All Change

This week: new days dawn for Westminster, Holyrood and Donald Trump’s bathroom; the most annoying thing on London’s tube map; and what makes a city worth visiting?

Some things that have happened since last I wrote this newsletter. Donald Trump has been to court in Miami, to face charges of mishandling classified documents. Thor only knows what’ll happen there – he’s yet to be convicted, and polls of Republicans, with painfully inevitability, show him actually increasing his lead over Ron DeSantis. But neither the photographs of the documents piled up in the bathrooms and ballrooms of Mar-a-Lago, nor the tape recording of him bragging about how he’s got all these classified documents he’s not meant to have, seem likely to help his case. A prison sentence, should there be one, must on balance be considered a net negative for his campaign. 

On Friday Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries quit the House of Commons, as a frankly baffling form of protest against the former’s failure to get the latter a peerage (a matter she sincerely seems to believe is of genuine national concern; a surprisingly therapeutic bit from me on the topic is going up on the NS website later). There was another guy who quit alongside them – be honest, you’ve already forgotten his name, haven’t you¹ – and one can’t quite shake the sense there were meant to be more. Even Tory MPs, though, were not stupid enough to convince themselves that Johnson’s leverage over Downing Street would be greater if he quit politics altogether. And so, thus far at least, that’s that. 

Oh yes, and Nicola Sturgeon was arrested, though not charged, as Hamza Yusuf continued his bid for the Liz Truss Memorial Prize for the Most Obviously Doomed Leadership of an Executive Branch of Government. I’m not touching that one with a bargepole. 

You know all of this. Obviously you do, and this is one of those times I’m writing not as information but as a form of therapy, though I’m not entirely sure who for.

Nobody would seriously compare Sturgeon to Trump or Johnson – nobody who ever intended to visit Scotland again, anyway – but there are clear similarities between these three stories nonetheless. All involve leaders who traded on forms of nationalism or populism, now facing legal trouble of one form or another. All three also had a talent for warping politics around themselves, and generating unnervingly hagiographic media coverage; and if the people praising Sturgeon came from left not right, well, the coverage was no less hagiographic for that. Worst of all, from the point of view of democracy, all three also engendered a sort of learned helplessness in the media, in which even normally more balanced commentators would marvel at their ability to avoid being held to account, as if they’d entirely forgotten whose job the holding to account was. 

And now, it’s possible that all three are being dragged off the stage forever.

The phrase “end of an era” is much over-used in politics, especially in a period in which world-shaking events seem to come along with roughly the same frequency as rural buses. But a conviction for Donald Trump; the final nail in Boris Johnson’s political ambitions; the end of SNP hegemony implied by events in Scotland – all of those could legitimately qualify for the title, couldn’t they? And they’ve all happened in the same week.²

Maybe they won’t, of course. Johnson, Trump and the SNP’s poll lead have all defied political gravity many times before. But, well, another great political survivor Silvio Berlusconi also left the stage on Monday when he died, aged 86, resulting in many wry questions about whether his career could survive this, too. Sometimes, things really do end. It’s inherent in the nature of gravity that, sooner or later, everything hits the ground. 

A shameless plug

Paper Cuts, that new podcast I’m popping up on occasionally, seems to be going down doing pretty well in the chart, which is nice. I made my debut on Monday, talking about the end of Boris Johnson, the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon and a trophy full of soup, with comedian Ria Lina and our host Miranda Sawyer. You can hear us all, trying to pretend we aren’t all dying of heat stroke, here.

What makes a city worth visiting?

It may have been the sunshine, glinting off the docks. It might have been the fact I was having a genuinely interesting, mind-expanding week in which my job was, basically, chatting to people. Then again, it might have been the fact I’d just drunk two pints of strong beer. Whatever it was though, one evening last week I found myself exhausted, halfway through a work trip to Merseyside, and thinking: This feels like a holiday.

Image: substacker’s own.

Work trips to Liverpool often do, I’ve found, even when it isn’t blazing sunshine: there’s something about the place that makes it feel like a plausible destination for a minibreak, in the same way that Lyon or Ljubljana do but Leeds or Leicester do not.³ I’m clearly not alone in this: over the last 15 years or so, Liverpool’s tourism sector has boomed. 

And so, because I’d been talking about the city for three days straight, I started to think about why this might be. The most common answer I received when I asked what made Liverpool different was: the people. That may well be a factor – I’ve found nights out there to be both friendlier and fight-ier than nights out in other places, and suspect those to be two sides of the same coin – but it’s a pretty subjective measure, and anyway there are plenty of friendly places that don’t feel like holiday destinations and just as many unfriendly ones that do. 

So let’s leave that to one side, and focus instead on factors which the people who build and run cities have at least some hope of controlling. Here are a few things which, it feels to me, make somewhere feel like a place you should go: