant of course. I doubt anyone is theorising on the motives of this killer on the basis of the position of the stars, or the closing DOW numbers. And if they are, this is unlikely to be fatally compromising to the ongoing investigation.

There are good and bad ways of thinking, to be sure, but this is a normativity which arises from within thought itself and is not to be decided and then handed down by journalists, politicians or even senior police officers.

To speculate is to think with imagination. There’s a reason we find it difficult not to do that: it’s threaded into our essences as created persons. Our souls are restless, Augustine tells us, and likely not satisfied by the meretricious and expedient instructions of people who seem to forget that they work for us.

What they really mean when they tell you not to speculate is "don’t go on X and post in ways which stress test the story we’re telling you”. There is a class of people who are permitted to speculate. This caste includes regime journalists who apparently have an infallible insight into the collective Reform soul, and you’re not in it.

The Higher Ups who manage the System that entraps the rest of us -Lucy Powell, Lisa Nandy, the Northern Archetype about to become PM- are happy for you to participate in social media discussion if this discussion is within the parameters of government-licensed propositions and if the debate is conducted according to forms of reasoning that aren’t dangerously creative, original or subversive.

Nobody wants to hinder a police investigation. But if the ambient ideological atmosphere has incubated violent sleeper cells of very mentally ill people then that is in large part to state-imposed constrictions on freedom of speech and thought and the consequent asphyxiation of eccentric and counter-orthodox ways of seeing the world.

And we are more than entitled to entertain the possibility that this is exactly the situation decades of expert class orthodoxy has put us in.

In other words, we are where we are because we don’t speculate enough.

We have duties of thought and imagination. There are natural limits on what we believe and say. If somebody believes that p and it can be demonstrated (and they understand) that p implies q then we can accuse them of a moral as well as a logical error if they decline to believe therefore q.

And if somebody else shouts loudly that Nicole Simpson committed suicide in order to frame OJ Simpson then we can and should forcibly expel them from the community of reasonable people.

But within the limits of reasonableness we should speculate away, as outrageously as possible.

The truth is usually hidden, and that’s the best way to find it.

Left the galaxy after being caught writing Ian Hislop’s lines

I think we should be grateful to Nigel Farage for pushing back against the incumbent progressive “comedy” Establishment by forcing a by-election in his Clacton constituency so that he can stand against Jonathan David Harvey.

Mr Harvey, you are probably aware, is the lefty BBC regime “comedian” who, having been caught writing gag lines for Ian Hislop, quite understandably now disguises himself as a bin and pretends to be from another galaxy.

Mr Harvey (aka “Count Binface”) returned to Earth some time ago with a new mission, to turn into one of those activists who hijack the honourable tradition of the election night absurdity candidate. Like many who came before him, he has tragically ended up taking himself seriously.

The British people understand comedy in a way that lefty comedians don’t, which is to say as something which triggers spontaneous laughter. There is something too forced about the Binface phenomenon, a feeling that to not find the whole thing “howling!” is to be excluded from the club of right-thinking people.

It puts me in mind of some of those Monty Python sketches, so loved by the posher kids at my school, but which seemed to me to be almost aggressively unfunny. If you didn’t collude in the pretence –that this was sophisticated and edgy stuff- then that was because there was something wrong with you – couldn’t just be that it was all utter crap.

And whilst people are quite happy to go along with a joke for a bit, even a bad one, and even if only for a quiet life, they are unforgiving when that joke gets tired.

And this one will, in short order. The preternaturally humourless eco-zealot and semi-sheared Dale Vince has reportedly offered to subsidise the whole stunt – a sure sign that it’s going to go the way of Dom Joly’s schtick with the large phone, now universally unloved by anyone with a functioning sense of humour.

I’ll follow my own advice and be briefly serious by saying something in favour of political gimmicks, which when used effectively have their place in the to-and-fro of electoral politics (flipping fries at MacDonalds and sitting behind the wheel of a refuse truck probably sealed Trump’s 2024 win).

Gimmicks, stunts, jokes etc can add to the form of life that is practical politics. They can jazz things up, recalibrate, and invite us to look at things in a different way. But that is very different from humour as political algorithm, which is the comfort zone of the contemporary political class.

So, when Kemi Baddenoch describes Farage’s “resignation” as a gimmick she is quite correct, but so what? If it is a gimmick to force this by-election then is it also not a gimmick to refuse to field a candidate?

Farage has got himself into bother because his execution of the stunt has been poor, not because it is fundamentally misconceived. The possibility that the other parties, knowing they would lose, would dress this up as a principled refusal to take part seems to have not occurred to him. His wargaming has been shoddy. This, I guess, is his strait of Hormuz moment.

That said, let’s remember the context and the general political background noise. We have an incoming prime minister who has achieved this not on merit but by an improbably (without deep state help) successful strategy which is more Kind Hearts and Coronets than House of Cards.

At some point Burnham’s coup really should have failed. Even his courtship of Makerfield was ungentlemanly: marry me and I’ll leave you immediately for my better-looking London mistress.

And because the prime minister’s party won in this election it finally became impossible for him to remain in office.

We are not, in other words, living through normal political times. If the Farage stunt seems like madness, then he’s only trading in the new currency.

Nobody normal cares that Farage took money from a friend. That’s what friends are for. And if he said at one point that he was intending to spend it on security, and then that he was getting a fleet of Ferraris, or investing in a salmon farm then so what? This tells us nothing that we didn’t already know – that money is essentially fungible and that free choice is happily adjusted to that fact.

And there is nothing wrong with being friendly with a crook, many of whom are more interesting than your average politician who happens to not be a crook.

Indeed, given that the Starmer premiership has released more criminals than Heath Ledger’s Joker it is very difficult to meet new friends who are not ex-lags or tagged prisoners on early release. Farage can hardly be blamed for that.

We are told that this is not about illegality, but accountability. The parliamentary rules are the rules, and these must apply to everyone. Except that’s not true, is it? Because whilst the rules are indeed applicable to everyone, they are in fact applied very very selectively.

This is how Farage, an adept in the arts of political alchemy, can turn the unpromising base elements of his current situation into electoral gold. He should ditch the story that this is him versus the Establishment (which always collapses into a discussion of who went to which school) and opt instead to make it about fairness versus process.

The procedures of any parliamentary standards investigation are, by cross-party consensus, opaque, Kafkaesque and in conflict with the basic principles of natural justice. Just because parliament has processes to follow it doesn’t mean those processes aren’t ridiculous.

And the Farage team need to reclaim the language around this. They have no need to call this shill “Count Binface” when “Jonathan David Harvey, longtime BBC anti-comic” will do just as well.

You can bet that the inter-party Reform haters, and in particular the people who insist on calling Tommy Robinson by his real name, will cry foul on this.

But at the end of the day, they’re the ones in thrall to a bin

.

Lisa Nandy has left X and has “taken her department with her” (whatever that means). This, she announced (on X) is because the platform has become riven with misinformation and hate. Ms Nandy, by the way, thinks that God gets things wrong and that people can change biology by choice. She despises those who take a more traditional view. This is neither misinformation nor hate, of course, just lanyard orthodoxy.

It strikes me that Ms Nandy’s departure might have crossed the line between “dignified and principled departure” and “performative flounce”.

What people have taken to call “misinformation” I think of as “speculation” and it seems to me that a social media platform should be full of that. I didn’t sign up for the X experience because I wanted accurate statistics on tractor production or an update on the new theme parks. I did it because I wanted to have some fun. If that’s at Ms Nandy’s expense then that’s just a bonus.

This is not the way the Left thinks though, and the mechanisms of censorship need constant use if they aren’t to risk becoming obsolete in a world where there is just so much to pretend to be offended by. Social media platforms, although privately owned, are -like your money and your child’s education- the de facto property of the State, and while fun is all well and good, the dissemination of government-approved propositions must always come first. Fun can wait.

Without wishing to be ungentlemanly, Ms Nandy’s absence will not be felt too painfully by those of us who like the lighter side of social media space. I doubt that any party in history has been thrown into crisis by the cry that “Lisa has walked out and she’s taken those people with her!!”.

And there’s nothing wrong with hate if the thing that is hated deserves to be hated. But this isn’t what she means. What Ms Nandy means by “hate” is just saying out loud things she disapproves of about those issues and people which have secured lanyard approval. It’s the same attitude displayed by people who don’t understand that in order to tolerate someone you must also disapprove of them.

Anyway, she’s flounced into the monochromatic meadowlands of that other social media space, BlueSky, where people differ greatly over just how much they all agree with each other.

If you’re anything like as cynical as me you’ll be wondering how long before she quietly returns. This is the pattern, X being like the Hotel California to people like Ms Nandy, who will even now be asking herself if she remembered to turn the virtual oven off.

And it’s her loss. To be fair to Starmer he’s a good sport about being Community Noted, to the extent that it’s starting to seem like he’s collected them1. Despite my best efforts at X speculation I’ve never picked up a single one. Which, along with never having my teenager referred to Prevent, is something I’m slightly ashamed of.

It can’t be too long before there’s another tiresome debate about “what does it mean to be English/British”. We haven’t had one for ten minutes so I guess we’re already overdue. I hope that along with obsessive queueing and residual affection for the Common Law we remember to mention our studied and total indifference when somebody walks out in a performative huff.

Remember a few years’ back when Anna Soubry did the stagger-flounce (it was after lunch) from the government to the opposition benches, as a public repudiation of some or other Brexit vote?

Neither does anyone else.

To be serious for a moment, I notice that Nandy is now a Senior Acolyte in the weird cult of Andy Burnham. We know that Burnham will be vulnerable to legitimate charges of illegitimacy if he fails to call an “early” General Election. The whole “devolution” spiel is a conjuring trick intended to vitiate that criticism.

Their objection to X, really, is that it is in that speculative to-and-fro that the truth about what they are up to will emerge.

Everything in the end comes back to free speech and that you guys really can’t be trusted with it.

Kirk and sidekick. Or replicas thereof?

Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons uses thought experiments to interrogate common sense intuitions about the identity of persons over time. Specifically the belief(s) that we are metaphysically identical to the person we were in childhood and the person we will be next week. And that there is some “fact of the matter” that makes us so.

Parfit suggests that this standard or common sense view is wrong. He argues for an alternative and deflationary picture of self-survival, one which gives up on identity in favour of something like psychological connectedness.

I am not, according to this account, literally the same or numerically identical person as I was as a child or will be next week. But I am connected to those iterations in ways which make it sensible to say that this is a photograph of me at my graduation; and that it is me that has a dental appointment next month.

(Memory, is a candidate supplier of this connectedness - the British empiricist tradition once again leading us back to Locke.)

In a universe of flux and contingency, continuity is as much as we can hope for, even in explanations of how it is that there is an I who is preserved as time moves forward (or seems to). Some of us draw the conclusion that, therefore, flux and contingency cannot be all that there is.

Reasons and Persons is an extended exercise in what Peter Strawson called “revisionary metaphysics” - it urges that we think seriously about one aspect of things as they seem to be (in this case human selves) and to be open to the possibility that conceptual housekeeping, perhaps to the point of house clearance, might turn out to be epistemically virtuous.

Reading the book it’s at times difficult to discern where philosophy ends and Star Trek begins. Not least because Parfit’s primary thought experiment exploits the (logical) possibility of teletransportation. What is happening when Captain James T. Kirk is “beamed down” from the deck of the Enterprise to the surface of some unsuspecting planet so he can infect its civilisation with his tiresome intergalactic secular liberalism1?

One possibility is that Kirk is destroyed and that every molecule of his physical body is recreated on the “host” planet using locally sourced carbon. Would this really be Kirk, though, or a replica of him? Has he survived the procedure?

If this person remembers being Kirk then surely that’s enough? But what if two “Kirks! are recreated, each as irritating as the original, and each with the same memories as the original? Which is Kirk? Both? Neither?

Parfit proposes that examples like this are baffling only if we insist on identity over connectedness. There should, and we shudder at the thought, be enough Kirk to go around. There is no ontological constraint on how much Kirk the universe can contain.

All good fun, but all very morally dangerous. It is not difficult to anticipate how this reasoning could be -and is- adjusted to urge a loosening of the intuition that we are identical with our future selves.

For if I am not strictly identical with my future self then this is more than a metaphysical clarification. It opens the door to autocratic utilitarianism. I might, for example, have an obligation to give up smoking so that I do not harm this future self, who is, strictly speaking, also a different self and who deserves as much (state) protection as the person sitting next to me, who is lucky enough to get my secondary smoke for free.

Thought experiments, I suggest, are quite often forms of trickery, pretending to be types of a priori reasoning. But when we reason a priori we are thinking in ways which are unconditioned by experience. Thought experiments, in contrast, are culturally embedded and, like sophisticated cyphers, will include the presuppositions and worldviews of whoever is thinking them up.

These days that’s usually the effective altruists, autocratic utilitarians or American neo-liberals who deploy impossible counterfactuals to subvert the ordo amoris - the proper hierarchy of the human heart. Thus we have Singer’s “shallow pond” thought experiment, the so-called “trolley problem” and the “veil of ignorance” of John Rawls, in which persons are mere data points and there is no space for a communion of souls.

Are these helpful instruments of philosophical inquiry? Sometimes. But they are not as common as their defenders would have us believe. Plato’s Cave is more metaphor than thought experiment; the simulation hypothesis seems to make genuine truth claims.

And it seems strange to use thought experiments as a way of investigating thought itself. Thinking about thinking is one thing. Imagining oneself into the structure of thought itself is something quite different and more, well, ambitious.

Also got five years…

Peter Murrell the political activist, collector, and Scottish vaudeville supporting act has been sent to prison for five years for stealing money from the separatist SNP and spending it on miscellaneous items in an extended and eccentric shopping spree with no detectable heterosexual pattern to it.

Sentencing Mr Murrell at the High Court in Edinburgh Judge Lord Young said that his crime was “calculated and dishonest”, both of which properties, to be fair, seem to be the least you can expect of any theft worthy of the name.

The sentence seems harsh, but at the same time historically resonant. Readers of a certain age will recall that five years is also the sentence handed down to the lovable burglar Norman Stanley Fletcher in the 1970s BBC series Porridge.

But burglary is a very serious crime, one which wrecks the lives of its victims who feel that they have been violated in a very personal way which leaves them unable to sleep.

In the case of Murrell it’s not clear that his really rather fabulous retail crime spree was targeted at a similarly vulnerable demographic, his victims being members of the activist Scottish political classes, each one of whom almost certainly will be cheering on every team playing against England in the football World Cup.

Was Fletcher treated too leniently or has Murrell been treated too harshly? Hard to say.

Fletcher had charm, sharpness of wit, and a certain clarity of thought. It is not self-evident that Murrell is blessed with all or any of these personal qualities, although it’s possible that he had them once and that they became eroded over time owing to the well-documented control-freakery of his former husband.

That aside, Fletcher and Murrell have one thing in common. They are both subversives in their own way.

It’s always tempting to dwell on the negative side of theft. But we should pause for a moment and take in just how very creative and yes, patriotic, Murrell’s actions have been, when looked at in a certain way.

It is not always easy to separate Scotsman and wallet. There are horrific rumours which continue to circulate about the late actor and SNP hobbyist Sean Connery for example. So we can conclude that the separatist Scot is even more “careful” than his politically neutral compatriot.

So this was Murrell’s accomplishment: to extract money from a provably miserly Scottish political demographic -funds intended to be used to undermine the Union let’s not forget- and to redirect it away from everyday party expenses in the direction of Amazon-sourced hairdryers, pens and curiously pricey umbrellas.

Is this really embezzlement? Or is it instead counter-revolutionary tradecraft? Is Murrell a secret hero? A willing Thames House patsy?

We don’t have sufficient evidence to confidently draw this stronger conclusion. But at the very least we should acknowledge the ingenuity of Murrell’s scheme, pay tribute to his diligence in its slow-motion execution, and, frankly, thank him for the laughs.

And also for his effectiveness in defunding the separatist project. True, the English taxpayer will continue to be shafted. But we always are, in any case.

If you happen to be reading this on a prison-pocket Nokia while lying on your mattress in your improbably well-bedecked cell, a bit like Grouty, then please take comfort in the knowledge that some of us are grateful.