The Ryanair-ification of government

Really, a confession about throat-clearing

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.

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: