In a predictable display of fecklessness, this week the portly denizens of the British Right have wafted into the replies and quote tweets of MP Hannah Spencer like a shiftless clump of frogspawn, foaming at the modest suggestion that the Westminster apparatchiks they otherwise spend all their time whinging about the ineptitude and inefficiency of might have their habitual day-drinking brought under scrutiny. Rather like their response to Farage’s comments on Wank from Home, they once again seem to have hallucinated that she was demanding an act of Parliament to ban the liquid lunch, rather than simply complaining that she finds it unpleasant and unprofessional when her colleagues come into the Commons stinking of lager. Why exactly this has caused such upset for the 39-ans temporarily embarrassed SpAd remains a mystery, but let us be generous, let us be benevolent, and condescend to survey the arguments they have burped and hiccuped up one by one, beginning with the lighter spots of bile, making our way to the larger solid chunks.

Among the first retorts the Gentlemen’s Relish brigade managed to dribble onto Ms. Spencer’s shoes was the blithe and oft-repeated remark that there was some hypocrisy in the fact that a party that has pledged to decriminalise drugs would draw the line at a stiff afternoon shandy. Yes. Very good. Touché. You’re right. Polanski and Co. want to see MPs shuffle into the Commons strung out on heroin and shoving keys up their noses; they want Mothin Ali doing donuts in a leased Mercedes S-class outside Whitehall, whipping empty canisters of NOS at passersby through the driver’s side window. That’s what’s coming. That’s the world they want to build. That’s the reality.

What has made this histrionic line of thinking so irritating is it has generally been delivered in a smug, world-weary tone, totally incongruent with the feeble grasp of logic the argument itself displays - ‘Make it make sense,’ says Mr. Farage, presumably having forgotten to attach the GIF of a member of the cast of the US Office, shooting a look of sassy bemusement at the camera. The conversation around drug decriminalisation should be a tedious, possibly pointless, back and forth of public health statistics and cost-benefit analyses and so on and so forth. At no point in this discussion does the question of whether it should be legally or socially acceptable to be intoxicated at your place of work enter in, because these two propositions have absolutely no bearing on one another; there is nothing inconsistent in maintaining that decriminalisation might result in fewer overdose deaths, and also that you should get fired for shooting up at your desk. The British state, as Peter Hitchens rightly reminds us, fails to seriously police drug offences already, so acquiring illicit substances is too easy and risk-free for us to have a good picture of what real criminalisation might look like, rendering the debate, in this author’s opinion, basically uninteresting. Nonetheless, the proponents of legalisation have never insisted that they be granted the right to get high on their lunch breaks, a line in the sand Farage has apparently not seen fit to draw.

We then move on to the slightly meatier accusation that Ms. Spencer was being performatively puritan on the question of alcohol as a gesture towards the Muslim voters the Green Party are looking to court. At first glance this might appear to have some weight to it, but upon inspection is no more intelligent or convincing than the first point. As their long, squalid love affair with the Labour Party, irrespective of its stances on gay marriage and abortion, and their burgeoning tryst with the Greens, should by now have proven beyond all doubt, unlike certain forces on the British Right, or the advocates of the Online Safety Act, British Muslims have the rare decency not to demand their moral and religious preoccupations be given voice in national politics. The Greens are now the only party seriously upholding the cause of transgenderism in Parliament (excepting maybe the SNP? The Lib Dems? Who knows or cares.), following the Supreme Court verdict last year that prompted much of the British establishment to change their positions on this question overnight. Muslim voters are evidently happy to ignore this, because they possess the social and familial structures to police these matters within their own communities without the help of the state, and seem to have zero interest in the moral lives of the rest of the country. They did not vote for outspoken LGBT-advocate Hannah Spencer with the expectation she would act as a covert agitator for sharia law. She is not doing “taqiyyah.”

O, would that she was! Over in the Outremer this week, Al-Sharaa’s transitional government has paraded former officials of Assad’s narco-state before the public in chains, subjected to the steely gaze of Judge Fakhruddin Al-Aryan; “Do not commit injustice when you are powerful,” he thundered at the opening of proceedings, “for injustice will eventually bring regret.” Meanwhile, the by now not-quite-so-recent revelations of the rank corruption of our own native class of regime crooks, most notably Mandelson and Prince Andrew, has yet to result in a single court date, and the British press seems to have been issued a blanket gag order regarding the ongoing trial of the three Ukrainian rentboys charged with the attempted arson of Keir Starmer’s home. Will Judge Al-Aryan moan that he is not allowed to sink a pint of Ruddles Best while the jury goes to recess? I should think not.

A few days ago, this debacle took a turn for the boring; bolt the chicken coops everyone, shotguns at the ready and tally-ho, because The Critic’s fox has come a-prowling. Things just got a whole lot less interesting. Per the house style guide, their piece on this serves as a Greatest Hits compilation of the arguments the author has seen floating around in the fetid pond water of “Anglotwitter” in the days prior, though the article mostly rests on a boozy nostalgia for an undefined period in British history where a culture of drinking on the job was combined with higher productivity. Churchill’s morning scotch; Wilson’s two brandy lunches; bottom-pinching city bankers swanning off Sweetings for a pint of champagne.

Graciously, the piece is happy to concede that an ‘understandable part [of the anti-drinking sentiment] might be resentment that MPs (and journalists) continue to enjoy a workplace drinking culture which has otherwise more or less died out in both the public and private sectors.’ Yes, ‘and journalists!’ Needless as that little interjection might seem, let us not forget that the author himself is a journalist. So while we uppity proles might not ‘get’ why we need to defend the right of our betters to get drunk at work, for those of a higher kind of stock - those who really know how the sausage gets made - day-drinking is a much-needed reprieve from the high-pressure lifestyle that comes with being a Prime Minister, a cabinet member, or a person who writes for The Critic. Yes, ‘And journalists…’

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The cocaine just wasn’t taking the edge off. Maybe edge isn’t the right word. Just that feeling that you are always in the preamble to the next thing. Thinking about how you will get somewhere. Finishing the drink so it’s out of your hands, out of your way. Now you’ve got to piss again. You are hungry. You can’t allow yourself to relax. You are on the treadmill my friend and there is always another task to complete. You only feel contentment for a moment after sex, and occasionally on Class A drugs. That’s when the scratching at the back your brain stops.

But even after finishing the first bag and licking out the rest of the contents there was still something gnawing me as I sit down opposite Morgan. One look at his pupils and I could tell that the drugs were having the desired effect for him. I knew it was would only be moments before-

“Ehhhhhh, d-d-d-d-dya, dya tink-”

As surely as night follows day. Morgan, when he could stick to just the pints could be reasonably good company but as soon as he’d had some of the marching powder he would just chew your ear off for hours with different business ideas.

“Dya, dya, dou ya, you ya tink, ya tink do, do you tink now do you tink now d-ya-”

“Morgan, please, slow down.”

Morgan tried to look at one of his phones to calm down but he was so high on cocaine that his eyes were flitting spasmodically and he was unable to focus on anything, his nose still smeared with white powder, face increasingly red. He was beginning to look so ridiculous that I worried that the stuff at the Rosemary Branch would lose their patience with our intermittent trips to the bathroom. Dribble forming in the right corner of his mouth, I saw a vision of how Morgan the serial University dropout could have ended up if he had never come into contact with Peter Mandelson. The Morgan who would have woken up in some underpass in Knocnaheeny and started the day with some Lyrica and then strung himself out on Skag by Cobh Heritage centre. No wonder he ended up owing Mandelson such a debt, a debt so enormous in trying to repay it he would consume he destroyed himself.

“Deeeya, deeeyaaa-”

Morgan’s eyes were now just up to the ceiling grinning, completely reclined in his chair. We receive a quizzical look from behind the bar.

“Morgan will you get a hold of yourself!”

At once my terse language began to restore his executive function. He leans forward to take a sip from his Asahi (dry). It is always Asahi, when you don’t really want it, when you don’t really care.

“S-sorry fella. Ehh, so, what I was saying, emmmm…so…ehh, what if we went into business together like?”

One of the best things about climbing up the ladder are the chances that you don’t have to take. Those think tank drinks that you used to box your way into that you would now never be seen dead at. No more networking over cold sandwiches. No more pub quizzes for you, you are a London author. You’ve got somewhere better to be, even if that somewhere is on your own, because your time to think has a premium on it now my son. But then you start to drift back down. You are no longer a sPAd. You are no longer in No.10. Just another middle-aged man looking to get a second wind in their career by leaning heavily on your contacts from journalists you used to leak to. It cannot just be this and then retirement, surely not? So instead of genial sneering you are forced to listen.

“What sort of business, Morgan?”

“Roight, ehhh…”

Morgan furrows his brow.

“So fella, d’ya ever see in Bee and Queue yeah? Have you been there? They’ve got these fecking great big things for ehh, well, now, ehhh, for feckin washing a patio loike. Three hundred euro. Maybe we pay two hundred loike get it second hand on d’ web loike. And then we go door to door and we charge forty euro for a wash.”

“Morgan I don’t think I want to power wash people’s front drives for a living.”

“Yeah, yeah, was just ‘tinking”

Morgan’s brow furrows once more.

“Well. Roight. Listen, ehh….roight. How’s this? You see out in Ealing, ehhh, zone five like, that sorta thing well, you see they leave their washing machines out in the yard, ehh, well, what if we went around with a van and said we’d take ‘em loike, and ehh, well I know these brothers in Kilburn, and we could sell them the copper wiring.”

“Morgan…”

“D’ Churches got lead in their rooves loike…”

“MORGAN!”

“Roight, yeah ok so, ehhh.”

Morgan then started to rub his temples. “Ehhhhh…soooo….ehhhh”

Forty will become fifty. Fifty will become sixty. All of that time thinking if I stay on as a journalist I’ll never know what it’s like. But now I do, or rather, I’ve learned something about myself. That I just couldn’t make it happen. Not for more than a year, I couldn’t even make it happen just mucking about in an irrelevant department. What on God’s green earth did I do to deserve this fate?

I look over at Morgan and see that he is roots around the pocket of his coat behind him. Suddenly his eyes light up.

“Janie Mac! Would ya believe it?” Morgan holds up a hitherto unseen bag of white powder.

His eyes darting around for staff, he scoops out a key and holds it to my nose. As soon as I take it in I realise that the white substance was not a powder but was in fact a crystals. Very large crystals.

“Morgan…what…the…fuck…have you done…”

“Ahhhh easy now.”

Ketamine. I won’t try and describe the feeling since Christian Bale captured it so well in Knight of Cups. All I will offer to the reader is how strange it is that this psychedelic drug is used in casual social situations, parties or nightclubs, mind leaving your body, every stage of your life and each person around you given new meaning. Perhaps I’ve just never been able to stop at the first key. With Morgan that wouldn’t make a difference, knowing him, this Ketamine would be of the Rhinoceros variety. They don’t call him ‘Captain Morgan’ for nothing.

Soon enough we are outside. I think I want a cigarette so I light it, but it doesn’t feel a part of me, the sensation of smoking isn’t working, my throat isn’t catching properly. The last dribble of Asahi is bitter.

“Wha, wha, wha if we loike…made our own…loike…emm..you know…centre left politics, ehh…that…fella wha was his name, ehh from the old think tank, eh….he could…ehh...”

Marie Le Conte pops into my mind. “Morgan…Changing Politics….”

“No no, no, not it won’t be loike that at all fella, ehhh-“

“We could even claim that I was the first to come up with the observation that Downing Street is too small a building for Prime Minister to operate out of…”

“That’ll show those feckers at the Canary…”

To be continued….

AGAINST STUPIDITY

OR:

THE CROSS-EXAMINATION OF BORDER FORCE OFFICER C. LYNTON

A PETITION FOR REASON, ON THE OCCASION OF MR. J FALSTAFF’S EXILE FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM

BY THE MARQUIS

WITH TESTIMONY PROVIDED BY MR. J FALSTAFF

Quacumque libido est, incedo solus; percontor quanti holus ac far.

~

Let the reader understand that, in the interests of privacy, the names of all persons involved in the events detailed here below have been changed, though the real names have been retained in a paper copy of this letter sent to the Home Office.

I first fell in love with Adriaen Coorte’s competence in painting asparagus at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, when, amidst the other still lifes of half-peeled citrus fruits and rotting fish in deliberate disarray, I felt that I was looking at the most unabashedly ordered work of art in the world - unabashedly, because it refused to partake in the dirty little early modern joke of sprezzatura, its construction clarifying rather than concealing its artifice and intention. Seeing a twosome or foursome of Coortes together on a wall is enough to immediately convey the method he standardised for himself, with few exceptions: he would take a single subject of his interest (asparagus, berries, or seashells being the usual), isolate it from the things natural and commonplace to it in other paintings of the period (luxury tableware, smoking pipes scattered about), and set it on a stone slab against a black background, coolly lit from above.

In the Ashmolean asparagus, the asparagus are greener, painted in a sharp and contrasting light that emphasizes their rigidity, but in another, currently housed at the Rijksmuseum, where he had chosen a whiter bundle for his subject, he allows a pale and gentle light to pass through the skin at the ends, thus, at the same time as it is pierced, giving a beautiful effect where the paint-matter of the form’s outline is preserved by its translucency against the vegetable-matter of the thing it is meant to represent. I decided while visiting a World War II fortification at the British international port of Harwich that I would make a brief excursion to the Netherlands by ferry to see this other asparagus painting in person.

Upon my return from the Netherlands three days later, the British immigration officer expressed suspicion at my circumstances. My plan was to visit some friends in London for the weekend, then to visit the Channel Islands for two weeks to see more World War II fortifications, then to fly to Central Asia. To describe my lifestyle: I obtain the money for my travel through online patrons who admire my words enough to pay me. I make hotel and flight reservations on the day of travel to preserve my freedom of movement. I travel without luggage, carrying only the clothes on my back, my passport, my debit card, my phone, and a phone charger. This has been a sufficient explanation for the immigration officers of Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Egypt, and, on three other occasions, the United Kingdom, but, in this instance, I was sat down and asked if I had any psychological issues. I provided evidence in the form of records of conversations with my patrons where I had requested and received large sums of money, and a contact who could confirm the narrative that I had given. When the contact confirmed what I had said, the officer informed him that the decision had already been made not to allow my entry into the United Kingdom before the call had begun due to the suspicion that I was entering to find a job and overstay, and that my friends should not expect to see me that night. I was told that I should come back with more extensive evidence in my defense and was returned to the Netherlands on the ferry, where the Dutch crew mocked the British for refusing me.

I tried to return to the British border the following day by Eurostar. This time, the interrogation was more extensive, and I provided more extensive evidence. I provided the conversations with my patrons. I provided multiple contacts. I provided the thousands of travel pictures on my phone, which the officer praised for their beauty, all of which show my main interests when travelling to be art and architecture. I provided an itinerary of where I would be visiting in the Channel Islands. I provided receipts of previous hotel stays. I provided my Venmo, which shows multiple donations of $2000-$4000 made to me in the last month with confirming captions such as “Tajikistan Islamo-Soviet Architecture Trip May”. I was refused again, and my Electronic Travel Authorization was revoked on the grounds that I was entering to find a job and overstay. The officer’s phrasing: “I am sorry to be the one who has to tell you this …”

Mr. J. Falstaff

~

Having established the sequence of events thus far, let us turn our attention to the written response provided by Border Force Officer C. Lynton on the occasion of Mr. J. Falstaff’s second refusal from the United Kingdom, the salient portion of which is reproduced here:

“You have sought permission to enter the United Kingdom as a visitor for the weekend before travelling to the Channel Islands for a period of days, but I am not satisfied that you are genuinely seeking entry as a visitor and have not provided any evidence of tickets or accommodation. [...] You state that you have approximately $2937 USD in funds to support you for the duration of your trip. You have stated that, whilst you currently are unemployed you make money through your poetry. You stated that people send you money online and pay for your travel, you also provided evidence of such payments ranging from $25 USD to $1000 USD. Given your reliance upon your patrons for funds I am not satisfied that you will not seek work whilst in the UK to support your stay in the UK. I am not satisfied that your purpose in seeking entry to the UK is genuinely and solely for the purpose of a holiday to visit friends. You stated that on this trip you would stay in a Premier Inn hotel however you have not provided evidence of any booking. When asked why you have not made the necessary booking you mentioned you like to be spontaneous and often book at the last moment. Given the fact you are reliant on someone giving you funds it is not feasible that you have come to the UK as a genuine visitor. [...] Since your initial arrival in the United Kingdom in April 2024, you have spent a cumulative period of approximately 24 months travelling as a visitor in Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the United Kingdom [...] I am not satisfied that you are seeking permission to enter the UK as a visitor [...] I therefore refuse you to enter the United Kingdom.”

Firm as we shall be, we are also fair, so let it be understood that, in revoking Mr. J. Falstaff’s Electronic Travel Authorisation, thus denying him entry to the UK, the letter cites paragraph 4.2, sections (a), (c) and (d), of Appendix V of the Immigration Rules, under which a visitor may be denied if the border officer is not satisfied they will leave at the end of their stay, or will not seek employment while in the country.

Here is a short synopsis of the situation, as Officer C. Lynton appears to understand it.

Mr. J. Falstaff has spent two years as an architectural tourist, wandering about the Outremer; he has seen the Ilkhanid mosques of Iran, has scaled Soviet radio-optical telescopes in the Caucasus, has watched the sundisk glittering on the Nile at Amarna (on this point, Officer C. Lynton does not quibble, and indeed cooed pigeonishly over the photo evidence), so far funded solely by his patrons (again, as duly evidenced.) Their generosity has kept him, for two years or longer, in a state of uninterrupted leisure; again and again, he has seen something glimmer on the far side of the bay, and he has asked his patrons, ‘Let me see it from closer up;’ again and again they have obliged, and once there, he has said at last to himself: ‘I am not satisfied.’

‘I am not satisfied,’ he is supposed to have said to himself, ‘at having been kept so long from drudgery - and besides, I am down to my last, measly $3000. A light lunch. Let me return instead to London, where I plan to seek employment illegally. I have spent two years doing whatsoever I like, and now I would like to ride a bike for Deliveroo.’

Perhaps the good Officer C. Lynton will inform us that these circumstances are more common among illegal immigrants than we might think. In either case, until last week, Mr. J Falstaff was in possession of an ETA; this entitles him to enter the UK, for a stay of up to six months, for a two year period, as he pleases. In defence of his ETA, he has provided no shortage of evidence. Asked for proof of income, he has shown, as the letter acknowledges (though is wildly imprecise on the exact amounts), an itemized history of his patrons’ goodwill; asked for proof of his motives as an architectural tourist, he has provided years’ worth of his photographs of pyramids, minarets, smokestacks and pillbox forts. Asked for proof of accommodation, he, in his initial altercation with Border Force, provided the contact details of a friend with whom he planned to stay; that friend’s protestations having proved futile with some inveterate hobnob-dunker at the Harwich office, he elected, on his second attempt the day following, to explain he would book a hotel. When asked why he could not provide proof of a booking he explained, to quote the letter, that he ‘likes to be spontaneous and will often book at the last moment.’ A brief scan of his previous hotel receipts will demonstrate this to be the case.

There is no claim made by Mr. J. Falstaff that he has not readily and articulately proven beyond all reasonable doubt under questioning. The reader may here wonder if we have been entirely forthright with him up until now; if there has not been some transgression we glossed over, some ace in the hole Officer C. Lynton still has yet to play. And indeed he does; all Mr. J. Falstaff’s supporting evidence is turned to hot air, because on the other side of the ledger, Officer C. Lynton has a hunch. He is not satisfied. That he might have reasons, well-substantiated reasons even, to find himself satisfied, his letter is happy to acknowledge - but nothing, sadly, that will quite scratch this itch, and satisfied he most certainly is not.

Let us be clear in our demands. We do not insist Mr. J. Falstaff has a natural right to enter the UK. We do not insist that he be granted any special privileges that would permit him to hold an ETA without a reasonable examination of his case. We do, however, insist that when the British State accepted his money in exchange for said ETA, it extended to him certain liberties; liberties not to be rescinded on the entirely subjective, unfalsifiable basis that Officer. C. Lynton has offered. We as British citizens, he as an American, us all as Europeans, insist we are too civilised, too literate, too modern, too familiar with life under an administrative state to expect less than that, where we interact with it, certain legible standards of justice and reason will rule the day. We expect a legal system that gives the same weight to the inscrutable hunches and baseless suspicions of petty apparatchiks it does to gris-gris dolls and evil eyes. We expect that when we are told our liberties are to be denied us, we will have an answer to the question ‘Why?’ and ‘Show me where it says so in the book.’

Mr. J. Falstaff’s experience is made all the more irritating by certain mundane details which will be familiar to all those who have had the misfortune of a run-in the British State; the inevitable faux-politenesses, the pretensions at rationality, even of compassion, the endless offerings of a glass of water. At one point, the questioning officer takes Mr. Falstaff’s willingness to travel abroad to see an important work of Dutch Golden Age painting as an obvious sign of a disturbed mind, and asks - in a tone the reader will have no trouble conjuring up - ‘Mentally.. Are you alright?’ (Let this be contrasted with Mr. J. Falstaff’s experience at the Iranian border: having expressed his fondness for Persian culture, the guard asks whether he prefers Rumi or Hafez; evidently satisfied with the answer, he proceeded to recite the verses of the latter from memory.) The conventional pleasantries thus concluded, we come now to the ceremonial passing of the buck to invisible higher powers, to voices from farther rooms, white rooms stinking of window cleaner and laden with choccy biscuits, from which the officer at last slithers out from behind his partition to pronounce the firm-but-fair: ‘I’m sorry to do this, mate…’

Perhaps the reader will here complain that we are being too harsh; that it is not such a bad thing if border force officers are given some leeway to go with their gut, to act on their intuition. After all, the British public has heard far too many horror stories, of violent crimes committed by channel-hopping migrants, to make fuss if our frontier guards are sometimes a little overzealous. It is a job that requires a man to make quick judgements, to think on his feet, and perhaps there is something Officer C. Lynton saw in Mr. J Falstaff that has eluded even his friends, some wicked angel on his shoulder, some lurking penchant for crimes unimaginable. Crimes perhaps still darker than those of Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, who entered by ferry from Europe in 2019 - who perhaps slipped through Officer Lynton’s very fingers - and was later found guilty of the fatal stabbing of 21 year old Thomas Roberts. Crimes perhaps still darker than those of Valdo Calocane or Femi Nandap; if only they too had expressed an interest in Dutch Golden Age painting, perhaps then their murderous psychoses would have been more apparent to our Border Force officers, and the random slayings of their victims averted. But for each one of these tragedies, we must naturally assume a dozen more have been left uncommitted, because men like Mr. J Falstaff have been refused entry to the country. The British people can rest easy knowing our borders are protected by men of such canny instincts.

I am not satisfied that this is the case. I am not satisfied that the motives at work here are not far less noble. Following the directives of the Under-Secretary of State for Migration and Citizenship Mike Tapp, a tin soldier of uncertain provenance, sprung fully formed from the side of Keir’s head - author of the expansion of the ETA scheme - Border Force today are under strict instructions to project an image of being, as Mr. Tapp is fond of putting it, ‘firm but fair.’ They are required, it is safe to assume, to submit to their superiors the proof of said firmness, in the form of increased numbers of those turned away at the border. This mood (a mood which certainly predates Mike Tapp’s tenure, let it be said, his contributions nonetheless duly noted) has produced, as our globetrotting American or European friends will tell us, a pattern of thuggishness towards those who present themselves as law-abiding and mild-mannered. To refuse someone entry to the UK involves hours of questioning, hours of phone calls with the applicant’s references, hours of offering a glass of water; naturally, it is less unpleasant to spend those hours with the likes of the well-spoken, even-tempered Mr. J. Falstaff than, let’s say, an Abdulrahimzai, a Calocane, or a Nandap, or anyone else who will need a translator, will not answer questions articulately, and may be mentally unstable.

This is a side of the British legal system I imagine many of us will be familiar with. George Galloway has been made familiar with it, when, attempting to enter his country of birth, he was told by Counter Terrorism forces at Gatwick Airport last year, “You’re not under arrest but you’re not free to leave, and you do not have the right to remain silent.” We ourselves have seen it in Mr. Jenrick’s chart-topping ‘Faredodgers’ video, in which he films himself watching dozens of slightly menacing looking men in North Face jackets jump the barrier, until a lone teenager he evidently feels more comfortable accosting attempts the same. We have seen it in the impenetrable gaze of the Council Enforcer, handing us a £150 littering fine for daring to place the butt-end of a cigarette atop a mountain of rubbish our neighbours have piled up in the street. He will tell us, ‘I’m sorry to have to do this, I’m just doing my job, and, no, you can’t go pick it up.’

Here the reader might interject, ‘You are being cruel; these officers of the law are simply following orders.’ All well and good. Show me, then, the man who is not following orders. Show me the man who writes the orders, and is not sorry at seeing them carried out. As recent proceedings in the Commons have proved, we can scour Britain’s chain of command from its bottom all the way to the very top without finding him. Questioned as to why he gave Peter Mandelson - a man who, twice already in his career, has been forced to resign over similar allegations of corruption - a high-profile ambassadorial position, irrespective of the fact he had predictably failed his security vetting over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the Prime Minister has answered: I was following orders. There was a process in place, there are forces at work in farther rooms, and I am, believe me, just as upset about this as you are.

Starmer is here leaning on his image as a boring, non-nonsense managerialist, run aground by a byzantine network of lanyard wearers and their mysterious procedures; this is an attempt to steer the conversation away from allegations of crookery, toward the safer, vaguely Dr. Newportian, territory of rallying against civil service incompetence, against “pulling levers and nothing happens.” In his addresses to the Commons and the press over the past week, that line has been shot out in sputters like a cloud of squid ink, as it becomes increasingly evident that scratching the back of a man as obviously corrupt as Peter Mandelson, as payback for favours during Starmer’s leadership bid, falls quite far short of the behaviour we might expect from the stiff, impersonal, lawyerly character Starmer has long styled himself as. In other news, three Ukrainian massage artists will stand trial this coming Monday, charged with an arson attack on Keir Starmer’s front and, indeed, back doors; a rare shot of adrenaline in the life of this apparently boring, latter-day George Smiley: he is as furious as we are, no doubt.

Soon after last week’s revelations, Zara Sultana would be suspended for five days from the Commons for accusing Starmer of lying. Is what she did illegal? No but, the next best thing, it’s against convention. Having disallowed a sitting MP from speaking on behalf of her constituents during what may prove to be the most decisive period in the history of this government, Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle remarks as she is made to leave the room: “I’m sorry you’ve done this.”

There is one last challenge our reader is yet to raise against the case of Mr. J. Falstaff; that unjust as it may be, it is ultimately a personal grievance, and none of our business. It is absolutely our business. Not only as partisans of internationalism, European high culture and the liberties of young men everywhere, but also out of embarrassment: collective embarrassment that a well-mannered guest in our country has been subject to the petty bullying of our government. His account is as good a caricature of our period as any, complete with all its most irritating cliches: an account of Firmness going cheek by jowl with Fairness, of the familiar Starmerite conceit of cold, managerial rationality, lending its cover to arbitrary tyrannies and the rule of affective whims; and accompanied by the same hand-wringing, the same self-denials and scapegoating of elusive higher powers with inscrutable motives.

In Satire VI, of Book I, written in defence of the author’s parentage as the son of a freedman, Horace sets out the privileges of middle-class life as follows:

“If after a given age Nature should call upon us to traverse our past lives again, and to choose in keeping with our pride any other parents each might crave - content with my own, I should decline to take those adorned with the rods and chairs of state [...] Today, if I will, I may go on a bob-tailed mule even to Tarentum [...] No one will taunt me with meanness as he does when on the Tiber road five slaves follow you, carrying a commode and case of wine. In this and a thousand other ways I live in more comfort than you, illustrious senator. Wherever the fancy leads, I saunter forth alone; I ask the price of greens and flour.”

It is these modest liberties that we find imperiled today; the liberty of a man of modest means to leave his country, his kindred and his father’s house; to leave aside the circumstances of his birth, to shed the dead weight of custom and habit, to travel light, to traverse the world at a leisurely pace without disturbing the scenery, unencumbered by the state. Set against him are the champions of drudgery, state thuggery and petty tyranny, of hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism. Should the reader feel compelled to take a side, we invite him to sign the petition here in favour of Mr. J. Falstaff’s case, and write his name on our side of the ledger.

The Marquis

On beating swords into ploughshares

They say that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, however it is even sweeter and more decorous to not die for one’s country, and then having survived to bang on about it incessantly.

Yes readers, today we will examine the pernicious role that former (and possibly on occasion, fictitious) junior officers and NCOs play in our public life.

FORCES

From 1940 through to 1979, every British prime minister with the exception of Harold Wilson had served in the Army or Navy during the First or Second World War. Wilson’s exception is hardly dishonourable: having volunteered to join the military on the outbreak of war he was seconded to the wartime Ministry of Fuel and Power as a civilian expert economist and statistician, a job he performed with distinction. A majority of Thatcher’s first cabinet had war service (one in Korea, another in the Malayan Emergency, the rest in the Second World War) and those that did not had all served in the military during National Service excepting only Thatcher herself, for obvious reasons.

Despite the ubiquity of what Americans would call “combat veterans” in public life well into the 1980s, it was rare for a politician’s war service to be mentioned. A possible exception might be Edward Heath, who following a distinguished wartime service in which he was mentioned in despatches and appointed MBE, served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army (TA) concurrently with his career as a politician. As Prime Minister he also inspected troops wearing his regimental uniform (this was regarded as being rather déclassé). Prime Ministers and leaders of the opposition would wear their medals at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, but beyond that military service did not loom large in political discourse. The reason for that is rather obvious: Most men of military age during the First and Second World Wars and National Service thereafter served in the military, and so the mere fact of military service was not at all distinguishing.

In recent years, a much smaller, professional army has been deployed on several major operations of varying intensity, and this has produced a relatively select cadre of “veterans” with war service. From this small pool of steely-eyed-dealers-of-death (and TA Int Corps officers) the Conservative Party and latterly and increasingly even the Labour Party has fished, and the phenomenon of the FORCES MP has been born.

FORCES

It is difficult to say who the first FORCES MP was. Sometime TA SAS Trooper David Davis used to flash the occasional bit of ankle. Ian Duncan Smith (late of the SCOTS GUARDS) briefly tried to play up his military credentials, but at the time no one was much interested, and controversies over other CV embellishments made by Conservative Central Office, made the naturally wooden IDS become increasingly diffident when talking about his background. We must therefore probably trace the genesis of FORCES MPs back to the 2005 intake.

The class of ’05 saw (among others) the election of Tobias Ellwood, Ben Wallace, and for the Labour Party, Dan Jarvis. Ellwood, late the R GREEN JACKETS, and currently serving as an officer in the Army Reserves (as the TA is now known) is easily one of the least intelligent men in Parliament. In the early days of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine he called for the RAF to establish a “No-Fly Zone” over Ukraine, which is a circuitous way of saying he wanted everyone reading this article to be embraced within the soothing arms of an atomically induced pyroclastic surge. Ellwood’s 5 year military career was sufficient to secure him several junior ministerial positions in the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office before his appointment as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee where he became an ornament of the Mother of Parliaments, issuing selfie-stick videos praising the Taliban, and encouraging them to adopt solar energy and be wary of the Chinese.

Readers may recall the near-spherical ex-Scots Guards officer Ben Wallace, who was rarely seen without his Brigade of Guards tie, and who despite rising to the high office of Defence Secretary, and once being touted as a potential candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party, is most famous for something or other that abruptly meant that he no longer felt that he should run, for whatever reason.

Dan Jarvis (late the PARAS) was at one time the Great White Hope for Labour centrists, who hoped their creed of wan managerialism could be reinvigorated if delivered by a muscular FORCES man. Jarvis turned out to be something of a damp squib, but if he baptised with water, the one who would follow him (who we will get on to later) will baptise with fire and the Holy Spirit.

What distinguishes this intake of MPs as the first FORCES MPs is that they were the first generation of parliamentary candidates to really stress their military credentials in their public personas and campaign literature, with their leaflets and websites festooned with pictures of them in uniform.

From left to right: Photo from Tobias Ellwood’s website, Ben Wallace giving a speech in an MTP smock worn over a lounge suit, photo from Dan Jarvis’ website.

But why was 2005 ripe for the birth of the FORCES MP , where 2001 had been barren for IDS?

The answer lies ultimately in a change made to British Army counter-insurgency doctrine. After a relatively poor showing in Mandatory Palestine in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the British Army developed into one of the most effective counterinsurgency forces the world had ever seen. Officers like Gerald Templer and Frank Kitson used the opportunities provided by conflicts of decolonisation in Aden, Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya, Borneo and Oman to improvise and prove a system of “low intensity warfare” based upon using intelligence and special forces to identify, capture and coopt insurgents, and use them to kill or capture their erstwhile colleagues. This system reached its apotheosis in Northern Ireland, where half the leadership of the PIRA ended up dead or in prison, with most of the rest being on Britain’s payroll. However, it came to be recognised that this doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare was not politically correct and could not be reconciled with our national commitment to universal Human Rights. As such, for the conflicts in Afghanistan (2001-2014) and Iraq (2003-2011), the British Army developed a new doctrine.

This radical new departure in the British Army’s approach to counterinsurgency warfare emphasised loading up highly trained soldiers with roughly 100 lbs (or £5,000) of kit and equipment and sending them out to perform “ground dominating” foot patrols. The advantage of this tactic was that the presence of Friendly Forces (FF) might RESTRICT the Freedom of Movement (FoM) of Insurgents (INS) and DENY them the opportunity to PROJECT Shadow Governance (SH GOV) and therefore ISOLATE them from Local National (LN) population whilst positively INFLUENCING LN perceptions of security provision by Host Nation Security Forces (HNSF). The disadvantage of this tactic was that British soldiers kept getting blown apart by roadside bombs.

Every time a recipient of the modern equivalent of two thousand pounds of education was dropped to the modern equivalent of a ten-rupee jezail they were sent home (at vast expense of time and steam) in a Union Flag adorned pine box, which was delivered to RAF Brize Norton. Following a sombre ramp-ceremony at Brize, the coffins would be loaded onto hearses and driven to wherever the funerals were to take place. By accident of geography, this meant that the hearses had to drive through the small Wiltshire town of Wooton Basset, and soon local residents took to lining the streets in order to pay their respects to the fallen.

Now the British public has always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards squaddies and the Army. Prior to the twin wars of Iraq and Afghanistan the TA was perceived as a club for weirdos (see Gareth from the Office and Mike from Spaced) and the Regular Army was regarded as an extension of the Borstal system and an employer of last resort. But ‘it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”’ and ‘It’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play’. And so, when the band did begin to play, and the hearses started to parade weekly down Wooton Basset high street the British public started to react with straight forward patriotism. Charities like Help for Heroes grew up, their rubber bracelets becoming ubiquitous. Every week at Prime Ministers Questions it became customary for the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, and Leader of the Liberal Democrats to pay tribute (in saccharine American style) to the latest recruits to the ghostly host of the Glorious Dead. And it should of course be remembered that this feeling was not just confined to the political mainstream. Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League (EDL) was formed in direct response to the Islamist Group Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah demonstrating against 1^st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment’s homecoming parade through Luton, following their 2008 deployment to Afghanistan.

It was in this context of extraordinary goodwill towards the military that the FORCES MP was born.

After the 2015 election the shining bounds of FORCES MPs did increase, with the significant additions of Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat.

Whilst Penny Mordaunt had no military experience when elected, once elected as MP for the naval constituency of Portsmouth North she decided to join her local Royal Naval Reserves unit as an Officer Cadet, and undergo training towards becoming a Royal Naval Reserves officer. Despite her failure ever to satisfactorily complete her commissioning course she was nonetheless appointed to the acting rank of Sub-Lieutenant and had fun dressing up in a naval uniform and inserting the word “cock” into Parliamentary speeches as a Mess dare. After 5 years without successfully commissioning, she was placed onto a reserve list requiring her to perform no further training, before she was eventually appointed to the honorary (senior) rank of Commander, and then Captain. Mordaunt’s moderately attractive appearance and her buxom (if expansive) figure, combined with her naval uniform made her irresistible bate for the horny old bastards (your dad) who read the Daily Telegraph, and for that reason alone she was consistently tipped as a Conservative Leadership hopeful, despite being functionally illiterate and being one of Parliament’s chief champions of wokish transgender nonsense.

Tugendhat is an even more interesting and egregious case. A major public schoolboy and son of a High Court Judge, who missed out on Oxbridge proper, Tugendhat eventually managed to get into Cambridge for post graduate study in Arabic, before working for an Arabic language newspaper in Lebanon. Tugendhat then obtained a TA commission into the (rather obscure) Educational and Training Services (ETS) branch of the Adjutant General’s Corps, before transferring to the Intelligence Corps and (most probably) performing a tour of Iraq as a seconded Arabic linguists to the SBS, the slightly less known but equally elite cousins of the SAS. It is extremely unusual for a TA Int Corps subaltern to have provided close support to a “Tier 1” (as the Americans would say) special forces unit, and the author would love to be able to out the awful Tugendhat as a Walt. However, all the available evidence strongly points to Tugendhat being the real deal.

This is unfortunate, because he is probably the most vulgar of the FORCES MPs when it comes to discussing his service. Produced below are two Tugendhat quotes, the first from Hansard following Biden’s Afghan rug-pull, and the second from an interview with the Times where he describes a conversation he had with a Helicopter pilot.

“Like many veterans, this last week has been one that has seen me struggle through anger, and grief, and rage. The feeling of abandonment of not just a country but the sacrifice that my friends made. I’ve been to funerals from Poole to Dunblane. I’ve watched good men go into the earth, taking with them a part of me and a part of all of us”

The first quote is so disgustingly sententious you might imagine it must have been uttered by an American in a TV movie. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was a catastrophically and wantonly incontinent strategic error which directly led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s conflict with Israel, but Tugendhat managed to personalise it to remind us all that he was in the Army. British soldiers traditionally go where they’re told in order to kill the King’s Enemy. They do not require any philosophical commitment or an outlook on international politics. To paint them as ideological crusaders and use their deaths to blackmail the public for yet more war is simply ghoulish.

Then the second quote:

“Were you in the first or second helicopter.’

‘I was flying the second one.’

‘Well your mini gunner nearly killed us. Luckily he’s a crap shot.’

That night we went to the bar and he bought the first round. I was standing next to the bar and he said: ‘Your round next.’

I said: ‘No mate, it’s your round forever. Because you tried to kill me and failed.’”

Could have been lifted from an unused script from Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace. What a Tugendtwat.

In the 2019 and 2024 intakes the ranks of the FORCES MPs were swollen yet further. A joyful omission from this crop was Tory twitter extraordinaire Ed McGuinness, a former Royal Artillery officer who served in Afghanistan after combat operations had ceased, but who cannot go five minutes without mentioning his time in the army. He was selected to contest a Tory safe seat and failed to win it. He was not the first McGuinness to fail to take up a seat in Parliament, but at least his namesake was able to win his. But McGuinness’s failure bucked the trend of the rise of FORCES MPs, and now seemingly half the Labour Party are ex-Int Corps officers. In all, approximately 40 arses on the green benches belong to FORCES MP, meaning they vastly overrepresent the number of British people who have served in the armed forces.

Joining the commons in 2024 was Alistair Carns DSO OBE MC, who may yet redeem the centrist promise for a messiah Dan Jarvis failed to fulfil. Carns had a seriously impressive military career. He joined the Royal Marines in the ranks straight from school but was identified as having officer potential and was subsequently commissioned. Few details of his career are known because he appears to have spent most of it serving in the SBS, whose activities are necessarily secret. That said, it is known that he was awarded the Military Cross (an award for gallantry) as well as a DSO (an award for exemplary leadership in combat). Prior to resigning from the Marines to contest a parliamentary seat he was due to be promoted to the senior rank of Brigadier, and he was probably the most decorated serving officer in the entire British military when he did so. Unsurprisingly, Carns was made an Armed Forces Minister in Keir Starmer’s government.

But a question hovers over Carns. It has been reported that a significant number of operators in D and G squadrons, 22 SAS, have resigned due to being hounded by lawyers conducting war crimes investigations with the government’s blessing, with over 120 active SAS personnel having been interviewed. It is the belief of some in government and the media that our special forces acted outside of the framework of human rights law when operating in Afghanistan, and indeed another ex-

FORCES MP who has not been mentioned so far, Johnny Mercer, campaigned for more Afghans to be imported into the country so that they could give evidence against British special forces operators in a war crimes probe. Now, if it is the case that British special forces were regularly committing murder in Afghanistan then once must ask Col. Carns whether he ever witnessed the commission of such murders, and indeed whether he committed any himself. If, conversely, this is all total nonsense, then we must ask Col. Carns why he is content to remain a minister in a government that subjects its serving and retired special forces troops to persecution by left wing lawyer parasites.

We must also make brief mention of the preposterous 2024 MP Mike Tapp. Tapp was a Int Corps corporal of no distinction, who somehow became a Labour MP and now serves as a junior minister in the Home Office. His chief responsibly seems to be producing short videos where he borderline abuses his dog “Scooby” by feeding him carvery roast dinners. Despite or because of his vapidity, Tapp’s military connection is used by Labour to project a sterile vision of Starmerite patriotism, and Labour party literature is filled with images of him walking poor Scooby whilst inexplicably wearing his medals and corps tie.

The forgoing has descended into an unstructured rant against various individual FORCES MPs, and we have lost the sense of them being a coherent group, defined by a discernible common identity. Let us therefore now try to locate the colours under which this Lost Legion marches. For the most part the FORCES MP is rarely a distinguished or successful member of the military mainstream. They were usually relatively junior in their military careers when they left, rarely rising above the rank of Captain, and indeed many were in the Reserves. As such, they can offer a necessarily limited perspective on matters such as military strategy, international politics, procurement, and defence futureproofing.

What they must do, however, is constantly remind people that they were in the Army. The way that they tend to do this (and this is particularly true of Ellwood and Tugendhat) is to ensure that they are constantly on the airwaves or giving speeches in parliament (to be clipped for social media) whenever there is a matter that has the slightest connexion to the military in the news. As such, they have little more dignity than Instagram prostitutes and their main stock-in-trade is to traffic in alarmism. Figures like Tugendhat and Ellwood, both of whom served as ministers in a government that in effect drastically cut the military by playing around with what was included in the defence budget, are seemingly constantly advocating for war variously with China, Russia and Iran. We must hope these figures never get near enough to power to make good on their Talk TV appearances.

A party contesting the local elections recently touted the recruitment of a veteran to their Swale & Mid Kent Branch. The photograph depicted someone in a business suit wearing medals which inexplicably included the NATO ISAF medal which British forces are not permitted to wear (as every soldier knows), and a Royal Anglian beret with a felt capbadge backing that looked like it had been cut by a toddler using safety scissors for use in a collage. Now of course this young man may in fact genuinely be a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan as his medals suggest, and he may simply be a little confused about when NATO medals may be worn, and how to cut a cap badge backing. In any event, clearly he thinks it is of sufficient political significance to be worth signalling his military background in 2026.

Why do they feel the need to make so much of their time in the FORCES? The author ventures the following answer:

Until 2014, when British forces handed over the Central Helmand “battlespace” to the US Marine Corps and combat operations were wound down, the British Army had been continuously at war since 1939. Most senior officers at that time will in their junior days have served under senior officers who had served in Malaya, Borneo, the Falklands, etc., and those senior officers in turn will have served under senior officers who faced Rommel in the Western Desert, or stormed the beaches of Normandy, or broke the Burma Area Army’s back at Meiktilla. 75 years at war, had made the British Army was of the few parts of the British state that was efficient, a distinction it perhaps shared only with the Security Services. At a time when the British state is visibly decaying around us, the idea that there is a secret backroom where the adults sit waiting, is a comforting delusion. By playing on their alleged connexions to the Army, they can promise their followers that with a “battalion [sic]” of Royal Engineers, they can solve our migrant crisis overnight.

And perhaps they are right, and what finally awaits us after Keir is a Juntaship of All the Talents led by Alistair Carns and Tom Tugendhat.

Dogbox is a pseudonym. Dogbox was a high decorated member of his school’s CCF.

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Addendum on Orban

I think much of the Anglophone commentary about Viktor Orban’s defeat has been deeply unfair. I retain, as a man who came of age with ‘Europa: Enemy at the Gates’, a great deal of affection for the thundering Calvinist who shut the border and started a public feud with George Soros in which he was, amazingly, victorious. Some of the criticisms come across as hypocritical: let it be known, ‘tradcath’ Viktor Orban abolished income tax for everyone under the age of 25 and nationalised private pension funds; ‘technocratic’ people in the ‘New Right’ defend the triple lock. Orban was, in fact, more economically pro-growth than those who call him a postlib. The Orban project wasn’t Meritocracy, it was, however, the only working case of right-wing institutional capture in Europe with an interesting and understudied economic legacy which more than makes up for its pragmatic adoption of ‘Christian democracy’. Hungary provided, in the mid to late 2010s, a working model which plainly refuted the idea, which I think people forget the popularity of, that everywhere east of Berlin was a hellhole.

This is all fairly minor stuff but one potentially harmful mutation of the commentary is that Orban failed because he was ‘too close to MAGA.’ So long as 95% of the British “Right” are uncomfortable ferociously attacking anyone who defends the mobile phone ban on 16 year olds, MAGA is going to lead Europe because people like me, ordinary citizens, need someone to look after our interests. When J’accuse sounded the call, it was the State Department who answered, while the British Right are still pretending Keir Starmer knowing your I.P address is an issue of “sovereignty.” You are going to get Eva Vlanderbrook whether you like it or not until very basic, nationalism 101 concerns are solved first.

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$105,000 — that’s how much Rod Dreher cost the Hungarian taxpayer last year, according to freedom of information requests by investigative journalism website Átlátszó. Roughly three times the average salary in Hungary, but small change for a government that sees the Christian blogger, in the words of Balázs Orbán, the departing prime minister’s advisor, as a figure equal to Napoleon in the great pageant of world history. Dreher’s world historical deed, according to Orbán, was to revivify American conservatism, and, in so doing, to put his adopted country at the centre of an intellectual revolution sweeping the West. Now that the ogre has been safely packed off to St. Helena and Minerva’s owl has spread her wings, what legacy does this upheaval of the spirit leave in the Hungarian capital?

Dreher, an affable chap whom I exclude from the following polemic, works for the Danube Institute, the prize pear on a cheese platter of right-wing institutions set up by the outgoing Hungarian prime minister to make Budapest, in the words of its own substack, “the new European capital of conservatism”. It never seems to have occurred to anyone involved that it is a contradiction in terms for a movement grounded in the Oakeshottian preference for the near to the distant or Scrutonian oikophilia to have a capital, — with that kind of money on the table, why would it? From Budapest, these narodniks of the new national conservatism were to fan out and preach the politics of place in their own towns and villages, although they mostly just sat around at the city’s indie coffee shops, enjoying their tasteful nordic minimalist decor and anglophone staff and writing the occasional piece for one of the many potemkin periodicals funded from the public purse. Occasionally, their pensées would be translated into Hungarian — Libri, the local equivalent of Waterstone’s, is well-stocked with hardback editions of Goodwins, Wests, and Nina Powers in aspirational pastel colours.

This “Budapest scene”, as the New Statesman has posthumously dubbed it, was less a Tory Montparnasse or a European dimes square than a conservative version of regular’s table at the Kinshasa Hilton: a boozy rogue’s gallery of intellectual mercenaries and arms dealers in the battle of ideas, blissfully uninterested in the history, traditions, or even the inhabitants of the place beyond how they might be turned into money. Not even the most perfunctory concessions were made to the local culture: one oft-relaid anecdote — one of those apocryphal stories which, to paraphrase Jacob Burckhardt, are true and not true, everywhere and nowhere — tells of a British journalist, a rising star in the conservative firmament who, when served at some official dinner a plate of that delicious beef stew that the Hungarians call pörkölt and the rest of the world goulash, demanded he be brought steak and eggs instead. Even the autochthonous conservative scene seems of little interest to these journeymen: in one by no means atypical exchange, when I brought up Mária Schmidt, the doyen of orbániste intellectuals, to one well-remunerated German think tanker, he surprised me by admitting he had never heard of her before. No one, of course, bothered to learn the local language.

When the populist fury on the Hungarian right against Orbán finally boiled over, this insouciance meant that these would-be Chateaubriands were caught blindsided. What liberals I knew in Budapest are not enthusiastic about Magyar, a creature of the Fidesz patronage network; it was voters on the right who led the exodus from real existing postliberalism. Like Hitler and Speer tweaking the models for Welthaupstadt Germania as Soviet artillery pounded Berlin, the Danube Institute was planning its expansion to America even as Orbán himself was weighing up his exit options. One fellow at the Danube Institute even claimed to have thought up a watertight mathematical model showing Orbán’s party five percentage points in the lead — a theory that could have been exploded by a simple conversation with one of the many disillusioned former Fidesz activists and irate tradcaths one meets in Budapest when one ventures outside the anglophone think tank bubble. These out-of-touch anywheres would have done well to pick up a copy of David Goodhart’s Úton hazafele, available for the equivalent of £9.19 white english from Századvég Press’ webshop.

It is appropriate that a movement whose representatives trace their intellectual lineage to T.S. Eliot should exit the scene not with a bang, but a whimper. Postliberalism has long stood naked before the bitter winds of reason, refuted by everyone from the Bronze Age Pervert, Nigel Carlsbad, to, of course, the editor of this iconic paper, to the point that even James Orr no longer wishes to associate himself with it. With Orbán’s decisive defeat, it has been sent to the back of the class in shame by History herself. The conversation on the British right has long moved on from its airy, metaphysical abstractions towards a pragmatic focus on the most important social phenomenon of the past thirty years: demographic change driven by mass immigration. It is noteworthy that its standard bearers, Farage and his Reform lieutenants have mostly kept their distance from Budapest — whatever their flaws, they understand that their voters want technocrats to sort out this clearly formulated and eminently solvable problem, not intellectuals to provide them with a worldview.

Orbán sold those anglophone conservatives who supped at his banquet a vision of his country as Brideshead on the Danube, but it was another melancholic 20th century Catholic writer’s vision that his Budapest scene embodied: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Normal autocrats flex their power through vast public works or monuments; Orbán built a glittering façade of think tanks, conferences, and podcasts on a brittle framework of prefab ideas and exorbitant contractors’ fees, only for it all to collapse in the blink of an eye. Not in anything its personalities actually wrote or said, but in the history of its decline and fall, does the Budapest scene express that sentiment most Christian: omnia vanitas, memento mori.

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Whilst J’accuse does not have an editorial stance it is fair to say that we are generally ill-disposed towards conservatism, be that of inherited wealth, the polythene mess that is the English countryside or state religions like Human rights.

Nonetheless, when I see ‘yoof’ in their late 20s declare themselves to be ‘suave’ and leaders of a political revolution online, I am made to think of Chesterton’s fence – the premise that some traditions and customs serve a purpose that we cannot immediately see. We could not have known that the collapse of the Yogscast’s viewing numbers would lead a generation of restless puffy men into the world of online political commentary.

Perhaps it is important for YouTube gaming commentary videos to remain a financially viable career path for autists who are too stupid to feel embarrassment. If we could somehow force Alphabet to pay all Terraria streamers the national minimum wage we could save hundreds of families from the humiliation of finding out their son is streaming himself being beaten up, or recording himself delivering speeches to gatherings of bemused pensioners about the need for a strong leader to wield the fasces.

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Britain has settled into an accepted cultural chronology of ‘Woke.’ Woke, for most British commentators, is something which mainly involved transgender people, possibly Black Lives Matter. It was imported “from America” and became noticeable around 2018 when people were rude to J.K Rowling on X, it ‘peaked’ in 2020 with the George Floyd protests and then sort of went away of its own accord some time last year, without any laws actually needing to be repealed.

“Unfortunately, however, in our current climate, it is impossible to express an opinion on TV because you are bound to upset a pressure group that then runs around with its arms in the air and calling for you to be sacked… Neither is very big or important. I’d guess they have fewer members than the Church of England. But they have websites, and they have spokeswomen, and they are always prepared to come up with a quote when contacted by reporters.”

– Jeremy Clarkson, Dec 2008

This narrative is wrong for several reasons. For one, and we shall see why it is difficult to dwell too much upon this later, Britain already had several decades of Woke by the 2010s. Transgender identity, diversity quotas in broadcasting and the civil service, statutory EDI requirements were all introduced by Tony Blair’s government where they were called ‘Political Correctness.’ Sticking to the 2010s and tracking more close to the grain of received opinion as to what Woke was, a certain social media aesthetics of activism rather than any real laws, you’ll still notice the official chronology is still wrong. The cancellation of Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize winner sacked from his KCL Job in 2015 for an off-colour but harmless remark about women, happened in Britain and is one of the canonical cases of ‘cancellation.’ (It is forgotten today but the same year a ‘Nietzsche society’ was banned from the same university – never forget Britain is a country which bans students from having philosophical discussions).

The official chronology of Woke serves clear political ends. One of them is that it exculpates feminism from any role in Woke; indeed, you would sometimes be led to believe Woke was primarily a movement against feminists. Feminism was in fact not simply a part of Woke but the overwhelming driver of the main ‘cancellations’ in the 2010s: the #everydaysexism movement was a massive cultural event very much part of the Woke scene with its prototypical use of the Internet for social shaming. The main protagonists of Woke in the public sphere, such as Laurie Penny, identified primarily as third-wave feminists rather than transgender people. Secondly, it allows for the indigenous, in many ways far more vehement, establishment New Labour Wokeness to be separated from an amorphous latter-day movement so that Blair himself can now mutter darkly about the topic when he literally went out of his way to invent the concept of Transgender people. Finally, it allowed Wokeness to be blamed on “Gen-Z” when it was quite clearly a movement whose adherents were drawn from postgrads c. 2015 (born in the 80s) with the complicity of more tepidly leftwing Britpop/Boomer faculty. The reason for this is that, even in the 2010s, it was obvious Gen Z were naturally opposed to cultural anti-fascism and an elaborate propaganda campaign had to be staged to disguise this.

Although the official chronology is bunkum, it is still worth considering in itself when Woke ‘peaked’ and explaining why 2020 is the wrong answer. When writing about a cultural movement, the ‘peak’, alongside other topographies of power, is going to refer to two different points: the moment when it has the most organic support, which is often just before it seizes power and the moment when, once in power, it feels moved by boldness or fear to the greatest public displays of this power. Most regimes tend to intensify before they start to collapse, Yuri Andropov, a KGB man, was the last Soviet leader to rule before reform. The National Party in South Africa was at its most dictatorial after the Brotherhood determined that the Apartheid experiment was unsustainable.

Before answering these questions, we should first clarify why a true History of Wokeness will always be unsatisfactory. Nothing Woke people believed was actually different from the credo of the 1960s radicals, others have noted that it was present in the 1990s and we have earlier described the Blairite legacy in Britain. Any true history, therefore, will start with the Nuremberg trials and the genesis of the ideas themselves. Nonetheless, we are good Wittgensteinians and ought to recognise that when people speak about ‘Woke’ in the 2010s they are trying to point at something perceived as aesthetically new. While Britain in 2013 already had diversity quotas and sent people to prison for bad thoughts, David Cameron could also tell a female M.P to “calm down Dear” and receive no real backlash; the popular television show Bad Education (2013) is full of racial and class stereotypes in no way out of place in 2004. A judgment we can be certain of is that Wokeness was, before anything else, a reactionary movement and this would suggest that the 2010s ought to be seen not as the scene of a ‘New Religion’ but as a form of “Western” Fundamentalism: an attempt to return to an earlier version of the faith as modernity became increasingly hostile.

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Trump’s escalation of hostilities with Iran to a near full scale state of war has invited much commentary and prophesying from the online right. There is no doubt that the decision to assassinate Aya…

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It is not unknown in the annals of history for a revolutionary elite to retain one or two old ornaments from the ancien regime, whose presence is so anachronistic as to suggest a great ruse has been …

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Picture 2029. Nigel Farage comes into power with a large majority holding a mandate for change. Within weeks he notifies the world that he intends to withdraw from the ECHR, and closely argued negoti…

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Let no one say that woke is dead after the tawdry slew of euphemism and obfuscation on display this week following the recent rioting in Clapham. Across multiple nights, large groups of ‘youths’ and ‘bored teenagers’ have looted shops, smashed things up, started fires and attacked bystanders and police, in disorder that is now spreading from south London to Bristol and Birmingham, and probably beyond. The villains of the piece are described as ‘gangs of youths’ ,‘teenage mobs’, ‘bored children with nothing better to do during the half-term’, even ‘mob[s] of masked TikTok twats’. Almost nowhere in the mainstream press is it made clear – other than through the footage of what’s happening – that the individuals causing mayhem in our inner cities are almost entirely black.

Even the spitting fury of the anti-woke liberals, who have been denouncing ‘feral mobs’ and calling for ‘mass arrests’, serves as a way to avoid acknowledging the basic racial dynamics at play here. That these teenagers are behaving like teenagers from their grandparent’s country of origin; that their privileged lifestyles in our inner cities are only possible through the largess of taxpayers and that they today act with impunity because they get soft treatment by the police owing to their skin colour. The Metropolitan Police, having made vanishingly few arrests, has instead been reduced to pleading with the rioters and their parents to ‘think of the consequences’ of their actions (for most, there will be none).

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In the summer of 2018, I would regularly take the DLR from Bank to Canary Wharf out of a pure instinct to flânerie. My reading of blogs containing bad financial advice convinced me that there would soon be a catastrophe in the markets; and I wanted to document the last moments of the financial district before it happened. The docklands is a unique place in Europe. It was, in a one-off exemption to the planning act, built entirely by dictatorial fiat when a single corporation was empowered to redevelop the area independent of any municipal authorities. Moving in from the City on the DLR, you have a gut-feeling of entering a new place from which ‘modern London’ is very different. The very existence of the DLR itself is a giant, flashing question mark to the whole existence of TFL. For every failure of the British state, the Docklands, so long as it stands offers an alternative: a world in which Beveridge’s report to the Eugenic society was heeded, a world in which Norma Tebbit was never crippled, a world in which Tony Blair lost the 1997 election, a world where the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers were scrapped, a world in which Britain stuck to the Herd Immunity strategy wisely recommended by all medical experts; Chinese nuclear missiles stationed in Bermuda.

You are brought flying above rows of low rise converted slums, 1960s housing estates where Bangladeshi women hang their washing from the balconies, crumbling high-rise Ballardian towers and churches built by Wren: it is the most subtle piece of architectural propaganda known to man. You visibly see every symbol of postwar Britain from a form of transport de-facto banned from the rest of the city, then, you arrive; the shops are underground and the streets are clean. There are plentiful roads but little traffic. There is nothing quite like it in Europe, a self-contained island visibly more sophisticated and at-ease with itself than the wider city in which it is set. It is a giant two-fingered salute to the last 60 years of “modern Britain”; a place with no churches and no chicken shops.

The point is, I love Canary Wharf with a comprehensive depth the c. 2023 “Angloposter” who vaguely likes “Skyscrapers” will never understand or equal. There are many who pretend to like it, just as there are many who pretend to like ‘eugenics’ or revisionist history, without understanding it. There has been no attempt by its soi-distant defenders to truly abstract from Canary Wharf a set of universal urbanist principles. The most innovative feature of the development is still completely unremarked upon: the fact that, within Canary Wharf, all the shops are placed underground: at once freeing the vast open spaces between high-rise developments to the genuine (viz. non-commercial) pedestrian. One notes the similarity with another beloved favourite, the Parisian Arcades so well analysed by Benjamin. You can easily see, in these principles the basis of Meritocratic palazzi: in the new government, one can imagine the construction of Italianate quadrangles in a series of insulae linked entirely by automated monorail: within these islands, all commercial activity necessary for the needs of the inhabitants would be placed underground leaving the central court, as in the barbican empty for recreation. Each of these ‘islands’ would be crowned by a Telvanni skyscraper reserved, not for office space, but the dwelling of the Meritocrat who controls the zone. The areas in between islands could be safely returned to nature in the synthesis of conservation and development. On this model, we could safely bulldoze the entirety of the London suburbs.

On these grounds, we are authorised to say that this decision should be registered as an act of architectural vandalism on the same scale as blowing up Big Ben, or turning the Barbican into a shopping centre. The HSBC building can be seen at miles from multiple directions of London – from Ally Pally to Customs House – it has a far greater claim to be “iconic” than Battersea Power Station, or the National Gallery, both of which were saved by influential lobbies. Any depiction of London between 2000 and 2020 A.D will include the HSBC tower. The ‘chunks’ in question completely destroy the cyberpunk uniformity of the present building which make it great, seen through a rainy haze. Why is it that such a self-evidently important building doesn’t even enter into ‘conservation’ discussions?

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Architectural conservation in Britain begins in the postwar period as a purely private scam to save the stately homes. Brideshead Revisited dates from this period, as does Orwell’s bombastically smug prediction that the homes shall soon be turned into holiday camps. Faced with a powerful new Labour government, which introduced an inheritance tax and made grammar schools free (skyrocketing the TFR in the process); the doddery old English aristocracy faced its first brush with financial independence and barely lived to tell the tale. As a result, authors like Waugh launched a propaganda campaign to persuade us that every squalid Tudor hovel was a palazzo and had to be saved for the nation in perpetuity.

Conservationism really came into its own about two decades later with the foundation of the Victorian Society. We all know the story, that brief decade in which the North London men were empowered to blow up vast boroughs worth of slums, and force their Celtic inhabitants into concrete jungles. A counter-movement began, championed by lively homosexuals like John Betjemen, who launched their first salvo in successfully saving the monumentally useless Euston arch, which today, quite fittingly, houses a Brewdog. Betjemen too was a North London man and Victorianism essentially a fronde of the suburbs, aiming to persuade a sceptical nation that a c. 1919 neo-Gothic CofE church ministering to 3 Irish drunks in Cricklewood was a treasure.

By the early 80s, the counter-movement was well on the way to academic respectability. Peterhouse College, of Cambridge, served as a madrassa of architectural traditionalism; a powerful patron was found in the figure of King Chuck, who by being stupid made people suspect the ‘serious’ trads were secretly rather clever by contrast. It was increasingly the turn of the Brutalists to play the card of conservation. The T.V programmes of Johnathan Meades in the mid 90s established the calling cards of sentimental Brutalism. Brutalism was lauded in far more ‘traditional’ terms than poundbury, the fact that the buildings didn’t actually work were immaterial to the Positive moral effects they had on society by representing “a time when governments did things.” Trying to get bits of increasingly pointless Brutalist architecture listed was a dimly remembered favourite activity of the sort of North London trot who felt ‘politically homeless’ under Tony Blair in the early 2000s.

The point is, conservation in this country is tied to not so subtle political agendas. Country houses can be counted on to be preserved because they are friends of Jesus and the Barbican will always find supporters so long as there are people who yearn for the days of Stalin and Mr. Wilson. Who, then, will speak up for the HSBC tower? That plucky little building, who wants to Have a View but doesn’t know what to Say? Certainly, we cannot count on our self-described ‘neoliberals’ who, just as they are radical Keynesians when it comes to lockdowns, are firm aesthetic traditionalists with no respect for their own heritage. More on them later. A part of the problem is that the majority of people do not realise the era of High Globalism has ended, and so fail to see buildings like the HSBC tower as the unique things they are. The word ‘postmodernism’, like ‘Victorian’, is a sort of non-category under which a variety of different styles are lazily placed.

There are some general categories of the style at all times we shall note. The objection typically levelled against Globalism by Brutalists is that it represents a downscaling of ambition from the mid 20th century architects who desired to remodel entire cities. Ignoring the fact that, outside of the Third Reich, no modernist architect actually did get close to remodelling whole cities, so it is pointless to judge them on an unfulfilled ambition, this is still wrong. The ambition of Globalist Architecture is to divorce buildings from ‘the Social’, it exists to create “spaces” which exist entirely in dialogue across continents with each other, without regard for the local conditions of Mumbai, London or New York. Within these spaces, the egoism of the architect, as shown by the once-contemporary term of rebuke ‘Starchitect’, is given free reign.

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It is strangely never noted that if you were, this writer disdaining the project, to try and locate a purely ‘British’ school of architecture, Postmodernism would not be a bad call. The greatest of the ‘postmodernists’, Foster, Rogers, Farell are all Brits; London the greatest exhibit of the style West of Suez. Palladianism, the Beaux Arts and Brutalism are all foreign imports, even the Gothic is basically continental but with Postmodernism we see the flowering of an entirely indigenous school of high art in these otherwise backwards and provincial isles. If one was to create a self-consciously ‘nationalist’ propagandistic official art for the purpose of valorising a new regime, it would naturally employ Postmodernism c. 1991 as official style rather than boring on about cottages and Lana Del Rey and village churches.

I shall propose three, amateur periods of High Globalist Architecture. The first is a triumphal stage, and is limited almost entirely to commercial buildings. It marks the emergence of a ‘modern’ style which is nonetheless non-functional around the late 70s and ends in the mid 90s. These buildings are commissioned largely by corporations themselves, often in areas like the docklands without any ‘local character’ in need of preservation, representing discerning but non-academic taste which hadn’t been enslaved by woke Universities. It is in this period that the greatest overtures are made to traditionalism in the form of the pastiche Italianate you can see in Canary Wharf, countless shopping centres and bits of Wall Street. This, however, is very different from the ‘walkable density’ of the 21st century trad; there is no attempt made to harmonise the revivalism with existing buildings, like in Budapest, Dresden or Prague; these buildings have been built out of a pure, spontaneous desire for pleasure and are perfectly integrated with the infrastructure of a modern city (‘cars’).

These two buildings, while both anti-modernist, cannot seriously be compared in their goals and effects. Cabot Square is an attempt to create a geometrical effect, resembling, discerning minds will note, a Masonic temple, with two ‘pillars’ holding up the Iconic pyramid; like the best modernist designs it has totally destroyed the ‘local character’ of the area in which it has been built in the name of an aesthetic project. Where it differs from Brutalism is that it refuses to be constrained by the moral diktats of the 20th century socialism, such as Mies van der Rohe’s refusal to put triangles on skyscrapers because they resembled feudal crowns.

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Two processes are taking place simultaneously in Britain, and the confluence of these Factors is something to pay attention to.

The first is a Crisis in the property market. All across Britain houses are failing to sell for their asking prices. House prices in London have been falling for six consecutive months, but when adjusted for inflation – contra what Gary’s Economics would have you believe – the value of a flat in London fell by 22% between 2015 and 2025. This graph by Savills gives you an idea of the national picture.

It would seem that in the last two years this problem has become particularly acute. There are a host of different reasons for this, the property market being generally inflated, unresolved problems with the leasehold system etc – the point is that there are a huge number of people in London and in other parts of the country who have bought houses and flats and are finding it difficult to sell their properties, even at a loss.

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