Sam Leith

You can’t turn on the telly or fire up the internet these days without stumbling across some celebrity or other baring their soul in a glossily produced documentary. Three hours, was it, of David Beckham – taking us from talented nipper playing keepy-uppy to grizzled paterfamilias wiping down his barbecue in wistful retirement? Or Renaissance: A Film, which showed Beyonce as flawed and human in the same way and with much the same aim as the Bible shows Jesus Christ as flawed and human. Or there was that interminable Robbie Williams doc, in which – for no reason that was completely obvious – he spent about four hours sitting glumly in his underpants in front of his MacBook, watching footage of his own earlier career.

Newsnight, we learned last week, is losing ten minutes off its running time, more than half its staff including its entire reporting team and is dropping its investigative films in favour of cheap ‘n’ easy studio-based debates.    The BBC’s news supremo Deborah Turness calls it 'an important BBC brand', but said 'we've made the decision to reformat Newsnight as a 30-minute late-night news-making debate, discussion and interview programme'. She hasn’t quite taken the old captive bolt gun to it yet, then, but this sacred cow is definitely mooing anxiously as it makes its way down the slaughterhouse gangplank.

It was reported this weekend that the great trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP), the one that Lord Cameron just boasted would 'put the UK at the heart of a group of some of the world’s most dynamic economies', will boost our economy by practically nothing at all. The OBR reckons CPTPP will put 0.04 per cent on our GDP over fifteen years. The bilateral deals with Australia and New Zealand, meanwhile, are predicted to give a 0.1 per cent uplift. This is better, but still, hardly the piratical free trade bonanza we were encouraged to expect. A gold-plated special-friends deal with the USA shows no signs of materialising. To what extent has pro-Brexit feeling shifted from being a political phenomenon to being a psychological one?

This summer, horrified by the rising numbers of students no-platforming and harassing visiting speakers whose views they don’t like, the government anointed the Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed ‘free speech tsar’. Prof Ahmed said at the time that his new role, at least as he saw it, wasn’t a culture wars stunt: he was interested in protecting free expression across the political spectrum.   There is a culture of systematic no-platforming and double-cucked snowflakery, it turns out, in the supposedly pro-free-speech government We have every reason to think he’s been beavering away since then to ensure our campuses continue to zing with the free and frank exchange of ideas, and good on him.

In my admittedly sketchy understanding of it, black holes are formed when something becomes so massive that it collapses in on itself (am I getting this right, Carlo?) ... and then keeps collapsing, over and over again, until it becomes infinitely tiny and inside-out and even the rules of physics cease to apply. This applies to supermassive celestial bodies, but also to supermassive shambles, such as we are to observe through our telescopes when we point them in the direction of the Conservative Party. Every zeptosecond brings a further wrinkle in political spacetime, and every zeptosecond sees the governing party, like a black hole, sucking harder than Newtonian physics ever thought possible. Take this latest reshuffle.

One of the consistent themes of Dominic Cummings’s kamikaze mission to reform the machinery of the British state was that we urgently needed more politicians with backgrounds in science, maths and engineering, and fewer with 2:1s in PPE. As he argued, the latter sort (see also: historians like Dom, classicists like Boris Johnson and pompous English graduates like me) are very well equipped to get themselves into a position of power, what with their networks of university chums and ability to produce plausible bullshit to a deadline. But once they get there they are out of their depth amid problems that require systems thinking, numeracy, the ability to weigh probabilities, technological literacy and so forth.