Does Israel’s right wing want to start a Holy War with Islam? And do they understand what that would mean for Israel, for the region and the world?

The question is not alarmist. Nor is it partisan. It’s not an ‘anti-Israeli’ or a ‘pro-Palestinian’ question. It’s a serious geopolitical question Western governments should be asking themselves. The possible answers are alarming.

Escorted by armed police, Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, joined thousands of Jewish extremists who flooded into the Temple Mount compound, Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site shared by Muslims, Jews and Christians, this week.

They prayed, waved the Israeli flag and sang the national anthem in a highly charged, provocative display of political power. It’s not the first time.

Emboldened by Israel’s overwhelming military force displayed with pitiless consistency across the region since October 7, 2023 the Israeli right - now part of the governing coalition - believes itself to be untouchable.

The use of the phrase Holy War is not a metaphor. It is a stated goal for the religious right without whose support Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s coalition would collapse.

For that faction, led by Ben-Gvir, the storming of the holy sites in Jerusalem are not tactics. Ben-Gvir is not a fringe protester. He represents the state of Israel.

And these are not occasional weekend protests such as we see at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. They are carefully organised steps toward a strategic and theological endpoint.

They believe they are doing God's work. That work involves at its core, the establishment of an exclusively religious, Jewish state from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean sea - Eretz Israel.

This moment in history, over the bodies of 70,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza and growing settler violence on the West Bank, is the moment that will lead to the final era of a united Jewish kingdom. Such moments will spark divine redemption (Guelah).

And like all extremists, Ben-Gvir and his fellow travellers are indifferent to the geopolitical consequences of their actions and their goals. This is something that should terrify everyone else.

Just so we understand the gravity of what’s occurring here is an analogy:

Imagine a serving minister in a European government, who happens to be a Muslim, leading thousands of supporters into St Peter's Basilica in Rome under armed escort.

They perform Islamic prayers at the high altar, wave the Palestinian national flag, sing their national anthem Feda’i which means warrior. The Pope watches, powerless. This happens repeatedly.

It has happened before - but not in times like these. America and Israel are at war with Iran, the world economy is hostage to the Revolutionary Guard’s hold over the Straits of Hormuz and a growing number of young Muslims around the world are being radicalised.

In 1969, an Australian Christian fundamentalist set fire to the Al-Aqsa mosque, the main Muslim congregational prayer hall in the compound. Riots erupted across the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia.

In 2000, the late Ariel Sharon, the general and later Israeli Prime Minister, visited the Temple Mount with a heavy security escort. That visit and what it symbolised is widely credited with triggering the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which killed over four thousand people.

The deeper historical precedent of course is the Crusades: centuries of catastrophic violence, rooted in competing claims to the same few acres of Jerusalem.

The memory of that period remains vivid in the Islamic mind in a way that the West consistently underestimates.

What could this fanatical behaviour lead to if it’s allowed to run?

At a minimum: the collapse of any prospect of Saudi normalisation with Israel, the end of the Abraham Accords as a meaningful framework, and the empowerment of Iran and its proxies. In other words shattering and prospect of peace in the Middle East for another generation.

Jordan, whose peace treaty with Israel is partly premised on Hashemite custodianship of the holy sites, would face an impossible position.

Saudi Arabia’s position is critical. The Saudi king holds the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Al-Aqsa is Islam’s third holiest site. If it were seriously desecrated — or if the attempt to change the status quo became undeniable — no Saudi ruler could remain silent without risking his domestic legitimacy.

Saudi Arabia may be an autocracy but the King rules by consent of the descendants of the Sudairy Seven - the seven brothers, sons of the kingdom’s founder Ibn Saud. They in turn rely on the support of tribal leaders.

The pressure from the Muslim world would be enormous. Iran, which has been trying to position itself as the true defender of Palestinian and Islamic interests, would exploit it.

Every proxy from Hezbollah to the Houthis would have a new and powerful recruitment narrative.

What could follow is a regional war framed in explicitly religious terms, which, as we know, is the hardest kind of war to end.

The Israeli security establishment shares this fear. Shin Bet, the IDF, Mossad have all warned that altering the status quo at Al-Aqsa is the most reliable way to spark a regional war.

Ben-Gvir doesn’t believe them or doesn't care. He appears to welcome it.

Religious fanatics believe they are answerable only to God. Ultra-orthodox religious Jews believe history vindicates them. Such people become, as we have seen with the Taliban and ISIS, immune to reason or even self-interest.

Muslims carry a shared narrative with Jews: the return of a golden age when Islam ruled the world. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. But there are many more of them- two billion. It has no equivalent.

Islam also shares many characteristics with Judaism: It’s a faith, an identity, a legal framework, a global solidarity movement and a potent political force. It would be a great mistake to underestimate its reach.

Israel’s feelings of vulnerability are not without cause. The massacre on October 7 poured fuel on the flame. Israel believes that only through the force of arms can it survive. That is understandable but misguided.

A country that mistakes military superiority for permanent security has confused the means with the end.

Israel has the finest army in the region, nuclear weapons it will not officially acknowledge, and the unconditional backing of the world's most powerful nation.

In the long-run none of that will protect it if it succeeds in uniting two billion people against it.

The more I see of Andy Burnham, the more I like what I see. It’s early days. But our new Prime Minister seems to have a destination in mind and a plan for how to get there. More important he seems to have good instincts.

These are rooted in the simple idea that the people best equipped to deal with a problem are those directly affected by it. They know it. They should have a say in how to fix it. With a little outside help.

Burnham also believes in the shockingly radical idea - alien indeed an anathema to Whitehall - that you make other people trustworthy by trusting them.

Burnham’s point is more straightforward than an ideology and less rigid than a dogma.

Ideologies begin with a theory. They decide in advance how human beings work, or how they should work, and then spend enormous amounts of energy making the evidence fit.

Tories try and shoehorn every policy into the idea that only the individual or the market know best. Anything else is Stalinism disguised as centrism as the Spectator, once the high-minded beacon of Tory thinking now a comic book, suggested last week.

(It also devoted an entire page suggesting that Burnham would make a better PM if he wore a suit and tie. I’ll just leave that there.)

Kemi Badenoch, a mediocre Tory leader at best, is struggling in the face of a political operator way above her pay grade.

There’s a great deal of wingeing, whining and moaning but so far neither Badenoch nor the Greens and certainly not Reform, who seem to be in a nosedive, have laid a glove on him.

On the far Left, impulses that start as liberation movements tend to end up as coercive bureaucracies. The theory must be protected, even from the people it was designed to serve. This was Corbynism.

Dogmas are worse. A dogma does not merely have a theory — it has a faith. And faith, by definition, is not answerable to experience. That’s true of the Far Left and Far Right and deeply reactionary movements like Donald Trump’s MAGA battalions.

Burnham seems uninterested in both. What he has instead is closer to a working observation that has evolved into a theory, refined over years of dealing with actual people in actual difficulty as mayor in Manchester : that human beings, given the chance, tend to rise to it.

The implications are enormous but they are practical rather than utopian. Trust people with decisions that affect them. Push power as close to the problem as it can get. Build structures that make accountability visible and manipulation difficult.

When Margaret Thatcher famously said “ there is no thing as society” she may or may not have been saying what we think she was saying. But for a really clever woman it was a dumb, or at any rate self-serving, thing to say.

Applied to economic policy, the consequences were damaging. Applied to communities they were catastrophic. Applied to public institutions, they were corrosive.

It was the beginning of divisions that have torn the country apart and left us stranded outside the protective embrace of our closest and most powerful neighbours in Europe.

If there is no such thing as society, there is no such thing as collective responsibility — which sounds bracing until the thing that goes wrong is something no individual caused and no individual can fix.

Society, or as I prefer to call it community, isn’t as about sitting around a campfire singing Kumbaya My Lord or feeding the homeless from a soup kitchen. Nor is it about feeling helpless and waiting for someone else, or the state, to provide.

Community - the idea that people achieve more by working together - is the engine of virtually everything we’ve achieved as a species.

A genius may provide the spark: Alexander Fleming and penicillin; Tim Berners-Lee and the worldwide web. But without the collective, great ideas languish in the archives. Even the great narcissist Elon Musk would concede that.

Human beings are, by definition, social creatures. Our values, our language, our capacity to build - rockets, social care systems, great enterprises- are formed in relation to or with others. You cannot strip that away and have anything meaningful left.

Empowering people to shape their own lives is not, of course, a new idea. In fact it’s a very old one. But it has been thoroughly buried under decades of target-setting, dogma, box-ticking and central diktat - whether from the Left and the Right.

Most of what Burnham has spoken of so far fits into the central theme of empowering people. Those who live with the consequences of a decision should have a hand in making it.

This includes a voting system that actually reflects how people vote — proportional representation. A written constitution that protects everyone, not merely those who can afford to interpret the unwritten one because they went to the same school or university. More revenue-raising powers transferred from the centre to the regions.

Burnham is also tackling what is possibly the greatest choke point to progress in Britain’s governing institutions - the Treasury which has a habit of quietly crushing good intentions.

The new Office of the Prime Minister, headed by the steely Louise Haigh, is tasked with overseeing the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the department of Housing and Local government.

It also has the job of running the Number 10 North unit. Far from being a gimmick this is the clearest signal that Burnham intends to shake up the way the country is governed to get us out of the mess we’re in.

The rediscovery of the idea that you can give away rather than hoard power and that you should trust people to do what’s best for them and their community feels almost revolutionary.

Twelve years running Greater Manchester taught Burnham something that Whitehall quite literally cannot learn, shaped as it has been by decades - centuries - of privilege plus a lack of real accountability.

Burnham seems to understand this at an instinctive level. The old centralising state turns people into data points making them invisible.

What Burnham seems to be proposing is something more interesting: the radical dispersal of power something Westminster refuses to contemplate.

As I say it’s early days. None of this may be achievable. We’re so used to the political language of orthodoxy - deregulation, deficits, subsidies, tax and spend - that recognising something truly radical is both scary and difficult.

But have you got any better ideas?

When I was a kid we used to take a house in the pretty, hillside village of Bormes-les-Mimosas in the Var on southern coast of France between Hyères and St Tropez. Bormes is built against a wooded hill. In the summer it dazzles with nearly 90 varieties of the eponymous, fluffy, golden flowers.

I can still smell, in my mind, the warm, resinous fragrance of sun-baked Provencal pine needles, dry earth and wild herbs. It’s the smell of carefree, childhood holidays, memories of dreams that stay with you long after you wake.

One night in August in the mid-1960s (I was 13 or 14) I was woken by my father at 3:00 am. “Get dressed, we need to go” he said. I looked out of the window. The sky was lit up by fire, silver and orange with dark, swirling plumes of smoke.

I was bundled into our Fiat hatchback with my stepmother and the paraphernalia of a South of France holiday and we fled the wildfire that later ravaged thousands of hectares and some houses. On the first night we slept on the beach with hundreds of others.

Two days ago my stepmother, now a remarkably resilient ninety-three year-old, was staying with a friend in a village outside Bordeaux.

They were evacuated, along with a quarter of a million other people, as forest fires still grip southern France and Spain. The fires are within reach of Bordeaux even Madrid.

Wildfires are not new. But they are becoming more frequent. And we are effectively powerless against these great, blazing infernos once they reach a certain intensity.

Which is worrying to say the least since the usual suspects are now rolling wildfires into the culture wars, denying a link between climate change and the gathering frequency and intensity of these beasts.

Southern Europe is not the only place to experience these virtually uncontrollable phenomena. Fires that have lit up the Cairngorms in Scotland are still burning after 10 days. Wildfires are increasingly common in southern England.

Last year Los Angeles. saw wildfires sweep with terrible, unstoppable fury through residential areas rich and poor. Wealth didn’t buy you immunity as Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins and Billy Crystal found when their villas were burnt to cinder.

There have been killer wildfires in Chile, Canada and Australia. Canadian wildfires have funneled dense smoke into major U.S. cities. Donald Trump’s reaction was not to send help but threaten to slap tariffs on Canada for failing to control the smoke. Yes really.

At the height of the Californian wildfire Trump was asked whether he thought climate change might have something to do with the fact that Holywood was burning. No he said. It’s “ One, you guys not maintaining your forest. And two, some allegedly, at this point, deranged arsonist."

The 1960s to the 1980s was a bad time for wildfires in Europe. In 1985 nearly half a million acres burned in Spain. Governments then invested heavily in aerial firefighting. Things got a bit better but people got complacent.

Since 2017, fires have returned with a ferocity that overwhelms the suppression capacity built up over 30 years. The crucial difference is that these modern fires are driven by climate conditions — extreme heat, prolonged drought, and wind — rather than just land management failures, human carelessness or arson. This makes them harder to fight.

What makes France and Spain especially vulnerable is that both countries have large Mediterranean climate zones — hot, dry summers, mild wet winters — which naturally create a fire season.

Extended droughts dry out soil and vegetation for months before summer even begins; when heat arrives it lands on a tinderbox.

But the Mediterranean climate is now being pushed to extremes. And it’s being pushed further north. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating roughly twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.

Wildfires risk becoming as common as thunderstorms with devastating consequences for wildlife as well as humans.

At its most basic, a wildfire is a chemical reaction of combustion, which requires a source of heat, oxygen, and fuel to get started.

The fuel is the vegetation available to burn (forests, shrubs, or pastures); the oxygen is in the air; the heat can be lightning, an agricultural burn which escapes, or a spark from a power line. It’s just waiting to light up.

There are the idiots who throw cigarette butts away, leave empty bottles in the shrub that become heat intensifiers in the sun or abandon half-extinguished disposable barbecues.

Then there are the big things that have long, slow-burning fuses: climate change, rising global temperatures, precipitation, the introduction of exotic species of plants (e.g., eucalyptus), intensive agriculture, and deforestation.

Some studies suggest that black carbon from the deforestation of the Amazon alone accelerates the melting of the polar icecaps by 3-4% a year.

The feedback loop is clear: climate change drives more fires → fires emit black carbon → black carbon accelerates warming and ice melt → which drives more fires.

The WHO estimates that black carbon contributes to around seven million premature deaths a year globally. So as well as a climate problem it’s a public health crisis.

It's a compounding loop, not a linear relationship. And it’s not a conspiracy or woke hysteria. It’s real and it’s connected. Climate ostriches want us to believe it’s cyclical. It’s not and the evidence proves it.

Air pollution, wildfires and climate change are linked like a deadly daisy chain.

The problem, as economists like to say, is structural, not cyclical, and we are not equipped to deal with it. Predictably it is becoming part of the culture wars.

Once you’re hooked onto the idea that global warming is not real then you are bound to deny that any of its consequences or its causes are genuine.

Loretta Mickley, a researcher at Harvard University puts it like this: "The fires are a terrible calamity, an outcome of climate change that can't easily be controlled. But it’s like hurricanes and sea-level rise. You can prepare for sea-level rise, but then along comes a Hurricane Irene.”

I don’t pretend fully to understand the science but I know a man who does. And I have the evidence of my lifetime.

The hard and gloomy truth is the feedback loop is already running. Hard. Climate change is, to a large extent self-sustaining. We’re not going to break the feedback loop. That ship has sailed.

International cooperation to stem the effects of global warming, like aspiring to world peace, is so last century. It was barely breathing but Trump has throttled it. It’s every man for himself.

Can we still do enough to slow its worst effects and grim runaway scenarios while we figure out what to do in the long term?

Possibly provided we can get enough shoulders to the wheel at a regional level. Which in our case means working with, yup, Europe.

That’s assuming there is a long-term.

What is the difference between healthy scepticism and cynicism? Answer: A sceptic kicks the tyres of an idea before deciding whether to get on board. A cynic always sees a flat tyre and gives up at the slightest sign of difficulty.

Granted cynicism can be a shield for a lifetime of let-downs. But a chronic cynic is someone, as Oscar Wilde said, who ends up knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Have we become a nation of cynics? And does that doom Andy Burnham’s cheerful optimism - the man with a plan - before it’s even hit the ground? Does a feeling that we’re basically stuffed as a country consign Britain to slow perpetual decline because nobody expects it to succeed?

Heaven knows we have cause. Over the past decade and a half we have been governed by silver-tongued Etonian toffs who mis-sold amateurism for competence; self-serving narcissists who never looked beyond their reflection in the mirror; wooly-headed fantasists and dreary place men afflicted by a stunning lack of imagination .

Things beyond the UK’s borders in the rest of the world do not offer much reason for optimism. Russia is still run by a maniac who menaces Europe; Donald Trump sanctions extra-judicial killings, suborns democracy for personal gain and starts wars he can’t win; Israel is spiralling down into Dante’s Nine Circles of hell; the earth is heating up remorselessly.

A sceptic might look for a silver lining. The cynic will only see darkness. They never expect a good outcome so they can never be wrong. A sceptic might adjust their view if things change. A cynic will trash the evidence and move the goalposts.

As a result society becomes disengaged and negative. A friend said to me the other day: “I don’t watch the news. Nothing will change. As long as my little world is OK I’m happy”. Fair enough.

This has a knock-on effect on the governed ( who give up) and on governments who govern badly (or defensively) in part because nobody expects them to govern well. Governing becomes about managing expectations and the barbs of the 24-hour social media cycle.

Civic engagement - Edmund Burke’s little platoons that can change things at community level - gets beaten down. This removes accountability which, in turn, produces worse governance.

The corrosive effect of cynicism is not imaginary like man-flu. It’s part of a vicious feedback loop that reaches deep into our sense of self-confidence and community - the idea that together we can do things.

Entire populations have simply checked out of democracy not necessarily from apathy or because they’re intellectually lazy. They’ve clocked off out of disgust or conviction that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and they’re powerless to do anything about it. Or they’re merely exhausted by politics.

This nihilism encouraged by a universe of state-sponsored bot networks, populists and outlets that thrive on outrage. Glued to our smartphones we are trained to expect failure.

Cynicism has become a major strategic weapon - by Russia, by Reform UK, by Musk and Trump. We are so affected by the collapse of hope it becomes easy to turn ordinary setbacks - the ebb and flow of political friction - into the seeds of despair.

The United Kingdom’s 59^th Prime Minister, fresh out of the box, is going to bounce up to the podium outside Number 10 Downing Street on Monday (possibly in an open necked shirt), to tell us what his plan is.

We got a glimpse of his style this week at a dress rehearsal in Cardiff. A clever choice because Labour’s fortunes have vaporised in Wales, once its greatest stronghold.

Two chairs were placed in a busy shopping street. Passers by were invited to sit and “ Ask Andy Anything”. This was not, of course, his first rodeo. AAA is a tried and tested part of his image-building.

It was a clever piece of showmanship posted on Facebook and X where it attracted close to two million views. But it was also intended to signal that he does not intend ruling as a prince in an ivory tower.

Passers-by seemed engaged. But overwhelmingly reactions on social media were drenched in lip-curling cynicism. “New circus, same clown” was one typical reaction.

Burnham’s march to Number 10 Downing Street has, so far, been met with an excess of cynicism. Not just from the Right but from the tribes on the Left who want a piece of him.

He’s this, he’s that but either way he’s an empty vessel, a shape-shifter, a people-pleaser who likes to be liked. He’s all mouth and no trousers.

Besides he’ll soon find that grappling with the housing crisis or a failing NHS isn’t the same as rolling out a fleet of shiny, yellow buses to applause in Britain’s second city.

Which is a shame because, if this last gasp effort to resuscitate the centre ( all right the centre left) is to succeed it needs some breathing space. Bill Clinton was once asked what he did to prepare for becoming President of the United States. “Nothing prepares you for being President” he replied.

Coverage of Burnham’s rise to power has, by and large, been pathetic. Will Ed Milliband be Chancellor? Will Shabana Mahmood? Will he be slightly to left of Starmer? Does he realise that running the country is not the same as running Manchester?

The questions that matter are these:

• What kind of country do we want to be? We are at sixes and sevens as a country only partly because we’ve lived through nearly two decades of failure. We’ve arrived at this point mostly because we’ve stopped believing in the possibility of success.

• Do we understand that making things better requires us to put all our shoulders to the wheel and not just leave it to the politicians. This doesn’t necessarily mean getting involved in local politics. But it does mean rediscovering a sense of community.

• Parliament, the engine of our democracy, is where policies and ideas are tested. But why does it have to be so adversarial, so performative, so childish? It just makes people think that politicians are clowns.

Burnham’s job - his chief task - is to show us that public life has a purpose, that the state and the private sector can work together to advance progress and that the decisions we make all the way down to parish councils can make a difference.

What’s the point of politicians if they can’t be trusted? And if elected politicians can’t be trusted what’s the point of democracy? Maybe we should find a simpler way. Cut out the middle man. The voter.

The United Kingdom is about to get its seventh Prime Minister in 11 years. Keir Starmer has fallen on his sword after an exquisitely executed palace coup. Andy Burnham’s coronation is less than two weeks away, voted in to 10 Downing Street by 0.05% of the British electorate.

It’s not unconstitutional but it is weird. He may do well. Heaven knows the UK needs fresh ideas and something to believe in. I like the idea of devolution as an organising principle especially if the Treasury has its wings clipped.

But is this democracy? Or is it, to quote Plato 2,400 years ago, an example of Democracy passing into despotism?

Plato’s argument was that democracy’s tolerance and freedom eventually ends up being exploited by demagogues. They promise everything, hoover up votes and seize power. He had a point.

We, the people, have shed our ideals and been conditioned to distrust all authority. We end up surrendering to the loudest candidate who tells us what we want to hear while fleecing us on the quiet. Or in Donald Trump’s case trousering billions in plain sight.

The British Social Attitudes survey shows trust in government fell from 40% in 1986 to a miserable 12% in 2024 — a collapse over roughly one generation.

Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan passed muster.

The fall started with Harold Wilson and (with the exception of a brief uptick during the Blair years) spiralled downwards with Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher (the Falklands factor excepted) and to the recent lot. They don’t get better.

The same goes for America. In the early 1960s 75% of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. By 1980 that had dropped to 25%, largely due to Vietnam and Watergate. Today it’s around 17%.

The picture is more varied in Europe but the trend is similar. Approval of political leaders hovers around 35-40%, down significantly from the postwar decades but measurably higher than the UK.

The exceptions are Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. By and large governments there do what they say they will, corruption is low, transparency is high, they vote by proportional representation so your vote feels as if it counts. And they’re smaller so social cohesion, despite growing concerns about immigration, remains high.

But who, at any rate in the UK, can look back ( or forward) and honestly say “Yeah, this democracy thing is working for me”. Perhaps older home owners the already wealthy and crooks: the top 10% who hold 43% of all wealth. But that’s it.

A sobering piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine points out that Britain’s output per person is only just above that of Mississippi -America’s poorest state.

The road to power is littered with broken promises. This may be due to incompetence, corruption or, as Macmillan said, “events, dear boy, events”. This is not new.

But perhaps something has changed fundamentally since the crash in 2008 which will surely go down as an event as seminal as the Wall Street crash of 2029.

It’s made it harder to govern and democracy more prone to the flattery of snake oil salesmen like Nigel Farage and Trump.

Globalisation’s broken promise, the end of growth as a given, more complex social issues, wars and geopolitical instability means governments have less money, less time and, crucially, less of a shared reality with their citizens to manage events.

One of the interesting aspects of voter disillusionment is that it has become more tribal.

Driven by the world of algorithms ( thank you Elon Musk) we’ve shifted from trusting institutions to only trusting them when our side runs them. That’s a slow death for democracy.

Cynics argue that democracy's value doesn't rest on politicians being trustworthy. It rests on the ability to remove them. The argument Winston Churchill was gesturing at ("democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others") is really about this.

That democracy is essentially a corruption management system, not a system for producing virtuous leaders.

The point isn't that elected officials are trustworthy — it's that they're replaceable without violence, and that the threat of removal creates at least some pressure toward accountability.

This is a depressing argument. It’s like saying that the only good thing about life is being able to stop bad things happening.

The alternative is more democracy not less. People are more likely to trust decisions - and help them succeed - when they feel they had a genuine hand in making them.

Go for radical transparency — open lobbying registers, published ministerial diaries, real-time spending data.

Reduce the wriggle room and the gap between what politicians say and what they do.

Break the hold of the centre. Set up citizens’ assemblies. Give citizens at a local level more control of spending. Try proportional representation.

Get involved. Or at the very least get interested. We’re assailed by fake news and AI. Find out for yourself.

There's something meaningful even moving about the principle that political authority derives from the consent of the governed — that citizens aren't just subjects. That's not cynical plumbing, it's a moral claim about human dignity that most of us actually believe in.

Teach democracy in schools.

Finally I’d make voting compulsory. It’s been so in Australia since 1924 and produces turnouts of over 90%.

We are not, as voters, passive recipients in the democracy game. If we are content to be spoon fed then we’ll get the governments we deserve.

Own it. And use it or lose it.

Harry Kane’s thundering second goal against the Democratic Republic of the Congo got me thinking about Englishness and the English hero.

The England captain took the game by the scruff of the neck as it headed, with grim inevitability, to defeat and an ignominious exit from the World Cup.

This was the quintessential English hero staring defeat in the face. With one, supreme, kryptonite-defying effort saying “ Not on my watch mate”.

It was a personal triumph for this quiet, grounded, family man and a joyful reprieve for the team, the manager and the country.

Kane’s goals will be written in football’s Hall of Fame along with David Beckham’s bendy free kick against Greece in 2001. But, here’s the thing: they would have done, I suspect, whether England had won or lost.

One of the endearing things about England ( my adoptive country) is its fondness for acts of personal heroism whether in victory or defeat. They lift - or console - us in moments of national endeavour. But sedately. Less Bruce Willis more George Smiley.

England is a supremely individual country, full of deeply conventional folk who can also, when required, be fully paid-up members of the awkward squad. Beware the quiet Englishman (or woman) aroused to fury out of his or her slumber.

The spirit of heroic failure, perhaps uniquely, runs through English culture and history from the charge of the Light Brigade to the failed explorations of Captain Scott and David Livingstone.

In the heyday of the British empire a heroic victory was not worth half as much as struggling bravely against impossible odds and going down in glorious defeat. Bravery in victory was one thing; in a lost cause, however, it took on some of the qualities of martyrdom.

England’s struggle to recapture the glory days of its 1966 World Cup win has been, like the loss of empire, an inter-generational coming to terms with its diminished place in a much more competitive world. We won’t always win. Who does?

The American idea that “ everyone’s a winner”, or becoming a nation of winners, is a fairly recent evolution in the English personality. Losing honourably has guided the English sense of sportsmanship for centuries.

Thankfully that kind of pointless heroism, much loved by the gifted amateurs, toffs and Field Marshalls of WWI who squandered lives like confetti precisely because they were amateurs, has been superseded by competency and common sense. Football was once a game only for amateurs and gentlemen.

Kane has not, in the past, come over as a footballing genius. He was not, in his early days, an obvious star snapped up by scouts unlike Lionel Messi, or George Best or the French wizard Kylian Mbappé.

He was a classic late developer. He struggled with building strength. The gangly youth was in Arsenal’s Academy as a youngster but was considered too small for the big game. And then, as he matured, moved around and moved abroad to Bayern Munich, he achieved his potential.

He very much resembles another Englishman I much admire the late artist David Hockney, also a late starter, also a quiet, thoughtful and supremely skillful exponent of his art.

Both men are from working-class English stock. Both left England to do their best work - Hockney to California, Kane to Germany. Both technically superb. Both emotionally subdued. Both unfashionably English in their sensibilities.

Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937, the fourth of five children in what he described as a "radical working-class family." Kane was born at Whipps Cross University Hospital in Leytonstone, London, and grew up in Walthamstow before the family moved to Chingford in Essex— solidly ordinary east London.

Neither origin story suggested destiny. But both men reached the top by meticulous, methodical almost obsessional about their craft. Both, at root, technicians of genius rather than romantic showmen.

Both men spent their early careers being under appreciated. Hockney dismissed as decorative. Kane in his early years underrated as a journeyman.

England is many things. In one sense, despite its rich cultural heritage, it’s a country that has never quite settled what it is unlike the Celtic nations. England as an idea is deeply felt by many but rarely properly articulated.

People feel intensely English — at a football match, at a village fête, reading Phillip Larkin — but struggle to say what that feeling refers to. Englishness arrives as mood rather than argument. Which is why it can also be toxic.

Football - and I suggest art - are one of the few things that brings the English together whatever their differences.

Hockney's England is radically personal and plural. He depicted gay intimacy before it was legal, at a time when England criminalised the life he was living.

And yet his most explicitly English work — the Yorkshire landscapes, the Woldgate paintings, the iPad drawings of the East Riding - is as emotionally explicit as any work by an English artist about this country.

If there is such a thing as the English genius it comes often from those who have stood slightly aside or apart from the mainstream: Alan Turing, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austin.

England is also, sadly, the idea in Tommy Robinson’s head: brutally nationalist, racist, without empathy. He is not alone but, I think, not of the majority.

Kane has been a consistent proponent of “ taking the knee”. He has repeatedly said he would lead the England team off the pitch if players are racially abused. As a diehard supporter of Englishness How does Robinson reconcile the two?

The England of Kane, Rashford, Saka and Bellingham is one defined by values rather than blood and soil. So is Hockney’s. One man weaponises his idea of England. The others choose to embrace it or its gentler values as a path to success.

Hockney, gay, quiet, radical, conservative with a small ‘c’, with a touch of anarchism fits the mould. His work, like Kane’s, is full of enthusiasm and joie de vivre.

Paul Kingsworth in his powerful, if gloomy, work Real England says: “ “We need, perhaps, a new type of patriotism, benign and positive, based on place not race, geography not biology. One which seeks to make the best of what we are and what we have.”

Amen to that.

Does our democracy work? And who does it serve? Does it deliver what it says on the tin? Or is it a false prospectus that favours oligarchs and fanatics backed by shady money and rigged algorithms?

It’s a good week to pose the question. The Makerfield by-election coming up is an epic event. Fewer than 40,000 mostly working-class voters in this Greater Manchester constituency will decide the future of Britain for the next few years.

If Labour’s Andy Burnham wins, odds are that he will evict Keir Starmer from Downing Street perhaps as soon as September and become Prime Minister. If he loses, civil war will break out in the Labour party.

It will then limp on to defeat at the next election. Like the Tories, it will become a shadow of its former self. And that, as they say, will be that for our two-party system which has delivered nothing but instability, ineptitude and extremism since 2010.

What’s interesting about this political cameo is that combines so much of what is wrong about British politics and why people are genuinely losing hope that democracy works for them.

Makerfield could be the spark that blows up our politics. It could be the moment the comfortable two-party arithmetic finally stops adding up. And it has all the ingredients of a murky thriller which could run and run.

It has added edge because it fields two parties bankrolled or loudly supported by very, very rich people most of whom are either not British or do not live in the UK.

The first is Reform UK. Its chief benefactor is British/Thai crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne who made political history when he recently handed Reform £9 million and, separately an undeclared £5m personally to Farage.

The second is Restore, Elon Musk’s top pick to save Britain from going up in flames. Restore, barely a year-old, is the new kid on the block for people who think Reform is too wet.

It’s led by Rupert Lowe, a patrician 60-year-old farmer with an affable smirk and a poisoned pen. It advocates “total remigration”. Taken literally that’s not far short of 10m people.

It’s wacko. But it is polling at seven per cent and could hand Burnham victory by splitting the Far-Right.

Makerfield has become the epicenter of a massive national media and social media campaign.

And Musk, who is now not only the world’s richest man but also by far the world’s biggest and most influential publisher as the owner of X, has his finger stuck firmly into this particular north of England pie.

The trillionaire has 240 million followers of which around 17 million are thought to be in the UK. He has unrivalled power to shape what people think and how they behave.

The algorithm that steers X is now indisputably right wing. All guardrails have been dismantled.

When Musk amplifies anti-immigrant calls from white supremacist Tommy Robinson mobs in hoodies take to the streets of Belfast, and Southhampton.

Political leaders are, as they have always been, captive to the very rich. This is not new. Right back to ancient Rome, money and power have been drawn to each other like gold filings to a magnate.

The rich have always had a louder voice. Men like Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere (Daily Express and Daily Mail), William Randolph Hearst, American mass media owner who admired Hitler and, of course, Rupert Murdoch ( Fox News, Wall Street Journal and The Times among others) have sought to bend events to their will.

But they have conformed by and large to the classical model of the oligarch. The classic plutocrat was a conservative of property: he wanted order, because stability was good for business, so he worked to protect the existing system from what was regarded as public fickleness.

The striking thing about figures like Musk is that they court disorder — aligning with anti-establishment, disruptive, populist forces that destabilise the very institutions old money sought to keep calm.

Musk has gone from mere millionaire to trillionaire in just 27 years.

He is not the only fabulously rich tech bro to own mass media outlets: Larry and David Ellison now own CBS News and CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post which he has gutted in the service of Donald Trump.

These men, who swear by the free market for all things and at any cost, have a growing hold over the media and therefore over the public realm and the decisions our leaders make. They don’t just influence policy. They make it.

In my last piece – We’ve forgotten what Winning looks like – I laid out just how stuck Britain is economically by looking at the yawning gap in life chances between the comfortable middle classes and those in the bottom 20%.

Incurable free marketeers at one end of the spectrum and state control freaks at the other find it hard to grasp this simple principle: humanity does things better when it works together.

An individual genius may light the spark. But it’s the team that carries the flame.

Agriculture as a bedrock of progress was not the work of a single genius but of communities experimenting over generations.

So was the defeat of Fascism. The development of Covid 19 vaccines was the result of scientists around the world sharing genetic data, research findings and clinical results at unprecedented speed.

Modern economic systems, as economist Mariana Mazzucato argues, are more than just a balancing act between left and right. It’s not a halfway point between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. It’s a collaboration between the community, the state and the market where and when it’s best.

Success through such coalitions between the individual and the community is built on millennia of human experience.

Survival in early human existence, depended on cooperation. Hunting large animals, sharing food, caring for children, and defending settlements.

Economies are in part social relationships says Mazzucato, author of the Big Con and The Common Good Economy.. Capitalism cannot exist without an active state. The public realm cannot thrive without capitalism.

Societies that can agree on shared objectives supported by a state that encourages growth and supports businesses to grow will thrive. The best examples are the Nordic states.

Countries that are riven by division stoked by malign outside forces who wish us to fail ( Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk), special interests and a market without a moral backbone are doomed to fail.

This is where Britain finds itself. Trust in the system is ebbing away. People flock to the extremes (left and right) because they feel let down, they feel they have no agency.

We are a country hollowed out by the excesses of privatisation. Our public sector has been handed over to outsourcing giants with no sense of social purpose.

There is a way out but it needs strength, courage and, most of all, imagination to head there. Devolve power because the more power is centralised the easier it is for money to capture it.

Involve citizens in the business of local governance (citizens’ assemblies).

Create structures that allow the state and the private sector to work towards agreed objectives.

This isn’t about the state subsidising the private sector or ‘picking winners”. It’s about acknowledging that one cannot exist let alone thrive without the other.

Makerfield and its outcome are consequential. But it’s not a serious attempt to fix things.

A stitch-up by the Labour party machine; a mayor abandoning his city to chase the crown; a split on the right between two parties spewing bile; an outcome we can’t foresee and which may not make a blind bit of difference to the issues that matter.

Where are the statesmen? Where are the serious people? Where’s the plan?

What ails Britain and why can’t we fix it? To state the bleeding obvious, without answering the first question we can’t answer the second.

This absence of hard, critical thinking matters. The political landscape is beset by earthquakes. The Tory party has imploded. Labour could go the same way yielding ground to the extremes on the Left and the Right.

Ideology or prejudice ( not quite the same thing but close) has become a hindrance to progress. For the avoidance of doubt being pro-business and looking after the vulnerable are not ideological alternatives. They’re both a necessity. The centre will not hold without rational thought.

To restate the obvious: we need a government that knows what it’s doing and one that isn’t bogged down by the staggering rigidity that seems to afflict institutional Britain.

Does Keir Starmer have a picture in his head of what is holding Britain back, an analysis? Do Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham, who seems a hop, skip and a jump from No 10 Downing Street? It’s not obvious.

We all know things are not right in 2026 Britain. We’re still a wealthy nation with (some) clout but not necessarily a happy one. Health standards are falling and so is life expectancy ( yes really). Regional inequalities are deepening. Disparities in income and especially hereditary wealth are stark.

A chasm has opened up between the 20% who hold 63% of Britain’s wealth and the bottom 20% who hold just 0.5%. If Britain's wealth were a single £100 note, the top fifth would own £63 and the bottom fifth about 50 pence.

Billionaires make the headlines. But the far bigger divide is between the asset-owning professional classes - people with paid-off houses, a decent pension and a share portfolio - and, say, a warehouse worker at Amazon.

The former can pass down wealth, which has been quietly compounding over a lifetime, through the Bank of Mum and Dad. The latter is stuck on a treadmill. They pass down the noble tradition of hard graft to make ends meet.

Before the 2008 collapse a 30 year-old from a working class background stood a better-than-evens chance of out-earning his dad (or his mum) at the same age allowing for inflation. Since 2008 this has collapsed.

Education, who your parents are and where you live matters. A working class barrister is not only rarer but likely to be paid less than a barrister from a privileged background.

Former industrial and mining areas across the North East, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland that carry the effects of half a century of decline, still do worse that London and the Home Counties.

Bear with me because it’s this stuff - not Ukraine, Gaza, Trump or Iran - that matters. Economic progress would cut immigration and dog whistle politicians down to size.

Here’s another eye-opener. Over the 15 years from 2008 to 2023, most people’s real disposable income rose only about 6%, against a 25% rise over the preceding 15 years.

Someone on the median income of £37,000 a year would have experienced (over a decade and a half ) a gain of less than £12 a month, £3 a week or a weekly medium Starbucks coffee.

This collapse in growth has been the lived-experience for most people at a time when the war in Ukraine and the Straits of Hormuz fiasco have supercharged inflation which peaked at 11% in 2022, fell and is now ticking up thanks to the Trump dividend.

These are not just the growing pains of a country living beyond its means. It’s the story of a nation no longer comfortable in its skin. We’re in a real bind and we don’t seem to know how to get out of it.

The looming presence of AI, a force whose potential few of us understand because it’s in its infancy, thrills and terrifies at the same time. Will it make life easier? Will it make inequality worse? Will it quell the storm or whip up a hurricane?

Group think leads us to make daft decisions and when they are shown to be daft we still double down. It’s costing us (that’s you and me) £100 billion to run a single train line 118 miles from London to Birmingham. This is roughly the 10-year cost of maintaining our nuclear force or building 300,000 new homes. This is insanity.

We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, a millstone round the neck of small and medium-sized business, the engines of growth.

The explosion of shopping malls and seductive social media substitutes for community merely paper over widening cracks. A symptom of this discomfort is rising inter-racial animus.

We are, in the words of the Rogers and Hart song “ bewitched, bothered and bewildered”.

But do we know why? And are we even interested in finding out?

Brits love to moan. Which is not, crucially, the same as complaining. Moaning bonds us. It’s a form of conversation. Complaining on the other hand- demanding that something gets fixed - is making a fuss, disrupting the social order.

We have developed a deep-seated capacity to put up with things that would provoke street protests elsewhere. Pot holes, failing public services, dysfunctional housing markets, poverty.

All these generate oceans of discussion, brilliant satire and synchronised griping, but rarely organised pressure for reform.

Problems become normalised. We are remarkably, mystifyingly, tolerant of underperformance. Governments are spared the effort of urgently confronting problems because the public response is often muted.

The default answer to a big problem is to set up an inquiry or a Royal Commission. The long grass is littered with the detritus of good intentions. So long as that pothole gets fixed before the winter we’re not that bothered.

Until, that is, frustration reaches boiling point. Then one of two things happen or both: people take to the streets or snake-oil salesmen, Left and Right, set up their stalls and woo voters with easy answers.

But by then the issues have become too complex or too expensive to fix so governments fall back on managing the 24-hour news cycle.

Election results may produce dramatic swings, like the landslide Labour victory in 2024. But it takes exceptional focus and persistence to make big change happen without a crisis as a catalyst. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, for good or ill, were exceptions.

Every government since 2010 has tinkered. Announce, react, rebrand, survive. Repeat. George Osborne’s austerity was a quick fix disguised as a strategy, painful and ultimately self-harming. Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss governed by headline management.

Rishi Sunak’s “ five pledges” - halve inflation, grow the economy, cut debt, cut NHS waiting lists, stop the boats - were all tactical, short-term fixes aimed at feeding the daily beast: a crackdown for the tabloids, a reset for the Six O’clock News a plan for the weeklies.

I found Blair’s tirade against Starmer’s government turgid, cliched and self-serving. But one bit resonates. Britain has become frighteningly insular: wary of America because of Trump; out of Europe because it’s inconsistent with national sovereignty; sees China as an ‘enemy state’; nervous allies of the Gulf States because they’re not democracies.

Starmer was handed a thumping majority chiefly because he wasn’t a Tory. The idea that the 2024 landslide was a ringing endorsement of Labour policies is, as as Rafael Behr says in the Guardian, a momentary illusion.

He’s squandered it. Which is why we find ourselves with a fractured system that has left Britain’s political economy holed below the waterline and drifting. It’s been a long time coming to be fair.

Immigration has become the lightning rod that has energised Reform UK. Grievance the organising principle for the resurgent Greens.

History teaches us that change rarely comes from the top. Pressure that leads to real change, therapeutic change, comes from organised resistance and careful thought.

The Reform Act campaign of 1832, the Suffragist movements of the early 20th century, Scottish and Welsh devolution and, of course, Brexit which, love it or loathe it, was a genuinely mass constitutional movement that changed the course of history.

We’ve been rummaging around for victories amid a landscape littered with defeat for so long that we’ve forgotten what winning looks like.

The somewhat clunky TV adaptation of Dear England, James Graham’s play about Gareth Southgate’s eight-year tenure as England football manager offers a glimpse of what you need to do before you can stop a losing streak.

Southgate was appointed after England were booted out of the Euros in 2016. Coincidentally the year Britain ( actually mostly England) took leave of its senses and voted to leave the European Union.

Country and team were beset by poor self-esteem matched with a misplaced sense of entitlement. England expects.

As the National Theatre blurb said, the country that gave the world football couldn’t win at its own game. For which read the nation that once ruled the world had to bend the knee to faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

In his now famous Dear England letter to fans Southgate said this: “I understand that on this island, we have a desire to protect our values and traditions — as we should — but that shouldn’t come at the expense of introspection and progress.”

Southgate’s approach worked. Up to a point. His England team found a purpose beyond money and fame. They became highly competitive. They also became a team. They stood up to widespread racism. They learnt to cope under the enormous pressures of national expectations.

He didn’t win but he made winning possible again. England reached two European Championship finals (including the first major tournament final abroad by an England men’s team), and a World Cup semi-final. Only Alf Ramsay did better.

A football team isn’t a country - four actually. But Southgate’s quiet and intense introspection masked a calculating and thoughtful ruthlessness we can learn from.

Will AI liberate or shackle humanity? Will it lead to massive unemployment, soaring inequality and social strife, perhaps civil war? Or could it usher in an age of superabundance for all?

I don’t know. You don’t know. Right now, nobody knows. But a handful of people – fewer than you can count on two hands – believe they do and, cocooned in a world of virtually limitless wealth and power, are working to bend the future in their image.

The hope that this technology, with seemingly limitless potential for good or evil, would come under the watchful eye of some supranational body like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is dead as the dodo.

Not that the IAEA has stopped nuclear proliferation. Since it was founded in 1957 four countries have become nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Regulation, as we’ve seen in America under Donald Trump, is dispensable.

When a technology emerges that can literally change, or destroy, the world, competition is inevitable. There is no consensus about nuclear non-proliferation ( I give you Iran) and there will be no consensus about how AI will develop. Xi Jinping isn’t going share.

The future of AI is therefore intimately, inevitably, tied to the ambitions, wealth and, crucially, moral compass of a few men ( and they are all men).

I speak, of course, of the Tech Bros: Elon Musk ( Space X) Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Larry Page (Google), Sam Altman( Open AI), Dario Amodi (Anthropic) Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Peter Thiel (Palantir). And those like them who are still in short trousers.

Their combined wealth – give or take a few billion depending on how the markets are feeling on any given day – is roughly $1.7 trillion. That’s the equivalent to the GDP of Australia or Spain or about 28 million people on an average OECD annual income of $55,000.

Like the great industrial titans of 20th century who, in inflation adjusted terms, were just as wealthy (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie) - these are men whose success has allowed them to slip the leash of gravity that keeps the rest of us grounded.

They can afford anything, risk anything, do anything. They have, in the words of an essay in The Atlantic, left the world of consequences behind. Their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

Donald Trump was recently asked if there were any limits, any checks, to his power. “ Yeah “ he replied” there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” That’s it in a nutshell.

How rich they are and how much cash their businesses generate is relevant. The path to a super intelligence is not cheap. Data centres, the beating heart of AI, require colossal amounts of land, power and water.

Multi-billionaires who are pally with heads of state can by-pass regulation and swerve around checks and balances. Acquiring land the size of Manhattan in a rural backwater is no problem whatever the locals say. Their wealth buys them immunity and a free pass.

But that’s not where the real danger lies. By the time it’s got to the planning stage of building this stuff the horse has bolted.

The peril of a super intelligence lies in the realm of ideas. How deeply these are rooted in the values that distinguish a human being from a machine. And whether the men and the companies at the forefront of this absurdly young industry that will change everything, really care.

Any technology begins with an idea. At birth technology is morally and politically neutral. It’s a response to a problem, a desire to make money, to make life better, to make us healthier or to acquire power.

But as it develops it acquires attributes which were not necessarily foreseen at its inception: oil led to progress but also to global warming; the discovery of the atom in the 1870s to nuclear war; the internet to surveillance, fake news, political manipulation and cyber warfare.

Whether AI leads to liberation or shackles ( or both) will depend on who controls the technology and, in so far as they are meaningful, under what rules.

There are historical precedents for optimism. Both the agricultural and industrial revolutions laid waste to entire ways of life. But they ultimately led to rising living standards albeit after generations of pain for millions.

The big difference with these two previous revolutions however is speed. Previous transitions unfolded over generations. AI has gone from a party trick to a civilisational force in just a few years.

In 2000 Intel’s flagship Pentium 4 chip contained 42 million transistors. The Apple M4 chip released in 2024 holds 28 billion transistors. In 2019 state-of-the-art AI could barely string a sentence together. By 2025 AI systems are writing, testing and deploying code to solve previously insoluble problems.

Chances are that you use Open AI’s Chat GPT or its more measured rival Claude, to fix a leaky radiator or tweak your share portfolio or find out why your child’s face has come up in blotches. Some people are having a relationship with AI. Some are marrying their bots.

And then there’s the dark side. AI is taking over warfare. It chooses who to kill. Israel’s deployment in Gaza relies heavily on AI-assisted targeting. The recent attack on a girl’s school in Tehran was almost certainly AI- assisted. It’s not infallible.

Armies are moving emphatically toward systems that can select and kill targets with minimal, or no human, in the loop. Killer robots have moved from science fiction to reality and urgent arms control negotiation.

AI surveillance from Xinjiang to London is used routinely not only by police forces but also by commercial data brokers who then sell extraordinarily detailed behaviour patterns ( yours and mine) to insurers, employers and governments.

But there’s good news too. Google DeepMind's AlphaFold effectively solved the protein folding problem in 2020. It looked at patterns across millions of protein structures. It was able to predict the 3D structure of proteins, crucial to developing new drugs, a problem that had defeated biology for 50 years.

The importance of ideas and morality in the race to create a machine that can out-think any human is starkly illustrated in Sebastian Mallaby’s fascinating biography of Demis Hassabis The Infinity Machine.

Born to working class, immigrant parents in North London, a chess prodigy by five, Hassabis is. a pivotal figure in the debate about how to develop AI, what for and how to make it safe.

Long before the current obsession with AI, he founded the path-breaking company DeepMind, now owned by Google. His goal: to develop an artificial super intelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe.

This isn’t make-believe. This is how Hassabis and his Tech Bro mates think. These are men who are driven to the point of narcissism. Hassabis tells Mallaby that the true reason for building artificial intelligence is “ to draw closer to God”. In other words to the intelligence that designed everything around us.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, is said to believe that machines are better than humans. “If we could just get rid of human obstructions and let machines do stuff, we could unlock all kinds of progress” he says.

Musk has mused that uploading a human brain to a computer or a robot could be the path to immortality. He believes the greatest danger to humanity is falling birth rates. He believes AI can influence the human limbic system to make people have more babies.

When Musk took a chainsaw to the American government and ended the USAID overseas programme almost certainly condemning entire communities to starvation, he was, by his own admission, having fun.

When Peter Thiel says he believes that democracy and freedom are no longer compatible, we need to take him seriously. He means it and he has the money to make it happen.

These are men who will never, ever be poor again because they’re just too rich. They exist in a world that never pushes back. And if it does they don’t care because they don’t have to.

Governments need to wake up while they still can. We don’t matter to these guys. We don’t really exist because they don’t see us. ( Bill Gates is the honourable exception). Poverty doesn’t exist. All that matters is the idea and their all-consuming ambition.

The dream for AI fundies is developing a system that can learn all by itself. One AI produces the next, better, faster, bigger than itself and so on.

Beyond that is the goal of AGI ( artificial general intelligence). A machine that can reason. And beyond is the jackpot ( or the nemesis): a machine that has its own stream of experience perhaps even consciousness: autonomous AI. Like driver-less cars. Why not?

David Silver, the world-renowned AI professor at University College London calls this “ crossing the Rubicon”. He has a vision of all AI across the globe working together to look after humans on the planet.

That sends a chill down my spine.

Truth is the first casualty of war. There’s a good reason for that. What happens in war is often hidden from public view. It’s only later when bodies are uncovered or witnesses come forward that the facts can be established.

Even then, the facts can be embellished or played down. Context matters. Was the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968 by the US army part of a systematic campaign? Was the torture and summary execution of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha by Russian soldiers in 2022 an isolated atrocity or routine behaviour?

Armies are capable of anything in war. The enemy is dehumanised. It has to be. How else do you look a man in the eye and shoot him at point blank range? The boundaries of what it means to be human shift. Man can become beast.

The ancient blood feud between Israel and the Palestinians, perhaps more than any other conflict, epitomises this tension between atrocity and denial.

The 289-page report titled Silenced No More by the independent Israeli Civil Commission on the events of October 7 is an articulate, carefully researched work that has taken two years to compile.

It makes for harrowing reading. Ten thousand images, eighteen hundred hours of video footage, four hundred and thirty testimonies have been drawn together to arrive at a single conclusion: that the sexual violence of October 7 was organised, widespread and systematic.

It states that civilians -women, men, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities - were “ hunted, executed, tortured”, burned alive, mutilated, sexually violated, and taken hostage in acts of extreme brutality.

The founder and chair of the Commission Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy states in his introduction: “The perpetrators did not conceal these acts - they glorified them. They filmed and broadcast them in real time, transforming their violence into spectacle and human suffering into an instrument of terror.

“During the prolonged captivity that followed, the families of the hostages and an entire nation, endured months of anguish through images and videos of their suffering. These were intended to imprint themselves on the public consciousness.

Visibility itself became a weapon, and the audience was, painfully, part of the plan.”

The report has received very little publicity. Some of it, like Camilla Long’s rather shallow piece in The Times takes every word at face value thus, in a sense, trivialising it.

Others attack it for being false or try, in an attempt at impartiality, to counter with stories about sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by the Israeli army. A few have ignored it completely.

Which is a shame. Whatever its shortcomings the Civil Commission report on October 7 is an important document.

It deserves to be read and understood not as a piece of propaganda ( by either side) but as historical document of significance.

The events it describes led to a war which has reshaped the region, reverberated around the world and led the Palestinians to a place from which they may never recover.

Elkayam-Levy says in his introduction that there are “moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves.” October 7 was such a moment not least because it unleashed a brutal reprisal attack on Gaza by Israel in which perhaps 60,000 people died maybe more.

The report has a floor and it has a ceiling. Based on the public evidence and footage which remains off-limits to the public, it lays out a strong case for sexual violence visited by Hamas on October 7.

What it does less convincingly is nail the claim that the dreadful acts committed by the men who breached Israel’s defences that day were acting in accordance to a detailed plan. It could well have been. But the evidence is thin.

Amit Soussana, a 40-year-old Israeli lawyer, was taken by Hamas from her home at Kfar Aza. She came home 55 days later. She gave a statement to a doctor at Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine where she was examined.

She later told the United Nations Security Council that her captor held a gun on her, groped her and forced her into a sexual act in Gaza.

That is on the record. Her name is on it. Her doctor’s name is on it. That is the floor.

Pramila Patten, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, reviewed five thousand photographs, fifty hours of video and thirty-four interviews.

She concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe that rape, gang rape and sexualised torture happened.

These acts occurred at the Nova festival, on Road 232 and at Kibbutz Re’im. Patten also found “clear and convincing information” of sexual violence against hostages held in Gaza.

The floor is also the autopsies. Women found naked. Women found bound. Women found shot in the pelvis. The pattern recurs across sites. Forensic investigators do not need a video to recognise a pattern.

There is little doubt that sexual terror happened and that it happened in a number of places. What is missing - which is not in itself unusual or definitive - is video or photographic evidence of rape.

The Patten team states that there "no tangible indications of rape" in the medicolegal assessment of available photographs and footage. The Israeli police say much the same about their own evidence haul.

The body-cams, the dashcams, the phones taken off dead attackers, the Telegram dumps. None contain footage of the act itself.

But neither was there such evidence in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur or Ukraine. But survivor testimony, forensic patterns and witness accounts suggest solid evidence of sexual terror.

Rape as warfare is not new as documented in Christina Lamb’s book Our Bodies Their Battlefield.

The middle ground is small, draughty and badly lit. It is also where the evidence lives.

The conclusion that the sexual violence of October 7 was organised and directed by the Hamas leadership is on less firm ground. No videos have emerged of the act of rape. No Hamas orders were recovered, no intercepted command directives. The Commission infers strategy from pattern.

Does this matter? Well yes it does. If this report is to lead to prosecutions for war crimes of top Hamas leaders then a higher threshold of proof has to be met.

A reason to be meticulous is that some of the early claims by Israel’s leadership proved to be wrong or inflated. The pregnant woman with her womb cut open. The baby in the oven.

The problem for those seeking the truth is that, in the wrong hands, the claim that the “story is fake” quickly morphs into “the entire body of evidence is Israeli propaganda” which is plainly not true. Facts no longer matter.

That judicial standard says survivor testimony is evidence. Forensic patterns are evidence. Convergent witness accounts are evidence. Hostage testimony from women who came back, is evidence.

The absence of a film of the act is not exculpatory. It is the rule, not the exception, in conflict-related sexual violence.

Both camps want a clean answer. Total atrocity. Total fabrication. There isn’t one - like the conflict itself. The evidence sits between the two — messier than the right wants and stronger than the left admits.

This is a story that punishes nuance. Say one thing and you are a Zionist apologist. Say the other and you are complicit in genocide.

The middle ground is small, draughty and badly lit. It also happens to be where the evidence lives.

The women raped on October 7 deserve better than to be conscripted into a propaganda war on one side, or denied on the other because their suffering is politically inconvenient.

They deserve to be believed where the evidence supports belief, heard on their own terms, and investigated to the standard the world has applied to mass rape in every other recent war.

There’s something sad about Keir Starmer’s final, desperate attempts to hold on to power. He seems to not understand why he has failed and at loss to know how to recover from what now seems inevitable.

His response to last week’s thundering defeat around the country was, frankly, bizarre. First he brings in Gordon Brown, the old war horse who has never won an election, as a special envoy on global finance as if that’s what disillusioned voters struggling to cope want.

Brown, like Starmer, ended his brief period as Prime Minister having forced thrice-winning Tony Blair out of office, beleaguered, unpopular and devoid of ideas.

Like Starmer he was awkward and buttoned-up. Like Starmer he spoke in stilted, formulaic sentences. He was a big brain, tough and resilient. But, as one critic said unkindly, Brown has the “social skills of a whelk”.

Starmer’s umpteenth ‘reset’ speech on Monday was, to put it mildly, lame. “ I feel it…I get it..” is an expression of remorse. It’s not a policy.

The stand-out change he proposed was to nationalise British Steel. Not Thames Water mind you, the private monopoly hated by every one of its 16 million customers.

There are arguments for nationalising British Steel: protection of critical infrastructure, supply chain resilience, economic stability. But a political hot potato it is not.

And this moment is, above all else, an intensely political moment. And it is now abundantly clear that Starmer doesn’t do politics.

His speech on Monday consisted of reheated ideas wrapped up in a skein of self-justification. Watching the Prime Minister feeling sorry for himself was not an edifying sight.

Labour had just lost 1,496 council seats in England, was wiped out in Wales and beaten back in Scotland. The ghost of Nye Bevan, son of a Welsh coal miner, a coal miner himself and one of the founding fathers of the Labour idea, is howling over the hills of Wales.

There are risks to ousting Starmer of course. The UK is developing a reputation for instability. Four Tory Prime Ministers followed David Cameron from 2016.

Including Starmer that makes five Prime Ministers in ten years, which averages out at two years per PM. The average time a national leader spends in power in the EU is 4.4 years, some much longer.

Britain’s shells out £110 billion pounds a year to service it’s £2.9 trillion debt. Bond markets don’t like instability. They jack up yields ( interest rates) on sovereign debt to cover perceived risk.

That translates to higher borrowing costs for companies and higher mortgage rates for homeowners. Kicking Starmer out of Downing Street could backfire.

The markets are dumping UK gilts. The UK’s long-term borrowing costs are now at their highest level since 1998. The pound is down.

Couple this with the instability spreading from the Gulf where the Iran war see-saws almost daily between hope and despair driving oil prices to over $100 a barrel and what you have is the makings of a recession.

So where does that leave us?

Voters need hope. So do Labour MPs. Nothing Starmer has said or done in the past few weeks gives them reason to hope. Their loyalty is being tested to destruction. “ Trust me” doesn’t cut it anymore.

Starmer’s erstwhile supporters are queuing to withdraw their savings from the Bank of Empty Promises. This may feel like panic to those who live by holding their nerve. But it’s not an irrational reaction to the gathering storm.

If the local election results were repeated at the general election ( unlikely but not impossible) roughly 300 Labour MPs would lose their seats. Labour would have 110 seats, the Tories 96, Reform UK 284 , the Lib Dems 80, the SNP 36, Plaid 13 and the Greens 13.

That’s a revolution. And it’s terminal for both Labour and the Tories.

So the question is whether a change of leader by Labour now or in September would make any difference to that dismal scorecard? Would West Streeting, Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner turn the ship around? Or Shabanha Mahmood, the Home Secretary, who ( oddly) doesn’t figure in the runners and riders?

And what would any of the above have to do to make a difference?

Change ( for the better) is rarely quick. Britain is treading water ( at best) due a combination of factors: stagnant productivity, Brexit, higher energy prices, an enormous debt burden and chronic underinvestment.

The welfare bill is heading towards a staggering £400 billion or over 10% of GDP. We don’t really make much anymore. Inequality is growing. A typical household in Britain is 10 percent poorer than its counterpart in France. Regional inequalities remain stark. Brexit has lopped between 6%-8% of the country’s earning power.

Low growth and high inequality are a toxic mix for which there is no quick fix. This leads to the inevitable and obvious conclusion that fixing Britain is a marathon not a sprint.

Populism is certainly not the answer. Pie-in-the-sky policies such as booting out immigrants implode on contact with reality.

Starmer is a political failure. He says that stopping Reform is the reason he gets out of bed in the morning. That’s a second order question. It’s a defensive and therefore a negative strategy by definition.

Starmer’s attempts to win over Britain’s socially conservative voters is, in any case, a waste of time because, in the long run, they don’t really want to vote Labour anyway. They vote Labour because the Tories have self-destructed and, under this leadership, they can justify voting for a Tory-lite version as a sensible, temporary compromise.

But the world has changed. The two-party party is over. The local elections showed us that we are in a wholly transformed political landscape.

It’s even possible, as Danny Finkelstein suggests in a sharp Times op ed, that Labour as we know it is over. That the working class/Left coalition which has carried it for decades has been splt asunder by Reform uK.

My guess is that Starmer is finished. Labour will elect a new leader - possibly a Burnham/Rayner ticket. That won’t make a big difference. We’re likely headed for a hung a parliament in 2029.

And that’s OK because proper change sometimes needs a catalyst to shake us out of our complacency.

There’s a vulgar saying which I am reminded of (please forgive me) which seems especially apt for this week’s Democratic Demolition Derby in England, Scotland and Wales.

It goes like this : “ If you don’t recognise reality when it’s staring you in the face then it’ll get shoved up your nose”.

I have been arguing ever since I received my free bus pass ( which is a while ago) that two party politics in Britain is way past its sell-by date. It’s inefficient, fundamentally undemocratic and deeply unrewarding - for voters not politicians for whom its a gravy train.

First-past-the-post (FPTP) has allowed the Tories and Labour (with the occasional walk-on part for the Liberals/Lib Dems) to play musical chairs every few years in their bid to run the country.

What these elections tell us ( and please no more cliches about mid-term wobbles) is that, like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, FPTP is dead. It’s not resting. It’s not stunned. It’s dead as a doornail. It’s an ex-parrot. It’s time to mourn it and lay it to rest.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, whether these results portend the end for Keir Starmer.

Let’s also set aside whether Reform’s spectacular success across the country (with the exception of London) is more than a protest vote or whether it’s a prelude to Nigel Farage’s triumphal entry into Number 10 Downing Street.

What do these results tell us and why?

The first thing it tell us is that legacy politicians have been behind the curve of popular opinion. Politics has been fragmenting for a while. It’s been heading towards something fairer like proportional representation.

To those of us who actually think that our solitary vote matters, that’s been as plain as the nose on your face.

Why should a Green voter in a safe Conservative seat, or a Conservative in an inner-city Labour stronghold, bother if their vote carries little practical weight? You faithfully buy your ticket every few years but you never win the lottery.

The simple fact is that the two-party system rests on an assumption which no longer holds: that two large parties can accommodate most public opinion.

I offer this imperfect analogy: when children grow up they leave home and make their own way in life, form their own views, make their own choices. They become independent of their parents.

As recently as the early 1990s, politics still reflected relatively stable class loyalties. In the 1992 general election, Labour won a large majority of working-class voters while the Conservatives dominated among middle-class homeowners.

In the 1960s and 70s, around 90% of voters consistently backed the same party from election to election.

But old loyalties – “ I’m Labour through and through and so was my dad”- have been strained to breaking point because the social, economic and cultural landscape, has changed beyond recognition.

Today millions switch parties regularly or identify with none at all. Labour and Tory party membership has collapsed while Reform UK and the Green Party have soared.

Age is now one of the strongest predictors of voting behaviour. In 2019, YouGov estimated Labour won around 56% of voters aged 18-24, while the Conservatives won roughly 67% of those over 70. Thirty years ago, age differences existed but were nowhere near as politically decisive.

Education has driven political change. In the early 1990s only around 20% of adults had a university degree. Today for Gen Z and Millennials the figure is above 40%. Graduates tend to lean strongly towards Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green parties.

Non-graduates are more likely to vote Conservative or Reform UK. That educational divide barely existed politically in the Thatcher era.

The UK is more complex, more diverse. People who might have felt safe as part of a Labour or Tory family want different things. Diversity has transformed politics. So have gender, climate change, wars like Gaza and Ukraine.

Politics has become less tribal while at the same time becoming more polarised. Millions feel economically insecure. The 2008 financial meltdown was a big factor in a rising hatred of elites. People feel left behind.

The fragmentation in politics mirrors the fracturing of society. Brexit tore a gaping hole in Britain’s body politic. Corruption in government, the irredeemable buffoonery of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, left us ( left me) asking ( a bit like watching Donald Trump) “ Is this really happening”?

Starmer has been a disappointing failure. He thought that all he had to do was move into Downing Street and the system would take care of the rest. He has proved unimaginative, feckless, indecisive and incompetent.

He was the two-party system’s last chance and he blew it. The Tories look irrelevant if not terminally ill.

Reform’s advance makes it harder for Starmer to be bold especially on Europe where it’s blindingly obvious we should be steering the ship. Trump in the White House, the resilience of the mullahs in Iran, an ageing and weakened Vladimir Putin all point to the need for decisive leadership with the EU.

It looks like three of the UK’s four nations ( Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) will be led by parties committed to the break up of the union.

Will Farage be Prime Minister after the next election? It’s possible. The numbers suggest not quite. I commend Peter Chappell’s racy novella “ What if Reform Wins?”. It’s a scary, skilfully put together scenario that is all too plausible.

FPTP, with its bias towards electing governments on the basis of sometimes less than 40% of the vote in elections with low turnouts, is a gift to extremism.

There is one way we can forestall the advance of snake-oil populism. It’s not to shut it out but bring it into the tent. Keeping populism out has failed here, in Europe and the US. This applies to the Green party which is really now a kind of Corbyn-lite roadshow of no fixed abode.

We are now in a five-party system. That’s obvious and there’s no going back. We have, to put it another way, proportional representation through the back door already. PR is not a panacea. It’s hard work. It can be slow and frustrating. But so is life.

These elections will force political parties up and down the country into coalitions. They will have to do deals. They will have to talk to each other. They will have to cooperate.

They will have to grow up. About time.

There is a heart-stopping moment at the very end of the docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab which leaves one speechless if not entirely surprised.

Hind was a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in 2024 by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza along with six family members, and two paramedics who tried to come to her rescue.

Unfolding over 24 hours the movie is set entirely in the control room of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in the West Bank. It’s the only one left in all the occupied territories. There are none in Gaza which has been pretty much razed to the ground.

The volunteers receive a panicked phone call from Hind’s 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamadeh. She is in great distress. There’s shooting in the background.

She tells them that they’re trapped in a car in a gun battle in Gaza. They are being fired on by an IDF tank. The exchange is garbled. After a few minutes the line goes dead.

When the Red Crescent team calls back the call is answered, not by Layan, but her five year-old cousin Hind.

She tells them everyone else in the car is now ‘sleeping’ including her cousin who, a few minutes earlier, had been on the phone. She is hiding among the bodies.

What gives this mesmerising film its raw power is that Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania splices real recordings of Hind’s voice begging for help with the team’s increasingly desperate (partly fictionalised) attempt to negotiate safe passage for the girl with the Israeli army.

Ben Hania has been accused of exploiting this little girl’s death. Perhaps. But how else, in a world flooded by made-up click-bait and AI-driven brainwashing, do we get at the truth?

Journalists and film makers must do what they can with what they’ve got.

Israel’s control of what is reported out of the territories it occupies is airtight - for a reason. It doesn’t want witnesses. This rare, searing glimpse lifts the veil.

Desperate hours are spent seeking the IDF’s permission to send an ambulance through the Red Cross and the Palestinian Health ministry. They, in turn, have to negotiate with the Israeli Defence Ministry which consults with commanders on the ground.

Messages are then relayed back through the same convoluted channels to an increasingly desperate Red Crescent team on the West Bank.

The nearest ambulance, which also happens to be the last surviving team of Palestinian first responders in Gaza, is just eight minutes away from the little girl who says she is covered in blood.

But experience has shown that setting out to rescue Hind without a “green light” on a precisely agreed route with the IDF, would be a death sentence for all involved. They must wait.

It’s a stark reminder that the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is governed by an iron discipline in which nothing moves without the IDF’s say-so.

There follows a half-hour of confusion, rage, helplessness and disbelief as they seek permission from the IDF to send a Red Crescent ambulance to rescue the child.

Hind’s voice, sometimes terrified, sometimes unbearably sad and at other times oddly subdued as if the fact that the grown-ups can’t work miracles dawns on her, cuts through the film like razor wire.

Eventually permission is granted. The ambulance sets off at walking pace through streets that no longer exist, razed to the ground by months of bombing.

Its progress is captured in moments of unbearable tension on the Red Crescent’s digital map.

The last audio recorded by the control room is of gunfire and one of the paramedic saying” oh..there it is.” Then silence. In the control room there is disbelief.

At the 2025 Venice Film Festival where the film won a 23-minute standing ovation, the audience was in bits.

Twelve days later, after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area, the ambulance was found, a pile of burnt out twisted metal. Investigations found it had been hit by a 120mm tank shell.

A few meters away was the black Kia car Hind and her family had been travelling in - its windscreen and dashboard smashed to pieces, bullet holes drilled into the side. Six bodies with gunfire and shell wounds were found.

After hours of toying with these innocent victims of the Gaza tragedy the IDF - or perhaps a rogue part of it we just don’t know- appears to have lured the Palestinian first responders into a trap. It then blew them to pieces. The IDF says it is still investigating.

The story of this five year-old child’s death and that of her would-be rescuers would be incomprehensible, almost inconceivable - a tasteless hoax - were it not for the fact that it is being repeated in Gaza, the West Bank and, now, Lebanon.

Last month in Lebanon two separate teams of paramedics on their way to help people injured in Israeli air strikes in the southern town of Mayfadoun were killed in what a BBC reporter on site described as “ triple tap” strike.

The first team sent in after an attack by the IDF is hit then the next when it comes to the rescue, a favoured tactic of the Provisional IRA and ISIS to kill as many people as possible in a terror attack. The cynicism is hard to swallow.

The World Health Organisation has reported a marked increase in attacks by the IDF on health centres in Lebanon since the start of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in March.

None of this is surprising. This is the logical outcome of a power that brooks no opposition and gives no quarter as it drives home the fact that it is the regional hegemon.

On the West Bank where attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian communities, homes, shops and schools are now commonplace, IDF soldiers are not infrequently filmed preventing Red Crescent medics reaching the injured.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights describes this as “state-backed terror” and part of a policy of ethnic cleansing and annexation. This not hyperbole.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security and a key member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, has stated it as government policy.

Is this really what the IDF has become?

Outnumbered and outgunned in the distant past the IDF garnered a reputation for being “the most moral army in the world.”

Men like Moshe Dayan, chief of staff in the 1956 Sinai war, with his black eye patch, became world celebrities. They were “dashing, daring, invincible warriors”.

Since the massacre by Hamas on October 7 Israel has been gripped by rage and fear and a desire to re-establish security at any cost. The solution for men like Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is simple: “The work must be completed. Total destruction”.

Families are killed in the endless search for terrorists. Palestinian shepherds are driven from their land. First responders are targeted. Villages (and their solar panels) in southern Lebanon are systematically bulldozed and blown up.

I witnessed this tactic in the town of Quneitra in 1974 after Israel withdrew from the Golan Heights.

Social media is full of footage depicting ugly scenes of bullying and intimidation by gangs of young Jewish settlers on the West Bank in their 20s as Palestinians harvest olives or tend their sheep.

This video on CNN shows settlers sabotaging crucial water pumping stations serving 100,000 Palestinian homes.

David Harel, President of Israel’s Academy of Sciences and Humanity and a professor at the world-renowned Weizmann Institute, speaks of “permanent and calculated displacement” enabled by the IDF.

Since 2020, Israeli courts have not handed down any jail sentences to Jewish settlers found responsible for the deaths of Palestinian civilians, even as both the number and severity of the crimes they commit have continued to increase.

In this upside down world the logic of endless violence driven by a deeply felt sense of victimhood - we must kill them before they kill us - becomes self-fulfilling.

Israel’s history, both before and after the Holocaust, is inevitably tied to a perceived existential danger. Perhaps it always will be. But October 7 has proved a force multiplier.

Trust in Netanyahu’s government, however, and his vision of Israel as a ‘Super-Sparta’ is eroding as one war cascades into another. Opposition to the war against Iran is growing especially now that it’s stalemated.

Israelis ( like Americans) were promised that a short, overwhelming bombing campaign would lead to the collapse of the theocratic regime in Tehran. The opposite has happened.

Netanyahu vision of a nation in eternal readiness, armed to the teeth and up for a fight is not really new. In varying degrees of intensity it’s been Israel’s core survival strategy since its creation in 1948.

Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18. Like Spartans every Israeli is, in that sense, a warrior.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the feud with Palestinians 80 years of war and nearly 60 years of unhindered occupation cannot but have a brutalising effect on generations of young IDF soldiers and conscripts. War can turn even angels into monsters.

During the 1973 October war between Israel, Egypt and Syria I found myself on the Golan Heights face down in a ditch with young Israeli soldiers. We were being shelled by Syrian gunners on Mount Hermon.

As the shells exploded in waves of three they recited in unison the Shema Yisrael, a prayer uttered in moments of extreme danger. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One…”. It was hard not to feel an affinity even admiration.

Israel once had the overwhelming sympathy of the world as it struggled to root itself in a Holy Land surrounded by hostile Arab states. Journalists were mesmerised by its military achievements.

But the world has fallen out of love with Israel. Even in 2009 the journalist and historian Max Hastings wrote this: “The most extraordinary, indeed nihilistic aspect of Israeli military policy towards the Palestinians is that it has sought to punish terrorism by deliberately wrecking the economic base of Palestinian society.”

Israel keeps pushing the idea that force will achieve security. Military supremacy is the code in its DNA. In this the IDF is its spearhead. One more strike. One more war and Israel will be safe.

In a sense Israel is trapped by its overwhelming military superiority and the weakness of its opponents. The alternative - dialogue, negotiation and compromise - are no longer seen as an option.

There’s an opportunity to switch direction in November’s legislative elections. Plenty of Israelis - including many in the IDF - are unhappy with how things are going. Will they take it?

Call it judgement or call it class. But boy did Charles serve up a masterclass in diplomacy when he addressed both houses of the US Congress this week.

He delivered a reminder that, for all Britain’s failing powers and its muddleheaded search for a role in a bewildering world, the long arc of history and the experience that comes with that counts for something.

In one sense it doesn’t matter a jot. Trump will still be Trump enabled by a supine and pathetic Republican party. He will continue to provoke and corrupt and wreck. People will die on his watch both at home and abroad.

But since politics is made by people and people are susceptible to argument (and emotion) King Charle’s speech to both houses of Congress, splashed all over the front page of the New York Times, was a reminder that things don’t have to be as mindless and cruel as they have been.

Later at the state dinner at the White House, to the accompaniment of Spring Herbed Ravioli, Dover Sole and White House Honey and Vanilla Bean Crémaux, King Charles charmed the Jester’s court, with little touches of fairy dust.

He presented the boy President with a bell, dug up by one of his courtiers, with the words TRUMP 1944. Evidently there had been a submarine called HMS Trump, launched from a U.K. shipyard in 1944, that played a role in the Pacific during World War II.

Charles’s earlier address to Congress had the quiet assurance of someone who understands that diplomacy is less about grandstanding than calibration. The tone was carefully judged: respectful without deference, warm without chumminess, and gently chastising.

He praised the depth of the transatlantic relationship, but did so in a way that implied shared obligations rather than mutual self-congratulation. That subtle shift matters. It turns nostalgia into responsibility.

What stood out was his ability to encourage and chastise in the same breath. References to climate, security, and the rules-based order were framed as common causes, yet the language carried an unmistakable nudge: these are not optional commitments Mr President.

He avoided hectoring but he did cut close to the bone. He drew a standing ovation when he spoke about how checks and balances in American government have their roots in English history.

The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society, said Charles, found that Magna Carta was cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, “not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” Gentle rap on the knuckles.

He reminded Trump that, after 9/11, Britain, among others, answered the call. Sure, he said, Britain and the US have had their moments including the 1956 Suez crisis after which his mother visited the US. “It is hard to imagine anything like that happening today” he went on drawing a wry smile from Trump.

Trump had been told “ stick to the script” in his after-dinner speech. But, of course, he couldn’t help himself. “ We’re doing a little Middle East work right now … and we’re doing very well…Charles agrees with me even more than I do (sic) we’re never going to let that opponent have a nuclear weapon.” Par for the course.

One of the things about the upper classes is that nothing they ever do sounds performative. Effortless superiority is the mantra. The cadence, restraint, the absence of rhetoric suggested a confidence marinated in a thousand years of privilege.

In one sense Charle’s speech, a bit like the monarchy itself, was detached from reality. Charles lives in a bubble. His worldview is informed by a life of privilege, introspection, man and boy slightly apart.

Charles the tree hugger, the man of moral conviction, the intellectually serious but emotionally dry adult, was forged in a world of duty, institutional discipline lacking family warmth.

He was a solitary, searching boy who never quite stopped trying to make sense of the part he had been given to play.

The King, a child bruised by a disciplinarian father and an absent mother, has spent his life looking for meaning, seeking a role. He is not, in the manner of his parents, a “ natural monarch”.

His marriage, divorce, the death of Diana and his recent diagnosis of cancer - all under the relentless public gaze of fame, have produced a man ideally suited to a role which exists half in the real world, half in a sort of fantasy.

One reason why Trump likes King Charles is because he also sees himself as king and America as his fiefdom. Trump’s own childhood, in some ways, was not dissimilar to Charles’: immense wealth, a highly competitive atmosphere and strict, often harsh, parenting dominated by a mentally absent mother and a disciplinarian father.

History is about power. America is so dominant right now that nothing will change what it sees as its core, national interests. Certainly not a descendant of the mad king who lost America.

This visit won’t have tamed Trump. It won’t change the course of America’s journey over the next couple of years let alone the course of history. The ‘special relationship” is largely in the mind. With Trump at the helm Britain’s place, more than ever, must be as part of as resurgent Europe.

But if it planted a seed in the mind of those who listened respectfully and who will come after Trump then it was worth the hoopla and the cost.

Archie is a second-year nursing student. He’s 20. Quiet, serious, steady. I’ve never encountered a student nurse in a teaching hospital allowed to perform an electrocardiogram test. Mind you it was a push button job.

Archie also performs a mean phlebotomy. Hardly felt a thing. Steady as a rock.

Archie comes from India. His dad runs a pub in Kerala. His mum is a nurse in Dubai. Between them they work every hour God sends to pay for Archie to study nursing in England. It’s £40,000 for a three-year course plus living expenses. The average profit for a small business in India is £6,000. Do the maths.

I liked Archie. He did a good job. We need more Archies. There are 31,000 vacancies for nurses in England alone. We also have 40,000-50,000 fewer doctors than the EU average with some six million patients backed up awaiting treatment. They’re leaving in droves for a better life in Oz or New Zealand or the States.

Nurses are routinely spat at or threatened in emergency care. Incidents of physical violence against staff have more than quadrupled since 2019. Would you do the job? You’re supposed to be a healer not a bouncer.

We’re lucky to have Archie. The NHS would founder without immigrants. The Faragist argument of ‘ Just train more Brits” is cynical wishful thinking. You can’t train them if they don’t want to do the work. It’s a stressful job with big responsibilities. The NHS struggles to keep people let alone recruit new ones.

The morning at the A&E department at my local teaching hospital begins, if not slowly, then unhurriedly. I’ve been sent there by a doctor I spoke to on 111 the night before about a mildly alarming drop in my oxygen level after two weeks of flat-out coughing.

I was told to ring 111 by my GP. But not before I was seen by a “nurse practitioner” which is my surgery’s default appointment for a chest infection - even for octogenarians.

The BMA says that the NHS is using too many nurses to cover for a nationwide shortage of medics and that this poses a danger to patients … a reasonable point to make even if it’s stating the bleeding obvious.

The nurse at my surgery was fine: experienced, level-headed, a listener. I’m lucky. I live in a rural area. I don’t have to fight my through a shield wall of bureaucrats to get seen even if a routine appointment, with a GP I know and who knows me, takes around three weeks.

By the time I got to hospital I’ve repeated my story, my date of birth and other unsavoury details, to a nurse and two doctors.

That’s the second big thing the NHS needs sorting as a priority: communication. Talking to itself.

What’s the point if, when I speak to one doctor, who is presumably wired, my conversation can’t be seen by the next medic I see in A&E who has to interrogate me all over again?

What has whizz kid Wes Streeting been up to all this time? Where is his joined-up AI-driven single patient record information system? Did he even have a plan when he got the job?

By late morning the A&E department begins to feel like Heathrow on a bad day. There’s a cheerful sense of chaos. But the sullen faces of some waiting tells a different story.

The small room where Archie works taking blood and working the dinky little ECG monitor feels a bit like the queue at the Red Lion pub on a Saturday night.

All the chairs are taken. Younger people have awaited for hours to be triaged.

I got a blood test, an X-ray and an ECG within three hours. I had a chat with a thoughtful but exhausted doctor who also happens to be of south-east Asian origin. I was done and dusted and heading home to my Catalan sheepdog in four hours. Which is pretty good.

The NHS is the very incarnation of Britain’s struggle to reconcile what it wants to do with what it can. It is now so big, so complex and so dense - in the way that a forest becomes impenetrable through a combination of uncontrolled growth and neglect- that seeing a path through to a clearing is requires the persistence and endurance of a Phoenix.

And like the mythical Phoenix it is itself the subject of myths: more money is the only answer; it is fundamentally wasteful; privatisation is either the solution or the problem; there are too many managers; GPs don’t work hard enough. It’s not just one thing.

The NHS is not about to ‘collapse’. In the same way that advanced economies don’t ‘collapse’. It’s struggling and that’s down to many things: global shocks like the pandemic; graduates are moving away from medicine or moving abroad because they feel undervalued or overworked or both.

There’s also the uncomfortable truth that we can’t afford the NHS as it is AND prepare for a Russian attack on Europe at the same time.

Targets are meaningless if we can’t get the basics right. I know we’re dealing with an organisation of over one million clinical staff. But communication in battle is THE core discipline. Without decent comms armies perish.

Navigating the NHS system is a slow, labyrinthian process. Staff can’t communicate properly. Fixing this is mired in controversy over the American defence and immigration data collection giant Palantir.

It’s not just the backlash against its darker side. It’s being argued by some that the £330 million system is “ all pixie dust and rainbows” and that there are cheaper and faster alternatives. I don’t know. What I do know from my worm’s eye view is that there ain’t enough of it.

I saw one practitioner with an iPad. IT systems between 111 and A&E are rarely compatible. The gulf between primary and secondary care is as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon.

My medical records, as I shuffled from one unit to another were not just lost in translation, they never existed. They will only appear in a week or six once the last medic I saw can find the time to thump them into his laptop.

You feel guilty knocking the NHS when virtually everyone tries so hard and takes pride in their job. But I have no misgivings about knocking the higher ups.

Mandelsongate is now officially a governance car crash. The Foreign Office knew the Labour peer was unfit for the job but did not tell Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister.

Number 10 didn’t want to know. The Foreign Office refused to tell when asked by the Cabinet Office which lives next door to Downing Street. Or any version of the above you care to believe.

I made the argument in my last column: The culprit in Mandelsongate is not the Foreign Office. It’s the system that places the political interests of ministers over those of the people who elect them

Allow me to elaborate.

If the conversation between Whitehall and the government it serves is so opaque and ambiguous as to leave both sides with an equally plausible story of what went wrong then it’s time to start over.

It’s not the people. It’s the system. A new leader or a new party in power will change nothing. Britain will continue to be governed by nods and winks.

When people’s responsibilities are vague, when action by government is dependant - not on clear constitutional guidelines - but precedent set in the mists of time decipherable only by the judiciary or constitutional scholars then the argument for writing things down becomes compelling.

The argument that ambiguity is a strength not a tripwire is misguided. It only serves an elite that can work the system at the expense of those who stand outside it. It’s a politician’s default defence and a lawyer’s gold mine.

A good parallel is the rearguard action fought by the church before the Reformation to keep the discourse of religion - the hotline to God - exclusively in Latin. And the word of God was law.

The people would speak to the clergy. The clergy would speak to God and they’d get back to the people. Latin was universally understood by the clergy and the powerful. It therefore helped, it’s argued, to strengthen the church beyond national borders.

But back in the 16th century most laypeople couldn’t read at all, let alone read Latin. By keeping the Bible and Mass in Latin, the Church effectively controlled how scripture was interpreted—through trained clergy.

Then came the Reformation, Caxton and Martin Luther’s bible in the vernacular (1522) . Mass produced and written in clear, simple German it was a book that changed the course of history by liberating language and handing spiritual power to the people.

Our lawyers and constitutional experts are today’s clergy. They interpret democracy on our behalf in their own language at around £300 an hour.

Those who favour continuing with the present arrangement of precedents, custom and culture as a mean of governing Britain make the following point and it’s a fair one:

“ We do have a written constitution, but instead of being contained in a single document, akin to a consolidation act, it’s dispersed over innumerable laws, judicial judgements. Past practices that have been respected by successive governments, over decades, sometimes over centuries become useful guidelines for the future. (My thanks to Graham).

Our so-called unwritten constitution is a hopelessly complex ecosystem that is comprehensible only to those who know how to work it or pay someone who does.

The ambiguity inherent in the system suits those who rely on it just fine because it allows them to make up the rules as they go along. I give you Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament during the Brexit farrago.

We were lucky to have Brenda Hale at the Supreme Court on that occasion. But a written constitution that set out clearly when the country’s primary legislative chamber can and cannot be prorogued would have been safer.

The same goes for the civil service. Its responsibilities should not only be to serve the government of the day by giving it the best advice it can. But also to some higher purpose - a national interest. That may sound complex. But modern society is complex.

People are able to hold two opposing thoughts in their heads at the same time.

Our much vaunted Parliamentary sovereignty lies at the heart of this flawed and unequal system. Parliament can make or unmake any law, and no court can strike it down.

In practice, a government with a disciplined majority ( however slim) can legislate with few hard constraints. There’s no entrenched, codified constitution setting “red lines” that are difficult to override.

Executive overreach becomes easy and easy to defend. Scrutiny becomes performative. Big constitutional changes can often be made by ordinary statute.

A government voted into office with, say, less than 40% of the popular vote but a working majority, can do pretty much what it wants.

The dodgy dossier which drove Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 is a good example where facts were subordinate to the truth. The present arrangement is as sound as leaky bucket.

Britain’s unwritten constitution is, in large part, if not exactly a relic of the class system but bears its unmistakeable imprint: the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Privy Council.

Key constitutional moments—like the Magna Carta—were agreements between the monarch and powerful barons, not the general population. For centuries, political power sat with landowners, aristocrats, and a narrow elite.

An unwritten constitution relies heavily on knowing how the system works. Power is flexible. Flexibility offers power - to those who already have the power.

Elite education, legal training and proximity to power offers access denied to the majority. Gradual change favours those who already hold power.

Of course written rules do not guarantee good or fair government. Donald Trump and a supine Republican party is a case point. You still need people to apply the law.

But a constitution that sets out who can do what, what responsibilities they have, written in plain English, just as Martin Luther’s German bible was , in a way that is universally understood would be a starting point.

It would offer guardrails we all agree on and a ledge on which we could all stand with a reasonable degree of clarity.

Isn’t that a reasonable definition of democracy?

MandelsonGate is about many things. The impunity of a British peer. The deviancy of an American mover and shaker. The exploitation of young women by the rich and powerful. One rule for the privileged. Another for the common people.

But this tawdry saga is the gift that keeps on giving. In the latest twist to this Florentine intrigue worthy of the Medicis, it shines a light into how Westminster works - and why it doesn’t, the aply-named title of Ian Dunt’s excellent book on why Britain is gummed up and not getting anywhere.

It’s an object lesson which may well earn Peter Mandelson a little footnote in the history of how not to govern. It may topple Keir Starmer. It is certainly the end of Mandelson as one of the great and the good.

The Labour peer it turns out was not, despite repeated assurances by the government, cleared by the spooks before he was handed the holy grail of diplomatic postings: UK ambassador to Washington DC.

On the contrary, his file was stamped with a great big warning sign marked “Dodgy”. The document produced by the UK Security Vetting (UKSV) after Mandelson went through the process we are told, offers three warning rankings: low, medium and high.

The vetting officer is then asked for their recommendation. Again, there are three options - green, amber or red: clearance approved, clearance approved “with risk management”, or clearance denied. It’s claimed Mandelson was denied clearance. We shall see.

Not, however, over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, murky as that was. But over the fact that Global Counsel, his private political consultancy’s single biggest client had links to the Chinese military. Mandelson resigned from Global Counsel shortly before the 2024 but continued to hold a stake in the company.

The Foreign Office overruled the spooks. Starmer wasn’t told or so he claims. Mandelson went to Washington with instructions to charm Donald Trump. Mandelson resigned when his leak of government secrets to Epstein were revealed.

It’s a tangled web. Isn’t it always when money and power collide. The revolving doors between power and commerce, the trading of political influence for personal gain is filled with unsavoury compromises.

The air is now thick with affront. Starmer is ‘ furious’. He fires Ollie Robbins, head of the Foreign Office. Robbins, we are told, is upset and intends to hit back.

The opposition is baying for Starmer’s head - along with a growing number of his own MPs. The British political circus continues on its chronically dysfunctional journey.

The Mandelson saga is a great story. But it is important to understand what it is and what it is not.

It is not about what one former head of the diplomatic service has called “the most serious crisis the Foreign Office has faced in decades”. This is the Foreign Office: skilled, “we know best” etched onto its forehead but not accountable.

Nor is it about whether Ollie Robbins could or should have gone to Starmer with the spooks’ conclusions. Of course he should. But civil servants and ministers have a symbiotic relationship. Mandarins first and foremost are loyal and accountable to elected Ministers.

So Ollie Robbins’ dilemma was not whether divulging the information about Mandelson was in the interests of the electorate - the people - but whether it served the interests of his “political masters”.

The distinction is crucial as we see in the United States where officials fighting back against the invasive and coercive nature of Donald Trump’s quasi-dictatorship, summon up their primary obligation to the constitution and the people it serves.

Even less is it about whether Starmer was insufficiently curious to find out the truth for himself. His lack of judgement is now well-established. His decision to hand Mandelson the keys to the UK’s most prestigious embassy is only the latest in a series of missteps. He will go. The only question is when.

The questions raised by this story are more fundamental. They boil down to this: If the organisation and delivery of policy revolves around a system which seems incapable of being straight with itself then the system itself is flawed and needs changing.

If civil servants worry permanently about what the effect of disclosure might be on their masters and their interests as opposed to whether it’s the right thing to do for the people then, as an instrument of democratic governance, it’s set up to fail.

Was Ollie Robbins - if indeed the decision was his - worried about what effect Mandelson’s links with a Chinese entity might have on Starmer’s strong desire to send Mandelson to Washington? Would it embarrass him? Might he have to admit - God forbid - that he was wrong?

Or was his overriding concern the safety and well-being of the country and the British people?

We delude ourselves if we believe that we live in a no-holds barred democracy. We live in a country where hypocricy bordering on corruption is disguised as nuance by people who spend half their time finding reasons for not grasping nettles.

Is there an answer? Yes there is. But it’s not a quick fix. It involves rewriting our constitutional settlement: how we govern ourselves.

First lay out a written constitution that states clearly who the government, the mandarins and the courts serve. Not each other but the people.

This would be no small change. Our parliamentary system implies that in serving the government of the day the civil service is serving the people because the government is elected by the people.

But that is manifestly not the case. An arrangement in which civil servants supported the government but had an equal and statutory obligation to uphold the national interest would concentrate the mind and avoid this kind of fiasco.

Second loosen up the voting system even further to devolve power from the centre so that those we elect ( and appoint) to serve us know precisely who they’re answerable to.

These are not either or options. They are mutually reinforcing. An incoming government will wish to preserve the status quo so it can use it to its advantage.

Which is why electoral reform is an essential prerequisite to a better way of governing.

THE WHITE HOUSE

SECRET/EYES ONLY

FROM: THE NSC

DATE: April 10, 2026

SUBJECT STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT - (Warts and all )

Mr President. This is a summary of the state of play now that those crazy bastards in Iran have agreed to a temporary ceasefire. You may wish to read it before deciding what to do next. Or you may prefer to chuck it in the Very Boring in-tray.

It’s in two parts: a candid assessment of what has and has not been achieved in the war by each of the parties. (You should consider taking a Xanax before reading that part.)

Followed by a ‘best case’ for credibly claiming that the United States has achieved its war aims and that you are still the greatest President in US history.

OVERVIEW ( Take a deep breath)

The ceasefire facilitated by Pakistan has halted immediate hostilities. But it has not resolved any of the underlying causes of the conflict. In fact it’s made things worse. America is weaker. Iran is stronger. Israel is still as mad as a box of frogs.

The outcome so far is best described as a stalemate. That sucks I know. But without your willingness to fight to the last Iranian it could have been worse. We could have lost a dozen aircraft.

All parties to the conflict can claim partial gains - except for short sellers, your family and members of the Mar El Lago Appreciation Society who made a killing on the markets.

Your personal efforts to nurture market opportunities when nobody knows what’s going to happen next are deeply appreciated by the wider investment community and those who have your personal number on speed dial.

There is some good news - though not for civilians and schoolchildren careless enough not to get out of the way of our valiant airmen.

Iran has taken a beating. It’s been set back years. Its military inventory has been significantly degraded. Its leadership and command and control structures have been decimated. It’s capacity to threaten its neighbours has been seriously corrupted.

The bad news is that those crazy mullahs don’t see it like that. They’re fanatical and narrow-minded. Nor does most of the rest of the world. Xi Jinping has been seen doing cartwheels in the Forbidden City.

In fact most people think Iran has won and we lost. There are a handful of exceptions. Secretary Hesgeth who can pick a fight in an empty room. And Viktor Orban who worships the ground you walk on and may shortly be asking for asylum in Florida.

But the bottom line is that it doesn’t look good Mr President. It’s upsetting I know. Your critics are very, very bad people. They don’t deserve you.

But that’s asymmetric warfare for you. As I’m sure you know that’s where there’s a little guy and a big guy in a fight and the little guy refuses to throw the towel in however badly he gets beat up.

In the words of Bob Dylan’s classic Like a Rolling Stone : “when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose”.

You will know from your deep study of history Mr President that these David and Goliath stories are legion. And people do love an underdog.

Remember the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 -that little, bitty shortcut for ships between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean? Britain, France and Israel seized it when those mad Marxists in Egypt nationalised it and started charging for passage.

Well that was the end of Britain as a world power. And look at it now. It’s an object lesson.

The mad mullahs in Tehran are trying to do the same with the Straits of Hormuz. The problem with fanatics, Mr President, especially when they’re high on religion, is they think God is always on their side.

We know this to be false. He’s on our side especially now that Secretary Hesgeth is holding prayer meetings in the Pentagon with those nice Christian Nationalists at the Reformed Evangelical Church in Nashville. If only we’d had Pastor Brooks Potteiger in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

(By the way Nigel called with a big thumbs up. He’s thrilled to bits with your success and he still loves you.)

Iran and Israel

This summary has already gone over the 150-word limit you prefer for which I apologise. But let me conclude with a word or two about Iran and Israel.

The Islamic Republic remains deeply unpopular among most Iranians. But opposition has been brutally suppressed. The people have not risen up despite your generous offer that help was on its way. People don’t realise how busy you are. You can’t be everywhere at once.

Iran has shown that it can disrupt global energy flows. Mr President the uncomfortable truth, as our British friends would say, is that they have us - and the world economy - by the short and curlies.

Iran remains a big player. It still a challenge and indispensable in any regional peace deal. Not much has changed. But they have begged us on bended knee to open talks and you have wisely agreed. Only you could have achieved such an outcome.

You should know however that our Arab Gulf allies are not happy. Your son-in-law Jared has been a regular visitor to the Gulf where he continues, as part of his mission to bring peace, bitcoin and Trump towers across the world, to strengthen the First Family’s interests.

However our friends in the region can see that that American protection no longer guarantees the safety of its people, its infrastructure or its reputation as a safe haven for capital. This a problem. Will that offer a jet for your personal use if and when you leave office from Qatar still stand?

Maybe invite MBS and other Gulf leaders for a long weekend and a round of golf at Mar El Lago with all it has to offer?

A word about Israel Mr President. In the immortal words of Michael Corleone “ Keep your friends close but your enemies closer”.

The idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu has led you up the garden path for his own ends is, of course, a big fat lie. I urge you however to give Truth Social a miss for a few days. It’s infected by Marjorie Taylor-Greene syndrome.

Israel is the closest thing America has to a brother-in-arms now that those Brits across the Pond are run by a bunch of crybabies. But is it getting above itself? Does it know its place in the pecking order?

Prime Minister Netanyahu set out three over-arching goals for the war: the collapse of the Islamic Republic; the destruction of its nuclear programme and the elimination of the ballistic missile threat.

None of these have been achieved. The regime remains in place and continues to oppress its people. The 440 kg of enriched uranium still lies in mountain tunnels near Isfahan. Missiles are still being launched.

Meanwhile while the Iran ceasefire is ( barely) in place Israel continues to “mow the lawn” in Lebanon. Your supporters are asking perhaps not unreasonably, if the tail is wagging the dog?

Israel’s guiding principle has been “ if violence doesn’t work use more violence”. The problem is the crazies in Iran don’t see military weakness as defeat. They’re queuing up for that ticket to paradise.

So you need to ask yourself, Mr President, do the United States and Israel want the same thing? Israel would be happy for us to bomb Iran back to the stone age in your memorable phrase.

When push comes to shove it doesn’t need the Gulf states. A desert of warring tribes suits it just fine. But is that in the long-term interests of the United States or your retirement fund?

Your legacy

Mr President you have already achieved more than any President in history. But to secure your place among the pantheon of leaders and a carving on Mount Rusmore you may wish to consider the following:

Fake news, traitors in the MAGA ranks and saboteurs have conspired to drag your poll ratings down. This is very, very unfair. But we do have elections to face in November.

Here are some talking points that will help you reverse the tide.

• We may have started the war but we successfully prevented into becoming World War III - by stopping.

• No US ground troops were involved except for those that took part in the rescue of our downed airmen which you brilliantly masterminded.

• Iran may not have been defeated but it has been checked. It may not be a strategic victory but it’s a containment success.

• Russia has been arming Iran. As a global disruptor Iran is indispensable to Moscow in its relentless campaign to undermine democracy. The war in Ukraine is relatively cost-free for the US. You might wish to consider a resumption of support for Ukraine.

• Europe is a little miffed. Who has America’s interests at heart? Russia or Europe?

People can be VERY SICK Mr President. Avocado-eating armchair pundits persist with FAKE NEWS. This is a typical example;

“ This Iran war puts an end to the idea that an all-powerful America can interdict its opponents anywhere in the world, keep the sea lanes open and guarantee that the oil keeps flowing. Its stature as a world power has been seriously undermined.”

We have your best interests at heart Mr President. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

What’s up with Vladimir Putin? Paranoid about his health and security at the best of times, he appears to have seriously upped his DEFCON settings.

Has he been spooked by the ease with which Iran’s Supreme Leader was assassinated ? Does he think he’s next?

Or is he, as the think tank Chatham House suggests, under growing pressure at home from Russians fed up with a grim death toll in Ukraine, food shortages and ever-rising prices?

Every kilometre gained by Russia in Ukraine is measured in hundreds perhaps thousands of lives. A big push in the Donbas foreshadowing a Spring offensive has recently been repulsed by Ukrainian forces.

Putin’s fable of the war rekindling great Mother Russia ( Matushka Rossiya) reaches the inner patriot of many ordinary Russians. The Kremlin’s spin doctors have successfully created a new generation of nationalists. But loyalty can wear thin when you’re struggling to put food on the table.

Putin, like Stalin ( and Donald Trump) surrounds himself with loyalists. He retains control of the army by regularly purging senior officers suspected of wavering in their commitment, or who fail. But is that loyalty wearing thin too?

Ukraine’s leader Volodymir Zelensky, not exactly an impartial observer admittedly but a man who knows a thing or two about survival, recently told an interviewer: “Putin does not have much time left”. Was this mischief-making or is he onto something?

We’re peering through a glass darkly but signs are that this archetypal example of the strong, silent leader is, if not exactly panicking, then has the wind up.

Putin is 73. He has been in power for 25 years. He has been variously described by those who have studied him as an “emotionally restrained” (buttoned up), calculating, deeply suspicious, “ hostile enforcer”. Pretty standard stuff for a despot.

Men like Putin rule by breeding insecurity in others through coercion, secrecy and violence. But, of course, this creates a world in which no one, least of all him, can feel entirely safe. Chickens almost invariably come home to roost.

The Kremlin has suddenly and sharply tightened its grip on the internet. Targeted shutdowns, once confined to regions bordering Ukraine, are now hitting Moscow and other centres of wealth and power. Muscovites are seriously hacked off.

Most social media have been blocked. All public rallies are forbidden. The internet blackouts in Moscow began days after Ayatollah Ali Khameini was killed in an Israeli and American air strike. Visitors report tightened security around the Kremlin.

Putin’s public appearances have been cut right back. Kremlin-watchers report that he mostly communicates by video-link from one of his heavily guarded fortress estates close to Moscow or on the Black Sea. These are surrounded by missile defence systems.

A number of foreign trips have been cancelled or postponed. He hasn’t been seen in public since March 8. Putin apparently has four offices in four different parts of the country identically furnished down to the door handles. Viewers never know where he’s broadcasting from.

The official story for this circling of the wagons is better to protect the Russian leadership from Ukrainian drones which have reached the Kremlin. But that feels like a “sledgehammers cracking nuts” explanation.

The war has made many rich. It has created jobs. But the Russian economy is in bad shape. Inflation is rampant. The rouble is weakening. Russians are grumbling. People in Moscow are dipping into their savings to buy food.

The price of potatoes - as much a part of Russian identity as vodka - has tripled. A poor harvest and now a shortage of fertiliser due to the Iran war will drive prices even higher.

Independent Russian media - mostly in exile - have been humming with the the astonishing saga of Ilya Remeslo, the pro-war blogger and former Kremlin stooge, who has recently turned on Putin.

Remelso denounced Putin as a war criminal and a crook in a series of increasingly audacious Telegram posts and videos. A day later he was admitted to a psychiatric facility.

The FT reports that Putin has asked oligarchs to donate to Russia’s budget to finance his war in Ukraine. Good luck with that. Who knows better than the oligarchs how the state pilfers public money?

True, the war in the gulf has been a bonanza for Russian oil. Every $10 increase in the average monthly price per barrel of oil generates an additional $2.8bn in revenue for Russia’s war chest.

But Putin is not getting any younger or more popular. His army is stalled. He’s running out of money. He needs, as they say, an off-ramp.

Stalin’s biggest mistake was thinking that Hitler would not turn on Russia. Putin’s is the stubborn belief that Ukraine would roll over abandoned by a feckless Europe.

It’s possible that Donald Trump, who has his own headaches, will come to his rescue with a grand bargain that sidelines NATO and Europe both of whom he loathes almost as much as Putin does. Wouldn’t that be something?

But it’s equally possible that we’re glimpsing the slow, inevitable loss of authority of the world’s number one gangster.

The Millibandwagon is rolling

Remember Ed Milliband’s ill-fated bacon sarnie? Then Labour leader he’d stopped for a swift breakfast in 2014. The picture may not have lost him the 2015 election but it did him no favours. The Sun splashed the image on the front page with the headline “Save our bacon”.

Milliband is suddenly news. He’s popping up all over the place. The ostensible reason is Iran, oil and the UK economy which is once again teetering on the edge of net zero.

Why, the question is being asked, is Milliband still blocking (most) North Sea exploration when the Iran war has shown, yet again, how vulnerable we are to oil shocks ?

It could take years to get oil-based supply chains going again: fertiliser for food, helium for microchips, refined oil. Damaged oil refineries and storage could take months, possibly years to fix.

But that’s window dressing. What the Millibandwagon is really about is the much-predicted Labour leadership contest after the May local elections and Keir Starmer’s demise.

A long, long, long profile in the New Statesman portrays him as a deep thinker. Another in The Spectator claims that, now that Morgan McSweeney has gone, Milliband is Starmer’s brain. He’s the man really running Britain.

Starmer’s authority is fading. Farage and Polanski are rising. May will not be good for Labour.

But do we really think a man who lost one election will turn the tide for Labour? He’s more likely to be spending most of his time batting away claims that he’s a loser.

Money loves a good war- and the inside track

I love a good chart. Here’s one I think you’ll enjoy.

At exactly 06:49 on March 23 Eastern Standard Time - 24 days after the war on Iran began - a bunch of trades or bets were made on what the oil price was going to do going forward. Posted on New York Mercantile Exchange within minutes these had totalled 2,168, equivalent to £170 million.

A few minutes after that future contracts in West Texas Crude and Brent Crude ( the two big oil benchmarks) jumped registering another $150 million. Similar bets were being made on the stock market: around $1.5 billion on the Standard and Poor 500, the Euro Stoxx etc..

For the avoidance of doubt the oil trades bet that oil prices which had been soaring since the war began were going to go DOWN. The trades on the stock market were, on the face of it, buying on a dip after shares tanked as the Gulf caught fire.

Now watch closely: at exactly 07:05 on the same day ( fifteen minutes after the trades) Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the US had engaged in “ very good and productive conversations” with Iran “ over a A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION” of the war and would the Department of War kindly pause the bombing.

What do think happened next? Yup. Oil prices. slumped and stock markets soared. Billions were made - by someone with a crystal ball. Or inside information. Not for the first time nor the last.

Bear in mind that most traders are tucked up in bed at that time. Trading for the most part doesn’t start till 09:30. Trump himself is a famously late riser. These guys are getting corruption down to a fine art.