Sam Leith

You could think of it as a Venn diagram. One circle would contain all the people who have read Homer’s Odyssey (it would contain a much, much smaller circle of people who have read it in the original Greek). The other circle would contain all the people who have seen Christopher Nolan’s film. The second of those two circles would contain all the people whose opinion on the movie was remotely worth listening to. The overlap between those two circles would contain all the people who, potentially, would have anything interesting to say about the relationship between Christopher Nolan’s work and the Homeric poem. Grumbling that movies aren’t the same as the books goes back forever And yet.

I wrote in this space not long ago, in the context of Nicola Sturgeon, about how incuriosity can, when taken to extremes, be a sort of superpower. So it appears to be, too, with Nigel Farage. First there was this crypto zillionaire stuffing the pockets of his red corduroy trousers with cash. Did Nigel at no point wonder whether there was any agenda beyond rewarding him personally for being a smashing chap and a real laugh to have a pint with? If he had wondered that, and the thought had crossed his mind that the whole thing might look a bit iffy to the voting public, he would surely have thought it best to make a note of it in the register of Members’ Interests – y'know, just to be on the safe side.

“Why don’t you write,” my commissioning editor suggested yesterday, “an optimistic piece on Andy Burnham? Give him a chance, sort of thing?” This seemed, on the face of it, an admirably charitable and fair-minded suggestion. Amid the projectile-vomiting epidemic of demented negativity and hysterical loathing which, as I remarked in this space last week, is the daily stuff of our politics, I thought for a moment, he’s asking me to do something a little bit different.

It’s possible, though not popular, to feel a bat-squeak of sympathy for Sir Keir Starmer on a human level these days. It can’t be much fun being him. It’s also possible, though not popular, to hold in your head at the same time the ideas that a) he’s been a pretty useless Prime Minister and b) he isn’t an actual monster. He has, where he has made any decisions, made terrible decisions. He has led from the back, thrown his colleagues merrily under a whole succession of Number 37s when things have gone wrong, switched tack at the first whiff of cordite, been serially economical with the truth and stubborn in his refusal to recognise reality. None of this redounds to his credit. Is this loathing, we should ask, strictly proportionate? Is it, y’know, sane?

Today, with much fanfare, HM Government is rolling out its new policy to protect young people from online harms. Here is a political/legal move for which I am the target audience. I have three teenagers, and for those not so afflicted, let me tell you that keeping them from spending all day, every day goggling at one piece of tech or another is an infernal game of whack-a-mole. Item: Child One, Instagram. Very, very occasionally, she forgets to delete her browser history and CTRL-H yields page after page after page, hour after hour, of Instagram hits. If you restrict or remove the phone app, it will be re-downloaded or the site opened instead in a browser window.

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user licence agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed. We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe This is the business model that now dominates the digital age. Neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, chokepoint capitalism: it gets called all sorts of things, but the basic idea it has in common is that the rules of property ownership, as we have tended to understand them for most of the history of capitalism, are shifting under our feet. We think we’re buying products.

They should make a film about Peter Murrell, shouldn’t they? Starring, possibly, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband is not only a crook of shameless proportions, but for a decade or so, he somehow spent like a sailor on shore leave without anyone around him raising so much as an eyebrow. Not for him the discreet Swiss bank account or the mattress stuffed with bearer-bonds. Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale Jr, Macavity the Mystery Cat: these figures are cautious amateurs by comparison. Is he a hypnotist? Is there a point at which incuriosity becomes a superpower?