Sometimes, in the early days, you can even find yourself telling yourself that it’s a welcome change, a trying out of something new, ‘Oh, remember that month that Dad died!’ That there was once a bizarre and invigorating interlude where Dad vanished entirely from the world for a while, allowing us all to realise exactly how much (tho of course we knew) we valued him. Well-played, old man! But after a while you want to say, OK Dad, enough now, we get it, joke’s over. You can come back now. But he isn’t coming back. They don’t come back, the dead stay very much dead. I will never say another word to him.

It’s natural to look for consolations. In my case, the chief being, as I have described here, that the relationship was good; there had been little animosity between my father and I for decades, and at least twenty years of respectful, loving parental dynamics as I made my way into adult life and he traversed old age. Of course, there were stickier times, harder moments, and I was rude and headstrong when a teenager and saw only his flaws, but he stuck with it and I grew up.

I read all the time about people who have difficult relationships with parents, irreconcilable ones even, but I still suspect they’re in the minority. It’s just that good relationships tend to be of less interest to people than fractious ones. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth thinking, as I mourn my dear old Dad, about just what he did right. After all, for such a good bond to exist between a man born into a council house in Ruabon, North Wales, in 1940 and an artsy indie kid who saw the light of the world in 1980s Nottingham, well, as the French say, ce n'était pas evident. There’s a big gap between those starting points in life and yet somehow we made it work.

If I had to say there was one lesson from the way my Dad was my Dad, which I imagine he barely thought about as a practice at all – I severely doubt he ever so much as skimmed a parenting guide – it would be to keep it simple. To a large extent his approach was, as the kids say these days, ‘don’t deep it.’ There were two hallmarks of my Dad as a Dad, consistency, and a lack of judgement. He was more than reliable; if I needed a lift – and much to his amusement I have not yet managed to scrape a driving licence together – he was always there, and not only that, seemed to turn such duties into things to actively look forward to. For him, thirty minutes in the car with his son going somewhere was an opportunity to catch up and have a laugh.

In the days when I lived in Berlin, he’d often drive me down to Luton airport, an experience which, amazingly, he would later tell me he ‘really enjoyed’. I got him into quite a lot of new (now old) music on those trips, tho there was still plenty of stuff of mine, from The Boo Radleys to Green Day, that he disliked. Even in later years, he’d always be happy to pick me up at Nottingham station, and it was only when he failed to come get me due to feeling the effects of a ‘new painkiller’ that I realised that something was seriously wrong with him.

Secondly, he accepted me as I was. A statement like ‘Your kids will turn out as they’re going to turn out and your job is to stop them getting eaten by bears in the meantime’ is developmentally sound, but apparently very difficult for many parents to accept. There are some people who view their kids as a creative project, as their ‘work’, which isn’t quite right; child-rearing is a creative process, but you don’t control the outcome. If you want creative control, write books.

My Dad wouldn’t have blinked twice at that idea of me being an independent entity of him; he just wanted me to be alright. Of course, he had his aspirations for me, as every parent does, but suffice to say I wasn’t in line with them. I was never going to meet his goal for me of attending Harvard Business School. What he did do was embrace what I was doing, and there was a lot of it. There was barely an artistic event, from my early sixth-form college shows to my final comedy hour, that he wasn’t present at, always well turned-out (my mother largely responsible for that), and seemingly genuinely enthused by whatever it was I was up to.

For sure, I would say a kid who is into stand-up comedy and writing funny plays may, short of me actually being a professional sportsperson, one of the easier ones to get behind. It helps even more if they’re decent at it, and I was; one of the proudest moments of my life remains, having gone with my Dad to a gig in Berlin that I was performing at – and where he made not the slightest fuss of being the oldest audience member by some forty years – and him remarking, almost to himself, ‘You’re very professional in the way you do it.’ That was a real moment of pride for me and, now I think about it, probably for him.

Lastly, we both knew when to leave it, that good relationships don’t have to include everything. We knew sometimes that shared mutual silence and chat about joint interests helped more than getting into heavy stuff. If we talked politics we’d end up arguing, so we didn’t; it was one of my greatest shocks, after years of dispute on individual issues, when he disclosed to me that he remained a dues-paying member of the Labour Party. We differed fundamentally on the matter of the EU – tho like anyone who lives and works in Brussels my position became closer to his Euroscepticism in recent years – but we also knew not to go there. Why would we waste the time available to us on political arguments?

For we did have things in common, a love of food, beer and football, and frankly the opposite sex, and that’s what I’d fill him in on or seek his views on. It certainly helped when I gave him some football tips that paid off, such as before the 2006 World Cup telling him to put money on Italy to win. Above all there was cricket, which we both loved in any form. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he’d say, ‘There are two sports. Cricket and all the others.’ You only need a few points of such unanimous agreement to sustain a great friendship with your Dad.

Sometimes it annoys people when advice is simple, but the point of simple advice is that it works for everybody, that it has proved largely universal. And I think my Dad’s formula would be hard to beat; show up for your kids, be completely reliable, and accept them as you find them. Perhaps in some way being a Dad is a minimalist craft, in contrast with the more holistic, more totalising art of the mother, but it’s no less important for that. Someone needs to be there to take the pressure off and chat about the T20 Blast.

Above all, my Dad dressed for the children he had, and I genuinely believe that all he wanted for me was to be living my life, doing things I’m interested in, showing a bit of drive, and happy. There’s a lack of ego in taking up that role in relation to your son – there was never the hint of competition between Dad and I, in part because our chosen fields were so different – and I’m not sure I could do it so selflessly. Let’s just say that if I were going to give my Dad an Oscar it would be for Best Supporting Actor. He absolutely aced his part and knew when to leave them wanting more.

The principles I’ve outlined, of reliability and tolerance, may not be the most glamorous or sufficiently highfalutin for some but they added up to an awful lot of love and good times over the 43 years we got to spend together. Without fuss, and on our own homespun terms, we loved each other very much.

This is the last post before my summer break. Thanks for all your support across the writing year, and see you all back in September. A special thanks is as ever due to my paying subscribers who keep this going. If you would like to say thank you with a one off gift, a tip jar is below.

Keir Starmer was the subject of multiple entries on this newsletter; a chronicle, as it were, of a resignation foretold. There is no doubt that the Prime Minister’s position had become untenable and, given that Labour Party politics is always in thrall to US political culture - even tho its home country's political culture is much more akin to say, Germany or the Netherlands - the party has at least avoided the mistake the Democrats made around Joe Biden. And Starmer too for his part avoided the selfishness of Biden in clinging on too long, which was decent of him. Perhaps that word itself would make a decent obituary to Starmer; decent. Clearly a limited politician, and certainly one unsuited to the current moment, but fundamentally a decent public servant and a decent man.

That is at least some kind of an impression. A decent, hard-working guy, happiest amongst his papers and briefs. Andy Burnham doesn’t even occasion that much of an assessment from me, largely because it seems so obvious that Burnham is just adopting a persona and I am not seeing the real him, that he is performing something that others do indeed seem to like. Of course, all politicians, indeed all people do this, but most of the better ones perform some version of what they actually are.

If pushed I might manage as a descriptor for the former mayor of Manchester ‘northern’, but, no matter how hard some try, ‘northern’ is not someone’s personality, anymore than anyone could grasp the essence of what my life has been about through saying ‘Midlands’. They could certainly identify some things important to me but they couldn’t get a read on my soul, as it were.

Perhaps Andy Burnham’s schtick is marketing ‘northern’ as a personality type to people not from the north, northmaxxing, in line with the apocryphal anecdote that he decided to play up his northernness in his first full week at university and never looked back thereafter. I wonder how I’d feel if I were from that part of the world myself. Certainly, I don’t think any northerner worth their salt would answer that their favourite biscuit was ‘chips and gravy’, not least because the northerners I know's main source of contention is that southerners think they’re all thick, and such an answer confirms southerner’s haughtier stereotypes of simple, stodge-based folk.

There seems to no doubt however that, whatever Burnham is selling, a lot of people are buying it, and not only that, that Burnham seems to fill a lot of people with hope. There have been multiple calls for optimism this week and moments of real sentimentality. Again, as in the case of Zack Polanski, I really don’t get this; I just don’t see what about this particular man could inspire such positive feelings. I mean he’s nice enough, and I’m sure he’s got the time of day for people, but to find him some kind of potential political saviour? What are people seeing here?

Now, bear in mind, I am atypically iterative and incrementalist in my political stances, and someone like Keir Starmer, grinding away at the work, watching the performance metrics and, crucially, actually winning an election, fills me with much more hope than Burnham does. For something to inspire hope in me, it cannot be vague. What gives me hope is serious people trying to solve hard problems, particularly if they are prepared to court some unpopularity when doing that, and Burnham to me, in all his doughy bonhomie, absolutely screams ‘If you don’t like these principles, I have others.’

As has been said, Burnham’s impressiveness has always been in inverse proportion to his proximity to power, which his previous distance from allowed whatever faction is currently feeling underrepresented to place their hopes in him. In fairness, Burnham himself normally knew exactly how to play the kind of distant soothing mood music the relevant grouping wanted to hear, how to flash the bit of leg required.

German has a great word, Projektionsfläche, a surface onto which things are projected, and Burnham has been that for left and centre-left hopes of all shades. He’s going to deliver electoral reform, a wealth tax, HS2 in full and he’ll make sure that the UK boycotts everything Israeli too. In this, he is the reverse of Keir Starmer, who has served as the same blank in a negative sense for everybody’s bugbear from the far-right to the far-left, accused of personally exonerating the grooming gangs from one side to killing kids in Gaza by the other, theories which fulminated in the space which Starmer’s personal diffidence left open.

For Burnham, it seems to be something in his own soothing blandness which allows this to happen, his children’s TV presenter air, even his soft, vaguely doughy expression and mistreated puppy eyes. From a distance, he seems the ideal politician you’d want to come and say, cut the ribbon on your leisure centre and have a glass of orange squash or even weak lager with afterwards, afterwards making small talk which avoids politics and focuses on music and sport. Andy Burnham would seem the ideal politician to be, for example, Mayor of a large progressive-leaning city, perhaps one where there are currently lots of buildings and projects to open. Any ideas?

Of course, people are also projecting onto Burnham because the stakes really are high. Even Nick Clegg gets that. This is likely the last go of the Labour Party and as such centre-left politics before one of our two genuine whackjob tendencies, the degrowth Greens or repatriation Reform, have a crack at the whip. If one rejects Burnham, the question can come ‘Well, do you see any hope at all then? Is there just no way of doing centre-left politics in Britain now?’

I’m the wrong person to answer this, for I was quite happy to see Starmer getting on with trying to improve the functioning of the economy and state for a few more years and believe that that was what Labour had been given a mandate for. I put more value on delivery than getting a candidate who’ll tut tut in a more Guardian-friendly manner about how awfully Israel is behaving, not in part because Starmer himself took concrete measures against Israel and in recognising Palestine. I’m more interested in tangibles than vibes and if nothing else Burnham is a further triumph of the Vibes Supremacy. The spate of touchy feeliness which his cabinet picks are displaying upon their nominations seems part of this; Andy Burnham is at base the physical manifestation of the Labour Party’s need for a big hug. His avatar on Twitter is a cartoon of himself, for pity's sake.

To be honest, I lost faith in British politics quite some time ago. Since Brexit, when the electorate voted to leave their largest market in order to become richer, it’s all been various shades of delusion to my ears, never more than in the left’s previous great platitudinal hope, Jeremy Corbyn, who provoked hope for the bizarre reason that he’d never changed his mind about anything. Well, no danger of that with Burnham; his views seem to be that of the last person he spoke to, as the joke he dislikes expresses. Personally, I get my hope from outside of politics these days and, to the extent that anything in the political world is hopeful to me, it’s things being delivered. ‘We’ll build a new station’ means very little to me; ‘A new station just opened’ is hopeful. After all, if making big promises of national transformation were intrinsically uplifting, Liz Truss would be an inspirational figure.

So the appeal of Burnham seems to be a matter of tone, like the way you like your lover's voice. Are there more concrete reasons for hope? In the case for the defence, two areas where I think Burnham’s premiership genuinely offers some grounds for optimism. Firstly, he’s interested in constitutional reform, and to a greater extent than Starmer seems to understand the linkage between political structures and political outcomes. He has after all seen devolution revitalise his patch.

Some continue to resist devolution entirely. There’s a certain kind of British constitutional conservative who thinks the UK went wrong with the Blairite reforms and that the ultimate aim has to be to row back devolution in its entirety and all will be well. Yet surely that person can recognise that trying to do five (and growing) party politics through a system set up to deal with two at a pinch just leads to chaos and no real relation between the public will and election results.

Just chiming ‘Blair should never have set up the Scottish Parliament!’ and saying that applause in the Commons chamber should be banned isn’t any kind of solution to abiding political chaos, nor can anyone really claim that our current constitutional set-up is working in delivering stable government; even Italy, long the butt of British political jokes, seems a model of stability compared to us these days. So there is a powerful conservative argument for electoral reform to create greater constitutional stability. If you like everything else in British politics - the monarchy, the Parliament, the existence of the United Kingdom - electoral reform is a way of protecting that.

Ironically for the right, the chief driver of the current instability is Brexit and its follies, but our voting system and constitutional structures are contributing too, and Burnham might at least understand the need for some change there. Not change for change’s sake; change to improve the health of our politics. After all, it’s in part these structures, and the build-up of electoral frustration it creates in the system, which cause things like Brexit, in which our chief foreign policy position was decided by voters taking a free hit at an unpopular government, to happen in the first place. Voters need pressure valves, and that includes occasional representation of nuts, not least because nuts tend to both secure representation and lose it more promptly in proportional systems.

I don’t support PR to create what Guardian midwits call ‘a progressive alliance’ – nor do I really consider a party like the contemporary Green Party to be progressive, considering their vision for the country seems to be positively prelapsarian, and the Lib Dems have never seen a housing development they didn’t want to block. Proportional representation should not be seen as somehow able to magically conjure up a new form of politics; our politics will remain our politics after its introduction.

However, I do think that PR would create a fairer way to manage our existing politics. The traditional argument for our current system of First Past the Post, that it keeps extreme parties out, seems less convincing in a five way split which could see an extreme party govern unilaterally on circa 25% of the vote via that system. Or any party being able to, really.

The French have this neat constitutional idea of proclaiming a new Republic. They’re currently on their fifth. It’s a weird idea, but you can just decide on a new Republican era, perhaps hold a constitutional convention with the proposed new arrangements, and get a mandate for it as De Gaulle in 1958. Such ideas are maybe a little highfalutin for British politics. Still, I do think something in that spirit might be necessary, a sort of symbolic broom cleaning of a political system delivering increasingly poor outcomes. That’s why I support granting votes at 16; it won’t change the outcome of many elections but it does bring new ideas and impulses in at very little cost.

There are excellent features of British political culture, such as our long tradition of democratic deliberation and our creation of a successful multinational state. However, these days British and particularly the English seem – ironically for a country that spend over a decade at war in part over constitutional reform – very bad between recognising the links between political forms and political outcomes, greeting anything from the refurbishment of the Commons to the creation of regional Mayors with ‘How much does this cost?’ In fact the British greet pretty much any societal or cultural development with this, and as for infrastructure investment, most British voters never saw a bridge which wasn’t a waste of money.

Yet those same English seem to have no trouble accurately diagnosing that our current political culture is sub-optimal, and I think Burnham might be able to change some things in a way which improves the system’s overall health. This is where his apparent comfort delegating power might come in very useful indeed, leaving him happy to lend a pleasant face to those driving political reform.

Ironically, circling back to where we started, the thing which gives me most hope about Burnham is how brutal he was to Starmer. He saw Starmer was fatally wounded in political terms and he didn’t hesitate, didn’t prevaricate, didn’t Biden; he planned in advance and had his knife well-sharpened when it came to wield it. Perhaps this sense of dramatic timing was the true benefit of Burnham’s vaunted English Literature degree.

Now, there’s only so much optimism this can fill me with, as Labour politicians have always been best at taking out other Labour politicians, perhaps because they’re the only other politicians Labour ones can conceive of to exist. ‘Like me but a bit less or more so.’ For Starmer’s part, his truly exceptional moment, outside of Labour tradition, was helping Boris Johnson to self-destruct; taking out a Tory rather than another Labour faction.

Nonetheless, Burnham was ruthless, he seized the crown, and perhaps there’s hope there. Burnham is going to have to get used to being hated and contested, and stuff like the ‘Makerfield test’, where every policy is supposed to be tested against the interests of his Manchester constituency, isn’t going to survive an explanation to the Japanese Prime Minister where Makerfield is. Yet the ruthlessness of Burnham’s political assassination of Starmer offers a hint of hope that behind that soft Pudsey bear face might just reside a political bastard. To the extent Burnham has a real personality beneath the character he plays on TV, I hope it’s that of a ruthless, cold-blooded and highly effective shit.

I’m inclined to say as little more about the show as possible; I did do some press about it at the time. What’s here is a soundtracked version of the show I toured from August 2019 to September 2022, taking in five Fringe festivals along the way. This show was my attempt to fill a ‘gap in the market’ for the kind of satire I thought the UK was missing, someone who was genuinely taking the mick out all sides without a dog in the fight. Predictably, audiences proved limited.

Life moves on fast, and I’m not really doing stand-up anymore. That particular itch feels scratched. But it’s nice to have a memorial of my years doing it in the UK. I am a conservative and cautious man in my private life, and have always put my radicalism into my work. For me, this piece marks when I was out on my furthest limb and, as long as you have some knowledge of the UK political scene circa 2015, I reckon you can get something from it.

Besides, it’s time to release it before the people involve start dying off. Some of the characters (George Galloway anyone?) are already looking pretty obscure.

Below is the show trailer, then the whole thing is below the paywall.

My thanks to all the people who helped me make this show, the friends who supported, the audiences who came, and my former spouse Ke Zuo. A particular thanks is due to my dear friend who put the facilities at my disposal to record the narration.

Read more

Now on with today’s post.

I don’t think non-native speakers of English, eager to practice our era's lingua franca, will ever understand how it feels, when you’ve shown that you’re capable of having a conversation with someone in another language, and even may have been connecting with them nicely, proving yourself completely fluent, and then they throw in a few sentences of English at the end just to show that they could have had the conversation in English all along. That they make it clear – your efforts are sweet, but I was at base humouring you.

You might refer to this as an ‘accent tax’. The fact that, regardless of fluency, the presence of a foreign accent in a language other than English is liable to provoke an unsolicited switch into English, or at least a tension about this occuring; the idea that speaking a language with an accent is an automatic sign that the world language should be initiated.

These days it isn’t even an English accent which provokes this; any non-native accent is seen as a prompt to change, even if the other language itself is spoken fluently. It’s as if an order has come down on from on high to not speak anything other than English with foreigners, and there has been a switch to this attitude, a homogenisation, in living memory, particularly in customer service settings. And I know from my own experiences at various Brussels guichets that these days people plenty of people show up to shops and services and just expect English to be spoken, without even asking, know that the link between ‘living abroad’ and ‘learning the local language’ has been broken.

In the Anglosphere, switching to the interlocutor's native language doesn’t happen, no matter how bad the speaker’s accent in English, in part because there is no other language to switch to but also that to switch on someone clearly struggling in a foreign language is seen as rude. I speak four languages myself, and would never show up a German or a French person if I heard them struggling in English in the UK; ironically, they’re usually delighted to speak their native language in such situations as the opportunity arrives much more rarely.

But the further irony here is that foreigners speak English with all manner of accents and it is no impediment to their ‘mastery’ of the language. Senior people at professional organisations can do all their business in fast American English with the thickest accent and still put down on their CV ‘full professional proficiency’. They are not lying. You can come into the English-speaking world and be acclaimed for your acting, like Javier Bardem, and still do your roles in a thick Spanish brogue. You can be one of the great political philosophers in Hannah Arendt and still speak English with an intense German accent which you show no desire to improve. It’s even a little quirky! In English-speaking culture, un accent n’est pas la guerre.

Can you imagine the same in other cultures? That bad accents would be not so much tolerated as celebrated? Of course, there are people who come in from outside language communities and do extraordinary things, the Canadian comedian Dashan (big mountain) for example, whose Chinese got good enough to perform on Chinese TV and who became something of an ‘honorary Chinaman’ for an older generation. Jodie Foster often appears in French films in French – indeed, quite a few female Anglophone actors have gone that route.

Yet it always seems such a big deal, not being native, like the comedian Gayle Tufts who in Germany used to make shows out of her bad German; or the Dutch comedian Rudi Carell, who’d made his living performing in Germany and whose German was fluent with a Dutch accent, being asked by an interviewer, ‘Can you speak better German than you do?’

Of course, all these figures were embraced by other cultures, just in a different way than elsewhere, with a greater sense of their uniqueness. There were fewer of them, I suppose, and more of a fuss is made of the non-native, more strangeness attached to their accent. I remember when I used to perform stand-up comedy in German audiences used to tense up when I spoke German, with a sense of ‘Who is this guy and why does he know our culture?’ The way round that was to encase it in English; they didn’t mind German-speaking sections within English sets, but an Englishman purely doing German was too much for them. Or maybe I just wasn’t very funny in German.

Living abroad, I’ve always felt my accent is an elephant in the room. You’re waiting to say something, and then you do, and sometimes you see such disappointment in people’s eyes when you speak – even something akin to fear. Who is this person? Where do they come from? Why do they know my language? How am I to behave?

Being most used to hearing them, most English native speakers are very welcoming to non-native accents, and yet for other language communities it seems to present an enormous challenge to hear their language mispronounced. The switch to English in these contexts seems at some level a desire to preserve the purity of the tribe and perhaps even some kind of compensation for not speaking the world language by emphasising exclusivity. Our language is smaller, but it’s pure.

There are glorious exceptions; Italian and Spanish speakers are extremely welcoming, as they are welcoming to outsiders in most contexts. Have food! Have shelter! Have language! And I suspect members of minority language communities would be delighted, if surprised, to hear, say, English-accented Basque.

Yet at base, having an accent means ‘getting the sounds wrong in a way that shows you don’t come from round here.’ At base it means ‘I speak your language worse.’ For most people, it still seems to present an obstacle to taking someone quite so seriously as they would as a native speaker. It’s worth saying to that it’s virtually impossible to eradicate a foreign accent from a second language learnt as an adult, and nor should that really be anyone’s goal; keeping it sounding relatively pleasant is a more realistic ambition. Yet it still seems very strange that it could be seen as ‘cute’ or ‘sexy’ or even ‘endearing’ to effectively wear a big propellor hat on your head which says ‘foreigner’ and vigorously twirl it round by the power of your own vocal chords.

The irony of it is that when my accent does bring a switch to English the English itself is often dire, with the thickest non-native accent imaginable. It wouldn’t annoy me so much, this cacophonous mangling of my native tongue, if there wasn’t this concordant strictness about the use of, say, French. As a group of speakers the French react to the slightest mispronunciation of English as if the Panthéon were being defiled. As I’ve written elsewhere recently, you can have the world language or you can have a perfectly pronounced language, but not both. A world language looks like English does these days – people filtering the language through their native tongues and sound clusters and something semi-coherent emerging. A tool, but not a refined one.

However, I will absolutely not accept is that the French accent is sexy in English. Why is it sexy to not make the slightest attempt to pronounce the words right? Why is it sexy to not make the merest gesture in the direction of English phonology? To treat correct English pronunciation like the shit on your shoe? All those pinched French vowels, the absence of plural ‘s’, the complete absence of ‘h’ sounds…. Bah. Laziness isn’t sexy. Calques aren't sexy. Couple that with an attitude that treats the slightest infraction of la langue de Molière as an international scandal, and you have what I would argue is a robust linguistic anaphrodisiac. Now, I do indeed agree that the French are very sexy, just in French.

In reality, as a punter, I have to say that I find vanishingly few foreign accents in English sexy. Germans are endearing for five minutes but the unchanging rhythm and endless Americanisms soon become annoying; the Norwegians sound weirder the more you listen, and while I have a soft spot for how the Dutch sound in English, small doses are fine. Indeed, having spent a large part of my life listening to non-native English, there are only two accents I would say really reliably profile as sexy; the Greeks, who come across as really beautifully whispery and calm, and for some reason the Czechs, who just sound oddly amiable.

I can only regrettably extrapolate from this that I am unlikely to be sexy in any of my second languages. That I myself sound weird and off-putting when I get all the sounds slightly wrong, just as foreigners do to me. This was always my dilemma in Germany – I didn’t know which language to speak with German dates.

Frankly, after years living in their country, my German was almost inevitably better than their English, but at the same time, they wanted their charming Englishman to be in English. To live the Colin Firth fantasy for an evening. In my experience, there’s also an unspoken convention that in relationships it’s the woman who does the linguistic heavy lifting, tho most of the male speakers of smaller Northern European languages that I know prefer to speak English with their foreign partners.

Whatever, while I think we can get good at foreign languages, and that learning them is massively enriching, aiming to be hot in in an auxilliary tongue is a fool's errand. Certainly for a guy, the basis of sexiness is charm, which requires improvisation, and it is damnably difficult to improvise in a second tongue. Even my body language, an important part of coming over as attractive, grows notably goofier and less controlled when communicating in a second tongue.

There’s a lot of soppy nonsense about how mispronouncing words is a sign that people learnt said terms by reading them, or than an accent is a sign of bravery, but the fact is we do look down on people with accents. I do and you do too. Even if on some level charming, an accent shows someone is an outsider; perhaps one sees them spoken to a little slower, taken as a little bit more stupid, or, as we began with, refusing to speak the local language with them at all. An accent is presumed to indicate that you don’t understand the language, or the culture; it means things get dumbed down for you and ignorance is presumed. Plus there is often tho not always that aforementioned look of fear from people when they hear your accent and struggle to know how to behave and where to allocate you.

Luckily, we’ve now created an international language where you can pronounce it however you want, whenever you want, all the while imagining you sound like Tom Cruise or Olivia Rodrigo. Perhaps that is sexy, in the sense of ‘an easy lay’, a language which is anybody's. For if there’s one thing an international language can’t afford to have, it's standards.

My apologies for one post fewer this month, but a month where your Dad dies is not a normal one. Dad’s funeral was last Monday, June 22^rd, and was attended by over 120 people. He will remain a much loved presence and absence in our hearts for the rest of our lives. Thanks to everyone for their kind messages, both on the newsletter and elsewhere.

I do have some rather more positive news for you all, for I am releasing a comedy album.

On July 12, two weeks today, my album ‘The Palace of Earthly Delights’ will be released via this newsletter. It’s a 43-minute political comedy album, and is a recording of the political comedy show I toured England with from 2019 – 2022. It’s a satirical narrative, stuffed full of grotesquerie and impressions of varying quality, and all backed by an ambient soundtrack by AVzounds. In a four-star review, The Lancashire Evening Post described it as ‘a mix between your deepest imagination (and) a sci-fi film’. I tried, when writing and developing the hour, to have a pop at every single current of the British political class.

Here’s an audio trailer for the show.

I’ll release it first for paying subscribers for six months and then it’ll be made available to everyone in spring 2026. I worked on this show for years; I’m really excited to finally get it out there.

As ever

James

There aren’t too many Brussels-based writers, or at least ones that I know, which is good for those of us who are in that category, every writer wants to be working a less-travelled beat.

One of those who is, and who is doing it well, is Eoghan Walsh, who writes the Brussels Notes Substack – a newsletter where he samples the delights of the city and also outlines its prevarications.

Being resident here for nearly three years now, I’d found myself increasingly asking and indeed writing, ‘What’s good about Brussels?’ And I wanted to talk about it with Eoghan. Put another way, I was looking for reasons to find to justify my presence in a city which seemed to attract such little love from its residents and to a certain extent wider Europe.

It feels, Eoghan told me, meeting me on a Bank Holiday Monday at one of the city-centre Brussels bars which form one of the city’s great assets, that nobody really knows what a Brussels identity is. For London, or Paris, or even Madrid, it’s clear, but for Brussels it's much harder to define. Institutional sclerosis? The underdog? Opening your tax bill at the frituur? It just wasn’t clear what Brussels stood for. And that was in part logical given the capital’s hyper-regionalisation, with 19 distinct communes trying to run the show. This is a city which took 600 days to form a government and where after just 100 days that government was already on the brink of collapse.

It always came to as a surprise to me, this, because I think Brussels always makes quite a good impression of itself on just those passing through it; it seems quite a cool city, laidback and hip, to those just using it to transit on elsewhere. The kind of place which appears to those moving through it to be an insider tip, where they'd like to spend more time, which makes it all the weirder that the people who live here are after so down on it.

Nobody cares about Brussels, Eoghan said. Nobody cares about it.

Anyway, Eoghan had already been in Brussels for a good long time and knew of what he spoke. He’d come here in 2012, working an NGO job hard, before transferring into a role at the institutions. He had a family, a Belgian spouse, and lived in Koekelberg. I didn’t know exactly where Koekelberg was but I thought I had run through it on the Brussels half-marathon.

In that time, and this gave Eoghan hope, he’d already seen Brussels improve. The previous Mayor, Yvan Mayeur, as part of a left-liberal (and Francophone-Dutch-speaking) coalition had driven the pedestrianisation of Boulevard Anspach, one of the city’s major thoroughfares. Cycling had also improved since Eoghan arrived, tho that was less down to Mayeur. From where I was sitting the idea of something actually improving in Brussels seemed a strange one.

However, since the 2024 municipal elections, and the loss of the Greens as his coalition partner, current Mayor Phillipe Close had kicked back against policies aimed at reducing car dependence. The main thing was parking, Eoghan said; Belgians were born with a very defined perspective on what a good life (‘the Belgian dream’) entailed and both owning a motor vehicle, and parking it where you wanted, was an integral part of that.

To the extent that it pays attention to it at all, the wider European press finds the Wallonian-Flanders/French-Dutch split in Belgium amusing, reporting on bizarre stories like the conductor who got docked for saying ‘Bonjour’ in Flanders. But actually living in it, living in a culture where people can’t agree on what language to speak and keep subdividing an already small space into endless disputes, is actually pretty tiresome. Why can’t the answer to ‘Do you speak Dutch or French?’ be ‘Yes.’ And that is the Brussels I dreamt of before I moved here, of becoming a truly sophisticated European person.

Brussels Notes

Short observations on life in Brussels

By Eoghan Walsh

It should be an opportunity, right, to have multiple languages in a country and in a city. Brussels is after all Belgium's only officially bilingual province, and perhaps any identity would have to be a hybrid one – those 12.6% of Brussel residents who claim to be fluent in French, Dutch and English.

But that’s in part the problem; a hybrid identity, the Goededagbonjour identity, necessarily takes a bit more work and a bit more comfort with pluralism, needs people who see the other as an opportunity rather than a threat. That takes time, and it’s no wonder so much of Brussels Eurobubble life defaults to deracinated international English, or even form part of the one in ten Brussels residents who speak neither French, English or Dutch. It’s fun when RWDM Molenbeek, my Brussels football team, make all their stadium announcements in Dutch and French, but it’s a bit more work than most people are prepared to extend on the day-to-day.

To an extent, both Eoghan and I had to find a way to like Brussels; his kids were going to a Flemish speaking-school, and my job was keeping me here. He knew Brussels could get better as he had already seen it get better. The picture of the city had changed in his time too; people of North African descent would start out in the inner city and then move out to the leafy suburbs; now new waves of immigration, e.g. from the Balkans, were coming. Yet other things were changing too, and crime which had once only been a feature of districts where poor people lived was becoming everybody’s problem.

Eoghan proposed that Belgium attracted a certain kind of person, one attracted to what they call in governance ‘hard problems’. Someone who almost felt sorry for the frightful constitutional mess of Belgian politics. Brussels was certainly, he said, and certainly when compared to somewhere like the confident and prosperous Antwerp, an underdog. Was it simply not very Brussels to be a Brussels booster? It wasn’t very Belgian to love Belgium after all, let alone be actively passionate about it.

All that was needed, Eoghan said, preparing to leave me, was that enough people cared about the city to take a stand about making it better. Well, I thought, as he pressed a cute little beer zine into my hand before he went, no-one could accuse Eoghan of not caring about his adopted hometown. Brussels could certainly use a few more like him for the city had an acute shortage of optimists. Not that I was exactly helping of late.

I remember reading during the pandemic, a time where I feared for my loved ones lives weekly, that one in a hundred people over the age of 80 died every week. In that context, I shouldn’t be too surprised that my Dad’s number has at last come up – and by the end, he was ready for it to do so, life reduced to hospital visits and pain – and should be more grateful for the half decade of octogenarianism he successfully navigated with such unflagging optimism.

I’ve been thinking of late, living through the last months of my ailing father, and how I loved him, that your real friend in such situations is the intellect. It’s the intellect, when losses start to bite, which offers you some guidance, even if just in giving you things to cling to or softening your fall.

Since my Dad left us, these are the thoughts which are helping; knowing that I spent plenty of time with him at the end, knowing that there was nothing unsaid or anything that needed to still be said couldn’t be said then – even a talk with a dying person needs to respect the rhythms of a conversation, and one of my last chats with my Dad was about the Champions League Final, which wasn’t avoidance of some great emotional disclosure but a way to take some of the sting out of such a cosmic moment, preparing to say goodbye forever – and knowing that other people, such as my dear friend Alex, who left us aged 29, died with a lot more money left on their table than my Dad did.

These aren’t really emotions, though, rather observations, and to the extent that I do have feelings, it seems wrong to, when asked after the death of a beloved parent as to how you’re feeling, respond ‘grateful and relieved’.

Emotion never quite matches up to incident. You dream of getting married for years and then the day arrives and all you can feel is that your boxer shorts are misaligned; you long to hear from an ex for years and when they do finally reach out life has long since moved on. Still, as I get older I find more and more that it is the intellect which remains constant and which sits at the wheel of the ship. Gut is decisive, emotions are consultative, but the mind must be at the helm.

Perhaps it’s because the storminess of youth is subsiding, and that a situation already experienced two or three times cannot but fail to come across as a little less existentially decisive and a little more ironical, but as I go on through life I am relying more and more and more on my judgement.

What I've lived, what I read, and the conversations I have, are all an important part of forming said judgement. Simply feeling things, or more specifically basing my decisions on what is running through me emotionally is a poor guide; rather than following a five-year plan for action in my career, I would simply have resigned from my job four times already and, as a result, likely be back in my childhood bedroom. I am a hothead, as befits a Welsh Jew, and following my emotions would generally only have made my situation even worse than it is.

What I read is also really important to me. Indeed, the idea of reading for pure pleasure, of reading without ‘direct use’, seems somewhat alien, as everything I read is in some way grist to the mill of moving through life. There may be only one outstanding lesson from reading about the more difficult passages of history, from the Black Death to Nazi Germany, but it’s a good one; things have always, somewhere and at some point, been worse. Whatever I’m going through in my life, I can tell myself ‘Well, it’s not the bubonic plague.’ Not least in such salient details at that the bubonic plague is these days eminently curable by a short course of antibiotics.

Of course, a sense of history can also give you the opposite; remind you not just that many of the problems of the past are now solveable, but also that they some are perennial. That people have always been striving for glory and status and wealth and suffering the vicissitudes of the quest.

There’s an argument – itself one conducted in pretty much every age – that artists should show more engagement with the issues of the day, but I think the opposite, that artists should show greater engagement with the past, right down to its more obscure reaches; I’d rather have an author who was not adept in the latest BlueSky controversy but deep into ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic’. Funny, isn’t it, that being deeply invested in the past might be not some abstract flight of fancy but a way to be more present, more committed to your own life, and making better calls in it.

Important as doing the reading is, what I’m praising here is more a deliberative mental process, a sense of rehearsing an argument internally until a point is reached where one argument on one side or the other proves decisive. Of course, you can easily pursue mental processes past that point, which isn’t healthy; tracing the contours of something when you’ve already know what the conclusion needs to be. But at any time when I’ve faced a big life choice – whether to move back to London, whether to get married, whether to leave London and start again elsewhere – there’s been a longish period of thinking followed by the gradual arrival at a point where one argument seems to become incontrovertible. It can take some time, but enough thought or just time usually gets you to that point.

I call this the ‘invincible argument’. You find the one point that you can't refute on the side of an internal debate. Considering whether to apply for a promotion, you realise no outcome would be worse than the status quo, so you apply; you realise that, if you don’t try to make it in comedy in London now, there will never be a better time regardless of outcome. Of course, you normally have a strong gut outcome on such things too, and ideally that aligns with your intellectual approach. The intellect can erect the correct scaffolding while you excavate the fresco your gut told you was behind the wall.

For a long time in the last year, I’ve been struggling with the decision I made to go and try and seek my fortune in London in my 30s. I have never made such a push for anything in my life as I made to establish myself as a writer and performer there and, given that one of the last social events I attended in the city was the book launch of a prominent political journalist, I can’t claim to have been completely unknown. The issue was and has always been money, and in 2023 I cut my losses to take a paying gig and a 9-5er which has resulted in the last decade seeming increasingly absurdly anachronous and bizarre, so different is the tack I’m on now and how I spend my time. I have often felt of late that that decade of peak me, replete as it was in minor incident, was a misfire.

However, when people ask me now what I am feeling, I have a new response. I may not have made it in that decade as I wished, and I may not be able to perform the emotion that they wish. Yet I can say that I am profoundly grateful that in that decade, the last of my father’s life, I was near him and that we made such efforts to hang out. We watched cricket at Edgbaston and saw West Ham in London twice. We welcomed him as a visitor to London and we walked in the countryside in Leicestershire. He was at my wedding and graduation; he saw my last comedy solo-show. Nothing I could have done, and certainly nothing I could have done creatively, would have been as precious as the time we got to spend together and being able to write the list I just supplied you with. And it is thought, and a cold assessment of life's realities, which led me to prioritise having that over other choices.

I may not be able to perform emotionality for you right now, but I can tell you that, in the immediate aftermath of my father’s passing, I am profoundly grateful that I was near to him in his last years. This isn’t to say that tears won’t come – they are coming more and more, my Dad died – but at least they will be the clean tears, the irreproachable tears, unadulterated ones. Not the ones mixed with regret.

I wouldn’t be able to say if we all have a personal aesthetic within. But I would wager in most of us there is an aesthetic palate, a sense of colours, climates, sounds and images that we find ourselves instinctively drawn to. Ways of looking and even ways of acting which feel like home. The difference between the languages we speak as foreign ones and the ones which, even if not our native tongue, feel closer to us even if we speak them imperfectly. Our vibe. I remember just before the 2019 election a friend, heavily into Jeremy Corbyn, doing a Twitter feed outlining their ideal societal conditions, and it was all subsidised lunch kitchens and hearty buns and free buses, all very Orwell and Silitoe, and thinking, ‘It does not feel inside this person as it does inside me.’ That their paradise would be different to mine.

I think this is an underrated factor in why people create – that they are drawn to a particular aesthetic so intensely that they want to marinate in it, even need to summon it given its absence in their reality. Writers are often criticised for writing the same book, but given that it’s hard to write at all, writers can’t afford to ignore those certain scenes, those certain configurations, which seem to possess an animating power and demand to be written again and again. I think it can simply be that the aesthetic charge of a particular scene is irresistible to that author. I’m reading Philip Roth at the moment, ‘I Married a Communist’, and tho his world of ‘50s union labour and eloquent characters is not my own, I can feel that for him it is highly charged. He is able to communicate to the reader why he can’t get 1950s Newark out of his head, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

By now, I feel pretty aware of my own creative aesthetic. It’s continental European cities, a lot of train trips or travel in general, people who feel like they’ve missed out on things. Millennials finding themselves abroad and older and reflecting on their lives, an emphasis on verbal wit and a deep interest in male friendship. Lots of rain. Girls walking alone around central European squares. Not expressly poetic; people have told me on several occasions that my writing comes over a bit like detective fiction, with the mystery being the universe. Kafkaesque, but gentler, and nostalgic and more in dialogue with pessimism than pessimistic. More influenced by the continental tradition than the English one, perhaps, but also totally English in humour and sensibility.

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Less than two years after securing a historic majority, in the wake of truly bad local election results, the UK Labour Party has embarked on a course of bloodletting, self-immolation and a factional tussle for control of the leadership. In other words, the party is back in its comfort zone. In reliably Millenarian fashion, Britain’s historical centre-left party is consumed with the search for a saviour. Current King Across the Water is Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester, who is throwing his hat into a by-election prompted by a resignation of an existing MP, under the slogan of ‘Only I can save the country from my party.’

In the UK, it is perfectly possible for governments to change leaders mid-term; at the same time, the public rarely rewards parties who do so. And they are likely to be even harsher on the Labour Party for doing it, because they are always harsher on the Labour Party, whose rare periods in government always begin against a background of scepticism due to prejudice and precedent.

Some might say though that a party which describes itself as a ‘moral crusade or nothing’ might be inviting a certain amount of ethical scrutiny upon itself. In part due to an electoral system which means that Labour is the only social democratic game in town for British politics, the Labour Party has a slightly mythical, storied quality that can be off-putting for those of who want a sane centre-left part much in the same way as we want a good dentist; to perform a function, not fulfill a mythic arc. Seeing the Party embark on its current self-immolating course feels, for someone not steeped in Labour Party lore, a little bit like being on holiday and watching people perform a strange ethnographic dance. You can learn its significance but the passion of it feels abstract.

Of course, I understand the logic in taking swift action. Current Prime Minister Keir Starmer is terribly unpopular in a way unlikely to improve; he comes across as wooden and is deeply disliked by the public. Labour wants to avoid the Joe Biden drift, with a dud candidate dragging the party’s fortunes and no-one brave enough to challenge him before it was too late.

Yet you can challenge too early too. The example of the 2025 Canadian election is salient here; the Liberals traded out Justin Trudeau, a similar dead electoral duck, for Mark Carney just six weeks before the vote. The result was a stunning last-minute comeback victory for the Liberals. As long as there’s a good candidate, a change of leadership can be done later, and it would be better to give Starmer a chance to suck up difficult decisions and own them if he’s going to be made an electoral sacrifice of anyway, to take the opportunity to position the next leader with a more than putative inheritance. I share the analysis that Starmer – somewhat unfairly in my view – is electoral hemlock and cannot win another election, but I find this way of doing it, the haphazard, uncoordinated, scheming spectacle we’re seeing, to be below the wit of the average chump. What’s needed is not urgency but a timetable; what’s needed above all is a period of cool heads and strategy.

And of course the Tories have done it. The Tories have swapped leaders like Tazos. In the period of 2010-2024 under Tory rule, we had Cameron liberal Toryism with hostility to immigrants, Mayeian Merkelism with hostility towards immigrants, Johnsonian populism with both overtures and hostility towards immigrants, Sunakian technocratic Thatcherism with hostility to immigrants, plus whatever Liz Truss was. That’s at least two more species of government than there were elections in the period.

For though the British system does allow for a change in PM mid-term, the new broom soon loses legitimacy without a fresh mandate. A new Prime Minister has to go to the people. Witness the case of the most radical of all those shifts in gear, Liz Truss, who came only with a mandate from the tiny Tory leadership, no more than a couple of constituencies in size; that is to say the most radical economic experiment of British politics’ recent years, Truss’ careening libertarian interlude, came without any real popular mandate at all. The Tories are still paying the price.

Indeed, it’s worth saying when acknowledging the Tory precedent of swapping leaders, where are the Conservatives now? Reduced to a Parliamentary rump of 121, with this towards the upper end of expectations at the 2024 General Election. Polling 18%, shattered to their right, and having just lost 433 Councillors in the local elections which they are hailing as a victory because Kemi Badenoch comes across well on television. The Tory Party is screwed, with much of its Home County heartlands lost to the Liberal Democrats, and stands sporting around its neck the albatross of its last period in power.

Those years took the UK from being a confident, mid-sized European power with problems, to a declining, sclerotic constitutional mess, after an extended period of sampling pretty much every flavour of right-wing governance. To the extent that you could make a case for any of those periods as competent, actual impact of policies aside, it would be the coalition of 2010 between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, which endured for five years and in the face of multiple thumpings in local elections. It then ended with the election of a Conservative majority government in 2015.

The fact is that Keir Starmer didn't win a majority for Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting or god forbid Ed Miliband to do with as they wish. Starmer was on the front of the Labour manifesto, won his majority on that program and has a mandate to see it through. It was Starmer who proved sufficiently electorally unthreatening that even the centre-right liberal middle class broke Lib Dem as they had no real fear of him being Prime Minister, even when up against the similarly unthreatening Sunak.

What Labour actually needs to do is clear; it needs, in exceptionally turbulent times, a year of head down governing, ignoring media froth, and getting the fundamentals in place for economic growth. There are green shoots already appearing; NHS waiting list down, train ridership up, GDP forecasts modest but upscaled. The foreign policy has been by and large just right. If these trends continued for a year, whatever personal objections people have to Starmer, it’d be worth a few percentage points for Labour in the polls, and it’s not an exaggeration to say none of this would be happening if Labour were on 25% on the polls and not 18%. Or even, say, 23%. After all that, a new man or woman could come in and have something to run on.

The media and the wider electorate have to take some responsibility for why this kind of political patience is not possible or does not seem to be. For it feels like the reaction to Keir Starmer has not been proportionate to his shortcomings. From the populist-right nickname of ‘two-tier Keir’ to the left accusing him of personally killing children - an accusation which besmirches the accuser more than the accused - it is Starmer’s very dullness and diligence that has functioned as a blank space into which personal grievances and obsessions can be projected. The tale of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind, with the boy now ‘British voters’.

For his part, Starmer clearly believes in the essential decency of the British, or at least of the English, but my have they monstered him. At worst Starmer has been wooden and earnest. This level of public hatred is just not commensurate with stuffing up the winter fuel allowance, nor with the very short amount of time Labour has been in after fourteen years of misrule; it’s more a tantrum by an electorate which has, from voting for Brexit or trying to make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister and indeed actually doing so with Boris Johnson, been off on one for some time now.

The irony is that Starmer is, in his biography, just as working-class as Burnham; Starmer seems to have an almost touching blue-collar belief that if you do your work diligently and well enough people will see your efforts and reward you. Ha! What the Labour Party seems to want instead is someone who is better at performing being working-class than embodying working-class virtues of persistence and grit, the kind of man who, asked for his favourite biscuit, replies ‘chips and gravy’. Really. That’s why a lot of the media class seem to like ‘Andy’; he looks more their idea of what a working-class person is than Starmer, jogging around in his Everton top and dressing casually at funerals.

I’m not saying Burnham’s class background is fake, by the way; his dad was a telephone engineer. Just that he’s better at performing he is than Keir is. And Burnham is a much better communicator than Starmer and might indeed come in and boost his party in the polls – an uptick of, say, 3%. Is this all worth it, in times of crisis, for a single-figure spike in polling, to have a new leader with all the same problems but who seems to like making harder choices even less? After all, being Mayor of Manchester is probably the easiest gig in the Labour Party these days. The economic growth is all there already and you just need to stay out of the way of the new housing developments.

There is an argument sometimes made in left circles that all that would be needed was a one-term Labour government to truly radically change things. Ken Livingstone used to say it. The current moment has shown, I’d suggest, why that would never be possible, because at any point of resistance (and the greater the radicalism, the greater the resistance), Labour’s internal coalition would inevitably self-destruct. This is almost unforgivable to me, this mass wobbly by a social democratic party which, elected on an incrementalistic ticket, seems to have decided to dress for the government it wants rather than the government it was elected to form.

I’m really sorry for Labour members that they don’t fancy another few years of managerial technocracy with redistributive features but that’s all their party has a mandate for. Flailing around for a change without strategy is the height of self-indulgence, of party before country, and of ambition over the greater good. It just so happens that, at the moment of crisis, the only solution is apparently what the Labour Party has wanted all along, or at least the particular faction’s conception of it. At the first sign of turbulence, the intellectual culture around the Labour Party always comes up with the same answer: ‘What voters are demanding is a shift to the left! Us, but more so!’

It feels, absent Blair-time levels of economic growth and Blairite brilliance of political leader, that Labour will always do this, will always at the first sign of trouble not keep course and try to damn the critics but instead indulge in factional warfare, will wilt, that whatever faction which has been spurned will take up arms against the one currently in power, for no party seems to treasure its winners less. Hence the shortness of the list of them.

The Labour Party, faced with the eking out of compromises and yes, the inherent unpopularity of trying to govern in straitened circumstances – and let’s be clear, there’s no money for Burnham, none for Streeting, and all this chaos probably means less for Starmer even if by some miracle he stayed – has retreated to its safe space of internal warfare, coupled with risible projections of a political messiah onto Andy fucking Burnham. Burnham, same unspectacular figure who ran so unconvincingly for the leadership in 2015. It reminds me of England World Cup campaigns past where we would always have been world-beaters if we only played the one player out of the team; all this hype around the Manchester Mayor, to use a footballing analogy he might favour, has strong ‘Gareth Barry in 2006’ vibes. And when he finally turns up he’ll be a decent hard-working midfielder but not the kind who wins you pots.

Meanwhile, the electorate has proven that, whatever it says about wanting a return to stability and good governance, it no longer has the patience to give anyone or anything a chance to improve things before reaching for vituperative hatred and gaudy lies. Lost in fantasies, craving magic bullets, and unable to hold fire, perhaps the best thing you can say about these voters and this Labour Party is that they deserve each other.

The Green Party of England and Wales has an official policy of seeking ‘the effective abolition of private landlordism’. It is worth enquiring, after someone says such a thing, as to how it might work. Would there be a national enforcement agency to make sure that no one was subletting their flat? Forced eviction of lodgers? Air BNB hosts doing time?

The British state, currently unable to build a rail line from London to Leeds without having a meltdown at Birmingham, would now be required to create an enormous security force monitoring against any outbreak of landlordism. This will require a considerable upgrade in state capacity. Oh, and just to let you know, the person in charge of making this happen will be… Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

Not like that, the Green voter says, not like that – but then how? The same with other Green Party policies such as legalising all drugs, removing language requirements for visas, or withdrawing from NATO to ‘fight American imperialism’. I sometimes think that all Green Party policies need to be followed, as a sort of intellectual ‘costing’, with ‘But in a nice way.’ Leave NATO, but in a nice way. Abolish Israel, but in a nice way. Of course, these are not policies in any meaningful sense; they are poses to be struck, not positions to be implemented, any more than a Green councillor can be expected to have any meaningful impact on the war in Gaza.

Poses, and you vote for them if you like the pose and think that endosring it says something about you; the distinct feature of left-wing politics is that it views itself as a revealed truth and not as, as other political tendencies do at their best, a statement of preference. The entirety of this kind of politics functions as such; adopt unworkable proposal, demand candidate asserts unworkable proposal, condemn others who do not. As such, the salient response to the demand that the genocide in Gaza be recognised as such is not to debate the case on the merits but to ask, ‘Why is it so important for you, so many miles away, and with such limited knowledge of the situation, to state this?’

What is risible, tho, is the idea that all this left-populism is supposed to inspire hope. It seems to me to be a straight up category error to present unworkable idealism as something hopeful; in fact, it’s the opposite. Thinking about it for more than ten seconds, it is impossible to outlaw landlords – no other country has managed it, not even the Soviets – and I suppose the idealism is in finding the idea of a world without landlords an inherently uplifting one; for me, it is more inspiring to try, giving the universal human attraction to either renting or renting out a room, to make sure the rental sector functions as well as possible.

‘But we need to teach the government a lesson,’ says the contemporary voter. I have several issues with this iteration of the Labour Party and think their policies on migration have been sadistic to the point of irredeemable. But I do find one thing quite uplifting about them – they’re in government. They’re in power, having made the requisite compromises to get there, and can now do things. Some good, some bad, but all the while things more likely to be in tune with the progressive tradition than parties from elsewhere. For all the rhetoric of the Corbyn left, their sum total of achievements has had less impact than the number of solar farms Ed Miliband approves before lunchtime. Yet of course that kind of far-left politics isn’t designed to get into power, because power would mean accountability; it is designed to fail in a way which can convincingly avoid taking the blame for the failure; it is the anxious avoidant of political styles.

In modern left populism, hope doesn’t mean something wide, realistic, durable, it means ‘the hope of seeing my particular political subculture represented on the main stage.’ The hope of personal validation. It’s not hope for everybody – I don’t think a world where Israel is destroyed or landlords are rounded up or we decimate NATO is hopeful at all. For hope to work, it needs to be something realistic and cognisant of the difficulties of even getting to the stage where you can approve a single wind farm; this is the hope Barack Obama stated well in his 2012 convention speech with ‘Our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.’ That's hope, and he sold it well.

Idealism doesn’t have to mean grandiosity. Think of those who helped you in times of trouble. Who helped more, the person who gave you concrete support, a place to stay, but one often presented with clear boundaries and caveats and a need for you to take responsibility to resolve your own situation? Or the person who offered you a load of nebulous, unspecified assertions that everything would get better? The Green Party is the latter friend.

Polanski’s brand of fake ‘hope’ (fope?) is particularly depressing for a specific branch of people – mainstream British Jewry, ironically the community he hails from and frankly is at loggerheads with. In the next few years, the Green Party of England and Wales will inevitably become involved in increasing level of political scandal about antisemitism. Not because of Israel, not because of the media, but because all the ‘antizionist’ obsessives who got Labour into such a spot under Jeremy Corbyn are heading to the party, the people who think that the way to solve the Middle East conflict is to weed ‘Zionists’ out of your local party treasury meeting and bully British Jews for crimes, real or imaginary, elsewhere. And unlike the Labour Party, the Greens are too small to offer any significant institutional pushback.

But, the defence will come, Zack Polanski is himself Jewish! The Greens can’t be antisemitic! Just like the Tories can’t be racist because Kemi Badenoch is Black, right? It genuinely is the entirety of many Green supporters’ answer to charges of antisemitism that Zack Polankski is Jewish, with a selective and rather repulsive outrage at any antisemitism aimed in his direction. Green boosters are up in arms about antisemitism in a Times cartoon of Polanski, but seem rather quieter when their own electoral candidates call Jews ‘cockroaches’.

Of course, daft as Polanski is, he does know what prejudice against Jews looks like. In his old, pre-populist life, he refused to endorse Jeremy Corbyn because of it. And in 2018 he said, as the Greens rejected a motion on making the Party ‘welcoming to Jews’, that he considered that his party’s attitude to Israel ‘felt a bit obsessive at times’. That’s what he really thinks, on Corbyn and Israel, but he’s decided to change his tune. Narcissism is apparently a stronger force than self-preservation.

At some level, though, I think Polanski knows what he’s helping to incubate. I’m less clear that he understands that his new friends will only stay on board if he proves the right kind of Jew for them. One of the ironies of far left attitudes to antisemitism is that the milieu presents the Jew who goes along with their views as the brave outlier, when of course the really brave stance for a Jew on the left to take is to show even the merest affinity for the world’s only Jewish state, let alone self-identify as a Zionist.

Anyway, for these elections there is a raft of dodgy antisemitic candidates running - and the response from the party’s supporters when their words are quoted or objections are raised will be that it’s all the right-wing media trying to stop Polanski becoming Prime Minister or the sinister power of the ‘Zionist’ lobby. That Israel is running false flags in the Kingston Green Party or wherever. Expect to hear the word ‘smears’ a lot and that old favourite left-denialist term ‘weaponised’. Perhaps if left parties don't want antisemitism ‘weaponised’ against them they should try doing less of or making fewer excuses for it.

Polanski is depressing because he’s stupid. He says stupid things, often with a weird gormless smirk when so doing. Asked whether Israel should exist, Polanski said ‘I genuinely don’t think any state has a right to exist.’ Thanks for that, Zack. A really useful contribution to the debate there. It's a first-year student politics answer, and not one of the clever ones, the first-term poseur who just spent a month on a farm in Cuba (or in earlier decades a kibbutzim, ironically enough). It’s the kind of unworkable position which quickly gets disabused by living in the real world of real people.

Why are we supposed to feel hopeful about this? Are we supposed to be happy that the left – which always has the odds stacked against it, through the right-wing media, its own internal division, and its tendency to govern horrendously once in power – has such a low intellectual wattage these days that this kind of unmoored glibness is taken for actual politics?

A Yiddish proverb says that a fool can throw a stone into a pond that a hundred wise men can’t get out. Zack Polanski is a fool; he says silly things for popularity, presents fake solutions to problems real and imagined, and has none of the grit and hinterland that mark a real politician out. And he’s all over the media tossing stones into any pond which will have them.

It is strikingly obvious that this is just a mirror image of all the facile solutions peddled on the populist right; instead of chuck out the migrants, it’s the real villains are the bankers, instead of cut benefits, it’s soak the rich. None of it gets us any further towards anything better in a country with an ageing population and low economic growth rate. It just isn’t true that there’s a massive pot of untaxed money sitting around which the Greens can just skip into power and redistribute and that, incidentally, perfiduous Labour have failed to seize; that’s no more viable a policy than basing your agricultural strategy on obtaining a new species of magic bean. The grim gear-grinding of the current Labour government, for all its shortcomings, is a more thought-out response to a straitened economic climate than Polanski’s promises.

The UK has real, hard problems, and in face of them Polanski is just a Shoreditch-tinged version of the pub bore claiming ‘As far as I’m concerned it’s all very simple...’ Indeed, I’d argue that, given that pub bores are inevitably big fans of nuclear power, Polanski is even less interested in energy issues than they are. He is the second cheek of the simplist arse currently suffocating British public life.

These two populist prongs, the Greens on the left and Reform on the right, feel like the first kind of politics we get into, the politics that appeals when we’re seventeen and think solving the world’s problems is as simple as identifying and denouncing the Bad People.

That this is one of the electorate's currently forward-riding political solutions doesn’t seem to me to be inspiring at all, rather a symptom of the paucity of everything else, including voters’ own level of analysis and their current need for cheap scapegoats. You can’t abolish landlords. You don’t get safer by leaving NATO, and Vladimir Putin is a hundred times worse than Donald Trump. It is all to be honest, pitifully dumb, and there’s never anything uplifting in that.

When I first became aware of professional football in a big way – essentially, the moment David Platt scored that extra-time volley against Belgium in June 1990 – the roles of UK Prime Minister and Nottingham Forest FC manager were both long-term positions. Margaret Thatcher and Brian Clough had been in place since the 1970s, and each seemed simply part of the order of things, constants in the national and local backdrop respectively. These were positions from which stability was expected, which, as a cautious child, suited me just fine. When, a few months later, my family watched on TV as Thatcher resigned, I was perturbed by the prospect of change. My mum had to come into my room later and explain that, actually, she and my dad were quite pleased.

By the time I was old enough to get properly interested in politics – mainly, I think, from watching Tory sleaze years editions of Have I Got News for You – there had still only been two of each in my lifetime. Frank Clark and John Major had replaced Clough and Thatcher and though Clark did better than Major (especially in Europe) things generally seemed to carry on smoothly enough. There was no particular reason, as Forest reached the 1996 UEFA Cup quarter final – where Bayern Munich eviscerated them, but still – to foresee a revolving door outside either office. Is John Major due some historical revision? At the time, 1995-96 or so, he seemed hopelessly doomed, an out-of-his-depth cipher, marking time until the 1997 election could put him and his shower of EU-crazed ‘bastards’ out of their misery. Yet in hindsight, he served seven years! When will we next see a PM last that long, never mind with GDP growth to match the 4.3% seen in 1996?

Forest returned to European competition this season, and they’ve done well. But instead of being led throughout the campaign by a club stalwart – as well as manager, Clark was a former player and later chairman – they’ve had four different managers, all appointed by the club’s grumpy, scowling, ambitious owner, Evangelos Marinakis. That’s more than any other English club, allowing that Spurs and Chelsea aren’t far behind with three managers each. The average manager in English men’s professional football now lasts around a year (in the slightly less febrile women’s game, it’s two years). Fans’ and boards’ patience is in short supply with instability the only constant.

To be fair, for Forest fans, it’s been that way for some time. Clark’s departure in December 1996, with Forest heading for relegation, marked the start of the club’s wilderness years, featuring a long string of managers ranging from the nondescript (Colin Calderwood, Sean O’Driscoll, Sabri Lamouchi) to the inept (Joe Kinnear, Alex McLeish, Steve McClaren, Gary Megson…). Between Clark and Steve Cooper, who finally revived the club’s fortunes in 2021, Forest endured 21 permanent managers and 11 caretakers. Many of them were indeed useless. Still, when 20 in a row fail, it’s obviously fair to ask whether there might be other issues. It’s not the aim of this piece to explain exactly why Forest were so shit for 25 years. Suffice to say, if you’ve got an organisation that, over an extended period, nobody can successfully run, you have to assume there are structural factors involved.

Which brings us back to UK politics. After Major, of course, Tony Blair and David Cameron managed very respectable periods in office. But since Marinakis took control of Forest in 2017, he’s appointed nine managers. In the same period, we’ve had five prime ministers, with all the signs pointing towards that becoming six soon. There’s a concerning convergence here, as well as some direct parallels. When Marinakis appointed Ange Postecoglou, an ideologue coach with no understanding of the organisation he’d walked into, and it all went south within 44 days, it was hard to avoid comparisons with Liz Truss1. If we pursue the metaphor, that makes Rishi Sunak (or Keir Starmer, or both) the UK’s answer to (Postecoglou’s successor) Sean Dyche – limited but pragmatic, bringing some stability in the wake of disaster, but otherwise uninspiring. Marinakis gave Dyche 113 days, but given his results (Forest were the 13th best team in England with him in charge) you can’t help but feel that in an earlier era, he might have got ten times that long.

In the same spirit, I look at approval ratings for Starmer, and indeed Sunak before him, and think: were these PMs really that bad? Sure, neither inspire, but they seem like fairly average prime ministers, rather than atrocious ones.

Both were competent at basic governing; not transformational reformers, but also not the type to lead the UK into a strategic calamity like Suez or Munich or Brexit or Iraq or the Truss budget. Yet their approval ratings show them as two of the worst PMs of all time. In Starmer’s case, what’s striking is that his rating tanked almost immediately. Within weeks of entering no. 10, he became hugely unpopular. Clearly, he made mistakes in that period – there was the winter fuel payments issue, and scandals over freebies and donations – but in terms of their national significance these were minor issues compared to, say, the 1992 sterling crisis that did for John Major, or Boris Johnson’s deadly botching of the Covid response in 2020. It’s remarkable how quickly and durably the public turned on Starmer, despite him not having damaged the country in any obvious way.

If one prime minister fails, that’s on them. But we’ve now had – five? six? seven? – failed PMs in a row, and it’s not as if anyone on the current political scene looks like they’d do much better. There is something structural going on here. We are, collectively, not producing a political culture that gives rise to successful leaders. We’ve become like Italy, whose chronic instability both in football and politics the UK used, back in the ‘90s, to look down on. Fans of Forest’s rivals look at Marinakis and see a figure of mockery, a fat man with a short temper and a dodgy past, whose appointees will almost inevitably fail. Who could realistically succeed for long under such a temperamental master? Yet maybe the UK’s voters are more like Forest’s owner than we’d like to admit. As University of Nottingham Politics Professor Steven Fielding puts it, the British electorate now demands ‘jam today, not tomorrow, even though it’s unreasonable to expect it’.

Democratic leaders must always balance short-term popularity against longer-term decisions, and often favour the former – one of the reasons, as this new book argues, why our record on climate change is so dire. But if their expected time in office is shortening, and the electorate is primed to rush to negative judgement, it only ratchets up the incentives for them to seek quick sugar rushes over good long-term governance. The new manager bounce is a real phenomenon, but it only gets you so far. At some point, you have to work out how to get the right people in charge – and how to support them for the long haul once they get there.

Richard Bates is a historian at the University of Nottingham and a Forest fan.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/departments/history/people/richard.bates1

I realise that my newsletter, to the extent that I’ve touched upon my current place of residence, may have sounded a slightly negative tone on the Belgian capital. For it’s true, that having come here for work and highly specific work at that, Brussels hasn’t been for me quite the same love affair as London or before that Berlin had been. It’s smaller than those cities, for one, and I think there’s an underrated degree of adjustment required for those coming from big cities to smaller ones, for those downsizing their urban space. If you've had the real big city experience, rather than a diluted version of it with an inevitable sense of reduction, you’re more ready to go and live in the countryside outright.

To deal with that, I’ve conceptualized it not as swapping London for Brussels but swapping London for the whole of Belgium, the two areas being not too far away in population.

Nonetheless, there are things I’ve discovered about the Belgian hoofdstad – where, to be clear, I wouldn’t have chosen to live if work hadn’t brought me here – that I’ve grown rather fond of, and some of them really do seem irreplicable anywhere else. Since October 2023, these are the things I’ve found I like most about living in Brussels, and I hope there are more to come.

1. The bars

I’m not much of a drinker these days, not entirely by choice; my body has taken that decision for me. In the few months after arrival in Brussels where I did attempt to drink even at London levels Belgian beer made clear it was not something to be messed with. But I still like and appreciate a good bar, and in Brussels I’ve found plenty.

If you’re passing through Brussels and want to do something really Belgian, I wouldn’t recommend anything more complex than going to a nice traditional Brussels bar and having a portion mixte (cheese and meats) with celery salt and a beer. Or a soft drink; one of the nicer things about said Brussels bars is that it’s perfectly acceptable to order a Chocomel hot chocolate and, when I’m off the sauce, I frequently do. A little cheese, a little celery salt and a nice snug (or seat on the terrace) and the time in Brussels can go by ever so nicely. Brussels is a talkers’ city, as befits a political town, so go out and find somewhere good to talk.

Here are some specific Brussels bars I like.

Le Coq. This is a very central bar, French and Dutch speaking, which is always busy. For me it’s the ideal place for a post-cinema debrief if I’ve been to see something at nearby Cinema Palace (more on which later). For payment, cash or Payconiq (the Belgian banking app) only. There’s a chess tournament on Sundays too, games being another good Brussels bar pastime. Very near is Billie, which has good food and soup and an excellent range of beers and softs. Also quite near is Café Merlo, another Dutch-heavy place, smaller but with a nice upstairs too.

Then there’s my local, Le Vieux Saint Josse, and my lady’s local, Au Duc de Brabant; both places have good, simple menus and friendly staff and clientele. Both are doing good trade too which indicate the popularity of a good Brussels neighbourhood bar. Further afield – you wouldn’t stumble across it as a tourist – is Cafe in den Hemel, way up in Ganshoren, but a really cool little neighbourhood bar. Incidentally, an awful lot of these bars seems to be run by Dutch speakers, which brings me to my next point.

2. The Dutch scene

Dutch is the native tongue of about 10% of Brussels residents. Yet there is also a really lively cultural scene around the language, which attempts to assert its presence within the city; Dutch book clubs, Dutch theatre groups, Dutch meet-ups and the aforementioned bars. As a friend said, if someone is trying to make something happen in Brussels, they normally speak Dutch.

What’s particularly pleasant is the way that that Dutch-speaking culture welcomes outsiders. (I use the term Dutch advisedly; insisting on the separateness of ‘Flemish’ as a language is more the province of Flemish nationalists). When I arrived in late 2023, I agonised about whether to learn Dutch, the language of 60% of Belgians, it wasn’t that useful in everyday life and at my work people speak English or French.

And yet I’ve received pretty much nothing but encouragement in my attempts.

From the highly subsidized evening classes I do twice a week, to the free summer drinks at the Huis van Het Nederlands, I’ve managed to attain a very confident level in the language in part because I’ve found people so open to my learning it. In terms of social life, I know I’m normally in the right place when people introduce things with ‘Goedendag/Bonjour’, when Belgium’s vaunted on-paper multilingualism (the country has three official languages) is actually lived as a reality as opposed to the deracinated global English dominating in many European contexts. 12.6% of Brussels residents speak French, English and Dutch, and that’s the kind of Brussels resident I want to be. Put simply, it’s a privilege to live in a city where you can speak multiple, and be encouraged to speak multiple, languages on a daily basis – even acknowledging that there’s also plenty of Brussels residents, often migrants from the rest of Northern Europe, who see multilingualism as an expensive waste of time.

The Brussels I dream of would be a genuinely multilingual one, where people can switch languages at the drop of a hat and are proud to do so. There are at least a few round these parts who share that dream.

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Brussels, where I live, is something of a transport hub, the last stop for many on a European jaunt before returning to the UK. Eurostar City. As such, I often get a message from acquaintances old and new that they’re passing through for a day and asking whether I’d like, as I invariably would, to meet for a drink.

My friend Paul was in town. I knew him from the time, approximately 2013 – 2019, when I was trying to break through as a stand-up in the UK. As a comic performer, of funny plays rather than stand-up, Paul was and is characterized above all by a fierce work ethic; he’s a fixture up at the Fringe, as I was in those days before I realised there were other places to summer than Scotland.

Paul for his part was not only usually there but indeed there heading not one or two but sometimes even four shows, one of them usually a well-rehearsed solo piece, along with plays he’d written and then something looser and more playful involving comedy, guest acts and music. He’s a real stalwart, Spirit of the Fringe type, with the blind optimism perhaps inherent in being a Spurs fan.

In recent years, Paul had had a feature film picked up and funded. I wanted to hear about that, as well as meet his wife, who was accompanying him to Brussels. We met at a bar in central Brussels to hear about the European jaunt that the couple were bringing to an end. Brussels, always first stop or last.

It’s always a little odd meeting someone still absolutely committed to the world of performance I’ve moved away from. Of course, I still do perform, almost every day; I turn my microphone on and talk into it to groups of people often larger than those I performed to in my comedy days. Although I’m taking others’ words, I find it as fulfilling as any performance I’ve ever done, with the added bonus that I get paid decently enough for doing it too. Whatever drove me to dedicate hundreds of nights of my life to stand-up from 2001 – 2022, it is entirely satisfied via interpreting now.

For his part Paul was still plugging away; this year he was even trying to do every Fringe festival in the UK, a typical example of his performing maximalism. We talked about some of the ones I’d done and he mentioned that at the Ludlow Fringe Judi Dench had been in the same building as him. And Alistair Macgowan had been in his actual audience. My own festival career had ended at the Durham Fringe in July 2022, when a man in the third row had fallen asleep during the show and which I took as a sign.

Paul was also in a position familiar to me from my recent marriage – being a one-man arts hustler while your partner worked a steady job. Not that he was freeloading; he didn’t have to tell me, as a former freelancer, that there’s more effort in keeping up that lifestyle than in many a ‘respectable’ nine to sixer.

I’d been like that too, a real klusjesman as the Dutch say, taking every single opportunity open to me from pub quizzes to primary teaching in a way which resulted in a career that wasn’t just hybrid but positively mutant. I was glad from a break from all that. Yet I saw the shape there of a familiar dilemma, the pressures of the need for financial security in a couple and the existing commitment to creativity. In a way, it feels like having a partner who does art is like managing someone with an addiction in the relationship, albeit they receive small sums of money and encouraging press coverage, rather than pariah status, for their habit.

To be clear, I thought Paul and his spouse were dealing with it a lot better than my ex and I had. My ex, coming from a culture where money counts deeply, had over time lost a lot of respect for dating a useless arts man, and what might have seemed charming in her mid-20s wore thin as her fourth decade drew on. In my experience, romantic partners say they don't care about money and then they do.

Still, it was also clear that for Paul certain decisions about the long-term viability of performing were becoming more pressing, and whether he was ageing out of the Kleinkunst milieu, whether it was ever going to happen and what that might look like if it did; what about starting a family, too?

He was talking about the film and the struggles to get it distributed. That it wasn’t enough to work your arse off and put your own money on the line to get the film made in the first place but then there were another load of costs to get people to actually see it. This was a Ponzi scheme, this was embezzlement, and we shouldn’t be encouraging the creativity of a single child until audiences could be secured for them! For all the frustrations of my current work, at least there was a paycheck at the end.

It was the last part of the conversation, tho, that stayed with me, that I took home in my thoughts as I walked along Brussels’ pedestrianised main drag. We were talking around what constituted success for us; Paul’s spouse, a headteacher, had a strategic and long-term view of things perhaps unusual in her sector. And she looked at the arts stuff with an outsider’s eye.

As many people outside artistic practice seem to, she viewed doing it at all as success. That’s often the case from people who feel that overcoming the self-doubt to get up and perform is an achievement in itself; of course, for us old hams, it’s as natural at water. Praising it is like complimenting people for being tall.

Anyway, for his definition of success, Paul pointed to various hits, various moments of computer says yes from a nice review in The Scotsman to compliments from audience members. After all, he’d worked with Dave Benson Phillips, and greater success knoweth no Millennial. Not that he viewed his comic endeavours without humour; this year he was spending his birthday on stage dressed as a monkey, but seemed to be enjoyed the minor show business humiliation of it all, as I once had done myself.

Still, my life has changed of late – everything has changed in fact, partner, place, profession. My definition of success has changed along with it. Indeed, one of the mysteries of my life is that despite being in a better position than in some years, with a certain amount of savings and a robust newsletter following, I feel less happy about myself than a few years back.

I didn’t want to be a comedian anymore, that was for sure, and any conversation with someone still involved in it only made that clearer. I had no regrets there. As for writing, even there, tho I’d love to one day get a book published, I could write and thousands of people on here would read which was already pretty good going for any writer.

On the walk home I tried to think what would constitute success for me now. It’s not easy when you’ve tried so many things. I tried to think about what had brought me feelings of success in recent years. It wasn’t the articles I’d published or even getting better at my job; what came to mind was the kid I’d tutored for history at GCSE. He’d had special educational needs, and I’d predicted him a lowish grade, in part through not really understanding the new-fangled grading system, but he’d finished far in excess of that. His Mum had written to thank me the same day.

And, though the relationship quickly went south afterwards, the day my ex-wife got her permanent residency in the UK was a day of the deepest happiness for us both. It had been a long fight, and we’d won. Together, we’d won.

Did that mean success for me was just about helping others now? I think I needed something else too, for there remained something unresolved in me. Though I remember at times feeling better about myself than I do now, overall, I’d say that I have almost never been happy with myself in my adult life. I have always felt that I have underachieved, that I haven’t done enough, that I should have had a bigger life. At times, I’ve truly hated myself and cursed what I’ve managed to come up with despite relentless personal application.

A phrase came to me: Success for me would be if I felt happy with myself. Or at least happier; to finally feel that I hadn’t undershot, that I hadn’t fallen short of fulfilling my talents, that mine wasn’t a misspent life. If I could just for one moment feel good enough about myself to give myself a break... That would be success for me. But how could that ever exist with my drive to achieve? Sometimes people tell me that I’ve done well but the problem is that I don’t feel that in my heart.

I suppose I could say that success for me would be to finally be able to accept that I’m human. Working on it.

The Republic of Letters

Who Is the Funniest....Philosopher?

Dear Republic…

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5 months ago · 35 likes · 8 comments · The Republic of Letters and James Harris

In my early days as a stand-up in London, a friend told me to go out and do a gig every night. I did try – I became no stranger to the night bus – but after one too many nights performing to my fellow comedians I realised that I wasn’t gaining much from it. Already past any basic fear of standing up before strangers, what I needed was not a sort of comic presenteeism but to find fewer and better gigs. It was more valuable to have three things a month in the diary worth doing than a spate of nights full of other acts; five minutes at the great Angel Comedy, booked months in advance, were more useful than dead tens elsewhere. And even the idea that you were rehearsing for the big gigs at the bad ones only went so far as the secret of any successful gig was always that you had to find the correct balance of your own material and audience interaction, segueing between one and the other to the benefit of both.

There is a general anxiety on Substack and beyond about the amount of writing you as an author should be doing. The ideal amount of Substack posts a month, the amount of pages or words you need to produce in order to attract and retain readers and grow your Online Writing Brand. It all strikes me, as do many of the writing courses and novel in a month challenges, as a kind of displacement activity, a kind of frenetic, Always Be Closing approach to scribbling in order to cover up that there just isn’t any money or much in the way of prospects for those who write seriously these days. An attempt to sustain the delusion that if you just write hard and pitch hard enough someone will at some point give you a chance.

Believe me I’ve lived that. I have six unproduced plays and a co-written screenplay on my hard-drive, and I’ve only been saved from the jaws of complete literary oblivion by my decision to self-publish my novel ‘Midlands’ in 2022. Doing that has proved essential for my sanity in showing me that, modest as the novel’s echo has been, I did actually write some things.

These days there are too many writers and not enough readers. But writing industrial amounts isn’t a sane response to that. It's all part of what we might call a culture of toxic productivity which is perhaps at its greatest precisely in areas, such as academia and the arts, where prospects and opportunities are so low.

I spent my 20s putting together a writing style; apart from learning German (which has come in useful) and getting to be a polished stand-up, it was the work of my decade. And that’s OK, it’s OK to spend your 20s pursuing artistic dreams; as a dear friend told me, it’s by far the best decade for unpaid creativity. You can live off beans and dreams as long as you’ve got enough money to take care of the jour au jour as the French say and everyone else is in your cohort is often skint too. Unless you’re a professional athlete or a pop star, it’s fine to use your 20s primarily as a vehicle for personal development. It’s the best time to go after a dream – if you can afford to.

The problem comes when you try and persist with Podunk creativity beyond that. For moving back to London in my 30s to pursue my comedy ambitions has had a much longer tail. Back there, I became trapped in the toxic productivity spiral I’ve spoken of; if one of the plays I’d written was rejected I just wrote another one, as well as endlessly revising those I had, trying to make them more commercial, more doable. I tried so hard to write my way out of the dilemma of there being next-to-no interest in my work.

I now see that this issue was a structural one in nature, and my ludicrous work ethic of the time – the readings I self-organised, the favours I called in, the submission after submission after submission - was my attempt to take personal responsibility for the absence of a support structure which would have allowed me to push on. You shouldn’t waste your time playing any game which you can’t win no matter how good you get at it.

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My adult life has been spent acquiring foreign languages. And this at a time when that is arguably both easier and less important than ever for a native English speaker. It has involved an enormous amount of bloody-mindedness and occasional outright dust-ups to get to the competencies I have. But it’s also clear that the reaction has been very different, and often internally varied, depending on the language I tried to learn, and it’s this that I want to offer you a tour through today.

Realistically, French is the most useful foreign language I’ve learnt. It’s a global language, the French are happy to assert it in international environments, and it even got me round a very distant country when I visited Senegal. It was the first language I started, due to my Francophile Mum; I can still just about remember the old Europe, the old Belgium, when people reached for it with foreigners as the first foreign language of choice and how self-conscious I felt not to know it. It’s also the language I do my everyday life in in Brussels, and there’s a sort of bouncy energy to doing basic admin in French which I can only enjoy.

What is true, and has always been true, about trying to speak French, is that the French correct you. Don’t take it personally. The French also correct each other. It feels like French natives, whether interacting with each other or foreigners, are always working towards a standard of ‘good French’ which you may or may not be meeting at any given moment.

What’s annoying about our new world where the French speak or at least do something with English is that they show none of the same care; they’ll be correcting a foreigner on saying accu-eil instead of acc-ueil but at the same time talking about President Doo-nal Tram. Indeed, one of the most unappealing habits of French learners is to adopt exactly this snobbery about other learners of French, become plus royaliste que le roi as it were.

This is the unique combination French offers you – a language which is genuinely useful, formidable in its precision and cultural reach, but also an experience which can be very tough on a learner due to its speakers exacting standards for use. It’s rare to combine an international language with expectations of it being used perfectly, but somehow the French have got there; I wonder sometimes, and this is ironic for a langue Républicaine, if to truly love the French language you don’t have to somewhere in you have something of the snob.

I remember one of my French teachers ending a course we had done together by going round the group offering feedback; his for me was ‘James speaks good French with an English accent. He speaks German too, perhaps with an English accent too.’ What a perfect essay in disdain. When I have got good feedback on my French, it’s invariably been from other foreigners; many of them have emerged as great fans of the language and not such great fans of all those who speak it.

I’ve always viewed the languages I’ve learnt as to some extent the members of my family. In this analogy, your native language is like the friendly uncle you see now and then who requires relatively little maintenance, and my aforementioned French would be the difficult but beloved teenage child. German, though, would almost certainly be my wife; loyal, an enduring love, someone I met young and stayed with through various ups and down. The first cut which cut deepest.

My German is better than my other languages, simply because I lived there when young and committed to it, which involved a certain amount of German whispering in face of Germans keen to practice their (often proficient and generally charmless) English. Germany is a big country, at least population wise, and I’ve met Germans with all kinds of attitudes to their language; ones who asked why on earth they should speak German with Americans and Brits and others who were proud of the language and subtly delighted when others tried to learn it. Some Germans are more into German than others. While on one hand I experienced a German comedian tell me in English ‘In my country, it’s my choice what language I speak’ – up there with the most contemptuous things anyone has ever said to me – I’ve also had people tell me that I spoke the best (specifically ‘cleanest’) German they’ve heard from a foreigner. It just suits me, German, it’s very intellectual but also capable of visceral directness, qualities I enjoy tapping into.

A question I’ve often asked myself is if it is really possible to have friendships with people across languages. Like if there isn’t some essential part of themselves people hold back in reserve in their native tongue, if my foreign-language friends aren’t always getting a kind of diluted version of me or I them.

Still, to the extent that I’ve managed cross-linguistic friendships, it’s definitely been in German, in long complex chats about Gott und die Welt (you can work out what that means) with German friends, where we’ve really got into it. Georg Kammerer, Johannes Blank, Maite von Waldenfels; fabulous people I had lovely German-speaking friendships with. Incidentally, many of these chats have occurred in South Germany, where I’ve found people more open to talking German or indeed any other language with foreigners. Baden-Wurttemberg, Bayern and Austria are are all etched upon my heart.

Professionally, the language has been of great use but perhaps still not as much use as it should have been. For the most spoken language in Europe, German maintains a relatively modest presence on the international stage and Germans can be very shy to speak it even when they have the option to. I understand the reasons for that, the historical German fear of asserting the slightest twinge nationalism, but it does sometimes seem a logic to me that ‘Because of WWII, I as a German have to speak bad American.’

Yet anybody who knows German culture knows the Germans have always been in thrall to some other culture and its perceived sophistication; earlier it was French, for the German Romantics Italy, now it is the Anglophone world. And that’s the great singularity in my view of Germany; it’s the biggest country I know which is also outward-looking, as the amount from other languages translated into German testifies to. The German-speaking world is intellectually wide, in line with Goethe’s old concept of the Germans needing to cultivate Innerlichkeit, interiority.

The language will always be my first love, and I’m glad that I insisted on learning it. I did often have to ask, though, which directness was at least excellent training in German communication norms.

This one has just been fun. To continue the family analogy, a bratty, boisterous child, young, full of energy and surprises, and growing up fast.

Learning Dutch it has finally decoupled the idea for me that the languages you choose to learn, beyond English, have anything really to do with their usefulness. I’ve picked up Dutch, having German and English already of course, to a pretty advanced level within a couple of years and so far it’s been both enormously enriching and professionally useless. Indeed, I wrote an ode to how positive an experience it’s been here; it’s made me feel closer to my family, of which there is a whole Antwerp, Dutch-speaking side, too.

I do, though, also live in Belgium, where the politics of speaking Dutch have long been contested and where learning Dutch has a special level of support and subsidy behind it. Here in Brussels, there is a happy coincidence of me (who wants to acquire as many foreign languages as I can) and a population desperate to assert the status of their own language in their own country. There are Dutch language centres, Dutch language days and Dutch language book groups in Brussels, in part to give Dutch natives the chance to use their own language in Belgian’s largely Francophone capital but also open for foreigners along for the ride.

I might well have had a less positive experience in Holland, albeit I had a pleasant time speaking Dutch on a recent trip to Rotterdam; so far, I’ve had nothing but encouragement to use and improve my Dutch.

I’ll give you a small example of how this positivity plays out in Brussels. I went into town to do some business recently, and in true Belgian style picked up a portion of chips. At the chippy, I ordered in French without problems and with an accent, and then the Francophone server switched to English with ‘Do you want a ticket?’ (This meaning receipt in English, Brussels variety). I felt belittled.

Then I went to the Dutch-speaking bookshop and paid for my items, with the lady at the till seeing my customer loyalty card which says on it James Harris, hardly the most Flemish of names. Yet she stayed in Dutch throughout the interaction, stayed polite and friendly and encouraging. Although my Dutch is still worse than my French, I have more positive interactions in the smaller language which creates a virtuous feedback loop.

Like all my other languages I’ve also had more sobering experiences. A woman I was working with recently who I asked to speak Dutch with me who just wouldn’t and replied to my every Dutch sentence in English for an hour. Dutch speakers who explain their language to me in English as if I didn’t know the first thing about it. A lady at a Dutch-language meetup who took exception to the German influence on my Dutch, hard corrected every single sentence I spoke, and almost left me in tears by the end of the evening. In part, I think she behaved like that because she came from a language where there isn’t such a big culture of foreigners learning it and she relished the chance to be hard on one for a change. Still, at least she was there trying to help outsiders learn, just with far too much strictness.

Yet above all the third-biggest Germanic language has been a positive and quick learn and has left me with the central realisation that what’s really decisive in acquiring a language is the experience you have doing so; indeed, you could even say that speakers of smaller languages are more likely, these days, to encourage foreigners in learning them, aware as many of them are of the need to maintain their language in a world of bigger and more dominant tongues. That's the optimistic view, anyway.

I’ve had serious goes at two others. CHINESE was the language of my ex-wife and both her and her family were seriously encouraging of my efforts; unfortunately, the end of the marriage brought the end of any interest on her part in encouraging me further. Fair enough and I accept that I’ve missed my chance to learn one of the few truly essential languages in the world today. I dearly miss having this fantastic language in my life.

RUSSIAN is the other, a language and literature I’ve long been obsessed with, and where Russians were endlessly encouraging, adoptive even, of people having a go at their complex but splendid tongue. And Russian is definitely the other language, hanging out with Georgians or Armenians, which has sometimes served as a lingua franca beyond English for me. It remains a big ambition of mine to go back and finish the job, tho the language’s image has suffered even in my eyes, those of a lifelong incorrigible Russophile. (It’s the snow, the vodka and the women). I’ve also managed to acquire basic conversational SPANISH and ITALIAN just by going to countries where they're spoken, and I’ve found in particular Italians exceptionally encouraging in face of any attempt at their almost extravagantly beautiful language.

Finally, based on two recent trips to the country, ROMANIANS are winningly delighted with your production of the merest word. I even had someone apologise for not speaking Romanian to me, a first for me as a learner.

It’s impossible for me to tell you that all this language learning has been good or not because, as I hope the piece above shows, it has been all manner of things; moments of huge joy and excitement and also humiliation and a feeling of being cut down to size. A lot of people thinking I’m stupid even as my own compatriots found me very clever. Languages have given me a living, but not a particularly lucrative one, and one threatened by the dominance of my native tongue which I am in some sense always trying to escape.

It’s certainly taken an awful lot of oglio di gomito to get, in adult life, to the shonky but fluent repertoire I currently draw upon. Four wonderful languages, four opened-up worlds. In all of them I’ve faced embarassement after embarrassment about my mistakes which I’ve felt no shame about whatsoever - the only shameful person to be is the person who has lived in a country for years and doesn’t know the local language.

Utility, then, is not the core of this; I’m not sure that for English speakers there is much use in foreign languages these days beyond Spanish, Chinese and perhaps French. Given that learning a language is primarily a personal asset, enriching above all in terms of public development, the thing to do is learn the language that you want to, be it big or small.

In beginning to do so, and this applies to pretty much all European languages by now, if you in the early stages want to avoid that sobering switch to English, you’re probably going to have to tell them not to do it as you’re learning their language. Because people want to practice their English. I understand that and would feel the same if English wasn’t my own native tongue. Still, the simple fact is that if I’d have helped out every single person who wanted to speak English with me, I’d never have learnt much German, French or Dutch at all.

By now I’m done with the gate-keeping attitude of a lot of Europeans to their native languages, the idea that they can mangle English to their hearts’ content but the slightest error in their own language registers it beyond incomprehensible and initiates an instant switch to English. Tired of the double standards. Personally, I think we should always be generous to people reaching out to learn another language and get out of their comfort zone, particularly if that person is living abroad with all the attendant risks of that. I'd never insist on using German with a German in the UK, for example, although ironically the Germans I've met there are happy to have a break from English.

The hope has to be is that in a world where soon enough most people will know English to a greater or lesser extent people will be, aware that they command the auxiliary language, more willing to speak their native tongue. That’s one possible future, but in the meantime, there are still enough non-English speakers out there to get truly fluent in pretty much anything; you just need to move to the provinces and change your name to something less Anglo-Saxon than ‘James Harris’. As for my next step, I’m considering learning Welsh. For as I’ve learnt, whether a language has 400 million speakers or 400,000, you can only talk to one person at a time.

‘Any idiot can face a crisis, it’s day to day living which wears you out.’ - Either Anton Chekov or Bing Crosby

In 2021, I took for the first time the EU simultaneous interpreting test, working from my passive languages French and German into my native English. I failed and it wasn't close. In 2024, after years of work and moving to Brussels to take up a job as an interpreter, I took the test and failed again. I now have one go left at the tests; I am 43 and living in Brussels on a work visa.

The pressure begins to feel unbearable.

I take a day off on a Wednesday in February and realise there is no longer anything in my life that would make me feel happy. There is nothing that I want. Nothing that feels possible, nothing that feels under my control. I want to make a success of this interpreting business, which I have come to late, but the way forward feels so narrow now. I’d like to have success with my writing – my novel is with an agent, a state of affairs which only years earlier would have truly gladdened my heart. But right now it feels like nothing could ever make me happy. I am upset and sometimes cry, but not from being unhappy but at the fact that I am so unhappy. There is a distinction there.

I have so much going for me, as I am regularly reminded. I come from a loving family and have never doubted they love me for one single minute of my life. I run, regularly, and am in good health. I have an amazing partner who adores me and I her. I am financially solvent and debt free, and have no addictions more harmful than writing.

Yet somehow I don’t feel any of it; my delight in life is like a car engine that refuses to start. It just doesn’t take. Perhaps in my youth I played up sadness or wallowed in it, but this isn’t that, this is something claiming me. I resolve to make the best of things, and yet almost every Thursday I am tired and my nerves tingle with pain. Is this just the reality of having a job?

It’s safe to say I don’t like Brussels all that much. Does anyone? It’s grey and the streets are covered in dogshit. Belgian jokes about lacking a government are funnier from a distance; on the ground, it means sclerosis, apathy and the defeat of ambitious people. There are things I do like; the wonderful cinemas, Le Coq and Merlo, the superb adult education centre where I learn Dutch twice a week at a bargain price.

Yet somehow the city keeps killing my optimism, and I note the irony of being desperate to make a career in a city I don’t like all that much. So the obvious choice is to leave – go elsewhere where I’m inevitably happier within hours of arrival. In the past years I’ve visited Rotterdam, Manchester, Saxony and Galicia, and I’d rather live in any one of them than where I do now.

But then there is a little word called Brexit, and the fact that my presence in the city is inching me towards Permanent Residency and a right to reside in Europe once again. If I got a job elsewhere, even in Europe’s bigger and funner places, my EU residency visa clock would be reset to zero. Nor does the New World have much appeal. I can always go back to the UK, or rather London, but I’ve just done ten years there hammering away and got nowhere – not well-paid work, nor my scripts produced, nor my novels published. Nothing but nos.

So I decide again and again, weekly even, pep talk by pep talk, that my best option is to continue where I am, but then I am squarely back to the problem of my unexpected quotidian unhappiness. Months of my life pass by going round the contradictions above, a problem without a solution, which doesn’t seem to stop my mind trying to.

I listen to music and make playlists. Again and again, I find new music I love, more than ever even, and make playlists for my partner and my friends. But what is the music that appeals to me now? I like classic Italian pop, Cate LeBon, film soundtracks, The Cure, ‘I love the sound of breaking glass.’ This song by Low gets what I’m feeling; momentum without hope. That being happy and proudly keeping on are two different things.

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Die Menschen haben ihre eigenen Spiele gespielt, und die sind fast immer übel ausgegangen1. - ‘Die Wand’, Marlen Haushofer.

Looking at Twitter the other day, it surprised me that I’d spent years of my life on there. That it had once seemed really important to me to maintain a presence and share my views on the platform. It struck me as almost absurd, the way people were pontificating and profiling themselves about a conflict they had no real involvement in or connection to, or even worse denouncing the views of others regarding it.

In a deep sense, I was grateful to no longer feel the need to contribute; I had no real desire to offer my opinion on the current war – except to hope that, like all wars, it ends soon – and to the extent that I wanted to talk about anything in relation to it, I had a small platform to do so here. It was like watching a distant shark feeding frenzy from the safety of a beach I’d washed up on. Why would I swim back towards that?

I feel like that too when I read an article about how AI is going to change everything or that it is not. Either it’s going to replace every job going or prove a vital but limited tool or sink the global economy when the bubble bursts or all of the above on differing timelines. And when people write that I’ve got a year or so to retrain before AI wipes out my skills, it inspires me not to action but to apathy. If it’s really going to be as disruptive as feared, humans will have to adapt to it in the myriad ways humans adapt to anything. If my job does disappear, I will just have to do something else.

I do want to share one voice in me regarding this matter. It's the one saying ‘I reserve the right not to be overly interested in AI.’ For even if this non-human entity does change everything about human life, I myself will still be human, dealing with my ordinary human challenges. No machine will change the central preoccupations of that.

I use it a little. Not to write; what would be the point of that? I didn’t spend my 20s and 30s in the trenches of getting a style to end up outsourcing it to a machine. I use it to do stuff like structure me short paragraphs in every Germanic language as a reading primer, or compile me lists of obscure films, some of which do indeed prove to be good tips. The best uses for it are specific and minor. My colleague and I are both learning Dutch, so we sometimes use it to structure language exercises for us. Still, at the end of the day, it’s us that have to learn the Dutch.

In this context, that the AI itself can produce endless perfect Dutch is irrelevant; it’s my shonky, spontaneous, German-accented Dutch which is relevant to me and in need of improvement. To think AI performance could even be a substitute for more is a fundamental misunderstanding of why people learn languages, or indeed undertake any form of difficult thing.

There’ve been many technological advances in my lifetime, but I think AI is the first one predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of human life. The proponents of AI seem to be working from an assumption that our goal here on earth to minimise humanity's difficulties to the greatest extent possible. Yet that’s not what humans need from life, or not all, and the delusion that humanity’s great enemy is the merest discomfort has something intrinsically American about it, from a society which views walking as an unnecessary inconvenience.

The same applies to the other pursuit of my current life, writing; the polished, bloodless and irritatingly perky texts AI culls from existing literature, characterised by short sentences and em dashes, are irrelevant to my own practice of writing. The point of the process of writing is to put things through innumerable drafts and gradually get closer and closer to having the words in the best order to communicate exactly what we as unique individuals want to say. It is precisely because any human intellectual achievements, whether in writing, acquiring languages or just finding out about anything, are difficult and hard won and slowly that we take satisfaction from them.

Perhaps the AI boosters don’t see this because AI itself is their own hard task. I mean that they find such profound meaning in their quest for a machine that solves human problems that they fail to acknowledge the damage they are doing to everyone else’s search for meaning. Ironically, they prove that humanity can accept any project no matter how destructive it is if it is a project which gives their lives a sense of purpose.

My adult life has always been consumed by obsessions. How to be a good writer. How to be a funny stand-up. For a long time when young, how to successfully attract the opposite sex. Latterly, how to be a good interpreter.

These are all human pursuits, and that AI is not human puts a severe limit on the extent it can help me with them. I do sometimes use it to discuss life problems – but that’s only because I want to give my friends a break from the repetitiveness of my concerns. In these AI fake-therapy conversations, there is inevitably a moment where the LLM gets stuck, and starts repeatedly proffering the same suggestions and plans, which is precisely the moment a friend would say – ‘We’re going round in circles here. Want to go eat?’ AI can offer you a list of restaurants in the area but it can’t pick up the cheque.

Here are some of the central questions which the rise of AI poses. Could we make a machine which solves human problems? Could we make a machine that gave us infinite leisure? Could we make a machine which answered all the questions? Could we make a machine which acted independently of us?

These are, to be honest, not questions that particularly intrigue me at this stage of my life. I’m in my early 40s and have lived too long for the idea of a technological resolution to the human condition to animate me much; I am sheltered from AI by the force of my involvement in my own ordinary human life. I’m not claiming this life as anything glorious or even better than the techno-optimist dream - it’s just mine.

The questions of my ordinary and miraculous life are ones like ‘How will I cope when my beloved father passes on?’ ‘How can I keep my girlfriend happy?’ and of course ‘How do I make best use of the time I have left?’ To the extent AI can offer me any answers to any of these, it is by directing me to some relevant human responses to these questions; being a superior search engine, in short. It will still be up to me to do the good human work of addressing them, and I simply can’t understand a mentality that would think that would ever be the job of a machine. I can’t even understanding wanting that.

Long-standing readers will know there are a few phrases I quote on this newsletter repeatedly, and one of them is the Roman writer Terrence’s Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. It translates as ‘I am human, and consider nothing human is alien to me.’ AI is not human; it is as such alien to me. To the extent that it interests me in the context, it is in how humans respond to it, and of all the jobs I do and have done the one I worry about losing to AI least is Terrence himself’s old career of comic writing. AI will never know how to write good jokes. It lacks the essential experience that sells a joke, namely the human condition.

I’m doing a new Internintellect salon on movies about comedians, drawing on the experience of my stand-up days. There’s still some tickets left here tho I’m pleased to say there’s already enough people coming for a decent chat. Do sign up - and if you’re a paying subscriber, just ask and I’ll comp you a place. Now back to the essay.

I also have no worries about AI replacing human writers. I recently went to see the lovely, handsome 1960s Roger Corman film adaption of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ at one of Brussels’ many wonderful art cinemas.

There’s a very elegant move in the screenplay in the final scene when - apologies for spoilers but the film came out in 1964 and the story in 1850 – where, instead of resolving the plot of each individual character, as a modern film would have done, the figure of the ‘Red Death’ mentions that ‘Only six survive’ and names the characters via description of them. We know their fates from this mention en passant and it saves us a lot of boring and superfluous scenes by a single line.

Now, how would the AI have come up with that, have made that successful and original artistic move? Only if we’d prompted it with ‘Give me a film ending like ‘Masque of the Red Death’ - e.g. by exploiting existing human knowledge and creation. It would have no ability to analyse why that ending was different from writing convention, with all its sources drawn from the same data soup. To do anything of artistic value, then, it would need the input of a knowing human, one with education, knowledge and taste; as an agglomeration engine of culture, it only has value based on extant human culture itself, which it is cannibalising to the point of dilution and without internal differentiation.

The only value of any AI product is in a human mind to curate it and the better the human mind the more potential value it offers. As such AI, in its current form, is only increasing the value of a broad cultural education. The AI has no ability to innovate of its own accord – it can be told to obey a pattern or break a pattern, but it does not have the capacity of the human creator to know when formulae are to be obeyed and when subverted. It has no judgement or discernment, any more than the Louvre’s museum catalogue can serve as art criticism.

If AI is indulged in a cultural context too much, it might well create generations of people with no capacity for cultural connoisseurship or striking thought, people who don't understand what art is for. What an achievement! Yet even then there would emerge pockets of resistance of those who understood, based in part on the wonderful cultural legacy we do have, the need for humans to create for humans humanly. AI slop would, again, only increase the value (tho not necessarily the profits) of real human artistic production.

Fundamentally, human life and artistic creation is not a problem to be solved, nor a process to be optimized, and imagining that it is a very American kind of intellectual error about how the can-do spirit should apply to the business of human life. It’s the kind of thinking which would say basketball is a superior game to football because it has more points in it, achievements reduced to metrics of scale.

Of course, if AI can indeed give us some marginal gains in relation to human suffering, say by quickly analysing large data sets, who I am to dispute it? I’m very happy to have AI do huge rote data tasks, and even in writing I'd rather have the submission package for my novel read by an AI than by nobody at all.

However, the idea that AI removing a lot of white collar jobs would lead to unbounded and beatific leisure time for all doesn’t stack up to the most customary historical analysis; aside from the durably small percentage of the population who like reading and thinking, humans will go mad and start killing each other without defining work. Only someone who doesn’t read about history and its upheavals would fall into this trap.

I speak with scepticism in part because, as an interpreter, I am in an industry which AI directly threatens. Maybe I will be replaced by software which lip syncs perfect American onto anyone who dares to speak in a language other than English sooner rather than later tho relatedly I’ve always been more worried by the dominance of bad English in international conferences than technological change. AI is just another rider in a cavalry charge of dumbness galloping towards my profession and indeed, these days, anything else I value.

Again tho, my ability to care is limited; even if I’m made obsolescent, even if the AI is somehow better than me at what I do, that wouldn’t change for a moment the pride I have in my hard-won skills, precisely because I’ve struggled and work so hard to acquire them. If my entire multilingual team of interpreters were replaced by AI, it wouldn’t change my pride in them and the work we’ve done, because we are humans doing a tricky human task. The idea of a little machine doing all that we do after tapping a few buttons – well, it might indeed be more accurate but it is also desperately sterile and dull. It would improve my profession in the same way VAR has ushered in an age of equanimity and harmony to professional football.

In Marlon Haushofer’s 1963 novel ‘Die Wand’, an invisible glass wall seals the protagonist in a biodome. This occurs suddenly and without explanation. Yet her reflections on the event itself remain limited.

Die Wand is so sehr ein Teil meines Lebens geworden, dass ich oft wochenlang nicht an sie denke. Und selbst wenn ich an sie denke, erscheint sie mir nicht unheimlicher als eine Ziegelwand oder ein Gartenzaum, der mich am Weitergehen hindert. Was ist denn auch so Besonderes an ihr? Ein Gegenstand aus einem Stoff, dessen Zusammensetzung ich nicht kenne. Derartige Gegenstände hat es in meinem Leben immer mehr als genug gegeben. Durch die Wand wurde ich gezwungen, ein ganz neues Leben zu beginnen, aber was mich wirklich berührt, ist immer noch das gleiche wie früher: Geburt, Tod, die Jahrzeiten, Wachstum and Verfall. Die Wand ist ein Ding, das weder tot noch lebendig ist, sie geht mich in Wahrheit nichts an, und deshalb träume ich nicht von ihr2.

Still, here’s the rub; in the novel, the wall is beyond the narrator’s control. There’s nothing much our unnamed protagonist can say or do about it, except adapt, as she does, and occupy herself with the very human business of looking after animal and maintaining her environment. Even in exceptional and changed circumstances she remains consumed by the unchanging fundamentals of human life.

This wall and its function and provenance are of less relevance to her than the little cats she looks after because she can’t do much about it, wheras they depend on her for survival. This too will be the overwhelming majority of people’s experience of AI. What can I do that some hubristic fools in Silicone Valley are cooking up a plan to devastate middle-class jobs due to their own essential misunderstanding of the human condition? Yet I certainly can feed the cat.

Just as after the wall comes down, my task remains the same in the presence of AI – to keep making the best of being human. The AI people think they are building something which will be more important than everything else in the world, but it can’t be, it never is, AI will simply take up its place in all the objects and things which make a life. For most humans, AI will trouble their minds less than a vague memory of a day out to the seaside they had aged seven. There is just a limit to which humans can engage with things and systems beyond their control, which is why every totalitarian regime is characterised by its citizens retreating to the private sphere.

I believe I, and indeed most people, understand more about what humans are and what they do than those selling these technological reveries of our frictionless future; they are just lost in the dreams of their age, no different at heart from Mongols who sought to conquer the whole world or ancient scholars who dreamt of collecting one of every single thing in the world. AI has no impact on the Dao. Civilisations have risen and fallen without AI, but none have risen and gone without the delusion of hidden treasure which will solve all the problems of humanity in a swoop – the dream the AI peddlers are selling is ironically an illustration of the permanence of the human condition.

What matters and will always matter most is the human; the laughter and conviviality of friends, the safety and contentment of your loved ones. The sense of the past; reading about historical eras which convulsed passions for decades in a matter of hours. The joy of travel and new tongues. Geburt, Tod, die Jahrzeiten, Wachstum and Verfall. Whatever matters in any age is never its toys and fads.

For any writer, and after a while even for any person, what matters is our study and knowledge of the human, and artificial intelligence in itself will never be a central function of this search no matter how much hysterical, ahistorical voices demand it be so post haste. If you respond to such demands with scepticism, you already know more than those making them do.

I’ve grown out of a sci-fi revolutionary view of the world and, tho you can undoubtedly level complacency at me in face of this latest disruption, I too was once a fourteen-year old boy. And I can still recognise the echo, in the idea of a computer which offers company, encouragement and endless solutions, of a fourteen year-old boy’s view of the world.

There are, like any approaches to life, limits and benefits to the tech bro, problem-solving, frictionless vision of life, but there is no way it should be a generalised view, let alone the only way of interacting with our lives. Life can be approached in infinite ways and the business of the human is figuring out which of those work for each of us. As anyone who has ever read a book could tell you. I mean, obviously, read a book themself.

Pep Guardiola was clear about it.

‘Never, ever in the history of humanity have we had the info in front of eyes, watching more clearly than now - genocide in Palestine, what happened in Ukraine, what happened all around the world, in Sudan, everywhere.

What happened in front of us? Do you want to see it? It’s our problems as human beings.

There is somebody who sees the images from all around the world who is not affected?

Today we can see it. Before we could not see it. Today we see. It hurts me.

If it was the opposite side, it would hurt me. Wanting harm for another country? It hurts me. To completely kill thousands of innocent people, it hurts me. It’s no more complicated than that. No more.’

Press conference before Manchester City - Newcastle, 03.02.2026

Admirable sentiments from the Manchester City manager. Who could disagree with them? I do ask myself tho if at any point during these words crossing his lips, at any given moment, does a voice not go off in his head reminding him who he works for? Namely the exact people arming the genocide in Sudan, the government of the United Arab Emirates? Does that present any ethical issue to him? Or, to take it a step further, is his behaviour in some way a response to this, a transference onto a third party, Israel, of something he’d like to say about his own employers but can’t for reasons of contract or courage?

Or is he just thick?

I try to avoid writing about Israel. For it is Israel which people obsess about; with honourable exceptions, nobody really writes about Palestine. The Palestinians are a mute crowd of NPCs in the morality play around the Jewish state whose unique evil the world sees as offering redemption from the Holocaust which provoked it. Personally, I’m more interested in writing about things I love, or things which can bring people together, and the failures which cut me most deeply in my life are my own and not those of my narratives of distant places.

Yet to the extent that I have Jewish heritage, Jewish friends, and have visited Israel, I have thought plenty about its situation. More than many much more strident on the matter, I’d wager. The chief conclusion that I have come to, informed deeply by the mass surge of antisemitism on the British left during the Corbyn years, is that the actual reality of events in the Middle East and how the matter is discussed and used as a proxy for conflict in the West are two separate phenomenona and are to be treated as such.

It is only the latter I feel qualified to pronounce about. When I say that Western leftists hate Israel more than actual Palestinians do I’m only half joking; I’ve sat and had dinner with Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs but I couldn’t imagine the same with Western pro-Israelis and ‘antizionists’. When UN Special Rapporteur Franceso Albanese says that Israel is the common enemy of humanity we’ve gone beyond the outlines of a nasty and intractable regional conflict and into something more akin to a Death Star for the crunchy middle class.

It’s the second phenomenon which Pep Guardiola, keffiyeh round his throat and condemnation on his lips, forms part of. For him, Israel is a modern morality play, a matter of moral clarity no more complex than a colonial boot descending and the innocent children below, the contours of any moral difficulty erased. What could ever possibly justify killing a child? If things are that simple, anybody adding a caveat or complexity becomes not just someone who disagrees, but a morally bad person.

For who could possibly support genocide or harm to a single child; even to say ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that’ would be evidence of terrible moral turpitude. ‘Here is a bad thing, those who disagree with me support the bad thing and are as such bad’ is the moral reasoning of a child/much of modern political discourse.

Yet thinking about it seriously for one instant surely indicates to Pep that the conflict flared up this time due to Hamas themselves killing a load of children. That the actions of Gaza’s own government was genocidal, that the moral transgression he reacts so strongly to exist on both sides. That the ‘opposite side’ he claims he would also condemn is already active and doing wrong, that the team who he has decided to support are also up to their arms in oppression and blood, not least of their own people.

You can also add into that Pep’s own domestic politics, as how we talk about Israel and Palestine in the West, as the example of Ireland shows us, is always to some degree a mirror of our own countries. If Guardiola sees Palestine as in some way an analogue of Catalonia, I wonder how he thinks the Castilian state would have reacted to an armed excursion into the rest of Spain which left 1200 dead and took hundreds of hostages back to Barcelona. Presumably with a restraint which eluded the Israelis.

What’s always so suspicious to me is that the obsession with these people is only ever Israel. I realise this point is often made, but it strikes me as, at its core, inherently a bit dodgy. I have so many friends who post relentlessly about Israel when the conflict flares up, accusing Israel of genocide long before the latest campaign, then remain almost parodically silent about the rest of the conflicts in the world1. Nothing about Iran and the terrible events there, except in the worst case to accuse it of being a Mossad operation.

My strongly pro-Palestinian friends say that the level of hatred is explained by the fact that the West is an ally to Israel - but we’re an ally to all kinds of places. Or that they view their activism as more likely to change minds, but then they also dismiss the views of one side of the conflict in a way that almost guarantees they won’t get a hearing from its more powerful partner, Israel. In my view, the scale of the hatred simply can’t be explained beyond a certain point without there being something exceptional about Israel in the world’s imagination. At the end of the day, when we get really down to it, the level of obsession with this tiny little country can only be explained by it being the Jews.

By way of example, an old Berlin acquaintance of mine was posting recently that Israel was at risk of killing 400,000 babies in Gaza at which I pointed out that that might be difficult because there probably weren’t 400,000 babies in Gaza. In addition that would involve Israel killing every baby in Gaza. He responded by making references to distinguished experts like Francesco Albanese. So the epistemic bubble is sealed; people read sources which direct them to other sources which come from the same perspective and they mistake that for becoming an authority on the conflict. They usually don’t ever get into finding the opposite view, and the only change comes when they unmoor entirely and switch into the outright conspiratorial.

Still, none of my friends who post their moral condemnations of Israel are as far as I know working for the Emirati government. Yet Pep Guardiola is a man whose outraged condemnations of the killing of children is genuinely combined with taking money from people who supply weapons to kill children.

There is currently a case at the International Criminal Court accusing the UAE - to all intents and purposes the owner of Manchester City and the people who pay Guardiola his salary - of complicity in genocide. The UAE are accused of supplying drone support, training and materiel to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries committing atrocities in Sudan in their war against the Sudanese government. We are talking here about a conflict which has displaced ten million people, left over 40,000 dead and is exposing three million children to malnutrition. If Israel was up to this, Guardiola would not be shy about mentioning the ICC case or the culpability of those supplying arms. Of course, I can be accused of acting in bad faith myself here as, in order to make a stand against a celebrity whose behaviour I dislike, I have gleaned a few facts about a conflict I know little about. That still appears to be more than the celebrity himself has done.

Plus I am, as a far as I know, not on a retainer for the government of the United Arab Emirates. I am not claiming the moral ground, and if I were accusing my enemies of tolerating the death of innocent children, I would check first that I wasn’t working for someone who didn’t sell the guns which literally kill kids. The political philosopher Judith Shklar said hypocrisy was so universal as to be unremarkable in politics, but this is at a scale where perhaps a measure of objection may be required. Pep Guardiola isn’t directly responsible for the genocide he’s condemning, but he’s a lot more culpable than most. That seems an unwise position to go on the moral offensive against others from, like Doctor Faustus denouncing Aleister Crowley.

Football has long since lost its moral authority and its selling-out to tyrants has ended in inevitable cynicism and moral corruption. What does stun me is to see people who’ve accepted that Faustian bargain start offering their own moral condemnations of their critics. To see the same people who’ve sold out their teams to the money of autocratic regimes, like Newcastle fans and Pep Guardiola, themselves adopting a morally strident tone. I would have every truck with Guardiola keeping his mouth shut and his head down and owning the decision he has made, namely to take the money off an evil regime in order to have access to incredible resources in football. Yet to do that and to go on the offensive about the moral shortcomings of others… To take blood money and then call everyone else dirty… Now that is audacious, the hypocrite’s equivalent of a Paneka, a sort of audacious act of attention-grabbing self-undermining. Pep always did have flair.

I’m not even saying stick to football. There’s been fine footballing stands in my time from Robbie Fowler supporting the Liverpool dockers all the way back to Germany’s Paul Breitner refusing to go to the 1978 World Cup as it was being played under the Argentinian military junta. I would, tho, say stick to football and spare us the high moral dudgen if you’re working for a country themselves arming a genocide. Or if you’re are going to start speaking out, be prepared to back it up with action. For if Pep Guardiola resigned from City due to the ethical issue of working for arms dealers, he would still remain an extraordinarily rich man.

Indeed, more than that, if Guardiola ever did take a serious moral stand as to where he got his money from, aside from a few snarky articles by overly cynical hacks, acclaim would likely be universal and reputational damage next to none. His millions would still sit comfortably in the bank and the titles he had won would only attain a magnificent polish of principle. It would all be a powerful use of his position to make the change he can, much more than another cup here or there, and might even encourage other fans and clubs to take a stand against sportswashing. As it is, Pep puts on the doe-eyed shtick and enjoys the acclaim of an already-convinced crowd, actions which will not change a single Israeli mind. And even Israel’s opponents agree that only Israel can solve this conflict.

Many people think given the chance they’d have been a good footballer. Fewer think they’d have aced management. Pep Guardiola is a world-class manager, but at present his innovations are chiefly in the field of hypocrisy, finding a way to demonstrate such staggering levels of self-awareness that they stand out even in an age full of calumny and deceit. Perhaps, in addition to the Best Coach Fifa award he snaffled in 2023, we should give him a further award for his outstanding, and so little pronounced, services to the Emirati arms industry; not the Ballon d’Or but the Ballon of Lead. The little silver bullets on its trophy will arrive very well-polished indeed.

In the debates around every aspect of literature and literary culture, in the Anglophone world at least – meaning those as to whether people are reading enough, the future of the humanities or the switch to audiovisual modes of media consumption – it seems ironic that the actually most important theme of today’s world literature, the unprecedented dominance of the English language, barely merits mention. Any more than goldfish remark upon the water they swim in.

My definition of a writer is someone with an unusually involved relationship to language. In this context, it seems to me that any content I can write in the language I am using today, the only language I can use to this degree, is less salient than that the choice of language itself. My native language has become ubiquitous and requisite to a degree that is actively harmful to other languages, not least because an increasing amount of the world’s business is done in a version of it at best deracinated and at worst catastrophically limited.

More perhaps than any other language in history, English has won, and to the extent that English-speaking culture takes any notice of it – with the honourable exception of those defending minority languages in places where English is the main language – it is with a sort of genteel chauvinism as to why English is the best language and deservedly on top.

Well, to be more accurate something called English is; anyone who has spent any time in international environments such as Brussels or Geneva knows that the language being used as a communicative auxillary there has very little to do with any local variety of English. I sometimes dub the English I hear in Brussels ‘The French revenge’, an en-masse calquing of Frenchisms into the English language via with the logic that, if French is no longer going to be the international language, the one we do use should at least be as Frenchified as possible.

A long time ago, I read one of those funny little ‘Bluffer’s Guides’, this one to the English, and it contained the claim that the ubiquity of English worldwide would make the English feel cosy. For my part, I’m not sure that’s the feeling the detached, error-riddled English I encounter in Brussels provoked, often spoken in an American accent and rammed full of register-inappropriate slang; it certainly doesn’t make me feel much at home.

It is a very weird experience to interact with this language as a native speaker of the language it has been named after; you are both advantaged and also forced to simplify yourself. It’s no more comfortable when people who know I'm Anglophone abroad make a demonstrative show of wishing me ‘Good morning’, as I don’t feel ‘Good morning’ belongs to me any more, that those words have no trace of locality. I feel no identification with international English at all. If these non-native speakers did want to make me feel at home they might want to greet me with my native Nottingham’s ‘Hey up me duck’, which has happened more often than you think. The ubiquity of my language has made me retreat to the local.

When I was young, I was quite angry that Anglophone culture was so parochial and uninterested in other languages. That it was entirely acceptable for my young English compatriots just to say ‘Oh, I’m crap at languages’ and be done with it for life, which always left me thinking ‘Well, we can’t all be.’

I made decisions to make sure that it wouldn’t be my destiny and went hard learning German and then French in my 20s and various other languages beyond. That did involve a lot of insisting people who wanted to practice English speak their native tongue with me and on a few occasions even some pretty ugly fights about that1. For all the struggles, it’s all been massively enriching and has led me to my career as an interpreter, although even that career is eroding at the edges due to the increasing dominance of English or at least what gets called it these days.

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You could use a lot of adjectives about modern screenwriting culture, but I’m not sure one you’d reach for all-too readily is ‘brave’. So many scripts, for page or stage, have been watered down in a kind of attempt to please everybody which ends up pleasing none; this is the classic fate of the British comedy movie, where the radical and disruptive aspects of the original series or sketch show are filed off in the name of mass appeal. With humble exceptions – recent Amazon series ‘Pluribus’ comes to mind, and that’s in part down to its writer Vince Gilligan having carte blanche from previously creating one of the most successful series of all time – it’s rare to see modern writers being given the opportunity to take a swing.

It is with excitement and even relief then that I found that recent zombie flick ‘28 Days Later: The Bone Temple’ to contain a plot point which was a genuine artistic risk. An actual ‘How did they get away with that?’ A daring idea that got through, something that a standard script reader – the kind I occasionally managed to extract a few words of comments on my own scripts from – would have responded to with ‘This is highly offensive, strike it out.’

I am talking of course about the gang of Jimmy Saville impersonators headed by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, played by Jack O’Connell, who weave a trail of death and destruction across northwest England in the name of ‘charity’. It’s a writing flourish which combines both precise satire and imaginative horror in a way which compounds the impact of both. It is a real gamble from screenwriter Alex Garland. I think it works.

The gang turned up at the end of the previous ‘28 Years Later’ film where I didn’t like them at all. I thought they provided an odd and jerky contrast with the rest of the movie which had until then basically felt like a family drama with zombies thrown in. They needed their own space, and I’m glad to say that ‘The Bone Temple’ more than provides it for them. From the moment in the opening scene of the new film where a stab wound to the leg pierces an artery, leading to one of the Jimmies dying an agonising death, we are in a world of really intense horror, of a place with real-life and visceral consequences. If you’re going to invoke a figure as wicked as Saville, you need to be in that kind of milieu, otherwise you’re in the realm of the many comedians I’ve seen sabotage their set by dropping a casual reference to a weighty subject and souring the mood.

For my many North American readers and four in Pakistan, Jimmy Saville was a British children’s entertainer who hosted a show called ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ where he did his best to make the requests of children come true1. He was also massively active for charitable causes with fun runs and fundraising drives. After his death, it swiftly emerged that he was a notorious paedophile and abuser and that this seemed to have pretty much been an open secret at the time across British institutions such as the BBC and NHS. Therefore, aside from the specific horrors of his case and what he did to his victims, he’s a symbol of a certain kind of rotten and duplicitous Englishness and the idea that every British television 1970s’ children’s entertainer was later revealed a paedophile.

So what’s he doing in this film?

In part, invoking Savile is intended as further condemnation of him, saying, ‘In a zombie-infested Britain, the likes of Jimmy Savile will find a natural home.’ The human evil in the film outstrips the zombie evil – the zombies are behaving without free will, but O’Connell’s vile cult are choosing wickedness and Saville is a great symbol of that voluntary wickedness. Of course, you could make the opposite point, that Saville’s notoriety is being sleazily exploited for shock, and that some American cinemagoers have dressed up as Saville to attend screenings gets us into uneasy (tho also uneasily comic) territory. They probably shouldn’t do that but, on the other hand, culture needs a safe space to successfully pillory and pantomime its evildoers too.

Why I really like it is that it successfully works at both a satirical and story level. That’s a space which confuses people, particularly screenwriting experts, when you can’t quite say something is meant seriously or in jest; that you as a writer are deliberately offering in the uncomfortable space in between. The truth can only really get away with it when it works, and in my view this does (tho others have dissented). Not least because O’Connell plays it brilliantly, as do the rest of his gang; they are frightened and he has the terrified intensity of an improvising cult leader dependent for his survival on keeping his narratives compelling.

The scene where he and Ralph Fiennes’ doctor Ian Kelson - the counterbalancing force of ‘creative goodness’ in the film – discuss the need to convince the cult of his Satanic parentage has an almost medieval air, not the least for occurring outside, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath who ‘into the feeldes wente’. The film is taking the figure of Saville and using him as a symbol of a collapsed society or one which deserves to be punished, which is always to a degree the charm of post-apocalyptic films are about, that it offers reassurance that society’s destruction when it comes will have been deserved. And of course it is a very culturally specific English symbol too; it hasn’t been watered down into a more familiar American monster. Savile is very much one of our own and northern England is the soil which spawned him.

Mark Kermode has said that in the world of the film, with the virus outbreak occurring in the 1999, it was likely that the truth of Saville never came out. This is a misreading I think; the idea is more that the cult gravitate towards Saville precisely because they knew something was wrong about him, that they intuited him as a nexus of evil, and even if they don’t know the extent of their icon’s crimes – or even for the younger members perhaps who he was at all – the audience very much do and can understand why Savile has been chosen. It removes the script purely from its world of zombies and chases and offers an extra satirical level; there is no way to include such a specifically early 21^st century British monster and not invite a sociocultural reading of the events in the film. And of course Britain’s isolation from the rest of the world in the series, leaving the country to embrace every random bad idea going might just be a fairly decent metaphor for another recent event in UK political history.

The UK is a funny place to write about these days. It feels a pinched place, a country long past its cultural height which nonetheless has some wonderful cultural assets. A lot of contemporary British satire is that chummy, politics as caper Iannucci mode (even ‘The Death of Stalin’ is basically a film about Westminster), by now a relic of another age. What Garland is going for here is rawer, nastier, more committed to be also in Chaucer’s words ‘the smylere with the knyf under the cloke.’ It’s part of a great tradition too of British weird, from Swift to Python to Chris Morris, where the satire is not just dry and abstract but really lived and unrelenting in its imaginative realisation. It’s a sort of committing to the bit, where you have a funny idea but you take its embodiment almost viscerally seriously as a scene, the space where the comic meets the visionary. Think Mr Creosote.

Making an evil serial killer gang of Britain’s most notorious paedo is an honourable contribution to that tradition, and I hope the film’s box-office, which has been patchy until now, is sufficient to embolden further swings. Even if not, I’ll treasure this remarkable sequel. I’d even say that the sheer nastiness of that vile Saville gang makes me feel a little more optimistic about a country which is at least honest enough not to have any illusions about its own place in the world. We may be sinking giggling into the sea but at least the laughter is aimed squarely in our own direction.