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The sad death of tabloid English
Before we routinely bored our friends to death with our hyper-optimised workflows, Strava personal bests, and alcohol-free lager, British people didn’t take themselves quite so seriously. Not so long ago, you couldn’t step five paces without a tabloid newspaper bunching around your ankles. The Sun and the Daily Mirror, their frontpages splashed in frantic red ink, served up a daily diet of love rats and busty babes often embroiled in something called ‘coke shame hell’.
With them vanished a magnificent dialect: Tabloid English—a compressed, bawdy, semi-literate poetry understood by barristers and bricklayers alike. Those newspapers flaunted their own vernacular: a rhythmic, gutter-level blank verse in which prisoners were lags, babes were busty, sex was a romp and unfailingly steamy. With the death of print, we didn’t merely lose newspapers. We lost a language. We lost Britain’s last great folk poetry.
This was a language forged not by academic committees or sensitivity readers, but by the brutal physics of the printing press. Headlines demanded punchy Anglo-Saxon words to fit tight layouts. All of the complexities of human nature were hammered down to their blunt Germanic roots. If a government minister disagreed with a Treasury policy, he didn’t riot in today’s airy Latinate language and ‘express extensive reservations regarding implementation models,’ he sparked fury in a bid to oust his boss. Today’s therapeutic language marshals its bloodless Latin and Greek roots to soften blows, avoid liability, and obscure reality. A philandering celeb doesn’t cheat on his wife. He engages in a temporary uncoupling.
Tabloid English was over the top. But at least it attempted some semblance of the truth. A typical story followed the hero’s journey. A typical headline went like so: ‘Sleaze MP Exposed in Steamy Romp’.
Over the next week, millions absorbed daily developments in this sorry saga. In cafés, pubs, and salons they’d debate the finer points. By Sunday’s edition, our fallen hero broke his silence. The sleazy MP revealed his shame. He wept. He apologised. His hero’s journey ended, ultimately, with the slate wiped clean.
In today’s post-tabloid culture, redemption is in short supply. So too is shame. Few lament the passing of Tabloid English excess—those linguistic pitchforks and throaty primal screams—but it served an instinctual social function. What replaced it is far from humane.
For want of a better term, I’ll call it Therapy English. Today’s shamed celeb stands little chance against the dreary syringe pumped with therapeutic buzzwords. Today’s wrongdoer doesn’t confess to being an ardent shagger or piss artiste. They issue a statement pockmarked with allusions to trauma and other therapeutic loopholes. They’re on a journey. They’re prioritising their inner child. Scepticism from the judgemental amounts to gaslighting or not holding space.
In today’s post-tabloid culture, redemption is in short supply. So too is shame.
Therapy English may congratulate itself on its compassion and humanity, but its genetic aversion to plain-speaking strangles both. Under Therapy English, our disgraced hero condemns himself to rolling a Sisyphean boulder. He may confess his flaws, but a confession dripping in therapy speak is not a confession, but a series of prefabbed words and phrases pressed together in sentence shapes.
This semantic shift plays out in the gladiatorial arena of social media. On X and Instagram, public shaming is no longer channelled through traditional media gatekeepers, but through algorithmic mobs steeped in TikTok therapy reels. When Jada Pinkett-Smith revealed her ‘entanglement’ outside of her marriage with Will, the online mob cleaved into opposing Swiftian tribes, each branding the other as narcissist or gaslighter.
The old red-tops trafficked in biblical transgressions of the flesh—greed, lust, wrath, and pride. Sins we intimately understood because everyone had committed minor variations of them. We knew what ‘booze-crazed night of passion’ involved, even if ours didn’t make the front page.
Therapeutic language, opaque by design, and administered like a prescription-only sedative, prevents the vital features of public shaming: catharsis and redemption. Tabloid English got it all out on the table. Sure, it was embarrassing and uncouth, but at least it wasn’t fatal. Equally, Tabloid English worked on the expectation that we would all fuck up now and then. If we said sorry and at least appeared to mean it, all was once again well.
Ironically, in a therapeutic culture obsessed with journeys and compassion, there is little redemption. Convicted by a pitiless show trial jury, the confessor shakily signs their permanent exile papers. When we traded the flawed character for the trauma-informed narrative, we didn’t just change our vocabulary but our grasp of reality. Tabloid English, bawdy and crude though it was, dressed in overalls and worked for a living. Rooted in the language of the plumber and the nurse, it was deeply suspicious of pomposity, humbug, or plain old bullshit. Tabloid English refused the putting on of airs.
Therapy English, by contrast, is the language of the HR department, the corporate away-day, the NGO workshop, the elite university, the lanyard class. It excludes and obscures rather than includes and informs. It replaces the robust, laughing judgment of the pub with the corrosive passive-aggression of the HR seminar.
Back in the early 2000s, in a flickering newsroom, an editor typed ‘love rat shame’ for the last time. He was crude. He was painfully nosy. He was possibly drunk. But he understood human nature better than most. And Great Britain is less fun, less liberal, and less humane for it.
Was Brexit a mistake?
Next week, we will celebrate a decade since the Brexit vote. The decade that followed was one of political turmoil: five prime ministers in just twice as many years, and maybe a sixth to join them in just a few weeks. David Cameron hoped that a referendum might stop his party obsessing over Europe. Instead, the stalemate in parliament and acrimony that followed Brexit saw his party dealt a semi-fatal blow at the ballot box.
To mark this anniversary, on Wednesday The Spectator asked those who played a key role in the events leading up to the vote: was Brexit a mistake? Batting for Remain were barrister and former Conservative MP Dominic Grieve KC and Spectator columnist Matthew Parris, while former Brexit Party MEP Baroness Claire Fox and The Spectator editor Michael Gove defended Leave. The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman refereed.
Dominic Grieve spoke first and provided the only passionate defence of the European Union. ‘The opportunities [the single market] gave us to increase our national security, prosperity and wellbeing were immense.’ Post Britain’s departure, he claimed that ‘the superior growth rate which we enjoyed in 2016 is gone’, replaced by ‘a 4 per cent reduction in growth, a 15 per cent reduction in trade, our GDP is down 5 per cent and our goods exports are down 18 per cent in real terms’.
Is the economy really suffering thanks to the electorate’s decision that we are better off out? It was a claim repeated throughout the night. Both speakers on the Leave side contested Grieve’s assertion that Brexit ‘was never going to work. It didn’t work and won’t in the future.’ Michael Gove offered the Remainers a bet, to prove they really did believe in the economic trauma triggered by Leave: ‘Even if Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister, I will bet that we will grow faster than Germany in the next five, or even ten, years.’ No one on the Remain side, nor even a single audience member, took him up on it.
‘Running away to join the circus was quite simply silly.’
Matthew Parris struggled to make quite such a positive case for the EU. He opened with a quote from his late friend Tristan Garel-Jones, one of the Conservative party’s most Europeanist politicians. Garel-Jones loved Europe and believed in the European ideal, but once warned Matthew to ‘never forget that the European Union is a f*ckpig organisation’.
For Parris, it was the Leavers who were too idealistic. They were searching for ‘sunny uplands’. But we are ‘doomed in politics to a world of least worse’. ‘Running away to join the circus was quite simply silly.’ Brexit was ‘a populist revolt … an insistence by those who had been overlooked that their voice should be heard. Their voice was heard and they made a mistake.’
Claire Fox, a former member of the British Revolutionary Communist Party and a former Brexit Party MEP, offered a defence of those who voted out. ‘It remains one of the greatest democratic accomplishments of the modern era.’ In 2016, Leave voters ‘who felt their opinions, lifestyles and values were derided … took a gamble and forced themselves on to the stage of history’.
She recalled a meeting of thinktankers shortly after the referendum was called, in which senior politicians ‘fretted that a low turnout would make the taken-for-granted Remain victory seem illegitimate’. ‘Let’s tell everyone,’ they concluded, ‘that this will be a once-in-a-lifetime vote.’ But that tactic worked against them. People concluded that ‘what we think really matters this time. We’re being trusted to make a constitutional decision’.
Fox remembers the referendum as a ‘David and Goliath’ battle: the elites versus the people. The ‘start of the fake-news moral panic’ in which the Labour party ‘branded their own supporters neo-Nazi types’. She believes it was always ‘about more than pounds and pennies and trade deals … it was about tearing up the excuses’.
Michael Gove concurred that Brexit was about democracy. ‘When I was a politician, I was accountable to you,’ he opened. ‘When I got things wrong, and boy did I get things wrong, you had the right to yank the chain.’ Right or left, ‘the thing about Brexit is that politicians can make choices and then you can be the judge’.
Gove regretted that team Leave lacked one speaker, whom he knew ‘would prove that this side is with us tonight’: ‘Schrödinger’s Prime Minister: Keir Starmer.’ Starmer built his career wrapping himself in the gold stars and calling for a second vote on the EU. But what are his revealed preferences? He has cut tariffs, protected the steel industry, allowed AI to grow and even imposed VAT on private schools (a policy booed by the audience). All decisions which Labour could not have made in the EU.
Gove was unconvinced by Grieve’s and Parris’s economic doom-mongering. ‘Dominic said before we voted Leave there would be a recession – the worst recession that we would ever have faced in living memory. The truth is, the British economy has grown just as fast as other European economies. Indeed, we’ve grown faster than Germany.’ In fact, when we were in the single market after 1992, we grew more slowly than before. ‘More Europe meant less growth.’
Our audience, on the whole, did not regret Brexit. At the top of the debate, only 37.9 per cent voted that Brexit was a mistake. Some 62.1 per cent thought that it was not. But that margin did tighten. Once all of our speakers had their say, 39.9 per cent of the audience came to the conclusion that Brexit was indeed an error, with 60.1 per cent against. So the Remainers won the swing.
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Do politicians really care about the evidence?
Is policy-making in the UK based on evidence? That is the question I address in my new book, Inside the Sausage Factory, in which I take four ‘public health’ policies from the 2010s and examine all the evidence that was cited for and against them in the media and in parliament.
You would hope that policies pertaining to the health of the public would be more evidence-based than most, but that is not necessarily so. While campaigners for each of the policies – plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto prohibition of fixed-odds betting terminals – had plenty of peer-reviewed studies and expert reviews to wave around, this ‘evidence’ suffered from serious flaws. When the policies were eventually introduced, there was little sign that they made the slightest improvement to any of the problems they were supposed to address.
Close examination of the campaigns which led to these four policies suggests that politicians did not make decisions based solely, or even mostly, on the evidence. It was claimed, for instance, that a Canadian province had seen the number of alcohol-related deaths fall by 32 per cent after a 10 per cent increase in the minimum price of alcohol. In fact, deaths rose significantly throughout the period in question. The modelling for the sugar tax, too, predicted a decline in obesity that never took place. The modelling of the relationship between alcohol-related deaths and minimum pricing in Scotland was wrong too. Instead of following facts, the government of the day bowed to political pressure whipped up by campaigners pushing policies had not existed until they came along. None of those policies had appeared in the manifestos of any of the main parties, with the exception of minimum pricing, which was mentioned by the Liberal Democrats in 2010 (and yet was never introduced in England).
A handful of MPs felt strongly about some of these policies, but they were low salience issues for the government as a whole. It was lobby groups such as Action on Sugar and the Campaign for Fairer Gambling that pushed them up the agenda, published press releases, got celebrity endorsements and garnered media coverage. This all had an effect on public opinion and forced the government to intervene. Politicians, wanting to get re-elected, gauged public opinion and asked themselves whether the political costs of doing nothing were greater than the costs of acting.
In the end, only 15 per cent of the public were opposed to plain packaging and only 6 per cent were opposed to clamping down on fixed-odds betting terminals. Resistance to the sugar tax was more substantial, at 33 per cent, but opponents were clearly in the minority and George Osborne needed to make an announcement at the Budget that would take the nation’s mind off the cuts he was making to disability benefits. Public opinion was evenly split on minimum pricing.
Once the ‘public health’ interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever
It would be an exaggeration to call this government by opinion poll, but that would be a more accurate description than ‘evidence-based policy-making’. Evidence did serve a purpose. Modelling studies showed how the policy could work in theory. Evidence from other countries where similar policies were in place reassured politicians that the they were enforceable and would probably not create a public backlash. The regular publication of new research gave the pressure groups a way of keeping their issue in the news, but scientific evidence was only one part of the overall campaign and was never decisive. In the plain packaging campaign, there were far more references in the media to Lynton Crosby, a government adviser, and his alleged links to the tobacco industry, than there was to all the peer-reviewed evidence on plain packaging combined. Similarly, Jamie Oliver’s support for the sugar tax was mentioned in more articles than all the evidence for the policy combined. It was the general climate of opinion, not the careful scrutiny of academic research, that mattered.
The evidence from Inside the Sausage Factory suggests that politicians will succumb to pressure on low-salience issues unless they believe that the policy will be widely unpopular or conspicuously backfire. Once the ‘public health’ interest groups had put their policies on the agenda, the government could not put off a decision forever. They became barnacles on the boat that needed to be scraped off. With the exception of minimum pricing in England, which had significant public and political opposition, the government in Westminster concluded that the reputational risks of inaction were greater than the political, economic and legal risks of acting. The squeaky wheel got the grease.
For those of us who are of a liberal disposition, this is not a happy conclusion to reach. It implies that politicians are hostages to small pressure groups manipulating public opinion and that the cycle will repeat itself again and again. Where will it end?
Whoops, I’ve given my children a gambling problem
The problem with my gambling, Caroline has always maintained, is not the fact that I nearly always lose. I only ever bet on QPR, so that’s inevitable. No, the issue is that I might pass on the habit to my children, particularly the boys. My bets rarely exceed £25, but my sons might have less self control. What if they become addicts, she wants to know? It will ruin their lives. In her eyes, gambling in front of them is like snorting heroin off the kitchen table.
Well, it pains me to say it, but she was right. My youngest recently celebrated his 18th birthday and the first thing he did, at one minute after midnight, was open a bet365 account. The fact that his becoming an adult coincided with the start of the World Cup didn’t help. His older brother told Caroline the 18-year-old has taken out a £200 overdraft from Monzo and stuck it all on England to win. I think he’s joking just to wind her up, but it may be true because he’s so convinced it’s our year he wants to get a tattoo on his arm, consisting of three lions and the words: ‘World Cup Winners, 1966 and 2026.’ Persuading him to wait until the end of the tournament – ‘just in case’ – has not been easy.
Not that his older brother is any better. His first ever bet was on the last World Cup and, disastrously, it was on Argentina. The fact that they won has persuaded him he has Nostradamus-like gifts and no amount of losing since – and there’s been a lot – has dissuaded him. He’s particularly fond of accumulators, or ‘accas’, where you get superficially attractive odds by betting on a series of results instead of just one. He hasn’t quite grasped that the reason these bets pay out so much is that your chances of winning are vanishingly small.
I think the penny may have finally dropped when they found an online betting app offering odds of 60/1 on England to win or draw against Croatia. ‘Look at that, Dad,’ said the youngest, jabbing his finger at his phone excitedly. ‘Even Mum couldn’t deny that’s a good bet.’ I looked at the small print – and by ‘small’ I mean unreadable without taking a photo and enlarging it – and discovered the maximum bet was £1 and any winnings over and above that amount had to be banked in the form of credit and could be used only to pad out accumulator bets. In other words, it’s a scam designed to get you to put money on the most unwinnable bets in the bookmaker’s repertoire. ‘So should I avoid accas in future?’ he asked, doubtfully. ‘Yes,’ I said, glaring at his older brother.
I know it’s not an excuse but the gambling companies are past masters at luring naive young men onto their platforms. Another ‘irresistible’ offer that my boys got excited by was £30 worth of free bets – again restricted to accumulators – if they could get someone else to sign up to an app using an email link. This led to a furious bidding war between them to tempt me into signing up, with more and more extravagant offers to do odd jobs around the house. I took the high road, telling them I didn’t want to encourage them to enrol on yet another gambling platform, but they pocketed the £30 anyway, having found willing co-conspirators in their friendship groups.
Bookmakers are past masters at luring naive young men onto their platforms
Part of the problem is that small amounts of money mean so much more at their age, so on the rare occasions when they turn a £1 acca into a £25 win, they are absolutely over the moon. The bragging goes on for weeks. Unfortunately, they don’t bank their winnings to offset their losses, but immediately spend them on industrial quantities of fried food from Chicken Cottage. I’m reminded of a Christmas card I joked about sending 15 years ago featuring my children, then aged eight, six, five and four, smoking cigarettes, chugging malt wine and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the caption: ‘Greetings from Acton.’ The idea was to ridicule the pretentious Christmas cards of my posh friends, featuring pictures of their kids looking like something out of a Boden catalogue. But the joke’s on me because my children have become the people in my imaginary card.
In truth, it doesn’t bother me that much. Given that the graduate labour market has been wrecked by AI, I’ve more or less given up hope of my children ever getting well-paid jobs which means they’ll probably never leave home. So it’s nice to have some shared hobbies, such as gambling. We disagree about what is and isn’t a good bet all the time, but the satisfying thing about these arguments is that there’s usually a clear winner – or, more often, three losers. And if we fancy a day out together, we can always take a trip to Gamblers’ Anonymous.
‘Through ecstasy I say: it’s perfect’: The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop reviewed
The obvious thing to say about themed restaurants is that they are usually bad. The Rainforest Café in London, for instance, was nothing like a rainforest, though it is slightly more like a rainforest now it has gone. But there are exceptions. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, for instance. Perhaps the sort of tourists who go to Bakewell for tarts are more dangerous than the ones who go to Bath for buns. They certainly look as if they read a lot of crime fiction and are capable of murder in their heads. But The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop out-gilds its myth. It’s rare.
The menu is epic, and lovely, and I mention only a few to make you drool
In the history of the human’s relationship to its mouth, the Bakewell pudding, which is earlier than the tart, being Regency, is just another happy error. Like setting cows on fire. It is jam and almond egg custard on puff pastry, and it was born by mistake. The canonical line is that a local cook tried to bake a jam tart but spread the egg on top, rather than stirring it in, and hello custard. What took you so long? Although this is mildly disputed – people just don’t get as angry about the provenance of Bakewell pudding as they do about tiramisu, but we are not Italian – you wouldn’t say so in Bakewell, which is as certain a town as exists in the British Isles; if you are having an existential crisis there are worse places to recover. The tart – jam and almond sponge on shortcrust pastry with fondant icing and a cherry – is Mitford era, not that they ate much, and, if you are the sort of person who wishes to celebrate Bakewell Tart Day, it’s on Wednesday.
The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop is 17th century: that is, it looks like a pub in a Mormon re-enactment of an old English village. The ground floor is the kind of bakery every town used to have – heaven for the eyes, nose, and mouth – now replaced by Greggs. I won’t blame Russian black ops for Greggs, though I want to, and they’ve done plenty. The restaurant is upstairs, styled as a comfortable barn: it looks like a barn, but it has a chandelier. The dominant colour is pale brown, but if you eat enough sugar it looks gold.
I know why it looks like a barn: because it is not for us. On the walls are Impressionist-style paintings of cows, rabbits, ducks and cows again. For Impressionism – indeed for cows, rabbits and ducks – they have a terrible intensity. There is a photograph of Mrs Wilson, ‘the founder of The Original Bakewell Pudding Shop’. She looks like an East End gangster, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The menu is epic, and lovely, and I mention only a few to make you drool: the Original Pudding Shop Breakfast (£13); All Things Bakewell (fruit cake, cream tea, Bakewell pudding or tart, £21.50); Hot Roast Pork Cob (sandwich, £14); Derbyshire steak & ale pie, £18.50). Usually, a menu of this size bespeaks chaos, but this is not an ordinary restaurant. We have an immense ploughman’s (cold beef and ham, a pork pie, cheddar and stilton, salad and roll, £16.25); the steak pie; a Bakewell pudding and tart (£14); a Mars Bar Crisp traybake because I am insane (£4.75). It’s hard to write about food this warm and expansive, because it is a mother’s love, and infants can’t write prose. Through ecstasy I burble: it’s perfect. Cakes of the peaks! It’s as fine a place as I have been, and there’s an ending.
The glorious silliness of tribute band names
Seeing a tribute band can be a strange experience. There are your heroes on stage once more, magically rejuvenated and playing the music of your youth. You too feel briefly young again – until you notice everyone else at the gig is also at least 57.
But as often as not the band is brilliant. They have lovingly tracked down the right guitars, effect pedals and amp settings in search of the perfect sound. They have styled their hair just so, applied the requisite tattoos and, at some obvious expense, commissioned perfect replicas of signature stage outfits. See Björn Again and the girls might come complete with the purple capes worn for Abba’s 1980 world tour before changing into the white-booted ‘SOS’ look.
This is interesting, as it apparently never occurs to a concert pianist that he should perform dressed as Liszt or Chopin. Yet while tributes take their appearance as seriously as their music, they usually acknowledge the strangeness of what they do by sending themselves up in their names. These can be glorious, with some of the best punning on the fact that they are not the genuine article: Proxy Music, Fake That, Faux Fighters and The Rolling Clones. Also, Oasish and Oasisn’t. Being a Pretenders tribute is obviously challenging, name-wise.
Tribute acts also love to riff on their origins, so please welcome, from the North-east, The Reet Hot Chili Peppers; and from Scotland, The Red Hot Chili Pipers. Also from north of the border there’s heavy rockers MacTallica and Eagles tribute Hotel Caledonia. Then (as seen advertised in an Indian restaurant) we have Patelvis. Other performers cheerfully admit to less than rock-god physiques, such as Blobby Williams, and Abba-gone-to-seed act, Flabba.
This tendency towards self-deprecation is a regular element of the tribute genre; witness the dead-pan wit of Fred Zeppelin, Jack Sabbath and the fabulously prosaic Brian Maiden. Even Spinal Tap had its own tribute band called Hell Hole.
Happily, the opportunities for wordplay are endless. I’ve long been amused by an off-licence in Bristol called Amy’s Winehouse, but imagine my delight upon discovering a tribute act going by the name of Amy Housewine. Some scope there for some joint promotional activity. Ziggy Sawdust and By Jovi are also personal favourites. In fact, tribute band joke names are such an established art-form that some bands exist only in joke form – such as fictional Elbow tribute, Arse (‘Most people can’t tell them apart’).
Perhaps some of the most interesting tribute acts are those which threaten to escape the confines of mere mimicry and become something more original – such as the intriguing reggae take on Page and Plant, Dread Zeppelin. Similarly, there’s a heavy metal exploration of the Abba canon featuring snarling, leather-clad versions Frida and Agnetha. You won’t be surprised to hear this self-styled ‘slaughterhouse disco’ outfit call themselves Abbatoir.
Another band to stretch the boundaries of tributism is Bootleg Blondie. They are so good that in 2019 Blondie’s drummer, the late Clem Burke, teamed up with them for a 15-concert tour. Like the fans, he was reliving his youth, and briefly the band were only 83 per cent bootleg. Incidentally, Bootleg Blondie’s singer, a remarkable Debbie Harry lookalike, was actually born Debbie Harris. How’s that for nominative determinism?
What I learned in the pubs of Makerfield
Last Wednesday I went up to Makerfield to do a bit of on-the-ground research into what voters there really make of Burnham, Kenyon, and whoever it is that’s standing for Rupert Lowe. To do so, I went from pub to pub in search of unguarded moments and in vino veritas. I have family just outside Warrington, ten miles up the road from Makerfield, and have lost more money than I care to count at Haydock Park Racecourse, on the border of the neighbouring seat of St Helen’s North, so I did not arrive entirely unfamiliar with the local area.
I pulled into Wigan North Western just before ten in the morning, early enough to make it before the pubs opened. From the station, I took a taxi to Ashton, the largest settlement in the seat. My driver was a lovely man called Ian, who lived in the constituency on a road that served as the border between Wigan, Greater Manchester, and Lancashire.
I chatted to a few other 10.30 punters, who spoke about ‘our Andy’ with genuine warmth. All of them said they had voted Reform in the local elections, but were going to vote for Burnham on Thursday.
We were making the usual cab small talk when Ian suddenly burst out with: ‘and another thing. We need to stop these people coming across our borders.’ Ah, I thought, leaning forward a little. Fantastic. I had not even reached the pub and already copy-worthy conversation had found me. ‘Which people do you mean?’ I asked. ‘These cabs coming over from Wolverhampton into Wigan,’ he said. ‘They’re illegally operating.’
Ian then explained that taxicabs licensed in Wolverhampton face far lower administrative and financial requirements than those licensed in Wigan. Andy Burnham, he said, had been very good on this, and because of that he was considering voting for him. He added that there was a time when he would never have considered voting for Reform or Farage, but now he wondered whether we did, after all, need someone new running the government.
I jumped out of the cab and headed to my first pub, a Wetherspoons called The Sir Thomas Gerard where I ordered a pint of Doom Bar. ‘Andy, is it?’ I heard someone say to my left. I looked over and saw a bald man sitting on a stool, reading the Daily Mail. I went over and confirmed my identity, and he admitted he had seen me on GB News before. Flattering. He then admitted he often found himself shouting at the television when I was on. Not so flattering, but at least he watched.
I asked him how he had found the by-election so far, and whether he was voting. He said he was obviously voting for Reform, and really didn’t like Andy Burnham at all. I asked if he had liked the outgoing Labour MP, Josh Simons, to which he spat back that he hadn’t, because Simons wasn’t from the area and because of his role in Labour Together.
I put it to him that, as a GB News viewer and Reform UK supporter, he might have been tempted by Restore Britain. He said he was ‘pissed off’ with Rupert Lowe, and that Lowe and Farage needed to get back together, since their policies weren’t that different in the first place. He then left, telling me to behave, and I chatted to a few other 10.30 punters, who spoke about ‘our Andy’ with genuine warmth. All of them said they had voted Reform in the local elections, but were going to vote for Burnham on Thursday.
I stopped after two pints, grabbed a bacon sandwich from the Cwtch Cafe across the road, and made my way up to the Robin Hood pub. I was making small talk with a regular when I heard the barmaid complaining about journalists in the pub from all over the world, every single day, trying to shove cameras and microphones in people’s faces. I can’t print what she said she would do to the next journalist she found in the pub, but it was enough to make me down my pint and head West through the constituency to a lovely local in Winstanley.
I bought my pint and fell into conversation with a punter called Stephen, who was on his second pint of Guinness. He told me he was ‘actually very right wing’, but would be voting for Burnham for two reasons. The first was that ‘we’ll be stuck with Starmer’ if Andy loses, or else we’d end up with ‘that Wes guy’, which, in Stephen’s view, was just as bad. The second was that his grandkids had gone to the same school as Andy’s children, so he felt some kind of collegiate loyalty to the man.
I shot back down to Ashton and visited a pair of pubs opposite one another: The Hingemakers Arms and the Commercial Inn, having a pint in each. The punters I spoke to echoed what everyone else had been telling me: if it were anyone but Andy, it would instantly be Reform.
Makerfield may not quite exist as a coherent political unit, like many constituencies it is an indiscriminate name given to a town, a scattering of villages and the bits in between to make up a fairly spread population density. But its pubs do exist, and in them the shape of the by-election could form. The voters I met were not, in any neat sense, Labour voters – maybe they would have been 30 years ago. Many of them had already wandered off to Reform and seemed perfectly happy to do so again if it was anyone but Andy.
Burnham is local enough, familiar enough, and, crucially, Andy enough. If you find yourself in the constituency, I am told Andy Burnham’s favourite pub is The Holts Arms in Orrell. Mine, for what it is worth, would be The Hingemakers Arms in Ashton. Whether that says more about him, about me, about Labour, or about the strange civic power of day drinking in a constituency that doesn’t really exist, I will leave to wiser minds.
Keir Starmer’s delusion is becoming tragic
Keir Starmer has entered what might be described as the peak delusion period of what remains of his time in Downing Street. There was fresh evidence of the Prime Minister’s all-consuming divorce from political reality in his latest comments about Andy Burnham, who is widely predicted to win the Makerfield by-election today, and then go on to launch a leadership challenge to turf the PM out of Downing Street.
The PM just doesn’t get it
Anyone and everyone knows all this and more, except Starmer apparently, who called Burnham “a great asset” and said he deserved “a big role in government”. What is Starmer smoking? The only big role in government that Burnham wants is Starmer’s job in Number 10. That’s the whole point of Burnham’s return to Westminster. Any attempt to pretend otherwise merely invites mockery.
Starmer’s delusions don’t end there. He goes on to suggest that it would be wrong for Labour to hold a leadership challenge ahead of a likely election to replace Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester which he described as “one of the biggest by elections we’ve ever fought, because of the scale of it”.
The PM just doesn’t get it. The response of those who want him out will be to suggest that the best way for Labour to hold on to the Manchester mayoralty is for Starmer to announce he is resigning. They would argue that anything less merely allows Reform to campaign on a “vote Reform, get rid of Starmer” platform that proved so effective in the local elections in May.
For added measure – and this has become a constant in the twilight period of Starmer’s premiership – he repeated his intention to fight any leadership challenge: “If there is a challenge, then I intend to fight. I’m not going to walk away from that, and I’ve been clear and consistent about that”.
There will be a leadership challenge if he doesn’t go voluntarily. It is not a case of if, but when. Everyone knows as much, except Starmer apparently.
There are plenty of real-world consequences to this never-ending Labour leadership psychodrama. Starmer is weak and growing weaker by the day, and there is semi-open mutiny from senior ministers.
A report in the Times suggests that Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has been “ghosting” his leader in recent weeks. Senior government sources are quoted as claiming that Miliband declined to take calls from the PM during a stand-off over defence spending. This has been denied by Miliband’s team.
Even so, relations between the two men are believed to have deteriorated significantly since Miliband became the first cabinet minister to advise Starmer to set out a timeline for his departure. The newspaper also claims “several cabinet ministers are weighing up whether to resign after the by-election in an attempt to force Starmer’s hand,” including potentially Miliband.
Meanwhile, Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, has said he will launch a leadership bid possibly as early as next week if Starmer doesn’t set a timetable for his departure.
Yet in Starmer World, none of this is really happening. Instead, ministers are united and working towards a common goal of making the country a better place. Andy Burnham will soon be joining the merry crew, happy to serve under Starmer, in an unspecified “big role”. The levels of make-believe involved are tragic.
Starmer cut a forlorn and isolated figure at the G7 summit in France this week. His waning influence on the global stage because of his increasingly tenuous hold on Downing Street was all too apparent at the leaders’ gathering. On a live feed, Starmer could be seen standing next to the leaders of Canada and Japan as they made small talk.
“Are they, are they having a meeting?” the Prime Minister could be heard asking. If there was a meeting going on, it seemed he hadn’t been invited. These international gatherings are supposed to be Starmer’s safe space, a setting in which he can get to play the role of statesman. That image has been irretrievably damaged by the resignation of John Healey as defence secretary and his devastating indictment of his own leader as someone unable to make the decisions required to defend the country.
Starmer could be seen standing next to the leaders of Canada and Japan as they made small talk
The government’s failure to put forward a credible defence plan will not have been lost on the US President Donald Trump. There have been frantic attempts by Downing Street to refute any suggestion that Starmer was snubbed by Donald Trump at the G7, with Number Ten pointing to the two hours Starmer spent sitting next to Trump during the opening leaders-only dinner on Monday evening. The Prime Minister continues to insist that he “gets on really well” with the US leader even though the pair did not hold a one-to-one meeting. In other words, more delusional thinking on the part of our dear leader.
The government is in a state of paralysis, with Keir Starmer’s time in power over in all but name. He is perhaps the only person left – in Westminster and beyond – who still appears to think he has some say over what happens next. It is his last and most self-serving delusion. True to form, he will hang on to it right until the Downing Street removals vans arrive.
The strange divide at Labour’s Makerfield HQ
On the eve of a by-election that could sound the death knell for his political career, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to fight on. From the G7 summit in France, the Prime Minister made a few last-ditch attempts to try to put Andy Burnham off plunging the knife into his back a little while longer.
On one side are the Burnham loyalists, exuding confidence with a hint of cockiness. On the other are Starmer loyalists
One was the promise of a ‘big role in government’. The other was a reminder that Labour is about to be pulled into a high-stakes fight for the Manchester mayoralty. Sir Keir’s team are determined to delay a challenge so they can put as many hurdles in Burnham’s way as possible. They are desperate to maximise the time for scrutiny of his ideas – and to present opportunities for him to mess up.
The Prime Minister said: ‘Andy is a great asset. And, yes, I want him to have a big role in government.’ But he added: ‘We’re immediately tipped into a Manchester mayoral contest by-election, one of the biggest by-elections that we’ve ever fought, because of the scale of it. And it’s really important to my mind that the whole of the Labour party and Labour movement focuses on that, which is the next most immediate task.’
Unsurprisingly, neither argument landed with Burnham or his team. It took them only a matter of hours to laugh off the suggestions.
A world away in Makerfield, spirits at Labour’s campaign HQ are strange. The community centre serving as a base for activists and volunteers is fitted with a fully functioning bar, complete with an array of beers on draught. But the space has effectively been divided in two, physically separated by a wall. On one side are the Burnham loyalists, exuding confidence with a hint of cockiness. On the other are Starmer loyalists and Labour staffers navigating the awkwardness of knowing that their presence is not universally welcome.
The mood has been described by multiple people on the ground as frosty – though volunteers less immersed in internal party gripes appear more oblivious to the strange atmosphere. Others in the centre insist it’s all happy vibes. Hugh Grant has even made an appearance to show his support. Tonight, the HQ pub will host a screening of the England game, where perhaps the weirdness between the different sides will subside a little.
Labour says its activists have now knocked the entire constituency eight times. The party believes Reform’s candidate, Rob Kenyon, has made life a bit easier for them – particularly after his performance on Question Time.
While all attention is, naturally, on Makerfield, two other by-elections are also taking place tomorrow. Polls will open to elect new MPs for Aberdeen South as well as Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, their incumbents having resigned to join the Scottish parliament. The Tories are in with a shot in Aberdeen after focusing their campaign efforts on North Sea oil and gas. The SNP are favourites to retain Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.
How quickly could Starmer be deposed?
Voters head to the polls tomorrow in Makerfield for what could be the most consequential by-election in modern British history. If Andy Burnham wins by a significant margin, he will be heralded as the man Labour need to beat Reform nationally – and Starmer could be forced out within days.
Yet the Prime Minister has come out fighting, warning Burnham that now is not the time for a challenge. What should we expect from what promises to be a febrile 72 hours in British politics? Will Starmer’s deposition be conducted with decorum, or will it descend into a bloodbath?
Plus: with Keir Starmer travelling back from the G7 today, parliament saw Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions. Amid Labour’s leadership turmoil, David Lammy went head to head with the shadow energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, herself tipped to be a future Tory chancellor. How did they both fare?
Isabel Hardman speaks to Tim Shipman and pollster Scarlett Maguire
Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.
Civil service grifting hits new heights
Violence, shooting and driving fast cars are not usually the first things that spring to mind when Whitehall talks about the ‘lived experience’ of the British public. Yet Policy Lab, an ‘experimental’ cross-government unit based at the Department for Education, appears to think otherwise. It has been very busy encouraging our esteemed civil servants to spend time at work playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA), an 18-rated video game, to learn about the public’s ‘hopes and dreams’.
Expectations of Whitehall’s pen-pushers are rarely high. But the so-called Policy Lab takes civil service grifting to a new level. The unit actually pays officials to ‘spend time with participants in videogames they played regularly’ to ‘experience the world’.
GTA, made by the American company Rockstar, allows players to commit a variety of fictional crimes as part of its missions. These include robbery and burglary, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, murder, kidnapping and extortion. The game was introduced to Whitehall as part of an attempt to learn about the ‘lived experience’ of the public – because nothing says understanding the British people quite like mowing down pedestrians in a fictional city at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
While the welfare bill soars and defence funding remains a shambles, it is comforting to know that taxes are hard at work paying for civil servants to feel emotionally safe while robbing virtual banks.
Shadow Cabinet Office minister Mike Wood was first out of the traps to accuse officials of spaffing away taxpayers’ money, saying:
Hard-working families will be in disbelief that their taxes are bankrolling this nonsense. Public-sector productivity is spiralling and yet officials are busy playing board games and video games and clay modelling. Clearly Labour’s efficiency savings are a total sham.
A government source hit back, saying: ‘This is a decades-old Tory initiative that we are now looking into.’
The perfect two words to describe this zombie parliament
With Sir Keir in Evian busy taking what must surely be his last opportunity to stuff Lady Victoria’s hand luggage with G7 branded bathrobes and slippers, we had the great treat of a Lammy PMQs today. Except it isn’t really a treat any more.
This parliament still has, potentially, three whole years to run, and yet it already feels zombified. Each week it goes through the motions, the same lame jokes, the same pointless questions, the same lingering sense of exhaustion and decay. It’s like the end of the French Third Republic but with fewer cigarettes and an even less impressive defence policy. They had the Maginot Line, we have the recycling of Dan Jarvis. Labour is stuck in a depressed, sexless marriage with itself and is betting everything on the deranged idea that a frisson with Andy Burnham at the end of this week will somehow spice things up again.
Attendance in the Commons was not good, with empty seats on both Labour and Tory benches. At the far end on the backest of back benches sat Wes Streeting. Claire Coutinho, the shadow education secretary, had lost whatever strange competition the Tories have to be the one who has to ask Lammy questions. She decided to lead on energy costs, and the government’s continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.
The shadow of an increasingly out of control Ed Miliband lingered over her questioning, like the love child of Jacob Marley and Beaker from the Muppets. Was it true, she asked, that Miliband was now so high on his own supply that he had refused to meet with the PM? Perhaps he is so keen on solar energy because he believes himself to be descended from a Sun God? Apollo with perma-sinusitis.
The Sage of Tottenham wasn’t even going to pretend to answer her question. ‘She should stop reading the papers’ he tutted. Presumably nobody in government reads the papers anymore. They certainly don’t seem to have any meaningful contact with the outside world. They are slowly morphing into a version of the Andaman Islands if they were run by the Fabian Society. The next step will inevitably be Sir Keir shooting arrows at Beth Rigby when she appears on Downing Street, lest her magic camera devices capture what’s left of his soul.
Coutinho soldiered on but it was the parliamentary equivalent of wading through treacle. She listed some of the positively Laputan ideas which the government had been pouring money into in lieu of defending the realm: from solar farms in the Congo to an experiment to dim the sun. ‘Why’, she asked, ‘don’t they just cut welfare and fund defence?’
The Sage of Tottenham wasn’t even going to pretend to answer her question
Reeves and Lammy stared at her with a slack-jawed incredulity, looking like exhibits at the Great Yarmouth House of Wax who’d got too close to a particularly warm hairdryer. It was as if she’d suggested getting sunbeams from cucumbers, which is presumably one of the other things Miliband is channeling billions towards.
Lammy ended this rather lacklustre exchange with the claim that ‘I’m proud to serve this prime minister’. You would have thought this obvious untruth alone would be enough to invalidate his previous answers.
The rest of the House was exactly as unimpressive as we’ve come to expect. The bottom crawlers remain out in force, presumably incapable, even during the slow death of the Starmer ministry, to subsist on any diet other than a constant stream of meaningless platitudes. Sarah Owen treated the House to a strangely furious speech about how Carol Vorderman was a national treasure and Reform hate women while John Whitby went on a weird rant about the climate and how wonderful Labour’s record on it was. Another asked a ‘question’ about the evils of social media, claiming that kids were subjected to things that were ‘often not free speech but manipulated speech’, which presumably actually means ‘speech I don’t agree with’. Lammy’s answers were predictable: unlocking potential. Youth hubs. Proud of that record. It’s an unchanging mantra of mediocrity.
Lammy waffled about legal migration figures, not what Pritchard had asked about
The calibre was so crushingly poor that one of the highlights was a Lib Dem MP offering to show Lammy his tattoo of Eastbourne pier. Lammy pulled a face. Later on, Tory backbencher Mark Pritchard endorsed Lammy for leader in the upcoming leadership contest. Dan Jarvis pulled a face.
Perhaps the worst moment of the whole sorry affair came in response to Pritchard’s follow up question about a small rural community in his Shropshire constituency which was facing the prospect of 121 illegal migrants being abruptly placed in it against its will, swelling the population by 35 per cent. Was this fair, he asked?
The obvious answer to this was ‘no’, but instead Lammy waffled about legal migration figures, not what Pritchard had asked about, and insisted that ‘most often’ these migrants would be deported. In reality, only 4 per cent of small boat arrivals have ever been removed from the UK. He finished by accusing Pritchard, and by extension his constituents, of Nimbyism. Simultaneously patronising and dishonest; no two adjectives better describe this zombie parliament.
The trouble with the Ministry of Defence
In a telling exchange on Radio 4 last week, during the furore following John Healey’s resignation, Debbie Abrahams, the Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions committee, was asked about funding for defence. She said that she supported the target of spending 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, but was unconvinced of the need to accelerate that rise and certainly not at the expense of what she later described, in a Facebook post, as ‘arbitrary cuts to social welfare’. She was, she told the BBC’s Evan Davis, an ‘evidenced-based politician’. Abrahams’s implication was that she did not accept that we needed to accelerate our spending on defence.
This is a misunderstanding that could prove catastrophic for Britain. Say what you like about the malign influence of Zack Polanski or Jeremy Corbyn, or about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s systemic weakness, but the blame for miscommunicating the need for Britain to spend more on defence lies squarely, and fairly, with the Ministry of Defence. Starmer could barely scrape almost an accounting error of defence uplift, some £13bn over four years, one hundredth of the annual total UK government expenditure, which shows just how unconvinced his Cabinet were.
The military does not have a record of spending properly the money it is allocated. The Army’s Ajax vehicle is years late, massively over budget, and currently more dangerous to our soldiers than to our enemies. The Type 45 destroyer refurbishment project has had one ship tied-up alongside since 2017. The procurement of the RAF’s E-7 Wedgetail has been emblematic of many MOD projects: late, over-budget, and, programmatically, poorly managed. As Eliot Wilson noted: ‘The Ministry of Defence has mishandled so many acquisitions it is hard to know where to look.’
Then there is real doubt about whether any uplift will be spent on the right things. The £28bn the chiefs were demanding was to protect existing defence programmes; it is very unclear how much of that was for the re-equipment, even wholesale re-imagining, the Armed Forces require for the challenges revealed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. To give but one example, while the UK currently has some 8,000 drones in its arsenal, Russia and Ukraine are both looking to build around six million drones in 2026. The suspicion, no doubt unworthy, was that the uplift was more about saving current hobby-horses, all linked to the still powerful defence-industrial complex, the MOD’s famous ‘primes’ – all good employers of ex-senior officers – than in actually equipping our armed forces for the future.
Perhaps, if the government had said it was going to build the equivalent of the Chain Home station – so vital to the Battle of Britain, and voted-on in late 1936, outwith the normal spending cycle, and after Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, both in that year – then Starmer’s case might have been easier. But he didn’t, and that was despite the cogent and well-argued Strategic Defence Review, published in 2025.
Beyond budgets, there is the matter of trust and openness. Here the MOD has been woeful: unforthcoming with information, devoted to spin, often neglectful of democratic accountability, and less than straightforward with the Prime Minister and ministers as to the limits of our military capabilities. The tendency for a long time has been to over-promise, under-deliver, have the begging bowl out for more, and then to repeat that dismal cycle.
The tendency has been to over-promise, under-deliver, have the begging bowl out for more
During the Afghan campaign, from 2008-10, we had but one visit from the Commons defence committee in two years; by contrast, the US embassy in Kabul hosted a congressional delegation almost weekly. Sometimes, no doubt, this was a painful distraction, but the vital linkage between the people, the executive and the forces fighting their nation’s wars was maintained. Not so in the UK. With almost non-existent official visits, enterprising then MPs such as Adam Holloway and Patrick Mercer, who wanted to find out what was going on, were forced to travel independently.
The net effect was evident by 2010. Towards the end of my tour as the defence attaché in Kabul, during what turned-out to be the swansong visit from outgoing Labour ministers, a senior minister stated bluntly to a senior British general that the MOD were no longer trusted by the Labour party and that, when they got back to power, this would matter. That minister is now in the Cabinet, with many of his then colleagues, and with the glowering presence of Gordon Brown, victim of many a patronising MOD misbriefing while prime minister, as a senior adviser.
If we are to genuinely match the new defence challenges, then along with new weapon systems, organisations and concepts, we need a wholly reformed MOD. Perhaps we should even start there.
How does this World Cup compare with the first?
Football fiasco
With 48 teams, this is the largest World Cup ever. How does it compare with the first?
– The inaugural World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930. It should have had 16 teams, in a format which endured until 1970. However, only 13 turned up. Siam (now Thailand) and Japan accepted invitations but then withdrew.
– Egypt were supposed to travel by ship with the French team, via Marseille. However, a storm in the Mediterranean prevented them making the connection.
– England didn’t compete until 1950, when they were eliminated in the group stage after defeats to the US and Spain.
Health and safety
How have defence and welfare spending changed as a proportion of GDP?
1952 2022
Defence 11.5% 2.25%
Welfare 2.92% 5.84%
State pension 2.18% 7.4%
Healthcare 3.47% 9.17%
Source: Institution of Chartered Accountants for England and Wales
Home economics
Are England’s local authorities really as cash-strapped as they claim? Budgeted spending for 2026/27 compared to 2025/26:
Education £2.4bn (5.2% increase)
Adult social care £1.4bn (+5.2%)
Child social care £1.2bn (+7.4%)
Housing £466m (+14.3%)
Cultural services -£61m (-2.3%)
Source: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
By a whisker
Keiko Fujimori won the Peruvian presidential election by a margin of 50.05% to 49.95% over her rival Roberto Sanchez. Some other close elections:
– Conservative candidate John Addison tied with Liberal candidate Alexander Rowley in the 1886 general election in Ashton under Lyne, both with 3,049 votes. The returning officer used his casting vote in favour of Addison, the incumbent.
– Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten won in Winchester in the 1997 general election by 2 votes. After a successful challenge by his defeated rival, Gerry Malone, the election was re-run – and Oaten won by 21,556.
– Marcus Morton won the 1839 election for Governor of Massachusetts with a majority of 1 vote (51,034 of 102,066 votes cast).
– In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 48.4 per cent to 47.9 per cent in the popular vote. But, under the electoral college system, Bush won thanks to a margin of 537 votes in Florida.
‘He’s been sent home for politicising the egg and spoon race.’
Portrait of an artist
The pernicious rise of the Fake Fuzz
The Harrow Council ‘enforcement officers’ might have been more extreme in their language than other members of the Fake Fuzz, but their arrogance was entirely typical. Uniformed security guards are appearing everywhere. Shops, pubs, train carriages – the wannabe rozzers are there, in your face, vests bulging, walkie-talkies at the ready. They glower and loom, filling your day with bad vibes and absurd rules.
It’s unclear what started the argument in Harrow, but the member of the public whose video went viral last week was told by the two officers not to ‘butt in my business’, then ordered to come to a nearby alleyway where one of them would ‘show you what time it is’. Needless to say, the man refused the offer. The guard continued: ‘I swear, when I’m not in uniform, I’m going to knock you the fuck out and rip your teeth out.’
While most Fake Fuzz operatives are less aggressive than this, their condescending self-importance is all the more irritating for its stupidity. Retail parks often employ them, as do individual businesses. A shop in my town has an entry gate, about three yards inside the door, one of those waist-level things that open automatically. Except it doesn’t anymore, so you have to push it.
The other day it was manned by the shop’s FF. He was a classic of the genre – middle-aged, stocky, not exactly over-burdened with personality. He opened the gate for me (no smile). I thanked him (still no smile). Having discovered that the shop didn’t have what I needed, I returned to the gate. ‘You have to leave through the tills,’ said FF. This meant a detour of 40 yards.
‘But the exit’s right there,’ I said, pointing to the other side of the gate. ‘It’s store policy,’ he responded. I asked why. ‘Health and safety,’ came the inevitable answer. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Two people have been hurt,’ said FF. ‘A child was hit in the face [presumably by the gate] and…’
At this point we were distracted by a woman approaching the gate from the other side. FF had to open it to let her in, but positioned himself to stop me walking through in the other direction. ‘You realise this is ridiculous?’ I said. FF countered that he was only saying what he’d been told to say. I asked if he’d tried telling the person who’d told him to say it that it was ridiculous. He repeated his previous statement. Realising it was pointless to waste any more time, I began walking towards the tills, telling him as I went that he sounded like an arse. ‘I’m only doing my job,’ he called after me. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘doing it like an arse.’
‘Right,’ he responded. ‘You’re barred. Language.’ By now I was laughing. My detour brought me to the other side of the gate, where FF was waiting. ‘Everyone has a right to do their job without abuse,’ he said as I left the shop for the last time. This has become a go-to argument of the grievance generation. Express the slightest irritation with them for being irritating and you’re the one in the wrong. Whereas any right-thinking person would realise that if it’s got to the point of someone calling you an arse, the fault might be with you and not them.
The Fake Fuzz accompany the ticket inspectors on my trains into London in gangs of three or four. OK, if a fare dodger gets violent, the inspector will need support. But what the FF never remember is that almost every passenger they encounter is an honest, pleasant person, whose money is paying their wages. A smile would be nice – or even making eye contact (not that you’d know with the ones who insist on wearing sunglasses, to really give it the full Men in Black). But the FFs obviously feel that such human touches would reduce their authority.
The wannabe rozzers glower and loom, filling your day with bad vibes and absurd rules
In this, they’re 100 per cent wrong. The very best security guards know that their strongest weapon is never having to appear strong. Humour, charm, getting someone on your side before things can turn ugly – these are their favoured tactics. Any nightclub bouncer worth his salt knows that a successful night is one where you don’t even get close to using violence. FFs, on the other hand, give the impression they’re doing you a favour by letting you be there at all.
Many pubs have taken to using Fake Fuzz. Not clubs, where things can get lairy at 2 a.m. – just bog-standard boozers. In my experience their guards tend to be slightly warmer in their welcome, more polite with their requests to (for instance) stay within a designated drinking area. But still their presence puts a dampener on proceedings.
I can see why shops need to tackle shoplifting, especially now that the real police have given up. But FFs should concentrate on the criminals. When dealing with normal customers they can ditch the Robocop routine. That shop I mentioned proudly boasts that it was established in 1895. I wonder what its founder would think of his successor’s employee? The founder knew that losing a customer was a failure. Fake Fuzz thinks that by barring me he’s had a success.
‘I’ve found a sweet “How to Avoid a Social Media Ban” guide on TikTok.’
Portrait of the week: Belfast riots, Starmer bans TikTok and Trump turns 80
Home
The electors of Makerfield decided who might be prime minister. After John Healey resigned as defence secretary, Al Carns resigned as armed forces minister. Mr Healey had declared that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, had ‘been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country’. Dan Jarvis was appointed Defence Secretary. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said the armed forces would have to ‘dial back’ operations without more funding. Belfast had multiple nights of anti-immigrant rioting in response to the terrible knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Two Ukrainian men were found guilty of plotting firebomb attacks on properties linked to Sir Keir Starmer. They were said to have been in the pay of a Russian handler known as EL Money. In the Channel, British forces boarded a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker, Smyrtos, with 704,962 barrels of oil. Two days later, the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich fired warning shots towards a 40ft British-registered yacht, Bright Future, in the Channel. The government promised to ban the import of diesel and jet fuel made from Russian oil by 1 January 2027. Scotland beat Haiti in the World Cup.
Sir Keir Starmer said that from next spring those under 16 would be prohibited from using such platforms as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not WhatsApp or Signal. Resident doctors in England called off a week of strikes after the British Medical Association union said the government had ‘made a new offer’. Inflation remained at 2.8 per cent. GDP fell by 0.1 per cent in April, but grew by 0.7 per cent in the three months to April. Ed Miliband was to ban the sale of most electric towel rails. Samuel Corner, 23, a Palestine Action agitator, was jailed for seven years and eight months for grievous bodily harm for breaking a woman police sergeant’s back with a sledgehammer; three others were jailed for causing £1.2 million damage at an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol in 2024. Outside the sentencing hearing, police arrested 107 protesters for supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. Prince George will go to Eton from September.
Southwark Council took possession of a council flat rented by Fatima Jabbe-Bio, the wife of Sierra Leone’s President. Among 1,182 honoured for the King’s official birthday, Dame Helen Mirren and Sir Don McCullin were made Companions of Honour. David Hockney, the painter, died aged 88. Lord Hattersley, deputy leader of the Labour party from 1983 to 1992, died aged 93.
Abroad
America and Iran agreed a memorandum of understanding to end their war: the Strait of Hormuz was to be opened; Iran could sell oil; America was to ensure that Israel ended its war in Lebanon. President Donald Trump of America said he ‘didn’t like where two hours before we’re signing the agreement that there was an attack in Lebanon’ by Israel. In an airstrike, America killed Héctor Rusthenford ‘Niño’ Guerrero Flores, the leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Mr Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by watching a cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. Five men were charged with an alleged plot to kill people there with drones and firearms.
A Russian airstrike badly damaged the 11th-century Dormition Cathedral in Kyiv. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploration and artificial intelligence company, was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange at a value of $2,200 billion; Mr Musk’s total wealth was put at $1,100 billion, making him a trillionaire in American terms. Anthropic, the American AI company, said it had been ordered to suspend foreign nationals from using its Claude Fable 5 program, and so had disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all its customers to ensure compliance. Pizza Hut was sold in two slices for $2.7 billion.
Switzerland rejected a proposal to cap its population at ten million in a referendum by 55 per cent to 45 per cent; the turnout was 60 per cent. Marius Borg Hoiby, the son of Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit, was jailed for four years on two counts of rape. The Swedish government will draft legislation to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 14 from the current 15 to counter gang violence; a reduction to 13 met parliamentary opposition. In Vietnam more than 400 cats stolen to be sold for food were rescued, according to Ho Chi Minh City police. CSH
Don’t avoid the right questions about Preston Davey’s murder
It is now retrospectively acknowledged that great harm was done by the refusal to investigate serious crimes and dangerous mental illness for fear of being branded racist – the grooming gangs, the Southport and Nottingham killings. No similar acknowledgment has been made about the handling of cases involving homosexuals. This week, Jamie Varley was convicted of murder, sexual assault, child cruelty and making and distributing indecent images. His victim was his own adopted baby son, Preston Davey. Varley’s partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, was convicted of lesser crimes against the boy. The details of Preston’s short life and bestial death are abominable. Preston’s biological grandmother suggested the authorities had been too frightened of being called ‘homophobic’ to challenge Varley when Preston repeatedly had to be treated for injuries. Most media are sidestepping this question. It should be answered and the process by which prospective adopters are approved in the first place should also be investigated. It would be wrong to say that homosexuals are inherently unsuited to adopt, but the risk to a child surely does arise if both adoptive parents are men. The sexual abuse of children by women, though not unknown, is much rarer than by men, because of biology and culture. For the same reasons, many more men than women are sexually predatory and violent. If this opinion is assailed as homophobic, that will only go to show how powerful the taboo against asking the right questions has become. By the way, Varley was, among other things, a ‘safeguarding lead’ at the academy where he taught.
I am nursing a small gash on my forehead after village festivities at the weekend. It is the 650th anniversary of the completion of our parish church (no one knows when it began) and so our annual fête had a slight medieval theme. I was ordered to dress as a knight. A re-enactments expert in the village produced chainmail and helmet. Their weight, which is historically authentic, gave me a new respect for the original combatants. Apparently, it meant their contests lasted for 15 minutes maximum. I could not even don the chainmail unaided and I quickly abandoned the idea of wearing it all afternoon in the June sun. To my shame, our young, fit rector, who is 6ft 7in tall, stepped in and wore it for two hours while barbecuing sausages. I was left with shield and sword, cheap hired tabard and the re-enactment helmet, from whose back depended a heavy curtain of chainmail. Naturally, I was the target of small boys with wooden swords. As I manoeuvred to avoid their blows, the fearsome helm cut into my head. ’Tis but a scratch, as Monty Python’s Black Knight says. The whole occasion was a tremendous success, as was the service the next day graced by a popular bishop (yes, such a phenomenon does exist), the suffragan of Lewes. The age range was six months to 92, and the primary-school children presented a well-stitched banner showing the church with their faces smiling out of it. Only one 21st-century feature clouded our merriment. Towards the end of the afternoon, I noticed something yellow out of the corner of my eye. Over the hedge, I spied two traffic wardens methodically ticketing as many fête-goers’ cars as they could find.
On the BBC on Tuesday, the Social Market Foundation presented, unchallenged, evidence that fake news was flooding social media in the Makerfield constituency to influence the by-election result. One ‘false’ story it cited gave me pause. The alleged fiction was that Ed Miliband is banning tumble-dryers (to save the planet). As far as I can see, this story is essentially true, though the much-loved headline word ‘ban’ might be better replaced by ‘phasing out’. There is now an industry of fake news about fake news.
A long-running television advertisement for Nationwide features Dominic West playing with gusto the one type of human being one is safely allowed to hate – a successful, middle-aged, public-school white male. He is Hugo Platt, the CEO of A.N.Y. Bank, who is arrogantly out-of-touch with the lovable, caring, multiracial customers and staff of Nationwide. The ad’s current boast is that the mutual is paying out £100 to each member (more than four million, including my mother) holding a ‘qualifying account’. That sounds a mutual thing to do, though the sum is small. To its chief executive, Dame Debbie Crosbie, however, Nationwide is handing out £4.67 million this year. That sounds a bit unmutual, and a big sum. Nationwide’s argument is that, to keep Dame Debbie, it must pay money which matches the earnings of bankers like Hugo Platt. If, as is traditional, the moral ethos of a building society is different from that of a big bank, should that not apply to those who run it? At its AGM, Nationwide is using the same ‘Quick Vote’ option which the National Trust management employs to direct members to support whatever it wants without studying the issues or people involved.
As a boy, I had a horror of the dentist. Dentistry hurt a lot, and the evil-smelling gas used to knock one out was genuinely frightening. As a result, I avoided the dentist for most of my adult life. I am blest with strong teeth, so nothing bad happened. Then one broke when I bit a stone concealed in a sandwich on what Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would call ‘a straightforward shooting weekend’. Friends recommended a dentist called James Dewe-Mathews. They were perfectly right. James has the best possible bedside – or rather, chair-side – manner and no inclination to chisel for more money by over-production. Last week came the news that he is retiring, though a mere 78 years old, passing outside the family the business which began with his father three-quarters of a century ago. I shall miss our annual, almost completely pain-free meetings, James’s unfeigned interest in his patients and his unshowy professional confidence. It is an unmitigatedly good feature of modernity that one’s dentist can be one’s hero.