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You’re sitting or standing or listening on the train in the mid 2020s to a radio play of 1939, based on a book, published in 1938, about the wrecking of a ship on the ice of the frozen north, which took place in 1910. It is a frail chain of hands, that which connects us to such a past.

Radio is a wonderful medium, made worse by thing not being live. The Mercury Theatre on the Air had live orchestras, their scores arranged conducted by Bernard Herrmann. They had sound effect work like the screaming wind I have just referred to. They have live actors, real actors, in studios together, standing around those big room mics. It felt real. It was real.

The radio is a portal. I know it well. Ask people who lived through the golden age of radio and they will tell you. These stories are always told by adults who were once children. They are children still. Johnny Carson told a story about hearing a particularly chilling horror tale on the radio one night, at the house of a friend. He said that the sound effect that most stuck with him, most transported him, was the sound of a head being chopped with an axe which, he said many years later on TV, was probably an axe sinking into the hard outer rind of a watermelon. But as he walked home from his friend’s house in the gathering darkness, Johnny was there, seeing or feeling a head being struck by an axe, and his father’s decision to hide behind a garden wall, and to jump out and shout boo, was not well-timed. Johnny was so on edge, so captivated, that he leapt into the air, or into a tree, or ran screaming down the road: whatever suits the teller of stories on that particular night.

One more story. My grandfather, when he was a very little boy, heard a horror anthology on the radio called Appointment with Fear. It began with the sinister voice of the narrator, interspersed with ominous chimes of the clock.

Good evening, the narrator would say. This is your story-teller, the man in black.

And my grandfather told me all of this word-perfectly. He remembered it eighty years on. And when I found one of the four of those programmes of which recordings have survived, and played it to him — the introduction just as he described to me from memory — I knew that the radio is a magical thing and the past is closer than we might sometimes imagine.

Now, odd though it might seem, this poisonous idea is useful in some ways. If some terrible thing is happening in a really local way, you can forget about it. You have permission not to care. That’s freeing and good and people love it. But the same concept can be a little more difficult, for example, if you want to fall in love or bring up a family or maintain a civilisation or build something or make something or create something useful to someone else, or, really, if you want to do anything worth doing in the world. In fact, it’s a paralytic, an easy exhortation to drop the heavy thing you might be carrying, to put stuff off for tomorrow. Because if nothing matters, why stress yourself, man? That’s what many people think. The world is built for them, made easy for their passage. Chill out. All they want is for everyone else to chill out. Entropy is on their side. The world was built for the chillers.

It’s the natural world-view of children, who are protected from many of the tragedies of life that will affect them and arrive only later. Eat the ice-cream, lie to avoid a day or two of school — why are you getting so upset? It’s the natural perspective of losers, too, who are so insulated by a lack of self-awareness (real awareness of their lives, of what little they’d achieved, might kill them), that they can laugh at people who try things with happiness and ease. The loser is the natural critic. But not a professional critic, however. That takes work. And who needs that?

They think like this. Nothing matters, so I can say what I want. I can do what I want because who’s going to stop me? It’s pointless to do hard things. Pointless and foolish and fraudulent. The people you grow up with often resent you most of all if you achieve something they did not. Because life’s meant to be chill. Why aren’t you being chill like the rest of us? We knew you earlier, when you’d done nothing. We know what you’re really like.

Much of the modern world is run like this, too. Britain is governed as though nothing mattered. Growth is at zero for two decades: let’s have a party. The country is slowly degenerating into a Yugoslavia style stew of ethnicities and religions, each of which seem to want to kill each other and to destroy the mainstream currents of society. Who cares?

No one ought to be punished for this, made accountable for this, humbled as a result of this. Because nothing matters, so why, precisely, should we take on a lot of stress and bother for something that, on a cosmic scale, means so little? This is the everyday philosophy of the bureaucrat: marking time, watching the clock, waiting to die or to retire and to collect a fairly generous pension. For all that hard work you put in on behalf of all of us. Clap for the NHS. Clap for the key workers, folks.

But occasionally people realise that this kind of institutional bias towards doing nothing, achieving nothing, attempting nothing and safeguarding only the job, the department, the civil service, the state — placing those things above all human virtues and all human achievements is actually bad. That on occasion it’s good to try things, to attempt to make of our lives something other than a couple of dates. The inertia against which all action, all activity, is ranged is powerful, however. The inertia is very powerful.

Defy it. Defy it if you can.

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So you’re set to give a big speech. A major speech. That’s what the papers have been calling it, a major speech. And in the speech you have to remember that you’re the representative of a party, a weird party with tribal loyalties among many strange and unwell people. A lot of the people you most hear from are strange and unwell people on disability and they do nothing all day but make your life difficult with their emails and phone calls and tweets. There’s probably no harm in that.

In theory, your management of the economy can help those people. That’s another lie — the lie your party campaigns on, that the squeaky wheel getting the grease is good, actually, that it’s the way for all wheels to work better, really, and that all you need to do is to hobble the wheels that do not squeak — just hobble them enough — and then the squeaky wheel that gets the grease will be no worse than the other wheels. You’ve rather lost control of your metaphor.

Now it’s time for a speech. You have to deliver a speech, and it has to be about all the things you apparently sincerely believe you can do to make the economy improve. There are things to do, of course. There are always things to do, but they’re often done in far-away places run by Asians or Americans who your advisers are unwilling, flatly unwilling, to copy. The rich world is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

You know that the previous government, the one you soundly beat, declared war on all facets of economic activity, regulating whole industries into non-existence, crushing the wills and abilities of individuals to make any progress, to improve their lots in life, to buy and to sell and to improve. There are a lot of things they could have built that they did not build. In theory, you could build those things. Hell, you can announce building them, announce it in your big speech, completely irrespective of whether these fantasy projects will pass the insane hurdles, the obstacles thrown up, vomited forth, by the evil state, the evil courts, the enemies of the people in the bureaucracy you now perilously sit atop.

You have some powers to get these things done, but do you have the will? The will to fight the state, the state that advises you on everything, the state that surrounds and binds you? Do you have the will to offend the only people your party really loves: public sector workers and racial and sexual minorities? Would you be permitted to do anything that might leave them less well off?

You think about your opponents again. What’s at the roots of their mental illness? Why are they so dysfunctional and failed and discredited for all time?

They clearly despised the young — something you affect not to do — and spent their fourteen years pulling up the drawbridge behind the only lucky generation Britain has produced in two hundred years. You say you won’t do that but oh dear, it looks as if the nation’s experientially growing population on disability, and all the pensioners who have nothing but time to write to you — they’re the most influential voices in this nation of ours. You can’t ignore them all that much, it seems. Their wheels squeak. They cry out and scream for satiation.

So you make your speech. You plan for a lot of things that won’t happen for ten years. Implementation? Do you think of that? It’s a game for little people, people who don’t give speeches. Will any of this be done by the time you are out of office, indeed, by the time you’re dead?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Place your bets. That may well be in the text of the speech. There’s probably no harm in that.

You’ve lived all over the place and you’ve met a lot of great people. That’s what you always say. People are good. People are generous and kind. They like Americans! And since you are an American, you can travel the world with kindly condescension. People love you. They love it when you smile with your beautiful capped white teeth in their direction. You’ve spent a bit of time in China and you know the US government is wack. The people there, in China, are so lovely, so charming. It’s a freer place than they say, the US government says. You love China. You’d happily go back. But there are so many places to see and you want to see them all. You want to see them all so you have to get going.

You went to North Korea so you could film yourself getting a Kim Jong-un style haircut from an army barber. You made a cool video about it. People loved it. All the people in the comments, they just loved the video.

Your mother told you not to go to Russia, never to go to Russia, but you didn’t listen to her because she doesn’t know your job at all. You have half a million subscribers and she doesn’t have any, OK? So you listen to her not that much. She says all kinds of things and you don’t listen, because she’s not been anywhere, and you’ve been to the Congo and the Central African Republic and North Korea, and she doesn’t know anything and hasn’t been to any of those places. So you went to Russia, against your mother’s advice, against the stupid State Department’s advice, too. Those guys are useless. The guys in the embassy are useless, too. And you’ve been to Russia before and you said all sorts of bad things about America while you were there and the people there seemed to like you a lot so it’s like, why not go back, right? Why not go back?

So you were in Russia and you were actually quite far into the east of Russia — like, Russia’s really big, dude — and you got into a taxi and the taxi guy told you to go to this building. He said it was a kind of joint Russian—Chinese friendship building, and a lot of people like to take pictures of it.

Is it OK? you asked him.

And he said yeah, sure, buddy. It’s OK. I take many people there.

So he took you there and you got out and you did take a few pictures, but oh no, there were local police who came up to you and asked you for your passport. And you didn’t have it because it was in your bags at the hotel like an hour away.

You were told by the police that they thought you were a spy and you had to go to the nearby FSB office. And there they went through all your things, didn’t give you your phone, and of course you didn’t speak Russian. Couldn’t ask for a lawyer. They said you might be a spy and also possibly a drug trafficker because you had some stuff in your bag from China. Just pills for your headaches. You get some really bad ones, man. But they said it could be meth so they drug tested you and oh man, you tested positive for heroin!

No way were the Russians actually like that, dude. No way would they plant evidence against you. But they did and you were in jail on a whole bunch of charges for like a whole two weeks. Craziest thing that ever happened to you. Scariest thing you can imagine, man.

And the State Department and the embassy were no help at all, dude. They gave you a lawyer but his English wasn’t that good. You thought you might be there for years. Luckily you’re, you know, tough, tough-minded. Not the type to get, like, PTSD. But eventually, after like four or five more trips to the court, with your lawyer winning all these appeals, they said they’d let you go. So they drove you, after like one or two more weird run ins with the FSB guys, they drove you to the airport and you flew back to China. Finally, a free country. Finally, you were in a free country.

You didn’t go home to America, though. Some thought you would like to, but you didn’t. You hung out in Japan for a while. It’s a paradise compared to a Russian prison.

Funnily enough, for a guy who travels for a living, you get really jet-lagged all the time. Like really jet-lagged. Jet-lagged like you wouldn’t believe, dude. For every difference in time zone, like each hour in difference, man, you need like a day to recover. Like a whole day, man. It’s crazy.

Bummer, dude. It was such a bummer, dude. Strangest thing that’s ever happened to you. You might not go back to Russia for a while. You might not go back for a while.

It’s a good life. It’s a good life in the heat, in the sun.

Now some time has passed. You’ve been around the town a few times, in the back of cars while you talk on FaceTime. You talk a lot to a lot of people. You’ve made it. People know your name. That’s all you want: people to know your name. But now you have another problem. You’ve made it but people think of you a certain way. That’s a problem — wouldn’t be for many, but it is for you, and so you’ve got to do something about it.

What are your options? Most people go for health and wellness, now: that slop, that soup of good-feelings nothingness that can print money as the world’s anxious and wealthy go to you to save their lives or their souls. Or you could pose as the intellectual. Write a book. Write a book, why don’t you? Write a book.

Other people like you write memoirs and you could do that. You’ve had an interesting life — so full of incident, so full of drama. And so many stories about things people said and did on set, while being fitted for costumes, while having make-up applied by the trowel-load and then removed with industrial strength non-biodegradable, not-free-range acids. Ah, the talk of trailers, and director’s chairs. Dinner at restaurants normal people only see on TikTok. Clubs tht don’t have names. You could give them their names!

People love to hear about all of that. You could publish your diaries, if you wanted. You could publish your diary, if you kept one. But you don’t, and memoirs are cheap and they’re basically eternal paperbacks, even the good ones, destined to be remaindered and forgotten, even if they mint New York Times bestsellers quite often. You need to come up with something else.

You’re sitting before the mirror, communing with your ancestors, when all of a sudden, it hits you. You’re surrounded by famous people, so many famous people. And you’ve heard of a lot of gossip. Why    not put it down — put it all down — but under false names. Call it fiction, call it a fantasia — like the one with Mickey Mouse. Humour and satire, humour and satire. It’s satirical. It’s ironic!

People will want to guess who Minx Glamourpuss, your star, really is; who Joel Ethan Pursestrings might be. Oh, it’s perfect. It is perfect. And you, with all your wonderful, endless talent — you are the man to write it.

Other men use ghostwriters and you have considered it. If all they do is make voice notes or recordings of your conversation and paper over the gaps, turn the whole thing into prose, you’ve no complaints. People have always said you were a lovely talker. They’ve always said you were a wonderful talker.

But, people say, the ghostwriter business is a bad one. It distorts minds and memories. Many people who’ve had something written for them can graduate, as it were, truly certain that they wrote it. That it emerged from their pen or Google Docs wholly formed. That the ghost was just a fussing little editor, a kind of secretary, someone you actually didn’t need, someone who barely helped. It worries you a little, this symptom of minor mental illness.

It might yet happen to you.

Better do it yourself. After all, people love the way you talk. You’re famous and on the late night talk shows. People love the way you talk. And people are told to write what they know and to write like they talk. A bit of thinking is required, but not all that much. You’ve contributed — that’s a bit of a euphemism — to screenplays before. It’s easy. It’s easy. Dialogue is easy. Just write down what people actually say — talk about the things they actually talk about. If they want to talk about TV or what restaurant they’re currently shilling to their friends, do that. Do that. It’s easy. And you are such a wonderful talker.

Bored no longer. You’re bored no longer. You sit down before the blank page. You think a little about your life, and then you start typing, typing with two fingers. It’s almost like sending a text to your agent.

But sadly, fate has decided to spit upon you. God, if he exists (you’ve got your doubts), has decided to torture you. Because someone has to be in power, prime minister, during this time of national suicide. And unfortunately, that person is you.

Someone has to be in power. Tragically, viciously, it’s you who has to be in power. Because someone has to be and this time it is you.

So, will you use your power? Probably not, if you’re like all the others. The immense civil service apparatus has every advantage over you. It is permanent, protected by statute and over a century of convention. You’re temporary — oh so temporary — and your office, your powers, are not so precisely defined. You could do nothing, like all of your contemporaries — you could allow yourself to be ruled and not ruler. Let the civil servants dissuade you from ruling the country; let the pressure groups and the donors dictate your every day’s work. Worry in Downing Street about the Today programme, the newspapers (if anyone still reads them), what people are saying about you online. That’s a case for censorship, for jail: the things people are saying about you online.

You could do all that. And then go to summits and explain that, yes, Britain is decarbonising, yes, Britain is kneecapping itself, and yes, we are walking away on bended knee from all overseas territories, and yes, we will pay for the privilege, and yes, we are very, very sorry, and yes, we won’t do it again, sir — never, sir, never once, sir — never again. You could do that. Seems like a plan. Like a plan that’s been made for more than one prime minister before you by their helpers in the regime. But it would do just as well for you. It’s been done before. Why not do it again?

The civil servants you deal with are all sub-par. You’ve dealt with cleverer lawyers in private practice. They’re officious, too, officials. Claiming everything you want to do is illegal, everything is improper and against precedent. They think their slowest and most conformist members ought to head departments as permanent secretaries. They think the most discredited, despicable among them ought to be cabinet secretary. But it’s all happened before. It’s all been done before. You content yourself that it’s all been done before.

You could let them carry on running the country, running it into the ground. Leave it as you found it. All economic activity illegal. Keep it as it is. Building anything in under 20 years remaining almost impossible, a crazy dream. Keep the courts on the throats of people who want to do things, to make things, to say things. Twenty thousand people under Security Service watch — same as it ever was.

Chase capital away by making the country’s only great city an international Mecca of crime directed against the ordinary people wandering its filthy streets. Import another million and a half forty-year-olds every year to do jobs at minimum wage, then pay for their pensions and health treatment for thirty years of retirement. It’s the social contract. It’s what the regime wants you to do. Happens on autopilot. Happens almost by itself. Don’t stop the boats. The previous guys said they were going to and then failed. Why bother, then, to say you’re going to? The regime has failed to stop the boats and said to you, too, that it cannot be done.

Sit back. Kick your feet up. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it.

Or you could do something about it.

Someone has to be prime minister and it happens, for this brief window, to be you. Someone has to be in power, and it may as well be you. You may as well save the country, right? After all, it’s something to do. Before retirement it’s something else to do.

But unhappily for you, Keir Starmer, leader of your party, the man you affect to despise, has but one option to grow the British economy. To look at some of the things Trump is doing, and bend and twist our failing constitution, our dying state, to make it do the same.

Here’s one thing. Executive orders. Trump came to power and on his first day was issuing them by the dozen. Some of them were stupid, some of them destined for years of clogging up the courts before eventually being thrown out for good by the regime. Stupid and pointless, you might say. Stupid and pointless.

And yet some of them are not going to be challenged; some of them are going to be put into effect; some of them are going to matter. And Trump did some of this in a stadium, surrounded by his 70 IQ supporters, and started throwing pens into the crowd when he was done.

Dislike the content all you like, hideous dysgenic Labour supporter. But think about it practically. Trump knows that the norm in his country is divided government. He knows that congresses are getting less and less productive as time goes on, that aspects of the regime are as contrary all forms of change, all forms of growth, as they are in Britain. That the inbuilt opposition to doing things conventionally is so immense that it might not be worth doing. He knows, in advance, that he has less than four years now, and no hope — no hope — so far of passing any meaningful legislation. Not a chance, not a prayer.

That, in other words, all he has are the prerogative powers of the president. So he may as well use those powers, use them relentlessly, shamelessly, heedless of what others say and think and, to an extent, do. Because when you have one tool to hand, you can complain about how it isn’t perfect, or you can go looking for nails to hammer.

Who gets more done at the end of the working day?

The British prime minister, because of this fiction of monarchy, has — in theory — a lot more power than the American president. He has the confidence of the Commons, which means he can pass legislation. He is the only political, elected figure who has any control over the sprawling leviathan which is our civil service. He declares war and makes peace. He has immense prerogative powers.

Of course, the legislative route is more or less out. His party hate him; they hate economic growth, too. They each have fifty or so mentally ill people, retired or on disability, in their constituencies — people who will object every time someone even hints at turning this or that hideous, cracked car park or disused garage or industrial dry-cleaners into something useful and functional. They’ll freak out and send letters and emails. And so the MP, cowardly and pathetic and empty and evil as they are — they’ll object, too. So legislation is out. Prerogative powers are starting to look a little better.

These are powers the prime minister is, for reasons of pure presentation — pure ignorance — unwilling to use. But time is short, the country is dying, and it might be time to think about aping one man who, if he knows nothing else, knows a little about theatrics. The American president, much though you despise him. There is no time to waste.

If Starmer were serious — and here’s why we know he is not — he would on day one in Number 10 commissioned an absolute psychopath, heedless of polite opinion and regime orthodoxy, to give him a total audit of his, the prime minister’s, prerogative powers.

He would have arranged a series of buttons and levers — metaphorical — on his desk, and he would have started, in ratchet fashion, to pull them. Get rid of this consultation. Gut this judicial review. Fire these evil, obstructing civil servants, and put them through years of hell on their pensions. That’s what’s got to happen if the country is to survive.

Who do I have to sack to get this built? That’s what the prime minister would have said. He would have said it many times by now.

It says it’ll take twenty years. Who do I have to fire, what powers do I have to invoke, to get it done in five?

What infrastructure projects can I call in? What paths can the king’s word break? Who do I have to fire? Who do I have to fire?

Think theatrics, prime minister.

He could do it in a stadium, if he so wanted. He could do it in a stadium. And here, the announcer from the darts could say, is the piece of paper necessary to get that data centre built, prime minister. And the prime minister could sign it and hold it up and smile. He could get his picture taken.

Using compulsory purchase laws, using defence of the realm law, using left-over capacity from this or that law a century ago, we’re getting these thousand construction projects going right now. They’re going to be built because I, the prime minister, have ordered it. No one can slow it down. Anyone who does is sacked, on the spot. And good luck drawing that pension.

And if they’re not done by the time of the next election, these people — here are their names and pictures — will be under arrest. They’ll have all of their devices seized and searched. All their family’s devices.

Think theatrics, prime minister. Why not do something — one single thing — to save Britain from the grave, the funeral pyre?

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It’s your job, in some ways, to control the press. Don’t say censor. It is not your job to censor the press. You’d hate it if it were. You’d resign, you’d write an open letter. You’d make an awful fuss if your job was to censor the press. Instead, and quite reasonably, your role is a simple one. If an event occurs – and they do sometimes occur, very sadly – that risks the country’s social peace, the relations of our very cherished communities, you do something. You do something then. That’s your job: you step in. You have a word. You suggest that people be grown up and responsible and that their commentary, their coverage, represent that. You tell them to be their best selves, to act in the best interests of the country as a whole. And they do that, they do it. Just as anyone else would do.

Only in the spirit of being helpful, really – that’s why you suggest the things you suggest. Some might call that distraction, creating a diversion, but all you are doing is highlighting. Highlighting some other things people ought to talk about, at a time such as this. Big companies who might be responsible for whatever unfortunate event has occurred. Not unreasonable to ask the question! Other regulations – necessary regulations – for the internet. It needs more regulation, you know. All well-meaning, honest people agree. And so you suggest a couple of ideas, the odd little notion, to the press contacts you have, the people assigning others to work on this story. It’s simply your job. Just as anyone else would do.

And the victims, if victims there are. Naturally, someone has to go out to them, to comfort them, to give them some direction. Because after all, it has been a difficult business. It is a hard thing, being a victim, being the mother or father of a victim, knowing how to behave on such a big stage, knowing what best to say. So you give them a few pointers, from the folder you brought with you. A few little things other people have found helpful in the past. If they want to make a statement, best it’s contained in one of those. Nothing sinister! Nothing controlling, just looking out for their best interests, looking out for the interests of the country as a whole. Just as anyone else would do.

And when the crises come, as they must, you know what it is you must do. You must get people who are willing, leaders, civic figures, civil society, to say it firmly and well. They reject all ethnic divisions. They reject all divisive rhetoric. They reject the twin dragons of misinformation and disinformation, so much of it no doubt coming from the enemies of this great land. All the professors, all the researchers, they agree. And if people want to organise entirely spontaneous demonstrations, moments in time where locals can commemorate the event without rancour or bitterness, well, there are state funds available, state funds available, and stages to rent and set up, and public spaces for their use at such a dangerous and hopeful time. You tell them happily that we as a nation cannot look back in anger. We don’t look back in anger. It’s what you tell them. Just as anyone else would do.

It’s straightforward, simple. It’s not evil! It’s what you’ve been tasked to do, what you’ve been asked to do, what you’re paid to do. You go out into the streets of this country, visiting the grieving, the wounded, and you tell them what they can and cannot say. It’s for the greater good. It’s your vocation. Just as anyone else would do.

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His wife, the former first lady of the United States — by the time you read this, the current first lady of the United States — afterwards made up her own fake currency, and that spiked in value, crashing the former president’s fake currency. Perhaps by the time you read this, that, too, will be worthless.

Neither of those people nor the other who were behind these tokens will go to prison. They will never be investigated. They will never be charged nor questioned nor suffer any consequences for making from whole cloth magic internet money designed to con their fans, their supporters, their most dedicated, obsessive admirers and partisans.

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In raw terms, yes, probably. The country’s geography, which made it a safe haven for European money, a fine petri dish for experiments in science and self-government, has not changed overly. Quite a lot of the American west coast just burned down. That’s not going to happen to Manchester. It simply rains too much for that. Britain’s still close enough to the continent to hoover up rootless talent, far enough away to avoid cultural or military contagion, even in the era of the ICBM.

But do we have the means? Do we have the muscle? Those are questions that must also be asked. The peoples who make up Britain are different now. Sixteen or more percent born abroad. Some of them will be molecular chemists. But not all. Let’s not kid ourselves. Rishi Sunak did that; he thought the country could derive most of its immigration from former Soviet holders of doctorates in mathematics. And look how well that dream worked out. Look how well that dream worked out.

But I digress. Back to attention.

The British state used to be small and it used to be efficient. Look at how William Pitt the Younger was permitted to run the country: using a small group of men he knew well, at least by reputation, he spent aggressively on favoured outcomes, backed winners independent of some judicial oversight which would have kneecapped those best placed to bid for contracts.

He put criminals in prison, too, and sent some to their deaths at Newgate. Now that was radical. And Pitt and his governments primed the action. For the eventual defeat of Napoleon. And they built the world’s largest empire (considered A Good Thing in those days) and grew the economy precipitously.

All this was possible because attention — that fickle thing, that currency — was not all lost. It could be maintained. It could be directed to grasping detail — and getting big things done.

What do we have today? A state that is so immense, so sprawling, that its functions cannot be understood, let alone gripped, by anyone. Departments and services and agencies which employ millions. Layer upon layer of precedent, of convention. All of which appear to amount (at least according to members of our legal-civil-service-NGO-professorial regime), to as good as a declaration — a declaration that you cannot build anything, can’t make anything new, can’t improve anything lest someone be made worse off, some favoured group lose their court-mandated rights, lest someone, somewhere have a claim for judicial review.

The state, more powerful than ever before, more all-seeing in theory than ever before, cannot marshal its resources. It cannot focus attention on anything, anything at all. At least so far as doing anything big, anything good.

One theory leaps to the front – stands, I fear, to attention. It’s because of who staffs the state and what they’re like. The civil servants know they are permanent. They’re going nowhere unless they get another job or a better offer. Sure, they’ll be moved around the regime’s bureaucracy. Often from one job with very specific responsibilities to another which has no overlap. But that’s fine, the regime believes, because civil servants ought to be interchangeable. They ought to think and do the same things. They ought to be no better than each other. It’s fine to farm our stars out. They must learn to play nicely with the other children.

The state can act this complacently because it is a distributed network, its attention never slacking, an all-seeing eye focussed squarely on the main job: getting nothing done.

It is for politicians that the difficulty emerges. They arrive newly in office, having worked hard to come up with ideas for change — plans to grow the economy, for instance. How novel!

But now their attention is scattered to the four winds. They are assailed by trivia. What were once priorities become inclinations, then things of interest but not daily importance. The media circus takes over, the departments stymie your legislation and write new bills themselves, the courts say you can’t build anything. The permanent state stays where it is, sitting pretty.

You need attention to save a country. Does anyone in Britain have what that task requires?

It might be considered apt, then, that for most of this century, the foreign secretary has been a man or woman of significantly below average ability — even if you just take as your reference the detritus who fill British cabinets.

Ladies and gentlemen, the foreign secretaries. No personal presence, no intellectual heft, no vision, no grasp of detail, no capacity to maintain the focus of the bureaucracy, no interest in hard problems, an IQ which, if measured, might be below a hundred. We’ve had them all.

The Dominic Cummings school of political nihilism would tell us that the foreign secretary’s job is already done in practice by scheming, weaselly enemies of the people called civil servants. So it does not matter if the foreign secretary himself is stupid, or an empty moralist with nothing to back it up, or stupid and an empty moralist with nothing to back it up in combination — like the one we have now. There’s some truth to this view. And the prime minister has been his own foreign secretary for a long time, making the office somewhat diminished, vestigial, perhaps a kind of phantom limb.

But let’s pretend for just a moment that this great office actually mattered. Let’s pretend — really entering the realms of fantasy, here — that Britain mattered, too. It’s still the old days. The country is not close to extinction. What kind of person ought to be foreign secretary if those things were true? Someone who did not talk without thinking. Someone who combined deep knowledge of some things — including languages that were not English — with an ability to assimilate information fast. Someone whose words were perhaps not often offered, but whose word meant something when you heard it. Not a fool who spoke often, frequently mixing things up in that difficult and painful transition from mind to mouth, like the guy we have now.

David Lammy may not be a stupid man either in raw computational terms or on paper. I believe he is, but let’s leave that aside for a moment.

He may not be a stupid man. You could have fooled me. He behaves like a very stupid man. He talks like a stupid man, acts like a stupid man, holds himself like a stupid man — a stupid man who is very, very chippy about his own stupidity. Someone whose stupidity may not define him as obviously as his wounded vanity does, but for whom stupidity has always been a millstone around the proverbial neck, a public obstacle to be confronted like a physical ailment: a large goitre, perhaps — or a particularly revolting skin condition.

Lammy’s stupidity, his evident ignorance of the actual substance of his job — which is, lest we forget, the world, the whole world — is such a barrier to his successfully fulfilling the duties of office that it’s funny. Watching him talk, even reading prepared remarks, is like watching an old, old women without dentures try to eat toffee. It’s horrific, it’s a warning about human frailty, but it’s also — if it hits you just right — hilarious, bitterly, cruelly hilarious. Every misfired project, every miscalibrated trip, every statement in print or spoken. Hilarious.

There he is — in Bulgaria — with the actor Barry Keoghan — to launch a campaign about children’s social care across the entire world — in the week that a Hamas—Israel ceasefire is announced and it is voted on by the Israeli cabinet. While rockets and drones rain down on Ukraine each night. As the Chinese nuclear programme and its naval building expands precipitously. It’s Peter Sellers. It’s Mr Bean.

At least he isn’t in Moscow, I suppose. At least he isn’t in Beijing, trying vainly to do his job.

It’s like some horrible Disney movie where a dumb animal is tasked with saving the family farm, but without the happy ending. It’s like a Make-a-Wish child on the football field, but the dumb-as-rocks players haven’t been told to go easy on the little guy. It’s like watching someone dancing via camcorder on an episode America’s Funniest Home Videos. They’re smiling, all content, but you know it’s going to end badly. Will they fall into the fireplace? Will they drop their partner? Will a slab of plaster detach from the ceiling and rain down dust on their head? You don’t know, but you know it’s going to happen.

‘Get ready, everybody. He’s about to do something stupid!’

Why is such a man head of what used to be a great department? Why is it he that the foreigners have to accept, have to meet, have to talk to — can you imagine? — if they want to petition the diplomatic apparatus of His Majesty? Someone so lacking, someone so unself-aware as to fail to notice that lack.

Tell yourself it doesn’t matter. We’ve had other foreign secretaries just as bad before. That instead of him, the enemies-of-the-people civil servants, the products of our own despicable, pathological regime, are running the department. That the prime minister is his own foreign secretary. That the job is mostly paperwork and nothing — do it all, if it makes you feel better. Do it all.

It’s still an indictment of our politics. An indictment of the Labour Party. An indictment of cabinet government. It’s astonishing. An example of how the state is content to run massive, constant opportunity costs for no apparent reason. Allow yourself the privilege of noticing that, at least.

But we have to look a little deeper. Britain does not have top-of-the-line space projects for the same reason that Britain does not have cities as safe as much of Asia. Britain’s state refuses to learn from other countries. It refuses to do anything that isn’t bespoke, tailored, and useless. Moving fast is for foreigners. Making people in office responsible for their own failures is for your dreams.

Don’t talk about Silicon Valley to me. Don’t mention Singapore a single additional time.

If building things is illegal and the currency is being slowly eaten away by inflation, why not hedge against the misery of tomorrow by taking all you can from the piggy banks of today?

For the same reason the state creaks and groans, and people creak and groan when you ask them to stop claiming disability in record numbers and to work for a living.

The world is a conflict of visions, and Britain has no vision. Some people might see a spiritual crisis in all this but I do not. Not necessarily. Contemplating the next world is likely a great drain on economics. If heaven is the target, why do things now, other than pray, to make the world we have tolerable or better or good? John Wesley may have said that man must earn all he can, save all he can, give all he can. But how many people, religious people, truly live by that dictum? In America, many might. In Britain, almost no one does.

Instead, I will propose a couple of other things, morale-sapping things, which I believe affect how Britons see the world.

Part of this is politics. The game of politics in Britain is a contest to see which groups can get other groups to pay for everything. The elderly — Britain’s richest age group — have been champions of this game for the past thirty years. See how even the suggestion of affecting the ruinous, nation-destroying pensions triple lock is leapt upon by parties which ought to know that it is killing us all by inches.

But racial and sexual minorities, and the millions and millions of people with ‘mental health’ are running them awfully close. Look to your lead, oldies, or else you might soon be overtaken!

The welfare state is, for all the comfort it provides the afflicted, a great and nation-wide sapper of morale. If the state can be your mother all your life, what chance do you have to do anything interesting — unless by having an uncommon passion, an uncommon amount of will? The British welfare state is not in cash terms generous. But it is ever present. It looms over everything. Sure, £24,000 per year is almost nothing, but could you earn more than that leaving the house? Is your labour really worth that much?

If the future had not been stolen, Britons should each be targeting salaries of about three times the national median. Yet they are not. Why? Possibly because various benefits serve to set expectations. They, and the growing minimum wage, enforce a kind of psychological blind, a floor and a ceiling. Brackets to what ordinary people not delusionally motivated might want or expect to achieve. If you can get a certain amount while pursuing little projects of your own, why change? If the process of trying to get work via the Job Centre is humiliating and pointless, why try all that hard? These are profound questions of morale. The state has been demoralising Britain to death for the past thirty years.

Outside a few isolated groups who will probably end up in other countries eventually, Britain is a close to zero motivation country. The future has been stolen. You can’t do anything of value or of use.

Why go to the stars when the state can give you and your family Motability cars? Why should people living in social housing in London’s Zone One care about anything except their own personal problems? The state gifts them the subsidised use of millions of pounds worth of property, but it doesn’t solve their issues. It’s a baseline, a floor. Why don’t we get even more from the state, not less?

We may be presented with a dichotomy. Call it false if you like. Social housing in Zone One, or multiple private space programmes. Motability or Mars.

How do you solve this? Hard to say. But first we must accept that the future has been stolen — stolen by a series of pathological state institutions, institutionalised by a state that favours tyranny for some and a negligent mother for others. Stolen by the millions of people who work for the state and don’t challenge the fact that it does not do well many of its core functions.

The state has done all this. The state is to blame. It sets the tone, it watches the score. The state holds the watches. But it’s our job, regardless, to know what time it is.

The people who surround you are younger than you. They’re ambitious to the point of institutionalisation. Broadmoor beckons. They want your job and they want your head and like you, they don’t care much about outcomes. They have certain sacred totems, amulets of steel and glass, amulets with budgets, that they want to protect. But vision? They are devoid of vision. They want a nicer and fairer world, if pressed. They believe there is no such thing as human nature. When they encounter reality they run screaming away, and pretend it does not exist.

Now you’re a diplomat-civil-servant-adviser, a creature of the state and its rulers, a thoroughgoing product of the regime. You’re getting on, now. But you don’t think about it. You had power before but that was a time ago. You’ve got it again, got it handed to you. You’re a tough guy, a really tough guy, and your publisher thinks you’re so tough it’s worth remarking upon. He says you’re the heir to Machiavelli. You aren’t, of course, because Machiavelli was intelligent and you have only what passes for intelligence in regime circles. But you think you’re Machiavelli, too, and you once read The Prince, so that’s only fair.

You’ve been angling for many years to return once again to power. What will you do with it? That is in question. You think of yourself as an administrator of power, a steward. You have no goals, per se, just instincts. Just instincts and a sense of how things ought to be comported, how poses ought to be held. You’re a genius, you tell yourself. A genius. What occurs to you so rarely occurs to other men.

Now you’re close to power. Something has come up. A foreign state, a small one, comes to you and offers you another deal. You can clutch it in your gnarled fingers. It’s almost like a return to youth and strength. You take it, and talk it up on the TV. It’s like you’re young again. It’s like you’re young again.

For people who believe in nothing, means matter quite a lot more than ends. Nothing matters per se, so whatever you choose to do is a good deal less important than the fact that you did it. Distinct accomplishment is for the birds. Plans of varying quality, beautifully administered. That is what the history books will say about you.

I believe the foreign policy of Keir Starmer and his grey cardinal Jonathan Powell is primarily understood on a psychological basis. A hormonal basis.

Starmer is a lawyer used to being esteemed by lawyers. He cares, possibly below the level of conscious thought, about what lawyers and courts say and what papers issue forth from their printers. What they say is carved on stone tablets. He would not wish to be shunned in their company. If a court tells Keir Starmer to do something, he does it. He would do anything if they told him to. Give away a piece of British territory: of course, he’s already done it. Sabotage Britain’s economic growth for a generation? The Supreme Court has only to publish a pdf on its website. It’s psychological, below the level of conscious thought. He may be beyond saving.

Jonathan Powell is what remains of the wreck of a man. He is old, prematurely old, and thinks of himself as a genius. He’s the very worst of what an old man might be. A walking ruin. Hormonally deficient, intellectually absent, morally dead. An enemy of Britain, an enemy of its future and its people. If he were vivisected, it’s possible they’d find some horrible parasite in his torso or his head, eating away at everything that might have made him a person — a human as distinct from a speck of yeast. But he’s empty now, fake like a wax dummy, an example of the living dead.

Yet empty people can do much evil if they are given power. Powell loves power, worships it. It’s his whole life. It’s sold his books, power and its pretence. But because he is nothing, believes in nothing, how he chooses to use power is empty, too. Britain is close to total destruction. And this man, this lack of a man, is the one who has been chosen to give the country strategic vision.

You are a prime minister who believes in nothing. Your chief adviser is a walking cadaver who believes himself Machiavelli. What would you do? What will you do?

They were born somewhere else; or their parents were; or they feel strongly the ties of religion or race or tribe or clan. When they talk about their distant homeland, they get all misty eyed. They mention ‘our enemies’, for example, when memorialising some ethnic spat a thousand miles (literally and figuratively) and possibly a thousand years away from twenty-first century Britain. Some of them effectively swear fealty to foreign countries to which they have ties of race or religion, under the guise of being the representative of a ‘community’ here in Britain.

It’s a busy gig. Do some work for firms in the old country. Go on all of their media. Talk in their languages at public meetings, languages which the rest of your country of residence can’t understand. It doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it, even in this age of machine translation.

This isn’t a sin, according to the regime. Here’s the official line.

You don’t have dual, divided loyalties: you’re a trailblazer, an inspiration. We need more people like you, and that’s a fact. The fact that you’re not solely British is good. The fact that you don’t think of Britain foremost, it’s good. It’s good. It’s what we need.

The mainstream, the regime, pretends both that all of this doesn’t happen, and that if it did happen, it would be great. For them, the irreversible, vast demographic change of the past three decades hasn’t happened, and it’s also good. Nothing has changed. Britain is as it always is, with a little bit more of a ‘global perspective’. Britain is an idea, an empty vessel without a core. Bring yourself to work, bring your whole self to work.

There are some problems with this approach. Britain, for all its dramatic lack of wealth and power, still has to have a foreign policy. It ought, this foreign policy, to be severely limited by the state’s gaping, glaring lack of capacity. But what policy there is has to be restricted and defined by Britain’s own national interest. That national interest is not philanthropic.

Britain could, for example, run up an enormous additional deficit (on top of the immense one we already have) every year to give tractors and seed corn to Mali. But that would be insane. There’s no reason to do it. The Malian government wouldn’t thank Britain for doing something so strange and didactic. But if the prime minister and much of her cabinet had Malian heritage, and one or two mega-donors were from Mali and wanted to augment their own farm stocks at Britain’s expense — could put together a good powerpoint, really get people around the table — we just might end up doing it. There could be a reason found.

But here’s the problem. There are powerful and increasingly numerous constituencies within the country who want Britain to do exactly that. You hear it all the time. It’s only the youth parliament — a hideous swollen appendage of a body, a national shame, a great disgrace of our sentimental, cringing institutions — but the most recent meeting consisted largely of a wonderfully diverse group standing up one after the other to declare that,    to take one of innumerable examples, the status of Kashmir (something Britain has no say over in the slightest, less than zero capacity to act) was the most important question not only in the world, but in Britain’s own politics.

Why did Rishi Sunak decide that Britain ought to solve India’s youth unemployment problems via migration? It’s a real mystery.

Policy is already highly susceptible to foreign lobbying. See how the Elgin Marbles, an immense sideshow, of virtually no importance, has been repeatedly brought onto newspaper pages simply by the brilliantly effective lobbying of the Greek government, which has bought and paid for innumerable past-it politicians of the last decade or so. It’s been impressive to watch. And Britain doesn’t even have that many Greeks!

Britain is now a host, a host to various parties to every ethnic conflict, to every religious dispute, to every struggle between tyranny and representative government everywhere on the planet. Would you reasonably expect people in that position to be quiet? To refuse out of principle to affect the politics of the place they live? No, that’s not how people think or operate. I go for a walk in my neighbourhood and I see PTI and Imran Khan stickers on the back windows of cars. Sit near a middle aged woman of South American appearance on the bus and she may well be liking TikTok after TikTok about Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. People are people, and they do feel loyalty, attachment, to places and people. They’re not blank slates. It is insane to expect any other outcome.

Britain’s debate on the wars in the Middle East is significantly orchestrated along ethnic and religious lines. The regime officially believes it is racist and antisemitic to say so, but it’s the truth. This is something of a problem in a democracy. What do you do with the varying loyalties of millions of your fellow citizens? When your politics is so dramatically decided by demography, by the immigration policies of the past x number of years. How do you avoid sprouting retrograde, rent-seeking ethnic parties like the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire? Can you avoid becoming Yugoslavia without rigidly controlling ethnic politics like Singapore?

It’s something to think about.

(This was really a post about Tulip Siddiq and her family ties to the disgraced fallen regime in Bangladesh, and why it was a terrible failure of Keir Starmer’s not to sack her, and why she ought to have the Labour whip withdrawn. I just didn’t say so until the end.)

Others matter more. The    readers.    They’ve had long enough to learn to like you, like a marriage in reverse. They post quotes from your work on Twitter. You know you’re better than average because people quote the piece — rather than the headline, which you didn’t write, attached to some statement about how awful the out-group is. That’s your difference, the difference you make. You know you’ve done an especially good job when each week, people quote different bits of the same piece. That’s how you get them in. It’s why you earn the medium bucks.

You used to do some TV on occasion and have for a while dressed a little more snappily than the average person in your profession. You were young once, and interesting. You’re still interesting but no longer very young.

You’re forty now and not very rich. You’ve lived in a few places. Seen quite a lot of the world. The world of cities and expense accounts. You’re part of the thing you dislike. Though not as rich as those you think are ruining things. You know quite a lot about writers who were hip when you were born. Here’s one, never quite out of style: Martin Amis. You think you’re a bit like him, in your way. The language matters to you, the style isn’t something you stick on afterwards. There’s a morality to good style, too. That’s what you believe. Saying what’s true in a way that makes people pay attention is a highly moral act. You’re a moralist, a moral philosopher.

People are so often wrong. You think about that all the time. At the dinner parties people still reference if they want to talk about approved opinion in London, people say the silliest things. They need you dearly.

You have to shake them up a little, burst them from their carapace of complacency. We need a war. That’s what you used to tell them. We need a war to shake this government out of its decades-long sleep. But now there is a war — more than one — and we’re not in it. And things are going along just as foolishly and sleepily as before, as ever. You think about this sometimes after drinks. Am I right too often, or not enough?

Do we have an elite that is too good? Too good at governing without democracy, without all the necessary thinking aloud? You ponder it as you go to a restaurant with some of your banker friends. They used to be bankers, now they’re venture capital. Now they’re tech people. They talk about software as though it’s an oil deposit. They make nothing themselves. Other people, little people in visas, do that for them. The tech people you know are just one cut above the tech people who block out several hours per working day to record podcasts.

They have the money so they generally pay. It’s good to know people in the real economy. Food matters a lot to you but you don’t overindulge. It keeps your look the way you want it. It means you never need to talk about dieting and low-calorie this and that. That’s for neurotic actors, insane models. You don’t meet people like that. You never thought about Ozempic, not for a moment, although its economic consequences intrigue you. Possibly a book in that? But you write two columns a week. Your sentences are beautiful but they’re a production. It’s a hard thing, this easy job. Perhaps not. Perhaps not.

You’re not stupid so you know it’s all going up in flames soon. The broadsheets, these institutions. No one reads them. They do online but that’s not the same thing and you’re competing against every fraud with a newsletter. The average browser really is too stupid to know the difference. It’s all text on a screen. People still listen to you, as they should, and you could clean up as a speaker if you enjoyed speaking. You have fascinating thoughts on culture to a deadline every week. You have options. You have options. Even if one day, quite soon, the place where you work will disappear so fast, like a puff of smoke, like a death.