Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Pity the poor 41 Club. The last time an image of a group of men eating dinner caused this much trouble, the art world was collectively trying to work out whether any of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was left beneath the latest restoration. For those not inducted to social media’s delights, the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen posted a photo of his dinner with his local branch of the organisation in a very standard piece of constituency engagement. By 7.30 this morning, that photo had been viewed some 5 million times, the count driven up by a torrent of vitriol. Readers might ask exactly what it was about the photo that attracted so much attention.

Is Covid over? With Plan B restrictions finally lifted, there'll be no more working from home. Masks will no longer be required in shops. Covid passes will become a thing of the past. We can go back to normal permanently. Or can we? Things won't be the same as they were in 2019, but they will be close. We will live in a world where occasional booster jabs – and careful monitoring of those arriving in our country – are the only noticeable things separating life before and after the pandemic. This normality is available to us, if we want it. The problem is, I’m not totally certain everyone does. Lockdowns, masks, social distancing and limits on meetings were never intended to be an endpoint. They were a way of managing the pandemic until something better came along.

There is a theory which states the primary reason for Boris Johnson’s political longevity is that there are simply so many scandals that the latest infidelity drives the last one from public consciousness before it really has time to sink in. 'Who paid for his wallpaper? Meal delivery? He had a party while forcing the country into social isolation and atomisation? How many parties— what do you mean the police are investigating him?' At this point, it seems like the revelation most likely to do him in will be the discovery that, at some point in the last two years, Boris Johnson sat quietly in a room and diligently worked through an afternoon without once breaking from his papers to do something outrageous.

Now that the dust from the choppers has settled, we are left with two abiding images of the West’s adventure in Afghanistan. The first is an American Chinook hovering over its embassy, rescuing staff in a botched evacuation. This debacle unfolded just weeks after president Biden promised the world there would be no parallel with the fall of Saigon, and 'no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy'. The second is a plane taking off from Kabul laden with 150 pets. The general success of the war in Afghanistan never came down to British policy. It’s for Washington’s post-mortem to confront the difficult truths about the limits of military power in the pursuit of political objectives.

Following the killing of Sir David Amess, MPs were quick to point to the ‘corrosive space’ provided by social media, the ‘toxic’ conduct of politics, and the general phenomenon of people being cruel to them online. Of course our parliamentary representatives don’t deserve to face waves of abuse for doing their jobs. They shouldn’t receive racial abuse, or threats of violence, or even simple insults for doing their jobs. This goes without saying for any worker, whether serving customers in a supermarket, helping commuters with their tickets, or indeed governing the country.

In the world I inhabit, the killing of Sir David Amess has been formally declared a terrorist incident, a suspect has been taken into custody, and the police have identified ‘a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism’. In a second world, constructed of headlines and commentary and tweets, a conversation is taking place that is almost entirely disconnected from this base reality. In this world, the Home Secretary is primarily concerned about the ‘corrosive space’ provided by social media, the Commons asks questions about the ‘toxic’ conduct of politics, and attention is given to the level of aggression and abuse experienced by MPs. These are important issues.

If the NHS's cheerleaders and detractors can agree on one thing, it's this: we need fewer backroom staff. If the health service's doctors, nurses and cleaners are heroes, the pen-pushers, middle-men and legions of drab men in drab suits are sucking the vital lifeblood out of the NHS, while droning on about synergies in management. All this while claiming a salary that could have paid for another two nurses. This debate has re-emerged after it was reported that almost half of all NHS staff are managers, administrators or unqualified assistants. Helen Whately, the care minister, spoke for many when she said she feels 'strongly that the money we put into the NHS needs to go to frontline'.

The evacuation of Pen Farthing and his pets from Afghanistan this week is not a ‘feel-good’ story. It is not a charmingly eccentric rescue mission. It’s a moral abomination that shames Britain. While American soldiers lifted their dead for their final flight home, British soldiers were carrying dogs onto a plane. When time was running out to get people who served with us out alive, ministers were sponsoring clearance for his charter flight and senior commanders were dealing with his supporters. Before we go any further, I’d like to be clear about one thing: I don’t particularly blame Pen. I’d probably want to get my pets out of a warzone too. I blame the government for going along with it, and for that I blame the British public too. This one is on us.

Ah, the last days of summer. Long evenings, sunny weekends, and crusty Extinction Rebellion hippies blocking arterial traffic lanes to the audible grinding of teeth from the police officers tasked with standing by and politely watching their sub-art-school amdram productions, rather than getting on with the business of giving them a much-needed hosing down with Boris’s water cannons. As Charlie Peters has pointed out for the Mail, the impression of police impotence has nothing to do with the willingness of the bobby on the beat to break out a truncheon and apply it liberally to the thorax of middle-class graduates enjoying their day off by making everyone else late for work.

There is an idea of the state that argues that the role of government is to act as a benevolent social planner, redistributing resources for the benefit of the population as a whole. British governance has more in common with Mancur Olson’s concept of the stationary bandit, a tyrant with a captive population and a desire to maximise the wealth he can extract. The only twist is that rather than a group of warriors seizing wealth by force, Britain works to the benefit of a large number of elderly pensioners thanks to their tendency to reliably turn out at the polls. To very briefly recap, years of austerity cuts combined with triple locking pensions ensured that while working-age families — particularly those with children — lost out, pensioners were protected.