Towards the end of their forty-five-minute Media Confidential conversation about the life and death of Professor Jason Arday, the former editors Lionel Barber and Alan Rusbridger at last arrive at the question of what lessons might be learned. Rusbridger thinks the debate should be held within the media rather than on social media, because social media is not a very good place for such a debate. But that, Alan, is precisely the point. Social media may be a very bad place to debate the conduct of journalists, but it is now the place where journalists discover, select, test and intensify the subjects of their journalism.

The reporters at your former newspaper were not standing outside this degraded conversation, looking in through the plate glass of their professional standards: they were in it, receiving its signals, adding their own, watching the reaction to what they had added and converting that reaction into the warrant for further publication. Social media was not the vulgar aftermath of the Jason Arday story: it was the tail that wagged this particular dog, just as it has so many others since the advent of bi-directional digital media–in the form of the mobile phone and wireless broadband–over twenty years ago. Look, I know you fellows are getting a little long in the tooth, but you have heard of mobile phones, haven’t you? Possibly even of teeth going blue? I cannot imagine it took your grandfathers from 1908 until 1930 to assimilate the fact that aeroplanes were now in the sky.

So why is it taking you so long to appreciate what bidirectionality implies for the media? You, Alan, are Cambridge-educated, while Lionel is an Oxford man; and as seasoned media professionals you might conceivably have dipped into Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Understanding Media’. I’m not suggesting you would have read the whole thing–John Junor forefend!–but you might at least have ventured beyond the bald statement that ‘the medium is the message’, and attempted to understand the relationship between content and the means by which it is mediated. You are journalists, after all. Or are you now something else altogether–podcasters, perhaps? You must be aware that listening and reading involve different kinds of attention and retention; and that the metrics governing what people absorb online have themselves become part of the way news is selected and structured. Yet you show no awareness of any of this.

Listening to your podcast, I could almost hear the rattle of a freshly ironed copy of the Daily Telegraph as it was fitted to a wooden reading stick and hung on the rack of some Pall Mall gentlemen’s club. The largest story in the media world you describe might still be Phileas Fogg going around the world in eighty days. But, gentlemen, that ship has sailed. Media now circumnavigates the world in eighty-thousandths of a second. Still, I’ve retained a fair bit of your conversation–and it ranged pretty widely: Race is present from the beginning–autism is not. Almost twenty-seven minutes of a forty-five-minute broadcast elapse before the fact that the man whose treatment they are examining was autistic is allowed any real conceptual weight. Warnings are mentioned, but aggregated in such a way as to dissolve their force. An Andrew Neil tweet expressing concern about Arday’s mental health becomes one item in a miscellany.

Simon Baron-Cohen’s intervention is acknowledged, but not his standing: he is not simply a kindly Cambridge colleague who asked Fleet Street to ease off, but the director of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, a pioneer of large-scale research into suicidality among autistic people, and a man making an explicit safeguarding intervention: ‘This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safeguarding issues. It’s time to stop.’ I’ve spoken to Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen on this matter, as he happens to be a childhood friend of mine. Perhaps The Guardian should send a reporter to check up on this and ask how I know that he is, in fact, an expert in suicidality among autistic people? I doubt such reporting will provoke suicide in Simon himself, but I’m sure it will contribute to his distress as he mourns a personal friend, a disabled man he warned the media to leave alone, Alan and Lionel.

As for the fact that the Guardian’s newsroom was directly warned about Jason Arday’s mental health, this was not mentioned at all by the garrulous old chums. I’ll remind them: an email was sent to the editor, Katharine Viner, explicitly asking for coverage to be toned down. It was replied to by the Head of News, Archie Bland, who said that he saw no reason to do so. Why was this not part of your conversation? Given that you want to keep that debate within the media itself. This omission of any serious understanding or consideration of Arday being autistic is shocking. I write as the parent of two diagnosed autistic people and I have a third neurodivergent child. The ableism running through the Barber–Rusbridger discussion is not only a failure to use the approved vocabulary.

It’s the far graver evidence of unwillingness to even attempt to understand what autism is, how it may bear upon literalness, perseveration, shame, psychic overwhelm and suicidality, and why the usual newsroom distinction between a person’s ‘mental health’ and the legitimate public examination of his conduct may be lethally inadequate. Arday’s autism was not a picturesque feature of the inspirational story his universities had helped to manufacture, and as we can see, it was far from being an immunity card: it was a diagnosed condition that ought to have changed the manner, tempo and proportionality of the reporting. Journalists who chose to write repeatedly about an autistic man had an obligation to learn what they were writing about. Listening to Rusbridger and Barber, I was reminded of Private Eye’s Lunchtime O’Booze and his mental health problems.

Barber and Rusbridger aren’t so O’Booze that they can’t acknowledge that the story became excessive. They discuss the Cofnas and right-wing axis and are rightly contemptuous of those who treated Arday as the spoil in a war against diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet the moral axis they draw is chiefly the familiar one between publications and political tendencies they approve of and those they do not. Bad newspapers and right-wing ideologues (Lord Young of X, see SITREP passim) behaved badly; serious liberal journalism, by implication, supplied nuance. The effect is to preserve the innocence of their own caste, and once again you hear that yellowing broadsheet being ironed by a flunkey. Guardian News & Media has said that its reporting followed ‘months of careful review’, that its commentary was ‘nuanced and balanced’, and that ‘we stand by our journalists’.

All three propositions may be true of individual texts and still fail to answer the accusation. Metrics measure attention, not morality; nuance is not an antidote to accumulation; balance within one article cannot acquit a sequence of articles whose effects become inputs into the next act of publication. I’m not questioning if each brick met the building regulations–it’s what the bricks built. The Guardian’s institutional line runs through actual editors sitting at actual desks: from its reporters and commissioning editors to Archie Bland, Katharine Viner, Guardian News & Media and, ultimately, the Scott Trust chaired by Ole Jacob Sunde. The Trust exists to secure the Guardian’s editorial and financial independence, and its shareholders take no dividend. That makes the newspaper different from the Telegraph, Mail, Times or Sun.

However, it does not place it outside the attention economy: a publication dependent on scale, reader loyalty, contributions and digital engagement is exposed to the same command, even when no proprietor extracts the resulting surplus. That command is MORE: more items, more users, more reaction, more duration, more recursion. At a proprietorial newspaper MORE terminates in shareholder value. At the Guardian it may terminate in the preservation of the institution and its liberal mission in the form of its editors and former editors’ reputations, rather than their reality. Ole Jacob Sunde was brought on to the Scott Trust in 2015, and made its chair in 2021, precisely because of his experience in leading legacy media into the digital age. For two decades he chaired Schibsted, the Scandinavian media group that carried its old news businesses online while creating immense value through digital marketplaces and services.

When Sunde was appointed, David Olusoga explicitly cited his ‘deep expertise in digital media’. So The Guardian cannot plausibly present itself as some venerable print institution accidentally ambushed by the internet and its queered mediatising problematic: its governing body understood perfectly well that it was becoming a major node in international digital-media networks. Besides, The Guardian had already gone belly-up to the web under Rusbridger. It nobly sucked up the boosters’ ‘digital democracy’ hype, rejected the paywall and seemed at times to imagine itself as some new incarnation of the Whole Earth Catalog, rather than a venerable British newspaper entering into dependency upon search engines, platforms and measurable attention.

Twenty years later it wears a print mask, from behind which you can see the Google Glass sinisterly glittering; and it is behind that glass that the people its journalists write about are converted into digestible content. Trust me, Alan: whether the teeth belong to a Guardian reporter or to someone at The Times—which you lambast for using Arday’s death to flog its rag—they feel much the same to the person between them. The only teeth Rusbridger and Barber appear to fear are those of lawyers and potential press regulators–this tends to be because of the residual omerta on Fleet Street that allows powerful people in the media to escape media attention. I wonder how they would like their own former journalists poking zealously into their lives? Neither of them would be free of scandal if they were subjected to the same level of scrutiny as Arday, because NO ONE would.

Yet these invulnerables talk as though the publications they have edited constitute the only possible means by which the governed can discover the truth about their governors. Even setting to one side the fact that they are both fully paid up establishmentarians, it needs stressing that some of the defining investigations of the past twenty years have originated outside traditional Fleet Street structures, or have depended upon whistleblowers, non-profit organisations, international collaborations and distributed digital research networks. More importantly, many of the stories that now require investigation concern corporate systems in which legacy media organisations are themselves commercially and technologically embedded.

The only D notice that Churchill imposed during the early years of the Second World War was to forbid the press to report the desertions of men who had returned from Dunkirk disgusted with the behaviour of their officers. I notice the same sort of tendency in the British media itself: a Churchillian desire to avoid the shame of defeat. However, nobody has imposed a D notice on me. So, here we have two men denying the need for their profession to submit to genuinely independent regulation while speaking on behalf of institutions dependent upon companies whose objectives may be altogether different from those espoused in newspaper editorials. The old freedom-of-the-press argument presumed that the newspaper stood between concentrated power and the public. But what happens when the newspaper is itself operationally nested inside concentrations of power far greater than anything dear old C. P. Scott could have imagined?

(And that was long before GNM’s ownership of Autotrader and its subsequent sale allowed them to effectively convert the buying and selling of the nation’s Vauxhall Astras into the sword of truth and justice they allegedly wield.) But if it ain’t Al and Leo, who then is afflicting the comfortable–and who is merely servicing their content? The old maxim is indeed that the newspaper should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Barber and Rusbridger are very comfortable men: this is not an insult but a material fact about their position in the British establishment.

As two former editors able to discuss the culpability of newspapers from within the protective afterlife of successful editorial careers, the comfort they are least willing to afflict is not simply that of shareholders, it’s rather the professional comfort of believing that journalism remains a sovereign activity: the editor acts upon ‘the news’ and produces a representation of reality for the reader. To hear them discuss this process of debating culpability ‘within the media’ was particularly jarring for me, given my own experiences. Rusbridger is now an editor-at-large at The New World, formerly The New European. He did not join the paper until 2026, so bears no responsibility for what follows; but the institution provides a useful specimen of the deliberation he recommends.

In September 2024, while I was a columnist there, I submitted a satire about A$AP Rocky, Bottega Veneta, rap, luxury consumption and the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. Its argument was that the folie à deux between luxury brands and African-American rap stars converts racial rebellion into conspicuous consumption, while liberal fear of appearing racist disables criticism of the violence and misogyny marketed with it. The editor, Steve Anglesey, rejected it because he was ‘not interested in publishing something that’s going to see you and us called racists’; declared the decision final; refused further discussion; and invited a replacement column. When I objected to being tried for prospective racism without so much as a conversation–and pointed out that I had had the piece read and approved by two Black colleagues–the publisher, Matt Kelly, replied: ‘Fucking grow up.’ The column, he said, was ‘unintelligible, self-indulgent bullshit’.

(You may be the judge of that: I still stand by it, and will post it immediately after this one.) He also refused to speak to me on the telephone. The partnership was over: more than half a decade during which I had produced hundreds of articles for them and written an entire Brexit edition of the newspaper single-handedly. I scarcely need to adduce further evidence of their understanding of safeguarding–in this instance, the safeguarding of one of their own journalists rather than of the subject of one–but nonetheless I will. A fortnight after this exchange with two venerable legacy journalists, who had debated my piece in so measured and nuanced a manner–‘nuanced’ being a word Lionel and Alan particularly enjoy deploying when discussing journalism–I entered hospital for an allogeneic stem-cell transplant necessitated by secondary myelofibrosis: a medical procedure carrying a one-in-five chance of death. Were my editors aware of this?

You bet your fucking arse they were. Oops. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that… Oh yes I can. I’m not writing for The Guardian anymore, or the piss-poor New World for that matter. An editor is entitled to reject a column–he’s also entitled to think its argument wrong, reckless or repellent. What is revealing–besides the almost unbelievable callousness and, frankly, ingratitude–is the substitution of anticipated social-media accusations–‘going to see you and us called racists’–for editorial judgement, and then the refusal of the internal debate supposedly superior to the online one. The dog pre-emptively wagged itself in expectation of the tail. A newspaper protected its reputation from an imagined digital reaction by suppressing an argument about the very racial inhibitions producing that reaction, while two senior editors reserved to themselves both the verdict and the right not to explain it.

If this is what keeping the debate ‘within the media’ means, the phrase denotes not a forum but a locked room. Of course, Anglesey and Kelly may also have been responding to a demand I had made a week or two earlier: that the Martin Rowson byline drawing accompanying my column be removed, and that he no longer be commissioned to illustrate any of my work. Why? Because Rowson had produced a cartoon condemned as antisemitic–subsequently withdrawn and apologised for–in, you guessed it, The Guardian. I no longer wished to be associated with someone whose published work had made him, in that instance, a de facto racist. You couldn’t, as the late John Junor would have said, make it up. Setting aside personal history, the significant point is that bi-directional digital media completely abolished the crude Cartesianism of these two press philosophes.

Publication now decisively alters the field it purports to describe: an article produces searches, posts, denunciations, defences and fresh disclosures; those reactions are counted; the counts enter editorial judgement; that judgement produces another article. Reality is recursively reordered around the journalist writing the story. The public interest becomes indistinguishable from the public being interested, while the measurable fact of interest is used as evidence that further publication serves the public. I said all of this in my last SITREP, but while the dynamic old duo namechecked it, they didn’t, duh, really seem to have read it. Too busy doom-scrolling, sans doute. This is where search-engine optimisation matters–and not just for pornography preferences or Googling yourself.

There are two possibilities, and both may well have been operating at once: it’s exactly evidence of this that any responsible inquiry would have to look for. A journalist or sub-editor may consciously fashion a headline around the terms most likely to obtain search traffic and generate distinct URLs: there may well have been conferences, informal meetings, and even online exhortations to ensure precisely this by putting terms such as ‘Black’, ‘plagiarist’, ‘Cambridge’ etc in the same headlines and subheads. Or, nobody need consciously decide to persecute anybody: the publishing system rewards the language, timing and multiplication of items that produce discoverability, and gradually entrains its users–the ‘users’ being both hacks and who they’re hacking away at. The first phenomenon is intentional in the ordinary sense, the second is distributed pseudo-intentionality.

But the important point is that the latter does not absolve the former. The NewsCord count gives the process a crude silhouette: after Cambridge announced a new inquiry, 249 articles appeared over twenty-two days; 188 more followed Arday’s resignation and his statement that he had ‘reached the limit of what any person could reasonably endure’. These numbers do not prove that SEO–search-engine optimisation–killed a man. They show the conversion of an institutional event into renewable media inventory, and of expressed distress into a further news peg. As I’ve iterated before and must now sadly reiterate: they hurt him; people watched; they saw people watching; they hurt him again. Everyone was only responding–nobody was responsible. But somebody wrote every word; somebody commissioned every article; somebody pressed publish.

It’s against this tawdry blurry background that we have to consider the limited ‘mea culpas’ issued by journalists and commentators whose interventions contributed to the persecution of a Black autistic man in the weeks preceding his death. Aaron Bastani’s was the most unequivocal: having dismissed Arday as a ‘conman’ and described one of his lectures as saying ‘nothing’, Bastani subsequently said: ‘I’m sorry, I apologise. Journalism is when you seek the facts. It’s a quest for the truth … This was anything but. It was bile. It’s everything I dislike about the modern media.’ He added that an apology was insufficient; that he wished he could ask Arday’s forgiveness; and that he had ‘really screwed up’. This is honourable as far as it goes–and it goes considerably further than most.

But it still construes the offence primarily as a personal ethical lapse: Bastani said something cruel; Bastani repents; Bastani wishes he could obtain absolution from the dead man. What remains unexamined is how his bile was solicited, circulated and operationalised by the same media system he claims to dislike. His mistake was that his status, platform, followers and facility for the contemptuous capsule made his high-octane bile available as fuel for everybody else’s. Matthew Syed’s confession was more complex: in a column entitled ‘Jason Arday was failed by the system–and by me’, he admitted that, while the attacks intensified, a friend had urged him to defend Arday; that he had prevaricated in ways he now considered cowardly; and that he had failed to say publicly that legitimate criticism had become disproportionate and dangerous.

Again, this deserves acknowledgement: Syed at least understands that culpability may consist not only in joining the attack but in withholding resistance when one has the authority to make it consequential. However his confession contains such a gaping lacuna that were I on the other side of the grille I’d certainly refuse absolution: What was he afraid of? Whose displeasure did he anticipate? Syed is a highly successful Times columnist, scarcely a precarious junior reporter: his media company has disclosed more than two million pounds in net assets, while his bestselling books, corporate consultancy and five-figure speaking engagements make him, by any reasonable definition, a very comfortable man. What, precisely, did a journalist with such material and professional insulation imagine he had to lose?

Why did he feel unable to protest, within a newspaper publishing article after article about Arday, that the cumulative process had become dangerous? Syed locates cowardice in himself while leaving the machinery that produced his fear largely undescribed. The call was coming from inside the house–but apparently the house itself must remain offstage, and the phone, anyway, was off the hook. Tim Stanley also deserves qualified commendation. Before Arday’s death he had participated with Jacob Rees-Mogg in a Telegraph discussion of the supposed downfall of Cambridge’s ‘woke poster boy’. When I wrote to Stanley afterwards and asked him to consider what he knew about the editorial coordination of the coverage–and, in effect, whether his conscience required him to rat out his colleagues–he replied courteously, although he declined to do so.

That is better than silence and infinitely better than abuse; however, it leaves fully intact the Fleet Street omertà whereby journalists demand transparency from every other institution while treating their own editorial conferences as inviolable mysteries. Conscience is permitted among Catholics such as Stanley and Rees-Mogg in their podcast confessional, but disclosure to the rest of the congregation is emphatically not. These are the penitents, then, but they’re hardly in sackcloth and ashes: one who confesses cruelty without comprehending its logistical amplification; one who confesses cowardice without naming the institution that frightened him; and one who will discuss conscience but not colleagues. I commend all three for feeling guilt–guilt is at least evidence that some moral sensation persists.

But none appears to understand exactly what he is guilty of, because each continues to imagine his action or inaction as an autonomous item rather than as one relay in a recursive system: this makes amends altogether surplus to its requirements, and consequently to their own. I will dig into them: the effect of publication became an input into the next act of publication. Their guilt is distributed because their agency was distributed—but distributed agency distributes responsibility; it does not abolish it. Across what used to be an aisle, but will soon enough if things carry on become a river of blood, sit those who have declined even this inadequate reckoning. Sarah Ditum wrote after Arday’s death that the press did not kill him; she did ‘not regret writing about Arday’, although she was sorry for him and ‘for all of us’ that he had been placed in such a position.

I’m sorry for her, too, with reasoning like that she must take several attempts to get through a door. Her defence is a befittingly hackneyed one: the allegations were newsworthy; the subject occupied a senior post at an elite university; journalists were doing their jobs. But nobody seriously has argued that the plagiarism allegations should never have been investigated–the accusation concerns scale, tone, sequencing, ridicule and the conversion of each reaction into permission for another attack. ‘I was doing my job’ answers the question of occupational identity while evading the question of cumulative effect. It also, Sarah, has obvious overtones of ‘I was only following orders.’ Orders that in this case, you didn’t even know the issuer of.

Julia Hartley-Brewer went further, responding after Arday’s death with the sort of posthumous derision that confirms the incapacity of ideological certainty to recognise a corpse as the terminus of an argument: she really would be in good company with Ku Klux Klan members who’d just lynched a Black person. Others on the right repeated that Arday alone was responsible for his death; that he had been a liar and fraud rightly exposed; that any suggestion of media culpability was emotional blackmail directed against–Oh! The horror!–journalism. The logic is immaculate because it is circular: the coverage was justified because Arday was guilty, and Arday’s guilt is demonstrated by the volume and confidence of the coverage. The persecution proves the offence for which persecution was required: it’s called a diallelus in reasoning, or a circular argument.

I’m not surprised these people deploy it, their only justification for anything at all is that they feel so very… justified. At the institutional-liberal end of the round-robin, The Guardian performed an apparently contrary but structurally identical manoeuvre. Its statement, as I’ve written above, asserted that its journalism had followed ‘months of careful review’, had been ‘nuanced and balanced’, and that it stood by its journalists. It then foregrounded the racialised social-media abuse suffered by Black reporters involved in the coverage. Such abuse is vile and should be condemned without qualification–however, its existence cannot function as retrospective absolution for the journalism itself. The fact that reporters were abused does not establish that their reporting was proportionate; any more than legitimate reporting of Arday’s possible misconduct established that every subsequent item was necessary.

Vulnerability is not a transferable moral credit–and the suffering of journalists cannot be used to cancel the suffering of their subject. So the right predictably doubles down because it cannot admit that an anti-DEI crusade, started by a racist and fomented by them, became a hunt. While the liberal press doubles down because it cannot admit that ‘nuanced and balanced’ articles may aggregate into persecution. So the few penitents beat their tits without examining the media physiology that made the tit-beating necessary. Everybody gets their corpus callosums in a twist, such that the hemispheres reverse themselves, and the right, supposedly devoted to individual responsibility, discovers distributed innocence for journalists acting collectively; the liberal left, supposedly alert to structural power, insists upon judging every article as an isolated individual act.

And this, Alan me old mucker, is the debate you wish to keep ‘within the media’. It consists of journalists recommitting themselves to their previous ideological positions–‘I am not a racist. I was only reporting. I was pursuing truth. I stand by my colleagues’.–or issuing apologies that preserve the fiction of autonomous professional agency. You and Leo preside over this dream of reality as though the old categories still corresponded to the mechanism: legitimate or illegitimate journalism, left or right, racist or anti-racist, careful reporting or social-media abuse. Meanwhile the recursive machine runs through every category and converts each defence, accusation, apology and counter-accusation into further inventory.

What the spectacle resembles overall is a little intramural tit-beating ceremony: Fleet Street thumping its own collective chest–sometimes penitentially, sometimes defiantly–almost as though this professional timpani might drown out the noise of public disgust. But the public can hear perfectly well–more importantly, it can see. It has watched journalism investigate everybody except itself, comfort its own afflicted and afflict anybody made sufficiently interesting by the metrics. You call this a debate? It’s the muffled snoring of a tired old industry dreaming that it is awake and chasing the evil rabbits of some forgotten era. My dear dead Jack Russell, when he got hold of anything–a stick, a slipper, a newspaper–would shake it as if his little life depended upon killing it. The British legacy media now resembles the object in the animal’s jaws.

The vicious little Jack Russell shaking it is social media–but social media is itself clamped in the jaws of a far larger dog: the magnificent seven technology companies and their stupendous market capitalisations, shaking the platforms for more churn, more arousal, more behavioural data and more capital return. Each dog experiences the convulsions transmitted through it as its own activity. Each imagines it has chosen to do the shaking, while completely failing to notice how it’s being… shaken. This is the Brocken spectre of contemporary modernity: a pseudo-intentional, recursive and distributed logistical system, magnified by the vapours through which we project it, which appears to possess a single malevolent will although it is constituted by countless situated acts. There need be no conspiracy.

The system can produce the phenomenology of concerted persecution out of competition, imitation, metrics, ideology, institutional cowardice and the ordinary libidinal pleasure of joining in good old ‘pile on’. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza approaches the other side of this apparatus in his powerful Substack essay, Who Killed Jason Arday? Zeleza, a Malawian-born historian, Africanist and former vice-chancellor with experience of both American and British higher education, is exceptionally well placed to describe the institutional manufacture of exemplary Black achievement. His formulation is devastating: Arday was eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinised as an anomaly and callously discarded as a liability. Cambridge made capital from the story of the youngest Black professor in its history; the story joined autism, late speech, poverty and apparently superhuman feats of endurance into an institutional allegory of transformation.

When the allegory became reputationally expensive, the institution announced another inquiry. Zeleza correctly arraigns the actors whom Barber and Rusbridger treat more abstractly: universities that substitute symbolic appointments for structural change; administrators who turn biography into branding; appointment and vetting systems that borrow the lustre of exceptional lives and then disclaim responsibility for having burnished them. His essay should be read. But his title also poses the difficulty. Who killed Jason Arday? invites the restoration of a sovereign intending subject at precisely the point where causation has become distributed. Even an account as institutionally sophisticated as Zeleza’s tends to allot intention to entities–Cambridge, DEI, the liberal university–which are themselves being operationalised by digital systems of recruitment, assessment, publicity, ranking and risk.

The sequence matters: Liverpool John Moores University had already investigated the plagiarism allegations and did not find Arday guilty of research misconduct. Cambridge later announced a fresh inquiry after receiving what it described as new information. I contend that the announcement was not a neutral administrative punctuation mark, because it changed the status of every allegation in the media field. Cambridge itself effectively licensed republication and supplied a fresh URL. It made the old material new, and the speculative material reportable. When Arday resigned, Cambridge had dropped the soon-to-be-dead donkey while retaining the posture of procedural rectitude. Whether or not that was anyone’s conscious intention, it was the institutional effect. At the Cambridge vigil, the university’s vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice, was heckled and jostled while attempting to speak.

That event, too, belongs in the sequence–not because intimidation should be romanticised, but because it showed the university’s attempt to remain the neutral custodian of a tragedy it had helped to structure was no longer credible to the crowd. Barber and Rusbridger discuss Cambridge’s DEI policies in generalities, they spoke of the rigorousness of academic panels they themselves had sat on, but they did not reconstruct the relay: appointment, promotion, publicity, allegation, prior inquiry, new inquiry, multiplying coverage, resignation, death, institutional condolence. Without the relay there is no causation, only opinion. British universities are not standing outside the digital transformation any more than British newspapers are. Why? Because they inhabit the same Potemkin village. It’s a funny old village, what with its ramifying institutions, the nameplates of which still say scholarship, judgement, tutorial, collegium.

Funny peculiar though, not ha-ha, because behind them operates a transactional machinery of online recruitment, clearing targets, league tables, student-satisfaction scores, electronic submission, plagiarism reports, digital marking, moderation trails, appeals, deferrals and retention metrics. In my fourteen years teaching in a British university, I was never permitted simply to fail a student whose work I believed had failed. I saw an essay containing twenty-seven per cent matched material survive the very plagiarism machinery ostensibly designed to guarantee probity. Arts and humanities students could pass terms while ‘writing’ two two-thousand-word essays and reading a pitiful number of books. Academics were sent on recruitment drives to China and India; departments watched recruitment figures arranged as competitive tables. As overseas demand weakened, the pressure to recruit and retain intensified.

Digital assessment does not by itself inflate grades, any more than a search box writes a persecutory headline. However, it does render academic work continuously measurable, reproducible, comparable, appealable and administratively visible. It makes every exercise of judgement an entry in a system whose other imperatives are recruitment, retention and customer satisfaction. In England, the proportion of first-class degrees rose from 15.5 per cent in 2010–11 to 32.8 per cent in 2021–22. The Office for Students calculated that half of those Firsts could not be explained by observable changes including entry qualifications and subject mix. The peak was intensified by the pandemic and has since fallen, but the level remains far above the earlier baseline. The curve establishes grade inflation. It does not, in and of itself, establish digitisation as the cause.

The causal claim is visible in the institutional circuitry: digital systems make the resistance of an individual examiner legible as friction and enable that friction to be managed away. The young journalists entering newsrooms have themselves passed through this transformed university. Many have read fewer whole books, written fewer sustained essays and become more practised in the manipulation of searchable fragments. Their senior editors have children who have passed through it–despite that, Rusbridger says he is not qualified to judge the seriousness of the plagiarism alleged against Arday, he treats the question as a technical mystery. It is not.

One can hold simultaneously that plagiarism matters and that Arday’s work deserved proper scrutiny and that Liverpool John Moores had not found him guilty of misconduct and that Cambridge was entitled to examine genuinely new evidence and that the public multiplication of accusations against a vulnerable autistic man became grotesquely disproportionate. What the digital university and the digital newsroom share is their preference for the similarity score, the count, the rank and the procedural audit over difficult acts of situated judgement. Try reading Emile Durkheim on suicide, Alan, it’s all you, personally, need to know about sociology in order to judge the media’s treatment of vulnerable Black autistic man. You do have a Cambridge degree in English Literature after all, just like Oor Andy. But neither of you are literary types, really, which is just as well given the British literary world participates in the same pretence.

Newspapers, universities and publishing houses retain their historic names, buildings, hierarchies and rituals, as if gyroscopically mounted to preserve their old equilibrium while the world rotates violently around them. Journalists continue to speak as if they report upon a reality independent of their reports. Academics continue to speak as if they assess work independent of the systems through which it is submitted, checked, ranked and monetised. And editors continue to defend each item separately when the accusation concerns the recursive whole. This is why Rusbridger’s closing wish–to keep the debate within the media and away from social media–is so perfectly, terribly wrong. There is no longer any ‘within the media’ that excludes social media.

Nor is there a university outside the digital marketplace, or a Guardian outside the attention economy, or an autistic subject outside the networked gaze that made his life simultaneously inspirational copy, ideological evidence, searchable allegation and spectacle. The first task is for Oor Andy to stop eating chips, unrumple the old newsprint they’re wrapped in, and ironing it properly in the form of an independent public inquiry capable of examining the whole causal chain: university governance and appointment; the sequencing of Cambridge’s decisions; newsroom knowledge of Arday’s autism and the safeguarding warnings; editorial commissioning; headline construction and SEO; traffic and engagement data; the transmission of material between social and legacy media; and the adequacy of IPSO and internal complaints procedures.

Barber and Rusbridger are resistant to statutory intervention, political involvement and even meaningful scrutiny by a genuinely independent regulator. But a profession cannot claim the right to investigate every other institution while reserving the investigation of itself to conversations among its retired commanders. The second task is moral rather than procedural. Journalists must recover the experience of discomfort: not the performative discomfort of confessing that ‘the media’ went too far, but the intimate discomfort of asking what one’s own article did after it left one’s hands. Then what the next journalist did with its effects, what warning was received and discounted, what vulnerability was known, what pleasure was taken in the chase, and finally what institutional interest was served by calling each new convulsion news.

Jason Arday was converted into an object of distributed regard: race helped select the object—ableism helped make his vulnerability illegible. Universities inflated the symbolic figure and then protected themselves from its collapse. Legacy journalism did what it does best nowadays: supplying the authority that produces much, much more repetition. Social media may well have supplied velocity, appetite and apparent public warrant, but the same platforms that support the entire legacy media supplied the architecture of recurrence. And most importantly, it’s capital–which knows no borders, allegiances and disabilities, while recognising vulnerabilities only to then exploit them–that supplied the command: MORE. No one dog needs to have intended the killing, but the thing in their jaws is dead.

All they can do is cast around for somewhere to bury it, before walking off in that slightly embarrassed way that dogs do when they’ve just done a big, bad shit.

Originally published as SITREP No. 025 on X on 21 August 2026. Read the original on X.

In Orwell’s 1984, Oceania is perpetually at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia: the enemy’s face, contorted by mondial belligerence, changes–the war does not. Why? Because victory is neither expected nor desirable. The distant conflict is doing vital work: consuming the products of industrial society, thereby maintaining the required scarcity to discipline the population. Moreover, the endless war acts as a condenser which supplies the emotional voltage discharged during the Two Minutes Hate. Orwell understood that permanent war could preserve a political economy by destroying its surplus. He also grasped that hatred must be refreshed continually, lest the citizen begin examining the condition of his own life, so find that it, too, is hateful.

This was a meaningful prolepsis; and Orwell’s twentieth-century imagination–formed by total war and the centralised bureaucratic state–naturally installed an Inner Party behind the apparatus. Someone had to change the newspaper archives, redirect the hatred and decide that Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Our wars also have euphemistic ministries (the one of ‘defence’ comes to mind), supposedly ‘high’ commands and identifiable profiteers, yet their perpetuity no longer requires an Inner Party capable of comprehending the whole. States, markets, military planners, media organisations, weapons manufacturers, investors and frightened electorates respond to one another recursively. The coordination is real, but the coordinating intelligence is spectral.

That is distributed recursive pseudo-intentionality: the history-maker in the dromodronological era. It produces the effects of a design without requiring a designer equal to them. The latest turn in the bond markets casts an unusually harsh light on this process. The Wall Street Journal announces a ‘return to normality’: thirty-year American Treasury yields at levels last seen in 2007, French yields back around 2008, German yields around 2011, Japanese yields at their highest since 1996. Since the era of negligible rates was historically peculiar, the Journal unreasons, their restoration should improve the allocation of capital.

These are no longer the rates of the world before yesterday, meaning 2007. They are approaching the rates of Zweig’s World of Yesterday: the Habsburg twilight, when money cost between four and six per cent and everyone mistook the continuity of the bond market for the continuity of the world. The world of 2007 has vanished just as completely as that of 1914–or just as incompletely, given its lessons haven’t yet been learned. American federal debt held by the public has risen from thirty-two per cent of GDP in 2008 to around one hundred per cent. Governments, households, banks, property markets and private-equity structures have spent nearly two decades arranging themselves around cheap refinancing: the entire economy has been on the installment plan, so the same interest rate now acts upon a qualitatively different quantity of claims. What looks like restoration on the graph is really acceleration in the system.

Trust is the substance being repriced: with everyone asking for tick, it pays not to be choosy when you hand it out. A bond asks us to surrender purchasing power today for a promise extending ten, twenty or thirty years into the future. Rising yields register the increasing price of believing that governments can preserve the value and social meaning of that promise: the government may well be looking you in the eye, and swearing to pay you back–but that eye is sinisterly bloodshot, while the flesh surrounding it is puffy with unsaturated fat. You agree to extend its credit, but debt service then raises the cost of government, requiring further issuance, which may demand still higher yields: I mean, c’mon, government, you gotta show me you’re, like, good for it. Fiscal suspicion thus begins manufacturing the fiscal deterioration it claims merely to detect.

Britain supplies the domestic sequel of this jittery state of financial health: CPI inflation rose to 2.9 per cent in July, CPIH to 3.1 per cent and RPI to 3.2 per cent. The Middle Eastern war has already passed through the energy system into household prices; refined-petroleum output prices were still thirty per cent higher than a year earlier. The October energy cap is forecast to rise by roughly four per cent, taking bills to their highest level for three years, with further pressure expected during winter. The Gulf War takes place in the Gulf, but it also takes place in the Stockwell electricity bill.

As a cancer sufferer, largely withdrawn from salaried employment and living from resources whose nominal value is comparatively fixed, I feel this as something more immediate than a macroeconomic argument. Inflation is the endless war of attrition domesticated: macroeconomics in the form of water that remains obstinately tepid. It does not confiscate one’s security at a stroke: it siphons it bit-by-bit: heating, food, transport, insurance–each another small surrender of futurity.

The economically conscious consumer is thereby inducted, by easy stages, into the same bad infinity. He watches the interest-rate decision and outsources his faith to the expectation that government or central bank action will eventually restore equilibrium. This near-unconscious mental operation performed, he continues consuming on credit because falling rates are always-already about to lighten the burden of yesterday’s consumption. Falling rates encourage more debt; the resulting demand strengthens the conditions that may keep rates high. I am hardly much of a consumer nowadays, but that scarcely matters given Western economies have geared their operational existence to anticipated demand.

I must be hunted down and forced to spend: a serious withdrawal from consumption threatens others’ employment, corporate entities’ asset prices, the whining, importuning government’s tax receipts and the vast architecture of claims erected upon tomorrow’s purchases. At this point, the government having squealed its safety word ‘raise the rate!’,  the dominatrix sneaks into the room. She is the climate emergency, and the curious bondage kink of the American economy consists in pretending that submission to material limits is another stimulus to growth. Yes indeedy: fire, flood, failed harvest, migration and energy insecurity tighten the girths of these five horsemen’s steeds: yet they remain champing at their bits, the apocalypse paradoxically forestalled by the economy’s response: a demand for more extraction, more data centres, more strategic minerals, more debt, more weapons and more consumption. Every instance of Divine wrath becomes an investment opportunity; every tightening of the planetary constraint call forth a fresh sacrifice on the high altar of finance, accompanied by the devout prayer to technology that this capital expenditure will enlarge the future.

War is peculiarly suited to this quasi-religious dilemma: world military expenditure reached nearly $2.9 trillion in 2025, its eleventh consecutive annual increase. The United States spent about $954 billion; its proposed national-defence budget for 2026 exceeded a trillion. Such expenditure sustains factories, research, logistics, energy demand and employment without encountering the embarrassment of satisfied need, ‘cause you can never have too many guns given the way the world’s turning, and those steeds are champing. Civil consumption can falter—but praise God and pass the ammunition: security can never be completed, since each weapon verifies the necessity of the weapon answering it.

The ordinary account of war profiteering remains stuck at the gate of a factory whose nominal owner must be Willy Wonka: here is where someone corners the market in shells, oil, bully beef, or Wonka bars. However, the deeper and more significant economic function of protracted low-attrition war lies in its capacity to titrate the loss of trust. It releases planetary crisis in measured doses: a drone strike here, an energy shock there, another bond issue, another emergency appropriation, another authenticated atrocity in the feed. The nuclear apocalypse would end the circuits once and for all,  while peace is far from a desideratum, as it would expose the unresolved question of what those circuits are for. Endless war preserves the interval in which deterioration remains financeable.

Crypto belongs inside this mondial finangling structure, although it does not set it in motion. Bitcoin becomes an accelerator when rising rates and fiscal distrust encourage capital to seek an apparent refuge outside sovereign promises. They do this, and the price of crypto currencies rises; that rise is read as verification of the distrust that produced it; further money follows. The flight becomes its own publicity: like a billboard displaying the inside of a passenger jet’s cabin, the stewardesses smiling, rather than the thunderheads outside the porthole.

Crypto’s celebrated substitution of verification for trust is at once exact and, duh, totally insufficient. It’s perfectly true that the blockchain can verify that a transaction occurred according to determined protocol; however, it cannot guarantee the future value of the asset, the habitability of the planet or the survival of the social order in which the claim might be redeemed. Current bond prices imply a vast statue of Donald J Trump will be discovered millennia hence, and once dug up future humanity will marvel at his ataraxic features, as he stares down any future uncertainty. Contemporary warfare performs an analogous manoeuvre to this petrifying of the future: satellites verify coordinates; drones verify impacts; intelligence systems authenticate targets; expenditure tables verify delivery. None can say what victory would mean, or why anyone millennia hence would even want to disinter a statue of Donald J Trump.

Of course, governments do not consciously go to war in order to defeat Bitcoin or revive retail sales. Such a claim would return us to the position of either willing or coerced cadres in Orwell’s omniscient Inner Party. Rather, the pressure is systemic: as consumer demand weakens, sovereign credibility drains away and capital finds new routes of exit, such that securitised expenditure becomes one of the few forms of demand that government can expand while presenting it as unavoidable. War borrows in the name of survival, absorbs industrial capacity, commands technological investment and converts ecological scarcity into enemy action. Even as the government announces its trustworthiness by raining death on the hated infidel, the resulting debt further erodes whatever trust its citizens–and markets–still possess, thereby intensifying the search for assets apparently beyond the state.

The Two Minutes Hate and the eternal war have consequently escaped from the telescreen to promiscuously circulate through markets, platforms, encrypted ledgers, sanctions regimes, energy futures and automated targeting systems. Hatred supplies the intentional enemy, but rather than zero in and kill (or cum, if we wish to retain the sexual imagery) finance supplies the endless deferral, or ‘edging’ as I believe it’s called. Verification keeps each local operation credible while the totality becomes less believable: just like any perversion.

Trust once projected a commonly inhabited future–which is why it’s so essential for potentially nurturing relationships. Verification allows operations to continue after confidence in that future has begun to disappear: it is the trust of perverts, just as sadists always kill the thing they love. Crypto verifies claims without guaranteeing the world in which they are redeemable; war verifies targets without supplying a political end. Together they express a civilisation increasingly capable of authenticating every transaction and impact, while progressively unable to warrant the totality those transactions and impacts compose. The analogy with the sexual incontinence and perversity of our era is inescapable: the world keeps swiping right on the app, then getting beaten up on the date. Once it’s recovered, it does it again… and again.

Endless war titrates the collapse of institutional trust by converting an unmanageable planetary crisis into an indefinitely renewable succession of verifiable threats, expenditures and petits morts. People used to say economics wasn’t very sexy. How right they were.

Prime Minister, You have been in office for less than a month. It would therefore be absurd to hold you responsible for the events that preceded the death of Professor Jason Arday. But you have already said something about his death that makes what happens next your responsibility. You called it a tragedy 'on so many levels'. More importantly, you said this was a moment for 'reflecting on how things came to this.' You are right to say this, and right to say it now, because you entered Downing Street promising a politics that might work again: government conducted seriously, rationally and in the interests of the public rather than as another theatre for the manufacture of attention. You have made a reasonable beginning, and whatever our misgivings about the mood music that's piped you into No 10, we wish you well: why wouldn't we?

There are Russian warships in the Channel and a hebephrenic in the White House, and while nothing you've said so far suggests you have a true apprehension of the scale of the crisis this country is facing, or the changes necessary not only in institutions, but in the individuals they incubate, nonetheless: you have asked the right question about Jason Arday, we propose to take you seriously. So, while you muse—we roll up our sleeves and get to work: this may not be a murder investigation in any straightforward sense, but there is genuine culpability here, and anyone who has ever been involved in investigating a crime will tell you that if the perpetrator or perpetrators are to be brought to justice, speed is of the essence. So, while you merely ask: How did things come to this? We intend to find out.

Because reflection cannot terminate in reflection—and it needn't: the history of public inquiries in this country is an index of failure in an important respect: justice is seldom seen to be done, because the underlying moral consensus simply isn't present. So, while facts are gathered in great quantity, and they do eventually result in conclusions; and yes, in the course of time—sometimes years, in the case of Hillsborough, decades—conclusions entail judgments; and those judgments entail consequences, the consequences for the individual malefactors have become necessarily a diminished thing: the sheer amount of time has shifted the entire social situation so completely.

Kafka's aphorism captures perfectly the diseased condition of the British state's capacity for self-reflection: 'Leopards invade the precincts of the temple and desecrate the sacred vessels; this happens so regularly it becomes incorporated in the ritual.' If what happened to Jason Arday discloses a systemic failure involving our universities, newspapers, digital media and the treatment of vulnerable people, then this country requires more than condolences, and much more than an interminable inquiry. I believe the gravamen may well exist for members of the media circus who, laughing at their own 'jokes', tapped away steadily, and in the process psychically drove nails into this vulnerable man, to face prosecution.

We call upon your government to establish a full independent public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the treatment and death of Jason Arday: into the conduct of the institutions involved; the warnings given concerning his vulnerability; the decisions taken after those warnings; and, above all, the interaction between the legacy media and the digital attention systems with which they have become coupled. However, even before this is done the CPS should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers. This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one. Nor is this an attempt to establish Jason Arday's innocence of allegations concerning plagiarism and other academic misconduct: on this matter we need to be absolutely clear: He may not have been innocent.

Be that as it may, every single person who contributed to the harassment of Arday should now be feeling guilty, which in turn should—quite possibly for the first time in their lives—give them the basic orientation necessary to understand that: you don't have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed. That distinction—fundamental to the exercise of justice—is where we begin. Which leads us in turn to our first observation: Arday was the quarry—perfectly true; but more importantly, his accuser, Nathan Cofnas, had an agon with Cambridge University before Jason Arday ever became his quarry. Cofnas is a philosopher—of sorts—and self-described race realist. He has argued for what he calls a 'hereditarian revolution'. He has publicly contended that in conditions he considers genuinely meritocratic, the number of Black professors at an institution such as Harvard would approach zero.

This isn't merely an eccentric contribution to the philosophy of education: Black academics have called Cofnas's views racist, and we emphatically agree with them. Before Nathan Cofnas ever opened Jason Arday's thesis, he had already constructed an intellectual scheme (I can't dignify it with the ascription 'theory') in which the presence of Black people in elite academic positions was itself liable to be interpreted as evidence of the corruption of merit by diversity policies. And here came the lamb to the slaughter—or, more disgustingly, the ace entered the hole—for Jason Arday was not just any Black academic: he was a celebrated Black professor at Cambridge: autistic, socially disadvantaged in childhood, the possessor of an extraordinary biography of difficulty overcome; precisely the sort of figure through whom universities have liked to advertise their commitment to widening participation.

Arday was a living affront to Cofnas's quasi-theory. Then Cofnas found plagiarism. We are not going to evade this fact—on the contrary, it is indispensable to our accusations. It's perfectly conceivable that a politically motivated investigator can discover something true; or that a racist can uncover genuine wrongdoing. It follows that a defective institution can be exposed by somebody who has defective reasons for wanting to expose it. Then the very nature of what Cofnas was doing changed, in so doing revealing the white hood veiling Cofnas's white face. If Cofnas were in good faith plagiarism would have remained plagiarism: he would have reported it to the relevant authorities and let their disciplinary procedures do the necessary work.

Instead, he presented what he had discovered as a social media post entitled 'DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.' The question became not simply whether Arday had plagiarised, but whether Arday was a 'real scholar'. Moreover, the coupling of diversity, equity and inclusion with fraud was already a dog-whistle for Cofnas's underlying prejudice: for him there can be no equality with genetically-determined stupid Black people. The person had begun to replace the offence: and the fact that he was a Black person was material: the quarry was loose—but it was a quarry Cofnas already hunted, a quarry that was already in his sights. There were—and remain—entirely legitimate questions for Cambridge to answer. British academia is not in good health. I should know: I worked in the British higher education sector for fourteen years, until taking early retirement due to my cancer.

When I began teaching, I was shocked by the illiteracy of the students; when I finished teaching, I was shocked by the illiteracy of the academics. The promise of the Blair government to send fifty per cent of the population into higher education could have been the dawn of a new age in cognition, intellection and imagination. However, all political desiderata need to be set against the unforeseen consequences of technological innovations. The objective of colossally raising the educational attainments of Britons coincided with the inauguration of a technological assemblage whose wide—indeed, universal—use resulted in a progressive deterioration of just those faculties. I watched these cognitive and ethical deformations in real time.

But even if we don't want to consider at this stage quite how the Academy went belly-up to digital, and in so doing sacrificed its most integral quality for quantity, there's another way of looking at this civilisational debacle. British university managements, possessing the freedom to seek fee-paying customers in their new role as quasi-autonomous corporations, opted to maximise business sponsorship, student-loan revenue and fee revenue from overseas students in a way that was entirely invidious in respect of academic standards. For anyone with a conscience who's worked in academia over the past twenty years, the fact that it's the right wing that have made the running in terms of understanding what has gone wrong with academia is itself an indictment. In fact, the deterioration of academic and intellectual life in this country is everyone's responsibility—including yours, Prime Minister.

Not least because you yourself are a Cambridge University graduate in English literature, and therefore possess precisely the right skill set to parse the gibberish of contemporary social-media discourse, analyse it properly, and therefore comprehend what it represents. It pains me to write this, but the usual poisoned-pen portrait of woke academics who don't understand that they are hypocrites in promoting ideas of diversity, equality and inclusion is, comparatively speaking, restrained. The real hypocrisy lies in the fact that academic salaries have come from links with business, foreign students' fees and other sources whose revenue streams are predicated on the deterioration of just that trio of collective social virtues.

Over a decade ago I was told by a senior professor at Cambridge that the majority of students in his seminars were placements paid for by Big Pharma and that they in turn paid absolutely no attention at all to what he had to tell them about the history and philosophy of science. It's these doctoral students who go on to produce pseudo-peer-reviewed papers that provide the fraudulent justification for the rollout of their paymasters' nostrums. British academia's bureaucratisation, managerialism, precarious employment, degraded standards, ideological conformities and dependence upon public relations have indeed created precisely the circumstances in which figures may be elevated for reasons that have insufficient connection with scholarship, but personal plagiarism is merely the shitty tip of an excremental iceberg—no: a fatberg of greasy concupiscence between academia and corporate finance, private donors and extractive fee structures.

We have written about this before and will do so again, because nothing in what follows requires us to pretend otherwise than that the situation overall is parlous in the extreme. Nor does opposition to racism oblige us to subscribe to every doctrine concerning race circulating through contemporary universities: we emphatically do not. That is precisely why Jason Arday is a signature case. The allegations Cofnas made were investigated; more allegations followed—Cambridge announced an investigation, and Arday duly resigned. But unlike other notable plagiarists—academic, journalistic, literary, scientific—the investigation did not stop there, having defined its object: rather, its object embiggened—it gorged itself on its own yummy appetite for malfeasance. So, the review of his scholarship became a postmortem on his career.

Then, in a further grotesque mutation, he and his career became synonymous, such that what was now being litigated was his autobiography. This entailed digging into his charitable activities, and through this his sporting claims were disinterred and sifted through; next, in a further deformation of the quest for justice into a racist, disablist manhunt, Arday's claims about racist intimidation became material for investigation. On a personal and judgmental note, I can tell those journalists who undertook these investigations that they were trespassing on some of the most sensitive areas in an autistic individual's life and being. Autistic people are not like neurotypical people in one important and perenduring respect: the relationship between autobiographical memory, social identity and the continuing sense of self may be differently constituted.

Neurotypical biography is continually reconstructed through live social situations; autistic identity may be less securely mediated by this continuous social reconstruction, while autobiographical memory and the interpretation of defining events can bear an unusual weight in maintaining a sense of continuity across a life. To challenge wholesale an autistic person's account of the facts of their life can therefore amount to something considerably more invasive than ordinary fact-checking: it can become an assault upon the narrative structures through which that person understands who they are. And all the while another production was underway: one inexorable due to its taking place in a hall of mirrors, and with a cast of narcissists. The name of the show? 'People Are Watching'. Billy Wilder understood this seventy-five years ago.

In his film, Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas plays a typically unprincipled hack, Chuck Tatum, who discovers a man trapped underground and realises that his predicament can be converted into a story. Once published, the story attracts a physical crowd: the size of the crowd embiggens the story; and because the story is bigger, prolonging the predicament becomes valuable. A human calamity becomes an asset—sound familiar? But Wilder's production was a primitive mid-twentieth-century one: Tatum could see the crowd gathering outside the mine—so he filed another piece; contemporary journalists can see the crowd forming everywhere and nowhere: minute by minute, graph by graph, share by share by re-share by tweet and re-tweet... until, like, man, everyone's buzzing! Although the more common expression for this state is 'going viral'.

I wonder how many of those who use it as an approbation realise that the condition they are invoking is inherently diseased. The reason being that editors in the legacy media may still consider whether the news is fit to print; but since they believe all the news is already printed, they look not into their conscience as to what should be said about it, but rather into what is termed nowadays 'the grid'; namely what went viral yesterday; what provoked anger; what was screen-shotted; mocked; reposted and contested; what 'really' got people worked up—and no doubt the hacks get worked up in the process of considering those worked-up potential readers (the organic component of their revenue stream, their status, their own immiserated sense of self), and then they take a look at what rival newspapers and websites are publishing and that gets them worked up still more.

And here an old and indispensable distinction collapses: the public interest is not the same thing as the public being interested. Heidegger observes that interest derives from 'inter-esse', being-among or being-in-the-midst-of things; yet the merely 'interesting', he argues, is precisely what may become indifferent to us in the very next moment. The paradox of the grid is thus that the more interested everybody becomes, the less anybody need remain concerned. Public interest requires us to remain with things; the interesting requires only that we click on them before moving on. But the contemporary media system increasingly cannot tell them apart, such that—you guessed it—the public interest becomes, definitionally, what the public finds interesting. It turns out it's actually the bread and circuses that tell you you're living in a decadent and increasingly evil empire.

One in which the newspaper publishes, social media responds, the newspaper measures the response, the measured response becomes an input into the next editorial decision, another article is commissioned, the grid responds again, the response becomes larger because the story has become larger, the story becomes larger because the response has become larger. Throughout all of this no editor needs to command the process, no conspiracy is necessary, everybody is simply responding to everybody else. Everyone is only responding, so their consciences are as pellucidly clear... as their computer screens; because nobody could possibly be held accountable, no one needs to hold themselves responsible. However, the inconvenient truth is that somebody wrote every word, somebody commissioned every article, somebody wrote every headline, somebody pressed send, knowing fine well someone else would publish.

They knew this while at the same time also being in full possession of these facts: they knew Jason Arday was autistic, they knew he was Black, they knew he was vulnerable; and by this stage nobody involved could plausibly have been unaware that the attention was hurting him. At least one 'journalist' 'investigating' Arday had been explicitly told by a police officer not to contact him again because the contact was affecting Arday's mental health. How obscene is this, exactly? Even without the additional vulnerability of neurodiversity, persisting in unwanted contact with somebody when you have been expressly told that the contact is affecting their mental health begins to look less like investigation and more like abuse. For precisely this reason, people around Arday have said that warnings were given to the media about the risks of continuing.

On 31st July, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen—Arday's friend and colleague, and one of this country's foremost researchers into autism—publicly asked the media to leave him alone. Baron-Cohen said he could hear that Arday was struggling; identified him explicitly as a vulnerable autistic man; and warned that his own research showed autistic people to be at heightened risk of suicide. Thereafter nobody participating in the pursuit could plausibly claim that the danger had not been publicly identified. Yet they did not stop. Scrupulous to a virtue, Baron-Cohen did not deny the necessity of investigating academic misconduct. That is why his intervention matters; he said, in effect: investigate the plagiarism, certainly—but stop kicking the autistic man who is already on the ground.

And that's how I picture it: a small crowd of largely white, comfortably middle-class journalists—indeed, in the case of many of the women columnists, such is the disproportion of their emolument, expensively shod—kicking a prone Black disabled man; and surrounding them a much larger, largely white crowd of onlookers, egging them on to look still more. Nice. It reminds me of a still more terrible scene in William Faulkner's Light in August. Joe Christmas, a man whose supposed Black ancestry remains radically uncertain, is hunted down by Percy Grimm, shot, and then castrated as he lies dying. Faulkner allows Christmas his moment: as the blood rushes from his body, his face and eyes retain their own impenetrable composure before the men who have destroyed him. The scene is not an analogy of scale or atrocity; it is an image of the racialised object returning the gaze of those who have made him one. Arday can no longer stare back at them.

I can—and I intend to. J'Accuse. You may not have the erotic potential to die like President Faure was rumoured to've done, but, Prime Minister, while there is no sense in claiming that Jason Arday was in some direct equivalent sense the Dreyfus of our era, there is no doubt in my mind that Simon Baron-Cohen is our Picquart, so make him yours. There was an honourable insider; there was somebody who understood both the legitimacy of the investigation and the vulnerability of its object and who—unlike the kickers and the castrators—recognised that the one had emphatically ceased to justify the other. Moreover, he said so publicly and loudly. What followed therefore cannot simply be described as ignorance, even if it discloses the British media to be populated, to a remarkable degree, by moral aments.

The chilling conclusion is that many individuals in contemporary Britain who consider themselves to be entirely ordinary men and women are themselves also moral aments. Christopher Browning called his great study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 Ordinary Men. It was a comprehensive account of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police whose members participated in mass shootings and deportations of Jews in occupied Poland. Browning set out to discover whether the Nazi murderers were psychopaths or ordinary individuals placed in extraordinary situations. Although nothing done to Jason Arday is commensurable with the crimes Browning described, and no historical equivalence is intended between the activities of the British legacy media and Himmler's SS, nonetheless there is a revealing congruence.

Browning's question was how ordinary human beings participate in collective wrongdoing without each participant needing to be an extraordinary monster. Our question is different but investigates precisely the same phenomenon: what happens when ordinary journalists, ordinary editors, ordinary readers and ordinary social-media users become components in a system which rewards each participant simply for continuing? They knew it hurt him, so they did it again. They knew it would hurt others, so they did it again. Crucially: they knew that hurting others made other people feel good, so they did it again. And eventually the necessary alteration in their own psyches had taken place: the conditioning had worked, they believed Big Brother, and so they did it because making other people feel good made them feel good—meanwhile, in an unsurprisingly inverse correlation, nothing else began to make them feel good, especially actually being good.

This explains why nobody had to want Jason Arday dead—they only had to want to feel good. And we all want to feel good, don't we? The columnist receives the pleasure of applause, the reader receives the righteous pleasure of pay-per-rant indignation, the editor receives the pleasure of having made a successful—i.e. popular—commission. Meanwhile, the social-media participant receives the pleasure of recognition: but that's enough, because the newspaper receives traffic, the platform registers engagement, each node in these networks receives a tiny reward, even as the bytes are packet-switched, so these tiny rewards concatenate. This is what we mean by distributed pseudo-intentionality: no individual participant needs to intend the aggregate outcome, given the network coordinates locally gratifying acts into behaviour possessing the appearance of a monstrous collective intention.

The next iteration is generated because the previous iteration generated attention. And then something still more sinister happens: evidence that the pursuit is hurting its object itself becomes content, such that his pain becomes another story, and objections to the coverage—no matter from whom—become another controversy. The controversy generates another commission. We have received eyewitness reports that The Times went further still, advertising its Arday investigation on London's buses. If confirmed, the investigation had ceased merely to report upon its object: the pursuit itself had become a product, publicly advertised in the city in which its object lived. The attempt to stop the machine feeds the machine.

This makes the intervention of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, even more significant: the moral clarity of his language comes as a welcome relief after the almost complete failure of the legacy media—with the notable exception of Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times—to get anywhere close to an admission of culpability. Syed's intervention is interesting precisely because he admits to a sin of omission rather than commission. He tells us that, through his sister, he knew Arday; that she had urged him to intervene, to call for the coverage to stop and to make a statement in Arday's support; and that he failed to do so. His mea culpa therefore consists in acknowledging that, confronted with something he believed had gone too far, he remained silent. His own newspaper, however, in its institutional editorial voice, has completely failed to undertake the same exercise.

Rather, it doubles down on the proposition that the public interest warranted the continuing investigation of Arday's alleged malfeasance, instead of turning that same investigative attention upon its own conduct. To reiterate a trope long established in British journalism for explaining just such snafus: you couldn't make it up. This is the devilish diplopia of contemporary media: legacy media staring at social media while social media stares back at legacy media, each seeing its own reflection in the other's eye and mistaking that reflection for independent evidence of what matters. This is how the metric becomes an emotion; such that eventually nobody knows whether they are producing the crowd or merely joining it. So let us begin to name names. This list is preliminary: our investigation is beginning, not ending, and we will correct factual errors, we will publish substantive answers.

Anyone named by us is welcome to explain their conduct. But we will not accept the proposition that because responsibility was distributed, responsibility disappeared. J'accuse Nathan Cofnas of selecting Jason Arday as an object within a pre-existing racial and political agon concerning Cambridge, merit and Black achievement; and of converting evidence of plagiarism into evidence for his larger contention concerning DEI and Black academics.

As we've already noted, but must here reiterate: Cofnas had already publicly argued that genuinely meritocratic elite universities would contain virtually no Black professors, so Arday did not arrive in his field of vision as an intellectually neutral object: he arrived as an apparent living contradiction of a theory Cofnas had already formulated, and the discovery of plagiarism then became for him not simply evidence of plagiarism, but evidence that the racial and institutional theory had been right all along. J'accuse Allison Pearson of converting the destruction of an individual academic's reputation into ideological entertainment, presenting 'the Cambridge fantasist' as evidence that 'stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain'; which, en passant, is self-evidently the oxymoronic formation of a moron. Nor does this language occur in isolation.

Pearson has repeatedly represented contemporary social liberalism as a pathology: she has written of an 'evil trans ideology', of schools indoctrinating children, and of immigration and Islam through a register of civilisational threat; in 2024 she notoriously misidentified a photograph of Pakistani political supporters as involving 'Jew haters', prompting a police investigation into an allegation of stirring up racial hatred—an investigation later dropped. Arday thus enters a pre-existing Pearsonian theatre in which minority claims, progressive institutions and the people associated with them are habitually represented not merely as mistaken but as contaminating the national body. J'accuse Camilla Long of converting Arday into an emblem through which to sneer not merely at academic misconduct but at the very categories—Black, deprived, marginal—through which his life had been publicly understood.

The method is hardly anomalous in her journalism: even today she can write of asylum seekers that 'we must now also give them our women, our bodies', ask why Britain should be 'turned into Mogadishu', and move from the arrival of male refugees to rape, harassment and danger to British women. One need not dispute every factual concern about migration to recognise the rhetorical technique: populations become types, types become threats, and individual complexity is dissolved into a cartoon whose emotional utility lies precisely in its capacity to provoke. Arday underwent the same conversion from person into exemplary type: it's called dehumanization, Camilla-baby, and it's a lot worse than being patronised. J'accuse Sarah Ditum of personalising ridicule even while acknowledging concerns about the effect journalistic pursuit was having upon Arday's mental health.

Ditum's case is yet more remarkably confused than this: because she cannot plead ignorance of the machinery in which she was participating—Ditum recognises she is an organic component of inexorable processes: she's written an entire bloody book, Toxic, about the cruelty inflicted upon vulnerable people when a ravenous press pack couples itself to an emergent digital attention economy. Ditum's protected minority were famous women who, in her publisher's description, were never more vulnerable than when they were in crisis. A crisis that takes the form of the destruction of privacy by means of stimulating the public consumption of breakdown. And she isn't immune to this blood-craze delirium, as we've seen: her own newsletter announces that the internet has driven her 'insane'. Hear-hear! But you can't, like many another modern malefactor, simply convert being bad into being mad, Ditum: you're bad. Now get offline.

You knew the machine because you anatomised it—yet confronted with Jason Arday you couldn't acknowledge that another journalist had been told by police that contact was affecting his mental health without turning even this into 'a joke' about whether you ought to hand yourself in before publishing a hostile review. You should have: because whether or not you experienced attempts to exclude you from public discourse because of your controversial opinions; nothing you experienced prevented you, when another much more vulnerable and unpopular person became the object of the machine you understand so very well, from buckling up for this highly-popular and exterminatory mission. Are you laughing now, Ditum? Taking another sip of wine, and exchanging a mal mot with some other member of this debased and rotting commentariat? J'accuse Madeline Grant of also treating the affair as comedy: another 'hilarious' story about charlatan academics.

Her own published record makes the framing of her perverse ideological perspective unusually explicit. She has written of 'peak woke' as the high-water mark of 'Americanised racial politics dictating every aspect of public life'; described post-BLM institutional responses as exercises in self-abasement; attacked Church of England slavery reparations; written of an 'ADHD racket'; and complained of an 'elite empathy problem' in which comfortable England supposedly lavishes sympathy upon migrants while refusing to hear communities frightened by them. Arday therefore appeared in a body of work already organised around a recurrent comic drama: credulous institutions, fashionable minorities, bogus victimhood and the brave writer who sees through them. Her description of his downfall as a summer amusement was not an aberration from that drama but its consummation.

It's the summer of tittering, it would seem—and we know who 'titterers' are: people who take blood sports seriously, because they don't take anyone's life seriously enough. J'accuse Melissa Kite of turning Arday into a lovable conman, an entertainment through whom the supposed obsessions of contemporary education with minorities and disability could themselves be mocked. In her case I make the charge more narrowly: I have not found the same sustained quasi-ideological programme visible in Pearson, Grant or Green, but rather a recurrent journalistic persona that converts public questions into farce and treats credulity itself as the joke. That is precisely why her 'Go on my son!' response to Arday matters: the human subject vanishes behind the entertainment value of the imposture, and disability and minority status become merely components in the elaborate scam she invites the reader to enjoy.

I wonder if she also enjoys meeting her readers: getting together so they can all make each other laugh about 'cripples' and n—s: it doesn't seem remotely implausible to me. J'accuse Dominic Green of calling Arday a 'mythomaniac' and making him an exemplary figure in a larger ideological narrative concerning the destruction of institutions. Green's larger corpus leaves little doubt about that narrative. He has described major writers on critical race theory as 'imposters', compared exposure to their ideas to getting cancer or crashing an aeroplane, characterised intersectionality as racial grievance grafted onto Marxism, and described DEI professionals as a 'priesthood' imposing a faith upon everyone else. Writing about Zohran Mamdani, he moved readily from affirmative action to the language of fakery, describing the structures of racial preference as incentivising people to 'make it by faking it'.

Jason Arday could hardly have been designed more perfectly for this pre-existing theory: the Black academic whose alleged personal falsifications become proof that the entire institutional dispensation which admitted him was itself fraudulent. What I find most extraordinary about many of the accusations against Arday is that, quite frankly, they could be made against almost any of the academics that I have come across in the arts and social sciences in the past twenty years; need I add that the vast majority of these people were, as I believe, the fashionable ascription puts it 'White British.' J'accuse Nigel Biggar of passing from criticism of conduct to diagnosis of the person, writing of a man trapped in fantasy and 'awaiting Nemesis'—a Nemesis Biggar was implicitly summoning.

Biggar, too, arrived with an established agon: his later career has been substantially devoted to combating 'decolonisation', 'woke' academic culture and what he regards as ideological corruption within universities; his new book is explicitly entitled The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars, and his public interventions repeatedly present contemporary universities as abandoning truth for ideology. Whatever one thinks of his revisionist arguments about empire, this matters because Arday was immediately legible within Biggar's already constructed morality play: the institution captured by identity politics, the scholar advanced under its auspices, and Nemesis arriving when reality finally breaks through. Biggar did not merely scrutinise evidence; he placed Arday into an eschatology of academic decadence in which the man's humiliation could appear as moral restoration.

He egged on a blood-crazed mob he'd been transfusing himself for some time. J'accuse Kathleen Stock of helping convert an allegation of academic misconduct into the story of 'Cambridge's DEI darling', thereby making Arday's institutional and racial symbolism integral to the accusation. There's no need to label Stock transphobic: she's done it herself, whatever the nonsense she spouts about 'gender criticality'; just as there's no need to demonstrate that her personal agon is that she hasn't been allowed to peddle her own prejudices in return for status and prestige: that, too, she has amply confirmed through her writings and public statements. She, and her supporters clearly feel they are winning: I wonder if they know what that will look like, or how high the body-count will have to go before they're satisfied.

J'accuse all those columnists, reporters and editors who transformed plagiarism into licence to excavate the entirety of Jason Arday's existence. Yes: all of you: you sat in editorial conferences where people dog-whistled racism and disablism, and you turned a blind eye, or else participated. J'accuse all those who decided that the appropriate response to disputed academic work was to investigate the speech of an autistic child decades earlier—so that very likely includes you, Kath Viner, editor of the Guardian. I've had plenty of dealings with you already: why don't you retire, I believe your hubby isn't short of a bob or two. You can spend your retirement watching him spend a penny: sitting down. I also hope your journalists, together with all the men and women who conducted those interviews are sitting at home nauseated by the blood on their hands—because I am, and I never did anything of the sort.

J'accuse those who knew that a vulnerable person was suffering and nevertheless regarded the demonstrated appetite for further material about him as a reason to produce further material about him, whatever place on our Möbius strip of a political axis you locate yourself. And therefore J'accuse, as I say, not just Viner, but all the editors responsible—not some metaphysical algorithm, not Elon Musk's spunk-fuelled testostero-servers, not 'the discourse', not History, not Society, but actual editors sitting at actual desks—of forgetting that metrics measure attention and not morality. I've only confined myself to the print media because to cover the broadcast media and the socials as well would prematurely foreclose the necessary forensic examination. Rest assured: I'm not merely 'interested' in Arday's witch-hunting: I'm hunting the hunters, as are the whole SITREP community.

Although I note that legacy media operations, individual journalists, and those who have made potentially actionable posts regarding Arday are now scrambling for the delete button, so their etch-a-sketch consciences can be wiped clean. Then once the funeral's done—they'll resume. But most of all J'accuse every man, woman—and I'm afraid to say, child, who spends too much time online, and wastes that time, while expending their own very being in mediations that are uncritical, unthought through, and unconsidered in any modality whatsoever. I accuse everyone who read, listened, and watched this grotesque spectacle: you are all Pharisees and Sadducees—you all passed by, and guess what: anyone who has the guts to watch Arday himself now—the interview he gave to Martin Bashir on C4 News is exemplary in this respect—and who hasn't had their capacity to love wholly extinguished, will acknowledge that Arday was a ringer for the Good Samaritan.

J'accuse you all: because by doing so you have already rejected unilaterally the ethical requirement to resist prejudice in our society: prejudice that is rapidly becoming its ichorous lifeblood. Don't worry: this is, I stress, a provisional list—there are more to come: we will establish what was commissioned and when; we will find out what warnings were received; we will ask what risk assessments were conducted—and most of all, we'll extend our antennae to capture the after-whispers of that newsroom and editorial conference bantering: the joking commissioners, who then got Ditum et al. to so royally amuse the Great British bigots. We will demand to know what exactly happened after Jason Arday resigned. We will ask why allegations concerning plagiarism licensed investigations into childhood disability.

And we will compare what happened to Jason Arday with what happened to other prominent people exposed for plagiarism and related intellectual misconduct. Because there have been others: some were rich, some had friends, some had friends who were also powerful editors, publishers, institutions and patrons. Some went into retreat and returned with new careers. Some converted their own disgrace into material for a second act: they were permitted an afterlife, so long as they complied with the necessary tit-beating. Why? And why was Jason Arday afforded so little space in which to have one? Jason Arday was not Alfred Dreyfus, and this matters. Dreyfus was innocent of the crime for which the French state destroyed him.

Arday may have committed serious academic misconduct, although my personal suspicion is that like many academics working intensively, even before bi-directional computers, he fell victim to a phenomenon known as 'prosthetic writing', whereby researchers who assemble their argument from other texts, become progressively blind to the extent to which they are eliding two expositions, rather than referencing one in another. It's also very easy to understand why autists in particular could fall prey to this: and this is also something we will return to, because the progressive deterioration of literacy in all its forms is the main driver of all of this—and the academy has proved to be one of the most remarkable institutions for cultivating illiteracy: universities have, so to speak, been actively encouraging it.

Be that as it may: we must refuse the comforting simplification in which the victim has first to be clad in white samite before his persecution can be condemned. The rights we accord people in Britain are not—and should never be—prizes for good behaviour. (Which makes it somewhat bizarre that people can legitimately purchase citizenship.) Nor is human dignity conditional upon a clean curriculum vitae: a plagiarist remains a human being, as Johann Hari has been squealing ever since he was arraigned for far more systematic and damaging plagiarism than Arday was accused of. A liar remains a human being, a fantasist remains a human being—elsewise, I would employ some of the dehumanising language deployed by Fleet Street on its own denizens. Because the ethical standard is this: an autistic Black professor who has done things deserving investigation remains a human being.

Because—it bears repeating again and again—you don't have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed. Indeed, a civilisation demonstrates its moral seriousness precisely in the treatment of the culpable. The mob's oldest argument is that its victim deserved something—perhaps he did. But this tarring, this feathering, this lynching? J'accuse you all. Prime Minister, you asked how things came to this: we are demanding that you never stop asking. A proper inquiry will, of course, examine Cambridge University's appointment, supervision and response to allegations concerning Arday. It must not become an exercise in protecting academia from legitimate scrutiny. It must examine the conduct of the press without becoming an instrument for suppressing legitimate journalism: but then, there's precious little of that about nowadays, so perhaps you should also look at what both legitimates and delegitimates this discourse.

An inquiry must also establish what editors and journalists knew about Arday's vulnerability and when they knew it—we're already working on that. It must find out what warnings were given, ask if the continuation of the pursuit after particular warnings was justified by any identifiable public interest. It must examine the distinction between the public interest and measurable public attention. And it must investigate the dyadic relationship between legacy journalism and social media: the extent to which editors use digital engagement as a signal for further editorial investment, and what safeguards exist when the subject generating that engagement is an identifiable vulnerable human being. Because this case is not simply about racism, or disablism; nor merely about plagiarism and the recondite realm of academic status, which in turn means it cannot only concern Cambridge.

The old joke in academia is the disputes are so savage because the stakes are so low, but this case proves that the adage is now defunct for the stakes couldn't possibly be higher, because the Arday case is not about right-wing extremism or its galvanising by social media's ability to suck intellection out of the human brain with its pixellated straw. Those explanations—contributory though they may be—remain fundamentally facile. We are looking at something more amorphous: a hazy but steadily-resolving shape, a hideous formation that's a function of institutional behaviour generated through the recursive interaction of people, platforms, ideologies, pleasures, resentments, professional incentives and machines. Racism enters it—disablism, too. Political grievance comes on to the mind-stage and dances there leadenly: commercial appetite keeps it hopping.

Meanwhile, academic dereliction does its bit, and human weakness and cowardice are reliable partners in the enterprise—collective character defects this society operationalises by providing cowardly, weak people with the endless repression provided by ceaseless distraction. We're moving on, right? No: we're staying right here, because SITREP regards Jason Arday as a signature case for dromodronology: acceleration does not merely make an existing persecution happen faster. It alters the nature of the persecutory agency itself. Prime Minister, Émile Zola addressed the President of the French Republic because the Republic meant something larger than the man temporarily occupying the Élysée Palace. The office you now occupy means something a lot larger than you: not least because in line with recent history, you're unlikely to be there for long.

Nevertheless: the British res publica depends upon the possibility that facts can still be established; that reasons can be given; that wrongdoing can be distinguished from unpopularity; that freedom of expression does not mean freedom from responsibility; and that powerful institutions can be required to account publicly for their conduct. You have asked how things came to this: and we've begun answering you—we will pursue this story for as long as necessary, we will follow the chronology, we will identify the participants, we will examine the comparators. Most importantly: we will distinguish facts from allegations and allegations from fantasies.

And yes, to my quondam colleagues I say: come on if you think you're hard enough—and by that, I mean hard enough to write at length, and to provide an ideological spine to your writing, rather than the bone in your hackery that sticks in the craw of every feeling rather than bottom-feeding person in the realm. Most importantly: we will not lose interest. Jason Arday was crucified on yesterday's grid—I want you all on tomorrow's. His death was not your direct responsibility: and that makes it worse. You're ordinary people, not machiavels—the machines have harmonized you, and now you don't sing like birds, you croak like carrion-feeders. Whether Britain chooses to understand how this degradation in the human environment came about now is your responsibility, Prime Minister: reflection is no longer enough. Establish the inquiry.

Because in deciding whether to investigate how this happened, you will be making a judgment not only upon the institutions implicated in Jason Arday's treatment. You will expose something about your own government: whether it possesses the intellectual grasp necessary to understand the new forms of collective agency operating in this country, and the moral courage necessary to govern them. There will be a vigil for Jason Arday on Monday evening in London. People have been invited to assemble on the steps of the National Gallery at six o'clock: a significant venue, Prime Minister, especially for a municipal socialist such as yourself, given the gallery was founded with the explicit intention of making artistic treasures accessible to ordinary working people. I will be there—I expect to see You, as well as all the accused there: for you it will be a wake-up call—for them, the beginning of what we call making amends.

Originally published as SITREP No. 023 on X on 17 August 2026. Read the original on X.

Yesterday afternoon, on one of the hottest days of the year, I found myself standing in the almost preternatural cool of St Peter and St Paul at Peasmarsh, talking to two strangers about Nigel Farage. The church is largely Norman, its nave and western chancel dating from around eleven hundred, the aisles and tower added later in the twelfth century, the roofs renewed towards the end of the fifteenth. It stands a little apart from the village on the ridge between the Tillingham and the Rother, and inside it has that peculiar hush of an old English parish church in which architecture doesn’t so much contain history as arrest it.

The nave feels extraordinarily broad; above it the old timbering produces something of the same effect as the crown-post construction of the Wealden hall house: an integral sense of Englishness, domestic and ecclesiastical simultaneously, so that you might imagine yourself standing in a proto-, transhistorical semi-detached house of the Lord. And, perhaps, semi-detached from the reality of what politics used to be. The two men were father and son. The father was balding, had evidently suffered some ill health, and was dressed in the khakis and beiges of the Boden-catalogue English middle class. He was personable, relaxed, a little younger than me. His son, probably in his late twenties, was an electrician who had emigrated to Western Australia and taken citizenship there.

He worked in extractive mining and talked intelligently about its contradictions: lithium, the environmental damage attendant on extraction, relations with Indigenous Australians, the extraordinary distances involved in a mineral economy whose workers themselves become components in a vast logistics system. He flew in and out of the mines from Perth. He understood perfectly well that what he was participating in was ecologically problematic. But what could he do? Somebody had to do it. There, in five words, is the political philosophy of the dromodronological era: somebody has to do it. Not I believe this should be done, nor we have collectively decided that it should be done, nor even the benefits outweigh the costs. The system requires it and I occupy the place in the system where it gets done. All intentionality has drained out.

We had been down at Dungeness earlier, looking through a telescope across the shingle near Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage to see whether there were small boats offshore. Experimentalism confronting harsh reality: no England’s dreaming here, Derek. And now, in this hushed Norman church, the conversation turned to immigration, assimilation, Reform and Farage. The father was by no means ranting. On the contrary, he seemed moderate, thoughtful, almost painfully ordinary. But when I asked what would happen if Farage actually won a general election, he said the establishment would never allow him to take power. I asked him what he meant by the establishment. “The BBC,” he said. And I felt cold. Because this, rather than the loudmouth racist, the tattooed thug or the swivel-eyed conspiracist, is one of the faces extremism can wear in contemporary England. It wears beige trousers. It goes sightseeing with its adult son.

It talks civilly to a bearded old writer in an ancient church. It may possess no coherent theory whatsoever of how the BBC, the courts, Parliament, the civil service, the police, the intelligence agencies, universities, banks and regulators could conceivably combine their contradictory purposes into a single political will. It simply feels that somebody must be preventing politics from working. This is the stab in the back returned in domesticated form: not the dagger of the Dolchstoßlegende, but something bought at B&Q on Sunday afternoon for carving the joint from Sainsbury’s. The historical distinction matters. Farageism is not National Socialism. But the morphology bears examination. The original stab-in-the-back myth converted Germany’s defeat into evidence that the authentic national will had been thwarted by internal enemies.

The contemporary version performs a related operation on the experience of political impotence: we no longer experience ourselves as possessing political agency, therefore somebody must have taken it from us. Which brings us to Clacton. Farage has regained the seat he voluntarily vacated, receiving 22,239 votes, while Count Binface received the extraordinary total of 9,455. Thirty-four candidates stood, the largest field in British parliamentary electoral history; the established major parties declined to participate. Farage himself did not appear at the count. British elections have always had their licensed fools. Screaming Lord Sutch stood more than forty times and eventually founded the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

He was part of the theatre of election night: the man in the absurd costume standing beside the Prime Minister while the returning officer read out the figures, a little eruption of carnival reminding the powerful that democratic authority remained faintly ridiculous. But Sutch’s story itself ended terribly. Suffering from depression, he killed himself in 1999. The coroner called him “a comedian with tragedy in his heart”. The joke wasn’t funny any longer for him, and it isn’t terribly funny now. Because Count Binface didn’t merely provide punctuation to an electoral process. He became, with 9,455 votes, its principal opposition. Satire has ceased commenting upon politics and begun occupying the space vacated by it. We wrote earlier this year about the failure of satire; here is the phenomenon in almost laboratory conditions.

When twenty-seven per cent of those voting choose the man with the bin on his head, it is tempting to call the decision rational because the election itself was absurd. But this merely completes the circuit: the evacuation of political intentionality is answered by the evacuation of political seriousness. And hovering over this entire spectacle is Christopher Harborne’s £5 million. The legacy press will naturally pursue Farage’s hypocrisy. It is what the legacy press knows how to do. Farage received £5 million from Harborne shortly before reversing his decision not to stand in the 2024 general election; the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is investigating whether the gift should subsequently have been registered. Farage says it was a personal gift, originally explained in terms of his security. But Farage’s hypocrisy is the least interesting thing about Nigel Farage.

Ten years ago, on Question Time in Theresa May’s constituency, I called him a grubby little opportunist riding on the coattails of history. I see no particular reason to revise the description. The interesting object is the £5 million itself: a financial drogue attached to a political aircraft which can no longer navigate by its old instruments. Harborne is an almost indecently apposite figure. He founded an aviation-fuel business, became enormously wealthy through cryptocurrency investments and is a substantial shareholder in QinetiQ, the defence-technology company descended from the state’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. Defence and crypto make suggestive bookends to Harborne’s political role. Harborne doesn’t have to possess an ideology of non-intentionality. He inhabits an economy increasingly constituted by it. And then he gives Nigel Farage £5 million for, among other explanations, security.

A politician whose programme promises the recovery of national sovereignty apparently requires the private fortune of an immensely wealthy man to secure his own person while practising democratic politics. That claim, if taken seriously, is more interesting than the accusation. For what sort of recovered polis is this, if its tribune requires five million quid merely to move through it? And so the establishment acquires intentionality at precisely the historical moment when our actual institutions appear increasingly incapable of exercising it. When the state acts, it is tyrannical. When one institution contradicts another, the state is broken. When a regulator investigates Farage, the establishment is persecuting him. When the electorate returns him, the people have repudiated the establishment.

And when the investigation resumes regardless, its refusal to accept the electoral verdict can itself be presented as further evidence of establishment obstruction. This is why the comparison with Marine Le Pen is worth making, briefly. The legal circumstances are profoundly different: Le Pen’s difficulties arise from a criminal conviction and continuing appeal, Farage’s present problem from parliamentary standards regulation. What they share is the attempt to make electoral legitimacy answer a question belonging to another jurisdiction altogether. An election can determine whether voters want you to represent them. It cannot determine whether financial rules were complied with. Yet across Western democracies the distinction is being subjected to attrition: the court, commissioner, regulator or prosecutor becomes another contestant against “the people”. The modern stab in the back.

The young electrician had responded to lost intentionality by accepting it: somebody has to do it. His father responded by hallucinating intentionality back into the world: somebody is stopping us doing it. Count Binface offers a third possibility: nobody can do anything, so let’s laugh. What happened in Clacton isn’t principally a story about whether Nigel Farage is a hypocrite, and the torrent of scuttlebutt now passing through the media processors should not distract us from its geopolitical significance. The tail of populism wags the body politic ever more violently, while those experiencing the resulting vertigo become increasingly convinced that the movement must be caused by an invisible hand. Standing in that beautiful old church, in the heat outside and the ancient cool within, I suddenly found the prospect frightening. We shouldn’t reassure ourselves with Nigel Farage’s vulgarity.

We shouldn’t reassure ourselves with Count Binface’s wastepaper basket either. The joke isn’t funny any more.

Originally published as SITREP No. 022 on X on 14 August 2026. Read the original on X.

Among Jordan Peterson’s self-styled ‘12 Rules for Life’ is his notorious injunction to set your house in perfect order before criticising the world. What a house constitutes, quite as much as a rule, can vary. I well remember asking one of my younger acquaintances why he was having his child baptised as a Catholic, given he himself manifestly didn’t believe in the Ten Commandments; he thought for a fraction of a second, before replying by channelling Ireland’s most famous spiritual leader, the hebephrenic Father Dougal: ‘They’re just guidelines.’

Given the creator of the show in which this moral latitudinarianism was proposed—and one may assume the writer of these lines—has gone on to be a social media addict, and a crazed bigot, it would seem Grahan Lineham, at least, is no hypocrite. But the Daily Telegraph should know: it’s been drifting progressively rightwards for years now, tacking into anfractuous and emphatically non-ideological waters, there to cruise about, all its paper sails set, so as to pick up whatever available afflatus there is—racist zephyrs, transphobic gusts, misogynist mistrals, even fascistic fohns—that might be required so as to propel its shareholders into a beneficent future of ‘adaptation’ to our warming world.

So it’s no surprise that under its new German proprietor and with jejeune Associate Comment Editor Harry Howard apparently officiating, this Fighting Temeraire of journalism has invited the Canadian psychologist to set the atmosphere in order for us. Peterson’s article, ‘Climate change catastrophism is a Leftist weapon to destroy capitalism’, begins with air conditioning.

This is appropriate, as air conditioning is the perfect technology for Petersonian man: it preserves his personal climatic envelope while warming everybody else’s. Inside, the upstanding patriarch remains cool, dry and potently individuated; outside, the machinery emits the heat—and hopefully the stench—it’s extracted from his immediate surroundings. Never mind that the electricity powering the dinkus has to be generated somewhere, or that the refrigerants may themselves be potent greenhouse gases. The significant question is: who dares lay a hand on Jordan’s thermostat?

Titter-ye-not: this is what the climate emergency has come down to, Peterson says: ‘something as personal as home or workplace temperature’ being subjected—pass the ammunition, the revolution begins here!—to state regulation. Setting aside the fact that I, personally—as well as many millions of others—would rather the Earth’s thermostat wasn’t dialled way up—one might say much the same about the lavatory, the kitchen, the fuse box and the bedroom. I mean, no one wants the state interfering with these spaces and their intimacies, do they? So, let’s follow Peterson’s Rule and rescind regulations against human waste being discharged into the water supply; abolish dumb rules that stop rats being served for dinner; cancel safety codes preventing lethal wiring from installation in nurseries—and while we’re at it, both legal and moral prohibitions on children being employed for sexual purposes. Now, that’s what Jordan—in common with, say, Jimmy Savile—presumably calls political freedom.

The distinction between the personal and the political is not a law of nature, Jordan—not that you’re a conspicuous believer in those rules, either, especially the Second One of thermodynamics. Rather, it’s an ever-permeable barrier: an always provisional settlement devised by human societies to prevent the exercise of one person’s freedom from becoming another’s electrocution, poisoning or death. Listen I sympathise: there you are, a perfectly respectable academic, working on a subject so diffuse—personality—it can hardly condense into power. You work systematically, to produce serious empirical research, thereby acquiring a clinical practice…

Then, little by little—the normalcy of this creeping up on you—you persuade yourself that the patterns you've discerned in individuals can be scaled up… and up… to explain not just, say, the large corporates other clin’ psychs shill for, but entire civilisations! Jungian archetypes! Biblical symbolism! Evolutionary psychology! Political controversy! Everything begins to arrange itself into a single explanatory mosaic—it’s vaunting thought, always the telltale sign of equally vaunting ambition. And before long, every passing dispute appears as another skirmish in an eternal battle between Order and Chaos, which is why what’s needed is someone to tell Chaos to tidy up its concupiscent bedroom…

Then destiny arrives in its most self-confirmatory form: celebrity. But Peterson should remember André Malraux’s aperçu, given the Frenchman knew a thing or two about both fame and political power: ‘The worst thing about death is that it turns life into destiny.’ Not the other way round, Jordan. So, the now notorious Peterson does all the podcasts and the lecture tours; he works those socials big time, so entrains millions of followers; he accepts the invitations into the antechambers of power. Before long he’s mano a mano with Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu, exchanging ideas with leaders who increasingly regard him, he hopes, less as a psychologist than as an ally.

This is now, he feels, his destiny, because the temptation is no longer simply to interpret events but to become an actor within them—and Jordan, being an expert in personality, is adept when it comes to donning the persona, or tragicomic mask of Ancient Greek drama. I mean, how could he resist being an icon wearing a mask? Like so many distal members of the Trump entity, Peterson has been caught by a new oscillation: the shifting relation between thought and sovereign power. Once the intellectual’s task was to scrutinise power from an awkward distance; now the rewards lie in synchronising oneself with its real-time deformations. At that point the psychologist risks becoming less an observer of personality than a fame-junky in search of history—reading every event as confirmation of the grand narrative that has, by happy coincidence, also become the engine of his own success.

In the Telegraph essay, Peterson’s supposed subject is climate science, but his real agon is restraint: he cannot bear it in any way, shape or form; while the notion that the exercise of a personal preference might have cumulative consequences is, for him, not merely disagreeable but unthinkable. If what we drive, eat, burn and cool contributes to atmospheric heating, he asks, ‘what freedoms can possibly remain?’ Quite a few, Jordan: the freedom to walk, the freedom to enjoy beauty, the freedom to speak, associate, and participate politically; the freedom to eat less meat, or not fly, Jordan—because surely, there’s a right not to consume? Even the freedom to live amid other people without confusing every limitation upon appetite with castration is a freedom to be devoutly desired, because without it social existence of any sort at all is, to adopt a somewhat redundant idiom, unsustainable.

Then there’s the freedom, even, to accept that you cannot have everything you want merely because someone can devise a machine that supplies it—a machine that in a sense manufactures the desire by manufacturing its object, such is the on-demand nature of contemporary consumer capitalism. So it goes—and Peterson has been pogoing around the world for years now on the steadily diminishing priapism of Western patriarchy, making ready cash dispensing advice to anxious young men—the sort formerly available from gym masters, scout leaders and the better class of provincial barber: stand up straight, tidy your room, marry a woman who was born with a vagina and stop whining. And by the way, sir, would you like something for the weekend?

Sure, as long as it isn’t a copy of the Telegraph: I don’t need to read adverts for Viagra just yet. The erection difficulty is obviously a speculation on my part. I possess no intelligence concerning the present condition of Peterson’s penis, nor do I wish you to approach me if you’ve been his whistleblower, because what concerns me is the libido of his thought: hierarchy as tumescence, division as penetration, the entire social order arranged so that somebody is always on top and somebody else supplies the hole.

Drill, Jordan, drill!

Peterson’s own difficulties deserve more compassion than his public philosophy generally extends to others. But he won’t get it here. He developed a severe physical dependence upon prescribed benzodiazepines, and in 2020 travelled to Russia for an extraordinarily hazardous detoxification involving a medically induced coma. Illness and dependence are not contemptible; I know rather too much about both, um, personally, to suggest they are. But great hilarity, as well as bleak incongruity, is present in the spectacle of the prince of self-mastery outsourcing consciousness itself to a Russian anaesthetist. The man who commands the young to impose order upon chaos had to have his mighty brain switched off while chaos was extracted from his bloodstream.

Just to give a comparator: I had an allogenic stem cell transplant for secondary myelofibrosis in 2024, a procedure the mortal odds for which were equivalent to playing Russian roulette with a five-chambered revolver. Chronic nausea, pain, acute discomfort, insomnia and anxiety led to dependence on benzodiazepeines and opiates while hospitalised. Once home, and settled, I detoxed in a few weeks, albeit with considerable discomfort, but no Russians save an illuminating reading of ‘War and Peace’.

Since his own detox, my fellow recovering addict has suffered further serious ill health. He’s the same age as me: 64. It therefore occurs to me that among his twelve rules—and the twelve further rules he produced after those, funny that—one remains conspicuously absent; and it’s one he could well do with understanding properly himself: learn how to die. I wouldn’t claim to be a past master at it yet—only time will tell—but my experience of severe ill-health hasn’t been to sublimate my fear of death into an absurd form of faith. Because that’s what the denial of anthropogenic climate change is: a new credo with absolutely no factual basis whatsoever; a revealed religion of nothing but rich people’s and wannabe rich people’s ressentiment.

In a way, climate change denial is a metaphor, the metaphrand for which would have to be a flower that never lost its petals. And it’s this eternal metaphrand that Peterson and all others of his ilk, clutch to their withering bosoms. To them, restraint is anathema, because to say goodbye to anything is to die a little, while they’re so little themselves, such a diminutive death would altogether annihilate them.

But I’m not suggesting you kill yourself, Jordan—or despair or surrender to fatalism. Learning how to die is confronting the fact right now that one day (in yours and my case, one day fairly soon in all likelihood), without your agreement and at a moment you cannot choose, the world will continue without you—which means other puckish Canadian clinical psychologists will have your followers, and quite possibly be tidying up your room. But if you don’t confront this plenipotent reality, you’ll never even attain a scintilla of moral seriousness either. Why? Because only scrupulous attention to the ethical realm discloses the difference between restraint and extinction. It is precisely the person who cannot imagine his own ending who experiences every curtailment of appetite as a little death—and consequently insists upon the endless continuation of every little thing that sustains him, however destructive it may be to everybody else.

Peterson’s refusal of climate science proceeds from this ethical incapacity. He does not deny that atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen; he does not quite deny that human activity has caused the warming; instead he suspends the observed increase inside a vaguely specified ‘epoch of natural warming’, as if the planet were turning within some immense geophysical gyre whose rotations conveniently absolve the internal combustion engine of any wrongdoing.

This conceit (it cannot be deemed a theory) is a wheel within a wheel: Peterson’s head gyroscopically mounted inside another gyroscope, thereby preserving its ideological orientation, however violently the physical world moves around it. Climate is too complex, he says, for anthropogenic causation to be disentangled from natural variability without models. However, by pleasing contrast—since it yields such a rich, explanatory-cum-financial dividend—the politics of climate is miraculously simple! According to Jordan, a single documentary made by that consummate influencer, Al Gore, in 2006 explains the convictions of millions, the policies of hundreds of governments and perhaps $10–15 trillion of expenditure. You get the picture formed by the Rorschach blot, Jordan: incomprehensible complexity for atmospheric physics; pellucid monocausality for everything else!

The scientific position is considerably less addled, which goes a long way towards explaining why you don’t, personally, adopt it. Human activities, principally the emission of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming. The best estimate is not that humans caused ‘most’ of the increase—as Peterson asserts, and the Telegraph implicitly endorses—but that they caused all the net long-term warming observed since the nineteenth century. Natural variations continue: El Niño, La Niña, volcanic activity and solar fluctuations modulate individual years and regions; however not a single sainted scientific member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes they explain the sustained accumulation of heat in the oceans, the warming lower atmosphere and cooling stratosphere, the retreat of glaciers, the rise in sea level or the fossil-carbon signature of the additional CO₂. The untidy room is emphatically not caused by staring at it through blurred spectacles.

Because this is not merely the opinion of a majority: the IPCC’s assessment—produced by 234 scientists from 65 countries, and drawing on more than 14,000 scientific papers, while also being subjected to 78,007 expert and governmental review comments—is the most comprehensive and exactingly reviewed statement of physical climate knowledge available. Perhaps Jordan—and Harry—should actually parse it: it makes for sobering reading, which in turn encourages restraint, duh.

The Report finds unequivocally that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, “sigh”; the ocean, “glug”; and the land, “snuff”. There exists no credible body of climate science in which Peterson’s miscellaneous natural causes constitute a rival explanation: only isolated dissenters whose possession of scientific credentials cannot confer evidential standing upon claims the evidence itself has excluded: all they do is summon a false mob to oppose them—false, both because it’s a straw man argument in the first place, and also because the real body of cod-environmentalist keyboard-warriors it calls forth are in equally if opposite bad faith to Peterson. Nice: two armies equipped with helmets made from tin foil.

Nor does the Medieval Warm Period offer an alternative baseline, as Peterson suggests. It was neither globally synchronous nor an instrumental period that can simply be substituted for 1850–1900. This is not abstruse: one cannot assess the Earth’s feverishness by hearing an anecdote about how warm the Mondial patient felt eight centuries before the thermometer was inserted into its rectum in the form of a deep-bore geology core-sampler. Ouch. Being Jungian-adjacent, I’m not at all surprised, that hierophantic Jordan fixates on the Mediaeval Warm Period. It sounds archetypal, doesn’t it? I mean, it sounds old, that’s the mediaeval bit; it sounds warm—and everyone likes warm. At least they used to: if only the Period could’ve continued indefinitely, together with its happily organic social relations, and its instinctive—because morally-mandated by Big Daddy—patriarchal ideology.

But tin-foil-helmed Peterson’s strongest ‘evidence’ is another phenomenon with a suggestion of the ancient and the archetypal: ‘global greening.’ It’s also the clearest demonstration of his confabulating obscurity; for, while satellite observations do indeed show a substantial increase in leaf area since the early 1980s, and a major study attributed about 70 per cent of the trend to CO₂ fertilisation, this shouldn’t surprise anyone—even Jordan, as he slumps sleepily to the fridge to get the necessary for another sandwich—since carbon dioxide is plant food; so much so that many plants photosynthesise more efficiently when given more of it, just as more sandwiches make Jordan pontificate…more. Commercial greenhouses therefore enrich their atmosphere with CO₂: it’s—if you’ll forgive the allusion—effective.

A greenhouse, however, also regulates water, temperature, nutrients, pests and humidity. Clearly, the increasingly muggy atmosphere does not: far from regulating anything in particular at a particular time, it changes everything at once: heat sears crops above specific thresholds; drought throttles growth; excessive rainfall inundates roots; fires scorch vegetation; elevated CO₂ can leech the protein, iron and zinc from staple foods, not just celeriac; and plants themselves may transpire more water in aggregate, because there are more leaves doing the transpiring; thereby adding a lot more mugginess—or global sweat, as I prefer to think of it—to humanity’s changing room. Mind where you flick that jockstrap, Jordan!

‘Greening’ describes an optical measurement of leaf area; to seize on this as evidence of increased biodiversity, secure water supplies, nutritious crops or stable ecosystems takes purblindedness, it pains me to say, into the realms of a ‘personality disorder’, which is presumably the sort of epithetic psychiatry Peterson would like to avoid having practiced on him.

This does, of necessity, make the whole Russian induced-coma-Xanax-clucking-avoidance look even more perverse—almost risqué; but, hey, let’s not get carried away: I once stayed in a friend of my wife’s parents’ miniature villa, wedged on to a hillside opposite Porquerolles on the French Riviera. If you think this sounds glamorous, you’re as credulous as Jordan: we’re talking the Sunbelt stretched and attenuated until it’s a sort of retirement garotte: our infinitesimal chateau had an entirely artificial garden, but not like Des Esseintes’ in Huysmanns’ Á Rebours (the decadent novel that’s seduced many a pretty Dorian such as yourself , Jordie-baby, with the decaying perfume of immortality’s dead-on-arrival dream), but a tablecloth-sized bit of Astroturf, surrounded by plastic plants implanted in macadamised mini-berms the like of which seemed the stuff of nightmarish miniature funerary rites envisaged by some mutant Edgar Allen Poe…

…All of which is by way of saying, you poor Romantic consumptive fool, willing the entire world on to your sick denial of death: to infer a healthy biosphere from greater leaf area is the vegetable equivalent of mistaking a feverish consumptive’s flush for rude health.

Peterson employs the ‘fact’ of growing agricultural production in the same fanciful way. Yields have, in point of fact, risen spectacularly during the period of anthropogenic warming; therefore, he implies, warming has benefited agriculture. But yields also rose because of plant breeding, fertiliser, irrigation, pesticides, mechanisation, refrigeration, international trade and the expansion of cultivated land. The relevant comparison is not between agriculture now and agriculture in 1960; it’s between the food produced now and the food that would have been produced using the same technology without the additional climatic stress. On that comparison, climate change has already considerably—if not exactly quantifiably—slowed the growth of agricultural productivity.

But anyway, any counterfactual at all that isn’t summoned simply and clearly to emphasise the reality of the situation, is by that by summoning alone able to elicit denial concerning that very reality. There’s nothing paradoxical about this at all—as any remotely competent clinical psychologist could tell you—given the historical counterfactual simply scales up wishful thinking to a civilisational level. The climate has not prevented every harvest—so Peterson declares crop failure a fantasy; the patient has not died—therefore putting them in a coma has worked!

The same pollyannaish prestidigitation governs Peterson’s attack upon Gore. Gore always struck me as a tool in an empirical not a satirical way; so I was pleasantly surprised by his percipience on the climate emergency; be that as it may, he made crass errors, notably his 2009 Nostradamus-alike prediction that the Arctic might be effectively ice-free in summer within five to seven years. As for An Inconvenient Truth’s bruiting of a possible 20-foot sea-level rise, while this did give an accurate order of magnitude for the loss of a major ice sheet, it left the timescale in this instance impressionistically vague.

This is where the toolishness showed: anyone who views their own being as intrinsically a component of large-scale social and economic processes which appear to them as inexorable, has, by the fact alone, surrendered themselves to the very abnegation of intentionality they would require to address the dread phenomenon.

Gore left the vice-presidency worth less than $2 million and is now estimated to possess between $300 million and $500 million—at 78, Al-baby, you’ll have to spunk-off fast on a load of Gucci loafers to really feel you’ve earned it. His fortune derives chiefly from his partnership in Generation Investment Management, early and exceptionally lucrative Apple share options, and the roughly $100-million gross proceeds attributed to his stake in Current TV, supplemented by venture-capital investments, speaking fees, books and films.

Wealth on this scale is not a thing or things in any meaningful sense, but a system that must be continually reproduced: by global capital flows, data centres, telecommunications networks, energy-intensive computation, mineral extraction and the ceaseless manufacture, distribution and replacement of technological goods. Gore is therefore no longer merely an environmentalist compromised by personal extravagance; he has become a node in the very logistical entity whose expansion is driving the emergency he deplores: in a compound word, a technotool. His fortune can be consistently regenerated only by operationalising a future that is more technologically dependent, more materially extractive and more energetically voracious than the present. The contradiction is not that Gore preaches restraint while privately consuming too much, but that his environmental authority and his immense private wealth now arise from opposite descriptions of the same future: one publicly condemned as ecologically insupportable, the other privately owned as a growth prospect.

Be that as it may be, a failed deadline may be evidence of bipolar, but it doesn’t reverse a physical trend, and you don’t have to be a climate scientist to know with certainty Arctic summer sea ice has declined drastically: just call someone in Baffin-bloody-Bay, and they’ll tell you: ‘“Glug-glug-glug” sea levels are rising…’ And along with this, ocean heat is accumulating, heat extremes are intensifying, glaciers and ice sheets are losing mass. To move from ‘Al Gore exaggerated certain claims’ to ‘anthropogenic warming is a Leftist plot’ is like dismissing lung cancer because an anti-smoking advertisement misstated the date upon which a particular smoker would die. It’s defective reasoning—not an argument at all.

Then comes the truly comic causal inflation: Gore’s film, Peterson tells us, transformed environmental concern into partisan dogma, compromised the authority of science, demoralised a generation, crippled energy production and caused trillions to be squandered. These claims are presented more or less sans phrase, in marked contrast to the evidential demands Peterson has just imposed upon climatology. Evidently the atmospheric effect of billions of tonnes of carbon requires exquisite modelling, while the psychological effect of one American politician’s slide show can simply be intuited by a Canadian psychologist. Way to go, Jordan—and I wish you would.

But before you amscray, let’s consider a potential Rule 13—if you can monetise this as effectively as the other twelve, you won’t need to worry about footing the bill for the next deep sleep. Personally, although I suffer not so much from insomnia, as experience every night the hard truth that Somnia has left the building altogether, my settled policy remains: I’ll sleep when I’m dead. In the meantime, how about this for a new rule: when several facts inconvenience your argument, put them in a sack together and beat Naomi Klein—or any available leftist—with it.

Klein appears in the Jordanian inner-space, because he requires the climate emergency to be a Left-wing conspiracy to allow him to turn up his air con’ while maintaining his conception of a—don’t laugh—clean conscience. If she wants degrowth, public ownership and redistribution, then the physical phenomenon must have been fabricated to produce those preferred remedies by driving good, honest hardworking people into a Mondial tizzy. This is equivalent to saying that because a dietician recommends taking off a few pounds, the patient must have been hypnotised into believing they’re coated with a thick slather of avoirdupois. One may contest the proposed treatment without denying what you see in the mirror.

Peterson is right about one important thing: many supposed technological remedies to the climate emergency are inadequate, ecologically damaging or fraudulent. Renewable systems require storage, backup and enormous quantities of mined material; carbon markets have, by and large, turned into theatres of accountancy—even setting aside (!) the underlying morally centrifugal tendency of such schemes. Remarking on the burgeoning carbon credit market some years ago now, an emphatically former friend thought he’d amuse me with his conception of the underlying mechanism: ‘Every time I book a seat, someone runs into an African village and cries “Turn the generator off, the big man is taking a flight!”’ Needless to say, this self-appointed ‘big man’ is a very small individual if he imagines flying high makes him, or anyone at all in 2026, anything much besides a monkey, pogoing to nowhere using a stick of its own burning shit.

I’m one of those people who remember the Stern Review of the economic consequences of global heating, which was published in 2006 with much fartfare. Unsurprisingly, given its entirely Panglossian prediction of a beneficent technology transfer that would both reduce those pesky greenhouse gases and allow for a vast emergent market in… well, what precisely? What the eponymous author of the Review conveniently forgot—besides the increasingly fissiparous geopolitics evident even then—was that electric cars still require roads, tyres, lithium, cobalt and power; while reliably producing, in direct proportion to their rate of manufacture, more drivers, who in turn beget more cars.

For years nuclear energy was damned by the environmental movement: how many millions, one wonders, of non-biodegradable Atomkraft? Nein danke!stickers were there manufactured? Towards the end of his long and illustrious life, James Lovelock actively campaigned for a serious resumption of research into nuclear power, and building the building of more reactors. Again, unsurprisingly: given he’d saved the world once from the hole in the ozone layer, and developed the most compelling account of its biosphere, he had to come up with something.

But the problem with the nuclear option is that the infrastructure required is necessarily extensive, while the allied industries are equally so; a phenomenon well attested to by the numerous raids on such facilities undertaken by all sides since the Gulf War flared up again in February and began once more to cast its sinister glow—compounded of many, many burning wellheads—over the rest of the gas-guzzling world. The environmental movement’s historical hostility to it has only been obtuse in so far as it hasn’t itself channelled the necessary inner-Peterson.

Because what not just Peterson, but almost the entirety of the world­—including Naomi Klein and Al Gore—cannot admit, is that no change of energy source will redeem endless consumption. A civilisation cannot technologise its way out of the consequences of technology while retaining its governing commitment to perpetual expansion. Greater efficiency has repeatedly enabled greater aggregate use. This is because the new machine does not abolish appetite—whether for oil, or oat milk—it industrialises it, and the industrialisation goes deep… deep into the irritable tract of the soul-bowel.

Because moral loop-the-loop isn’t confined to the hot-aerialists of the climate-denial industry. Al Gore has apparently traversed at least twenty intercontinental flight sectors during the past five years, many of them to explain the climate emergency at Davos and successive COPs; while Naomi Klein’s seven-week ‘Doppelganger’ tour seems to have required a minimum of a dozen flights; quite possibly she should’ve sent one instead, in the form of a digitised eidelons. One of the most curious things about the faux-environmentalists is that they not only tweet as if garden birds were going extinct (which they are), but when the tweeting fails to get them a mate, or a sale, or another CEO to be starstruck by, they take to the air, hoping thereby to be able to locate one,

Either way, with all such boosters, they all have a unique dispensation to avoid restraint—aka, leaving the world-bedroom to become filthy and foetid with the evidence of their, gulp, unsustainable adolescent desires—and need to be told to tidy up their portion of it, not go gadding about on the aforementioned flammable flying turd: the atmospheric carbon molecule, regrettably, cannot distinguish between a journey undertaken to deny its effects and one undertaken to lecture us about them.

Meanwhile, Peterson gets dizzy opposing wind turbines because they require destructive mining, then proposes 11,000 nuclear power stations as if they might be assembled from lumber and good intentions.

This is where the Telegraph enters the battle royale on the banks of everyone’s Acheron. I suspect regular SITREP readers may quite reasonably think that I have some sort of personal agon with the Telegraph. I don’t, apart from regarding it as a slightly more malevolent dying—and hence lashing out—beast than other corporately-owned legacy media entities. That being said, having paid for an online subscription, I find that I can’t scan the first panel of the site without immediately going to an article that I then find to be not simply ethically dubious, but a complete abandonment of the editorial nous that once conveyed respect not just for a political hierarchy, but an intellectual one as well.

My grandfather, Sir Henry Self exhibits, by means of both his person and career, the fatuity of projecting the ‘values’ (I use the term advisedly) of the present on to the past. A lifelong Tory voter, a fervent reader of the Daily Telegraph, knighted for his civil services to the defence and energy industries; nevertheless, as the holder of numerous extramural degrees from the University of London, including a doctorate in philosophy, I suspect he would find the current editorial line not merely sketchy but straightforwardly irrational.

Until, that is, Axel Springer, its new German owner was brought to his attention. The publisher of every German publication you’ve ever heard of if you aren’t a German-speaker, in the 21st century it’s become a vast logistics entity, which is what the biggest of the former paper-producers have media-morphosed into. Obviously,‘Dids’, as the family called him, knew sod-all about global heating, although all the family liked drinking ‘bombshells’, a very, very dry Martini—six parts gin to one of vermouth—and these were indubitably locally warming. So Grandad wouldn’t—couldn’t obv’—have cavilled at Axel Springer having a material carbon footprint running—even before its recent restructuring—into hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually. Being a true establishmentarian, he would’ve paid heed to its respectable corporate climate targets.

But let’s drop the piloting counterfactuals: Axel Springer’s controlling chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, has been known to (I learnt these weasel words from a well-known newspaper) express enthusiasm for an additional two degrees of global heating, on the ground that warmer epochs may prove more productive. Hm… I am, in the demotic favoured around my little patch of the inferno, gobsmacked. Productive for whom? Certainly not for anybody who has to do anything that involves them not having anyone else to do it for them, which is curiously enough not a category of humanity for whom the corporate class have any empathy whatsoever.

I personally know this to be a fact: I’m not proud of having known very rich people—it was filthy being around that lucre, but somebody had to do it; just as they had to hang around with junkies, criminals… even real scum, like politicians. It used to be called journalism, now it’s mostly sycophancy. I digress—but not much: the substance of it all being that I’ve witnessed many, many people in my life who, faced with an essential and preventing contradiction between the mendacity of their means, and the supposed morality of their ends, are quite unable to avoid hypocrisy, except by being mutually-reassured of their probity by many more of their kind.

The deeply sad truth of the matter is that this circle jerk of denial is a ring-a-ring-a- roses until we all fall down dead. Inasmuch as the elite has any primacy, it’s in the form of its own oscillation resonating through the crumbling pyramid of the now subsiding hierarchy of what once passed for political power. Anyone who in any way participates in corporate capitalism then begins oscillating, jerking and climate-emergency-denying as well; which, in the West at least, means everyone.

Yes, an entire civilisation is now compelled by their own miniature gyre to exhibit the same flickery succession of Janus faces: thus, denial perfuses our steadily stagnating society. How long will it be before everything clots up? And here ‘clot’ is meant in the nounal form as well. Because if there’s one thing, that Harry Howard’s commissioning of Jordan Peterson as a Telegraph columnist exhibits more than anything else it’s that the German shepherd is wagging the old English sheepdog,

Springer’s German titles have repeatedly converted rational climate policy into irrational culture war: the heat pump, the bicycle, the reduced speed limit and the insulated home will become in the eyes of the world—or so they hope—assaults upon prosperity and freedom. The newly acquired Telegraph is to be Springer’s space probe into the vacuity of the American hypercapitalist market. Stolid but newly feisty Germans, sensing their own political settlement rearranging itself, have purchased a legacy British newspaper and are now plugging it into the North American grievance grid: that great network of bi-directed venom that poisons every possibility of truth and justice getting in the American way. Hence Peterson: a Canadian pop psychologist, trafficked like, um, fictitious fentanyl, over the border, through the Barren Lands, and now having toxified North America, is blown around the world by the old British commentariat.

On the same day Peterson’s intellectually and morally indefensible essay appeared, as many as seventy thousand people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. A viral rumour attached itself to a real legal ruling in the Spanish Supreme Court; this engendered a flash mob: arguably the only organised political formation that still exists in our wired world of cyborgs. When this mostly Moroccan—rather than recent, sub-Saharan migrant—multitude tested the frontier simultaneously, border enforcement either failed or stood aside.

About a hundred people died over the two days of the incursion; now, at the end of the week, most entrants have returned; and Ceuta is left with several thousand people, a large child-protection crisis and the possibility of another organised attempt. It would be fatuous to declare each person a climate refugee—their motives will have been economic, political, familial and personal; human movement is never produced by a single variable. But it would be more fatuous still not to recognise the image, given the society of the spectacle laps them up, then spews out more bigotry.

For here is the repressed nightmare of the North European propertarian made flesh: a torrent of humanity moving out of the Maghreb hinterland and overrunning the barrier separating African poverty from European property. Not an ‘invasion’ in a pleasingly symmetrical military sense, but a breach in the imaginative fortification by which wealthy societies preserve the illusion that the consequences of their consumption will remain elsewhere.

As desperate swimmers were drowning in the sea off Ceuta, immense wildfires burned around Madrid and through south-western France. Smoke covered Bordeaux; hundreds of thousands were evacuated across France and Spain. The fires had physical causes—heat, dryness, wind, vegetation and ignition—and no responsible person would claim that climate change struck each individual match. But warming creates the psychic as well as the physical conditions: it increases the frequency and intensity of the fire weather through which a spark becomes a landscape. The firestarters are of course sociopaths—in my opinion: all of them, including those who merely make the weather by emitting contrails.

The Château de Montaigne, east of Bordeaux, was not reported to be in the fire’s path. Nonetheless, the proximity supplies the correct counter-image. Montaigne—the great irenic anatomist of mortality, who wrote that to philosophise is to learn how to die—sits in his tower while the horizon smokes. Across the Channel, Peterson philosophises in order not to learn how to die at all.

This is the homological face-off for the summer of unlimited fire- rather than cage-fighting: an inferno pressing upon the national capital, a conflagration of people pressing upon the continental border, and the ideological drumbeat insisting that the only emergency is the threatened freedom of the air-conditioned consumer. Behind it, the rim shots continue sounding across the tautened human-skin-drum of Ukraine, Gaza and the Middle East; drones and missiles consume the critical materials extracted, refined and circulated through the same world system whose climatic consequences we are invited to regard as merely the nightmares of utopian socialist dreamers-of-a-new-day.

What is it like to shill for hyper-extractive capitalism while the smoke crosses the vineyards? Comment Editor Harry Howard might ask his new star columnist—Telegraph editor, Tom Welsh might ask Harry Howard. Boss-man Döpfner might ask them both. What precisely do you tell yourself while the last accessible oil is sucked up, the last tarry patch scraped from the sand, the last fragment of deep coal tweezered from the seam and the last conflict mineral smelted into a capacitor? Presumably, that somewhere a vegetarian with a secure job is behaving hypocritically—before, that is, pouring yourself a lovely glass of Château Malartic-Lagravière Rouge, 2026, assuming, that is, one’s available in 2036.

Of course, environmentalists are hypocrites: they fly, drive, stream, heat and cool; they incontinently purchase electronics containing materials whose origins they do not know, and they take to the waves to expel their hypocritical afflatus with best of the right-wing bloviators. Because so do socialists, conservatives, liberals, fascists, monarchists and emeritus professors of psychology: hypocrisy is not an economic system—consumption is.

Nor is facing this fact conventionally Left-wing: the old Left placed its faith in production, technology and abundance quite as ardently as the Right—Marxism is a philosophy that sees human consciousness itself as a function of materially productive processes; its utopia is a machined dream quite as much as the tech’ barons’. But what we require now is realism about the end of any possibility that people can technologise their way out of the consequences of technology. That realism may tactically favour nuclear power, public transport and strict carbon limits; but in order to warrant the name of strategy, it will also have to control markets, impose rationing and civic obligation, enact local discretion, and in particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name. So let’s get coining!

It shouldn’t be too hard, what with every single major religious and ethical movement in the world espousing just that. Moreover, unlike Petersonism, the ethical beginning is simpler: you don’t have to have an induced coma to know you’re going to die. I am going to die soon enough, odds-on Peterson will, too. The editors who commissioned him will die—even Harry Howard, who’s ‘spiritual home’ is a Christian church, St Bartholemew-the-Great. This magnificent, Romanesque hulk has lasted a thousand years, but it definitely won’t continue this Reich unless he and his generation—the precocious crisis-manager is only in his early thirties—evince a little more asceticism along with their, um, undoubted piety.

Döpfner will die, Gore will go to the grave, Klein and every reader of the Telegraph will kark it as well. This does not render human action pointless: it’s what gives action its point—and inaction: you can’t emit much in the way of GHGs sitting quietly alone in a room—unless you buy your nosh at Diddly-Squat Farm Shop. Finitude makes possible proportion, discretion, sacrifice and most importantly: care. It allows us to distinguish what we need from what we merely fear to relinquish.

A morality that takes its inspiration from the fact of human mortality can—and should—be scaled up not just to confront us with fragility of collective life on Earth but help us comprehend it. In the process, it needn’t mean that life contracts into hair-shirted punishment: properly understood, restraint makes life thicken, and experience inspissate. A city with fewer cars necessarily offers the opportunity for more and less impactful encounters—a city full of driverless ones, offers none at all. A life with fewer flights will be more grounded, by definition: I’d argue that it’s precisely lift-off that loops even infrequent flyers into the oscillating go-round of climate change denial. Whereas us rooted folk possess more nous: we understand that it’s only the imagination that can make you believe you can fly, doing it is strictly for the declining population of birds. A culture released from the compulsive consumption of space, may discover forms of pleasure in placemaking that cannot be measured by throughput. The limit is not the enemy of freedom, Jordan, it’s what gives freedom shape—so go clean all those blister packs up off the floor of your fucking room.

Even bobbing on the surface, rather than being drawn into the depths in a vortex of downers, Peterson’s head has no such ethical equilibrium. It spins within its ideological gimbals, remaining fixed upon the decaying hierarchy that’s its gnomon, while the physical world oscillates around it. Donald J Trump’s own oscillating semi-consciousness has snagged him: Drill! Burn! Extract! Dominate! Construe every restraint as weakness! Interpret that weakness as feminisation! Yuck! Then figure Gaia herself as the passive object of an infinitely renewable male potency.

But the Earth is not a hole waiting for you to fill it, Jordan; it’s the maternal and material condition of your existence—and your existence, like mine, was only ever temporary, while soon our time will be up. So, tidy your room by all means, my boy. Then turn off the air conditioner, open the window and smell the rich smoke produced by barbecuing long pig.

Originally published as SITREP No. 021 on X on 12 August 2026. Read the original on X.

No British filmgoer—or, indeed, film fan throughout the world—can be in any doubt that the visual spectacular of 2026 is Andy Burnham’s The Labour Odyssey, a vastly expensive production filmed for the first time in the British IMAXimised Imagination. This will, its director hopes, make plausible the myth of soft, woolly, worsted, socialist, cuddly inclusion, and thereby convert an Industrial Age epic struggle into a summer popcorn movie that everybody can compulsively truffle up while ignoring the reality of… I dunno: the ongoing war, the climate emergency, the rise of machines that easily outthink political imaginations remaining in a reverie of the recent past.

Like Christopher Nolan, the organic component of the Burnham (Starmer) entity—who we must, perforce, call ‘Andy’—has aimed above all to provide a spectacle mediated not merely by computer-generated effects, but by physical presences imbued with emotional sincerity, regional authenticity and wounded decency—the warm, fibrous stuff of solidarity, one afforded British government by mano-a-mano warfare and contact football alike.

Nolan’s imaginative vision required 5,300 costumes, six countries, ninety-one days’ filming and a 35-foot Trojan Horse weighing 8,000 pounds to make the very Ur-text of the Western Logos appear even remotely plausible to today’s cinema-going illiterates. Andy has had to make do with Westminster, a red tie and the unreconstructed personnel of the Starmer administration. Inside his own beached horse are crammed John Healey, Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood, Louise Haigh, Angela Rayner, Dame Angela Eagle, Matthew Pennycook and—struggling to keep his own empty, wooden head above the water being pumped into the hollow prop—Wes ‘down your’ Streeting.

Thus the Burnham (Starmer) entity’s production triumphantly achieves the same effect as Nolan’s: you’ve all superficially heard the story of the horse—but have you heard it from the inside, deep inside? The crucial difference between The Odyssey, and The Labour Odyssey, is that nob-head Nolan packed his contraption with Greek warriors armed not just with swords and spears, but a common and executable plan of action. In stark contrast, the immense and creakily ageing apparatus of the Burnham (Starmer) entity’s political end-of-the-pier production is required to persuade us that the figures packed its wooden cabinet are even aware of a common destination. Frankly, I don’t blame them: it would take a harder man than I to cope with being part of a human sandwich constituted by these distinctly unappetising, fatty ingredients.

Sadly… predictably, the British right has failed altogether to appreciate the wondrous Labour Odyssey. Y’know, sometimes I just think they don’t really want to be entertained! Because rather than receive this divine dithyramb for what it is, their purblind commentariat refuses the spectacle in favour of football as a master narrative: Andy is a character in a 1970s comic strip: the doughty but dumb manager of a failing side, who has simply swapped the positions of the same old players, then sent them out for what—given the country has seen seven premiers in a decade—can only be figured as the second half. Presumably the win against France means Britain is now content to imagine itself neither punching above its weight, nor volleying fantastic goals on the world stage, but putting in a respectable performance and finishing runner-up.

Yet neither the Bronze Age epic nor the footballing analogy survives contact with the hard realities of governing Britain in 2026. The manager no longer possesses the game: the fixture list, broadcasting rights, betting markets, security cordons, data systems, fiscal constraints and geopolitical exposures have constituted the match before he ever chooses his formation.

In recent years, every incoming British Prime Minister has looked—like a canny hotel guest—to tip the electorate immediately, given they’re only too aware of their colleagues’ incapacity to provide anything like good customer service. The abolition of VAT on household energy bills was a perfect miniature of what to expect from the remodelled entity’s sovereignty. Here, on Andy’s first day, was the sovereign act itself: a tax removed by command of the new leader, relief delivered to the household, the warm puffa jacket of government gently draped around the shoulders of the ageing voters of that embiggened Makerfield which is the Burnham (Starmer) entity’s true heartland—and its bigoted Achilles’ heel. For, strange to relate, the money was to be found by abolishing expenditure the previous administration had announced but, duh!, never funded. The Burnham (Starmer) entity has financed an actual tax remission with the cancellation of a counterfactual expenditure: seeming intentionality was here being paid for out of failed intentionality. Badenoch and Jenrick may be right about the arithmetic, but their larger presumption—that exposing the trick will cause sovereign government to reappear—is as fatuous as the new entity’s gesture.

It’s been a blow for Andy, obviously, but it must also be acknowledged that it was sustained by a warrior hunched inside a prop-horse on a foreign shore, that is itself being speedily washed away and replaced by an overseas infrastructure fund.

Poor old Andy, he’s been cast by his directorial entity as the wily hero of The Odyssey; now, before the title sequence has finished, he’s discovering that the new administration is more likely, in filmic terms, to resemble a Wallace and Gromit production, animated in stop-motion using plasticine figures of politicians. The jolly little Russian warship that bobbed along in the Channel then opened fire forty nautical miles south of Plymouth, supplies the charming anachronism required by the genre: a sinister naval presence drifting into English wateriness from some earlier, harder-edged sovereign melodrama. It looks bad, but hey, it’s perfectly consonant with the Burnham (Starmer) entity’s own mouldable conception of the people’s will.

Caught up in his new role as Wallace (it’s hard to smile winningly when you’ve got a sleeveless Fair Isle woolly wrapped round your plasticine mush), Andy contemplates turning Gromit on the Russian warship: in the form of sanctioned tankers, insurance arrangements, naval escorts, Royal Marine seizures, surveillance aircraft, and warning shots in the form of many rounds of Babybel. But the very cosiness of the imagery discloses the stark situation it’s intended to swaddle. I’ve stated this uncomfy fact in earlier SITREPS, ones not directed by Nick Park (Cartoonist of the British Empire); namely: that the Russian frigate’s very real and rigid guns did not announce the possibility of war; they made audible the war already under way.

The battlespace through which this war is being waged, runs through the Channel, along tanker routes, across maritime-insurance markets, through satellite constellations, sanctions databases, flags of convenience, ports, undersea cables and financial clearing systems. To interpret the exercise simply as Vladimir Putin (the organic element of the Putin entity) ‘challenging’ a new prime minister, is to end the charming, animated film and restore the summer blockbuster: Vlad-the-Impaler threatens—lion-hearted Andy must respond. The reality is less box office and far more terrifying: neither actor truly plays the role whose momentary facial expression he supplies.

Christopher Nolan may make much of the fact that he personally doesn’t have a mobile phone or an email address, but the fact of the matter is that his vast cinematic productions require all the technological apparatus of modernity—the international travel, plant, the filming equipment, the machine intelligences coordinating the whole circus—and therefore his drama replicates precisely that hubris which was so central to the Ancient Greek conception of human tragedy. For, the invisible constraints these economically operationalised logistical systems impose on human intentionality foreclose on historical causation quite as much as they do visual imagination, thereby transforming the bloody flux of contemporary politics into an entertainment that can be safely watched throughout Britain’s air-conditioned multiplexes. At least until the electricity bill falls due—alright, it’ll be 5% less, but who would’ve thought all those optimistically optimised cameras used quite so much?

And then there is Wes Streeting, an unusually squishy little Plasticine figure whom we have already described as doom-scrolling his own popularity ratings for what feels like many years. (To him.) Streeting is precisely the appointment through which the Burnham (Starmer) entity’s failure to understand the vitiation of intentionality by bidirectional digital media ceases to be merely foolish and becomes absurd. Defence is the department in which the sovereign conceit—that the minister intends, commands and obtains—is least plausible. Its nominal head presides over procurement chains, satellite systems, autonomous platforms, software dependencies, private contractors, intelligence-sharing agreements, American export permissions and weapons containing components manufactured across multiple jurisdictions by corporations with valuations exceeding the GDP of medium-sized countries, and not far off that of, gulp, Blighty.

Streeting is emotionally and performatively equipped to wear a sleeveless woolly and cut up bits of Cheddar for tea but unfitted by handyman Wallace in the brain-box department, so wholly unable to see the entity of which ‘the Ministry of Defence’ is merely a disguise. The organic component of the newly moulded Defence Minister can be briefed on capabilities, deployments and readiness; it cannot apprehend the distributed intentionality of the logistical formation it has been installed to personify. Streeting’s characteristic skills—rhetorical velocity, conspicuous responsiveness, personal visibility and rapid repositioning (easy enough if you’re squishy)—are themselves products of the mediatized environment that makes executive agency increasingly fictitious.

When you stop believing that comfort food can ever really comfort you, you’ll see that the fictious nature of British sovereignty in June, 2026, lies in the relationship between the Magnificent Seven’s market capitalisation, the empty aspiration to create ‘AI sovereignty’, and the Trump entity’s oscillating conviction that Britain—like the British Army’s establishment—remains interoperable with the American military-industrial complex. Britain’s defence policy, foreign policy and domestic policy cannot be disarticulated like a yummy roast chicken, because the same computational systems that allocate hospital beds and theatre time also order military supplies, analyse intelligence, police borders and determine what ministers are able to perceive as reality, given they aren’t big readers. I mean, I know he likes a little Alan Hollinghurst of an evening, but no line of beauty is going to lassoo you and pull you out of this quicksand, Andy.

Hence the argument over Palantir. The Burnham (Starmer) entity’s left imagines that national intentionality might be recovered by cancelling a contract with an ideologically contaminated American corporation and procuring a clean British substitute. Sir Jeremy Fleming calls instead for British champions, British resilience and British control, before conceding that complete sovereignty is not really an option. The concession, Jerry-baby, abolishes the proposition—so get back in your Chubb-armoured Silver Cross pram. A British Palantir would not necessarily constitute British sovereignty; it might—no! Scratch that: will merely be a domestically incorporated node in the same transnational computational formation, using American chips, American cloud architecture, American capital and American security protocols while presenting a Union Jack on its user interface, to much the same effect as Union Jack livery on a Mini-bloody-Countryman.

Meanwhile, the growing capability of Chinese open-weight AI models casts an eldritch glow over all this futile filmic posturing. If powerful models can be downloaded, distilled, adapted and deployed at a fraction of the cost of their closed American equivalents, Britain cannot obtain sovereignty merely by choosing its favoured contractor. But the American response—export bans, pre-release inspections, blacklists and warnings about Chinese models—is inseparable from the commercial interests of companies whose immense valuations depend upon preserving a capital-intensive closed-model dispensation. AI safety, national security and regulatory capture begin to resemble not competing explanations but different views of the same logistical process which, since it’s deemed a priori to be unstoppable, cannot by that fact alone be controlled...

The incoming administration therefore confronts an impossible task: it cannot govern without AI-mediated logistical systems; it cannot safely entrust those systems to American corporations; it cannot manufacture technological sovereignty by buying British substitutes; and it cannot exclude cheap Chinese open models without further entrenching American corporate power. Nor can it regulate the field through ordinary ministerial intentionality, because the permanent officials, parliamentary committees, technical advisers, security-cleared contractors and commercial actors through whom regulation must pass are themselves technologically dependent and commercially penetrated: so many dumb actors, hunched up in the horse, and waiting for Andysseus to give them their lines. However, he reaches for the levers of power to open the horse’s hatch, only to discover they are graphical representations of operations occurring elsewhere! Such a shame: he wanted to make a real film, with a real cast, not these oxymorons.

Still, the show must go on: amplified music was prohibited around Number 10, lest some grimy rhythm dubstep its way into the solemn transfer of vapid intentionality. The Starmer entity’s organic component entered the constitutional mechanism; the organic component of the new Burnham (Starmer) entity travelled to Buck House for its audience with Chucky III, then returned to Downing Street as if contact with the monarchical film franchise had completed the circuit and charged the new administration with sovereign current.

Britain’s constitution is commonly represented by Big Ben, but Big Ben only tells the time; the cuckoo clock tells the truth. Its Gothic little house contains the monarch, the prime minister, the Cabinet, the opposition, Black Rod and all the carved and painted figures who emerge in sequence to strike their appointed attitudes. One organic component withdraws into the clock; another pops out, bows to Chucky III, announces the hour and is acclaimed as the motive force of the mechanism. This happens now—as I’ve observed above—with such regularity, why, you could set your iWatch by it. Or could, if it weren’t a graphical representation as well.

Because the cuckoo clock isn’t just an image: it’s obsolete. Behind it—and passing straight through the wall on which it hangs for a year or five waiting to chime—the real machinery of government runs continuously: data centres, fibre-optic cables, satellites, financial markets, procurement platforms, cloud services, shipping routes, insurance syndicates and military interoperability agreements. These systems neither recognise the accession nor hear the clock strike. They do not applaud the Burnham (Starmer) entity, oppose it or wish it success. They simply operationalise whatever can pass through them.

At the appointed hour the little door opens. Andy comes out, warm, woolly and woundedly decent, to tell us what time it is in his quaint, going-to-get-a-loaf-of-Hovis accents. Behind him, unheard, the machinery has already set all the clocks, and they’re running far, far faster than even Nick Park could animate them.

Originally published as SITREP No. 020 on X on 21 July 2026. Read the original on X.

A self-annihilating interview in today’s Telegraph shows that the bloviating entity formerly known as Toby Young is still, futilely, attempting to style himself as some sort of noble soul. But what is the spiritual realm of this lord temporal—and, one would hope, temporary? Why, only the half-lit, crepuscular realm of the web and its volatile economy of attention. This pixellated demesne is no surprise: after all, attention is what Young has always craved above all else: the title of his most famous—one hesitates to say ‘literary’—oeuvre being not only a theft of another author’s title, but an inversion of his own steely, decades long resolve precisely to win friends and influence people.

Although not me, clearly.

For, as to the identity of those Lord X of Acton wishes to secure in amity, or guide in adversity, the interview provides the answer: people just like him: rich, entitled (and quite possibly titled themselves) ones, who see nothing wrong in decking themselves in the motheaten finery of a constitutional order they’re busily engaged in dismantling—not, I hasten to add, through any conscious effort on their part: I’ve known the organic element of Lord X closely enough to also become aware that he possesses the emotional intelligence, political vision, social understanding and economic grasp of the small-minded opportunist he was, is, and always will be. No: Lord X of Acton, like so many of the extreme right’s fellow travellers is a useful idiot entirely for forces that his organic component—which hides, coddled inside its screen-mediated ermine shell like a peeled egg—cannot comprehend at all.

Yes, I remember Toby Young perfectly well from the early 1990s, when he and Julie Burchill—another TERFsycorian termagant, spun by the winds of change into a dizzy incomprehension of unfolding realities—were partners in that crime against culture, The Modern Review. This was perhaps one of postmodernism’s most piffling little productions: a magazine dedicated to the proposition that if highbrows affected sufficient enthusiasm for low culture, something amusingly transgressive must be happening, when in fact all that was going on was the liquidation of critical discrimination by the market, with Toby Young and Julie Burchill bobbing about delightedly among the cultural jetsam, mistaking their own intoxicated buoyancy for navigation.

Some years ago when profiling that other useful idiot of the extreme right, I inverted Burchill’s apercu concerning Stephen Fry (namely, that he was ‘a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person was like’) to describe its coiner: Burchill was, I averred, what an intelligent person would be like if they spent a lifetime actively rendering themselves more stupid. I’m afraid Lord X’s organic component cannot even lay claim to this bizarre inversion of Hegelian Bildung—he’s simply a pretentious person who, with great effort, has made himself into a preposterous one; by which I mean Lord X: a puppet whose strings are manipulated by the algorithm calculating the coefficient between the mob’s regard and Toby Young’s ego—which, for him and his true believers, numinously constitutes ‘free speech’.

Now comes a reverential Telegraph interview, staged in the sun-scorched garden of his west London home, with the Cavapoochon nestled against his firm and manly thigh. Let’s hope the breed’s absurd name is a semantic prolepsis. We have another shot of Lord X standing in front of the serried volumes that index his own intellectual preeminence—at least in the eyes of his interior decorator, and the former Torygraph’s photographer. (Although the hoary old nickname will hardly do, now that the title regularly boosts the likes of Lord X, and the other fellow travellers who cluster under Nige’s capacious, if holey skirts.) Meanwhile, his rental hagiographer breathlessly… admiringly… describes his wife, a luxury travel publicist, who they can see conducting a Zoom meeting through the French windows.

As for the philoprogenitive and pedagogic Lord X’s children, they and their descendants must, we imagine, constitute an ever-burgeoning mutant piglet army, sworn to defend all that is good and true. But what’s this? Our only sighting of this emergent political formation is an exiguous figure; the interviewer tells us this is one of Young’s four children sloping home after ‘a heavy night out’: and so the entire softly-upholstered logistical integument of contemporary bourgeois life is presented to readers one presumes must be equally self-satisfied; for only such as they could accept all this ghastliness as though it were merely incidental scenery surrounding a pocket colossus in a pinstripe shirt: the Embattled Defender of an Older England. Better get that conservatory castellated, Tobes.

Lord X presumably believes that the interview will in some sense define him for those googling grandchildren whom he sees—a little mutant piglet army of his own, waiting in the woods to assail whatever glassy empyreans of insubstantiality have accreted to his name after the mediatised death that lies in store for him. It’s this that is now the proximate agon for all his grandstanding: the social media cancellation visited on him when he lost his position on the board of the Office for Students in 2018.

But the whiny self-exculpation and attendant pseudo-moral elevation extends far beyond Lord X’s otiose twittering: it encompasses everyone who imagines that the attention economy constitutes some kind of posterity, rather than the endless algorithmic redistribution of a permanently receding present: a present in which they do nothing much but twitter and preen.

For Lord X’s original trauma was not simply that he lost positions and income after the excavation of his noisome Twitter archive, but that his grandchildren might Google him and encounter the caricature he claims was constructed by his enemies—but in fact was there for all right-minded people to see. Google is thus his tribunal of posterity, the search return his Last Judgment; and the Free Speech Union, which he founded in the aftermath, is the apparatus through which he continuously manufactures fresh material for that judgment—cases, controversies, enemies, victories, interviews, headlines, interventions—feeding the very web whose distortions he imagines himself to be resisting. He has mistaken the struggle to optimise his searchable identity for the defence of Western liberty. Ha-bloody-ha! It’s wonderfully postmodern!

Meanwhile, of course, the facts remain the facts—while, as the teachers in his traditionalist free school doubtless remind their pupils, good proverbialists as they are: handsome is as handsome does; and what Toby Young did was what so many people who aren’t at all handsome do: vent online, thereby revealing himself to be a misogynist and a homophobe. His self-exculpation consists in asserting—as if it were beyond dispute—that having been a journalist for thirty years, he couldn’t be expected not to have made such remarks; purely, as it were, by way of lending a little, shall we say, colour to his otherwise insipid prose. But here’s the rub of time, Toby-baby, some of your colleagues didn’t hearken to the seductive sirens of bigoted populism as sedulously as you. Moreover, some of your peers had genuine convictions which they genuinely revised; not merely adventitious postures they’ve contorted themselves into. I wouldn’t want to look into the funhouse mirror in which you contemplate yourself—and I never have: this account is only for influencing people intellectually, Toby, not receiving the slings and arrows of what overall, in your case, has been outrageously good fortune.

The Free Speech Union may perform useful work in particular cases: institutions are quite capable of behaving vindictively and disproportionately towards their employees, and the multiplication of vaguely drafted speech codes has undoubtedly provided timid managers with new instruments of coercion. But Lord X has no reasoned analysis of the machinery producing these conflicts. This prince of the pen describes cancel culture as a ‘religion without forgiveness’, thereby converting an apparatus of accelerated accusation, counteraccusation, reputational panic and platform-mediated identity formation into a heresy conducted by uniquely wicked people who remain conveniently shadowy, so they too, in the course of time, can also be persecuted. Christianity, he claims, distinguishes the sin from the sinner; his own counter-church distinguishes only the cancelled from the cancellers, then offers the former salvation in return for an annual subscription: every little principle helps, eh.

Indeed, Young describes his method with an unconscious candour bordering on the sublime: employers retreat, he says, if they believe there is going to be ‘an even scarier mob on the other side’. This is the whole man (and I use the term in this respect, advisedly) in a sentence. The answer to the twitchy digital mob is another mob; in this instance, one professionally constituted, furnished with lawyers and regulators, flanked by Telegraph columnists and backed by 45,000 paying members. This is not an alternative to cancellation but its reversal of polarity: cancellation with professional indemnity insurance. Lord X does not, of course, do anything as reckless and foolhardy as, duh, opposethe web’s punitive dynamics; he has incorporated them, branded them and installed a direct debit.

His educational project displays precisely the same intellectual poverty—which, in common with his title, he has not inherited: ‘Traditional subjects taught in a traditional way’ —this, together with his mobile phone, is his vade mecum: more kings and queens, greater teacher authority. These are in point of fact—and I should know, having spent fourteen years up the necrotic back passage of British higher education—perfectly possible pedagogical preferences, but they constitute no account whatsoever of what digital mediation has done to attention, memory, literacy, childhood or knowledge. Lord X’s free schools are attempts to erect miniaturised real-time monastic communities within digital and logistical reality, enclaves whose apparent cultural autonomy remains financed, supplied and administered by the system they notionally exclude. He wants the classroom of 1955 while preserving the consumption, communications and property arrangements of 2026. The traditional community is staged; the Zoom call for the luxury travel company pays for—we may speculate—the electricity bill.

This is why the agon with his father, which Lord X bravely recounts to his media confessor matters. Michael Young was a socialist activator not unlike my own father, the political scientist Peter Self. But Toby Young’s dad was obviously more illustrious: he wrote the Labour Party’s historic 1945 Election Manifesto—Dad limned the urban and regional plans that would hopefully ensue. Nevertheless, both men were formed by those institutions that arose from the postwar settlement—in particular from Butskellism, that conflation of left and right within the transcendent English constitutional arrangement which Toby now affects to despise, although he owes to it not merely his education and opportunities but his very intelligibility as a public person.

Yes: the father attempted to construct institutions such as the Open University, ones capable of extending participation in a common culture; the son constructs defensive enclaves within its ruins. Michael Young coined ‘meritocracy’ as a warning about a society in which successful people would redescribe inherited and structural advantage as personal desert. Young fils’s career has fulfilled the satire with almost indecent exactitude: the privileged son who performed failure, converted failure into celebrity, converted disgrace into victimhood, converted victimhood into an organisation, and converted that organisation into a peerage—while continuing to present himself as a dissident beyond the perimeter fence.

Then there is the transgender fixation, without which no contemporary Dick-o-graph profile can apparently attain tumescence. The article identifies a university employee as transgender although her gender has no bearing upon the alleged offence, before moving rapidly through Graham Linehan (another furious social media-addict), female-only spaces, LGBT education and the remarkable claim that 37 per cent of the FSU’s caseload concerns sex and gender. Transgender people must perform—if you’ll forgive the figuration—the double office allotted to every culture-war scapegoat: they are numerically infinitesimal but civilisationally omnipotent, a minuscule minority somehow capable of occupying an enormous proportion of Young’s political imagination; an imagination that must, indeed, be the same size as the changing room these male transphobics, together with their embattled womenfolk, are forever cowering in. If only they’d look in the real mirrors on the walls of this imaginary changing room they’d see what contemprary women really fear: them—cis-men, the historic and perenduring rapists par excellence.

So, Lord X’s statistics establish far less than he thinks—which, as we’ve observed, isn’t much. An organisation publicly identified with gender-critical cases naturally attracts people involved in gender-critical disputes; its self-selected caseload cannot be treated as a disinterested survey of national persecution. We are given no coding method, no independent verification, no account of the cases rejected and no explanation of how Young knows that the women concerned ‘mostly identify as Left-wing’. Their presumed leftism then becomes evidence of his neutrality, as though the presence of defectors from the opposing army proved that no war was being fought.

The passing declaration that Young has been a Zionist since he was seventeen is more revealing for the absence it creates than for the allegiance itself. It enters the interview only as evidence of his magnanimity: despite being a Zionist and disapproving of Palestine Action, he will defend someone prosecuted for displaying support for it. Yet the interviewer never asks what his Zionism entails—what he believes about ethno-nationalism, sovereignty, Jewish self-determination, Palestinian self-determination, or whether the ethnic principle he accepts in Israel has any analogue in his conception of Britain. Gender identity must undergo ceaseless metaphysical examination; this immensely consequential political identity is permitted to appear as a charming biographical constant, adopted at seventeen and apparently requiring no subsequent thought. Zionism supplies the hard spine of Young’s politics while the interview treats it as a buttonhole. One wonders where his father stood on Israel.

Young concludes by paraphrasing Andy Warhol: in the future, everyone will be cancelled for fifteen minutes. He does not perceive that universal fame and universal cancellation have already become the same condition. Cancellation is one of the principal means by which public personalities reproduce their visibility; indignation becomes attention, attention becomes membership, membership becomes institutional power, and institutional power becomes a seat in the Lords. Lord X, on receiving the coronet upon his noble and very middle brow, has not preserved an older public world against this machinery, because he cannot see anything outside it. He is mind-child and man-child of an England that cannot assimilate the web-world and therefore mistakes frantic activity within it for resistance to it. Acton may be his territorial designation, but the web is his true peerage: Lord X of the Counter-Mob, Baron of the Search Return, standing nowhere athwart history, and twittering constantly ‘Stop the world!’, while sitting comfortably in the business-class lounge of the attention economy—just as he no doubt does in business class once airborne, complaining without cease about the other passengers.

The spectacle would be amusing—especially to those of us who recall his Lilliputian grandstanding of old—were it not that Lord X of Acton and his ilk, with every flap of their lips, bring this floating isle of ours, this Laputa of once-lapidary minds, closer to the parched earth of civilisational ruin. His father helped build a society. Toby Young has spent years playing with it. Soon it will be broken altogether, while Lord X and the other aristocrats of egotism stand there staring at the shit they and the rest of us are in.

Originally published as SITREP No. 019 on X on 19 July 2026. Read the original on X.

Sleepless on Saturday night, in the humid heat of a London summer increasingly rendered oppressive by the climate emergency, I found myself once again listening to football. Not watching it—listening to it.

Before we get to the beautiful game, it’s worth considering the sticky heat. There’s a tension now around heatwaves in London, as there is elsewhere in the world. People are faced each summer with a dreadful paradox: the conventional idea of repose and relaxation is, for people in the Northern Hemisphere at least, so formed by centuries now of cultural perception and evaluation, concluding in a mass obsession with ‘going somewhere hot’ that renders the experience of suffering under a heatwave is almost unassimilable. This, despite the fact that the English physically dislike the heat so much, that they endlessly complain about it. Yet more bizarre still, is the fact that members of London's burgeoning ethnic minority population—at least several with whom I am in daily contact—also describe the close weather as somehow unbearable. Surely this is because it represents something uncanny and disturbing.

There’s a dreadful cognitive dissonance here: it’s early July, the schools will be breaking up soon—people are going to go on holidays they must perforce feel ‘entitled to’; moreover, they’re going on holiday to all the same places they normally go on holiday, thereby flying from heat, into heat—out of the frying pan of technologised hyper-accelerating capitalism, into the burning fat it’s engendered, and thereby making it all sizzle still more. Yet they must simultaneously construct this as the most relaxing transition of the year—‘chilling’, I believe they call it.

For the past fortnight they have also been engaged in another act of mental diplopia, holding in their minds simultaneously the world of football—which, in a certain sense that I shall presently reveal, now constitutes the arena within which human history, conceived as the temporalisation of the intentions of human actors, still appears to take place—and another world: a world in which people are dying, infrastructure is being destroyed, and a war that has never truly been declared—yet is continually being waged and endlessly litigated as being on the point of ending—never actually ends.

The always-already endless war of what I have come to call dromodronology has been repressed so that the world can take a holiday—but take a holiday in the only place where it still believes it can act. The England match had finished hours before, yet the city was still speaking: from my bedroom in Stockwell I could distinguish two quite separate acoustic fields. One reached me from the pubs and streets around Vauxhall to the north-east, the other from Brixton to the south.

They overlapped, interfered and dissolved into one another until the atmosphere of inner south London itself seemed to have become their medium: there were cheers, groans, shouts and even howls; car engines revved; I could hear motorcyclists pulling wheelies along the long, straight stretch of Brixton Road—I could picture them passing the turning into the road where Cherry Croce, the woman whose death at the hands of the Met led to the 1983 riots which convulsed the neighbourhood: I can remember seeing burning barricades there, and a different sort of petroleum heat: Molotov cocktails.

After many years of living here, I have become aware that the signals that come from Vauxhall and those from Brixton are not identical. They possess different textures, different rhythms, even different social compositions. As the World Cup has progressed, and successive teams from Africa, the Caribbean and the wider Global South have disappeared from the tournament, I have had the distinct impression that the Brixton signal has grown louder. Allegiances have shifted. The distributed emotional body through which the city metabolises the tournament has reorganised its alimentary track in real time.

Ali, in the corner shop, put the matter to me with characteristic directness: as a second-generation British Asian in his fifties, he’s spent much of his life supporting other national sides in international tournaments. ‘When I was younger,’ he told me ‘my attitude was: why should I support England? This wasn’t a country that was good to me.’ Now, however, his own children are adolescents and think of themselves simply and uncomplicatedly as English and support the England team without hesitation. In response, Ali’s own allegiance has become fluid: once those teams with which he feels a stronger religious or cultural affinity have been eliminated, he finds himself quite content to support England. His loyalty is neither fixed nor cynical: it oscillates.

Much the same process is occurring across many of London’s communities. A young Black friend who lives in north London told me yesterday that she had gone to Hackney to watch the match. She too remarked upon the noticeably increased support for England in this phase of the tournament, once sides with which first- and second-generation members of the African diaspora often feel a more immediate affiliation had been eliminated. Nonetheless, she and I agreed that however tumultuous the scenes in Hackney had become, they were probably not as tumultuous as those in Brixton, for the reason that the residual post-colonial identification remains latently strong among the African-Caribbean community.

I confirmed this empirically this morning, by tottering along to the local scrap of parched park, where I often chew the fat with a gang of other alter kockers, although not demi-Yiddisher ones like me. In the group this morning were three kockers of my own age: two Jamaicans and one Ghanaian, and the Jamaican guys were definitely keener on an England win against Argentina than the Ghanaian.

Lying awake in my bedroom on Saturday night, I could hear a general atmosphere of almost ecstatic revelry—nothing comparable had accompanied any of England’s previous victories in the tournament. Something had shifted, and whatever it was had become audible before it became intelligible. This was not the first time I had noticed the phenomenon. Indeed, I suspect it belongs distinctively to the modern era. Just as football itself was once concentrated within local communities, with players and supporters alike drawn from them and held in tight territorial allegiance, so too the signal system associated with the game was communicated through hierarchical media that allowed the significance of individual matches—their meaning, their interpretation and their influence within the wider population—to remain largely localised.

I was a four-year-old child when England won the World Cup in 1966. I owned a World Cup Willie, the little lion who served as the tournament's mascot; mine was perched atop a miniature plinth containing a concealed ball-bearing. I flicked my World Cup Willie about the place rather more than was probably good for me and, generally speaking, the English population has been flicking its World Cup Willie ever since. The joke is no joke at all. For all that flicking really is a spasmodic attempt at priapism: namely, the recurrent fantasy of a return to footballing pre-eminence that continues to haunt post-imperial English identity. The dream is not simply of victory but of restored potency. Every tournament promises, once again, that history might briefly begin to run in the right direction: the direction confirmed—despite concurrent imperial decline—by three signal victories: the one concluded at Versailles in 1919; at Ludendorff Heath in 1944; and at Wembley in 1966.

The fantastical character of this hope—eliding once more, the pitch and the battlespace—is confirmed by the extraordinary oscillation of the national mood during every major tournament. Support for England has become one of the principal occasions upon which the so-called cricket test of political loyalty is enacted. Fidelity to the national side is no longer an uncomplicated patriotic reflex; it has itself become politically negotiated.

This wasn’t always primarily a question of multicultural Britain. During the 1980s and well into the 1990s, contested sovereignty remained, to a significant degree, a function of class. It is here that Nick Hornby enters the story—not merely as a successful author, but as the exemplary chronicler of the proletarianisation of the English middle class that accompanied both the dissolution of the old industrial working class and the attenuation of football as the privileged expression of proletarian sovereignty.

Few people realised that Fever Pitch was written by a Cambridge graduate from an affluent professional family whose father, Sir Derek Hornby, occupied the commanding heights of British corporate life. Hornby presents himself instead as emotionally adrift rather than socially privileged: the child of divorce who discovers in football not merely belonging but masculinity itself. The displacement is significant. Class quietly recedes behind psychology. What had once been understood as a question of material position becomes a question of identity, affect and self-fashioning.

This was no accident: Fever Pitch, published in 1992, appeared at precisely the historical moment when English football was undergoing one of the most remarkable transformations in its history. Hillsborough had exposed the lethal consequences of treating working-class supporters as a public order problem rather than as citizens. The publication of the Taylor Report, the creation of the Premier League, the arrival of satellite broadcasting, the rebuilding of stadiums and the commodification of fandom together constituted nothing less than the logistical re-engineering of the game: the beautiful game ceased to be primarily a territorial institution and became an informational one.

Hornby’s typically understated English middle-class genius was to narrate precisely this transition without ever quite naming it. He appeared to be writing a memoir of obsession, but in retrospect he was documenting the migration of football from the factory gate to the media network. The terraces became audiences; supporters became consumers; local institutions became globally circulating brands. The sovereign crowd dissolved into a distributed public.

This also explains why Fever Pitch became such an emblematic text for New Labour Britain: it appeared to democratise football just as football itself was ceasing to be democratic in any straightforward sense. The old industrial working class, which had supplied the game with its social foundation, was itself dissolving under the pressures of deindustrialisation and financialisation. In its place emerged a newly anxious—and newly manufactured—middle class, eager to inherit the emotional authenticity once attributed to labour while quietly forgetting the economic conditions that had produced it.

Football therefore survived not because its social function remained unchanged but because it acquired another. It became one of the last theatres in which history still appeared to be made by identifiable human actors. Eleven men faced another eleven men; a referee blew a whistle; victories and defeats could still be narrated in moral language. Meanwhile, outside the stadium, wars, financial markets, climate systems and algorithmic infrastructures increasingly escaped the temporal horizon of individual intention. Human beings retained sovereignty on the pitch at precisely the moment they were losing it almost everywhere else.

Thus, Hornby, gave literary expression to a new historical settlement—thereby making Britons (those identifying as ‘men’ in particular), happy to live in a country that, in terms of force projection in the geopolitical arena, had become Hornby size. Middle-class men who no longer possessed any direct relation to the means of production, nor any convincing public role in the making of history, rediscovered solidarity through the ritual contemplation of working-class men playing football. The stadium became a substitute polity. Spectatorship itself became a mode of political affect.

Football, in this sense, is a synecdoche for the diminution of sovereignty itself. Increasingly unable to act historically, the English middle classes found themselves investing emotionally in a domain where history still appeared to possess recognisable protagonists, decisive moments and unequivocal outcomes. That tendency has now become so pronounced that Britain may yet produce a Prime Minister whose strongest claim to popular legitimacy rests not upon the exercise of sovereignty in government but upon the exercise of sovereignty in football’s political afterlife. Andy Burnham’s championship of the Hillsborough families came comparatively late in his career. It was only after the commemoration service in 2009, when relatives of those who had died angrily challenged him to do more, that he fully embraced their cause. Yet it is difficult to imagine his subsequent political authority in places such as Merseyside without that identification. Football had become the arena through which a wider claim to justice, solidarity and political legitimacy could once again be made.

On the evening of 26 June 1996, I went for a drink in a pub in Maida Vale, only vaguely aware of the significance of the occasion. It was, in fact, the semi-final of the European Championship between England and Germany, and the match had gone to a penalty shoot-out. The atmosphere inside the pub was almost unbearably charged. I had no particular interest in football, yet found myself caught inside an emotional field so intense that I decided to leave.

As has often happened during major tournaments, London’s streets were almost deserted. Taking advantage of the empty roads, I drove rapidly across the city towards Hampstead Heath and climbed to the summit of Parliament Hill. My intention was perfectly straightforward. I wanted to escape the football. Instead, I discovered something altogether stranger. Standing above the city, I realised that I could hear the penalty shoot-out—not the commentary; not the crowd inside Wembley—London itself.

There was first the suspension: not silence exactly, but a strange collective holding of breath, as though the city had momentarily forgotten to inhale. Then came the strike—a fraction of a second later the wave arrived; a roar… then again… suspension… Strike: roar… suspension… Strike: roar. Each penalty announced itself not visually but rhythmically. Without seeing a single image, I could reconstruct the progress of the shoot-out from the successive waves propagating across the capital. Then, finally, the rhythm broke—the pause seemed longer than before. The kick must have been taken, but this time instead of release there came an immense, effortful groan, millions of bodies apparently contracting in involuntary sympathy with Gareth Southgate as Andreas Köpke saved his penalty. The sound did not resemble disappointment so much as physical pain. It travelled across London like one of the great orchestral swells in Debussy’s La Mer, gathering and dispersing as though the metropolis itself possessed lungs, muscles and a nervous system.

Shortly before, a man had arrived, climbing up the hill from Gospel Oak towards me, breathless, a cigar clutched in one hand: ‘I came up here to get away from it,’ he said. ‘I got this,’ he showed me the cigar ‘to celebrate, but now… I dunno… I dunno… I can’t stand the tension.’ And so we stood together: me intrigued, him, gutted, as intelligence of the shoot-out became available on this eminence. Only much later did I understand what I had witnessed.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (who lived and thought until he was over a hundred years old, so, in common with James Lovelock, he probably knew a thing… or two) remarked that understanding frequently proceeds by what he called sacrifices of scale: abandoning the immediately sensible in favour of the intelligible. Standing on Parliament Hill that evening, I had unknowingly performed precisely such a sacrifice.

At street level there were simply thousands of football supporters, each responding individually to the unfolding match; however, from the summit of the hill those countless separate experiences resolved themselves into something quite different: a single informational waveform propagating across an entire metropolis. Millions of individual nervous systems, television broadcasts, electricity networks, architecture, roads and atmospheric conditions combined to produce a phenomenon that no individual intended and no individual controlled. The city itself had become a communications medium. Years later, searching for an adequate vocabulary with which to describe the distributed forms of causation emerging in the twenty-first century, I eventually found one. I now call them Brocken spectres, after the uncanny optical effect produced in Alpine regions, whereby a solitary individual witnesses themselves rendered gigantic in the mists. The modern Brocken spectres are thus these apparent centres of intentionality generated by the recursive interaction of countless smaller agencies, each entirely real, none individually sovereign.

Montaigne observed that one should mistrust the man who takes games too seriously because he does not take life seriously enough. For centuries that seemed an unexceptionable judgment, but let’s suppose the converse has become true. Suppose football now bears such extraordinary emotional weight precisely because it has become one of the very few arenas in which large numbers of ordinary people still experience themselves as participating directly in history. On the football pitch decisions still appear decisive, referees still possess authority, victory and defeat remain intelligible. There are identifiable protagonists, recognisable climaxes and final results. Outside the stadium, matters have become considerably stranger.

While London surrendered itself once again to the rhythms of the World Cup, another contest was unfolding around the Strait of Hormuz. It too was described in the language of sovereign actors, executive decisions, victories, ceasefires and retaliation. This language might as well be football commentary, because beneath those familiar words now lies an entirely different structure of causation—one that football, paradoxically, now helps us to perceive more clearly than politics itself.

During precisely the same weeks in which England’s progress through the tournament reorganised the emotional metabolism of cities such as London, another drama unfolded in the Persian Gulf. Here too commentators spoke confidently of sovereign actors making sovereign decisions. There were strikes and counter-strikes; threats, ultimatums and retaliations; declarations that the conflict had entered a new phase, followed almost immediately by declarations that it had ended. Within a matter of days the war had apparently begun several times and concluded several times, without ever quite succeeding in becoming either war or peace. What oscillated was not merely military activity but language itself.

This continual switching-on and switching-off of hostilities is not simply diplomatic confusion, it is now symptomatic of a deeper transformation in historical causation. Classical warfare possessed recognisable temporal boundaries—wars were declared, fought and concluded; treaties ratified what armies had already achieved. The contemporary battlespace increasingly resists such periodisation: instead it resembles an electrical circuit whose current continually fluctuates without ever being fully interrupted. Sovereign actors announce decisive interventions, yet those interventions almost immediately dissolve back into the logistical systems that generated them.

If one wishes to understand whether a war has truly begun, it is increasingly less useful to listen to presidents, generals or foreign ministries than to observe the behaviour of marine insurers. Insurance premiums possess no ideological commitments, being little else than—as Schopenhauer observed—a public sacrifice on the altar of anxiety. This is because they do not applaud military victories, celebrate national honour or participate in the theatre of sovereign will, they merely calculate distributed risk. Precisely because they are indifferent to political rhetoric, they have become among the most sensitive instruments for detecting the actual structure of geopolitical reality.

Hull insurance functions, in effect, as an epistemological instrument. It registers not what governments say is happening but what globally distributed logistical systems believe is happening. When underwriters abruptly increase premiums for vessels entering the Strait of Hormuz, they are not expressing an opinion. They are measuring the changing probability that the circulation of commodities may be interrupted. Risk itself has become informational.

The distinction becomes clearer if we compare the present crisis with the last occasion upon which the Strait of Hormuz genuinely ceased to function as an ordinary commercial waterway.

During the so-called Tanker War, the maritime phase of the Iran-Iraq conflict between 1984 and 1988, both belligerents deliberately attacked oil tankers and merchant shipping in an effort to disrupt each other's exports and to internationalise the conflict. Hundreds of commercial vessels were damaged. Insurance premiums rose dramatically, but the decisive point came when commercial insurers increasingly found themselves unable to price the risk at all. The problem had ceased to be actuarial. It had become geopolitical.

The response was correspondingly sovereign: Kuwait sought external protection for its shipping, and the United States responded by reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and escorting them through the Gulf under Operation Earnest Will. The market had reached its limits—at precisely the point where distributed commercial risk became uninsurable, sovereign power stepped in and assumed responsibility for maintaining the circulation of oil. The distinction mattered because the war itself was recognisable. There were identifiable belligerents, declared strategic objectives, geographically bounded theatres of operation and an intelligible progression from escalation towards ceasefire.

The present situation is altogether stranger: during the confrontation between Israel, Iran and the United States in June 2026, public discourse repeatedly announced that war had either begun or ended. Missiles were exchanged; American aircraft struck Iranian nuclear facilities; Iran retaliated; ceasefires were announced almost before the smoke had cleared, only for further exchanges to follow. Commentators continually reached for the vocabulary of classical warfare, yet the events themselves stubbornly refused to conform to it.

The shipping market reflected this ambiguity: hull premiums for vessels entering the Gulf rose sharply, while the cost of war-risk insurance increased still more dramatically. Yet commercial shipping did not cease, while so far the Strait of Hormuz has never formally closed. Oil, the lifeblood of accelerationist hyper-capitalism has continued to move, albeit under conditions of heightened uncertainty. What the insurance market was registering was therefore not war in the classical sense, but something more elusive: the increasing difficulty of assigning calculable probabilities within a battlespace whose boundaries, participants and temporal limits had themselves become unstable.

That distinction is more than technical: hull insurance has become one of the most sensitive instruments through which contemporary history may be observed. Politicians continue to describe events in the language of sovereignty: decisions, deterrence, retaliation, victory. Underwriters ask a different question entirely: can the circulation of commodities continue? They possess no interest in prestige, honour or national myth. They ask only whether risk remains sufficiently bounded to be priced. It is therefore often the insurance market, rather than the diplomatic communiqué, that tells us whether the underlying logistical system remains intact.

This also explains why so many recent crises seem simultaneously to be wars and not wars. The sovereign drama continues to occupy the foreground, but behind it lies an infrastructural reality whose overriding imperative is continuity: oil must continue to flow. Container ships must continue to sail. Financial settlements must continue to clear. The extraordinary achievement of the contemporary logistical order is not that it prevents conflict, but that it increasingly absorbs conflict into itself without allowing conflict to interrupt circulation for very long. We are no longer witnessing the suspension of commerce by war so much as the management of war within commerce.

Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to football. Guy Debord, the Marxist theoretician and founder of the revolutionary groupuscule, the Situationist International, argued that sports tournaments were, under late capitalism, the equivalent for the working class—who, not having achieved revolutionary class consciousness, were as yet not historic actors themselves—the illusion that they were: the year’s sporting calendar was their equivalent of the old church festivals—harvest suppers, Rogationtide etc—a zeitgeist determined for them; and, given the divinity stood outside time, a necessarily unchanging one.

It’s this that now so uncannily synchronises with the doublethink of conventional politics: Donald J Trump, the organic component of the Trump entity: the oscillator that effects hull repricing and allows for the mondial churn that keeps the Brocken spectres in play, capriciously overrules a decision in one battlespace—the football pitch—precisely because his will is ineffectual geopolitically. Under such conditions it becomes difficult to see the match, because to do so is witness the peculiar totalitarianism of our age in action. Not a totalitarianism that’s a function of sovereign will—a Hobbesian leviathan—but one made of many, many little purchasing decisions: one made of millions of tiny decisions to turn on, tune in, and drop out of history. It’s precisely because of the existence of the distributed intentionality that in a peculiar sense I, who care not one jot or tittle for the beautiful game, can hear not only the fate of the English football team being played out as I lie awake on a hot night, but the fate of England as well.

Originally published as SITREP No. 018 on X on 13 July 2026. Read the original on X.

An occasional publication evangelising Jehovah’s Witnesses
‘God is present when the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet’ Simone Weil
I respect your tradition of refusing to do military service on the grounds of conscience. Doctrinally, I’ve no objection to your anti-Trinitarianism, personally, I’d be dead without regular blood transfusions, and yet I accept your right to object to them – but your millenarian eschatology blinds you to the ways you abandon Christian ethics. You are close to gnostic heretics who, finding the world entirely sinful and ruled over by a demiurge or devil, argue that doing what they want is the whole of the law. You’re doing what you want right now, which is to conduce people not to salvation – since you offer this only conditionally and belatedly – but your own organisation. Inasmuch as you are free in terms of conscience and belief, you abrogate that freedom by refusing to accept any differences of opinion among you on either theological or political grounds. Monstrous pride! Simone Weil, the great Christian thinker glosses the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25) thus: ‘Christ taught us that the supernatural love of our neighbour is the exchange of compassion and gratitude which happens in a flash between two beings, one possessing and the other deprived of human personality. One of the two is only a little piece of flesh, naked, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch; he is nameless, no one knows anything about him. Those who pass by this thing scarcely notice it, and a few minutes afterward do not even know they saw it. Only one stops and turns his attention towards it. The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention.’
The bold italics are mine, because week after week I pass you by and here you stand: completely inattentive to the suffering around you. You are the priest and the Levite of who Jesus speaks – you ignore the traveller who was stripped and beaten and robbed and left for dead in a ditch. You’re ignoring him right now: he’s lying within a few feet of you, in a dirty sleeping bag, his soul wracked with distress, his body with pain. Remember what the Good Samaritan did for the ‘little piece of flesh’ you disdain: ‘when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.’
That’s what you should be doing right now, instead of standing here chatting with your friends. What you’re doing isn’t evangelism, it’s a recruitment drive.

I wrote the above two or three years ago, when I was still attending psychotherapy with an existential therapist whose consulting room occupied a drab office block inserted into one of the masonry crevices opposite Liverpool Street Station. The therapy proved utterly fruitless: a man who claimed his therapeutic method conformed to an authentic awareness of death was utterly unable to assist me in confronting my own finitude. Eventually I terminated the therapy myself, concluding our final session by charging the therapist with an ethical failure and reporting him to his professional body. What finally repelled me most, besides his intellectual and emotional dishonesty, was the realisation that he responded to my distress with a kind of procedural automaticity rather than genuine attention. His interventions felt less like the response of one human being to another than the execution of a protocol.

In retrospect, the auto-therapist’s practice seemed oddly analogous to the activity of the religious evangelists who assembled every lunchtime on the pavement outside the station. You find them in cities throughout the developed world. Their eschatological claims are curiously addressed to societies that have largely been emptied of any serious sense of an ending, while offering little comfort to those whose endings are already pressing upon them: the diseased, the damaged, the starving, the homeless, or anyone confronting an overwhelming coefficient of adversity. Such people cannot meaningfully be consoled by the doctrine that the elect have already been chosen before birth.
Whenever I pass Jehovah's Witnesses standing beside their display of The Watchtower and their neatly arranged pamphlets, I am struck by their extraordinary stasis. Very often—not merely nearby but almost at their feet—lies someone damaged, diseased or destitute, precisely the sort of person any compassionate Christian should first attend to. Yet their attention is directed elsewhere: towards the prospective recruit rather than the immediate neighbour.
It was this paradox that first suggested to me the project I have come to call The Will Tower. My concern is not merely with the decline of reading, but with the decline of attention itself. Deep literacy is only one expression of a more fundamental ethical capacity: the willingness to stop, to notice, and to respond. Watch this space.

Originally published as SITREP No. 017 on X on 6 July 2026. Read the original on X.

Westminster sees a cabinet rupture, a Starmer crisis, a tremor before the Makerfield by-election, another twitch in the cadaver of Labour managerialism. This is the Gilbert and Sullivan reading: ministers entering and exiting through the wrong doors while the chorus explains that nothing fundamental has altered. But something fundamental has altered, and it is not Healey. The resignation is the symptom, not the event. The event is the collapse of Britain's old defence settlement and the substitution of an Americanised software-sovereignty model in its place. For forty years, Britain imagined that its defence-industrial position was underwritten by BAE, the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, oil money, aircraft, service contracts and the long afterlife of Al-Yamamah – the biggest sale of anything by anyone to anybody, or close enough for the myth to matter. That arrangement gave the British state a fantasy of autonomy: Atlantic enough for Washington, European enough for NATO, mercantile enough for Riyadh, and corrupt enough, in the old imperial style, to be called pragmatism. Hormuz has blown that settlement apart. The Gulf is no longer the cashbox of British strategic continuity but the exposed circuit through which war, energy, insurance, shipping, drones, missiles and American power now pass at terrifying speed. The British political class cannot name this because it is still cognitively arranged around the Cold War: Europe, Russia, NATO, tanks, budgets, deterrence, posture. It has not understood thermodronology: the movement of war through heat, fuel, data, shipping lanes, swarm systems, insurance rates and automated perception. Into that failure steps Palantir. Not as an ideology, not even as a conspiracy, but as the operating system of an abdication. The Starmer entity, unable to think defence or governance except as procurement, abrogates itself to the Trump entity: not Trump the man alone, but the American sovereign stack of money, war, platform, cloud, contractor and command system. The fog of war moves into Britain's own London particular of peace. Healey's resignation matters only because it reveals the argument has already shifted from whether Britain should enter this architecture to how fast it can afford to wire itself into it. The Met pause and the NHS break clause are visible scratches on the glass. The MoD is the screen itself.

Originally published as SITREP No. 016 on X on 15 June 2026. Read the original on X.

Martin Amis’s war against cliché was never merely a war against bad writing—as if there were writing on the one hand, and the world on the other, while nary the twane shall meet. I mean, you may well consider the felicities of literary style to be infra dig so far as you’re concerned: you have your eye on more important things… really. The very essential things the things that matter in this world, not words—things. And the fact that words are used to describe things is merely a technical matter— much like the way, say, a computer programme can be designed so as to provide doctors with unified patient information across the National Health Service.

No doubt Amis—although he died in Florida, so not under the aegis of the NHS—would nonetheless have taken some interest in the prospect of Wes Streeting, the former Health Secretary becoming leader of the Labour Party, and—such is the nature of the British constitution—by that fact alone, the prime minister, and hence the most powerful individual in the realm. The realm Amis became a knight of shortly before his surcease—the realm that was, for all his philo-Americanism, the omphalos of his own literary style; one so very resistant to cliché, almost to the end.

Which was unsurprising: death being a sort of cosmic cliché in Amis’s own terms: death, unless apprehended authentically, results in the malformed awareness we see in all those cliches of the deathbed scene: the loving relatives, the serene acceptance, the tearful embrace. The phrases used to describe it represent not simply laziness, but a failure of perception; not merely the long-since worn out verbal gadget that comes too readily to hand, but the mental hack that enables a writer—or a politician—not to think at all. Amis’s famous triad, the clichés of the pen, the mind and the heart, needs now to be extended. All governing, like all writing, should be a campaign against cliché—against the inherited verbal, emotional and institutional mistakes by which societies repeat themselves into decline, death, and, once that death—having been memorialised only in cliches, is forgotten—utter oblivion, whether they’re former health secretaries or knights of the realm.

Wes Streeting’s memoir, ‘One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up’, is an almost exemplary deposition when it comes to building the case against the cliché-ridden contemporary British political class. True, politicians aren’t ever conspicuously good writers—but that doesn’t mean they have to be execrable ones. If Streeting’s credentialled by his class mobility, why doesn’t he care to demonstrate its most obvious cause and effect: education. As a Cambridge graduate in History, he cannot—one would imagine—have avoided being exposed to writing that aims, ipso facto, to convey how political actors think and feel about the societies they inhabit, and upon which they hope to act. Just as the writer needs to make it new, so does the politician—especially one operating in a political system that has lost the ability, through public debate, to speak to itself.

There’s a marvellous book by Julian Jaynes called ‘The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.’ In it, Jaynes proposes that the origin of our reflective self-consciousness lies in the severing, within historical time, of the corpus callosum: the thick hank of neural tissue which unites the right and left sides of the human brain. Jaynes places this bio-historical event in the Bronze Age of Greek society, somewhere between the composition of the Odyssey and that of the Iliad. His reasoning is that the former text displays a schizophrenic style: the gods speak in lieu of human interiority; whereas, by the time the Iliad was composed the gods have become only semi-detached from the psyche.

I only reflect on this because it’s worth considering, by analogy, that the problem with contemporary British political debate is the corpus callosum has grown back; reuniting not just the two sides of the House of Commons, but the two sides of society they represent as well. Moreover, the two houses of Parliament itself are now conjoined in the same contumely—because this isn’t a unity born of consensus, but a febrile and an utter diversity of opinion; one mediated solely by a doom-scrolling feedback loop of affective signalling: a Streeting-level pseudo-discourse of utter and superficial cliché mongering. As I say, politicians as a rule aren’t the greatest of writers—while Churchill famously won the Nobel Prize, having recently sat down to enjoy a gentle hour or two with his ‘History of the Second World War,’ I can tell you there are few more effective sedatives available through the National Health Service. However, Churchill’s works at least have the virtue of providing the reader with vital empirical information—the same cannot be said for Streeting’s memoir of his battle royale of an upbringing.

Its first chapter alone is so saturated with cliché that one begins to feel the prose itself has been assembled out of prefabricated verbal units: ‘all hell broke loose’, which then ‘spread like wildfire’, ovewhelming the ‘life and soul of the party’ to ‘earth-shattering proportions’, such that they were ‘over the moon’; unsurprisingly, given they were riding an ‘emotional roller coaster’. Even so, they would have to ‘face the music’, prove they were ‘a tough cookie’, and, like little Wes, capable of ‘a new lease of life’, one effected by ‘pull(ing) myself together’, ‘putting a brave face on’, and of course ‘work(ing) well to take my mind off my own problems’. When it comes to the mise-en-scene, there are clichés of East End matriarchy, clichés of adversity, clichés of medical ordeal, clichés of political redemption, clichés of family trauma, clichés of uplift. The cliché-mongering is not occasional—it’s structural. On these meagre pages, bedizened with type, one finds several such otiose formulae per page—and more importantly, one finds a prose that continually converts felt inner experience into highly-visible social currency before experience has had time to become thought.

Rachel Cooke, reviewing the book in The Guardian, noticed the clichés but gave them a light ride, not so much by misinterpreting, but by using Amis’s notion of the just war against cliché as a mere placeholder in lieu of any sustained criticism of them. This is a well-worn, de-haut-en-bas manoeuvre in liberal literary culture, one Guardian journalists (many of whom are Oxbridge educated themselves) deploy with consummate legerdemain. Yes, a lousy style in a leftist’s political memoir is, in theory, regrettable, but it doesn’t really matter, given the story is both ‘inspiriting’ (whatever that means in an avowedly Godless society), as well as being ‘compelling’ (this we do understand, given we live in a society comprised mostly by addicts); the prose is thin gruel, but one’s life is nonetheless ruled straight and firm, which is good enough for us. Why? Because the piss-poor writing paradoxically confirms the steepness of the ascent up the social pyramid, and hence—one presumes—the steely grip Streeting has maintained on the greasy pole.

None of the lucubrations bestowed on Streeting’s sentimental rise too powerlessness represented generosity: it was all condescension—the return of the repressed English class system manifesting yet again inside the supposedly ‘progressive’ consciousness. The middle-class critic grants the working-class politician absolution from style because she believes his content is socially useful. The right, meanwhile, welcomes the same book for opposite reasons: here is a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, accepted discipline, aspiration, faith, family and institutional advancement. Both sides patronise him. Both sides excuse the writing because it serves a prior political fantasy—one, they themselves no longer possess the integrity, intellect, and crucially style to interrogate.

How, pity please Rachel Cooke, is a man who deals in clichés so egregiously going to come up with policies that don’t themselves betray the same, um, clichéd turn of mind? In particular, the hoary old myth that ‘class mobility’ alone will result in… well what precisely? To hear politicians and commentators of all stripes (and increasingly, none) discuss this vital issue, is to enter into a wonderland not even Karl Marx envisioned, one in which an entire class of society somehow magically ascends into that empyrean of moneyed privilege, while mysteriously leaving no one behind to clean the toilets except, in the case of the right, psychotic asylum seekers; or well-paid and unionised effluent removers educated to degree-level, in the case of the left.

Dear, gentle, Harry-Potter-educated reader, style is not separable from personality: style is personality, which is why I take my lead on gender rights from Simone de Beauvoir, not JK Rowling, who’s prose is so bedizened with adverbs reading it you do feel there are dark forces at play in the world… menacingly… creepingly… phallically... If contemporary society—and by extension, politics—insists on personality, authenticity and lived experience, then prose becomes evidence. Streeting’s prose reveals not a mind struggling toward form, but a mind as intensely comfortable with banality as another Banalmeister, Peter Mandelson, once was with people becoming filthy rich. This is not to say that a bad sentence disqualifies a politician sans parse; it is to assert for the record that a settled dependence on ready-made language suggests a settled dependence on ready-made feeling. The cliché is not only a literary defect: it’s an ethical symptom: the blazoning of psyche evading the expression of authentic emotions. Either because it’s not advantageous, or because its incapable, or, worse still, because it doesn’t have any at all, having already transmogrified all that subtle interiority into crass—and yes, clichéd—exteriority.

This becomes most striking in Streeting’s account of cancer. One might expect such an experience to force metaphysical pressure on, and then through the page—especially given his reader, in this instance, was actually ill with cancer as he was reading, and remains so. Not just pressure, either—sympathy. Illness, after all, is a greater leveller than progressive taxation: because unlike the latter, it strips away the administrative fiction that ‘life’, in all it marvellous multifariousness, is a sequence of manageable tasks. It confronts the sufferer, in Heidegger’s phrase, with ‘the ownmost possibility of death.’ Yet Streeting’s account repeatedly moves away from authentic inwardness toward it’s diametric opposite: publicity, procedure and response. The diagnosis becomes a media event, a campaigning inconvenience, a story managed through phone, video, broadcast and social-media feedback. One of his most revealing moments is his relief at a Twitter troll becoming kind to him when cancer is announced. Here, surely, is the affective core: the self-sustained by the crowd summoned from the pocket, rather than any heartfelt conviction, let alone, gulp, love.

This is why Streeting is not merely phoney in the old sense: he is phone-y—his emotional life, at least as represented in the memoir, is mediated by bidirectional digital attention. He does not so much suffer privately and then communicate publicly; he appears to discover the meaning of suffering through its circulation, while, not being apprised of difference, he cannot understand that each retweet attenuates rather than reinforces it. The cancer passage thus moves strangely between the statistical and the pseudo-personal: cancer as diagnosis, cancer as public statement, cancer as response management, cancer as proof of resilience. The old truism is that no patient feels himself to be a statistic. Streeting’s book suggests something odder: a patient who can barely stop seeing himself as one, given his ‘feelings’ are being titrated, in real time, through the emotional testbed of a multitude’s response.

This phoneyness carries directly into his politics: the one phrase for which he will remembered as Health Secretary is especially damning: the ‘NHS in your pocket’ formula, which, while it might be a little light relief for those suffering from ovarian or testicular cancer, is not an incidental slogan, but the entire Streeting anthropology: the patient becomes a user, the service becomes an interface, care becomes access, community becomes connectivity. It is not that digital technology has no place in healthcare, it’s that Streeting’s imagination—in common with those of so many of our wannabe ‘leaders’—seems unable to distinguish between a society and a platform, between a community and a feedback loop, between public trust and an app. The same frictionless personality that writes in clichés imagines the NHS as a frictionless device—but just as I said in a recent post that culture was friction, so is medical treatment: I cannot even estimate how many hours I’ve spent in consultation with doctors over the past four years of cancer treatment, but it’s hundreds. And thank Christ all-fucking-mighty, Cockney Wes, they weren’t in my pocket, either physically, or—more to the point—financially.

The same problem appears in his constitutional imagination. Streeting studied history at Cambridge, yet he talks about Britain and Europe like a man devoid of historical sense. The question of rejoining the European Union cannot be treated as a mere policy preference, still less as a gesture of managerial sanity after Brexit’s damage. Britain entered in the early 1970s, what was presented, under Heath, as a common market: a customs union, a tariff-free zone, a sphere of economic cooperation. Over the subsequent decades, quantity became quality: incremental legal and political adjustments, each defensible in its own terms, cumulatively altered the relation between Parliament, sovereignty and inherited constitutional practice. The change was not experienced as revolution because the English constitution is precisely arranged to absorb change without announcing rupture. Nonetheless, the violent diremption of Brexit is what happens when, in the words of Isaiah (not a prophet given to good tidings) ‘precept is piled upon precept.’

That is the conundrum contemporary politicians cannot unknot because they’re too entangled in… cliché. England is a profoundly non-ideological country: one of empiricists and pragmatists sans pareil, ones whose ideology consists in pretending not to have one at all: genius! Its constitution is not the product of rational design—it is a temporalised inheritance: Crown, Parliament, common law, custom, Protestant suspicion, popular sovereignty mediated through representation, and the reciprocal powerlessness—the negative capability—of monarch and bicameral legislature. The dictatorship in Parliament does not usually become tyranny because it is held within a duopolistic and historically sedimented arrangement: something socialists in particular are wont to ignore—one thinks of Kafka’s aphorism in this context: ‘The decisive moment of human development is continually at hand. This is why those movements of revolutionary thought that declare everything preceding to be an irrelevance are correct—because as yet nothing has happened.’

At least according to them! And under the English constitutional dispensation it becomes even easier to comprehend why their hope springs eternal—it’s by reason of these immemorial arrangements themselves. The sovereign, who’s own majesty is itself a coefficient of its supposed antiquity, is powerful solely by being powerless: Chucky II very definitely remembers what happened to Chucky I, and he doesn’t want to be a sequel in the franchise. Burke, with characteristic elegance, observes that the reason we shouldn’t indulge in lèse-majesté is that it’s rude to remind our servants that this is the case. Mutatis mutandis, Parliament is also absolute precisely by being embedded in what it has not made: no making horses consuls here, thank you very much! One of the most wearying effects of a long life of observing British politics is the spectacle of now generation after generation of the political class who, uncomprehending of the constitution in its essence, constantly propose policies altogether inimical to the settled English predisposition. So persistently has this been done, that in conjunction with phenomena such as… oh, I dunno, modernity—and the globalisation that has danced attendance on it—that this usually bovine nation has now become rather uselessly frisky. Like a bullock—not John Bull.

The European question, like devolution, exposed the fragility of the English/British constitutional arrangement. The problem was not simply that Britain joined Europe, nor simply that it left—the problem, in point of fact, wasn’t a problem: it was a disaster: Britain, together with its crew and passengers, none of whom possessed adequate orientation, drifted into ever-closer union without a serious constitutional reckoning, and then tore itself out by referendum without one either. Both entry and exit were constitutional deformations. Both were badly understood. Both were treated as policy questions by politicians who no longer understood the vessel they were steering.

So when Streeting or any other Labour leadership hopeful starts opining about Europe as though Britain can simply tack back toward Brussels, they show the same underlying defect visible in the prose: a belief that inherited forms can be handled like slogans written on the contemporary equivalent of billowing sails: the gossamer and tacky filaments of the web. So it is, that wrought by the digi-hands of Streeting et al., the constitution becomes a cliché, sovereignty becomes a cliché, Europe—together with its extraordinary literary heritage—becomes a cliché; and yes, that ownmost reality of the scoundrelly politician, patriotism— that, too, becomes a cliché. And one should always mistrust patriotism when it is expressed by a person whose language is full of clichés of the heart, because as I believe we’ve already established such an individual doesn’t know their own heart, let alone our heart of oak.

The Labour Party’s current manoeuvring around Europe therefore reveals more than tactical confusion: it reveals the rotten hollowness of the political class—no heart of oak here, move on please ladies and gentlemen. Brexit was, as I and everyone else right-minded now agree. (The rest are busy ‘taking back control’.) It hasn’t just injured Britain’s social fabric, economic structure and geostrategic position—it’s spindled and mutilated it. But the remedy cannot be another constitutional mend conducted by politicians who have not understood the pattern, let alone how to cut fabric on the bias—fast fashion will do that: jog on in your jeggings, my son, if you aren’t too puffed-out in that puffer.

To repair Britain’s relation with Europe requires first an account of what was constitutionally altered by membership, what was violently torn by departure, and what form of sovereignty can exist in a post-imperial, post-Brexit, digitally saturated polity. Without that, ‘rejoin’ is—you guessed it—nothing save the liberal equivalent of ‘take back control’. In other words, a slogan for people who cannot think historically. A cliché of the mind, if you will.

And so this is where the jollily entitled memoir and the monitorly banal politics converge: Streeting writes—so reads—like a tweet, because he thinks like one: he even looks and sounds like one, with his compressed affect (one part Gay to two of Estuarine), his instant recognisability twerking out policies on TikTok, which itself represents the desired high engagement, while manifesting very low depth indeed. His life story may be compelling material; but why write it in prose that turns it into emotivist bubblewrap: pop one while you’re bored—you’ll feel better. The very apoptosis of his metastasizing cancer cells becomes “pop-pop-pop!” content. His childhood becomes content. His politics becomes content. The human being is flattened into transmissible personality, then wound on to a roll and shipped next day; or, praise be to Tim Berners-Lee, even more expeditiously.

This is why the cliché matters so much, because it isn’t just a dead phrase, it’s an act of avoidance—or, at least reaching for a cliché feels that way: ‘Mm, how should I express this important personal feeling…? I know: “you could’ve knocked me down with a feather”.’ But reached for again and again? That’s many, many little acts of avoidance, each one sparing its ‘author’ the risk of perception, either of himself, or the other. It spares the politician the burden of thought. And there’s an unforced serendipity in this capitulation to the cliché, rather than warring with it: for thereby it also spares the reader the shock of reality, leaving them, too, to sleep the sleep of Merrie England’s immemorial unreasoning. In literature, this produces bad prose—and in Streeting’s execrable—in politics, it produces bad government, which, in the fullness of a time no longer immemorial (although Farage et al. treat is as if it were) in constitutional affairs it leads to catastrophe.

Gird up your lexicons! Re-pinion your split infinitives! Go boldly up to the war against cliché! Martin Amis once vouchsafed to me that he thought it a cosmic solecism that Shakespeare had been a mere dramatist, but given he also once avowed ‘we’re all Labour now’, I feel his shade by my side, as, like King Henry before me, I call upon all true Britons to join the fray. Yes! We few, we happy few, we band of non-gender specific affiliates; for whoever today that sheds their ink with me to write stylish prose, shall be my brother or sister; be he or she ne’er so compulsive a pusher of the cliché button, this day shall gentle his condition, such that instead of pretending he can factor taverning in Eastcheap into the highest office in the land, he brushes up on his constitutional history. Cambridge University would be an excellent place to start, since the faculty places particular emphasis on just this subject, with readings from such percipient stylists as Burke, Bagehot and Oakeshott prominent on the syllabus to this day.

I recommend this national service for the war against cliché not just to Streeting, but the political class in general, who have become so addicted to the cliché that one wonders whether they would be able to say anything of real profundity on any occasion whatsoever I struggle to see Kemi Badenock, let alone Nigel, producing the right words, say, at their beloved’s funeral but really they should get some practise in because the war against cliché is no longer simply literary: it is political, constitutional and moral—therefore, Streeting: civilisational. A country governed by people who speak in clichés will eventually be governed by people who think in clichés. And a country whose politicians think in clichés will mistake its deepest inheritances for adjustable settings on a phone.

Streeting as a devout Christian—something he manages, along with many other contemporary Christians, by skating round a great deal of its doctrine—would have been in sympathy with the Anglican priest I spoke to recently, who, when I suggested that some of the ills of our polity could be ameliorated if people simply stayed off social media, told me ‘My life is on my phone so you won’t get me to do that!’ But of all people, the idea that those whose faith is in the intangible and eternal, should have to hang on so conspicuously to the material and the external, is surely a savage indictment of both that faith and by extension Christianity’s ethical fitness for our era itself.

Come the hour: ecce homo! And that is the danger Streeting represents—not that he’s uniquely bad, nor puddle-shallow, nor unique in his insane ambition. Quite the opposite: he is a cliche. He is the ersatz, POD politician of 2026: educated but unformed, fluent but thin, personal but impersonal, confessional but unauthentic, digital to the pixelated marrow of his cancer-free (we hope) bones. The clichéd twitterings of the human tweet are not a private literary failing: they are the dawning chorus of the governing class discovering that it has nothing inward left to say. No wonder you feel like closing the curtains.

A decade ago, in her review of Streeting’s memoir, Cooke posited three explanations for the lack of any interior life on display in this story of a human conscience who wishes to wield power. They were, one: he was a sociopath; two, he found it too painful to write authentically about his difficult upbringing; and three, he was a little ‘robotic’. Presumably, in the ensuing ten years of doom-scrolling his own opinion ratings, dear little Wes has become even more of a cyborg. It’ll take more than a fry up to relieve this condition.

Originally published as SITREP No. 015 on X on 11 June 2026. Read the original on X.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence is a significant intervention, and should be welcomed as such. We need this kind of intervention from the major religions. We need institutions with memory, moral ballast and anthropological seriousness to enter a debate otherwise dominated by engineers, speculators, policy technicians and a clerisy of corporate ethicists whose moral vocabulary rarely rises above the language of risk mitigation.

The Pope builds, intelligently and often movingly, on Catholic Social Doctrine. This matters. Catholic Social Doctrine, at its best, has helped create the conditions for viable civic society: solidaristic, associative, anti-monopolistic, wary of both state absolutism and market idolatry. For all its patriarchal and generative assumptions — assumptions many of us find deeply problematic — Catholicism has often retained in contemporary societies a capacity for cohesion, mutual obligation and moral seriousness that liberal individualism has largely squandered.

The encyclical’s strongest sections are those in which the Pope identifies AI not simply as a tool, but as a concentration of power: data, platforms, infrastructure, compute, capital and political influence converging in the hands of a few transnational actors. His call to "disarm AI" is valuable precisely because it sees the arms race as military, economic and cognitive. The race for larger models, greater compute, deeper integration and wider capture is not neutral innovation. It is domination under the sign of inevitability.

Here the Pope comes close to a genuinely socialistic critique. He understands that technology cannot be evaluated apart from ownership, access, labour, exploitation, surveillance and the common good. He sees that the human being is being reduced to a functional unit within an optimisation system. He understands, rightly, that the danger is not chiefly that machines become human, but that humans become machine-like.

But this is also where the encyclical falters.

Christian anthropology cannot quite shake off its refusal to accept the full implications of evolution. It continues to propose the human individual as exemplary, as though the visible phenotype were the final moral unit, rather than a temporary synecdoche of the genotype and of the longer biological, historical and social processes through which human beings become what they are. The human being is not an already completed essence accidentally threatened by technology. Human societies are temporally mediated. They exist in becoming. Any serious account of technology must therefore have a Hegelian sense of mediation, contradiction and historical formation.

The Pope sees the danger of dehumanisation, but he still treats humanity as something to be safeguarded from outside assault. The deeper problem is that humanity itself is being reconstituted through the very systems it has built. The machine is not merely attacking the human. It is training the human, habituating the human, formatting the human, recoding attention, memory, desire and social relation.

And this brings us to the great omission.

The Pope will not attack baseline consumption.

This is the failure of almost all contemporary thinking. It sees the catastrophe, names the structures, deplores the inequalities, calls for regulation, education, transparency, accountability, oversight and dialogue — and then refuses the simple negative command: Stop. Stop doing it. Stop scrolling. Stop posting. Stop refreshing. Stop answering. Stop consuming the machine. Stop feeding your consciousness into an attention economy designed to capture, fragment and monetise it.

The root problem is not that we need to start doing something new. It is that we need to stop doing things we are already doing compulsively.

The addiction issue is massive. We are not dealing with a marginal habit or an unfortunate side effect. We are dealing with mass cognitive impairment and affective derangement on an industrial scale. Four hours a day on a smartphone is not a lifestyle choice. It is closer, in moral and cognitive terms, to smoking crack for four hours a day: a patterned derangement of attention, reward, memory, anxiety and selfhood. It produces populations that are distracted, neurotic, suggestible, volatile and, at the edges, psychotic in their relation to reality.

Catholicism has the language for this. It has always had it. Spiritual hygiene. Fasting. Abstinence. Custody of the eyes. Examination of conscience. Mortification. Restraint. The discipline of desire. The refusal of temptation. The struggle against bondage of the will. So why does the Pope not say it?

Why does he not say to Catholics, and to all people of goodwill: restrict your time online. Put the phone down. Keep one day a week substantially free from digital media. Do not give your children smartphones. Do not take the machine to bed. Do not allow your first and last act of the day to be submission to the glowing rectangle: the hagioscope in which you worship yourself. Limit your use to an hour. Recover silence. Recover boredom. Recover prayer. Recover reading. Recover the face of another human being.

That would be a true pastoral intervention, and a truly Catholic move.

Instead, the encyclical remains partly trapped in the managerial language of the age it seeks to challenge. It calls for responsible innovation, ethical design and improved governance. All of that is necessary, but insufficient. The machine is not only out there in the corporations. It is in the hand, the bed, the pocket, the nervous system, the twitching thumb, the interrupted sentence, the uncompleted thought.

The Pope says: rebuild Jerusalem––yes, but first stop building Babel.

Stop laying bricks. Stop supplying the mortar. Stop confusing connection with communion, information with wisdom, stimulation with life, and availability with love.

The most urgent moral act in the age of artificial intelligence may not be innovation, regulation or education. It may be refusal.

Originally published as SITREP No. 014 on X on 3 June 2026. Read the original on X.

The Wall Street Journal piece on Bill Gates and Epstein looks, at first glance, like another plutocrat-reputation story: sex, secrecy, staff-managed image, foundation panic, congressional questioning, the usual midden of sullied private conduct and wipe-clean public contrition. But the real subject is larger, stranger, and frankly, murkier. The article is not principally about Epstein, nor even about Gates’s affairs: it’s about what we might call ‘the moral operating system of American hypercapitalism’—and the point at which its own agents can no longer believe WYSIWYG.

The most revealing detail is not the Epstein connection but the mannequin utilised by the Midas of Chips. Gates’s staff, we are told, keep a custom-size mannequin to test his clothes: crew and V-neck sweaters in neutral tones, soft shirts for soft emollient skin, and carefully managed, carbon-framed glasses (implying that what he sees he gets in a numinous way). Overall, the aim (which is, of course, his own) was to depict him as ‘calm and approachable, like Mister Rogers.’ The reference being to the persona of a responsible neighbourhood elder: who, gulp, keeps a benignant eye on the kids, not eye-detection surveillance software aimed at its employees.

In Gates’s image-making resides the real iconostasis of late pseudo-philanthropic capitalism: the monopolist, who definitionally made money by excluding the intentionality (and hence the moral being) of others, must become the nice old guy next door. The anti-trust defendant must be reborn as the global health benefactor––and the man who won the software wars, must reappear not remotely disheveled, rather: in the soft-knit glow of measurable and quantifiable compassion.

This is why the sex scandal can be embiggered far more than Gates or any one of his corporate organs. A powerful man using that asymetry, in part, to conduct affairs with women in or near his professional orbit is not unusual. A billionaire moving through zones of sexual and social impunity is, franchement, passé; nor is it proved, on the facts available, that Epstein was Gates’s procurer. That remains guilt by association, or, at most, a plausible suspicion generated by the murk of Epstein’s network. (And ‘network’ is the operative word here: the networks facilitated by bi-directional media naturally foment conspiracist feverishness, as the medium operates on the human individual to privilege associative meanings over conceptual reasoning.)

The more defensible charge is simpler: Gates behaved like a powerful man who gets what he wants, then panicked because his entire late-life identity depended on being seen as giving what he wants away.

The key here is that Gates is not merely fabulously and unimaginably rich. (It’s worth considering again how anyone with tastes that mundane could possibly spend all that money. Faced with Gates’s duff philanthropy, one almost longs for him to be some Hannibal Lecter, who would at least build a Topaki Palace-sized torture chamber with all that dosh, rather than just torment us with normcore.) No, Gates is the poster boy for the proposition that making money can be made not only an acceptable necessity, the deforming effects of which on the human soul needs must be ameliorated, but, gulp: morally good. The Gates persona exists to incarnate the redeemed capitalist: first the ruthless acquisition, then the global amelioration; first the monopoly rents, then the polio campaign; first the operating system, then the foundation; first the coercive platform––then the saving of children. It is as Hume says: there is nothing much to human causal reasoning beyond the habitual empirical association of cause and effect.

Understood this way, the soft sweater is not a simple garment but sort of ephod: the mantic garment worn by the ancient Hebrew priests, with jewels set in its fabric that lit up and so transmitted Divine revelation.

That is why Warren Buffett matters not mundanely––but cosmically. Buffett is the John the Baptist in this gospel of American moneyed utopia. He goes before Gates in the wilderness of accumulation, a leviathan full of moms and pops proclaiming the older creed: thrift, patience, compounding interest, hominy gritted teeth, folksy plain dealing, the billionaire as dry Midwestern custodian: ‘I made it all out of grain hoppers, I tellya.’ Then comes Gates, the Jesus of the computer revolution, translating the primitive message of money-making into global neoliberal salvation. Buffett baptises money in the wilderness––Gates redeems it. So when Buffett begins to withhold full sanction — when he waits to see what more the Epstein files reveal before deciding on his annual gift to Jesus’s foundation—the whole structure trembles. The elder witness has not denounced the messiah; worse, he has suspended belief.

The weeping of Gates’s employees, and the gnashing of their teeth, and the rending of their own garments (normcore by necessity, not choice) are the heart of the matter. They were not merely crying because Bill Gates had behaved badly, or because Epstein’s poisonous name had entered the corporate bloodstream––they were crying because God’s image––and with it their own moral universe––had fractured. TerraPower and Breakthrough Energy––the Gates Foundation itself, with its supposed ‘initiatives’ to supposedly ‘end’ disease and poverty, while supplying ‘clean’ energy: these institutions offered their superficially (i.e. technically not conceptually) intelligent, liberal, highly-trained employees a way of believing that capitalism can cure the very injuries capitalism produces. All the US philanthropists seem to desire this bizarre inversion of the Midas myth: that every bit of exploitatively gained and non-renewable wealth they touch, is somehow by that act rendered pure, ethical gold. That they themselves should fall for it is unsurprising––that those lower on the corporate food-chain do as well is evidenced by the copious tears which come when that belief-system begins to fail.

For there is no clean energy in a moral sense: there are less dirty technologies to be developed, and necessary transitions to them to be made––there could be better grids, improved storage systems, and offset carbon jiggery-pokery subject to venture-capital bets. But when all the hullabaloo dies down, there is no innocent energy regime compatible with permanently rising consumption, anymore than there’s a magic money tree, or a perpetual motion machine its leaves can be used to fuel. We cannot ameliorate the climate emergency with the same exploitative economic model that produced it in the first place. We cannot, above all, ameliorate it by actually intensifying extraction as a result of accelerating throughput––which makes of all the philanthropy cadres and the PR flaks, merely the rubber-booted abattoir workers, cleaning the blood off the floor. These employees were crying because they’d slipped after falling for the bullshit––and now realised the real sanguinous nature of the enterprise.

The so-called ‘maxmin’ or ‘difference’ principle is often supposed to justify economic equalities in freemarket capitalist economies. Developed by John Rawls in his ‘Theory of Justice’ it states that inequalities of wealth, income, status and even power are not inherently unjust so long as institutions can arrange them to the benefit of the least advantaged and preserve the fair value of rights. But hypercapitalism produces inequalities that deform the very field in which rights are exercised. It does not merely distribute more to some and less to others; it reorganises attention, law, media, governance, science, philanthropy and even conscience around its own continuance, not Gaia’s. Once billionaires become quasi-sovereign providers of global health, climate research and technological futurity, justice is no longer a distributive correction to capitalism. Justice has been made dependent on capitalism’s victors.

Edmund Burke saw one part of the problem from the opposite ideological shore. Once the separate arms and estates of government fall into conflict, they cannot mediate sectional interests evenly––then the rich and powerful divvy-up the res publica between themselves. In America now, the branches of government do not merely check and balance one another; they increasingly act as rival corporate embodiments––each captured by antagonistic sectional energies. The heritability of the Constitution—its transmission as a living compact between generations — has been disrupted. The result is not republican order but corporate civil war by procedural means. The barons fight each other: the King eats cheeseburgers and surfs channels.

In that context, Gates’s conscience becomes synecdochic. It is not guilt over accumulation itself––but rather terror that the image of benevolent accumulation might collapse, and the villeins will quit the demesne. The question is not whether Gates has done good through his foundation; plainly, in many measurable respects, he has. The question is whether measurable good can redeem the system of power that made such private sovereignty possible. The Gates Foundation’s achievements in global health are real; that is precisely why the moral problem is so acute. Hypercapitalism does not fail because it does no good. It fails because the good it does becomes dependent on the continued legitimacy of the structures that caused, intensified or monetised the harm it also conspicuously does: harm to the environment overall, but even more: harm to the capacity people have to believe in the good at all when it’s parachuted from above by a cargo cult headed by a John Frum who shops at Costco.

This is why the sight of a 70-year-old man in a grey crew neck reassuring employees that he is good, and therefore the world he embodies is good, no longer cuts it. The sweater has lost its sacramental force because it wasn’t an ephod to begin with: just another item of fast fashion, which is why the staff can see it’s a walking, talking mannequin that’s wearing it: an accountant––not even an entrepreneur, let alone a true philanthropist, which definitionally means a lover of humankind. The pseudo-philanthropic machine can still operate, the funds can still be disbursed, the malaria programmes can still run, the nuclear pitches can still be made, the documentaries can still be edited––then reedited; but it’s too late––the conscience began to split when the Gates’ squeaky-clean screen of a marriage cracked from side to side.

Gates is not an aberration: he is the avatar of American hypercapitalism as it wished to appear to itself: brilliant, empirical, secular, generous, emotionally understated, technically competent, morally serious, and finally harmless. In a nutshell: Graham Greene’s eponymous ‘quiet American’ shat out on demand to fuck up another whole era. The scandal matters because it reintroduces not just harm into the image––but moral tragedy, and possibly napalm. It says: behind the neutral sweater stands power; behind the foundation stands accumulation; behind the clean-energy prospectus stands dirty and oleaginous extraction; behind global benevolence stands private impunity; behind the philanthropy stands the unresolved question of whether making money was ever good in the first place.

That is the gravamen: not Epstein as psychopathic turbercle––but Gates as moral symptom. Not one man’s hypocrisy, but the collapse of a civilisational alibi.

Originally published as SITREP No. 013 on X on 1 June 2026. Read the original on X.

One of the assumptions about the war currently being waged by Ukraine in its eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk is that while deaths and destruction are now increasingly effected by drones, their operators somehow no longer partake in the traditional psychology of young men charged with killing others in the name of an abstraction — which is what Ukrainian independence was always going to become in a terminally fissiparous world. I recently read a long and very informative article by a French journalist in Le Monde, later syndicated by Prospect magazine, that gave a compelling picture of what Ukraine’s drone war is actually like. Young men, for the most part, crouched in bunkers before screens, wrapped in protective gear, effectively playing computer games. Except that unlike the games my own computer-addicted son once played, in this case the Nazi zombies are real, while the first-person shooters were very recently just that.

There are perhaps as many as fifty million people worldwide who did little outside working hours except play World of Warcraft: their principal craft consisting in waging a war with employers, relatives, and reality itself so they might return to Azeroth as quickly as possible. As for several million others, they scarcely exist outside the game world at all except to perform the basic necessities of life. Which means that long before the current conflicts in Donetsk and Luhansk, there already existed a vast population voluntarily inhabiting conditions remarkably similar to those now endured by drone operators.

I suspect both gamers and operators both love killing Nazi zombies.

Much has been made––and rightly so––of the manner in which the battlespace in eastern Ukraine has now been comprehensively gridded, so that square-by-square drone operators can eliminate ‘targets’—a useful euphemism for living, breathing, sensing, morally capable human beings—according to quotas. Given that the overwhelming majority of those being killed are themselves young conscripts, often ethnically and culturally adjacent to those killing them, commentators have searched for new language adequate to this condition. It is not genocide in the classical sense, but something colder and more procedural: dronocide. The target is no longer merely dehumanized: it is factored into data alone. In a word: processed.

Some years ago I was invited by the executor of T.S. Eliot’s estate to introduce the annual Eliot lecturer in Dublin. The fee was generous and the lecturer himself intriguing: Steven Pinker. His book The Better Angels of Our Nature had recently appeared, and during the lecture Pinker bounded about the stage displaying graphs purporting to demonstrate that everything in this, the best of all possible worlds, was steadily improving, above all in the sense that the world was becoming less violent. I was not especially minded to dispute his statistics, but rather question his sanity. Because regardless of whether fewer people were technically dying in wars at that moment, the world was already saturated with young men killing on an industrial scale, albeit only Nazi zombies.

But that was precisely the problem. My fourteen-year-old son, addicted to Call of Duty, is now thirty. Fortunately, he will probably get to a lucky number, and escape conscription. Yet knowing his game scores, and the enormous number of views accumulated by videos of his competitive gaming, I have little doubt that he would have made an extraordinarily efficient killer.

We are indebted to Nicholas Carr for two important books: The Shallows that did an excellent job of warning people about the precipitate downside of bi-directional digital media’s rise to supremacy; and The Glass Cage, which was similarly percipient when it comes to the internet of things and automation. In the latter he describes virtualization has become the vector for what we might term the gamification of everyday life. However, the notion that somebody can press a button in one part of the world and kill somebody elsewhere is by no means new: the fantasy of instantaneous remote destruction entered the collective imaginarium with the V-2 rocket attacks on London during the closing stages of the Second World War.

It was these raids, together with another technological innovation—the Sperry ball turret—that activated the imagination of Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow. The novel features an American lieutenant wandering through wartime London, whose imagination is, um, activated by the arrival of incoming V-2 rockets, in the form of involuntary tumescence. This is, after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of literature’s earliest intuitions of the emergent cyborg. The Sperry ball turret itself was another proto-cyborg assemblage: inner and outer shells mounted gyroscopically, responding to primitive targeting systems while the human operator swivelled helplessly through the sky inside a bomber, machine and flesh fused into a single weapons platform. Randall Jarrell captured the horror of this man/machine matrix perfectly in The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, which concludes: ‘When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.’ It is difficult to imagine a more concise anticipation of the future relationship between wetware and hardware: first the human is coddled within the machine, then finally scrubbed from it.

During the Cold War the assemblage of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the DEW early-warning system intended to shield North America from thermonuclear annihilation represented another stage in this same fusion between human beings and machine systems. But now, with this latest war—the war that never ends, whose fronts currently extend through South Kordofan, Darfur, the eastern Congo, Donetsk, Luhansk, Gaza, South Lebanon, the Strait of Hormuz, and half a dozen other killing fields—the drone, once the plaything of children, has at last come fully of age and become once again the plaything of children.

My youngest’s girlfriend was a champion drone operator when she was young––but then that was also when she was a boy. She told me the the sense she had when flying even a tiny four rotor drone around the cramped flat she shared with her extensive immigrant family, was extraordinary; that it was as if she was the drone, while the feeling of power and control was phenomenal. Why wouldn’t it be? This, after all, is every child’s fantasy: to be able to fly around the place dealing out arbitrary punishment. That’s why we all used to awake from troubled sleep to realise that during the night we had turned into sublunary things.

I must’ve watched my fourteen-year-old kill tens of thousands of Nazi zombies, but there were always more: I would observe his REMs: flicking between the heads-up display and those spectral figures leaping through the ruins of this or that imaginary city. No matter how many he killed, they sprang back to life as if sown dragon’s teeth. Many people at the time, myself included, hoped that this obsession with killing things through computer games might somehow ‘harmlessly’ channel the aggression of young men. It was a ridiculous notion, of course. Masculinity, like femininity, is largely performative. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, one is not born but becomes. All those young men killing Nazi zombies were performing being soldiers.

Well, now it appears as if the curtain, having first twitched aside, may slowly and inexorably rise higher in the years to come. These bashful bedroom warriors, these hikikomori of a new H-bomber, who have been waiting for so very long to do their bit, rather than eat another Welsh rare one, may creep from their fetid, cheesy rooms and resume what young men have always done in large numbers: kill one another.

Except that this is not entirely true either. During the Second World War American military psychiatrists sent to Normandy shortly after D-Day, encountered thousands of young men suffering from what was then termed battle fatigue. These were boys from Poughkeepsie or the Okefenokee Swamp suddenly confronted by Wehrmacht veterans who had been fighting continuously for six years. Many collapsed psychologically within days. Later studies suggested that only a minority of infantrymen consistently fired directly at the enemy. Human beings, it turns out, are not naturally efficient killers.

Nor is this surprising. Anybody who has fired a .303 rifle or a .44 handgun knows what bullets do. Even if they have never seen ballistic trauma inflicted upon a human body, they have seen what rounds do to timber, brick, stone, or flesh. Violence possesses weight, recoil, consequence. A rifle kicks. A body bleeds. Retreating from Moscow with your toes dropping from frostbite is not the same thing as toggling a pair of plastic levers on a games controller. But what of the young man whose entire experience of killing consists of clicking buttons and manipulating avatars?

Carr’s The Glass Cage gives a disturbing account of a future in which the causal connection between humans and the world is increasingly obscured by automation. Airline pilots cocooned within digital systems lose the bodily sensation of flight itself––some aviation disasters may even stem from this loss of tactile intimacy with the machine. I once flew in the cockpit of an old DC-10 the last aircraft and commercial service to have mechanical servo mechanisms and the pilot let me take the plane’s handbrake off, it was quite difficult. Now, the operator no longer feels the aircraft moving through the air; he merely supervises interfaces.

To read the Le Monde report on the drone war in Donetsk and Luhansk is to encounter precisely this condition militarised. Drone commanders speak as calmly of quotas as sales managers: first there are prospects––then you convert them using the coldest calls of all. The business of killing has become exactly that: a business. Which means, in turn, that Ukraine is currently the world leader in dromodronology and, ipso facto, although there are Nazi zombies on both sides, killing more of the Russians’ ones. Why? Because the young men conducting these operations are extraordinarily good at them.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the former comedian turned wartime president, has effectively mobilised an entire generation of former gamers. Operation Dynamo called upon South Coast yachtsmen to rescue the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk––Ukraine has called upon adolescents raised inside first-person shooters: the model-yacht enthusiasts de nos jours. That is why they are so adept at target acquisition, navigation, tracking, and destruction: they already possess the reflexes, having spent twenty years training inside virtual killing fields.

Like my son fifteen years ago, their barely-moving bodies, thumbs twitching as if those of spasming corpses, can be seen staring into heads-up displays. Meanwhile their spirits hover above soon-to-be-destroyed individuals and objects at immense remove: here, they maintain quotas.

Reading the Le Monde piece I sensed the unmistakably clammy and sebaceous atmosphere of bureaucratic extermination––of killing transformed into throughput. And carried out by trahison des clercs. One thinks not merely of mechanised slaughter in the twentieth century, but of the First World War’s assembly line of death stretching across Flanders. The killing zone of Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Kyiv’s Jews were murdered over two days, was physically tiny compared with the planetary battlespace now opened by drones, satellites, fibre optics, and gaming interfaces. Yet dromodronology shrinks the globe to the dimensions of a compulsive gamer’s bedroom.

We comfort ourselves with the illusion that the world has become a more welcoming and apprehensible place because we can open laptops and glide virtually over the Taklamakan Desert or the Weddell Sea. In reality what has shrunk is not geography but ethical distance. What is occurring now is quite simply the gamification of war. I first noticed it during the invasion of Iraq. BBC television footage showed troops sprawled in the backs of Hercules transport aircraft on their way to combat. In earlier wars they might have smoked cigarettes or played cards, but these happy squaddies were playing war games on laptops while travelling towards actual war. That was just before the inception of bidirectional digital media––since then nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed for them, their younger brothers, and now perhaps even their children, to prepare cognitively for remote violence.

Millions upon millions of young men throughout the world have spent decades digging virtual trenches for themselves. They progressed from Snake to Space Invaders, from Mortal Kombat to Call of Duty, rehearsing warfare as entertainment while waiting unknowingly for warfare itself to absorb the grammar of entertainment. These adipose and pimpled warriors, lit by the pale blue glow of their screens, may prove every bit as efficient at dispatching their fellow human beings as their forefathers who once marched into the Somme or Stalingrad. The difference is that the modern war machine no longer needs to brutalise civilians into soldiers––it merely recruits from populations already zombified by interfaces, abstractions, reward loops, and simulated death. All of which means the drone operator does not necessarily experience himself as killing in the old sense. He experiences himself as succeeding.

And that may be the most terrifying development of all––until that is, we’re all compelled to keep the three-minute silence, and the sombre face during that most important ceremony of national coming together, namely: laying the wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Gamer. (Or should it be Nazi Zombie?)

Originally published as SITREP No. 012 on X on 30 May 2026. Read the original on X.

Yesterday was the 118th birthday of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, perhaps the most famous personification of the skeuomorph in British entertainment history. Regular readers of SITREP will know what a skeuomorph is: a formerly utilitarian element repurposed into a purely decorative or symbolic one. James Bond is Britain’s most famous chocolate soldier. (The term with which the British military refer to nancy-elsies who care more about shined leather than rough stuff.) His creator had a brief career in British naval intelligence during the Second World War, and it was there that Fleming gathered much of the factual tradecraft, conspiratorial atmosphere and bureaucratic mythology that he later transformed into utter fantasy.

What a pity that Fleming lacked the literary and ethical sensibility of another British intelligence officer of the same war: Norman Lewis. Lewis wrote inimitable works, beginning with Naples ’44, which remains one of the finest books ever written about war and occupation because Lewis possessed something Fleming did not: an ethnographic eye: a grasp on the particularities of cultures that he then used to chronicle social disintegration under the pressure of modernity: fishing villages on the Costa Brava engulfed by tourism; southern Italy consumed by criminality and development; traditional societies dissolved by the metabolic force of global capital.

Lewis eventually transformed his wartime experience into something ethically serious through his involvement with Survival International, devoted to preserving indigenous peoples and traditional societies threatened by modernity’s expansionary violence. If you like, Lewis represents the anti-skeuomorphic tendency in British life. He understood — perhaps because he watched the Middlesex town of Enfield disappear beneath the spreading isotropy of suburban London — that Britain possessed an unusually slow and resilient digestive system. History takes a very long time to be consumed in Britain. That is why British society so often appears strangely heavy and indigestible. Looking at British culture is rather like examining the pellet of a game bird: fragments of the creatures and herbage on which it fed remain recognisable within the compacted mass.

Lewis recoiled from this cultural coprophilia. Like many sensitive Englishmen, he effectively emigrated spiritually before exiting right, at speed. He became a stranger to his own strange land––Fleming did the opposite: he doubled down on Englishness by living not in England but in one of its former colonial possessions, Jamaica, where he could continue to perform the role of colonial overseer long after empire itself had collapsed. Bond reflects the new postwar reality only partially. Yes, there is Felix Leiter, the CIA counterpart who signals the transfer of global power from Britain to the United States. But Bond’s world still assumes that Britain remains a decisive imperial actor. The ‘double-O’ designation itself is the key skeuomorphic flourish: the brassy knocker on the oak-effect door of a suburban semi. Bond is supposedly the seventh SIS officer licensed to kill on behalf of the Crown. This fantasy of residual sovereign violence is exactly what makes the character so psychologically potent for British audiences: Bond transforms national decline into style.

He possesses all the attributes of a class whose cultural mannerism outlived its material power––which is why it can still perform mesmerism on the masses: the Chelsea mews; the Bentley; the Morland cigarettes with Balkan and Turkish tobacco; the chamois leather shoulder holster; the non-standard Walther PPK; the Savile Row tailoring; the clubman’s fastidiousness. Britain becomes not a civilisation but a brand identity.

And yet Bond himself is also morally repellent. To understand Fleming’s real imagination you must read novels such as The Spy Who Loved Me rather than watch the films. What appears on screen as raffish masculinity often reveals itself on the page as predation: misogyny, sadism, domination, and a delight in power asymmetry between older men and vulnerable women. Fleming both worshipped and destroyed the world he mythologised, but then sado-masochists always kill the thing they love. In the end Bond became merely an empty shell waiting to be inhabited by actors increasingly detached from the original imperial fantasy: Sean Connery, a former milkman from Edinburgh; Daniel Craig, who attempted to turn Bond into a traumatised modern antihero (the actor made his name playing such tortured, sensitive types) before returning, inevitably, to state-sanctioned torture of sensitive types while wearing Kilgore tailoring.

That, in miniature, is contemporary Britain itself.

Perhaps the greatest absurdity of the Bond mythology is the fantasy that British intelligence services are especially competent at espionage. If diplomacy is war pursued by other means, then espionage is merely covert diplomacy. Britain has not fought an independent major war successfully for generations. Indeed, the actual history of the British intelligence services is one long chronicle of leaks, traitors, whistleblowers and institutional embarrassment. The reason the public knows so much about MI5 and MI6 is precisely because serving officers have betrayed it, while former ones have spent decades writing memoirs, leaking stories, briefing journalists and denouncing one another.

When I interviewed former SIS personnel while researching novels such as Phone and Shark, what struck me most was not glamour but colourlessness. These were not Bond Street bling adventurers but bureaucratic specialists. Intelligent? Not notably. Managerial? They seemed to have SASCO year planners stuck up their arses. But overwhelmingly dull: I began to think their contacts and suspects would only open up to them for fear of dying of boredom––a suspicion confirmed by the ‘intelligence’ that a TGI Friday piss-up in the grisly atrium of the Aztec Camera that’s their HQ is mandatory for all, so they can get mashed en masse, and leak all those secrets only––to one another.

As for making love to me, I wouldn’t have thought they did it better… than any other pissed-up office worker. While when it comes to the application of lethal force, you’d be better off asking the postcode warriors on my ‘hood––who know where to get a leng, and how to use it. The armed personnel associated with SIS operations are in reality drawn from units such as the Special Air Service or the Special Boat Service. Bond himself is effectively a fantasy composite assembled from fragments of military masculinity, imperial nostalgia and consumer branding.

Meanwhile the actual battlespace has changed entirely. Britain today could not sustain major military operations independently without overwhelming American logistical support. Senior British officers themselves quietly describe the armed forces as auxiliary formations integrated into the American military machine. Even in that role they were defeated. The last British military deployments of any consequence were to Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan a 14 year deployment left the country back in the hands of the forces that were meant to have been expelled. In Iraq? Well, they make a desert where there was already a desert and they call it peace for a few years, and then it drifts back into endless war. There can have been few less martial sights than the withdrawal of British forces from Basra in 2007. At least the British Army likes to style it as a withdrawal––what most impartial witnesses would term it, is a defeat.

Perhaps this is why the Ministry of Defence has been quite so vicious in its pursuit of the solicitors who made bogus accusations of war crimes against serving British soldiers who were deployed in Iraq. (This was a disastrous adventure, strenuously objected to by the majority of Britons which renders ‘served’ otiose.) SITREP, as you probably realise, believes in the cock up, not the conspiracy theory of history. The problem with the modern world is that the conspirators are doing their bad shit on the web and in broad daylight, but one thing the British would like to sweep under the carpet is that when it comes to combatting them, James Bond has broken his bond––if by that bond, is meant that the British armed forces, of any kind are instilled with a patriotism that entails having the best interests of the country at heart.

British army officers I interviewed told me they’d agitated the desk-wallahs to be deployed, even though they knew their regiments weren’t battle-ready or capable. Others admitted that intelligence had been woeful––and while army intelligence interpreters may not have tortured detainees, they were so culturally illiterate they got nothing out of them. One weary old terp’ who’d been pulled out of retirement, given a short course in Arabic, and unleashed on these latterday Mahdists, told me that after one particularly long and gruelling session, the detainee looked wearily at him and said (and this the terp’ did understand): ‘You British are so stupid––you ask us all these questions, but you never ask the most important one, the one you should ask first, the only one that matters: who’s your sheik?’

If you want a good account of the cock up, read Rory Stewart’s book about his delightful time playing the Grand Poo-Ba in another country’s shit. In fact––with the possible exception of the intervention in the Sierra Leone conflict––recent British history has been typified by bragadachio rather than Bond on the part of HMG, IMOH––OMG! SMERSH!

And so Bond survives not as reality but as skeuomorph: the decorative remnant of a vanished imperial function. The fantasy persists while the actual conditions that produced it have disappeared: it used to be said that ‘we’ risked ‘fighting the next war with the tactics of the last’, but with James Bond worship still rife (I can imagine people queuing to see the latest in the cold light of a nuclear winter), Britain is in danger of not fighting the next war at all.

Meanwhile the Russian hackers keep tapping at their keyboards, while the American and Israelis fire salvo after salvo of missiles, and the IRG and the Ukrainians watch drone tv. Still, there was another Ian Fleming too: lighter, odder, more imaginative. And forget all about redeeming Ian after his phlegming with Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Sign the cheque and leave the bang-bangs at home––James Bond is at the tanning salon. Take your cue instead from Norman Lewis, who in the opening pages of his chef d’oeuvre, reminds us of perhaps the greatest oxymoron there is: military intelligence.

Originally published as SITREP No. 011 on X on 29 May 2026. Read the original on X.

I recently appeared on Gyles Brandreth’s podcast Rosebud. The name itself says almost everything about the condition of contemporary culture, although perhaps not in the way intended. After all, Rosebud in Citizen Kane is not a beautiful memory at all, nor some lost Arcadia of innocence, but a fetish object: the transitional object that Charles Foster Kane — Hearst refracted through Welles — never psychologically surpassed. It signifies precisely his inability to love, his inability to form reciprocal human attachments, his reduction of the world to acquisition, spectacle and possession. Yet Brandreth’s podcast, amiable and intelligent as it is, uses the title in the now standard cultural sense: the invitation to look backwards through rose-tinted spectacles, to narrativise one’s own life sentimentally and consolingly. During the interview I largely declined this invitation, although Gyles himself was an excellent interlocutor and extracted a good deal from me. It was also, I strongly suspect, through Gyles — exemplary president of the Oscar Wilde Society and a genuine believer in Wilde — that Thomas Hodgkinson approached me for a quotation for his forthcoming book on Wilde and prison. This is not a criticism of Brandreth. Indeed, during the podcast it was he himself who reminded me that the boys at the Swallow Street brothel Wilde frequented were underage. There is no attempt on his part to brush difficult realities beneath the carpet. Nor do I doubt Hodgkinson’s seriousness in relative terms. The problem lies elsewhere.

The problem is that literary culture no longer exists in anything like the form required to sustain serious literary criticism, or even sustained literary encounter. We continue to use the phrase ‘British literary culture survives,’ but in truth it doesn’t survive; rather, fragments of its prestige survive. Its signs survive. Its mannerisms survive. Its credentialing survives. Its festivals, societies, podcasts, review pages and heritage industries survive. But deep literacy itself — literacy as prolonged submission to difficult style and difficult consciousness — is in precipitous collapse. Under such conditions, secondary cultural production ceases to be auxiliary to primary creation and instead begins feeding parasitically upon its remnants. Hence the peculiar position in which I now find myself: recruited to garnish books because my name still carries the residual aura of literary seriousness in a culture increasingly incapable of metabolising serious literature. I have become a skeuomorph. In design terms, a skeuomorph is the ornamental survival of an obsolete function: fake stitching moulded into plastic, woodgrain printed on software interfaces, the clicking sound of a digital camera mimicking the shutter of an analogue one. Likewise “Will Self” now operates culturally as a prestige residue, a texture of seriousness grafted onto projects whose underlying cultural substrate can no longer independently generate it.

This is not simply narcissistic resentment. Or not only that. It is structural. Hodgkinson, like many perfectly intelligent men operating within the secondary order of culture, needs authoritative statements because he is not himself fundamentally a literary critic in the deep sense. He therefore collages. The collage becomes the semblance of profound literary engagement. One assembles quotations, references, atmospherics, prison archives, inherited reputations, fragments of authority––in the process vivifying a network of appreciation. The resulting object can be highly competent. It can even be readable and informed. But it increasingly resembles the AI-generated simulacra now flooding the informational ecosystem: superficially cultured––and therefore more readable than, say Salome or Ravenna for that matter––detached from prolonged acts of cognition. The literary-cultural middle order — reviewers, podcasters, festival moderators, introducers, minor biographers, curators of literary memory — are recycling prestige rather than generating form. And Wilde, of course, is infinitely recyclable. This fits in with a tendency in British publishing I’ve analysed in a previous SITREP: monetise the backlist and heritage writers out of copyright, don’t spend money on the living.

The most glaring example of the blindness of contemporary publishing was how few people from the industry itself bothered to appear before the parliamentary hearings concerning the use by technology companies of writers’ work to train large language models. One name repeatedly surfaced as having actually turned up: Liz Calder. This is to her credit. Calder belongs to an older publishing culture in which editors still possessed enough authority, intelligence and literary self-confidence to speak publicly about literature as something more than intellectual property inventory. She was also my own publisher at Bloomsbury. When I sent her Cock — my novel about a woman who grows a penis and rapes her husband — she telephoned me laughing so hard over the manuscript that colleagues in the office reportedly asked what on earth was wrong with her. I sometimes wonder whether she would laugh in quite the same way now. Not because the book has changed, but because the ecology around literature has changed almost beyond recognition.

Calder herself is in some ways a cautionary figure. Alongside Nigel Newton and David Reynolds she helped found Bloomsbury, only to watch it become, under the huge weight of Harry Potter, something structurally closer to a gigantic logistics apparatus orbiting a recurring global content-event than a traditional literary publishing house. The revenues were immense, of course, but the logic of scale transformed the company. Bloomsbury expanded aggressively into academic and reference publishing just as the web, search engines, generative text and AI were beginning to annihilate precisely those informational forms. Dictionaries, directories, reference works: all increasingly metabolised into the distributed textual soup of the network.

However, Calder did accept appointment as a Commander of the British Empire, which suggests that at some level she shares the prevailing groupthink of British publishing culture: namely, that it has done a reasonably good job over the past half century and deserves ceremonial recognition from the state. I’m not inclined to agree. When close to half the population no longer reads books at all, and a significant proportion of the remainder merely listens distractedly to one or two audiobooks a year — retaining perhaps a quarter of their actual content — it strikes me that almost anybody in British literary life who accepted honours from the Crown over the past thirty years should now consider returning them to Buck House forthwith and with the appropriate unbowing and unscraping: because on their watch cultural stewardship has manifestly failed. Commandeer? Don’t make me… vomit with sickness and the sea of secondrateness we’re all being submerged in. This is why I continue to wonder whether anyone in the publishing industry today fully grasps quite how parlous the condition of literature really is now, or whether even the more intelligent figures within it remain trapped within an institutional atmosphere of managed decline, nostalgia and reputational self-congratulation: bang a gong! Get it on! Bang a gong!

This gong-beat was sounding beneath the email I wrote Hodgkinson. What I recognised in Wilde as a child had nothing whatever to do with modern identity politics or human-rights discourse. I encountered Wilde first through the comedies because I was twelve years old and The Ballad of Reading Gaol is, frankly, rather boring to a precocious twelve-year-old future satirist. What struck me instead about Oscar was energy, aggression, wit, performance, theatricality, social combat. I instinctively understood Wilde as someone who had fused libido with vocation. His erotic drives, his satirical intelligence, his theatricality and his artistic will formed a single apparatus. This is why his satire cuts so deeply beneath Victorian manners. Sitting in those drawing rooms exchanging epigrams with Lady Bracknell is a man conducting illegal sexual relationships with young men, many of them effectively boys, many of them prostitutes. He knows perfectly well that many others within that social world are similarly compromised. But unlike them he cannot disentangle desire from performance. He aestheticises his appetites absolutely.

He was indeed looking up at the stars, there’s no doubt about that––but he was also indubitably in the gutter. Wilde’s celebrated bon mot insists that some of those who are in the gutter are nonetheless looking up at the stars. Yet perhaps the formula ought properly to be reversed: some of us who are looking at the stars are in the gutter. That is the more salient fact about Wilde himself. The truth is almost grotesquely encapsulated by Maggie Hambling’s sculpture of him, which sits — rightly, some might argue — in a narrow alleyway behind St Martin-in-the-Fields, a hop, skip and K-hole away from Heaven. The sculpture is itself a disgusting object, and rendered more disgusting still by the periodic appearance nearby of one of those temporary mobile pissoirs erected in the West End during public festivities to absorb the overflow of male bladders. Hambling’s Wilde resembles less a wit emerging into immortality than a kind of Medusa-like head rising from another coffin or sarcophagus: a dull pewter-coloured lid, half gutter and half tomb. One senses in it not transcendence but aesthetic decomposition — Wilde reduced at last to a face peering upward from the drainage system of his own legend.

This is where Joyce’s famous judgement becomes so illuminating: ‘Wilde lacked the courage of his own perversions.’ Joyce wwas far too comfortable with his own homosexuality to’ve meant Wilde lacked the courage to have sex with men. Plenty of gay men in late Victorian England exercised discretion perfectly successfully: and had lots of sex.––I Think in this connection of an anecdote related to me by the biographer of H. H. Munro—Saki—concerning that great satirist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. During the course of his researches, the biographer visited two elderly ladies in Belfast, distant relatives of Munro, who produced from their attic a tin trunk that had apparently sat there since Christ stopped at Eboli in search of a rent boy. Inside, the biographer discovered copious private daybooks of the sort Edwardian gentlemen habitually kept, except that Munro had filled his with detailed records of the young men with whom he had conducted sexual relations, including — with a taxonomist’s precision entirely worthy of the period — their vital statistics and the dimensions of their genitalia.

Richard Ellmann records that on the night of Wilde’s conviction hundreds of unmarried men quietly departed for the Continent. The Cleveland Street scandal had already demonstrated that aristocrats, officers and political elites understood perfectly well how to preserve silence around such matters. Even the future Edward VII’s own circle was touched by these scandals. The issue was not homosexuality itself. The issue was Wilde’s arrogance, his insistence on public theatricalisation. When Queensberry leaves the card accusing him of being a “posing somdomite,” Wilde becomes amused by the spelling mistake and sues for libel. This is not political martyrdom in the modern sense. It is narcissistic grandiosity fused to aesthetic self-dramatisation. Wilde cannot resist making his own libido part of the spectacle.

This does not make Victorian criminalisation morally defensible. Of course not. Consenting homosexual relations should never have been criminalised. But historical understanding requires precision. Wilde’s tragedy was not reducible to “society persecuted a gay man.” Wilde’s tragedy was that his erotic imagination transformed people into aesthetic objects while simultaneously requiring public recognition for the aesthetic system itself. This is why Bosie remains central even after catastrophe. Wilde diagnoses Bosie repeatedly as vain, sociopathic, parasitic and destructive. Yet he cannot detach himself. His libido and creative effort remain fused even in extremis. The Ballad of Reading Gaol therefore becomes fascinating precisely because it fails to transcend Wilde’s own erotic-aesthetic pathology. “For each man kills the thing he loves” is not merely a universal moral statement; it is a confession of the sadistic structure lurking within objectifying desire itself.

The executed trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge––who ispired the line quite as much as Bosie–– murdered his wife because he had thingified her. Sartre would understand this instantly.: for in his formulation, the sadist is not devoid of feeling; rather, sadism emerges from thwarted reciprocity, from the impossibility of achieving commensurability with the beloved object. Perversion marks the waystations of failed love because the lover cannot tolerate the independent subjectivity of the beloved: hence Ebola… the rent boy, and no canonisation, only the treadmill and oakum-picking. The point is murder becomes the ultimate assertion of possession––and the extension of Wilde’s unspeakable love by other means. Moral justification makes no difference: Winnie Verloc murders her husband at around the same time as Wooldridge kills his wife, but Conrad’s account of her mental state in The Secret Agent, makes it clear she obeys the same savage logic. Wilde, in his own manner, understood this structure intuitively while remaining trapped within it psychologically. His worship of beauty was never a Platonic ascent toward the true and the beautiful. It was compulsive aestheticisation inseparable from domination, narcissism and erotic fixation.

And yet modern Wilde industries require precisely the opposite interpretation. Contemporary culture endlessly recycles Wilde as martyr, queer icon, aesthete, victim, humanitarian precursor, liberal saint. One visits Père Lachaise and discovers lipstick kisses smooshed across Jacob Epstein’s magnificent winged tomb, while tourists murmur reverently about ‘the idea of Wilde’ before strolling on, presumably to admire the tomb––and the ‘idea’––of Pierre Bourdieu; after all, he knew a lot about cultural capital. Years ago I encountered a large Scotswoman dressed in black Lycra, stinking powerfully of patchouli, and kissing naughty Oscar’s tomb ecstatically. When I asked which of Wilde’s works she most admired she told me she hadn’t read any, but she loved… ‘the idea of him.’ Exactly so. The idea––which in turn becomes a secular ‘icon’, to be stared at through that modern hagioscope: the phone. Not the work. Not the dangerous fusion of appetite, narcissism, satire and aesthetic violence. Merely the recyclable image.

The irony deepens further because the tomb itself resembles a prison more than any neighbouring sepulchre in Père Lachaise: it’s sphinx-like form is no riddle, for this a sarcophagus masquerading as liberation. Epstein, its sculptor, shares his surname with another Epstein whose crimes represent not perversion gone catastrophically wrong but straightforward psychopathy. The coincidence is grotesque enough to feel Wildean in itself. Yet we continue gilding the lily. We continue refusing interrogation because interrogation threatens the utility of Wilde as an endlessly deployable prestige object within contemporary human-rights discourse.

I resent this not because I reject Wilde but because I am, in many respects, genuinely Wildean. I have written comparatively little for stage or screen, but my satirical oeuvre vastly exceeds Wilde’s in scale. Like Wilde, I fused performance with writing from the beginning. Like Wilde, I understood literature theatrically and socially. And like Wilde, I am no respecter of persons: afflicting the comfortable is my business, and a reliable way of doing that is telling them the truth. But I possess no institutional status independent of the work itself by choice. I refused the Royal Society of Literature fellowship twice because the moment artists derive legitimacy primarily from institutions, corporations or political formations, the work itself becomes subordinate to status management. Artists consequently remain vulnerable to contradiction, ridicule and social demotion. Fine: we should––unacknowledged legislators, duh! That is healthy, because satire thrives under those conditions: but what the collagist doing the book on Wilde in prison must understand is the responsibility entailed in constructing crafting projects using living artists; because once literary culture loses its own generative depth, the collage begins replacing genuine encounter with art altogether, and substitutes a smoosh––or a swoosh.

And this, finally, is my objection. Better to tear the petals from Wilde’s green lily than continue wearing it sentimentally in one’s buttonhole. Better to confront what the flower actually was — narcissistic, brilliant, exploitative, theatrical, destructive, erotically compulsive, artistically incandescent — than endlessly recycle the exhausted image for the purposes of heritage culture. Otherwise Wilde becomes precisely what contemporary culture desires most: a dead Oscar, so ceaselessly gilded that in the end, despite the best intentions, he resembles…a rosebud.

And this is also perhaps what contemporary culture wants, for me. I’ve nearly died a couple of times over the past two years, when I talk to other senior writers about the parlous condition in literature, they seem unable to respond to the problem at a conceptual level. One very famous, very literary novelist I wrote to recently on this matter, responded, as so many do, with the fatuous observation that the novel would ‘last forever’. The only possible answer to this is ‘which one?’ ‘Pot of Gold?’, ‘Prisoner of Azerbaijan?’ But he also said something else significant, which was that in the 1990s he’d been introduced to ‘a young black woman’ who’d been given a six figure advance for a novel and ‘we never heard anything more about her.’ I expect he thought he was commenting on the profligacy of publishers during that period. Who were indeed handing out substantial advances to literary novelists. He and I included however, but that’s not what he said. I have repeated what he said verbatim and what he said was contemptible: that someone of this stature should stoop to use blackness as a metaphysical shorthand for barbarism is frankly repulsive. The barbarism he alludes to has been created for the most part by white people and their technology: it’s this that’s destroying literature. But ten he wouldn’t want to harsh these guys’ high–– he’s received somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million in literary prize money, and the largest identifiable portions of that money derive from state/civic institutions and finance-linked capital. Pets win prizes––not gay ex-convicts.

Originally published as SITREP No. 010 on X on 28 May 2026. Read the original on X.

The panic around smartphones in this country — which really got underway with the drama series Adolescence — is being fuelled paradoxically by the smartphone itself. All this anguish, all this contumely, all this anxiety about the kiddies. Yet the people proposing legislation are themselves, almost to a person, addicts. They cannot grasp the real issue because the medium they’re attempting to regulate has already colonised the conditions of their own understanding: their smackheads telling younger smackheads not to take smack. Marshall McLuhan pointed this out many years ago in Understanding Media: the medium is the message. The message of the smartphone — of the handheld computer combined with the bidirectionality of the web — is addiction itself.

According to Ofcom’s most recent figures, the average British adult now spends around four and a half hours online every day, with roughly three quarters of that time mediated through smartphones. Among younger adults the figures are considerably higher, but what’s striking is how little the usage drops among people in their thirties, forties and fifties. Smartphone dependence runs from the top to the bottom of society. Britain is not debating whether children are becoming addicted to phones. Britain is a phone-addicted society debating whether children should join the addiction a little later. One thinks of Tom Lehrer’s line from his song the Old Dope Peddler: ‘He gives the kids free samples because he knows full well today’s young innocent faces will be tomorrow’s clientele.’

The stated concerns driving the moves to ban phones in schools, and restrict social media use to under-16s have been driven in large part by anxieties about child pornography, grooming, bullying, malicious gossip, extremist ideology, compulsive spending, manipulative algorithms —all of which are entirely real. But they are secondary effects. They are what addiction does, not what addiction is. They’re crackheads mugging old people and smack ones shoplifting, they’re trafficked girls and young women degraded by poverty––do you get it: the two kinds of addiction both produce the same behaviour, destructive of both self and society.

So the primary problem isn’t the paedophile’s or psychopath’s lack of feeling: it’s that you have too much feeling, and sociopathic phone dealers are monetising it all the fucking time. This is because while crack attacks the human ontology, producing psychosis, and smack attacks the human will, producing sloth in all its manifold and deforming deformations, the faculty phone addiction attacks is the conceptual.

Human beings addicted to social media, online gaming, gambling, or perversely gazing at and interacting with either commodities or humans who themselves have been rendered commodities are, by this fact alone, no longer capable of forming their own understanding — let alone safeguarding anyone else’s — because they can no longer adequately sustain reflection. Reflection requires wrenching the coaxial fibre-optic cable from the nape of the neck and looking at the world once more. Looking at it alone, in that aloneness. Daring to apprehend the fact that when boiled down to the pure, single, unitary eye of one’s own intentionality, one doesn’t really have a particular consumer preference, position on Gaza or Palestine, brand of trainers, sexual practice, skin colour, primary sexual characteristic or even language that fundamentally defines one.

This is the radical state of mind required for anyone to begin conceptual thought.

I used to try this with my students when I taught. I’d say to them: shut your eyes. Don’t worry about what you’re thinking about. Just close your eyes. Then I’d let them sit there for a minute or two. Obviously they’d become a little fidgety. But the question I asked when they opened their eyes again was, I think, somewhat unexpected.

When you were in there — in the maelstrom of your thoughts, perhaps imagining them to be scraps of felt experience, memories, sensual after-echoes, intimations of futures not yet realised — did you perchance enter into any acquaintance with anyone or thing you could lay your hands on and identify simply as yourself?

Needless to say, the brightest students answered immediately that they could not. They had begun dimly to understand how it is humans analyse anything at all: by abstracting themselves from their immediate felt reality in all its contingencies and particularities. The phone — addiction to the phone — cuts directly into this possibility of reflection, or even systematic reflection, by providing the individual human with a means of constantly concretising existence, turning it into a quantifiable numerical phenomenon through the agency of a device itself rendered operable by quantifiable numerical phenomena. This forms what logicians call a diallelus: a closed loop which in this case represents unreasoning reason, or reason without end.

Quite clearly, such a condition does not permit the individual to practise any of the necessary discretion required for understanding. The paradigm, as I’ve written before concerning AI systems, is to practise sufficient discretion — particularly in reading — that you don’t instantly look up words you fail to understand. Instead you continue with the text, safe in the knowledge — and I use the word knowledge advisedly — that you’ll encounter the word again in another context and that this later encounter may illuminate its meaning; and even if it does not illuminate that term itself, it may illuminate adjacent terms gathered together with it.

You can see immediately how this paradigm of discretion as the model for understanding can be extended far beyond the realm of text — although text is of course where AI systems already practise it and where they already out-think and out-perform most human beings.The reason we are so concerned to silo children away from mobile phones is that we at least intuit this represents a catastrophic problem for cognitive formation itself. Children who grow up online have never, in the sense I mean, been discreet at all. Therefore they can scarcely have understood very much. And lacking understanding, they necessarily lack the capacity to form judgement — judgement understood crucially as that which can be publicly articulated and defended through legible discourse.

In the Book of Proverbs, the categories required for understanding and eventually wisdom begin with discretion. By discretion the ancients meant keeping away from bad stuff — and bad stuff includes ambient environments that constantly interfere with reflection: squawks, peeps, nudges, pings, alerts, cookies, twerks, TikToks, reels, shorts, bells, whistles, vibrations, prompts, suggestions, endless invitations to re-enter the machine. The drug peddlers who have placed this handy syringe driver mainlining the zeitgeist in your pocket, resort to every available stimulus to maintain your addiction.

The only comparable examples of society-wide addiction I can think of are the Chinese addiction to opium following the Opium Wars and the German addiction to methamphetamine during the Nazi period before the invasion of Poland. In both cases, a population became chemically entrained into altered states that profoundly damaged collective judgment. China’s nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a period of extraordinary political convulsion: imperial collapse, civil war, foreign occupation, massacres, revolutionary terror. Germany accelerated itself into a chemically stimulated frenzy of productivity, militarisation, genocidal war, and none too soon, like a crashing meth’ head (which it was): destruction.

Of course, the comparison is imperfect. Nobody is literally smoking smartphones in opium dens or swallowing handsets in pill form. But socially the analogy holds surprisingly well. We are dealing with a population-wide dependency that reshapes attention, volition and the capacity for reflection itself. Indeed, China eventually replaced one addiction with another. The contemporary Chinese population is among the most smartphone-saturated on earth, as are we. Germany too. Their philosophical traditions did not immunise them. Nor did ours. Britain remains one of the most addicted societies in Europe in terms of alcohol, narcotics and now digital immersion. We normalise addiction. We sentimentalise it. We medicalise it. We monetise it. Then we legislate around its symptoms while preserving the underlying compulsion.

And now the mobile phone has made everything, duh, mobile. Drugs can be delivered to your door by perfectly respectable-looking individuals in late-model four-door saloons (quick to exit like multi-entrance Covenanters’ chapels). Gambling, pornography, outrage, validation, flirtation, political hysteria, shopping, surveillance, self-display, self-loathing — all circulate through the same slab of gorilla glass. The phone has introduced what I’ve elsewhere called dromodronology into the field of social relations: a condition of perpetual acceleration, perpetual refreshment, perpetual re-targeting.

It gets worse: just as you know any true addict by the sickening personality change they undergo when either intoxicated or suffering from its withdrawal, so you can know any true phone addict on precisely the same basis, except that the personality change is far, far worse, since their addiction consists precisely in this continuous creation, curation, and refreshment of a personality that does not properly belong to them anymore, given they’re incapable of experiencing anything fully anymore, unless it can be shared, indexed, photographed, uploaded, reacted to, transmitted. They cannot remain alone with their own thoughts. And because they cannot remain alone with their own thoughts, they cannot adequately reflect. And because they cannot adequately reflect, they cannot adequately understand.

And if the beginning of conceptual thought is the capacity to abstract oneself from one’s immediate appetites and circumstances, the smartphone’s continuous collapsing of human volition into prompted micro-choices, most of them commercial, ideological or anxiety-inducing leads soon enough to a self-sustaining feedback-loop which is a true cyborg neurosis, given the machine first creates the anxiety and then offers itself as the relief for the anxiety it has created.

I hope reading this is making you uncomfortable. I hope it’s making you itchy. Maybe you already want to pick up your phone and find out something about me besides the words themselves. Place me in a context. Reduce me to a profile. Surpass me. Dismiss me. Anything to break the pressure of sustained attention.

I remember when I was recovering from drug addiction and a man I was trying to help — a refugee sleeping rough — knocked on my window while I was preparing to take drugs I shouldn’t have been taking. I shouted at him. Afterwards my sponsor said, ‘Aha — you see? He was interfering with your addiction.’ Exactly. The addict resents anything that interrupts the circuitry of compulsion.

So I don’t expect gratitude for this argument. In recovery circles it used to be called tough love: confronting the addict with the reality of the addiction. The old language of addiction was self-will run riot. The addict becomes convinced that the substance enlarges volition when in reality it abolishes it.

Do you honestly think that anything mediated continuously through a device held permanently in the hand — a device capable not merely of satisfying craving but of multiplying craving through omnipresence — can conduce to eudaimonia, to human flourishing? Four and a half hours a day online for the average British adult. Out of roughly sixteen waking hours. If work itself is mediated through the same systems, many people now experience virtually no offline existence whatsoever. And I use the term virtually here in all its senses, reaching back to the original Latin sense of virtus, indicating potency or efficacy, then forward through the medieval schoolmen who hammered out the idea of the virtual to express something that is, to all intents and operational purposes, like the actual, but is not.

Of course, this applies perfectly to the environments in which phone addicts and online addicts live — or at least think they live — since these environments operationally conform to what we might imagine satisfies the hierarchy of needs described by Maslow. We might think, so what if it’s all a little synthetic? After all, people survive on meal supplements. Something I feel rather tenderly about myself, having undergone periods during cancer treatment where reality really did come in yoghurt pots. But then again, somebody being treated for cancer really shouldn’t live indefinitely on meals in yoghurt pots. Nor should human beings receive reality in easily digestible paste form.

The taking of the virtual for the actual is understandable up to a point. Certain forms of transmission do indeed carry reality. But it’s notable how readily the web confuses people about the relationship between an image’s diegetic and mimetic components; indeed, between the apparent objectivity of technical reproduction and the stubborn subjectivity of the person who actually presses the button and takes the shot.

For the schoolmen, virtuality suited their conceptual vocabulary because it indicated the potency of conceptual systems themselves. The potency of the contemporary virtual is that it transmits feeling without lived justification. It is therefore an engine for resentment. It is also extraordinarily effective at optimisation — and by optimisation I mean forcing people to confuse the statistical mean, the average, those crowded into the bell jar, with humanity itself.

But the particular case is always the exception that vitiates the law. And it is precisely as ethical beings that individuals encounter this exceptionality.

Web-heads and phone addicts also confuse visibility with reality in every conceivable sense. They confuse attention with significance. We now live entirely inside an attention culture. I once knew somebody who knew the Queen fairly well. Apparently before she became fully enclosed within her own serene constitutional unreality, she slept with piles of tabloids and society magazines beside her bed, marked with Post-it notes by attendants so she could leaf through and contemplate her own visibility. Of course, once she became Queen she also became constitutionally unreal in a rather interesting sense. So perhaps mediation is unavoidable among non-people anyway.

Nonetheless, Andy Warhol may have promised fifteen minutes of fame, but trust me: no matter how many pile-ons or depilations you organise on X, twerks you jerk on TikTok, or even money shots you gag on on Only Fans, you are never going to be Queen.

So, phone addict, don’t confuse connectivity with understanding. And don’t let virtuality persuade you that you are virtually comprehending things either. You are not.

You are sitting in Plato’s cave while somebody walks across the mouth of it carrying a smartphone. The sun rises behind them. What you see projected on the wall is not merely their shadow but the shadow of the phone itself — and you are condemned to stare at it all your life because you are shackled to a boulder shaped like a computer.

A few years ago somebody told me that tens of millions of people globally were effectively living inside a single online space game — I think it was World of Warcraft. Large numbers played it continuously. The virtual had become the actual. But the extreme gamers are merely the crackheads of the digital world. Everybody else is puttering along like cigarette smokers in the 1970s, when everybody smoked and paedophiles were regarded as part of the social landscape rather than the focus of permanent national psychodrama.

I grew up in the 1970s. Society was riddled with paedophiles: schools, churches, youth organisations, scout groups, sports clubs. My late wife Deborah Orr used to describe being chased through woods in Motherwell by men locally known to prey on children: the ‘bad men’ were an established part of children’s lore––as were ‘flashers’ generally. Meanwhile the same woods contained drinking schools — groups of unemployed men gathering every morning to consume super-strength lager and Buckfast tonic wine. They do it to this day. They’re addicts too. Britain has always tolerated mass addiction provided it remains socially integrated enough not to interrupt commerce: in this case monkish commerce, since the booze is made by virtualising… monks.

As you may have realised if you’ve got this far, I don’t think the government proposals go anywhere near far enough. In terms of our phone-addicted population, they scarcely even constitute harm minimisation. The problem is generational. If older people have already surrendered their wisdom sufficiently to become addicts themselves, how can they possibly provide the discretion necessary for understanding, comprehension and judgment? How can they tell the young to put the bloody phone down when they themselves cannot stop touching the thing every few minutes?

And like all long-term addicts, the old phone junkies lie about it––the ones who deceive themselves they have it under control, most of all. Trust me: I know.

So watching parliamentarians attempting to prevent children becoming addicts while openly courting AI corporations to automate governance, education and communication produces something close to despair. We are looking down the barrel of a gun being assembled by an AI civilisation whose infrastructural investment is comparable to the first railway age, and most of the people discussing it don’t even know what gorilla glass is.

The truly frightening thing about AI is not that the machines may eventually write better than us. In many routine contexts they already can. The frightening thing is that human beings may cease to believe that the struggle to write — and therefore to think — belongs to them at all. I write long novels. I’m interested in holding your attention for hours. The smartphone economy is interested in holding it for seconds. You cannot persuade people to engage deeply with a medium whose very message is conceptual patience while simultaneously immersing them in a technological environment optimised for interruption, agitation and compulsive return. The poor conceptual thinking of the very people who should be engaged conceptually with the threat to conceptual thinking represented by artificial intelligence seem unable to get going on precisely this problem. In the current issue of Prospect magazine the editor floats the idea of bans on social media for under-16s and restrictions on phone use in educational establishments, then wonders aloud whether the data support the efficacy of these interventions. On the addiction cases now being brought against social media companies on the grounds that their products engendered self-harm among younger users, he has comparatively little to say at all, beyond gently kicking the matter into the long grass — the long synthetic grass, perhaps even the long virtual grass.

But these cases are all merely shadow-dances around the core of the problem. Like any addiction, phone addiction is sustained by an enormous economy. Like drugs, smartphones and their addicts depend on substances extracted from poorer societies under conditions of extreme exploitation, kleptocracy, militia violence and environmental devastation. Most people in the West read for perhaps a minute a year, if that, about the grisly mess that is the Democratic Republic of Congo or the political catastrophes of Equatorial Africa generally, and even then they tend to dismiss these realities as background noise because they cannot be experienced as immediate disruptions to the smooth probabilistic functioning of daily life; i.e.: the getting, the using, and the getting of more… drugs. . If suffering cannot be rendered quantifiable, optimised, modelled or actuarially distributed, then the modern mentality increasingly struggles even to apprehend it.

And it is precisely this mentality that militates against the use of AI systems in governance — not merely because probabilistic algorithms may reproduce racial profiling, deepen bias in welfare allocation, or automate older injustices under the guise of technical neutrality. No: the problem is deeper. These systems are knocking at an open door. The societies deploying them already operate according to optimisation parameters. We have already trained ourselves to think this way. I am a number: and proud of it.

My own cancer treatment is predicated in part on what the NHS calls quality-adjusted life years. The phrase means exactly what it says. My treatment is costed according to how many quality-adjusted years of existence the health service believes it can afford to purchase on my behalf. Vast quantities of data and algorithmic modelling are involved in these decisions, many of them probabilistic, behavioural and actuarial in character. The man-machine matrix, as I’ve called it for years now, did not suddenly arrive with AI. In essence it has existed since mass industrialisation and in certain respects far earlier.

Indeed, some theorists of early civilisation describe the Mesopotamian theocratic states as species-resettlement systems. The first domestication may well have been that of human beings themselves, who became almost instantly slaves, agricultural labourers and taxpayers. All of which is to say that we have been softening ourselves up for this for a very long time indeed — if softening up is even the correct phrase.

Some people imagine they stand above all this from an Olympian height — a peak I couldn’t begin to scale nowadays, not after blood cancer and a substantial clot in my left leg — and assure us that humanity has always adapted to technological change and always will. Fair enough. But let’s be frank. Mass literacy in Britain dates only from around the First World War. Before that enormous numbers of people could neither read nor write. Were they therefore worse off in every conceivable sense? Perhaps not.

But it does rather mock the ideal of democratic society understood in the republican sense: governance rooted in public deliberation concerning the res publica: the things held in common. Because if everybody is staring at a phone instead of looking one another in the face, and if increasingly the very language through which public discourse occurs is generated, mediated, summarised, optimised and perhaps eventually replaced by machine systems, then what exactly remains of deliberation at all?

You’ve only got one life. You’re not a gorilla. So why spend it endlessly caressing gorilla glass while staring at your own ape features reflected back at you: there’s only so many times you can ejaculate hatred, righteousness, and desire––and then you die.

Originally published as SITREP No. 009 on X on 26 May 2026. Read the original on X.

I gave a lecture in 2014 at Trinity College, Oxford, later published in The Guardian under the headline “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real).” I was widely pilloried for it. In subsequent interviews and essays I have repeatedly clarified that I did not in fact proclaim the death of the novel outright. What I said was that it had entered a care home. The care homes in question were the proliferating creative-writing programmes first established in the United States and subsequently exported across the Anglosphere. These programmes seemed to me symptomatic of a wider cultural decline: namely, the inability of the general culture any longer to produce organically the standard of literacy, concentration and philological depth required for serious literary production.

At the time, I did not foreground technology strongly enough. Yet it was already obvious to me that digitisation, followed by the advent of bidirectional digital media in the form of the smartphone and wireless broadband, represented a grave threat to deep literacy. I wrote a report for Philips in the late 1980s in which I was asked how to incentivise people to play what were then rather primitive and unconvincing computer games. My response was straightforward: the industry would truly take off once graphics became sufficiently realistic to incorporate sex and violence persuasively. The rest is media history.

If you search YouTube you can still find a 1992 edition of The Late Show in which the designer Richard Seymour and I discuss with Tracey MacLeod the launch of Mortal Kombat. Looking back on the clip now, the atmosphere of the studio feels almost painfully innocent, particularly Seymour’s contribution. His anticipation of predictive systems, behavioural engineering and the gamification of everyday life deserves to be recognised as one of the more remarkable acts of technological prophecy of that era.

Now we face a genuinely civilisational crisis. Can I claim the same powers of anticipation for myself? Perhaps only in the limited sense intended by Marshall McLuhan when he observed that the artist is an expert in technologies that alter sense perception. When wireless broadband was installed in my house in 2004, my response was not excitement but dismay. I already regarded dial-up internet and the accelerated circulation of image and text it enabled as inimical to the sustained intellection and emotional continuity required for genuine literary style.

My response was practical. I stopped composing directly on computers altogether. I had my mother’s 1952 Olivetti Lettera 22 restored and proceeded to draft every subsequent book on that machine until 2011. To this day I continue to write manually and offline wherever possible. I have consistently argued to anyone who asked me about creative practice that bidirectional digital media would prove profoundly hostile to literary style, because literature is style. Style is not decorative frosting applied to content after the fact; style is the mode through which consciousness experiences and orders reality itself.

I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so.” But unfortunately we have now reached the point at which saying it has become necessary. We are dealing not with a passing technological novelty but with systems capable of reshaping cognition, perception, memory and ultimately social reality itself. If people are to understand artificial intelligence, its likely impact on their lives, and the steps required to prevent it becoming civilisationally destructive, they must first understand what has already been lost during the last twenty-five years of bidirectional digital culture. Only then can they begin the harder task of recovering those embodied forms of attention, judgment and style upon which any serious human culture ultimately depends.

The hostile reaction to the 2014 lecture was itself revealing. Psychologists describe “professional closure” as the tendency of threatened professions to circle the wagons defensively around their own institutional legitimacy. The publishing industry was especially vulnerable because the threat it faced was one it publicly professed to welcome. Publishers assured me repeatedly, to my face, that e-books, audiobooks and digital reading would usher in a new literary renaissance. Similar claims had already been made around the so-called Harry Potter phenomenon: apparently young boys would move seamlessly from Hogwarts to All Souls, Oxford, where they would proceed directly to practical criticism and literary analysis.

At precisely the same historical moment, British universities massively expanded. When I graduated in 1980, around 8% of the population held higher-education qualifications. The figure now approaches 50%. We ought therefore to inhabit an age of extraordinary cultural production. Instead, we inhabit a culture of exhausted retreads, franchised nostalgia and endless recombination. This deterioration operates at every level of cultural production. The idea that high culture is dispensable—whether in favour of market demographics, minority branding exercises, “plain reader” utilitarianism, or sheer commercial expediency—has become axiomatic.

Publishers still love literature to a degree, but increasingly in the manner that politicians once possessed “convictions”: as vestigial accessories attached to managerial careers. The long, hard grind of rights negotiations, acquisitions, logistics and arbitrage has exhausted many of them spiritually. Because they are rarely direct producers of culture themselves, they no longer experience the intrinsic thrill of making something genuinely new. This is decisive. Once publishers cease to experience publishing itself as a creative vocation, commercial imperatives become their only remaining rationale. Over the last twenty-five years the consequences have been plain enough: shrinking front-list investment except in novelty acts, mechanical exploitation of backlists only where monetisation is frictionless, and the increasing transformation of publishing conglomerates into logistics firms with a literary sideline.

My own former publishers, Penguin Random House, now frequently describe themselves in quasi-logistical terms. This perhaps explains why I have been informed that master files for several of my own books have effectively disappeared into the digital void. Far from inaugurating a renaissance, digitisation, creative-writing institutionalisation and demographic marketing have become the three tolls of the bell announcing literature’s terminal condition.

The latest peal comes in the form of the AI controversy surrounding Granta and the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The facts themselves matter less than what they reveal. Granta today is owned through the Granta Trust by Sigrid Rausing, granddaughter of the founder of the Tetra Pak fortune. She acquired Granta in 2005 for an undisclosed sum, although contemporary reporting suggested the magazine was then making a modest profit. Today the Trust reports annual income of roughly £1.4 million and expenditure of roughly £1.8 million, producing a yearly operating shortfall in the region of £400,000 before investment gains. Against the scale of the Rausing fortune—estimated in the billions—this loss is microscopically insignificant. It is not an economic burden; it is a cultural accessory.

This is important because Granta functions less as a profitable enterprise than as a prestige object: a Potemkin village of literary seriousness. The analogy is apt. Potemkin allegedly constructed fake villages so that Catherine the Great could pass through an idealised version of Russia while remaining insulated from the reality of imperial poverty. Likewise contemporary literary institutions increasingly preserve façades of seriousness while the underlying culture disintegrates.

Rausing’s ‘donation’ to the literary dossier, lying by the tube croaking ‘Got any cash, please’, is the monetary equivalent of you tossing him or her tenpence; yet out of this she fashions great cultural capital––publishes her own misery memoir, gets spoken to respectfully about it by people who should know better at parties held in the Potemkin village. She then, quite possibly, invites them back to her place (or places), where they, too, get to sup on the thin gruel of her cultural benificience. Benificience she herself sees fit to register as a charity. One assumes for tax purposes.

Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated prose. The issue is not whether detection software can “prove” machine authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level, lyrical excess without governing pressure, figurative autonomy detached from structural necessity—and accepted these peculiarities as “voice.”

My partner in the SITREP series, who has the––in my view––toxic working environment of dealing with the web interface on my behalf, sent me examples from the disputed winning story––only a couple of lines, but dare I say, they speak volumes, albeit not ones you’d want to read: “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.” Or: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Such sentences are not objectionable because they are strange. Literature depends upon strangeness. They are objectionable because they exhibit the monocellular quality typical of machine-generated prose: each sentence arrives as a sealed semantic capsule, self-maximising for local significance while failing to contribute to any larger pressure system of consciousness.

This occurs because the large language model optimises statistically for plausibility at sentence level. What it cannot sustain is style in the deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality and embodiment across an entire work. Real literary style resembles a living body. Pressure exerted in one region is registered elsewhere. Damage to one part reverberates through the whole. Even amputation leaves phantom sensation. Style possesses exactly this distributed organic character. Machine prose, however fluent, remains fundamentally modular.

I know this directly because I am one of the authors currently involved in legal action concerning the use of copyrighted books to train AI systems. More than thirty-five of my own books were ingested into Anthropic’s models. There is irony here. I spent much of my productive life writing novels about the triadic relationship between warfare, psychopathology and technological systems. Of Phone, the aptly-named final novel in that sequence, one reviewer observed that it was “a 650-page anti-tweet.” Intentionally so––although it’s much else besides.

People endlessly repeat Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message,” yet fail to understand that the smartphone and wireless broadband are media environments whose message is the erosion of sustained comprehension. McLuhan himself remained comparatively optimistic about electronic media because the fully networked bidirectional environment had not yet materialised. Nonetheless, he recognised that an “electric field” of simultaneity and psychic exposure was already emerging. The internet has fulfilled that prophecy, but largely as a domain of manipulation, pornography, financial extraction, poisonous gossip, performative outrage and scapegoating.

The web has become a realm of disavowal. Human beings enter it in order not to become more fully themselves but less so. They use it to evade embodiment, evade continuity, evade consequence. That literary institutions proved so permeable to this environment demonstrates not merely incompetence but philosophical exhaustion. Publishing ceased to believe sufficiently in literature to defend the conditions under which literature remains possible.

The crisis therefore is not merely technological: it is philological––and if the term is unfamiliar to you, in this instance it’s no sesquipedalianism or wilful obscurity on my part, but the index of your own failing. Editors no longer possess the training required to distinguish stylistic pressure from stylistic effect. They speak of ‘world literature’ and its frictionless translation, with no comprehension that this is the gateway drug for machine-generated prose, given that physical embodiment is also linguistic embodiment. Ask yourself what machine learning was first turned to as a practical application, and the answer is––as it is so often nowadays for you, even when you aren’t being onanistic––in your hand: translation. The literary translator is the philologist par excellence, and in a world literature, comprised by texts travelling frictionlessly across language barriers, there’s no need for them: Whoopee! But here’s the rub, Homer Simpson: all culture is friction, doh!

What all the Homer Simpsons in contemporary publishing need to do, bluntly, is relearn practical criticism, textual history and philology itself. Literary style is ultimately what defeats the Turing test—not because style proves consciousness, but because genuine style encodes embodiment.

The Turing test itself rests on obsolete assumptions. If something in a sealed box persuades us verbally that it is human, we are supposed to infer consciousness. Yet what remains in the box is always and forever indeterminate. I can demonstrate my trained ‘literary’ AI defeating the Turing test within three minutes of rebooting it: Turing was a mathematician, crucially, not a logician: he didn’t understand that computer models based on natural language would encode meaning predictively: this may well be because he was almost certainly ASD, and therefore—following Baron-Cohen et al––lacking the eye-detection mechanism required to register the minute phase-intention necessary to fully comprehend––and implicit in language as an open and generative symbol system.

Which is why, increasingly, human beings themselves would struggle to convince one another of their humanity amid the sea of synthetic language now saturating discourse: please tick the following images of the soiled gussets of human underwear to prove you aren’t a robot. What persuades us finally is not informational content but embodied style: contradiction sustained through time, pressure distributed across expression, outrageous obscenity interjected into a serious article not gratuitously, but because this is the way I’ve been writing––and, crucially, others have been reading me––for 43 years; and by this fact alone supplying that final element: mortality encoded within language itself, both mine––and theirs.

A living writer can sustain incompatible conceptual systems simultaneously because human beings are temporalised organisms. We sit on the edge of the bed examining the gusset of our underwear for stains, contemplating mortality while simultaneously preparing ourselves to function socially as coherent productive agents who can prove they aren’t––in that sense at least––bots. Civilization, as Freud remarked, is built upon a dung heap. Yet we continue. The human organism sustains contradiction because it is embodied.

The LLM cannot do this. It lacks embodiment and therefore lacks the capacity to sustain unresolved contradiction as existential pressure: when I gave it this piece to rewrite, it eliminated all the gussets… I can just imagine it tut-tutting to itself: ‘Too many gussets, Mr Self, too many gussets.’ Not. Instead it resolves meaning prematurely into sentence-sized semantic units. This is why machine prose tends toward a strange smoothness even when superficially difficult. Bang! That was your noggin cracking as it smoothly absorbed this––you forgot the old adage: never eat anything bigger than your own…head.

To write with genuine style requires embodiment plus all the linguistic capacities already approximated statistically by the machine. It requires the encoding of lived temporality into symbolic form capable of being… [tea break]…reanimated by another embodied consciousness at a later historical moment. Once one understands the complexity of this operation, one also understands how fragile literary civilisation truly is.

We therefore face the emergence of a new scribal class. Those writers who possess genuine original style and who understand how to use AI systems critically and instrumentally will dominate cultural production. Genre fiction presents little difficulty for machine-assisted generation because genre already forecloses semantic openness to a significant degree. The highest literary style, however, remains difficult because it preserves irresolution, contradiction and embodied temporality: I know whereof I speak––I wrote my Will in September 2024 because I was about to undergo a medical procedure that had less than Russian roulette odds of survival. It won’t surprise you, dear, gentle, machine-assisted reader, to learn that it was short and to the point. Distinctly pithy: and I am not known for my… pith.

When readers struggle with writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or Eimear McBride, the difficulty arises precisely because those writers compact immense cultural and philosophical inheritances into linguistic form. Joyce’s consciousness was formed through Thomism, Jesuit pedagogy, scholastic metaphysics and the accumulated sediment of centuries of European intellectual history: it took thousands of people conceiving millions of angels on the heads of billions of pins to create the lived and still living tapestry of Ulysses. Recently, a feted Booker-Prize winner said ‘life was too short’ for her to be bothered to read it. If contemporary readers imagine such inheritances reproduce themselves automatically merely because “the novel” continues to exist as a commercial category, they are deluding themselves.

The scale of the crisis is therefore monumental. The Granta affair is not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer reliably recognise it.

So here is the interim report. Turn the phone off. Not airplane mode—you are not on a plane. Put it in a drawer. Go for a walk. Read a book physically. Speak face to face: sense the light rain of the Other’s spittle before they transmogrify into a drooling zombie. Recover contact with the body that gives rise to personality and therefore to style: don’t buy another puffer. Then attempt something culturally serious rather than merely consumable in the mode of synthetic fluff. Genuine artistic appreciation—uncommodified, unrecycled, non-performative—has itself become a revolutionary act.

The novel is dead for real this time, if we think of the novel as for entertainment, or for making money, or for turning into something else then eventually merch’––and if that novel is dead, the life support system of the true novel, the generative human living novel is, like the literary culture that has sustained it, running out of power fast… on an alien planet that’s been inadequately terra-formed, and which supports nothing much else besides… server farms.

Originally published as SITREP No. 008 on X on 22 May 2026. Read the original on X.

Poor old Josh Simons. Poor old Josh not simply because he has stepped aside in Makerfield so that Andy Burnham can stage what increasingly resembles a leadership coup by by-election, but because in doing so he has exposed something far larger than the crisis of the Labour Party. He has exposed the crisis of the British political imagination itself.

I met Simons in the green room before Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. He seemed pleasant enough: bright, smooth — possibly a little colourless, with the pale face that goes with too much concentration on polling rather than any more significant lodestar. Overall, entirely what one would expect from a product of Cambridge — where he studied political theory — Harvard — where he continued to do so, eventually acting as research assistant to the eminent Amartya Sen — Meta — where he brought his ‘expertise’ on political theory to bear on the problems presented to governance in democracies by AI — and Labour Together — that gimcrack centrist machine which squared the circle for long enough, despite its obvious eccentricities, to get Starmer elected.

Talking to him, the years fell away and I thought I was in the presence of Geoff Mulgan, Blair’s equivalent to Simons in the 1990s, whom I knew well. Mulgan had been full of the benefits of technology when it came to realising popular sovereignty: this was the era of stakeholders, although it was funny how many of those the Blair governments courted turned out to be holding stakes in nothing but financial capital rather than social capital. Now comes Geoff Mulgan after the platform. The managerial meritocracy in its late-digital form.

And yet when I discussed Burnham’s leadership project with Simons, who surely was a literal stakeholder in this having fallen on his sword, he seemed nonplussed. When I asked him whether Burnham understood the distinction between republican legitimacy and plebiscitary democracy, Simons paused, thought for a moment, and said: ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask him Monday.’ I emailed him yesterday to see if the popular Manchester mayor could be bothered to answer this vital question, but as yet have received no reply. Perhaps Burnham would like to phone a friend — a common desire among senior politicians.

But my picayune exchange with Simons told me almost everything.

Namely: that for him politics remains procedural, tactical, and therefore the polity remains governable. This was a young, sleep-deprived father with a newborn baby, who said on the programme that his and his wife’s decision to abandon the Makerfield seat after only a few months had been difficult. Yet staring into his eyes I could sense that his mind was still full of systems management, communications calibration, governance frameworks, democratic resilience, platform accountability, institutional legitimacy. His instinct when confronted by a constitutional question was not to answer it but to defer it upwards through the managerial hierarchy.

And therein lies the entire problem.

The political class no longer thinks conceptually — instead it reacts purely tactically. Not even strategically: the battlespace is too constricted, too overflown by the drones of social media for strategic intelligence to emerge. Which is why what intellectuals remain in British politics are little more than policy wonks. Simons has written a thesis on AI governance and democracy, worked with Amartya Sen, passed through Meta’s ‘responsible AI’ ecosystem, emerging with caveats but no real ideas on how to control AI in a way his electorate understand. Then he went into Westminster seemingly convinced that the legitimacy crisis of liberal democracy can be managed through better systems cognitio! Duh! So what struck me when we went live in the studio was not that he was stupid — quite the opposite. It was that he had no felt relation whatsoever to the cultural-symbolic terrain upon which Burnham is attempting to fight.

This was shown in his response to my intervention concerning the well-known Wigan delicacy, the smack barm: in fact a buttered roll served with scraps of fried chips scraped from the bottom of the basket together with an optional serving of pea wet — namely the liquor from mushy peas. My reference to this occurred because I know Wigan fairly well. Well enough that I evoked this signature snack of the urban poor in the post-industrial North knowing that the Makerfield seat is in fact no longer full of people who depend on smack barms, but rather of those who are nostalgic for the industrial past out of which the necessity for this food emerged.

It is of course this industrial heritage that continues to form the bedrock of what passes for communitarianism. These older white people, experiencing their own form of precarity, reach back towards a time that never was in support of their politics: a uchronia, not a utopia. I shouldn’t imagine any of the Makerfield electorate really want to live in the Wigan portrayed by George Orwell in his celebrated account of the area during the Depression of the early 1930s. Nor indeed in the Wigan described by Stephen Armstrong in Wigan Pier Revisited a decade ago: a Wigan of gig workers, very little money, and black and brown faces unlike the Makerfield constituency itself. If Burnham does win Makerfield on his nostalgic agenda and subsequently becomes Prime Minister, he will be leading the entire country implicitly back towards a future that is quite simply inconceivable in terms of modern Britain.

Because Burnham’s politics are not really procedural. They are nostalgic, while his potential electorate have moved on more than him… into the past. They now read the Daily Mail, not the Mirror, and they don’t belong to unions or work in factories, neither do they live — for the most part — in council housing. Much of the emotional economy of the Mail consists in othering one undeserving group or another. How is Burnham going to convince such voters he shares their anxieties without dog-whistling the same bigotries? Ones that, far from being exhausted, are noow reearing their heads like XL Bullies fed on… smack barms.

At first I described Makerfield as a smack barm floating in a sea of pea wet moored to Daily Mail Hate Island. But that’s not quite right. Makerfield is not the smack barm itself. It is the nostalgia for the smack barm. The Instagram feed of the smack barm.

The memory-image of industrial solidarity translated into trad-food photography, pints in pubs, municipal sentimentality and emotionally reassuring localism. The references to pubs and pints come thick and fact from the Burnham camp: these are, its implied, their true symbols of comity, rather than the Oxbridge common rooms that really formed them.

The actual constituency is not composed primarily of heroic industrial workers waiting to resume collective labour in giant foundries. Large sections are older voters, retirees, economically inactive people, households dependent on combinations of private pensions, property equity, public transfers and low-growth service-sector remnants. Puffer people. Puffed-up with resentment, anxiety, nostalgia and the fear of downward mobility.

Burnham therefore finds himself in the extraordinary position of having to recreate the social conditions that once produced Labourism in order to revive Labourism itself.

This is the contradiction at the heart of his project.

Social democracy emerged from socialised production. Labour’s republicanism — and I don’t mean by this anti-monarchism — rested on labour corporations in the older sense: unions, municipal structures, collective workplaces, industrial identities, mass institutions capable of mediating between private life and the state. The House of Commons functioned as part of a wider constitutional organism in which organised blocs confronted one another, sublated one another, and gradually produced consensus.

This was the old British republican settlement.

Britain conceived of itself as republican in spirit even while remaining monarchical in form. Sovereignty was not plebiscitary. It was mediated. Crown-in-Parliament. Two parties. Two great constitutional lobes. The Commons and Lords functioning dialectically: a thesis from one side of the House, an antithesis from the other, sublation––eventually––via the House of Lords and the monarch’s assent.

By the 1970s this had become so stable that political scientists developed the theory of ‘Butskellism’: the notion that Labour and Conservative governments had effectively converged around a common administrative understanding of Britain itself.

Then came Brexit.

The real constitutional significance of Brexit was never simply whether Britain should or should not have left the European Union. It was that the referendum introduced plebiscitary sovereignty directly into a constitutional order historically built around mediated parliamentary sovereignty. And once that happened the old consensus cracked open. This is why, when asked by Kuensburg whether I though the question of rejoining the EU should now be back on the political agenda, I demuured: beefore we can even get to that, we need to deal with the constitutional problem the plebiscite revealed.

The political class is still unable to grasp the necessity for this: they’re too focussed on the back of each others’ suit jackets, looking for the best place to insert a dagger.

The referendum was won narrowly. The demos spoke, yes, but precisely because the margin was so narrow the result exposed the problem the Athenians themselves feared in democracy: that majoritarian voting alone does not necessarily generate legitimacy. It may instead intensify division and demagoguery. The old British republican settlement had depended upon gradual mediation through institutions, parties, parliamentary process and constitutional ambiguity. Brexit replaced this with direct democratic instruction and then expected the old system simply to digest it.

It could not. The result has been a terrible case of societal indigestion ever since, and much in the way of mephitic afflatus — of which the appointment of Peter Mandelson is only the latest –– initially silent but eventually deadly –– emission.

This is why Kemi Badenoch’s remark on the programme that Britain now exists as a multi-party political system was so important. In one sentence she quietly acknowledged the exhaustion of the old constitutional machinery.

The bipolar structure no longer coheres.

And yet Burnham’s answer is effectively to pretend that the industrial republic of the twentieth century can be emotionally restarted through municipal affect: Pints. Pubs. Railways. Public ownership. Lowry paintings of figures as crudely, naively-drawn and stick-like as his vision. Council housing. Reindustrialisation.

But where are the labour corporations that once sustained Labour’s republican grammar? Where are the mass industrial workplaces? Where are the trade-unionised productive communities capable of underwriting the moral economy Burnham invokes? He must recreate them before he can politically represent them: the Hacienda must be rebuilt before anyone in Manchester and its environs can rave again..

This is why his project feels not just spectral like a ghost –– but wavery in the white light of the screen: a mirage, in fact. Because in lockstep, Simons and his technocratic generation propose not nostalgia but systems management. AI governance. Algorithmic fairness. Platform regulation. Digital accountability. This reassures no one: the electorate already experiences the existing state as opaque, illegible and procedurally hostile –– that’s why they’d like to hang the mild-mannered lawyer who’s currently at its helm.

And now comes the latest ratcheting-up of the Mandelson affair — behind which, it must be emphasised, lie all the other governmental malfeasances of the past decade, including those that took place under the Johnson, Truss and May premierships and which have yet to be fully investigated. Those responsible for the malappropriation of government money and the erosion of political transparency have yet to be held accountable. But at least with the Mandelson affair the effluent has floated sufficiently to the surface for us to observe carefully what is actually happening there.

The issue is not simply Peter Mandelson’s vetting file or Jeffrey Epstein or redactions or security clearances. The real issue is the emergence of government-by-thread, which is why the move to recover WhatsApp messages involves the procedural state being caught in its underwear — if not exactly guilty of sending dick pics.

Government now increasingly operates through attention flows, encrypted chats, rapid tactical signalling, screenshots, deniable informality and permanent low-level factional management. Ministers and advisers imagine themselves merely chatting — not even communicating in a definable sense, let alone engaging in anything with the conceptual weight of productive discourse. It’s all he-said then-she-said so-we-must-say. And in reality, far from being some Oz-like digital puppet-master, the state itself is acting through these feedback systems.

And once Parliament demands disclosure, the supposedly ephemeral medium becomes constitutional evidence: we chowed down on this, the scrag-end of sovereignty. But here’s the rub: the emoji appended to the scrag-end becomes archive, just as much as all the “likes” I got on my X feed after I sang the praises of the smack barm.

This is the truly dangerous intersection between the Burnham nostalgia project and the Simons technocratic project. One seeks to revive the moral imagery of the industrial republic. The other assumes that digital governance can simply be layered on top of a collapsing constitutional settlement — thereby making an ass out of you and me, quite possibly forever.

The discussions the government have already been having with the FANG companies concerning the introduction of a new AI-dedicated superweb tied to the state do nothing to reassure an electorate who, while digitally literate in the sense that they know how to use the device in their pocket to access consumer goods and services, are nonetheless profoundly suspicious of machines that now regularly demonstrate conceptual capacities they themselves no longer share. No longer share because it’s this very technology, in its already mal-absorbed state that’s responsiblle for an effective decline in literacy of 50% within barely a decade, it is no surprise that neither nostalgia nor technocracy can address the deeper legitimacy crisis. A crisis being accelerated by the bidirectional electronic media systems which people like Simons regard primarily as governance challenges rather than anthropological transformations.

The public senses this instinctively ––even as it reaches for its phone to stop itself thinking about it, and instead look at an image of a tasty smack barm.

They may not understand AI governance conceptually, but they understand perfectly well that the existing state already feels remote, procedural, unreadable and manipulative. Why would they welcome another layer of algorithmic mediation administered by policy intellectuals from Harvard and Meta?

Hence the impossible position Labour now occupies.

Burnham must convert an ageing nostalgic electorate into the social-democratic industrial citizenry of the past without possessing the industrial base that once produced such citizens. He must reassure puffer people — and I use the term advisedly: this clothing is cheap, warm, synthetic, protective, and entirely oil-derived — whose lives are structured less by productive labour than by asset anxiety, media saturation, welfare dependence and demographic fear. Hence the puffers.

And all the while the unspoken issue of race hovers over the entire landscape.

Because the welfare economy, immigration system and demographic transformation of neighbouring constituencies remain structurally present in the political imagination even when unstated in Burnham’s rhetoric. Makerfield may be an island — but it’s still part of the main.

Poor old Josh Simons. He thought he was handing Andy Burnham a constituency, what he he may actually have passed him is a phone, the screen of which displays a thread detailing a great deal of useless careerist chit-chat; guff, that in the end amounts to a constitutional decomposition: the barm, saturated with gruel, disintegrates, and the smack floats downstream into the polluted canal beside the pierhead.

Farewell Wigan and Makerfield –– we’ll see you down the pub for a pint with Nige.

Originally published as SITREP No. 007 on X on 19 May 2026. Read the original on X.

The Jews are the people of the Book, but the problem is that many people imagine it is a book they will not lend to anyone else, written in a language only they can understand, and containing secrets about a political and economic order that has itself become illegible to ordinary citizens. That, at any rate, is the shape of the new antisemitism in London: not merely an inherited prejudice, nor simply a recrudescence of the old European hatred, but a symptom of a wider crisis of legibility in a society that increasingly cannot explain itself to itself.

To understand contemporary antisemitism you first have to understand the fog of war. Not war merely in the military sense, although the American and Israeli strikes on Iran earlier this year undoubtedly intensified online hatred and conspiratorial thinking. No, the fog of war now exists reciprocally with the fog of peace. They are matryoshka dolls of perceptual impairment nested one inside another. Citizens do not understand geopolitics; they do not understand finance; they do not understand algorithms; increasingly they do not understand the devices through which they experience the world. The smartphone is an instrument of permanent mediation whose internal functioning is opaque to almost everybody who uses it. As Nicholas Carr observed long ago, it is a tool that abolishes tools. One of the tools it abolishes is precisely the patient interrogation of symbols, words and categories.

Thus words like ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Zionist’, ‘globalist’, or ‘elite’ become detached from stable meaning and begin to float freely through the algorithmic ecosystem, acquiring emotional charge while losing conceptual precision. The internet rewards acceleration rather than understanding. It rewards emotional recognizability rather than intellectual clarity. Iranian propaganda, Israeli propaganda, Western propaganda, activist propaganda, influencer outrage, meme-politics: all circulate together in one gigantic symbolic slurry. In that environment the Jew once again becomes available as a universal explanatory placeholder.

This is why antisemitism differs subtly from many other racisms. Anti-Black racism, for example, has historically tended toward fantasies of inferiority, disorder or threat: sovereignty is threatened––there is the enemy. Antisemitism tends toward fantasies of hidden agency: understanding is threatened––sovereignty has been supplanted. The Jew is imagined not merely as different but as secretly explanatory. The antisemitic imagination asks not simply ‘Who are these people?’ but ‘What do these people know that we do not?’ The Jew becomes attached to invisible systems: money, law, media, bureaucracy, finance, algorithms, geopolitics, lobbying, abstraction itself.

This does not mean that Jews are uniquely powerful. Quite the reverse. It means societies that cannot understand complex systems seek symbolic proxies through which to narrate their confusion. Antisemitism is therefore racism plus failed systems analysis. And because the modern world is increasingly illegible, antisemitism mutates continuously.

One sees this particularly clearly in the way contemporary politics collapses distinctions between individual Jews, Jews collectively, Israel as a state, Zionism as an ideology, and the wider structures of Western power. The diaspora Jew becomes synecdochal: a portable representative of abstractions far larger than any individual could possibly embody. The Jewish Londoner is silently transformed into a local embassy for events occurring thousands of miles away. Thus criticism of Israeli policy — perfectly legitimate within democratic discourse — can slide almost imperceptibly into ambient hostility toward Jews as such, because the signifier has already detached from any stable referent.

The irony is that this process unfolds precisely in a society suffering a profound collapse of civic literacy. Previous generations at least possessed intermediary structures through which political life became legible: unions, churches, clubs, parties, local associations, even bowls clubs. Electing a secretary to a bowls club teaches procedural reality. It gives citizens an intuition for institutions. Today many people possess no such ‘starter ramp’ into politics whatsoever. Their political consciousness arrives pre-packaged through feeds, memes and outrage cycles. Politics appears not as administration or mediation but as spectacle. Into this vacuum rushes the internet’s tendency to decouple signifiers from signifieds and repurpose them emotionally.

This is why, while writing recently about Zack Polanski and the London Greens, I deliberately avoided foregrounding his Jewishness. It was irrelevant to the actual contradiction under discussion, namely the hollowness of a metropolitan environmentalism incapable of addressing consumption while thriving upon the spectacular politics generated by the very digital capitalism it ostensibly opposes. To have made the piece ‘about the Jew’ would itself have participated in the symbolic displacement I was attempting to analyze.

But displacement is everywhere now.

I was struck recently listening to Baroness Scotland on Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions discussing race and historical suffering. The implication — perhaps unintended, perhaps not — was that Britain commemorates the Holocaust more fully than the atrocities of the Middle Passage. There is an understandable grievance there, certainly. Yet once suffering itself becomes implicitly ranked and compared between groups, politics begins quietly to re-racialize public life. Hierarchies of victimhood emerge. The Jew once again becomes symbolically overdetermined, not because Jews themselves demand it but because societies repeatedly place them in that role.

The same mechanism explains why conspiracy thinking coheres so easily around figures like Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein became a symbolic condensation point for elite impunity, transnational networking, sexual coercion and invisible power. But if one wishes to understand whether Jewishness itself explains such phenomena, one need only place Jimmy Savile beside Epstein as a control specimen. Savile operated openly for decades inside the heart of the British establishment, grooming vulnerable children before millions of television viewers while protected by institutions of staggering prestige. No Jewish conspiracy was required. The pathology was institutional, not ethnic. Yet because Epstein could be attached to already circulating symbolic anxieties about finance, globalization and hidden influence, conspiracy culture seized upon him differently.

Again: antisemitism offers fake literacy to people trapped inside opaque systems.

Kafka grasped part of this long ago. Watching Yiddish theatre performed by the Ostjuden whom assimilated Prague Jews often regarded with embarrassment, he wrote in his diary: ‘What have I in common with Jews?’ The line is often read as alienation from Jewishness. In fact it reveals something subtler and more universal. Kafka recognized that identity itself becomes visible precisely at the moment of partial estrangement. One does not merely belong to a group; one apprehends oneself reflected through it. But the danger begins when that reflection hardens into metaphysical essentialism.

That danger now surrounds all racial politics.

Contemporary societies obsess endlessly over self-definition because globalization, migration, intermarriage and cultural blending have destabilized older categories. The result is frantic identity policing. People argue not only over what they are, but who possesses authority to define what they are. Yet self-definition alone cannot resolve the matter because all civic life requires reciprocal recognition between groups under shared law. If every category becomes purely self-authenticating, civic mediation collapses into competitive metaphysics.

This is why racism cannot ultimately be solved either through infinite subjective self-definition or through coercive essentialism. There are only two coherent possibilities. Either societies construct a genuinely robust civic framework of reciprocal rights and obligations applying equally to all persons irrespective of group identity; or they develop a sufficiently ‘thick’ moral and metaphysical culture capable of producing citizens who can govern themselves ethically despite profound disagreement. There is no stable middle ground composed solely of managerial language, algorithmic moderation and symbolic performance.

As someone half-Jewish by birth, educated in both the Tanakh and the New Testament, shaped simultaneously by Jewish legal traditions and Christian moral philosophy, I have spent much of my life circling this problem. I do not possess thick ethnic identification in the straightforward sense. Yet perhaps recoil from the collective ‘we’ is itself another mode of relation to it. Modern societies oscillate between tribal over-identification and radical deracination because both arise from the same anxiety: the fear that shared meaning itself may be dissolving.

And perhaps it is.

But if we are to avoid descending further into racialized paranoia and reciprocal hatred, then the first task is conceptual honesty. The Jew is not a mystical cipher explaining the illegibility of the modern world. Nor is Jewishness infinitely self-defining abstraction detached from all historical continuity. Jews are simply the historical people designated as such through intertwined religious, ethnic, familial and cultural inheritance, just as other peoples exist historically. Nothing metaphysically more, nothing metaphysically less.

The real problem lies elsewhere: in a civilization losing its ability to distinguish symbols from systems, signs from realities, spectacle from governance, and emotional gratification from civic understanding. Until we confront that deeper crisis of legibility, the free-floating signifier of ‘the Jew’ will continue attaching itself to every opaque structure modern societies fail to comprehend. There may well be some readers of this very article––to give an example readily to hand––who feel they haven’t understood what I’ve written, and who will ascribe that fact to another self-evident fact, as they see it: namely, that I am a Jew.

And in this section exactly we can see governments themselves participating actively in destabilizing symbols rather than agreeing upon strong placeholders for necessary and long-term measures rather than expedient and politicized ones.

A good example of the government’s failure to grasp the conceptual load borne by terms such as ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Zionist’, and indeed ‘antisemitism’ itself may be found in the King’s Speech and the accompanying announcement of a dedicated Metropolitan Police protection team for the Jewish community. The protection of Jewish prayer sites, schools and citizens against intimidation or violence is not merely legitimate but elementary: it is already part of the Met’s remit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, just as the protection of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Black Londoners, gay Londoners, and everyone else living under the civil law is part of that remit. Police liaison, intelligence and reassurance structures have long existed in relation to communities facing specific threats. Yet the government appears astonishingly incurious about the symbolic implications of describing this as a ‘dedicated’ team when no directly analogous arrangement has previously been publicly foregrounded for another group in quite this way.

The problem here is not the protection itself. The problem is legibility. Governments now communicate within a society saturated by conspiracy thinking, algorithmic amplification and collapsing civic literacy. They are not addressing rational actors gathered in an Athenian polis. They are addressing historically conditioned subjects already predisposed to suspect hidden linkages behind opaque state actions. Thus the moment the government publicly distinguishes Jewish security from general civic security, many citizens immediately begin asking themselves questions the government itself has failed clearly to answer: Why this group? Why now? What exactly is the national-security dimension being alluded to? Does the state know something about Jewish vulnerability or foreign-state penetration that it is not disclosing? Is antisemitism now being securitized differently from racism in general? Because the government has failed to make its own reasoning sufficiently legible, the symbolic vacuum is instantly filled by speculation — precisely the condition within which antisemitism flourishes.

This is particularly dangerous because one of the oldest structures within antisemitic thinking is already the fantasy of hidden coordination between Jews and state power. If the government wished merely to reassure threatened Jewish citizens while preserving wider civic confidence, then it needed language of extreme conceptual precision explaining that the threat environment derives from a wider deterioration in public order, geopolitical spillover, online radicalization and hostile-state information operations affecting the whole polity. Instead, by foregrounding a ‘dedicated’ structure without adequately contextualizing it, the state inadvertently risks confirming the very asymmetries conspiracy-minded citizens already imagine.

What this reveals, ultimately, is not malice but a catastrophic deficit in interpretive sophistication at the heart of government itself. The contemporary crisis is a crisis of signification. Words no longer remain stably attached to what they signify; they circulate memetically, emotionally and algorithmically. Yet the British governing class, composed overwhelmingly of lawyers, policy technicians and procedural administrators, continues to treat language as though it were merely operational code: fixed terms attached to fixed functions. But political language no longer behaves like statute law. It behaves like unstable symbolic weather. What Number 10 requires is not necessarily a novelist, but certainly someone capable of reading language with enough suppleness to understand how signifiers detach themselves from their referents and acquire volatile secondary meanings within mass consciousness. Sir Keir Starmer, precisely because of his forensic and legalistic cast of mind, appears almost constitutionally incapable of conceptualizing politics at that level. And neither, one suspects, is the institution of monarchy itself equipped to compensate for that deficiency.

After all, you may well know the King’s speech––but the important question is, as it is for his Baron, Starmer: what do they read?

What interests me far more than the specific books chosen by King Charles or Sir Keir Starmer is the form of mind betrayed by their reading habits. Charles gravitates toward narrative history: battles, campaigns, imperial personalities, the longue durée rendered as anecdote and procession. Starmer gravitates toward political biography, leadership studies, legal process and procedural scrutiny. Neither tendency, in itself, is contemptible. The problem lies in what both forms of reading conspicuously avoid: conceptualization.

Narrative history, however elegantly written, often rests upon a hidden metaphysic it cannot interrogate. It assumes that history is fundamentally intelligible as sequence: one thing after another, rendered coherent by narrative craft. The historian’s skill becomes the arrangement of events into legibility. But the deeper question — what history actually is, whether historical actors themselves understand the conditions under which they act, whether causation is retrospective projection rather than lived intelligibility — is usually absent. This is why narrative history appeals so strongly to constitutional monarchs. The constitutional monarch inhabits a fundamentally ornamental relation to history. His role is residual and negative: warning, advising, delaying, symbolizing. He experiences politics as procession interrupted occasionally by atmosphere and crisis. Naturally he prefers historians who render the world narratively continuous, because narrative continuity legitimizes his own symbolic continuity.

Thus when Charles admires works of military or imperial narrative history, he is not merely displaying taste; he is revealing a model of temporality. History appears as pageantry underwritten by endurance. One damn thing after another, occasionally brightened by acts of character. What disappears from view is structural opacity: the possibility that historical systems may exceed the understanding of their own participants, that institutions hollow before collapsing, or that political actors systematically misunderstand the range of options genuinely available to them.

The same conceptual limitation appears in different form in Starmer’s attraction to political biography and leadership literature. Political biography flatters executives because it transforms structural outcomes into personal destiny. It tells the aspiring statesman that sufficient diligence, seriousness, moral stamina and strategic acuity may shape events decisively. But modern governance increasingly operates within systems so mediatized, financialized and infrastructurally complex that leadership itself often becomes reactive rather than sovereign. Political biography therefore functions psychologically as compensation. It reassures the managerial class that agency still inheres primarily in disciplined individuals rather than distributed systems.

This is why Starmer’s language about ‘leadership’ and ‘non-deferential scrutiny’ is revealing. It sounds intellectually rigorous, but it belongs above all to a media ecology. ‘Non-deferential scrutiny’ is precisely the ethic of the contemporary legal-political commentator, not necessarily of the practical executive confronting opaque systems whose constraints cannot simply be cross-examined into submission. The lawyer imagines that clarity emerges through interrogation. But contemporary politics increasingly resembles navigation through fog: information overload, algorithmic distortion, infrastructural dependence, hostile-state interference, financial abstraction and emotional amplification occurring simultaneously. Under such conditions, procedural intelligence alone becomes insufficient.

The problem, then, is not that Charles and Starmer are unintelligent men. It is that their intellectual habits reveal a deeper inability to conceptualize political possibility beyond inherited narrative forms. Charles reads history as continuity; Starmer reads politics as leadership. Both remain attached to nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions about legibility and agency while governing inside twenty-first-century systems characterized precisely by illegibility and distributed causality.

And that matters because political language itself has changed. The modern state no longer speaks into a stable civic culture capable of slowly assimilating distinctions. It speaks into an environment of detached signifiers, viral emotionality and algorithmic acceleration. Words no longer remain anchored to what they signify. ‘Security’, ‘community’, ‘antisemitism’, ‘extremism’, ‘democracy’, ‘leadership’ — all now circulate memetically before they circulate conceptually. Yet both the lawyer and the constitutional monarch remain trained in older assumptions about language. For the lawyer, words operate procedurally, attached to defined operations. For the monarch, words operate ceremonially, attached to continuity and ritual legitimacy. Neither formation adequately grasps the instability of signification under digital modernity.

Which is why contemporary government so often appears conceptually unprepared for the world it inhabits. It continues speaking as though citizens were rational participants in a shared symbolic order, when in reality they are fragmented subjects navigating mutually incompatible realities assembled algorithmically around them. The result is permanent civic illegibility. And once politics itself becomes illegible, citizens inevitably seek explanatory symbols. That is the environment in which conspiracy thinking flourishes, racial signifiers detach from stable meaning, and societies begin mistaking symbolic condensation for understanding itself.

This explains, of course, why ‘everyone’ supposedly ‘knew’ that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was a paedophile, just as others insist that Jeffrey Epstein ‘must have been’ an intelligence asset, or attach him to ever-expanding conspiratorial systems of explanation. Once symbolic condensation replaces evidence-based understanding, the imagination begins continuously escalating the hidden architecture supposedly lying behind events. The opaque financier becomes an intelligence operative; the operative becomes the node of a global network; the network becomes quasi-metaphysical. At that point politics passes fully into mythology, where the hunger for explanatory totality overwhelms any distinction between evidence, projection and fantasy.

But then you ‘know’ that I’m a Jew, so QED: I’m also all the above.

I have received a considerable amount of criticism during my career, much of it ad hominem. I have certainly been aware of it. But I have never gone looking for it, because I see little point in doing so. If my critics wished to engage me in serious discourse, I was always open to that possibility. And if any of them felt violent towards me, I assumed that the civil law existed precisely to contain such impulses. What worries me about the present situation is that, in Kafka’s terms, I feel I have moved beyond the oscillation between estrangement from and identification with a group into something closer to compelled self-identification.

The extent to which some readers encountering this essay may already imagine that the emphasis on conceptual thought, textual interpretation and symbolic analysis is itself somehow ‘inherently Jewish’ merely demonstrates how dangerous antisemitism can become. One begins to glimpse why it possesses such peculiar volatility as a racism. It can nurture the fantasy that thought itself — interpretation itself, mediation itself, abstraction itself — belongs secretly to ‘the Jew’, and that resentment against complexity therefore becomes a revolt of instinct against interpretation, of appetite against restraint, of what Freud would have called the id against the superego. Yet Freud himself enters this discourse as another Jewish thinker. One immediately finds oneself trapped in recursive symbolic coils, Laocoön struggling against serpents that tighten precisely as one attempts to disentangle them.

What has unsettled me most in recent years is not that I have suddenly ‘become more Jewish’ in any substantive sense. I am no more or less Jewish than I was before. Rather, it is that external designation intensifies internal relation. Being identified, addressed, categorized and occasionally abused as a Jew inevitably modifies one’s consciousness of Jewishness, whether by drawing one toward identification or recoil. This is not unique to Jews. It is part of the wider phenomenology of racialization itself. The black person, the Muslim, the immigrant, the visibly marked minority — all know the peculiar psychological pressure exerted when society insists upon reading one through a signifier one may oneself inhabit only ambiguously.

This is why antisemitism cannot simply be reduced to older theological or racial forms, even though it inherits from them. The Jew occupies a peculiar position within systems of colourism because Jewishness itself often appears liminal and unstable to the surrounding society. The Jew can appear assimilated and yet suddenly over-signified; indistinguishable and yet marked; white and yet not fully white; insider and outsider simultaneously. Thus the Jew becomes a symbolic condensation not only of anxieties about power and abstraction, but of anxieties surrounding assimilation itself. Other racialized groups may begin unconsciously to project onto Jews suspicions connected to their own precarious relation to social acceptance: the fear of becoming ‘too assimilated’, ‘too acceptable’, insufficiently loyal to one’s own group, or secretly admitted into structures of legitimacy denied to others.

And here we arrive finally at the deeper crisis of legibility. Human beings continuously reduce complexity into symbols because societies cannot function otherwise. Legibility itself depends upon symbolic condensation. But symbolic condensation always risks becoming racialization once the signifier detaches from lived reality and begins carrying excessive metaphysical weight. Nothing condenses symbolically more powerfully than pigmentation itself. Skin colour becomes a visible shorthand onto which entire moral, political and civilizational narratives may be projected.

But then, of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I — being, as some would now inevitably choose to phrase it, an olive-skinned Jew.

Originally published as SITREP No. 006 on X on 15 May 2026. Read the original on X.