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It’s hard to hold anyone responsible for anything today in British politics. That’s because no sooner have the facts emerged than everybody in Westminster has played another game of musical chairs. If the word ‘amusing’ can be used in the same paragraph as ‘attempted beheading’ allow me one amusing example. Last month, a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan allegedly attempted to behead a local man on the streets of Belfast. The attack was apparently caught on video. Everyone was geared up to make their points. The left was preparing to argue ‘So you’re saying all asylum seekers are beheaders, are you?’, while the right was gearing up to say: ‘We must hold people accountable.

Every time I begin to see Kemi Badenoch as a plausible leader not of the Conservative party alone, but of the whole nation, something crops up to spoil it. Don’t misunderstand me. She’s now an imaginable prime minister. Badenoch is beginning to impress not only old has-beens like me, who always wanted to admire her – though at first we struggled – but also a news media that had tended to dismiss the possibility of a strong Tory challenge. Many who weren’t fans can’t but notice a leader growing into the job. Opinion polling backs that up. While Badenoch speaks well and has been writing impressively for newspapers like my own, the emerging regard for her capabilities is so far owed mostly to her performance at Prime Minister’s Questions.

A brass fanfare; a wide establishing shot of five men in three-piece suits, seated in a library of leather-bound tomes – this is Harold Macmillan doing informal. The scene is from a 1959 party political broadcast, which purports to show a ‘relaxed chat’ between Macmillan and four of his ministers, all of whom he refers to by their cabinet titles. Almost everything about it is artificial (including quite possibly the claim that it took place the day after the parliamentary recess). Watching it now is a reminder of two things, perhaps contradictory. First, that prime ministers have always played a clever and not entirely authentic game when it comes to informality; second, how far we’ve fallen. Can you imagine the equivalent today?

A stray thought of my own while watching Iranian drones tracing fiery paths over the Gulf, a stray quote from Ukraine and the background rumble of uncertainty about Britain’s Defence Investment Plan, have set my mind racing. My conclusion is at the same time obvious yet unnerving. As a European power, we have been watching the Ukraine war from almost the front row, but it has seemed a world away. Nightly on television we’ve seen Russian and Ukrainian attack drones streaking through the sky, half-reminiscent of a grisly firework display. From our armchairs we’ve read about how this conflict is turning into a competition between drone capabilities.

There were many reasons why 2016 was a strange year. One of them was the halfhearted effort by people on both sides of the Atlantic to try to understand why voters had voted the ‘wrong’ way in the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. The book that was touted as an explainer for all of this was Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by someone called J.D. Vance about his upbringing in rural Ohio. After the election of Donald Trump, Vance’s description of family breakdown, de-industrialisation, poverty and drug abuse was said to explain why so many Americans had voted for Trump. There was much that was patronising about all this – mirrored in France by the attention paid to Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims.