Miliband’s story is really about the exhilaration of ideas: where they come from, why some of us fall in love with them, and what propels those ideas from the fringes of the debate to the fulcrum of an era. This is not an argument about whether those ideas and the policies they eventually become are right or wrong. It’s a story about the long-term political power that commanding those ideas allows an individual to wield. It is about the years of Edward Samuel Miliband – and Milibandism – which might be seen as the latest, or perhaps even the last, attempt to restore a social democratic political economy in Britain.

Since July 2024, when Labour returned to government, it has been hard to work out precisely the point of this administration: to spend a bit more here and there, but leave an abject economic settlement largely intact; or to be much more than that, to fundamentally reshape Britain? For the past 20 months, Miliband has stood distinctly apart from those growing doubts. Even his enemies admit that the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero knows what he is doing. That, in large part, is why he is so hated by his opponents. Miliband is getting social democratic things done at scale – during an era of uncontrollable global conflict, which began with the Ukraine war and is spiralling in Iran, when the direction of energy policy has become the most fiercely disputed issue in British politics.

Miliband and his ideas have become a lightning rod for opponents of this government. (“Eco-zealot”, “madman”, “hysterical eco-obsessive” – these are Fleet Street editorials’ relentless tribute to his perceived threat.) And yet, as one of those critics, a source who had worked with Miliband during his leadership of the Labour Party between 2010-15, grudgingly admitted: “There is something about Ed that is significant. He is a symbolic figure… the last flickering of social democracy.”

North Wales, 13 November 2025: Ed Miliband’s day started just after 4am. He had to get to Anglesey, go on the Today programme, Times Radio and Sky News, announce the creation of new nuclear power stations, deal with the latest ructions in the Labour Party and take questions from the New Statesman.

The announcement was pure Milibandism. New small modular reactors (SMRs), publicly owned by Great British Energy-Nuclear, designed by Rolls-Royce, will be built in Wylfa, on Anglesey. After decades of low investment in British nuclear power, Miliband was clearing the ground for a future of self-sufficient, independent energy, controlled from Whitehall and Aberdeen, not by foreign-owned companies and their shareholders, nor dependent on the whims of petro-states. Public ownership was the key to the whole thing, a way of threading social democratic DNA into crucial, non-carbon-emitting national infrastructure.

“We are charting a course to a different economic settlement,” Miliband explained. “I talked about it as leader and didn’t get to implement it.” At the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miliband hoped not only to build a new energy settlement, but a new political economy: “Turning around the super-tanker of the energy policy department to be as much an industrial policy department. We’re not just about having the right energy policy, we care about where things are made, who makes them, the way they’re made, the role of trade unions.” But even this expansive idea of energy policy may not be enough. Some of those who know Miliband are clear he has his eyes on becoming chancellor. Nigel Farage has told friends privately in recent weeks that he expects Miliband to become prime minister by 2027.

Despite Miliband’s influence, or perhaps because of it, some of the party establishment remains wary. Yet an attempt to remove Miliband from his post in September during a cabinet reshuffle was easily rebuffed. Miliband has real power and popularity in Labour, built up sedulously with some cabinet colleagues, the membership, the unions, even what remains of the socialist left. Attempts to redirect his policies have met a similar fate. One former No 10 adviser recalled trying to soften Miliband’s net zero commitment last year. “Ed’s lads talked us into the ground.”

“Ed’s lads” are another part of his power: intellectual outriders for their boss – and against the Blue Labour advisers around Morgan McSweeney who once had the Prime Minister’s ear. “This government cannot be a centrist restoration,” an ally of theirs told me. Successful social democratic projects in Spain, Canada and Australia showed the way forward now. “The ‘Third Way’ stuff is insufficient. The crisis that we are facing demands more.”

Although Miliband would not admit it that morning in November, the fact that the nuclear announcement irritated right-wing Americans probably made it even more enjoyable. The US ambassador to the UK, Warren Stephens, was “extremely disappointed” by the decision to go with Rolls-Royce, not the US company Westinghouse.

Miliband’s nationalism often surprised me. (I once asked him when it was appropriate for Britain to go to war. “When it’s in the national interest,” he snapped back instantly.) Throughout our interviews, he returned again and again to the necessity of British ownership of energy infrastructure. “I went to see the largest wind farm in England and Wales in opposition, and it was 100 per cent owned by the Swedish state: Vattenfall… Why is there no British equivalent that could even think of owning this wind farm?” GB Energy is his answer. His advisers have taken to calling this “British Gaullism”.

Miliband’s plan was simultaneously simple to outline, complicated to execute and historically unprecedented. He wanted to resolve inequality and tackle the climate crisis. The transition from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy requires enormous investments. These should bring jobs – engineers, technicians, factory workers – to ailing post-industrial areas such as Anglesey. Those jobs bring prosperity and renew a sense of security in those benighted communities. The new clean energy projects are at least partly publicly owned, so in some sense those communities have a stake in them: the transition becomes a patriotic mission, reorienting the nation towards a collective goal. Clean, homegrown power brings down bills for good. Britain leaves what Miliband calls “the fossil fuel rollercoaster” and is once again in control of its own energy supply.

Over the years, almost everything terrible that could be said about Ed Miliband had been said about Ed Miliband. Now, I heard the confidence of someone who had been torched so many times that they could no longer feel fire. “He wasn’t allowed to be the truest version of himself when he was leader,” one of his former advisers told me. And what was that “true” Miliband? “He is just really, really left wing.”

So is Milibandism. In January, Miliband outlined his ideas to the Fabian Society Conference. He began with a historical narrative: Thatcher, the failure of trickle-down economics, the nightmare of 2008, the deepening inequality within society. (He didn’t mention New Labour once.) Then he proposed his solution. A social democratic political economy reimagined for the 21st century: “Harnessing the power of the state to transform our energy system and economy.” Nothing he said that day was particularly different from what he said when he was leader of the opposition. His beliefs had deepened, not changed. They have influenced his colleagues, too, perhaps without them realising. Should Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner become the leader of Labour this year, they will not deviate from the script that Miliband has written.

But it’s not just Labour either. In 2008-10, as climate change secretary, Miliband created the architecture of Britain’s energy policy as it related to the economy and climate change. “From the economics point of view, Ed has seen this right from the beginning,” Nicholas Stern, author of 2006’s The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, told me. Largely unknown to the general public, in climate circles the report is as influential as Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, and spoken of with reverent awe.

In the world of climate economics, both Miliband and Stern are seen as visionaries who helped shape what, before Trump, was the Western consensus on how to deal with climate change. The pair know each other well. Miliband told Stern of his relief in 2010 when David Cameron decided not to fiddle with his legacy. In fact, no important Tory would deviate from it for the next 14 years. Boris Johnson was doing exactly what Miliband is doing now, except in more slovenly fashion. Michael Gove recently suggested in the Spectator that Miliband was secretly running the present government. It’s worse than he realised. When it came to climate policy, Miliband was in power without office under the Tory governments Gove served. All of them were enthusiastic Milibandites, too.

We met just before the SMR announcement; Miliband, in a blue suit, red tie and shiny black shoes, sitting across from me at a classroom table. He has a thin body, a remarkably enormous oblong of a head, thick hair, huge eyes, tumultuous hands. A caricaturist’s dream. But given how those caricatures tend to paint Miliband – as a rarefied nerd, an aloof geek, a sinister zealot – I was continually surprised just how much liquid charm oozed out of him in small groups, or one-on-one conversations. Miliband palpably loves the fleshy side of politics: the back slaps, the handshakes, the glad-handing, the group selfies, the acclamations. I watched him pursue a bewildered group of Welsh teenagers across a corridor that morning with the tenacity of a Clinton or Kennedy. He caught them, calmed them, told them a joke, and they laughed.

It was all getting a bit too nice, so, once we sat down, I accused him of playing politics with his net zero targets. Wasn’t his pledge to generate 95 per cent of electricity in Britain from low-carbon sources completely unrealistic, a political manoeuvre, not a practical measure? He began to answer, then stopped. Miliband will shift the position of his body and the tone of his voice when he wants to make a serious point. When he becomes really serious he looks you directly in the eye. “It’s not political manoeuvring.” Miliband’s voice suddenly became quiet. “I suppose, honestly, it’s because I’m still in politics to do big things.” Unprompted, he began to talk about the leadership years, about sacrifices he had made.

“On the day I lost the general election 2015, I thought to myself, you know… Errr, sorry I’m getting slightly emotional. I thought to myself, I’ve lost the general election. But you don’t need to be the leader of a political party to fight for big things.” He talked about those years, over a decade ago now: how he had a diagnosis about Britain after the 2008 crash; how he knew that “yearning”, “frustrated” people wanted “big change”. Beneath the crust of British society a volcanic, underground, pent-up demand for something better than the country we were becoming.

But he knew he had messed it up. It was all messed up, back then, in his head: the Ed Miliband who raged against Peter Mandelson, critiqued Tony Blair and Iraq, ennobled Maurice Glasman, slammed Rupert Murdoch; who wanted the working classes back in Labour; who desired to lead a Corbyn-style movement, not a political party; who employed “tough guy” Tom Baldwin as a spinner; who rhapsodised about “predistribution” – that Miliband was too cautious on austerity and listened too much, perhaps, to Ed Balls.

So no, no, no. He was not manoeuvring any more. He would be himself, drive through his policies, whatever it took. There might have to be some compromises along the way, sure, but if there was going to be a fight over net zero at the next election, Labour would fight, and it would win. “You think, look, you might as well just go for it. What’s the point otherwise? You might as well just go for it.”

Maputo, Mozambique, 17 August 1982. An hour before her assassination, the anti-apartheid activist Ruth First went shopping. “She was in a euphoric mood,” her daughter Gillian Slovo writes in her memoir Every Secret Thing (1997), after organising a successful conference on southern Africa funded by the United Nations. First returned from her shopping trip. “It was at that moment that Ruth must have slit open the buff UN envelope that had been sent to her. In doing so, she broke the circuit that had been carefully laid inside.”

First died instantly, killed by the South African police, leaving behind her husband Joe Slovo and their three daughters. Among the obituaries was one in the Socialist Register, written by Ralph Miliband, then one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the English-speaking world.

The Milibands and Slovos were friends; Ed can recall meeting Ruth when he was “12 or 13, and then she was murdered a few months later. I remember my parents still being incredibly upset about it.”

More than one friend of Miliband’s told me to read Slovo’s memoir. They suggested a parallel in growing up a Miliband and growing up a Slovo. Both families came from a now distant milieu of 20th-century secular-Jewish Marxism, survived the Holocaust, were refugees and then were politically influential as scholars and activists in their adopted homes. To understand Ed, I had to understand his parents and what it was like to be their son.

In Every Secret Thing, Slovo writes about being the child of internationally famous, even venerated, crusading left-wingers. “Even as children we carried internal scales of justice which we used to weigh up ‘their’ needs – the needs of the impoverished masses – against ours. How could we win? Compared to the poverty, degradation, discrimination they endured, our suffering was negligible.”

Recently, I asked Miliband if that was his experience. Every single colleague of his I spoke to mentioned an obsessive work ethic, bordering on neurosis. Where does that come from? Was he forced to be like that, maybe by his father, who by all accounts worked ferociously all his life? Did Ed feel a sense of guilt, the way that Gillian Slovo did? Was his suffering “negligible” compared to the struggle?

Miliband told me a story about his father that I had never heard before. Ralph didn’t like going on holiday, not really. He just felt lucky to have made it to England during the war. “When we used to go abroad sometimes to France, he came back and said, ‘Well it’s nice to go abroad but it’s much nicer to be at home.’” Miliband thinks that was the refugee in his father speaking. “I think their sensibility was, without ever saying it: we’re so lucky. We survived, so we’ve got a responsibility to leave the world a better place than we found it. That is definitely a burden as well as a great thing.”

The burden – that sense of survivor’s guilt from the Holocaust, the Marxist conviction that chains around the world were yet to be broken, that injustice and inequality were intolerable – that was what was handed down to Miliband by his parents. “We were not a religious family, but that’s what it must have been like to grow up in a religious family.” The Milibands looked to the future, their son becoming in the words of one colleague in government “hyper-progressive” because they could not look to the past. What happened in Europe was not something they wanted to dwell on, or remember. Look forwards. Make the future better than the past.

“The trauma of the Holocaust does echo down the generations in a way, people say this and, you know, I feel it myself,” he reflected. When he was climate secretary the first time, Miliband was once sent on an official visit to Russia in October 2009. As part of the trip he did a call-in segment on the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy. An elderly woman called up. Her name was Sofia Davidovna Miliband. She identified herself as a long-lost relative, explaining that her grandfather was the brother of Ed’s great-great-grandfather, both of whom were from the Jewish quarter of Warsaw. I found the story flabbergasting, and when we spoke about it, Ed clearly still did too. I wondered what all this history was like for him to carry.

“Some people go through life thinking bad things are going to happen, and feel anxious about them happening. I’m one of them, and I think it must, in part, be because of the background I came from.”

Did Ed’s teenaged sons understand what the family had gone through? “Yes, definitely,” although it had been a “world away” for him, and he wouldn’t pretend it wasn’t distant for them. What did he hope for his boys? “Whether they’re happy, that they do something they care about, but they also do what makes them happy.” Miliband groaned slightly, comically. “Maybe I’ve just revealed the answer to the earlier question unwittingly.” I left thinking he might be raising his children differently from the way his parents brought him up. 

North Wales, November 2025. I met Miliband again on the train back to London. I apologised in advance that I was about to do something that, if I were him, I would find annoying. I took a copy of Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism (1961) out of my bag. It might be his father’s most famous work, a scintillating attack on the Labour Party, which, in Ralph’s view, was little more than the graveyard of British socialism. “Ralph thought electoral politics was problematic for people who wanted socialism,” a family friend had told me, chuckling. That his son then became a special adviser in the Treasury is one of those facts about Ralph I could never quite get out of my mind.

Ed was fine about the book, so I read him a surging passage in which his father described the mood of the country in 1945, when Labour swept to power: “All this is not to suggest that the popular radicalism of wartime Britain was, for the most part, a formed socialist ideology, let alone a revolutionary one. But in its mixture, bitter memories and positive hopes, in its antagonism to a mean past, in its recoil from conservative rule, in its impatience of a traditional class structure, in its hostility to the claims of property and privilege, in its determination not to be robbed again of the future of victory, in its expectations of social justice, it was a radicalism, eager for major, even fundamental changes in British society.”

Was that not us? Was that not what the mood was like in 2024, and what the mood was still like today? Miliband stayed silent for a while. “I mean…” He wasn’t quite sure what to say. “That is brilliantly written. One thing about my dad is that he wrote brilliantly.”

I agreed eagerly. “That is such a brilliant paragraph.” He asked to take a photograph of the page. “I should go back and reread this. I don’t find it easy to read my dad’s books… He was my dad, it’s sort of… it’s sort of weird.”

Yet the influence is there. On the way to the last Labour conference, a friend of mine stole a glance at what Miliband was reading on the train. It was a speech Ralph had given at conference, 70 years before. In his own speech that autumn, the son alluded to his father.

Wasn’t Ralph Miliband really writing about us, writing about now? Yes, his son nodded. “Since 2010, you’ve talked about it, that feeling of coming to some kind of break with the past,” I said. “You’ve made a parallel with Thatcher before when you’re a leader.” Miliband agreed. “Shouldn’t this Labour government be one of those governments?”

“Yes.” Long pause. “You’re getting me to think about something I don’t normally think about every day.” Like what? “About New Labour, what did happen and what didn’t happen.” (Miliband remains close to Gordon Brown, with whom he speaks regularly. The relationship with Tony Blair, a net zero sceptic, is different. The pair haven’t seen each other in years.) “Social and economic change in Britain is hard. It’s hard because there are big countervailing forces that want to stop it happening.” There are the editorials again: madman, zealot, fanatic. “I’m not making excuses.”

“We won on a modest, relatively safe platform,” Miliband went on. “That’s not meant as a criticism. It’s just a description of the facts.” Miliband mounted a defence of the government. Good things are happening, he promised. The train rolled through North Wales, through Conwy, Llandudno, along the coast. The wan, autumnal sun was setting.

There are passages from his father’s last book, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, that Miliband can quote from heart. The book is a blueprint for an insurgent government, and was studied closely by some of Corbyn’s inner circle. Reading it in recent weeks I was struck by how prophetic it was, and how odd it must have seemed in 1994, published when social democrats were happily making their accommodations with capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Those prophecies aren’t the passages that Miliband quotes though. He likes the last two lines of his father’s book, a blueprint for a future that still feels very far away.

“In all countries, there are people, in large numbers or small, who are moved by the vision of a new social order in which democracy, egalitarianism and cooperation – the essential values of socialism – would be the prevailing principles of social organisation. It is in the growth in their numbers and in the success of their struggles that lies the best hope for humankind.”

Whitehall, 12 March 2026. A few days before we met for the last time, Donald Trump started a catastrophic war in the Middle East. But in the UK it was all Ed Miliband’s fault. A leak to the Spectator the week before had accused Miliband, in an alliance with Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, of stymying the Prime Minister’s efforts to join Trump’s war at a meeting of the National Security Council in early March. Unnamed “security sources” singled out Miliband as the biggest conflict blocker: “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political”.

The briefing was aimed to chop Miliband down. It fed into old memories of 2013, when he helped parliament defuse David Cameron’s desire to bomb Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, and old calumnies against Ralph printed by the Daily Mail during Miliband’s leadership. It fed into the idea that in using some Chinese firms to ease the transition to net zero, rather than doubling down, as Trump’s America has, on fossil fuel extraction, Miliband was doing something against the special relationship and our long-term national interest. In any other northern European country, Miliband would have been seen as a fairly mainstream social democrat, even by his opponents. In Britain, he was deemed a traitor. The implications were enough to make your head spin.

While I worked on this piece, several China spying scandals appeared in the news. Miliband was attacked by Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, a man often condemned for his role in the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq War, who thought that net zero was little more than a Chinese power grab over Britain. (China dominates modern industrial supply chains. It is quite hard to find an expert on the energy transition who believes it can be done without some engagement with Beijing.) On the right, the idea that Miliband’s windmills and solar farms were a “national security threat” was becoming common sense. Then the president himself launched his own assault: “Open up the North Sea! They got windmills all over the place that are ruining the country.”

I thought of Ralph Miliband’s writing about the security state, from 1994. Imagining a reforming socialist government taking power in a future Britain, he observes: “Members of the military and intelligence establishment would almost certainly view the government earmarked on courses which constituted a menace to the ‘national interest’, particularly as these courses affected their own domain; and they would naturally also take it as their duty to do all they could to defeat these policies.” If that was too far, too paranoid, there was, to my mind, an unmistakeable hint – not that Miliband would ever say it – of anti-Semitism in the intrigues around him. Could he really be trusted? Was he really a patriot? In what sense was he one of us? It reminded me of the bacon sandwich incident, something I had always seen as cruelly tabloid, silly even – until a friend, a British Jew, had told me that almost everyone Jewish they knew thought it was obviously an anti-Semitic dogwhistle.

A friend of Miliband called the “from the spooks presumably” leak “outrageous”. In his office in the Department for Net Zero, a grand if slightly cramped building opposite Horse Guards Parade on Whitehall, Miliband was terse, refusing to be drawn on it. “I’m not going to comment on what’s reported from the National Security Council.” He wanted a leak inquiry, and the Prime Minister knew what Miliband wanted to happen to the offender.

He looked amused when I mentioned Trump’s comments about Britain’s energy policy. “I’m not sort of surprised any more. I mean, this has been his consistent position.” He was more open about his dislike of Peter Mandelson, the man Morgan McSweeney believed capable of charming Trump into Britain’s orbit. Was it a good thing Mandelson had been sacked, investigated? “Oh yes.”

Miliband began thinking aloud about the Blairites – not, he insisted, “meant pejoratively”. To him, they had become statues, frozen figures unable to move with the times. “Tony Blair was elected 29 years ago. Times change. The world is very different. What did Tony Blair say? You honour your past but you don’t live in it.”

In February, Miliband signed an energy pact with Gavin Newsom, the Democrat governor of California. Miliband can quote Ted Kennedy speeches off by heart, and keeps a poster of Robert Kennedy (senior) in his parliamentary office. He has taught at Harvard. He is in regular contact with Columbia University’s Adam Tooze. He met the Biden team many times while they were in office. Miliband’s own successful tilt at the leadership of the Labour Party was based on the Obama insurgency. Now, though? What did he really think of Trump? The other side of American politics. The side that begins with Andrew Jackson, takes in Charles Lindbergh and George Wallace, and ends with Ice paramilitaries roaming through Minneapolis?

“America is aligning itself with the petro-states,” said a long-term Miliband ally, weeks before the bust-up in March. “Undermining support for the climate agenda and actively trying to destroy jobs in the renewables sector. This is an extraordinary, ideological campaign.” Miliband, they argued, will end up aligning Britain with the “electro-states” in Europe and, unavoidably, China. The clash between Labour and Reform in 2029 was not about values or any policy area other than this, in their view. “Farage is fifth column for a US-backed petro-state campaign in Britain.”

Miliband was never too explicit about these issues with me. His distaste for Trump was obvious, as was his fear at what the US was turning into. That did not mean he was throwing Britain into the unlovely embrace of the Chinese Communist Party. But it did mean the choices he was making were fraught with political risk and would attract suspicion from those who believed the UK could only succeed in the world as loyal satrap of the US, regardless of who governed from the White House.

The war was sending shockwaves through the global energy markets. At times it appeared to be dragging all of Labour’s aspirations in government down with it. And yet Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have doubled down on Miliband – and Milibandism. They believe, like him, that the price shocks are yet more evidence that Britain had to get off the “fossil fuel rollercoaster”. Their critics had begun to put intense pressure on the government to reopen exploration for gas and oil in the North Sea basin, something Miliband had effectively banned last November. To U-turn on this would be a catastrophe for him, personally and politically.

Either social democracy could be brought back online, or it was over, brought down by the shock of war. Either Milibandism’s time really had come, or this oil shock would do what its historic antecedent had done in the 1970s: sweep away a Labour government and clear the way for a revolution from the right. For Starmer and Reeves, for most of the Labour Party, the crisis only seemed to prove how right Milibandism had been all along. Not for the first time, the destinies of the British Labour Party and Edward Samuel Miliband have become one and the same thing.

[Further reading: The everything shock]

Mykhed, dressed head-to-toe in clerical black, was scowling over his coffee, dead tired. Everyone was dead tired in Kyiv this winter. We were a short walk from the Maidan, ground zero of the revolution, where today a section of the square pays tribute to the soldiers killed fighting the invasion. The images of the young men’s faces, the miniature Ukrainian flags, the insignia and laminated love letters – they were all covered by blue snow and hard frost, their faces hard to see, buried for a second time. 

“Our Western partners are gung-ho, saying ‘woo-hoo, keep on going’,” Mykhed told me. “But we are not OK.” He likened the war to a chronic illness. This war entered your bones, like arthritis. I could hear the Ukrainians around me creaking. But that didn’t mean the war was nearly over, or that a peace deal would be struck. Arthritis isn’t fatal. The war was in the bones of this country, and in those that refused to flee, men like Mykhed. Ukraine was a militarised society, a laboratory for some of the most sophisticated weaponry in human history, funded by allies abroad; a garrison state, “a big Israel” where every activity pulled towards survival.

Mykhed wanted to know if Europeans understood this. Ukrainians would survive, he argued. They always did. But would Europeans when the war came for them? Everything we thought we knew about the world order has been violently upended. Now the war was spreading, germ-like, warping those it touched.

What had begun as a street protest against a corrupt government on the Maidan in 2013 had taken Ukraine, and eventually Europe, into a new security reality. A war waged with circuits made in China, drones designed by Iranians and mercenaries drawn from Colombia and Cameroon, North Korea and Tajikistan. The war was fought in Ukraine, but likely to be decided by drab industrial parks in Shenzhen and production lines in Massachusetts and anonymous offices in Düsseldorf.

I came to the war late, first visiting at the end of 2024, with the advent of the second Donald Trump presidency. I wrote stories about smuggling and alarming demographic decline, about volunteers who exclaimed they would fight for the next thousand years if they had to. I witnessed Europe’s early hope and energy begin to curdle and move elsewhere: to Gaza and Greenland, Venezuela and now Iran. The world was a mess, expensive munitions for advanced air defence platforms were running low and needed everywhere from Kyiv to Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi; Ukraine was not a front-page story any more. There was no romance to be found in the front line in the east, where men hunted each other with FPV drones across ruined forests and shattered villages. The same image, the same blood, the same nation. Shrug. A terrible thing was happening somewhere far away. This war, as grotesque and strange as a Max Ernst canvas, was becoming normal even as it transformed the rest of the world in ways it barely understood.

As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approached last month, Zelensky inflated his rhetoric. He used the same formulation I had heard countless times from Ukrainians every time I visited. This was not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia any longer, if it had ever been that to begin with. These were, Zelensky told the BBC in February, the first years of the Third World War.

“People think this is the third act,” Mykhed told me as we sat in a café, in ice-bound Kyiv. “But you should think of this as the first act.”

Ukraine awakened extraordinary hopes in a generation of European leaders. As Russian rockets fell across Ukraine on 24 February 2022, signalling the start of the invasion, Volodymyr Zelensky was told by his allies in the West he had hours to escape. But Zelensky did not move, and all those predictions of collapse were swiftly, surprisingly, bloodily falsified.

Historians will recognise that as the moment when the energy appeared; everything started to move. The German chancellor struck a term on 27 February: Zeitenwende. Literally the moment when “times turn”. This shocking, euphoric energy was propelling us from one period of history into another.

In the early weeks of the war, so many British citizens drove vans full of aid to the Polish border that Ben Wallace, then the defence secretary, had to ask with some tact that people send money instead. A few hundred miles away, near the village of Liubymivka, in the Kherson Oblast – this is a story Ukrainians still laugh about today – local Gypsies purloined an abandoned Russian tank, one of many left rotting around Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s hapless armies. The Gypsies have stolen a tank: the phrase became the punchline of patriotic memes, a tagline for cash-in retail goods. Clips of born-in-the-USSR Russian incompetence electrified social networks. This was warfare as knockabout viral entertainment: ubiquitous images of death, spun for a laugh and viewed from a safe distance. No war ever seemed to cost so little.

As the spring of 2022 saw the Russian blitzkrieg falter, this utterly harmonious communal energy spread across the West. One voice spoke from podiums in the White House and Berlaymont and No 10 Downing Street. The voice said that we would not allow the encroachment of the Russian world beyond its borders.

The crusading energy generated a new, brief faith in ourselves, even in Boris Johnson. Our capabilities, our diplomacy, our technology, our sanctions packages, our intelligence services, our rules-based liberal order. You were either with us inside the Swift international payments system or with them inside the Russkiy Mir. “A battle between democracy and autocracy,” said the then US president, an ailing but seemingly decent man. A wall of money, military hardware and intelligence support moved towards eastern Europe.

We didn’t even have to fight. The Ukrainians would do that for us. Ukrainians funded by Western treasure and armed with Western technology. “We Ukrainians have ended up in a time and place where the planet’s future literally depends on us,” wrote the author-turned-soldier Artem Chapeye in early 2022. “We’re the guardians of the fucking galaxy.” Has a heavier burden been placed on a people in our lifetimes? 

On 29 March 2022 the Kremlin announced that Russian troops were “repositioning” from the north of Ukraine to Donbas. As they withdrew from Kyiv, Cherniv, Kharkiv and Sumy atrocities were uncovered. Hundreds of dead civilians shot by Russian troops in the Kyiv commuter town of Bucha, with many showing signs of torture and rape. Other once-anonymous towns soon became similarly infamous: Bakhmut, Sievierodonetsk, Maryinka, Rubizhne, Volnovakha, Lyman, Izyum. Ukraine, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, was a good war, a morally clean war, giving a precious gift to Europe’s leaders they could not get from governing their own countries: meaning, valour, solemnity, glory.

Yet that was not how it looked in Kyiv this winter, where the congealed violence of four years of war had transformed the country into something many in Europe no longer want to think about: a war of extermination fought between two militarised societies barely two days’ drive from Dover.

“You begin to perceive war more professionally, as a type of activity,” Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi told the flagship ICTV news show Facts on 6 February as I watched from my room in Kharkiv. Biletskyi is the commander of the 40,000-strong 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, a powerful volunteer formation that he claims has the lowest number of soldiers going absent without official leave in Ukraine. “At first war is a challenge, it’s a battle, it’s an emotion… but people can’t burn all the time, endlessly.”

The energy was gone in the West, but it had left Ukraine transformed. The national flag was, wherever I went, joined by the red-and-black flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Ukraine was a society that experienced a revolution and then rapidly militarised itself, closer to France in the 1790s or the USSR in the 1930s than anything in Western Europe. (Crucially though, Ukraine remained a democracy.) The most radical Ukrainians were always the happiest Ukrainians. Nataliya Zubar is a nationalist I met in Kharkiv, an organiser and an activist whose grandfather secretly spoke Ukrainian to her in the dark winters of the USSR, telling her this war would come one day. Now, it was everything to her, wish-fulfilment on a barely believable scale. To see Ukrainians, armed, dangerous, radicalised – truly, this was her dream come true. “We are building the Ukrainian nation,” she said. The power in the café we were sitting in came and went. “When this war is over Putin will have some place as a hero, as someone who united this nation. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has told you that.”

Volodymyr Matsokin wakes up every morning at 5.30am. The deputy mayor of Izyum helps his wife turn on the heating in their home, then begins his daily rounds. He’s responsible for healthcare in the city. Check the hospitals, check the pregnant women, check the elderly, the sick, the parents with suffering children. The heating went down across the town yesterday. There is a kind of tiredness you see in Ukrainians like Matsokin, a special kind of tiredness that makes people turn grey. “The day never ends,” he said in his office, a spartan room decorated with a single portrait of the writer Taras Shevchenko in a brick municipal building flecked with shell damage, on 3 February. He likens himself to a “firefighter”. Matsokin said his town was “invincible”. But the fires around Izyum never go out.

Volodymyr Matsokin, 56, deputy mayor of Izyum, in his office in Izyum,  February 4, 2026. Photo by Viacheslav Ratynskyi

Izyum, a city on the Siverskyi Donets River in Kharkiv Oblast, used to be home to 45,000 people. It’s close to Donbas to the east. Further north is Kharkiv, further south the strategically vital fortress towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, much desired by the Kremlin. Izyum, Matsokin said, has lost about half its population since 2022. The city was occupied by the Russians between April and September that year, after they had destroyed an estimated 80 per cent of its buildings during bitter fighting at the start of the war. After the invaders were forced out that autumn a mass grave was discovered on the forested outskirts of the city.

“There are not enough fingers on my hands to count the number of people who were tortured or killed”, Matsokin, a bald, squat, spectacled man in his fifties, said flatly. Ukrainian investigators eventually uncovered 447 bodies.

Since 2022 the city’s population has stabilised at around 27,000, including 2,000 children. A lot of life, particularly schooling and healthcare, goes on underground, as it does elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine. New apartment blocks are being constructed, slowly. The streets in Izyum are webbed with anti-drone shields made from donated European fisherman’s plastic nets. These were being stretched out and strung around tall metal poles all over Kharkiv Oblast in February. I never knew whether these made much of a difference with drones, but they did catch birds, crows usually, which froze and hung like dead flies above the roads.

In 2022 Izyum had fallen to the Russians. Some in the city, assuming the conquest was permanent, switched their allegiances. Halyna Ivanova, the director of the local history museum, has been collecting evidence of the occupation since 2022. She could “forgive but not forget” what happened in those months. Occupation bent people you thought you understood into new shapes. “My best friend wouldn’t share half a loaf of bread with me,” Ivanova sighed. “Whereas one of my neighbours, an alcoholic who I didn’t know very well, used to give me food.”

A short, phlegmatic woman with a black bowl cut, Ivanova was particularly proud of one room. Her “museum of occupation” collected everything the Russians left behind. There, hanging from the ceiling, was half a Shahed-136 wing, from the same simple Iranian-made drone currently throwing the global economy into disarray and menacing the British in Cyprus. Below the drone were remains of cluster munitions, military uniforms and helmets, ration packs and brands of cigarettes that Ivanova, in her sixties, hadn’t seen since the fall of the USSR. She pointed to a box of ammunition with labels written in Mandarin.

Ivanova passed me a wooden crutch the invaders had left behind. It looked like it was made around the same time Tolstoy was reporting on the Crimean War. The Russians had invaded carrying antiques and maps of eastern Ukraine from the 1980s. Their rations were minimal, their uniforms were cheap, and the soldiers in them were rustics from Dagestan, Buryatia, Volgograd and Bashkortostan. Poor men out for a pay cheque and violent sprees. Ivanova showed me a crudely fashioned wooden medal – a joke? – awarded, according to its Cyrillic inscription, “for all this shit”.

In that exhibit, in the stories of occupation Ivanova relayed to me over many hours by the tiny heater in her office, you could feel that Russia’s war was a despairing howl against decline driven by the logic of rape and plunder.

Soon spring thaws would turn the ice around Izyum to mud. The Russians call the mud rasputitsa; it would help them, just as the winter helped them. It was Mykhed who pointed this out to me, the pagan belief the Russians had in snow and frost and mud to save their misfiring armies. In a few weeks’ time the ice would melt, the rains would start and the dust and the mud would coat the remains of women and men and the wreckage of the drones and missiles that killed them in Kharkiv Oblast. A thousand miles south, meanwhile, the drones would begin to land in the Gulf; an Arab spring offering diplomatic opportunities – and dangers – for Zelensky’s war-ravaged Ukraine of a kind not yet perceivable.

One freezing morning in early February, as the air around the city briefly rang with the sorties of war planes, we took a trip to a wooded training ground near the front line. The man escorting us there was a communications officer in the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, call sign “Disney”. He wasn’t a natural soldier. As we drove deeper into the forest, Disney occasionally broke up his long, chatty answers on the role of the United States in this conflict and the demanding technical knowledge now required of his colleagues in an age of rampant drone warfare to admit, quite simply, that he missed driving his car around Kyiv at night, drinking coffee and chatting up girls.

It was -21C when we left the vehicle in a clearing surrounded by pine trees. A couple of pick-up trucks were already parked nearby. Eight soldiers of the 3rd’s Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) Company were there, preparing to test their new kit. Icicles hung off their facial hair. One of the men, irritated, scratched at his eye: the lids had been frosted shut.

The 3rd wanted to show us their latest toy: a remote-controlled box the size of a large fridge, a vehicle they used for evacuating casualties, for delivering pizza to the men bored in their foxholes and for gunning down Russians with 12.7mm machine guns. What the 3rd are doing with the UGVs was groundbreaking, Disney claimed. There was no rulebook, no real record of using these machines in combat, no accepted tactical doctrine for their deployment. Their caterpillar tracks crunched in the distance. “We are making history here,” Disney chuckled, shifting his weight from foot to foot, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, half-soldier, half-salesman.

This cost-effective capacity to build, operate and kill with drones has become a hallmark of the Ukrainian resistance since 2022. Small teams of engineers working at speed have changed the face of warfare. Ukrainians had worked out how to fight a larger enemy with less manpower in appalling demographic circumstances while millions fled the country. Drones were the weapons for a century in which fewer and fewer countries had a fertility rate above replacement level.

Such advanced drone warfare is seen as Ukraine’s gift to the West. “For us, this is like oil,” Zelensky told reporters on 15 March. “The production of modern drones and Ukraine’s relevant expertise is today’s Ukrainian oil.” That was the offer Zelensky made to the Gulf as the Iran war began last month. You only had to talk to the soldiers in the 3rd about their experiences training with Nato armies – the Nato guys had no idea what they were doing any more – to realise how far four years of conflict had pushed the Ukrainians in fighting terms. They were in 1918; the rest of us were in 1913. 

The machines were less interesting than the men who made them function. While the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is reportedly 43, the volunteers in the 3rd skewed much younger, usually around the twenties. They were vividly unlike their grandfathers, farmers who grumblingly acquiesced to the Soviet imperium, more familiar with tractor engines than automatic rifles and FPV drones. In the space of a single generation the Ukrainian male had transformed. He no longer resembled a peasant farmer but a cossack.

The men in the 3rd styled themselves as such: long, whiskery moustaches and closely shaven heads save for the long locks of black hair left to dangle at the back. They were ultra-nationalists too, a fact testified by the Scandinavian runes they tattooed around their arms and up their necks. Russian propaganda calls these men Nazis. They do, of course, dispute that. They – these warriors, engineers, mechanics, software developers, drone operators – are easily among the most admired men in Ukraine, educated and transformed by revolution and war. What was the future balance of power like in a continent where 40,000 men like this existed, trained and armed to kill with advanced weaponry? What happened if their hopes were disappointed after the war?

The 3rd has its roots in the Azov Battalion, a volunteer unit of radical ultra-nationalists formed by Biletskyi and others when the war in the east with Russian-backed separatists began in 2014. Biletskyi, who has been a politician before, likely has a political future ahead of him should the war ever finish. The 3rd’s distinctive orange-and-black marketing is a feature of every city and town in Ukraine I have reported from in the last three years. In Izyum this took the form of banners that starkly called for “REVENGE”. Often, the fiery posters and banners featured Biletskyi, whose ferociously blank expression now loomed over buildings across the country.

Combining logistics, technology, public relations, and ideological partisanship, the 3rd can look to an outsider less like a formation in a national armed unit than a paramilitary force. When I interviewed Biletskyi’s men, they spoke of him using his full name and title whatever the context of the conversation. Our Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi says. Our Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi taught us. Our Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi is a student of history. I thought little of this before a Ukrainian friend mentioned how unsettled it made them feel. It was strange to use the full name, they said, as if they were back at a political meeting in the days of the USSR.

“There is a dark side to war, and anyone who says otherwise is lying,” Biletskyi declared in 2018, speaking at the launch of a Ukrainian translation of a work by the German conservative writer and war veteran Ernst Jünger. “Why was Jünger read with enthusiasm? Because there is another truth of war; when from nothing complete powerlessness, chaos, new truths, new forms, new orders are born.”

There were new forms all around us in the forest. Cossacks who had stepped out of the pages of a Ukrainian fairy tale were tinkering with advanced robots belonging to steampunk fantasies. As these hardened ultra-nationalists shared cigarettes with each other, I was struck by the irony that they were not just defending their homes but all of liberal Europe. And, perhaps, soon, much of the rest of the Allied-American world.

When the war began in February 2022, I started to note down the ways British officials described it in private. Back then the war in Ukraine was what it remains: a war for independence; a liberation struggle; an anti-colonial defence of freedom and nation. But such struggles, waged in defence of a homeland, transform the homeland in the process.

Before I returned in February a British official told me that Ukraine’s population, which had been estimated at just over 40 million in 2014, had shrunk to something like 20 million by 2025, significantly less than most estimates in the public domain. What would be left after this war, if it ever ended?

Not everything made exact sense in Ukraine this winter. One afternoon my friend took me to the outskirts of Kharkiv: I had to meet a guy there. He was in his sixties and he lived alone in a 16-storey Soviet apartment block. The top of the building had been chewed up by a Russian missile in 2022. Snow filled the empty floors. The building smelled of rotten concrete. The man’s only company was a dog outside chained to a crate and the circling crows in the grey sky.

This man, the Robinson Crusoe of the block, had no electricity and no heating. He cooked with a camp stove, collected food from a local charity and smelled unwashed, sour. I felt very sorry for him. He was trying to exist. What else could he do? He took me to a window, with panoramic views of the edge of the city, out into the flat, frozen white countryside. His bottom lip trembled while he spoke. He was tense, on the edge of something bad, trying not to cry.

Over the edge of the horizon was the front line. The teams of men coldly eyeing their live feeds in bunkers, busily assassinating each other with drones, then posting the results online. The netting hung with dead birds all along the roads. The schools where children learned underground, as if they were surviving a nuclear winter. The old men and women who froze in their apartments and had to be cut out from them once their neighbours realised what had happened. The war had pulled the US and Europe apart, invented a whole new machinery of death, underlined our dependence on brutal petro-states, flooded this corner of eastern Europe with several generations’ worth of weapons. It had killed and radicalised and burned and exposed whatever it touched. It was hard to express any of this in words. I stared out of the window with the old, broken man, watching the snow fall.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on Iran a few days after I returned from Kyiv. Turkey, the keystone that sits directly between Ukraine and Iran, may yet be pulled into it. The vengeful Iranian Shaheds, so familiar to Ukrainians after four years of nightly terror, now rained down all over the Gulf. There were rumours that they were being mass-produced in China. Taken aback by the violent efficiency of the Iranian counterattack, Trump was demanding a Western armada enter the Gulf. War was spreading. Act I.

The damage to energy storage, terminals, refineries and pipelines around the region threatened to plunge the world into another recession, toppling governments, immiserating millions. They would learn what it felt like to be Ukrainian. They may come to understand that the Ukrainian experience is the key to global security now. The world would transform again, and not necessarily to our advantage in sleepy, barely defended Britain. I began to fear that we would not understand the new reality until it was crashing down towards us from a hostile sky. 

Slowly, I came to believe in what Mykhed had told me in Kyiv. “People think this is the third act,” he’d said. Whatever this war was – a war for independence, a proxy war fought between empires, a third world war – it was nowhere near over. It was spreading uncontrollably, violently, like a germ. I think about Mykhed’s words all the time now. “Are you ready to be in the first act?” That is now the question for Europe and its fearful, cocooned leaders looking out of their windows as the street lamps begin to flicker across the continent.

Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir and Viacheslav Ratynskyi

[Further reading: The crumbling Crown]

I walked with my friend Celyn, a zoomer goth girl from Swansea, back along the road into Peckham, past a black beauty salon, a West African grocery store, a Nigerian “spice” joint and a slightly singed-looking shop that claimed to stock “Bibles, bells, incense, CD-roms, DVDs”. Shoppers eyeing up pigs’ trotters and salted cod seemed unaware that on this day 1,437 years ago, St David died. Traditionally, he was said to have passed away from natural causes aged 100, which is about how old the cod looked. I thought of the lost breakfast – “Smoked bacon, Blas Y Tir leeks, Câr-y-Môr cockles & laverbread, on toasted focaccia £12” – as we filed sadly into a kebab shop and asked for lamb shawarma. Lamb not chicken. We had traditional standards to uphold.

Celyn is actually Welsh. “Ultra-orthodox” Welsh, in her own description. Like most ambitious young people from Wales, she speaks the language fluently, but finds herself marooned in London because the only jobs where she’s from involve call centres, packing meat or, at best, working in a hospital. When she talks about greyscale Swansea it sounds strange and beautiful, like a town in Guatemala or Game of Thrones. I’m half-Welsh, which means something but also means absolutely nothing other than a vague preference for solidly working-class Welsh rugby over the pig-faced, quasi-fascist game they play at Twickenham. Celyn has promised me a tour through the London Welsh diaspora on this feast day. “It’ll be like your Aliyah,” she said, referring to the return of diaspora Jews to the lands of Israel and Palestine.

London is the second largest Welsh city after Cardiff, although you would never guess it. This weird fact is known in Wales, though. A few months ago, I watched Eluned Morgan, the First Minister, give a sad speech on the site of a proposed modular nuclear reactor in Anglesea for an audience of several hundred dazed-looking teenagers. My memory of her exact words is hazy, but her address to the Welsh youth was as clear and clean as Welsh tap water: please don’t leave. Stay here. Work here, have families here. Don’t move to London. Wales needs you…

Yet here we all are in London. Celyn insists that we ignore the St David’s Day rugby match at Old Deer Park and the St David’s Day food festival inside Spitalfields Market to attend the St David’s Day “daytime rave” in the London Welsh Community Centre on Gray’s Inn Road.

I ask Celyn what the most unacknowledged facts about Wales are. The list is long. Nobody understands that Jesus College, Oxford, is a nerve centre of Welsh supremacy, she says. Saunders Lewis, the founding figure of Welsh nationalism was actually born in Liverpool. North Wales is itself a zone of Scouse imperial overreach. Most Welsh speakers today are third-generation Welsh speakers taught by second-generation Welsh speakers, so they’re probably doing it wrong, but that is still better than the language dying out entirely, which could have happened in the 20th century. Swansea was bigger than Cardiff until the 1960s. The Welsh outside Cardiff talk about the city in the same cutting tone that the English outside London talk about the capital. St David’s monks once tried to poison him. When Plaid triumph in the Senedd elections in May, it will have nothing to do with romantic Welsh nationalism, and everything to do with the rubbish condition of Welsh schools, hospitals and roads. The Irish and Scottish nationalists couldn’t sort their language out. “We could, though.”

Celyn gave me an old history of Wales by Gwyn A Williams to read on the bus that we took to north London. I opened it on a random page, looking for some answers about Welshness, now that I wouldn’t find them inside Bara. Williams’s history was extremely well written, in the way that books by Raymond Williams or Jan Morris always are. But it’s not very helpful on the whole being Welsh thing: “Wales is impossible. A country called Wales exists only because the Welsh invented it,” Gwyn writes. “The Welsh only exist because they invented themselves.”

It’s nearly 4pm inside the London Welsh Community Centre, and they’ve sold out of Wrexham Lager. Above the bar the historic county shields of Wales are hung, and a small and possibly libellous sign that claims King Charles “shags dogs”.

The day rave reminded me of cousin David’s wedding in Essex a few years ago. A Welsh occasion that happened mysteriously in an English setting. Celyn claimed that the scene inside the club is “very South Walean”. Men in rugby tops staggered towards a cheese board. (All Welsh artisanal products are made out of cheese.) Paper plates stacked with Welsh cakes tottered dangerously on the edge of tables. A woman pretended to eat an inflatable daffodil the size of a guitar. The heavy curtains were drawn, the disco lights were on and the DJ promised “Welsh music” before blasting Earth, Wind & Fire out of the speakers. I drank heavily. (Brains Limited Edition “Tight Head” Ale.) “You do realise you have to dance at some point,” Celyn said. “There is no way I’m going to be the first man in this room to dance,” I said at the exact moment a tall, thin, bald, long-nosed and candidly South Welsh bloke staggered on to the floor, forcing me to join him. Everyone looked like my Auntie Carol.

I once asked a Cambodian fisherman standing by the shore of the Tonle Sap what made Cambodians Cambodian. I have never forgotten his thoughtful, considered answer: “Drinking and eating.” This makes the Welsh Cambodian and the Cambodians Welsh. I found a Welshman, born in Anglesea and now teaching at a famous school in London. He said he always knew he would leave the island, first to Cardiff, then to London. We didn’t have a huge amount to talk about and I was already falling-over drunk, so I asked him what it meant to be Welsh. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Rugby. Mountains. Singing.”

“You feel like you’re living in an internationally recognised sovereign state but you’re surrounded by people who aren’t your people. Welsh is an acute regional identity, but we also have a language, we have our own genetic markers. I’m not trying to measure skulls or anything, but it’s true.” David stopped for a moment. We have moved to the smoking area of the Old Red Lion pub in Islington. The climax of our St David’s Day: Welsh spoken-word poetry.

Everyone here was young, Welsh-speaking, political. The men wore heavy knitwear and the women had brilliant, curling Celtic tattoos running down their arms. They read each other’s poems and Dylan Thomas’s poems inside the dark, warmly lit pub. We sang all the songs you’d expect apart from “Men of Harlech”. They sound like underground songs here, like Gypsy songs from Romania or Ukraine, songs written in the heyday of romantic nationalism, which in Wales means sometime between the 1960s and the early 1980s. Ry’n ni yma o hyd! The Welsh voices fill the room. Ry’n ni yma o hyd! Allow me some small, undeserved ethnic pride. Nobody else can sing like this. Ry’n ni yma o hyd! Celyn told me what it meant later. We are still here.  

[Further reading: Rachel Reeves is pretending everything is absolutely fine]

Dwell on what Steve Greenhalgh wrote. “Country”, well every nation has patriots. “God”, that’s a love older than country. But “Queen”? The Nato soldiers serving in Afghanistan in 2010 from Estonia, Poland, the US could not say that. I doubt the Commonwealth troops venerated her quite in this way. But for hundreds of men and women from the UK, the Queen, their commander-in-chief, was something else, almost semi-divine. When Greenhalgh gave his life for the Crown, he gave his life, in part, for her.

Greenhalgh served in First Battalion, Grenadier Guards. The elite infantry regiment is one of five regiments of foot guards in the Household Division, responsible for performing state ceremonies in London and Windsor. They are the closest thing the royals have to an Edwardian boy’s tin toy soldiers.

Far-flung Helmand is a long way from Derbyshire. It’s a long way from Windsor Castle and the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. Why exactly Dave Greenhalgh was there used to be a difficult question to answer. For freedom? Security? Nato? Women’s liberation? It can be hard to remember at this distance. It was all so long ago, so far away, so grim in how the mission eventually failed, so marginal to the common experience of our flowing national life. Thankfully, an answer – this is what the lance sergeant fought and died for – came with the release of a tranche of the Epstein files in January.

At the time of Greenhalgh’s death, Prince Andrew still generated the aura that resulted from a glittering life of serial high achievement. From a remove, Andrew resembled nothing less than a human peg on which post-nominal golden titles were looped, a doll painted with colourful honours: “Personal aide-de-camp” to Queen Elizabeth II; “Lord High Commissioner” to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; “Grand Master” of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators. Andrew would soon be given the “Freedom of the City of London”. The prince somehow found the time in between all the grand mastering and lord high commissioning and personal aide-de-camping to discharge further duties as the UK’s “special representative for international trade and investment”, an appointment made by the Blair government, wholeheartedly backed by Andrew’s friend, Peter Mandelson.

Andrew, the former trade secretary Mandelson predicted in 2001, would “have a very important role for which he is well qualified”. The prince was not just another golfing duffer wrapped in a tinsel of fake jobs, which was the gist of numerous criticisms from those who didn’t want him to become a “special representative” for the UK. No, no, no. Mandelson was on hand to butler away these dark notions that risked poisoning the public mind before Andrew clinched another top job: “This activity on behalf of the nation should not be confused with the commercial activities for personal gain which is associated with certain other members of the royal family.” Mandelson’s good sense won out. Andrew began the role around the same time British troops filtered into Afghanistan.

Eventually these two parallel foreign adventures met. Special Representative Andrew, as the Epstein files appear to suggest, was taking a close interest in the progress of the war in Helmand, which reached a lethal crescendo with Operation Moshtarak in 2010. A document – a briefing that appears to have been prepared for Andrew by UK officials outlining investment opportunities in the province – was apparently forwarded by him to Jeffrey Epstein that December. There was some money to be made in the region. Helmand’s main airport was a mere 90-minute flight from Dubai, while Gereshk, one of the main towns, was a 90-minute drive from Pakistan. Once all the Taliban’s improvised explosive devices were detonated by careless vehicles driven by the poor blokes in the Household Division, Helmand would be an exporter’s dream. Thanks to the British taxpayer, the Department for International Development was already putting together “secure industry sites” in the main towns. Thanks to Prince Andrew’s apparent email, Epstein knew there were “significant high value mineral deposits” – a spectacular periodic table of marble, gold, iridium, uranium and thorium, as well as possible deposits of lucrative oil and gas – all with the “potential for low cost extraction”. And thanks to men like Greenhalgh, those “high value minerals” could be washed clean and safe for men like Epstein to profit.

Documents like this, an anonymous former trade official told the BBC in February, before Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at home by Thames Valley Police on 19 February, “were absolutely not for sending outside government and particularly not to somebody who might seek to use them for commercial purposes”. Not for nothing did Epstein have a dog called Duke. Truly, there is no greater sacrifice, no greater honour than to die for God, country and a Crown forwarding investment opportunities in a territory littered with British bodies to a convicted child sex trafficker.

Andrew was appointed a colonel in the Grenadier Guards, Lance Sergeant Greenhalgh’s regiment, by his mother in 2017. Eighteen men in that regiment died in Afghanistan. To make Andrew their honorary chief was a mystifying decision, but it continued to find supporters even after the prince was stripped of that honour in 2022. “Very much to her credit she held on [protecting Andrew] for as long as possible,” wrote AN Wilson in his obituary for the late Queen in 2022. “While the Grenadier Guards and others were imploring her to sack him as an honorary colonel, she placed loyalty, and one must assume her love for her son, above public duty.” Today, we turn from Andrew to the late Queen, then look across the whole House of Windsor, wondering what else they placed above public duty.

Traditionally, if we were to take our seats in the Royal Box for an evening spent watching our never-ending island story, it is the republicans, the intelligentsia, the bourgeois radicals who perform the stock role of anti-English freaks. It is they, risking boos from the crowd, who turn off the television when the monarch makes their Christmas speech, who mock the flag and snigger at suet puddings. It was these careless, limp-wristed, book-worming creeps who made a mockery of “uniforms that guard you while you sleep”, as Rudyard Kipling thundered in his poem “Tommy”. By contrast, the valiantly stolid, unvarying, miniature-flag-waving patriotic masses who loved the monarch and hated nonces were proved right in the end as the curtain fell across the stage. Bravo, encore, fin. I am probably not alone in being someone who accepted this play as a useful myth based on partial truths. I am probably not alone in having relatives who served in Helmand – risking their lives for what? – who now find that their blood is heating up. After Andrew it’s hard not to feel that so much of what we saw in that pageant was a lie.

For who mocks those uniforms now? Where is the laughter coming from? The call is coming from inside the palace and every single one of us can hear it. Andrew has taken the monarchy and dumped it in an acid bath; a very important role for which he is well qualified. We have learned in recent months that princes can be de-princed by a Labour justice secretary, that it is popularity based on polling, not the hereditary principle, that buttresses the Windsors’ continued survival, and perhaps very soon, that the line of succession is for parliament, not the palace, to decide. What kind of monarchy do we have now? A quasi-elective one?

All the glib fogeyism in the realm – do you really want a President Blair or Farage? – will not put the House of Windsor back together again. Things will never be the way they were. Andrew, of course, strenuously denies all wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. He denies any personal gain from his role as trade envoy. He is no longer a prince, a lord chancellor or a grand master of anything other than his £80,000 Range Rover and the seven dogs and two staff who live with him in mud-flecked, photographer-haunted exile in Norfolk.

Let’s follow the line pumped out like water from a holed schooner by Buckingham Palace and its hard-working proxies for a moment. After the arrest, His Majesty the King put out a rare statement written in the first person on 19 February. He asked that the law be allowed to take its course. The King had already promised to cooperate with the police. Charles had “felt powerfully about this issue in his in-tray”, a “friend” told the Sunday Times, forcing us to imagine the ageing King staring hard and feeling “powerfully” at pieces of paper marked “ANDREW” since 2023. This, the Windsorists wittered in print and across the airwaves, was the screeching sound of a line being drawn under the matter. Radioactive Andrew would be placed in a lead-lined box.

According to Jonathan Dimbleby, who went out to bat on Newsnight on 13 February, this was a “personal crisis for the individuals involved”. Andrew was a private individual and this was a private individual matter, perhaps to be decided in a not very private court. “It will blow over,” burped a tramp-like Boris Johnson on 22 February. No more questions, please. Do not wonder how Peter Loughborough, Seventh Earl of Rosslyn, the former head of the Met’s royal protection squad, nicknamed “the Queen’s favourite policeman”, can remain a key player in the King’s Court. Shhh. Pity their plumage. Forget the dying bird.

In the days after the arrest it became commonplace to hear that the police action showed the system was working as intended. All was well in England. Even a royal – forget for a moment that Andrew was supposed to have been un-royaled last October – could come face to face at 8am with 15 coppers surrounding their grace-and-favour manse. It would be more just to wonder why this did not happen a long time ago. “The Met Police will not investigate Prince Andrew”, has been a perennial headline of the past decade, appearing as reliably as stories in the Daily Star about the ghost of Elvis haunting Graceland. Andrew is only being investigated now because the American authorities released the Epstein files. I don’t remember the bit in Blackstone’s Commentaries where the great jurist explains that the operation of our law depends on the 119th US Congress, the US justice department and the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Can our legal system cope with the trial of Windsor, should it come to that? At first sight that seems like a hysterical question. Even a year ago most of us would have laughed at it. But can you have a fair trial of the King’s brother in the King’s Court, overseen by a judge who has sworn a personal oath to that same King, sitting under the King’s royal coat of arms? The mind boggles. It’s not just judges. Magistrates and KCs, soldiers and MPs and the police, privy counsellors, bishops, archbishops: they swear their allegiance to the Crown, not to you. And you can only understand the Andrew story in all its proportions when you know that to cause potential embarrassment to the firm – to ask the wrong questions, to speak out, to raise tedious little concerns – was not a way to open up one’s professional horizons within our multitudinous oath-taking bureaucracies.

“No one would complain, it wouldn’t help your reputation,” a former trade official told the BBC on 23 February. They were attempting to explain why the top-flight (mostly male) Oxbridge brains staffing our diplomatic service never bothered to stop the prince allegedly charging massages to the taxpayer while he was on his foreign jollies. To cause grief to the Crown in official Britain was – probably still is – to commit professional self-harm.

Senior civil servants and former chancellors of the Exchequer are on the record saying as much. The tone such confessions were made in was usually jovial. Before Andrew, the stakes seemed negligible. So what if, as Valentine Low reported last year, the Queen ensured the survival of the Highland Bagpipe School of the British Army during the austerity years by asking George Osborne whether the school was closing? Osborne had been due to junk the place, but reversed the cut once he realised the Queen cared lavishly for piping. We can see how the same force might have protected Andrew during his decade as a “special representative”.

That pre-emptive cringe before the Windsors was a powerful thing in this country. Was. That force – who knows for how long – is at its weakest point for a generation. The crown sits on the head of a timid, tragic King. Unpopular monarchs in the past could at least use the royal prerogative to bribe, bully and intimidate the elite to fall in line. The hated and hateful George IV was able to create 57 peers between 1820 and 1830. For the people, King Charles III offers yoga classes at Highgrove and tea towels at the Balmoral gift shop. For politicians, he can provide association with his family, whose connections to the world’s most famous paedophile continue to stack up. An alluring offer. At least the future King William V will be able to offer them free tickets to the Earthshot Prize gala. The Crown, then, in the gutter. Who will pick it up?

Keir Hardie was a dedicated republican throughout his life, liable to embarrass his colleagues with the strength of his outbursts against the Crown. As Labour danced around the centres of power in the 1920s and 1930s, the party’s hostility to the throne became taboo. Embryonic Labour MPs were overwhelmed by the dazzle and glitter that surrounded the royals. Former revolutionaries, cotton spinners and miners became dedicated Windsorists. Their sharpest teeth were falling out. “He soon took to the grandeur and high life,” recorded the Conservative MP Chips Channon of Labour’s first prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, “and wallowed in it like a man who had been starving all his life.”

It’s an old, sad story. Labour’s radicalism was quenched by the moat of sugar water surrounding the Crown. Whenever power comes into sight for the party, the obeisance and the flags come out. How else to explain the peculiar figure of Keir Starmer and how he relates to royalty? The youthful republican is today a knight of the realm, pursuing a dour pragmatic politics that bends over backwards to shore up our broken institutions.

Whatever stirs in the recesses of Starmer’s conscience, parliament today has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the monarchy. Erskine May’s convention that MPs should not cast “reflections upon the sovereign or the royal family” ought to be shredded. The Windsors’ exemption from freedom of information law must end. Long-overdue questions about the provenance of the millions Andrew used to reach a settlement with Virginia Giuffre must finally be asked. The Royal Archives, entombed in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, must be opened up to the nation, not just its most sycophantic historians. Andrew must be removed from the line of succession. Envisioning a constitution and a monarchy appropriate to our circumstances is a challenge Labour was born to take up, though it is unlikely it will. Andrew’s arrest may have stirred memories of Charles I’s capture by parliament in 1649. But it does not appear to have woken up our legislators to their Cromwellian heritage.

Appearing at the Baftas on 22 February, Kate Middleton wore a floor-length Gucci gown, paired with a  maroon velvet belt and clutch. By her side was William, the future king, in a coordinated dark red velvet tuxedo jacket. Asked the toughest imaginable question by gathered reporters – had he seen Hamnet? – William gave a morose answer. “I need to be in quite a calm state and I am not at the moment. I will save it.”

The heir has made some odd moves ever since the scandal around his uncle intensified last October. In a recent interview with a BBC podcast, William claimed that his mental health had suffered after a couple of years spent working as an air ambulance pilot. “I’m carrying everyone’s emotional baggage,” the prince recalled thinking. Obscure references to hidden traumas are a predictable part of the bristling public relations arsenal of celebrity. We are probably only a few years away from seeing the Prince of Wales on the Steven Bartlett podcast discussing The Body Keeps the Score with Rylan, Mark Wright and Romesh Ranganathan. What does it tell you about the UK today that some of the highest-paid PR professionals in the kingdom are telling their royal client – whose ancestry can be traced to the Anglo-Saxon god Wotan – that affecting misery is the fastest route to relevance?

At some level, after all this, there will be a great emotional need for him and his wife to just be good. The prince’s father was much-satirised for his moaning during the decades he spent waiting to become a bank note. William’s decision to take up this mantle of depression at a time when direct questions are being asked about the alleged harm done by his family to vulnerable women and girls is, frankly, puzzling. He will be closely watched now. The briefings emanating from his camp against both his father and grandmother suggest a crisis, a lack of “calm” in the heir to the throne that will not be resolved soon.

Windsorists are yet to comprehend what the threat to William’s succession and the firm actually is, beyond a potential trial of Andrew. In January, the Times reported that Prince Harry had won his fight to regain armed police protection. The newspaper did not spell out the full implications for its readers. Harry can now return home to his ailing father and his unhappy country. Should he wish, he will be able to set up a rival court in the land. The House of Windsor and the House of Sussex will be forced to share our small island while the public watches on. A febrile scenario reminiscent of more unpleasant chapters of the medieval period, loaded with the potential for an all-out popularity war between the houses, with unknown consequences for the monarchy itself. What courtiers call “business as usual” will be at a premium.

More dangerously still for the Windsors, the questions that swirl around Andrew threaten to drag the late Queen into the darkness with him. While Charles can be thought of as boring, and William dull, true reputational damage to Elizabeth herself would have been unthinkable at the time of her death in 2022. Lance Sergeant Greenhalgh’s commander is the object of something close to British Shintoism, less a person than a deity. Besmirch her and we could start believing in anything.

What did she know about her son; when did she know it? The British felt as if they knew her all their lives. But there was so little to go on. Only snatches of that enigmatic smile. Look at those close to her. Look at how they crumbled over the decades. Philip, with his wandering eyes, driving his polo ponies mercilessly. Margaret, reduced to the look of boozy seaside landlady by the end, barely able to walk. Miserable Charles, turning to quacks and religion to feel sacred, scrawling his spidery notes to government ministers. Diana, who died believing that the firm bumped off her first lover, Barry Mannakee. The two young grandsons marched behind her coffin in the world’s glare. And Prince Andrew… to the public, Elizabeth justified this broken family as the product of “duty” and “service”. We may soon discover, through the efforts of the Thames Valley Police, what she thought privately. We know what Dave Greenhalgh thought he died for now. Soon we may find out the truth.

[Further reading: Abolish the monarchy]

“His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. His lease on Royal Lodge has, to date, provided him with legal protection to continue in residence. Formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease and he will move to alternative private accommodation. These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him. Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”

Yesterday, on his 66th birthday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He denies any wrongdoing and the presumption of innocence must apply in this case as it always does. 

Buckingham Palace marked the occasion with the release of another statement. Again, it’s worth reading the whole thing: 

“I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office. What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation. Let me state clearly: the law must take its course. As this process continues, it would not be right for me to comment further on this matter. Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.”

What do you notice? These are the only statements the King has made about the rolling disgrace of his younger brother. (The fact that Andrew is Charles’s brother is mentioned in neither of the statements.) Other than briefings to newspapers and palace aides whispering to television correspondents, these two slight paragraphs are all we have to go on. 

In the weeks between the statements our monarch has, according to the Court Circular: visited the Vatican and met the Pope; received the presidents of Ukraine, Romania and Germany when they came to Britain; received dozens of notables, flunkies, consequential religious leaders and various unappointed community spokespeople; “attended the L.G.B.T.+ Armed Forces Community Memorial Dedication Event at the National Memorial Arboretum” on 27 October; laid an enormous number of wreaths; handed out an enormous number of gongs; met some people who survived that knife attack in Huntingdon last year; witnessed a flypast of Falcon jets on 19 December and just generally done King stuff. He made his annual Christmas speech and surprised the nation by calling for unity and dignity, while mentioning World War II a few times. He’s been to church. He released a documentary with Amazon Prime called A King’s Vision. 

At no point over those weeks was the King asked by any journalist: what did you know about your brother and when? Nine simple words that could bring down the monarchy. A high wall of deference and cowardice has shielded the King from the proper scrutiny those nine words would bring. The only people who have tried in recent months to get a straight answer from the House of Windsor are hecklers. 

Is the question going to go away? Is the question addressed by those two statements? Yesterday the BBC called the second statement “unambiguous… offering no hiding place or protection”. The King’s statement, argued Simon Jenkins, was “scrupulous”. 

Uh huh. Taken together, both statements are in fact deeply ambiguous because they answer nothing. They cannot be “scrupulous” – careful, thorough, attentive to detail – because they leave us entirely without detail. They are statements trotted out from the usual never complain, never explain Windsor stables. The only difference between them is a stylistic one – a shift from the second person to the first – the slight, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smoke signal that suggests things are getting a bit desperate in the palace. The BBC correspondent goes on: “This statement from the King will seek to draw a line under this and separate the Royal Family from whatever might happen to Andrew.”

But that’s not possible. Unfortunately for the Windsors, there are other questions, other details and other ambiguities in play here. Read the first statement from October again. Why exactly was Andrew being stripped of his titles? What was the reasoning? Were they stripped after an internal investigation into the connections between the Royal Household, Epstein and Andrew, or was this simply done on the whim of His Majesty? How the palace, the King, the Queen, the Prince of Wales and their private secretaries actually reach decisions is not for us to know. Can any of them be called to give evidence by a parliamentary select committee so we might be able to understand how this happened? No, they cannot. Would our current MPs even want to do that? Evidence for such courage remains thin on the ground.

Our monarch and his household instead exist in a realm of hocus-pocus rituals and make-believe titles, guarded by a corps of journalists who are so fierce that they roll over to have their bellies tickled whenever they see a Windsor, hacks who ask soft questions in exchange for access and would probably kill your grandmother to make a royal vanity documentary for Amazon Prime. The King’s existence appears to be a blithe one, where the fighter jet flypasts are only broken up by the occasional visit to the National Memorial Arboretum. He does not exist to be accountable, to be open to any process of formal review or to ever answer any real questions no matter how much his family embarrasses our country. Has this existence been good for the Windsors? Again: no. It is dragging their whole house down towards the rocks. The contrast with the exiled Prince Harry, who at least tries to make honesty and truthfulness his watchwords, even when the results are uncomfortable, is stark. 

Has a line been drawn under the following: what did you know about your brother and when? What did the late Queen Elizabeth know about her son and when? How was Andrew’s £12 million civil settlement with Virginia Giuffre paid for in 2022? Was any public money involved? We do not know. We know about as much about the way royal finances work as we do about all the other questions raised by the events of the last few weeks. 

No Windsor has spoken publicly about Jeffrey Epstein since then Prince Andrew told Emily Maitlis about his unusual appearance at that lovely Pizza Express in Woking back in 2019. As Lewis Goodall pointed out yesterday, that is a truly remarkable fact.  

The King has promised to assist the police with their enquiries into his brother. I wonder how different their questions will be from all the hecklers the monarch has recently pretended not to hear. 

[Further reading: Abolish the Monarchy]

“It was like I knew her.” 

The Queen, one third bank-note-post-stamp, one third human being, one third deity, was nevertheless considered to be part of our extended families. The people I spoke to were dumbstruck by a strange kind of distant grief, an emotion mediated by television and social media. I was too. And the longer they spoke to me, the more I realised her subjects were not describing the Queen at all. (How, after all, can you ever really know a person who is one third bank-note-post-stamp, one third human being, one third deity?) Elizabeth’s death gave them permission to talk about all the people they had lost. Their own grandmothers, mothers, aunties, sisters. Everyone they had lost was somehow mixed up with the death of this enigmatic woman. 

“It was like I knew her”. They talked about Elizabeth while imagining their own grandmother fixing a Sunday lunch, or poking about in a fireplace, or heading down the races.

I remember writing down something I overheard a woman say in Windsor the afternoon before the Queen’s coffin was finally put to rest: “My mum has messaged me saying I’m so glad you’re coming home this weekend because I don’t want to be on my own.” The Queen’s death reminded many of us that life is short and precious, that we often take the people closest to us for granted and that we need to look after each other. It revealed, I thought at the time, a yearning among some of us to return to the seemingly settled and ordered world of her coronation in 1952, when a third of the Queen’s new subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God. 

Did we know her though? 

In September 2022 I thought that the Queen was, as Jenny Diski once put it, part of the “great amorphous conspiracy that keeps society on a roughly even keel”. In my more snobbish moments, I would probably have agreed with Walter Bagehot that monarchy is “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. I find those seductive words a lot less convincing today. Read this morning’s frontpage report in the Sun: “SHAMED Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was loaned £12 million by his parents and brother Charles to pay off sex accuser Virginia Giuffre – and has yet to give any back. The late Queen is said to have stumped up £7 million for the 2022 settlement, with another £3 million coming from Prince Philip’s estate – a year after his death.”

What are we supposed to know about the late Queen again? That Elizabeth was a grandmother who everybody in this country felt like they knew. She made picnics. She liked a Dubonnet and Gin with lunch. She kept a commoner’s crap electric heater in a few of her many multi-bathroomed palaces. She seemed to prefer dogs and horses to most of her relatives. She never really said or did anything in public other than make dry remarks inside freshly painted municipal buildings, a supposed fact that Craig Brown recently managed to get a whole 672-page book from. 

But Elizabeth also gave millions and millions of pounds to her son long after it had been established that he had a close relationship – a relationship that he demonstrably lied about – with a man who had once been jailed for procuring an underage girl for prostitution. The millions allowed Andrew – against his wishes, if Andrew Lownie’s Entitled is to be believed – to pay off Giuffre in March 2022. The prince never had the day in court that might have thrown some daylight on his activities with Epstein. He has always denied any wrongdoing. Giuffre took her own life last April. 

The Sun doesn’t say where the money came from. Part of the settlement Andrew reached with Giuffre – £1.5 million – came from Charles, then the Prince of Wales. This raises the spectre of profits from the posh Duchy Originals organic stuff sold by Waitrose being put forward as hush money to one of the women allegedly abused by the Prince and Jeffrey Epstein. Or perhaps Charles’s money came from the rents derived from his enormous commercial landholdings spread all over Britain. 

But most of the money came from the Queen. Add those millions to the allowance she continued to pay Andrew after his epochally stupid Newsnight interview in 2019. Who was this woman we all knew so well again? A corgi-walking great grandma juggling her tupperware while organising pay-outs to alleged victims of sexual assault like the PR fixer for a MeToo’d Hollywood producer? 

Before the latest tranche of Epstein files were released, we didn’t know very much about the Queen’s attitude towards Andrew after 2010. Last week ITV found an email which might have revealed some of her thoughts. “He has full support of his mum,” Andrew’s then advisor David Stern told Epstein over email on 9 March 2011. “Only dealing with you was ‘unwise’.” His mother’s money was more welcome than her advice. However “unwise” Andrew’s connection with Epstein was, in January 2025 the Times reported that the pair remained in communication for five years longer than the Prince claimed to Emily Maitlis in 2019. 

You might say that the Queen was doing what any mother would do in that situation. But “any mother” is not the Queen. “Any mother” is not, as Roger Scruton wrote “the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. The duty and service that were so often invoked by Elizabeth during her reign extended to a rather more local circle than most of us once imagined. 

Monarchists often despair of the image of a Queen who shared marmalade sandwiches with Paddington bear. They have a different image. Elizabeth was actually hard as nails, with the outlook and values of Britain’s classical governing class. Skilled at creating the appearance of distance from the maelstrom of our public life, Elizabeth reigned over us, silent as a sphinx, strategic as a general, more restrained than any nun. All the subtle, non-verbal communication could be summed up in one phrase heavy with aristocratic elan: Never complain, never explain. 

If that was true, why did she give millions of pounds to Andrew after he torpedoed himself on Newsnight in 2019? (Why did Charles?) Why did she give him that money in the full knowledge that funding a pariah would risk threatening the entire firm? 

We are left at a loss. A Queen of sentiment, duty and honour who nevertheless indulged her son knowing his “unwise” connection to a convicted sex criminal. A Queen of strategy, nous and coldness who could not see the possibility that her son would bring the whole Windsor show down with him. “It’s like we knew her.” Do you still think that’s true? And more importantly, what did she know about her son, and when did she know it?

Update: since this article was published the King has denied that he contributed to the £12 million then Prince Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre in 2022.

[Further reading: Gordon Brown: Police need to interview Andrew]  

I find the nets unsettling and strange. This is how the war has changed, I venture to my colleagues. First dragons’ teeth and mines and tanks; now fishing nets in the sky and drones buzzing around. Maybe due to drone threats in the future we will all have to put up these nets. Or live underground. Maybe one day a huge net will be stretched over Ukraine itself, opening only for the occasional train from Poland to Kyiv. Maybe the nets represent… But my colleagues in the car have seen it all before. They would not be surprised if tomorrow they find out that the Russian cruise missiles that smashed into Kharkiv last night were piloted by live bears. They shrug at my net chat. “Don’t think about the net too much.” Am I overthinking the net, I ask? “Yes,” comes the reply. “The net is not Freudian.”

The roar of power

In Izyum, more nets and the constant roaring sound of generators. These are everywhere you go in Ukraine. It’s hard to speak outside without having to shout over them. A friend says that generators have produced more power over the course of this winter than Ukraine’s four operational nuclear power plants. I’m not sure that’s right, but it feels true.

We enter a café. While we wait to meet a man who was tortured when the town was occupied by the Russians in 2022, we talk to a tall, bearded soldier. He has a rescue cat on a lead. It doesn’t like the lead at all, so the soldier scoops her up and stuffs her in his jacket. As he leaves, the cat’s head pokes out and it opens its mouth. It has no bottom teeth.

Peter Mandelson for beginners

The shadow of the Epstein files is impossible to escape – even here, 30km away from a live war. One day I tried explaining who Peter Mandelson is to my colleagues. This is trickier than it sounds. “So, yeah, basically there was this guy who called himself the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and sort of jokingly told everyone who would listen for three decades that he was evil, but we mostly ignored this and gave him cool jobs, but he turned out to be advising a man who was convicted of soliciting underage prostitutes.”

My colleagues struggled to understand Mandelson, as they generally picture Britain as a powerful, incorruptible force for good in the world. One of them asked if Mandelson could have worked for Viktor Yanukovych, the absurdly corrupt former president of Ukraine who fled during the high tide of the Euromaidan protests in 2014. It sounded right to me.

A general mistake made about Ukraine is to think of it as an aberration, an outlier from the European mainstream. Before the war, escalating crises – political, economic, environmental – built up here, resulting in a roulette of short-lived governments, staffed by hard-to-distinguish politicians and parties, themselves puppeteered more or less openly by oligarchic networks. In the end, no personality was trusted by the public, no state institutions were seen as legitimate, and the result was revolution. It would be an exaggeration to say that this is Britain’s future. Or would it? 

An international freeze-off

Back in Kharkiv, we bumped into the unbelievably well-travelled Times staff photographer Jack Hill in a hotel bar. Along with Anthony Loyd, Jack was going over the fallout from a pitiless Russian drone strike on a married couple, Valentyna and Valerii Klochkov, outside Hrabovske.

Jack was recently back from Greenland. There was only one question to ask: surely it was colder there? Nope, he said. Kharkiv was colder than Greenland by some distance.

The next day we began the long drive back west to Kyiv. Ukraine looks more like Greenland than Greenland does. What does it look like in the summer, I ask? “In winters, it’s white,” comes the reply. “In summer, it will be green.” I’m overthinking things again.

I can abide 12 hours on a bunk bed. I can stay awake all night, itchy, hungry, bored, cold. And it’s not that I am prejudiced against fat or drunk men. I just cannot abide their snoring. The low, cabin-shaking white noise I have endured on previous trains has left me with deep psychic scars. I was lucky this time.

On Friday evening three leaf-like, silent women shared the cabin with me. They entered, quietly said hello, quietly drank some herbal tea, then quietly clamped ear mufflers to the sides of their heads. Everyone was asleep within minutes.

Anywhere but Kyiv

Kyiv is frozen. “Don’t go there,” a British diplomat friend told me when I mentioned going back a few weeks ago. Some Kyivans I know have swapped the city for the countryside. A lot of couples with children don’t want to hang around during this, the most calamitous winter of the war. More than 600,000 people have left the capital in the last few weeks, says the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko.

Their enemy has spent over ten billion rubles in January alone flinging missiles designed to sink warships at apartment buildings and heating grids. The outlook is so desperate, one friend admitted, that Kyivans are discovering that they actually do, after all, love their mother-in-law – just so long as she has a nice, safe house somewhere in the country.

Ukrainians like to joke away their desperation, their exhaustion and their contempt. Contempt is the precise word for how they feel. If you could convert their pure hatred for the enemy into energy you could give light and heat to a million homes. Meanwhile the schools are closed. Offices are closed. Rare plants in the botanical gardens freeze to death. Pets freeze to death. The elderly are trapped in their apartments.

On 13 January Yevhenia Mykhailivna Besfamilnaya, a Holocaust survivor, was found frozen in her apartment. The police initially refused to kick down her door after there was no answer. They couldn’t smell anything; surely if she was dead there would be that unmistakable smell of rotting body? Yevhenia was a private person, the police said, why should they disturb her privacy? Her neighbours eventually persuaded them to enter the apartment. There Yevhenia, according to a news report “was frozen, covered in ice; she had not yet started to decompose”.

Crampon my style

I find it difficult to walk around Kyiv. You either fall over, or you involuntarily ice skate. An Irish expat here warned me to buy crampons if I didn’t want to humiliate myself. I secured them to my boots shortly before I set foot on Ukrainian territory. After ten minutes walking from Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Station I looked down. The crampon on my right boot had mysteriously disappeared. I was down on my face a few minutes later. Nose stuck to the ice, I reflect that this probably never happens to John Simpson.

The fog of war

I’m staying in a famous mob hotel. I only realise this after I arrive, when the concierge tells me that I’m free to use the sauna, steam room or swimming pool. There are none of the usual wartime Clive Myrie/NGO bean-counter/earnest Finnish weapons salesman types in the lobby: only hulking terminators with green tattoos of cobwebs crawling up their necks, sitting underneath despot-chic crystal chandeliers. Every single guest looks like they have murdered someone in exchange for a modest cash payment.

I’m confused. Hundreds of buildings in Kyiv don’t have heating, there are blackouts all the time, but this hotel has an operational sauna? I ask around: what does it mean? It means gangsters, duh. The hotel is on the same street as a foreign embassy and the HQ of a major charity. Apparently neither of them have much power right now. Why? A fellow guest suspects that they fell afoul of the mob, who routed all the power into the sauna we are (shamefully) sitting in early one morning. “These people have connections,” he says, darkly, in a heavy accent. I ask him what he does. “It’s to do with security. But nothing sexy or cool.”

I ask him what will happen in the future, given that he has an answer for everything. “The real war starts when this one is over.” It’s the first plausible thing he says.

As I leave the steam zone I receive a worried text. My interlocutor has been reading the news. About blackouts and bombings and drones. Am I OK? I hesitate as I reply: “Err, I’ve just left quite a nice sauna, actually.” War is hell.

[Further reading: Militarised police have taken America to a new level of brutality]

The branches and the bare hedgerows that line the lane in this half-suburban, half-rural sprawl I walk smell rotten. The winter shrubs audibly drip with rain. I’m heading to a medieval ceremony – well, the website says it began in 1980. Soft wet mud clings to my boots, a film of rain runs down from my forehead to my nose, and water drips coldly down my back. I’m on foot, because the roads are flooded. The Fenland sky is low, wet, grey.

In September 1950, Ray Bradbury published a story called “The Long Rain”. I keep being reminded of it as I tramp along the wet fields and sodden pavements approaching Whittlesea. As far as I know, Bradbury, the genius writer of science fiction, never visited the Fens. He was born in Waukegan, Illinois. And “The Long Rain” is set on Venus. In Bradbury’s imagination it is a deluged planet of constant, fatiguing rainfall. It is not a happy place for Bradbury’s astronauts to be. The rain makes them go mad. Venus, in other words, may as well be five and a half miles outside of Peterborough.

It is hard to see clearly in this rain. But I’m getting closer to the meeting place: farm buildings are visible through the mist. There are small fishing lakes to my left. Motionless fishermen, lonely hooded figures in synthetic puffa fabrics, wait silently by the shore. Cars begin to roll along the lane towards the outbuildings, towards the burning that will begin in a few hours. I give way to one vehicle, down into the wet mud, and when I look up a figure with a human body and the head of an owl waves at me from the back seat. They drive away. I don’t believe in transfiguration or magic. I think it unlikely that men can grow owl heads from their bodies. I wonder if, like Bradbury’s astronauts on Venus, the rain is making me see things.

At the gate, a young woman directs the cars into a nearby field. Her high-visibility jacket is printed with an image of a bear, standing up like a man, made from straw. “Oh, it’s really exciting,” she says. “We had the dance on Friday and the festival, a parade, on Saturday.” Today is Sunday – the day of the burning. In the back seats of the cars that pass us there are flashes of coloured cloth. Her family’s friend started all this, she says. But she doesn’t know why. Or what it means. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s got to do with the plough festival.” She smiles a bit desperately.

I find a man who wants to explain things. He tells me that the Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival was founded in 1980 by the Whittlesea Society. The festival’s origins are older, stretching back to at least the end of the 19th century. Then, whenever “then” really was, there was a custom that on the Tuesday following Plough Monday (the first Monday after Twelfth Night) one of the ploughmen would be dressed in straw and called a “Straw Bear”. Straw was tied around the man’s arms, legs and body. Two sticks fastened to his shoulders met above him and were wrapped in straw too, forming a cone over his head. He couldn’t see. The “bear” would be made to dance in front of pubs and houses for food and gifts. We have no record of how or why a man was selected to be a “bear”. We don’t know whether it was an honour or a punishment. “It was a drink and a dance for the boys after plough season,” says the man. “Just a bit of fun.”

The modern “bear” still dances in front of pubs every January in Whittlesea. The costume is more practical – easy to remove – and people take turns to perform alongside other dancers, particularly Morris dancers, from around the country. It no longer sounds like the tradition is a form of rustic torture. Then again, this is England. You can never be too sure. When I finish downloading information from the man, I walk up to the bear. A straw figure fixed to the ground under the close grey sky in a pit. It looks like the sort of place you dump bodies.

Before the burning, the dancing. Troops of Morris dancers meet on a patch of wet ground. A crowd grows around them in a circle. A few hundred people, three or four deep. There is a specific look among them: pale skin, pale eyes, red beards, ale bellies. I see a man who, down to his spidery limbs and pointed beard, looks like the resurrection of Lytton Strachey. Each dance is announced by a large man in a wide, flowered straw hat. He is well over 6ft tall, strongly built, masculine despite the flowers and the ribbons that cover him, cheerfully aggressive. If he hadn’t been wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, it would have been easy to imagine him pinning down a poor, squealing plough boy on a winter’s morning in 1880to force the “bear” costume on him. The large man summons the dancers and the musicians. “Plough season is over! This dance is all the way from the Forest of Dean!”

Six dancers and an accordionist move out into the mud, dressed in yellow shirts and black trousers, under tall straw hats. Each dancer wears thick clogs fastened with a buckle. The bells strapped to their calves jangle as they move. Slowly, the dance begins. They face each other, cross the ground, and face each other again. They cross and recross, their feet never still. The dance resembles a march. They stamp. When the dancers pass each other, they turn, jump, and let out a high-pitched whooping scream.

After they finish, several dances later, I ask the leader of one troop when Morris dancing began. Another tall slab of a man, he peers down at me from somewhere above his salt-and-pepper moustache. “Thereby hangs a question,” he says. Like the bear festival itself, these dances are deep mysteries. I sense their origins are hotly disputed. The leader begins to talk of 15th-century wills and medieval stained glass. He speaks of a goblet owned by Henry VIII. All, he believes, provide evidence of primordial Morris dancing that stretches back long into the infancy of England. “But nobody really knows.” I ask him if the dance has any religious significance. He bristles. One of his dancers hears the question and turns. “We are not pagans,” she says.

The crowd begins to gather around the burial pit. I pass a man wearing the head of an owl. Someone shoves him and says, “Shouldn’t you be in a nest?” The atmosphere is festive. People are drinking and carousing. It is just before midday.

A solemn, hollow drumbeat announces the beginning of the end for the bear. Then the merry notes of the accordions rise up from the crowd. There is giggling and shrieking. Children run in circles. Burn him! Burn him! It takes three men to light the bear. The fire takes its time. The flames are shy at first, lingering at the feet, then climbing slowly up a leg. When they reach the cone – the head – the body collapses into blackness. The men around me laugh. “Can you hear him screaming?” one says. “Let me out!” As the smoke rises from the burned-out bear, I look up. The sky is blue. The mud is beginning to dry. The rain has stopped, the mist has lifted. Another plough season is over.

[Further reading: The march of the Pink Ladies]

School one said that Badenoch should take her time to develop new ideas out of the public eye. She ought to keep her head down: the public didn’t want to hear from the Conservative Party because the public didn’t like the Conservative Party. The road back to credibility was long and it was paved with an interminable policy review process. 

School two thought that school one was living in a fantasy world. Badenoch could only survive as leader and make that pitch to the public if she first took on the discredited Tory establishment within the party and the media by directly laying the blame for 14 years of failure in government at their door. School two’s inspiration was Donald Trump in 2015, when the then candidate for the Republican nomination powered through televised debates taking GOP scalps left, right and centre. Trump attacked the GOP because they were “fucking useless”, one former Badenoch advisor told me last year. She had to do the same. “Can you have renewal without a massive bust-up?” (Interestingly, school two’s analysis – that Badenoch had to fight against her own side and sack large numbers of MPs associated with the previous Conservative government before she could get anywhere with the public – is shared by senior figures around Keir Starmer.)

Badenoch, it would be fair to say, did not go after the Tory establishment in her first year as leader. Those who know Badenoch say she reveres party grandees, donors and old-school Tory hacks such as Simon Heffer, the Daily Telegraph columnist who she rewarded for loyalty with a peerage last year. There was no Trump-style bust up within the Conservative Party. Instead it has sunk in the polls, from leading in December 2024 to a seemingly permanent position behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK today. 

Until this morning. Badenoch’s decision to sack Robert Jenrick and remove him from the party looks at first glance like a triumph of school-two thinking: a direct internal party fight that differentiates Badenoch from her rivals, even delivered in Trumpian style with a post on X. Jenrick had told friends in recent weeks that he thought Reform lacked a viable economic spokesperson and an eventual shadow chancellor. Perhaps he was plotting. If it was a case of “conversations” with Nigel Farage, as the Reform leader put it this morning, then quite a few Tory MPs including members of the shadow cabinet could be caught in Badenoch’s purge. 

Yet I would be surprised if Badenoch goes further and goes on a full Trumpian 2015-style rampage against, say, Charles Moore and the Centre for Policy Studies. The sacking pushes Jenrick out of the Tory establishment, which Badenoch is trying to shore up ahead of what will likely be another set of poor local election results in May. As one Johnson-era adviser put it to me when I asked them what the sacking meant for the Tories: “Zombie party with zombie leader.”

[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch isn’t working]

I don’t know if other countries “do” heritage railways. Maybe they do. Maybe in Cambodia, in a workshop outside Battambang, there is a team of harried volunteers tweaking the cylinders and toiling over the pistons of a resurrected iron horse so that it can painfully yet triumphantly ride the tracks once again to Phnom Penh. But even then, it wouldn’t really be able to compare with the full-bore precision, capital-H Heritageness of the Epping Ongar Light Express train.

“Do you still get people after Christmas?” I ask one of the volunteers at the station on a freezing night in early January. Ongar used to be the most remote stop on the London Underground but it closed in 1994 because there were not enough passengers. You can see why they dried up when you walk around the village.

Even at night you can tell Ongar is proper prosperous Essex territory. If I lived in here I wouldn’t want to go to London. I would just stay in my massive house – everyone I can see looming out of the dark is a massive Georgian-looking extended manse with a shiny black German car parked outside – and watch YouTube videos. I would cruise along the A414 to Maldon in my brand new Range Rover, blasting my Balearic deep house mix, have some fish and chips by the sea then drive back home. I wouldn’t even think about London.

The station’s walls have been sprayed with strings of warm orange Christmas lights. A fire crackles in the grate inside the entrance. Somebody has crossed out “Happy Christmas” on a board and written “Happy New Year” in its place. Several National Heritage Railway Awards are stuck proudly on the wall above it. Proudly: each award has been recently polished. The interiors have been painted in various shades of brown (Bovril brown, dripping brown, ration cocoa brown, wireless brown, Burma brown) that went out of fashion sometime between the end of the fall of Singapore and the coronation of Elizabeth II. I feel a bit like I’m an extra on the set of Brief Encounter, except there are several giant inflatable snowmen outside – objects far beyond the imaginings of Noël Coward.

“Yeah, we do get people,” says the volunteer. He is one of those teenagers who loves trains (they still exist). He’s wearing a black peaked cap and a black wool British Railway uniform with shiny buttons, all slightly too big for him, making him look like a child who has got lost trying on his grandfather’s mothballed army uniform. He directs me outside and I follow the smell of frying oil to a marquee. The passengers, 30 of them, are waiting here in their puffa jackets. A small boy staggers past me, weighed down by three boxes of chips. A sign says all the sausages and burgers are HANDMADE IN CHELMSFORD FROM ESSEX PRODUCE. There are doughnuts for sale. Real doughnuts; end-of-the-pier doughnuts. Sugar, no icing, deep-fried heart attack grenades. I go to the bar and bravely smash through dry January, ordering a bottle of Spitfire. Take that Göring, I murmur lavishly to myself. A whistle blows. Puffa jackets rustle. Heads turn. The journey is about to begin.

I am by no means an expert, but the train leaving Ongar tonight appears to be a GWR 4900, or “Hall” Class of locomotive, designed by Charles Collett. Only 259 were ever built, of which 11 have been preserved for the nation. One of them, named Olton Hall, became an international celebrity after it appeared as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films. In other words, this kind of locomotive is what the majority of people in the world today think a steam train looks like. The Epping Ongar Lights Express takes a GWR 4900 and covers it in several thousand LED lights. Children scream as they board it and their parents laugh. A blue stream of soot billows from the smokestack into the night sky. Worryingly, before we board, we are given a song sheet. Mine has the lyrics to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” printed on it. I am nowhere near drunk enough (I would have to be unfathomably drunk) to sing on this train in public.

We leave the station. The train lurches forwards then sort of levels out at a speed most dogs could comfortably outrun. The LEDs mounted on the surface of every carriage change the colour of the woodland outside, turning the bare branches and hedges and squat outhouses we pass lurid shades of neon turquoise and fuchsia. The entire journey is narrated by Voiceover Man, the guy who voiceover-ed X Factor and The Price Is Right. There is a great deal of call and response: “Are you ready?” (This is the first of several moments when I realise I should have bought more bottles of Spitfire.) My compartment affirms it is ready. Puffas are removed as we slowly stagger forwards, deeper into the bare, flat Essex land towards North Weald.

“Oh, the Sixties, WHAT a time to be alive,” voiceovers Voiceover Man. “Pinball Wizard”, begins to play from the speakers in the carriage so loudly I worry it might strip the upholstery from the seats. Voiceover Man proceeds to play a series of songs in chronological order, from the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” (1969) up to Shane Ritchie’s cover of “I’m Your Man” (2003). Given how badly everything has gone since 2003, I realise that it is probably fair and just for Voiceover Man to end history with Ritchie’s crooning. Why would anybody sane want to find out what happened next?

“Here we are in the rich, ancient woodland of Epping Forest,” intones Voiceover Man. I look out the window, hoping to see an angry crowd of protesters attacking a hotel. But it’s all skeletal trees as far as I can see into the gloom, painted green and red by our insane lights. “Does Your Mother Know” plays. “Oooh, I love Abba!” screams a woman in the compartment across from me. She savours every word of“Does Your Mother Know”. Then she yells every word of “Dancing Queen”, as do her friends, as do all the kids, as, with enormous reluctance and a good deal of bravery, do I. Collectively it sounds as if several horses are being strangled at the same time in our compartment. A bloke with a beard and a ponytail films himself dancing entirely with his chin – it’s the only part of his body that moves, loosely in time with the Abba – as his daughter laughs at him.

The late Tony Judt wrote convincingly that the railways were the great glory of industrial civilisation. As they spread from London to Sydney to Bombay to New York they reshaped our cities and our imaginations. “Railways were never just functional,” he wrote in 2010, shortly before his death. “They were about travel as pleasure, travel as adventure, travel as the archetypical modern experience.” I thought of Judt and these lost horizons as the locomotive huffed back into Ongar. The people around me were happy. They had taken a journey to nowhere in particular, cocooned in layers of protective heritage, happy and drunk and messing around. For an hour, the rest of the world ceased to exist. Exactly what I suspect most British people are craving right now.

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of the UK – has run in the New Statesman since 1934. If there is a patch of the country you think we should write about, send an entry to thisengland@newstatesman.co.uk. Successful suggestions will receive a £5 book token

[Further reading: America’s imperial fights are not necessarily ours]

Look: the procession glinted in the far distance. The Household Cavalry in outline, a cloud of scarlet and polished steel, surrounding the state hearse taking Queen Elizabeth II towards St George’s Chapel. Most of what the country had left behind long ago had lived on, for a time, in her. Now she was gone.

Castle gates opened. The hearse, the coffin, the Crown, crawling forwards. Eight billion eyeballs, watching on television, followed the Queen towards her vault, there to be taken to the cheerful English Heaven she and few others still believed in. An era was passing with her.

Somewhere behind the Crown in that final procession was her flesh and blood legacy. He had been stripped of his military uniform but not his titles, and accused of rank criminality that he denied – and denies still. This was the man who is defining the new era we now find ourselves in. The cameras didn’t linger, but they couldn’t ignore either. Prince Andrew, Duke of York.

Looking back, it’s hard not to be impressed by Andrew, world exclusive star interviewee of the June 2000 issue of Tatler. His sit-down chats with its then editor, Geordie Greig, took place over several days in several different palaces and carried 12 whole pages in the society bible.

Greig’s subject had just turned 40. He was “fitter and slimmer” than he used to be, dressed down in a black turtleneck and chinos, “more Pierce Brosnan, less Nick Faldo”, nothing like the “box-suited, blonde-dating, cack-humoured oaf” of tabloid lore. He was running a fundraising campaign for the NSPCC against child abuse like a “military operation” and sharking around the globe, “spotted with Ghislaine Maxwell in the front row at Ralph Lauren’s show in New York”.

Somehow, Greig noted, Prince Andrew – “strong-minded”, “unconventional”, “articulate”, “forceful”, “wholly connected to Blair’s modern Britain” – also found enough time between fashion shows to be “the model of a family man”.

Greig is a reasonable person. But, like so many subjects at so many different times in history, interaction with a representative of the Crown appears to have compromised his ability to see straight. Nobody with any sense of reality in June 2000 believed that Andrew was anything like the man presented. They thought he was cavalier in his personal relations, profligate in his financial dealings, immensely entitled, stupid and cruel. Such truths were not meant for the pages of Tatler, however. This is how false consciousness works. Faced with the reality of monarchy, people simply do what they always do: they become blind.

The truth is that an estimated £13m of public money helped to fund the decades-long Caligulan lifestyle of a prince who cavorted with, among others, a convicted paedophile, a Libyan arms smuggler and a Kazakh oil baron. This truth was obscured, denied or ignored – that is, until Andrew’s world began to collapse in 2011.

Since his 2019 Newsnight interview, the prince has been in continuous freefall. He may yet pull down the House of Windsor with him. Though he vigorously denies the latest allegations of sexual impropriety against him, made in Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, Andrew nevertheless issued a terse 103-word statement, printed under a royal coat of arms, on 17 October. It explained he would “no longer use my title” of Duke of York or the other “honours” bestowed on him. The use of “my” suggests Andrew does not understand the dark depths of the well the Windsors find themselves in.

Nor do his relatives, it seems. The King and Prince William have not seen the need to issue their own statements about the allegations against Andrew. They have instead been classically mute in the old Windsor way. Neither of them has spoken about the allegations against Andrew publicly. Charles’s lackeys feed journalists lines about his frustration with the former duke or, more extraordinarily given the reverence he publicly holds his mother in, blame Andrew’s conduct on the indulgence of the late Queen Elizabeth. (Being dead, she cannot answer back. The King’s silence is less explicable.)

Rather than taking responsibility for the damage their family has done to Britain’s reputation and clarifying exactly what steps will be taken to ensure that the Windsors never produce and protect another Andrew, open explanation is left to others. Proxy pseudo-authorities such as Jennie Bond, the former BBC royal correspondent, who was rolled out on ITV’s Loose Women on 22 October to inform a no doubt grateful public that William is “hopping mad with black sheep Uncle Andrew”.

Silent Charles and “hopping mad” William’s plan – or the plan of their private secretaries, Clive Alderton and Ian Patrick, respectively – appears to be to isolate Andrew. Force him and Fergie from the 30-bedroom mansion in Windsor. Find him a smaller mansionette. Would a five-bed be acceptable to the public? Would the mob care if he still had a valet? Or pack him off to a palace in Abu Dhabi like the disgraced Spanish king, Juan Carlos? Let him fade into exile, then obscurity. Forget the allegation that a key member of the head of state’s family stands accused of ordering his taxpayer-funded police protection officer to dig up dirt about Giuffre. Do not ask questions about the £500,000 Andrew paid for a “PR expert” who sought to discredit Giuffre by enlisting the services of an internet troll. Blame the rot on the apple, not the orchard it fell from. Clip it from the branch. Heal.

Several majestic assumptions are at work here. That awkward questions about how the royal family is funded and housed will fade away, despite Keir Starmer’s recent call for “proper scrutiny” into Crown properties. That the public will forget that the previous government refused to disclose documents that might have revealed partial truths about Andrew’s activities. That nobody will listen when the prince’s biographer Andrew Lownie says he unsuccessfully submitted hundreds of freedom of information requests about Andrew’s time as a trade envoy to the Foreign Office over a four-year period while he wrote his book. “Obstructions were placed in front of Andrew,” Lownie told me on 27 October. “Ambassadors were told not to talk to me. Interviews with major magazines were pulled just before my book went to press. A PR firm was set up – with whose money we don’t know – to undermine me.” Lownie has been on a book tour in front of audiences in what he calls “Middle England”. The “crusty colonels” out in the shires are not happy with the firm. “The Windsors are in dangerous territory,” he says. Maybe the most hopeful assumption of all is that, in an era defined by splenetic anti-system politics, a wounded monarchy can continue to calmly buttress and awesomely represent a failing, discredited status quo.

But the most damning assumption is that the country is so stupid, so sycophantic and so passive that it won’t mind that Andrew has received no real punishment since Giuffre’s memoir appeared. Then again, if you were the monarch or his handlers, you would have a lifetime of evidence to back up that assumption. We have been bowing and scraping for the past 365 years. What must we look like to the Crown?

The Windsors’ attitude towards inquiries into their activities is well documented. Brief the tabloids. Cut deals with broadcasters. Otherwise, bully, threaten, obstruct, deny, redact. “Everyone is saying there is a right to know everything,” Charles moped to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994. “I don’t agree. There isn’t a right to know at all.”

What we do know about the Windsors is bewildering. We are told that the King has the pure soul of an artist; that he is a romantic aesthete who worries about flower meadows and rare pig breeds, who forages for his own mushrooms, who was correct about climate change long before public or establishment opinion recognised the onrushing apocalypse. Yet we also know, thanks to the Sunday Times, that the Windsor’s corporation tax-exempt duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster have been active in selling the rights to dig and drill in protected landscapes to mining companies.

Which is it, then? Does Charles love every tree and hedgerow in these ancient lands, or does he want to profit from despoiling them? A recent biography informs us that the present Queen is “an ordinary person who’s gone through the same things we all have” such as marrying a Prince of Wales, and who, in the 1990s, became an international hate figure. It could happen to any of us, I suppose.

Camilla is a long-standing campaigner against sexual abuse, but the Palace will not say whether she has read Giuffre’s book or even “expressed an interest in its contents”, reports the Sunday Times. We are told that her predecessor, Queen Elizabeth II, was a simple woman – almost a peasant, really – a rustic country hausfrau who loved her dogs and her horses and her Tupperware, yet continued to give Andrew an annual allowance of £1m long after his relationship with Epstein was public knowledge. Maybe that’s what any mother would have done in her position. Maybe it’s not.

William, the heir to the throne, is perhaps the most underexamined of all. We are briefed that like Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III before him, he will be a fresh, positive, modern influence who will delouse the archaic fabric of monarchy. He cries in commoner’s kitchens about mental health and is praised for his empathy. He watches Aston Villa and may even be able to name their second-choice goalkeeper. He even made sure his press secretary went to a comprehensive, not a public school. We know from the royal super-biographer Robert Hardman that William is unable to name a favourite author, but that this “box-set guy” does love “Batman-related” superhero movies.

In some respects William might simply reflect what the average British bloke is like today. But average isn’t the expectation of the Crown, and he differs a great deal from Charles and his grandmother. Thanks to Valentine Low, another long-time royal observer, we learn that: “William is not a great reader: he prefers an oral briefing.” In Power and the Palace, Low reports that William will be the first monarch in several generations not to have read Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution. Read between the lines. What are they telling you?

In Prince Harry’s Spare, William is a frowning, balding, swearing, feuding, violent Abel, who obsesses over keeping his brother’s charities out of Africa, as if these were territories that belonged to him the way they once belonged to Victoria. William emerges as furious and bossy, with an ultimate mission: the lifelong endurance test his grandmother called “duty”, a task he is prepared to sacrifice his brother for. “The monarchy, always, at all costs, had to be protected.”

What exactly is being protected at this stage? None of the arguments for paying to feed and water the Windsors make much sense any more. The Windsors provide stability. The Windsors provide pageantry. The Windsors, being “above” politics, never meddle in its process. The Windsors are an amorphous but vital part of our national identity, like the word “decency” and our unsettling tendency to prefer animals to foreigners. Taken together, these arguments amount not to a sturdy ballast for constitutional monarchy, but to Windsorism, an increasingly senile belief system.

It was George V who rechristened the firm after their castle in 1917, under pressure from a public mourning the deaths of 18 children killed by German bombs in east London, a public beginning to find the German origins of our royals suspicious. “Windsor” was homely and national, easy to imagine printed on a biscuit tin in a way that “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha” was not. This was change, but change made so that everything could stay the same. That is the essence of Windsorism. Not quite reactionary but definitely conservative. Distrustful of any reform beyond cosmetic tinkering, seeking after peace and stability. “In the Crown we possessed a symbol of patriotism, a focus of unison, an emblem of continuity in a rapidly dissolving world,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his George V (1952). That is a classically Windsorist passage. Why? Because the Windsors are presented as a consolation prize for the elite (“we”), of which Nicolson was a member, a way for them to keep a grip on the nation’s imagination during an era of decline. The “rapidly dissolving world” is the old world of the Victorians and empire. Britain’s horizons were shrinking – often due to choices made by men such as Nicolson. But they could still retain a link to that glory even as it passed, by maintaining a human breeding farm on a variety of estates in the home islands.

Windsorism had much in common with the personality of the late Queen and flourished during the last decades of her reign. Elizabeth II preferred “a sort of consensus politics rather than a polarised one”, Martin Charteris, Elizabeth II’s longest-serving assistant private secretary told the constitutional scholar (and dedicated Windsorist) Peter Hennessy. “If you are in the Queen’s position, you are the titular, the symbolic head of the country, and the less squabbling that goes on in the country, obviously the more convenient and comfortable you feel.” This might have been a noble ambition in the immediate aftermath of a global war. “There was a satisfaction,” Nicolson wrote, “in feeling that the sovereign stood above all class animosities, all political ambitions, all sectional interests.” An understandable desire for peace may explain why Windsorism lasted as long as it has. We see that desire hitting a wall under Starmer, a knight of the realm leading Labour into government for the first time in 14 years, but part of an unbroken line of Windsorist prime ministers stretching from John Major to Rishi Sunak.

Windsorism relies on the moral authority of the Palace being greater than that of parliament. Charles has pushed Windsorism further than his mother. In a fractious and polarised multicultural society, Windsorists believe that only the Crown unifies. The monarch, Hardman wrote in his insider biography Charles III, can “play the role of referee, promoting togetherness amid disunity”. Charles is analogous to Franz Joseph I, the Habsburg emperor whose sheer longevity prevented, for a time, his realm’s rot becoming fatal. When the emperor died in 1916, his empire soon vanished. He was powerless to prevent its collapse, because, like our own King, he was never really the one holding it together. “He saw the sun going down on his empire,” Joseph Roth wrote of the Franz Joseph in The Radetzky March. “But he said nothing. He knew he would die before it set.”

Britain today is a divided, downwardly mobile and irreligious place. Its monarchy is both important and irrelevant, silly and serious, trivial and profound; beyond real criticism from a supine media. Its members are idiosyncratic men and women who are forced by Windsorism, with increasing difficulty, into trying to represent the nation in its most characteristic form so that the rest of us can take an atavistic tribal pride in them. They are simultaneously a living alibi for not having to think too hard about how we are governed and, for Windsorists, the tense invisible thread stitching the nation together: the holders of ancient wisdom, the vessels of the people’s unspoken concerns. The United Kingdom. His Majesty’s Government. His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Stamps and bunting and bank notes. Decency and duty. Coronations and weddings. The more things change the more Britain stays the same, argue the Windsorists, the Crown being a cross-generational link between the past, the present and the future. England, argued the Windsorist philosopher Roger Scruton in England: An Elegy, was the “land construed as a person”; monarchs, the “light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”.

Royalty is no longer quite so royal in the way Scruton imagined. Forty years of scandal and betrayal have seen to that. “Monarchy is, I do believe, the system mankind has so far evolved which comes nearest to ensuring stable government,” Charles said in 1981. How stable is Britain now? The social peace and emollience the Crown is supposed to bring to our democracy have disappeared.

After the 7 October attacks in 2023, the King made a typically Windsorist speech at Mansion House. While his words did not address the atrocities directly, Charles made an implicit plea to his subjects to respect each other across demographic and religious lines. He talked hopefully about Britain as a “community of communities” and called, rightly and blandly, for civility and tolerance in public life. The Windsorist constitutional scholar Vernon Bogdanor interpreted the speech as Charles saying: “The politicians represent what divides us and he represents what unites us.” Bogdanor’s top-down argument, anti-democratic and anti-political, could only be made from a position of utter complacency. Politics, the art of finding majoritarian solutions to our deepest problems without violence, is what the country needs. Politics is not a squalid exercise in “division”. We need more politics, not less. Two years on, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Charles’s careful words were ignored by the public. In the 2020s, Britain cannot be wooed back into civility and tolerance by a rich old man with a medal on his chest.

At some subconscious level, our political class know and fear this. Like Nicolson, they know the country is in decline and they don’t know what to do about it. That is why so many of them have affected such deep, deferential, clingy Windsorism in recent years. Hardman’s biography of Charles is full of politicians meekly deferring to the monarch, or of the King making unanswered political interventions against them. The King did nothing to correct the idea that he despised the Rwanda asylum scheme; he wore a Greek-flag tie to criticise the government over the Elgin marbles controversy; at a state banquet in France he appeared to use his speech to attack Liz Truss.

The point is not whether these policies or the politicians behind them were right or wrong. The point is that Charles felt he could interfere in politics. He always has done, perhaps most famously when he lobbied New Labour about the fox-hunting ban. (Tony Blair, coincidentally, later called the ban “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret”.) His mother and great-grandfather, despite a popular legend of apoliticality, were much the same. George V eased the National Government into being in 1931, helping to smash the Labour Party for the best part of a generation in the process. Elizabeth II’s influence was decisive in keeping Rab Butler out of Downing Street in October 1963, in favour of the far more agreeably one-of-us Alec Douglas-Home. “She loved Alec,” an aide recalled later. “He was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together.” On such commonalities with the monarch were prime ministers made 35 years after Britain became a full democracy with the Representation of the People Act in 1928. The idea that Elizabeth was some sort of cuddly grandmother who looked down on politics from an exalted sphere is simply not true. She had her own interests. She pursued them. They were not always synonymous with the national interest. We need only think of her protection of Prince Andrew to understand this.

In the spring of 1979, the Shah was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi escaped, and bounced from country to country trying to find a safe harbour. Jim Callaghan and his foreign secretary, David Owen, believed it would be a mistake for Britain to be that. The Queen, according to Low, “is said to have expressed the view that Britain should show loyalty to the Shah”. The autocratic Pahlavi, who ran one of Earth’s most feared secret police forces, was nevertheless, like “Sir Alec”, one of us. The right sort of chap. Margaret Thatcher, soon to win that year’s general election, supported her.

Once she became prime minister, however, Thatcher was convinced by the Foreign Office that granting asylum to Pahlavi would endanger the lives of embassy staff in Tehran. He eventually ended up in the US. What conclusion can we draw from this? A harsh interpretation would be that the Queen cared more about giving succour to the exiled Shah than the safety of her civil servants abroad. “It was said she believed that states must recognise personal as well as national obligations,” wrote William Shawcross in The Shah’s Last Ride (1988). She was angered by the way Thatcher changed her mind. “Once you give your word,” the Queen allegedly said at a dinner party, “that’s it.”

From then on, relations between Thatcher and Elizabeth were never cloudless. They were particularly fraught over the Commonwealth, an area of policy in which the Queen frequently pursued her own interest. (A suggestion for why the Windsors liked the Commonwealth more than Thatcher was provided by Rupert Murdoch: “It’s something that makes them feel different from other royal families.”) In 1986, the Sunday Times, heavily briefed by Buckingham Palace’s press secretary Michael Shea, reported on its front page a rift between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher over the Commonwealth and the miners’ strike: “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher”. The story claimed to be based on an “unprecedented disclosure of the Monarch’s political views”.

A week later a follow-up story explained the Queen’s pursuit of her own foreign policy: she was “able to take a wider view of international problems than any national leader”. The then editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, would later claim the story was part of a “whispering campaign” against the prime minister from within a Palace that was determined to undermine her government”. Thatcher – who was so scared of the Queen that she twice fainted in her presence, often turned up 30 minutes early for their appointments and usually needed a whiskey immediately after – wanted to go on the attack, but knew she was at a disadvantage.

The prime minister told her adviser, Charles Powell: “Those little old ladies will say, ‘Mrs Thatcher is upsetting the Queen.’ I’ll lose votes.” Britain’s most radical postwar leader after Clement Attlee was cowed by Elizabeth. As the later Tory chancellor Ken Clarke, a rare non-Windsorist in the front line of British politics, put it: “Most politicians are so in awe of the royal family that expressions of displeasure from the Palace about issues bearing directly on the family can usually produce quite significant policy shifts.” Such an atmosphere of secrecy and deference is what produces a prince like Andrew and a country like the one we live in today.

It makes no difference whether politicians are blue or red. Charles is “above” them; they are beneath him. That is all our constitution is. Our political class clutches the royal boot and kisses feet. (Low reports the celebrated scholar of public law John Griffith remarking that “the British Constitution is what happens”.) The Windsorist justification runs that this keeps our politicians humble, honest. “The greatest power of the monarchy is politicians knowing their place,” simpered the former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden earlier this year. “Politicians come and go. The sovereign embodies the continuity of the British state.”

The former deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, admitted to Low that the civil service was scared of the Palace. “It was definitely my experience working as a civil servant that the thought of upsetting the Palace was not a happy one. So you pre-emptively think about it, and ministers would pre-emptively think about it, and ministers would pre-emptively think about what the impact would be of decisions that they were making.” The public believes our head of state is as harmless as a brand of shortbread biscuit, while the most senior civil servants in the realm worry about what the Palace might do to them should they make the firm unhappy.

Before Prince Andrew, it may have made sense for politicians and civil servants like Dowden and MacNamara to hide behind the Crown and its halo. This is, of course, what the Crown expects. “There isn’t any power. But there can be influence. The influence is in direct proportion to the respect people have for you,” Charles said in 1981. In his first three speeches after his mother died, Charles mentioned his duty to uphold and protect the constitution. It sounded like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Windsorist blather, but the new King was sending an important message to parliament and the civil service. He was giving them something to “pre-emptively think about”. Post-Boris Johnson and the prorogation crisis of August 2019, the Crown would be less amenable to manoeuvre by politicians.

We know how William felt about Johnson’s prorogation. In 2021 his friends briefed the Sunday Times that he would have handled it differently to his grandmother. When he became King there would be more “private, robust, challenging of advice”. Convention says that advice is meant to be followed, not challenged. William does not seem to understand this. What if, say, another high-risk constitutional manoeuvre were made by another populist or, perhaps, simply a radical prime minister is overwhelmingly supported by the public but opposed by a majority of Windsorist MPs, judges and senior civil servants, backed by a future King William V? We can imagine the royal response, like his ancestor Charles I’s in 1641: “Nolumus leges angliae mutari.” We are unwilling to change the laws of England.

What lies at the root of Windsorism – what gives it its emotional force, prolongs its life, maintains its hold over the British – is human sacrifice. Windsorism, ultimately, is cruel. It asks that babies become tea towels and brides become commemorative chinaware. As the second half of the 20th century wore on, the Windsors offered their children and grandchildren to the public and the tabloids as fodder and punchlines. They were not revered by us any more, unless you believe that dancing bears are revered. They were entertainment and chip paper. “I’m not very good at being a performing monkey,” said the Prince of Wales in 1994. But he was. His divorce, which he compared privately to a Greek tragedy, rivalled EastEnders not Sophocles as entertainment for a rapacious public. The pattern repeated itself with Harry and Meghan. Further sacrifice will be made of William and Kate’s children.

The Windsorists will call this sacrifice duty and moo that it provides a link with the past. Those who survive Windsorism are, like Zara Tindall, those who abandon it. “In their minds royal was synonymous with non-person,” Prince Harry writes of journalists. “Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.” This is his gloss on King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport…” Alternating extremes of spite and adulation are what our royals are required to weather as they are sacrificed. This is not stability. It’s dangerous. Cromwell remarked to Thomas Fairfax when they were riding through cheering crowds that the same people would have turned out as happily to see him hanged. So it is for the Windsors.

Shortly after he bought the News of the World in 1969, Rupert Murdoch had a conversation with his mother, Elisabeth. She fretted that the paper was too tawdry and coarse, even for her son. He told her not to worry. The life of the average Brit was so miserable that they needed proper diversions – gruesome murders, priapic vicars, royal divorces – to keep them sane. Murdoch was right: the proof was in the circulation figures of his newspapers. In the 1980s and 1990s, Murdoch’s tabloids trashed the Windsors and played them off against each other. The public lapped it up. In 1996, Murdoch, himself a republican, was asked if Britain should lose the Windsors. He observed that Britain didn’t have the “self-confidence” to live without the monarchy.

Republicanism is an almost buried tradition in Britain. The successors of Oliver Cromwell talk in the soporific language of accountants and lawyers and NGO managers. They grouse about costings and rationality. They talk dimly about the need for “grown up conversations” about the Crown, about “accountability” and “rationality” in ways that thrill sixth-form debating societies and bore everybody else. They lack self-confidence.

If republicanism returns, it must talk in the frank, sturdy, moral language of the 17th and 18th centuries. It must condemn corruption and demand redress. It must fight the irrationality of the hereditary principle with its own forms of irrationality. “What is called splendour of the throne is no other than the corruption of the state,” wrote Tom Paine in 1791. “It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of public taxes.” Those two lines are worth more than anything put to paper by a republican in Britain for 70 years. They also, given our experience with Prince Andrew, remain true.

The Crown is not a politically neutral, ceremonial creche designed to produce toothy celebrity symbols for the gaiety of the nation. It is a political actor. It has its own interests. It has protected the reputation of Andrew at all costs for the best part of 15 years, despite this being an insane and disgusting course of action. Successive governments and MPs of all parties have helped the Crown do so. Lords and judges are appointed in Charles’s name, police officers swear an oath to him. Charles cannot be sued. He has access to more official documents than any minister. He sits on a reserve of gold, diamonds and jewels that would make Smaug weep. Parliamentary convention dictates that Crown consent is sought whenever a proposed piece of legislation will affect Charles’s prerogatives or interests, including hereditary revenues and personal property. What I am describing is pure power. I could go on listing and documenting that power for several pages. There is no British equivalent to Japan’s Imperial Household Law, which defines the emperor’s ceremonial and symbolic role. Instead we have the Crown. We have power that exceeds symbolism. And, looking at the Windsors’ activities with Prince Andrew, the abuse of that power. We have the splendour of the throne and the corruption of the state.

It may be that this power is beginning to fade. It will soon be questioned in parliament, a highly unusual moment, pregnant with possibility. The world is rapidly dissolving and so are the Windsors. The family itself is thinning out, with fewer and fewer of them to go around. The King is an aged, ill man who will be succeeded by a middle-aged man, who, in turn, will be followed by George, by then long past his youth. The future of the House of Windsor will be a conveyor belt of cloistered and confused men attempting to force consensus on an ungovernable country.

William should stop the rot and acknowledge the truth when his father dies. The mystique is gone. Charles III should be the last King of England. He is the last Windsor who really believes in any of the hocus-pocus of his house. William doubts that God exists. How can he go through with a coronation in Westminster Abbey without acknowledging that God has put him there, on the throne?

Abolition would be contested and vicious. Or, the monarchy could end very beautifully. There are inalterable facts in our lives and the lives of nations. As Charles’s favourite poet wrote centuries ago: “All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity…” The old statesman’s body in a casket on the Royal Train. Crowds would gather along the route as they did for Elizabeth, to watch its journey as dusk falls, to hear its pistons hiss through the meadows, the Crown and the King being carried sadly back to the old chapel in Windsor, home again to the green heart of England, the royal throne of kings royal no more. A final human sacrifice. There would be no more kings. But there would be no more princes either.

[Further reading: The wonderful world of Prince Andrew]

What he loved most was the exclusivity of the clientele. The Clooneys were only a few tables away. Also present were Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie – “They’re very nice, those girls; they’re both really nice.” Meanwhile, their disgraced father was presumably sulking in a black box in Windsor, without any iconic spicy rigatoni to comfort him. Carbone had only been open for a few weeks, but it reminded Morgan of the old Covent Garden Ivy in its starry, early-Noughties pomp under restaurant power couple Chris Corbin and Jeremy King. Hard to get a table. Celebs climbing the walls. Comforting menu.

But what clinched the evening for Morgan was the presence of Mikel Arteta at a nearby table. The notably circumspect Arsenal manager had so far managed to avoid meeting Morgan – the notably uncircumspect and voluble Arsenal superfan – since taking over the club in 2019. Morgan bounded over to Arteta’s table to discuss transfers.

Arsenal had a busy summer window, spending a club record-breaking £257m. That included £63.7m on the clumsy Swedish striker Viktor Gyökeres, who, with three goals in eight Premier League games since his big move, has more closely resembled a slow-turning basking shark that occasionally gets hit by a football than a world-class forward. Morgan loved Gyökeres, though, and told Arteta. “Why?” asked Arteta. “Because his work rate is unbelievable. He takes two defenders off whenever he goes,” Morgan replied. Then, according to Morgan, Arteta went: “Exactly!” The leading strategist in English football agreed with the leading journalist in the English-speaking world. Spectacular.

Morgan works most Mondays and Wednesdays in the News Building, a glass-and-steel Death Star owned by Rupert Murdoch that squats next to the Shard and overlooks the River Thames. HarperCollins and the Times and the Sunday Times occupy the top-floor offices, where imperial views encompass all of London – and, beyond the city, seemingly the whole world. Morgan’s seismically popular Uncensored YouTube show is located in a basement – or, at least, down a flight of stairs from the first floor, deeper in the building’s bowels – where I am ushered to meet him in his admirably small dressing-room-slash-lair. Framed splashes, a typographic print of a Winston Churchill quote and magazine covers about Piers Morgan swarm the walls beside a sofa. I sit down. The self-described liberal wants to talk to me about his new book, unambiguously titled Woke Is Dead.

But it’s also a big news day. In Morganese, it’s “sensational” and “massive”, it’s “huge” and “explosive”. Donald Trump rattled into the Holy Land yesterday, releasing several doves over the bloodthirsty warring tribes there – apparently bringing peace to the region and the surviving hostages back to Israel. Lions, at last, were lying down with lambs. Roses were shedding their thorns. Should Trump – whom Morgan considers a mate – get the Nobel Peace Prize?

“Why shouldn’t he?” Morgan shoots back. He’s dressed in blue suit trousers, a white shirt and shiny black shoes. He has a large forehead, surrounded by an even larger face and small, clever eyes. He looks steamed somehow – pinkish – as if he’s been simmering in a pot on the stove for a couple of hours.He swivels on a chair in front of a dressing mirror and looks at me. The small eyes grow smaller.

“I’m serious!” exclaims Morgan, grinning. He wants to know how the New Statesman could possibly suggest that Trump is not worthy of the prize, something we never suggested. He’s rolling now: “Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize after eight months in office and two fancy speeches, and did nothing to warrant it all; why would Trump not get one?”

I realise Morgan would like a row, but I find him too funny and interesting for that. He speaks in perfect tabloidese: irreverent, indignant. Every question is answered either with a baiting return serve or a completely unambiguous statement. Listening to Morgan is like travelling back in time to hear him dictate copy to a cringing leader writer on the Daily Mirror circa 2002. Did he meet Obama when Morgan replaced Larry King at CNN during the former president’s first term? “Yes, once.” What was he like? “Frosty.” We both laugh. Morgan says he was about “number 1,800” in a 3,000-person queue at a meet-and-greet with the Obamas at some overwrought Washington DC comms event back in the day. While Morgan scrolls through his phone to find a picture of himself with the president and Michelle, I tell him a rumour I’ve heard about one of them.

“Really?!” Morgan looks up from his phone. I can almost see the screaming headline flashing in his mind: “BARACK OBAMA REVEALS…” He turns the idea over in his mind for a couple of seconds. Ten years editing both the Mirror and the News of the World have given him a nose for bullshit. “I would be astonished if that was true. I think that’s wishful thinking.” Still, it’s clear he prefers the current president to whoever Obama was back then – or has become now. He last spoke to Trump on 18 September, the morning after the state banquet at Windsor Castle. I mention that a member of the cabinet thinks Benjamin Netanyahu is the most “alpha” politician in the world – this is genuinely the kind of thing politicians talk about in WhatsApp groups. Morgan is having none of it. Only his man Trump has the “alpha personality” and all the “alpha moves.” I realise that Morgan’s swivel chair is much higher up than the blue sofa I’m sitting on. He towers over me, despite being shorter. Alpha move.

Morgan is by some distance the most successful British hack of his generation. His life reads like a schoolboy’s dream of journalism realised in every detail. Born 1965. Grows up in an East Sussex country pub. Dad, a dentist, dies very early. Mum, usefully discreet and immensely supportive. Local news reporter. Then showbiz reporter at the News of the World. Rupert Murdoch makes him editor of the most ferocious tabloid in the Anglosphere at 28. Sensational. Unbelievable. World exclusive. Defects to edit the Daily Mirror just a year later. Jaw-dropping. Huge. Truly staggering. Fired in 2004 after dragging the paper into a no-holds-barred confrontation with Labour over Iraq. Morgan wouldn’t apologise for publishing images of British squaddies appearing to abuse Iraqi prisoners that many thought fake. Horror show. Gutted. Derided. Loses his chauffeur. Writes The Insider, the funniest book written about British journalism in the past 30 years.

Moves into television. Britain’s Got Talent. Absolutely massive. Moves over the Atlantic. Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN in 2011. Bigger, better, bolder, but bad ratings. Show axed. Complete disgrace. Back over the Atlantic in 2015. Good Morning Britain. Storms out amid controversy after he’d called Meghan Markle a liar. Farce. Rehired by Murdoch for TalkTV. Staggering. But the channel bombs. Disaster. Morgan buys the rights in 2024 and moves the whole show to YouTube. It explodes. Interviews, debates, world exclusives. The editor has become the ringmaster of the internet’s biggest talk show. “I’m my own boss,” he tells me proudly. Millions of followers, subscribers and views. Millions of pounds in revenue. Gigantic. Global. They know him in India now. I looked before the interview for a photo of Morgan in the past 30 years where he isn’t beaming like a nutter. Impossible. The guy just loves it.

We only have 45 minutes, although we end up talking for an hour. I get Morgan to rattle out some instant op-eds. He would still have dinner with the thrice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, but he knows it’s over for him in terms of public life: “I feel sorry for him.” Likewise, Prince Andrew deserves to be banished to the outer darkness, because you can’t carry on with a paedophile like Jeffrey Epstein once you know he’s been convicted. British print journalists are facing a reality check: “Newspapers are dying.”

Morgan thinks Keir Starmer is a dud, with Labour “awful” since they took power, but he is fond of Wes Streeting, “a skilful politician”. Nigel Farage is the “best communicator in politics”, but his economic policies “are a massive Achilles heel”. Prince Harry is “as dumb as a rock”. The monarchy itself is “quite a tenuous thing now”. What about GB News co-owner Paul Marshall? “Paul is a smart guy.” Why didn’t he join the channel? They made Morgan multiple offers, but he doesn’t think he’s right-wing enough to take his show there. He saw Murdoch – “driven, genius, forward-looking” – this time last year. They lunched. Murdoch had just been to a Starlink satellite launch site run by another Morgan mate, Elon Musk. “He was absolutely blown away by it all.”

Morgan is houndishly loyal to his old masters. He talks about Murdoch and Simon Cowell the way the Pope talks about Jesus and the Virgin Mary. “He was like a teenager talking with excitement about what he had seen. That’s Rupert’s mind and that’s what Elon is like. The really transformative figures in our world, in our lives, are the people that always look forward.”

I ask Morgan if he’s sentimental about anything. “Not really, no.” Even Arsenal? “No. I always look forward.”

Woke Is Dead feels like a bit of a period piece. Woke definitely is dead thanks to Trump’s re-election last year, although I suspect Morgan thinks it is alive and well at the New Statesman. Disappointingly for him, I basically agree with the parts of the book I skim through before going back to The Insider. (I find it impossible to resist a text that describes the late Queen Mother like this: “Absolutely tiny and moves very, very slowly – like a little shrew moving through a sea of treacle.”) Still, I suppose we must argue about what Morgan refers to during our conversation as “woke”, “wokeism”, “the woke mob”, “the woke brigade”, “the woke outbreak”, “the woke mind virus”, “the woke ideology” and “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”.

If we take “woke”, broadly, to mean altering the balance of societies to enhance the rights of women and minorities, in order that they achieve equity with other groups, wouldn’t a totally “woke” world actually be a happier place? Would it be terrible for Pakistan to become woke? Or Chad? Morgan cuts me off. He looks like a python that’s about to pounce on a cornered gerbil. “Are you woke?”

“Not really,” I confess. He suddenly looks sad. “I’m not even sure people will admit to it any more.” I try to make him answer the question: surely a “woke” Chad would be a better Chad? “I don’t buy that argument.” He says it’s contradictory for “people on the woke left” to support Hamas. I point out that if the Gaza Strip were ruled by a “woke” dictatorship, there probably wouldn’t be much room for Hamas there. “The woke wouldn’t be in charge,” Morgan says, with some menace. But if they were? “Right, well, if Mother Theresa ran the world it would be a nicer place. You can take a hypothetical to the nth degree. It’s not gonna happen.” Is Susanna Reid, his former co-host on Good Morning Britain, woke? “She’s pretty woke, yeah,” Morgan chuckles. Although, when he watches her now, she “sounds increasingly less woke”. Morgan 1-0 Reid.

I change the subject from “woke” by asking Morgan a question he asked Gordon Ramsay in 2005. “If you could have sex with one other woman with your wife’s permission before you die, who would it be?” Morgan bursts out laughing and doesn’t stop for a while. “Did I really ask him that?!” I tell him he did. “Hmmm. With my wife’s permission…” He looks thoughtful for a vanishing split-second. “I think the gentleman in me is going to have to take a pass on that.” He applauds the New Statesman for asking him one of his own questions, though. “The Morganisation of journalism is complete!”

He’s probably right about that. Journalism is barely recognisable from the industry that Morgan bombed out of in 2004. Anybody with a phone can have a go at it. While traditional reporters are tethered to paralysing libel rules, podcasters like Joe Rogan can and do say anything they like. Social media revealed that far from the tabloids being as uniquely cruel as they were thought to be in the News of the World’s phone-tapping heyday, there is a miniature, fulminating Piers Morgan or Kelvin MacKenzie inside each and every one of us, merrily posting trash online. Is daily life more or less cruel for not being dominated by tabloid headlines? You can find the same stuff every day in Facebook groups or X threads.

Morgan has to go. A gleaming black Mercedes is waiting for him outside the News Building. He doesn’t want to stop talking. We argue about Trump. Morgan thinks he will respect the results of the next presidential election. I tell him about a conversation I had with a senior diplomatic source who thinks Trump will run again. We are standing outside the office. Journalists stream past us. “I bet you £100 Trump will step down,” says Morgan. I accept. “Only £100, though,” he cackles, “I would go higher but I know you can’t afford it!” He steps into the powerful car. Alpha move.

[Further reading: The Wonderful World of Prince Andrew]

By 2010, Vidal was waterlogged, a storied and slowly sinking destroyer. He could no longer control his bladder. He hallucinated. His brain, the doctors said, was “wet”. He had dementia and congestive heart failure and a tendency to excommunicate what few friends remained, or banish once-loved nephews he believed were spying on him for the Central Intelligence Agency. Old comrades turned away.

Christopher Hitchens accused him in Vanity Fair of hawking “crank-revisionist and denialist history”. At the time, Hitchens was the spokesperson for a large constituency that believed liberal democracy could be spread throughout the Middle East by the US Marine Corps and the Fifth Fleet. Vidal thought that elements within the Bush administration might have allowed 9/11 to happen. He also predicted that the US would be run out of Afghanistan, paving the way for China to resume its historic role as a world power.

Vidal seemed mad and sad and alone and drunk. His writing – his writing, Vidal’s, whose essays had been compared to his hero Montaigne’s – no longer seemed contemporary. It was the early Obama era. The cargo-cult optimism that accompanied the 44th president’s rise was not yet completely dispersed. And there was Vidal, who couldn’t read the room any more, gabbling from his wheelchair about the downfall of the United States, writing and saying everything was bad and would only get worse. Maybe he had nothing left to say, mistaking the decline of his own flesh and mind for the decline of the world itself. His watchful attendants – all of whom would be cut from Vidal’s legacy when he died in July 2012 – approached him wearing surgical gloves, as if to protect themselves from contagion. Vidal had always liked to quote Montaigne on death: “How did the living die and what did they say and how did they look at the end?” Those near Vidal as he lingered on and on noticed that however reduced he was, even when he was wracked and struggling to breathe, his eyes stayed wide open.

Gore Vidal was born 100 years ago. His family had roots in the Irish bog (maternal) and the Austrian Alps (paternal). While Vidal would eventually entertain on two coasts, and in London, Venice, Marrakesh, Bangkok, Rome, his antecedents were heartlanders; his grandfather was a US senator from Oklahoma, a populist – as Vidal later reflected without judgement 1985, “anti-banks, anti-railroad, anti-black and anti-Semitic” –  and an isolationist. His self-image was aristocratic: “I belong to the highest class there is: I’m a third-generation celebrity. My grandfather, father and I have all been on the cover of Time. That’s all there is. You can’t go any higher in America.” The Vidals were the ruling class. His father, an aviation pioneer, still has an award at West Point named after him; his mother is usually described as an “ambitious” (drunk) socialite. The United States was the family business. He felt that the state itself was his patrimony: “Whenever I want to know what the United States is up to, I look into the blackness of my own heart”. Vidal’s understanding of power’s true basis was elitist. Small groups and charisma counted for more than ideas. Individuals generated more real motion than systems. History was no more than a kind of “gossip”. 

The US in 1925 was largely dominated by a north-eastern Wasp establishment which took their manners, clothing, sporting habits, husbands and stylised anti-Semitism from the British aristocracy. The country was ambitious and industrious, driving hard and fast towards an imperial horizon. After the Second World War, Vidal would grow to become the chronicler of that transition from republic to empire. “We have embarked upon empire (Rome born again our heavy fate) without a Virgil in the crew, only tarnished silver writers in a bright uranium age,” he wrote in 1956: part lament, part audition for the role he was destined to play. An essayist, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and occasional ham actor, Vidal’s work adds up to a beguiling, barbed compound of Tacitus and Oscar Wilde.

He confused his contemporaries, the American alpha novelists like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His art was not as pure or secluded as Roth’s or Bellow’s, less frenzied than Mailer’s. “Art is energy shaped by intelligence,” he wrote. His intelligence was lacerating. His energy was bullying and gratuitous; he liked to goad his targets, to kick and scratch at them when they were down. An irrepressible bitch, he impugned people by questioning their mental acuity. He liked to tell his readers who people really were. Edward VIII: “The Duke’s stupidity was of a perfection seldom encountered outside institutions.” F Scott Fitzgerald: “barely literate”. The English: “eccentric Norwegians”. Ronald Reagan: “an indolent cue-card reader”. When he was an old man he said he regretted that he had never killed anybody. He had no need for regrets. His essays were already littered with bodies.

He produced trash from time to time in a way that even Mailer, author of an alimony-raising Marilyn Monroe biography, sidestepped. Caligula (1979) was “easily one of the worst films ever made”, Vidal said. He was its screenwriter. In Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), Fred Kaplan reports how Bellow introduced his son to Vidal with the words, “I want him to meet someone really cynical!” They thought Vidal, when he turned to politics and power – the subject that is the true through-line of his work – was a paranoid bore. Roth, whose overblown late-historical novel sequence has rightly been compared to watching a man chewing, dismissed Vidal as “a society hairdresser who has written a book or two”. While Roth lived like a monk in his forested 150-acre Connecticut estate, Vidal palled around with Tim Robbins and Princess Margaret and Tennessee Williams. Following Goethe, Vidal did not believe talent could survive if it was solitary. Talent must enter the torrent of the world and fight. That was how real character formed. He laughed at the alphas for their “terrible garrulousness” and their lamely insular writing about writing. Men like Roth and Bellow were chestless talents, not mighty characters. Vidal noted that American authors were, “if not Waldenised solitaries, Darwinised predators constantly preying on one another”. He was a superb and steely predator.

Vidal predicted his own future and those of the other writers he came up with. Their lives – picked over by academics and journalists – would blot out their work. “Novels command neither interest nor affection but writers do, particularly colourful ones who have made powerful legends of themselves. I suspect that eventually novels will be read only to provide clues to the author’s personality…” In the obituaries, the awful prophetic power of Vidal’s novels and essays take a back seat to his mannerisms, sexual habits and friendships. There was naked envy at the way he was able to live. “I interviewed Vidal for the Sunday Times in 1984,” wrote one undoubtedly penurious British novelist in 2012 in a typical death notice. “We had lunch in his room at the Dorchester – A-list authors were well looked after then.” The obituarists were not remembering Gore Vidal. They were wondering why they weren’t as rich or as successful as he was. Otherwise they condemned him, as Gideon Rachman did in a short, curt piece in the Financial Times: “Vidal was an arrogant conspiracy theorist, trading off a reputation he made with novels written decades ago.”

Early on in his valedictory 1,200-page United States: Essays 1952-1992, Vidal tells his readers who he is. “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag,” he declared in 1956. Across reviews, reportage and memoir in that collection, Vidal prosecutes a set of unchanging arguments. America, once a republic, was now a decadent empire doomed to become a tyranny. Literature could not be taught by academics or studied in universities; it existed only to illuminate people and transform them into “archetypes – elemental figures like those wild gods our ancestors peopled heaven with”. Monotheism was “intrinsically funny”. The sexual attitudes of any given society were the result of political decisions. If an argument or personality inspired great hatred, that meant they were usually right about something. (This was convenient for Vidal, who attracted passionate hatred at all times.) History was a set of “crude fictions” agreed by contemporaries, then selected and presented as truth at a later date by unwitting historians and biographers. The world was governed by men’s deeds, not by buried Freudian motives. Events were the work of individuals who were “frivolous, even casual”. We are atoms. All the essential problems of life are the same, generation after generation. There is “no cosmic point to our lives”. Nothing follows us. “No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”

Like Montaigne or Suetonius, Vidal had the gift of telling us what we ache to know. His birth and breeding gave him access to rooms that careful observers are often barred from. (The powerful and celebrated do not, generally, want to be watched too closely by cruel eyes.) From Vidal we learn that Amelia Earhart had “mild-white eyelashes”; Tennessee Williams once “commented favourably” on John F Kennedy’s arse; Orson Welles patted his stomach “as if it were a dog”; Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt’s arguments usually ended with her fleeing from the dinner table “in tears”; Anaïs Nin referred to herself as a “legend” in later life; Edmund Wilson, well into his seventies, would begin an evening at the Princeton Club by lining up a sequence of six martinis at its bar, and after a few drinks Clark Gable would “loosen his false teeth, which were on some sort of peg and then shake his head until they rattled like dice”. Vidal relates a public dinner with Harry Truman, with the former president in the middle of “making a particularly solemn point”. Suddenly Truman’s face “jerked abruptly into a euphoric grin, all teeth showing”. Vidal thought Truman had finally lost it, when he saw “photographers had appeared in the middle distance”. The high and the mighty, the commanders of fleets and bombers, the playwrights and artists: to Vidal they were all so many whores.

He wanted and expected to be the president of the United States. From Vidal’s perspective nothing else made sense. He was reading Livy (in translation) by the age of seven, flew and landed a plane by the age of ten, attended his first presidential convention at fourteen. By the time he was 25, he claims in his memoir Palimpsest, he had had over a thousand sexual encounters. This was not gay, of course. (“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person.”) He said if he had become president he would have married and had nine children. Vidal stood as a Democrat in Republican upstate New York in 1960 and narrowly lost the race. In 1982 he finished second in the Californian Democratic senatorial primary to Jerry Brown. In between he twice set out his vision for America in “state of the union” addresses, as if he were an unelected shadow president, written for Esquire magazine. 

“We hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how”, he wrote in May 1975. “We don’t know what our cage really looks like because we were born in it and have nothing to compare it to but if anyone has the key to the lock then where the hell is he?”

Gore Vidal believed – he sincerely assumed as his birthright – that Gore Vidal had that key. Jason Epstein was the co-founder of the New York Review of Books as well as the editorial director of Penguin Random House, and Vidal’s editor at both, recalled that, “He thought he should be president and would have been better than most.” Vidal, like Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, was a visionary politician who had somehow been waylaid by literature. He was trapped in his historical novel sequence and his essays. It was as if after Disraeli wrote Vivian Grey he never became an MP or Prime Minister. 

What kind of president would Vidal have made, nine children aside? “Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist — in theory, anyway — but he was not convincing as one”, wrote the New York Times in its obituary. “Both by temperament and by birth he was an aristocrat.” We have discovered in our own time that a billionaire (Trump) or a private school boy (Farage, Johnson) can renege on the values, ideals and expectations of their class. An “aristocratic” upbringing is not a barrier to harrying a distant, uncaring oligarchy nor promising a rabid electorate retribution for the failures of their leaders. This did not mean Vidal loved the people. That wasn’t what was at stake. “The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid”, he wrote. “Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.”

There was a fearsome autocratic populist inside Vidal. He was fascinated enough by Abraham Lincoln, whom he knew had similar tendencies, to summon him to the pages of a best-selling novel. He likened Lincoln to Otto von Bismarck, admiring him not for “freeing the slaves” but for his Caesarian certainty and ruthlessness. He liked to quote Lincoln’s speech before the Springfield lyceum in 1838. “Here he speaks of the nature of ambition and how, in a republic that was already founded, a tyrant might be tempted to reorder the state in his own image. At the end Lincoln himself did just that. There is a kind of terrible Miltonian majesty in his address to the doubtless puzzled young men of the Springfield lyceum. In effect, their twenty nine year old contemporary was saying that, for the ambitious man, it is better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven.” 

Lincoln, “this essential American writer”, was simultaneously the same as Vidal and his opposite “A literary genius who was called upon to live, rather than merely to write, a high tragedy.” Lincoln’s bloody re-ordering of the United States through warfare, his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863, all his terrible fateful grandeur, amounted to something like the first and (so far) only tyranny experienced by the United States – that was the life Vidal wanted for himself. Instead, novels and essays. Nervous interviewers, winding their way towards Vidal’s palace overlooking the Gulf of Salerno, the same sea that Tiberius gazed upon from Capri, were unsettled by Vidal once they met him. They compared him to Xerxes and Adolf Hitler. “The trouble with Gore,” Princess Margaret once observed, “is that he wants my sister’s job.” She wasn’t joking. 

In late January this year I was in Washington for the second inauguration of Donald Trump. The Golden Horde was moving into the frozen city. There was flu in the air, and the bars began to fill with bearded young men in red hats with running nostrils who told me about the anonymous racist X accounts they ran from their phones. They were about to start working for the Pentagon or the State Department.

At a cocktail party I stood next to a famous Maga essayist dressed in white tie who had been pulled back into working for Trump on national security, while he went through the pros and cons of bombing Iran. On balance he thought it would happen soon. A gala reception was held for one of the released Israeli hostages. I couldn’t hear what she was saying because I was being harangued by somebody who believed 9/11 was an inside job. Trump was spoken of flatly, with no irony, as an emperor. The Golden Horde was not sure it wanted to go through the rigmarole of another election. The hottest party in town was called the “Coronation Ball”. We watched the ceremony in the Capitol rotunda on 20 January in a bar filled with boys hollering at the sight of the oligarchs who owned most of the American economy, men who once turned their newspapers and social platforms against Trump, kneeling and broken before his power. At night the white marble monuments in the centre of the city yellowed under artificial light until their colour was indistinguishable from old skull and bone.

Vidal did not live to see this moment but he would have recognised it. America was “rotting away at a funeral pace” he told the Times in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.” He believed Obama would be broken by the “madhouse” that the US had become. The Americans were chased out of Kabul in 2021, years after it had become obvious that China had resumed its historic role as a major world power and a peer of the US, something Vidal had anticipated in 1988. The cost of empire that pushed America down with “nukes, bases, debts” had eventually inspired a populist revolt from its immiserated citizenry, opening the gates of the capital to a figure Vidal knew well from history: Caesar. America First would return, Vidal said in early 1995. “It’s no bad rallying cry.”

Extreme sickness had made an extreme remedy inevitable. The conspiracy theories Vidal obsessed over were now truths widely held and cherished throughout America. The madhouse rattled and jabbered to music that he heard first, many years before. When I returned from Washington, I found my old copy of United States. The author portrait showed him in black and white, turning shyly half away, his mouth turning towards a smile, eyes wide open. The years of bile lay far in the future.

United States: Essays 1952-1992
Gore Vidal
Abacus, 1,213pp, £18.99

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

[Further reading: Kamala Harris cares too much about being nice]

It was 2.17pm on the second day of the conference. The improbably tanned Dr David Bull appeared on the main stage. Reform’s chairman is a hybrid of Douglas Murray and the late Dale Winton, though more menacingly right-wing than both of them. (This is saying something: you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard about Winton’s politics.) I tried to avoid looking directly at Bull, for my own safety. If you reflected concentrated sunlight off his teeth, the resulting beam would be enough to turn a skyscraper to ash. Bull looked a little sheepish after Zeus messed up the timekeeping. “He’s called Showbiz Mitch,” said Bull chucklingly of the announcer. “And he’s clearly been on the wine!” Thousands of Reform UK members in the stands around me tittered indulgently. Showbiz Mitch had been on the wine? Well, so had everybody else. This was, after all, the morning after the night before.

For several hours on the opening day of the conference I was worried. A reshuffle and resignation in the government had sent lobby journalists hurtling back towards Westminster – literally, in the case of GB News’ political correspondent, “Chopper”. There was an intense look of dominate-the-story on his face as he sprinted back to the train station. He seemed swollen with pure news: stick a pin his side and he would have exploded into source quotes and headlines. It was not inconceivable that Chopper ran the 118 miles back to the Commons from Birmingham just so he could say the words “Angela Rayner” on College Green.

Was this the right place to be? Reform had been labelled “camp” by a major right-wing magazine a few days before the conference began. Rather than looking at what the party has achieved as it chewed on what little remained of the Conservative Party in the past 12 months – a burgeoning membership, spectacular wins in council and by-elections, and a 15-point lead over a misfiring government in the latest polls – the Spectator decided to call Reform another word for “gay” on its cover. Maybe this wasn’t a very important gathering. Maybe the polls could be ignored. Maybe promising to deport 600,000 people is just a bit of sequinned Wildean banter. Maybe politics would go back to “normal” and dreamily cruising technocrats coloured Tory blue or Labour red would form the next government in 2029, just as they have done for the past century. Maybe it was all a bit… camp.

The conference was not a conference at all. It was a rally in a hangar that smelled strongly of fried onions and chopped hog due to a couple of food vans plonked in the middle of one of the halls. The allium smell was as physical as an arm wrestle. It hung over the attendees: 10,000 Reform Party members. I asked one, a former military man, if they were “camp”. His answer was disappointing: “Fuck off.”

I walked over to the main stage auditorium and took a seat. Imagine a basketball arena bathed in turquoise light. The seated Reformers in the glow were a spectral blue: rank after rank of staring ghosts. A cheerful man next to me, who claimed to be on Reform’s councillor candidate list, said he had once worked for MI6. I decided not to ask him if he was “camp” as well.

Above us was a jumbo screen. Every hour or so Jeremy Kyle appeared up there, gamboling about the conference floor with a camera crew, interviewing happy Reformers. He found two bearded men in three-piece Union Jack suits they bought from Amazon. They were veterans. “I hate what this country has become,” one told Kyle, who frowned.

Kyle turned to the camera. In the auditorium his manicured, familiar face was as enormous as a moon. A wave of heady nostalgia washed over me: watching Kyle gearing up to go off on a big one was like being back in 2005, before everything went wrong, with ITV2 playing in the background of an endless summer afternoon. Kyle let rip. We were definitely in 2025 now: “We lived our lives correctly. Why are we at the back of the queue?” The crowd hooted. Kyle smirked.

As evening fell, I found a man who worked for Nigel Farage. He was intelligent and decorous. He said the leader had accepted the inevitability of becoming prime minister. Something had changed inside Nige. There was a new gravitas, a new caution, a new respect for process. The bomb-throwing Farage of yore, who never saw an institution he didn’t want to tear down, had instead become Nigel the Builder, mastermind and foreman of Reform, the most significant new political force in 100 years. Farage, it was said, even drank slightly less than he used to. I shuddered. It was like hearing that Noel Edmonds had shaved his beard off.

Soon the afterparty began. Seats were cleared in the auditorium, creating a dance floor. After an initial school disco feeling of desertion and apathy, the room began to hum. Nigel was coming. He appeared on stage in an eyeball-melting turquoise suit. “I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’m not the main singer.” Who would be? Lee Anderson? Ann Widdecombe? Enoch Powell? The crowd booed. There was a scream: “Piss off Nigel!”

“Although,” he grinned, “if I have another beer I might change my mind.” The crowd, geared up as if for a wedding in waistcoats and ball gowns and tuxedos, cheered ecstatically. “The Conservative Party! Is! Dead!” More thunderous hollering. Farage began a story. “I was almost moved to tears by this,” he began. An elderly member, in his nineties, had somehow broken through the testudo of burly security guards that surrounded the leader earlier in the day to tell Farage his final aspiration. The elderly geezer said he was only staying alive so that he could see Farage take Downing Street. I began to realise that everybody was very, very drunk.

I staggered out towards one of the bars. Some young men were there –the sort of boys who used to loiter at the fringes of Conservative Party conference. Now they were here, cannily aware that the future promised much more with Reform. They looked small and sharp, like little elves. “Who do you work for?” one of them squeaked. He was drunk too. I told him. He twitched. One of his eyes grew larger. “You… are the enemy!” He turned away and almost collapsed into a bin.

The afterparty was rocking. Somehow (money), Reform had managed to book the remnants of the Jackson 5 – billed at this late stage simply as the Jacksons – to sing and dance for this rebellious crowd. Happiness, joy and Marlon Jackson’s voice filled the air. “No other country in the world could do this!” shouted one woman. I tried to ask her if she was “camp” as well, but it was impossible to hear anything over the familiar, oddly comforting Jackson crooning. The light in the room was strange. They danced and danced and danced. They said they were going to win, that they could not be stopped. I looked at people’s faces, and for a brief moment all I could see was Nigel Farage smiling back at me.

[See also: How Labour learned to love the flag]

It was the most telling moment of the two-day conference. Thousands of words have been wasted by the media trying to work out if Reform is aesthetically “camp” or “whacky” or “end of the pier” or “daytime television-coded”. But here was, if the polls are to be believed, a convicted prisoner and self-confessed racist being crowned by the next government as a blessed saint and a bleeding martyr for their cause, a cross between Nelson Mandela and Kyle Rittenhouse. Connolly was treated as normal, not aberrant. Nobody around me believed she had done anything wrong.

Connolly, interviewed on stage by the Daily Telegraph’s Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson, was talking about her son Harry. Fourteen years ago, Harry died – a catastrophic blow to Connolly’s family made worse by NHS negligence. Harry’s death, she and her partner Ray believed, was preventable. The tragedy continued to colour her life in unexpected ways. She felt she could not really be hurt anymore: as a mother, the worst thing that could happen to her had already come to pass. She talked about this softly and slowly. The thousands of Reformers in the stands around the stage listened along as quiet as church mice.

I looked at each of the three women in turn. Each of them was silently crying, while their partners held their hands.

On the evening of Monday 29 July last year Lucy Connolly posted on X. It was a few hours after three girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. Rumours circulated online that the killer was an asylum seeker, a Muslim who had crossed the channel on a small boat to enter England. Connolly, afraid for the safety of her 12-year-old daughter (she would later describe herself in court as a “ridiculously overprotective mother”) sent the following tweet:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.” The post was deleted three and a half hours later, but not before it had been reposted 940 times and been viewed 310,000 times on X.

On 6 August Connolly was arrested for the post, then bailed. Three days later she was arrested again and interviewed by the police about previous tweets. She was charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with distributing material intending to stir up racial hatred, and with the more serious crime of intending to incite serious violence.

In the days between Connolly’s post and her arrest, riots shook England and Northern Ireland. In Tamworth and Rotherham crowds attempted to set fire to asylum hotels while they were housing human beings. On 1 August, as the riots began to spread, Keir Starmer began to lay some of the blame on social media companies and their users for the criminal activity. He described it as “violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime, it’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere”.

This was the Prime Minister in full “Mr Rules” mode. If there is such a thing as Starmerism, it can be found in such statements. Rules, norms, conventions and procedures must be upheld. Starmer, a former public prosecutor, has always been happy to be perceived as tough and ruthless, as long as that toughness and ruthlessness is in defence of existing rules and standards. “The law must be upheld everywhere.”

The Conservative Party, who have since tried (unsuccessfully) to cash in on Connolly’s enormous popularity on the British right, put forward little criticism of Starmer’s pledge to review social media laws in the wake of the riots.

But they did attract a ferocious response from Reform UK. Richard Tice, MP for Boston and Skegness, described Starmer’s plans as “the stuff of dictatorships”. Tice would later visit Connolly in prison after she was found guilty of inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X last October. She was sentenced to 31 months in jail, with a 25 per cent reduction in her sentence because she pleaded guilty.

When Connolly appeared on the main stage at Reform, she was greeted by the loudest noise I have heard outside of a warzone: a sustained, screaming, shaking ovation. It was also the first time I have seen a self-confessed racist, introduced as “Britain’s favourite political prisoner”, interviewed at a party political conference.

If the aim of Connolly’s sentence was to discourage others from following her example then it has backfired. Mass deportations, a policy that Connolly herself rejected when she was asked if she supported it by a prosecuting lawyer last October, are now a promise Reform will have to keep if they form the next government. More horrific statements than Connolly’s are a minute-by-minute occurrence on X. You do not have to travel particularly widely around Britain to hear such statements made out in the open: “set fire to the hotels”; “shoot the boats crossing the channel”; “a civil war is coming”.

The official British right, whether it comes in the form of Farage’s party or the sinking Tories, are struggling to keep up with the radicalism of their own voters. In Connolly that base has found a martyr.

Connolly was widely described as “middle-class” in the initial reporting on her case. Not quite right. Her accent, her manner, her 1930s semi in a small Midlands town: she is not the sort of person that, to put it mildly, many of those who have written about her case would know socially. Connolly does, however, resemble the median Reform voter in 2025. The party leads both Labour and the Conservatives with working class voters. When those voters look at Connolly they see themselves. Some of them cry. They might have sent that tweet. They might have been imprisoned for 380 days.

As Connolly’s sentence was handed down last October, Judge Melbourne Inman KC said: “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”

Judging by what has happened since, Imran was wrong. That small minority is beginning to look like a large majority. That group may not riot again but they will relish the opportunity to put Nigel Farage in Downing Street. 

[See also: Nigel Farage really means it this time]

The black goat trotted briskly ahead of me, away from the carrots, towards our supplies of beer and spanakopita. In what can only be described as the greatest physical feat of my adult life, I rushed after the goat and courageously patted it on its arse with a bamboo stick. This had no effect at all on the goat, which stared at me incredulously. One of my companions, a Greek woman known for her indiscreet and entertaining Substack, took up the stick and screamed something at the goat. He crabbed backwards up the mountainside, just as Xerxes I had done several centuries earlier when confronted with similarly well-armed Greeks.

An idiot abroad

Life in Symi is seasonal. The one town – a spread of neoclassical homes, bars and stores that sell sea sponges – swells in size during the summer and empties during winter. My impressions of it were those of a tourist: stupid. I spent too much time drinking Mythos to understand the town or its inhabitants. Whenever I holiday like this – a trip booked late in the day, with no prior knowledge of where I am going – I think of those lines on tourism in Don DeLillo’s chilly seventh novel, The Names: “You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it… There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.” So I walked around Symi confused, entering and exiting taxi boats, eating formerly sentient crustaceans, struggling to understand my pompous beach read, Herodotus’s The Histories.

An unstoppable traveller, Herodotus may have been the least stupid tourist of all time. Nothing appears to have been lost on him, from the mating practices of the cave Ethiopians to the art of scalping perfected by the Scythians. He had a genius for assimilating knowledge, hearsay and gossip into narrative. Much more accurate to call Herodotus the first journalist, not the first historian.

From protest to psari plaki

Our Airbnb was jammed into the side of the hill overlooking the harbour and owned by a French couple. (Symi is immensely popular with the French – our cousins across the Channel must have a rarely discussed need to buy sea sponges.) They were pushing 70 but in explosively good health. They moved sprucely up and down the steep hillside, their deep wooden tans covered by tastefully billowing linens. They seemed to spend their days living in the anticipation of civilised evening drinks, followed by a meal of greens and grilled white fish. Was any European generation as fortunate as the one born after the last war? Health, heartiness, holiday homes… linen. I expect that by the time I am their age these Soixante-huitards will be looked back on with more envy than pity.

Holding out for a hero

In the evenings we went to restaurants, ate tiny shrimps that were cooked inside their shells and smoked thin cigarettes that reminded me of pencil lead. We drank wine by the carafe and argued about how to end the war in Gaza. (We were unable to resolve the conflict.) I tried to recall the Herodotus I read at the beach but nobody wanted to hear about King Darius’s war on Scythia in the sixth century BCE. Everyone in the group was a journalist of some kind, which means everything that was said during our dinners will probably end up in print one day. I was the only man among four dynamic women, which led one of my friends to say: “It’s just like Sex and the City except you’re here, Will.” I decided not to point out that there is no episode of SATC in which a bloke with a stick unsuccessfully attempts to defend Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte from the savage attention of a goat.

[See also: How Labour learned to love the flag]

Readers might quibble with the notion of generations such as “millennials”, particularly when they are often employed as a lazy journalistic-sociological shorthand. I am almost convinced by the Oxford academic and essayist Noel Annan’s belief that the idea of a generation is a social construct. But I think every generation since the Ancient Greeks has become convinced they are a generation, with common anxieties. I’ve always been struck by the difference in political attitudes between British people born in, say, the 1960s and those born in the 1990s. The young generally have more extreme views on everything from social housing to migration to green energy.

Our cover story this week, written by Kate Mossman, reports on how a generation born in the 1980s is tackling child-rearing in the 2020s. We meet the millennial parent: desperate to raise their children differently to the way their parents raised them, anxious to treat them gently and respectfully, and struggling to wade through a sea of confusing and bizarre online parenting advice. This may be the first time the New Statesman has received a manifesto written entirely in the third person in response to an interview request – courtesy of Jo Frost, aka Supernanny. Let no one say that we are afraid to surprise our readers.

Elsewhere, Tim Wyatt reports on the future of the Church of England ahead of the appointment of the new archbishop of Canterbury. The Church now plausibly resembles the rest of the public sector: struggling with budgets, scandals and a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Whoever replaces Justin Welby may need more than a benevolent God to work through the Church’s problems. For stress relief, they could do worse than checking out the God-squad running club Elliott Kime discusses in his column.

On 20 August the Israeli government granted approval for construction on “E1”, a small but strategically vital patch of land in the West Bank. Lamorna Ash interviews Hassan Mleihat, a Palestinian Bedouin solicitor in the occupied territory. Mleihat’s days are “consumed by efforts to catalogue the violence going on in the West Bank – heading off in his car, morning or night, as soon as news reaches him of settler attacks against Bedouins”. As the New Statesman went to press, Israel continued to push ahead with a new offensive in Gaza. As with the conflict raging in Ukraine, writes Katie Stallard, there is no end in sight.

In the Back Pages, Finn McRedmond inaugurates our new food column by taking on London’s most “authentic” sandwiches and the men who keep taking photos of them. She still hasn’t paid me back for the chicken escalope I bought her last week, so for this week’s Sketch I forced her to attend the Clacton Air Show with Nigel Farage. Farage’s summer and Labour’s incoming response to his claim that Britain is “broken” are the subject of George Eaton’s politics column.

Freddie Hayward interviews the former chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, the trust-busting Lina Khan; sadly there is no British equivalent to the ferociously smart and tough academic. Nor is there a British equivalent to the sui generis filmmaker Whit Stillman, interviewed by our culture editor, Tanjil Rashid. One of Britain’s most original artists, the novelist Irvine Welsh, has written this week’s Diary.

I returned to the New Statesman in May after a spell at the Sunday Times. It truly is a joy to be back, not only with brilliant colleagues but what must be the sharpest readership in British media. I can fact-check that assertion: I now have access to the letters email inbox. I read every single one and am staggered by their quality, humour and decency. And by how many of you read the magazine while in the bath. Please keep them coming.

Will Lloyd is deputy editor of the New Statesman

[See also: Labour can’t agree on how to fight Farage]

The first subheading in the book, clinically regarding Andrew when he is barely out of the crib, is called “Baby Grumpling”; the second, surveying his years at Heatherdown Prep School, is called “A Tiresome Little Shit”. According to Lownie, Andrew was a bad baby, who became a bad boy, who became a very bad man. We knew Andrew, following revelations about his relationship with the late child-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was disgraced. Lownie shows us that the Duke’s predicament is even more funereal, a living death. 

Lownie claims to have approached “some 3,000 people” during his research for this book. About 300 of them sharpened their own knives to cut a slice from Andrew and Sarah. That is a remarkable hit rate for a reporter, reporting like this, on a still potentially litigious and incendiary subject. There is no dramatic arc in Entitled, no chance of redemption in what almost reads as a nihilistic satire of royal biography itself. The typical Windsorist book that parades birth, boarding, marriage, military service, foreign excursions, second marriage and so on, often written in threatless prose amidst an atmosphere of flummery, is not Lownie’s style. Less a biographer than a mortician, he has delivered a 456-page obituary for the Duke and Duchess of York. It may also prove to be the first line of an obituary for the monarchy itself, if the ominous noises Lownie makes at the book’s conclusion grow louder in the years ahead. 

The obituarist, Lownie, a well-lunched looking, jolly-seeming former barrister educated at Westminster and Magdalen College, Cambridge, appears an unlikely English radical. Yet his trilogy of royal biographies, including Entitled as well as The Mountbattens (which revealed Louis Mountbatten’s peculiar interest in young boys) and Traitor King (which damned Edward VIII for his Nazi-philia) add up to a clutch of barrel bombs dropped on the Crown. I cannot be the only reader, confronted with this unforgiving sequence and Lownie’s odd public statements to the effect that he remains a “monarchist”, who will recognise here a sustained if ulterior campaign to persuade the British public that the Windsors must endure the unhappy fate of so many other European monarchies. 

Andrew, far more the subject of Entitled than the hapless Sarah Ferguson, stands revealed here as a kind of British Caligula. Read what those 300 sources briefed to Lownie. The Duke is a “pompous git”; “a man with a big bottom who laughed at his own jokes”; “a bully”; “a wally and a tosser”; “boorish”; “spoiled”; “yob”; “a deeply unpleasant man… of low intelligence”. His polo-obsessed mother-in-law Susan Barrentes thought Andrew lacked “character” – short of being called “boring” that is about as devastating a judgment a posh English person can cast on another posh English person. “You have to understand what I’m dealing with here,” Ferguson, then his wife, told a confidante, “I’m married to a man who has never been inside a supermarket.” Andrew, not given to self-analysis, has said little that is memorable about himself, other than his fabulous claim on Newsnight 2019 that “It is almost impossible for me to sweat.” 

Lownie claims Andrew once fired a lackey for having a mole on his face. Another fluffer was dismissed for wearing a nylon tie. Then there is this: “At one dinner party [Andrew] sniffed the pâté served as first course and turned to his right. ‘This pâté smells. What do you think?’ His female companion leaned forward to smell it and he promptly pushed her face into the dish.” The common thread between these stories – and Lownie has many more – is gratuitous cruelty. Caligula, Suetonius tells us, once warned a minion: “Bear in mind I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” His words might have been Andrew’s motto. 

The duelling leitmotifs in Entitled are money and sex. Ferguson is the money case, Andrew the sex case. The couple were set up by Princess Diana, after Andrew’s heroics during the Falklands War. Prince Philip – who, in one of many startling and unexplained asides, Lownie claims had an affair with Ferguson’s mother – thought she was “a girl on the make”. After their engagement was announced, a crack team from “MI5, the special branch, no one to this day knows” scoured her home, removing everything into vans. Ferguson was effectively being vanished into the royal family, the British equivalent of being disappeared under a 20th-century totalitarian state. Instead of a gulag set in frozen tundra, Sarah moved to Buckingham Palace. She might have been better off in Siberia. Andrew duly married her in Westminster Abbey on 23 July 1986. Their wedding cake cost £10,000. By the time divorce came eight years later, she had settled into a kind of financial bulimia, a binge-then-vomit cycle built from reckless spending on staff, homes, holiday homes, showers of gifts for friends and underlings, followed by dramatic confrontations with creditors and banks, often only settled by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth II. Her father Ronald wondered whether she was “in love with Andrew or in love with the royal family”. He thought it was the latter. 

The Windsors and their staff did not love her back. Before Andrew became one of the most hated men in Britain, or Charles and Diana’s 1996 divorce made the Princess a potentially radical free agent in the year before her death, Ferguson worried royal courtiers more. She was “the greatest single threat to the monarchy in the current era”, said the Queen’s press secretary Robin Janvrin at the end of the Eighties. A minor theme of Entitled is how Ferguson endures in the face of such scorn, and the larger scorn of the public and press. “Fergie” as they call her, was a redtop hounded by the Redtops. She is described over the decades a “fashion obscenity who walks like a duck with a bad leg”, “an extra from the Night of The Living Dead”, “completely bizarre” and a “trollop”. She has survived every form of obloquy that the British media can stump up, from being stung by the News of The World’s Fake Sheikh, to hosting a Sky TV Show pertinently called Surviving Life, to being the victim of a telephone poll, conducted by the Sun, that asked: “Would you rather date Fergie or a goat?” Respondents voted seven to one in favour of dating the goat. 

As persistent as damp, Ferguson could not be brought down by her affair with the scion of a Texas oil family, nor by hosting a private dinner at Buckingham Palace with Dr Ramzi Salman, the head of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation, a mere month before Saddam Hussein’s government invaded Kuwait. A slothful Ferguson avoided being turned to dust on 9/11 because she was late for a meeting in one of the towers. Then she brought out a four-part children’s book series called Little Red, based on “the adventures of a red-haired rag doll based on a doll found in the remains of the World Trade Centre”. The proceeds “ostensibly” went to charity. Scandal, embarrassment, humiliation, egregious spending, a key staff member ending up behind bars for murder – Ferguson endured them all, whereas the comparable Diana died in a tunnel and Meghan Markle fled to Montecito. The dubious bounty Ferguson’s victory has secured? Her wall-eyed daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, were able to hold tasteless parties and weddings in some of our ugliest palaces and churches, with guests ranging from Ricky Martin to a Libyan convicted of arms smuggling. She retains her “HRH” title, with all its commercial possibilities, such as selling teaspoons and bed linen to credulous Americans. She still lives with Andrew, in a home in Windsor Great Park that King Charles would dearly love to evict the Yorks from. 

Ferguson’s family were close enough to the Windsor’s to give the Andrew match the tang of incest. “Every generation of her father’s family since the 19th century had been commissioned into the Life Guards,” Lownie notes, making Sarah yet another sacrificial body pressed into royal service. The Ferguson family home, the balefully named “Dummer Down” was once owned by George IV, while Ronald, a man of pure, hard, rural 18th-century tastes and character once commanded Queen Elizabeth’s sovereign escort. Fergie was raised in the folkways of her class: a stint at a metal beds and horsehair mattresses school, a familiarity with ski slopes and horses (“She would ride anything” notes Lownie in Carry On-ish fashion), all part of an upbringing that emphasised physical, rather than moral courage. Ronald would later be found in 1988 at the Wigmore Club, a West End massage parlour: “He claimed he only went there for ‘straight massages’ and was said to be more upset by the suggestion he had worn a blazer at Claridge’s than by the accusation of adultery with a nymphet called Babs.” Ferguson’s mother, Sarah, ran off in the summer of 1972 with a polo-playing Argentine called Hector while Ronald was having an affair “with the 23-year-old daughter of a colonel”. Ronald’s class, once pressed into imperial service in the far abroad, and decimated with some honour in the First World War, did not have much to do in the second half of the 20th century. Ferguson’s pratfalls during and after her life as a Windsor are merely one more expression of the uselessness of a class that today no longer has a purpose beyond questing after sexual and financial gratifications. 

“Baby Grumpling” – Andrew – was marked out from birth by a lack of intelligence. The Queen called her second son “a bit of a handful”, while Philip – in a famous quote that Lownie doesn’t use – once described him as a “natural boss”. Certainly, compared to the otherworldly Charles, Andrew was loud, stupid, devious, spoiled, rude and cruel. Toddler Andrew followed footmen around tugging their tailcoats, climbed up surfaces to take things placed deliberately out of his reach and pedalled furiously along palace corridors on his tricycle. He developed a passionate interest in watching cartoons and lining up his teddy bears well into adulthood. At Heatherdown, Andrew’s prep school, where there were three toilets at the sports day (“one for the ladies, one for the gentlemen and one for the chauffeurs”), other pupils included David Niven and David Cameron, along with the future King of Bhutan. Gordonstoun followed. In the Charles story, this Scottish boarding school has taken on a bleak significance as the site of the future King’s trials against bullies, muddy games fields and the domineering will of Prince Philip. But for Andrew it was simply another gilded waiting room. His contemporaries called him “Randy Andy” and “The Great I Am”. He was priggish and good at cricket. When Andrew visited Gordonstoun many years later, a teacher showed him to his old digs and said that the Prince mumbled only a few words: “The smell is the same. The smell… I’ll always remember the smell.” 

Notwithstanding “the smell”, Andrew’s education was no different to that of his future wife. Running around and hitting things was good. Contemplation was bad. Extreme wealth and fame was impressive. They were channelled into inevitable careers. Andrew the Navy, Sarah public relations. In the early Eighties naval poster boy Andrew helped to create a rosy image of service and duty for the royals; Sarah was used as a posh ornament at an image-making firm, because, as one of her colleagues put it, “she gets on with all sorts of people”. With the exception of the Falklands War, Andrew’s record in the Royal Navy between 1979 and 2001 receives the same demolition treatment from Lownie that everything else in the Prince’s life does. Andrew appears to have cheated on a test to get ahead at one point, while his colleagues largely thought him solitary, strange and stupid. 

The Queen was adamant that her spare son should serve in the Falklands. Piloting a Sea King helicopter, Andrew narrowly avoided being murdered by a radar-confusing substance fired out of a ship called “chaff”. When he returned to England with the victorious task force on 17 September 1983, the Prince was greeted at Portsmouth Harbour by “pleasure cruisers filled with bare-breasted women”. His mother and sister, not aboard those cruisers, greeted him in the state room of HMS Invincible. The Prince was lionised by the press that would later become, besides himself, the major antagonist of his life. Even Lownie, though, cannot really quibble with the Prince’s service in the Falklands. Andrew rescued sailors, saving their lives. He survived the war’s terror. Lownie instead notes that Prince William was born on 21 June 1982, while Andrew was returning from the South Atlantic. The birth began Andrew’s slide down the succession. Here began a long process of waning, which would see Andrew winnowed of almost everything that he believed gave him value as a human being. By the time he visited the Caribbean with the Navy a year after the Argentines were packed off, it was clear that Andrew had no idea what to do with the rest of his life. 

So, he had an affair with a Page 3 model. Their shagging reached the press, leading an astrologer to tell People magazine: “If he [Andrew] wasn’t a member of the royal family, his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun, with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.” Given Andrew’s tastes, the psychic’s imagined beach bar would have needed a large staff of valets, pot-washers, accountants, PAs, sports massage therapists and bum-wipers, as well as a nine-hole golf course and a stables for the Prince to be satisfied with it. Nevertheless, there was something true in the assertion. Andrew was simple, and a simpler life in tolerant surroundings would have suited him better than one where his natural inclination towards laxity chafed against the constraints and attention imposed by his birth. 

What would he do with the rest of his life? Andrew did what sidelined princelings usually do: he chased women. Lownie takes readers on what can only be described as a meat inspection of Andrew’s old flames, lovers, girlfriends, one-night stands, paramours, bedfellows, hook-ups, courtesans, friends with benefits, conquests, procured lays and victims. “He is supposed to have slept with over 1,000 women,” writes Lownie, almost mournfully. A source pins down the origin of the prince’s sex addiction to childhood trauma. Lownie does not interrogate this theory, but it sounds like rubbish. Andrew may have lost his virginity at 11 to a sex worker in a West End hotel, but that does not explain his subsequent behaviour. For Andrew, sex is about power and control – as a royal with little chance of being monarch, he is paradoxically short of both in his day-to-day life. 

“I’m a diplomat, not a pimp,” said one of the civil servants asked to procure a blonde for the Prince during his time as trade envoy. Luckily enough, Andrew already had Jeffrey Epstein for that. After 100 or so pages where Lownie moves like a basking shark through newspaper archives, consuming what feels like every clipping about the Duke and Duchess in them, we reach Epstein. Lownie says that “financier” was introduced to Andrew by Ghislaine Maxwell, some time in the early 1990s. (In a recent interview with armed men from the US government, the now imprisoned Maxwell said that Ferguson introduced the Prince to Epstein.) The trio become close after Andrew’s divorce, when the Prince becomes an enthusiastic patron of London nightclubs and the massage services offered at various homes owned by Epstein. According to Lownie, they often passed into the orbit of Donald Trump: “Andrew and Trump were overheard at an event discussing Trump’s plans for a golfing complex in the north-east of Scotland, talking entirely about ‘pussy’, with the American producing a list of masseuses for the prince.” Andrew’s seeming escape from the trashy Ferguson into the international party circuit was widely celebrated by the press at the time. Andrew was chosen as number one on Tatler’s “Most Invited Party List” in July 2000.

Lownie quotes at length from an interview between the Prince and Tatler’s then editor Geordie Greig, granted for Andrew’s 40th birthday. Greig found Andrew: “Open, warm and has a surprising moral strength. He is different from the caricature we apply to him… a strong-minded and unconventional young man. Articulate and forceful… there’s certainly no trace of hauteur, remoteness or even noblesse oblige.” This is so wildly off of the mark that it would embarrass North Korean state media. Lownie only quotes Andrew at length once in Entitled, a snippy remark – that the Palace later forced him to retract – that he gave to some enterprising journalists from the Sun who were bothering him in October 1998: “The difficulty now is trying to convince you, the press, that what you are being told is the truth. You cannot believe you are being told the truth because for the last 20 years you probably haven’t been. It’s like the Russians.” 

Jeffrey Epstein’s housekeeper recalled a trophy drawer of “newly wrapped women’s pantyhose, lingerie and sandals” that Andrew kept in a cabinet at one of the financier’s homes. When he saw women, he saw prey: Andrew was hunting, a monstrous parody of his forebears’ penchant for boffing tigers in the Raj. His safaris, accompanied by Epstein and Maxwell, would lead him to the 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre in 2001 and eventually bring about his ultimate downfall. Andrew is now referred to in the past tense on the royal’s website. Another form of burial. 

The questions that swirl around Epstein – how did he amass a nine-figure fortune? Why did men with much to lose, like Andrew, continue to meet him even after his conviction for soliciting child prostitutes in Florida in 2008? – are not answered by Lownie. They may never be answered. The source of Epstein’s financial power, and his power over elite men, may end up as the 21st-century corollary to discovering who exactly Jack the Ripper was. A source of folk tales, conspiracy narratives and endlessly regurgitated facts, repurposed over and over again in thrillingly new and strange patterns. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner once. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Andrew, who Epstein compared to his very own “Super Bowl Trophy” was destroyed like so many others. 

When the prince was six, his parents gave him a “a miniature Aston Martin, an exact scaled down version of the one in Goldfinger with the number plate JB007, complete with toy machine guns and smoke system built at a cost of £4,000”. Reading Entitled, I became convinced that at some level Andrew really believed that he was James Bond. At the very least, he identified with the secret services and was childishly infatuated with their world. This infantile preoccupation bobs up every now and then in Lownie’s book. Andrew tried to appear on the scene of the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, but was shooed away. Lownie reports that he “repeated offers of his services to MI5 head Eliza Manningham-Buller… she turned him down on the grounds he was too high-profile… he wouldn’t let it go and continued to write letters to her”. In the Noughties, Andrew’s mobile ringtone was the theme to the spy show 24.

Jack Bauer, James Bond: men of action who act without restraint in pursuit of a great good, men who believe the ends justify the means; cold, realistic and amoral. They also shag around a lot. Andrew’s problem was that he was a mummy’s boy, not a restless adventurer. Too stupid to be a spy, he acted out his fantasy in a rapidly changing world that no longer had much need of financially and sexually profligate royalty. 

Lownie wonders darkly how much kompromat for Britain’s enemies Andrew generated thanks to his bad habits. I am told by a senior diplomat, familiar with Andrew’s time working as the UK’s special representative for international trade and investment, that from 2001 until he stepped down in July 2011, the Prince was never told enough about anything important to do real damage to Britain. They knew – and much of the diplomatic chatter recorded by Lownie about Andrew reflects this – that he was not to be trusted. The only damage Andrew did was to himself and those in his orbit. How much damage he has done to the Crown remains an open question.

[See also: How low can King Charles go?]

The police officer, a balding, hulking man in official black with a danger-yellow taser velcroed to him, asked me what I was doing. I had been waiting by the gate for a few minutes, and couldn’t see the camera that had obviously seen me. I told the officer I was here for the “Harmony in Nature Wellness Day” that I had blown £180 on. I hoped it might help me understand our monarch, who is poorly understood at the best of times. The officer said I was at the wrong gate. The entrance to the “Wellness Day” was 600 yards up the road. He added, somewhat apologetically, that he couldn’t give me a lift because there was a real weapon in his car.

The then Prince of Wales purchased Highgrove House through the Duchy of Cornwall 45 years ago. Before Charles, the house had been owned by Maurice Macmillan, son of the former prime minister Harold, who was, according to one historian, “indifferently fond of gardening”. Charles, it must be said, is not indifferently fond of gardening. Over the decades, while he patiently waited for his mother to die, he dug a miniature botanical universe on the ill-used acres around Highgrove. With the help of a marchioness, a Rothschild, huge sums of money and some of Britain’s smartest garden designers, he created the clearest statement of his beliefs out of branches and petals. Simultaneously his solace and his redemption, the garden, he once said, was “the outward expression of my inner self”. For his Herculean efforts, Charles was awarded a modest label by television’s Alan Titchmarsh in a documentary 15 years ago: “The best royal gardener in history.”

The ulterior purpose of Highgrove is mentioned less often and was perhaps unknown, even to Titchmarsh. The prince, as he then was, wanted a residence of his own to “convene” the great power players and personalities of his future kingdom. Few have been able to resist a private lunch with Charles at Highgrove, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. A list of the government ministers who have been Jaguared to the house and the minutes of their discussions with Charles would make a revealing alternative history of the official British mind between 1981 and 2021. Recent years have brought changes, though; privacy and powerbrokering have given way to something much more public. In July 2021, ahead of the Queen’s death, Charles signed a deal with the Duchy of Cornwall to rent Highgrove from William, the future Prince of Wales. The gardens, house and swimming pool – the last a wedding gift from the British Army for Charles’s doomed marriage to Diana Spencer – would remain under his control. Highgrove’s hedges and topiaries would be protected from William, a man who probably can’t spell the word “trowel”, let alone use one.

Now a King with expanded royal duties, Charles has handed the day-to-day management of Highgrove to its executive director, Constantine Innemée. The garden sanctuary has become a rural hypermarket and “space” raising funds through tours, private dinners, black-tie galas, classes and branded goods. Highgrove sells jams (£7.95), plant pots (£230), seeds (£7.95), picnic hampers (£150), and a “Highgrove x Burberry Castleford Trench Coat” (£2,490), as well as a £4,950 made-to-order, almost life-sized Irish moiled cow sculpture woven from British willow and bronze wire. The outward expression of Charles’s inner self was also a commercial opportunity.

Whatever was sacred about the place has become, if not profane, then at least profitable. Turnover at Highgrove last year was £6m, according to accounts for the King’s Foundation, higher than any of Charles’s other properties. The King and Innemée have had their reward: Highgrove Gardens, Tripadvisor informs us, is now number two “out of ten things to do in Tetbury”. Somebody must be buying those cow sculptures. But who is coughing up for the £180 “Wellness Day”?

The answer was me and around 24 women. We were overseen by two instructors with gleaming eyes. Everybody was dressed in harem pants and T-shirts. I was wearing dress shoes and a belt, and had forgotten to bring a yoga mat. We were ushered into the Orchard Hall’s ante-room, where a Transylvanian florilegium – a large, expensive book filled with drawings of rare flowers – took a central place in a glass box. A strategic photo of Harry, William and Charles decorated a table in the corner. The walls heaved with reproductions of Charles’s watercolours: landscapes from around the world, not a single human figure in them. I began a conversation with a retired nurse who revealed she had recently “got into ecology”. She recommended a book on yoga and bodily trauma. The other ladies drank tea around us.

Then it was outside to the gardens, where we gathered around a flower meadow and were asked to thank the plants, a proxy for Nature herself. One of the instructors said everything we did that day would be inspired by Charles’s thought, which was collected in his unsettling, apocalyptic 2010 book Harmony. (Its main thrust is that Nature will soon kill us all, so now is a good time to learn how to make dry-stone walls and plant more vegetables.)

Two prim guides turned up to show us around the grounds, which were twisty and strange, filled with odd pagan flourishes, staring busts of Jungian psychoanalysts and disturbing tributes to the late Queen Mother. One guide pointed out the best view of the house: seen from behind a statue of a naked gladiator, taking in his pert, oxidised copper arse cheeks. The ladies loved the geraniums, which bloomed hectically. Every stem and leaf looked like Charles: tense, heavily waited on. As we thanked the plants again in an artificial clearing, the hoarse sound of a lorry driving to Tetbury was just audible above the birdsong.

We returned to the Orchard Room to do yoga. One taxing afternoon in Laos aside, I had not done anything of the sort for ten years. Our instructor had a drum and gently commanded us to turn into geraniums, which the ladies did with great success. Later, in a feat of heroic fortitude, I completed a “downward dog” and found myself staring through my legs at a small portrait of Queen Camilla on the wall behind me. The session ended with a group hymn to “Divine Mother Amba”, which everyone seemed to think was normal.

Over lunch (chicken breast and vegetables, all organic) we discussed Charles’s artworks. One woman said she felt he had “really come into his own” since becoming King. A recent Sunday Times report revealing terrible staffing problems at Highgrove was not mentioned. I wondered if my fellow wellness-seekers read newspapers, or rather favoured books about trauma or following yogis on Instagram. They resembled their King: “getting into ecology”; worshipping an amorphous Nature that could threaten but never disappoint them. They left, smiling, happy, stretched out – all ideal subjects. There was the future of the British monarchy: the Crown that once demanded service in war now only wants £180 and a convincing geranium impression, and only if asked nicely enough. I suppose that’s progress, whatever “progress” means.

[See also: The Online Safety Act humiliates us all]