Housekeeping: I’m going to take a little break — watch some World Cup, stay off social media, generally try to practice a modicum of gratitude. I understand other sources of news and unattributed Blair quote generators are available, but I’d rather you refrained.

Wasn’t it easier in the West End Final days? Write formulaic leaders (“the government should, the mayor ought to”), have a spot of lunch, plump for the biggest story of the day and hit ‘send’ on the newsletter at 4pm. It didn’t matter if no one so much as asked for my view — this was a job, after all.

Lines To Take is a different beast: less London-focused, more narrative-led, landing in inboxes far earlier in the day. I can write about anything from a history of inflation targeting to how I finally learned to rest my meat (a disappointingly safe-for-work edition).

Still, it would be frankly eccentric not to start with the only story Westminster is waking up to. Here are some early reflections on a seismic by-election result.

Makerfield, bat and bowl

• It wasn’t even close. Burnham1 won with 54.8% of the vote to Reform UK’s 34.5%.

• But even this threatens to understate the comprehensiveness of the victory. As More in Common’s Luke Tryl observes, Burnham secured a fairly stunning 23-point swing from Reform to Labour in Makerfield since the local elections six weeks ago.

  

• Suddenly conscious I may have buried the lede here. Burnham is going to be the next prime minister. A win is a win, but size still matters in politics. Lot of Labour backbenchers will look at a 50% plus vote share and conclude: yes, please.

• Reform UK may consistently lead in national polls, but they have once again been punished by tactical voting at a Westminster by-election.

• For some time, the fear of many has been that, with a multi-party system operating under a first past the post electoral one, Nigel Farage could get into Number 10 with only 30% of the vote. It now seems as likely that the other 70% is a sufficiently motivated anti-Reform bloc to prevent that from happening. See: the Lib Dem + Green vote collapsing from 11% in 2024 to 1%.

  

• It’s not obvious that Burnham won over many Reform UK voters. Then again and as per above, it’s not obvious he needs to.

• Restore Britain did not do as well as some had predicted, nor would adding its tally to Reform UK have prevented a Labour victory. Still, 3,111 votes and a retained deposit for a party that think me, my family and millions of others are not British and should be deported is at least 3,000 more than I’m comfortable with.

• A 59% turnout2, even for a high-profile by-election, is pretty extraordinary. Fun fact: that is the same level as for the 2001 general election, the lines to take from which this newsletter gets its name. (Jack Straw suggesting a low turnout was in fact evidence of a contented electorate).

• Meanwhile, north of the border, the Scottish Conservatives impressively won the Aberdeen South by-election off the SNP with over half the vote. More than a seat, it further clouds any narrative about which party leads the right bloc. The Tories would, however, have to stop looking at how polarising Reform UK is and rather of emulating it, go: maybe we should be the normie centre-right alternative instead?

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This is no time for contrarian takes. The story of the day is unfolding in the market towns and former coal mining communities on the outskirts of Wigan, where voters are poised to elect the Labour candidate and in doing so precipitate a leadership challenge against the Labour prime minister.

But sometimes, even when the main story garners all the marketing buzz, it is the B-plot that steals the show. Perhaps the best example comes from the classic Friends episode, “The One with the Embryos”, in which Phoebe agrees to undergo IVF to become a surrogate for her half-brother, Frank Jr. and his wife, Alice.1

It’s a major life event for one of the characters, carries real emotional heft and has long-term consequences for the rest of the season. Of course, what many fans remember most fondly is the secondary storyline — the ultimate trivia contest between Monica, Rachel, Chandler and Joey where [spoiler alert] the boys win the girls’ apartment.

For the purposes of today’s newsletter, the role of B-plot will be played by the latest inflation figures from the Office for National Statistics.

Managed Expectations

UK inflation unexpectedly held at a 13-month low of 2.8% in May, comfortably below the 3% forecast by analysts. While higher petrol prices and airfares increased pressure on prices, these were partially offset by lower food inflation. This would represent welcome news even if it didn’t arrive hours before today’s Bank of England decision on interest rates.

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Yes, the Monetary Policy Committee was already widely expected to keep the main rate unchanged at 3.75%, with all 65 economists polled by Reuters predicting a freeze. And sure, this all chimes with Governor Andrew Bailey’s ‘wait-and-see’ approach to the inflationary impact of the Iran War. Still, it is good news at a good time.

Not least because, up to this point, pressure for a rate rise was, well, rising. The Strait of Hormuz had remained effectively closed. The Australian, European and most recently Japanese central banks were tightening monetary conditions. The US Fed, though yet to move, is expected to enact at least one rate hike this year. Surely Britain, the home of stubborn inflationary pressures, would be next in line?

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It has, mercifully, been supplanted by more recent stress dreams: you know, the ones where you find yourself — inexplicably — back in that mouldy apartment, that soul-crushing job or that codependent relationship.

Still, I am occasionally forced to acknowledge the memory that lurks beneath several million layers of electronic rock. The email contained two attachments — a cover letter and CV — which I had drafted, edited and triple-checked to within an inch of my sanity. This was the early 2010s, so there was still a reasonable chance a living, breathing organism might actually read it.

I knew everything about the company, the hiring manager and her mother’s maiden name. Each claim I made was backed up and no statistic went unreferenced, while the tone conveyed just the right amount of personality without tipping into anything that might alienate the reader. I was content — even if I never heard back, I’d done my best.

Of course, soon after hitting ‘send’ and re-reading the draft, I noticed that I’d spelt the hiring manager’s name incorrectly. At which point I let out a whimper, put on my pyjamas and inhaled a family size box of Ritz crackers. I haven’t been able to touch the stuff since.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to get an interview and I don’t for a moment blame her. She’d doubtless received hundreds of applications and there has to be some painless way of whittling them down. An immediate typo in a name surely suggests a lack of care if not a walking international incident.

But when it comes to other forms of writing, how important is blemish-free copy?

“Spelling is fun” — Taylor Swift, “Me!”

Before we go any further, I’d like to draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Newsletter Writers’ Interests. I have committed many typos dating back to my West End Final days. This is an occupational hazard of having no editor to provide the second pair of eyes and ponder: who the heck is Olaf Scholtz?

If I appear whimsical, it is only as coping mechanism. I hate typos. I try my best to eradicate them from my work, using online tools as well as old-fashioned hacks such as reading aloud, changing the format and, best but most time-sapping, reading backwards1.

I hate typos for the obvious reason that they look bad, damage credibility and empower truly the worst people on the internet to email in gleefully pointing out every errant article. Still, like being winded on the football pitch, typos are at least recoverable in comparison to factual mistakes.

I once wrote a piece for Tortoise (cc stress dreams) in which I confidently asserted that Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1939 (it was 1940) amongst other small but serious errors. For the first time in years, I could taste salty, buttery cracker rising from my gut.

Whether spelling, syntactic or factual, what is eternally at stake is also the most important quality in any writer, in anyone really: credibility. Derived from the Latin verb credere, meaning to trust or believe, it is where we get English words such as creed, credentials and, most importantly for wavering subscribers to Lines To Take, credit cards.

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It’s also, let’s face it, a polite way of asking whether someone or something is full of crap. Back in the 1960s, the term “credibility gap” was favoured to describe the growing chasm between what the Lyndon Johnson White House was saying about Vietnam, and the reality of boots on the ground. But what was really meant by it was: the president is a liar.

Sometimes, of course, an error provides the opportunity to deepen trust and recover ground. Everyone makes mistakes, but all too few offer corrections. That is the difference between an honest attempt to get it right and a charlatan. And no one is immune. The New York Times, which as of 2024 employed 7% of all US journalists and presumably some sub-editors, gets it wrong with gusto:

And not always about the UK:

Typos of any kind are infuriating, mostly because they threaten to undermine the credibility of an entire argument. At the same time, one can only do one’s best and learn to roll with the punches.

At the very start of my newsletter writing journey, I hit ‘send’ from the Evening Standard’s west London offices, stepped on the Tube at Marble Arch, promptly lost signal and spent half an hour in a panic that I called Louise Casey ‘Baroness’ instead of ‘Dame’.

Only to emerge at Bethnal Green to discover she was in fact… both.

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1. With a population of 156,000 people, when Curaçao are defending, they are doing so with approximately 0.007% of their population behind the ball

2. Crystal Palace (12) have more players at the World Cup than Real Madrid (11)

3. More than 8% of all managers at the tournament have at one time or another managed Chelsea

4. Having conceded a goal to Curaçao, Germany have not kept a clean sheet at a World Cup since Narendra Modi became prime minister of India

5. While 51% of English people hope Scotland perform well in the World Cup, Scots are more likely to hope England do badly (32%) than hope they succeed (27%) according to YouGov

   

6. The No. 1 FIFA-ranked team has never won the World Cup. Bad news for Argentina, who only secured top spot a week before the tournament when France lost to Ivory Coast and Spain drew with Iraq in pre-tournament friendlies

7. Cristiano Ronaldo has appeared in 62.9% of all World Cup matches played by Portugal. That figure is expected to rise in the coming weeks

8. Uzbekistan is the first double–landlocked nation to qualify for the World Cup (there are only two, the other being, erm, Liechtenstein.) Just eight landlocked teams had previously qualified for the tournament.

9. Curaçao manager Dick Advocaat became the oldest to take charge at a world cup, at the age of 78. I mention this only because my reaction is “gosh, that’s old, I hope he’s getting some down time” and then remember he’s younger than the last two US presidents

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The path to power used to be carefully charted: president of the Oxford Union, optional selection as a paper candidate before being handed a plum Conservative seat, attend to the rubber chicken circuit while ascending the greasy pole until appointed to one of the great offices of state and then… wait.

Sooner or later, the prime minister will become heavily dependent on amphetamines, embark on some foreign policy folly or, in the case of Anthony Eden, both.

Nowadays, the pieces are somewhat in flux. The Tories are fighting to remain a going parliamentary concern, fading class loyalties have gnawed away at the very notion of a safe seat and the armed forces could scarcely defend Hastings from a band of marauding Norman cavalry, let alone sustain an empire.

[If you’re really not prepared to be a Conservative, I suppose you could try being the Labour deputy prime minister during a successful total war or, at a push, Tony Blair, but otherwise, it probably isn’t happening for you.]

The rest is still uncodified

It is therefore a notable development — not least for a political system as centralised as Britain’s — that in recent years a route has opened up from metro mayor to prime minister. It remains an awkward one: Andy Burnham requires a high-risk, high-profile by-election to get back into parliament. Still, what should we make of it?

Past experience is not encouraging. The first and thus far only prime minister to make the jump from City Hall to Downing Street is Boris Johnson, whose sheer unsuitability for high office and distant relationship with the truth saw his government disintegrate within three years. But Johnson is, in so many ways, sui generis — ill-qualified to run a coastal rock candy kiosk, for fear of embezzling the product.

The pertinent question is therefore: is being Mayor of London or Manchester commensurate with serving as Home Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer? In many of ways, of course it is. Burnham heads the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and controls a budget of around £2.6bn, with responsibility for a whole range of polices such as transport, skills, planning and policing. GMCA additionally has some control over a £6bn health and social care budget.

But there remains an HM Treasury-sized hole in England’s devolution settlement: tax raising powers, or lack thereof. As mayor, Burnham has the power to set a council tax precept for any additional discretionary revenue, currently £128.95 for a Band D property while some business rates are retained locally. But in reality, metro mayors are reliant on central government grants for a range of programmes.

Money for nothing

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I interviewed a number of mayors, including Burnham, for The House Magazine, and his frustration with the fiscal status quo was obvious:

If devolution continues to be all of us bending our knees asking for this bit of money for this or that then we don’t have true devolution.

Dan Jarvis, then mayor of the Sheffield City Region, concurred.

You’ve always got to start with the money. At the moment, we’re only able to draw upon a series of small, short-term pots and these often come with quite onerous restrictions.

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But if mayors lack many of the fiscal levers they say they need to do the job properly, just how good a training is it for prime minister? Back to Johnson for a moment because, if you recall, he was perceived to be a moderate success in London. An enthusiastic cheerleader for the city both at home and abroad, his greatest failure — a garden bridge that was never built — was costly and embarrassing but at least did not involve fatalities.

Yet Johnson was widely panned for his performance as foreign secretary and could not sustain a premiership despite a substantial parliamentary majority. Does the fact that he appeared to prosper as mayor before faltering in high ministerial office evidence that the role of metro mayor is insufficiently difficult? Put another way, should one be able to run the capital but not a government department?

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What does it mean to be a Eurosceptic? Well, it depends when you ask.

Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Bruges Speech1 is often portrayed as a landmark statement of modern British Euroscepticism. In it, the prime minister warned against a federal Europe, arguing instead that national governments should remain the primary source of political authority. Yet Thatcher also reiterated her belief that Britain’s “destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.”

Fast forward to late 1990s and early 2000s and Euroscepticism principally meant opposition to monetary union and the single currency. In that vein, the Conservative position evolved from John Major’s ‘wait and see’ approach to William Hague’s ‘LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE POUND’ campaign.

By 2005, David Cameron’s Euroscepticism combined a plea for the party to “stop banging on about Europe” with an attempt to partially offset his scary modernising agenda by promising to withdraw the Conservatives from the centre-right European People’s Party grouping in the European Parliament.

But by the mid-2010s, things were getting dicey. To be a Eurosceptic in 2013 meant being one of the 116 Conservative MPs — representing more than half of all the party’s backbenchers — who defied the government by backing an amendment to the Queen’s Speech expressing “regret” that legislation paving the way for an EU referendum had not been brought forward. Three years later, and with notably rare exceptions (see: May, Theresa), to be a Eurosceptic effectively meant campaigning to leave the EU altogether.

True, there had always been a small band of “swivel-eyed loons” who never reconciled themselves to Ted Heath’s treachery or the verdict of Harold Wilson’s referendum. But it is remarkable how, through a combination of retirements and fear of activists, being a Eurosceptic went from mere opposition to a ‘super state’ to glorious isolation in less than 30 years.

“Weak, weak, weak”

I’ll be honest, that intro — like Tory Euroscepticism itself — kind of got away from me. I was only trying to set the scene for the sheer strangeness of the 1997 Conservative election campaign, where not only did sitting ministers issue personal manifestos contradicting the party line on the single currency, but the prime minister declined to sack them!

For instance, just watch health minister John Horam explain. Warning: the whole episode is just incredibly camp.

You may think that, well, you know, Britain was never going to join the euro or that support for the single currency was some weirdo, hashtag FBPE thing. Not true! It was largely a combination of Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Tony Blair’s foreign policy adventurism that put paid to it in the end, but in 1997 there was a real possibility that the UK would join in the next decade. Think about it:

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John Major was… well, he wasn’t angry. No, that would be going too far and, in any event, unbecoming of the man and the moment. It was March 2001 and the former prime minister had risen to deliver what would turn out to be his valedictory address. The House of Commons greeted his presence in the way it did most of the lobby fodder speaking on the third day of a Budget debate: with a sea of empty green benches.

Having rewatched the tape, read the Hansard and consulted an online thesaurus, I feel confident in describing Major as miffed. In the way that a first-time buyer might be if a conveyancer didn’t acknowledge their email or a friend who realises they have been invited to the wedding party but not the ceremony. Good — I hate the waiting around and climbing onto coaches anyway.

As it was a Budget debate, Major felt obliged to draw out a few criticisms. The 26 increases in personal taxation and 19 on business since 1997 — an allusion to the then opposition Labour charge against the previous Conservative government and its 22 tax rises, which he bemoaned as “patently untrue”.

But mostly, that prematurely grey man of the 1990s, the Bruce Rioch to George Graham’s Margaret Thatcher and Arsène Wenger’s Tony Blair, paid tribute to the economic inheritance bequeathed to the Labour government. The key paragraph:

Some hon. Members, but perhaps not all, believe that an economic miracle began on 2 May 1997. Let us take a date at random — 1 May 1997. Growth was set to be 3.5% for the next year. Inflation was 2.6% and stable. Unemployment was falling rapidly and, although still high, was down to just over 1.5m. The fiscal deficit was falling sharply — a point that the chancellor invariably overlooks because it embarrasses his campaign to discredit his predecessors. The trend of a falling fiscal deficit was clear, and it was falling sharply. The right hon. Gentleman can take credit for not wrecking the trend, but he cannot take credit for beginning it, for it preceded him by four years.

And he’s right, of course — at least in broad terms. The economic inheritance enjoyed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was as favourable as it was frankly unusual. Just compare it with any other change in government since the war:

• 1945: severe war damage, shortages and debt

• 1951: food rationing still in place, periodic balance of payments crises, inflation

• 1964: low productivity, weak export performance, recurring currency pressures

• 1970: slowing growth, rising inflation, increasingly troubled industrial relations

• 1974: oil crisis, three-day-week, stagflation

• 1979: inflation, strikes, rising unemployment (“Winter of Discontent”)

• 2010: weak recovery from global financial crisis, large budget deficit

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By contrast, 1997 stands out like a clown at a funeral. Growth was strong, inflation low, unemployment falling and the public finances improving. This wasn’t solely the product of Conservative policy. Sure, the cabinet was having a lot of sex, but they weren’t entirely responsible for the superior worker-to-pensioner ratio, let alone the post-Cold War peace dividend. But if government gets the blame for what happens on their watch, then they should also take the credit too.

Given all the economic good news, one might be forgiven for asking: how the heck did the Tories lose the 1997 election? And not just lose — suffer their worst parliamentary result since the Duke of Wellington in 1832? Well, I’m afraid we need to remove our 2026-tinted — what is productivity growth again? — glasses and actually remember what the government was like by the late 1990s.

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I was 15, maybe 16 when I issued the ultimatum. I would attend seder night, the ceremonial meal that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover, but I would not be asking the Four Questions.

For the purposes of today’s newsletter, it’s not important to know what those questions are or that there are really five of them. Suffice to say, traditionally it is the youngest person at the table who asks the them, and after a decade of this dubious honour, and with no younger sibling on the horizon, I’d had enough.

How is this night different from all other nights? Well, ladies and gentlemen, due to mental fatigue, for tonight’s performance the role of Youngest Person at the Passover seder will be played by An Older Sibling. We thank you for your understanding.

Still, it beats being subjected to the question that the worst adults love to ask children: what would you like to be when you grow up?

Just not cricket

I had an answer to this one from a relatively young age. Nothing whimsical or adorable; neither firefighter nor even an athlete. I wanted to be a football commentator. Specifically Martin Tyler, Andy Gray or, as a compromise candidate, John Motson. Dream big, kiddo.

Professional cricketer was never on the cards. Partly because it was the 1990s and England were heroically bad, but mostly because I could neither bat, bowl nor field. Indeed, I still have a slight indentation in my right tibia, after being struck by a cricket ball while fielding at slip. It really hurt and no one much takes you seriously when you tell them you got injured playing cricket.

Which, in retrospect, may have been an early glimpse of one of the game’s enduring problems. From the outside, cricket can look faintly ridiculous: the baffling terminology, absurdist laws1, the sawdust, ludicrous amount of time it takes to get anything done and the fact that, in some formats, you non-ironically stop for tea. As a result, even avid followers can underestimate how tough the game can be.

Not just the batting, bowling or fielding, though god knows England still make that look a challenge. But the travelling, the uncertainty, the sheer mental strain of trying to make it in an individual sport masquerading as a team game. It is far more difficult than it looks.

The relationship between cricket and mental health has received greater attention in recent years. For instance, one study monitoring mental health for South African professionals found that almost 60% were experiencing anxiety and depression2, while more than a quarter were engaging in excessive alcohol use3. Other studies have found that rates of suicide were high for test cricketers4.

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Being a professional sportsperson is generally stressful, but cricket may be uniquely demanding for a number of reasons:

• A high failure rate — a batter can practice in the nets for weeks and get out first ball, whether due to a poor shot, an unplayable delivery or umpire error. Even elite batters fail more often than they succeed. An average of 50 is considered exceptional, and those players will ‘fail’ much of the time.

• Bowled into the ground — but at least batters can mishit and on-drive for a single and receive a ripple of applause. Bowlers have to pick themselves up and hurl themselves towards the crease for almost no reward. And they are always carrying an injury.

• Long tours, endless travel — a professional footballer will spend much of their time at home (or, at least, their adopted home) but Test crickets can spend months on the road, away from family and friends. England batsman Harry Brook, who plays in all three formats, spent less than a week at home throughout the entire winter, according to England men’s managing director Rob Key.

• Isolation within a team environment — cricket is a team game where individual performances are highly conspicuous and all concerned are obsessed with statistics. Averages, strike rates, speeds etc. Everything is quantifiable.

• Long periods of concentration — it’s called a Test for a reason, and while they rarely last the whole five days anymore, cricket demands a sustained focus most other sports do not. Throw in the fact the fielding combines long periods of intense boredom with acute moments of fear there’s little respite.

Key once observed that fielding is “as close as a human gets to being a dog.” Which at least answers one of the Four Questions: why did England have no specialist fielding coach for the disastrous Ashes tour?

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Do you remember last summer’s “is Britain headed for an IMF bailout” discourse? Liz Truss certainly thought so. Her successor but one, Kemi Badenoch, feared that the indicators were “pointing in that direction”. For its part, the Sunday Telegraph was having fun playing journalese whack-a-mole, quoting “leading economists” on their grave “warnings” about a “1970s-style” crisis in which the UK would be forced to go “cap-in-hand” to the International Monetary Fund.

This was, of course, triple-A-rated nonsense. First, because the IMF has a total lending capacity of around $1 trillion. Sufficient to provide material stabilisation for small to medium-sized economies such as Egypt (with a nominal GDP of $429bn and outstanding IMF credits of $9.6bn1) and Ecuador ($323bn and $9.7bn). But compare that to the UK.

Despite the best efforts of successive administrations and plebiscites, it is the world’s sixth largest economy, with a GDP of $4.26 trillion2. It also has total debts of around $3.9 trillion. Simply put, it is way too large for the IMF to save. But even this risks missing the point. As the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph C. Sternberg points out in this terrific piece, it is not obvious that Britain’s economic woes are ones for which financial aid would be the answer.

The IMF, acting vaguely like a central bank, specializes in smoothing over liquidity panics. Britain and France aren’t illiquid. They’re insolvent.

Pourquoi la différence?

The UK, like many of its peers, is caught in something of a pincer movement, afflicted by low growth, high taxes and stubborn inflation. Throw in the rising costs of an ageing society, rearmament and climate change and no wonder the dinner party set talk of little else.

Still, the question — at least in the short-to-medium-term — isn’t “who” will lend to Britain. Plenty will! Rather, it is “for how much?” Swiftly followed by “good grief, how can we bring that down?”

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“Why won’t you take a firm stance against American warmongering?” asked Frank Cousins, former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and a serving Labour minister. This was May 1966 and he was far from the only one asking. Harold Wilson’s line on Vietnam: full support, no British troops, was pleasing pretty much no one.

On the pro-US side, there was, well, President Lyndon Johnson, whose departments of State and Treasury were running a somewhat capricious campaign of carrots (financial inducements) and sticks (vague threats against sterling). On the other extreme, far-left students were denouncing Denis Healey — a man who two decades earlier was storming the beaches of fascist Italy — as “Hitler Healey”.

And all the while, the Parliamentary Labour Party was just thoroughly cheesed off. The left, which had helped elect Wilson leader three years earlier, was up in arms. On the right, the always irascible and occasionally sober foreign secretary, George Brown, confided to cabinet colleague Barbara Castle that he was “sickened by what we have had to do to defend America — what I’ve had to say at the despatch box.”

But Wilson, never one to shy away from a grubby compromise, had his answer to Cousins. In a moment of private fury, he answered the ‘why’ question: “Because we can’t kick our creditors in the balls.”

Neither kind nor strange

In his 2017 Mansion House speech, then Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney1 observed that Britain was reliant on “the kindness of strangers”. Strictly speaking, this was a reference not solely to the funding of government debt (indeed, the cost of borrowing was at near record lows) but to the persistent current account deficit.

That is, the country was spending more abroad than it was earning, and was therefore dependent on foreign investors buying up UK assets such as equities, businesses and gilts to fund the difference. But “the kindness of strangers” has broadly speaking come to mean reliance on foreign buyers of government debt.

It’s also a somewhat misleading phrase because buyers of, in this case gilts, are doing it neither out of kindness nor are they strangers.

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The walk from the flat above the pie and mash shop on Bethnal Green Road to the Houses of Parliament took exactly one hour. This meant that if I left home at 8 a.m. (9 a.m. during recess, m’lud) then I could tell the time simply by the various way stations I passed: Liverpool Street station at 8.15, Mansion House at 8.30, Temple at 8.45 and the leaning tower of fig trees that is Portcullis House at 9 a.m.

That is one of the principal benefits of a regular walking route — no checking Google Maps for reassurance or padding of schedules to account for signal failures at Camden Town. The only possible delay is little old ladies hogging the pavement, for whom I practised my Richard-Ashcroft-in-the-video-for-Bitter-Sweet-Symphony, in which The Verve frontman walks along a busy pavement in Hoxton, violently oblivious to his fellow pedestrians.

The principal drawback of regular routes, of course, is that they quickly grow tedious. The pedestrian crossings that take forever to turn green, the patch of pavement that turns slippery in winter, the memory-sapping sameness of it all. Moreover, what sort of sicko wants to know exactly what time it is on their commute? The answer is always going to be: “too early”.

You could liven things up a little. Jump a left instead of heading straight on, go crazy and cross the road one intersection earlier than planned. But commutes are for operating on autopilot, finding the quickest, simplest route and postponing the choices to later in the day. As president, Barack Obama elected only to wear blue or grey suits to eliminate decision fatigue. I was working for a backbench MP, so a similar line of work required similar focus.

A beautiful day in the neighbourhood

In contrast, the late-afternoon, early-evening, local neighbourhood stroll is all about small experiments. Unfortunately, there are only so many side streets, back alleys and possibly-private-but-screw-it-let’s-risk-it car parks to traverse. The scenery becomes wallpaper, flattened by routine and familiarity. And then, this week, in an area I have known for some time, I stumbled upon a new route.

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Behind a fancy school where the students sport little caps, there was a street I had wrongly written off as a dead-end. Instead, it turned into a new path and a new flight of stairs down to the main road. Not quite Narnia, granted, more like discovering an unwatched episode of an old television show you used to like.

[Note: this once happened to me. Many years ago, due to some DVD navigation errors, I managed to skip half a dozen episodes of Mad Men and so was quite confused when *spoiler alert* Peggy had a baby. When did she get pregnant? By whom? Gosh, the 1960s were a confusing time.]

Gimme, gimme, gimme

Humans like novelty and familiarity. The O.G. of YouTube content creation, Tom Scott, recently observed:

The audience would like four albums which are really identical to the one album they really like of yours, but are also new and novel and exciting at the same time.

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Please do share your own in the comments. I need some wisdom.

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How do you show people that you don’t care? You can’t say you don’t care — that totally negates the not caring!1 You can’t post vague messages online anymore. You can’t even don a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do you?” during a visit to a migrant child detention centre, at least if you’re Melania Trump.

Instead, you have to signal indifference. Following several years of declining sales, wired headphones are enjoying something of a renaissance. It isn’t just Drake, Zendaya or Harry Styles — walk around a ‘young person’ neighbourhood, breathe in the microclimate of flavoured vapes and you’ll observe an epidemic of little white wires.

In the second half of 2025, US sales jumped 10%, rising to 20% in the first six weeks of this year. Is it a price thing? Wired headphones are significantly cheaper than their Bluetooth-enabled brethren. Is it an ease thing? Wired headphones don’t need to be charged and so won’t die on you mid-commute. A sound quality thing? A wired connection doesn’t require Bluetooth compression and has no compatibility issues.

I mean sure, maybe. But it looks a lot more like a 2010s nostalgia / timeless ‘poverty-as-aesthetic’ mashup. Hey, I’m no tech bro with my Canada Goose gilet and AirPods Max, I’m a carefree, starving artist jumping whimsically on a Lime bike, listening to indie artists who just played Mighty Hoopla.

Look, I follow vibes, am susceptible to advertising and I get nostalgic. I mean, I’ve written multiple newsletters about John Major and this evening will play a spot of Championship Manager 00/01. But the wired headphones thing doesn’t strike me as an honest yearning for a simpler time.

And I can’t decide which is tackier: signalling in-group status by pretending to be out-group, or joining an obvious trend as a way of proving you don't follow trends.

Yes, I’m painfully aware that today’s edition long ago entered chatty, yelly, “can we get the Gen Z intern to write about the latest thing?” territory and I’m sorry about that. Perhaps this is a spasm of middle-age millennial rebellion following a double-header on the oil price.

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On certain days, British Airways will quote you north of £1,000 to fly from Edinburgh to London in business class. Which, let’s face it, is a little steep for less than 90 minutes in the air and not a flat bed in sight. Why do they do it? How do they get away with it? Cue the national sport that is BA-bashing.

Except, not this time. You see, it isn’t for a lack of competition — not when easyJet and Ryanair will get you there for far less1 and in similar levels of comfort, while the train offers a slower but more serene alternative. Instead, it’s priced so high for the simple reason that British Airways really doesn’t want you to fly with them.

They would much rather keep that seat clear for someone else — namely, someone looking to fly a far more lucrative route from Edinburgh to, say, New York, and who has no choice but to transit via Heathrow. That itinerary might fetch several thousand pounds, even more at short notice.

Don’t get me wrong, if you willingly hand over a grand for a domestic flight, BA will gladly take it. But they’re pretty sure you won’t, because their customers respond to price signals.

Dire Straits

Returning for a moment to the question posed but left conspicuously unanswered in yesterday’s newsletter: why isn’t oil at $200? This is a market that magically lost almost one billion barrels in the first 10 weeks of the war. Here’s where we left off:

Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, explains it thus: “The market is assuming it can’t last for a long time and therefore it won’t last for a long time.” Put another way, if you were looking to take out zombie apocalypse insurance, I would gladly provide it. Not because I’m licensed by the Prudential Regulation Authority, let alone have the money to pay out. But because, should such an eventuality materialise, no one will be paying out. It is a zombie apocalypse — contract law will have been superseded.

But that isn’t the whole story, of course. Suppliers and buyers of oil respond to price signals just as British Airways passengers do.

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Espresso martinis, skinny jeans and thick-rimmed glasses — the early 2010s were a break-out era for some of Hackney Wick’s most tedious hipsters. But ask me for the most pre-Brexit, post-financial crisis cultural coda and I tell you: Uber surge pricing discourse.

Perhaps it was the novelty of visible dynamic pricing, but come extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy or security incidents such as the Sydney Lindt Cafe siege, the outcry from politicians and riders would be one and the same: how could a company justify price gouging during emergencies?

And each time, Uber would offer an apology, process a few hundred refunds before returning to its zero-interest-rate-enabled, shareholder-subsidised, aggressive expansion mode. What a time for luxury beliefs.

The value of everything and the price of nothing

To be clear, there is no moment in recorded history when consumers would have displayed a positive sentiment towards a brand demanding they pay five or six times the price to get home during a tropical storm. But nor is it coincidental that the global financial crisis, and the deep recession it wrought, fuelled a general mistrust in markets and prices. I mean, they had just proven to be pretty darn fallible, if not overseen by the criminally negligent.

And after 2008, the tempo of exogenous shocks seemed only to quicken: Brexit1, the Trump I, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic and now the Strait of Hormuz. Each time, governments in the rich world sought to protect their economies and most vulnerable citizens, with furlough schemes, direct cash transfers to households, energy price guarantees and the like.

The instinct to shield people from price shocks or prevent unnecessary bankruptcies can be morally correct and economically coherent. But what is lost each time is the power of price signals. And I think this hit home most forcefully, at least to me, amid the UK government’s response to rising costs associated with the Iran War, which appears to be pressuring supermarkets to freeze prices on certain goods2.

To be fair, Keir Starmer did previously name Harold Wilson as his favourite party leader of the last 50 years.

Strait-acting

This morning, a barrel of Brent crude is trading at around $933. This is significantly higher than before the war, when oil was going for closer to $70. Yet it remains far below some of the frothier predictions of $150 or even $200 a barrel, predicated on the fact that, until recently, approximately one-sixth of the world’s natural gas and one-fifth of petroleum transited the Strait of Hormuz.

And $93 is not even historically high.

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It is possible not to like tennis, but it is inconceivable not to open up your heart to Gaël Monfils. The Frenchman, now 39 and into his final season as a professional, is the ultimate showman. If Rafael Nadal was born to suffer and Roger Federer to croon, then Monfils was put on this Earth to delight with his sheer athleticism, electric chaos and gloriously unnecessary tricks.

Perhaps my favourite thing about Monfils is his nickname, “La Monf”, handed down to him by his Parisian friends. I don’t know how true this is, and it’s too good an origin story to fact check, but I once read that he got the feminine “la” rather than the masculine “le” because he played with such explosiveness and unpredictability that he is practically elemental — and forces of nature are, of course, feminine.

English doesn’t do grammatical gender in the way of French, Spanish or German.1 Instead, it attempts to neatly polarise all manner of activities into good or bad, depending on education, class and the population density of one’s local area. I’m thinking:

• GLP-1s (cheating versus a legitimate medical intervention)

• Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (promoting safer, cleaner streets versus entitled middle class NIMBYs)

• Working from home (unproductive shirkers versus modern flexibility).

But for the purposes of today’s newsletter (and London’s heatwave), it’s air conditioning.

Hot in Herre

I once got injured playing cricket. But when I got home from school to inform my mother and elicit some sympathy (and possibly a mini Magnum), she replied in pure American incredulity, “How the heck do you get injured playing cricket?” It’s a similar thing with this country and the Sun — despite the rumours, it can still kill you.

There were 1,504 heat-associated deaths in England last year, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). Unsurprisingly, the highest mortality rates were among those aged 85 and older, with incidents concentrated in London and the South East.

Last summer was also the warmest on record, while heat episodes are predicted to become more intense, longer and more frequent as a result of climate change. The UKHSA estimates there could be up to 10,000 deaths per year due to extreme heat by the 2050s, under a “high warming scenario without adaptation”.

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The independent Committee on Climate Change has called heat waves the “single greatest climate threat to public health” and has explicitly acknowledged that provision of air conditioning is going to be “essential”, particularly in places where vulnerable people live, such as care homes and hospitals.

But this is not a treatise on housing policy (new-builds are important but the UK has among the oldest housing stock in Europe2 so retrofitting is essential) or energy consumption (though it’s worth noting that air con is often considerably less energy-intensive than many forms of heating). It is about the apparent moral dichotomy.

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It is among my more parochial thoughts. Partway through Collapse, Vladislav Zubok’s terrific book on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the realisation dawned: the gravest threat to the United Kingdom as a political union is not the election of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish separatists (though that frankly isn’t helping matters) but the awakening of English nationalism.

Zubok’s contention was that the collapse of the USSR — overlord of one-sixth the Earth’s land mass, with a four-million-strong army and by the 1980s the world’s largest producer of oil — was far from inevitable. Instead, it was something of an inside job. Mikhail Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms, intended to reinvigorate Soviet communism, served only to loosen the very structures holding it together while empowering Russian nationalism, as embodied by Boris Yeltsin.

The unions that unravel are not necessarily the ones whose peripheries have the strongest grievance, but those where the centre stops believing in itself.

You’d think this might have occurred to me when I was working on devolution policy at the Treasury. But as a North London boy, I was far too busy trying to persuade my brain that ‘Barnett’, as in the formula, had two ‘Ts’, unlike the borough. Incidentally, this affliction followed me to the Evening Standard, where I continually struggled to spell the mayor’s name correctly, having grown up next door to the Kahns. A charming family, but deeply unhelpful to me professionally.

Devolve and forget

When it comes to devolution, Northern Ireland is, as ever, sui generis. For one thing, the place was formed following partition. But it also had a parliament long before Scotland and Wales. It even had its own prime minister until 1972, when the UK government suspended Stormont and imposed direct rule from London.

Edinburgh only got its devolved parliament and Cardiff its assembly (upgraded to a parliament in 2020, like a football ‘head coach’ getting a title bump to ‘manager’ after a couple of successful seasons) in 1999. Back then, it was all rather convivial: a Labour government in Westminster devolving power to Labour-run Scotland and Wales1. No more.

In fact, it’s been like this for a while. Northern Ireland (when it has a functioning Executive) has a Sinn Fein first minister, Scotland has been run by a variety of SNP administrations since 20072 and even Wales (Wales!) has a Plaid Cymru-led government.

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But what of the threat from the UK’s very own Russia — England, where 85% of the population lives3 to the point that we don’t even bother with a separate parliament for it? Perhaps if life felt a little less pressured and governments a little less chaotic, the English might look at the current settlement — earnestly referred to as a patchwork of devolution — and baulk.

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There are few risk-free investments. And even they are hedged and caveated to the point of compliance fatigue. Ever tried putting your money in gilts?1 Merely hover your cursor over the Hargreaves Lansdown tab and you’re inundated with Financial Conduct Authority warnings that your capital is at risk and you may get less back than you invested.

And sure, this newsletter likes to have a laugh and a joke about Britain’s fiscal position. Moreover, I’m painfully aware our new overlord (and latest darling of the Labour soft-left) Andy Burnham has made a few disobliging comments about the bond market. But come on — the UK is not about to default on 2-year gilts.

In my admittedly blinkered view, there’s only one 100% guaranteed return. It is in the idea that people over the age of, say, 45, do not fundamentally change. And by my reckoning, Tony Blair turned 73 this month.

There’s always a Janan Ganesh column

I can’t find it and I’ve already lost 30 minutes of my life looking for it. But a while back, Ganesh wrote words to the effect that people should stop overthinking, Blair was simply a rock star who had his fingers on the pulse of UK public opinion on everything except foreign policy.

The year is 2026, and little has changed. In a 5,600-word essay (he really does call it an essay), Labour’s most successful leader comes closer than most to nailing the present government’s failures. Short Blair: Keir Starmer got elected with no coherent plan for a changing world. Longer Blair:

It won the 2024 election not by acclaim, but by being an acceptable (credit to Keir Starmer) default option to a Conservative government the country felt had behaved unacceptably.

However, partly because of the intellectual wasteland of the Corbyn years, it had no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing and what that meant for policy…

… The government’s principal problem isn’t Keir’s personality2. Or a failure to communicate ‘our achievements’. Or a need to assert more strongly Labour’s ‘values’.

It is because we don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world and are in the wrong political position from which we can devise one and win a second term.

The government is governing from an essentially traditional Labour ‘soft left’ position, parked firmly in the party’s comfort zone.

But being Blair, things start to get a little weird in the foreign policy section.

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What is wrong with me? The football club I have supported since indoctrination, about whom I’ve shed non-ironic tears — of grief (Paris, 2007), anger (Bolton, 2003) and exhaustion (Wembley, 2014) win the league title for the first time in 22 years and I feel…

I wish it were “ennui” because then I could make a gag about Thierry Ennui and move on with a degree of damage limitation, like a hard-earned point away from home. But it’s closer to a branch of homesickness.

I don’t think it’s an age thing. Partly because my number still starts with a ‘three’, and partly because all the old people I know are, if anything, even more invested in their football teams than they were in middle age. May as well spend it all now, lads. Rachel Reeves (or the next chancellor) is bound to bring it into the scope of inheritance tax by parliament’s end.

Don’t misunderstand me — I’ve been mining the content farm since Tuesday evening, when the title was confirmed. Listening to podcasts I ordinarily eschew, reading The Athletic deep-dives that skirt the line, not always successfully, between parody and public interest.

But the boy who requested (demanded?) his bar mitzvah party take place at Highbury, who attended every home game for over a decade and gladly swapped the rarest, shiniest sticker in the Merlin’s Premier League 1999 album for one of Nigel Winterburn — no longer lives here.

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Even the club’s unofficial anthem, better known as ‘North London Forever’, leaves me feeling cold. I stopped going to matches during the tedium and unpleasantness of the late-Wenger era and, by the time I returned, everyone around me was belting out the words to a song I had never heard. Me! Someone who could reel off not only the starting lineup for the 1998 FA Cup final, but 1971 as well.

Just another imagined tradition, I grumbled — like military parades and tiramisu.

But then, on Monday morning, I saw footage of Ian Wright, the main character of my early childhood, wearing the reddest polo shirt in his wardrobe, under the blazing Crystal Palace sun, grinning from ear to ear. And if I struggled to be happy for me, I could not help but be happy for Wright.

Oddly enough, this happened twice over the long weekend. The second time involved Stephen Colbert, whose late-night show came to an enforced end, an apparent victim of machinations involving CBS, its owner Paramount and the Trump administration.

To be clear, there are only so many bad (or bad-adjacent) things one can care about, and this wasn’t in my top 50. Colbert seems like a nice enough fellow and I still recall with some awe his performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when, in his Colbert Report character, he brilliantly skewered both President George W. Bush and the press corps and was rewarded with crippling silence.

But then I watched Colbert — among the most successful comedians of his generation — in his final show play backup singer to Paul McCartney in a rendition of “Hello Goodbye” and I thought, holy shit, that’s really cool for you.

This isn’t fandom, I don’t think. Fandom is living vicariously through someone or something else. Fandom would be supporting Arsenal and being overjoyed when they win the league. Still, in an age of diminishing certainties, I’m fairly sure there are worse emotions than feeling happy for Ian Wright.

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It is one of those rare spring London days. The sun is up, the sky is blue and the contents of an entire postcode have been dumped onto the local park:

The £100,000 tax trap couple, sat atop a sensible blanket, playing host to an E5 Bakehouse sourdough, M&S picky bits and Tesco Finest prosecco. The group of eight twenty-somethings, somehow with nine bikes, drinking pre-mixed G&Ts and playing music not quite loud enough to justify complaint. And the young parents attending an emotionally volatile third birthday party, doing their best to exude calm.

Still, the expanse is wide and there is enough space for all — so long as everyone follows the rules. And, albeit unconsciously, they generally do.

(Don’t) sit down next to me

Imagine you’re walking into this park. Where would you sit? The universal answer is “as far from everyone else as possible in order to secure the largest patch of grass possible”. But how do you know where that is? You don’t know, you just do. It turns out, you’ve been engaging in a bit of complicated mathematics this whole time.

Voronoi diagrams divide a space into regions, called Voronoi cells, based on their proximity to a set of points — each region belonging to whichever point is nearest. It works a bit like gravitational pull, except without the gravity.

The really cool thing is that park-goers tend to do this organically. Rod Bogart, a computer graphics software developer, has overlaid a Voronoi diagram on top of an aerial image of people sitting in New York City’s Bryant Park. Just drool over the shapes:

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