Gavin Haynes

Railway arches are functional. If you want to keep a railway bridge horizontal, you’re going to need arches. Once, Network Rail owned these bits that kept the trains in the sky. But these days, they have a price on them, as retail space. There are currently around 5,200 businesses located in railway arches, and in 2018, Network Rail was convinced to part with the lot for £1.5 billion.  Now, these arches are worth at least £2 billion. This is the price that their new owners, the private equity group Blackstone, are paying. Since 2018, Blackstone owned them in collaboration with Telereal Trillium. This month, Blackstone bought out Telereal, establishing a new market value of £2 billion.

The Schooner Scorer is a young man in a gilet with good bone structure, who glugs 2/3rd pints (schooners) in one fluid unbuttoning of the oesophagus.  This is a talent. Or at least, it is a thing; 440ml is not exactly a yard of ale. Even Therese Coffey could manage a full pint. But if we are all to be famous for 60 seconds on TikTok, we must be famous for something, and it is almost as though SS took a life inventory: ‘What do I enjoy? Drinking beers in widely known taverns. Well then, that shall be my calling.’ Each video is inaugurated by his catchphrase: ‘Schooner Scorer here, sixty second snippet, scoring a schooner...

We’re a long way from 2015.  Nine years ago, Barack Obama rolled up to a soundproofed garage outside the comedian Marc Maron’s California home, and entered podcasting lore. Not only the first black president, the first president on a podcast.  Fast forward to 2024, and the first three-President podcast. By March, when Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden all turned up on Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s mega-bucks big-network vehicle, SmartLess, something had shifted.   It’s been a long short ride, with many false starts, but just as 2008 was indisputably ‘the first social media election’, 2024 is definitely the first longform podcast election.  What began as a trickle is ending in a blitz.

For almost a fortnight, the Democrats have had only one word in their word cloud when it comes to JD Vance: ‘Weird.’ On Sunday, Vance finally responded to the charge, on CNN’s State of the Union, calling it: ‘fundamentally school yard bully stuff.’ ‘No, we’re not ’, Trump had told a rally in Montana, a couple of days earlier. ‘We’re very solid people.’ Yet on it goes. From dawn to dusk, the CNBC/USA Today/NPR message machine has been pumping out the same word in the mouths of different commentators. This is no accident. The ‘weird’ meme is supposed to have started with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ VP pick, during an appearance on the TV breakfast show Morning Joe.

JD Vance, at 39, would be the first millennial vice president. But not only is he a new generation, he might also be the first American vice president to take his intellectual armoury from the extremely online world of the New Right.  Vance says he is ‘plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures’. He draws from a whole new political lexicon, one that would seem baffling to his more starched colleagues in the Congress. Even someone like Alexandra Ocasio Cortez – 34 years old – is taking her cues from a more orthodox political tradition.  The New Right is a tag that has been worn by many radically different movements down the years.

Could the subject of the Sudetenland have been resolved more satisfactorily if Adolf Hitler had been given a more open platform? Somewhere he could really air his views? No messing, no clipping. Four hours on Joe Rogan, perhaps?         It’s a historical what-if stirred up again this week by Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The rangy two-hour session at the Kremlin, trailed for days, became available on Tucker’s website yesterday. It makes for uneven listening. Early expectations were of a blockbuster that could have become the most-viewed video in the history of Twitter/X. They have been wide of the mark.

Could Threads kill Twitter? Tens of millions have signed up to Meta’s rival app since it was launched this week. Its early success has led to renewed predictions of Twitter’s imminent doom.  When Elon Musk sacked half Twitter’s staff and pronounced himself Chief Twit back in November, the scoffing was endless – and has continued ever since. ‘It’s been an unmitigated disaster,’ wrote Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times, back in April. ‘The speed and totality with which he’s (Musk) ruined the site have been almost impressive,’ before falling back on mystical definitions: ‘Cultural relevance is difficult to quantify, but you know it when you feel it.