An elite-tier benefit of living in a country where access to firearms is highly regulated — other than the absence of school shootings so frequent they barely make it above the fold — is that I get to gesticulate wildly at motorists who almost run me over.

Now, I am extremely proficient at crossing roads. So much so that my ‘tempting fate detector’, perennially stuck on sensitive, doesn’t even blink at such a statement. I have a very particular set of skills, honed through sheer weight of walks1 and an honest acceptance that noise-cancelling headphone wearers must exercise greater precaution.

The point I’m driving at is this: if I’ve nearly been hit by a car, it is because said vehicle has run a red light or determined that stopping at zebra crossings is an optional, subscription-based feature — like BMW’s heated steering wheels2 — rather than because of any misjudgment on my part.

My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends

With the US midterm elections taking place tomorrow and James Talarico in with a fighting chance of winning a Senate seat in gun-toting Texas, the Democratic National Committee has begged me not to raise the issue of the Second Amendment. But, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, you go to pixel with the newsletter idea you have, not the one you might wish to have. In that spirit, here’s what went down on the weekend:

As the jet-black Mercedes SUV — still wafting that new car smell but with indicator lights mysteriously inoperative — brushed past me, I flung out my arms in a manner that I hoped radiated righteous indignation but I fear was more Julian Clary fisting Norman Lamont on Hampstead Heath.

After which, the car came to a halt, the driver’s window wound down and a shimmering bald head appeared. I sauntered over and remarked in my best Received Pronunciation: “If you signal when you turn, you might kill fewer pedestrians.” To which he retorted, no word of embellishment, “I’ve not killed any pedestrians.” And promptly drove off.

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After replaying the incident roughly 400 times in my mind, I amused myself with the notion that, while I am certainly growing more extra in my old age, this was something I simply would never have done were I wandering around a suburb of, say, New York City, rather than London or Sydney.

Sure, as far as I’m aware, none of the Americans to whom I’m related own a gun. But then again:

1. There are more firearms in the US than people and

2. I don’t know anyone who voted for Brexit in 2016, but my understanding is Remain lost that particular contest.

What struck me wasn’t the fact that I’d have reacted differently in a different jurisdiction. Rather, that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to react at all, so no restraint would have been necessary. The decision would have been, somehow, preconfigured.

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Do you remember the anonymous “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” op-ed?1 In the piece, published by the New York Times in September 2018, the author claimed that many senior individuals in the administration were working from within to frustrate parts of the president’s agenda. It was a whole thing.

And the fallout was instant. Donald Trump, still on the social platform then called Twitter, attacked the author and the “failing” Times, later posting a one-word Tweet: “TREASON?”

The White House launched a frantic investigation in an attempt to uncover the ‘senior administration official’. Cabinet members — including Vice President Mike Pence — felt compelled to publicly deny authorship.

The media, what with its pesky First Amendment rights, were also keen on identifying the individual. And in the era before large language models began to pollute the written expression, everyone was on the lookout for clues in the writing. [Editor’s note: can you imagine a more ‘the Strait of Hormuz is still very much open’ news event?]

Twinkle, twinkle little lodestar

For instance, it was widely acknowledged the word “lodestar”, which appeared in a section of the op-ed praising the late John McCain, could be a verbal breadcrumb. Meaning ‘guiding star’, it was unusual enough to stand out and as good as any place to start digging. (Patrick Maguire, then at the New Statesman, deployed the word five days later in his newsletter, a detail I very much appreciated.)

It’s also how Pence gets involved, with numerous reporters noting that the Vice President had frequently used the word in his speeches, dating back years. Et tu, Mike? Alas, it would be a couple more years — and Trump merely tweeting about his deputy’s shortcomings while the baying crowd he had assembled erected gallows — before Pence decided to join the resistance.

Meanwhile, the op-ed author revealed himself to be Miles Taylor, then deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

I was working at the (UK, your honour) Treasury at the time and so wasn’t doing much in the way of writing, beyond setting the Northern Ireland Executive’s draft budget weeks before it collapsed, though I prefer to blame the Renewable Heat Incentive2 scandal, First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister3 Martin McGuinness, rather than my departmental expenditure limits.

Are we out of the Bretton Woods?

Nonetheless, it got me thinking. Were I ever to anonymously pitch a comment piece to, say, the Financial Times, revealing all my valiant attempts to bring fiscal stability to Ulster or my thwarted plans to raise fuel duty by as much as RPI inflation, would my verbal tics give the game away?

Look, this is unspinnably self-indulgent. No one, beyond a select few extremely smart, funny and smoking hot subscribers, has even the foggiest who I am, let alone how I write. There are, as far as I’m aware, no undergraduate English courses that cover Hemingway’s love of short clauses, Mantel’s adherence to the present tense, oh, and Kessler’s obsession with the Bretton Woods system.

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With the prebuttal competently dispatched, here is a highly curated list of idiosyncrasies that would have me swiftly identified and summarily fired:

1. “Something of a” — things can never be too declarative. Everything must be hedged. Please, Lord, let there always be wriggle room.

2. “Galloping shock”, never simply “shock” or, heaven forbid, anything as pedestrian as “surprise”. It’s a Sorkinism, though I’m practically teetotal compared with my teenage years.

3. “Frankly”, as in “mild”, “unattractive” or “unwise”. Also, “mercifully” as in “rare”, “short” or “unaware”.

4. There is always an aviation angle.

5. The balance of payments, the exchange rate mechanism and Russia’s “full-scale” invasion of Ukraine — the latter, in recognition of the 2014 invasion of the Donbas region and illegal annexation of Crimea.

6. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Curtis Sittenfeld and surely one other female Jewish novelist.

7. Stephen Kotkin, Robert Caro and, forgive me, for I have sinned, Jeffrey Archer.

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It’s easy to forget, because of how it all ended: in confusion, excruciating pauses and ultimately in victory for authoritarianism. But during his prime, Joe Biden was one heck of a communicator.

“That’s not change, that’s more of the same!” he confidently asserted during his 2008 address to the Democratic National Convention, in a straightforward but devastating critique of John McCain’s desperate attempts to distance himself from the heroically unpopular Republican incumbent, George W. Bush.

“Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative” was another of his pithy maxims. But my favourite Bidenism relates, perhaps unsurprisingly, to fiscal events. Adopting his most empathetic tone, Biden would turn to camera and urge his opponents: “Don’t tell me your values. Show me your budget — and I’ll tell you your values.”

In that spirit, following yesterday’s festivities, what are Andy Burnham and John Healey’s values?

The rest is fiscal policy

The first order of business is where not to start. The Budget speech is, for my money, the inexplicably popular podcast to the Red Book and Office for Budget Responsibility’s painstakingly researched (and only grudgingly acknowledged) source material.

If you simply listened to Healey’s words and then popped to Pret for a Dom Raab special,1 you might be forgiven for concluding that the UK economy was doing broadly fine, and the chancellor’s main job was to dole out a few tens of millions here and there to well-deserving interest groups. Would that it were so simple.

To be fair to Healey, things were even stranger in the George Osborne days. Not the austerity or pro-NATO position of the US government, but the fact that the Treasury had to spend actual money on actual projects in order to land the chancellor’s jokes. It may cost nothing to be polite but being funny can be fiscally irresponsible.

Strait Talk Express

So, the headlines. The UK economy has, in the short-term, weathered the Hormuz-shaped shock better than expected. But there is no getting around it — the Iran war has made Britain, a run-of-the-mill net energy importer, poorer.

For consumers, it has sent the cost of gas and electricity soaring, with a compounding impact on inflation. And for the government, it has hit the public finances hard thanks to higher borrowing costs — around £15bn more on debt interest this year than the OBR forecast back in March, driven by increased inflation raising the cost of index-linked gilts.

Given the sheer amount of change since the spring, the chancellor effectively had two options:

1. Change with it — that is, offer some combination of spending cuts and tax rises, or

2. Allow the fiscal headroom bequeathed by Rachel Reeves to absorb some of the shock in the immediate term.

Healey has enthusiastically plumped for the latter. From welfare reform to wealth taxes, options are very much being kept open. This is not obviously stupid, given the sheer level of uncertainty — economic, geopolitical and military — going around. But it’s also not exactly what Burnham promised in his poetry phase.

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So, in place of major tax reforms or big-ticket spending items, we got the chancellor’s refrain of “breathing space”. For households, that looks like short-term cost of living support while for government, it provides for time to work out next steps. The problem, which I set out below, is that this Budget falls short on both fronts.

Pain in every postcode

This is not to ascribe blame per se. For one thing, Healey and Burnham are not responsible for oil jumping from $60 a barrel at the start of the year to $115 today. But they do still have choices around how to respond. And in an uncertain world, a smaller fiscal buffer (£15bn, down from £23.6bn) confers real risk.

Specifically, that if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and economic conditions continue to deteriorate, the chancellor will be forced to come back next year to raise taxes, with all the negative pre-Budget discourse that entails. Just ask Healey’s predecessor, sat on the backbenches.

As the OBR notes, “if productivity growth were 0.5 percentage points higher or lower than forecast, borrowing could reach £50 billion lower or £40 billion higher.” That is essentially a big, fiscal watchdog-shaped shrug.

One thing that is guaranteed, however, is pain. FOMO dictates that I share the graphic everyone else already has. It shows real household disposable income, a somewhat esoteric term for ‘do people feel like they have any money?’ And it doesn’t make for pretty reading. The forecast is bad, made even worse by the fact that it’s been two decades of this sort of thing with no end in sight.

The broader phenomenon is neatly illustrated by the energy support package. Compared with the equivalent proposed by Liz Truss, it’s fairly small beer: a £100 cash transfer to households living in council tax bands A–D (in a bearish sign, the website for checking your home’s tax band swiftly crashed), coming in at a cost of £2.6bn. While £100 is not to be sniffed at, it runs into the uncomfortable reality that the energy price cap is set to rise by almost £300 next January and again later in the year.

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The simple truth is that, given the cost of energy, the number of households in the UK and the government’s precarious fiscal position, it is very difficult to subsidise people’s bills to the point where they might actually thank you for it.

For instance, Healey could have announced a £1,000 package at far greater cost. Of course, we’ve seen that film before. The bond market freaks out, the cost of borrowing soars, the government U-turns and everyone is poorer than when they started.

Can we get back to politics, please?

Briefly, because I can feel my average dwell time slipping. It might seem churlish to criticise a Budget for not doing much when that was precisely the aim. Don’t make things worse, don’t further aggravate business and for goodness sake, don’t spook the bond market.

To that end, mission accomplished. Borrowing costs barely budged, bank shares even rose despite a hike in the profits surcharge (though I suspect this is a result of wishful thinking: any ‘time limited’ tax rise is likely to be about as temporary as when income tax was introduced as a stop-gap measure to fund the wars against Napoleonic France.)

It’s just that… Burnham will never be more powerful than he is today: a massive parliamentary majority, rising poll numbers, a cabinet that isn’t quite compliant (see Rosebank, immigration reform) but is pretty darn eager to impress the new boss.

And then observe the sheer tonnage of can-kicking: on welfare reform, defence spending, you name it, pushed into the Spending Review, now not expected until late 2027. This is the same guy who as recently as a few months ago wanted to unpick Thatcherism and blow raspberries at buyers of gilts?

As for Kemi Badenoch, the sheer lack of surprises meant she was able to deliver her Budget response — historically a fiendishly difficult task — with little deviation from the pre-prepared script. She even got, by the standards of the Commons chamber, a decent joke in, about how Burnham had gone from wanting to overturn 40 years of neoliberalism to cutting 4p off the price of gherkins.

It’s just my job, five days a week

In this writer’s opinion, the single biggest disappointment in this Budget was that Healey didn’t get out his novelty-sized scissors, cut the ribbon and proudly declare the Strait of Hormuz open. In retrospect, he and Burnham really shouldn’t have campaigned quite so vigorously for Donald Trump’s election in 2024, but we are where we are.

In the event, I think you know what the prime minister’s values are: a larger role for the state in delivering services, an unprecedented rebalancing of power from Westminster to the regions and higher taxes on the wealthy. But you wouldn’t necessarily get that impression from this Budget.

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Forget the maverick who breaks every rule in the book or the villain who patiently explains the entire dastardly plan to an audience of henchmen. My least favourite television trope is the office lifer who hates every aspect of their job. It’s not the authenticity I object to — offscreen these people exist in their billions.

Rather, it’s that the role of ‘person who despises their work’ is being played by someone doing a job they presumably love. Even struggling actors — that is, the vast majority — who wait tables or greet wealthy customers at Chanel have at least chosen a particular kind of struggle.

Few enter the entertainment industry for purely economic reasons. A tiny fraction may end up accumulating generational wealth but for the rest, the motivation is intrinsic: the thrill of performance, the spark of creativity, the glamour of proximity to celebrity.

Without these (the former Treasury official in me wants to call them ‘benefits-in-kind’ but they’re really just perks), what would be the point? Consequently, anyone embarking on a career as an actor is competing against people who would do it — and often are doing it — for free.

The vineyard test

We see this replicated across numerous industries, from restaurants and bookstores to surf shops and sports franchises. These are businesses where the owner’s personal enjoyment almost necessarily conflicts with a fiduciary requirement to maximise shareholder value.

We’ve all heard the one about the bloke in his mid-fifties who’s made his millions from a commercial cleaning company or car repair shop and decides it’s time to have a little fun, so buys a vineyard in Provence. But people tend not to go in the opposite direction.

Not least when, like show business, running a vineyard can be not only deeply unprofitable but seriously hard work. I mean, it’s farming!

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And so here’s the all-seeing, all-knowing 1980s American sitcom-dad lesson: in the words of restaurateur and entrepreneur Richard Mott, speaking on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, “You never want to be in a business for economic reasons when you’re competing with people who are in there for non-economic reasons.”

Or, as my real-life American mom would say when evaluating the merits of a significant purchase: “You have to love it.”

Resolve

At the risk of going ‘ah, now we’ve eaten our microeconomic vegetables, let’s binge on some geopolitical cookies’, the same asymmetry plays out in rather more consequential settings. If in business, the amateur is happy to lose money to play, in war the party fighting for national survival is usually willing to absorb far greater losses than the one waging a war of choice.

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Do you remember where you were when Harry Kane took all six corners1 for England in their opening 1-1 draw against Russia at Euro 2016? At the time, this was seen as a strange, verging on subversive decision by manager Roy Hodgson. “I can't understand it… We need Kane in the box,” bemoaned former England midfielder Jamie Redknapp.

Never one to knowingly turn down the descriptive dial, the late Ray Wilkins said the decision “baffles the life out of me.” Alan Shearer, meanwhile, compared it to “asking Lewis Hamilton to change his own tyres.” The consensus view was clear: can’t someone else do it?

To be fair to the punditocracy, Kane took only seven corners for his domestic club, Tottenham, during the 2015-16 season, where midfielder Christian Eriksen was the designated set-piece specialist. And all seven of those Kane corners were taken short — that is, the ball was passed to a nearby teammate rather than lobbed directly into the penalty area.

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Moreover, Kane was England’s main goalscorer. At an imposing 6ft 2in, surely he was better off trying to finish off crosses rather than take them himself?

Everything, everywhere, all at once

The problem for the likes of Redknapp, Wilkins and Shearer — but an even bigger headache for Hodgson — was that Kane was not only England’s best striker, but best everything. Had the manager enjoyed the option of fielding 10 Kanes plus a goalkeeper, he surely would have done so.

Fast forward to 2026 and Kane has been one of the best players in the world for over a decade. Not only a formidable goalscorer, but a player of incisive through balls, terrific link-up play, intelligent movement, anticipation, decision-making and pressing.

He combines the finishing of a traditional number nine with the passing range and awareness of a playmaker — and that may in fact undersell his abilities. I mean, in the Champions League last week, Kane took a goal kick because he’s the best at that too.

His value simply cannot be weighed in goals alone. And, oddly enough, that may have been holding him back.

Undervalued

At first glance, it might seem somewhat eccentric to describe a player who joined Bayern Munich for €100m2, earns an estimated €25m per year and has just won the Ballon d’Or as undervalued. Clearly, clubs, managers and chief executives get it. And yet, at 33 years of age, this recognition has been a long time coming.

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Hands up if you have more than one child. Now ask yourself: where did the love for that second prince or princessling come from? Was it deducted at checkout from the firstborn? Or, as I suspect, did your heart do something extraordinary: expand to fill your new universe?

My experience of dessert1 is much the same. No matter how garlic-buttery the escargot or how crackling the pork belly, when it comes to dining out, there is always, always room for pudding.

The appetite grows in the eating

Partly, this is because, biologically speaking, our brains are wired for sweetness. In a savannah of scarcity, sugar packed one heck of a calorific punch. Of course, this is 2026, around 10% of Americans are on GLP-1s and when it comes to the rest, there are only so many fibs you can tell your dental hygienist.2

Let’s be real: no one goes out for dinner because they’re hungry. They go to celebrate a special occasion, catch up with friends or avoid the washing-up. And when it comes to dessert, it’s about the pursuit not of fullness but completeness. We crave the catharsis of ending on a sugar high that we get to share with the people we love.

I mean, when was the last time you ordered soup with “two spoons, please”? Instead, the crème brûlée lands like a trademark Max Martin pop song key change and it’s like, “Yes. That’s how it was always meant to end.”

Historically, restaurants have been only too happy to oblige. But that is subtly changing.

What’s that got to do with the price of fish?

It’s never a good time to open a restaurant. One fundamental problem the sector faces is a combination of relatively low margins with high fixed costs, perishable inventory, labour-intensive production and limited capacity. Throw in regulatory hurdles (it’s a business that relies on indoor fires) and the sheer absence of scale economies and it’s a wonder any survive the winter.

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And the last few years have been especially challenging. There was that time in 2020 when people were largely banned from leaving their homes, swiftly followed by various energy shocks, relentless food price inflation, minimum wage rises, higher interest rates and in Britain, hikes to business taxation.

Restaurants can raise their prices, but that comes with obvious downsides. Customers are facing their own financial pressures, and eating out is often one of the first luxuries to go. Not least when even ‘casual’ options such as Wagamama can now quite easily set a family of four back £100.

Drinks, and alcohol in particular, form a core profit centre, which is why you are automatically handed a wine list without even asking but the dessert menu is preceded by a question. Wine is typically marked up two to three times, and critically does not consume much time or labour to serve, beyond fetching it from the cellar.

Then there can be decent margins on meals with lower cost ingredients that still command perceived value, such as pasta, risotto and chicken dishes. Pudding should be on that list. There are no quality beef cuts, bluefin tuna or saffron on the dessert menu. Instead, the cost is of the opportunity variety.

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What on Earth is going on at Manchester United? For a second successive week, following a fairly dismal Champions League defeat, a senior player has taken to the post-match media round to eschew the usual platitudes about how “we switched off at crucial moments” but “we'll dust ourselves off and go again” in favour of lashing out at the club’s hierarchy.

Speaking to TNT Sports after United’s 4-1 drubbing by Como, captain Bruno Fernandes turned on his head coach, appearing to suggest that Michael Carrick had got the tactics wrong. When offered the chance to dispel such an interpretation, Fernandes replied: “That’s on the manager and staff.”

Even for a club that has turned underperformance into something of an art form, this is unusual.

And, in my best Carrie Bradshaw, it got me thinking about something I suspect we all grapple with in our personal and professional lives: how — and more importantly, when — to give feedback.

A time and a place

The question isn’t whether Fernandes or Carrick was right when it came to United’s inability to press. Who cares? Nor even whether the extremely public venue the player chose was the most appropriate forum for communicating his frustration with the boss. My hunch is, probably not. Rather, it is about timing.

Say the manager’s tactics were wrong, a proposition not obviously unsupportable, given the final score. Surely the most effective time for a player of Fernandes’ experience and stature to air his concerns would be before the match, followed closely by during the match itself. If the objective is to alter an outcome, feedback needs to arrive while there’s still the opportunity to do so. Once the final whistle is blown, it’s little more than punditry.

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And while my sense is that anyone who subscribes to a daily newsletter is, statistically speaking, on the ‘can’t kick a ball straight’ side of the bell curve, few of us will be strangers to the frustrating experience of receiving or giving feedback only after it might have been useful.

Of course, there are plenty of occasions when discretion is the better part of valour. Perhaps it really is too late, the person in question isn’t in a position to hear it yet, or the stakes are simply too trivial to justify a confrontation. Being right doesn’t automatically make everything worth relitigating.

But all too often, people either say nothing, or wait until it is too late.

“A chance to serve — that is all we ask”

The most egregious case comes on holiday. Say you’ve walked into your hotel room for the first time and, despite the punchy price and glossy online photos, it’s all a bit sad: tired carpets, harsh lighting, a television bearing the logo of an electronics brand that went bust during the Mitterrand presidency. Or you’re out for dinner at the sort of place that charges £8.50 for bread and by the time the main course arrives, it has clearly been sitting under the heat lamp on the pass for a good few minutes.

You could email the hotel or restaurant after the fact and, best-case scenario, get an apologetic reply with a discount on your next visit. But that’s not really best-case: you already had the crap holiday or the congealing hollandaise sauce. The time to speak up, politely but firmly, is when the problem arises.

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It was the last book I ever read1 — a combination of words most people don’t get to write, either because it’s embarrassing or, more likely, because they’re dead.

The book was 747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation by Joe Sutter, the celebrated engineer who led the design and construction of arguably the most important (and undoubtedly the best looking) aircraft in aviation history: Boeing’s Queen of the Skies.

What makes 747 such a compelling story is the often unsteady relationship between ambition and discipline. Boeing in the 1960s was a company bursting with engineering genius, led by people with a profound sense of personal responsibility, where a culture of attention to detail and challenging false assumptions radiated outward. These were planes made with love.

In other words, the book represented everything the company was not by the late 2010s when its newest aircraft, the 737 MAX 8, started falling out of the skies.

Maxed Out

On Tuesday, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted Boeing final approval for its long-delayed 737 MAX 10, paving the way for the company to deliver the largest version of its best-selling airplane.

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Boeing has endured years of near-permanent crisis, sparked by a series of engineering failings that culminated in — but did not stop with — two crashes and the deaths of 346 people in 2018 and 2019. Indeed, scrutiny of the company’s production and quality control only intensified following a 2024 mid-air cabin panel blowout on a nearly new2 Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9.

Since then, following major shareholder, regulatory and congressional pressure, Boeing has been focused on a major turnaround program. FAA certification (approval from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency is expected in the coming months) therefore represents a vital step in that journey. Now, the company needs the MAX 10 to be a commercial success.

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Longtime readers of this newsletter will be aware that I’m no longer allowed to criticise Sydney after the… unpleasantness. The city is, I have been warned, like a beautiful woman with low self-esteem. She has the stunning harbour, sandy beaches and heiress lifestyle but in her darker moments, wonders whether anyone would still find her interesting were her looks to fade.

London does not have this problem. Such is his security of esteem that his frequent bouts of self-deprecation are really just a flex. At social events, the capital has the power to make you feel like the only person in the room or, with eyes darting, remind you that he’s waiting for someone more important.

London’s — really Britain’s — vulnerability is centred on whether people like him, or are only there for his name and reputation. And, let’s face it, he’s had a rough few years, what with the divorce and various financial difficulties.

So when there’s good economic news, the response of Brits, or at least economists, tends to err on the side of barely concealed suspicion. “Really? Are you sure? Why?”

Exogenous zones

Some of this comes down to experience. The UK has endured two decades of weak productivity1 and wage growth, punctuated by a series of semi-regular exogenous shocks: the Global Financial Crisis, Brexit,2 Trump, Covid-19, Russia, Hormuz. And with each recovery, Britain always seemed to lag behind its peers.

Then there’s the data itself. In recent years, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has taken something of a reputational battering over the quality of its data, particularly around the labour market. This is a problem, not least because everyone from newsletter writers to the Bank of England relies on these figures to write articles or raise interest rates.

Finally, there is the matter of energy prices. The UK, like much of the rest of Europe, is an energy importer. If the price goes up, we pay more and get poorer as a result. To add insult to injury, the resulting higher inflation tends to send interest rates and government borrowing costs higher.

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But I’m sorry, there’s simply no getting around it. The UK economy is, for the moment at least, doing alright. Certainly, less badly than many experts believed. Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that Britain would be the hardest hit of the world’s advanced economies as a result of the energy shock from the Iran war.

In reality, we’ve been resolutely middle of the pack. In fact, in its most recent report, the IMF managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, went out of her way to commend Britain for its deficit reduction plan (even if it’s predicated on pre-election spending cuts that verge on science-fiction).

Then there’s growth. Loath as I am to quote monthly GDP statistics, the UK economy expanded by 0.1% in August, confounding expectations. More importantly, over a three-month period, the economy grew by a positively frothy 0.7%, surpassing the forecasts of both the Bank of England and the IMF.

We are now looking at an annual growth rate of 1.8%, something not seen since the post-Covid recovery. Throw in a labour market showing signs of resilience3 and I can sense the animal spirits emanating from all around.

No, really, why?

Taking a step back, this should perhaps not come as a galloping shock. The UK is a mid-sized, open, services-dominated economy with genuine strengths in artificial intelligence and the global AI investment boom is clearly a rising tide capable of lifting more than just US-flagged vessels.

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Digging a little deeper (by which I mean, reading the ONS release and the Financial Times), UK computer programming grew by double digits while professional services were up 6.6% year-on-year in the three months to August. With the Budget a week away, this is clearly good news for the chancellor, John Healey. Can you sense the ‘but’ coming?

Britain is still Britain. Borrowing costs remain high, indeed the highest in the G7,4 thanks in part to Long Liz Truss and also the general view that our inflation problem is stickier than that of our peers. This and the Iran war are expected to have roughly halved the £23.6bn of fiscal headroom bequeathed by Rachel Reeves.

Meanwhile, households are suffering right now. The cost of refinancing a mortgage continues its merry rise, while the energy price cap is forecast to hit £2,000 early next year, near its 2022 peak. And, because in economics good news can also be bad news, more resilient GDP growth makes it more likely that the Bank of England will raise interest rates as early as next month.5

Climate change notwithstanding, the UK will never enjoy Australian weather. Nonetheless, some good economic news is better than none at all.

I wasn’t much interested in politics in the late-1990s, what with the booming economy, thriving rules-based international order and my being in primary school. For instance, I’m fairly certain I couldn’t have picked John Major, Bill Clinton or Benazir Bhutto out of a lineup.

And yet, growing up in the Suburb,1 ferried daily between Highgate and Hampstead, I knew all about Jack Straw. I mean, how many interior ministers had a bright yellow castle named after them?

Jack of all trades

The title of Straw’s memoirs, Last Man Standing, published in 2012, refers to the convention that the Lord Chancellor is the final member of the outgoing government to resign. Though, given the rather more generous proportions of his successor, Ken Clarke, Straw at least got to keep the ceremonial tights.

It also alludes to his extraordinary and unbroken tenure in office. Straw is among only three ministers to have served continuously in cabinet for all 13 years of the Labour government: as Home Secretary from 1997–2001, Foreign Secretary from 2001–2006, Leader of the House from 2006–2007 and Justice Secretary from 2007–2010.

For completeness, the other two were Gordon Brown (Chancellor 1997–2007, Prime Minister 2007–2010) and Alistair Darling (it would be quicker to list the departments he did not run). Tony Blair, of course, was gone by 2007 and only ever held the one post in government.

Clutching at straws

Straw survived four years at the Home Office, traditionally a graveyard of political ambition — and he did so before its partition into a separate Ministry of Justice. As Foreign Secretary, he oversaw the UK’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the rise of Islamic extremism as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And as Justice Secretary, he helped to consolidate a new and sprawling department.

He did this, by the way, after serving the full 18 years on the opposition benches and even found time to run both Blair and Brown’s successful leadership bids in 1994 and 2007 respectively. Little wonder that his friends playfully referred to him as a political tart.

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Straw was also a lucky general, something he freely admits. Critically, however, his talent for survival was matched by an intellect, empathy and base level of competence. A sort of yin to Chris Grayling’s total fucking uselessness.

Straw man (I’m not even close to running out of puns)

Last Man Standing is a terrific book and forms a vital part of the historical record. For paid subscribers, I’ve collated the most amusing, alarming and quotable passages, starting with one freebie because it’s just too delicious not to have the widest possible audience:

1. Straw recalls the old-stagers who reassured him that however bad things were in the 1980s, they were no worse than in the 1920s and 1930s. One such grandee was Bob Edwards, MP for Wolverhampton South East, born in 1906, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and, ten years before that, attended the 15th Conference of the Soviet Communist Party, where he’d met Stalin, Molotov and Trotsky.

   Years later, when hard-left activists showed up at Edwards’ constituency party and one of them, the age of his grandchildren, started quoting Trotsky at him, Edwards silenced him with the immortal line: “That wasn’t what Trotsky said to me.”

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It is difficult to overstate just how important the Facebook status was for a period of, say, the 10 years between the collapse of Bear Stearns and the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Before text-based microblogging platforms were sold off to the alt-right and short-form video was still a twinkle in the Chinese Communist Party’s eyes, the status provided an opportunity for horny young adults to manufacture an image of themselves to the world with photolithographic precision.

The format itself encouraged public relations. Prior to 2009, all posts began with a name followed by “is”, effectively mandating that users refer to themselves in the third person. “Natalie is off to uni”, “Tom is eating toast”, “Jack is really overthinking this”.

The Facebook status was the venue where many of us took our first steps towards vagueposting — those cryptic tomes such as “some people are so fake” or “can’t believe how things turned out”. These would be followed by, depending on the social standing of the original poster, scores of “what happened?? x” replies.

For reasons I can’t quite articulate, my pet peeve was the statuses that simply read: “LDN”, signalling the person was back in London. Just so tacky.

They say it's your birthday

There was no single moment when the algorithm swallowed the social network whole and therefore no big bang of our present-day content hellscape. But it was all there from the start: humblebrags (LinkedIn), wall-to-wall conversations (Twitter/X) and anthropomorphic fast-moving consumer goods brands (Threads).

Low-rent forms of peacocking were swiftly matched with minimum-effort forms of acknowledgement when the ‘like’ button launched in February 2009. The bar for engagement had been thoroughly, wonderfully debased. And finally we could properly quantify teenage popularity.

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This was never clearer than on birthdays. Regardless of whether you’ve studied the birthday problem (the probability that, in a set of randomly chosen people, at least two will share the same birthday, which passes 50% at 23 people) you instinctively know.

Because on a social network where:

1. Everyone you know has 200-500 friends

2. Is young enough to still be happy about the reality of birthdays

3. And birthdays are permanently displayed on the homepage

The thing is relentless. And, for the socially conscious, this made birthdays a genuinely perilous occasion. What would happen is that, for the beautiful people at least, there would be a constant stream of “happy birthday” messages from midnight until well beyond the next day with its “belated happy bday!” screeds.

Such were the stakes that in the early 2010s, when Facebook suffered a global outage on my now-husband’s birthday, the resulting absence of messages he woke up to remains one of the most destabilising moments of his life. “The great Facebook blackout of 2012,” he still calls it with touching sincerity.

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Butskellism, eat your heart out. An NHS free at the point of use, forget about it. Indeed, such is the unanimity of opinion on this matter that even the Liberal Democrats — a party permanently engaged in a slow-motion civil war over its loveless marriage to disaffected Tory voters in the south of England — speak with one voice.

I am, of course, referring to the epidemic of loudcasting: people playing music or watching videos without headphones in public places. The image might conjure up young people on the bus scrolling through TikTok, though I’ve been forced to listen to both sides of many a FaceTime by people of all ages, for which I absolutely blame The Apprentice for mainstreaming speakerphone-use-as-plot-line.1

Panic! at the Disco

The phenomenon has spawned all manner of think pieces, on the basis that it is kind of interesting and drives a lot of engagement. Explanations range from loudcasting as a means of marking one’s territory to rebellion, self-expression and sheer obliviousness. Inevitably, we are assured it is a first-rate symptom of Long Covid, alongside higher levels of public borrowing and childhood learning loss.

Refreshingly, I’m with the herd on this one. Other people’s musical tastes are often dreadful and therefore better confined to headphones, Bluetooth or otherwise. Whether we need new laws or just better enforcement of Transport for London’s conditions of carriage is between you and your brand of liberalism.

Still, there’s a hint of moral panic about the whole thing, with echoes of when Sony introduced its futuristic music-maker, the Walkman.

Panic on the streets of Tokyo

It is difficult to overstate just how revolutionary the Sony Walkman was back in the early 1980s. Cassettes and headphones already existed, but the concept of private listening in public areas, stereo sound at pocket size, music as personal accessory — this was new. And therefore prone to pushback.

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In his terrific book, Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World, Matt Alt notes that, so alive was Sony co-founder Akio Morita to the criticism that his company’s new invention would generate — that its users would isolate to the point of ceasing to participate in the world altogether — that the first generation of Walkman came with two headphone ports and a ‘hotline function’ that muted the music in favour of a microphone so two people could talk over it.

Indeed, the first Japanese-language adverts for the Walkman highlighted young couples using the device together. But pretty soon, it became clear that neither Japanese music lovers, nor their contemporaries around the world, were particularly keen on sharing their musical tastes in public with anyone. What they craved was escape.2

“It’s nice to hear Pavarotti instead of car horns,” explained Andy Warhol to The Washington Post in 1981. Though Warhol was equally pleased by the earphones’ other feature: stopping his hair from blowing around.

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Housekeeping: my fellow Americans living abroad, today is deadline to submit your FBAR.

“I don’t need an umbrella,” I convinced myself. And it didn’t take much convincing. I’d checked two weather apps — one better for temperature and another that boasts an almost carnal moving map — and gleaned exactly what I wanted from each: that it was mild, and the rain would take great care not to fall in my neighbourhood.

Therein lies the creative genius of confirmation bias — the mind that produces the prejudice is the very same one trying to detect it.

Being a thoroughly decent and sober individual, I reached a negotiated settlement by donning a rain jacket. And not just any rain jacket — a Uniqlo BLOCKTECH Parka purchased from its flagship store in Ginza, Tokyo, which spans 5,000 square metres and occupies all 12 floors of a glass-fronted building on the prestigious Chuo-dori Street. I was covered.

The first few minutes were vindication unconfined. The skies may have been leaden and café staff prudently stacking outdoor furniture, but I remained unperturbed. Even when the first drops of rain began their inevitable descent, I defiantly raised my hood and pressed on. “Nevertheless, he persisted” might have been the rallying cry.

And then, the heavens opened their very own flagship store.

Boy, you're gonna carry that weight

It’s childish, obviously, but I really don’t like carrying things. Rucksacks are fine, but anything I have to hold in my hands — tote bags, coffee cups and, yes, umbrellas — are a real downer. I think it has something to do with the attentional load — the constant reminder of a handle pressing against my fingers, an object swinging as I walk, the need to maintain any sort of grip.

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Even now, aged 37½, I might hand over something (light) for my Dad to carry when we’re together. Just for old times’ sake.

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Famously, I enjoy an unblemished copybook when it comes to matchmaking: two friends, one cohabitation and now a baby. Indeed, each day that goes by, I grow ever more perturbed that the Singaporean government, so quick to market its evidence-based policymaking, has yet to even pick up the phone.

Still, I continue to do my bit domestically. Recently, I was assisting a single, beautiful friend as she was scrolling through a well-known dating app. And when I say beautiful, I mean I’m not that way inclined and have known her for years and sometimes still catch myself thinking, “I can’t believe she’s talking to me!”

Now, because this December marks my first decade of spousehood (the Instagram carousel is already in post-production), I’ve not spent much time on these apps. And when invited to look, I try my best not to behave like one of those tedious secondary characters in the first act of romcoms who turn to their single protagonist friend and say words to the effect of:

“I don’t know how you find the time, it must be exhausting,” or, “What fun! He looks cute! Oh, no, Giles, dear, stop gnawing at the skirting board.” Giles being Tedious Secondary Character’s three-year-old who, for reasons relating to Title 8, Section 11760 of California’s child entertainment code, will not be seen again until the climactic finale.

Point being, I consciously wasn’t there to gawk or cosplay but rather to offer the occasional second opinion. Alright, and to judge the various suitors’ writing. Sorry, I’m only human, this is my profession and their one shot at impressing a potential shag/the mother of their children. So, why resort to cliché?

And then, somewhere between the plumber with the leading-man cheekbones and IT consultant with a hairline receding so imperceptibly even I didn’t notice immediately, it hit me. I may not be an authority on dating apps but I do know property portals and the two are, cosmetics and margins for error aside, functionally identical.

Floor plan, floor plan, floor plan

I grew up in a Kirstie and Phil household. As a result, my first port of call on Rightmove or Zoopla is always the Google map. Everything is negotiable, supporting walls can be moved and asking prices dismissed as pure vanity. But location (and, indeed, aspect, but let’s not go there) comes as is. And it serves to explain everything else.

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On dating apps, the closest corollary isn’t the profile pic, but age. To be clear, I’m as superficial as the next middle-aged millennial male. My boomer forebears consider obesity to be a moral failing while even to this day, I only semi-jokingly quote Kate Moss’s iconic aphorism, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

The point about age isn’t the number itself. Presumably, however old the person claims to be on their profile fits within your pre-set range. Rather, it frames everything else: the photos, financial circumstances and the big one — whether you are bothered or not by the prospect of step-kids. Being childless in your forties might mean something quite different from your twenties.

Last orders

I’m not trying to be cute or reductive here. There will be no accompanying PDF depicting how the number of bedrooms and bathrooms on a property’s page tracks with the practical needs and future expectations of a husband, or the status of the party wall as metaphor for a guy’s emotional availability. More to the point, photos — whether of kitchens or gym selfies — are both fun and informative.

Still, the order in which you prefer to scroll for information (or perhaps simply default to) does matter and comes down to something called the primacy effect — a cognitive bias whereby people better remember (and are more heavily influenced by) information that comes first in a given sequence. In other words, we don’t just add up words or data points, we interpret each in the context of what came before.

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The classic research is Solomon Asch’s 1946 study, Forming Impressions of Personality. Asch, a pioneer of social psychology, presented participants with lists of traits describing a hypothetical person and found that the order of those traits affected the impression. Consider the two descriptions:

• Envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent

or

• Intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious

Asch’s results showed that the second description led to the person being rated more highly. And, I mean, if pushed, who would you rather swipe right on?

You’ll see them on stage, at the local village hall or leisure centre, often wearing silly hats and looking oh so pleased with themselves. “Mum, watch! I’m standing next to the prime minister!” And for the princely sum of £500, you can do the same.

It’s not corruption — perish the thought. It’s how much it costs to stand as a candidate for parliament,1 paid to the returning officer and refunded in the event of securing at least 5% of the vote. At the last election, there were 1,673 lost deposits (37% of all candidates), raising £836,500 for the Treasury’s Consolidated Fund.

Incidentally, the record for the most lost deposits in a single contest [learning is fun] occurred at the 2008 Haltemprice and Howden by-election — the one David Davis called for reasons no one quite understands to this day. With the other main parties declining to stand, independents poured in and 23 out of the 26 candidates lost their deposits.

Such were the conniptions being suffered by health and safety officers over the structural integrity of the temporary stage at Haltemprice Leisure Centre that the candidates were forced to stand in a semi-circle on the floor as the returning officer read out the results: Tory hold, though Davis didn’t get his shadow home secretary role back.

The proportion of lost deposits has steadily increased since the 1990s, in part as a result of a change in the law. Deposits were first introduced in the Representation of the People Act 1918 over latent Edwardian concerns that there were “frivolous” candidates standing for election.

Originally set at £150 and requiring 12.5% to be returned, in 1985 the cost was raised to the current £500 and the vote share lowered to 5%. Since then, we have seen more independent and fringe candidates stand. Not least because, due to the ravages of inflation, £500 today is worth only £155 in 1985 money.2

How would you feel if I told you today’s newsletter wasn’t actually about deposits? Relieved? Or would you have no idea because you closed the email at around the point of “Consolidated Fund”? Either way, it’s about things that have stayed the same price for a really long time.

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Football is a closed-loop system. That doesn’t make it separate from or impervious to outside influence. Culture, violence, state-ownership — it’s all there. Rather, football is knowable. Completable. With the right inclination and a fair inheritance, you can give up your day job, tie up your laces and embark on the long road to sporting ataraxia.

This goes some way to explaining why football rewards obsessives in the way your partner, employer or the expanding universe may not. Step away from the manosphere and life tends to reward adaptability over mastery. Complex systems, from the climate to financial markets, continuously confound even those paid handsomely to predict them. And all the while, the twin perils of time and technological development might, without warning, render hard-won knowledge obsolete.

This, happily, supports my unified theory of football as ‘human-systems emotion wheel’ for men, on the whole, who never learned to develop a rich emotional vocabulary beyond rage. The game, therefore, allows them to outsource the work of feeling to a self-contained world whose rules they understand.

Refereeing decisions and managerial sackings may make for infinite online debate but every fan instinctively knows what to feel for a given situation. So, winning beats losing, a draw’s worth depends on who scores last, while the opposing team’s striker hitting the side-netting and their fans breaking into premature celebration is the greatest joy of all.

But now, City have blown a 114-charge, £900m hole in the loop.

Man! I Feel Like That Was a Waste of Time

Heading into Sunday’s clash at Anfield, City had started the season with a perfect record: five wins from five games. Under normal circumstances, fans of rival title challengers — Arsenal, Chelsea, Man Utd (sic), even Brighton — would be rooting for Liverpool. It’s not schadenfreude — it’s how this works.

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But as far as I can tell, my Arsenal-blinkered preferences were broadly shared. With a guilty verdict and a potential relegation looming, it made more sense to want City to win, on the basis that any points they accrue this season and perhaps seasons beyond will be effectively null and void. And it gets sillier.

Do the Premier League 19^TM (that is, all clubs other than City, with a pleasing echo to the EU 27) want City to win every match, not only going the season unbeaten but with a perfect 114 points, by way of demonstrating to the independent panel, who will be in charge of doling out punishments that, yeah, funny what an unlawful billion pounds of spending over a decade can buy you?

Thierry Ennui

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“No.”

“No?”

“No!”

That was the totality of the conversation and — if I’d been any older than seven, or if the adult in the room had been anyone other than my Dad — I’d surely have dropped an F-bomb.

My form teacher had told us we needed a calculator, so Dad dutifully came home the next evening with a brand new one. Nothing fancy, not like those scientific calculators that can calculate cos, sin and tan or tell you random facts about the universe. Just the basics: addition, subtraction and the ability to spell out “BOOBIES” if you knew how to multiply to 5318008 and turn the thing upside down.

But there was a problem: this was a Sharp calculator and we were a JVC family. Even now, I resent having to explain the issue, but Sharp was the front-of-shirt sponsor for Manchester United while JVC adorned The Arsenal. This, therefore, was no longer a means of counting, but a matter of conscience.

And I couldn’t believe that my Dad — of all people — the man who bore 50% responsibility for my existence and twice as much again for my footballing sympathies, could betray me and our boys in red in such a glib manner.

By the mid-1990s, the Japanese asset bubble had well and truly burst. Still, long before China became the one-stop manufacturing shop for practically everything except the most advanced semiconductor chips, Japanese electronics were how you consumed the Premiership.

I’ll be honest, this intro has gotten away from me and any decent editor would have sent me back to my desk with no track changes or compunction. But it’s Friday, it’s been a heavy week, and I’ve just finished Shoe Dog, the memoir by Nike co-founder, Phil Knight.

The book roughly spans the years 1962 — when a 24-year-old Knight borrowed a small amount of money from his father to start a company importing running shoes from Japan — to 1980, when what became Nike went public. I’ll be honest, it didn’t move me as much as it clearly has others.

I found the early, living by the seat-of-the-pants days as well as the minutiae of Japanese business practices and manufacturing processes fascinating. But as the pages turned, the will-they-won’t-they of the exact timing of Nike’s initial public offering wasn’t transmitting as much peril as Knight clearly felt. Like a stand-up comic who earnestly believes being of average height contains sufficient trauma to serve as the emotional heart of an hour-long show.1

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And then, right at the end, Knight almost casually starts talking about his eldest son. And even though you don’t, you know exactly what’s coming. Matthew died in a scuba diving accident at the age of 34. And suddenly Nike, let alone my grumbles about a book I came to only mildly enjoy, felt like the least important thing in the world.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg is few people’s idea of a moderniser — a reputation that the double-breasted, Eton-educated, faux-Edwardian former Conservative MP for North East Somerset has assiduously cultivated. And this extends beyond the cosmetic.

From his extraordinary remarks at the start of the 2019 general election, in which he appeared to blame victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy for following the fire brigade’s ‘stay put’ guidelines, to his opposition to abortion in all circumstances, including cases of rape and incest, Rees-Mogg says what he thinks, no matter what his usually more conciliatory party leaders would prefer.

And yet, in one crucial regard, Rees-Mogg has been something of a radical in this iteration of the Conservative Party. For he has been utterly — and publicly — consistent in his rejection of an old idea that has gained traction among elements of the new Right: that Englishness or Britishness is somehow a matter of racial or genetic purity.

In a September 2026 article for The Spectator, based on a video he had recorded and published on X, formerly Twitter, Rees-Mogg described the English as a “mongrel people, not an Aryan master race”, arguing that Englishness is based on “values and culture and strengths and liberties” rather than ancestry. In doing so, he was calling out not just prominent members of Reform UK, but his own party.

And this was by no means something new for him. In April 2018, Rees-Mogg tweeted a reproduction of his father, William’s, 1968 editorial in The Times, which condemned Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, writing: “My father’s view which has stood the test of time about Enoch Powell’s famous speech.”

The past is a foreign national

Britain’s two main political parties of the last hundred years have decidedly mixed records when it comes to race relations. Labour governments under Harold Wilson passed the 1965, 1968 and 1976 Race Relations Acts, which variously prohibited racial discrimination in public places, employment and housing as well as establishing the Commission for Racial Equality.

Following the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Tony Blair’s government legislated to extend race-equality obligations to public authorities, including the police, while in the final breaths of the Gordon Brown administration it passed the 2010 Equality Act.

On the other side of the ledger, of course, is the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, which severely restricted immigration to Britain, particularly by East African Asians holding British passports, and which a report commissioned by the Home Office in response to Wendy Williams’s Windrush Lessons Learned Review said was designed to “reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin.”

Later, in 2020, Labour became only the second party, after the far-right BNP, to be found by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to have committed unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination, in this case relating to antisemitism, requiring the party to implement a legally binding action plan, which it completed in 2023.

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The Tories, for their part, did not repeal Labour’s race relations legislation, admitted tens of thousands of Ugandan Asian refugees in 1972 while Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell from his shadow cabinet following the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. He had little choice, with multiple cabinet ministers saying they’d resign if Powell was not sacked, but still.

Later, Theresa May launched the Race Disparity Audit in 2017, set up the Windrush compensation scheme after the scandal, while the party can lay claim to a number of individual ‘firsts’, including Rishi Sunak as the first British Asian prime minister. On the flip side are the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962, the 1971 Immigration Act, and the Windrush scandal itself.1

The past is clearly important both for reasons of context and path dependency, but the present is where we are fortunate enough to reside and it’s where we turn to next.

Ian Wright, Wright, Wright

In her speech to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham yesterday, Kemi Badenoch took a direct swing at Reform UK, an indirect one at members of her own shadow cabinet and in some ways her really quite recent former self. The Tory leader explicitly, passionately and in highly personal terms, condemned the rise of an ethno-nationalist conception of Britishness. She said:

I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, call veterans traitors and debate whether my mixed-race children are English.

I don’t want to explain to my son when we’re watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English.

I remember back in the day when Ian Wright and John Barnes were playing, nobody was questioning whether they were English.

We certainly didn’t have sitting MPs questioning whether they were English.

We must not let these people take us backwards.

That is not the country we are.

Reform MPs are openly questioning people’s identity.

They are not like us; we are not like them.

We are different.

We are the Conservative Party.

Put aside the typical Badenoch inattention to detail. Yes, Barnes and Wright were absolutely subject to appalling racist abuse in the 1980s and 1990s. But get over yourself. The broad point stands. The Conservative Party, which for two years now has flirted with — or at the very least stayed conspicuously quiet on — the notion that, amongst other things, nationality is racial — has firmly come down against it.

You might think, how could they do otherwise? The centre-right party in a liberal, multi-ethnic democracy, the most successful party in the history of free and fair elections, led by a black woman with mixed-race children, a fact Badenoch noted in her address.

And yet, this is the same Badenoch who only recently handed Rupert Lowe, leader of the far-right Restore Britain party, a seat on the influential Commons Public Accounts Committee because he “shares our values on cutting waste”.

Never mind the fact that Restore has had public backing from Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and, as reported by the Telegraph, has received donations from people such as Steve Laws, founder of Remigration Now, which calls for the expulsion of every non-white and Jewish person from the UK.

The leader of a party in which one of its ‘rising stars’, Katie Lam, then a shadow home office minister, suggested in 2025 that a large number of people living legally in the UK should be sent “home” and the leader’s spokesperson initially said these views were “broadly in line” with party policy. Or a colleague of Robert Jenrick, then still not only a Conservative MP but shadow justice secretary, when he complained about a lack of “white faces” in parts of Birmingham, something Badenoch defended as a “factual statement”.

And this is relatively recent. Cast your mind all the way back to the prelapsarian days of *checks notes* 2024 when Sunak suspended then Tory MP Lee Anderson for suggesting that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, on the apparent basis that the mayor is a practising Muslim. From a party management perspective, this was by no means a cost-free decision for the prime minister. Anderson had allies and later defected to Reform. But Sunak did it anyway.

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Speaking of which, politics isn’t a simple morality tale. It is extremely political. Badenoch’s choice — and it was a choice — to establish some clear blue water between the Conservatives and conservatism with Reform UK and its nativist tendencies is an old-fashioned dividing line straight out of the George Osborne era.

By which I mean, it ought to unite the Tories while splitting Reform. Nigel Farage — forever determined to ride the horse of nativism while maintaining the barest of cordons sanitaires against the explicitly racist far-right — will ultimately have to come closer to deciding whether he wants the likes of Suella Braverman and her views on race in his party, or if those people are better off in Restore, further splitting that section of the electorate Badenoch has decided she doesn’t want.

Does this change in approach reflect purely noble intentions? Who the hell cares? I want parties to do anti-racist things regardless of whether they feel it in their bones or their parents marched on Cable Street. And I want them to be rewarded at the ballot box for it too.

In the same way that I’d like Labour to rule out cooperation with the Greens, whether it’s because they agree with me that the Greens are now an antisemitic party or purely because they are concerned that such a conception, should it take hold, could poison the broader progressive bloc.

In short, let’s bring back shame to public life and political benefit to those still capable of feeling it.

At this point, I might as well go the whole amoral hog. In an era of spiralling costs, from the energy transition to demographic change and hybrid war with Russia, social reform is attractive because it is practically free. Equal marriage under David Cameron didn’t add to the deficit. The legalisation of abortion under Harold Wilson didn’t spark a balance of payments crisis. Historical consensus suggests that votes for women was not a leading cause of the Second World War.

But I’m getting overexcited. Ultimately, neither Labour nor the Tories have done nearly enough to confront the sort of open racism we have seen in recent years. To be clear, I’m surprised by neither. Speaking as a British Jew and therefore from lived experience, I don’t automatically view parties of the Left as being inherently more anti-racist than those of the Right.

Anti-racism (that is, being against all racism, not just racism targeted at your favoured minorities) is something you do, not something you are. Badenoch may be late to the party, but not as late as others, and I choose to highlight and celebrate the fact that she decided to show up at all.

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Those four words make my heart sing, my jaw unclench and the world feel like a more forgiving place: “You still have options.” That the only time I receive them is via text from the parcel delivery and logistics company DPD, checking in to see whether I’ll be home to collect that replacement vacuum cleaner filter I ordered yesterday, is context I choose to ignore.

If nothing else, it reminds me of a scene from Notting Hill. You know the one, when Julia Roberts’s movie star character goes up to Hugh Grant’s everyman1 bookseller and, with just the right ratio of tears to smile, urges him not to forget that she’s just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.

Except, not that scene but the one straight after. When our Hugh retells the story to his dumbfounded friends in the hope that, spoiler alert, they support his decision to spurn her advances:

Bernie: But she said she wanted to go out with you?

William: Yes — sort of...

Bernie: That’s nice.

William: What?

Bernie: Well, you know, anybody saying they want to go out with you is... pretty great... isn’t it...?

Being told you still have options is pretty darn great. Except, of course, it can come with several fairly obvious drawbacks.

Baby you can drive my light goods vehicle

When was the last time you took a bus in central London and didn’t instantly regret it? Recent figures provided by the Confederation of Passenger Transport suggest that the capital’s buses travel at an average speed of 7.1mph, or a decent jogging pace. Little wonder that bus ridership in the city is enduring a slow decline.2

Not all of that is a result of congestion caused by delivery vehicles, of course. Roadworks, 20mph speed limits, low-traffic neighbourhoods and the expansion of cycle lanes have also been blamed.3 But last-mile delivery plays an increasingly important role because of its sheer growth. Total measured parcel volumes rose by 7.1% to 4.2 billion items in 2024-25, and are up a third on 2017, according to Ofcom4. Inevitably, this impacts the roads.

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Between 2010 and 2019, miles travelled by vans and other light goods vehicles rose by 68%.5 Freight, especially road freight, is critical to any major city’s economy. But the congestion it creates (it accounts for roughly a third of London’s morning traffic peak) negatively impacts on carbon emissions, air quality and road danger in the capital. And Transport for London expects continued growth.

So, what is to be done?

It’s a sin (tax)

One option is good old-fashioned price signals.

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“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love someone else? Can I get an amen?” These words, popularised by shale gas rights lessor and drag queen, RuPaul, can also operate as a reasonable first principle for political parties.

For several years, Britain’s two largest parties have appeared intent on throwing shade at their respective electoral bases. Labour alienated core supporters with its rhetoric on immigration and asylum, while it had to be dragged kicking and screaming to repeal the two-child benefit cap.

The Conservatives, for their part, have effectively told anyone who doesn’t consider Brexit a triumph or climate change a fuzzy, future-tense phenomenon, that they can take their business across the street. It’s all a little strange, and a Downsian median-voter explanation doesn’t neatly track.

Vote counting

True, across the democratic world, but most especially in first-past-the-post systems such as Britain’s, parties are incentivised to broaden their appeal and in doing so discomfort their base, in order to attract floating voters. This remains true even in an era of bloc party politics, and it comes down to simple arithmetic:

Driving a die-hard supporter to the polls earns you precisely one vote. In Labour-Tory marginals, convincing that voter to switch is effectively worth double. The trick to winning parliamentary landslides is to balance both needs. And to be fair, it’s harder than it looks.

But a good place to start is by identifying potential supporters. That is, those who may be predisposed to voting for you and just need a little fiscal persuasion or rhetorical reassurance. Ideally, they should also live in marginal constituencies, and earning their support shouldn’t cost you too much politically (by pushing as many or more out of the tent). In this regard, Kemi Badenoch is finally onto something.

In an interview with the BBC ahead of her party’s conference in Birmingham, Badenoch confirmed that the next Conservative government would scrap the so-called £100,000 cliff edge. At present, if either parent in a household earns more than £100,000, the family loses eligibility for free childcare hours, so one extra pound of income can cost thousands.

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(This compounds a second problem, which is that those earning between £100,000 and £125,140 lose £1 of their tax-free personal allowance for every £2 earned above £100,000, which pushes their effective marginal tax rate to 60%.)

Speaking as a former Treasury official who wanted nothing more than to raise your fuel duty, the current system is completely mad, economically damaging and any sensible party would seek to reform it. The surprise is only that the Conservatives are the ones proposing to do so.

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