The point, made by both the real president and the fictional one, is not just that stirring rhetoric matters, but that ambition does. Keir Starmer, who waited nearly two months to give his first big speech on the state of the country and then told us everything was obviously going to get worse, never seemed to get this. Andy Burnham does: before he’d even passed the front door of Downing Street, he’d said his first priority would be to end rough sleeping.

Whether he can actually do that is a matter of some debate. Yes, he found £340m for the job, presumably down the back of a sofa or something. On the other hand he did not, in fact, manage to achieve it as mayor of Greater Manchester, and while “central government wouldn’t give me the powers to do it” is an entirely plausible explanation, it’s also a convenient excuse.

On the other, other hand I have no doubt whatsoever that it is possible to end rough sleeping because we did it during the pandemic. More than that, I am old enough to remember Cardboard City in the tunnels by Waterloo, which lasted into the 1990s. By the end of that decade it wasn’t there: a Labour government addressed a huge issue of public concern so successfully that rough sleeping was all but eliminated, until some time after the Tories returned to office 2010. That this is a hugely complicated social issue taking in everything from the housing shortage to the benefits system, Home Office immigration policies to mental health provision, seems to me not an excuse for inaction, but the exact opposite. All those things are broken? Better get to work.

More than that, the growing visibility of homelessness is not merely a moral stain on the country, but a sort of psychic weight, a very visible sign that something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Fixing it thus seems like a great way of highlighting the power of government to make things better. Doing so won’t merely – merely! – improve the lives of those currently living on the streets. It might also improve the political prospects of a party elected on a promise of change.

I find myself wondering if there are other problems that have been ignored – because they cut across multiple bits of government; because they sit outside government altogether – but which would be worth tackling because of their disproportionate contribution to that crippling sense of national decline. The misery of the average high street; the precipitous decline of public toilet provision; the growing tendency for hire bikes to carelessly litter our streets – that’s just off the top of my head. Hell, a couple of extra billion – basically pocket change! – to fund more frequent bin collections and thus deal with literal litter feels like a thing that could work wonders.

Many of these problems seem to run through the decline of councils, and the near total collapse of their enforcement functions. In my more optimistic moments, I wonder if Burnham’s interest in devolution, and his promise to spend his political capital on grabbing the third rail of social care reform, are because he understands that fixing local government will fix rather a lot else.

I am under no illusion that a new prime minister inevitably means sunlit uplands. Retaining Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office suggests continuity with the Starmer regime’s horrendous immigration rhetoric (although Ian Dunt has found a more optimistic spin). Keeping Bridget Phillipson in the equalities brief suggests Labour activists will still be unable to meet their trans friends’ eyes. And the government’s financial position is no better than it was last week.

But at least we have a prime minister who thinks the purpose of the state is to make things better, not to manage decline. Making promises might be a recipe for disappointment. It’s also the first step to getting anything done.

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Book, etc.

My new book, 31 Inventions That Built Our World, is currently 25% off on pre-orders from Waterstones.com. You can see me talking about the new book in this video ad that someone thought it’d be a good idea to make, and from which I have learned I have what can only be described as resting thug face. (“Why do you look so angry…?”)

This Sunday afternoon, I’m also doing my first event about the book at the Rock Oyster Festival in Cornwall. This is the second year I’ve played that particular gig – always nice to get repeat invites – and I’ll be speaking again to my sinister co-conspirator Tom Phillips.

I’m not saying this makes it worth booking specially or anything – but if you did happen to be attending, I’m told there is at least a chance there will be, for the first time, copies on sale, a whole month early. This, entertainingly, means that those who buy one will be seeing it for the first time at the same moment I do. Anyway, if you’re there, please say hi.

The day we caught the train

Skimming the 2024 Guardian story, I spot a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. Geoff Hoon was one of those ministers who was a fixture of the New Labour era, serving in multiple roles over a dozen years without ever quite coming to trouble the public consciousness – quite the feat, for the defence secretary in post for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I’m not sure I’ve had a single thought about him since he stepped down as transport secretary in June 2009.

But it was in that role, I learn, that Hoon became the first senior minister to support the reopening of the Northumberland Line to passengers after six long decades; other transport secretaries who’d do the same would include Chris Grayling in 2019 and Grant Shapps the following year. Even so, it took until 2022 for construction to begin, and until the last weeks of 2024 before the first passenger trains actually ran. “It took 15 years to reopen this thing?” I say out loud to my companions. “Geoff Hoon supported it?” No one else seems quite as shocked by the mention of Geoff Hoon as I am.

It’s a sunny Tuesday last April, a couple of days after my afternoon watching the Greens campaign in the eastern suburbs of Newcastle, and we’re on a Northern Train heading north, somewhere between Manors and Northumberland Park. (“North” is a big theme of our day.) On the table before us are coffees and some bright pink donuts from Greggs. Underneath it, Henry Scampi seems less interested in the views or career of Geoff Hoon than he is the potential for escaping and making friends with the noisy school party just up the carriage.

There are a couple of reasons for our day trip. One is to track down the house of Ebby Edwards – the trade unionist, Labour MP and first secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers who was also, as it happened, the great grandfather of my friend and travelling companion, the writer Pete Mitchell.1 Another, for me if not for the others, is to have an excuse to visit an actual pit village.

The third reason, though, is simply to travel on a new bit of railway, which Pete has been using to try to get me to visit Newcastle for more than a year. It’s clearly seen locally as a hugely important development: not only is the new half-hourly service shown on some versions of the Tyne & Wear Metro map, despite it being a national rail line, but it’s been integrated into the network’s fare zones and the fares kept low. At peak times, it costs just £2.40 to travel the full 18 mile route from Ashington to Newcastle Central.

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This is in some ways odd, as the world is far better today – the people richer, trains faster, air cleaner – so I’ve been trying to work out where this feeling comes from. It is, I’ve concluded, about direction of travel. A century ago, there was a sense of social and technological progress, a belief the future would be better than the past. At this moment in time, as with much of human history, it’s hard to feel that’s true. And so, I can look back at a meaner, poorer world wedged between two horrific world wars and somehow instinctively imagine it better than today.

Most of today’s newsletter is about another lost future, the one where we’d sail through the sky in luxurious airships. But for, absurdly, the fourth time in the five year history of this thing, I find it’s a Wednesday afternoon and Britain is about to switch prime minister. I have a fair few friends, in the Labour party and beyond, who are cynical that this changing of the guard will make any difference. A couple go beyond cynicism into outright hostility, one to such a degree that, rather than risk fighting, we’ve quietly agreed to stop discussing politics at all, in rather the manner of my father and I after Brexit.1

And it’s true that, despite their mutual animosity, Andy Burnham shares certain of Keir Starmer’s flaws. Neither is known for candour or their ability to make tough decisions; both have often wavered in the face of opposition. Both, too, seem unnervingly taken with the horrific immigration policies of Shabana Mahmood. The political or economic headwinds that make Britain so difficult to govern these days haven’t gone anywhere, either. There is a reason we can’t hang onto a PM.

And yet there are three reasons I find myself foolishly – irrationally, dangerously – optimistic, convinced that this really will make a difference.

One is that Burnham is good at the frontman bit of politics. Sure, the Reddit AMA or YouTube videos of him naming his favourite Madchester albums can be seen as fripperies; giving a speech without allowing questions borders on cheeky. But there is visibly a strategy, which involves marketing the leader and getting him and his ideas in front of the public. Even if all he offered really was Starmerism with good comms, that would be a hefty improvement on Starmerism without it.

Another shift is that Burnham very obviously likes people. He spent the Makerfield election going out of his way to meet voters who weren’t convinced to try to talk them round. His staff are loyal; even his opponents generally recognise his personal decency.

This is not the tone with which people speak of Keir Starmer, a man who frequently used underlings as human shields, and seemed to think dealing with MPs and even ministers an irritating distraction, rather than a core part of his job. An instructive moment these last weeks came the weekend the outgoing PM spent considering his future, when briefings implied his team were expecting Burnham’s rise to provoke a pro-Starmer reaction that never came. It felt as if they assumed their man must have a faction, merely by virtue of having done the job. Just as he governed on behalf of non-existent hero voters, so he seems to have imagined the support of imaginary hero MPs.

But the biggest reason I think Burnham might – might – be better at this than Starmer is that his entire being exudes optimism, about the ability of both himself and the state to make lives better. That may be a delusion. Perhaps he can’t devolve power from Westminster back to communities in the way he’s promising; perhaps it’ll make little difference if he does. Nonetheless, he set out a vision of what his Britain might be like, and why it would be better to live in than the one we have today.

Keir Starmer, by contrast, used his first major speech as Prime Minister to explain at length how things were not only bad, but would soon enough get worse.

Perhaps the future won’t be better than today. Lord knows there are reasons to doubt it, and on a long enough timeline the outlook is bleak for us all. There was no shortage of shadows heading towards Kensington Olympia in 1926, too.

But imagining a better future is not merely a useful prop if you want to get out of bed in the morning: it’s the first step to bringing it about.

And I am sick of feeling hopeless.

Anyway, feel free to argue:

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Whatever happened to airships?

It’s not often I’m inspired to professional jealousy2, still less by something I spot on LinkedIn, but last week Londonist’s Matt Brown managed it. “Absolute career highlight this morning,” the relevant post read, “getting to fly over London in the Goodyear Blimp!” “You bastard,” I thought to myself, having watched the blimp fly over the East End just a few hours earlier. “Bastard, bastard, bastard.” Jealousy inspires poetry in all of us. (You can read more of Matt’s adventures here.)

It isn’t just that I’d love to see London from that angle – the views are always the best thing about flying into Heathrow – but that I’ve long found airships themselves fascinating. Like the Apollo programme, or Concorde, they’re one of those things that come from the past, but seem, too, to represent a lost future. When our hero travelled by Zeppelin in Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, it hinted that the past could offer a level of luxury entirely missing from most air travel today. When they appeared in Doctor Who, it was to show we’d entered a parallel universe, a timeline where the world had taken a different path.

But while I haven’t myself set foot on any airships recently, Matt’s adventures offer as good an excuse as any to answer a question I’ve often asked: why did we stop using airships? Was it just because they’re Nazi-coded and had a nasty tendency to blow up?

Actually, while it was those things, it wasn’t just those things. And there’s a chance – no more than that – they’re on their way back.

The idea of airships actually predates that of aeroplanes, which seems to make sense: it’s easier to imagine an airborne ship analogous to a seagoing one than it is to imagine something entirely new, and anyway the physics of a balloon are intuitive in exactly the way those of a plane are not. As far back as 1670, an Italian Jesuit named Father Francesco Lana de Terzi proposed an “Aerial Ship” in which four vacuum spheres made of copper would lift what is, very obviously, a boat. Here’s a picture.

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But as the rambling whinge-a-thon entered its third decade in a manner distinctly reminiscent of Father Ted accepting the Golden Cleric award, it began to dawn on us that the media had once again been played. BBC News had abandoned its regular programming to broadcast an unedited Reform broadcast live; the large chunks of the lobby currently at the NATO summit in Ankara had ceased engaging with the small matter of the defence of Europe to tune in; the podcasters were gearing up for emergency broadcasts. (Ours is here, by the way.)

And what we were all talking about was no longer the rolling financial scandals, but a new story Farage had served up on a plate: an unnecessary by-election, which he would almost certainly win, and which was now all we’d be discussing all summer, thus depriving Andy Burnham’s Downing Street of headlines in its crucial early weeks. This was the sort of move Donald Trump would pull, changing the story by simply chucking out something new. The reactionary content industrial complex had struck again.

But just as Farage seems to have lost both his instinctive sense of exactly what the British electorate will bear and his infuriatingly effective air of bonhomie, so he seems to have shed his ability to reshape British politics around himself. The LibDems, who were never likely to be a factor in any Clacton by-election anyway, announced they weren’t playing and would not be fielding a candidate. So, with greater potential effect on the result, did the even more furious Reform tribute act Restore.

Labour, the Tories, the Greens – all soon fell into line. By bedtime it had become clear that Farage’s attempt to get himself tried by a higher court than the parliamentary authorities by effectively calling a referendum on himself was actually on course to be a straight fight between him and a comic with a bin on his head.

From here, there’s no possible outcome that will not be cripplingly embarrassing for the Reform leader. Most likely he holds his seat, without being able to claim any mandate from it; but there’s a slim chance he’s beaten by Count Binface, a moment from which there can surely be no return. And if he cancels his resignation now, it amounts to admitting he’s a coward who’s just wasted everyone’s time. His best outcome would probably, ironically, the one the LibDems were pushing: that the government should decline his permission to resign at all, thus allowing him to claim establishment stitch up yet again. Alas for Nigel, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, to whom the decision bafflingly falls, posted earlier that, if he wants to spend his summer “arguing with a bin”, she would not stand in his way

Even if his strategy had worked, it would not have solved the fundamental problem: parliamentary investigations are not invalidated simply because you call a by-election. He’s mistaken a regulatory problem for a political one.

Nigel Farage, of course, is a political cockroach, a man who’s survived results and scandals that would have nuked most political careers to smithereens. Many of his supporters, I’m sure, couldn’t care less about the sources of his money, or what any boring regulator has to say about it.

But at least some of the voters required to take his party to 30% surely will. And anyway, something bigger has shifted. He built his profile by being both available to and cheerful towards the cameras. But the British media, a shallow bunch as ever, don’t respond well to those who treat them with contempt.1

And laughter is harder to survive than any scandal.

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What the hell’s going on with my breathing, and other questions

Interrupting your actual content with a quick note that the audiobook of A History of the World in 47 Borders is currently in some kind of sale – so if you want me to talk history at you for 10 hours while sounding like I’ve just climbed a big hill then now’s your chance.

Also, thanks to everyone who’s ordered the new one, pre-orders have a disproportionate effect by telling bookshops they should pay attention, yada yada yada.

And now, back to the show.

On the nationhood of Portugal

Were I braver, I’d have headlined this section with the question my mother asked me a few days ago during a lovely family trip to that extremely fine country: “So, why isn’t Portugal a part of Spain?” You know about borders, runs the extremely subtle subtext. Explain that one.

And it is, in some ways, a good question. The two countries share the Iberian peninsula, which is clearly a distinct geographical unit, and there’s no obvious physical barrier to divide them in the way the Pyrenees separate Spain from France. There are cultural similarities between the two countries too, not least their closely related languages: not only are both descended from Latin, but speakers of one can generally read stuff written in the other.2

All of which means it’s not immediately obvious why it was that, when the region’s various medieval kingdoms combined to form the global superpower of the 16th century, Portugal was not among them. Why did the Spanish Habburgs never complete the jigsaw?

The reason I did not use that obvious headline, though, is because the most cursory of searches will make clear it’s a question that angers the Portuguese, even though – perhaps because – it’s asked rather a lot. Consider the responses to a Quora post asking “When and why did Spain and Portugal separate into two distinct nations?” “To diverge they needed to be the same to start with,” reads the most popular reply. “I’ve replied to this question so many times I’ll soon be asking those who do so to read previous replies,” begins another.

Fair enough: ask a Canadian why they’re not American, or someone from Dublin why they don’t consider themselves British, and the response is likely to be a whole lot less polite than that. The story of how Portugal came to be a proudly independent country, though, tells us much about both the contingency of national identities, and their enduring power, so let’s have at it.

Portugal is not one of those nations that can trace its existence back to ancient times. The Romans divided Hispania, as they called the peninsula, into anything from two to four provinces, depending on which century they were living in; these, though, never mapped onto Portugal and Spain in any obvious sense. Following the fall of the western empire in the 5th century, the region was divided between Visigoths, Suevi, and a toehold for the eastern empire on the Mediterranean coasts. A couple of centuries after that, the Umayyad Caliphate conquered not quite all of it for Islam, and renamed it Al-Anadlus. At every stage of this story, Iberia was divided. At none of them was one of those divisions Portugal.

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So for Unproven, Unlikely, and Firmly Believed, the sinister Tom Phillips and I essentially completely rewrote the beginning, the end and also frankly some chapters in the middle (covid). Since I’m away this week1, and since I feel a bit bad that many of you were kind enough to buy copies of a book that’s now out of date, I thought this week I’d publish some of it here. What follows is the new introduction, written to reflect the fact that – in those halcyon days of 2021 – we didn’t imagine that the conspiracists who’d just tried to overthrow a presidential election result would somehow find their way back to the White House. North American readers can buy the book, should you wish, from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or the Grass Roots Bookstore.

You know the scene. You’ve probably seen it a hundred times now, from a dozen different angles. You might be sick of seeing it.

A man stands behind the desk of the Vice President in the United States Senate, leading the chamber in prayer. There are subtle visual clues that something here isn’t right. The man is speaking through a bullhorn and is armed with a spear, to which he’s attached a US flag. His face is covered with red, white and blue paint, and his chest with tattoos inspired by Norse mythology – which are visible because he’s naked from the waist up, except for a furry hat with horns. Yes, something is definitely wrong. That’s supposed to be where Mike Pence sits. That’s not Mike Pence. Mike Pence doesn’t dress like that.2

That scene took place on January 6, 2021 – and even though years have passed and every second of that day’s events have been endlessly scrutinized, there remain two competing interpretations of it that are entirely incompatible. One is that when several thousand protestors descended on the Capitol building, they did so peacefully, to prevent a cabal of traitors from stealing the previous November’s election. Armed with nothing but the purest love of American democracy, they came with but one intent: to prevent the confirmation of a fraud as the nation’s 46th President, and to defend the rightful occupant of that office, Donald J. Trump.

The other, incompatible interpretation of these events is that January 6, 2021, was a day on which several thousand thugs invaded the Capitol in a naked attempt to overturn a democratic election of which they didn’t like the result. To intimidate Congress – not just their opponents, but their allies, too – they brought violence into the very heart of American democracy. And some of them dressed like assholes to do it.

The interpretation that you think is correct will be determined by whose side you are on, and which information environment you live in. (To be absolutely clear about where we’re coming from here: it’s the second one. It is absolutely the second one.)

In his remarks on the Ellipse earlier that day, President Trump had encouraged his followers to make the journey and ’peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard’. Sure. Why not. Helpfully, though, he’d also suggested they ’fight like hell’ – and some of those who invaded Congress that day seemed rather more into the ’fight like hell’ bit than the ’peacefully make their voices heard’ of it all. One of them came armed with eleven Molotov cocktails. Out on the Mall, mock wooden gallows had been erected, to cries of ’Hang Mike Pence!’ Over the course of the day, multiple journalists covering the protest were attacked, and fifteen police officers were hospitalized. One of the rioters, a thirty-five-year-old former US Air Force officer named Ashli Babbitt, was shot in the shoulder while attempting to break through a door in the Capitol, and died from her wounds. An officer assigned to protect the Senate, fifty-one-year-old Howard Liebengood, died by suicide several days later.

As the world watched agog, on live TV, a mob tried to overturn the results of an American election – even as many of them remained convinced they were trying to save it.

In their immediate goal of course, they failed. Joe Biden was confirmed; Mike Pence was not hanged. Delaying the process until the next day didn’t have the effect that they expected, because counting electoral college votes is not a magical ceremony that only works if you do it at exactly the right time. American democracy got another four-year lease. But the forces that brought the rioters there – the forces that had been brewing for a long time, the forces that fueled their anger, their distrust and their fundamental misunderstanding of American constitutional procedure – did not go away.

The January 6 rioters were brought to that point by a conspiracy theory – or, more accurately, by a large number of conspiracy theories, most of them false and one of them basically true.

The main false theory was most pithily expressed by President Trump on November 4, the morning of the election. ’We are up BIG,’ he tweeted, with his customary commitment to the shift key, ’but they are trying to STEAL the Election.’ This was perhaps not surprising, coming from a man who in 2016 had insisted that an election he’d won had been rigged against him – at that time based entirely on claims from a random guy on Twitter who said he’d discovered 3 million fraudulent ballots, enough to hand Trump a popular vote win. You’ll be amazed to learn the Twitter guy never produced the evidence he promised.

Four years later, there were a lot more theories about exactly how the Democrats planned to ’STEAL the Election’, most of which . . . didn’t really fit together. Bags of ballots had been thrown out, it was claimed, or suitcases of fresh ones mysteriously found. Mail-in votes were supposedly rife with fraud. Illegal immigrants and dead people were said to have voted in droves. Many claimed rigged voting machines had fiendishly switched Trump votes to Biden ones. Six months after the election, a spurious ’audit’ in Arizona was still microscopically scanning ballot papers for traces of bamboo, in an effort to prove they’d been shipped from China. (That the allegations mostly centered on major urban areas with large non-white populations – despite the fact that Trump largely increased his vote share in these places, while losing in the suburbs – provided a subtle hint about what was fuelling many of these claims.)

One especially prolific source of fraud claims was a Texas activist named Gregg Phillips – the very same random Twitter guy who’d supplied Trump’s ’3 million illegal voters’ claim back in 2016. Phillips supplied the core research for 2000 Mules, a ’documentary’ that claimed to prove organized ballot-harvesting through cellphone location data. The film’s claims were quickly and thoroughly debunked, and Phillips’s own organization again failed to produce its evidence, admitting it didn’t even know the identity of a person they’d claimed as a ’whistleblower’.

And why were the Democrats stealing the election? The answers here ranged from your basic hunger for power, to Marxist takeovers, to the belief that the President had been fighting a one-man war against a Deep State cabal of cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles, possibly operating out of a pizza restaurant basement, and definitely somehow connected to Jeffrey Epstein, and that they needed to rig the election to avoid their imminent date with justice. This last idea stemmed from QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy theory based largely on a series of anonymous messages on the troll-infested message boards, to which Jacob Chansley – the guy in the horned hat – had subscribed.

At any rate, conservative America’s fears about the election, nurtured by decades of overstated or baseless claims of electoral fraud, had been brought to the boil by months of assertions from President Trump that the Democrats were trying to steal the win. (This was, after all, a man who four years earlier had insisted that an election he’d won had been rigged against him.) This was amplified by the widely anticipated ’blue shift’ during the night of the election, as the running count began to include different types of votes from different types of area. None of this was unexpected. But if you were the sort of person who simply couldn’t conceive of how the President could lose – which, it turned out, a significant minority of Americans were – it all looked pretty suspicious. A poll in May 2021 found that a majority of Republicans believed the election had been rigged, that Donald Trump was still the true President, and that the Capitol riot was led by left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.

The thing is, there was fairly compelling evidence that somebody was conspiring to steal the 2020 Presidential election: the guy who lost. That the Trump camp had planned to declare premature victory and cast doubt on the election – whatever the result and whatever the evidence – had been reported well before election day. In the aftermath, the President openly discussed his expectation that the Republican majority in the Supreme Court would help hand him victory; in addition, his campaign and sundry hangers-on had filed over sixty separate lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the vote in various states, while state election officials were pressured, sometimes directly by the President himself. It all culminated in early January, with the novel legal theory that the Vice President – the real one, not the guy in the furry hat – had the power to unilaterally reject the election outcome and declare himself still the Vice President. We know this part because, helpfully, they wrote the plan down, in clear violation of the rule about whether you should take notes on a conspiracy.

So, that was the true conspiracy theory – the one about a real conspiracy that relied on a slew of other conspiracy theories, which would end up with over 400 people being charged with federal crimes and a man with no shirt leading the prayers in the United States Senate.

Several things are worth bearing in mind about this story in the pages to come. One is that the Trump camp’s conspiracy theories – whether they genuinely believed them or not – look surprisingly like the real conspiracy between the President and his fellow travelers. Another is that conspiracy thinking, so long dismissed by much of the culture as the preserve of outsiders, weirdos and the generally disenfranchised, was being propagated by the actual President of the United States.

The third is that conspiracy theories have real consequences. People died, and for the first time in its history – which included one election held during the actual Civil War – the United States failed to have a completely peaceful transfer of power.

And of course, there’s a fourth thing that’s inescapable – the reason why January 6, 2021, will go down as a watershed in US history, even though it didn’t work – which is that none of this was enough to prevent Donald Trump from winning 31 states, 312 electoral college votes and thus the White House again four years later. The man who built a political career on indulging in conspiracy theories ever since he questioned the true origins of the Hawaiian-born Barack Obama would be far more explicit in his embrace of them in his second term – not merely indulging in conspiracy theories, but building an administration on them. His FBI director, his Director of National Intelligence and his Secretary of Health and Human Services were all active believers in conspiracy theories that ranged from election fraud to vaccine plots.

Oh, and remember Gregg Phillips, the random Twitter guy behind those baseless election fraud claims in both 2016 and 2020? He was put in charge of disaster response at FEMA. He has no experience in disaster response.

In 2021, the events of January 6 seemed to many like a shocking aberration, a dark undercurrent of society briefly bursting its banks and flooding into the heart of American democracy. Four years later, it was the governing ideology.

All of which raises the question: how the hell did we get here?

Buy the book!

There’s no doubt that the conspiracy theories that helped drive the Capitol insurrection were a product of the modern age, born in the fever swamps of 4chan, popularized through YouTube and Facebook, and spearheaded by a President who ruled by tweet and got his intelligence from cable news. Social media has made it easier to propagate theories, while algorithms designed to keep people clicking or watching videos have doubled as conveyor belts to pull people towards more radical viral content. (And all of that was before generative AI arrived and flooded the internet with deepfakes.)

But while Donald Trump may be the most famous head of government to use and spread conspiracy theories to achieve his goals, the recent history of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil are a reminder that Trump is hardly unique. And all this was true even before the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off, and we all had to come to terms with the fact that a bat in central China had coughed and millions had died as a result (with the rest of us stuck inside for over a year and left unexpectedly celibate, unemployed or simply getting really into sourdough).

If it sometimes feels like we are living through an unprecedented period of paranoia, it’s important to remember that conspiracy theories have a very, very long history. They were present in the politics of Ancient Athens and Rome. And while many historical conspiracy theories have been lost in the mists of time, some have endured: as we’ll see, many of the theories that motivated the movement that descended on the Capitol that day have lineages that can be traced back centuries.

Indeed, the very American democracy that was threatened by conspiracy theories that day in January 2021 was originally founded on conspiratorial thinking. Several historians argue that the Declaration of Independence – with its dark warnings of covert British plans for imminent tyranny, and its long list of supposed ’abuses and usurpations’ – didn’t so much include a conspiracy theory as it, in itself, was a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories may be having A Moment right now, but that doesn’t mean they are new.

These theories rarely spring from nowhere. Very often, they’re adapted from earlier versions, updated and adjusted to fit new social contexts. Sometimes the villains, whether individuals or institutions or entire ethnic or religious groups, change over time. Sometimes – as many Jewish people who have tried living in Europe over the last thousand years or so could probably tell you – they do not.

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The stereotype of conspiracy theories often says that they’re something that the masses believe about society’s elites – a backlash of the powerless against the powerful. And sometimes that’s true. But, as the events of the last few years have done so much to remind us, conspiracy theories are often spawned and spread by elites themselves. The patronizing view that they’re the sole preserve of the left-behind, the under-educated and the ill-informed couldn’t be further from the truth. Among the conspiracy believers we’ll meet in this book are monarchs and political leaders, lawyers and businessmen, mathematicians and chemists, eminent physicists and pioneering inventors. There are plenty of military officers, and a fair few priests. There’s one Nobel laureate who’d feature on any decent list of ’smartest people of the twentieth century’.

And none of us – whether we’re on the political left, right or center – are immune from believing in conspiracy theories. Our brains are built to see patterns in the world, and do it so well that they sometimes see patterns where none exist. At the same time, our world is often shaped in profound ways by unseen forces that can seem like the product of conscious design – from social change to patterns of disease to the effects of the market.

Many of these forces are, as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, ’not originally the effect of any human wisdom’, but simply a ’consequence of a certain propensity in human nature.’ All our lives, we’re constantly pushed, pulled and prodded by invisible hands. Is it really surprising that, sometimes, we imagine those hands must be attached to somebody? Conspiracy theories allow us to put a face to those forces, to give a name to the most primal fears and deepest anxieties that haunt us. They give us someone to blame.

There’s one other thing it’s worth stating outright before we get too far into the weeds here: sometimes, conspiracy theories are true.

Sure, we can be pretty confident that the Earth is a globe, that the ’chemtrails’ left behind by planes are harmless condensation, not some kind of bioweapon, and that Bill Gates has not been using vaccination programs to turn humanity into his personal slave army. But in 1956, the British and French governments really did secretly coordinate an Israeli invasion of Egypt, so they could march in as peace-keepers and take control of the Suez Canal. The US Department of Defense really did draw up (though didn’t carry out) plans to commit terrorist attacks on US soil as a false flag operation. And the US Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention really did leave several hundred African American men with untreated syphilis for decades while telling them they were healthy, just to see what would happen. You could write a whole other book just on the conspiracies that may once have been dismissed as crazy talk, but turned out to be absolutely real.

Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. They’re just probably not.3

So, if we’re going to understand the role that conspiracy theories play in our societies – how they affect our politics, our culture, and how they can draw our loved ones down obsessive rabbit holes – we need to understand their history. We need to understand where conspiracy theories come from, why people believe them, why they’re more likely to pop up in some circumstances than others, and what it is about our brains that makes us prone to believing them.

In the first part of this book, we’ll dive into the theory behind the theories: what is a conspiracy theory, what are the different types, and why do our brains seem irresistibly attracted to them?

Then we’ll look at the history of conspiracy theories that try to explain specific events – from revolutions to assassinations, from UFOs to pandemics – many of which teeter on the boundary between the implausible and the all-too-plausible.

After that, we’ll look at the theories that expand their scope and, in doing so, become increasingly detached from reality. These are the ones that suggest that our world is not as we know it, that global events have been maliciously engineered, and that everything is controlled by shadowy groups, who may be the Illuminati or possibly aliens. We’ll see how these have developed over history – and confront the possibility that history itself may be a lie.

We’ll finish back in the present day, as we return to look at our modern age of conspiracies – and, finally, we’ll suggest some helpful tips on how to live in a world in which conspiracy theories seem ubiquitous. How can you avoid falling down the rabbit hole yourself? How can you tell the difference between a bullshit theory and an actual conspiracy? And is there any way to fight back?

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There are a lot of conspiracy theories in this book. Sometimes they link up; often they don’t. And the further in we get, the more we’ll find that people have found ways of connecting them all the same. Along the way, we’ll see both how conspiracy theories have helped create the world we live in, and how they often reflect our societies and ourselves back at us. We’ll learn that the Illuminati really did want to change the world in secret, but that this wasn’t as scary as it sounds, and anyway they weren’t very good at it. We’ll see that, sometimes, conspiracies spring from nothing more than the excitement of deciding that everything you know is wrong.

We’ll discover that many of them are weird; some are funny; others are terrifying. And we’ll find that none of us is immune from believing them.

But first, we need to ask: what exactly are they?

To find out, you’ll need to buy the book – from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the Grass Roots Bookstore. or direct from The Experiment. (The original unupdated British version is still available too.) I’ll be back next week with your regular newsletter service.

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That was an excerpt from Unproven, Unlikely, and Firmly Believed: Why We Fall for History’s Most Seductive Conspiracy Theories, and How We Rediscover Reality © 2022, 2026 by Jonn Elledge and Tom Phillips. Available everywhere books are sold.

There are two interpretations of this turn of events doing the rounds. The one most popular among more casual observers is essentially: this is weird. Four of the last 11 summers have seen an internal party coup of some kind; a fifth, a change of government at a general election. Yesterday, a child born on the day of the Brexit referendum would have celebrated their 10th birthday; they will reach the seventh Prime Minister of their lifetime in a matter of weeks. I was older than that, albeit slightly, by the time I reached my second. By the time I hit my seventh I was 38.

So the obvious conclusion is that Brexit made Britain ungovernable. Maybe it’s the way it created a new dividing line that cuts across the two traditional parties. Maybe that it raised a bunch of expectations that no one can actually fulfill. Maybe it’s just that it made us poorer. Whatever it was, though, it was the referendum.

I have some sympathy with this idea – Brexit, and I don’t know if I’ve ever made my views on this clear, was extremely and catastrophically bad. But it was striking that the people most baffled by Britain disposing of yet another prime minister seemed to be either foreign observers, or people who have better things to do than follow British politics.

To those who were following more closely, this turn of events was not baffling at all, because Keir Starmer was extremely bad at being prime minister. He didn’t just struggle to make difficult decisions: he seemed not to understand it was his job, with insiders claiming he would get angry when advisors suggested something involved trade offs and required his judgement. At the same time, he preferred not to talk to MPs unless forced to; he didn’t like ministers to promote their own ideas, but seemed incapable of articulating his own. The result is that there are vast swathes of the state – the higher education system is the one with which I’m most familiar, but I have little doubt there are others – which are in serious active crisis, but on which no one in government has tried to get a grip.

At the same time, he’s repeatedly claimed to be taking personal responsibility while throwing underlings under the bus. He’s made some catastrophic errors in judgement, most notably the appointment of disgraced former minister and Jeffrey Epstein groupie Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, and while such things can too often be survivable it should hardly surprise us when they are not.

Most foolishly of all, from a self-interest point of view, Starmer has presided over a political strategy that meant attacking his voters and their values, in a doomed attempt to impress those on the other side. Those who’ve felt under attack in some way or another during his tenure have included protestors, migrants, refugees, trans people, welfare claimants and the aforementioned universities – all groups either important to left-leaning voters or an actual major provider of them. Politicians are often hated by their enemies. Keir Starmer went out of his way to be hated by his friends, too.

I understand that these granular details of British politics are not visible to observers in, say, Minnesota. But no, it is not strange that a Labour party looking down the barrel of extinction, just two years after a huge election victory, might be open to pitches from other potential leaders. This is not an irrational decision by a party that has lost its mind.

This is the real trend since the referendum. Three of the five Tory prime ministers to have held office since 2016 were forced from office by their own parties1; two of those had behaved in a manner which made clear that they simply should not hold the role. Only May was consumed by the contradictions of the referendum. Brexit was dreadful. But it has not finished a Prime Minister in seven years.

I loathe Brexit. I think it was a huge geopolitical blunder which has weakened our economy and soft power and left us poorer and more vulnerable in an increasingly hostile world. But the question in my mind this week is not whether Brexit has left us ungovernable. It’s why British politics keeps promoting Prime Ministers who are simply unable to do the job. I’m sure Brexit is a factor. But as with the state of the economy, I suspect the rot is deeper than that one, stupid vote.

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A quick commercial message for the North American market

Americans and Canadians! You can currently get 25% off pre-orders of my new book at Barnes & Noble. Apparently premium members can actually get 35% off? That’s a pretty big discount, I’d order it right now if I were you. Click here.

Some notes on the Paris Metro, from the parochial perspective of a Londoner

I have a bad habit, when reading other people’s histories, of seeing them through the lens of my own. Because histories are first and foremost stories, any set of dynastic or national myths you can think of will almost certainly include heroes and villains, some queens seen as snakes and some placed on pedestals, a revered figure who was actually a genocidal monster, a defeat that’s been reframed as a victory. Nerd that I am, I’ve had a lot of fun reading French or American history and exploring the parallels and contrasts. History may not repeat, exactly; but it certainly tends to rhyme.

Something I realised on my recent travels is that I also do this with, er, transport networks. Much of my time in Paris was spent rushing about looking at things and generally being a tourist. But at times I needed to catch my breath; and after realising that if I did that on a train I could see more of Paris, sort of, while also reading and sitting down, much of that breath catching happened on the Metro. This was also, I realised later, how I first explored London back when I was still a baby nerd.

And just as there are rhymes between English and French history, so there are parallels and contrasts with the London Underground and Paris Metro. So. Some thoughts.

Maps, colours and names

The first time I can remember giving any thought to the question of how Parisians got around their city was about a decade before I ever set foot in it. Some time in the late 1980s my uncle David, who collected such things, showed me a map of the Metro, telling me, “The thicker lines are mainline rail.”

I’ve just spent an hour trying to track down that specific map, which is a stupid thing to do because I saw it for five minutes nearly four decades ago, and these days I have to think quite hard to recall what I had for breakfast. The mainline railways David referred to were actually the RER – Réseau Express Régional (regional express network); basically, Crossrail – and there were then just three of them, which means it predates RER D in 1987. Here’s my best guess:

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America, winter, 1966. Nearly four hundred thousand soldiers in Vietnam. Underground bomb tests in the desert. The Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’ at number one.

In his apartment on Riverside Drive, on the cold edge of Manhattan, a downcast, middle-aged writer named Leonard Lewin is agonizing over whether he should just give up and go back to Indianapolis. After years stuck working in his late father’s sugar refinery, he has finally escaped to New York to make a living as a writer. But here he is, deep in middle age, worrying that he is a failure with nothing to say. He wants to be remembered “for good reasons”, but cannot find a big project to sink his teeth into.

Then he gets a call. It’s an old contact, a social sciences professor from back in the Midwest, whom Lewin hasn’t heard from for years. The professor is in New York and wants to meet. Urgently.

Over lunch the next day, in a restaurant in midtown, the professor is on edge; finally, he spills the beans. Just over three years ago, in early August 1963, he was contacted by an anonymous man in Washington, who told him that he’d been chosen to serve on a commission “of the highest importance”. The idea was initiated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and like minds in the Kennedy administration. Its task was “to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive”. Having done so, the “Special Study Group” would have to “draft a program for dealing with this contingency”.

The professor tells Lewin that he felt he had no choice but to sign up. For one thing, the man from Washington seemed to know a troubling amount about his personal life.

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In the mid-1960s, this kind of mind-bogglingly ambitious project is fairly standard. This is the high noon of Cold War think tanks like the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute. The vast expansion of American wealth and power since 1945 means the nation has grave dilemmas to think through, and plenty of money to pay people to do that – but these attempts to answer huge, unfathomable questions with remorseless logic can sometimes produce strange effects on how people think.

Nothing encapsulates the question of what America should do with its military might more sharply than the Bomb. And no one has been thinking this through with more gusto than a man named Herman Kahn, a RAND Corporation physicist-turned-systems-analyst who exploded into American minds in 1960. In a book called On Thermonuclear War, Kahn explained that, approached coolly and rationally, nuclear war was not unthinkable. He’d thought about it, and it could be fought, and won. Even if the bedraggled remnants of America had to survive for a time in bunkers deep underground.

Ever since, Kahn has been denounced as callous. He has been lampooned as a crazed scientist – he was one of the inspirations for Dr Strangelove, the satirical 1964 movie about how the power elite might accidentally let lunatics blow up the world. He has even been compared to the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann. How could any decent person calmly discuss the destruction of tens of millions of their fellow human beings? Kahn defends himself by insisting that someone has to think through the real implications of a nuclear war: would people who accuse him of “icy rationality” prefer “a warm, human error”? Is it not worth trying “to reduce casualties from, say, 100 million to 50 million Americans”? But to many, this is what the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills had condemned as “crackpot realism”. You cannot have a “value-free” discussion about mass killing, and trying to do so just winds up rationalising slaughter, as Vietnam shows.

There is another criticism, too: the ‘unthinkable’ notions Kahn is thinking about are not just intolerable, but unknowable. How can he and his colleagues be ‘realistic’ about how nuclear war might unfold when they have no precedents to draw on? Computer modelling can only take them so far. They have to use their imagination. One way they do so is through ‘war games’: a fusion of computing and theatre, in which generals and officials get to act out high- stakes scenarios. But these are a form of fiction, neater and cleaner than any real crisis.

By 1966, Kahn has left RAND and set up a new think tank – the Hudson Institute, based in Croton-on-Hudson, in upstate New York. And he has expanded his methods beyond nuclear war, hoovering up more and more government contracts. However much he has spooked the public about how those in government think, Kahn’s imaginative capacities are still highly valued by those same people.

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The professor tells Lewin how the Group first met at a resonant location: Iron Mountain, about a hundred miles north of Manhattan. This is one of the vast underground vaults to which members of the power elite – in this case, company executives – will flee in the event of nuclear war. The professor discovered that the Group included an industrialist, scientists, a systems analyst, and a war planner. But most of his new colleagues were, like him, from the social sciences: an economist, a sociologist, a cultural anthropologist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist. Many of these men – they were, of course, all men – had worked with government before. Some were “very well known”. This is the kind of co-opting of supposedly independent experts to which the New Left objects. The radical magazine Ramparts has recently exposed how academics at Michigan State University spent years secretly collaborating with the CIA.

The Group met around once a month for three years, all over the United States, before returning for a final session to Iron Mountain. But when they submitted their final report, it was judged too shocking for public consumption. Like that earlier study by a Senate subcommittee, it has been suppressed.

And that is why the professor has come to see Lewin. He stands by the Study Group’s findings, and after ‘months of agonizing’, he has finally decided that its report must be published, and wants Lewin’s help making that happen. The public has a right to know what is “being done on its behalf “.

When he reads the report, Lewin sees why it has been buried. The Group was charged with following its analysis, without moral or cultural value assumptions, right through to its logical conclusions. And those conclusions leave Lewin horrified. He agrees to try to find a publisher.

Meanwhile, he persuades the professor to record a series of interviews. On the tapes, the professor reveals that the Group’s assessment is that war is “the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies”, allowing for the disposal of surpluses, the generation of demand, the boosting of growth. This is why, when there is news of possible peace, the stock market tends to fall. But the Group’s fundamental insight goes well beyond this. War, it concludes, has a much wider range of uses than all those “disarmament scenarios and reconversion plans” have identified. It is not just economically useful, or strategically necessary: it is “the basic social system”.

The report’s analysis explains a lot of things that seem strange about Cold War America, from the “unnecessary” size and power of the world war industry, to the way military institutions are exempted from normal standards – and why the state sometimes has to effectively invent threats and conflicts. Without war, the Group’s report explains, there is no real basis for national sovereignty. Major military threats are vital for fostering “allegiance to a society and its values”. The need to be ready to resist attack, and the state’s capacity to protect the population, is basic to its “right to rule”, and this – not least in late-1960s America – has domestic applications. As the report has it: “On a day-to-day basis, [state authority] is represented by the institution of police, armed organizations charged expressly with dealing with ‘internal enemies’ in a military manner.”

Military service itself underpins political stability by giving “antisocial elements” a role, especially in periods of upheaval when they might be attracted to fascism. The evidence even suggests that the focus on war allows states to maintain the class system, including the incentives instilled by continuing poverty. And that war keeps the population level under control. On top of all that, it has done much to spur scientific advances. Were war to end, the change would disrupt all these processes and a range of substitute functions would be required.

This, the report warns, will not be straightforward. Diverting spending to healthcare, education, housing, and infrastructure projects would simply not use up enough of the surplus that war currently absorbs. This would actually worsen over time, as the population’s improving health would steadily reduce the costs involved. Converting the army into a “giant military Peace Corps” wouldn’t work. The report maintains that one purpose of war is to stabilize America’s booming economy by ridding it of excess wealth; turning the army into a huge international welfare programme would not achieve that, because the money would find its way back into the normal economy. The space programme might provide a more sustainable alternative drain on excess resources.

Politically, to sustain the public’s acceptance of its leaders’ “political authority”, the threat of nuclear attack would have to be replaced by a similar threat to human survival, such as “massive global environmental pollution”, but this is advancing too slowly – and deliberately accelerating it is unlikely to be “politically acceptable”. It may be necessary to “invent a threat to prevent peace [from] causing social disintegration”. This, however, is not easy. “Experiments have been proposed to test the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat,” but this idea seems unworkable too.

If hundreds of thousands of young men are suddenly released from the armed forces, it could trigger serious disorder. Logically, therefore, the state might instead need to convert the “code of military discipline” into what would effectively be a “sophisticated form of slavery”, adapted to “advanced forms of social organization”, perhaps beginning with the introduction of military service for all. As for alternative ways to channel all that young male aggression, the report notes that “Games theorists have suggested, in other contexts, the development of ‘blood games’” as a method of controlling this. Without the role of war in reducing population levels, it might in theory be beneficial to introduce eugenic artificial insemination.

Much of which might sound crazy, but in the think tank world of game theory and scenario planning, doubtless another such study group has come up with worse. Having followed its logic to all these alarming conclusions, as instructed, the Group concludes that “no program or combination of programs yet proposed for a transition to peace has remotely approached meeting the comprehensive functional requirements of a world without war”. On that basis, “the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until ... we know exactly what it is we plan to put in its place.”

It does not take Lewin long to find a publisher. The Dial Press is upmarket and adventurous, a Third Avenue publisher favoured by radical, taboo-breaking literary superstars like James Baldwin, author of The Fire Next Time, and Norman Mailer, author of Why Are We In Vietnam? In autumn 1967, in its new non-fiction list, Dial announces a volume called Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, with an introduction by Leonard C. Lewin, and waits for the media to respond. Or most of the media. The book has already grabbed the attention – and the spending power – of one of the biggest, brashest, smartest magazines around.

A few blocks uptown and west from Dial’s office, in a skyscraper on Madison Avenue, lies the headquarters of what the Sunday Times calls one of “the world’s great magazines”. In 1967, Esquire rules, and not just for splashing succulent Hollywood colour into a print world full of black and white. Its circulation has topped 1 million; in 1966, its advertising revenue leapt 25%. Esquire’s superstar editor is a man named Harold Hayes – a North Carolina geek sharpened up by military service, Harvard, and years of fighting with colleagues to win the editorship. From his curved-glass corner office, he’s thrown off the caution of the 1950s and now comes at things from surprising, jarring, irreverent new angles. He commissions diagrams charting America’s power networks – which might look like a conspiracist’s pin board if they weren’t so obviously provocative. When the president was shot, he ran a piece called “Kennedy Without Tears”. He sent reporters to follow Marines into battle in Vietnam, and turned the whole cover black, save for a quote in white from a soldier: “Oh my God – we hit a little girl.”

Hayes’ leadership has helped produce something that will come to be called the ‘New Journalism’. An Esquire writer doesn’t hack out a story; he (it’s nearly always he) composes it with the care and flair of a novelist. Not least because that’s what a lot of them are. James Baldwin writes about Norman Mailer; Norman Mailer writes about John F. Kennedy. Tom Wolfe hangs out with Cassius Clay (the future Muhammad Ali). Gay Talese chases Frank Sinatra. Two of Hayes’ staffers have written the year’s totemic movie, transfiguring a sordid old news story about shambolic Depression gangsters into Bonnie and Clyde: an achingly hip, generation-dividing celebration of fighting authority with guns.

Esquire’s December issue is the most important of the year, packed with twice the ads. Given the clunky technology of the day, it has to be done in August. This year, not for the first time, Hayes has a Christmas bomb to set off for his million readers, to shake them up, and to make them think about the impact of war. Alongside a piece by Candice Bergen on the burning of the old order, and an image of film star Sharon Tate seductively eating a pear, Hayes has decided to run what he proclaims “an important piece”: a condensed version of Report from Iron Mountain. Condensed, as in fully 20,000 of the Report’s 28,000 words.

In Washington, meanwhile, rumours of a suppressed report have been coursing through government circles, triggering “a severe case of jitters”. Journalists are picking up talk that it will “soon see the light of day and shock the nation”. One official passes the galley proofs to the next, generating what Newsweek calls “megatons of speculation”. Can this document be real?

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There’s only one way to find out: you’re going to have to buy the book. That’s no hardship: it is one of the best things I read last year, and it concerns, among other things, the military-industrial complex, conspiracy theories, America’s fear of its own power, and the relationship between centrists and radicals. You can buy it from Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles or Bloomsbury Publishing.

Phil Tinline is a journalist and historian. He is also the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares, The Times Politics Book of the Year 2022.

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More thoughts on at least some of those matters in newsletters to come; you wouldn’t want me to rush my long read on Lille’s innovative use of the first fully automated driverless metro now, would you? So instead here’s some fury inspired by something I read on the Eurostar home, a very good but pretty worrying Guardian feature about youth employment, written by reporter Sammy Gecsoyler and published under the headline, “Young, ambitious and out of work”. With apologies to Paul Clapp, director of the digital marketing agency Priority Pixels, who I’m sure is a very nice chap who doesn’t deserve his comments to be dissected as an example Everything That Is Wrong With Britain Today, that is in fact where I’m going with this, sorry:

There are a couple of things here that caused the muscles beneath my right eye to start involuntarily twitching, which I’ve helpfully highlighted so I could complain about them on social media. The lesser of them is the implication that young people should be producing thoughtfully personalised applications for starter jobs offering the generous salary of… £25,000 a year.

Given that most of the piece is actually about how job seekers are now sending out literally hundreds of applications to be greeted by stony silence – and given that, for a 40 hour week, £25,000 a year is now less than minimum wage – this seems ever so slightly tin-eared. Obviously using AI to pump out loads of identical applications is bad. But if employers are going to use AI to read applications – or interview applicants, or take their jobs, which is what most of the piece is about – it seems a little unbalanced to tell young people they can’t also use it when applying.

But of course, “tailor your application to the job you’re applying for” is neither new nor controversial advice, and if Clapp has lost track of exactly where the minimum wage stands these days he’s hardly alone, as the frequency of ads for jobs paying less would attest. So let’s move onto the other thing that annoyed me, where I think I’m on firmer ground. Here’s the offending quote again:

He doesn’t think the education system is setting up young people for the jobs on offer today, especially in his field. “We’ve got two colleges near us and neither of them have ever done a web development apprenticeship, which I just find staggering.”

Is it, though? Is it really staggering that publicly funded educational organisations which happen to be based near your company are not providing specialist training in your field, just so that you can employ one or two young people a year? Is it staggering, indeed, that the education system seems under the impression that perhaps professional training is to some degree a matter for employers?

I shouldn’t pick on this guy in particular, I know. Partly that’s because he took the time to talk to a newspaper about youth unemployment, and didn’t necessarily know the context in which his comments would be presented. But mostly it’s because – and this is why I felt this rant worth writing – these are in no way unusual sentiments. Business lobby groups have been complaining that the British education system doesn’t turn out model employees who they can immediately plug into jobs for about as long as I can remember. These comments are so unexceptional, indeed, that we’ve all stopped interrogating them: in 2019, a survey from the CBI found that 44% of employers felt young people leaving education were not ready for work.

But… why should they be? They’ve not been in work. Businesses once understood that training young workers was something they had to undertake themselves. Now, perhaps because first jobbers are more likely to be 22 than 16, they expect the education system to do the entire job for them. Given that it’s often those very same business owners that talk about the need for a competitive tax system, I have some questions about how exactly they’re imagining we’re funding the training they expect someone else to provide.

The reason this annoyed me enough to inspire the sort of screed I normally reserve for whatever stupid thing the government has done this week is because it provides, I think, two different windows into why everything is currently stuffed. One is that it’s a reminder of why AI – or perhaps the misuse of AI – is going to mess everything up. For all the talk of it being a labour saving technology, there’s a very real danger it’ll just increase our output of entirely pointless content. It’s hard to see how the switch to applications both written and judged by AI will improve your chances of getting a job; it’s extremely easy to see how not applying in volumes you can only do using AI might decrease them. It’s bad enough that employers are replacing human workers with AI, of course, but at least you can envision how somebody there might be winning. This just seems to be making everything worse for everyone.

The other thing this story highlights is entitlement. That’s a word we’re most likely to hear in reference to young people who think the world owes them a living. But it’s entitled of employers, too, to assume the education system owes them perfect employees so they no longer need to offer training themselves. As ever, the idea we might owe something to one another – that our responsibilities towards society at large extend beyond paying the minimum legally permissible tax rate – is simply missing from the debate.

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A personal note

It’s the third anniversary of the worst day of my life. Don’t worry, I’m not going to write about it again, but it felt wrong not to acknowledge the fact. Here’s the essay I wrote about Agnes this time last year.

One of her favourite bits bits, as a proud Leeds graduate in a world of Oxbridge products, was her attempts to wind people up by pretending to have never even heard of Britain’s oldest university (“Oxford? Is that a bit like Cambridge?”). So, in her honour:

The five hundred year grudge

In 1827 University of Oxford decided to review the written rules and regulations which governed life in the city of dreaming spires.1 By then the university was 731 years old, and some of its statutes had stood unchanged for centuries.

That explained the strange thing those reformers encountered when they came to consider the oath that holders of Bachelor of Arts degrees had to swear to become Master of Arts.

The oddity was not, as one might imagine, simply that you could simply mutter a sort of incantation to magically transform your BA into something that sounds like a postgrad degree2, but was something else entirely. Here’s archivist Alice Millea for the Bodleian Library blog:

As well as being required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, privileges, liberties and customs, as you might expect; and not to lecture elsewhere, or resume their bachelor studies after getting their MA, the Bachelors of Arts also had to swear that they would never agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis.

Here’s the full oath, from the Corpus Statutorum (Statute Tit VII section 1):

Magister, tu jurabis quod nunquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis, nec statum Baccalaurei iterum tibi assumes.

Master, you shall swear that you will never consent to the reconciliation of Henry Simeon, nor will you assume again the status of Bachelor.

The shift from “Symeonis” to “Simeonis” isn’t a typo: it’s a mark of the fact this statute had been in place so long it predates standardised spelling.

If you’re feeling shamed by your ignorance of who Henry Symeonis was and what he had done, rest assured that the men running the University of Oxford in 1827 had no more idea than you did. Worse: it soon transpired that no one had known for literally centuries.

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At risk of getting into even more offensive territory, though, I do sometimes wonder if there’s a parallel with other ultimately fulfilling yet frequently agonising projects like – just plucking this out of the air here – books. The writing process for my latest has frequently felt horrible: the concept misconceived, my plans too ambitious, the last page so far away I couldn’t imagine ever reaching it. Now the end is here, though, I find that the finished product might be – and I’m tempting fate by saying this – good. Really. I’m surprised, too.

So I found myself wondering whether this was just what happens every time, and realised with a jolt that I simply didn’t remember. This is my fourth book, it’s looking pretty likely there will be a fifth, and whether because they’re all so different or just because the memory plays tricks I still have very little sense of what writing a book is actually like. The process is like a black box.

While it’s fresh in the memory, then, I thought I’d write it down. I hope it’s interesting but – more than that – I hope someone can tell me it’s normal.

Usually, when writing a non-fiction book, you start with one of the worst parts: the proposal. That generally includes some combination of a detailed plan, a sample chapter and a cover letter describing the book’s argument, audience and tone. Often, you end up doing several drafts of this – a couple until you’re satisfied, a couple more until your agent’s satisfied, then possibly more based on feedback from editors about how to persuade the publishers’ acquisitions meeting to say yes.

This can add up to a vast quantity of effort on a project that may never see the light of day, and as work on spec for no money tends to, it sucks. A decade ago now the proposal for my zero-th book went through about six drafts and a lot of primary research, and actually got quite far with one editor before ultimately being knocked back. This, it turned out, was no bad thing – the final rejection came in May 2016 and, as it turned out, we’d all have other things on our mind soon enough. But it meant I never wrote a wonkish but polemical book about the housing crisis. All that work, with nothing to show for it but life experience.

Today, of course, I can’t really complain, because I’m a – and this is an industry term – privileged little shit. I’ve been with the same publisher since my first actual book: Wildfire, which is an imprint of Headline, which in turn, publishers being like Russian dolls, is a part of Hachette. The team there are lovely and supportive and know me well enough by now that this time I was spared most of that. No sample chapter; no detailed plan; just a fairly open-ended list of potential topics, with some notes on who and what the book was for. Reaching the point in my career at which someone would say yes to a pitch based on a couple of pages of A4 felt like an enormous achievement…

…right up until I sat down to start writing, realised I had no sense of how long a chapter should be or how it should work, and suddenly understood why they make you jump through all those hoops in the first place. Oh. Bum.

Another issue, it turns out, is that you can’t necessarily simply take a format that worked on one topic and port it over to another. The pitch for this one was “47 Borders, but on all the things that make up modern urban life”: instead of the Partition of India or the Schleswig-Holstein question, the topics would be things like sewers or skyscrapers, buses or trains – all the stuff I’ve covered on that website I used to edit or in this very newsletter, only in book form. I’ve been thinking about this stuff for years! How hard can it be?

But there was, as I realised when I sat down to write, a big difference between those two ideas. The borders book came with built-in stories, even if their characters were as likely to be states as people. Starting with a concept, instead of a chunk of history, meant I didn’t have that: I had to go out and find those stories. Each chapter also required a brief history of a technology, from ancient times into the future; some social history, of how it shaped the way we live; plus the usual diversions and jokes and enough footnotes that my editor’s patience visibly wore out. All that meant both that it was a bugger to write, and that the chapters came in longer than expected.1

Which is why, if you’ve been wondering, a book that was announced as 35 inventions will ultimately only have 31. The offcuts will appear here at some point. One already has.

Originally I’d hoped to have a nearly complete draft by the end of 2025. This turned out to be “nearly” in roughly the sense the war in Iran is “nearly” over: those involved like to say it, and everyone else wants to believe it, but deep down we all know it isn’t true. In January, with a dozen chapters left to write and a deadline looming, I found I had to speed up, whether I liked it or not, and gave up all hope of seeing daylight until March. That later slipped, inevitably, to May. Did I have the same panicked rush to the finish with the previous books? I honestly couldn’t tell you. The brain protects itself; the memory cheats.

(My lovely editor Lindsay, incidentally, was entirely relaxed about the fact I came into 2026 with something like 40% of the book still to write. At the time I took this as a vote of confidence. In retrospect, she may just have known I had little choice but to get moving.)

One of the biggest things I didn’t grasp about writing a book until I’d actually done it2 is that there’s never really a moment when you feel you’ve finished – or possibly, if you prefer to be a bit more glass-half-full about it, there are multiple moments at which you can pretend you’re finished, even though you know you aren’t. When you’ve a draft, and have no blank pages left to fill. When you’ve a draft that you’re happy actually showing to someone. When you’ve taken in edits, fixed the problems you decided to ignore until you’d finished writing, taken in more edits, fact checked…

Even as I write, when it really is on some level “finished” – I recently had two whole days without thinking about any of it! – there’s still more left to do. I’m in the middle of the final, post-production read, the one in which you can see it on page, with chapter headings and illustrations and are strongly discouraged from changing anything in a way that might affect the wordcount and thus mess up the pagination. Even once that’s done, there’s marketing to think about, and an audiobook still to record, during which I’ll no doubt notice more things I’d like to change and curse myself that it’s too late… It’s a privilege to write books at all; even more so to have had the support and, let’s be honest, luck that I’ve had. But it’s nonetheless a slog. You never get the release of pressure you get when you take your last exam. It can all feel a bit anticlimactic.

So one moment that I really tried to savour this time was the first full read through of the chapters in the correct order – the first time experiencing it as a book rather than a bunch of essays. In the event, that inevitably became yet another round of edits. The moment of victory was undermined, too, the fact the next job was to deal with a bunch of stuff I’d stuck a pin in, and so I immediately made myself extremely depressed by spending a day thinking about nothing but the parts which didn’t then work.

That first read, though... It’s not quite the book I thought I’d be writing, when I pitched it back in November 2024. But I think it might, in fact, be good - better, possibly, than the thing I’d first imagined when I scribbled out the pitch. At the very least, it won’t bring shame on my ancestors.

And those illustrations include a quite beautiful pencil sketch of my dog Henry Scampi for the introduction, courtesy of my illustrator, Matthew Burne.

Here’s the cover. You can pre-order it, if you want.

Map of the Week: To form a more perfect union

Some years ago now I read a book3 about US politics which repeatedly insisted on confusing the hell out of me. Firstly it referred to Kansas City, Missouri, which baffled me because surely Kansas City would be in Kansas. Then it also started referring to Kansas City, Kansas, which made more sense, and left me assuming it was probably just one of those names – like Lincoln, or Springfield – used by multiple states. But no: as I read on I realised that these two places were, essentially, the same place: one city, with two names and two municipal governments in two different states.

As if that’s not stupid enough, Kansas City, Missouri, turned out to be the bigger of them.

This is quite obviously absurd. What it is not, though, is unusual. Places like Hoboken or Jersey City, that geography suggests should logically be inner suburbs of New York City, are actually outside it in New Jersey, a different state altogether; so is one of the city’s main airports, Newark. TV shows set in New York often include references to “the Tri-state area”, which turns out to not really mean three states, but the bits of those states (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) the city’s urban area sprawls into. Other big cities have their own tri-state areas: Philadelphia sprawls out of Pennsylvania into New Jersey too (south Jersey, not North Jersey, this time), as well as into Delaware. Chicago has suburbs in Wisconsin and Indiana. A good chunk of what logically should be Cincinnati, Ohio actually lies across the Ohio River in Kentucky.

All this is a function of the fact the US set its state boundaries in an age before cars, before even trains, when cities were rather more compact. Putting a state boundary on a big river probably felt like a perfectly sensible thing to do when settlements tended to stay on one side of such things. A couple of centuries later, though, it means that areas which are, in functional economic terms, a single city, have ended up divided into multiple states, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Or is there?

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I spend a lot of time thinking about ancient history in general, and ancient Rome in particular – so in 2024, when the historian Rhiannon Garth Jones asked me if I’d like to read her upcoming book on the legacies of the Roman Empire I leapt at the chance. Then I told anyone foolish enough to come within three feet that they should read it, too.

Tomorrow, All Roads Lead To Rome: Why we think of the Roman Empire daily is published in paperback, which makes this the perfect week to go out and buy your copy. Here’s an extract from the introduction, on how a polity and period can be so fundamental to everything that followed, yet remain so misunderstood.

Next week, I’m taking a much needed week off – but I’ll be sending out a full newsletter (pre-written and thus slightly less news-y than normal) from my holiday1 like some kind of hero.

Here’s Rhiannon.

Ancient Rome was painted, bright and gaudy – so why do we imagine it as white?

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A gleaming pale building rises high into the blue sky, its monumental columns creating an imposing entrance. Above it, an enormous dome emerges, defying gravity. White marble statues of gods, goddesses, and leading politicians serenely gaze on, decorating this austere, impressive space. Men in togas gather, discussing the politics of the day. In the forum below, citizens stop at market stalls and around beautiful fountains sculpted from pale stone.

This, in the popular imagination, is ancient Rome. It is an incredibly powerful image, one that connects much of modern Europe and the USA with a Mediterranean empire that thrived nearly 2,000 years ago. Take away the togas and this could describe a scene today in London, Paris, or Washington DC. Important government buildings, public spaces, and the statues that decorate them are often made in the same style. They might not remind everyone who sees them of Rome but, on some level, we all understand that this is a sign of power and identity.

Except ancient Rome didn’t look like that. Yes, there were columns and domes, statues and fountains, temples and forums. But they weren’t white; they weren’t even pale. We would certainly not describe them as austere or serene. The Romans loved colour – the more, the better. And it wasn’t just paint – they decorated their statues and buildings with gold leaf, sparkling glass, and brightly coloured gemstones. Imagine those serene, ageless faces painted in with heavy eyeliner and cherry-red lips, their clothes in vibrant, colourful patterns. Rome was bedecked, bedazzled, and generally decorated in a way we would now consider gaudy.

This is not something science has only just revealed to us. The evidence has always been available: it is actually visible to the naked eye, even if chemical analysis, infrared, and ultraviolet techniques can help us reconstruct things more precisely. Roman art shows people painting statues, Roman texts describe the colours of buildings and the role of paint. Nor is it just a popular misconception because we have all watched the film Gladiator a few too many times. Many experts will freely admit they can still find it jarring to see ancient Rome in full colour. In the past, some experts have simply refused to believe it.

In 1755, a scholar called Johann Winckelmann arrived in Rome. Over the next 13 years, he would revolutionise archaeology and art history. He was in the right place at the right time. For centuries, artists living on the Italian peninsula had been encouraging a greater appreciation for all things Roman. Hadn’t everything been better and more beautiful when it was ruled from the city of Rome? Shouldn’t their art, recreating the art of that glorious period, be the most prestigious?

As PR campaigns go, it had been extremely successful.2 All over the Italian peninsula – the various Italian-speaking states did not consolidate into one until 1861 – people were digging up ancient Roman antiques for the burgeoning art market. Italian artists were making beautiful paintings and sculptures that ‘revived’ those of Rome, in contrast to the so-called ‘barbarian’ styles across the German-speaking lands.3 Wealthy families were funding architecture, art, and scholarship on incredible scales.

During the previous decades, the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried under the debris from the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, had become part of this mania for all things Roman. Winckelmann was on the scene during the early excavations. One of the key early finds was a statue of the goddess Artemis, a statue on which red paint could clearly be seen on the hair, the sandals, and the strap of her quiver. This paint meant the statue could not be Roman, Winckelmann concluded: Roman statues were white, and so the colour must mean this was a statue from an earlier period, perhaps an Etruscan one.

More excavations revealed incredible painted wall frescoes in both cities, whose vibrant colours had scarcely been touched. There was other evidence that the Romans – along with the ancient Greeks – appreciated colour in their art. It was clear that other powerful ancient cultures, like the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Etruscans, embraced lavish amounts of colour – and, indeed, that they had used huge amounts of resources to achieve such colours.

Winckelmann was undeterred. Colour could make something more appealing, he argued, but it was not beautiful in itself. In fact, he famously argued about sculptures that ‘the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is’.

In the more than 250 years since Winckelmann made his claims, archaeology and art history have developed as major areas of study. There have been regular, significant discoveries of colourful paint on buildings and statues, in Rome and throughout the territories that made up the Roman empire. Scholars are confident that the Artemis Winckelmann saw, with her red hair, shoes, and weaponry, was Roman. The only area of doubt left is just how bright the colours that decorated Rome might have been.

And yet, if you visit a museum exhibition where scholars have reconstructed a Roman statue, using state-of-the-art scientific techniques, it is hard not to flinch. Although some European museums in the late 19th century did paint copies of statues and altars to recreate the possible colour schemes or displayed them in brightly painted spaces, for a combination of reasons, this quickly fell out of fashion and seems to have made little wider impression. Well-meaning, misguided archaeologists have frequently scrubbed the remaining colour off statues to get to the white marble below, believing themselves to be restoring them. This idea of Rome, this interpretation of Rome, is more powerful than what we know to be the reality.

Once you start to look, you can see Rome everywhere in the modern world: in art and architecture, languages and law, politics and philosophy, religion and warfare – even in places incredibly far removed from its Mediterranean territories. Not just in the buildings and statues, not just in the ruins and the foundations of European roads, but in cultural phenomena like Star Wars, tech bro stoics in Silicon Valley, and the counterculture Goths. Rome is so present, that one of the biggest internet trends of 2023 asked ‘Do you think about the Roman empire daily?’

But are we seeing Rome in full colour or are we looking at the ‘restored’ white statues, scrubbed of their paint, their detail, and their meaning?

Rome began in the 8th century BCE, as a small but militarily aggressive kingdom based in a small city on the river Tiber in Italy. It expanded rapidly, becoming a republic that was proud of its opposition to the idea of monarchy but still militarily aggressive. Eventually, it became an empire and military superpower, whose hegemony stretched across the entire Mediterranean basin and beyond.

At different times and in different ways, the things that made up its identity changed: religions, leading families, political systems, military systems, ideals, art, literature, language. This was true at every level of society and in every province. Roman society was obsessed with tradition, with the mos maiorum, the customs of the ancestors – but its idea of tradition changed as its society changed.4

These differences and changes mean that a number of very different interpretations of Rome are possible, depending on your focus. The colour spectrum of possibilities is vast. It should therefore not be surprising that a number of different societies have looked at themselves and seen Rome, or a connection to Rome, with a lot of evidence to support that view. In fact, many of those very different societies have claimed Rome at the same time, each using different pieces of evidence.

It is not just Rome itself that we see and think about every day, but these many different interpretations of Rome. How and why these have developed explains much about the modern world and underpins the different ways we understand each other today. Ideas about Rome have been interpreted and re-interpreted, repackaged and repurposed for different reasons in different times and places throughout history – right up to the present day. The only constant is that Rome has remained important.

Rome, of course, is a place. It is the capital city of modern day Italy, home to millions of people, and beloved by tourists for its architectural marvels and historical charm.

But Rome is also a concept. When Vladimir Putin talks about Moscow as ‘The Third Rome’, we know he isn’t talking about the Italian city. When fundamentalist groups like ISIS declare – war on Rome, we know they don’t mean the Italian city, either.

When Russia and ISIS fight over Roman remains at Palmyra, they are competing over different interpretations of Rome and its legacy. (Likewise, when they ignore the long Christian and Muslim histories of the city, they are only seeing part of the picture of the place and its people.)

The culture war over statues? That has its origins in different interpretations of Rome.

Modern fascism? That, too, has its origins in different interpretations of Rome.

The very concept of Rome is about identity, power, and legitimacy, and for more than 1,500 years, governments, rulers, and religions have been using it to legitimise their power – often in direct competition with each other. Understanding this helps make sense of the so-called present day ‘clash of civilisations’ between both the West and Russia, and the West and Islam. It helps make sense of the current identity crises of the USA, UK, and EU. It helps make sense of the modern world.

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A populist leader believes an election has been stolen from him and encourages his supporters to #CrossTheRubicon, marching on the centre of government to restore the Republic.

In 2021, the attack on Capitol Hill, an attempted coup supporting Donald Trump, failed. In 49 BCE, however, Julius Caesar successfully marched on Rome. His armed forces crossed the river Rubicon, the traditional border of Italy, and he was given the official title of Dictator in the Senate building on Capitoline Hill, the political and religious heart of the Roman Republic.

Donald Trump’s supporters and opponents had been comparing him with Julius Caesar long before the result of the 2020 presidential election. After his loss, however, this claimed connection became more meaningful; it became a different way of conferring legitimacy and moral authority.

Many people, at the time and since, considered Julius Caesar to be a political, military, and literary genius who was beloved by ordinary people and was the last hope of the Roman Republic. He was attacked by inferior political rivals who were jealous of his popularity and success, and who put their own personal ambition before the Republic. They attacked him in the Senate, in the law courts, and in the court of public opinion. You can see why this interpretation might appeal to Trump supporters.5

In fact, in the United States, a claim to the inheritance of Rome is baked into the nation state’s identity. The Founding Fathers consciously modelled the new republic on their interpretation of Republican Rome. The name Capitol Hill is a direct reference to the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the political and religious centre of the city. The neoclassical buildings of Washington DC, all white columns and domed roofs, are modelled on an idea of Roman architecture.

Trump’s opponents believe in the importance of Rome as much as his supporters. The fight is over whose interpretation of Rome is the right one – whose claim is the right one, not whether that claim is meaningful. Rome, after all, is central to the West’s understanding of itself and the United States is the leader of the West. Its right to claim the mantle of Rome is taken for granted.

Except that Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia, has been claiming Rome for himself to legitimise his war against Ukraine, a war many understand as an attack on Western values. At home and abroad, Putin has been leveraging an ideology with its origins in the 14th century, which argues that Moscow represents the Third Rome, the righteous defender of Christian values. According to this ideology, the Orthodox Christianity of Russia claims the moral and religious authority of Rome.

Putin has been supported in this by an archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, another institution that claims to have inherited the authority of Rome, in opposition to Orthodox Christianity.6

While Americans, Russians, and the Roman Catholic Church might not be able to decide which of them has a better claim to Rome, they would probably all agree that the legacy of the superpower that ruled the Mediterranean underpins Christianity more broadly. As a collective, they would probably agree that Christianity and Christian culture have a better claim to Rome than Islam, for example. Islam and Christianity are, so this logic goes, fundamentally different religions that have generated fundamentally different cultures.

However, if you study a map of the Roman empire at any point, its cultural, intellectual, and economic centre ran from modern day Turkey, down the eastern Mediterranean, and back across to Libya. Cities like Leptis Magna in Libya, Timgad in Algeria, Jerash in Jordan, Palmyra in Syria, Baalbek in Lebanon, and Ephesus in Turkey all have stunning Roman ruins.

Most of the Roman emperors between 27 BCE and 476 CE, when we usually say Rome ‘fell’, were born in Italy. But there were also emperors from modern-day Algeria, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Lebanon, Libya, Serbia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. None, funnily enough, were from the North American continent.7

So what gives the United States, a nation state that was formed only around 250 years ago on a completely different continent, a better claim to have inherited Rome more than 15 centuries after it ‘fell’ than some of the countries where actual Roman emperors were born? Who decided this interpretation was definitive?

The last emperor of what we often call Rome didn’t leave a last will and testament, so how do we decide who gets to inherit its authority? If we could ask him, what would he tell us was the most important element of his identity: his language, his army, his religion, his ancestors, his geographical location? And would the people he ruled have agreed or would they have highlighted different elements and customs?

This book considers some of the most important interpretations of Rome throughout history and the ways in which they have frequently competed with each other. In doing so, it reveals the world today more clearly – in a little more colour, if you will.

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If you enjoyed that, you might want to read another guest post Rhi wrote for me last year:

All Roads Lead To Rome: Why we think of the Roman Empire daily is available in paperback this very week. Buy it now from Waterstones, Amazon or Bookshop.org.

I’m being unfair – both to the media, which long ago ceased to refer to these interventions as “rare”, and also to Blair himself. He is, first and foremost, a thinktanker these days, and half the point of think tanks is to release reports that get people talking. On that measure, at least, the Tony Blair Institute must be counted one of the most effective think tanks in the world today.

But that does not mean the advice itself is good. I haven’t read the full thing – again: 5,700 words – but the stuff that’s floated to the top of the coverage like scum on a pond seems, at best, mixed. Blair seems to me correct that Britain is currently negotiating with Europe from a position of diplomatic weakness, and that cuts to things like international aid were one source of that weakness. He makes a reasonable point that raising NI on businesses may have been a drag on growth. And he’s surely right that one of the biggest problems for this government is that it never defined what it was trying to achieve – and that, unless it works that out, there is a very real risk a change of leadership will solve nothing.1

But the other stuff, my god. Blair seems to think it’s a mistake for Wes Streeting to even argue for rejoining the EU, as if actually making the argument isn’t a necessary first step to combating the forces that are the biggest current barrier. He attacked Ed Miliband’s net zero policy, and wants more licences for drilling in the North Sea, even though a drive for renewables will be far quicker to scale and thus more likely to affect energy bills on an electorally helpful timescale.2

Worst of all, he wants an end to all obstacles to AI-related businesses, more welfare cuts and no change to capital gains tax. Those may at first seem unrelated – they certainly do to Blair – but the economic chaos set to be unleashed by the first of is surely one of the main sources of the insecurity driving support for things like the others. Perhaps the 271st industrial revolution, or whatever ordinal we’re up to by now, will unleash previously unknown levels of wealth creation, although citation needed. But if you don’t arrange your political economy to make sure those rewards are shared, they’ll just accrue in the bank accounts of tech bros and their shareholders, most of whom aren’t even on this island. It is unclear how this will benefit Britain, or serve as an election-winning platform.

Blair clearly believes Labour wins from the centre. That was true in 1997; perhaps it’s still true now. But the world has changed a lot in nearly 30 years – this sort of intervention is roughly the equivalent of the late Harold Wilson running interference on Blair’s first term. As many years separated the elections of 1997 and 2024 as separated the former from 1970.

And of all the many changes to have happened since Blair was last at home in Downing Street, there seem to be two in particular he’s missed: that vastly more people are shut out of having any stake in the economy; and that it is no longer clear the US is an ally. Perhaps Blair does engage with these questions, deep into those many thousands of words. But from the answers he’s given to interviewers, generally prefaced with “Look-” I suspect not.

Julian Barnes once wrote that Margaret Thatcher’s view of the world was “relentlessly monocular”: she could see how feted she was in some quarters, but not how loathed in others.3 Blair seems similarly unable to clearly see himself and his position. He understands people are mad about Iraq – his answers there are polished and unwavering, and no interviewer will ever get him to crack. But that he’s ascended to the world of the super rich, where people build wealth through disruptive companies or buy-to-let portfolios, and that this is not the world most of us inhabit or enjoy, continues to elude him. He can’t see how his world differs from ours. The Labour party, he says, has an “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”. Not just the party, I fear.

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It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity

It is, as I write this on Tuesday afternoon, extremely hot in London: 34C, which would be a lot to deal with at the height of summer, and is absolutely terrifying in late May. This is actually the second day running on which the city has seen record temperatures not just for this month, but higher than any ever recorded in June, too. This is, in what it says about a changing climate, really not good.

But it could be – may yet become – worse. The “wet-bulb temperature” – a measure which combines heat with humidity, and thus tells you more about the stress the temperature places on the human body – is a relatively comfortable 19.5C. That is a long way from the point at which the heat becomes truly dangerous. Put like that, it barely even sounds warm!4

Other heatwaves, in areas with hotter climates – this definitely was a heatwave, by the way; the UK has an official definition – have seen wet-bulb temperatures that are both significantly higher and more dangerous. The highest of all seems to have been in Ras Al Khaimah City, UAE in 2010: 36.3C, some way past the point at which it becomes a danger to human life. This, remember, is the combined wet-bulb measure: the actual air temperature was significantly higher.

All of which raises some questions: what is the wet-bulb temperature, why do they call it that, how does any of this work, and, let’s not beat around the bush here, what the hell?

Name first: the reason it’s called “wet-bulb” is extremely literal. Early attempts at “hygrometers” – devices for measuring humidity – involved pouring water into glass receptacles at various temperatures and measuring the rate at which condensation formed. This, though, was always a pretty rough and ready way of doing things – so in 1755, a pair of Scottish chemists, William Cullen and his student Joseph Black, came up with something more accurate, based on the nifty use of two adjacent thermometers. One would be wrapped in a damp muslin sleeve, so that the evaporation of water would reduce the temperature it showed; the other would be left alone. The difference between the readings on these “wet bulb” and “dry bulb” thermometers would offer a measure of the rate at which the air was absorbing water. Because that rate depends on how much water it already contains, it was a measure, in other words, of humidity.

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It is 2019. In the midst of a national crisis Britain is looking forward to a summer wasted on waiting for the governing party membership to have their say.

It is 2022. In the midst of-

And here we are again, just in time for Brexit’s tenth anniversary. I can’t help but feel that holding an election and switching parties would ideally have bought us more than one extra year. Well, they say the fourth time’s the charm!

This is one of those days when it would feel deeply weird for the top section of this newsletter to be about anything other than the state of British politics, but I’m aware that some of you are lucky enough not to be with us here on Airstrip One. Those of you who’ve been trapped in the same news cycle as I have may wish to scroll past the bullet point-ed list; but for those who’ve not been following, here’s a quick precis of everything the last two weeks have brought:

• An existential set of local and devolved elections suggesting that the governing Labour party is on course for extinction;

• A make or, as it turned out, break speech from Prime Minister Keir Starmer in which he claimed to understand people’s frustration without promising to do anything even slightly differently to address it;

• Extensive rumours that health secretary Wes Streeting was about to challenge for Starmer’s job;

• A flurry of low level resignations from the government;

• A flurry of leadership speculation including a brief moment in which it looked like energy secretary Ed Miliband, the Labour leader who lost the last election before everything went to hell, might throw his hat in the ring;

• Former deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner being cleared in a long-standing tax scandal, and thus free to stand, depriving us all of the extremely narratively satisfying Miliband redemption arc1;

• Streeting bottling it;

• Streeting briefing again that he was going to challenge, then simply resigning with no challenge appearing;

• Starmer loyalist Josh Simons resigning from Parliament entirely to clear the way for Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to stand;

• Burnham looking like he was being blocked by the Labour party’s governing body from standing;

• Burnham being cleared by the Labour party’s governing body to stand;

• Streeting saying he was going to challenge Starmer anyway, despite the fact that if he had the votes in parliament to do it, he would clearly have done it already;

• Starmer maintaining he was just getting on with the job, as if none of this was happening; and, inevitably:

• An unedifying war of words about Brexit.

If you write about politics in this country without having to worry about the state of its economy or public services, it’s probably been quite fun! For the rest of us, not so much. What’s more, the months of stasis wrought by those previous summer crises was at least offset, for those of us who wanted rid of the governing Tory party, by the increased chance of a change of government. With Labour in power, and its most likely challenger Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, that is significantly less of a comfort. Between Donald Trump and a looming oil shock, the crisis going ignored is substantially worse, and Britain has less resources to address it, too. None of this is great.

Anyway look, I’ve been thinking about it and: the best outcome here is that Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister as soon as politically possible.

This stance may come as a surprise to some people, not least to Andy Burnham, about whom I’ve often been uncomplimentary. And it’s true he still has some big problems as a candidate. He has rarely shown an aptitude for telling people what they don’t want to hear. He has built his popularity as an outsider, who complains about Westminster, a trick it’ll be impossible to maintain from inside Downing Street. And his politics have shifted with fashion in a manner that seems, let’s say, convenient. As I wrote in the New Statesman in August 2015: “If this was a one off, it might be possible to excuse it, but this air of slipperiness follows Burnham like a bad smell.”

Against that, though, we clearly can’t go on with the status quo. That’s obviously true for a party that, under Starmer’s leadership, is looking down the barrel of electoral extinction. But it’s also true of the rest of us, forced to live in the country whose problems his premiership was failing to address even before he lost the support of a large chunk of his party. Just this morning news broke that, instead of levelling with the country about the looming shortage of oil, the government had decided instead to loosen sanctions on Russia. Keir Starmer, it turns out, will do anything he can to save his premiership, except for actually trying to govern.

This inability to make decisions and refusal to speak out on big issues has not just meant drift from a government that should have been fixing things: it’s left certain groups (trans people, migrants, anyone who cares about the above) terrified, as their rights are either inadequately defended or actively under attack. Starmer has pursued a form of politics that involved empowering one narrow faction of the Labour party while stamping on the entire rest of the progressive movement, on the assumption that this would appeal to swing voters and the progressives would vote Labour anyway.

Well: we now have extensive evidence that being the Labour faction most popular among people that didn’t want a Labour government in the first place is not, in fact, enough. Wes Streeting’s will-he-won’t-he candidacy feels like the ultimate expression of that: he is a leading candidate because the papers have declared him as such; he can’t get into the race because nobody much else wants him to. Whatever the man’s actual view or qualities it’s abundantly clear he has little actual support outside those papers.

The resignation of Josh Simons – a man previously associated with the Starmerite Labour Together think tank – to clear the path for Burnham is unlikely to be without cynicism. But it does point the way towards a progressive politics based on holding Labour’s voting coalition together, not deliberately tearing them apart.

And Andy Burnham is, for the moment at least, genuinely popular. Ditching the guy who’s hated for the one who isn’t – who would beat any other plausible candidate in a head-to-head – feels like a smart move. Even if nothing else changed, and it might not, having a man who is both well-liked and good with people would be a big step up from Starmer.

Burnham has talked about reaching beyond the party to the broader left – there’s cynicism about this from Manchester LibDems I could name, but it is nonetheless the right vibe to aim for, when the key to the next election will be to create a Labour Party which other progressives are happy to put up with to keep out Reform. And there is another reading of Burnham’s weathervane tendencies: that, like Joe Biden in the US, he has tried to remain roughly in the middle of his party, wherever that may be. That may not be enough – you can interpret the Biden parallel both ways – but after two years of a government that attacked its friends to impress its enemies, it must surely be an improvement.

Reports in Politico suggesting his team are working on a first 100-day plan, to address some of the most pressing problems at the very start when his political capital as it its highest. If true – and it chimes with stuff I’ve heard – that too would be an encouraging break with Starmerism. The best time for a prospective prime minister to make such a plan, of course, would have been before the 2024 election. The second best time is now.

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Ideally, I know, we wouldn’t be wasting another summer on a leadership election and stasis in government. Ideally, Starmer would have gotten better at this and such a change would not be necessary. It’s entirely possible that Burnham, too, will be consumed by trying to hold his party together in the face of intractable problems. Perhaps he won’t even get that far: perhaps he’ll lose the Makerfield by-election to Reform and wish he’d kept his powder dry, while the rest of us wonder if there’s even anyone left to play the part of Mark Carney in two years time. Farage may yet be inevitable. Things can always get worse.

But it is abundantly clear that, under Keir Starmer, things will not be getting any better. Britain’s best shot of reviving this government and blocking Reform is for the Labour party to ditch the hated leader who can’t or won’t do the job, and pray the popular one can and will.

Roll the dice.

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Map(s) of the Week: The Shape of Our Cities

A few years ago, LSE’s Urban Age programme produced some fascinating graphics showing the form and population density of some of the world’s most important cities.2 Here are three now:

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He didn’t quit, of course: in that version of events, he was persuaded to stay, and the rest is history. I don’t imagine I’m the only person who, after the last few days, has one or two questions about this rumour.

Let us, though, be generous. Let us imagine that Starmer genuinely is the sort of person who might have considered voluntarily departing a job that most people in his line of work covet.1 Why, after a historically disastrous set of election results, when he’s clearly leading his party towards oblivion – when ministers are quitting and something like a quarter of his parliamentary party is suggesting he do the same – why would he not go?

Being prime minister is in many ways, after all, a horrible job. You get little privacy or personal space, everyone screams at you, and everything is your fault. It is not to suggest that Keir Starmer is in any way good at it, or even a particularly nice guy, to note that the public venom about him now sometimes seems out of proportion to anything the man himself has done. The Prime Minister clearly lacks either an animating mission to remake the country, or a love of the limelight. Why does he want to put himself through it?

One explanation, obviously, is ego. It’s not even two years since he led Labour to a huge majority. Going now would mean accepting the first line of his own obituary would be, forever more, embarrassing.

But there’s another version of events which, even if not true, I can imagine he may have convinced himself to be so: that the dutiful path is to stay put. A leadership election, after all, will mean several months of distraction in the middle of an international crisis, during which nothing much else will get done. It will communicate to the world, and to the bond markets, that it wasn’t just the Tories: that Britain is now ungovernable. That is, I would suggest, incomplete – it implies that Britain is being properly governed now which, citation needed – but nonetheless I can imagine it being something that Starmer tells himself

If so, it’s more than a touch reminiscent of another failed prime minister, whose motive, we were often told, was duty. Theresa May, too, seemed to conflate what was best for Britain with the form of party management most likely to keep her in her job. She, too, had a habit of getting the lectern out to give major speeches at which she changed literally nothing at all. It didn’t go well, obviously – but when Starmer says he gets it, and that he takes full responsibility for disastrous midterm election results, before changing even a single measly thing, it’s hard not to spot the rhyme.

There are echoes, too, of other failed prime ministers these last few years. Rishi Sunak, too, was a very smart guy who’d succeeded all his life and thus didn’t understand he might not be good at this, or quite how out of touch he was. Liz Truss, too, upset the bond markets.

Most damning, though, are surely the echoes of Boris Johnson – a man whose cavalier attitude to the responsibilities of government seemed to inspire genuine fury from his opposite number across the despatch box. Keir Starmer, it was always clear, would not be treating the opportunity to govern Britain as a jolly jape. And yet, it turned out, both men were touched by scandals that were genuinely infuriating yet oddly grubby. Both had a habit of throwing underlings under the bus, and then seeming baffled that they might take it personally. Neither wanted to do large chunks of their own job, and made no effort whatsoever to disguise the fact.

And both, as it all fell apart, seemed desperate to remain in post but utterly unable to articulate a single reason beyond wanting it.

Maybe he goes. Maybe he doesn’t. Predictions are a mug’s game; perhaps by the time this hits your inbox it’ll all be over, and we’ll be on course for our seventh prime minister in under a decade. But based on everything I know about both Britain and the Labour party I suspect it’ll be more drawn out than that. We’ll get the outcome that satisfies nobody: the Starmer premiership fatally wounded but still in place, limping on but unable to govern.

The only small consolation is that it’s not as if it was doing anything like enough governing anyway.

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Some unwritten rules of English

No, not the English: what follows is not a load of nonsense about warm beer, coded insults and queuing. English. The language.

Nearly a decade ago now, a BBC journalist went viral with a paragraph from someone else’s book, which seems faintly unsporting but reach is reach. The journalist was BBC Culture editor Matthew Anderson, the book was Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, and the paragraph concerned the order into which we automatically sort adjectives. Here it is now:

One reason it went viral is surely that “you’ll sound like a maniac” is the perfect level of exaggeration to maximise impact (the guy who wrote a book about eloquence, unsurprisingly, pretty good at writing). But a lot of it is that “here’s something you didn’t know you know” is even more shareable than “everything you knew is wrong”: people will go looking for exceptions, be unable to find them, and then post their amazement at discovering that yes, this previously unexpected thing someone just told them was true is true.

And, for the most part, the adjective order rule (it doesn’t seem to have a better name) does hold true. You can have “a big red plastic ball” (size, colour, material), but not “a plastic red big ball” (ew). A “lovely square cooking pot” (opinion, age, shape, purpose) is fine; a “cooking lovely square” one does, indeed, make you sound like a maniac.

But – and far be it from me to question a paragraph which attained a level of impact I can only dream of – I do think Forsyth’s version might be, at least, incomplete. It contains eight different types of adjective:

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And on Thursday, my publisher Wildfire unveiled the cover using this delightful little Instagram reel. The piano music! The animation! How lovely.

The book would, of course, look perfect on your shelf next to your much loved copy of A History of the World in 47 Borders, to which it is a conceptual, if not actual sequel.1 And pre-orders really help with later visibility, so if you did feel moved to order now I would appreciate it very much. Here’s a LinkTree of places where you can buy it.

I can’t stand the idea of clogging up your inboxes with something that’s just advertising, though. So since you’ve been good enough to sit through all that, here are two bits from deep in the archive which fed into different chapters. In a second I’ll tell you about the unexpectedly complicated origins of the term “parkway”. First though, a mystery for the ages.

Why do buses come in threes?

The idea that you wait ages for one bus, then three come along at once, sounds like a cliche of the “you’re more likely to spill things if you’re wearing a white shirt” variety. Sure, it probably feels like that, just as it feels like that delivery you’ve been waiting three days for will always finally appear the literal moment you finally pop to the shop. But it’s not really true: it’s just an expression of sod’s law, right?

Wrong. Not only is the bus thing true, it’s mathematically inevitable. “Bus bunching” is a real and intractable problem which transport planners have spent an enormous amount of time trying to overcome.

Here’s why. Imagine an extremely simple bus system: two buses, covering the same circular route. (Because most buses run A to B then back to A again, even linear routes can be considered loops, but an actual circle is much easier to visualise.) It takes an average of, say, 10 seconds to stop and restart a bus, plus five seconds for each passenger to board or alight: so to set down four passengers and pick up four more means that the bus has to stop for 50 seconds. The exact numbers don’t really matter: the point is that, the busier a stop, the longer a bus has to stop for.

In an ideal world, you’d start your two buses on opposite sides of their circle, and they’d stay there, equally spaced. We do not live in that world. Sooner or later, something is going to happen – traffic, an accident, a passenger who needs more time getting onto the bus – to slow one of the buses down.

Think what happens then: the stops ahead of that slower bus will have been waiting longer for service, so are statistically likely to have more passengers waiting, no doubt glancing at their watches and tutting while they do so. That means that instead of needing to stop for 50 seconds, the bus needs to stop for, say, 60. That delays it further; so as the bus continues around its route, the queues at the stops ahead of it get longer and longer, and its progress gets slower and slower.

The other bus, though, is now arriving at stops that have seen a bus slightly more recently than they normally would. These have fewer passengers waiting, so its stop time reduces slightly. That speeds it up further, so as the bus continues around its route, the queues at the stops ahead of it get shorter and shorter and its progress gets faster and faster.

Wait long enough, and eventually, the faster bus behind will catch up with the slower bus in front. All because of one very tiny delay.

There are two reasons why this process is so insidious. One is that the thing that can cause the equilibrium to break could be “slightly different numbers of passengers waiting at different stops”, which out in the real world is pretty much a certainty.

The other is that it’s a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Passenger numbers at a stop increase with the time since the last bus; boarding time increases with passenger numbers; and the time since the last bus increases with boarding time. Even the slightest of delays can set off this loop, which means the first, slower bus finds it’s picking up more passengers, while the second, faster one finds it’s picking up fewer. And so, the gap between them begins to shrink.

The screenshots I’ve been using, by the way, are from this game, designed by Lewis Lehe, while he was a postgrad working on a PhD in transport engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, as a way of demonstrating the problem. You can have a play with it if you want to see it for yourself.

What is to be done? One partial solution discussed on the Transport Notes blog is “stop consolidation”: reducing the number of stops, to even out passenger flows. After all, it takes longer, per capita, to stop for one passenger than to stop for five. The problem with this logic is that, if you followed it to its conclusion, you’d do away with stops and passengers altogether: since bus companies are meant to run for the convenience of passengers, not the other way around, “stop consolidation” seems of limited value.

So back in the real world, most transport companies deal with bus bunching in one of two ways. Either they run buses to timetables, rather than letting them simply drive on whenever possible; or they hold them back, to regulate the gaps in the service. If you’ve ever wondered why the bus you’re on was just sitting there when it had a perfectly clear road ahead, the need to prevent bus bunching was almost certainly the reason why.

As to why buses come in threes, and not fours or nines, I’ve not been able to find a mathematical explanation. My suspicion is that this is just as bunched as most transport companies will allow a system to get, before they take action.

I don’t think you can blame the laws of physics for your tendency to spill spaghetti on yourself while wearing a white top, by the way. That’s just because you’re a klutz.

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The parkway paradox

There’s an entire genre of articles about words that mean radically different things in British and American English: the verb “to table”, for example, which means “open for discussion” in the former, and “shut the hell up about” in the later; or “homely”, which means “cosy and comforting” in Britain, and “the ugliest damn thing you ever saw” in America.

I have a couple of issues with such pieces. One is that, as with one of my favourite genres of clickbait, “Explaining Eurovision to Americans”, I suspect these are far more interesting to the side of the divide that isn’t currently the cultural hegemon, because honestly what proportion of Americans actually care what the rest of the world has to say for itself? The other is that they tend to quickly run out of steam and start reaching for words like “biscuits” which have differing but not diametrically opposite meanings, and thus have vastly less potential for heart-warming misunderstandings in romcoms.

So I will not be attempting such a list here. I will, however, be offering a new example of such a word, that I don’t think has received enough discussion: “parkway”. In the UK, it’s a word you’re most likely to come across on the rail network, where the word suggests a station that’s probably quite inconveniently located for wherever it is you’re trying to get to. In the US, though, it tends to attach to actual roads, probably surprisingly, given we are talking about roads, pretty ones. What on earth is going on?

Perhaps unexpectedly for a question about the English language, this is one of those where the British have actually messed up an Americanism, and not the other way around. The word first emerged in Brooklyn, of all places, in the late 19th century, where they were attached to new roads designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects who designed Central Park. Eastern and Ocean Parkways were to be wide, landscaped streets which separated different types of traffic, and with areas shaded by trees, roads as useful as social venues as transportation arteries. In essence, a parkway was a sort of American equivalent of the word “boulevard”, intended to sell still independent Brooklyn as a peaceful and airy sort of place in contrast to the dirt and chaos of New York City.

Other of Olmstead and Vaux’s parkways went further – in Buffalo, New York, they designed an entire system of parkways, with tree-lined areas between the traffic both providing a green route to the park, and acting as tiny parks in their own right – but with the arrival of the car the meaning of the word began to shift. By the early 20th century, it had come to mean a scenic route which people might drive for pleasure: it was still a road for recreation, yes; but the form that recreation might take had changed.

These are the parkways you’re most likely to encounter in the US today. Some, like Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, still justify the name by being prettier than the average interstate. If others just seem like roads, and not especially scenic ones at that, that’s often because, with the growth of suburbia, the city sprawled around them and no one thought to change the name.

In the mid 1960s, on the other side of the Atlantic, British Rail decided to build a new station, on the site of what had been Stoke Gifford Marshalling Yard. The station, on the main line from London to South Wales, would both serve the growing suburbs of North Bristol, and act as a “Park and ride” facility for those driving to the station. BR gave the new station a name sometimes used for the planned M32, which linked central Bristol to the M4, and which took its name from similar roads in the US: Bristol Parkway.

Thirteen years after that new station opened in 1972, British Rail decided to rename another, 70 miles up the line. The decision to change the name of Didcot to Didcot Parkway reflected the fact it now had a massive car park and thus, like Bristol Parkway, wasn’t merely of use to locals but to those from further afield. Someone, somewhere, had got confused and didn’t realise that the “parkway” in “Bristol Parkway” had come not from a specific road: they thought it meant “park and ride”.

And that meaning of the word has stuck. Warwick Parkway, East Midlands Parkway, Luton Airport Parkway... All were either built some way from the place they’re ostensibly meant to serve, or were renamed to reflect their use as park and ride facilities. All of them seem, by their very existence, to be ignorant of the way that the “parkway” in Bristol Parkway referred to a road, not a function – or, come to that, that parkways were ever a type of road in the first place.

And that is how British and American English ended up with so radically different meanings of the word “parkway”.

…

I only did this because it’s about transport. Please don’t ask me about “pants”.

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If you are interested in those sorts of things, you really should order 31 Inventions That Built Our World. Again, look how lovely the cover is:

Alternatively, you can always

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This is Walker, a white working class suburb of exactly the sort half the British press is constantly ventriloquising, and a bunch of local Green party members are gathered around a woman with a clipboard. Henry Scampi and I have accepted an invite to come to watch them campaign for a couple of hours, and one of us – I won’t say which – has taken to crying hysterically whenever anyone leaves the group to knock on a door. This, they are doing rather a lot. On the clipboard, every voter in the area is listed with a number by their name: 1 for those all but certain to vote Green, 5 for those all but certain not to. A couple of weeks out from election day, they’re focusing on the 3s and 4s.

Walker, like ex-industrial suburbs the nation over, might well go Reform: in some households, the campaigners have found husband and wife are split between Farage and the Greens. That’s no surprise: like places all over the Red Wall, or like the east London/Essex suburb Dagenham near where I grew up, this was an area dominated by a single industry, with an entire social world of trade unionism and working men’s clubs attached. The decline of that model of work has – like the decline of everything from churches to pubs – meant atomisation. It’s also meant a growing gulf from a Labour party that once ran through the place like a stick of rock.

The thing that most struck me about Walker, though, was not actually the hostility to progressive values which the right-wing press like to talk up. Nor was it the flags, of which there were surprisingly few (often the work, I’m told, of “one bellend”). The thing that struck me was how friendly it felt to an insurgent left wing party. No one seems inconvenienced to see the campaigners; when one of the team complains that, without cafes or pubs, there’s nowhere to pop into the loo, a woman who overhears invites them in. One voter, heartbreakingly, tells them his wife has died since their last visit, but the Greens can still count on his vote. “None of us are gonna be sad when the campaign’s over,” says Pete Mitchell, the writer behind the book Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves and a candidate in nearby Lemington, who’d invited me along. “But I am gonna miss chatting to people on the doorstep.”1

Several of those on the campaign trail are ex Labour members, with all the anger towards Keir Starmer that implies. But a big reason they are focusing on this ward, beyond the obvious fact that they might just win, is something else that’s been missing from much of the coverage: they think they might help stop Reform.

That goes double for the candidate whose name is most prominent on the leaflet, so as to make clear that he is the candidate. Matt Williams is a mental health worker, who works in a local GP surgery and gives talks in nearby schools. For months now, he’s been out litter picking. He recently got a burned out caravan removed by bothering to ring the council – a lot.

And after months of this stuff, he seems to know everyone in the area. More than once, during the course of our time together, people approach him to buttonhole him like he’s already their councillor.

I don’t want to overstate my case here. I was in Walker all of three hours and spoke mainly to activists. There are many people, in many parties, doing this kind of work all the time, and there’s a danger of my seeming like I, a professional opinion haver, have just discovered the existence of these strange things named voters and campaigns. I know all this.

But – what the hell – I found all this oddly inspirational. That’s partly because, even though Williams has not been elected yet, he’s doing exactly what you want from local politicians: the thankless work of getting out there and listening to people and finding out what he can do to help. It puts the many of us whose engagement with politics consists of spouting opinions onto the internet to shame.

The big reason I found seeing all this up close inspirational, though, is because it was a reminder that the future isn’t written. Yes, places like Walker – left behind by the economy, ignored or ventriloquised by Westminster, which once had industries and social clubs and now have some houses and not enough good jobs – may be tempted to vote for whichever party offers them the best scapegoat for their problems. But that isn’t inevitable. Perhaps, if someone gets out there and shows what progressive politics can do for them, there might still be another way.

At the very least it beats just assuming that the only thing anyone cares about is who can can be nastiest towards immigrants.

Plenty of Labour activists know all this already, I know. It’d just be nice if someone, somehow, got it through to the leadership.2

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Some notes on bank holidays

“Why is this a bank holiday anyway?” someone asked me on Monday, in roughly the way you’d address a question to ChatGPT if it complained a lot more and never shut up about its dog. And yet, despite this vote of confidence in my ability to Somehow Know Stuff, I found I had no idea. May Day? Worker’s rights? Nope, nothing.

Still, what’s the point of having a newsletter that can cover literally anything if I’m not going to use these rabbit holes to my advantage, so: let’s find out.

Why are they called bank holidays?

Because the bank closes. Duh.

Actually it used to do this rather a lot – until 1830, the Bank of England closed roughly 40 times a year for saints’ days – but this was not as cool as it sounds as most workers didn’t get the day off and even if they did they almost certainly didn’t get paid.

That changed in 1871, in large part because of the work of one man. In the course of a long and varied life, John Lubbock was variously:

• A young visitor to Down House, where he befriended Charles Darwin and assisted in his work on barnacles;

• The academic who helped establish archaeology as a scientific discipline, and coined the terms “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic”;

• The founder of the Proportional Representation League, which later evolved into the Electoral Reform Society;

• Vice-chancellor of London University, a Liberal MP, chairman of the London County Council, president of the London Chamber of Commerce and a trustee to the British Museum;

• The guy who originated the idea that Britain’s heritage deserved protection, and thus the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882.

The matter that concerns us today though – don’t start feeling inadequate and drift off into a reverie about how you still haven’t finished that thing you meant to do, stay with me – is his other world changing bit of legislation. The Bank Holidays Act 1871 established four or five new holidays – more on that indeterminacy in a second – on which…

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In under 48 hours, though, 31 Inventions That Built Our World has to go to the copy editor – “No, Jonn, we’re really not joking this time,” apparently – so this week it just isn’t happening, sorry. However! Obsessive Elledge-watchers may have noticed that the title of the book has changed, and the number of inventions therein dropped.

So today, you’re getting one of the four chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor. This one – it’s about the LA streetcar network, and the whether or not it died at the hands of a motor industry conspiracy – was an artefact of an earlier structure. And while I really love some of the material in it (Rail tycoon nepo babies! Bob Hoskins! Aunt-cest!) it just didn’t fit the final book. Stay tuned for more such goodies as publication day approaches.

Oh – and thanks to those of you who came to see me talk borders in a Milton Keynes shopping centre last week, despite it being the first proper sunny Friday evening of the year. I get a genuine kick out of both travelling around the country and talking about myself – shocking, I know – so stay tuned for more of those as the year goes on, too.

Right, back to this manuscript. I’ll see you on the other side.

The Life and Death of the Streetcar City

In Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 comic-fantasy movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the villainous Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) plots to tear down Toontown, the animated district of Los Angeles where all the cartoons (“toons”) live. In its place, he plans a new world of gas stations, car dealerships, cheap diners and motels, all surrounding the slip roads to an entirely new type of road. “A freeway – eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena!” he brags. “Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.”

The hero, depressed alcoholic private detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), is cynical. “Come on. Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.”

“Oh, they’ll drive,” replies Doom, who – twist! – represents a bunch of automotive industry interests. “They’ll have to. You see – I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it!” Who Framed Roger Rabbit is surely the only film Disney ever released about an evil plan to replace lovely public transport with horrible big roads.

Everyone knows LA is a place where you can’t survive without a car: an endless sprawling suburb the size of a large English county, choked in the smog spewing from the traffic on its freeways. To some it’s a paradise; to others, a by-word for everything that can go wrong with a city when car culture gets out of control.

Something that everyone doesn’t know, but that many people who like to start sentences with “well actually” do, is that LA once had one of the most extensive urban streetcar networks in the whole of America. In fact it had two, each known by the name of their distinctive paintwork. In and around Downtown LA, the 642-mile Los Angeles Railway, operated the Yellow Cars; the 1,100-mile Pacific Electric, which connected the city to surrounding areas and operated more like a commuter railway, ran the Red Cars. In their peak year, 1924, the two networks served an incredible 350 million riders a year. 1“Who needs a car in LA?” asks Eddie Valiant, as he jumps aboard a streetcar, “We’ve got the best public transportation system in the world!”

How did the streetcar paradise end up a car-clogged hell? No one believes that LA was ever home to some strangely-sexy living cartoons2 – but the other part of Roger Rabbit, the notion that evil car companies shut down the streetcars for their own financial reasons, is still often assumed to be accurate. It’s not entirely untrue. But it is, alas, mostly untrue. For those who like public transport, and dislike cars, the real story of what happened to Los Angeles is a little more complex and far, far more depressing.

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Isa recently launched Broad History, to tell forgotten stories from women’s history: what follows is one of them.1 If you like it, you can, and should, sign up to her mailing list here.

It started with a seemingly innocuous assumption, an easily made logical leap. For a rather long time, archaeologists who found burial sites with weapons or hunting gear inside would label the remains as male.

It was, in the absence of other clues, an educated guess of sorts. Skeletons left in the ground for millennia were simply too damaged for forensic science to tell us much at first. Often there weren’t even bone fragments, only objects. To scientists living in a world where fighting and hunting were overwhelmingly male activities, it made sense. But as research technologies progress, we are learning how wrong we’ve been. Maybe our educated guesses were simply a failure of imagination.

In 2018 in the highlands of Peru, archaeologists found the remains of a person they dubbed Wilamaya Patjxa individual 6. “WMP6” died around 9,000 years ago between the ages of 17 and 19 and was buried with a 24-piece big game hunting kit. An analysis of WMPG’s femur and the peptides in her teeth determined her to be a woman.

The researchers took this opportunity to review the remains of other Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunters found in the Americas. (Roughly, that’s early modern humans until about 8,000 years ago.) Of the 27 skeletons of which the biological sex could be determined, 11 were women. The authors concluded with good statistical confidence that participation in Stone Age big game hunting was gender-neutral, or near enough – more so than previously thought and more so than in contemporary societies. When you picture Stone Age hunters chasing wooly mammoths or vicuña, do you see 40% of them as women?

“Man the Hunter” and the limits on our imagination

The “Man the Hunter” myth took hold in the early 20th century on the back of a few fossil finds in Africa and posited that hunting was the seminal trait that took us from apes to modern humans. You heard it in school: standing tall freed men’s hands for weapons and allowed them to peer over the top of tall grasses to spot preys and predators. That shifted the human body’s centre of gravity, enabling the development of a larger cranium and therefore brain, moving us to the top of the food chain and to dominion over nature. All because we wanted meat.

The theory assumed a strict gender specialisation in early human societies – prehistoric men hunting and warring, prehistoric women waiting at the cave with the children, gathering plants and preparing hides... It appealed to a definition of virility rooted in strength and violence, to a mental model of the nuclear family as “natural” and to gender roles shaped in the Victorian era. It was a lot of storytelling wrapped around a tiny bit of research.

It’s with that model in mind that early archeologists and anthropologists labeled burial sites. They started questioning it as early as the 1960s, though: it likely both overplayed the role of hunting in human societies and underplayed the role of women in it. Current research shows the division of labour wasn’t nearly as neat before the introduction of agriculture. Women’s physiological advantage for endurance could be an asset for stalking prey to exhaustion. Gathering likely provided most of the calories anyway, but where collective hunting was required, small communities could not do without half their able-bodied individuals. Communal childcare freed up young women for the hunt. Evolution gave human societies a rare gift – the menopause. It spared experienced women from the deadly gamble of childbirth and allowed them to transfer their knowledge to younger generations. It gave us grandmothers.

How sexist is anthropology anyway?

How much “Man the Hunter” endures and impacts current research is itself a matter of debate among anthropologists. They also disagree on how much women hunt in present-day hunter-gatherer societies and what that can tell us about our distant past. Don’t look for consensus where the forward edges of research meet contemporary politics. If you want both sides, I found these two articles in The Conversation enlightening:

• Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock, who conducted the research on women’s physiological advantage for the hunt, write that “the idea of ‘Man the Hunter’ runs deep within anthropology” and that they are often “accused of rewriting the past to fulfil a politically correct, woke agenda” despite bringing plenty of evidence as biological anthropologists.

• Vivek V. Venkataraman says “the theory died a well-deserved death decades ago” and is irrelevant. Of course, women were and are capable of hunting, but gender specialisation was and still is the norm, he argues.

My aim is not to replace an outdated theory, which imposed Victorian gender roles on prehistoric societies, with a different kind of anachronism, which would make out the Stone Age to be some kind of feminist utopia. I only aim to show how our own context can limit our understanding. If only men wield weapons, then all tombs with weapons are male. If only men are ever found interred with weapons, then it’s unlikely women ever wielded them. We only see what we can imagine, and we only imagine some version of what we’ve seen. It takes a lot of unlearning to learn history.

When assumptions become convictions

New research will continue to prove us wrong; that is the way of science. The 2,600-year-old mummy of a teenage Scythian warrior, found in Southern Siberia in 1988, was assumed male because it was found with a bow, a quiver of arrows and an axe. She was determined to be a girl in 2020. A Bronze age tomb (circa 1,900BC) found just this January in Normandy (sorry, link in French) is being presented all over the media as a male warlord’s. The only clues are 27 decorative arrow heads and two knives.

Even when scientists are willing to update their operating system, the general public is much slower to catch up. As one commenter pointed out when I first published this piece, the American biologist who popularised the concept of the alpha wolf, David Merle, has spent the last 27 years screaming from the rooftop that he was wrong. The theory has now been debunked nearly as long as it ever was in circulation. No one’s listening. Some theories are just too seductive.

Problems arise when what should be a loosely held assumption becomes a politically charged conviction.

The “Birka warrior” is one of the most exceptional Viking tombs ever found. Excavated in 1878 in Birka, Sweden, tomb Bj 581 contained an adult skeleton, probably originally buried in a sitting position, with a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, a full set of gaming pieces and, stunningly, two horses, a mare and a stallion laid at the individual’s feet. This is the full kit of a professional warrior. The grave dominated the burial site and was marked by a large boulder visible from afar. Based on the grave goods and location, this 10th-century individual was understood to be a high-ranking officer with a mind for tactics and strategy and was labeled male.

You know where this is going. A first osteological analysis in the 1970s determined the body to be female, but it was not taken seriously. The slender bones were again determined to be female in 2014, before a genome analysis confirmed it in 2017. The Birka warrior was a woman.

While some female Norse soldiers had been found before, she was the first high-status female warrior ever identified. Or was she? The second it was suggested Bj 581 was a woman, every conclusion drawn about her when she was thought to be a man was questioned.

Maybe the grave goods were heirlooms or an homage to her family, and not about her. Maybe there had been another, male body in the tomb, and it had been removed while hers and the horses’ were left undisturbed. Maybe the 19th-century excavation had mislabeled samples. Maybe while chromosomally female, the individual had been intersex or had lived as a transgender man. Anything rather than imagine a woman may have led armies.

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“The iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”

The study’s authors were prudent and were taken aback by the criticism and online abuse they were subjected to. (Frankly, the strength of people’s feelings about the Vikings is upsetting and more than a little suspicious. You should have seen the comments when I posted about this on Tiktok.)

The researchers did not write that soldiering was a gender-neutral activity in Norse society, only that the simplest explanation of the evidence before us is that Bj 581 was a woman and a high-status warrior, and that some women did manage to succeed in male-dominated fields. Fine, the authors added, be skeptical... but ask yourself why only now:

“Since [the site] was excavated in the 1870s, it has constantly been interpreted as a warrior grave because it looks like a warrior grave and it’s placed by the garrison and by the hillfort. Nobody’s ever contested it until the skeleton proved to be female, and then it was not a valid interpretation anymore.”

- Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, main author of the Bj 581 study

What we assume with ease when it comes to men’s history, we concede with reluctance when it comes to women’s. This would all be academic debate if certain forces in the world weren’t wedded to a naturalistic and deterministic view of history, regardless of its scientific validity.

Stephen Miller, perhaps the most ideologically driven man in the Trump administration, told us: “We live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The emphasis is mine, on a part of the quote that is often omitted. In this world view, laws or values matter little. Change is neither desirable nor possible. Something universal and immutable in human nature commands. “It was always thus” is justification enough.

Any proof that it wasn’t always thus, any scientific research that complicates the human story, is a challenge to their power. The idea that human flexibility – not human nature – rules is a threat. Whether prehistoric women hunted should be immaterial to the fate of 21st-century women. It isn’t.

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If you enjoyed that, you can subscribe to Isabelle’s Broad History newsletter here. And here’s another link to her women’s history guided tour of London’s Suffragette Line.

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I have neither the philosophy nor the theology to be anything other than hazy on all this, but Keir Starmer, I am coming to suspect, is significantly hazier still: that it’s simply not occurred to him that Keir Starmer the Prime Minister is more than just the sum of the actions of Keir Starmer the man. We expect the head of a government – a party, a business, a team – to be more than themselves, but a representative of the body they run, the power they can exert, the things that are done in their name. Witness the way we attribute actions taken by people whose names we may never know to “the department” or “the palace”. Donald Trump probably doesn’t know or grasp many of the things being done by the “Trump administration”. No one in their right mind thinks that should get him off the hook.

Keir Starmer’s actions this week suggest that he might think it should. Olly Robbins, until late last week head civil servant in Britain’s foreign office and the latest designated can carrier, said Peter Mandelson’s ambassadorship was approved in spite of his failed vetting under pressure from “Downing Street”. Starmer has said, repeatedly, that he’s furious at any such suggestion: he, a good man, believes he exerted no such pressure.

Possibly the Prime Minister is lying, in which case, game over. More likely, I think, is that he just doesn’t grasp that “Downing Street” can be both him and not him. He may never have instructed underlings to do something; it was still done in his name nonetheless. The pressure came not from Starmer natural, but from Starmer politic. That does not mean it did not involve Keir Starmer.

If the two bodies theory helps explain how he got into this mess, it may also explain how he can’t get out. To shore up his position, with the media gunning for him and every other party leader demanding his head, Starmer needs his party to do more than sullenly accept this is not the time for a leadership contest: he needs outriders willing to make his case. A leader’s authority, like their actions, extends beyond themselves: Boris Johnson’s premiership finally collapsed, after all, when MPs got sick of being sent out to say things to journalists which it would turn out, within hours, were untrue.

It is not clear, to put it mildly, that Starmer has any such extended self any longer, if he ever did. There’s actual footage of the moment Ed Miliband seems to have decided not to burn his own credibility here. Or consider these lines, from a “Labour insider” in Politico on Monday (“Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth”) or backbencher Sarah Champion (”I’ll be honest with you people don’t like Keir on the door but it’s not over this Mandelson thing. They don’t like him personally”). These are not the words of a party prepared to man the barricades for their beloved leader. They are also an entirely predictable outcome of a strategy of declining to charm MPs and repeatedly throwing underlings under the bus.

And as with Westminster, so with the country. One of the many issues with a political strategy based on deliberately alienating your own supporters for being soft on migrants/working at universities/on the wrong side of the culture wars is that none of them are going to make the argument for supporting you. Local elections are due, the leadership is under fire – and it’s spent the last two years machine gunning its own first line of defence.

If we take the Prime Minister at his word as to what he did and didn’t say, Keir Starmer wants to be judged entirely on his own actions – not on anything else that was done by others who worked for him. That, though, is simply not how government works. I can believe Starmer did not lie to the Commons. But the nature of his defence suggests he’s been more than negligent in doing his job: it amounts to an admission he did not understand it. A Prime Minister, like a king, can be said to have two bodies. And both of them are f*cked.

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An extremely quick reminder…

…that I’ll be talking borders to the Open University’s Daria Chernysheva at Waterstones as part of the Milton Keynes Literary festival on Friday night. Tickets here. Why not come along?

Of ray cats, atomic priests and nuclear semiotics

How could you, as a Roman tavern owner, hope to communicate the availability of delicious and surprisingly affordable wine to the large number of potential punters whose money was as good as anyone’s but who could not, in fact, read? Easy: stick a bush outside your shop. The symbol may have been a reminder of grapevines; then again, it may have represented the ivy associated with the appropriate god, Bacchus. But how it came about didn’t really matter: the point was, people saw a bush, they understood there to be wine. Lovely. In the same way, it doesn’t matter whether the three golden balls reflected the three bags of gold coins once given by St Nicholas to enable a poor family’s three daughters to marry – an unexpected link between pawnbrokers and Santa Claus, there – or just the heraldry of the Medici family. Everybody knew they meant pawnbroker.

Visual symbols like that, though, are still a form of language, a way of communicating based on consensual understandings about what something means: the red and white stripes of the barber’s pole don’t inherently mean “you can get your hair cut here”, any more than the series of shapes that make up the written word “barber” do: it’s simply that those reading it grew up in a culture in which that’s what it meant.1 So what do you do if, instead of being a trader trying to communicate with illiterate people who share the same cultural assumptions you do, you’re a nuclear scientist trying to communicate with people who may not share those assumptions at all? People who won’t even be born for millennia, whose worldview you can’t even imagine?

In 1981, the US government and engineering giant Bechtel brought together a group of archaeologists, psychologists, climatologists and experts in verbal and non-verbal communication, under the distinctly MCU-esque name of the Human Interference Taskforce. Their mission: to work out how to tell people in the unimaginably distant future that they were at risk of radiation poisoning.

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If you’ve given it some rather longer thought, you might be aware that what the internet has done to advertising has been a fairly big factor, too. Once upon a time, if you wanted to advertise anything to potential customers – your company’s services; a used car; your own selling points as a potential partner – the classified pages or trade media allowed you to hit particular market segments in a way that, say, TV advertising did not. That no longer holds true, any more than “if you want to read about this, you have to pay for it” does. There are loads of places to spend ad budgets – often, thanks to big tech, better targeted at the people you want to reach. This has been particularly bad news for those who work in the industry, but it’s not been great for anyone – or at least, anyone who thinks1 the fourth estate has a role in holding power to account.

There is, though, another2 big factor that’s dismantling the old world – one that affects people far from newspaper journalists, not least the people who hoped to displace them. It’s this:

The supply of content is now functionally infinite. The audience available for it is not.

Someone can always write another article; someone can always launch another magazine, or newsletter, or YouTube channel. But no matter how many things are vying for their attention, there are only ever a certain number of eyeballs to go round. The audience only has so much money to spend on media; they only ever have so much time to read or watch.

It is easier, in other words, to create and distribute content than it is to actually find anyone to consume it. Sure, there’ll always be new things that break through and achieve scale – but the majority will inevitably find themselves scrapping over smaller and smaller bits of audience. To make matters worse, some of those eyeballs are going to get distracted by a rising tide of AI slop. And legacy brands are not immune to any of this. There just aren’t enough consumers to go round.

In the last few years, we’ve been blessed with more glitzy TV to choose from than ever before, with budgets that make them look like movies but stretched out over eight or more hours. More and more streaming platforms have popped up to host them, too. The thing is, though, there’s not enough consumer spending available to pay for those platforms. There aren’t enough people to watch them in the numbers required to make them sustainable. Here, too, there are simply not enough eyeballs to go round.

For a time the solution has been that everything must be made for the international audience, which has meant less comedy (too dependent on culture) and more weirdly geographically non-specific stuff like the US-style high school in Sex Education. That, though, will only get you so far – even the international market is finite – and it feels like we’re reaching a point at which the investors who’ve poured money into TV production are starting to realise they’re spending a fortune on stuff that functionally nobody is watching. It’s ever so slightly reminiscent of the point around 2019, when all the investors backing online media started wondering if they were actually going to grow like tech firms after all.

There will inevitably be things that don’t find the audience they deserve because, mathematically, the audience literally isn’t there. Not every show can be Heated Rivalry, just as not every podcast can be Serial. But the difference between TV production and most other forms of media is that it’s entire orders of magnitude more expensive.

I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the TV industry to know what that shakedown will look like. But sooner or later, something is going to break.

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Some announcements

1. I am finally fulfilling a long-standing ambition to play Britain’s fastest growing city. On Friday 24 April – that’s next week, for avoidance of doubt – I’ll be talking borders to the Open University’s Daria Chernysheva at Waterstones as part of the Milton Keynes Literary festival. Tickets here.

2. “Who among us has not used a trust in Jersey, three shell companies and a pension investment vehicle to reduce our tax burden by a mid six figure sum?” I’m also switching slots at the New World, moving from Nerd’s Eye View to writing a sort of sketch. This week: Richard Tice’s tax affairs

Animal of the week: South America’s incest drug hippos

“Cull” is a fascinating word, isn’t it? It comes, apparently, from the Old French cuiler meaning to collect, gather or pluck. From there it entered Middle English meaning “to select the best” and, by the late 19th century, had a silent “animals for eating” attached. By the mid-20th we’d forgotten all about the quality and eating parts, and it just meant “to kill to reduce population numbers”. The reason it fits this meaning so well, I think, is that the word sounds like a softer version of “kill”, which of course is exactly what it is. It’s not quite a euphemism – we all know what it means – but it’s not quite coming out and saying it either.

Anyway, the Colombian government just announced it would be collecting, gathering or plucking a selection of Pablo Escobar’s in-bred feral cocaine hippos.

Some context may be necessary here.

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Anyway, we can all breathe out. Despite yesterday’s threat that a “whole civilisation will die tonight”, an unnerving thing to say when you’re the president of a nuclear-armed state at war with Persia, Donald Trump instead announced a two-week ceasefire. You probably could have guessed this, even if you haven’t checked the news, from the fact you did not wake up this morning to find your neighbourhood looking like Threads.

Other things didn’t happen, either. Global oil prices did not reset to where they’d been six weeks ago, before any of this started. The threat of interest rate rises later in the year, to combat growing inflation expectations, did not recede. The Iranian regime did not fall.

And the Mail did not pause to note any contradiction between the armageddon Trump threatened on Tuesday and its recent attacks on the British government for declining to join his ill-planned war. In the event a nuclear holocaust ever does take place, the only things to survive will be Paul Dacre’s hypocrisy and cockroaches.

There are many things one could say about all this. We could consider the fact it may not be over yet – bombs are still raining on Beirut and Dubai – and even if it is, much of the economic impact is already locked in. We could discuss the way it seems to have strengthened, rather than weakened, the Iranian regime; or what the American regime’s baffled inability to understand its opponents had agency might tell us about the limited helpfulness of a worldview based on mocking everyone else as “NPCS”.

I could even join in the inevitable festival of sanewashing, and conduct a lengthy debate as to whether the apparent threat of armageddon was the warning that persuaded Iran to agree a ceasefire, or merely positioning to hide a climbdown so great it meant US defeat, even though surely the answer is: it does not, in any meaningful sense, matter.1

But the truth is: I simply do not care. Right now I don’t even have the energy to feel relief. All I feel is the numb terror of a passenger in a vehicle whose driver keeps feinting that he’s going to drive straight into a wall. Yeah, he swerved this time – but what about the next? And the next?

Actually, my strongest emotional response right now can be summed up as a question: Why the f*ck must everything I hold dear be subject to the whims of a demented shitposter with no emotional regulation and no plan? Why can I not book a holiday or make a financial decision, without first stopping to think about that guy? Why should I have to wake up every morning to find out what he’s done?

And if that’s how it feels in one of the countries he hasn’t attacked, how must it feel right now in Caracas or Tehran?

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The Mirror, incidentally, went with “World holds its breath” and illustrated its story about Trump beneath a picture of the moon taken by the Artemis II astronauts. This is of course far cleverer than what the Mail did – but because this is the worst timeline, it remains a far less influential paper.

But it is onto something. There are those who’ve criticised the new moon missions as an expensive waste of time when the world has real problems and climate change is a thing. Even leaving aside the extensive list of technologies that space exploration has given us – and the fact that, even if it hadn’t, seeking out knowledge is surely its own reward – this is exactly why we need this stuff. We are one world while we wait to find out what nonsense Donald Trump is going to inflict upon us next; but we are one world, too, when we go to the stars.

Which of those worlds it’s more fun to share is not a difficult question.

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Some notes on the Moon

1. As our closest celestial neighbour, and something that is comfortingly just there each evening, there’s a tendency to imagine the Moon is the space equivalent of right next door.

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The reason this makes for a good thought experiment is that a lot of people do, in fact, have to think about it. From a utilitarian point of view, I benefit from the money, and am not affected even slightly by the fact a terrible human being who, for the sake of argument, we shall call Matt Goodwin benefits even more. In practice, something catches in my brain. I do, at least, hesitate. It’s not always enough to benefit. Sometimes we need to win.

This is not entirely rational, but from conversations with others I gather it is not especially unusual.

This shouldn’t, of course, tell us anything about the war in Iran, a conflict that’s been on the cards for years, in which there are more than two players and which no one can truly win. I fear it does, though – because one of the key decision makers is a man who genuinely seems to believe the entire world is a zero-sum game; and because both sides, now, need to be seen to have won.

By now, it’s surely obvious even to Donald Trump that the war is a disaster. There’s been no rally round the flag polling boost, of the sort such things normally offer a sitting president. And from both the way he keeps announcing it’s almost over – immediately before suggesting he might just commit the odd war crime first – and the way he periodically suggests it was never really his idea anyway, you get the impression even he wants out.

So: the obvious route is to walk away and say he’s achieved everything he wanted to anyway. Trump saves face, as he has before, by just pretending that he won.

The problem is that – both for reasons of national pride, and to make clear there are costs to attacking it, and reducing the chances of the same thing happening again – the Iranian government needs to do the same. We’re straying into territory I really have no business writing about, I know, but consider what that means for the Strait of Hormuz. To credibly claim victory, the Americans need to show they can keep it open. To claim victory, the Iranians need to show they can keep it closed.

Both sides now clearly want to stop this. But both need the other to lose. The two outcomes are incompatible.

The good news here is that it feels like this might genuinely hurt Trump and his movement. A presidential administration can do horrible things to foreigners or even lose small wars without paying any particular domestic price. But the things American voters do care about include significant increases in fuel prices or large numbers of their neighbours coming back in bodybags, and in the Gulf right now that seems to be the choice. That, I’d guess, is why Trump keeps pushing for a third option, in which countries even more dependent on that oil supply step up and open the Strait for him: he’s looking for a way out in which someone else bears the cost.

The bad news is that, whatever happens, the rest of us will be bearing the cost. Even if the war doesn’t spread, we’re all living in the same global economy, one in which everything from food prices to plastics is also driven by the availability of fossil fuels – and as things stand they’ve just become a whole lot less available.

In the meantime, if anyone out there with deep pockets and loose morals wants to conduct an experiment, well, you know where I am.

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So, why do so many old manuscripts make their S’s look like F’s?

In a recent piece, I described an old manuscript as having “delightfully odd capitalisation and italicisation choices and S’s that look like F’s”. This was obviously just some offhand snark, but as so often happens when I engage in snark, offhandedly or otherwise, it got me wondering – why do old documents make one letter look like another?

You do, after all, find this phenomenon in some pretty notable places. In the first edition of the Dictionary of the English language, Samuel Johnson self-deprecatingly describes himself as a “harmleſs drudge”. One text of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII has Katherine of Aragon tell her husband, “I am ſorry.” Even the heading of the US Bill of rights seemingly refers to “Congrefs”. What is with that?

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