Actually, the bus is not quite as near the end of the line as a careless read of that headline would suggest. It’s true that the buses are to be withdrawn from three routes this year, and two more by the end of 2028. But the reason is not, in fact, Sadiq Khan’s irrational desire to erase his predecessor’s legacy, probably while laughing like a maniac: Transport for London (TfL) wants to switch the capital to zero-emission electric buses. These don’t fit the bill, so that’s that.

Even then, that will not be that for quite some time. Generally, TfL requires bus companies to supply their own buses, but it took the unusual step of buying 1,000 of these fat boys itself. Each has an anticipated 14-year lifespan and the newest were built in 2017, so they could be running on other routes for five years yet. When they’ve only been going since 2012, that’s no minor reprieve.

What is clear, though, is that Sadiq Khan will not be crying any crocodile tears: the Mayor sounded the buses’ death knell when he told TfL not to buy any more of them back in 2016. And if their demise “means getting rid of the legacy of the mess made by the previous mayor”, he said earlier this month, like a sassy bitch who lives for drama, “so be it”.

How the man on the Clapham omnibus feels about all this is hard to know: I’ve not been able to find polling. But I, for one, will not mourn. The new bus for London has been a catastrophe.

The first problem is the price tag. Each bus cost £350,000 – really, what is it with Boris Johnson and questionable sums of money beginning with those digits? – compared with £190,000 for standard double-deckers. That figure was meant to come down as more of them rolled off the production line; TfL could even have made money, through its cut of sales to other markets. Alas, TfL only bought 1,000, the precise number required for it to claim its share of the IP, and other markets didn’t want any.

That’s because, despite extensive up-front design work by Thomas Heatherwick and Wrightbus, the buses never worked very well. Their diesel-hybrid engines were stymied by repeated battery failures, meaning they often turned into pure-diesel buses which, being heavier, were actually more polluting than the vehicles already on the roads. They were also quite comically uncomfortable, and brought forth complaints of lack of leg room, poorly placed handrails and a tendency to turn into ovens the instant the sun came out. (The windows didn’t open until they’d been refitted at a cost of millions; it did at least provide them with the vaguely amusing nickname “roastmasters”.)

Worst of all, the new buses couldn’t even deliver the supposed benefits of the better-looking Routemasters they were meant to resurrect. The three doors and two staircases were intended to allow faster boarding, and to let passengers jump on and off the back while imagining they were in the Swinging Sixties. That picturesque decade, though, had a rather more cavalier attitude to passenger safety, and to work in the 21st century the new buses required conductors as well as drivers, adding £62,000 each year to a single bus’s running costs. Multiple doors also enabled fare dodging. In 2016, TfL announced the new buses would henceforth be opening one door only and laid off the conductors. That did good things for its balance sheet, but terrible ones for the prospects of its expensive new bus.

How did what could still, in 2012, call itself a serious world city stumble into this spectacular white elephant? It’d be easy, and also fair, to say simply “Boris Johnson” and leave it to that. But the reason Johnson was prone to creating this kind of mess stemmed, I think, from his particular view of politics: like an ambitious Roman senator, he always seemed to see the world as merely a stage set for his grand ambition; those of us who populated it were just the mob.

In the same way, the New Bus for London was conceived less as a functional mode of transport than as a piece of scenery – a bus designed for the benefit of people who would never even dream of travelling on one. No wonder Johnson found a kindred spirit in Thomas Heatherwick. They deserve each other. London didn’t deserve either.

[Further reading: Inside Labour’s escalating immigration feud]

Worse than becoming an adjective, though, must surely be becoming a noun, and for that noun to eclipse them entirely. It’s possible, now, to use the word “quisling” without ever suspecting it wasn’t always a generic term for a traitor and collaborator. But it referred to a Norwegian politician, Vidkun Quisling, whose choices during the Second World War you will be able to guess. Despite having been executed before 1945 was out, for leading his country’s government during the Nazi occupation, Quisling could have witnessed what his name would become, all the same: as early as 1940, the Times ran a leader column headlined “Quislings everywhere”.

The UK is not, of course, occupied territory. But – after the tariffs, and the threats to Greenland, and the attacks on European liberal democracy, and the lawsuit against the BBC – it is hard to argue that the Trump administration is not, at this stage, a hostile foreign power. Neither Trump (YouGov net approval rating: -56 per cent) nor his war (-21 per cent) are popular in Britain. That should not surprise us: even if the war is short (we’ll see), it will do horrible things to energy markets and provide yet another shock to the British economy and household budgets, and quite frankly, we’ve all had enough of those in the past couple of decades. It’s at least possible that limiting Britain’s involvement could be the first actually popular thing Starmer’s done all year.

All of which raises a question. Why are so many prominent British right-wingers – conservative does not seem quite the word – determined to take Trump’s side over ours?

Last week, long-standing defenders of UK independence and sovereignty such as Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage furiously argued that doing anything other than letting the US president dictate British foreign policy amounts to unforgiveable weakness. Neither public opposition to the conflict, nor that it is still unclear what the American war aims actually are, seem to have factored in their thinking. The same can be said of Tony Blair’s decision that this is the moment to break with his successor, by telling Starmer he should have backed Trump’s war. Full marks for consistency, I suppose, but nil points for learning even the most clunkingly obvious lesson from his own history.

If these guys don’t have the voters on their side, though, they do at least have the press. The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson wrote a column enthusiastically agreeing with Trump’s claims that Starmer is “no Winston Churchill”. (Well, no.) Piers Morgan noted that Trump’s comment was “brutal”, without feeling moved to comment on the credibility of its source.

The Sun’s Harry Cole, meanwhile, has been gleefully trumpeting his interview with the president in which he “slams” or “blasts” Starmer (verb choice varies) for his refusal to join the bombing. It suggests Trump accused the PM of “pandering to Muslim voters”; on examination of the actual text, however, it turns out that the accusation was the Sun’s, and all Trump said was “it could be”. This is certainly an entrepreneurial approach to journalism. That it is in the public interest, I’m not so sure.

It is not that one expects these guys to actually like Keir Starmer: few of those who actually voted for him do, at this stage, so it’s a little much to expect approval from the other side. Nonetheless – when did denizens of the British right convince themselves that backing a foreign leader over their own countrymen was in any way patriotic? How does “doing whatever the White House dictates” mesh with that long-standing promise to take back control?

One possibility is that they spend too much time on what we used to call Twitter, on which the algorithm and the potential of virality makes pro-Trump takes look much more popular than they actually are. Another is simple financial incentives: put bluntly, if you really want to make it on the right-wing comment circuit, you need to break America, and you’re not going to do that by criticising Trump.

Or maybe it’s simple muscle memory. If you are on the right, you attack Labour and go where the American right goes and you don’t stop for a moment to think about it. Culture wars can wreak chaos, too.

Donald Trump is not occupying our territory, but our minds may be a different matter. He and his country have power over us, through everything from defence partnerships to the global financial or tech architecture, and have made clear they are not afraid to use it. Donald Trump is not on the side of the British people – yet the British right line up loyally behind him, nonetheless.

These people are not, at this stage, quislings. But perhaps they should rethink – before one of them ends up as a word.

[Further reading: Oil prices mean Starmer must raise tax or face recession]

Early drafts of The Line have been circulating for some time. Last May, Loughborough MP Jeevun Sandher argued that years of economic insecurity had pushed voters to seek answers beyond the political mainstream. “Our political battle is no longer left vs right,” he wrote – in a sentence containing more dubious assumptions than the UK now has major parties – “but mainstream sensibles vs radical outsiders (in the form of Reform and the Greens).” It is far from clear that Labour, at this point in its history, still gets to style itself as the party of the “mainstream sensible”.

In his speech to the Munich Security Conference last week, Keir Starmer struck a similarly forceful note, warning of “the peddlers of easy answers… on the extremes of left and right”. “It’s striking that the different ends of the spectrum share so much,” the Prime Minister continued. “Soft on Russia, weak on Nato, if not outright opposed – and determined to sacrifice the relationship we need on the altar of their ideology.” He did not specify his targets. He didn’t need to. In the past, he has been far less coy.

I’m sure you can grasp exactly what Starmer is reaching for here. Nigel Farage’s oft-stated belief that Nato provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine finds its warped mirror in Zack Polanski’s opposition to the UK’s membership of the alliance, even if the two positions spring from radically different premises: the latter rooted in suspicion of strongmen, the former in a disconcerting admiration for them.

And there are other, more superficial similarities between the two. Both are charismatic communicators, capable of inspiring a fervent loyalty in their supporters in a way Starmer very obviously is not. Both have prospered as populists, feeding – as Sandher noted – on a broad, simmering dissatisfaction with the status quo.

And both trade in simplism, shrinking a knotted, complicated world into a comforting fable of heroes and villains – even if they disagree entirely on who the villains are. It is, of course, less morally grotesque to lay the country’s woes at the feet of the parasitical rich than at those who are inconveniently non-white or foreign. But moral gradations do not magically produce workable policy.

The idea, however, that the two forces are comparable is nonsensical – worse, offensive. Reform is unapologetically a party of the radical right, ideologically aligned with Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. It promises mass deportations and flirts with reopening the settled status of legal residents. Its candidate in Gorton and Denton has declined to disown his habit of interrogating who, exactly, counts as British. Reform trades openly in resentment, nastiness and rage. Its poll lead is a genuinely alarming development.

By contrast, the Greens, broadly speaking, are a party of people who would like things to be kinder – and who quite like trees. I’ve had my quarrels with it: over hypocrisy, naivety, nimbyism, and the company it has occasionally kept in pursuit of votes. But it has not, at any point I can recall, come within a million miles of proposing mass deportations. You do not need to think much of Zack Polanski to recognise that equating him with Nigel Farage is absurd.

Even if the comparison were remotely fair, it would still be a strategic blunder for the government to push it. Disillusioned progressive voters have plenty of reasons to look elsewhere on the left: the Starmer government’s repeated failures to deliver, its habit of careening from one crisis to the next, and its willingness to make life harder for some groups in a bid to impress others. Telling those voters that they are morally equivalent to supporters of the deportationists addresses exactly none of these problems. Once again, it seems the Labour leadership’s instinct is not to give progressives what they want, but to chastise them for even wanting it.

The real reason the party is pushing this line, of course, is not that these two parties pose equal threats to Britain – but that they pose equal threats to Labour. Starmer would hardly be the first Prime Minister to conflate his country, his party, and his job, but make no mistake: this is electoral calculation masquerading as statesmanship.

[Further reading: The House of Lords’s cosplay democracy]

The year was barely two days old when the administration brought its military might to bear in the kidnapping a foreign president, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, not to mention his wife: the rules of diplomacy have always stated that, even with dodgy leaders you don’t much like, this is very much not done. The act was soon followed with unnerving noises concerning Cuba, Colombia, Canada, yet again. It was only after several days of discussion in European capitals about how Nato should respond in the event of a US invasion of Denmark that Trump clarified that, though he might long for Greenland, he would not be taking it by force. Since this concession was offered in the same tone with which a gangster said they would be very sorry to see anyone get hurt, however, that was of pretty limited consolation. At least the wall was only trying to keep people out. How much more unnerving to threaten to aggressively pull people in.

It would be comforting to tell ourselves this is some kind of aberration. For decades, even if we can all list plenty of times the US failed to live up to its own stated values (or at least, covertly funded somebody else to overthrow them), Washington has been guarantor of a global security architecture with national self-determination at its heart. Actually, though, there is no shortage of examples from history that rhyme with all of this.

Take foreign interference first. The Monroe Doctrine was originally conceived by the eponymous fifth president as a way of guaranteeing the status of the various newborn Latin American states which had recently declared their independence from Spain. In conception, it was not a million miles from Nato’s Article Five: an attack on them, went the theory, is an attack on us.

In 1823, of course, it’s not clear the US had the power to enforce any such policy. By time it did – at the end of the 19th century, when the US intervened in the Cuban War of Independence – a significant chunk of the American elites had adopted an attitude that can be best summed up as “if you can’t beat them, join them”. Following the Spanish American war, the US held Cuba for years, and the Philippines for decades; Puerto Rico and Guam it holds to this day. It is not immediately obvious how this differs from the way the European empires had been grabbing territory off one another for centuries.

The more flagrant example of American imperialist conquest, though, was surely much closer to home. The young country expanded its territory in a variety of ways: buying enough land to make a dozen new states from France in 1803, and Alaska from Russia in 1867; acquiring Florida and Pacific North West through treaty negotiations, with Spain (1819) and Britain (1846) respectively. It attempted to do the same with Greenland after both world wars, too.

The west, though, came into US possession through a rather different route. Everything from Texas to the Pacific Coast was, until the 1840s, a part of Mexico. Then, following the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, suddenly it wasn’t. There were always those in Washington who questioned the theory of “manifest destiny” – the belief that continental expansion was an inevitability, so help me god – used to justify this. But those guys lost the argument.

All of which means that nearly a third of the lower 48 states was taken through the military conquest of what had previously been rather more than half of Mexico: one of the great ironies of the “build the wall” policy is that those trying to cross Rio Grande were trying to reach territory that had once been Mexican anyway.

The Republicans’ line on Maduro, incidentally, seems to be that, because his election was illegitimate, the US did not in fact remove a foreign leader. This, because there is nothing new under the sun, is exactly the argument used during the 1989 trial of deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, too.

Donald Trump, of course, didn’t bother with such niceties: he just said wanted the oil. The terrifying thing about the “Donroe doctrine” is not that it is some breach with US history, because it isn’t. It’s that it’s not a doctrine – constraining, predictable, in exactly the manner that Trump could never accept – at all. It’s no more and no less than the belief that, what American can take, America should have.

[Further reading: How Nicki Minaj became Maga’s queen]

This must, now I come to think about it, be something that’s been true for literally thousands of people for every season of reality television there’s ever been. Nonetheless, watching the novelist Harriet Tyce, who I actually know and can text, would have given me a reason to not be entirely miserable about the onset of 2026, even if she hadn’t turned out to be cleverer in this game than literally anyone else who’s ever been on it up to and including Stephen Fry, which she has. What’s more, having posted that I know her on multiple social media platforms in the hope of reflected glory, I’ve been fielding fan mail for her from other friends (“Please tell her she’s my office’s favourite”), and have been able to bask. Really, it’s been a revelation. More shows should give it a try.

There’s another way in which this has added a new layer to the experience of watching The Traitors: by providing me with an insight into what it’s like to be quite hilariously bad at it. Obviously, I told anyone else who would listen and also a few who would not, the producers will have picked the thriller writer to be the secret traitor, right? Plotting is literally her job. Now that I’ve personally had the experience of taking a couple of entirely unconnected bits of information and spinning a richly detailed but wildly inaccurate theory out of them, I’ve got a much greater sense of what it must be like to actually be on the show as a faithful.

Which, of course, is what the secret traitor twist has done for pretty much everyone. This show offers numerous sources of joy – the campness, the cliffhangers, the outfits – but one of the greatest surely is the hubristic thrill that comes from watching people being embarrassingly wrong on prime time BBC One. “How can they not see it?” we ask ourselves, as we watch a smiling villain transparently manipulating their friends or Alan Carr unable, for the fourth time, to say he’s a faithful without pissing himself laughing. “It’s so obvious!” Well, now we know: without the aid of an edit that repeatedly cuts away to the traitors cackling away like supervillains, it’s not so easy after all. You apologise to David Olusoga, right now.

Another source of joy in this show – the one, I suspect, that attracts the sort of people who tell themselves they wouldn’t be seen dead watching other reality TV – is the hilariously bleak insights into human psychology and herd mentality it offers. The players unable to contain their outrage at the suggestion they might be a traitor, even though we literally saw them tell Claudia they wanted to be one, and also it is quite literally just a game. The way some people have an incredible ability to build a mountain of theory on a molehill of evidence, while others have the charisma to bring a room with them no matter how obviously wrong they are.

But by far the most thought-provoking insight it offers, though, by virtue of being the most horrifying, is quite how easily people will conclude that there’s something off about someone, based on characteristics that have precisely squat to do with whether or not Claudia Winkleman may have tapped them on the shoulder. Much of the discourse around this season has concerned whether or not The Traitors has revealed subconscious but widespread racism: suspicion does seem to have an unnerving tendency to round on black people at the early roundtables, although there’s some debate on how statistically significant this is and I may, anyway, be the single worst placed person to comment.

But the same instinctive suspicion seems to me to apply, too, to those with disabilities or too much intellect or the wrong sort of neurodiversity – to anyone one step too far removed from some abstract notion of the median Brit. The first person ever evicted at a roundtable, lest we forget, had to explain that the reason she hadn’t joined in with a toast to “the faithful” is because she literally didn’t have the necessary arm. It’s perhaps too much to expect that a reality TV show should provide moral lessons as well as entertainment. If it does, though, what it tells us is surely that we are none of us free of bias – and where we lack information, we may all be prone to plug the gaps with prejudice.

The other lesson of course is that an upsettingly high proportion of the public cannot, in fact, spell.

Incidentally, Harriet is a secret barrister, not the secret barrister; she’s married to neither Hugo the less secret barrister nor Amanda the world’s least undercover detective (I’ve met Harriet’s husband, he’s very nice); yes, I am jealous of watching her Instagram following and book sales exploding; no, she won’t let on what happens. And obviously I wouldn’t lie to you about that. I’m a 100 per cent faithful.

[Further reading: Heated Rivalry is the romp we need]

All this, at least, afflicts only the relatively young. But there’s another break in the wiring of public life that affects essentially everyone on this island – one that, I’ve begun to suspect, is proving even more consequential for our politics.

A horribly long time ago now, the Tories ran their 2010 campaign under the twin slogans of “Year for change” and “We can’t go on like this”. What they were actually promising to change is difficult, from this distance, to reconstruct – but after 13 years of Labour, the last couple of which had not gone brilliantly, enough people were ready for something new, and in so far as the old government had broadly been about public service renewal, and the new one was broadly about a smaller state, they got the chance.

That, though, was surely the last time a promise of change was in any visible way delivered. The Tories’ unexpected majority in 2015 election result was treated, not unreasonably, as an endorsement. Drill into the detail, though, and public satisfaction with the status quo was much harder to detect: Labour’s vote share was up by more than the Conservatives’, and the very different fates of the Lib Dems and SNP explained almost everything.

It surely shouldn’t have been a shock the next year when, asked a question that could be parsed as, “Are you happy with the state of this country?”, a slim majority voted “hell, no”. Exactly how the Brexit vote should be interpreted in terms of the UK’s relationship with Europe, its place in the world or its immigration policy would be debated at fascinating length for years to come. But the one thing everyone seemed to agree on was that it was a vote for change. Longer queues at airports aside, it is far from clear they got it.

And so it’s continued: 2017 was meant to be a lock for Tories, yet they managed to lose seats thanks to a large, unheralded swing towards Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Two years later, the Conservatives learned their lesson and offered “levelling up” (a promise of a better deal for the parts of the country that felt left behind), and campaigned on the slogan “Get Brexit done” (a phrase that can be parsed as “enough already”). To the extent that a fourth election victory running for the same party can ever be seen as a change election, 2019 was it.

Yet afterwards – would you believe it? – for all those bold promises, the country somehow continued along the exact same trajectory as it had been on before, only this time we were all locked in our homes for 18 months as well. So the Tory vote collapsed, and Labour won a huge majority on a manifesto with the single word “change” on the cover, only to retcon this as “stability is change” the moment it actually made it to government.

Is it any wonder Labour’s support immediately collapsed, too? Is the message not clear enough at this stage? The one constant in the past decade of British politics is that, when you ask the electorate what it wants, it has consistently replied, “Not fucking this.”

It would be easy to paint the voters as fickle and ungrateful, like a child that screamingly rejects every food offered or the cat sat by a bowl demanding a secret third thing. But I’m not sure that’d be fair: for all the merry-go-round of new prime ministers or a new election every half an hour, it feels likely that the things the public are asking for are fairly clear. Better public services; prosperity and security; and (don’t shoot the messenger, I don’t agree with it either) reduced immigration. The demand for all those things has been pretty much consistent. None of them have been on offer for a very long time.

Every time we asked the electorate its opinion, vast numbers of voters press the button clearly marked “make things better”. Yet every time, things just keep on getting worse.

There are all sorts of reasons for that, some the fault of our leaders, but many of them not. Demographic change and geopolitical headwinds are against us; there are limits to what governments can do. But for all the head scratching about the enthusiasm for Reform on one side or the Greens on the other – or, come to that, for Brexit or Corbyn, the SNP or Plaid – I suspect much of the explanation is actually incredibly simple. People tell the government what they want, yet the government doesn’t deliver it. They vote for change and find nothing changes at all.

Little wonder, by this stage, that an unnerving number of voters are just about ready to kick the whole thing over and start again. When the computer freezes, you start mashing the keyboard in the hope of waking it up.

[Further reading: Britain is blind on immigration statistics]

This is not entirely unreasonable – better men than Carlson have struggled with the whole three-and-a-half-nations-in-one-state thing – but nonetheless, this sounds like a him problem. Luckily for all of us, Tucker doesn’t let his inability to actually name a country prevent him from launching a broadside against it. “After winning the two biggest wars in human history,” he goes on, “Britain has shrunken, not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different.” For some reason, my dog just started barking.

There’s more – goodness me, there is so much more. The most grimly fascinating part, if only by virtue of being the most offensive, is when he compares the state of the UK to the plight of the noble indigenous American. (The problem, apparently, “is not necessarily the immigrants,” he adds. “The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there.” Well then.)

Much of it, though, would be familiar to anyone who’s had the misfortune of encountering the views of the American right about the current state of what they call – don’t ask me to explain this – the “Yookay”. The transformation from globe-spanning empire to sad, grey land of litter and graffiti. The role of condoms and abortion in plummeting birth rates. Free speech panic, concerned in this case with the arrest of a pro-life campaigner caught praying outside a family planning clinic. Throw in a few references to Sadiq Khan’s sharia law, or teenagers street fighting with machetes, and you’d have a full house.

Few residents of Airstrip One would deny we have problems, some of which – the grubbiness, the demographic crisis – Carlson even manages to identify. (Personally, of course, I’d put the blame on austerity, the financial crash and housing shortage rather than “brown people”, but you do you). Literally no one would deny our global status has declined somewhat since half the globe was pink, even if there is some disagreement over whether or not this was actually a bad thing. And yet, the Britain seen through the eyes of the American right is like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, identifiable but grotesquely distorted. Why, to mangle a quote from a work of great American literature, are they so obsessed with us?

One explanation is surely the same as that for most of the other terrible things in the world today. The world’s most divorced man, Elon Musk, is frequently online at hours in which the English-language internet is dominated by Brits; he’s the only person on Earth who thinks Keir Starmer’s problem is that he’s too left-wing; and because he owns a platform that’s radicalised half the planet, his views have spread. Bummer.

A related factor – on X, but also not X – must be the rise of short-form video. For a long time, the vision of this county most likely to reach American screens came with a sort of sepia filter: the Britain they saw was the one of Harry Potter, Downton Abbey and Paddington, all massive houses that still manage, somehow, to be cosy. When they actually got to see the reality of modern Britain – with its graffiti, crime, houses the size of postage stamps and, yes, brown people – perhaps it’s understandable it might come as a shock.

I think, though, there’s something else going on. The uncanny valley is the hypothesis that there’s something deeply unnerving about things which are almost, but not quite, like you. Brits have often been lulled by a common language and some shared culture into thinking Americans are basically us, only to start gibbering when they encounter someone who seems normal yet genuinely loves both the Republican Party and guns. Perhaps this is just the same process happening in reverse, and it’s simply more shocking for US right-wingers to be faced with people who love socialised medicine and hate guns when they’re from the country that birthed their own.

Then again, perhaps this is over complicating it. The wheel turns, and this too must pass: ruling classes have often been haunted by visions of what has happened to the people they replaced. Perhaps this obsession is entirely natural.

What seems rather less natural, though, is the behaviour of the British right. Such people would surely be offended by the suggestion they were anything less than patriotic – yet there they are, allying with foreigners against their own countrymen, colluding to spread nightmarish visions of a Britain in decline. Perhaps those hysterical Americans were right – and Britain really is in danger from an enemy within, after all.

[Further reading: Americans don’t care about Britain]

The fun kicked off, as all the best weeks do, with the Home Secretary reassuring the Commons that she would not, in fact, be stripping asylum seekers of their jewellery the second their feet touched the beach at Dover. (Since inquiries are all the rage these days, perhaps she might usefully launch one into who’d been briefing the Sun.) The stuff not backed away from was only marginally less dispiriting: doubling the frequency with which “leave to remain” is reviewed to every 30 months, in case we might be able to get rid of a few; promises to deport families more aggressively, even if they contain children; an end to the public duty to prevent destitution which, oh god.

And this, remember, is targeted at refugees. There’s a promise of “safe and legal routes” too, but you’d need to look hard to spot it, and the numbers will anyway be arbitrarily capped by the Home Secretary. Whether this will act as a deterrent to small boat migrants remains to be seen. As a deterrent to left-liberals voting Labour, it’s surely hard to beat.

After all that, the proposed reforms to the rest of the immigration system seemed almost cuddly. Sure, the wait period for indefinite leave to remain will be extended from five to ten years, including for 2.6 million people already here, and a whole bunch of factors could lengthen that period by up to another decade. Yes, the people on post-Brexit health and social care visas who came here to stop our public services imploding will see their wait times triple.

But at least they’re not changing the rules for those who already have ILR, unlike some parties I could name. It’s a dividing line, guys! Just don’t look too hard at what just happened in Denmark. Everything’s going to be fine.

So much of the debate has focused on this stuff – the politics, the practicalities, the inescapable opinions of Nigel Farage – that there’s been no room to discuss the morality of the situation. The idea there might be something shoddy about expecting people to work for a pittance in our underfunded care homes for 15 years, without ever being sure we’re not going to kick them out, simply doesn’t feature. Little wonder, then, that no one seems to be asking my next question, but nonetheless:

Doesn’t it ever strike you that deciding someone’s legal rights based on a nebulous combination of birthplace and parentage is a bit… weird?

Look, I get why we do it. I’m not going to say everything would be fine if the world had open borders, because I’m not actually sure that’s true. I think it’s an ideal to strive for, yes – but so is a combination of European public services and American tax rates and, funny story, it turns out that actually doesn’t work great either. In the same way, there are obviously practical reasons we can’t simply throw open the doors – not just because most people don’t want to, but because the results are highly likely to end up a mess.

Nonetheless, the current situation means that we grant people different rights based on their genetic heritage and on which scrap of land they happened to be born on: that is a literal description of how we manage the human race. There are those whose fates and life chances were determined because they were born on this side of some made up line rather than on that side of it. That’s mad, isn’t it?

For much of history, after all, we did no such thing: the first restrictions on immigration to the UK weren’t introduced until 1905. You could have uncontrolled borders in the 19th century because, bluntly, it just wasn’t that easy for large numbers of people to move about. Today, though, between air travel and a global lingua franca and social media making the lives of others much easier to see, it’s both simpler and more tempting. Climate change can only accelerate this. There can be no going back.

Even so, while modern states may prove bigger and more durable than the often-fragile polities that preceded them, borders can and do move, and entire countries can sometimes spring from nowhere or suddenly die. That seems a flimsy basis with which to determine the rights of actual people, who exist even when it is not politically convenient for them to do so, and to tell them where they can and can’t live.

I understand why we do it. I don’t think it’s going to change. But I can’t help but think there’s be less poison in this debate if we could somehow acknowledge “nationality” is a contingent and imperfect response to a practical problem – rather than pretend that it’s as an eternal, unalterable quality that somehow determines self-worth.

[Further reading: Tinkering with ECHR definitions will not help the government]

The moment the show went from guilty pleasure to uncomplicated love, though, is something you’re less likely to remember. A man named Rayan was having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack at the thought of being momentarily buried alive for a task. This was not exactly unreasonable – my heartrate spiked just thinking about it – but the reason it sticks with me is because another faithful, Hannah, who had not to that point impressed with her sensitivity, responded by gently telling him that nobody would judge him if he found he couldn’t do it.

And it made the edit. In a show named The Traitors.

This, I think, is a big reason the show is as compelling as it is. Sure, it’s essentially a gameshow about suspicion and prejudice, lies and betrayal, and contains more funereal imagery than a Halloween party hosted by some goths. And yet for all that, it’s surprisingly… nice? You’d think those who appeared on it would end up hating each other and unable to trust anyone ever again, but not a bit of it: post-show interviews and Instagram feeds alike suggest they all end up bonded for life through the deeply weird experience they’ve shared.

The number of anodyne corporate away-day style teamwork tasks inflicted by the producers suggests this sense of camaraderie and esprit du corps is not a coincidence: bonding the group together is the point. After all, it’s one thing to watch someone get destroyed by an enemy. But how much more fascinating to see them destroyed by their friends?

I had worried this slightly bizarre mix of Bake Off and the Millgram experiment might not carry over to The Celebrity Traitors – partly because it’s essentially season four, a point by which most such shows are starting to search desperately for novelty. (The fifth season of Big Brother was promoted under the slogan “Big Brother goes evil”.) But also because, well, they’re celebrities aren’t they? Who wants to watch a bunch of famous people being terribly nice to each other?

Well, as it turns out – almost everyone. The Celebrity Traitors has had the exact same vibe as the regular version, only with people we already know and a better wardrobe budget. (Tom Daley’s funeral outfit was worth the price of admission alone.) And the celebrities chosen have turned out to be overwhelmingly lovely. Stephen Fry’s national treasure status has declined noticeably since 2007, when the BBC dedicated a weekend of programming to his 50th birthday. But he did not, as some might have expected, blunder around believing himself clever enough to outwit the game, but instead played the part of the wise old owl, warning the others of how little they know. Actual clever, not TV clever.

Other highlights have included the case almost immediately being cracked by the unlikely bromance between rugby’s Joe Marler and comedy’s Joe Wilkinson, and everyone inevitably ignoring them; Alan Carr almost giving himself away by giggling helplessly whenever anyone asks if he’s a traitor, and only getting away with it because he does exactly the same in all other circumstances; and Kate Garraway repeating everything anyone else says in the manner of a parrot. The closest the show has come to making anyone look bad is broadcasting Celia Imrie cheerily admitting it was her who just noisily farted to the nation. A lot more national treasures have come out of the castle than went in.

It’s tempting to read The Traitors as symbolic of the state of modern Britain: a place where everyone suspects that everyone else might be against them; where the mood of the herd can turn on a dime, and which seems diverse but where those who seem in some way different are the first to face suspicion when the going gets rough. Maybe. But if we’re going to play that game, we also have to consider the other side of the story. Not every version of The Traitors has left room for the contestants to befriend one another – many, indeed, have followed the more traditional reality TV route and played up the exact opposite sort of behaviour. (That also turns out to be incredibly compelling, which frankly raises some questions about my “the niceness is the key to its success” thesis.)

Our version of the format involved putting a bunch of musicians, actors and comedian in a castle and letting them plot while also being charmingly odd; where an Olympian and TV presenter marched into her post-banishment interview slot with a notepad containing her theories and a Very Serious Look on her face. It almost makes you proud to be British.

[Further reading: The British right is swimming in an open sewer]

It is hard to have faith a similar speech would receive the same response today. The rhetorical temperature concerning immigration, hardly cool to begin with, has recently been hitting new highs, and few prominent figures on the right have felt moved to speak out. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch did see fit to condemn pro-Palestine marches: she did not do the same with the largest far-right street protest in history. She did, however, suggest that anti-asylum protests like the one in Epping could be dealt with if we took steps to rehome asylum seekers in camps.

Other ideas that once seemed extremist and verboten now seem, for the right, to be well inside the Pale. This week it was the turn of “rising star” Katie Lam, who suggested in the Sunday Times that large numbers of people who came legally and have indefinite leave to remain “will need to go home”. This, she claimed, would create a more “culturally coherent” country. For some reason, my dog just started barking.

Do not assume this is just a new MP trying to make a name for herself as a hardliner: it’s a position reflected in a draft bill presented by shadow home secretary Chris Philp back in May which, hilariously, no one had previously noticed. The bill, British Future’s Sunder Katwala has noted, would mean revoking legally settled status from up to 400,000 people, with no exceptions for having a British spouse or children. The FT’s Stephen Bush reckons its terms are so stringent it would mean deporting a greater proportion of the population than Uganda’s Idi Amin did. There has been some push back from within the party, admittedly, but it is notable who is not pushing back. The plan is “broadly in line” with party policy, says Badenoch’s office.

All this is terrifying – yet it’s hardly the only example of the British right drifting into territory that would have seemed extreme very recently indeed. A few weeks ago, Robert Jenrick was uncovered complaining that the Birmingham district of Handsworth was “one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to” because he “didn’t see another white face”. Again, while the remarks were criticised in most quarters, those quarters did not include Kemi Badenoch’s office. He remains her most likely successor.

If the opposition front bench are drifting ever rightwards, though, that’s at least partly because that’s where the tide is going. A significant share of the electorate looks set to vote for Reform, just as vast number of Americans last year opted for Trump. The Express journalist Christian Calgie, meanwhile, was recently caught cracking jokes on X about deporting Zarah Sultana, a serving British MP. He apologised, with the traditional talk of mental health and a social media break – but if he’d lost his instinctive grasp of where the line was, that’s at least partly because the line has been moving, unnervingly far and upsettingly fast.

The theory that the left hunts traitors while the right seeks converts is hardly a new one: so familiar is the idea that the left’s own internal power struggles are dressed up in issues of doctrinal difference that I can simply put “People’s Front of Judea” and you can fill in the rest of the argument yourselves.

What is less often discussed, though, is the corollary to this: that the right’s very different culture means it sometimes doesn’t worry about purity enough. Movements, like states, need to control their own borders, and some ideas should be off-limits not because they are unpopular (the Tories’ latest wheeze is), but because they are wrong. We may struggle to come up with a national consensus on many issues. But surely we can all see that deporting retired NHS staff of Britons’ own spouses or children because they didn’t earn enough or don’t have the right bit of paper is simply not something government should do. Change the rules going forward, by all means; but promises were made, and lives and families built upon them. How have we reached a place where wrecking those lives is even up for discussion?

And yet this idea, apparently, is no longer off limits at all. It is indeed broadly in line with Tory policy. Nigel Farage, incidentally, is in favour of mass repatriations, too.

Ted Heath led the British right in a very different age. Partly that’s because he didn’t have Reform to contend with – if you’d called him an “elitist”, he’d surely have been baffled you meant it as an insult – but partly too because he didn’t have the internet. Heath will surely have been aware of popular support for Enoch Powell. But he didn’t have a buzzing box in his pocket to remind him of it, and how easily it could be mobilised against him, let alone an app owned by a foreign billionaire designed to radicalise his own views.

It is striking that Calgie’s apology went down far worse with the population of X than his original offence. Perhaps the conservative soul has changed. But if the right’s problem is ideological hygiene, then perhaps it’s because it’s swimming in an open sewer.

[Further reading: The Trump regime wants to make America white again]

One of the less upsetting ways those effects can manifest is outlined in a new report from “reputation management consultancy” Montford Communications. Posting to Policy explores the way wonks, politicos and shitposters alike drive government action through the raw power of their takes. “A niche account posts something punchy. It lands,” the report explains, with more full stops than is acceptable anywhere but LinkedIn. “Traditional media pick it up. Politicians respond. And policy follows. This is the ‘posting to policy’ pipeline and it’s fast becoming the new normal.”

Not all the examples the consultancy gives of this pipeline are entirely convincing. The “Nicholas, 30 ans” meme may have generated discourse, but it has not, as far as I’ve noticed, led to attempts to actually rethink intergenerational fairness; and while Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging video made some waves, the shadow justice secretary is not, appearances notwithstanding, a shitposter. The most persuasive example offered is the transformation of Motability from a worthy but obscure scheme allowing those in receipt of mobility allowance to lease cars, to a “something must be done”-level spending scandal through noise on X alone.

Montford’s argument isn’t wrong: it’s abundantly clear by now that things that happen on the internet rarely stay there, and while hacks and wonks hang out on the same platforms as those with actual power it’s unsurprising that ideas sometimes migrate from the former to the latter. That, though, does not mean these conclusions are either new or significant. I can think of things I put on the internet ten years ago that genuinely, if surprisingly, brought change. (You can see one of them on the Tube Map right now.) This report exists largely, I suspect, because writing about people who spend a lot of time online is a great way to guarantee coverage. YouGov used to poll silly arguments I was having on Twitter, on the grounds I was a reliable retweet: this feels like the same trick.

If something has changed here, it’s in who is numbered among the “new class of online actors”. The report breaks these into five groups: policy wonks, Anglofuturists, progressive activists, issue driven obsessives and civic provocateurs, obsessed with “crime, immigration, housing, and public order” (quite the most flattering euphemism for “people creepily obsessed with Sadiq Khan” I’ve ever read). As you read the report, pictures of these people follow you down the page whether you want them to or not. This is a pretty apt metaphor, but remains intensely irritating when you’ve been around a while and know these people personally.

What’s really striking, though, is the pool of broadly centre-left online opinion havers who are conspicuous by their absence. “While the dynamic is most advanced on X,” Montford writes, “we’re seeing similar shifts on TikTok, Instagram, and beyond.” At no point does the report mention BlueSky.

Did the centre-left bit of UK politics Twitter make an error in decamping en masse to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Twitter? The old site, now remade as X, remains significantly larger than the new, and much of the political class have failed to make the jump. Did those of us who went let our desire for a comforting liberal bubble undermine our actual influence?

Well – no. Bluesky may or may not be, as one centre-right friend who felt unwelcome put it, “self-righteous island”. But the idea that that is the reason why we went is nonsense. That I’ve largely stopped posting on a site that’s done more to shape my career and social circle than the rest of the internet combined is less about avoiding rival opinions (I love arguing with people who are wrong) than with the fact the site simply became unusable. It stopped generating the things (good jokes, interesting debate, clicks) I wanted; it became extremely good at generating the things (racists, pornbots, racist pornbots) I did not.

The story of social media in the last few years is not one of a self-righteous liberal flounce, but of fragmentation: network effects are a thing, and if most of the people you like to talk to switch platforms, there feels little point in remaining behind. If we have lost influence, that’s at least partly down to the government’s reluctance to use its convening power to reshape the information environment, and its odd commitment to a site owned by someone who wants Keir Starmer in prison.

Those who stayed behind have lost something, too: the ability to not have their worldview shaped by some of the maddest people on the internet. One of the Tories’ big conference announcements was the promise of an Ice-style border force that would deport [citation needed] 150,000 people a year. That mass deportations of most existing migrants is not actually popular in the UK – that such a policy places yet more distance between the Tories and the mainstream centre which deserted them last year – seems not to have occurred.

It’s hard not to connect this to the fact that much of the political class remains on a platform now dominated by the political extremes. They might do well to remember: Twitter is not the real world.

[Further reading: Birmingham doesn’t like Robert Jenrick either]

The answer here is surely obvious: that, at least, is the implication of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE)’s “State of Brownfield 2025” report. It’s the latest instalment in a series that has been in production since Constable, when your house was probably greenfield, too. The CPRE found, using the old trick of literally just asking councils, that last year England had enough previously developed land to contain 1.48 million homes at locally defined “minimum net dwelling” standards. That is within touching distance of the government’s 1.5 million target – and all without endangering a single rabbit. How convenient!

There’s more good news. Over a third of this total (535,000) could be built on land in London, where demand is highest. Over half (55 per cent) is on land that already has planning permission, “meaning over 800,000 new homes could be built rapidly”. And because brownfield sites – which include abandoned factories, offices and shops – are a “constantly renewing resource”, the total is actually up 15 per cent on the 1.29 million recorded in 2023.

Whether a sudden upsurge in abandoned commercial properties is entirely a good thing is not something the campaign has stopped to consider. And there are other questions the CPRE does not ask. Chief among them: if there is so much brownfield land available in the middle of a housing crisis, then why on Earth aren’t we already building on it?

One possible answer, strongly implied by both the report and a sympathetic write up in the Guardian, is: developers are greedy. Building on greenfield land is easier and more profitable, and developers have little reason to care about either urban regeneration or fields. Boo.

That giant construction firms care more about bonuses and shareholders than they do about nature is no doubt true; we are none of us pure under capitalism. But there are rather a lot of other reasons brownfield sites rarely sprout houses. Firstly, it is a label that’s both simplistic (it tells you nothing other than that it was previously developed) and misleading (not only are there bits of brownfield now functioning as important wildlife sites, but less than two decades ago the category included actual gardens).

Actually, plenty of brownfield is in the wrong place, either in the sense of being in the wrong towns and cities to meet demand, or just being in locations where no one in their right mind would want to live (in industrial parks, say, or unnervingly close to motorways). Some sites are simply better suited to commercial or industrial uses – and since we do need those things too perhaps we should reserve them for such.

Then there’s the fact that lots of brownfield sits empty for years because it is quite literally toxic, thanks to the run-off from previous industrial uses. That can be fixed – the creation of London’s Olympic Park involved removing 2.3 million square metres of soil, and scrubbing a third of it in giant soil-cleaning machines before putting it back. But such interventions are expensive, and while you can argue that government, developers or both should put their hands in their pockets to increase housing supply without damaging nature, it should be abundantly clear by now they’re not going to.

Sometimes in life, if you spot a blindingly obvious solution to a long-standing problem, it’s because you’re a genius. More often, though, it’s because you haven’t thought enough about that problem. Yes, it would be lovely if we could do everything through brownfield, simply by forcing developers to sacrifice a bit more of their profits and still build enough homes. But they’re not going to. Demanding otherwise may make you feel righteous; it won’t deliver those homes.

The CPRE, of course, doesn’t have to worry about these trade-offs. More than that, by pretending they don’t exist the organisation can attract headlines and public attention. But a brownfield-only housing plan would mean missed housing targets and not enough homes, with all the damage to family finances, fertility rates and the economy that entails. In politics, as in life, there is usually a reason why something seems too good to be true.

[Further reading: Will broken windowism save Labour?]

I had, admittedly, been primed to be annoyed with Netflix’s feature-length adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club – not because I don’t like the book but because I do. Author Richard Osman has an obvious fascination with people and their foibles, something it’s hard not to connect with his years working on game-shows, and his novels overflow with human warmth and sympathy. (I listened to the fourth as an audiobook, and one scene – if you’ve read it, you’ll know which – had me bawling my eyes out in the street.) But I was always cynical about the idea of squeezing a story whose joy lies in plot detours and wry narration into a two-hour film, and I’m sorry, but Pierce Brosnan is not Ron.

And lo, it came to pass. Brosnan is actually not bad – one of the genuine highlights is his beatific smile during a pensioner aquarobics class – but he’s not obviously the character from the books, and should quite obviously be Ray Winstone. Worse, Joyce (Celia Imrie), who as narrator is the closest the books have to a protagonist, has been sidelined because Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) is more famous. If you’re going to make a version so stripped down you’re basically just expecting applause for familiar characters, you need to actually show those characters. (This, perhaps, is why at one point Mirren all but literally turns to camera to announce she was a spy.)

Oh – and even nice old people’s homes don’t look like Downton fucking Abbey. Really, I don’t mean to go on, but then I doubt the film-makers meant to muff the ending in a way that torpedoes later books either. This should have been a six-part BBC One series with budget to match. But I’m sure the money was very nice.

I would be coping better with all this had it not arrived in the same week as a second disappointing adaptation, this one of actual historical events. I’ve wanted a TV show about the years leading up to the Norman Conquest of 1066 for literally decades, ever since I read the relevant chapter of Simon Schama’s A History of Britain and realised it was basically England’s I, Claudius. (The story of Emma of Normandy – a woman who marries an English king, then marries the invading Danish king who ends up replacing him, then helps a son from her second marriage to the throne, then does the same to a son from her first marriage – makes the empress Livia look positively shy and retiring.)

The BBC’s King & Conqueror – James Norton as Harold Godwinson, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as William the Bastard, reimagined here as sort mismatched political buddies – started a bit later than most of the good bits of Emma (Juliet Stevenson)’s career. Exactly when, though, is not clear – Edward the Confessor’s 24-year reign now lasts about six months. I can cope with that, and with the various name changes (the female name shortage in medieval England is well-attested, and you can’t call everyone Edith or Matilda or Aelfgifu). But the bits where they just make stuff up, which had me googling to see whether it was I or the writers who were wrong, is baffling because the story was more than interesting enough already.

Both these things are, to be clear, fine. They’re not great; but they’re not crimes against eyeballs, either. They pass the time. The reason they annoy me so is because of what I’ve come to think of as the John Adams problem. The 2008 HBO miniseries about the second US president begins with two brilliant episodes about America’s path to revolution. Then, though, it follows Adams to France in search of allies and thus misses both the War of Independence and the creation of a new nation-state. After that, it follows him out of France, so he misses the revolution there too. John Adams is a beautifully made story about a man with an incredible talent for walking out of rooms just before history happens in them.

I’m aware that I’ve just switched from complaining something is inaccurate, to complaining something else is not inaccurate enough. (It was an adaptation of a biography: of course it followed Adams.) But the reason John Adams frustrates me so is that the American Revolution is a fascinating story that seems ripe for the peak TV treatment, but no one’s ever done it – and “well, HBO already made John Adams” is surely a big part of the reason. In the same way, there can now be no Sunday night miniseries version of The Thursday Murder Club books; and no one will be making a better drama about the road to Hastings any time soon, either. It’s not that these adaptations are bad – but by existing, they prevent us from getting something better.

Meanwhile, HBO is doing what looks increasingly like a shot-for-shot remake of the extant Harry Potter films, at vastly greater length, even though nobody asked them to. Like I said: disappointing.

[See more: The Girlfriend review: bizarre love triangle]

It feels weird and sinister. In England, you tend to see flags during royal events, or sporting competitions, or occasionally wrapped around Geri Halliwell’s torso. Mostly, though, this mode of jingoism just isn’t a mainstream English “thing”.

So far right activists seem to have spotted an opening. Anti-extremist campaigners Hope Not Hate have revealed that, “While many instances of flags being raised, or crosses being painted… are being carried out by ordinary people inspired by posts on social media, the main organising force behind the campaign is ‘Operation Raise the Colours’.” That’s the group raising the money; its founders include men associated with Britain First. At least some of the flags, reports suggest, were hung at night by men in balaclavas. That does not feel like a spontaneous expression of unthreatening local pride.

This feels like a mark of territorial control: a way of saying this is a place for people like us, not people like you. But there are plenty of people – many of them decent, not all of them white British – who don’t see the problem. They’re just flags, aren’t they? Why would a national symbol make anyone uncomfortable?

So the whole project seems calculated to draw a dividing line between liberals and the left on one side, and those who don’t spend much time thinking about politics on the other – where they will find themselves unexpectedly aligned with the nationalist right.

And it’s put the authorities in a difficult position. Affixing things to highways without express permission, for example, is technically breaking the law. All this pushes councils or the Highways Agency towards removal: in Worcestershire, even a Reform councillor, Karl Perks, has warned against painted flags, on the grounds it’s vandalism.

But, in fulfilling their legal duties, the authorities risk putting themselves on the other side of a debate from a large and vocal section of the public. That goes double if they’ve not taken the same approach to, say, pride flags or Palestinian ones. That might explain why Robert Jenrick has gone out of his way to attack those “Britain-hating councils” who enforced the law by removing flags. (It’s tempting to suggest we club together to find a really big flag and drape it over one of his houses, to see how he likes it.)

It can be irritating to feel like your national identity is one of the few it’s unacceptable to take pride in: it’s not as though France and Spain and a dozen other countries don’t have their own imperial-atrocity strewn history to contend with. But England is not just a recovering imperial power, but by far the largest component of a multi-ethnic, multinational state. Occasional liberal discomfort around vocal expressions of patriotism is the other side of the coin to the success we’ve made of diversity compared to most European countries. That we don’t shove pride in a majority identity down everyone’s throat enables minority ones to feel included.

And the fact we don’t “do” flags means that, when people do, it inevitably looks weird and try-hard – in a way that American or French flag-waving does not. More than that: it does make one wonder about the views on race-relations of the flag-waver. That may be unfair: not everyone who likes, or even hangs, such flags is an extremist. But when the last government’s “plain English guide” to such things, dating from 2021, claimed that flags are a “very British way of expressing joy and pride”, the problem is that they weren’t.

There’s a strong argument for reclaiming such symbols from the far right: if we all embraced the flag, regardless of politics or ancestry, it would lose its power as a symbol of extremism. Change who hangs the flag, and you change its meaning, too. The problem is that doing that overnight would be hard. Doing it at a time when many of those posting them really do intend them to be offensive? That might be impossible.

[See more: Flying planes with the most powerful people in Britain]

If this information comes as a shock, then I can but point you to this tweet by Daily Express political correspondent Christian Calgie that reads: “If you don’t understand how close tens of millions of Britons are to wanting a full-blown revolution, let alone fail to understand why, then you have no value as a political commentator.” There are almost 70 million people in the UK. That, by my count, puts the odds that you’re a closet revolutionary at somewhere around one in three. Eye your neighbours with suspicion, comrade.

This is easy to mock. But this excitable doomsday prophesying is hardly unique. The Express journalist Carole Malone has warned Jeremy Vine that immigration has left Britain “like a tinderbox that’s set to explode”. Over in the Telegraph, Isabel Oakeshott has, more in sorrow than in anger, agreed with Nigel Farage’s claim that Britain is facing “societal collapse”. “Unless our leaders get a grip – and fast,” she warned, “exasperated communities will turn vigilante.” Meanwhile, columnist Allison Pearson – who, delightfully, co-hosts a podcast named Planet Normal – recently tweeted, “Anyone else hoping for a military coup?” At its end, she included a shrug emoji.

Then there’s disappointed former politics professor Matt Goodwin, whose Substack I have looked at so you don’t have to. Recent headlines over there have included “Labour is pushing the UK into civil unrest”, “Is Britain about to blow?”, “Epping is a warning of what’s to come”, and “How things fall apart”. (This last one promises “more BOMBSHELL numbers on what is really happening in the UK”. Exciting!)

I am writing this from London, which, so far as I can tell has not fallen, is not on fire and remains free of sharia law. So perhaps I know not whereof I speak. But I do not think this country is on the verge of revolution. Sorry, but I don’t. It just isn’t very British. We tried it once, didn’t like it, switched it off again, and were then one of the few countries in Europe that didn’t join in the fun during 1848. We’ve experienced both street action and political violence, yes, and these are febrile times – but such things have never overthrown a government. Most of the time they don’t even change policy.

There is ample evidence of real rage out there (there’s this report from Anoosh Chakelian, for one thing). Events in Epping are worrying; last summer there were riots. From Corbyn to Brexit, the Labour landslide to the Reform surge, there are plenty of signs that the public hungers for substantive change.

But anti-migrant protests have often been accompanied by pro-migrant counter-protests, and polling has found that the British public overwhelmingly oppose street violence as a form of political action. (According to YouGov, just 7 per cent supported last year’s riots; 85 per cent were opposed.) This is not a country that’s ready to man the barricades. Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.

All of which raises a question: what exactly do right-wing commentators think they’re playing at? Why are they not just predicting social disorder – of the sort they’d want water cannons or worse to deal with, if it came from, say, students – but salivating over it? Their tone inescapably brings to mind the anti-hero character Rorschach from Alan Moore’s Watchmen (“And all the whores and politicians will look up and shout: ‘Save us!’ And I’ll look down and whisper: ‘No.’”). Or possibly it just reminds one of a tantruming child sobbing out the words, “THEN you’ll be sorry.”

One possible explanation for all this is that an urge to shout increasingly unhinged things is an unfortunate necessity in today’s ultracompetitive attention economy. Another is that Brexit irreparably warped some commentators’ grasp of the concept of loser’s consent. If you’ve spent years earnestly arguing that the will of the people is paramount, and an election victory is a mandate to deliver whatever what you happen to want, then an election loss must come to feel insupportable. The will of the people, surely, must make itself known in some other way.

Then again, perhaps this is just what happens when a government is too cowardly to ever state, in plain language, that not all concerns are legitimate, that whipping up hysteria is, at best, anti-social, and that feeling angry is not the same thing as being right. It’s just possible that all that’s in the mix, too.

[See more: Visions of an English civil war]

And yet, compared to the sort of thing which literally every other European country had to deal with at some point in the 20th century, it’s nothing. Britain was not invaded or occupied; Britain did not see its population starve. Britain simply learned that it was no longer top dog. That’s all. The event and the reaction don’t seem to go together.

But this, of course, is to see the world from the perspective of today. Now, we all know that Britain cannot just do what it wants – that the US is the far more powerful player. At the start of 1956, though, large chunks of the map were still coloured British pink (or, come to that, French bleu), and the median opinion at home was that this was broadly a good thing. Suez was the moment when the loss of status we now date to 1945 came home.

I wonder, in my darker moments, if we’re going through something similar now – a less dramatic decline, perhaps, but a potentially more ruinous one. The loss of empire, after all, was mainly an issue for the pride of the political classes. Today’s decline in status affects everyone.

Consider the number of areas in which the current British government seems utterly helpless before the might of much bigger forces. It’s not quite true to say that Rachel Reeves has no room for manoeuvre – breaking a manifesto pledge and raising one of the core taxes remains an option, albeit one that would be painful for government and taxpayer alike. But her borrowing and spending options are constrained by the sense of a bond market both far flightier than it once was, thanks to an increase in short term investors, and less willing, post-Truss, to give Britain the benefit of the doubt. The thing that much of the public would like Reeves to do – spend more, without raising taxes – is a thing it is by no means clear she has the power to do.

Over in foreign policy, Keir Starmer has offended sensibilities by making nice with someone entirely unfit to be president of the United States, and whose actions place him a lot closer to the dictators of the 20th century than to Eisenhower or JFK. The problem for Starmer is that saying this out loud would likely result in ruinous tariffs, or the collapse of NATO before an alternative system for the defence of Europe can be prepared, or both. Again, he has no space to do what his voters want him to do.

In the same vein, consider the anger about Britain’s failure to act to prevent the horrors still unfolding in Gaza. It is not to imply the government has handled things well to suggest that at least part of the problem is that – 69 years on from Suez – the government of Israel doesn’t give a fig about what the government of Britain thinks. The things the public wants may be outside the realm of things the government can actually deliver.

Even in less overtly political realms, the British state feels helplessly at the mercy of global forces beyond its control. The domestic TV industry, a huge British export, is in crisis thanks to the streamers. AI will change the world, we’re told, and it’s very possible that isn’t a good thing: and what is Westminster supposed to do about that? And with which faculties?

In all these areas and a thousand more, people want their government to do something to change the direction of events, and it is not at all obvious it can. Ever since 2016, British politics has been plagued by a faintly Australian assumption that, if a prime minister is not delivering, you should kick them out and bring in the next one. That is not the worst impulse in a democracy. But what if Britain is so changed that delivery is not possible?

Researchers have found that social status affects the immune system of certain types of monkey – that the stress of lower status can, quite literally, kill. It already looks plausible the electorate might roll the dice on Nigel Farage. This is terrifying enough. But when it turns out he can’t take back control either, but only trash what’s there – what then?

[See more: Trump in the wilderness]

Things breaking and not being fixed – the sneaking suspicion that things might just keep getting worse – has been a theme of British life of late. In too many towns, boarded up shopfronts predominate; shops and restaurants that closed during Covid and never reopened, or did reopen, but as low-value and slightly suspect operations like vape shops or nail bars. A general air of scuzziness has crept in, as councils make their final metamorphosis from the once proud local corporations that built this country, to struggling and underfunded social care funding bodies with an occasional sideline in bins. Meanwhile, social media is awash with stories of police ignoring petty crimes, and immediately marking inquiries as closed, as if there’s no value in investigating and nothing to be done. (When someone is caught expressing support for Palestine, at least, Kent police are on it.) 

Even in London, which for all its problems remains far richer than the country it governs, commentators whine about graffiti on tube trains, station lifts out of use due to unspecified motor faults, the year it’ll take to replace just four escalators at Cutty Sark station. Such criticisms are heard most often from the right-wingers who seek to demonise the city and its liberal Muslim mayor alike – but they resonate nonetheless, because they’re not entirely wrong. It does feel absurd that a city that just a few years ago was New York’s only plausible challenger for the title of “capital of the world” now can’t find the parts to fix a bloody lift.  

Consider the sorry saga of Hammersmith Bridge, which connects two districts of plush west London. In the 1820s, the bridge took just three years to build; in the 1880s, just five to replace after a boat smacked into it. Now, it’s been closed to motor traffic for six years and counting – the cars may not matter; the buses surely do – and no one has offered a timetable for when that might change. Everyone is waiting on someone else to pay. 

I could keep banging on about both the sense of decline and the apparent inability of our government to arrest it –  I’ve not even mentioned, say, the looming collapse of the university sector, taking a bunch of regional economies with it, or the 20-year failure to even think about social care. But I want to devote the rest of my wordcount instead to the psychic cost of all this.  

For quite a while this country was blessed with a sense of, for want of a better word, progress. Many lived hard lives; for certain people in certain places, things could get worse as well as better. But if you look at the state of the nation as a whole at any point in the 19th or 20th century, you could generally rely on things having improved visibly over the previous, say, 20 years.  

That no longer seems to hold true. We’re not significantly richer than we were in 2005, but the cost of living is significantly higher, and the cost of having somewhere to live higher still. Worse, a lot of basic state functions are in remission. We no longer trust that the police will come when called, or you can see a doctor when sick. And we have a prime minister who doesn’t recognise that anything has broken. Perhaps the idea of progress was an aberration. For much of history, even the bits that didn’t have Rome to look back on, the golden age was assumed to lay behind, not ahead, of the present. 

But that sense that things would get better made a whole load of otherwise near impossible things plausible. You could redistribute resources, because the size of the pie was growing. You could ask people to make sacrifices, because tomorrow would be better than today. How do you do that when too many people don’t have enough, and no longer trust their sacrifice will even help? How can you have progressive politics without any sense of progress? 

Tomorrow is not looking better than today. Thanks to a combination of demographics and economics, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, there are excellent reasons to imagine it might actually be worse. At least when the Tories were in office, we had the day that they’d lose to look forward to. Now the only plausible change in the offing is Nigel bloody Farage. The emperor isn’t coming to save us. He may yet be the one to cut the aqueducts. 

[See also: Gaza will radicalise a generation]

Being overweight has rarely held me back. I’ve suffered neither health problems nor social stigma. (Men have it easier.) I walk long distances, cycle everywhere, even frequent a gym, and have been known to snap “I’m not sedentary!” at helpful doctors offering me pamphlets on the benefits of moving about.

But I am cursed with the vanity of a much slimmer man. It had come to upset me that my face had expanded, that clothes had ceased to fit, and photographs become a source of stress. Around 2013, I’d lost a load of weight doing “5:2” (essentially starve yourself until your brain ceases to function, but only twice a week), but that worked solely because I had a job with a predictable rhythm and, bluntly, because I was still in my early 30s. Older, as a freelancer living alone, I’d never quite managed it a second time. “If you were going to do it again,” one friend gently suggested, “I think you’d have done it by now.”

And so, shortly after Christmas, I joined the latest viral health trend. I Googled “Mounjaro” (better than Ozempic, I’d been told), braved the scales, and sent the least flattering photograph I could take to a private online pharmacy. I’ve since lost somewhere upwards of two stone.

The critics of drugs such as Mounjaro (and there are a lot) would suggest that this method of weight loss is, effectively, cheating. They ask, frequently and on public forums, what’s wrong with lifestyle changes? What’s wrong with discipline?

This is a line I suspect is only possible to take if you are not cursed with one of a number of invisible problems. A metabolism convinced it needs to cling onto calories, in case of some unforeseen crisis; a body chemistry that tells you, constantly and in all situations, to eat (“food noise”); a psychological history that’s created an unbreakable link between food and happiness. It’s difficult to reduce your dependence on anything to which you’re addicted.

I’m not convinced that’s all that’s going on there. At least some of those critics, I think, have invested a lot in the idea that others are bad and weak, while they are good and strong. The idea that an overactive appetite might be a moral failing rather than a matter of biology is, for some people, a source of self-esteem, not to mention an opportunity for socially sanctioned bullying.

Which is why, I suspect, there’s an odd code of silence around the use of the drugs. The treatments have, effectively, gone viral. I started because I’d seen what they’d done for friends; others have since started, because they’ve seen what they did for me. Many people, though, prefer not to talk about it. That’s their choice, but, well, bugger that. I’m on it, I’ve had blessedly few side effects, and I feel absolutely no shame about any of it.

And it’s worked. I still enjoy food: I just want less of it, and find it easier to make good choices. As the friend who first suggested it put it: “The jabs are my willpower.”

The result is that I’m down 16kg (35lbs) and counting without feeling I’m denying myself. Clothes I’ve not worn in a decade suddenly fit. My cheekbones, last seen before the pandemic, are back. And the other week, I walked into my therapist’s office after a two week absence, and she said I was looking slim, which is the best thing a therapist has ever said to me.

Ahh, those critics add as final volley, but when you get off the jabs you’ll just put the weight back on. This is potentially a problem. It is, however, a problem that applies to literally any diet or exercise regime ever invented. The new treatments are arguably under-regulated; they’re certainly not cheap if you’re not in the small group placed on them by the NHS, and it’s unfair that right now, access is often dependent on money. But they are, nonetheless, good.

The same cannot be said of the widespread impulse to get your kicks from fat-shaming strangers. That isn’t good at all.

[See more: What Conservatives get wrong about London]

Or would it? An hour later, the Sunday Times‘ Gabriel Pogrund claimed the former Labour leader was “furious and bewildered” at Sultana for launching the party without him. The next day Corbyn released his own statement promising “real change is coming” but not confirming the co-leadership plans. Cue the jokes about the left’s inability to organise its way to a piss-up in a brewery from one side, and questions of about the reliability of Pogrund’s sources from the other. For those of us who wasted the 2010s hanging out on UK politics Twitter, it felt just like old times.  

This has not been the only opportunity for the softer, soggier and more centrist progressives to poke fun at the left. The Green Party is having a leadership election, you see. And, for the past two years the party has had two leaders. The upside of this is that they can appeal to two constituencies at once: the rural conservationist bit of their coalition (represented by Adrian Ramsay) and the more radical urban half (represented by Carla Denyer). The unfortunate downside of this is that neither leader has any name recognition outside of the party. Now the membership faces a choice between a Ramsay/Ellie Chowns ticket, or Zack Polanski running alone.

Given the obvious problems with having two leaders but this time from the same wing of the party, you’d think Polanski would be a shoo-in – and to be fair he is very good at viral social media comms. The problem is that he, too, brings forth a certain amount of sniggering, because he once gave an interview to a Sun journalist, in which he claimed that he could – there’s no easy way of saying this – enlarge women’s breasts through the power of hypnosis. He’s since clarified that he didn’t actually believe this.

Polanski’s myriad and vocal online supporters argue that this is a stupid thing to focus on at a time when the planet is on fire and “fascists are on the march”, and they’re not entirely wrong. The problem is that people are not going to stop focusing on it, because it is extremely funny; and because as the Greens increase their profile from a low base, there will always be new people to hear it. So, again, on the political internet: LOL. LMAO, even. 

All this is all very enjoyable. Try to follow politics without laughing at it, after all, and you’ll go mad, plus some of the main characters and habits of the left can genuinely tend towards the ridiculous. What worries me is the suspicion that those running the Labour party might be laughing along. I’m not sure they should be doing that. 

There is, after all, a lot of rage right now: about the cost of living, or the decline of public services; about continuing economic stagnation; about the welfare bill, the “island of strangers” speech, or Gaza. There are a lot of reasons for voters with left-wing instincts to be disappointed with the government. They have a lot of reasons to look elsewhere.

Not least among these is Labour’s strategy of focusing its campaigning on those voters who might jump ship to Reform. This is a worry – there are dozens of seats where the Farageists are a threat – but the decision to fight such defections by trying to appeal directly to Reform voters risks alienating those who are temperamentally more naturally Labour. There is polling, after all, that most voters defecting from Labour are not going to Reform, but to the LibDems or Greens.

And you don’t have to look far back into history to find evidence of a governing party – the Tories in the Blue Wall in 2024; Labour in Scotland in 2015, or the Red Wall in 2017-9 – losing the voters it assumed were its base. Next year will see council elections in London and other metropolitan areas. It seems entirely plausible that Labour loses councillors in the urban heartlands it held even in the 1980s and 2010s.

“Worry about the centre, the left have nowhere else to go” may have been a viable strategy when the left did have nowhere else to go. But British politics has been fragmenting for a long time: even last year’s Labour landslide brought a record number of Green MPs and a dozen anti-war independents. Neither a new left party nor the rising Greens need take that many votes from Labour to put large number of seats at risk. And a more fragmented left could well hand more seats to Reform. It might be time to stop laughing. 

[See more: The welfare bill that pleases no one]

Asked their views on who should pay for it, though, and the picture gets a lot cloudier: only 29% support an increase in taxes on people like themselves, while 57% oppose it. Restrict the poll to those who say they strongly hold those views, those numbers become 6% strongly support, 33% strongly oppose. That, there, is British politics in a nutshell. We want the thing. We just think someone else should pay for the thing.

I suspect you could repeat this exercise with most bits of public policy. Many people worry about the social care system that may await them or their loved ones in old age, not to mention terrible pay rates for those who work there. But nobody thinks that they are the ones who should put their hands in their pockets to fix it, and any politician who suggests otherwise is effectively signing their own suicide note. And so the local councils that built so much of this country continue their gradual transformation into insolvent social care funding bodies with an unprofitable side hustle in bins.

It’s not that people don’t understand that these things cost money: it’s just money that they assume will come from elsewhere. I’m unavoidably reminded of the 1998 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is elected sanitation commissioner after campaigning under the slogan “Can’t someone else do it?” and promptly ruins the town.

If the public are deluded about the mismatch between the demands they place on the state, and the taxes they’re willing to pay, then they’ve been encouraged in this delusion by the political class. The economic booms of Thatcher were built on unrepeatable giveaways of state assets or tax cuts funded by North Sea oil. New Labour used the proceeds of big finance to rebuild the state while keeping income taxes low, which worked brilliantly, until one day it didn’t. Then David Cameron and George Osborne preached austerity and the need to shrink the state, all the while making sure that the bits that mattered to their voters remained protected. At every point, those in power have been distinctly reluctant to tell the electorate the awkward truth that they might need to contribute more.

After all that, is it any wonder that we ended up with Boris Johnson, a prime minister who’d elevated cake-ism into an ideology? For decades the public has been told they can have US tax rates and European public services. The country has been led somewhere closer to the opposite.

The current government has two big problems. (Actually, it has dozens, but let’s focus on two.) One is in having inherited a mess. The other is the lack of a clear message or organising principle. At risk of committing the columnist’s cardinal sin (“This latest news shows why they should do what I’ve always wanted them to do anyway”), I think there’s a single solution to both these problems:

Tell the truth. Be the government that levels with the electorate about what it and can’t do with current levels of resources, and what choices we realistically have about the future. Tell them that, as things stand, the state is broken, and that if we want to fix it we have to pay.

That would make it easier to make the case for the further tax rises that, I’m sorry, are almost certainly coming. It would allow the Prime Minister to adopt a tone of moral seriousness that fits both the geopolitical moment and his own personality, while framing Reform and the Tories as an irresponsible bunch of chancers treating the electorate like children.

And it’d help sell the painful choices that lie ahead. Being able to explain things like the now reversed Winter Fuel Allowance cuts would never have made them popular – but it would at least make them explicable. Without the narrative to explain it, policies like that just look mean.

I’m not saying “if you want to fix stuff, we’ll all need to contribute more” will be popular: if it were, someone would have tried it by now. But it does at least have the advantage of being true. The government is almost certainly going to have to raise taxes: they have to find a way to do it.

[See more: Abortion’s unwelcome return to British politics]