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Rebel with a cause: The David Hockney I knew
For six years, in the 1990s, I was David Hockney’s ex-pat English next-door neighbour in the Hollywood Hills. A rickety blue fence divided us as well as 18 years. I spent Christmas with him one year at his cottage in Malibu, me and twenty other men eating BBQ turkey in shorts and Speedos. We got to know each other pretty well, having some memorable adventures together in LA as mischief-making Brits who regarded the city as something of a playground. Neither of us took the Californian authorities especially seriously.
Hockney was certainly a rebel at heart. It came as little surprise when I later found out David was a Eurosceptic
My first thought on hearing of his death in London this week, aged 88, other than sadness at the loss of a friend, was not only that Britain had lost its “greatest living artist”. But two other points are worth making. David, perhaps more than any other artist, helped create the splashy pool-side dreamscape idea of Los Angeles as the new “Promised Land” in the world’s global consciousness.
He liked to say that when he arrived in the sixties, he set out to become not a fleeting pop artist but an artist – like Canaletto in Venice, or Caravaggio in Rome – who captured Southern California’s suburban zeitgeist, its long afternoon shadows and its sexual spirit of place. He once said that when he arrived in the 1960s, he thought: “My God, this place needs its Piranesi. So here I am!”.
Hockney’s death also brings down the final curtain on the original cast members who were seduced by the post-war Californian Dream with its swimming pools, azure skies, palm trees, tanned bodies, and the promise of class, hedonism and sexual freedom, (before Aids) that had first lured so many to the US West Coast since the 1960s.
For a few decades, LA became like Paris or Berlin for European artist exiles like Christopher Isherwood, screenwriter Billy Wilder, comedian Billy Connolly (another neighbour), or English boulvardier restaurateur and art collector Peter Langan – for whom David drew art works for his restaurant. As Martin Amis’s narrator of Money, published in 1984, put it on first landing at LA’s airport: “California, land of my dreams and my longing.”
That California chapter is over. By the 1990s, LA’s ranks of ex-pat escapees included displaced British artists, aristos, screenwriters, singers, actors, Mid-Atlantic producers, Vons, Hons, pool party lizards, and other social fugitives – including many bohemian and creative gays, who craved escape from the stuffy, restricted, class fettered old-establishment world of London and Europe. Unlike old European types, this new Mid-Atlantic creative breed – often shuttling first class from LA/New York to London – travelled for the demands of their high-flying jobs.
This was the very opposite of David Hockney whose motivation to fly to California was driven by more carnal rather than career demands. He told me that a major reason for first moving to California in the 1960s was reading John Rechy’s 1963 gay hustler novel City of the Night which describes – in graphic detail – the sexual adventures of a gay hustler operating out of Downtown LA. He especially enjoyed a notorious gay bar in West Hollywood called the Red Raven, certainly not the type of place you’d find in Bridlington.
David used to talk of him being an “English Los Angelino” and he was definitely never a Mid-Atlantic Man, or Mid-Atlantic Artist. He always proudly kept his Yorkshire accent. This was because his art was an extension of himself and he never had any doubts about who he was as an artist, nor his talent for that matter (although he was always modest and would introduce himself at dinner saying “I’m David Hockney”). He once told his close artist friend RJ Kitaj: “I’ve got Bradford; they’ll never take that from me”.
The difference between David Hockney, and say, David Frost, who also came out to America in the 1960s, was that Hockney wasn’t especially interested in money, fame, social mobility, or changing his class or status. He was always utterly down to earth and he never liked fancy power restaurants or A list Hollywood parties. He preferred to be at home, working in his huge studio close to his pool, and cuddling with his beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Boogie.
The other thing that made David different to most other ex-pat Brits in LA I knew, or at least those that I partied and hung out with as the Times’s young, twentysomething West Coast Correspondent – sharing a house next to David with Elizabeth Hurley for a while – was that David was only really obsessed with one thing: his work. He was an artist workaholic. I remember he was quite seriously ill for a while with a heart condition and his doctor had advised him to rest up. But he still used to “crawl into the studio” every day.
He lived for his art, his loves and his close friendships. He would occasionally go out for dinner with friends, and was generous in showing people around his studio, especially when he was working on the sets for various LA operas like Tristan and Isolde for the LA Opera. He kept a drinks fridge in his studio and would offer guests a cold glass of a good California Napa but he was never much of a drinker.
Smoking, however, was another subject all together. David liked to smoke and one of the reasons he left LA was because he couldn’t stand the ever-increasing nanny state of California telling people what to do health-wise. It came as no surprise to me that, towards the end of his life, David “came out” as being “bored of wellness” and launched an attack on this modern cult, describing it as “bossy” and “ridiculous”.
Part of the reason he moved back to East Yorkshire for around eight years circa 2005 was that he loathed what he called the “health police” in LA, especially in regards to smoking laws (despite his having a California Medical Marijuana Verification Card which allows him to buy cannabis). David used to actively enjoy taking on the smoking authorities. When writer Auberon Waugh, whose daughter Daisy was living in LA at the time, came to his studio for a visit, David soon found out that Bron was as keen as smoking as David (usually Camel).
Eying up the Californian wine in David’s studio fridge, Bron asked him more about his cellar than his paintings. We then went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, which ended in us all being thrown out onto the street, with the threat of the police being called, when Bron and David both lit up and then refused to put the cigarettes out when challenged by the enraged maître d’. David found this sort of thing funny. He was certainly a rebel at heart. It came as little surprise when I later found out David was a Eurosceptic.
As neighbours, neither David or myself exactly lived in houses that fitted the usual LA healthy lifestyle retreat. Our little enclave was an ‘anti-wellness’ oasis. Cannabis and driving were not incompatible. He loved lighting up before taking me on his ‘opera trip’ of the Santa Monica Mountains – driving through Malibu Canyon – with Wagner played at near deafening volume from his convertible (David’s hearing was never good) while we enjoyed the sweeping canyon vistas in a cloud of his home-made rollie. I will play some loud Wagner and toast him.
The MoD wanted more money. Does it deserve it?
John Healey, the former defence secretary, resigned on Thursday because the government wouldn’t give defence more money. Experts, military chiefs, and even Keir Starmer have stated that defence is the priority, so what went wrong?
Good defence spending prevents war, because it makes an adversary think twice about attacking you. In a perfect scenario, the guns and missiles are never fired, because the cost of war is greater than the cost of deterrence: Ukraine is spending half of its GDP and losing thousands of lives because Putin thought he could win.
But that money needs to come from somewhere, which is a difficult argument to win: we never see the wars we don’t fight, but we do see the potholes that aren’t filled or the taxes on our payslips. That’s why the former chancellor Phillip Hammond once said ‘there’s no votes in defence’.
The UK has already lost a year of preparation since the SDR was released
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was supposed to tell us what the military needs and the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was supposed to fund it. Twelve months later, the DIP still hasn’t been published, leaving the defence industry (particularly innovative start-ups) in limbo and costing the military another lost year of preparation.
The SDR feels like a wish list of everything the military wants (fighter jets, submarines, a corps-size strategic reserve, drones, munitions), with few trade-offs or options, like global power projection versus homeland defence, or sea power versus land power. Healey backed that position, but it seems that the draft DIP contained half the money that the SDR required. In his resignation letter, Healey blamed Starmer for failing to get more money from the Treasury or other departments, forcing the former defence secretary ‘to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces… and could make the country less safe’. Now the DIP has been delayed again.
British defence has a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency: we already spend 30 per cent more on defence than France for a smaller, less ready, less-capable military. The Ministry of Defence (MoD), meanwhile, keeps ‘discovering’ budgetary blackholes of several billion pounds. To justify more money, political and military leaders will have to explain what’s gone wrong and what will change, which starts with acknowledging past mistakes.
The Royal Navy built its strategy around two aircraft carriers, believing that the government would give them more money for other ships. But contracting failures and fundamental redesigns doubled their cost, leaving the navy without the money for the escort ships and sailors to go with them.
Army procurement is just as bad. The Ajax vehicle is over-budget and ten years late, as is Boxer (a vehicle programme that the UK joined, quit, then re-joined at an increased cost). The army’s lead war-fighting formation was transitioning from Warrior to Boxer until a delivery delay forced a switch to Ares, which wasn’t designed for that role. Nobody knows how this will work, forcing the army into a bodged solution that upends planning, training, doctrine and logistics.
Planners can’t anticipate every risk or redundancy, but the long delay between starting a programme and getting it operational (20 years for Boxer, 23 for the aircraft carriers, and over 30 for Ajax) shortens every capability’s lifespan. The cause is military chiefs fiddling with designs mid-programme, and a perverse Treasury accounting system that structurally encourages delays. Both inflate costs.
Revelations of abuse, harassment, bullying and incompetence have further damaged faith in the military, whilst Iraq and Afghanistan were strategic failures that cost hundreds of lives and consumed 20 years of energy and money that could have been spent on modernising. People are also justifiably wary of politicians talking up threats to national security, given the falsehoods and failures used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
These failures are the fault of successive governments and service chiefs, the MoD and the Treasury, but they have made it harder to argue for the tax rises or cuts that are needed now. To win that argument, political and military leaders need to change the story.
First, remind the public that deterrence works: the Cold War stayed cold because Nato deterred Russia until the Soviet Union collapsed. We won the peace through spending on defence. When deterrence fails (as in 1939), the costs in lives and living standards are enormous.
Then the government needs to talk about what’s going well. Special Forces conduct remarkable operations every day and RAF aircraft are integral to Nato air and naval missions. The Challenger 3 tank upgrade was on time and on budget. Ukraine has shown that mass can be generated by machines as well as humans, and the UK start-up defence industry is a leader in this field.
Finally, leaders can improve the standing and credibility of the military by making it a more appealing employer. They could grow both recruitment and retention by improving housing and scheduling and creating unique benefits, like lower interest-rate mortgages in return for long operational tours.
The UK has already lost a year of preparation since the SDR was released. Security of the realm is the first duty of government, so winning the arguments is a matter of leadership and integrity. There might be a political cost but, with good storytelling, there may be some votes in defence yet.
The Muslim Council of Britain is losing relevance
It’s nearly time for the Muslim Council of Britain’s annual general meeting, where its new leadership will be elected. Alas, almost no-one wants to stand for, or even vote for, the positions.
The MCB secretary-general, Wajid Akhter, bemoans that nobody will stand to take over from him: ‘If I am candid, my preference would be for fresh and youth [sic] leadership now… Unfortunately, the curse of incumbency and other factors have meant that there are likely no other candidates standing even though many better than myself are there.’ With nominations now closed, this is indeed the case.
The MCB has also had to ‘extend the deadline for delegate registration’ at the AGM ‘in the hopes of registering more delegates’. And to further drum up attendance, or share the cost of the room booking, the MCB has combined the AGM with a ‘Muslim mental health conference’ held earlier the same day in the same place. I can, of course, quite understand why the state of the MCB should make its members – if not the rest of us – depressed.
There are two candidates for Akhter’s deputy. But one of them, Lamine Konate, admits: ‘Many Muslim communities in the North perceive the MCB as a largely London-centric organisation with limited understanding of their local concerns and realities.’
In further outbreaks of truth-telling, Akhter confesses he hasn’t done a very good job at building the organisation: ‘I underestimated how long structural change takes in a 500-affiliate body built on consensus. I moved too slowly on some fronts and too quickly on others. Communications have been inconsistent. I have not yet built the volunteer pipeline I promised – the “dream team” is still half-assembled.’
Given Akhter’s views, this is probably just as well. As I revealed for Policy Exchange last year, he believes that to be a Muslim today is an ‘act of revolutionary defiance, standing at odds with the prevailing culture in many ways.’ In the same 2022 article, Akhter wrote that British Muslims should raise their children primarily as Muslim, rather than as British.
In 2012, he attacked New Year celebrations as ‘pagan’ and usually involving ‘un-Islamic practices’ such as ‘mixed gender events where people wear fashionable clothes, dance and sing songs’. Any Muslim participating, he scolded, was taking ‘the first step on a slippery slope… to disappearing within the dominant culture.’ The Policy Exchange report, with a long catalogue of Akhter’s other commitments to tolerance and inclusivity, is here.
The MCB has long been boycotted by both Labour and Tory governments because of views like this. It’s often forgotten that it opposed a government ban on al-Qaeda, declaring that armed struggle was a way for some people to ‘claim their rights’. That was before 9/11, though after al-Qaeda had already perpetrated three mass-casualty attacks, killing hundreds. Later, it also opposed a ban on al-Muhajiroun, which was linked to just under a quarter of all Islamist terrorist attacks in Britain and whose leader, Anjem Choudary, is now serving life for directing a terror organisation. The MCB has denounced Choudary.
The meagre response to the MCB’s elections also illustrates the other reason why it would not be sensible for the government to restart engagement with the organisation. The MCB simply does not represent British Muslims, either in its views or in its membership. It claims to have ‘over 500’ member organisations, itself perhaps only an eighth of the number of mosques and Muslim civil society bodies in Britain, but even this number is suspect. Each member has one vote in its leadership elections. At the last election where figures were given, in 2021 (which was online and easy to take part in), only 167 votes were cast.
The MCB simply does not represent British Muslims
The MCB has not published a full list of its members since October 2018, when it claimed 20 national affiliates, 12 regional affiliates and 413 local affiliates – a total of 445. But there was significant overlap between these. One organisation alone, the UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), a British associate of the Pakistani Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, accounted for 29 members, one national affiliation and 28 local branches. The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), a British associate of the Bangladeshi version of Jamaat-e-Islami, accounted for 15 members. Many other organisations had multiple memberships. Other nominally separate members, including many mosques, are controlled by the IFE (now renamed the Muslim Community Association) or UKIM and have or have had the same or closely overlapping leadership as the local branch of that organisation.
So the Labour MPs calling for re-engagement with the MCB, or attending its events and hoping nobody will notice, are, not for the first time, barking up the wrong tree.
Why are we still seduced by wealth?
Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed.
Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term ‘plutography’, to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-colour insight into how the other half lived. The New York Times somewhat downplayed the meaning behind Wolfe’s coinage, no pun intended, describing it as capturing a demand for writing about the lifestyles of the much, much better off. Rather Wolfe’s ‘plutography’, of course, was more a deliberate play on ‘pornography’, with all that suggests of our baser natures, our compulsions.
He described it as the ‘graphic depiction of the acts of the rich’, the true motivation to titillate hidden by an ostensible desire to educate readers on design or antiques or fine food. He argued that the restraint of the 1960s and 1970s – when it would have been considered bad taste to flaunt your wealth – had broken down. ‘Greed is good’, as the 1980s had it. And we’ve been on a downward slope ever since, both in terms of the readiness of the rich to flaunt it – see John Caudwell’s recently unveiled £250,000 statue of himself – and in our obsession with it.
Research repeatedly affirms the adage that money doesn’t buy you happiness; a lesson some of us finally come to understand as we grow older. But that’s not the prevailing tenor of our times. Rather it’s the contradictions of calls to tax the rich while simultaneously salivating over their excesses; a desire to punish them for their good fortune – or bad, depending on your politics – while aspiring to live just like them. We celebrate as we denigrate.
Yet the iconography of their wealth, as predictable and pedestrian as much of it is (money doesn’t buy you happiness, nor much originality it seems) is everywhere and inescapable. Millionaires are two-a-penny. A billion used to be an incomprehensible sum. Now – whether it’s about some Silicon Valley whizz kid or government spending on debt interest – it’s bandied about as though it’s chump change.
Apple TV’s current hit series Your Friends & Neighbours perfectly encapsulates this double bind. We might watch its story of an ex-financier who starts burgling his neighbours’ homes, safe in the knowledge they have too much stuff to even notice when a six-figure trinket has disappeared – yeah, stick it to the monied man! But we’re also watching it precisely to wallow in the cavernous houses, cashmere blazers and country club living. Ditto Succession, The White Lotus, Billions. We’re a long way from kitchen sink drama these days, unless your sink is made of Carrara marble.
There was a time when our sense of material satisfaction was measured against our peers. As long as your friend or neighbour didn’t suddenly buy a new Porsche while you made do with the jalopy, that sense of your place in the world of money could maintain a calm, wilfully blind status quo. But today’s media invites us to have new peers, all around the world. Now we all live in Dubai, at least mentally.
One study last year suggests the average Brit now believes that they need over £3m in the bank to consider themselves wealthy
In this atmosphere it’s no wonder that, worryingly, schoolchildren increasingly aspire to jobs not of social value, or that satisfy at any deeper level, but those that pay big and pay quickly – the YouTube star has become the archetype – with little appreciation for the role in this very narrow definition of success of either sheer talent or dumb luck. They are equally rare.
Yet if we adults check our own mammongrams it’s easy to see how we too are easily tinged with the cancer of chasing ever more extreme affluence, even as so many of us already lead lives markedly richer than those of our forebears. One study last year suggests the average Brit now believes that they need over £3 million in the bank to consider themselves wealthy, with those in London needing £6 million.
It’s easy to understand why this might not just be avariciousness, nor a hyper-sensitivity to the wealth gap, as skewed as that is by the enormous wealth of the 0.1 per cent. With wars real and cultural, climate hysteria, an economic doom-loop, rocketing prices and the coming jobs AImageddon, it feels like we live in times of perma-crisis over which we have very little control. But somehow not for the wealthy. They appear to have achieved escape velocity from an unpredictable and unruly system that seems forever on the precipice.
That’s an illusion, of course. Maybe. But, if nothing else, how much more comfortable to go down in opulent style, sipping a martini on a sundeck, wearing one of those big fluffy robes and surrounded by so much terribly expensive stuff.
Is Britain still Great?
London, one of John Le Carre’s characters reflects in The Night Manager, is ‘the land of make-believe power’. These lines were written in 1993, a year when the British economy was in dollar terms larger than that of India and the People’s Republic of China combined. What Le Carre would have made of Britain today, long since overtaken economically by China, and grappling with a host of problems at home and abroad, does not bear thinking about.
Pessimism about the United Kingdom’s position in the world has a long pedigree
Pessimism about the United Kingdom’s position in the world has a very long pedigree. In 1897, at what appeared the high point of the British Empire, the ‘bard of empire’, Rudyard Kipling, penned ‘Recessional’ to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. He warned that ‘far-called our navies melt away’, and that soon the ‘pomp’ of the empire would be no more than the defunct civilisations of ‘Nineveh and Tyre’. A few years later, the secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, lamented that ‘the weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of his fate’. These voices swelled after the Second World War and the onset of decolonisation, and reached a crescendo immediately following the Brexit referendum in 2016.
The critics had a point: Britain has indeed lost considerable ground since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of its navy has actually melted away, as the recent fiasco around the deployment of HMS Dragon to Cyprus demonstrated. Despite this, the United Kingdom still acts as one of the few Great Powers today, as a mainstay of the Western alliance with a global presence, and as the first line of defence against Russia in the Baltic and High North. It does so on the basis of its considerable resources, reach, reputation and resilience, especially when viewed in comparative terms.
Today, Britain remains the fifth largest economy in the world and until a few years ago it had long had the third largest peacetime defence expenditure. The Royal Navy is now only the eighth largest by tonnage, but it is still widely regarded as among the top two or three most powerful fleets in the world, and in its two new aircraft carriers boasts a capability which is exceeded only by the United States, though China is gaining rapidly. Britain is also one of the few countries with a substantial ‘heavy lift’ capacity, meaning that UK forces can be deployed quickly across the world. Moreover, unlike many other contenders, the UK armed forces have extensive recent combat experience.
Underpinning the United Kingdom’s conventional capabilities is the British nuclear deterrent, which consists of 225 warheads, a number set to increase. This rests on four submarines, one of which is always at sea. The current Vanguard fleet is due to be replaced by the new Dreadnought-class submarine in the early 2030s. The decision to deploy the deterrent, which is assigned to the defence of Nato allies, lies solely with the prime minister. The targeting of the weapons is also entirely independent and does not rely on American assistance. Beyond this, the UK intelligence services are the second-most significant in the world.
When it comes to reach, that of the United Kingdom is second only to that of America. There are British bases in Gibraltar, Cyprus, the Falklands and there are also British overseas territories in the Caribbean and Pacific. Until recently, this reach was supplemented by a huge overseas aid budget, formerly the third biggest in the world. In the World Bank, the United Kingdom, along with France, has the fourth largest voting power, after that of the United States, Japan, and Germany.
Britain’s great power status is also widely recognised. The United Kingdom is generally regarded as the most significant and reliable European military actor behind the United States. For example, when Finland and Sweden applied to join Nato in May 2022, it was from the United Kingdom that the two countries requested and received a bilateral security guarantee for the period between application and actual membership in the alliance. Moreover, it was striking that when President Zelensky of Ukraine visited European capitals in February 2023, he went to London before visiting Brussels and the EU member-state capitals. This was in recognition of the United Kingdom’s major role in supporting Kiev at the start of the conflict. In Moscow, by contrast, the UK is regarded as the biggest European threat, and its intelligence services are feared at least as much as those of the Americans.
Britain also enjoys a high standing in democratic East Asia, partly as a result of its military commitments to the region, but mainly because of the widespread perception that London has been leading the European effort to contain Russian aggression. A victory for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, it is felt in Tokyo, Canberra, and Taipei, would embolden China’s president Xi Jinping to attack Taiwan or to ramp up the pressure in the South China Sea. The United States is still the main point of reference, of course, but Japan strongly welcomed the dispatch of the carrier strike force in 2021. Contrary to a widespread view, the Royal Navy, when deployed, makes a substantial difference to the maritime balance of power in the region.
Finally, the United Kingdom has demonstrated exceptional resilience as a Great Power. It enjoys the longest continuous statehood of all the major actors, going back at least to the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707, but arguably to the origins of England itself. It has lost wars and empires, but it always bounced back. It has a long record of success in the conflicts it has faced, including against Bourbon France, Napoleon, Imperial Germany, Hitler, and the Soviet Union.
The United Kingdom is still one of the four or five leading global powers – a force always to be reckoned with. For hundreds of years, Britain has coped with whatever the international system has thrown at it and if the necessary political leadership can be found it will continue to do so.
How London became Poland’s second capital
When Keir Starmer and Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk met at RAF Northolt to sign a Polish-British security and defence treaty, the choice of place was more than ceremonial. Northolt is not just a London airfield. For Poles, it belongs to the moral geography of the Second World War: Polish pilots, the Battle of Britain, exile, service, sacrifice and unfinished history. A treaty about the future of European security was being signed in a place dense with Polish memory.
London was not merely a refuge; for a time, it was a temporary Polish capital
That moment, at the end of last month, captured something essential about London’s place in Polish life. For generations, Poles have sometimes thought of London as the other Polish capital – not constitutionally, but because history made it so. Here exile acquired institutions, archives, newspapers, schools, churches and rituals of statehood. In moments of danger and displacement, London became the place where Polish history found a second address.
The city has long played host to Polish exiles and institutions – not as a mirror of Warsaw, but as something more atmospheric: a capital of the Polish imagination. It was the Warsaw of exile, memory and manuscript, of émigré presses and Saturday school dictionaries. For decades, it was where Poland went when it had nowhere else to go.
London wears this legacy lightly, as the English tend to do. But scratch the surface, and the traces are everywhere. In Kensington, Polish bookshops once flourished, cafés buzzed with exiled argument, and neighbourhoods hummed in Polish. These were not just émigrés. They were a displaced intelligentsia, convinced that a country could be kept alive in editorials, archives, sermons, schoolbooks and tea-stained manuscripts.
One of the most moving places in Polish London remains the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum. Named after General Władysław Sikorski, the wartime prime minister of the Polish government in exile, it is not simply a museum. Entering its rooms is like stepping into a state that no longer exists – except that, in some ways, it still does. Uniforms, letters, medals, maps and photographs of men who fought for a homeland they could not return to: this is history, but not merely commemoration. It remains stubbornly awake.
Britain hosted several exiled governments during the Second World War. But the Polish exile was distinctive in its duration. When the war ended, theirs did not. With Stalin’s regime entrenched in Warsaw, the Polish government in exile refused to disband. For decades it operated from London, complete with ministries, ambassadors and memoranda. London was not merely a refuge; for a time, it was a temporary Polish capital, the place from which the legal and symbolic continuity of the Republic was maintained.
The government in exile insisted that a Soviet satellite state was no legitimate heir to the Polish Republic. Only in 1990, did it hand over its insignia to Lech Wałęsa, with the quiet dignity of a government that had waited half a century for history to catch up with it.
But exile is not only about politics. It is also about life. Polish London was a city within a city: theatres, newsrooms, cafés, parishes, clubs and committees, with passions imported from Lwów and Wilno and rerouted through Hammersmith, Kensington and Ealing. Wiadomości, the émigré literary weekly, offered readers not just reviews and essays but continuity. A country could survive not only through armies and treaties, but also through syntax, memory and argument.
Today, that legacy is not merely archival. In 2026, Polish London is still visibly alive: in the crowded calendar of POSK in Hammersmith; in parishes, Saturday schools, book launches, debates and family gatherings that turn parts of west London, at least for an afternoon, into something remarkably Polish.
The old émigré London has not disappeared. It has been joined by a newer London of post-2004 migrants, bilingual children, entrepreneurs, students, academics, builders, bankers, artists, nurses and soldiers’ families – less melancholy than the world of exile, but no less important. POSK still hosts plays, concerts, lectures and exhibitions. The Sikorski Museum remains a sanctuary of memory.
The Saturday schools, more than a hundred of them across the United Kingdom, continue to teach the language and history that the wartime exiles feared might be lost. The Polish Catholic Mission in England and Wales, founded in the nineteenth century, has also helped sustain language, tradition and belonging.
Census data for England and Wales tells its own story. Polish remains the most common main language after English or Welsh: more than 600,000 people declared it as their main language in 2021. What began as wartime refuge, then became intellectual resistance, has settled into something more permanent: community.
Some old landmarks have faded. The bookshops are fewer. The émigré journals have ceased publication. Many voices that once defined Polish London – wartime officers, editors, poets, professors, priests, tireless committee members – are now part of history. But the spirit remains. In cafés of west London, one still hears arguments about history, delivered with that unmistakably Polish mixture of erudition and vehemence.
The signing of the new Polish-British treaty at Northolt was therefore not merely an episode in contemporary diplomacy. It reminded us that Polish-British relations have always drawn strength from memory as well as strategy. Northolt linked the pilots of 1940 with the security dilemmas of 2026; the war against Nazi Germany with the defence of Europe against Russian aggression; the old alliance of necessity with a new partnership of choice.
London was never simply another foreign city in Polish history. It became the other Polish capital: a city of exile, memory and persistence. For a time, in the most literal political sense available to a country deprived of sovereignty, it was also a temporary Polish capital. It was a place where a nation without a country managed, with remarkable stubbornness, to carry on.
And it remains a place where Poland continues to speak, pray, argue, remember, celebrate and imagine itself. London is rainy, stubborn, hospitable, reticent, half in love with the past and yet always being remade by those who arrive in it. Perhaps that is why Poles have recognised something of themselves here. Not a second Warsaw. Not a substitute homeland. But another Polish capital all the same.
This essay is a revised version of a chapter originally published in Piotr Wilczek’s new book, Entwined Histories: Essays on Poland, Britain, and Cultural Memory
Kim Kardashian deserves better than Lewis Hamilton
I’ve always been keen on Kim Kardashian, going right back to the earliest years of her family reality show. At one point in an over-excited piece for the Sun, I even compared her to Helen of Troy – a modern day icon of beauty whose bum launched a thousand quips.
Hamilton has a long history of acting like both a princeling and a drag queen in terms of entitlement and drama, while also liking to present himself as the underdog
But my word, she can pick them. Starting with Ray J, who appears to have been talking about little else since 2007 but the sex-tape they made as youngsters in 2003. Then there was most famously Kanye West. And now she’s taken up with the ghastly Lewis Hamilton – probably the most ludicrously virtue-signalling sportsman on the planet, with the exception of course of Gary Lineker.
Until 2020, I had nothing against Hamilton. He’s handsome and rich, always good things in a chap, and has obviously achieved something in Formula One. Regrettably, his myth-making – which some might call self-pity – started early. He was born in Stevenage, which obviously one wouldn’t wish on anyone, but in 2018 he got into a bit of hot water when he said, ‘It really was a dream for us all as a family to do something different. For us to get out of the slums… well, not the slums, but to get out of somewhere and do something.’ Hamilton’s dad was an IT manager who took voluntarily redundancy to manage his son’s talent, while Hamilton himself completed his education at Cambridge Arts and Sciences, a private sixth-form college.
Understandably, Stevenage Borough Council leader Sharon Taylor said: ‘It is disappointing that Lewis Hamilton referred to Stevenage as “the slums” at such a high-profile event. He clearly realised what he had said and tried to correct it but sadly the people of our town, many of whom admire and support him, felt very offended.’
He was shown up even more by the Team England para-badminton player Gobi Ranganathan who countered robustly: ‘I for one am proud to fly the flag for Stevenage. It’s made me who I am today. It’s not perfect, but it’s home. And it has a lot to offer if people just open their eyes.’
Not for the first time would Hamilton want to have his Fougasse Monegasque (the national pastry of Monaco, where he is resident) and eat it. He has a long history of acting like both a princeling and a drag queen in terms of entitlement and drama while also liking to present himself as the underdog. (He accused Max Verstappen of ‘dangerous driving’ in 2021; dressed down the Mercedes crew in public after losing in 2022; and turned on his long-time friend Nico Rosberg during the 2014 season.)
On the other hand, there’s no doubt that Hamilton has experienced terrible racism, though far less so in Britain than from Spanish fans, especially at the Circuit de Catalunya when some dressed up in blackface and Afro wigs and carried banners claiming to be ‘Hamilton’s Family.’
These two strands – extremely privileged man with things to feel justifiably sad about – came to a head in 2020 when Hamilton (and his dog) went out on a boat somewhere gorgeous and shared the following thoughts online: ‘Took the day off on Tuesday, a day for myself and no phone, no training, just me and Roscoe on the water. I had time to reflect on where we are in the world today, every day I see something upsetting happening, people being abused, people suffering, volcanoes erupting, explosions, oceans and forest’s [sic] being destroyed. 2020 is such a heavy year. But it gives me hope seeing people come together, fighting for justice…cleaning up oceans and just generally doing more for our planet…I’m sending you all positive waves.’
It’s true that Hamilton sold his private jet in 2019 as part of his plan to save the earth. His candy-apple-red Bombardier Challenger cost £16.5 million, which according to the Paradise Papers he swerved paying £3.3 million VAT on in 2013 (his lawyers at the time said a tax barrister review found the structure was lawful and it was incorrect to say no VAT had been paid on any of the arrangements). Luckily, he can still afford to charter them – and what would life be without a bit of partying on super-yachts, notorious for being super-polluters. A 2024 report by Oxfam states that ‘The carbon footprint of a super-rich European, accumulated from nearly a week of using super yachts and private jets, matches the lifetime carbon footprint of someone in the world’s poorest 1 per cent.’
Hamilton is believed to earn a basic salary of around £48 million driving for Ferrari, but far more when his sponsorships deals are added; his net worth is believed to be over £400 million. However, he appears to have a beef with the billionaire community, according to a podcast in 2023. In it he opines glumly that the wealth disparity is something ‘I struggle with every day.’ (The way I ‘struggle’ with eating a baked Camembert, I’d wager, judging from the lovely lifestyle he lives with justifiable relish.)
He added that ‘You shouldn’t be able to have billions… I think there should be a limit to how much you can have because there’s enough to go around for everyone.’
This isn’t just the usual tone-deaf blathering of an ultra-privileged man bitching at those with even more toys; this is a man dating a woman who is very much a billionaire, perhaps even twice over in American money. We certainly won’t be hearing KK taking a poke at trillionaires any time soon.
Perhaps this is the difference between the ways our two nations treat money. Americans glory in being rich, while many rich Britons pretend they’re not. Most rich Americans stay in the land of their birth and pay their taxes; many rich Britons move abroad and evade theirs. One online commentator said that Hamilton has ‘literally structured his life to pay as little tax as possible’. And indeed, by living first in Switzerland and then Monaco he has certainly paid much less tax than if he lived in Britain – though in 2015 he told the Sunday Times magazine that he still paid tax in the UK on money earned here.
It’s at this point that my partiality becomes a little hazy; I wouldn’t want to give a quarter of my income to some useless government to fritter away, either. And as a sportsman, he can’t be said to have signed on to some rebel creed which makes the sight of rock stars upping sticks to avoid tax so amusing. The difference is that I have never heard a pop star calling for a wealth cap.
To give Hamilton credit, he’s not as annoying as those British MPs who back a wealth tax, which is always conveniently estimated as above their own worth once their nice pile in North London is taken into consideration. They often refer to their pin-ups, the monumentally irritatingly-named ‘Patriotic Millionaires’, a group founded in the USA in 2010 and spreading here in 2021. It’s the ultimate elitist club – look how loaded I am, I’m dying to give it away. To which it is hard not to reply, why not lead by example? Still, I do believe that Lewis Hamilton should give it a go; it may prove good for his soul, which does appear to be in ceaseless turmoil despite his achievements. He could turn himself from a multi-millionaire into a decent, hard-working millionaire who has no chance of becoming a beastly billionaire.
But, paradoxically, while talking about there being enough to go around, Hamilton seems intent on signing up to even more lucrative sponsorship deals – or becoming a ‘brand ambassador’ to give it the pretentious modern title. Only last month his alliance with Perplexity AI was announced thus:
‘A collaboration that brings together the relentless pursuit of speed, precision, and curiosity. This partnership unites a world-class athlete and icon with a platform built for those who never stop asking, learning, and moving forward. Lewis Hamilton is not just a Seven-Time Formula One World Champion – he’s a symbol of focus, intention, and constant evolution. Lewis says, “Whether it’s in sport or life, you can never stop asking questions. The best never stop learning. Curiosity is fuel, and that’s why I like using Perplexity.” On and off the track, Lewis leads by example: always growing, always pushing, always questioning what’s possible. At Perplexity, we build for people like Lewis – those who seek clarity in a noisy world.’
As confused fans have wondered, how can a man bent on saving the planet one plant-based breakfast at a time form an alliance with an organisation which will use up vast natural resources? But look at that name: ‘perplexity’. Should we expect logical thinking from sportsmen, magnificent specimens that they are? We wouldn’t expect a great thinker to be a great athlete. Maybe the only conclusion to draw is that handsome is as handsome does – and ponder that while Lewis Hamilton’s girlfriend may have the most famous bottom in the world, his is even more remarkable. Because he can talk out of his.
My Memorial Day pilgrimage to a Pennsylvania Walmart
Here in the US, Memorial Day – which falls on the last Monday in May – is, officially, an occasion for mourning and honoring military personnel who have given their lives in service to this great country. Unofficially, it is an occasion for charred hot dogs, 24-packs of Bud Light and nationalistic merchandising usually confined to airport gift shops. In our household, however, Memorial Day marks something different entirely. It’s the day we make our annual pilgrimage into the heart of consumer capitalism: a Walmart in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
By now you might know that I live in Manhattan. You might, therefore, be wondering why exactly we’ve adopted this strange ritual, necessarily involving a rental car and gridlocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Rather than explaining myself, though, a better use of these column inches is to tell you about the experience of setting foot inside this sacred big-box arena and, indeed, about the rich anthropological – and educational – experience it can become if properly embraced and surrendered to.
The first lesson is a political one. It starts with a steamy carpark full of Hondas and Toyotas and the occasional Chevrolet Silverado, adorned with peeling bumper stickers that run the gamut from “Feel the Bern” to “Hillary for Prison.” More than just displays of automotive taste in the Steel Belt state, we’re provided an intimate glance into the lives and loyalties of those who live here. Not convinced that this country is as polarized as some headlines suggest? Spend 20 minutes here. You’ll change your mind.
Next, we walk into the mercifully air-conditioned store and an education in marketing and consumer psychology begins. Immediately, we notice the discount contact lens solution and cut-price kitty litter. The offers are so compelling – the signage so convincing – it’s all simply too good to refuse. Smugly, we load them into our boat-sized shopping trolley only to sheepishly remove them moments later. We haven’t worn contact lenses since 2009. And no, there’s no cat. There never will be.
As the humiliation of having been so easily manipulated subsides, another realization emerges: a lesson in self-awareness. Standing inside this enormous temple of physical commerce, we’re forced to confront how fully online our consumption habits have become. We’ve become accustomed to products being served to us with eerie precision. Search for a pair of running shoes and for the next three weeks every corner of the internet will attempt to sell you moisture-wicking athletic wear and electrolyte tablets. Mention an interest in gardening within earshot of your phone and Instagram suddenly becomes convinced you’re in the market for artisanal compost bins.
In these carefully curated digital worlds, there is at least some logic to the manipulation. The algorithm identifies a plausible version of who we already are and tries to sell us things accordingly. Walmart, by contrast, operates with a far more ambitious understanding of human psychology. Walmart doesn’t just respond to existing desires: it creates entirely new ones.
Which is where the knitting comes in. As we wander the aisles of discount patio furniture, industrial-sized condiments and novelty garden flags – as our eyes become accustomed to the aggressive fluorescent lighting, our noses stop registering the smell of rubber, detergent and faintly stale popcorn, and our ears actually start to quite enjoy the faint echoes of K-Pop emanating from distant, dusty speakers – we might happen upon the arts and crafts section.
A billowy ball of yarn evokes the fantasy of becoming the owner of a cottage in coastal Maine
We might suddenly lay our eyes on something that seems so antithetical to the digital-first reality we live by, so twee and quaint, that we can’t help but pick it up and take a closer look. It’s a set of three pairs of bamboo knitting needles – ethically sourced and sturdy, as the packaging promises. Next to them, a huge, billowy ball of yarn evokes wholesome nostalgia and the fantasy of becoming the owner of a cottage in coastal Maine.
Without engaging the rational part of our brains, we might find ourselves already at the checkout, reciprocating vapid well-wishes with the salesperson and then loading our bags full of bamboo knitting needles, pastel-colored yarn and a family-sized bag of pistachios into the back of our own Subaru Forester.
Days later, as I’ve just learned, we may well encounter the ultimate and most uncomfortable lesson: that Walmart can actually be right. Algorithms may know what we already want. But only a physical store – a sprawling fluorescent monument to impulse and possibility – can convince us that we might plausibly become someone else entirely. Contact lenses will always feel like sandpaper in my eyes. But back in New York City, I’m having a grand old time googling properties in Maine. The scarf should be ready by autumn.
How iPhones became birth control
A new study has found that smartphones are a likely cause of falling American birth rates. Economists Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper tracked the rollout of the iPhone across the country and found that the more people used smartphones, the further birth rates fell.
This was especially true for the youngest cohort of women. Between 2007 and 2011, use of the iPhone was correlated with between 33 to 52 percent of America’s fertility decline.
There’s been a lot of discussion about smartphones and falling fertility rates lately. Most arguments go something like this: smartphones and social media are linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression, less sex and less in-person socializing. My generation is distracted from what really matters and is hooked on simulations of human connection. These are decent explanations. But they are not the full story.
Social media doesn’t just distract us from having children, but completely alters how young women think about themselves. Since the rise of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, young women have grown up seeing themselves as nothing but objects in a marketplace. For young women today, life is not about living a fulfilling human existence but about optimizing ourselves for the market. We are very different from previous generations of women. We are more like products than people.
Young women have grown up seeing themselves as objects in a marketplace
When you begin to understand this, our hesitancy about having children makes sense. And that hesitancy is real. According to a 2024 Pew survey, only 20 percent of young American adults say being married is “extremely or very important” for fulfillment – and just 22 percent say the same about having children.
Older generations wonder why we wouldn’t want to do something so human, forgetting that we aren’t anymore. Instead, we are ornaments for Instagram, filtered and Facetuned. We are objects, shopped for on dating apps. We are brands, managed and monetized. The market determines the worth of our faces, our bodies, our relationships, our memories – and we spend our time tweaking ourselves to become what sells.
More than anything, young women want to look like perfect products. Not even necessarily for male attention but for popularity on Instagram and for the other women scrolling through our profiles. And products must be pristine, without defects. Pregnancy might damage our packaging. This helps to explain trends like the “Girl with the List,” a young woman who went viral after sharing a crowdsourced list of reasons not to have children, which included everything from “acne breakouts” and “stretch marks everywhere” to “your face swells up” and “your booty may go flat.”
Another popular TikToker hosts a “Free Birth Control” series for her 1.6 million followers, posting hundreds of reasons not to have kids. “Pregnancy nose is no joke,” she warns in one video, explaining how your nose, face and feet can all widen while pregnant. “Take your birth control. Take it right now.” Women in the comments reacted with horror, swearing off children entirely and declaring this “the strongest birth control ever.” So many of my generation’s decisions make sense when thought of in these terms: we want to be the best product on the market.
We also experience the world very differently from previous generations. Life is now, first and foremost, content. We put on make-up to look good for Instagram. We travel to get good TikToks. We make memories to market them online. Other people have become props for our posts; boyfriends have turned into tripods who take endless pictures of us. Beautiful scenery is nothing but a backdrop for selfies, friends are accessories to pose with. We have become so consumed by our online lives that very little exists outside them.
If you think our addiction to social media couldn’t possibly override the most natural of human instincts, think again. People risk their lives for selfies, hurt themselves with stupid “challenges” for more followers, let strangers watch the most vulnerable moments in their lives for views. Our basic biological drives can be overrun for online attention – and this is what’s happening with fertility. The pull of social media is so powerful it feels more important than the primal instinct to have children.
I don’t say this to blame young women. This is the only world we have ever known. We spent our formative and most vulnerable years on social media. We went through puberty marketing our developing bodies online, flirted for the first time through these platforms and spent our teenage years advertising ourselves on dating apps. We have been ranked and reviewed like products since we were preteens. Now our self-worth is inextricably tied to likes and followers. Our value is determined by how well we are selling. We can’t imagine our lives without an audience consuming them.
Deep down, I think we are also afraid. We are scared of being betrayed in relationships, terrified of hurt and heartbreak. It almost feels safer to become a product, to be inanimate. Better to invest more into our online profiles, something we can control and perfect, than a partner who could leave us, or a family that could fall apart.
Many of us lack the kinds of support that previous generations had. As many as half of American marriages end in divorce, meaning that many young people have no stable family to fall back on if things go wrong. Meanwhile, communal spaces have collapsed, neighbors no longer talk to each other, and religious faith has declined. We distrust other people, and the possibility that anything meaningful could last. But online, we are instantly rewarded with likes and views and followers and an immediate sense of belonging. So we follow the incentives and we focus on ourselves.
The results are clear. One in four millennials and Gen Zers has reportedly ruled out children entirely, the most common reason being “wanting time to themselves.” As if we don’t already have plenty of time to ourselves. Statistics from the United Kingdom show that the amount of time people spend socializing has fallen by two-thirds in a single generation. In the US, a 2021 Pew survey of adults found the top reason for deciding not to have children was even simpler: “I just don’t want to.”
Young women aren’t the only ones turning inward. Increasingly, young men are striving to become perfect products too. There’s the rise of “looksmaxxing,” in which men compete to give themselves the smoothest skin, sharpest jawline and most sculpted physique; some resort to steroids, cosmetic surgery and even hit their faces with hammers in the hope of improving and honing their bone structure.
Men also obsess over self-optimization by tracking sleep scores, calories and hormones, and by following perfect productivity routines – but not to become fathers. As with young women, this isn’t about becoming beautiful to attract a partner and start a family. Instead, their aim is to build a bigger online profile, for better metrics, more engagement and a higher market value.
Our self-worth is inextricably tied to likes and followers
It’s young women, however, who feel the most anxious and hopeless about the future, who are the least interested in getting married and having children.
In the US, a quarter of eighth-grade girls spend seven or more hours a day on social media. Instagram and TikTok are precision-designed to snare teenage girls, tapping into their vulnerabilities and vices during their most impressionable years. This has huge consequences not only for their happiness, but for their future relationships – and for the fate of society as a whole.
Human beings were never meant to be products. This isn’t making any of us happy. Since I published my book, I keep getting asked about the way out, about how we can go back to being people again. The most countercultural thing you can do now is be a person. Notice when you are treating yourself like an object, and decide to stop.
If we choose, again and again, to be people over products, maybe our most human instincts will come back. And maybe we will finally remember what life is really for.
Despite it all, I love the World Cup
It was nearly 9pm in the Puskas Arena. Gabriel sunk to his haunches. Red flares went up in unison in the PSG end opposite. Freed from Desire. Bedlam. The wrong kind of limbs. Arsenal fans around me collapsed against the metal railings, spent, vacant. Before leaving I made sure to gather myself, clap the players as they drifted over to thank the support. They didn’t know I was there of course, but I still applauded them in an official manner like I was a retiring Premier League veteran, taking in the adulation one last time. Knackered. If that was how I felt, I can only imagine what it must feel to have crested the wave of a 63-game season, and somehow find it within you to go again for six weeks on the biggest stage of all.
Football is increasingly a hysterical mix of romance and logistics
That was almost three weeks ago. Since then, football has been played. The Arsenal players have pieced themselves back together, boarded private jets to the States, muted social media, and alongside 1,248 colleagues, prepared themselves to be heartbroken all over again.
I don’t think there’s ever been a World Cup that has felt more exhausting. That’s before you enter nonsense cuckoo land of England coverage where every decision is wrong. We must debate the integrity of a German man being in charge of our national team. We must decide on Morgan Rogers or Jude Bellingham. Phil Foden (until recently) is the second coming of Christ, and every single player of colour in the team braces for impact for the inevitable tidal wave of racial abuse that will crash over them if they do something wrong.
I am not too proud to support England, this isn’t a political statement. An early experience of the unfairness of life was watching Wayne Rooney get baited into a red card against Portugal, Cristiano Ronaldo’s wink to the cameras. The inevitability of failure crystallised in Jamie Carragher’s rushed penalty. Gareth Southgate did something special in 2018; that was a wonderful summer.
But this England, this time, are distinctly charmless, neither favoured nor outsiders. I should love them, there are so many Arsenal players in this squad, but I don’t. If they win, will it quell some of the negativity towards my team? Perhaps momentarily.
Add to that that there are 48 teams going to this expanded World Cup, so there will be a round of 32 in the knockout stages – there is a reason why the Europa League is rubbish! Omar Artan, the Somalian referee, was turned away at the border this week despite holding a diplomatic passport and a single-entry US visa. Fifa initially banned water bottles in stadiums, only to reverse the decision after concerns people might die.
Tickets for the opening game between Mexico and South Africa went unsold, probably because they cost as much as $2,273 (£2,000). Shuttle bus tickets to the Met Life stadium in New Jersey (inaccessible by foot) were initially $80 (£60). Eight out of the sixteen pitches have turf laid over an artificial surface, leading to injury concerns.
The question I find myself asking along with a lot of other football fans is: What are we doing? What are we doing to these players? But most importantly, what are we doing to Bukayo Saka, who is “managing” achilles tendinitis at the World Cup? What if he plays badly and everyone is horrible to him (a tale as old as time)? Or he plays well, at what future cost to his career?
Football is increasingly a hysterical mix of romance and logistics. Uefa’s “Champions Festival” in Budapest featured Robert Pires and Cafu playing five a side with YouTubers next to a gigantic replica of the Champions League trophy. Portaloos, random Barcelona shirts. Everything sponsored by Heineken and/or Pepsi, Uefa insulted by the very possibility fans might want to buy beer. Oh and €8 (£7) pretzels. But it’s still Cafu. It’s still Robert Pires. This is still a World Cup and I’ll still be watching.
Perhaps not for the hope that England win it, though there will be some. I’ll be watching this tournament for the Azteca Stadium: 87,000 capacity 2,200 metres above sea level, replete with the ghosts of the ‘Hand of God’ goal and the ‘Goal of the century’. For the opening rendition of Flower of Scotland (at 2am). For Curacao’s first World Cup at the expense of Steve McClaren’s Reggae Boyz, “One love to you all”, he said before resigning. For the Brazilian team jet being baptised by giant hoses before take off. For Mark Pougatch, lulling us to sleep in the boring international breaks, now flanked in the ITV studio by Wrighty and Roy Keane against a Hudson river backdrop. For Bellingham. For Lamine Yamal. And for Harry Kane not being on the opposition team.
Donald Trump, Iran and the art of a peace deal
In a now-familiar pattern, US President Donald Trump announced an imminent escalation in the stand-off with Iran on Thursday – before reversing course a few hours later in the face of self-declared diplomatic progress. In a post at his Truth Social page that afternoon, the President wrote that ‘at some point in the not-too-distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island and other oil infrastructure points and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets’. Kharg Island is Iran’s primary oil export hub in the Persian Gulf. It handles around 90 per cent of Tehran’s crude oil exports.
The President appeared to half walk this statement back almost immediately after making it. In a call with Fox News later that day, he said that his preference had in fact always been for taking the island but that he was not sure if ‘America has the stomach for it’. Then later in the day, he reversed course entirely, announcing that he had cancelled air operations scheduled against Iran for that night because a deal had been reached between the US and Iran. The deal had been approved ‘both in concept and great detail’ by all involved parties, he wrote.
The place, very clearly, where Trump feels comfortable is where deals are made
Media channels associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) responded to the announcement with derision. The Tasnim news agency wrote that Trump had already claimed ’38 times’ in the last two months that a deal had been reached and recommended that unless Iran also announces an agreement, this declaration should be treated as similar to previous ones. Fars News, more prosaically, noted that Iranian sources suggested that no agreement had been reached, while holding out hope that agreement might be imminent.
Israel Channel 12 News, meanwhile, quoted Israeli sources as confirming that Jerusalem was not part of the negotiating process and is not party to the agreement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released a statement saying that Israel appreciates President Trump’s commitment to reaching a ceasefire that will:
Include the removal of enriched nuclear material, the dismantling of enrichment infrastructure, limits on missile production, and an end to Iran’s support for its terrorist proxies in the region.
There are no indications that the deal Trump claims has been reached contains any provisions regarding the Iranian missile programme or its strategy of supporting Islamist proxies to foment instability and build power across the Middle East. Indeed, all available evidence suggests that the US has abandoned any hope of achievement on these two files, and is concentrating on seeking a breakthrough on the nuclear issue alone, in return for various concessions to Tehran, and the mutually agreed reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
It remains to be seen what exactly the proposed memorandum of understanding contains. Available information suggests that it includes as its central point the reopening of Hormuz and a 60-day negotiating process on all remaining issues. What all this to-ing and fro-ing indicates is that the US administration has no real plan for extricating itself from the dilemma in which it finds itself mired.
On the one hand, as Trump’s statements regarding Kharg reflect, that, as the overwhelmingly stronger power in conventional terms, the US has the capacity both to reopen Hormuz by force and to cut off Iran’s remaining lifeline for the export of its oil. On the other hand, there is little public support for an expansion of the war, and none at all for the prospect of coffins coming home which the ground commitment necessary to take Kharg would surely involve. Concurrently, the Iranian regime appears disinclined to award Trump the appearance of achievement or even an honourable exit from this dilemma.
It is difficult not to draw the conclusion from all this that Trump’s administration entered the war on 28 February without a proper analysis of what the Iranian regime was, or of its strengths and weaknesses. The President is correct, as he often notes, that Iran has little left by way of a navy. ‘Their navy is totally gone – 100 per cent,’ he told Fox News recently. ‘The air force is totally gone – 100 per cent.’
The problem with this is that the particular strengths possessed by the Iranian regime are not located in the field of conventional air or sea power. The regime in Tehran is an Islamist, ideological gathering, engaged in a ‘forever war’ of its own – of society against society, rather than army against army. Its practical successes, both in retaining power in Iran and in building influence and strength from the Gulf of Aden to the Mediterranean, derive from its ability to mobilise (mainly but not only) Shia Muslim loyalties and commitments and to use these as the engine for political and paramilitary mobilisation.
It is likely that nothing like this really exists in Trump’s world. One imagines him and those around him dismissing such issues as unreal or unimportant, assuming that in the end, everyone’s motives are similar, everything is for sale and a deal can always be reached. His remarks this week following exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran that ‘each of them had their fun’ but that now it was time to ‘get back to the table and make a deal’ appear redolent of such a view.
Trump, caricatured before his presidency as a warmonger, is nothing of the kind. The place, very clearly, where he feels comfortable is where deals are made. And in particular, where deals reflecting the greater physical strength of his side are concluded, with the other side coming to understand the benefits of accepting the power differential and understanding how it can gain from it.
The problem is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not an entity which is prepared to play this role. The US could force it back. But the political support for the inevitably costly means required to do this isn’t there. Hence the present shenanigans.
Israel, too, for a long time failed to understand the nature, depth and seriousness of the Islamist project raised against it and intended to result in its destruction. Neither the security establishment, for all its technical skills, nor the current prime minister, for all his authentic intellectual depth and interest in history and ideas, properly grasped the nature of this challenge. The result were the policies that made possible the massacre of 7 October 2023. There has since been something of a course correction, though the costs of engaging Iran and its allies, the sacrifice required, and the tenacity which will be required to defeat it long-term are all issues with which Israeli society is still grappling.
In any case, the current curious dance-with-itself diplomacy of Trump’s administration shows the extent to which the seriousness of the challenge has not yet been internalised in the west. The responses of British officials, of course, such as Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s call this week for ‘both sides’ to ‘show restraint and de-escalate immediately’, and for ‘negotiations…towards the lasting settlement that we all need, for peace and stability in the region’ serve to add an additional inadvertently comic element to the picture.
The aircraft carrier which shows the deep flaw in Britain’s navy
The 400-mile-wide stretch of water between the Svalbard archipelago and the mainland of northern Norway has a nickname: Bear Gap. It is the only way out for Russia’s Northern Fleet warships and submarines from its bases around Murmansk to the deep waters of the Atlantic ocean.
This is only one of a number of scandals that are putting the Royal Navy’s crewmen and women’s lives needlessly at risk
During the Cold War, these waters were the site of a cat-and-mouse game between Russian submarines and Britain’s Royal Navy, whose wartime mission was to close this chokepoint. Now it has become once again one of the most militarised areas on the planet, and tensions are at their highest for 40 years, just as – once again – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer failed to publish his government’s long-awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP).
Russia has reopened more than 50 Cold War-era military bases in the Arctic. Its army may be weakened by the war in Ukraine, but its navy has deployed a new generation of stealthy, heavily armed and highly sophisticated submarines to confront Nato in these waters.
Norwegian fighters have scrambled 39 times in the first five months of this year to intercept and identify 51 Russian aircraft. This matches the number for the whole of 2025. In April, two Russian strategic bombers flew over the Barents Sea, one carrying a long-range cruise missile under its wing – such fly-overs have increased markedly since the Ukraine invasion.
Yet the real danger that a cold war could quickly become hot, nor his failure – and that of successive governments – to fund the Royal Navy properly, has not stopped British Prime Minister Keir Starmer from ordering the HMS Prince of Wales and up to 1,600 crew into the Arctic in what is supposed to be a powerful show of force aimed at deterring Russian aggression. HMS Prince of Wales is one of the Royal Navy’s two vast Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers.
But the Kremlin will assuredly know that the Prince of Wales and its strike force is a paper tiger that is in fact unable to adequately defend itself or take offensive action; and when the illusion of power is suddenly shattered – and it will be at some point now or in the future – its crew will pay the price. The loss of life from a drone, missile or torpedo hit will be horrendous.
It is impossible to see HMS Prince of Wales for the first time and not to feel proud. We are conditioned to expect British decline, and this ship seems to signal the opposite. It is a tremendous feat of British engineering, one of the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy, and one of the most powerful, with its F-35B Lockheed Lightning II fighters combining stealth with a massive weapons payload and impressive electronic warfare capabilities in one aircraft.
The Prince of Wales is a symbol of the Royal Navy’s glorious past and great future, positively Nelsonian in its ability to project British power worldwide. But the Prince of Wales that recently sailed into the Arctic feels like a far cry from such a vision.
It sailed from Scotland with its state-of-the-art F-35 fighters absent, stripped away due to the need to defend British interests in the Middle East. The respected independent Navy Lookout news site posted that the air power of the 65,000-tonne carrier was restricted to a ‘pocket sized air group’ of around five helicopters. Even the mounts for its four 30mm cannons to shoot down drones and small attack craft – standard kit on other ships – are still empty seven years after the huge ship was commissioned into service.
Then there is our so-called Carrier Strike Group, which barely justifies its name. It should include a number of warships, and different types of them to boot. The group in fact comprises only one Type 45 destroyer and a fuel tanker. Admittedly, the Type 45 is a formidable air defence platform, but there is only one, and it is not the most reliable design. And the group contains no Type 23 frigates, whose job is primarily anti-submarine warfare, perhaps because there are only five frigates left in the whole fleet.
Let’s hope our allies can fill in the gaps.
But this is only one of a number of scandals that are putting the Royal Navy’s crewmen and women’s lives needlessly at risk, from the shrinking of the Royal Navy’s fleet to a historic low and the poor availability of the few ships and submarines it does have, to the failure to order and build replacements in a timely manner, as well as the willingness to sell expensive and hard-to-replace vessels such as landing ships to Brazil and other nations at bargain basement prices, often after expensive refits.
The laying up of the frigate HMS Iron Duke, despite an expensive refit, means that there are only five of these workhorses left in the Royal Navy, which are vital for the defence of HMS Prince of Wales from submarine attack, and if the Royal Navy is to close the Bear Gap.
The F-35B Lightning II isn’t immune to the whiff of scandal. Its technical problems, lack of spare parts, and a lack of ground crew and pilots, meant that a ‘surge’ or ‘maximum effort’ was needed in 2025 to ensure that just 24 F-35Bs out of 48 could be deployed on a carrier at one time.
Over a month since the HMS Prince of Wales sailed from Scotland, a rumoured handful of F-35s have belatedly embarked on the carrier. Meanwhile, two ministers have now resigned over the ‘underfunded and outdated DIP.’ By contrast, no serving admirals have resigned over this state of affairs. Admirals, like anyone, are susceptible to spin, and find it easy to convince themselves that rather than speak out the best way to protect the service they love is to do it from the inside. Perhaps they really don’t want to lose the pay and prestige that comes with their role. But it’s time they did so if they want to avoid the loss of HMS Prince of Wales.
Who stands to gain in the pistachio wars?
If you’ve ever lived in Marseille – where the habit of exaggeration is imbibed with mothers’ milk – you’ve heard about the sardine that blocked the port. But that’s nothing compared to the pistachio that took over the world.
In late 2023, Dubai chocolate, a new kind of chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream, tahini and crunchy, toasted phyllo pastry, went viral. Chocolate brands, bakeries and purveyors of fine foods were quick to jump on the trend. Coffee chains began offering pistachio chocolate drinks (iced Dubai-chocolate matcha, anyone?) and delectable pistachio bomboloni – soft donuts filled with pistachio cream – came back on the menu in Italian restaurants. Meanwhile, pâtissiers seized on the craze with spinoffs such as the pistachio and raspberry dessert by Montreal’s Farine & Cacao: yogurt mousse, raspberry confit and whipped pistachio ganache nestled atop a pistachio biscuit, crowned with fresh raspberries and pistachio praline.
Much of Iran’s 2025 pistachio harvest is jamming up shipping terminals waiting for some kind of stability
The quietly elegant pistachio has always been around, of course. It’s the Ralph Lauren of food: understated, classic, refined. But it’s been elevated to the rank of haute couture at this point, complete with its own range of downmarket knockoffs. Even Hermès has surrendered to force majeure and launched a pistachio perfume, Un Jardin à Cythère, which is supposed to smell like a Greek island garden: olivewood, fresh pistachio, bleached grasses, cyan skies. Parfumiers from Kayali to Tom Ford have picked up on the trend, and you can recognize the cool people now by the lingering notes of pistachio in the air when they leave the room.
Emilie Wolfman, a trend innovation manager at upscale British grocer Waitrose, told the BBC that searches for “pistachio” on its website had jumped by a massive 788 percent in spring 2025, compared to the same time the year before. “Pistachio offers luxury appeal,” she said. “It’s a versatile ingredient, integrating into a wide range of foods from decadent chocolate to savory pastries and even sauces, which is driving its popularity.”
But where do all the pistachios come from to supply the pistachio-addled fashionistas and influencers? Chiefly from the US and the Middle East, especially Iran. Everyone knows about Iranian black gold, but the country is the world’s second-largest producer of green gold, as its pistachios are called. The nut is native to the region and in Iran they have pistachio trees that are more than 700 years old. It is said that the Queen of Sheba once declared pistachios to be a royal food and ordered the region’s entire harvest to be brought to her kingdom. This was back when kings and queens understood the duty of magnificence. (It’s a pity Handel’s music for the Queen of Sheba had not yet been composed – it would be just the thing to accompany the piling of thousands of sacks of pistachios before the royal throne.)
Pistachios are much smaller than sardines but, under the right circumstances, they too can block ports. The war has disrupted supply and driven up price by more than 50 percent in recent months. Much of Iran’s 2025 pistachio harvest, totaling around 225,000 tons, is jamming up Iranian shipping terminals. No relief is in sight; on March 6, the Iranian government banned all agrifood exports, citing the need to preserve essentials for domestic consumption, and the poor pistachio, its top food export, has taken the biggest hit.
Analysts see the green nutmeat as the canary in the coalmine. Spanish pistachio-growers group Viridi says the military escalation in Iran, “intensified by the country’s severe internal political crisis and an internet blackout that has lasted since January 8, has turned pistachios into a silent indicator of tensions in the Middle East.”
But while the Iranian pistachio-canary gasps weakly in its cage, the Californian canary is snapping up birdseed with vim and vigor. With both demand and prices rising, American growers should do very well this year, although some – like Nichols Farms, a major California pistachio grower and processor – are complaining that the war has prevented their shipments from reaching destinations in the Middle East.
Nichols Farms had about $5 million worth of pistachios on ships in the region when the Strait of Hormuz closed. The pistachios got stuck. The company managed to get three loads out of the area, but $3.5 million in inventory is still stranded there – a sitting duck for entrepreneurial salvage companies, which may never again see such an opportunity to negotiate free pistachios for life. Here’s hoping the trend lasts that long! Fortunately, pistachios are a classic. They grew in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and they’ll be around when Dubai chocolate disappears into the mists of time.
Curiously, the sardine that blocked the port in Marseille was also a war-related blockage, indirectly caused by the US War of Independence. If it weren’t for Louis XVI’s taking America’s part, the British wouldn’t have laid siege to the French colony of Pondicherry. The French held out for ten weeks, but eventually surrendered. A prisoner exchange took place and the French frigate Sartine (named for the French secretary of the navy, Antoine de Sartine) was granted safe passage to bring the prisoners back to France.
With both demand and prices rising, American growers should do very well this year
Owing to a misunderstanding with the British HMS Romney off the coast of Portugal, the Sartine’s captain was killed en route. The first mate took over, but his navigation skills weren’t up to par. When they reached Marseille, he couldn’t quite manage the tricky bottleneck entry into the harbor. The Sartine blew onto the rocks, then sank right in the middle of the entry channel, blocking ships from coming or going. It remained for the resourceful harbormaster – a veteran naval officer with a wooden leg – to make the catch of the week, fishing the Sartine out with a winch mounted on the quay.
The Marseillais are proud of their reputation for hyperbole, and happily make a tuna out of a minnow and a mountain out of a molehill any day of the week. But in this case the teasing is unjust; a sardine – or Sartine – really did block the port! If the pistachio hadn’t already conquered the world, that would be hard to beat.
The future of the Trump-rebranded institutions lies in court
Since Donald Trump retook office in January 2025, Washington has experienced significant upheaval in its institutions. The United States Institute of Peace underwent a DoGE takeover that involved federal police occupying the building, taking over its board of directors and seizing control of its assets and operations. The majority of people who had worked there prior was fired or nudged toward resignation – with their severance conditional on a promise not to sue their old employer. It was renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
In May 2025, the District Court ruled the takeover unlawful, which was appealed, pausing the decision’s impacts until further proceedings. In May of this year, it was reported members of the State Department were moving into the building, despite the ongoing legal dispute. Cockburn notes that regardless of what ends up happening in court, damage has been done to the institute’s work and its assets (which were largely privately funded), given that they have been under ambiguous control for months.
Up the river, the Kennedy Center also finds itself in the middle of an ongoing legal battle, following the hollowing out of the institution and the hampering of its operations.
Josef Palermo, who was hired as the Kennedy Center’s curator of visual arts and special programming after Trump took over, wrote for the Atlantic in April: “About a year elapsed between the moment President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025 and his declaration this past February that he’d decided to shut down the nation’s cultural center for two years. In between, we had seen artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones – a lot of drama, just not onstage.” Trump had, of course, also slapped his mark on the institution, renaming it the “Trump Kennedy Center.”
On May 29 of this year, judges ruled the name change illegal and said it needed to be reversed. As of this week, the decision is under appeal, and the name may or may not remain in the meantime. Whether or not the center will still be shut down in July for renovations, as the Trump-installed board asserted, is also unclear.
On our radar
ART OF THE DEAL “The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing,” wrote President Trump on Truth Social this morning. “They better get their act together, and FAST!”
ALL THE WORLD’S A CAGE A UFC press conference will be held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at 7:30 p.m. tonight, ahead of Sunday’s bouts on the South Lawn of the White House.
FIGHT AND WIN Further down the National Mall, there will be a watch party outside the Capitol for the USMNT’s debut match of the World Cup, against Paraguay at 9 p.m.
Thune’s blues
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is a divisive figure for such a mild-mannered man. Is he a secret #NeverTrumper working to undermine the President’s agenda or a modern-day Job at the mercy of the capricious God in the Oval Office?
It now seems like the pressure is getting to him. After weeks of speculation, the White House has just announced its new pick for director of national intelligence to replace Tulsi Gabbard: US Attorney Jay Clayton of the Southern District of New York. Trouble is, the announcement came just as Congress was about to head into recess, and mere minutes before the Senate’s close of session. The resultant jumble in Senate business meant that the FISA warrant surveillance program – which permits surveillance of foreign intelligence services and requires legislative approval – will expire without being renewed.
Thune’s statement to reporters was uncharacteristically morose. “As always, the timing around here matters. It would have been nice if we had had this a couple of days earlier,” he said. “But you play the hand you’re dealt. And we’ll try to figure out the best way to process this [nomination] quickly.” On Thursday he told reporters, wanly, that “my hopes often get dashed.”
To allies, Thune is the latest in a long line of put-upon Trump whisperers, asked to perform the impossible and driven to the end of their tethers. Yet whenever Thune complains about legislative timetables, Cockburn can’t help but be reminded of the Senate Dog Parade. In February, congressional Republicans were able to find time to wheel a fat bulldog around Capitol Hill.
Evenings with influencers and Substackistas
On Tuesday evening, Cockburn headed to City Tavern Club for an event called “Thomas Paine Would Have Had a Substack,” hosted by Substack and More Perfect’s In Pursuit . There was an open bar (thank goodness), circulating appetizers and subtle red-white-and-blue accented bars and tables. An actor impersonating Thomas Paine opened it up by reading from his own Common Sense, followed by Substack head of politics Catherine Valentine, and the archivist President Trump ousted, Colleen Shogan. The final speaker was “Gen Z historian” Kahlil Greene. He intimated that the concept of free speech includes distribution and access to an audience, citing the TikTok ban, which seems to have left a lot of zoomers traumatized and perhaps a little confused about the nature of the First Amendment.
Spotted: Billy Binion, John Bridgeland, Ann Compton, Jonas Du, Christine Emba, Samuel Kimbriel, Shadi Hamid, Ben Jacobs, Ryan Lizza, Anita McBride and Jacob Wasserman.
The following night, the Embassy of Italy hosted a reception called “Left, Right, and Center: A Conversation with Creators ahead of the 2026 Midterm Elections.” The night consisted of three panels: the first of conservative influencers, the second of liberal influencers – and a final conversation with one representative from each. The moderator of the last panel was a “self-described moderate” which didn’t help at all. There was a tense back-and-forth between one questioner and Jayme Franklin of the Conservateur about the difference between “birth rates” and “fertility rates.” The conversation eventually deteriorated into bickering and one liberal panelist stormed out. Afterward, she told Cockburn that Republicans (and Democrats for that matter) plant fake questioners in audiences all the time. In general, the conservatives were smooth-brained and the liberals were prickly. It made Cockburn wonder if maybe the kids really aren’t alright.
Spotted: Barrett Adair, Isabel Brown, Nikia Chirkov, Suzanne Lambert, Isaiah Martin, Aaron Parnas, Rina Shah and Chloe Trapanotto.
Will peace be the perfect gift for the President?
Donald Trump’s 80th birthday is this weekend, and what better present for a struggling octogenarian Commander-in-Chief than a peace deal with Iran, signed if not quite yet sealed and delivered.
There is, I’m told, some late scrambling over “semantics” in the so-called “memorandum of understanding” between America and Iran, and lingering issues over the language concerning the “nuclear dust” – i.e., Iran’s enriched uranium. But the rest is all but agreed. J.D. Vance could fly to Europe to sign a deal tomorrow – or if not it will be Trump as he attends the G7 in Evian near the Swiss Alps on Monday.
Trump really wanted to stage a peace photo-op with Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei but had to be told that would not be possible. Nobody outside a very small circle of Iranian officials seems to know if Mojtaba is able to walk or talk or is actually alive. And even if he were able, he would hardly shake hands with the man who four months ago ordered the strikes that killed his father, wife, son, daughter, niece and grandchild.
I understand the American delegation, led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were slow to grasp this point. But the memorandum of understanding progressed nonetheless. The markets are already responding positively to the news, but there are bound to be more bumps along the way. A memorandum is not a peace treaty, and nobody outside Iran can be quite sure that the Iranian regime, such as it still is, will be able to control the piratical forces who now threaten the Strait of Hormuz.
For Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the financial universe, the chief worry is that the pain from the disruption to the Strait of Hormuz is very “in the post,” as they say. Oil prices are unlikely to tumble too dramatically, since many nations will be frantically trying to restock their petroleum reserves. The negative economic consequences of this war could be felt for years to come.
On Sunday, Trump will enjoy basking in his reflected glory as a “peacemaker” of the war he started, as he enjoys watching men beat each other up in the special UFC Freedom 250 cage fight on the White House lawn. The king’s birthday is now America’s special day, too. And then he hopes to fly to France, on a roll, and try to end the other war in Ukraine, too.
Still, it’s been a deeply confusing week for anybody trying to keep up with the Iran news. On Monday, Israel and Iran were exchanging missiles, which appeared to be derailing the peace process. Then, that evening, after attending an NBA finals in which he appeared ever so briefly to fall asleep, Trump told reporters that a peace deal was imminent. And then, on Tuesday, Trump abruptly announced “VERY HARD” retaliatory strikes against the Iranians after an American Apache helicopter was struck down by a Shahed drone.
The US duly attacked Iranian military sites on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Iran returned fire early Thursday by launching missiles and drones at Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. Trump then escalated his rhetoric even further by vowing to take Kharg Island and seize control of Iranian oil and gas production. Then, by Thursday night, the President announced that peace was back on the agenda.
In fact, it seems that all parties involved in the negotiations, including the Iranians, now understand that Trump’s bombastic threats are largely intended for his domestic audience, so that he can sell a sense of victory to his public. The Iranians, for their part, will do the same. War is peace, peace is war, and we are all living through a new phase of post-truth diplomacy. Happy birthday, Mr. President!
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
A&E is broken. Can anyone fix it?
‘Corridor care’ should be an oxymoron, but is instead such a feature of the NHS now that nearly 3,000 people a day found themselves being treated in corridors, cupboards or even car parks last month. New figures show that 2,241 patients a day on average who had corridor care while in A&E, with a further 669 being cared for in cupboards, toilets and car parks. These are the latest official figures which show how the NHS isn’t working – but earlier in the week the Royal College of Emergency Medicine came up with its own estimate of how many people were dying unnecessarily as a result of long A&E waits: 1,300 a month.
A&E has been broken for at least a decade now
Both figures provoked interest but not outrage for the simple reason that they’re not surprising or particularly new: A&E has been broken for at least a decade now. The RCEM’s analysis suggests that in that time, the excess deaths have risen tenfold, from 1,657 in 2015 to 15,860 in 2025. It used a study of more than five million patients to develop this estimate.
Whether or not politicians agree with the figures – and they often quibble with these kinds of estimates from the RCEM – there is a bigger problem here, one identified by RCEM President Ian Higginson. He said:
‘To make things worse we are being asked to focus on the least sick patients to try to marginally improve headline statistics, rather than on those who need our services the most.’
The problems lie outside A&E, in the form of ‘exit block’ – meaning patients can’t get into other wards in the hospital because they too are full – and that’s often in turn caused by a failure to find safe social care placements to discharge a patient into.
But gaming the system, as so often happens in A&E, will make the stats look better without changing the reality. So too will the solution that some hospitals have come up with which is that they ‘don’t do corridor care’. Talk to any ambulance worker who regularly takes patients to any of these trusts, and they’ll point out that this just means they’re waiting on the tarmac with people for hours, often the entire length of their shifts. That isn’t solving the A&E crisis either.
A&E is often seen as the shop window of the health service, and figures around its performance one of the vital signs that the NHS is functioning properly. But the attention at the moment is focused on the wrong vital signs: just because a hospital isn’t doing as much corridor care as another, doesn’t mean the problem has been solved at all.
Starmer is facing the beginning of the end of the end
This is not the end, but it’s well past the beginning of the end, or even the middle of the end. It feels, with six days until the Makerfield by-election is expected to return Andy Burnham to Parliament, that we are at the beginning of the end of the end.
It is also well past the point of no return for Britain’s credibility on the world stage. Like the clockwork toy which goes off just as you have drifted off to sleep, Keir Starmer weathered an interview with the BBC on the departure of two ministers from the Ministry of Defence (and two ministerial aides) only to get an Exocet in the guts from the Americans.
Elbridge Colby is one of the Washington hawks, but he also has a respect for Britain. When David Lammy was foreign secretary and making new friends with the Trump administration, ‘Bridge’, as he is known, was one of his friendly contacts in DC. Which makes it doubly damning that Colby has been the one with his finger on the trigger today. In a post on X, the US Under-Secretary of War wrote:
If Burnham wins the by-election, Starmer can safely book a winter holiday far, far away
The United Kingdom has an extraordinarily proud military history. It commands our respect. There is again a great need for more British military strength in this critical time. We urge the UK to meet that need with urgency, scale, and determination.
A reminder: both John Healey, the defence secretary, and Al Carns, the armed forces minister, quit because, in Healey’s words, Starmer was ‘unable’ to deliver the funding the military desperately needs and Rachel Reeves was ‘unwilling’ to do so. If Starmer thinks this is wounding, imagine how he’s going to feel on Monday when he runs into Donald Trump himself at the G7 summit. In his resignation letter, Carns, a highly decorated former SBS man (MP is tellingly only the fourth of the suffixes to his name), made the case that Starmer’s legalistic approach to war has broken the military covenant with those in uniform.
And yet Starmer ploughed, nasally, onwards in his interview with Chris Mason, boasting that he is responsible for the biggest uptick in defence spending since the end of the Cold War. A reminder, Starmer himself has pledged to raise defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 and Healey was demanding 3 per cent by 2030. Starmer and Reeves are planning for 2.68 per cent by 2030 – up from 2.6 per cent next year. At a time when most of Europe is rearming, this is untenable.
Starmer insisted he had made ‘hard-edged decisions’ in order to put ‘considerable’ money into defence already. And yet the row seems only to have put politics into suspended animation until Thursday’s by-election. A good case can be made that if SW1 were not Waiting For Andy, a decent number of ministers would have taken one look at Starmer’s vacillation and weakness on an area he personally vowed to make the centrepiece of his premiership and forced him out with a wave of coordinated resignations before Thursday.
The Prime Minister declared he was ‘not going to walk away’ and said: ‘I don’t think we should plunge the country into the chaos of a leadership election.’ Well, true. He probably won’t walk away, but when Burnham returns, he will be shoved pretty firmly in the direction of the door – and there is some possibility that Wes Streeting will see the writing on the wall and decide not to challenge Burnham. Either way, if Burnham wins the by-election, Keir Starmer can safely book a winter holiday far, far away. Though I wouldn’t advise him to head to Cyprus, or anywhere else with a British overseas military base.
Spare a thought too for Dan Jarvis, a decent and honourable man who has fought for his country and who has been appointed as deckchair attendant on a listing transatlantic liner / the new defence secretary. In his first public comments at a drone factory in Swindon, he said: ‘The character of warfare is changing, and it is changing fast.’
The same is true of politics. I rather suspect two of the things which will change before too long are the identities of the prime minister and the defence secretary.
‘We’re only a few months away from the first political assassination by drone’
‘We’re only a few months – perhaps years at most – away from the first political assassination by a drone’. That was the chilling verdict delivered by Francis Dearnley on this week’s episode of The Edition podcast from The Spectator.
The host of the award-winning Ukraine: The Latest podcast was speaking as Russia’s war in Ukraine reached a grim milestone: it has now gone on longer than the first world war. That Ukraine has been able to fiercely resist Russia for so long is due, in no small part, to advances in drone technology.
‘Ukraine is the cutting-edge drone superpower in the world’, Francis said. He explained that while around 80 per cent of Russian casualties in the first year of the war were down to ‘conventional’ artillery fire – much like in the first world war – now, around the same amount are caused by drones. These drones are ‘first-person view’, operated by small hand-held devices that look like video game controllers.
To explain the advance in drone technology, Francis takes the first world war analogy further. In the Great War, artillery shells were fired and troops sat and hoped that they landed on their intended targets. With new drone technology, ‘you fire the drone up into the air, it stops, it looks around – AI-trained – and finds the target that it has been told to pursue’.
The significance goes beyond the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have become such experts that they’re now liaising with the Pentagon about their drone technology, following America’s own recent experience with Iranian Shahed drones. For governments, there is a fear that drone technology could be used outside of warzones. This brings us back to Francis’s grim prediction of a political assassination. If a malign actor chooses to target a British building that is of military sensitivity, Francis asks, is the UK prepared for it? No, he says.
On the frontline in Ukraine, the advances in technology are not just increasing casualties for the Russians, but also for the defenders. Francis argues that despite Ukraine being in its strongest position for more than 18 months, the Russians ‘have adapted’. The race is therefore on to end the war. The calculation of western countries and Ukraine ‘is what is the metric that we have to hit’ to stop Russia. Francis puts in another way. To destabilise Putin, ‘how many Russians do we have to kill a month?’
Starmer vows to fight on (again)
Not even the resignation of a respected defence secretary will stop one Sir Keir Starmer from ploughing ahead with his tumultuous premiership. Despite John Healey’s blistering warning that the Prime Minister is incapable of keeping the country safe, Sir Keir today vowed to take the fight to Andy Burnham should he triumph – as currently expected – in the Makerfield by-election.
The Prime Minister insisted to the BBC that battling on without the confidence of more than half his party is ‘not about personal vanity’. He argued:
It’s not about stubbornness. It’s out of a very deep sense of duty. I was elected to serve this country notwithstanding the difficult circumstances, that is what I am doing.
Sir Keir also trumpeted that he has made ‘hard edged decisions’ to boost defence spending, which will be the ‘number one priority at every spending review’.
Meanwhile, Al Carns has been busy bashing out some not-so-subtle posts on social media that read rather like a manifesto in search of a launch event. One of his many interventions reads: ‘The next war won’t be won by armies, navies or air forces alone. It’ll be won by the country whose 19 year olds can code, whose factories can build drones in weeks not years, and whose grid stays on when someone tries to switch it off. Industry. Society. Economy. That’s the fight now. We’re not ready. And we’re not being honest about what getting ready will cost.’
The vindication of ‘Sophie of Dundee’
So ‘Sophie of Dundee’ has been vindicated. The Scots girl who was so sickeningly defamed by the digital left stands exonerated. ‘Liars!’, cried creeps across the internet when the girl and her friends said they had no choice but to defend themselves from a foul-mouthed, abusive migrant male. Yet now we know they were telling the truth.
Others insulted the girls. Armies of haters said it was ‘Sophie’ who was the brute. They called her a chav
The image of this girl that went viral really was extraordinary. The events took place on a street in Dundee in August 2025. A grainy still from smartphone footage showed one of the girls holding up a knife and an axe. Her face is etched with terror. This was clearly a child in distress. Her name has never been released – because she’s a minor – but the internet christened her ‘Sophie of Dundee’.
Some championed her. She became a symbol of innocent defiance. See what the migrant crisis has done to our kids, they cried: it has forced them to take the law into their own hands against iffy men from afar. But others insulted the girls. Armies of haters said it was ‘Sophie’ who was the brute. They called her a chav. There were classist barbs about Irn Bru. It was child abuse dressed up as social criticism.
‘Sophie’ wasn’t lying. That has now been established at Dundee Sheriff Court. This week a Bulgarian man, Ilia Belov, was found guilty of making sexual remarks to the girls. The court heard that he said ‘Hello sexy, I’ll show you a good time’. The girls called him a ‘creep’ – good on them – at which point he became angry. He called his sister, Nadjedzha Belova, for back-up, and then things got really ugly.
Nadjedzha arrived and assaulted one of the girls. She pulled her hair, dragged her to the ground and struck her on the head. The girl’s mother said it was ‘heartbreaking’ to see her daughter being ‘dragged about’ in the CCTV footage shown in court. The court sheriff was clear about where the blame for this awful incident lay: ‘the trigger for all of this were the comments you made’, he said to Ilia.
The digital mobbing of these girls, especially ‘Sophie’, added to the upset of their families. After the verdict, one of the girl’s mothers said: ‘They were telling the truth and they were slandered.’
First they were subjected to disgusting sexual remarks from an adult male, then they were bombarded with cruel abuse from strangers on the internet. The salt of classism rubbed into the wound of sexual harassment.
To me, there is no mystery whatsoever as to why the girls were not only disbelieved but mocked, mauled and treated as if they were the perpetrators. It’s because they are working-class. It’s because they are ‘white trash’. It was a searing testament to the modern left’s haughty disgust for the ‘riff raff’ that they would take the word of a 22-year-old Bulgarian male over the word of scared Scottish girls.
Their gross caricatures of these supposedly feral girls necking Irn Bru and wielding axes at innocent immigrants completely fell apart in court. The sheriff described the girls’ evidence as ‘eloquent’. Their case was true and well put, he said. Eternal shame on every keyboard bigot who saw one clip of these girls and instantly decided they were the scum of the earth.
The slandering of ‘Sophie of Dundee’ was like a replay, on a smaller scale, of the state’s vile denialism when working-class girls said they’d been raped by gangs of primarily Muslim men. Then, too, the men were often believed over the girls. Well, they were from an ‘oppressed’ minority whereas the girls were just classless ruffians hanging out in places they shouldn’t have been. That was the odious prejudice on which the grooming-gang scandal was built.
Isn’t it striking how brutishly working-class women and girls have been excluded from MeToo? ‘Believe women’, we’re told when a middle-class professional says she was harassed at work. But don’t believe those other women. From the working-class mums who’ve protested over sexual assaults by migrants to the vulnerable girls who say they were groomed by Muslim men or insulted by a Bulgarian man – those lot you should never believe. Well, they’re from the wrong side of the tracks, they tell lies over there.
Maybe now that we know the truth about ‘Sophie of Dundee’ we can have an honest discussion about the endangerment of working-class girls as a result of mass immigration. Just this week an Iraqi man was found guilty of trafficking and raping girls aged 12 to 16 in Doncaster. We hear about things like this almost every week now. These girls matter. Their safety matters. A society that believes the lies of migrant men above the pleas of its own children is a sick one indeed.