Governmental Competence Has Left The Chat

Also this week: some peculiarly English place names; and why are so few animals blue?

I’ll say one thing for the collapse of the western alliance and the threat it poses to all we hold dear: it is at least giving The Onion a hell of a run. Just this past week, its US politics headlines have included:

• “Trump Orders All Children Born Under Biden To Be Renamed After Confederate Generals”;

• “DOJ Designates Posting Photos Of Balding Elon Musk As Domestic Terrorism”;

• “Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole” (oh, God);

• and an op-ed column written in the voice of a cybertruck and headlined “Am I Ugly?” (“Sometimes I’ll pull up at a stop sign and notice people staring at me and laughing, and I could swear they’re saying mean things about me under their breath. Is that insane?”)

Monday’s incredible Atlantic scoop – that editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been added to a Signal group chat in which senior Trump administration officials were discussing actual plans for actual war – has brought out the best yet. “‘I Messed Up At Work Again,’ Crestfallen Michael Waltz Texts Wife, National Geographic Editorial Staff,” reads one headline. “Teen warned not to accept chat invites from National Security Advisers she doesn’t know,” runs another. It makes me sad we don’t have more satirical content from the fall of Rome, it really does.¹

None of this could happen here, of course. Partly that’s because no British editor would have printed it: for both legal and cultural reasons, our media bigwigs tend to be a lot more squeamish about matters concerning national defence. More to the point, on this side of the pond, there’s also far less separation between politicians and the people who report on them in the first place. It’s unnervingly plausible to imagine senior Tories consulting the editor of the Spectator before going to war anyway. (These are, of course, two sides of the same coin.)

Attempts to move the story on since it broke on Monday have generally been concerned with two things. One is the excuses being made for such an obvious and incredible screw up. Waltz, the National Security Adviser – let’s just take a moment to revel in that job title here – told Fox News that he takes “full responsibility” for the mistake. He then went on to add “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened”, which doesn’t sound that much like taking full responsibility after all. You don’t need a tech genius to explain how it is you added the wrong person to a group chat: the average teenager can do that, and explain quite how much damage it can do while they’re at it. Another question seems to be why Waltz had Goldberg’s number at all, but I’m not sure you need Elon Musk’s assistant to answer that one either.

Trump himself, meanwhile, has called the incident a “glitch” which had “no impact at all”. His outriders have taken to X – I think I’m finally ready to stop calling it Twitter – to crack jokes about how the best place to hide state secrets was on page 2 of the Atlantic, or suggest these brain geniuses were actually playing four dimensional chess again “These are some of the most competent people in the country,” posted very smart podcaster Joey Mannarino, “and you believe they would just screw up like this?” Yes. Yes we do.

The other day two version of the story concerns the other side’s attempts to compare it to one of the “scandals” that mucked things up for the Democrats eight years ago. Time has dug out all the things the people who hadn’t noticed they were talking about bombing Yemen in a groupchat with a journalist had said about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server back in 2016. “But her emails!” screams the Atlantic itself. Look, runs the message, these people are hypocrites!

They are. Of course they are, and much worse besides. But we already knew that, and a mere adjective can’t hurt them any more than (to pluck one out of the air) “fascist”. These people don’t care about principles: they care about power. There are plausible mechanisms through which this story could reduce that – action in the courts, or Congress; a collapse in confidence among their own supporters – but the former looks uncertain, and the latter all but impossible.

This is of course why Waltz is not really admitting to his error, nor Trump to its severity. So long as they lie, there will be people like Joey Mannarino willing to launder events for them for retweets. A charge of hypocrisy can’t hurt people who don’t experience shame.

Self promotion corner

Two big things happening tomorrow. The happy one, which you’ll be aware of because I never stop banging on but sorry needs must, is the publication of the paperback of A History of the World in 47 Borders. This is obviously delightful, as were the brief reviews in the Observer and Standard. (I was also on Hugo Rifkind’s show on Times Radio at 10.50 this morning.)

The less happy one is that Miranda, Grainne and I are recording the last ever episode of Paper Cuts, which is going to the great podcast platform in the sky. I’m heartbroken that a show that’s been a genuine joy to record, with some of the best people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, is coming to an end – but we had nearly two years, and something absurd like 400 episodes, and all good things and so forth.

I will say, though, that I’ve had more fun doing it than almost anything else in my career. It’s the one where they made us talk about pegging that people tend to quote at me, but the day I got to read out Liz Jones’ column about her treacherous boyfriend was probably my favourite. I’m very proud to have been part of it, to have worked with Miranda and Grainne, and Alex VT and Jason and Marcus and all the rest. Particular shout out to our lovely producer Liam Tait. Thanks for everything, mate.

Okay, that’s quite enough self-indulgence for one newsletter.

Animal of the week: actual lobsters which are actually blue

One of the most exciting developments from my safe, loving and thus often unmemorable childhood was the 1988 arrival of blue Smarties. I dimly recall a moral panic about this, to do with rumours that they made kids hyperactive – call me a cynic, but I suspect that was the sugar – which apparently reached such a pitch long after I ceased to be a child that for a few years they withdrew them from sale, while they searched for a more natural colour. That proved initially difficult, though, for the same reason they’d been so exciting in the first place: because you don’t really get blue things in nature.

Or so I thought. Look at this thing: