Thanks to unforeseen circumstances, I now find myself, like James Price, waving goodbye to Kilburn. Goodbye to the last bitter dregs of the London Irish, goodbye to the snarling Arabs and their enormous piles of fruit, a fond goodbye to all that. We are a few stops down the Mildmay Line, back in the leafy bosom of Kentish Town; back with mother and father and the endless dogs, back in a foldout bed in the home office that, in the intervening years, my childhood bedroom has become. Some damp miasma seems to be hanging over this part of London. In recent appearances, a permanent sheen of migraine sweat has settled like wet silk over the face of the local MP, and shows no signs of letting up; you and me both, Mr. Starmer, you and me both. Keir and I find ourselves in the same spot, gearing up for what’s looking to be another tangled, clammy summer of striving and crisis. Still, there are worse places than Kentish Town to spend the month of June. Readers may remember, or perhaps not, that some months ago I let off a little falconet in these pages, against the English tradition of painting. But a few flightless weeks flapping about Hampstead Heath have drawn my attention to another, much finer, English tradition, fine enough indeed to cover a multitude of sins; the English school of landscape gardening.

The inverse of our situation vis-à-vis the fine arts, here the English School looks its best when set against that of the French. The French garden is premised on long lawns broken up with winding parterres and well-trimmed topiaries. Its principles are architectural - the struggle against nature for manly precision: the clean line, the solid mass, the harmonies of calculated geometry. Naturally, the purest example is that of Versailles, or else the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The English garden opts instead for a look of studied Byronic dishevelment; the treeline broods over high grass full of wildflowers, the pond calls itself a ‘lake’, and is fed by a brook, not a fountain. Its groundskeeper takes as a maxim: the highest art is to conceal art - his hope is that the landscape will resemble a Constable painting. This is the style exemplified by London’s Kenwood House, at the North-East corner of the Heath, or Scotney Castle in Kent. In a broader sense, it is the style we find all across the English countryside, wherever it contrives at looking ‘wild’. Most of our ancient forests had been torn up for agricultural land by the end of the Middle Ages, and little of what was left survived the Industrial Revolution. Ours is among the most well-cultivated, well-ordered landscapes on the planet: the bulk of our existing woodlands were re-introduced by artifice over the course of the 20th Century. The J’accuse reader, a dedicated partisan of Reason and Candor, might here find himself turning up his nose. The English garden is dishonest, sentimental, and, in its preference for the rustic and the rough-edged, has the dowdy, anti-modern stench of the Arts and Crafts movement. So far, so bad. But there is one great practical advantage the English School offers over the French: privacy.

Say, at some dreary Sunday luncheon at the Tuileries, you and your associate grow bored of your fellow guests and invent some excuse to peel off from the group - where will you go? Behind the trellis, into the hedge maze, under the gazebo. Private space is clearly demarcated, and announces itself in right angles and hard partitions. Should you and your confidant eventually skulk back to the picnic, should you stick your head above the parapet, the rest of the party have a direct line of sight across the flat plane of the lawn. You are shot through with furtive glances from over the grassy knoll… and where have you two been? Not so at Hampstead Heath, where everything is louche and unclenched. The landscape is all hiding spots, all long, pubic grass and shady clearings. Here you are free to leave the madding crowd to their cold cuts and glide off into the thicket undetected. Such has ever been the purpose of the public garden, emerging in the 19th Century to meet the needs of a growing middle class (and the working class on Sundays) who had time to spend at leisure, but unlike the landed gentry, no grand estates to scuttle off to, away from bad air and prying eyes.

There is an undercurrent of sleaze here, and perhaps my dear Reader has already detected the slightly purring tone with which we have been curling that word - ‘privacy’ - over our tongues. The pleasure gardens of 19th Century London or Paris were not only the settings for properly Christian forms of leisure, but also the sanctuary to which a young couple might steal away from their families to molest one another en plein air. The haunts of, in Marx’s words, the ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie … discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers … in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass the French call la bohème.’ Here, Second Empire France buckled under the weight of its appetites, and was forced to make concessions to the English style in search of privacy - Napoleon III’s public gardens, most notoriously the Bois de Boulogne, designed in a hybrid mode modelled on Hyde Park.

This is the tradition that, as any number of North London’s, to use the old-fashioned term, confirmed bachelors can attest to, perseveres at Hampstead Heath. And though its long-standing reputation as a den of vice (especially of that vice, the Greek vice, the Turkish vice: bumming) is well earned, those of us who grew up nearby will confirm that, despite what you might have heard, most of these liaisons are not between middle aged closet cases, but perfectly healthy, heterosexual teenagers. A late bloomer, at that age my relationship to these goings-on never went beyond that of an accidental, impassive voyeur, like a stray car witnessing a robbery. But still, it happened, I was there, I saw it. I assume, though I don’t care to prove it, it is still happening.

Compare the brilliant, luxurious freedom afforded by the 19th Century English garden with that of its contemporary equivalents, the developments built in the last two decades to host London’s 20-somethings on their weekend afternoons. Trendy retail developments like the Boxpark in Shoreditch, or King’s Cross’ Coal Drops Yard. There is no escape from the mob: not in the streetwear boutiques, not in the Japanese homeware shops, certainly not in the restaurants, where a server is waiting to pop down next to you in a presumptuous squat and ask - in that outrageously chirpy tone that, when I worked like that and heard it in my own voice, inspired barely any more hatred than it does now - So guys, what’ll it be? An infinitely less dignified gesture than getting your cock out in a public park.

In his last appearance in these pages, discussing the ‘birth rate’ question, Mr. Pervert made the following observation on modern relationships, against the line peddled by conservative elements on the Right, that young people are delaying having children for the sake of a long, debauched 20s full of nameless sex:

“I’ve seen frequently this pattern: an intelligent, articulate woman, not bad-looking has a series of monogamous relationships, often including cohabitation (which in my view is marriage in all but name). None of these “work out,” none result in children. At some point she realizes she’s 44 and childless.”

The topic of his essay is one I generally steer clear of, seeing as it involves people other than me having sex - a prospect I have only ever met with indifference, bordering on contempt. Nonetheless, it is one to which this discussion of the English garden might have something to add, so we will pinch our noses and wade in. His characterisation of contemporary romance is perfectly apt, but let us examine the relationships of cohabitation he is describing with a closer eye. The reason the pattern he sets out is so common is largely economic - rising rental prices and stagnant wages make splitting a one-bed a very attractive option to a young couple who might otherwise prefer a greater degree of independence, and hold off moving in together until marriage. This produces a perverse form of domesticity that possesses only the worst traits we associate with married life - the drudgery of routine, arguments about dishes, falling asleep in front of TV - and none of the forward momentum that might come with the possibility of buying a house together and raising children. Huge swathes of London’s population under 35 are living a lifestyle identical to that of a pair of 60-something ‘empty nesters.’

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“Facts ignore ideology”
Richard Dawkins, February 16, 2020

I had a sudden realisation on Thursday, reading that the Green Party is considering banning parents from circumcising their children unless it is medically necessary. I am part of the voiceless electorate and have been since 2019. Brexit is the only thing that has ever moved me to turn up in person to a ballot box, and though I nurture dislikes against different politicians and belief systems, I have not been given a positive reason by a mainstream British political party to take part in the democratic exercise in this decade.

But if David Paulden promises to ban the barbaric evil of non-consensual genital mutilation I will not just vote for Zack Polanski, I will canvass for Zack Polanski and I will join his party. Such would my zealotry be that I would be at risk of being groomed into a Green Party adjacent paramilitary wing.

The Green Party will not only win my support, they will also have a bulletproof defence against the gibbering charge that the party is ‘sectarian’. Of course the blue jumpered filth will attempt to claim that banning circumcision is intended to signal persecution of British Jews on behalf of the Hate Marchers, but this falls apart when we observe that there are many more Muslims in the electorate, many of whom have gone over to the Greens over Palestine.

Banning circumcision is the opposite of sectarianism. It would instead show that the Green Party does not base its politics on the interests of minority groups but begins from points of principle, and in this case, aligns itself with the enlightenment values of rationality and reason against violent rituals – whether it be rooted in bogus, bigoted pseudoscience advanced by John Kellogg at the turn of the century, or ancient promises made in religious texts. It will therefore be an act of political sacrifice on behalf of defenceless children, grounded in ethics, whilst the ‘mainstream parties’ ceaselessly kowtow to the demands of religious minority groups.

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Venerable hack Giles Coren said on a podcast not too long ago that one of the main reasons for the decline in restaurant criticism is that “restaurants nowadays are basically great.” Long-gone is the era in which A. A. Gill (RIP) and Michael Winner (RIP) would descend on some rickety bistro and issue forth a rejoinder on the Lobster Bisque so withering as to prompt the maître d’ to fellate a shotgun barrel the moment the copy landed off the press the next morning. A truly sh*t, dreadful experience when dining-out is something that has to be largely sought nowadays, rather than braced-for, to the extent that a knowing sh*ttiness exists as a marketing-pull for the ironically-minded. Wong-Kei in Chinatown is reduced to a simulacrum of the actually-existing rude-and-shooddy-ness that defined it in the 1990s, despite its contemporary reputation still leaning on that schtick. More egregiously down the line is ‘Karen’s Diner,’ mercifully closed in the UK as of last-year, which adopted a fairly dated anti-honky meme from Black Twitter into a defining gimmick. Ho Ho Ho! I’m being given bad service! On purpose! (Kill yourself).

Such is the Le Epic Late-Stage Consumerist society that we live in that such things even propagate, loathe as I am to do Who Remembers Proper Crap Things as a line. Yet there is at least a kernel of truth. Millennials (especially the older ones) love Irony. Permit me the leap, but what applies to restaurant criticism as a trend also applies to pop music, the Eurovision Song Contest in particular. Eurovision used to be sh*t. It used to be full-throatedly, genuinely sh*t. Enduring it with my dear old dad during my youth was not an act of nudge-nudge-wink-wink appreciation for the knowingly kitsch, but an act of joyous sadism. Witnessing Tomaz Pierogi from Syldavia obliviously croon his way through ‘Bing Bong Boing’ was something to be laughed AT and not WITH. It was given added frisson by the fact that the UK was never ever going to win, even in the event that we were to submit a half-decent tune, as to quote the old man, “everyone f*cking hates us (roar)”. Scooch’s performance in 2007 doesn’t even feel like it belongs in the 21st Century, an abominable piece of bubblegum pap better left languishing in the early 90s. Daz Sampson’s attempt at a jack-the-lad rap tribute to Top Of The Pops Savile-ism the previous year was seriously pitched as approaching Cool. And in 2010 Poor Josh Dubovie was persuaded last-minute by Pete Waterman (presumably at gunpoint) to finish his offensively pedestrian oontz-oontz-lite ditty at a pitch he couldn’t possibly hope to hit, and it ended up being not much of a surprise when he crashed into last place.

A thorough itemisation of the dreadful Eurovision offerings domestic or otherwise would be a long-form listicle in and of itself, but it must be communicated as to how much the tone of this stuff was not explicitly knowing in intent. Bear witness to Albania’s 2012 offer, in which anime vampire Rona Nishliu caterwauls with such po-faced aplomb as to be unintentionally disturbing and amusing in equal measure, as one example of many. And even the acts that deliberately courted a sense of levity were cut from the same essentially earnest cloth- we all love Epic Sax Guy, but for Moldova’s SunStroke Project he was just Sax Guy, and camp flair aside his memeification was a latter Reddit-led phenomenon. Camp is not the same as Ironic Knowing. Verka Serduchka gave a tremendously shlocky performance in 2007, but it was far more Danny La Rue than Ru Paul, all full-throated spectacle and not so much constantly checking over the shoulder to make sure you ‘get the references, yeah.’ While the actual winners of the contest usually ended-up as at least Soberly Competent (with a few authentic bangers in there - Lena in 2010, anyone?), cocooned on sceptered Blighty the event to me was, in essence, just a load of bollocks.

This was the mood that had set much of the domestic coverage throughout the 2000s, a weary tone of “oh here we go” as Wogan squished into his tuxedo for another broadcasting adventure in national humiliation. Admitting any genuine enthusiasm for the contest among friends or normal people marked you in the same way you might be after admitting some odd hobby or habit, like collecting porcelain dolls, feeling sexual attraction to garden gnomes etc. A friend of my dad’s actually went out there to see it once, and was considered a “wrong-un” for doing so. Eurovision was not remotely an ‘event’ at school in the same way an X Factor Final was, and anyone older who was in the faintest sense ‘cool’ did not acknowledge it. Perhaps this was different in the more robustly middle-class echelons across the country, but I like to imagine that on the whole, those even aware accorded it the status of a hatewatch. I have old parents, and the reason I watched at all was probably an imparted vestigial notion from the 1980s that it was somehow a bulwark against imminent nuclear holocaust or whatever.

However, from about the mid-2010s (the maturing salad days of the Millenial), things had begun to change. I confess I was paying less attention by this point (our entry by Electro Velvet in 2015 nearly unironically killed me off, a tune that somehow managed to blacken the name of electro-swing even darker), but then I only had to dip-in to pick up on the shift in tone. I am skeptical that any young group of people before 2017 hosted a “Eurovision Watch Party,” and indeed for a while I was convinced such had been invented wholesale post-Brexit by a strike team from the IPPR commanded by Sunder Katwala, yet there my contemporaries were. Constructing gin vats. Doing witty banter on socials. Rating performances with genuine aplomb, and so on. The contest was enjoying an apparently newfangled popularity among the Buzzfeed classes. I caveat this already highly-generalist theory with the observation that there were still plenty, a majority even, of basically pedestrian tunes being offered, increasingly in tasteful Mumford And Sons-mode, which were fine. And yet in terms of the heartfelt sh*ttiness that hitherto had been the core characteristic of the stand-out acts, a mutation had occurred, along dual lines.

I will touch on the first less-interesting one briefly, which isn’t to do with the Millennial weakness for irony, but rather Big Queer and its encroachment on the contest and pop-culture more broadly. Now, oxymoronic as this sentiment might appear, Eurovision wasn’t always *quite* so gay, or so prefigured around ‘empowerment’ as a theme. Conchita Wurst in 2014 represented something of an amping-up in this regard - decent tune, bloke with a beard, upset the Borat-coded viewing nations yep brill. By the end of 2010s Eurovision was going the way of Dr Who in terms of its core fanbase presenting as well-gay, and the contest being billed as capital-f Fabulous. During the initial RTD-revival of Who of course I recall an equal split within the fanbase between those who were bullied because they knew who Isambard Brunel was and those bullied for knowing the lyrics to ‘Defying Gravity’ - this dynamic is now far more dominated by the gender people. Such is the story for dozens of other ‘fandoms,’ ‘spaces,’ etc., with Eurovision being a not immediately-appreciable example. This should not read as a straight (lol) criticism, indeed there’s a whole history to be written on this phenomenon, but it did mean a switch-up in tone from ‘Haha Look At That Bloke’s Gay Haircut’ to ‘Really Quite Important, Actually.’ It wasn’t sh*t anymore, it bloody well meant something.

The key way in which Eurovision is no longer sh*t however, or at least sh*t in a different way, is the insidious note of self-awareness permeating through the wackier acts. The appetite for kitsch-remix defines Millennial tastes, the apologism inherent to a generation that has only known decline in their adult lives. Stay with me on this. Take Daði og Gagnamagnið in 2021, an international sensation in its own right. The jumpers, the awkward keyboard-ring, the deliberately twee choreography. This isn’t sh*t. It’s wearing sh*t’s clothes and attempting to trick you into recalling when you hate-enjoyed something actually sh*t, transubstantiation through irony. Windows95man in 2024 was an absolute howler of an example of this, a performance that with its measured attention-seeking recalls a below-average insta reels comedian riffing on the quirks of MSN messenger. Every ‘weird’ moment curated specifically as a wink to the audience. This is not what the contest was about. A colleague was recently singing the praises of Europapa from a couple of years ago, and asked me if I thought it was “good.” “No,” I said. “It’s not good. It’s trying to be a bit rubbish on purpose.” This isn’t Lordi (2006). It’s not Milan Stanković (2010). It’s not even LT United (2006 again). I note that it is mainly the Scandinavian countries that are leading the charge in this trend but Croatia in 2023 stood out. Look into their eyes in this performance. They know what they’re doing, how this will play, they don’t think it’s ‘good’ but because it’s ‘bad’ it’ll work. At home, the gin cascades out the vat and a cry of “oh that was just really out there wasn’t it haha” goes up. We even had go at this year, but in true GB Eurovision tradition still managed to massively f*ck it up and come last (roar).

I think this is a sad development. But perhaps it’s moot to care about in any broader sense. The winner this year was actually quite good, and the sh*tiness of the entries I’ve put in defence really only owe their schticks to the gaucheness that defined the pop culture of the long 2000s - and times have simply changed. Nonetheless I long to tune in next year and see a Bulgaria 2009, something unapologetically garish, where I’m not invited to laugh but am doing so in spite of the artist’s intentions. Let me be a proper b*stard Eurovision, it’s the reason I watched at all.

There is tentative excitement abroad that Péter Magyar’s meteoric rise heralds a new, stripped-down brand of populism, one purged from the „politics of place“ and other tired Mayisms. Having run a mostly non-ideological, largely negative campaign focused on the government’s corruption and unstable economic management, Magyar and his Tisza party seemingly offer a working example of Bickerton and Invernizzi-Accetti’s „technopopulism“ thesis, which holds that, far from being opposing poles, technocracy and populism are fundamentally similar insofar as they posit a single rationale for governance (expert opinion vs. popular will), and politically compatible insofar as they share a common enemy in a pluralistic political establishment where elites are promoted through parties and beholden to interest groups. Setting aside all debate over this theory’s broader descriptive power, it falls short as a guide to understanding the worldview of Hungary’s current government, which is neither technocratic, nor populist, but combines the worst elements of both with none of their virtues.

Tisza’s particular mind virus is of a drearily familiar strain that has been kicking around Eastern Europe since the 1980s. This is the radicalism of a politically immature professional class that desires, above all things, to finally live in a „normal country“; a country like Germany, Denmark, or, well, Britain. „A normal Hungary has awakened“ declared the centre-right Válasz Online’s Péter Magyari (no relation) the morning after Magyar’s victory. „We are not used to living in a normal country, but we should try, because now we have the chance,“ said the newly elected president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Normality is when the speaker of the house casts out her old oak seat for a modern swivel chair, cabinet announcements begin by rattling off the number of master’s degrees their appointees hold, and ministers go to work in shining blue polyester suits. In a normal country, cabinet meetings are not held in converted baroque monasteries, but in somewhere more up-to-date. In a normal country, the government doesn’t pull the wool over people’s eyes with bots and AI slop, but takes the fight to Grok. In a normal country, the Prime Minister doesn’t rule by unaccountable emergency degrees, but focuses on delivery.

The promise of a return to normalcy has enjoyed an unbeaten winning streak at the ballot box throughout the region for more than three and a half decades. Practically every non-socialist government returned in the region first post-communist elections donned the notionally centre-right, corruption-fighting everyman’s costume that Magyar now wears, and which has more recently dressed (to give a far from exhaustive list) Mikulaš Dzurinda, Kiril Petkov, Igor Matovič and his rather puckishly named party „Ordinary People“, Emil Constantinescu (ooooo remembers???), Szymon Hołownia, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, most successfully of all, Alexander Lukashenko in his 1994 presidential campaign, who, in a rare exception among normalcrats, managed to survive more than a single term in office. Boris Yeltsin, presenting his privatisation drive in a speech on the anniversary of the failed military coup, proclaimed that Russia was „taking just the very first steps toward a normal human life“. Is Magyar so different? That the new prime minister has turned over operational control at the crucial Interior Ministry to a former Budapest police chief, who joined the force under communism and retired from the service sixteen years to run the Fidesz-aligned Mayor of Budapest’s security operation, suggests that all is not quite as normal in Hungary as the friendly Ikea furniture around the cabinet table makes it seem.

Where does this notion of a normal country come from? Determining the provenance of so generic a phrase is never easy, but the likely source is the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, in which the „post-totalitarian“ societies of the post-stalinist Eastern Bloc are indicted for their „absence of a normal political life“. Havel understood normality in terms that might have come from Hayek, Spencer, or Maine: „plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organisation“ — these Havel believed to be the natural tendencies of human existence that political institutions could either acknowledge or suppress. Post-totalitarianism differed from the „normal“ totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler because, whereas the latter were periods of dynamism and upheaval where a small elite attempted to reorganise society on ideas, in the former the institutions of society exist solely to perpetuate themselves meaninglessly. When, later in the essay, Havel introduces his famous greengrocer who places a sign reading „workers of the world, unite!“ in front of his shop window, the point is that the symbolic codes of socialist ideology no longer relate to any material reality or imply any actionable consequences (as they certainly did for Lenin or Stalin, for whom „workers of the world, unite!“ was hardly a LinkedIn platitude), but serve as a ritual semiotics offering „the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe“ — a role that might, under different historical circumstances, have been played by national socialist, fascist, or liberal democratic jargon.

It apparently escaped Havel that the idea of „normal political life“, being by his own definition amenable to a broad and ever-evolving menu of social configurations, has a necessarily loose relationship to reality that lends itself even better than communism to playing the role of a ritual semiotics of cosmic harmony and social stasis, whose comparatively concrete prescriptions contrasted sharply to the socialist everyday in a matter that undermined their credibility. It makes no difference if the green grocer’s sign reads „workers of the world, unite!“ or „long live the open society“, but the second is less risible. This, by the way, is precisely the sort of argument that Eastern Europe’s conservatives — old, John Gray-quoting fogeys like Ryszard Legutko — make when critiquing the legacy of the liberal dissidence of the 1970s and 1980s (although this one I thought of myself, mom), but we would be giving actually existing liberals too much credit if we were to argue at the level of pure ideas as formulated by proper philosophers like Havel and not their corruptions in the muddled minds of Karl Marx University of Economics graduates.

In fact, in contrast to Havel’s high-minded abstractions, the ideal of „normal political life“ came to take on a much harder meaning in the minds of the Eastern Bloc intelligentsia who read his writings, namely: social, political, economic, and especially cultural convergence with the dynamic, hedonistic societies of the West, which (as was not lost on the often economically trained young intellectuals) were leaving the socialist economies in the dust while simultaneously abandoning the shared fordist principles that the Cold War world had been built on. The Eastern Bloc liberal has a taste for the Western boomer lifeworld tout court. „West Germany in the 1980s was the perfect society“, one prominent Budapest lawyer involved in liberal activism during the Orbán years once told me, „this is what everything should be like“. And so it would be, if it weren’t for Orbán and his Tory mates.

To live in a normal country thus means to live in an odd collage of the West cobbled together from a murky array of sources that include Hollywood movies, Radio Free Europe, and Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech; a world in which elections are free and fair, pride parades are held, everyone reads respectable centre-right broadsheets like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and politicians get on with the job instead of trying to, well, politicise things. The absence of „normality“ can be found lurking behind all conceivable problems, not always those that might occur in a typical liberal democracy. „A country with a normal army would have wrapped this up in one or three months, not dragged it out for three and a half years“, one disgruntled anonymous Russian woman told The Economist, „[Putin] f—ked everything up completely“. Some observers are more circumspect; a normal country, the liberal Polish ex-dissident Adam Michnik once told the Wall Street Journal, is one with „normal corruption, normal scandals“. Orbán’s Hungary had corruption and scandals too; what was so abnormal about them?

In truth, very little about Orbán’s regime deviated from the path charted by the West over the past two decades. His generous funding for „civil society“ has obvious analogues in Western Europe; the soft censorship of critics through „deplatforming“ is a tactic which Western liberals spent my entire youth affirming. It is common practice for western governments (Canada and Austria, to name two examples) to fund „independent“ journalism through various channels; the amount of self-censorship that goes on in Westminster thanks to a mixture of political scheming and strong libel laws is probably larger than the entire output of the major Budapest dailies. Whether Orbán’s regime was abnormally corrupt is difficult to say conclusively: though certainly prone to more lavish displays of waste and opulence (were those palaces really worse than HS2?), corruption is by nature done under the counter — that Orbán’s excesses were relatively well-documented may just be evidence of a more energetic civil society and a more critical press than exists in the West, despite his well-documented attempts to suppress these institutions.

This, then, is the perniciousness of the „normal country“ meme, which by conjuring up a false image of the West impedes Eastern Europe’s own political development. Orbán’s crusades against immigration and „gender ideology“ were no more than a defence of the social norms of the liberal democratic West at the time Havel came up with his felicitous coinage — there is no reason why, in a truly open society, people must accept these things, only that they debate them without prejudice and reach their conclusions based on the facts. Greengrocers putting out pride flags (a practice ubiquitous in Germany), lockdowns, the permanent mobilisation of the state and its quangos against „populism“ — Havel would hardly recognise any of this as „normal political life“, yet an entire generation has grown up knowing little else. The West today may not be post-totalitarian, but it is certainly post-liberal — as long as the eastern half of the continent’s intellectuals continue to follow its fads, they will find themselves mired in the type of Ruritanian despotism from which they once looked westwards for relief.

Buckingham Palace

Paddington vibes. That’s the phrase going through my head as I watch the last stragglers reach the finish line of the London marathon. Hopecore reggae – music that owes more to Ainsley than to Stormzy – plays through a tinny speaker amid colourful UK bunting. Stalls selling Yorkshire pud burritos and sticky BBQ ribs ply their trade. People with old money-coded names like Hugo and Isabella vibing in the afternoon sun. A bald man with Henry VIII physiognomy in shorts and a t-shirt drops an armful of pints, a ragged cheer of “Wahey” goes up. Anglo exuberance. I couldn’t help but grin.

Yet all the while, I hear the low roar of the Palestine march coming from Whitehall. I cast a nervous glance towards the Palace. Does Charles III, UK king, even feel safe here anymore? I look again on the Hugos and Izzy’s, living and loving, and I think how much those marchers must hate them. Understand how much they hate you, I feel like shouting. For these are the Nick aged 30s – if they would but know it. People in KPMG and EY, the Atlas of our reeling UK growth. The nucleus of the Anglo-Gaullism to come.

Once in 2024 when leafleting for Nigel Farage (I know, I know) I tried to explain to a retired electrician living in a bungalow in Clacton why these people had higher social status than he did and that he must try to swallow his natural feelings of envy, and he told me to go away. Now Clacton electrician wants to put an illegal immigrant processing centre next to Nick’s house share just because he voted for more illegal immigrants. Resentment-coded. This “High Twee” ticketed event was not my scene.

But as the steel drums ring out and the Nicks started bobbing and weaving, I fight the urge to countersignal. These are people besieged on all sides – by Boriswave and slopulism both. On my way out, a Boriswaver ritually humiliates me by making me wait eleven minutes for my Truffle Mayo smash burger.

Greene King pub, Russell Square

“Did you hear” asks Tom England, down from Hemel Hempstead. “St Dunstan’s College up in Cheltenham, that independent school founded all the way back in 1898, it’s going to close because of those new VAT changes.”

The mood at the impromptu Witan darkens considerably. Rear Admiral Horatio Raccoon shifts in his stool. “I sometimes wonder. With everything that’s going on… I mean we talk about the next election. But will UK even survive until then?”

Murmurs of agreement follow from the assembled Anglo poasters.

“They hate you,” says Robert Walpole Respecter, flatly.

“I mean,” continues Horatio Raccoon. “Tom, you know you’ve got this show, and you’ve got all this reach. I almost think, to be fair… that maybe you could actually just invite Keir Starmer onto your show. For an interview. I mean he’d probably say no but… to be fair… on the off-chance he did, you could really ask him about what he’s doing. You could really corner him, you know?”

Tom England gives a worldly snort. “Mate, waste of my time and yours, yeah. I mean if by some miracle, and I do mean a *miracle*, I could get that man on, he’d just give a politicians answer. Yeah? Like he wouldn’t even answer any of the questions. So what’d be the point.”

Horatio Raccoon nods gravely.

The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of our food.

“We are so back,” grins Politics Raven, as burger and chips are set down in front of him. He decides to lighten things up. “But to be fair, none of us expected Keir to start Mussolinimaxxing out of nowhere. Like, ‘Fuck you, I’m staying where I am, come on if you think you’re hard enough’ – almost admirable.”

Tucking into my UK beef and ale pie, I sense my moment. “The thing I just worry about is that if Keir goes,” I begin, “all of his successors. They’re just incompetent. I mean it’d be the same under Rayner, say, but without the competence. And I know she’s upper-normie coded, in a way, but think what she’d do as UK leader to the economy…”

Nods of approval. “Understand how much they hate you,” says Walpole Respecter.

Meanwhile Tom England has noticed that Horatio Raccoon ordered a Chicken Tikka Masala.

“Slop alert!” he hoots. “Slop. Slop detected.”

Horatio Raccoon smiles bashfully. Politics Raven chimes in with a pitch perfect recitation of Rowan Atkinson’s iconic sketch.

“I like… curry. But now that we’ve GOT the recipes,” he bellows.

“I can’t believe you’ve literally memorised that,” I chuckle. “Absolute scenes.”

Twenty minutes pass, Tom England has to leave to go interview Olly Gloucester on Restore. After the success of my remark on Keir’s competence, I decide to venture something else.

“Did anyone see Peter Mandelson’s WhatsApps where he talks about UK growth? Like he was literally the only one there with any competence. Cracked, to be fair.”

Politics Raven flashes a devilish smile. “The Dark Prince. It is known.”

Meanwhile, the 2013 hit single ‘What Does The Fox Say’ by the comic duo Ylvis has come on over the speaker. The iconic chorus plays as Horatio Raccoon lists the possible merits of the erstwhile Washington Ambassador and Baron Foy.

“Yeah I mean” says Horatio Raccoon.

‘Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!’

“I mean, he did some good work”

‘Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!’

“He did do some good work, to be fair.”

‘Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!’

“And like you say, you know, he was at least competent.”

‘Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!’

I was glad that this “hot take” had gone down well, but I didn’t ultimately think that these –admittedly powerful – Anglo poasters really understood the Vibes of Dark Mandelson. It’s things like this that make me want to leave politics behind, and just Build.

As I drink the last of my Abbott Ale, the song draws to a close. It seems to belong to a more naïve world, before the Boriswave. But when you think about it, it was the last period where there was some genuine UK optimism.

The White Cross, Richmond-upon-Thames

I’m having a roast. In a country pub. And I can barely move for dogs. Immense Irish wolfhounds and Labradors barking and lying prone in the middle of the floor. I watch as a child grabs a biscuit from a mason jar of doggy treats on the pub counter and returns to her parents, beaming.

“Proper pork crackling – oh my days,” says a man in a bucket hat in his early thirties, waddling back to his table with three foaming pints of Guiness. As he takes his seat, a Big Headband sitting opposite cheekily yanks one of the glasses and ‘splits the G’ – there and then. “OooOOOoOooOhhhh,” the table roars.

Conversation turns to Formula One, age-gap relationships, and then, politics. As I ladle the last of my UK mash onto my plate, my ears perk up.

“I was thinking Zack Polanski for a time,” says the bucket hat man, “But the thing with Burnham, is that he’s just a cheeky Northern chap, right? Like actually just a sort of normal person. And I could live with that, to be fair.”

My heart rate speeds up. For this is upper-normie speaking. Status made flesh. I see Big Headband opening her mouth, and every nerve in my body seems to clench as I await her verdict.

“Yeah I mean, he’s done a good job in Manchester. So many of my mates have moved there since uni.”

There it is. The vibe has shifted. Actually Existing High-Trust England has had its say – and countersignalling would be spiritually brown. As Gaetano Mosca wrote, aspirant Elites must always agree with the masses and with the opinions of those currently in power lest they fall into contrarianism.

There was a Dark Blair, now there would be a Dark Burnham. I smiled, despite myself: I loved Big Bucket Hat.

Okay fine, I’ll say it: Sooooooo, Sally can wait…

By the Marquis

The Nambikwara men of Brazil’s Mato Grosso region wear nothing but a single sheaf of buriti straw, fastened to a belt, set dangling over the penis. Should a Nambikwara man come to blows with one of his fellows, he will begin by grabbing his own penis with both hands, pointing it menacingly at the enemy, and then rush to snatch his opponent’s tuft of straw, unveiling the rude organ that a dry blade of grass had, until then, so deftly concealed. Such were the Nambikwara as Claude Levi-Strauss encountered them in the late 1930s, recorded in his landmark work, Tristes Tropiques. Though an informant tells me things have changed a great deal since - by the end of the 90s, those locker-room antics had fallen victim to an ascendant Nambikwara modernising wing, which Nambikwara journalists have since described with words like “competent” and “robust.”

Should this give us cause for lament, we can take solace in the fact that the spirit of the game still perseveres here in Britain, in Kemi and Keir’s weekly sparring matches at PMQs: both, by canny twists of rhetoric and clippable ‘mic-drop’ moments, seeking to embarrass one another by ‘revealing’ what the outside world has already decided it can see all too clearly - that neither is fit to govern the country. Not only has Britain never had a less popular prime minister than we do now, but the unpopularity of the prime minister has never failed so dramatically to translate into a rise in popularity for the leader of the opposition. PMQs is dominated by two leaders who, if YouGov’s most recent polling is correct, would fail to win more than 13% of the vote each were an election called today. We may as well be watching a Lib Dem leadership debate. The whole charade has never felt more pointless.

The pair do themselves no favours. Each session follows the same formula, into which the issues of the day - North Sea oil licences, the welfare bill, sanctions on Putin - can be slotted in in Mad Libs fashion. Kemi sallies forth: ‘Mr. Starmer, you have done X, and it is very bad’; fancy footwork from Keir: ‘Ah! But Ms. Badenoch, your party also did X when you were in power!’; Kemi, back on the attack, with that trademark cattiness that puts a spot of drool at the corner of puts a spot of drool at the corner of certain old Tories’ bottom lips: ‘Ah! But Mr. Starmer, your party is doing X right now!’ If in some sudden bout of masochism, if in some bleak hour a wicked angel curls wormish about our inner ear, we force ourselves to listen all the way to the inevitable stalemate that awaits us at the end of these proceedings, we will note that they only draw attention to a conclusion that three quarters of the electorate have reached already. The accusations both Keir and Kemi levy at each other are often broadly correct, because both parties are indeed criminally liable for the state Britain finds itself in today; Keir represents a continuity with the New Labour era which, despite 14 years in government, the Conservatives (the Brexit referendum aside) failed to meaningfully break with.

Last week, PMQs made a bold pivot from the merely dull to the rage-inducing. The sham of bourgeois democracy in Britain has rarely appeared so barefacedly thuggish as in the joint response from the Prime Minister and the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition to the murder of Henry Nowak. On Wednesday, Badenoch opened her remarks with a brief note of condolence to the Nowak family, clearly intended principally as the set-up to a stern reminder to her colleagues of their responsibility to ensure his death will ‘bring people together, not divide them.’ She then embarks on a long, wittering eulogy for Lord Alan Haselhurst, a man who apparently spent much of his life playing cricket, the subject of a few polite-chuckle-raising jokes from Kemi, before dying of being very old. Keir began his rejoinder to her question on the welfare bill by thanking Kemi for her tone in addressing the Nowak case, met with rumbling approval from around the chamber.

Here, and in the language from the state at large, as well that of its belly-crawling court satirists like Ian Hislop, ‘bourgeois democracy’ takes on a meaning beyond the strictly material sense that Marx and Lenin intended. It is bourgeois in that all the worst habits of the middle classes, the same habits we find satirised by Zola or Wyndham Lewis - the obsession with politeness, conflict-averse to the point of neurosis, the allergy to speaking bluntly - are elevated to the level of an inviolable political principle that triumphs over rational debate. Farage’s present enemies find themselves incapable of speaking about the Nowak case except in strings of ill-defined nothing-words that belong to the pages of Chelsea Ladies’ Rotary Club Encyclopaedia of Etiquette circa 1920: ‘decency,’ ‘division’, ‘respect’, ‘bringing people together.’ That the case is inherently political, in so far as it concerns the behaviour of the armed wing of the state, is trumped by the fact that to take this seriously might cause offence to a grieving family: it is simply the height of bad manners. When Farage, at the same PMQs, suggested that the debate depart from abstract nouns and turn instead to the black-and-white question of racial bias in police guidelines, he was met with wild howls of rage from virtually the entire chamber.

This speaks to something of the character of whatever is presently being called ‘Woke 2.0.’ When guidelines like those Farage is referring to were first introduced, the Left made some attempt to justify these positions intellectually. Their proponents, in their accusations of structural racism against the Western nations, would cite things like redlining or the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, and pull quotes from bell hooks or James Baldwin. Though if, at whatever time we decide to agree marked the peak of ‘Woke 1.0’, ‘The Rest is Politics’-listener-types who would otherwise consider themselves politically moderate were happy to adopt ideas about race that had until then been understood as radical, it was not because they were won over by the arguments (which they now seem to have totally forgotten). Instead, it was because in day-to-day life these ideas were chiefly encountered as rules of politeness, backed up by a degree of institutional support that elevated them out of the realm of the political and into that of conventional bourgeois morality. Much of the conversations around BLM were essentially discussions about etiquette: what words one can and cannot say, what hairstyles are acceptable for White people to wear, which gestures of solidarity are respectful and which appear performative - for much of the middle class, perfectly familiar, comfortable territory.

In the age of ‘Woke 2.0’ (which is only a real thing in so far as it is a by-product of the Western bourgeois becoming illiterate at breakneck speed), the intellectual constructs supposedly supporting these social rules have vanished. Overt racial bias in police conduct will not be defended, by Starmer or even Polanski, with attempts to convince the public that this is a necessary corrective to institutional racism, backed up with a lengthy history of Britain’s role in the slave trade or quotes from Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Unlike in the mid 2010s, nobody is going to pretend to read any books. Farage’s attacks will instead be rebuffed only by temperamentally conservative appeals to stodgy public morality; he is being unkind to the bereaved family, he is being vulgar, he is spreading ‘division.’

If like me, dear Reader, mon semblable, mon frère, you too belong to the middle classes, let us comfort one another with this. Keir Starmer, Alastair Campbell and Ian Hislop are late, degenerate members of our species and not the archetype. Ours is the class that gave the world Horace, the Prophet Mohammed, Robespierre, and Lenin - the picaresque heroes of the long, unfinished novel that is Modernity. There is, let us hope, strength left in us yet. Perhaps, sometime this century, our better natures will win out and we shall once more lead the world into a springtime of the peoples. Alas, until then - death to bourgeois democracy, and long live honest men.

Many hours of documentaries and even a book has been dedicated to the educational background of the Tory modernising generation who went through Oxford University in the 1980s. But the politician for whom their education mattered most was Nick Griffin, who was Chairman of the BNP between 1999 and 2014.

The fact that Griffin had been privately educated, and then attended Cambridge marked him out from the beginning of his involvement in fringe politics.1 Here is how a critical Times profile from 2009 opens:

“At first glance Nick Griffin’s early life appears to mirror that of many within the political elite to which he aspires. A product of the best education money can buy, the BNP leader attended private schools in East Anglia before taking history and law at Downing College, Cambridge.

As his Oxbridge contemporaries set their sights on traditional professional and political success, Mr Griffin was steadfast in his resolve to achieve his own brand of glory within the far Right.”

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As well as giving its users boundless manic energy and making them unable to eat, methamphetamine gives its users an extreme sexual appetite that simply will not go away for the time that they are high. It is not unheard of for tweakers to spend upwards of twenty hours practicing ‘self-abuse’ with their glans red and raw from the friction. Heavy binges of Methamphetamine can also temporarily change the user’s sexuality; they may find the same sex attractive but can also feel sexual urges towards animals and even inanimate objects. Crypto currencies made millionaires of many people in my generation; for others it was the first step on a short road which finds you trying to fondle the hollow of a tree in the early hours of the morning.

Most ‘chemsex parties’ are just rooms with people taking meth in them and having a very long orgy, which is why certain prominent figures in the media occasionally go through phases of looking very gaunt as they have developed a dependency from these engagements. Opium, which unlike Methamphetamine is a depressant, played a similar role as the narcotic of choice for sexual deviants in the Victorian era. Although laudanum had been used in British society for well over a century, proper opium dens to facilitate binge usage only emerged when Chinese immigrants in port cities like Liverpool, Cardiff and London began to set them up in the late 19^th century. At roughly the same time cocaine was successfully isolated from Coca leaves and by the 1880s recreational use had become widespread in Europe’s great cities. In 1884 Freud published Über Coca based on his experiences with the new drug, saying that three of the persons to whom he had given coca had ‘reported violent sexual excitement’ and recommends it as a ‘remedy for occasional functional weaknesses’.

In Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the titular character corrupts a young man (Adrian Singleton) and ruins his reputation by introducing him to opium. Wilde himself practiced sex tourism in Italy and Algiers whilst, according to Gide, taking hashish and other drugs liberally. It is not a stretch to suggest that the abrupt proliferation of gay men in upper-class British society and the wider decadent movement during the Fin de siècle was caused by the contemporary popularity of drugs like opium, hashish and cocaine, as one might argue acid was the cause of the environmentalist/hippie movement in the 1960s (nature can breathe, it has a face).

Taking methamphetamine will do to your perception of sex what ecstasy does to your perception of serotonin. You will have the sophomoric revelation that ‘it’s all just chemicals’ and this thought will prick you in real life encounters with the opposite sex. It also does to the act itself the same thing that a lovely cigarette does to a glass of wine. Once you know you are missing you will enjoy the unenhanced experience less.

Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria, was addicted to methamphetamine in his teenage years. I could have told you that he was a meth addict without reading his biography because of the hyper fixation that he clearly has with degrading pornography which comes through in the show.

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Addendum: Could people please stop posting screenshots of my posts on X dot com?

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Kemi Badenoch made an incalculable error yesterday morning when she decided to weigh in on ‘two-tier’ and Farage’s use of the phrase ‘White lives matter’ (transcript here). Badenoch said that it s ti…

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Tucker Carlson is running for President in 2028.

Does he even know? Of course he does. He is calibrated for it, inside of that confused identity.

It’s years, possibly decades in the making. Don’t kid yourself, behind that trademark laugh and folksy visage is someone a lot more like Frank Underwood than your Thanksgiving uncle. What? No way. He can’t be. This is the goofball who talks about UFOs and spends half his time reading nicotine adverts. It’s not like the millions of Americans who lap that content up are a significant demographic, let alone had elected the current President. Didn’t you know that he has dogs! Only inhuman “fascist(s)” like Ron Desantis don’t. That guy hates dogs. This guy, he just wants to fly fish… with Dick Cheney.

What if someone knew the absolute cover that such a disarming nature gave them? The manipulative power that such could wield in an age, that for most, is becoming ever more confused. It’s not that its faked, but that it is weaponized.

Let’s consider that time when America’s uncle was the only Western journalist given a two-hour chit chat with the triple decade Premier of the Russian Federation? I do. I found this moment quite nice:

TUCK: With the backing of whom?

PUTIN: With the backing of CIA, of course! The organization you wanted to join back in the day as I understand…

TUCK: “…”

PUTIN: We should thank God they didn’t let you in *piercing laughter* although it is a serious organization. I understand.¹

Do you put the word the in front of God?

Being cute 24/7 apparently isn’t a serious enterprise according to the embodied ghost of the KGB. But hey, it’s not like someone of that profession knows what ‘serious’ means anyways, don’t sweat it. Did Trump stay quarantined in entertainment when Obama made a whole ball laugh at him?

When Zuckerberg was blown off at parties by women and ‘people’, he decided to appropriate their whole existence. Whether this was his handler humiliating him with doublespeak or his idol shoving his face in the sand, the result is the same. You think this guy is all laughs and smiles?

The comfy Boomer. Deception is the greatest stratagem. Deep down is a hungry little tactician, in him just as in all of us. For what lesson did Trump teach us? That this country is a joke. So you think it’s the ‘serious people who are going to ascend to the top? A mixture of idiots and the shrewd push out the lovers of normality. Crazy is the new normal in times of exception, so get used to it and recognize that is the defining condition for political prediction in our time. If a reality tv show host is now Presidential, surely too is a political pundit.

Curious instant gestures at 1:06:18, upon being asked about JD Vance being the next President. Could be nervous about controversy hitting Vance, but the defensive posture and hand is more than bizarre.

MEGYN KELLY: JD Vance. Is he 48?

A “NOT STRATEGIC” THINKER: *Nervous laugh* I’m not an adviser to JD Vance by the way, I’m a podcaster just to be clear. Umm I’m the least svengali like person you’ve ever met, like I can’t plan a birthday dinner, I’m not strategic in my thinking. I’m the last person you would go to like what do we do? I don’t know! So *laughter* - its true. And so I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow, so like no one asks me for my strategic advice ever, and no one should, including JD. So I have no role in that.² *Proceeds to say he is a good Vice President and defends him from being attacked by association with himself*

MEGYN KELLY: Is there anyone else who could do it? Besides JD?

A “NOT STRATEGIC” THINKER: You know I don’t, I don’t really know… There’s a huge scramble to define what the Republican Party is after Trump… *shuffles away from the question and proceeds to define what MAGA is*

Now let’s say, hypothetically, you want to be the Presidential successor to this absolute shitshow. Good news for you, it being such makes it quite opportune for the unexpected to swoop in. A dark horse maybe? One who just so happens to be correctly tuned to appeal to a public at large sick of bombastic narcissists - especially ones that aren’t cool like the current one. Standard politicians of default skin don’t work anymore - the Democrats are going to do that one, we’ve gotta press against that and not emulate it. Unless they run AOC, in which case this entire analysis will have to be adjusted. Hmmmm. If only there was an anti-Trump. Someone who is an exact inverse of the man’s temperament, character and qualities. As any inverse of course, this someone will still be just as much of an act - une même forme ; a man of many laughs.

In this ocean of mystery, who are the prospective fish?

Well Ron Desantis is talking about how Somalis are uncivilized savages which is a direct challenge to being the GOP’s chief dog-whistler. The current incumbent of that job laughs at his cackle. Ronnie, you poor guy. That dinner revealed your cards to the master! Unreal recognizes unreal and you will be outplayed. It’s ok, maybe he’ll give you VP, or secretary of something, but you’ll have to lick the scraps with the hounds. A naval man himself, he’d prefer the golden days of doctrine; that ‘normal world’ where you simply ascend after decades of feckless toil. Get your trophy wife, become governor and check all the boxes only to get the Presidency stolen from you by a comms fuck up. Elon Musk seems really good at screwing with people, just as much as he is at creating them. Which begs the question - isn’t there a far-right Fox expat that he’s really cozy with? Anyways, like a fine first-rate battleship, pristine and shiny, Desantis will be sunk from below by a silent running Poseidon. Blown out of the water before he ever acquires the target.

So what about Jay Deee!, the guy we’re all supposed to think is going to be Trump’s successor. To this it can only be said: Really? With that face? We do live in stupid world but even here we keep the Big Chair from those with extra chromosomes. He would make a very funny coffee mug.

“But he held the casket at Kirk’s memorial!”

And who gave the most impassioned speech?

“But he’s the Vice President!”

And who made the call to put him there?

When SSBN’s are making their final attack run, its standard operating procedure to drop decoys. Juris Doctorate Vance? Come on. Too easy. On the outside all of us dupes break off and chase that louder noise, while inside the TK-16 Карлсон you hear a faint celebratory “uuraah!” It’s the mark of a seasoned captain to be an unknown unknown - better yet right in plain sight! - because when you suddenly appear on everyone’s radar, it’s too late. If I were to guess Rummy taught him that one, with Dick, fishing.

Ah but some are starting to notice. The coast guard has been activated a distant 15 nautical miles off shore of the Washington metropolitan area. Who will save the day? A washed out careerist, who never made it into the admiralty - the Boss didn’t exactly like it when he told all the cadets to vote their conscience. Ted Cruz notices a shimmy in the waves and sounds the alarm. “RED ALERT! RED ALERT! A jaded WASP is coming in for the kill!” The Shapiro’s, the Weiss’ the Levins’ all scramble in their Phantoms like it’s an unfestive Yom Kippur. They fail miserably, although some do successfully sink a few million tons of US flag waving freight. The cruise missiles launch, a single Cruz faints. It’s not 2003 anymore Teddy, all your friends have fled. Although we’d love to see ‘CRUZ/CHRISTIE 2028’ so we can print T-Shirts that say ‘Only ONE MAN can save the United Satellites of Israel once and for all!’ - it’s a joke even they will struggle to get behind.

Rubio is probably the most dangerous case, but he’ll struggle in the populist age. Nevertheless, he is the only intelligent person holding the Administration’s baton. Politically speaking though, no one else is positioned like Tucker Carlson, and if he doesn’t see that maybe he really is an idiot. But I doubt it. That’s his character, not him.

The water is still, the waves now absent.

POISED FOR THE POUNCE

Did Fox News fire Tucker Carlson or was it the other way around? They got the Dominion lawsuit and he got their audience under 70. Now securing a hard bargain like that may show why even Trump likes him. Michael Burry if you can hear me, devise an instrument that can short just the news portion of FoxCorp, their market-base will physically extinguish in about ten years, give or take. Now, why didn’t Carlson join Newsmax? He surely could have dominated there too? Curiously he didn’t try to build a broadcasting network with those like Charlie Kirk or Megyn Kelly, nor Glenn Greenwald, Dave Smith, Candace Owens, Steve Bannon and so on. There is no network big enough for this man now, it’s not just a preference for sitting in front of a digital stream. As for those others? Why limit your brand to them when they already orbit you? No need. The aim, clearly, since the departure from Fox has been to build the most dominant single-person centered pundit brand - and he succeeded.

No one else gets ratings like him, well except for one person, but not in the mainstream yet. Of the ‘old guard’ pundit class he is king. He and his staff have very aptly developed their content to appeal to all the right people, and repulse all the wrong ones. Promoting conspiratorial narratives, rigid American isolationism and a generic xenophobia have all proven profitable for this endeavor because White Americans en masse are flocking to these things, among other things. Establishment conservatism and Zionism, not big winners on the ticket for the 2020s.

He has a mothership media operation positioned both in network and ideological terms right at the center of the mainstream American Right. He not only knows everyone big but is able to reach everyone little across the country. No one else is in that position and he knows that. Maybe he is just a goofball that is constantly learning, but if he is not to any degree at all, he and his team are going to strike HARD in 2027. Pay careful attention to how he speaks of Trump. It’s just a little too innocent.

MEGYN KELLY: What letter grade would you give Trump right now?

UNASSUMING CUTSIE GIRL DAD: Umm well as always I’d just give him like huge style points *hehehe* he’s just (unable to control laughing) hilarious! He’s just unbelievable! And he never gets credit for it, you know. People always say Trump is always seeking credit for everything but in my view… - from here it just turns into a ramble about glazing (1:01:00 on the Kelly/Carlson interview if you want to microwave your head) - …I think he’s freaking hilarious!

The glaze… The glaze is too conspicuous. Especially after calling him daemonic. Why dost thou glaze Tucker? One can only wonder…

An approach towards Trump completely unassuming in posture, an outmaneuvering of all the other opponents before the show even starts. This man, and no one else, is best positioned to succeed Trump - receive blessing and be most likely to actually carry forward the election in 2028. Anyone else will most likely drown in public opinion trying to salvage this ‘legacy.’ The anti-Trump? He stands a good chance. America’s Uncle. Cozy. Comforting. Focus group tested. If you need to be spoon-fed, the theory here is that JD Vance is *literally unelectable* and everyone on the inside knows that, so a vacuum will present itself; the smarter are already planning accordingly. Source? My brain. Newsom would devour him like that shark from Nemo, not to mention the ‘Groyper’ torpedo. Sorry James, it’s the same thing that happened to Cheney, Mondale, Bush against Clinton, etc. We live in an era where personalities, not the best operators, make the Oval. An entire election is not going to be wasted just because the supposed frontrunner has the best power-elite network. Someone else is taking this place. Someone all women in this country can feel warm fuzzy’s about - yeah that’s a real metric and Carlson nails it.

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Piers Morgan is the most successful journalist of his generation by every conceivable metric. In name recognition, international presence and wealth he outclasses everybody else b.1960-69. He is in a class with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson, who also started off as journalists but did not stay the course. He has managed to stay in broadcast media consistently around thirty years now and still has an uncanny ability to set the News agenda once every three months (just this week he is in the news for being ‘spotted’ celebrating Arsenal on the pitch).

The reason that Piers Morgan is so successful is that he has a supernatural talent as a tabloid journalist for understanding Middle England. He is always able to position himself precisely on the side of the tabloid reading classes. He condemns the antisemitism of Nick Fuentes, the communism of Ash Sarkar. He goes after vegans, says ‘woke needs to be put back in its box’, tells everyone who will listen that he is friends with Donald Trump but also ‘SLAMS’ him for posting racistly about Obama and says that women footballers should be paid MORE than the men’s team. He DEMANDS Dianne Abbott take a position on deporting illegal immigrants but also TEARS DOWN David Davies for suggesting that we check child migrants’ teeth.

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Like most people, when I first heard of Enoch Powell I imagined that he was a sort of hooliganish, rough-and-ready, beer-drinking sort of ‘racist’; when I discovered he was actually a Classical prodi…

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As World by Wolf so astutely points out, Restore have failed to stand candidates in Aberdeen; they also failed to stand a single local councillor outside of Great Yarmouth in May. The only thing the …

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Just last week the largest trade union for Civil Servants (PCS) voted to double their financial reserves in preparation for strikes to take place after a Reform government is elected – on the basis t…

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I’m often slightly offended on my future self’s behalf by how much energy I have put into ‘devolution’ as a cause to attack. I am depressingly aware it will be used to furnish bogus intellectual genealogies of Meritocracy to cope with the fact I came up with the Future Government of Mankind at 15.

Like drinking alcohol, I don’t know why I write about this topic; I do not enjoy it and its never been an academic interest of mine. Beyond jokes, I do not really have anything against the North of England or the West of England. The apocalyptic significance I saw within the Brown review has not been evidenced, yet. Perhaps, it is simply the hypocrisy. It is hard to convey how, more than any immigration, the idea ‘Britain is the world’s most centralised country’ is the unifying orthodoxy in Westminster with even the most dogged reformists bringing it up at one point or another.

There’s just something about the idea of ‘localism’ which offends my sensibilities. I inherently recoil from everything about it: the suspicion of ‘bureaucracy’, the spectre of ‘community’, the insistence that small is always best, Democracy, the phoney invention of local identities, the massive corruption – it is like a fusion of the tabloid anti-elitism of the Right and the redistributive politics of the Left. Similarly, localism attacks the good bits of every other ideology: the ruthless Thatcherite developer and the Whitehall civil servant of Mr. Wilson’s white heat. Localism is the opposite of what politics should be about, a narrowing of horizons; a repudiation of the Work of Change.

It was inevitable that the final act of Britpopper rule would be localism. The winter of civilisation follows the winter of Culture. Just as Richard Coles, Mr Bates vs the Post Office and ‘the North’ were the last port of call after Brand Britain proper had fallen into naffness; so too, the failure of Starmerism, the pinnacle of British political thought 2010-20, will precede a miserable capitulation to localism. Localism is the last desperate roll of the dice to sustain the Commonwealth project.

The rational and inevitable way to govern Britain is to centrally appoint officials on the same Meritocracy blockchain to a series of regional governorates with local ‘party secretariats’ underneath them. Swiss-style regional initiatives can provide a certain amount of democratic ‘voice’ and the officials can then compete to fulfill targets of economic growth, lawkeeping and experiment within certain broad powers set by central government. This is the only way to justify devolution of serious powers over health, transport and infrastructure. The governors must not be called something stupid like ‘Lord Lieutenancies’ but shall instead be called something like ‘Prefectures’ or ‘Lower Secretariats’ in order to remind the British people their miserable Anglo-Celtic traditions have Failed and they shall instead become Japanese. Even better, if you follow The Manifesto, these governors can form the upper house with a democratically elected lower house choosing which experiments they like the best when they select a new cabinet after the end of term limits. Policy will be tested before it is implemented on national level.

However, this solution relies on the Meritocracy being implemented in central government first in order to recruit officials and, as such, it is bad idea for any party to adopt it wholesale; we need a stop-gap measure that parties like Reform can adopt before the full Rectification of Names is complete.

Municipal governments which are bankrupt, or above a certain level of debt to HMT or private lenders, should be forced to hold local referenda on conversion into municipal corporations. The debt will be converted into bonds held in the corporations, the current administrators turned into chief executives and boards of directors appointed by the bondholders. All elected officials will be sacked and no new elections shall be held.

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This week the book was closed on the manic incoherent foreign policy which began with the Brexit referendum in 2016. Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to lift some sanctions on Russian oil and gas when great British motorists are being pounded at the pumps is shocking for those of us accustomed to successive British governments sacrificing the wellbeing of middle and lower class people for various foreign policy commitments abroad.

Most interestingly, with Starmer it fits a pattern. Starmer’s refusal to join in with the American strikes on Iran was a clear break with the past; but a more important aspect of Starmer’s foreign policy realism has been his approach to China.

Starmer has ‘reset’ relations with China (signing amongst other things a deal which enables all British citizens to visit the end of the Silk road) but he has also implicitly allowed Chinese electric vehicles to flood our market (Jaecoos have been in the top three selling cars in Britain most months this year) which has happily driven down costs for the sort of person who wants to experience a luxury SUV on a modest budget. Both the EU and the US have been imposing tariffs and restrictions on Chinese EVs since 2024, our Brexit enabled refusal to do so bears all the savvy globalism which was promised in the utopia of Singapore-on-Thames.

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But it did not have to be this way. Our timeline has some lucky br…

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