Max Jeffery

In Great Missenden we were affixing the last details to our Friday Effigy when the alert came. It’s a new tradition we villagers have started – weekly, ritualistic burnings of the Guilty Men of ‘High Speed Rail 2’, the groundwork for which has recently begun blighting our pretty green hills. This Friday, a big dolly of former transport secretary Andrew Adonis was going to be torched. We’ve done Andrew a few times, and he always pulls a crowd. His resemblance would be staked over a bonfire in Buryfields Park. There would be fireworks and food served al fresco to the mobbers, cooked on disposable barbecues which we would frequently leave unattended. The ‘Severe Alert’ killed our plans.

Dave and Lynne are remembering the good old days when kids had their baths in galvanised tubs in front of the fire. ‘No inhibition,’ says Dave. ‘Straight with your clothes off. Straight in there. Mum’ll throw a bucket of water over you. Wash yourself. Another bucket of water.’ Dave manages the E. Langston hardware shop, but it isn’t a real business. Not anymore. Some years ago, its premises were transposed from Piper’s Row in Wolverhampton to the Black Country Living Museum. Its life is happier here. There’s not much left on Piper’s Row today: an off licence, a bus stop, a cheap hotel. The Black Country Living Museum was founded in 1978 to teach people about life during the Industrial Revolution.

William Dalrymple says that children ‘don’t learn’ about the British Empire at school. It is an ‘elephant in the room’, he claimed on the Green party leader Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics podcast last week. This isn’t true. I learnt about the Empire at school. Studying A-level history a decade ago, we spent a year covering the Raj. The Indian Mutiny, 1857. The Amritsar Massacre, 1919. On viciously cold mornings, my teacher, Ms Pearmain, would open the windows and say that boys’ brains were slowed by comfort. It kept her lessons in my head. It would have taken Dalrymple a few seconds to do some research and realise his error. In schools which follow the national curriculum, lessons about the British Empire are prescribed by the government.

The first arrest of the weekend at Badminton Horse Trials occurred at 7.17 p.m. on Saturday. Fight, separation, removal, detention, escape, capture, arrest. Things had accelerated in the preceding hours on the Duke of Beaufort’s estate. With the day’s eventing over, there was nothing to punctuate the drinking and the drugs. Attendees gathered at Lakeside – an enclosed boozing zone on the grassy, tented banks of a 600-foot-long pond – and consumed until nightfall. ‘Badminton is the best event of the year,’ said Ollie, a late-teen boy familiarising himself with the attractions. ‘Fanny, beer, horses – what else do you want?

It’s a year since the Supreme Court ruled that gender means biological sex – and not much has changed. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is advising the government on how to apply the judgment to law, has spent a long while drafting guidance. But last week, word arrived that Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, wants the EHRC to ‘tone down’ its advice, leading to further delays. Why the hold-up? My guess is that it has something to do with a new era we are entering. An era of ‘TRANS RAGE’. That’s not my expression. It’s from Bash Back, a recently formed anonymous collective going after people and organisations it believes frustrate the transgender experience.

Four weeks since a caravan was torched on Goodneston Road in north-east Bristol, and still no one has bothered to clear the debris. The black carcass of the caravan remains, dressed with yellow tape reading ‘CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS’ and sitting among expired syringes, used laughing gas canisters, a shopping trolley of indiscriminate electrics, and unmarked bottles of off-coloured liquids. The caravans settled on this street some time ago. They brought drugs and left faeces on the pavement and made many local people unhappy. Police think the fire was started deliberately. By luck, nobody died. In Bristol, caravans are everywhere. They squat on residential roads and outside parks and under bridges and right in the city centre.

Everyone who’s anyone in Oldham knows Irish Imy. Born Mohammed Imran Ali in Dublin in 1980 and raised in Werneth in south-west Oldham, Imy is the borough’s recurring bad guy. He’s done time for assault, trafficking heroin and being the getaway driver for the murderer Dale Cregan, who shot three people and blew up their bodies with grenades in 2012. Naturally, Imy now wants to be a politician. He’s standing in this year’s local elections as an independent, promising to ‘Make Werneth Great Again’. His campaign is not regarded as insane. He may win. Imy is capitalising on the sense that this Greater Manchester borough is corrupt. People in Oldham say the local elections are rigged and believe that council seats are handed out through the South Asian biradari clan system.

You’ve probably seen the videos. Kemi Badenoch delivering her Budget response in the form of a rap to a sobbing Rachel Reeves. Keir Starmer as a McDonald’s drive-thru worker. David Lammy as a Spice Girl in a tight dress. Reeves (again) as the Grand High Witch from The Witches. Behind the videos is one man. He runs the Crewkerne Gazette, an online publisher of viral political videos made with artificial intelligence. The ‘Crewkerne Man’ would not give me his name when we met for lunch in Somerset last week.