In recognition of our new Andy Burnham overlord (let’s agree to memory hole that newsletter intro in which I admitted — even in an infinite universe with its infinite possibilities — I still struggled to imagine a world in which Burnham led the Labour Party), I want to talk to you about buses. Specifically, the 243.

Running from Waterloo Station to Wood Green, what it lacks in ‘N’ designation (it runs 24 hours), it more than makes up for in range. First, there is the neighbourhood it bisects, from the theatres of Aldwych to the nightlife of Dalston and finally the residential neighbourhoods of Stoke Newington and beyond. But I was thinking more about the people.

From an architectural and urban perspective, the night bus can be understood as an interstitial space — a temporary environment that exists between origins and destinations. Not quite anonymous or public, neither dead time nor, given the capital’s average speeds, especially efficient. But the night bus is more than an interstitial space — at its best, it becomes what Victor Turner called “liminality”, or the state of “in-between-ness”.

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Think about it. It’s 5am and the 243 is playing host to both the nightclub reveller going home and the office cleaner heading into work. For the former, the previous day has yet to end, like the long 19th century but without having to read Hobsbawm. For the latter, it is a new day entirely. Is it elision or collision? Two liminalities moving in sync but in opposite directions?

I was again reminded of this phenomenon by, of all things, the UEFA Champions League. Due to the lingering effects of Covid-19, the qualifying rounds for the 2020/21 tournament began on 8 August 2020 — two weeks before the final of the 2019/20 edition. The football season’s previously hard boundaries just became… porous.

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Perhaps it was more of a 2010s reflex — one of the few seemingly impervious to the zero interest rates phenomenon or the rise of athleisure. When an adult asked a child what they wanted to be when they grow up and the reply came “A content creator”, the grown-up might respond with varying degrees of horror:

“A content creator! Why not an astronaut?”

Of course, becoming a content creator is by several astronomical units more achievable than becoming an astronaut, even taking into account the recent return of crewed Moon missions and ongoing advances in commercial space exploration.

So, this is my preemptively passive-aggressive way of saying: hey, I get it. I’m not one of those cranky, text-based, obsolescent-and-afraid-to-say-it grown-ups who finds change, whether technological or otherwise, visibly frightening.

Want to monetise your first serious relationship or fly to Santorini for what seems to be a collab opportunity with an insurgent shoe brand (though the email from the PR wasn’t entirely clear)? It certainly sounds like a job.

My query is more limited in scope: why does Andy Murray — two-time Wimbledon champion, three-time major winner and father of four who sits atop career prize money of $65m and more than $100m in off-court earnings — want to be a content creator?

Posting Daley

Tom Daley is a fixture across algorithmic social media, his various platforms1 awash with topless selfies, aggressively hipster knitwear and highly curated insights into family life. The former Olympic diver has a net worth of around £4m, largely on the back of sponsorships with the likes of Adidas and British Gas.

In a 2025 interview with The Times, Daley said: “I had to work really hard from the age of seven years old to set myself up in the way that I have… I never would have imagined that diving would be a viable career path for me.”

Social media has been critical to Daley’s commercial success. This aligns with his broader positioning, standing out initially by his youth (Daley was 14 years old when he competed at the Beijing Games), later his leading-twink handsome looks and his unusualness in being a publicly gay male athlete (coming out on YouTube, of course).

Murray’s wealth and position within the public imagination are quite different.

We are all media companies now

Obviously, the guy needs something to do other than golf. He isn’t yet 40 and lives in Britain, where tennis exists for one fortnight a year. The market for people who want to hear him talk technique, or why his entire game was, in the words of tennis writer Steve Tignor, an elaborate edifice to mask the fact that he lacked a point-ending forehand, is not large.

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Nor is this to say Murray isn’t entitled to a bit of fun, or ought to retire from public life and pursue good works. He didn’t sleep with a young woman involved with a Soviet attaché and then lie about it to parliament. Still, it pains me to see him reduced to doing zany challenges for clicks, dustbin lid in hand, reaction face adorned to thumbnail.

Partly, the medium itself diminishes Murray, dragging him from one of the finest tacticians in tennis history to “former athlete tries frying pan challenge”. It’s low rent precisely because the incentives reward a certain type of performance. No doubt, it’s also a taste thing. I’ll be honest, I rather enjoyed the one in which the Murray brothers played with rackets from different eras.

In an earlier age, Murray would for financial reasons have been forced to become the pro at a regional tennis club, or run the local pub2, called The Murrayfield Arms or The Ace & Racquet, perhaps with a few television adverts for washing powder thrown in during the summer months.

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It’s scarcely my insight to observe that social media has transformed celebrity (and not just celebrity) from something you are into something you perform constantly. And so the odd thing isn’t that young people aspire to become content creators. It’s that people who’ve already won the game, set and match increasingly feel obliged to play it too.

In his 1951 farewell address to Congress, General Douglas MacArthur said: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away”. I think I speak for many when I say: thank goodness MacArthur didn’t have access to a YouTube channel. Imagine the cringe:

“I Returned to the Philippines After Everyone Said It Was Impossible (BIGGEST Comeback Ever)”

“5 Leadership Lessons From a 5-Star General (You Won’t Believe #3)”

“How I Defeated an Empire: My Complete Pacific Strategy Breakdown”

“Reacting to My Own Standing Ovation (EMOTIONAL)”

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I’ve always wanted to use the standalone, “Various”, as a subject line. It was a favourite of another prolific email writer, my grandma, Jo. She would place it atop correspondence that, as one might expect, covered a wide range of subjects: what she’d been up to of late, what annoyingly impressive feats my cousins had achieved, what I ought to be reading.

Of course, grandma didn’t have to worry about open rates.

Books

Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer

What is the latest point at which you have given up on a book? For me, it was page 446 (or, rather, hour 16, minute 49) of Archer’s apparently “global number one best seller”, Kane and Abel. I’ve tried to spin it in my own head as a triumph of staring the sunk cost fallacy in the face and winning but no one’s buying it.

Having previously enjoyed ‘First Among Equals’, a political thriller that follows four ambitious British MPs with the usual intertwined careers, this one is another multi-decade drama following two men, born on the same day to vastly different circumstances, whose lifelong rivalry for power, wealth and… no, I refuse to relive it for your benefit.

Prose as thin as the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, plot as formulaic as a party conference speech and the greatest crime of all (in a literary sense, not in Archer terms, obviously), the length. I know I’m one to talk here, but my dude.

No Spin by Shane Warne

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received comes from a perennially single friend of mine, and in the form of a flow chart, which starts with the devastatingly simple question: is this a salmon farm? If the answer is ‘no’ (and, let’s face it, it usually is) then do not expect to find salmon there. Salmon, of course, standing for eligible, non-creepy men.

I find this adage can also be applied more widely. For instance, if you find yourself reading Shane Warne’s autobiography, and feel consistently punched in the temporal cortex by the level of prose, ask yourself: is this a salmon farm?

The thing about Warne, the greatest leg spinner in the history of Test cricket, and the reason why he transcended the sport, became clear in the viewing. Even if you didn’t understand the laws of the game, you could instantly tell he was doing something self-evidently absurd with a cricket ball.

To hear Warne describe the art of spin bowling is to be in the hands of a consummate storyteller. The way he played with chaos and control to create things that weren’t there to get into the opposition’s head. Airhead fast bowlers can always run up and aim one at the batsman’s neck. Spinners have to harness deception, cunning and guile.

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But his views on corporal punishment? What makes a “ripping bloke”? Why some people are annoying haha actually they’re alright? Look, I’m really not a literary snob. You could withdraw food from me until I read Middlemarch and I’d die of hunger. Meanwhile, the sections on Warne’s treatment by the media, in the days before in-house training and pastoral care, were genuinely insightful.

Still, you’d be better off just watching this great bit of footage between Warne and Afghan leggy, Rashid Khan.

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I have a confession to make. It’s not an especially juicy one — more akin to when the hiring manager asks an interviewee to name their biggest weakness and they come out with “I care too much” or "Sometimes I forget not everyone works at my pace”.

Tuesday’s edition — about how the new government is still trying to do the thing of using targeted interventions (VAT on electricity, business rates on pubs) to trick households into feeling that their living standards are rising and businesses that their costs are falling — initially had a whole different opening.

I care about intros. In fact, I might care too much. Like Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, who had the idea of opening a bakery that only sells muffin tops (on the basis that they are the best part), I should like to make a living just writing the opening few paragraphs to a newsletter. No need for anything as bourgeois as an argument or direction of travel. Just ultra-processed anecdote.

Of course, when Elaine’s old boss at Pendant Publishing, Mr Lippman, stole her idea and opened a store called “Top of the Muffin to You!” that sold, you guessed it, muffin tops, the business failed. When Lippman sought Elaine’s advice, she pointed out its fatal flaw: the absence of ritual:

Here’s your problem. You’re making just the muffin tops. You’ve gotta make the whole muffin. Then you... Pop the top, toss the stump. Taste.

Not every newsletter is a search for profundity — that would be tedious to read and exhausting to write. But they have to at least provide a nod towards resolution, ideally rather more pithily than I can often muster. Otherwise, you might as well just scroll short-form video, a sort of digital candy floss with its maximum sensory appeal, minimum satiety.

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In the end, I cut the intro for reasons of length and ambition: it represented too much of a throat-clearing exercise even for this newsletter, and a thesis I wasn’t at all confident I could land. You be the judge:

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The news broke — as all bad news surely will one day — on a terrapin. There was a list of names dotted around an amphibious reptile shell, spelling out where everyone now worked following the restructuring. And mine was headlined ‘social’.

Which was odd for a couple of reasons. First, given 50 adjectives with which to describe me, I’m confident that few would select that word unless under duress. And second, this was definitely not the role I was hired to do a year earlier. Sure, the Treasury wasn’t exactly my Graceland, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t leave it to draft tweets for a living.

Now, I owe a lot to the place and to the people there, who took a chance on me when they had no earthly reason to do so. Without them, I’d never have got to do any of the incredible things of the last few years. There would have been no move to the Evening Standard, no West End Final newsletter and certainly no Lines To Take.

Also, real talk. I was a hopeless employee that first year. In my defence, this was compounded by a near total absence of support that someone changing industries might expect. Still, I can hardly blame the transfer committee for looking at me and having second thoughts about their recruitment strategy.

So, yes, this is a story about scar tissue and that sinking feeling but also the trust that, though things may be bad — and indeed getting worse — that doesn’t preclude the possibility of something turning up.

“Don’t drop the ball”

It might have been, well, not ok, I was in shock that I’d been shunted out of journalism and into social media. But it would have been manageable if the pandemic hadn’t sent the jobs market into reverse, or the thoroughly charming head of social hadn’t left to be replaced by someone with the emotional intelligence of a Ford Cortina.

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We were set heroically optimistic targets and when they weren’t met, it was our fault. Initiative was frowned upon; doing any journalism was treated as an act of sedition. We’d be told to post less — quality over quantity, y’know — then admonished when the numbers fell. And feedback could be reduced to “work harder,” texted on days off. Can you sense my teeth grinding through your inbox?

This was compounded by the fact that, in external meetings, I was still being introduced as “Jack, who we hired from the Treasury.” I always wanted to interject with “Who you then extradited into social media, despite him lacking any relevant skills” but I was too distracted by Slack messages from my line manager demanding I send social assets I’d already emailed over.

Don’t get me wrong, social media promotion is very important! I do it for this newsletter. And we are more than a decade removed from major corporations asking the intern to come up with some tweets. It just wasn’t the dream job I’d had just months earlier.

After further pandemic related shenanigans, I left to join the Standard as a leader writer, but oh boy, that scar tissue. It meant that a few months later, when the editor asked me to take over West End Final, the paper’s daily newsletter, I was aghast. Was a job that I enjoyed being taken away from me again? The newsletter was basically just links to assorted news stories. What the heck could I do with that?

It turns out I was afforded a frankly unwise degree of freedom to do what I wanted, quietly burrowing away in my corner of the office, or at home, or just off the City Airport Pret, coming out with ever-more obscure 1990s cultural references with which to contextualise the latest convulsions in great power competition and political scandals.

And when my time at the Standard had come to a natural end, I had developed a voice, built up a loyal following, without which I’d never have been able to launch Lines To Take.

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Years ago, I recall reading an interview with Guillem Balagué, the UK-based Spanish football journalist. He was asked how he got into it and his answer was basically: dumb luck. Or at least, hard work and a lot of happenstance.

So, I try to remind myself to enjoy the good times, to expect change, but not for that change to resemble what came before. As mindset shifts go, it’s a work in progress.

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Why did the Conservatives win the 2015 general election? Take your pick: David Cameron’s personal ratings, Ed Miliband’s unpopularity, the fact that Tory voters had been largely protected from spending cuts, Labour’s continued reputational damage from the global financial crisis, the Liberal Democrats’ collapse, cut-through regarding SNP influence over UK-wide policy.

But if I could pick only one, it would be this: real wages were rising. This may come as something of a surprise, given that the early 2010s were not exactly famous for their roaring economic recovery. But in the six months prior to May 2015, and after roughly six years of decline, real wages were finally above water. Talk about good timing.

Between March-May 2014 and March-May 2015, regular pay for employees rose by 2.8% in real terms, according to the Office for National Statistics. This was the highest annual growth rate since 2007, driven by extremely low inflation, largely due to the late-2014 collapse in oil prices, which went from nearly $100 a barrel to just over $40.

Of course, rising living standards doesn’t guarantee reelection. Just ask friend of the newsletter, John Major. Nevertheless, you try winning an overall majority without it.

I’m from the government and I’m here to help

Within hours of taking office, Andy Burnham announced a slew of retail-friendly policies to signal his desire to help Britons with the cost of living. For families, this meant cutting VAT on electricity from 5% to zero from October, saving the typical household around £45 a year. For pubs and live music venues, there was a 20% cut in business rates from April 2027, estimated to save them around £1,100.

Putting politics aside, not only could one imagine the ancien régime doing this sort of thing — chancellor Rachel Reeves literally previously announced a 15% business rates relief package for pubs and live music venues from April 2026 — the reaction has been a little, erm, muted.

When Sky News took to the streets of Sheffield to ask people what they thought of the electricity support package, responses ranged from “it’s a gesture, but a bit late” to “£50 doesn’t even buy a meal”. Even the woman who welcomed the move was concerned that the government would only claw the money back through higher taxes.

It’s easy to mock the bloke who, walking around the city in the middle of a weekday afternoon, complained that £50 can’t buy you lunch. But someone had to say it, not least when any savings appear likely to be wiped out by rising wholesale costs. Cornwall Insight predicts that Ofgem’s price cap will climb to £1,700 per year in October.

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At present, the government is still stuck in Starmer mode, trying to improve perceived living standards using tools that are simply too small relative to the forces doing the squeezing.

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Working for several Members of Parliament, I got to do some cool stuff: write speeches, develop policy, laze around the Commons Terrace for most of the afternoon during summer recess. But in terms of actual vote-getting? The only thing I ever did that made the slightest bit of difference was arranging tours for constituents.

Mercifully, the tours themselves were provided externally. That is, professional tour guides employed directly by the parliamentary authorities who actually knew what the paintings in Westminster Hall depicted, and not simply freelancing with an air of private school assurance.

But sometimes, whether due to a last-minute request or some logistical cock-up, I had to deliver the tour. On one occasion, this involved me showing two dozen or so school children around the palace. They must have been no older than eight or nine, and with only half an hour until the coaches arrived to take them home, I was fairly sanguine about the whole thing.

And then we walked down the Lords corridor.

Rumour has it

Parliament runs on rumour and gossip.1 This is perhaps unsurprising, given that there are few hard-and-fast rules or formal institutions. Everyone is operating under incomplete information, so being ‘in the know’ confers status. Information is exchanged, sometimes for specific trades, but more often for the express purpose of building relationships and boosting influence. All this watered down with a culture of plausible deniability.

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Much of the information to which I had access was at the staff level and fairly innocuous: who was sleeping with whom, which MP was an absolute nightmare to work for and should be avoided at all costs. But there was darker stuff too. Rumours — always, as far as I could tell, unsubstantiated — involving addiction, coercion and assault.

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Just past Parliament Hill Fields Lido, at the corner of Highgate and Gordon House roads in North London, lies a wholly unremarkable set of traffic lights. But it is one that carries a special meaning for me, being the site where I first discovered the limits of persuasion.

I’d spent large swathes of an otherwise idyllic childhood in the back of the family car, first a white Mitsubishi Space Wagon and then a deep blue Ford Galaxy, as first my sisters and then finally I was deposited at school. Someone must have taught me the spell:

Magic, magic, make the light turn green. Before I turn you into a frog.

I would then proceed to count down from 10 and it worked every time. However, it transpires that traffic lights run on fixed timers or sensors — they don’t respond to magic words or threats of transfiguration. And on this occasion, the inevitable happened: the light stayed red even as I reached zero.

I can still recall the disorientation. Much like you should never ask a question unless you’re prepared for the answer, it is best practice not to commence a countdown unless you’re quite sure you won’t reach zero. A lesson I thought I’d committed to memory until earlier this month, when I started rereading The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Oh great, another Caro Bro

Robert Caro1 turns 91 in October. His last book in the biographical series, The Passage of Power, was published in 2012. Previous instalments Master of the Senate, Means of Ascent and The Path to Power came out in 2002, 1990 and 1982 respectively. The length of these intervals is hardly surprising from a man who relocated himself and his wife (Ina, his researcher and an author in her own right) from New York City to the Texas Hill Country in order to research the first book.

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Caro gets understandably (if commendably mildly) irritable when journalists ask about how the final instalment is going and when it’ll be published. That is because, given his advanced age, it is very difficult to ask the question without making it seem like you’re mostly concerned about his death. And that would be a frightful inconvenience for the reader.

Now, I’m painfully aware that being a middle-aged millennial man who drones on about Caro risks advertising the same dearth of self-awareness as a Gen-Z woman who walks around Walthamstow with a Trader Joe’s tote bag. No kidding, you’ve been reading Caro and you now have a fascinating insight into how power really works? Pray tell, oh wise one! What next, you just came back from Japan and I won’t believe how they do things over there?

On commencing my second go-around2 with Caro, I’m less interested in Johnson this time, who, if I may précis one of the great works of non-fiction into a single sentence: did some good things (civil rights, Great Society), some bad things (Vietnam, stealing elections) and was just generally an appalling husband, employer and beagle dad.

Instead, I’m in it this time for Caro himself. We are very different writers, of course. His style involves back-breaking, gut-wrenching research and precision, while mine is just a series of takes. His books are light and breezy even at hundreds of thousands of words, whereas my newsletters can feel bloated at 750. And he is among the best-selling political biographers of all time, while I’m frequently sceptical whether my husband reads Lines To Take.

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What was your Covid lockdown distress signal? I don’t mean the banana bread or pandemic beard, but the really chilling stuff, like unironically laughing when your colleague asks in faux confusion, “is it Tuesday or Thursday today?”. Simon from commercial has always fancied himself as a bit of a comic.

Thanks to the watchful eyes of YouTube’s search history, I can pinpoint my breakdown to mid-April 2020, when I started watching old episodes of Family Fortunes. You know, the brightly lit, distinctly suburban game show hosted by O.G. short king, Les Dennis, that became a staple of ITV’s Saturday evening lineup.

For the uninitiated: two families consisting of five members (it was always strikingly subversive when the Dad wasn’t team captain) tried to guess the most popular answers to survey questions posed to 100 people. The winning team usually went home with a bit of cash and what seemed to resemble the final car to cough and splutter its way out of a British Leyland factory.

Where the more recent quiz show Pointless, presented by the double-act of Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, rewards contestants who skirt the boundaries of collective knowledge, Family Fortunes rewarded thinking like everyone else. Perhaps mirroring a cultural shift, from mass entertainment with its inclusive answers to a more ironic era that prizes niche facts.

Regardless, as a result of my pandemic-induced binge, by the time chancellor Rishi Sunak had defected to the virus launched Eat Out to Help Out, my finger was so firmly on the pulse of 1990s British public opinion that Tony Blair would surely have ditched Philip Gould and instead sought my guidance on New Labour’s election strategy.

Margaret Thatcher, commie basher

This got me thinking. If Dennis were to roll back the years to pick up a cue card that read “We asked 100 people to name what Margaret Thatcher is most famous for”, what do you think the survey would say? My guess, as articulated by this newsletter’s [imo delightfully crafted] hero image, would be:

• The Miners’ Strike

• The Falklands War

• The Poll Tax

• “No, no, no” to a federal Europe

• Unemployment

• “Milk-snatcher”

If you’d said ‘Cold Warrior’, I’m afraid you’d be going home with only £80 and a Sony camcorder. Which is strange, isn’t it? Because Thatcher became a figure of quite some foreign policy heft by the time she left office in November 1990, and had been denounced as the ‘Iron Lady’ by Krasnaya Zvezda, official newspaper of the Soviet armed forces, three years before she even came to office.

No doubt, this memory-holing is in part a consequence of Thatcher’s unique personality and, for a period, near total dominance of her government and domestic agenda. But, as Charles Moore, author of a magisterial three-volume biography of Britain’s first female prime minister has sought to demonstrate, she was an absolutely central figure on the world stage too.

Indivisible from Thatcher’s legacy is her critical, albeit necessarily supporting role, in placing greater military pressure on the Soviet Union, which in her view remained expansionist, and was only gaining strategic advantages from détente. She was steadfast in strengthening Britain’s alliances with the US and Nato, championed the hosting of American Cruise missiles, and vigorously promoted the idea of Western economic strength and the power of free-market capitalism as a bulwark against communism.

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She helped bridge the gap between Ronald Reagan’s obsession with the Strategic Defence Initiative, nicknamed ‘Star Wars’, and European fears that SDI could undermine US nuclear guarantees. And, despite a highly-cultivated hard-line reputation, she was one of the first leaders to recognise the opportunity of working with Mikhail Gorbachev.1

In addition to the Cold War stuff, Thatcher was central to the West’s bullish response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and before she became a fierce critic of European integration, was successful in her push for a more market-oriented Community, ultimately helping to build what later became the EU single market.

And this wasn’t just about influence accrued by the end of her premiership. As Moore notes, once German chancellor Helmut Schmidt left office in October 1982, Thatcher became the senior leader of the West in terms of length of service, a position she held for the rest of the decade. Little wonder that everyone who was anyone in the world wanted to meet with her. Her unusualness as a woman leader made her possibly the most famous politician going.

So what?

Why am I writing about this? Well, first of all, how about you come up with 250 newsletter ideas a year? But more to the point, though I haven’t yet finished Moore’s trilogy, I have watched and listened to every interview he has given. And, after being quite taken by his range of jumpers, distracted by how remarkably alike his voice is to one of my uncles, and occasionally shocked by a stray right-wing observation, it was his point about Britain’s parochial view of Mrs Thatcher that most struck a chord with me.

Of course, this is far from a British disease2. The same gap between domestic and international reputation constantly re-appears in politics. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky drew widespread criticism and sparked mass protests by firing his Defence Minister, Mykhailo Federov. You’ll be relieved to hear I take absolutely no view on this, not least because I only learned of Federov’s name yesterday. Instead, read the update from historian and Substacker, Phillips O’Brien.

But it serves as a reminder that leaders tend to be remembered quite differently at home than abroad. In Britain, Zelensky is part legend, part Zoom therapist for under-fire prime ministers. In Ukraine, he is a symbol of national resistance and a war leader who also faces severe criticism over the centralisation of power, allegations of corruption and changes in personnel.

There are plenty of other examples too. Gorbachev himself, who is celebrated abroad for helping to end the Cold War but widely blamed in Russia for the economic turmoil and loss of great power status that wrought. More recently (and marginally less geopolitically important) there was Jacinda Ardern, admired abroad among left-wing circles but who became so divisive in New Zealand over her economic and pandemic policies that she stood down rather than face re-election.

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One of life's thornier truths is that we are different people to everyone in our lives. Not just a father and son, friend and colleague, but a million others too. Hold the door open for an elderly neighbour and you might be a kindly soul; block the other’s driveway and you are pigeonholed as an enemy for life.

For that reason and more, I have absolutely no desire to learn what 100 people would say if they were asked to name what they thought about me.

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Why is the economy class experience so miserable, you ask yourself as you surf Skyscanner, select the 5.15am departure and haul small children to Luton? It is almost as if consumers’ stated preference — for more legroom, better food and friendlier service — differs from their revealed preference: flying at the lowest possible cost.

This — in addition to various bouts of deregulation — helps explain the rise of ultra low-cost carriers and the legacy airlines’ riposte, basic economy, in which nothing but the seat is included in the ticket price. And even then, there’s little space for all but the tiniest feet.

Which is why Emirates’ big new idea for economy class isn’t more legroom, but a fancier headrest.

Emirates likes to think of itself as different. Its business model (and despite the protestations of US airlines, it is not simply bankrolled by the UAE state) relies on its ability to command higher prices. That is, passengers choosing to fly with the airline, rather than with budget or full-service alternatives.

It manages this in a couple of ways. First, through its best-in-class entertainment system, quality soft product and global network. And second through its much-vaunted halo effect. In practical terms, people see the showers in first class and the bar at the back of business and assume surely some of that must rub off on a standard economy seat?

The big squeeze

Genuine innovation in economy class is rare, and Emirates is little different. As premium cabins have been embellished with doors and all-aisle access, the economy experience has, if anything, deteriorated. For instance, the airline’s older Boeing 777 aircraft, originally installed with a 3-3-3 (nine-abreast) economy class layout was later switched to the denser 3-4-3 (10-abreast) configuration.

This enabled Emirates to squeeze an additional 30-40 seats on board, at a cost of around 1.5 inches of shoulder width per passenger. But it also speaks to basic airline economics. The most lucrative seats are in premium economy and business class. As far as the typical chief commercial officer is concerned, the unwashed hordes at the back of the plane — replete with their tracksuit bottoms and neck pillows — are essentially providing little more than ballast.

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Now, despite all my market research, which suggests that Lines To Take readers would really rather I wrote about British politics every day1, it was frankly unavoidable that I should opine on what Emirates is calling its “world first U-Dream headrest”.

Give it a headrest

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There are a couple of ways to view the appointment of John Healey as chancellor of the exchequer. The first is to marvel at team Burnham’s ability to avoid leaks on the question of greatest intrigue surrounding the new administration. The second is to observe that reshuffles1 are fundamentally unstable and unpredictable beasts, even for prime ministers at the height of their power.

Perhaps the textbook case in terms of how not to do it was Tony Blair’s June 2003 reshuffle, which saw the Lord Chancellor fiasco and sowed genuine confusion among ministers over whether they had been sacked or not, alongside the usual machinery of government changes that hurt the Institute for Government’s feelings.

Much like Shabana Mahmood, Healey’s primary advantage lies in who he is not: Ed Miliband, the new foreign secretary2. But as with several of Andy Burnham’s first moves, it comes with a significant price tag.

A Labour defence secretary turned chancellor called Healey

You will no doubt recall that it was Healey’s resignation from defence over funding for the armed forces that did such damage to the already listing Starmer premiership. Last month, Healey said the Defence Investment Plan, at an additional £13.5bn, fell “well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time.” He is also on record as saying the UK should be spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, another costly spending commitment, at an extra £17.3bn a year by 2029-30.

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Then there is Britain’s “broken” social care system. Burnham has suggested it ought to operate “on the NHS principle”, at an estimated cost of £18bn a year. Throw in the commitment to end rough sleeping, the promise to remove VAT from household energy bills (repeating past mistakes whereby the more you spend, the more you save), a pledge to commence the “biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”, possible caps to bus fares and rent freezes, support for pubs and the high street and… crikey.

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I don’t know about you but I get some of my best work done by way of displacement activity. For instance, I’m not sure I would ever file my taxes, change my bed sheets or respond to texts if I had no need to avoid something even worse. But I could put these two errands off no longer: I had to visit the local council’s offices and then the bank. In Carly Simon-speak, “Sentenced first to burn and then to freeze.”

The council expedition started well enough. The man at the welcome desk, tasked with directing all manner of bewildered arrivals, nodded with approval when I explained how I had printed and filled out the relevant document ahead of time. So I was handed a ticket and asked to wait for my number to be called.

On sitting down, I glanced at my phone and took a mental screenshot. Five minutes past ten and the place was already packed. A row of desks sparsely populated with local authority representatives. I waited as less deserving, earlier arrivals were called, one ear ensconced by audio, the other exposed to the restless energy, whispered (and not so whispered) conversations punctuated by irregular coughing fits.

Third podcast in, my number was called and the kindly older woman behind the desk swiftly went through her list of ID requirements. She appeared armed with reservations for each example I provided:

“Your driver’s license expires soon.”

“Yes, good thing it hasn’t yet.”

“Your energy bill has two names on it.”

“Yes, I’m married.”

“The name on your debit card doesn’t perfectly match that on your passport.”

“What do you think the ‘JH’ stands for and could it be the Jack Harry on all other documents?”

At this moment of heightened tension, the Eurythmics’ 1980s classic Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) was playing over the speaker and the colleague behind the adjacent desk started singing along. Not humming or mumbling — full-on belting — in between explaining to the young woman next to me there would be an additional charge for translating her documents from Romanian.

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I left the building and emerged into the bright late morning sky, eyes involuntarily squinting. Next stop, the bank. Come on, private sector, show me that sweet, sweet efficiency of the global invisible hand. The first point of difference was that the branch was completely empty. Not a total shock for a weekday outside of lunch hours, but don’t repeat my mistake of confusing empty for quick service.

My first mistake, it transpired, was not to sign in via the app. This was how, it was explained to me, I could join the virtual queue. Despite being the only customer, the app informed me I was second in line and I was asked to take a seat next to a simply enormous television displaying beautiful young couples taking out mortgages at frankly unattractive rates.

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I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Ken Clarke is quite right wing. The former chancellor, home, health and justice secretary (this is by no means an exhaustive list) was a fiercely committed economic liberal when it came to free markets, privatisation, regulation and taxation.

As Health Secretary, Clarke implemented elements of the NHS internal market, which split purchasers (health authorities) from providers (hospitals) and introduced competition between NHS trusts, with the aim of improving efficiency. As Education Secretary, he pushed the expansion of grant-maintained schools, championed the regular testing of students, published league tables and helped found Ofsted.

And, on being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the wake of Black Wednesday and amid the early-1990s recession, Clarke made reducing Britain’s large deficit a priority through restrained growth in public spending and increased taxation1. He targeted low inflation, expanded the use of the Private Finance Initiative and approved the privatisation of British Rail.

So why the heck do some people perceive Clarke to be a Tory wet, even a bit of a lefty? The trademark brown suede Hush Puppies don’t help, nor do his penchant for cigars, brandy and late night jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. Moreover, the social liberalism was real. But ultimately, it boils down to Europe: Clarke was a passionate supporter of the European Union, all the way down to monetary union2.

By 1997, let alone 2016, this position made him an outlier, if not an outcast, within the Conservative Party. Indeed, had Clarke been prepared to ditch his Europhilia, it is highly likely the leadership would have been his. And Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, both rightly wary of Clarke’s political skills and popularity in the country would have, in technical terms, shat the bed.

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Shabana Republic

If our well-sourced friends at the Financial Times are indeed correct (and team Burnham doesn’t have a last-minute change of heart) Shabana Mahmood is set to follow in Clarke’s footsteps by making the short walk up Whitehall from the Home Office to the Treasury. And the business community is quietly relieved.

For one thing, this is about who Mahmood is not: Ed Miliband. But it also speaks to what she has done in her two years in the cabinet: overseen a crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration, as Justice Secretary she even considered a national rollout of voluntary chemical castration for the most serious sex offenders. Roy Jenkins she ain’t.

This record — in addition to her refusal to serve under Jeremy Corbyn, citing economic disagreements — appears to be serving as grade-A cope for the British business community, which already seems to be missing the halcyon days of the Reeves Treasury, despite their many bitter complaints about the outgoing chancellor.

I think this is misguided. First because, regardless of your views on small boat crossing and legal immigration, a net migration level of nil is not an economic growth plan. And second, the relationship in this instance between being an immigration hawk and social conservative — both of which apply to Mahmood — and a free marketer, is not obvious to me.

To be fair, social conservatism and economic liberalism (in the classical sense, not the American one) often intersect within centre-right philosophical frameworks. But less so on the Left. Indeed, in Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Labour produced two of the most socially conservative prime ministers of the post-war period. It is not for nothing that the historian Peter Hennessy described Callaghan as a man whose values “remained fixed at around 1948.”

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“He’s never going to leave her, darling.”

“He might.”

“He won’t. And in any case, when a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy.”

This is a transcript — lightly edited to conceal potentially identifying details and Jägerbomb-infused hyperbole — from a series of crisis catch-ups that took place beneath the ever-cracking glass ceiling of Portcullis House on the Parliamentary Estate.

My dear friend was ‘the other woman’ in this Jeffrey Archer novel-esque love triangle and my advice was always the same: dump the clown. Of course, this counsel went unheeded. To be fair, the sex was, allegedly, tremendous. And then, the improbable happened.

He left the other other woman, shacked up with my friend, eventually they got married and had children. I was pleased for her, though a little bruised about my obvious wrongness. I share this story partly to demonstrate that there is no confidence I won’t jeopardise in pursuit of a newsletter intro, but mostly as a reminder that nearly every prediction of mine fails to materialise.

I thought Gareth Gates would beat Will Young in the first series of Pop Idol1; I was convinced that Rafael Nadal would defeat Roger Federer in the 2017 Australian Open final and I genuinely believed that Keir Starmer would be a moderate success as prime minister. In fact, I undersell my error of judgement.

In the prelapsarian days of June 2023, I wrote an article for the Evening Standard2 with the headline (and for the millionth time, I didn’t write the headline) “Why Sir Keir Starmer may end up being the left-wing Thatcher”. To paraphrase Emperor Hirohito, these words developed not necessarily to my advantage.

My reasoning was informed in part by timing: following two decades of stagnant living standards and a succession of short-lived Conservative prime ministers, Starmer had the opportunity (and appeared on course for a large Commons majority) to break from the status quo, from planning and employment to net zero.

The argument was a little flimsy, I concede. But it was also underpinned by a heuristic of mine that, on reflection, obviously requires urgent structural examination: Starmer had been a successful leader of the opposition and my view at the time was that this was the best guide to a successful premiership.

Keir Starmer was good at politics

Soon after being elected MP in 2015, Starmer identified that the next Labour leader would have to come from within Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. And so — though he did resign as shadow immigration minister (serving under shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham) as part of the wave of resignations that followed the EU referendum — it was one of those ‘in sorrow rather than anger’ letters.

Months later, and following Corbyn’s landslide re-election as Labour leader, Starmer swiftly accepted the post of shadow Brexit Secretary, a position he wielded for maximum political benefit. By serving in the shadow cabinet, Starmer could not only demonstrate loyalty to the leader, but also leverage the sharpest dividing line between Corbyn and the membership: Europe.

Don’t forget that Labour members at this time loved their leader but, unlike him, they also largely wanted Britain to remain in the EU. Starmer sensed an opening. He used his role (some in the leader’s office may say “abused”) in order to shift the party’s position towards a second referendum. This was the political sweet spot for anyone hoping to succeed Corbyn: public fealty to the leadership, but firm pro-EU credentials for the membership. It worked.

Starmer went on to defeat the actual Corbynite candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey, to win the 2020 Labour leadership election, with 56.2% of the first-round vote. And having secured the position, he subsequently went on to denounce Corbynism, worked meticulously to rid the party of antisemitism and even kicked his predecessor out with such élan it would have made Nikita Khrushchev blush.

This was not even the first time Starmer had demonstrated strategic patience in advancing his political career. Having stepped down as Director of Public Prosecutions in November 2013, he stood for the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras — with a little help from party HQ.

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It was reported at the time that rivals complained that the contest was delayed by then leader Ed Miliband to ensure that the former DPP had been a member of the party for the necessary 12 months in order to stand.

By the way, as opposition leader, and despite obvious shortcomings, Starmer acted decisively over ‘Beergate’ and was quick to prosecute ‘Partygate’3 which, at the beginning at least, was not the political slam dunk it later became.

Politics vs government

But the skills of opposition don’t perfectly align with those of government. And the benefit of the former (there is only one, and it is time to think) was not used to its fullest, or even the bare minimum. Consider that Starmer:

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Football is a game of opinions. Which is just as well, because frequently very little actually happens on the pitch. For starters, it is low-scoring: 220 runs should win you a T20 match while 110 points ought to get you over the line in basketball. But soccer? Such is the paucity of goalmouth action that “1-0 to the Arsenal” (set to the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 re-release of ‘Go West’) became an iconic chant.

🚨Kessler family folklore klaxon 🚨In the early 1980s, my dad took his American bride to her first English football match. Astonishingly — this was not a vintage era — the Gunners won 4-1, after which my mom remarked:

“That was a bit dull.”

To which my father deadpanned:

“Well, that’s as good as it gets, sweetheart.”

A couple that turned compromise into something of an art form over the last few decades (he wanted blue dinner plates, she preferred white, they settled on a tasteful white centre with blue rim) failed to agree on football. What did I say about opinions?

England, Argentina, Falklands and Malvinas

Yesterday, during my allotted daily allowance of five minutes on Bluesky, I stumbled across a Wall Street Journal article entitled: “The Greatest Rivalry in Sports Braces for Its Biggest Game Ever.” At which point I did what any self-respecting middle-aged millennial would do — I stood up, grabbed my belongings and pulled the “quote post in case of emergency” lever. The greatest rivalry in sports?

What about India vs Pakistan? Real Madrid vs Barcelona? The New York Yankees vs the Boston Red Sox? Look, I’m not here to dunk on this piece. First, because the Financial Times today published something similar. Second, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, who wrote the Journal article, previously co-authored a terrific book on the rise of the Premier League.

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More to the point, I ain’t gonna alienate the Wall Street Journal — one of the finest English language newspapers (and one of the few that turns a profit) — on the basis that they may, theoretically at least, want to commission me one day.

I'm also cognisant of the fact that the piece was likely aimed not at nerdy English football fans like me, but American subscribers to the paper who might require a little prodding to care about the second semi-final of a tournament in which the US has long been eliminated.

Unrequited hate

Certainly, there are numerous cases where one half of a particular feud cares more than the other. Think New Zealand’s obsession with beating Australia at cricket, the Netherlands with defeating Germany at football or Wile E. Coyote with nailing Road Runner in the desert. (The coyote is obsessed with catching [and eating?] the Road Runner; the Road Runner appears largely indifferent.)

Is England vs Argentina one of those? Certainly, the subject of the Falkland Islands, or the Islas Malvinas, appears to be of greater centrality to Argentinian politics than to Britain’s. Yet the games between the two nations have, as the writers note, rarely ended without incident. Think the 1966 encounter which led FIFA to introduce yellow and red cards, Diego Maradona’s Hand of God in 19861 and David Beckham’s petulant little kick in 1998.

But the greatest rivalry? Not to the English. If someone told me they didn’t like Lionel Messi because he was ‘an Argie’, depending on how well I knew them, I would either politely smile and back away or Google the signs of mild concussion. England fans — like all tribal associations — can be small-minded, petty and occasionally violent. But no more toward Argentina, a nation with whom we share so much: currency crises, beef exports, even cricket. (Argentina really ought to have secured Test status 100 years ago.)

It is, of course, enlightening to learn how outsiders view you. Rivalry, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But beauty can be unrequited. Rivalry must be reciprocated. Then again, if football has taught us anything, it’s that there will always be someone in the comments section convinced of your wrongness.

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Arsène Wenger taught a generation of hitherto untroubled young men to fear amortisation. From the early 2000s, the economics graduate turned football coach decreed that players over the age of 30 were entitled to contract extensions of no more than a year, lest they get injured and therefore saddle the club with an aged, stranded asset.

This theory was more recently turned on its head by the new owners of Chelsea, who clocked that if you give expensive signings absurdly long contracts, you can turn a terrifying transfer fee into a manageable (and more Financial Fair Play-compliant) annual expense.

Alas, this act of financial chicanery came too late for my nervous system. As a result, my autonomic response to seeing any sort of floating leisure craft is to turn to the nearest person, even a stranger, to wryly observe that once the stern hits the salt water — even if the thing manages to float — its value plummets.

Of course, the Wenger years weren’t all macroeconomic orthodoxy. The bloke positively transformed English football through his knowledge of the French transfer market and scientific breakthroughs like maybe not drinking 10 beers the day before matches. The problem is, such insights are useless to me.

I can’t afford to buy even an average Frenchman and my athletic performance is sadly impervious to alcohol, diet or indeed instruction. But where Wenger’s methods did rub off on me is stretching. I mean, the human body is the ultimate depreciating asset.

Inelastic demand

Before he became a somewhat divisive commentator during this World Cup, Arsenal’s Lee Dixon was universally regarded as a fine full-back: boundless energy, terrific positional sense, difficult to beat in isolation. He once remarked on Wenger’s obsession with stretching.

We started stretching before we went for a warm up, during the warm up, after the warm up. We’d stretch after the training. We’d stretch after a sauna, after lunch. I’d never stretched so much in my life.

But the results spoke for themselves. Not just in trophies, but longevity. Dixon was already 32 when Wenger arrived, and played on until he was 38.

Before we go any further, I’m prepared to acknowledge the irrefutable: stretching is really boring. You just lie, sit or stand there while holding a moderately exposing position for 30 seconds. Nor do I claim to understand (or frankly care to understand) the science behind it. There’s a video explainer here but it’s a bit like wondering about the purity of the water emanating from the tap — it’s clean, I don’t ask questions.

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What I do know is that, like saving for a pension or beefing up your obituary, it is never too soon to start.

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I am what the French call un gros utilisateur of YouTube. This is made possible by a rare, although probably not unique, confluence of personal circumstances:

1. I have a lot of time on my hands

2. I have a premium subscription1 — a 33rd birthday present that I now fund out of pocket, like a puppy or jet ski

3. My appetite for content is functionally insatiable2

4. I have, as previously discussed, stopped reading the news, by which I really mean severely restricting time spent on microblogging sites such as (then) Twitter or more recently Bluesky, where breaking news, think tank reports and dad jokes are served up on a platter

What am I actually watching, you may or may not be wondering? Like roughly 70% of YouTube videos, it is whatever the algorithm serves up. Full-length Arsenal matches from the mid- to late-1990s, a documentary series on the collisions in the early Solar System, Thames Television (ask your granddad) panel discussions on the Labour Party and Militant — featuring a youthful Michael Meacher who still somehow looks 77 years old.

The loose thread that connects these seemingly disparate subjects is time. Each operates joyously independently of the world as it exists today. (Though, whatever you think of your lot in life in 2026, you really wouldn’t want to live on Earth a few billion years ago, what with the violent asteroid bombardments, molten lakes for a surface and so on.)

And at their best, these videos can send me into a fugue-like state.

The past is a closed system

The challenges we face today are certainly significant: climate change, geopolitical instability, terrorism, technological disruption. Little wonder many of us feel anxious. I can’t say whether they are greater than those encountered by previous generations, who fought the Cold War, Nazi Germany and sabre-toothed cats. The difference, of course, is the tense.

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When my mother first recounted how, in her Long Island high school, she and her classmates would practice hiding under their desks in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike, I broke out in laughter. Not only at the naivety of believing a wooden desk would offer protection from a radioactive blast, but at the idea it could happen at all. We know now there was no nuclear strike. The USSR collapsed! Except, of course, she couldn’t have known that in the 1960s. Even the CIA seemed frequently surprised by events.

The past may not exactly be resolved. For instance, we frequently disagree on its lessons, sometimes whether it even happened at all. But we can know with some certainty that the past is, well, past3. And it is simply much more difficult to feel anxious about something when we know how it ends. That is what makes the present uniquely capable of generating such dread.

Walled gardens

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Coogee to Bondi (3.5 miles)

It’s not Sydney’s ‘best-kept secret’. There’s no short-form video “I’m a dermatologist and I refuse to gatekeep this skincare hack” pretence. Sometimes, good things are just good. And while I’d still maintain a wide berth during December and January due to the throng of tourists, the landscape speaks for itself.

It’s not necessarily the most spectacular in Sydney, let alone the country. But the fact that it is only a few miles from the city centre — which Australians adorably call the Central Business District (CBD), as if life is one long Edexcel GCSE Geography course — and you can take in pretty much all the main Eastern Suburbs beaches along the way (Tamarama, Bronte, Clovelly) is the clincher.

The only major life decision is which end to start. My view is it depends on whether you prefer to leverage the Coogee Pavilion, home to the southern hemisphere’s best chips, as fuel or reward.

Hackney to Hackney via Regent’s Canal (8 miles)

A bit more Blue Peter DIY vibes here. The route goes something like this: Haggerston Park > De Beauvoir > Upper Street > Barnsbury > Coal Drops Yard > Regent’s Canal back to Hackney.

The dining options are justification alone. The De Beauvoir Deli pain au chocolat, the Islington Gail’s sausage roll, The Coal Office’s everything. This is not a way to get healthy.

The regeneration of the place is also a wonder. My mom described learning to drive around King’s Cross in the 1980s and being mistaken for a kerb crawler, such was the area’s somewhat sketchy reputation. Today, there is a COS and Google’s London headquarters.

The only problem is the cyclists, who have a habit of treating the towpath along the canal like a segregated highway rather than a shared space. Yes, I was born at the age of 52.

ABC Pool to East Balmain (5 miles)

It isn’t Spit to Manly or the Cremorne Point Walk, but dammit this is my list. Start with a dip (and something of a display if you’re feeling cute) at the Andrew “Boy” Charlton Pool, where you can take in sun, sea and 2.5-3.5% of GDP on defence.

Then it’s through the Royal Botanic Gardens, over the Pyrmont Bridge on Darling Harbour (it swivels to open which is very cool the first time you see it in action, but gets progressively more annoying on each successive occasion you have to wait) and onto the Anzac Bridge. Nowhere near as famous as its Harbour cousin, it is by some distance my preferred crossing, day or night.

And then you wind your way along to Balmain where the more basic among you can enjoy this particular view.

Richmond to Rotherhithe (20 miles)

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With notably rare exceptions (Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron’s “we’re all sinners” gambit), I struggle to manufacture surprise at politicians’ answers. Even when I don’t agree with the argument, consider the approach misguided or merely clumsily expressed, I can at least see it coming.

So it was with unpractised astonishment that I listened to an interview with Kemi Badenoch, during which she carved out the time to praise Rupert Lowe, leader of the far-right Restore Britain party, for his work in Parliament. How did we get here?

Accountability to the public

Last October, the Conservatives agreed to give one of their seats on the influential1 Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which scrutinises the value for money of government projects, to Lowe. At the time, a spokesperson for the party defended the move on the basis that Lowe "shares our values on cutting waste". I can’t speak to the veracity of this claim but it could not be more tangential.

Lowe leads a party that is endorsed by Elon Musk and bolstered by the X algorithm, has received public backing from far-right activist 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.

Pressed by Politico’s Anne McElvoy on why, given all this, she appointed Lowe to the PAC, Badenoch replied that Lowe “turns up to work” in contrast to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Conspicuously absent from that defence is any distancing from what Lowe actually stands for. He is instead fungible with any other Tory. Don’t believe me? Badenoch goes on to say:

“He is doing a decent job. He is doing what a Conservative on that committee would probably be doing.”

To be fair, she stopped short of complimenting Lowe on at least getting the trains to run on time.

Cordon blues

In the narrowest, most near-term of political senses, one can just about see the Badenoch game. Farage is her main rival on the Right. If Restore Britain can eat into Reform UK’s lead, both in the national polls and individual seats, then the primary beneficiary may well be the Tories.

I mean, ok, but remind me where the Tories finished in the Makerfield by-election?

More to the point, by making nice with Lowe, Badenoch is crossing a rubicon. The cordon sanitaire — intended to keep out the extremes of Right and Left, what with their racism, threats of violence and actual violence — is not in a good way. As Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank, wrote in The New World earlier this year:

[A] party with no limits on the racism and prejudice it will accept will struggle to get beyond a 5% ceiling… The real threat of this new political racism is to the social norms of our society. That is what must be resisted.

Have I Got Jews For You

Alongside many British Jews, I appreciated Badenoch’s full-throated condemnation of the ever-rising tide of antisemitism in the UK, which in the last few months alone has seen synagogues set on fire and Jews stabbed on the streets of North London — while some of the political class shrugged their shoulders in disinterest.

But by appointing Lowe to the PAC and then brushing off any criticism, Badenoch appears to reveal herself to be yet another politician who is opposed to the racism — in this case antisemitism — only of her ideological opponents, be they the far-left, Islamists or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

And here’s my problem with that approach. As a Jew, every racist is my ideological opponent! I’m not especially fussed if your conspiratorial antisemitism is predicated on Jews running the banks and the media, on obsessive hatred of Israel or the Great Replacement Theory — it’s all a threat to my freedom and very ability to participate in civic life.

And it necessarily forces me to consider whether, should the Tories come to view Jew hatred as a vote winner, might they be persuaded to join the bandwagon too?

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If you had to guess, is the smallest thing smaller than the biggest thing is bigger? Put another way, when thinking about the scale of the Universe, are there more orders of magnitude above or below human scale? If you’re not sure, and frankly even if you are, check out this lovely little interactive tool which takes you from a human all the way down to Planck length and up to the size of the observable Universe.

You’ll find that within the 60 (sixty!) orders of magnitude, the smallest things (Plancks, strings) are many, many times smaller (relative to human scale) than the observable universe is bigger. In the words of the legendary physicist Richard Feynman1 (and with thanks as ever to Jason Kottke), there is “plenty of room at the bottom”.

I like this because it challenges one of the strongest human intuitions. Sure, the universe is vast, with staggering distances between even the nearest stars and galaxies. But when you look at reality on a logarithmic scale, you soon discover that the journey inward, down to the microscopic is at least, if not more, epic.

Floors and ceilings

It’s also a useful framework when it comes to leadership. Take football — fans obsess over managers, chief executives hire and fire them at will, but to what end? Stefan Szymanski, Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology, analysed the spending of 40 English clubs between 1978 and 1997 and found that wages accounted for 92%2 of the variation in league position.

As the author and journalist Simon Kuper once noted:

The obsession with football managers is misguided. Hardly any of them make any difference to results. The institution of manager is something of a con-trick.

I think this is almost right. The greatest managers — Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti — can improve their teams’ performance by 2, 5, perhaps even as much as 10%. And in elite-level sport, where even the most marginal of gains are ruthlessly pursued, that is absolutely enormous.

But that is on the upside. It is on the other end of the spectrum — that is, the downside — where the numbers can get truly scary. For a bad manager — one who gets the tactics wrong, loses the dressing room or, despite my desperate yelling from the upper tier of Highbury’s North Bank, refuses to practise set pieces — there is no floor. There is instead, a bottomless pit of hurt, points deductions and back-to-back relegations.

Truss vs. Hunt

Invariably, we turn to politics. Before Jeremy Hunt torched his reputation for sound money with his wildly ill-judged and fiscally ruinous cuts to national insurance, he achieved something rather substantial: convincing the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to raise its forecasts for potential output.

In the November 2023 Autumn Statement, the chancellor’s announcements on full expensing of capital investments and various changes to welfare, childcare and other policies led the OBR to raise economic output in the medium term by 0.3%. For a single fiscal event, this was considered a legitimate achievement. But this only serves to highlight the downside.

The 2022 Truss/Kwarteng mini-Budget had a substantial negative impact on the UK economy. It sparked a gilts crisis, saw mortgages removed from the market and to this day continues to sully the UK’s reputation as a safe investment. But even that pales into insignificance compared to the big one: Brexit.

According to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, by 2025, as a result of Britain’s exit from the European Union, GDP per capita was 6-8% lower than it would have been, investment 12-18% lower, employment 3-4% lower and productivity 3-4% lower. Oops.

Asymmetry

This, of course, was one of the many frustrations with Brexit. Sustainable economic growth, like winning football matches, is really hard to do. On the other hand, causing recessions or reducing standards of living, like losing games of football, is really easy.

A good politician is considered a wild success if he or she can keep the show on the road while making incremental improvements to the economy, infrastructure and public services. A bad one can simply precipitate a gilts crisis or launch a war of choice. The asymmetry is unsettling.

Systems are simply easier (and certainly quicker) to break than to optimise. Not least when the best outcomes are often compounding (GDP growth) while the bad ones (a bank run, institutional collapse) are non-linear.

It’s not all bad news, thankfully. In the long-run, upsides can be enormous. One reason why the United States is so rich despite frequent and often painful recessions is that growth compounds. An economy that expands by 2% a year but suffers a 3% recession every decade will still become fabulously wealthy.

If I may, I’ll end not with Feynman, outer space or even football, but another sport. Played over five days, it can be intensely frustrating. A team (not England, obviously) can build patiently for four and a half days, only to collapse in 25 minutes on the final afternoon. In Test cricket, as in life, only bad things happen quickly; good things take time.