Lost futures

This week’s big question: whatever happened to airships? First though, on Starmer, Burnham and the audacity of hope.

Design can have a strange effect on me. A week or so ago I was cycling through Kensington when the sight of the Olympia Exhibition Centre gave me a genuine twinge of nostalgia for an era I never knew. I get this quite a lot from the grand visions of the late 19th or early 20th century, whether art deco architecture or old fashioned trains.

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:

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.