Each year, as the D-Day anniversary approaches, all sorts of vintage aircraft rumble through Kentish skies towards the Normandy invasion grounds. Last weekend, two Dakotas in echelon, droned at low-level over my local, evocative and moving. Too easy to imagine their nervous parachutists heading for Pegasus Bridge or Sainte-Mére-Église.

And, not far from where I live, woodland paths are marked with plaques to PLUTO, the pipeline under the Channel that supplied fuel to the invasion armies and which is still in use to this day. 

It is more poignant in contrast with other things. Like the pillbox at the crossroads and another at a bend on the nearby Medway. Bricks and a Bren gun versus the panzers. Fortunately, it was The Few and the Navy between us and them.

D-Day it is, though, once again. One of the wartime moments that even us who were not there can’t help – along with Battle of Britain Day – find intensely moving in their significance. I have tried, often, both from here in Kent and standing on the beaches in Normandy to understand why. And it can be summed up in one very obvious word: “liberation”.

For all my straining at the imagination, I can’t summon an equivalent feeling to what it must have been like, after years of war, to wake and find salvation had arrived. That the boots on the street were jump boots and not jack boots; that the men on the tanks smiled.

The great World at War series dubbed its episode on the Second Front simply “Morning”. In it, a French woman does in broken English what I can’t in fluency: “Ah, we feel very happy. The best day of our lives. I think so. La plus grande joie. How you say, in English? ‘The biggest joys [sic] in our life’.” 

“And we admire those courageous soldiers. They came from so far away to liberate us,” she adds.

It is instructive that this “joy” came despite what the Allied air forces did to the Norman hinterland to rid it of German armour and stubborn points of Nazi resistance. One particularly grim fatality was the ancient abbey city of Caen. “We gave them everything,” the French lady continued. “Cider, pouf, cider. And Calvados, of course,” setting a precedent enjoyed by Anglo visitors ever since. 

Freedom. Liberation. At a high price and one we increasingly forget as our politicians haggle over defence budgets while always finding money for God knows what. 

There is, because the politics of our times demands there must be, an increasing tendency to undermine the achievement of the Western allies in their reconquest of the Continent. Despite the hard slog through the Norman bocage, Germany fell within a year and all this was based on that most difficult of military operations, an amphibious landing against a well-prepared and sophisticated defence. 

Jonathan Dimbleby has recently published Endgame: How Stalin Won the War. One hardly need be a historian to know that this is both true and contentious. True in the sense of Russia’s endless capacity to absorb military casualties and to deal in hundreds of divisions while the Western Front dealt in tens. Contentious in the circumstances of the Soviet Union’s eventual participation, the fate of Poland, the enormous efforts of the West to keep Russia in the game and the huge sapping of resources demanded of Germany to defend itself from endless Allied bombing. 

It is a bad habit to pin down the causes of victory in such a complex and global conflict in a rather glib statement, although one has to sell books and the book itself is by no means glib. Survival and victory were feats of mutual dependence and shared contribution.

What is less contentious is that what the British, American and Canadian effort implied and provided in a way Stalin never did were those two things; freedom and liberation. Of course, the gates of Auschwitz were thrown open by the Red Army in the Vistula Offensive. But thereafter? As Churchill put it shortly after the war:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.”

He said other things too: “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.”

It is, of course, hard as we ponder the horrors of Bloody Omaha to think that we must live in perpetual readiness to repeat it. The very idea was not to have to go through it again. But as Europe discovered then, sometimes it is not a matter of choice. 

Back though, to remembrance. There will be many televised opportunities to recall the heroism. Few will be more moving than the final scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Few more remarkable than the oddity of Richard Todd – who actually fought at Pegasus Bridge – playing the man who led the assault in The Longest Day. “Mortality was an issue at the time.” he later choked out in an interview. And none more harrowing than Fury, Brad Pitt’s Sherman crew battling from the beaches to Berlin. 

Watch ‘em all, and remember that they heralded the “morning”.

All I can say is: thank you, boys. 

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Few mastered it better than Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Borrowed straight from the Gospel churches, he would collapse, broken by the sheer exhaustion of being a channel for divine inspiration. Acolytes would gather, help him from his knees, hallelujah, and wrap his cloak about his sweat-soaked form. Supported from the stage, he would turn at the last, head back to the mic and, despite the protestations of his backing singers, deliver just one mo’ number. Ah, the sacrifice. 

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight, I give you, Nigel Farage! 

An unlikely comparison, I know, but did anyone really think he wouldn’t make it fast with one more thang?

The question, though, is why? In an uninspiring clash of personality-free mediocrities, both promising in variant form “a plan” or nameless “change”, Farage may have spotted a gap in the market. 

It may, equally, be the long touted plan of occupying the body of the Tory party while it still exists, rallying its frustrated Right to his colours, sweeping up social conservatives in the Red Wall seats and carrying the Reform banner deep into traditional Labour territory too

That means for the Left, the game of “say nothing, do nothing” attentisme is over. Unloved anyway, the power of its Red Wedge recently revealed in the failure to rid itself of Diane Abbott, its nastier instincts revealed in the private school VAT raid – a visceral impulse laden with unintended consequence – Labour is going to have to fight on its flanks as well as in the centre.

Whatever way you want to look at it, Farage has lit it up with his greatest hits and a hell of a solo.

Solo. Ah, there’s the thing. Can the band match the flying fingers and that masterful use of distortion?  After his exile on Main Street, Farage may be able to turn it up to 11 but isn’t that only drowning out artistic differences? And then there’s paying for the tour.

This is Farage’s last comeback. Either Elvis conquers Vegas or it’ll end in “the who?”

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I was at a portrait exhibition the other day at which hers stared from the wall. If her expression could be summed up in a word it was ‘humourless’. ‘Misunderstood’ came in a close second. The vaguely hurt look of one voted head girl at the beginning of term and driven from the common room by a barrage of inky pellets and laughter by Christmas. 

She came in like a lion. “Sound familiar?” she goaded Jeremy Corbyn at one PMQs as though the Sainted Margaret smiled down ethereally just above her shoulder. And left like a lamb. Blubbing like one having the head girl tie pin removed by an angry headmistress for being found running through a farmer’s corn in her school blazer. 

I couldn’t help but laugh y’see because, in advance of her retirement,  she’s been ‘interviewed by journalists at Westminster’, during the course of which she has suggested that Tory travails are all the fault of class rotter Johnson B and Tyke minx Liz Truss, ties askew and catapult elastic dangling from their back pockets. 

Few would suggest that either bestride British politics like a colossus. One rarely did his homework and held dorm cake parties while the other failed maths and probably killed the Queen. Well, it was something like that anyway.

But, as with many people who pride themselves on their seriousness, May cannot be. To invert John McEnroe. 

It appears she’s forgotten a few things. Like her inability to “get Brexit done”. A project in which she didn’t believe, her idea of the British bulldog approach to Michel Barnier was to roll over and beg for scraps. Untrustworthy near Europe’s dinner tables, she was often left outside. 

Seeking to give ‘em all a learning, she called an election at which she lost her majority, helped by an ill-timed “dementia tax”, a proposition often associated with memory loss.

Meanwhile, Gina Miller scored a spectacular own goal by forcing May to constantly seek Parliamentary approval on Europe negotiations. Unable to quietly sign off a “nothing has changed” deal with “our European allies”, she found herself in thrall to a Parliament that went on to disgrace democracy, all the while telling us that the “people’s voice is sovereign”.

Agony among her own party, pain from Labour. And from those Labour pains was born Boris. 

A peculiarity of sensible centrists is that they often create the thing they hate. This is largely because they know better. And their heedlessness has consequences. 

All of which moves matters neatly to Rishi Sunak who May praises for “bringing stability”. Thus proving the theory of relativity.

Decrying the social media-inspired “expectation of celebrity”, even among politicians, she feels both Sunak, and by implication she, have suffered at its hands. Up to a point, fair point. An idea of service as opposed to CV-building seems reasonable enough but that doesn’t excuse a dearth of personality. It inspires, you see. Un fonctionnaire est pour fonctionner but, being distinct from civil servants, politicians are there to lead and implicit in that is the ability to brew the emotional fuel for the practical journey.   

May failed on that point.

It’s easy for a PM who struggled in tumultuous times to accuse all others of sailing the ship perilously close to the rocks. The truth is, for a good spell she was captain. Certainly for longer than Liz Truss. 

Another truth is that no Tory master has handled the vessel well since Cap’n Thatcher, whose ghost still haunts the SS Conservative. The party of business never really thought about succession planning as they rushed from one mutiny to the next and for whom the jagged reef is always Europe.

And so, with the boat close to breaking up, we finish where we started. With unlikely combinations. As the late, great Frankie Howerd would have said: “You’ve got to admire her sauce.”

Hackman won an Academy Award for his performance. Shocked journalists and outraged politicians have won nul points for a similar and sudden realisation in the aftermath of the murderous ambush of a police convoy near Rouen in northern France and the escape of Mohamed “the Fly” Amra, during which two French prison officers were shot dead. 

The armed springing of Amra, which took place on Tuesday, may have its origins further south in notorious Marseille and, as an international manhunt gets underway, French PM Gabriel Attal has channelled his inner Liam Neeson pledging: “We will track them, we will find them, they will pay.” Let’s hope he has that particular set of skills.

I was in France over the weekend. I rush to add that the two developments are unrelated. No greater criminality did I witness than the hiding handed out to La Rochelle by les Bordelais, Damien Penaud mugging Gregory Aldritt for a thief’s try in the corner of an uproarious Stade Chaban-Delmas.

But, over that weekend, Le Figaro alerts flashed up constantly. News of a dismembered man found in a suitcase and two policeman shot in a police station in Paris. All this hot on the heels of the trial of a French prison guard giving the Judas kiss to her charges at Corsica’s La Bastia airport so an assassin could identify them. Among the dead was a man called “Tony The Butcher”.

Back with prison breaks, France is not unused to coup de théâtre spectaculars. In 2001, Pascal Payet, sent down for a raid on a Banque de France armoured car, escaped not once but twice. By helicopter.

Of similar apparent surprises that aren’t is news, via The Times, that Marbella has become “The UN of crime”. Yes, the same Marbella that was known in the 70s and 80s, when Spain didn’t have an extradition treaty with Britain, as the “Costa del Crime”. I refer you to Sexy Beast for details. Not to be outdone, the Italian Camorra called it Costa Nostra. 

Today’s Times also reports on Daniel Kinahan, boxing promoter and named by the Irish high court as a major figure in international drug and arms trafficking. Now living in Dubai, following a lengthy spell in Marbella, his wife,The Times alleges, is trading in property to avoid asset freezes. 

Irish TD Neale Richmond said some while back: “Daniel Kinahan needs to come back to Ireland to answer to the very many rulings of the High Court and what’s been accepted by the Special Criminal Court.

“The work of the Kinahan cartel has been an absolute blight on the streets of our capital for some years now.”

There, I think, is the difference between then and now. As I write, news is breaking of a woman shot in the legs in the crossfire between two cars in London. Sweden has problems with international organised crime targeting police. The dangers of being a French policeman are well known whether escorting prisoners or dealing with the violence of notorious estates. Irish news reports Kinahan “taking on the Irish state“. While The Times describes Marbella as a parade of ostentatious bling, gunshots and Yakuza-style tattoos.

There is, to it all, a nakedness. An almost defiant disregard for consequence and little concern for “civilians” who might get caught up in things of which they know nothing and have no interest. 

Life is becoming a movie. A gangster flick. Imitating art. Exaggerated violence. Impunity. Crime pays. The extras bleeding on the margins but not central to the plot.  

And Gene Hackman is 94.

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The causes were easy to enumerate. Ban the Sun! The newspaper that is, not the orange thing, which, in 1980s northern England had largely gone into self-imposed exile anyway. Thatcher out! A rare alliance between town and gown where I was in Yorkshire. Brits out of Ireland! And, inevitably, being cross with Barclays for banking anyone called Van Der Merwe. 

There was much in the way of skinny white arms in black t-shirts and The Smiths drifting from late-night windows. The very Establishment trembled. All easily dismissed. And as the Thatcher tanks rolled remorselessly on to election victory after election victory, it was clear that power lay with Essex man, not the fella skipping in and out of NUM headquarters with a scowl on his face and something odder on his head.

This was a mistake, of course. The tide forever turns. Often slowly. Inch by creeping inch. Until, there, you’re up to your neck in it. And I can’t help but feel an inundation has returned as I watch events at Columbia University and UCLA.

There is, in every student of a certain disposition, a lurking soixante-huitard. Forever, convinced that, in glorious alliance with the working man, a revolution is imminent. Aux armes les citoyens, formez vos bataillons!

The difficulty history has posed these Street Fighting Men in recent years is that prosperity, gentrification and professionalisation have placed greater emphasis on actually doing stuff that might qualify you for a job in an increasingly technocratic world. A struggling arts graduate speaks. But now, in the Israel-Hamas war, an opportunity has presented itself to go full Vietnam and dress what looks like something rather more sinister in the clothing of anti-war protest. “Hell no, we won’t go.” Except, of course, nobody is asking them to. 

In the meantime, the wannabe successors to student protest at Kent, Ohio, the Sorbonne and Grosvenor Square – who will go on to rule the world – are ignoring the fact that student shenanigans have a very short shelf life. As they say, start life with the Guardian, end it with the Telegraph.

The sceptical Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and Philip Roth have now been replaced by former BBC executives in Britain and something even worse in America where academia seems tortured on a rack of competing interest groups looming over the agonised student body. 

There may well be things to object to in the unedifying footage emerging from Gaza. Cold children being hauled from the rubble seems unlikely to bring matters to a conclusion in the long term. But the tie-up between the radical Left, antisemitism and student activism which seems to be what we’re witnessing on various US campuses, is not new but greatly invigorated. It’s all about capitalism, d’ya see? Odd that America once regarded Jewish émigrés fleeing Europe as replete with dangerous socialist ideas and destined for the film industry and McCarthy. 

But detaching that particular issue from the seemingly never-ending media coverage of universities proscribing, de-platforming, banning and disciplining views and people with whom they disagree, it seems that outside the extreme specifics of Columbia and UCLA , universities, pausing only to take donations LSE-style from regimes like Libya, are caught fully in the contradictions of who they allow to speak and who they don’t.

This, of course, is the paradox of free speech. Some mandatory Churchill coming up but his point is a timeless one; “Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”

Acknowledging this truth, universities at one time indulged callow student positions as precisely that and saw them as notions that might be laid down in the cellar to mature into something more palatable later. And that demanded a certain even-handedness. But recent university over-indulgence of one “progressive” side at the expense of the other has led to a sense of licence that has unleashed the hell we are witnessing now with professional agitators running to the student bonfire with a can of petrol. 

Some day, doubtless, an ageing alumnus will look back in nostalgic pride at “the day I manned the barricades”, chuckling at their folie de jeunesse but complaining that “today’s students just don’t seem angry enough about anything!”

But the worrying thing is that they are and, mandatory Kennedy: “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”  What’s being taught to those leaders? What are they learning? And what the hell does that mean for the rest of us?

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Certain things are obvious. She’s an attractive woman, in an all-American and slightly feline way, and she treads a very nice line between knowing lyrics and catchy pop songs.

A lot of post-vocalic “r” knocking about too, helping female fantasy lines like: 

“You got that long hair, slicked back, white T-shirrrt
And I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirrrt..”

Hang together with all the cinna-bun authenticity of the King of Prussia mall. Hey. Let’s hang out.

She lives the dream too. Dating quarterbacks and British actors, some of whom, like Tom Hiddleston, seem rendered equally adolescent by the whole experience. 

Quite how she’s extrapolated being very good at winkingly clever bubble gum pop to the great influencer of our age is surely down to social media, its love of lifestyle and the infantilised nature of our times.

We are invited to see Swift as deeply wise. Her views – which are very predictably artsy – rush to embrace all modish American causes with the same enthusiasm as a cheerleader to a Kansas City Chiefs quarterback. For all that, according to The Times, the Right still “covets” her.

I suppose, being fair, this is no more or less a modern phenomenon than JFK finding a fan in Frank Sinatra or Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama sharing a beer. “This Bud’s for you”.

Across the floor, I seem to think Johnny Cash performed for Richard Nixon and discussed prison reform at the White House. Who knows the ways of American politics but they and showbiz are closely intertwined, as Clint Eastwood and Ronald Reagan would surely affirm.

But Swift is now 34 and has finally recorded the album she “really needed” to make. A record, breathlessly reported by both Times and Telegraph in which, it appears, she lists the many failings of her previous beaux in a compilation entitled The Tortured Poets Department. 

British thesps are high on the list of the many, and I quote, who didn’t “measure up.” Surely the lowest, oldest and most predictable female swipe at those who have, erm, come before.  “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” Ooh-er.

All, in its way, very Cosmo and Femail and doubtless playing to a market of which, I again concede, I am not part. It’s notable that men rarely write revenge songs riffing on the theme; “you got your kit off and, frankly, I wish you hadn’t.” Honestly, ladies, it does happen. 

But I wonder, in times to come, whether we’ll all sit back and listen wistfully thinking, “That’s a classic and stood the test of time.” My feeling is not. It’s clever manipulation of the zeitgeist and the spirit of our age doesn’t seem one likely to last. Then again, didn’t someone at EMI once say something similar about the Beatles?

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And, like the bar room bully, I’ve been threatening it for years without ever quite backing it up. Well, mister, time to either do something or just stand there and bleed. And, put to it, I gone done. 

The upshot is Bang Out Of Order. That, I hasten to add, is its title and not a judgement on the quality of the book. 

For a synopsis, I’m going to quote the publishers because, frankly, who am I to argue with the professionals?

“In 1979, a desperate Irish republican detonated a bomb on a London train, killing dozens and causing irreparable damage. Years later, with the culprit never discovered, ageing cop Sean Christopher reopens the case, noticing a direct link to his past. As he begins to piece together the evidence from maturing Londoners burdened by their knowledge for far too long, romance begins to blossom with him and a young, witty colleague. Both a tense, quietly desperate crime procedural, and a meditation on time, generational differences, and family trauma, this immensely confident debut by journalist Patrick Barrow is a must-read.” 

So much for the what, how about the why?

I’ve always had a fascination for London, the city I grew up in. It has changed greatly over the years. It was, once, low-rise, four-star stained, gap-toothed and post-war. A city that traded on what it had been more than what it wanted to be. Largely because, like the country as a whole, it didn’t really know itself. 

It had had, at the furthest outer reaches of my memory, a brief moment of cool, “swinging like a pendulum do” and forming the backdrop to films like Alfie with Michael Caine and Up the Junction starring Dennis Waterman, later of The Sweeney. A last hurrah, really, of the London white working class and its particular culture of London pride. So much so that Battersea even served as the northern backdrop to Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

But its long moment of transformation came in the late Seventies, firstly in the beginnings of the dockside property boom when great stretches of London’s abandoned warehouses and moorings started to attract the eye of developers. By 1980, the film The Long Good Friday was already alluding to some of the forces behind it. 

The Brinks Mat robbery of 1983 was life imitating art, chunks its vast haul being laundered through Thameside development. By 1986, Big Bang had transformed the City and its overspill was Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, in which the old East End went vertical.

The City and finance were the second engine of the great change. The Square Mile had, in one form or another, always been there but globalising its markets, the expansion of derivatives trading and the Eighties cult of money-making sent it stratospheric. 

Living where I did in south east London, it happened literally under my nose. From Greenwich Park, you could look down on the buildings going up. By the time it was done, they looked down on you. A looming presence in every sense.

Everything changed. Everything. For good and for ill. Few shifts are unalloyed. I’m not sure I like the old place so much anymore. Its face is more beautiful but its soul – and I don’t romanticise the old one by any means – is one of a characterless, corporate city-state, right down to a citizens and helots divide. 

But against that backdrop – and the book’s narrative is split between then and a dateless present – the more timeless human dramas continue to operate. The things over which we have no control. Childhoods. Lonely and only. Or tumultuous and cruel. The mixed fortunes of ageing. The people we fall in love with or lives changed by a single moment of pure and catastrophic chance. Sometimes, as with at least one character, the two are the same.

You don’t make your own luck, you know. The Fates are ever at play and their instrument in the central moment of Bang Out of Order is the IRA. Like the gleaming towers of finance, they were a looming presence in London from the Balcombe Street Gang of the Seventies to the bombings at South Quay on the Isle of Dogs, Bishopsgate and the Baltic Exchange in the City by the Nineties. 

Things moved from the comic or inspiring – kids started phoning in bomb warnings to escape exams and London took pride in its blitz “we can take it” ability to carry on regardless – to the simply horrifying. Machine gun attacks on restaurants, detonations in pubs, mortar bombs on Downing Street. 

The transport system didn’t escape either and it is a fictional train bomb at London Bridge station around which all action revolves. Unmitigated, long-lasting devastation. For those who lived. For those who died. For those who weren’t even there.

In their later manifestations, IRA attacks originated with the Ultras of South Armagh. “Bandit Country” as Home Secretary Merlyn Rees dubbed it. Snipers, soldiers and the SAS. Having had an Armagh grandmother and been schooled among second and third-generation Irish kids, the temptation to connect the two in the plot was irresistible.

Unlike London’s remorseless advance into the future, Northern Ireland, for all its efforts not to, carries its past heavily. Its everyday folk are unfailingly courteous and welcoming. Warrenpoint may seem now like a genteel lough-side town. Bessbrook Mill doesn’t rock to the roll of helicopter rotors. But the police stations are still fortified and a laval flow still runs hot under the surface of Crossmaglen, Newry or the border bocage. To visit is to be constantly aware of the dragon’s breath of yesterday. 

Neurosis, they say, is an unhealthy attachment to the past and, to cure his, the hero, Sean Christopher must venture into it. (I needed a name with sufficient Anglo-Irish tang but didn’t want a Prayer for The Dyingformula. Discovering they’re hard to avoid, I borrowed two of my own.) 

He’s a man increasingly at odds with the times he lives in. Despite his daily acquaintance with London, he hardly recognises it. He shakes his head at newspapers that are no longer newspapers. Doesn’t understand ubiquitous beards. He is baffled by the easy tears of man-children and finds his own, old-fashioned brand of almost Western-style masculinity both a fortress and a burden. He talks slow and acts quick. But by night the shadows close. He is a damaged man.

Ultimately though, his is a quest, as all stories have been from Beowulf to Bond, that demands he venture into the heart of the beast and confront it there. And he will need, as such quests do, as we all do, a maiden helper to succeed. Sex and violence. Driving human behaviour and story-telling narrative since the Iliad. Not much changes, you know, and their emergence via the writer’s hand is as much via the alchemy of deep-seated psychology as considered creativity. And let’s be honest, we all love a bit of it in a book. 

Bang Out Of Order is, I hope, a rattling good read. Taut and tight. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed conjuring it from the imagination and things distantly remembered. I hope you thoroughly enjoy reading it. 

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Oh yes, Oscar Wilde Jnr III, VP of Naus at Nike is today reviewing his press cuttings and probably thinking “that went well” as England rises to defend the cross of St George on the national football strip. 

Never having heard of Gerald Ratner, though distantly recalling Dylan Mulvaney, he’ll believe his American sports brand has achieved “cut through’” in the European “soccer” market in a way that merely indulging the annual replica rip-off game could never achieve. 

He may well be right, of course. On marches the news. But, on the other hand, Budweiser thought that too. They were once number one as well. 

Let’s for the moment overlook the arrogance and presumption in what Nike did – and the FA signed off – in altering a national emblem of almost 1,000 years standing and let us acknowledge as a given that the soulless commercialism that, among other things, drove it. And, finally, jot down somewhere the likely result of sodding about with the Stars and Bars in the same casual manner. Supreme Courts and hand guns all round.

Instead, let’s look at a developing pattern in sport. One which, because of football’s ever-open maw for money, has allowed the ingestion of the nasty corporate habit of diluting the profit motive with virtue-signalling politics. 

They’re after sport, you see. All of them. Rugby, when it’s not seeking to bankrupt itself, is an easy shot because of its perceived elitism. A sport, apparently, of public schools, empires and toxic masculinity. It being a ruffty-tuffty sort of a pursuit, “safetyism” will almost certainly see it off. 

There is much to be said on the selective nature of what gets reported on the head-injury subject and even more on the flaws in the class action which receives such uncritical coverage. But the sheer fear of risk and liability may well bury it. After all, who can question “elfnsafety”?

Meanwhile, cricket; village greens, Indian maidans, “play up and play the game”, manages to combine Englishness, imperial appeal and the Eton v Harrow match and, therefore, must be racist and exclusive. It can even be persuaded to publish a self-flagellating report to that effect. 

Which only leaves football. The big ‘un. It, of course, poses a different problem. Global. Lucrative. Diverse. But it does have that working-class tribal patriotism problem. “England till I die”? Something must be done. If only there was a way to deal with that and still make money. You see where I’m headed, don’t you?

The difficulty all sports present is that they inspire loyalty. Often passionate loyalty. And loyalty to an identity. And, of course, identity is the cause du jour. Unless, of course, it’s English identity because Englishness whether in the stereotypes of pith-helmeted viceroys, self-confident public schoolboys or shaven-headed “Enger-lund” supporters is wrong, very wrong.

Don’t believe me? Well, note how there’s always some twit a-tweeting about how St George wasn’t even English, fish and chips are Belgian and Churchill was a racist. They are emblematic, almost like a flag. And they must be run down and burned. 

Other national identities, of course, are to be indulged. Particularly if they manage to combine that odd blend of fringe nationalism that mixes anti-Englishness with socialism. Step forward the SNP as one example in many. 

The trouble is that many of these presumptions about sport and the clichés and subsequent thinking on which they are based don’t bear much examination these days. At elite level, sport is a meritocracy notably uninterested in much beyond ability and its capacity to achieve on-field and commercial success.

This is also reflected in the crowd. Take Spurs whose goalkeeper is Italian and whose most notable marksman is a Korean, Heung-Min Son. So numerous, voluble and diverse are the supporters behind these globetrotters that, age-old Tottenham fans from the North London locale are complaining – ironically – that they are excluded both by price and availability from watching from the stands that endless bid for silverware. 

Meanwhile, one corner of the Tottenham ground is garlanded with a rainbow banner and, over in SW London, Harlequins devotes a match every season to Pride. Both are notably metropolitan sides and there is, of course, an element of demographic marketing to these endeavours, however ultimately well-intentioned. Why exclude someone who might buy a ticket?

The fact remains though that in my experience nobody takes much notice of these things. Oddly, their focus is on joys and frustrations of the game. Their ire largely reserved, in time-honoured fashion, for the officials and few vigilantes stalk the grounds asking difficult questions about sexuality or ethnicity. 

Elitist? Well, elite sport is. But interestingly, both Harlequins in rugby and Surrey in cricket, both of whom enjoyed in the past a reputation for only wanting the right sort of chap, are spearheading attempts to democratise access to their sports. Both teams have been notably successful in recent times and know that a wide demographic nets all talents. 

Back then to Nike and football, a brand which, having recently been selected to provide Germany’s kit has provoked a patriotic backlash there because home-grown manufacturer Adidas has been dropped. Rumour has it they flirted with rendering the red cross of St George as a rainbow before that idea got vetoed. The odd purple pantone they’ve ended up with – now disguised as an obscure link to the 1966 training kit – seems to wink at it still. No matter. It’s all about identity. And when it comes to England, some identities are more equal than others. 

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Yes, a ropey old way to hold sport together and more frayed still in an age where nobody can hold an opinion moderately and technocratic officials hide ever further behind threadbare credentialism. But it’s what we have. And, without willing suspension of disbelief on the part of all involved, sport would simply fall apart. 

“There’s no game without the ref, boys!” It’s a point made by soothing captains, desperate whistlers and uncertain umpires every week. 

Wherefore this meditation on officiating? Well, you guessed it, we wuz robbed! In fact, there were several robberies over the weekend and all of them in plain sight. I’d call the police but their ability to referee is also the subject of what might be politely termed “debate”.

Always best to return to the scene of the crime and seal off the area. In which case, throw the incident tent up in Lyon where England’s rugby team had their pocket picked by a late, late call from the television match official (TMO) claiming heroic number eight Ben Earl had put in a no-arms tackle on French lock Romain Taofifenua, a moving massif central who weighs in at over 21 of your British stone and stands a casual 6’ 8”.

Unsurprisingly, he made Big Ben look small and Earl himself tried to work on the principle that everyone is the same size round the ankles. He went low and, in doing so, clearly offered his right arm. A point made in increasingly high-pitched mitigation plea by pitchside pundit Ugo Monye. Taofifenua, as you would, simply leant his avalanche bulk on Earl who never really stood a chance thereafter. His attempt to grab on was broken.

Fair do’s. It’s about momentum and as anyone who can match my ‘O’ level physics will tell you, momentum = mass x velocity. Romain had both on his side.

Not so to TMO Ben Whitehouse, whose assumed knowledge of the laws of the game – he’s been on a course, y’know – trumped the universal laws of physics and felt he must intervene in the dying moments of a close and titanic struggle to whisper “no arms tackle” in the ear of referee Angus Gardener who, in any case, had been right by the incident and was playing on. That was it, Gardener’s self-belief collapsed and he immediately gave France a penalty advantage they went on to butcher.

Seventy-nine minutes on the clock and up steps Tomas Ramos to belt over the kick from the half way line. England lose. Just. 

A shame, not just for England, but for the spectacle. It had been a Waterloo of a match. Each side had, at points, nearly been swept away by the ferocity of the onslaught. England in the first ten to fifteen minutes where French size and continuity had the boys in white “Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off at the next tide.” France, either side of the half when England unleashed a three-try counter attack to put them ahead. The lead was changing hands more often than La Haye Sainte in 1815.

Then, like an officiating Blücher, Whitehouse arrived late in the field and felt he must do something. That thing being to make an intervention that even French former international Benjamin Kayser described as “harsh”.

“When you have such a powerful ball carrier… for me the elbow is on the floor, so for me it is shoulder-first, but I agree with you [Monye] that it’s a half-decision.” In other words not one you throw into the mix in minute 79 of “the closest run thing you ever saw”.

Former referee Rob Debney wrote in The Times:

“Unfortunately, World Rugby has now found itself in a tricky position where TMOs are getting involved in things they really should not be. They have got to trust the referee’s judgment more often.

“The TMO coming in like this adds an extra layer of inconsistency into refereeing, and massive calls are being made that are changing the result late in the game. It’s beyond a joke, unnecessary and not good enough.”

This, you see, is the danger of giving people jobs. They will insist on doing them. Especially when given the false security of technology. Witchsmellers will find witches. Or what’s the point of having them? Meaning warty girls and outweighed number 8s are in big trouble. 

All of which must be moderated by pointing out that flaky decision-making is among sport’s oldest phenomena. Philosophers and football managers mumble it away with “swings and roundabouts” and “what goes around comes around”. Or, at least, they used to. 

Now, of course, they rail against the round ball’s VAR system, introduced, and this’ll get you, to emulate rugby’s use of technology to bring an element of certainty to the marginal. More than “did the ball cross the line?”, it governs all sorts of things from penalty decisions to whether a lock of hair or half a hand constitutes offside.

Proving that mission creep backed by tech can be nugatory were matters at West ‘am, where the ‘ammers were un’appy at the longest decision-making process in VAR ‘istory.

Denied a 95th-minute winner against Aston Villa by a marginal handball call that took over five minutes to adjudicate. West Ham’s Scottish manager David Moyes went marching onto the pitch like PG Wodehouse’s “ray of sunshine”.

The obvious point being that, if it took more than five minutes to establish a handball missed by the human eye then its effect, if such it was, was marginal to inconsequential. The letter of the law and the spirit of the game clash in a way that makes the former more “honoured in the breach than in the observance.”

Nor does it do much for flow. Watchers of gridiron will know that a sixty-minute sport can take some years to complete, the factors behind which include the oddly quaint habit of the legion of officials hurling flags onto the field after each play. Staccato and the more flowing appeal of old world sports are bad bedfellows. It already takes enough time to complete a scrum as players and officials compete in an escalating war of technical offence. 

Only in test cricket has tech really worked. Snicko’s ability to detect bat on ball has rendered the chances of being dismissed caught behind to an enthusiastic appeal highly unlikely while leg before wicket (lbw) – always a decision in the eye of the beholder – now yields willingly to the Decision Review System (DRS) along with marginal run-outs and boundary rope catches.

Ironically, the human element, dealt with by the introduction in 2016 of “umpire’s call” – in which on-field decisions can only be reversed where technology reveals a clear error – is the one bit up for grabs. England captain Ben Stokes – up in arms over Zak Crawley being sent to the pavilion in India – called for its removal only recently. Mind you, he had just lost. Badly.

One has to be cautious near all of this. Sport, drama and emotion are what make its alchemy. But they are not ingredients for 20/20 vision. Nor are the legion of keyboard warriors and armchair commentators watching endless replays in the unenviable position of being given a whistle and told to keep their heads while all around are losing theirs. No sport finds it easy now to recruit and retain officials. Some of the abuse that forced rugby’s Wayne Barnes to quit early only proves that sport, social media and a lack of perspective are bad juju.

Officials, meanwhile, can by nature lean to the officious. Grassroots sport is riddled with those who confuse endless courses for a feel for the game and an understanding of the balance required to referee or umpire well. Ben Whitehouse proves professionals aren’t immune.

Sports folk too need to remember that the caprice of the officiating gods is not new. Former England batsman and selector, Ed Smith – an erudite student of What Sport Really Teaches Us About Life – believes that one of its lessons is what it teaches about luck and the deus ex machina. The bounce of the ball, the rub of the green, the mood of the ref. It explains why sportsmen are so intensely superstitious.

Technology is now too often that deus and yet it isn’t omniscient. Too often it’s only being used to confirm bias or to introduce a sterility which is at odds with the drama on which sports thrive.

As yet another metaphor for life, sport’s use of technology is teaching us something about the way we live in general: just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.  

Subscribe to Patrick Barrow’s substack, Risky and Wry.

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No country is free of a self-image, of course and the diaspora has done a good job of exporting Ireland’s in both spirit and, occasionally, deed. Think Ned Kelly, son of a Tipperary transported convict sent to Van Diemen’s Land – Tasmania – for pig theft, next minute shooting it out with the coppers and a bucket on his head. 

Even the bands are defiant. Bob Geldof demanding charity money with menaces. Póg mo thóin. The Pogues. “Kiss my arse.”

You might have thought that Leo Varadkar, what with being Taoiseach and all, would have been aware of this tendency not just to talk rebellious talk but walk the rebellious walk. I mean, he’s played the card enough himself when it comes to villainous England, painted forever as a reactionary murder city, no immigrant safe and the sun never setting on the Brexit vote. There’s a pub song in there somewhere.

But, just like his English homologues, the danger of talking only to a political class with whom you violently agree is that you can occasionally forget the population you’re supposed both to lead and represent. 

You see, deciding that your country is a shining example of internationalism, modernity and social liberalism is one thing, checking to see whether “your truth” and reality coincide is entirely another. And in such moments, reality always wins. 

Because while the English tend to exhaust themselves in moments of huge but centuries-separate upheaval, like regicide, reformation or voting Brexit, for the Irish, like the French, revolting is a way of life.

A once homogenous, socially conservative country still hearing the echoes of the Catholic Church and rural at heart doesn’t, like the English, wring its hands over the social impact of mass immigration. It riots and takes up the centuries-old tradition of “burning out”. 

Undaunted by fair warning that the population might have had enough of the ever-onward march of what the metropolitan classes believe, Varadkar, flogged on by NGOs and a cross-party consensus, held a referendum on changing the constitutional definitions of family, motherhood and family care. The upshot was the highest ever no vote in Irish referendum history. And they’ve had a few!

Holding the vote in the same week as Mother’s Day was a particular stroke of political genius. Married families and mothers as domestic boss, home win. 

As with many of these debates, what you and I might make of the causes at issue isn’t the point. We either live in a country that’s given up God for card companies and hashtags and who think being devoted to mum is a bit Eastenders. Know what I mean? Or, failing that, believe traditional social structures don’t reflect the reality of people’s lives and live and let live. Take your pick. 

But what we Brits and the Irish appear to have in common, apart from a rather testy and intimate history, is feeling increasingly fed up with being led where we don’t want to go by a heedless ruling class permanently convinced of its own rectitude.

Yup, we got there first with Brexit, just like we beat the French to making kings a head shorter than they were at coronation. But thereafter, we collapse into managerialism, grumbling and political foot-dragging. Unlike the Brits, too polite for our own good and far less rowdy than our friends on the Emerald Isle, you can’t help but feel that the Irish have just told their elites to póg mo thóin.

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Where, oh where can one find reasons to be cheerful here on plague island? Well, I’ll tell you. Twickenham. I went on Saturday for the first time in a while. It’s a privilege I’ve ducked recently because, quite frankly, it’s just been another thing that’s hard to get to, overpriced, overhyped and fails to deliver.

But I went because I had a sneaky feeling in my bones and in my water. You see, when journalists sit together they, like most groups, tend to concur. This is a phenomenon recognised by evolutionary psychologists who suggest that we tend to hold tribal opinions. Not because we believe them necessarily but because it saves everyone else in the cave hitting us with a club until we’re dead. 

Sports desk opinion was that England were, are and will be dreadful. The first bit is undoubtedly true. The second, as Saturday went on to prove, open to question, and the third ignores the pendulum swing of sport. Like Chrissie Hynde, I may be great tomorrow but hopeless yesterday.

Because assembled scribes adhere to the narrative that Scotland are permanently one match from greatness, they’d confused English bumbling with Scottish performance. A point confirmed in Rome earlier on Saturday when they went down to Italy. The fact was though that England were trying something. And their rusty passing couldn’t match the ambition. Hence, they literally handed the game to Duhan Van Der Merwe. Yes, he of the clan Van Der Merwe, star of Highlander.

What the observer might also recognise is that the beloved old Six Nations always throws up a week of shock which, among other reasons, is why Grand Slams remain rare and glorious achievements. Going, as Ireland were, for an unprecedented two on the bounce was always going to be a stretch, not least because such monumental achievements require the courage of deep self-belief and Ireland, as their World Cup record will reveal, lack it when the real big ‘uns come along. 

England duly won. 

But that isn’t the point of the piece. The point is reasons to be cheerful and in this country’s great, glorious and unmatched weekly sporting pageant is that reason. Let me explain.

I took an early train because I was meeting friends for lunch and maybe a pint or two. The England match didn’t kick off until late afternoon but the train was heaving with sports fans going to other events.

A family took a table diagonally opposite. They were going to the races and sat either side of a carrier bag of cans. Dad, loudly telling everyone that the days when he could drink all day were regretfully behind him. Unselfconsciously, he dipped into the bag and cracked open a Foster’s. It was not yet 11am.   

Behind me, a couple regretted not having bought “roadies” themselves. They were going to football.

A loud discussion somewhere as somebody boarded wearing a Crystal Palace shirt – “How to embarrass yourself in public” was the theme. Discussion of odds was interrupted by speculation over whether all three of south London’s main teams, Palace, Charlton and Millwall, had contrived to be playing at home that day. A dream to some. A nightmare to the Met.

In a lull the word “Arsenal” drifted north to south down the carriage and floated off largely unobserved.

To my right, Barboured and Twickenham bound, a man was praising Mike Atherton’s piece in The Times on the great Jimmy Anderson, 700 wickets down and a bright light in England’s Indian gloom. A topic repeated across the day.

Twickenham town itself seemed half green. Never have I seen so many away fans, Grand Slam expectations and a week out from the Cheltenham festival. Confident good humour, later gracious “fair play”. The bars were full, the fun, the “craic”, the chat. 

Behind me in the restaurant sat Fergal Sharkey, unmolested by perfect cousins until some good heart knocked his beer into his lap with a swaying handbag. Taken in good part.  

Harmony too at the Guinness Bar as the big screen played Scotland’s Rome defeat to universal approval and the talk moved on to Anthony Joshua’s second round delivery of a clubbing right and a knock-out. 

Another knockout in the stadium, a match where the chariot swung down from the stands and the fed and watered answered with a famine song. Marcus Smith delivers the blow. 

Britain on a Saturday doing what it loves best. And it will do it all year round, summer and winter. Cricket grounds and “the season”, Henley to Headingley, Windsor to Wimbledon. In the winter, league, union, association, pick your football. Tours faraway, fights and finals. 

Largely good-natured, always impassioned, multi-faceted, never-ending and in seemingly infinite variety. 

I’ve seen American football Sundays, college to NFL in a single day, the French south in its deep love of the oval ball, Italy torn between Ferrari and football, Florentine too. Australia, State of Origin to Sheffield Shield. All boast their merits.

But for sheer unruly week-in-week-out impassioned variety, I think I’ve found the reason to stay, whatever The Telegraph says.

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A report in The Sunday Times suggests pubs are closing at a ground-rush rate. Caught in a maelstrom of lockdown, rising costs, rising taxation, declining staff and the mad, bad rent habits of breweries. Chuck in a generation that has apparently developed a fixation on whole milk and believes the “social” bit in social media actually applies and it’s a recipe for a sinking. 

It isn’t entirely new, of course. The village in which I now live was once devoted to hops. The essence and life force of beer. The ghosts of several pubs live on in local houses and, until the sixties, there was a brewery. The landscape is dotted with oast houses – whose conical roofs swing to the wind to dry the hops inside – and much of the land here was owned by the Fremlin family, once a ubiquitous name in Kent brewing. Their name now lives on in a shopping centre in the county town. “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!” 

At the bottom of my lane are crumbling hop-picker huts, Orwell was once among the occupants,  and an incongruous in-and-out gate on a relative “new build” that was once a heavy horse stable. Most of the surviving pubs in the locale were ale and cider houses until the late 50s. Licensed for nothing else. Tastes changed. Lager hops were grown elsewhere, rural workers departed for the London expansion. No customers for the ale house. Today, you’re more likely to find vines.

The pub I used on Sunday is a short, erm, hop away. It faces a cricket green. To its right, an Anglo-Saxon church and, to the left,  a series of almost fortified farm buildings, bastide style, topped by oast towers. Orchards peep over the hedge and the bowler’s arm if he comes in from the non-pub end.  A snapshot of departed rural life so ideal, it was used for the remake of the Pa Larkin series, Darling Buds of May.

Yet the landlord wants to move on and only a community buy-out stands between the continuation of a hostelry that’s home to a cricket club, a clay shoot, the Sunday walker tribe, ancient bikers on ancient BSAs and, of course, the locals, and it becoming just another house. “Save our pub!” as we all dutifully chorused to the local ITV outlet recently. 

But the point is it typifies. It is a rural pub. Woven from and into a way of life. When I lived in south-east London, the pubs too reflected something. Deptford and parts of Greenwich with their street corner and back alley pubs, The British Sailor, The Hoy (a sort of coastal and inland freighter) where bargees tied up for a livener away from prying eyes. Gone.

Others just had a character that came with their position, the considered Bohemian sparseness of Richard I – now a favoured “mum pub” beloved of the Ashburnham Triangle set. It had a rival, the Fox and Hounds, bang next door. Gone, as is its brewery, Charrington’s.  And the nearby Barley Mow, today is a tapas bar. 

Back in the days where the idea was to grow up quickly rather than linger in perpetual childhood, my school nodded and winked at trips to two locals. One had “A”-level art on the walls and our groundsman at the bar. The painting was done by the son of a London Bridge publican. His old boozer now a Thai gastropub. But both have survived. 

The other, run by the Irish father of a lad in my year – as a brief glimpse at the juke box would reveal. It was dartboards, fags and an outside gents with a corrugated iron roof. It died with the London working class and now hosts a plumbing supplier.  

Where rural pubs have fallen to bankruptcy, gastronomics and drink driving laws, London pubs should have fought more successfully but they’re clearly not immune. Some of the West End “brown” pubs live on. Reaction management will be pleased to hear the magnificent Victorian gin palace, the Lord Salisbury, breathes on as living memorial to what the inhabitants of the rookeries would have seen mirrored, gaslit and gleaming in the slum nights as they headed to Covent Garden music halls. Meanwhile, the Green Man and French horn, a few doors away, is a Greek taverna. 

Even the City has succumbed to sobriety and TWAT (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays) working. The insurance market fortifies its Leadenhall bastions and the Old Jam Pot off Cornhill but the mahogany haunts of once thirsty Square Mile grow harder to find.

Which forces me to make a stark choice between the remorseless logic of changing times, market forces and the inevitable consequence of that misbegotten lockdown and a melancholy lament for the way we were.

The points are obvious. We navigated by pubs. We met in them. We knew, as we raised a glass, that we followed in a grand tradition and from the beer-stained floor, oozed the very ullage of our forebears. 

Relationships; business, amical and romantic, conspiracies and the stabbing of playwrights, Marlowe in a Deptford tavern,  Greenwich “many a villeyn in” right back to Chaucer and his pilgrims who met, after all, in  a Southwark boozer called The Tabard. Falstaff in his Boar’s Head, Blind Pugh in the Admiral Benbow,  Barbara Windsor; “Get outta ma pub!”

Stitched by centuries into our culture, occupations and surroundings. The Jolly Waggoners, The Forester’s Arms, The Cutty Sark, Stratford’s “thespy” Dirty Duck with Burton glowering on jealously, The Cheshire Cheese and the bottled spirits of Fleet Street. 

What would we change them to now? The Dry January, the Low and No, The Dating App, The Laptop Arms and The Working From Home? Perhaps even in their death, pubs are reflecting British life.

A sad cliché of resort but do we know the £7-a-pint cost of everything and the value of nothing?

There are 45-odd thousand left. Some 30,000 fewer than the mid-Seventies. An attrition rate to frighten Bomber Command or the boys on the Somme. “Save our pubs” while you still can.  We won’t know what we’ve lost till it’s gone.

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Take the Trident missile failure, phutting like a damp November firework before a back garden party, leaving only disappointed children where ooh and aah should be. The system has been tested well over 100 times and only skittered across the lawn on ten occasions. 

But I’m going to do some extrapolating anyway because timing is the art of life and Trident coughed at a moment when the state of preparedness of HM Armed Forces is under scrutiny like rarely before. It’s not often defence looks like an election issue  – a fact which has allowed politicians to pull all sorts of fast ones – but it might be now. 

For Brits, y’see, pride in “our boys” is a matter of historical doctrine. And all of a sudden it’s looking shaky. It’s as though the apex of the national pyramid has suddenly developed a huge crack. I mean, the one bit you actually expect to work and look at it!

And that feeds a narrative that, in this sceptr’d isle, everything is clapped out. Our institutions are no longer trusted, the roads have potholes, the trains are an intermittent and overpriced luxury, the National Air Traffic Services has a breakdown if a single flight is misplotted and nobody wants to go to work anymore.

That we’re very far from alone in all this is hardly the point. A quick trip across the Channel is educational. A slightly longer one across the Atlantic still takes you to a city where people fall into rat-infested sink holes in a country where fentanyl-dazed zombies paw the windows. But we don’t live in Marseille or Naples, New York or San Francisco. We live here.

Going back to context, I wonder if we haven’t been here before. Y’see, if, like me, you still think of the Eighties as three or four years ago, you remember a thing or two. Like the Police, by which I mean the band, kicking off the decade with a number called When the World is Running Down.

And, of course, it was running down. Football stadiums caught fire, as did tube stations. There were 31 major rail crashes. And, when we went to war in the South Atlantic, the RAF had to scavenge bits from museums to render a Vulcan V-bomber from the Sixties serviceable. A splendidly sticky tape and hope adventure that culminated in the world’s longest-ever bombing raid. 

Oddly, the Eighties has entered popular memory as the decade of modernisation. That spell when Britain stopped being a post-war country. And, of course, it was. Not least because this litany of disaster spurred overdue reform and investment in a nation of slam-door trains, wooden football stands, ageing infrastructure and underinvested industries in sectors no longer competitive.  

The difference between then and now was a once-in-a-generation politician and a country in the mood to change. Now, no such leader looms and the nation has, as lotus-eaters are wont to do, fallen into a dreamy dependence on the state. A habit it learned with astonishing rapidity in the madness of lockdown, demotivated by the stagnation and austerity of the financial crisis and now under the yoke and whip of onerous tax burdens.

But to all things a season. And more than occasionally I wonder if the season in which we find ourselves is the one, where, like a snake we are sloughing the last of something started in the Eighties. The last itchy skin of post-war solutions. 

They are in the big and the small. In the usefulness of aircraft carriers, the utility of Europe as an entity for the moderating hand of mutual prosperity, in whether NATO is, to borrow from Macron, “brain dead” and whether America will continue to keep it alive. 

In whether the BBC can be trusted now it no longer wears a dinner jacket, in whether the NHS can still be indulged now that we protect it rather than vice versa, in a demographic dependent on immigration for youth and cheap labour and in whether we can continue discarding old industries like steel, power generation and car manufacture. Or in university being a panacea.  And, going back to Trident, in whether Britain can continue to strut and fret its hour on the stage or whether, nearly eighty years after our last great military part, we’re finally too tired to remember the lines. 

Back in the Eighties, we were led from the wilderness. This time we look like we’re going into it. 

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Ah yes, a line as timeless as anything the man himself produced. Yet, while classic he may be, he’s also out of favour. “The poet of Empire” is, these days, a mark of Cain even though he penned that perennial national favourite ‘If’.

Well, up to a point it’s a fair cop and one must treat triumph and disaster just the same. What is it they say in advance of any film of vintage these days? “Language and attitudes reflective of the time.”

But it might easily be argued that Kipling was misunderstood. Take, for example, The Man Who Would Be King. Based loosely on the adventures of Josiah Harlan, it’s a tale easily rendered as one of the imperial spirit. A great gamble undertaken by fearless sons of Albion, fame and fortune among the high passes and snowy peaks of the North West frontier. Connery and Caine in a buddy movie of chemistry unmatched outside, perhaps, Redford and Newman in another mountain adventure, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 

Know the tale though and you know it ends badly. Hubris and nemesis among things half understood and of millennial permanence. Here before you came, here after you’ve gone. Anyone would think it was a metaphor for empire. 

Similarly, and here’s the difficult bit, The White Man’s Burden, Kipling’s exhortation for America to join in colonialism and empire and pay the price it demands as the Old World began to show signs of exhaustion.

One way or another, the United States took it to heart. Within 50 years of the Philippines entanglement Kipling was writing about, America had taken advantage of a pre-eminence gained over two world wars to establish, as Niall Ferguson convincingly argues in his book Colossus, an American empire.

Someone transatlantic grimaces and goes all 1776 but how else would one describe a nation boasting the world’s mightiest military garrisoning strategic spots from Berlin to the Far East, holding the world’s largest economy, the reserve currency, the pre-eminent cultural reach and being quite unabashed by using them all to exert its power?

What came with that, of course, was global leadership and all its responsibilities and accompanying resentments. For Pax Britannica, read Pax Americana, and while Europe has been quite happy to live under that Ich bin ein Berliner guarantee, it has never quite forgiven it. Perhaps it was the way they treated De Gaulle as a weird chancer in the latter stages of the war. 

Either way, the trick Europe managed to pull, argues Ferguson, was to establish a rival United States of Europe. A collective old world economic force to match the new, eventually adopting its own supranational currency and legislature but working the historically unprecedented stunt of getting the rival empire to pay for its defence. 

Now that gig looks up. Kipling, you see, was right. Empire is bloody exhausting and very expensive and, in a moment of supreme irony, the US would be quite happy to see Europe take up the burden of actually defending itself beyond regulating on the beaches and on the landing places. What with Russian shell factories being notoriously disregarding of EU working time directives and all. 

Naturally, the finger of social democrat European opprobrium is giving US president-to-be Donald Trump, the full j’accuse. The bellicose blondie has, after all, threatened to feed any NATO payment laggards to Putin’s dogs. 

Possibly worth remembering though that the most recent manifestations of US nose- holding over Europe came with Obama, when Crimea was invaded, and it was Joe Biden’s fine disregard for his allies that prompted the come-on of unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan. Putin was less keen to chance his arm when “the Donald” was in power.

Either way, it’s hard to argue that there isn’t a fundamental fairness at play in demanding Europe, finally, “does its bit”, what with China looking to take away Taiwan’s chips and keeping the American head boy busy.

This, I think means it’s time for an overdue attitude adjustment over this side of the Pond. Once, it was, as Kipling put it: “An Englishman’s burden to be misunderstood.” Now, I can’t help but feel, it’s an American’s.  To return to film, who better than Marine Colonel Jessup to put us Europeans straight?

“You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall! We use words like honour, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something, you use them as a punchline. I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself, to a man who rises and sleeps, under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said ‘thank you’, and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn, what you think you are entitled to!”

And, right now, he’d be right.

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“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” Or, if you prefer a little Dierks Bentley with your Churchill: “Half your life you struggle, half your life you fly. Half your life making trouble, half your life making it right.” Pick your philosophy of consolation – we all need one. 

And, what with the increased emphasis on mental health since Covid, most of us have developed little ways and means of dealing with the dark times, from Boethius to exercise. Alright, perhaps not Boethius. 

One of my favourite recourses is “the happy ending”. That deeply embedded cultural desire to see triumph in the face of adversity. The fairy tale from which we emerge safely from the deep, dark wood to live happily ever after in the shire. We have to have this hope in life or else face despair and, from there, it’s a short hop to “What’s the point?”

So what better way to haul oneself from the slough of despond than the escapism of the screen? Diversion, absorption, entertainment, for a short spell transported and, indeed, reassured either by fact or fiction that people have, do and will rescue victory from the jaws of defeat.

And yet. 

For all the plethora of streaming services we nowadays enjoy, if that’s the word, it strikes me that more and more time is spent searching to find something that is not afflicted by that great misnomer “gritty realism”, the confusion of dark with clever, or a series of thinly disguised moral lectures. 

Most striking of all is the extinction of the sitcom in the wild. Caught in the crosshairs of our po-faced times, the idea that we might share and recognise comic reactions to life’s challenges has been denied us. Few survive outside BBC iPlayer or the various sub-strands of Channel 4 where one might occasionally see a Frasier disappearing into the bush. 

The essence of many of the best was an essential sadness. Porridge was set in a prison. Only Fools and Horses in the Peckham tower block that hosted Del Boy’s thwarted dreams and pretensions and Rodney’s aching desire for something better. And Cheers was an assemblage of the lonely, the pretentious and the perpetually immature. The bar where even the barman had a problem with alcohol. 

To some greater or lesser extent we see ourselves in these characters and in their experience of the human condition. Hence when they win, we do. Norman Stanley Fletcher thrives on his “occasional little victories” against the system and the dreaded Prison Officer McKay, both confined if the latter but knew it. Del Boy’s endless optimism and endeavour finally rewards his motto that “He who dares, Rodney, he who dares…” And Sam finally realises that Diane isn’t for him and that Cheers is where he is happiest. And always was. 

And so it was that I recently found myself watching To The Manor Born, recommended by a cunning algorithm on iPlayer that has picked up on a penchant for seventies television. Peter Bowles and Penelope Keith dual. He for the class to match his wealth, she for the wealth to match her class. Keith behaves appallingly but does so with the ironclad Boudica-cum-nanny confidence that so oddly appeals to Brits. 

Eventually, their fortunes reverse and, the field levelled, they marry in a final episode watched at the time by 24 million people. There was, of course, a reason for a viewing figure today’s programmers could only dream of.

In the end, for all their trials and tribulations, De Vere and fforbes-Hamilton triumphed. She over the circumstances that had reduced her, he over his loneliness and struggle for acceptance and both over their mutual affection. We wished them well. We found it uplifting. For all that she was a hectoring snob and he an oleaginous parvenu, we liked them because, deep down, they knew their own ridiculousness and laughed along.  

And that’s the word, uplifting. It seems so absent in a screen world of dark lighting, mumbled dialogue or a brand of humour that is so remorselessly earnest. Who now could live as, the recently departed Ian Lavender did, off a role in which he was eternally condemned as “stupid boy” as a punch line?

Humour must have a victim and victimhood is not allowed. 

Much the same in film where a happy ending would not allow the endless continuation of a franchise or where the American psychotherapy obsession demands that everyone is badly damaged. Or a superhero. Or both. Mind you, even Bond succumbed. To leave one of these films feeling the world is perhaps better than when you went in is to emerge like Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in gales of laughter only to discover they’ve been watching Platoon. 

An exception stumbled across in desperation recently is Green Book, an Oscar winner, based on the true story of a 1960s musical tour of the Deep South by Don Shirley, a black American pianist, and his Italian American minder “Tony Lip” Vallelonga.

An American story of the road and a buddy movie at once, it looks beyond the caricatures and finds two flawed, different but essentially decent men who strike up an unlikely and enduring friendship in flawed and difficult times. 

Struggle, if you will, not to feel better after seeing it. It’s what we all are and what we all live in. It’s hopeful. And we need more of it. 

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It’s a proper one, too. High on its earthworks, solid, Norman and, though a bit knocked about by history, clearly the sort that was meant to remind Saxon England who held the power. 

Down the centuries, it found itself at the centre of rebellions. Against Rufus, against John, against Henry III and, finally, against Charles I. Playing for a kingdom. The stuff of high stakes and beheadings. Worse if you were Simon de Montfort. Ooh nasty.

Imagine then how little the unarmed mini-mob gathered either side of The Big Bridge must have seemed from its ramparts last Saturday. Normally, the fortress looks benignly on people collecting for charity or, in summer months, waiting for a pleasure boat. 

But no, in the bleak midwinter, here was politics. “Hoot if you support a ceasefire!” the placards urged. I glanced for a multitude trying to force the castle gates. But no. In Palestine of course and, where once the mighty standard of the de Clere’s might have flown, waved a thousand, perhaps a hundred, alright a few dozen Palestinian flags.

The traffic, unaware perhaps of Tonbridge’s pivotal role in Middle East peace negotiations, was unmoving and unmoved. More mute than hoot.

Stranded as I briefly was beside the revolution, I had a chance to view the unhappy few at close quarters. No surprises. The majority were, of course, the quilt-coated middle class, wielding nothing more ferocious than a strongly worded op-ed in The Guardian. Yes, and in Tonbridge too where the Tugendhat majority stands as unassailable as, I don’t know, a castle.

Harmless enough, I thought, eyeing that odd look they get. Something akin to the martyr. An ecstasy of righteousness even in the face of dungeon, fire and sword. The wan smile of the misunderstood destined for welcome by a heavenly choir.

But then I relented and thought of Kent’s long history of rambunctiousness, riot and rebellion. Tyler and Wyatt. Testonites, Tithe Wars and the Betteshanger Strike. Orwell, workhouse and a hop-pickers diary from the Elephant and Castle to Wateringbury. A county Brexit to its core. Except Tunbridge Wells, as you ask. And I looked closer for that defiant tradition.

It wasn’t there. Except in disguise.

It was more than a call for a ceasefire, a worthy enough camouflage in line with for which, as the body count mounts and the region wobbles, there may well be a case.  

Because beneath the apparently benign call to “for God’s sake stop the killing” was a notable lack of even-handedness. No Israeli flag flew. No hostage pictured. There was no pretence at a hands-across-the-Jordan, blessed-are-the-peacemakers, unity of voice which added “for all our sakes, oh brotherhood of man.”

What there was, of course, among the banners raised less high was plenty of condemnation of Israel, most notably as “an apartheid state”, the cloak of Hain so lately borrowed, not least by South Africa. 

Among the ragged crowd may well have been the well-intended, even the slightly uncomfortable, but as the traffic edged by either in silent disapproval or apathy, one knew what the mini-mob was essentially about.  There are some instincts the old castle would still recognise. 

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Damned if I can find the quote but, as the good citizens of Oran labour between the deadening horizons of an overheated hinterland and a becalmed blue sea, the rubbery rat corpses begin to fill the stairwells and the first cases of plague appear, narrator Dr Brieux says something that struck then as it strikes now. 

“Life carries on as normal right until the moment of catastrophe.” Some such anyway.

The restaurants were full, love affairs continued, newspapermen reported. And so on. 

It resonated during Covid but resonates more now because La Peste is, famously, rooted in war as an allegory for the German occupation of France. 

Appropriately then, “NATO warns of all-out war with Russia in next 20 years” leads The Telegraph. Notably, widespread panic has not ensued, despite the fact that Sweden has warned its citizens similarly and Grant Schapps warns that we live in “pre-war” times.

In The Times, I can read about someone finally tasting Britain’s best roast after a four-year wait. The Brighton and Hove News reports an Extinction Rebellion protest outside a local defence manufacturer. I know because my local car mechanic got held up by it this morning, driving from his partner’s house. Another newspaper has Penelope Cruz looking as only Penelope Cruz can.

All normal. Right until the moment of catastrophe. 

All this begs questions. Are we apathetic? Is British sang-froid alive and well even in our emotionally incontinent times? Is there little choice but to keep calm and carry on? Or are we eye-rollingly bored of the endless predictions of imminent disaster to which the permanent hysteria of the internet age so easily lends itself? It’s the wolf! Yeah, whatevs.

Probably all of the above. But, of course, other explanations might apply. We get such counter signals. We have an army that could fit inside Wembley stadium and stretch out a bit too. We turn down highly capable pilots for being the wrong sex and colour. Not that we have sufficient aircraft to train them. Two years before you can get a fast jet spot at RAF Valley. The Navy builds ships it can’t man, or woman, nor, apparently, escort and supply. 

We’ll allow the closure of refineries and steel works, restrict farming and cut ourselves off from energy supplies. 

We’re not alone in this and variant madness. The US can’t recruit for love nor money, France gets cross if Germany pledges weaponry to Ukraine and chunks of Europe have a defence budget that will just about cover a nice staff car, some gold braid and a catapult. 

We have, apparently, shot our munitions all over Ukraine but can, evidently, still find enough left to squirt at the Houthis. 

Our “special relationship” allies blocked the appointment of a genuinely capable Defence Secretary in Ben Wallace to NATO and came up with the blinding idea that Ursula Van Der Leyen, a woman who left the once mighty Wehrmacht armed with broomsticks in her spell as German defence minister, might be the very gal.

The regiments of former officers contributing newspaper columns veer between telling us that we’re down to our last Spitfire or praising the can-do professionalism of our brave men and women of the Armed Forces. 

All that has saved us, it seems, is the fact that the once-feared Red Army is still driving T.34s in an armoured charge with the ammunition stashed in the turret and Iran has inexplicably pooped off Pakistan.

Now, apparently, the citizenry is expected to strap on a tin helmet and gaze stoically skyward while the wife joins the ration queue. 

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, nobody’s buying. The azure heavens hold no Heinkels. And haven’t done in many a long year. And we’ve rather got used to that as being the norm, always overlooking that nothing lasts forever and the Roman wisdom that he who desires peace should be prepared for war.

It is too much for politicians to expect us to take all this seriously now. For so many years they have forgotten to do so themselves. A salami slice here, a “peace dividend” there and settle down with Francis Fukuyama come eventide.

So things carry on as normal. Right up until the moment of catastrophe. A plague on all their houses. 

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There’s little new to add to its lofty sense of superiority, sealed within a security-ringed village, high on a mountain. Its attendees veer between considered casualness and the wide-eyed wonder of a Victorian urchin, fed on a charitable whim in the kitchens of a grand hotel.

On that subject, I was billeted at the Schatzalp, a former sanatorium immortalised in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and boasting a belle époque restaurant. To reach it, you took a funicular. To leave it, well, let’s leave that just for a moment. 

Being, as it was, snowbound, delegates were obliged to stomp from one venue to the next doing that New York thing of sloughing puffer jackets, bobble hats and so on to reveal suits and passes.  

Divesting themselves for public scrutiny were, among others, Gordon Brown and François Fillon, respective PMs of Britain and France at the time. Not that the scrutiny was intense. As they’re wont to chant at football matches for a favoured son, “He’s one of our own, he’s one of our own..”

The financial crisis was imminent, though neither knew, and it went on to put one amidships both for Gordon Brown and the Davos class. “Why did no-one see it coming?” as the Queen asked. 

Fillon, meanwhile, went down with the Sarkozy government and then scuppered his own lifeboat in a corruption scandal known as “Penelopegate“. Down he went along with the French centre-right. Born near Le Mans, his race was run. 

It hardly needs pointing out that such are the prophets whose mountain we ascended in search of tablets of wisdom. 

And yet back they still come, hoping for that Davos-branded executive bag to casually sling on the desk back at Global Management Consultant HQ or Megabank Incorporated. 

This year, the theme is restoring trust. I can only refer you to the above to see why this is both literally and figuratively an uphill task. And since then, of course, we’ve had Eurocrises, Brexit, pandemics, immigration crises, energy shocks, inflation and wars current and, mayhap, imminent. 

The global übermensch have not turned in a convincing performance. 

Though he’s had the good sense to swerve a quick flight out to Zürich and the tricky limo ride up the hill to enlightenment, one always feels that Rishi Sunak belongs among them. Global, business school, a meritocrat in the literal sense and a man who renders politics less a matter of passion and conviction than an exercise in management.   

Now they’re coming for him. The electorate, his own party, posterity, God help us, the man brought down by Keir Starmer. “Savaged”, to quote another politician, “by a dead sheep”.

Like Brown and Fillon before him, Merkel and Macron, they seem set up to prove the adage that all political careers must end in failure. And the truth is he was set up to be so. 

Elected by nobody, Sunak seems to embody that worst reason for arriving in office. Not being the other fella. The blight that has long infected French politics whereby people vote against and not for in such a way that conviction, passion and obvious cause are muted and the dead hand of centrist managerialism is all that’s left, while reform never carries a mandate. 

We can see the upshot worldwide. We don’t like mad Donald, we get gerontocrat Biden, you will get mad Donald. We don’t like Hollande, we get arrogant Macron and for which you will now almost certainly get Le Pen. A constant overcorrection.

Meanwhile, for those below the cloud base, far from the belle époque restaurants, the private meetings and cloud nine, the world doubles, doubles, toils and troubles.   

So how do you get down from the Schatzalp? It has its own toboggan run and, so the local story goes, it was used to discreetly move the bodies of those for whom the Magic Mountain had proved less than magic.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I wonder if Gordon and François ever tried it. I’m sure Rishi will. Incurable, you see?

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One has so many things to dislike. Things largely accelerated by the toxic death ripple of lockdown and the masquerade ball of social conscience. #BeKind as we shut your branch and rip out your cash machine. Deserted customer care centres forever experiencing “unusually high call volumes”. The bad primary school teacher tones, no longer content with firing the staff, they’ll sack the customer too. 

What is the perfect corporation? A people-free automation from production to fulfilment. Even the dividend paid silently, electronically, in the deep dark night.  I, Robot. 

And yet, while part of the Venn diagram, that’s not quite what corporatism means, for all that we’ve folded it into a synonym for big business. 

What it means, of course, is capture. And capture of state or organisation by interest groups. And, oddly, it had at its heart a quasi-Communist collectivism. No surprise then that one of its most successful exponents has been Woke. Though that’s come up late on the rails because, way ahead, a dot in the distance, is what we think of as the corporation.

Think Eisenhower’s industrial military complex. Or the EU. Their very essence is the relationship with the company. The big ones anyway. 

And big counts because 18,500 Consolidated Liberator bombers or 600,000 Willys Jeeps is a lot of solution, a lot of money and an awful lot of vested interests. 

Scale and solution. The corporate offering. And it shouldn’t be dismissed because, as in wartime, we welcome it. As, most of us, welcomed big pharma’s capacity to produce in double-quick time an effective Covid vaccine. Meanwhile, at consumer level, which of us hasn’t staggered, tearfully grateful from some benighted region of the world into the welcoming arms of a Guinness, a Heineken or a Hilton. Ubiquity of standard. The globalisation of taste.  

Not all of which might be condemned as entirely bad. Though the impact on the small trader, the regional offering, ingenuity, creativity, genuine market choice and the capacity of the small to influence the large is obvious from macro to micro. It compels a stark choice between niche specialism or vastness. At which point, the niche specialist is likely to be bought by the giant next door. 

But, to the procurer, boxes are ticked and, yes, I use that expression advisedly and all condensed into an oft-repeated corporate aphorism: “Nobody got fired for hiring IBM.”

One of those boxes, particularly to government, looks like adding free market virtues to state decision-making. On behalf of the taxpayer, we do as the consumer does and look along the shelves for the very best the market has to offer. 

Except, of course, that the free market long ago succumbed to constant consolidation. Take mobile technology. I once worked on the transition between One2One, famed largely for its advertising, and its acquisition by Deutsche Telekom’s wireless division, T-Mobile. At the time engaging in an acquisition rampage across Europe and beyond and its great rival was France’s Orange. And yet now, to quote the Spice Girls and I very rarely do, two become one in the form of EE which, itself, has been folded into BT.

The consumer rationale – as it was when One2One died a death – is a greater resource and an enhanced offering. But of consumer choice, scant mention. 

Similarly, a government defence buyer looking for submissions for a new aircraft might once have chosen between offerings from de Havilland, Bristol, Hawker, Avro, Blackburn, Gloster or English Electric. All of whom, in the aftermath of the war, were perennial and pioneering record holders for first, highest, fastest, most vertical and, one might add, most stylish both in civil and military manufacture. 

Forcibly consolidated for many of the same reasons that rationalised the mobile phone market, one sees scant evidence that this has been reflected in more efficient procurement or similarly world-beating aircraft. Governmental ineptitude combined with the weary chasing of British Aerospace or “our European partners” is embedded. Anyone seen my Nimrod?

Nor is procurement sufficiently interrogatory about reputation. I’m just taking an example off the top of my head here but let’s say, Fujitsu.

As The Spectator helpfully revealed, its reputation in Japan is awful, implicated in system failures for ID cards, the Tokyo stock exchange, ATMs and various other projects.

Crediting the BBC for its investigative journalism, The Speccie says: “The BBC cites Satoshi Nakajima who worked at NTT (Japan’s premier telecommunications company) before becoming a foundational member of Microsoft. Satoshi characterises Fujitsu as a zombie company staggering on thanks to its close relationship with the government. The cozy relationship ensures its continual profitability despite the ossified company culture and inadequate tech capabilities.”

Comforting though it is to find that an inability to deliver an IT system functionally, on time and on budget is not a uniquely British problem, it’s a shame nobody brought this to the attention of the Post Office when it hired Fujitsu to install its system in sub post offices to all the horrendous effects we now know. 

It’s not like Fujitsu doesn’t have previous, having been embroiled in Lorenzo, the failed NHS patient data system.

Swirled into this Japanese recipe for disaster are all the usual UK ingredients. Political heedlessness encouraged by arrogance, vast contracts, unaccountable consultants, honours and post-politics advisory roles on lucrative fees. 

A ghastly SNAFU in which we have been invited to watch an unspeakable troilism between the head of a business, a minister and a corporation. 

Think of the children. And the offspring of this awfulness are the falsely condemned and financially broken of “the sub post office community”.

“What a carve up!” As Jonathon Coe might have said. Except he thought it was all down to Margaret Thatcher who famously mistrusted corporations, as she did all vested interest,  and threw a hankie over a model BA jet when the airline abandoned the Union flag. I wonder what happened to the world’s favourite airline. Consolidated, I should think. 

Meanwhile, as, once again, the tax payer gets bent over, the dividends get paid, the minister ducks the issue and the dishonours are even, it’s worth remembering the old music hall wisdom. 

“It’s the same the ‘ole world over

It’s the poor what gets the blame

It’s the rich what gets the pleasure

Ain’t it all a bleedin’ shame.”

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One could say similar of the world in macro. Politics, geopolitics, economics, society have all gazed dinosaur-like at the skies and wondered what that flaming ball heading heaven to horizon was before returning heedlessly to doing dinosaur stuff.

So far so apocalyptic. But that’s easy to do, isn’t it? We’ve been at it since the Greeks invented the word. A long time ago. And yet here we still are.

Optimism then is the brief. Things to look forward to. So follow me now and mind the steps because they’re slippery.

Here, deep below the Dordogne, we find ourselves in a hitherto undiscovered chamber of the caves of Lascaux, let’s call it Lascaux V, and it lies just past the picture of an ancient bison hunt with an early environmentalist telling everyone off. 

We are among the very origins of human consciousness. Some 17,000 year-old evidence of our ancestors’ ability to think in the abstract and to see themselves as both different to and part of the inhabitants of their world. Cor. 

And here, hold the torchlight higher, scribed onto the very living rock, the earliest evidence of news. Three headlines. A Question of Sport Launched. Can Test Cricket Survive? Hopes Rise for Middle East Ceasefire. And there are, archaeologists say, signs among the fading umber of a fourth. Protestor Run Down by Rare Bison.

The very writing on the wall.

Of these, only A Question of Sport is no longer with us. It died in 2023. “Bantz” having long ago been outlawed and parlour game TV consigned, along with Ask The Family and Call My Bluff, to a time where families gathered round a single screen for a post-homework, just-in-from-the-office, Bird’s-Eye-beefburger shared experience. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips.

The rest is oft predicted but has rarely come to pass. In 1882, England’s loss to Australia was described, stand by, as “the death of Test cricket’, and from those Ashes rose… Notwithstanding one of the most compelling series in modern history last summer, those same cave artists are back at it. Former England and Australia captains Mike Atherton and Steve Waugh striking up the Greek chorus, as India’s megabucks, the IPL and the compelling briefness of the short-form game combine to suggest a tragic end to five days in the sun. 

I remain optimistic. Test cricket has become high octane and high drama. And, unless rain intervenes, now almost always produces a result. A good product, for this is what professional sport is, tends to live on and oddly, given its fossilised reputation, cricket’s ability to adapt has kept it relevant. It’s survived rebel tours, Kerry Packer, “vectors of disease” and still boundary fielders from abroad endure the wit and wisdom of the Hollies Stand come summer.   

The largesse of the Big Three (India, England and Australia) will be compelled on the basis of enlightened self-interest. No shop window, no sale. All will be well. 

More seriously, the Middle East. Dig if you will for optimism. The unfortunate fact is that “smiting” has been the custom since Biblical times. But while Israel’s righteous anger may now be putting its cause in peril, it’s notable that the Arab world has not been in a hurry to join the bundle, nor has its enthusiasm for Gaza’s diaspora been notable. 

With Gulf nations spreading their considerable global financial influence into everything from aviation to sport and the prime mover being troublesome and non-Arab Iran, who needs the aggro?

Not that this leaves the West without its problems, the rapier end of which is Houthi corsairs troubling maritime trade and the bludgeon being power bloc disruptor politics, but one could easily argue that this has given complacency a long overdue jolt and some necessary focus has been forced upon leading nations whose smugness and arcane social concerns have been misdirecting them badly. 

It is not the end of history. And never has been.

Might we get away with some optimism on “woke”? It’s an odd world that allows the boss of a FTSE company to joyfully concede that she discriminates on the basis of sex and colour in the name of diversity but, outside Aviva, the corporate world’s experience of failing ESG funds, debanking and tone deaf advertising has not been a happy one. Time to get on with the business of business?

The counter, of course, is that with a Labour government increasingly probable, we’ll all be plunged back into its penchant for sewing identity division in the name of social cohesion. Keir Starmer has knelt for plenty but stood for little.

But cause for optimism may be that a Labour government might finally be in the mood to grasp its own nettle and deal with the NHS. Wes Streeting certainly makes the right noises and the unfortunate fact is that it’s a kicked can we’ve all finally caught up with. Only they can do it without the faux indignation and tiresome ideological howl of a lobby that’s tested its righteousness to destruction. Odd to think doctors once stood against it. 

More broadly, politics is in for a shake-up. Europe which has always had a penchant for political disruption – to varying degrees of global effect – is already showing the way, leaving Britain counter cyclical in its Hobson’s choice zig to the Left while the Continent zags to the Right. 

Back home we’ve long thought ourselves immune but, between Brexit, Covid, generalised incompetence, dullness and a display of impotence in the face of events that is surely unprecedented, “something better change” to quote Guildford revolutionaries, The Stranglers. 

Step forward, or not, reluctant virgin Nigel Farage who, even as I write, is still doing a burlesque behind his feathers and teasing us over whether he will “return to frontline politics.”

Of course he bloody will.

Now, ease up, I ask you not necessarily to find optimism in the lad himself. That’s between you, the ballot box and whether you want the Conservative party to survive. But that a new dynamic to the Buggins’ turn mediocrity we’re all so heartily sick of is overdue seems beyond doubt. 

Yup, yeah, gottit, “populist”. All that. Bend the word to your own personal awl. Fact though. Farage rarely intervenes without consequence and he has a Thatcherite instinct for what people think as opposed to what Westminster would like them to believe.

Something to look forward to? Well, we’ll see. Nothing lasts forever, you know.

So, now, to get us out of this cave, if you could all just turn round, carefully, sir, so you don’t rub anything off. Ooh. That’s a new one. Soothsayer: “Never predict. Especially About Future.” 

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