Rory was a Dog who loved to smile

Rory loved to make other people smile as well, especially small children

When little children were feeling unwell, Rory would sit by them, calmly, to help them feel better

Because Rory loved everyone, everyone loved Rory

I love Rory

I love Rory

I love Rory

I think Rory should be drowned in a vat of acid until he is dead

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

MNYEH MNYEH MNYEH BIN-FACE BANTER BIN-FACE BANTER

Now children, the police are on their way and don’t worry, Rory the smiley dog may be dead but at least there’s still Henry the Peaceful Cat

MNYEH MYEH MNYEH BIN-FACE. BIN FAAACCCEEEE. FUNNY FUNNY. HA HA HA HA.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The Prime Minister Sir Andy Burnham has “welcomed” proposals from “Count Binface” to have London Zoo Penguins “ground into mince”

Is “Count Binface” Britain’s “Silliest Sausage” asks “bemused” Josef Fritzl

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The End

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By the Marquis

There was not one provincial antique dealer in the country who did not let out a low hum of recognition at the sight of the removals van that reversed so gracelessly through the gates of Number 10 to collect Starmer’s effects last Friday afternoon. The bright canary yellow. The name, ‘Bishop’s Move’, which sounds like the name of an episode of Inspector Morse about the murder of a gay country vicar. The choice of fonts; a stately, self-possessed Times New Roman for the company name, and a flowing, brasserie-menu cursive for the words ‘Fine Art Services’ in the lower left corner - per the slightly wet-brained, befuddled approach to marketing of the aging small-town-small-trader, these are luxury words, and deserve an appropriately luxury font.

The kind of font that says words like ‘Crepe Suzettes’ and ‘Duck à l’Orange.’ Yes, the whole picture has the decisively dawdy, mothball odour of the petite bourgeoisie of Britain’s cathedral and market towns; Hebden Bridge. Rye. Tetbury. Long Melford. That van is a Lib-Dem Tory swing voter. We are quite safely in the creamy, mock-Tudor world of unpaid VAT bills, of murano glass ashtrays and Edwardian mahogany bureaus with piles of costume jewellery rattling in the bottom drawer. The world of brown furniture. As one pictures dealer I sent the video to put it:

‘Saw van. Harold McMillan. Like him all the more.’

McMillan is exactly right. That van belongs to the world of the archetypal Conservative voter of the last century, the Home Counties grammar school boy cum small businessman. A van known for its pragmatism, wit and unflappability. A van that belongs to the part of Starmer that was raised in Surrey, and not the part that feathered his nest in Kentish Town.

Human rights lawyer; pescatarian; spent his youth in a minor Trotskyite faction; a secular Jewish wife - so far, very Kentish Town: tick, tick, tick and tick. But Starmer has never belonged quite so obviously to that patch of North London as neighbours like David Aaronovitch or Will Self. For one, the love of football is very slightly too earnest. An archetypally ‘Kentish Town’ man watches football for the same performative reasons Fergus Henderson’s St. John serves ‘Jam Roly-Poly with Ice Cream’ - a working class institution, ‘culturally Labour.’ Starmer watches football because he straightforwardly enjoys watching football.

Starmer can’t name a favourite novel or poem; again, that’s a point against. A man like Giles Coren, while obviously stupid, would feign some kind of continuity with the more literary generation that occupied this corner of the world toward the third quarter of the last century, the likes of David Sylvester or Kingsley Amis, and could probably pull a few lines from Larkin out of his hat under duress.

Finally, there’s Starmer’s choice of pub. The Pineapple, which with its bright teal exterior, the fake bookshelf wallpaper and cheap Thai food, veers slightly in the direction of the sort of ‘fishbowl glass of Pink Gin and Tonic’ pubs that cling to the Western bends of the Thames, out toward Richmond and Chiswick. No, no, that’s not very Kentish Town at all. The standard line of the Kentish Town middle class is (falsely): ‘There’s some rough bits around here, you know, but we get along.’ A real Kentish Towner would have told us he goes to one of the few slightly dingier pubs that still count the remnants of the area’s older Irish working class among their clientele, and insisted it’s the only place in the neighbourhood that does a ‘proper’ Guinness.

Yes, there is something in Starmer that seems to belong more properly to a place like Ealing, or Kingston upon Thames, or indeed his native Oxted; the leafy world of Côte Brasseries and ‘posh hot dogs,’ where people aren’t so ashamed of owning a television. A world that is so well summed up in the decals on Starmer’s moving van.

An occasional dealer myself, that van summons up all the frumpy, leather-jacketed hawkers and peddlers the antiques trade has brought me into contact with over the last few years. Maybe this is the direction Starmer, post premiership, will find himself moving in - something a bit less ambitious, less flashy, more ‘everyman’, than the usual roster of Silicon Valley speaking engagements. Maybe I’ll spot him hopping the fence to get into the Newark Antiques Fair at 5 in the morning, maybe he’ll try to sell me a beat-up Regency sofa that’s ‘good for reupholstery’. In either case, that van looks like a rare moment of contact between his life and mine - that van that belongs to a world of men who prefer cash and only pay half their taxes and, frankly, it warms my cockles. So from one petty hustler to another, let me take this opportunity to wish Keir a very slightly less frosty goodbye than I might have otherwise.

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This video of Andy Burnham wanly dancing to True Faith by the New Order has given me some much-needed reinvigoration after three months of feeling depressed about ‘UK’ politics. Nobody could watch that video, even the most credulous of Britpoppers, and believe that Burnham is capturing some sort of national mood. It is clear from his own lack of enthusiasm that he knows that he cannot pull of the kayfabe of taking the country back to the 1990s culturally or spiritually.

It was notable too that this year that political attention paid to the World Cup in Britain was at a very low ebb. There was some stir made about Sir Keir Starmer staying on for if England won, and his final Prime Minister’s questions had a few searching references to it, I count only one tweet from the past week from Andy Burnham about the game. This is extraordinary from a man who, as culture secretary, tried to part nationalise premier league football saying that money had ‘poisoned our national game’. We are a long way away from Boris being hounded by the press for failing to attend the ‘Lionesses’ Euros victory in person.

The raw audience figures bear this out as well. During the 2021 Euros final 31 million people ‘tuned in’ to watch England play Italy. For England Argentina last week this cratered to a humiliating 24 million – this also being lower than in 2018 World Cup when England also crashed out into fourth place. It was, anecdotally, far, far harder to find a pub in which to watch the games in 2021.

Burnham wants to win the next election by ‘bringing back hope’. He is also planning for defeat by devolving power away from Westminster, such that Reform winning a general election will not change the country meaningfully. But ‘bringing back hope’ is Burnham’s version of ‘Make America Great Again’, it is his reactionary promise to take the country back to the 1990s.

Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again, by taking the United States back to the 1980s, is in and of itself a fine promise. America by many objective metrics peaked in the 1980s, in 1985 the American economy accounted for 32.74% of global GDP. The worst humiliation at the hands of the Middle East America had stopped. Reagan was by no means a perfect President, in many respects he was one of the worst, but 1980s America works as a stand in for a stronger economy, less indulgence abroad and fewer Hispanics, the original promise of 2016.

It was a period, and a place, with much more esteem than the Britain which Burnham is trying to recreate. It would be wrong to give a specific decade to where Burnham wants to take the country. He opposes Thatcher on the one hand, which would imply that he wants to take us back to the 1970s, but his music tastes mostly date the 1980s and 1990s. It is not a flavouring of social democracy but a feeling that right is besting wrong and that the communities are getting the respect they deserve, and that all of us get to join in.

The Britain that Burnham wants to go back to is one where music, football and generic celebrity capture the heart of the nation and produce a wave of sentimentality which he can crest. That was politics as it worked during the New Labour period. Blair spent much of his first term in government courting celebrities in Chequers, as disclosures in the mid 2000s revealed, he used his grace and favour home to host hundreds of ‘stars’ including Stephen Fry, Elton John, Bob Geldof, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren, Trevor Nunn, Prunella Scales and of course, with grim inevitability, Sir Jimmy Savile.

My cautious case for optimism is that Burnham is trying to invoke spirits which no longer, and can no longer exist. The output of celebrity culture, the metric by which we might judge how much relevance these people still have is charity fundraising work. Jimmy Savile, Britain’s first Disc Jockey who, in his own words, was ‘the very first in the whole world to run a dance to records’ was the author of 20^th century British celebrity culture, having more or less invented popular music and then dominated broadcasting for decades.

Outside of this work he pursued fundraising for charity with the same bloody-minded vigour that Napoleon pursued his conquests of Continental Europe. A day did not pass by in his life without him participating in some marathon or charity dinner to raise money for his various causes including Stoke-Mandeville. Such was Savile’s enthusiasm for charity work that our very own King Charles enlisted Savile to invite guests to Kensington Palace on his behalf following a ‘telethon’ (a televised charity fundraiser).

When I was a child, growing up in the shadow of Sir Jimmy, I remember well how pervasive ‘charity’ was. The crap was constantly rammed down your throat, we even had the begging bowl sent round our school for tins of food following the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. The worst of it by far was something called ‘Red Nose day’, an episode of our history – as with Pakistani grooming gangs – which I’m loathe to share with international audiences but share we must. Every year, in March usually, children of primary school age would be made to wear a foam red ball on their nose, and the TV would be full of ‘national treasures’ doing comedy shows to raise money to end child poverty.

It was a sort of show of power on behalf of the Masons, intended to humiliate you with your impotence. This was the Britain of Tony Christie and Peter Kay performing ‘Is this the way to Amarillo’ and Jamie Oliver’s In Your Face and of course David ‘big boy’ Walliams. Tony Blair even appeared as himself in a 2006 sketch with Catherine Tate.

Between 1988, the year that Comic Relief started, and 2011, the real value of yearly donations quadrupled from £41m to £160m. Then, beginning in 2011, year on year donations fall sharply. By 2023 they have fallen, in real terms, to below where it was in 1988. Last year it only managed to raise a poxy £33m.

There are a number of theories we could posit for why Comic Relief has fallen apart. It could be the rise of the internet and the fall of terrestrial television. It could be, per Lobe, that in a ‘low trust’ society less money is set aside for charitable causes. Perhaps it’s the algorithms. I find the fact that 2011 is the precise turning point very strange indeed, as this was also the year that:

The pillars of Burnhamism – Footy, Music and Celebrity – are very much decayed from where they were during the New Labour years. I do not think it is possible for Andy Burnham to recreate ‘Madchester’ and so I do not think it is possible for him to recreate the ‘hope’ and thereby capitalise on the reactionary nostalgia that he is trying to tap into. Because the World of Yesterday - of the nation being obsessed with fiddlers and footy players and following their every move and listening to which politician they endorse – those days are over.

I quite like the British version of The Office as it is remarkably classical piece of writing. David Brent is in fact a (relatively) good boss. We receive multiple signs of this in-universe. Unlike B…

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Sentimental admirers of British Imperialism sometimes intermix their respect for the world’s most progressive institution with affection for the constitutional monarchy that nominally headed it. This is wrongheaded. Britain, to a much greater degree than other European states, pursued two separate models of imperialism; on the one hand, uncoordinated, profit-seeking conquests led by individuals like Rhodes or organisations like the East India Company; on the other, state-led governance under the watchful gaze of the monarch, typically justified by moral imperatives and/or plain conservatism.

India gives us a natural experiment in which the qualities of the two can be contrasted. Whilst some try to talk up the positive impacts of British rule on India, it remains undeniable that the most profitable British activity pre-Mutiny was direct wealth extraction, chiefly of bullion and jewels; Robert Clive became perhaps the wealthiest self-made man in Europe without trifling with the free market. This wealth transfer rewarded merit whilst providing capital for nascent British industry: pro-market activists who believe that wealth circulation is a universal good would do well to consider that a violation of property rights converted huge amounts of hoarded gold into fluid, highly productive capital.

Overseeing this activity were about a thousand ‘writers’, British men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, who could expect to return home with seven to eight figures in savings. The newfound ‘Public’ (viz. ‘democratic public sphere’) did not take kindly to the implicit assault on hereditary wealth and aristocratic control of Parliament, and soon Burke, Smith and others were rolling out the standard accusations of Unlawfulness and Unworkability. To Smith, the role of merchant was incompatible with the sovereign dignity required to install obedience without force; Burke, in criticising the insubordinate allocation of judicial authority to newly-employed writers, inadvertently wrote one of their greatest panegyrics:

Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority, at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,—they are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers that despotism involves.

This economic model, together with expansion and intensification of Company rule, was pursued up until the Mutiny. In the last decades before the defenestration of the EIC, the doctrine of lapse was aggressively pursued; steadily eliminating the corrupt, incompetent native monarchies. Burton’s first years in India give one a good picture of the whirlpool of excitement and immorality that prevailed in 1840s Bombay: it is like a little piece of the future dropped into the nineteenth century. He gives us the response to Cobden’s proto-libertarian broadsides against British rule:

He declared (as if he had been taken into supernatural confidence), that God and His visible Natural Laws have opposed insuperable obstacles to the success of such a scheme... All this was the regular Free-trade bosh, and the Great Bagsman would doubtless have been thunderstruck, had he heard the Homeric shouts of laughter with which his mean-spirited utterances were received by every white skin in British India. There was not a subaltern in the 18th Bombay N.I. who did not consider himself perfectly capable of governing a million Hindus... for every subaltern felt (if he could not put the feeling into words) that India had been won, despite England, by the energy and bravery of men like himself.

All of this ended with the advent of the Raj. The subaltern’s Indian mistress and platoon of servants went out; Victorian moralism had arrived; the new world order would be black-coated, austere, deferential, and sexually repressed.

British India would now bend the knee to Queen Victoria, where once it had wrestled with the “little Kings in Leadenhall Street”, and become obedient. Inevitably, a government devoted to the hereditary rights of monarchy set aside the destined aegis of conquest. Whereas the EIC had just taken Southern Burma and annexed the Punjab, twenty years would pass until the Raj stirred itself to a war in Afghanistan, in itself a joylessly conservative enterprise aimed at creating a ‘buffer state’ rather than at fun and profit.

This second Afghan War proved a costly débacle, as did the succeeding conflict in Burma. An immediate stop was put to the annexation of native states under British suzerainty; the last Governor-General, Dalhousie, had annexed an area larger than the Low Countries in eight years while eighty-nine years of the British Raj allowed a parade of premodern rulers to retain their authority into the era of the atom bomb. Before 1858 the local Rajah was a figure of fun; afterwards, the incompetence, oppression and needless cruelty were effaced and traditional rulers in India romanticised as a species of noble savage.

The reaction against the empirical racism of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries reached its peak around this time. Phrenology, in practice an egalitarian theory not unlike the unsubstantiated ‘multiple intelligences’ introduced by various woke windbags of the twentieth century, flourished in popular culture even as every one of its predictions was falsified; Lamarck introduced a bogus theory of inheritance whereby the natural hierarchies catalogued in the preceding could be overcome by sheer effort. The advent of exuberant Rhodesian expansionism and later Weisman’s genetics were experienced as a revolutionary outpouring of progress rather than a natural development of the status quo ante.

Starting from 1858, Guelph India began to install the machinery of Egalitarianism, replacing the rule of the writers with the sort of debating-society politics one can read about in Kipling; where natives* exempted from the rigourous selection process applied to British civil servants were paid large salaries to parody the worst aspects of European municipal politics in a system justified solely by democratic dogmas. In fact, the immediate consequence of Guelph rule in India was to turn an increasingly aggressive, expansionist power, which had just indulged in a successful war against China, into a conservative, utilitarian state; thereby defending the principle of hereditary privilege against a threat which had prompted concern amonst Britain’s moneyed classes ever since the Battle of Plassey.

That Monarchy and Egalitarianism should go hand in hand conflicts with the prejudices of a twentieth-century British intellectual culture, which in practice defended both against the inroads of progressive politics and science; but history and philosophy show that the two are natural allies. Monarchy is incapable of justifying itself on the meritocratic criteria that were the sole values of Company India; Vicky Guelph and her children would have failed at both the classical examinations that selected writers and the real-world, political-military competition in which their graduates excelled.

Resentment is not the sole prerogative of the poor. Neither is class warfare. The masses and the monarchies use the same doctrines and follow the same methods in extracting wealth. Within the Egalitarian system, every elected spiv and local Stakeholder is the image of the Big Boss, enjoying his meagre dole of power according to inherited right. That every citizen has a right to vote by simple virtue of being born is philosophically identical to the claims made by monarchs, and stands or falls by the same revolutions in the human mind.

What was the thwarted future of the colonial system? A. J. Hobson (himself an Orwellian reactionary who regarded the introduction of machinery into India as a retrograde step**) supposed the ultimate destiny of Western Imperialism to be the division of China; providing a labour pool which would obsolete the white proletariat and render the whole metropole from Lemberg to Los Angeles an image of the Home Counties, devoted to bureaucratic administration and artistic and scientific pursuits. Looking back at a twentieth century where Hobson’s moralistic bigotries prevailed, we may wonder what exactly about this intriguing vision rendered it an object of such dislike to elements of the British ruling class; but when we consider the importance of hereditary right to that class, the answer is not hard to find.

* देसी
** His lurid praise of Qing China as a country where “even capital sentences are executed by consent” is good for a laugh

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Camberwell, where I have been recently living, feels like an admixture of both Clapham and Hackney. Like Hackney, the locals are liable to describe themselves as ‘young creatives’ and as in Hackney, ‘creative’ most often means ‘in marketing.’ Occasionally: ‘in film.’ But like Clapham, and very much unlike Hackney, they are unashamedly well-to-do. There is no pretence of late-in-life flatshare squalor the way you find in Haggerston. Nobody here looks like they’d settle for a Tesco’s own brand hummus picnic on London Fields for their birthday dinner; that part of their lives has been and gone.

Retired from the scene, they are fashionable in a more relaxed, less self conscious way than they might have been in their 20s - friends’ DJ sets and gigs have been replaced by opening nights for galleries and restaurants. NTS Radio is wafting gently from the kitchen speakers out over the back patio. Ahead of them is a long, leafy thirties full of dinners in the garden, long, leafy dinners lined up in rows. They sometimes moan half-heartedly that they’ve had to go to too many destination weddings this year - but that’s not so bad because these days, with work, with the kid (one per couple, like pandas), with the dog, it’s about the only time they get to do coke. Otherwise it’s all clean living, and they look it - they all look great for 36. If they weren’t so obviously well-off, they could pass for 25.

I am growing to like them; they are less pretentious, more hardworking, less stupid than their near-relatives in East London. Just by being close to them, I feel myself moving up in the world - these moseying, gentle people, who seem to swat away life’s stresses with one lazy swoosh of the tail; these herbivorous dinosaurs, late in the Indian summer of youth, enjoying the cud al fresco until middle age crashes like an asteroid.

Unbeknownst to them, they are the people the British Right have been rushing to defend in Twitter’s latest rehashing of the well-trodden ‘gentrification’ debate - sparked initially by a post from Sam Bowman, head of publishing at Stripe, which, much to the ire of the black population of South London as represented in his quote tweets, described Camberwell as ‘gentrifying nicely.’

The high-water mark of anti-gentrification rage in Britain has arguably been and gone, with the riots that broke out in protest of Shoreditch’s since-deceased Cereal Killer Cafe (a Millennial gimmick institution, which had people queuing to pay something around the £5 mark for a bowl of Lucky Charms) in 2015, and the arguments against - that the more established communities in places like Shoreditch and Camberwell are being priced out of their homes by the incoming middle-class adventurers - have remained virtually unchanged. In some important ways though, the debate looks very different than it did back then.

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WE can now announce that ‘the Summer Reforms’ have been completed.

UPAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! *furious applause, rhythmic banging against chair heads and desks, sound of leaflets being waved with great enth…

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My strength of feeling over gun rights are, as with my feelings about circumcision, evidence that I could never be a front-facing politician in Britain. In a country where the two coping mechanisms for Suez are ‘you lot pay $80,000 for yer ambulances’ and ‘you lot shoot up kids’ the strength of feeling against legalising assault rifles in Britain seems like an insurmountable mountain. As a man of principle who was raised on FPS Russia Golden Desert Eagle videos I would be unable to compromise on this point of honour.

As a creature of Blair’s Britain who remembers those Daily Mail headlines about farmer’s wives being arrested for waving knives at thieves, I fell in love with the United States the moment that I read about Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws circa the Trayvon Martin shooting. I wanted, and want, my own AR-15. I wish, and wished, to brandish it at those who see fit to violate my English castle.

A Britain where infants can shoot their parents for trying to circumcise them on self-defence grounds. That is the Britain that I want. The Britain that could never be.

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J’accuse can exclusively reveal that Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, was once a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

UKIP was a minor far-right party which made limited electoral breakthroughs in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s.

Our forensic investigative team has spent the past six months performing deep textual analysis techniques upon a paperback copy of One Party After Another by Michael Crick. The Wikipedia page for Nigel Farage was also consulted at some length.

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That the world’s most asocial nation should have delivered such an outsized contribution to literary realism in the 19th century is a historical irony requiring some explanation, though you shall not have it here. Dr. Stockmann’s people are of a solitary, pensive type optimised to roam the wooded hills and dales and generally live the life under which Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus; should the northman busy himself with social justice, it is only as a quaint hobby equivalent to folk dancing or collecting unusually shaped pieces of driftwood. In any event, this seems to have been a brief, historical aberration, and today Norway’s preeminent litterateurs (think Fosse or Knausgaard) are of a more introverted cut; a countercurrent whose spiritus rector is nevertheless a man of Ibsen’s time — Knut Hamsun, Nobel Prize winner and apart from that nothing else.

It is all too easy to read Hamsun as the contrary pole to Ibsen, Bjørnson, and their co-combatants in the national canon; indeed, Hamsun himself gave such interpretation his imprimatur through his open and rather frank criticism of the former. Yet though the contrast between his emotional prose and the older generation’s socially conscious objectivity might make for a tidy periodisation for the high school literature textbooks, Hamsun came of age as a writer under the influence of the Christiania literary establishment and, even while departing from its stylistic conventions, strove to preserve what was good in it, namely its overarching concern with social currents. Whether consciously or not, Hamsun grasped that the society of the 20th century wrestled with a feistier spirit than Ibsen’s sober, social-critical style could pin down, and that telling the truth of the times would require a new approach in which inner experience would provide the novel’s structure and substance. This modern spirit — repressed, but never quite dispelled, by our own age — fills the pages of Hamsun’s most timely work, Victoria (1898).

Writing is an unconscious art, and what lasts is only ever coincident with the writer’s aims. „If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak!“ My own few felicities are daughters of necessity, melodious bricolages of wrong words salvaged whilst groping about in the dark for the right ones, born of the imperative to flag down the feeling before it goes forever into the night. They are slung out to e-girls and bored housewives in a sunless hour, typed by sweaty thumbs on crowded trains before the thought goes forgotten in the crush, oddly capitalised and always with more Hs than really need be. If my poxy feuilletons have not pushed the front of European letters one inch closer to Moscow, these pensées have at least left a visceral impact. But what is the quality that makes a word endure? The debate over whether the property of a great writer is a heightened sensitivity to the temper of the times or an intuition for the timeless has rumbled on for what feels closer to the latter, and there is usually something of either side in every meritorious pen. Nor need they be opposed: what both ultimately treat of is the essence that places man on equal footing with God; the particle in which history and eternity meet.

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“You’ve gone a bit loopy Tim”. “Tim, this is bonkers.” And then less politely. “F--- you Tim”. These are just some of the notifications which were blowing up my phone when I appeared on Television at…

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Andy Burnham is about to become the first Catholic Prime Minister in Great Britain and the government he leads will possibly be the most hostile to technology we have had in our history. During the Makerfield by-election Burnham promised to increase taxes on Amazon warehouses. Before becoming Prime Minister he has announced that he will excise Palantir from the NHS, ‘slow down’ the rollout of driverless cars and move away from courting US AI companies and ‘tech boosterism’.

Though Andy Burnham is the first openly Catholic Prime Minister we must also remember that Tony Blair converted to Catholicism within a year of leaving Downing Street and that he had been clandestinely attending Roman masses for some twenty five years at that point having hidden his real faith so as to avoid aspersions being cast on his decision to surrender to the IRA. Boris Johnson was baptised as a Catholic (before converting to Anglicanism as a teenager) but subsequently married Carrie Symonds in a Catholic service whilst he was Prime Minister.

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The one thing missing from my colleague’s obituary to Sir Keir is that Keir was not ‘always known to be a duffer.’

If you asked anyone within SW1 who the best possible candidate for P.M would be – the…

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By the Marquis

It is the perfectly temperate afternoon of June 29th. The heatwave is spent, or in a lazy mood, and the express train out of Chickentown is sliding on its belly back to Euston at a stea…

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ALARM CLOCKS ARE RINGING

BRITAIN IS BURNING

A RECORD BREAKING 23 DEGREES

IT HAS NEVER BEEN THIS WARM BEFORE (APART FROM A FEW TIMES)

SO STAY INDOORS

STAY AWAY FROM THE WINDOWS

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HUNKER DOWN IN YOUR BURNHAM BUNKERS

AND READ J’ACCUSE

The J’accuse Summer sale is now live. 15% off. Offer ends 23/7/26.

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Woke has pulled a blinder in 2026. The British left has found a candidate who not only unites them, they’ve found one with a specific appeal voters tempted by Reform in the North of England. Burnham …

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A film or a television show has ‘made it’ once it inspires a visible trend in wider society. The character of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987) changed office fashions in the United States as more young men went for slicked back hair and suspenders. ‘The Rachel’, taken from Jennifer Aniston’s haircut in Friends (1994), became almost universal in the 1990s and it still remains one of the most popular women’s haircuts. The popularity of Matrix (1999) led to a sudden surge in young men wearing very small sunglasses, a look which is now associated with the accursed neverending ‘Y2K’ trend.

The changes are not always just in clothing or fashion. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) can be credited in part for the growth of memestocks and retail investing more widely. Malcom Tucker in the Thick of It created a generation of politicians and special advisers who made a performance of being aggressive and vituperative - a development which aggravated Armando Ianucci so much that he said:

“I stopped doing The Thick of It because politicians were seeing it as some sort of training manual rather than a warning…I thought they no longer saw it as something to be embarrassed about, they saw it as something to admire, so I had failed totally and should stop.”

The piece of media where inadvertent cargo-culting is both most amusing, and most profoundly important is Aaron Sorkin’s masterpiece The Social Network (2011). The film, which charts the early years of Facebook, inspired a generation of young men and a few women to adopt the aesthetics of ‘Tech’, which Sorkin created through the character of Mark Zuckerberg as played by Jesse Eisenberg.

If you want to understand why the people in and around ‘Looking for Growth’ make a point of dressing badly and being performatively autistic, you must understand that The Social Network came out when they were still at university. They could not replicate the other assets that made the real life Mark Zuckerberg successful - his coding ability, and the fact that he was a student at Harvard. But they can wear a hoody and talk about the need to ‘move fast and break things’, even if that takes the practical form of picking up litter on behalf of the local council. CF Dominic Cummings, a humanities bluffer turned Steve Hsu enthusiast wearing an OpenAI t-shirt for his first day in No.10.

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On some level I will always have affection for Keir Starmer because, being a Britpopper, he is the age of my parents, their friends, and my friend’s parents. The faux chumminess, the pretence to inte…

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The first and worst of these interventions came from ‘Reform insiders’ who told the Observer that it was time to ditch Zia Yusuf and that red lines on extremism should be firmly reimposed, this is apparently taking the form of ‘personal pleas’. The article does not acknowledge that Reform began to perform marginally better after the Nowak murder and the subsequent hardening of rhetoric. It was suggested elsewhere in the article that there are ‘serious splits within the party that are going to break out at any point’. This is the corrosive rigmarole which makes running a functional government in this country impossible as every actor within a given political vehicle is professionally motivated to leak to the press to advance their own career interests. It is why Yusuf’s proposal to fill the cabinet with appointments from the House of Lords is so attractive.

I am 90% sure that one of these ‘sources’ is in fact one of Reform’s self-appointed spokespeople who is a useless post-liberal with very longstanding connections to the machinery of the Conservative Party. This person is going to be one of the locus points that the media uses to tease out ‘Reform splits’ and they will give quotes to journalists over and over again unless they are publicly excommunicated – which will, at the very least, prevent journalists from citing this individual as a ‘Reform insider’ or ‘Reform source’. More widely it is important that Reform adopt a very strong stance on this internally. The No.10 of Dominic Cummings had various strategies for preventing leaks, including seizing people’s phones and giving out different versions of documents with visible differences such that once it leaked the source could be traced and fired. Given how much more difficult it will become in government it would be wise to begin best practice now.

Another article came from Gawain Towler who wrote an article focusing on women and their reticence to vote Reform. He believes that Makerfield must be a wakeup call for Reform regarding its failure to win over women, particularly after running Kenyon despite his locker room talk vis Carol Vorderman. He points out that in the age 18-24 category support from young women is only 7%, whilst for men it is 14%. He suggests that Farage is too blokey and confrontational on television, that women aren’t as keen on deportations and Reform instead should focus on how children are being harmed by the crossings – finally that good engagement with schools, the NHS and ‘social care’ is more important than his tough press releases on immigration. I recommend reading the article in full as it also has other interesting insights (e.g how women often find ‘lady MPs’ unrelatable).

I hold no animosity to Gawain Towler who is a sovereign individual but I am sceptical in the extreme that the support of young women can be done by Farage changing his language or Reform councillors delivering on social care well. This understates that scale of contempt that young women have towards Reform and also the extent to which they have firm moral commitments to migrant rights and Palestine. All buttressed by another advantage the left has in that every single cultural institution in the English-speaking world has been taken over liberals and leftists and their values are transmitted through almost all modern celebrities like actors and musicians.

Every popular film, song and television show which has been produced in the last forty years reinforces a clear moral framework that is positive about migration and is varying degrees of sceptical about billionaires and new technologies. Often these cultural products will include characters and story arcs to stigmatise ‘populists’ and the ‘far-right’. Individuals within cultural institutions which do not hold these views either keep quiet or are purged.

The internet provided an escape from this in the 1990s by bypassing the institutions which could enforce moral control over the text which could be published in books, newspapers or in video form. AI promises to expand this revolution by allowing anybody talented enough to create studio-quality films and television without the connivance of Hollywood. Prominent streamers, most of whom are at least contemptuous of political correctness, have far more cultural sway over young people than the BBC – which is partly why Starmer is attempting to ban them. The possibilities that have arisen and are arising are only possible because of technology, which is why anybody who positions themselves against social media or AI is an enemy to progress and a friend to woke.

Most women under thirty are not choosing to avoid Reform because Farage seems too blokey with his pints of beer. A great number of them subscribe to the mainstream view that Reform is a party for racist fruitcakes and loonies as this is generally how Farage is presented to them. Others who might be somewhat sympathetic avoid it because supporting your political party carries a tremendous social penalty in their peer group, particularly amongst educated people.

There is a structural issue on the right whereby ‘young people’ market themselves as ambassadors for Gen Z and thereby have an incentive to misrepresent what most people under the age of thirty believe. It profits these individuals for them to tell the right-wing donor class what they want to hear – namely that there is some sort of nascent right-wing rebellion amongst the youth, and that by giving them enough money, or even ‘buying them a coffee’, they can help red pill more teenagers.

Of course the opposite is often true. Often the ‘young person’ receiving sponsorship from donors is in fact in their late 20s or early 30s, almost always they are a visibly strange person whose endorsement of a concept repulses their peer group. The real audience for the YouTube videos and Substacks that these people produce is mostly middle aged men who want to believe that there are sensible young people who also find Andrew Doyle funny and don’t go in for gender woo woo.

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In 2019, in Makerfield, Labour won 45.1% of the vote with the Conservatives winning 34.4%. In 2026, Labour have won 55% of the vote, while Reform have won 34.49% of the vote. Labour have won a superlative victory in one of their safest seats with a famous candidate, with the option to choose the new Prime Minister on the ballot, and Reform are performing at around the level of prime Boris in a Northern seat while being thrashed by the press and various campaigning organisations while running a weak candidate with a spotty personal history.

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The conclusion from this result should be that Reform is still performing incredibly well, and is the only plausible national party on the right of British politics. Reform began to suffer a dip in the polls from around September of 2025, falling from a high watermark of 34% in July of last year (FindOutNow 9-10 Jul) to the mid 20s in March (e.g FindOutNow 22-23 Apr). Reform appear to have recovered from this nadir and are now polling nationally in the high twenties and are occasionally cresting 30%.

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