I often do not agree with Peter Zeihan, to put it mildly, but he might be more or less right about this, given the Atlantic alliance effectively ended in January 2025, at least de facto if not de jure. It pains me to write that as someone who has been a pro-US Atlanticist my entire life.
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There is a ritual as old as democracy itself, and it has nothing to do with voting. It takes place in the days before polling, in the offices of think tanks, the studios of broadcasters, and the columns of political magazines. It is the ancient art of expectation management — the careful calibration of what counts as success and failure, conducted not in the interests of accuracy but of narrative. This week, with the May 7th elections bearing down upon us, we have been treated to a masterclass of the genre. Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov and a man whose estimable intelligence I have no interest in disputing, has published a guide to the upcoming elections in Prospect. It is admirably readable and contains much of interest. But embedded within it is a paragraph about Reform that repays close attention, because it illustrates with almost pedagogical clarity how the expectation game is played. Kellner deploys the Rallings and Thrasher model to suggest that if Reform win 1,400 seats, they will be “sunk in gloom,” and that anything short of 2,000 should indicate that they are “slipping back.” He frames sub-2,000 as the threshold of adequacy. The implication is clear: a party that currently holds two councillors among the seats being contested should apparently consider 1,400 gains a cause for institutional mourning. Only? Let me be direct: I would be happy with 1,000 seats. I would be delighted with anything north of 1,200. And I say this not from false modesty but from an honest reading of the data, weeks of campaigning on the ground, the political landscape, my own politically pessimistic nature, and, perhaps most importantly, from a sceptical eye on the baseline figure Kellner has chosen to make his arithmetic work. Read the whole thing. May 3rd, 2026 | 12 comments
 Many years ago, I was chatting with the grandmother of a family friend, whose name was Hannelore. She grew up in Germany on a family farm in Schleswig-Holstein, not far from Hamburg, and candidly admitted that as landowning farmers, they all feared the communists and so were broadly supportive of the NSDAP during the 1930s. Indeed, when the war started, any misgivings they had evaporated when Poland swiftly fell in 1939, and then France collapsed in a month and a half campaign in 1940. The family even attended some pro-government rallies to celebrate these victories. By 1943, Hannelore said it was clear it was not going to be a short war, as Allied bombers were now a constant presence in the skies above. It was also very hard to find farm labourers as the war effort was consuming more and more resources by then. Yet even so, the family remained broadly optimistic about the war ending with German victory. But then in late July for an entire week, the RAF and USAAF filled the sky over Hamburg by day and by night. And although Hannelore did not know it at the time, it was called Operation Gomorrah. She told me that on one night in particular, her father called the whole family outside. It was bright as day, the entire skyline to the south a line of incandescent light. By morning, white dust entirely covered their home and farmland, with a constant rain of ash still falling from the sky. 40,000 people had burned to death in a firestorm in a single day in Hamburg. And only then, our friend’s grandmother said, did they finally realise everything was not going to be alright and the war had been a catastrophic mistake. Only then, and from then onwards, did everything they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio ring hollow. I was in my late teens sitting in an old farmhouse in Scotland when Hannelore told me that story from her youth. So, on this portentous Beltane as I watched a series of videos from Tuapse in Russia, I had something of a flashback to that story told me several decades ago. In the early days of the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine in 2022, there was a series of rallies in Tuapse in support of Putin’s government. I wonder if perspectives have started shift now that the reality of this war is coming home to Russia in earnest. May 1st, 2026 | 15 comments
April 30th, 2026 | 33 comments
Already, the Golders Green terrorist is being explained away as “he suffered from mental health issues”. As a therapist, I’m sick of this. It is circular. Only someone seriously unhinged could commit such a heinous act. Hold people responsible for their actions. — And for added context… — It’s worth remembering that the man who stormed a kosher supermarket with a knife in 2024 received only a suspended sentence – Ed West April 29th, 2026 | 21 comments
What it has contrived to be is this: a place of extraordinary, almost accidental richness. The common law, grown from below like something organic, from precedent and custom and the quiet accumulation of ordinary cases, the idea that law is not handed down from above by sovereign will but earned, argued, tested, revised. Parliamentary democracy, which we invented and then spent several centuries apologising for exporting. This language, this mongrel, scavenging, irresistible language that has borrowed from everyone and been diminished by no one, that can be the King James Bible in one register and the Shipping Forecast in another, and both are beautiful, and both are unmistakeably themselves. The music. The painting. The literature. Turner’s light, Elgar’s longing, the particular English melancholy that is not quite despair because it knows, somewhere, that the lark will rise again above the hill. – Gawain Towler waxes lyrical on St. George’s Day
April 23rd, 2026 | 15 comments
The Iranian Islamic Republic’s strategy is obvious: simply remain in power by gunning down or hanging any internal opposition, and inflict as much global economic damage as possible to increase pressure on the USA and Israel until Trump lives up to his TACO nickname. The USA strategy is rather less obvious as pretty much any result that leave Iran as a hostile Islamic Republic is an Iranian political win even if their military capabilities are degraded. April 21st, 2026 | 38 comments
The media’s fixation on Epstein, sordid though the Epstein story indisputably is, has performed a remarkable public service for those who would prefer the harder questions to go unasked. We are so busy being appalled by the dead paedophile that we have forgotten to be appalled by what the living intelligence services were actually worried about: that Britain sent to its most sensitive diplomatic post a man with deep, documented, inadequately severed financial ties to both Peking and Moscow. That is the scandal. Not the gossip. The geopolitics. I note as I write this that some in the media are finally looking into this aspect. But let’s focus on Nathan Gill and Epstein. April 21st, 2026 | 5 comments
Wat Tyler’s men in 1381 marched on London to demand the abolition of serfdom and the repeal of the poll tax. They did not want revolution; they wanted the king to be good. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was 30,000 northerners marching under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ to protest Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries – it was not a rebellion against the Crown but a petition to it, in arms, to reconsider. The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 involved Cornish and Devon men refusing the new Protestant liturgy, and dying in considerable numbers for the right to pray as their fathers had. The Covenanters of Scotland fought not for novelty but for a particular understanding of the proper ordering of church and state. The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 was a Protestant constitutional protest dressed as a dynastic claim. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, that driest and most English of upheavals, resulted not in a republic but in a constitutional settlement – William III was invited in from the Netherlands not to overthrow the monarchy but to regularise it, to make parliament sovereign without making it supreme over everything that mattered to ordinary people. Each of these movements sought not the destruction of the existing order but its correction, its return to a lost and better version of itself. The Chartists sit squarely in this tradition. What they wanted was not new. The rights they demanded had a genealogy that stretched back through Thomas Paine to the Levellers to the barons at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was sealed. Each generation of the English popular movement has had to rediscover that the constitutional ground gained by one era tends, mysteriously, to be lost by the next, that the establishment has an almost geological patience in the slow work of reclaiming power from the people who briefly forced it to concede. April 19th, 2026 | 22 comments
The instructions? “Focus on ideas, not grammar.” Reward “the use of culture, language and identity.” Embrace “linguistic diversity.” Decolonise the curriculum. “Validate diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences.” Reduce essay word counts to ease “stress.” Ditch proper exams. Let students pick formats that suit their precious “identity.” This isn’t assessment reform. It’s compulsory brainwashing with a marking sheet. The university’s own Quality Assurance Handbook makes the ideological capture explicit: everything must align with King’s Strategic Vision 2029, embedding EDI, sustainability and “inclusivity” as non-negotiable from day one. One anonymous KCL academic told the Mail students will soon be able to challenge grades on the grounds their “culture and identity” wasn’t sufficiently validated. Fantastic. Nothing screams “world-class education” like turning every essay into a victimhood Olympics where clarity is penalised and grievance is gold. April 14th, 2026 | 16 comments
Today please remember the victims of the Katyn Massacre. In 1940, thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were executed by the Soviet paramilitaries. We will never let this be forgotten. April 13th, 2026 | 42 comments
J.D. Vance, who is the Vice President of the USA, goes to Hungary, an EU member state, and delivers a campaign speech for Victor Orban, the president of Hungary, in which Vance accuses the EU of… interference in Hungary’s elections. Am I the only one who finds that absolutely hilarious? April 9th, 2026 | 47 comments
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