Can I let you into a secret? I’m increasingly unconvinced by Substack as a format. Perhaps it is odd for someone who writes here on Substack to acknowledge the shortcomings of this publishing platform, but there you go.

There is already way too much (dread word) “content” on Substack and it is difficult to make sense of it all and get it into some kind of order that is readable and understandable. There are basic problems of publishing comprehension. What is a Substack “note” for as opposed to a longer post? Is a “note” supposed to imitate social media? What is the point of writing at all if everyone has a Substack and half of it is filled with AI-inspired slop? What is the difference between following on Substack and subscribing? I don’t know the answers to those questions and I have been in the media one way and another for something approaching forty years. What the general reader is supposed to make of it I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many great writers on here, but at a time when technology is challenging and undermining the very idea of writing and reading, those absolutely essential civilisational activities, I’m unconvinced that immersion in the swirling soup of Substack is going to help us much.

You really can’t beat a proper publication, it turns out.

And in that spirit (I always have written intros, or drop intros in old newspaper parlance, that are too long) I will get to the point.

Very much not on Substack is Engelsberg Ideas, the publication my team in London helps produce for the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. EI launched five years ago and features writing by many of the world’s brightest minds on history, ideas, geopolitics and culture.

This week we launched the Engelsberg Ideas app.

It is free to read, providing access to excellence. It is an oasis of calm in a crazy world.

You can download it here on the App Store and here for Android.

There is no catch. The app is free to download and it carries no adverts, thanks to the support of its publisher, the Foundation I mentioned, which is based in Stockholm.

The range and quality of the writing - over essays, historical portraits, and shorter notebooks - is, without sounding boastful, astonishing.

This week, among the pieces we chose to launch the EI app is a magnificent new essay by one of Britain’s greatest historians, Sir Antony Beevor, dissecting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1940s classic The Last Days of Hitler.

You can read it here, and then download the app and read much more like it on Engelsberg Ideas.

This is my newsletter for paying subscribers. Thank you for supporting.

If you haven’t read Ed Conway’s book Material World from a few years back, can I suggest that in the context of what just happened to oil prices amid the war in the Middle East you do so, immediately? The premise is simple, even if the text is rich in detail. Ed (who is economics editor for SkyNews) is fascinated by the way in which complacent Western societies take so much for granted and take so little interest in how the stuff of our daily lives works and is produced.

It wasn’t always this way. Quite recently, relatively speaking, when the heavy manufacturing side of our economies was more visible, most people had some sense of the means of production. This was an era of coal, steel, shipping, armaments production, heavy bits of metal, and dirty, hard work. The education system in Britain and elsewhere in Europe placed a great emphasis on the physical sciences, and even if this wasn’t part of your schooling you knew someone - perhaps your entire family - who owed their living in some way to manufacturing.

Read more

This is my newsletter for paying subscribers. Thank you for your support.

In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, the villain of the piece (or one of the villains, the one who conveniently for the other characters gets all the blame) contemplates his imminent downfall and disgrace which must surely come the next morning. Melmotte has imbibed and is in a morose mood. What, he asks himself, could he have done differently to avoid the collapse of his City of London financial empire? Why he wailed, had he let himself be dazzled by the bright lights and London society into overextending himself and chasing status? Why had he not concentrated on running his business - in Abchurch Lane in the City - instead of going into Parliament?

“Why,” writes Trollope, “had he called down unnecessary notice on his head by entertaining the Emperor of China? It was too late now, and he must bear it; but these were the things that had ruined him.”

Read more

I was invited to deliver the defence lecture at Newcastle University ten days ago, as part of their public lecture series. As my theme I took the “end of history” period in the 1990s and the way in which the rupture that has taken place since then requires us to transform our thinking about how the world works and the role that should be played by Britain and its allies.

I’m reproducing the lecture here (free to read) with the permission of Dr Martin Farr, who is a leading figure in the field of contemporary history. I have edited it down a little but I hope the essence of the message is clear - the world has changed, there is no room for future Budgets in which defence is not a priority and barely merits a mention, and we need to get our act together, fast.

This weekend, I was in Munich for a dinner connected to the Munich Security Conference. Along the way I was writing the next paid newsletter for loyal subscribers which should land in the next few days. Thank you for your patience.

Eight weeks today it is the London Defence Conference, the fourth edition of the gathering of allies and friends. Our theme for LDC 2026 is Readiness, with a big question implicit in that title: Are we ready?

Here’s the text of my speech from Newcastle.

Thank you for that generous introduction. It is a pleasure and an honour to be here, in one of my favourite cities, and to be invited to speak at a great educational institution by one of the nation’s finest academics in his field - Dr Martin Farr.

In this defence lecture my aim is to examine the arc of history since the end of the Cold War; to chart the effect of the post-Cold War ideology on weakening our defences; to examine the current threat picture and offer some thoughts on how we should think carefully about what comes next.

First, a disclaimer, or an advisory warning. Looking at the news and at the state of the world it is easy to be discouraged. Doing what I do, as director of the London Defence Conference, I am often asked - are we headed for war? Is it inevitable? How bad will it be if or when it happens?

The point here is not to instigate or provoke conflict. This is not about seeking war, which we know looking at history is best avoided whenever possible.

This is about avoiding war, if we can. With the world having become more dangerous, this is about strengthening our defences to create deterrence. To signal to potential adversaries that we have the wherewithal and capabilities to respond as a nation, with our allies, and in doing so to change the risk calculation.

And if deterrence does not work and our adversaries are intent on conflict at any cost? In that unhappy situation by rearming we will give ourselves the best shot at defending our way of life and repelling our adversaries.

This concept is something which was very widely understood across society in the 19th and 20th centuries, until relatively recently. But something changed since the end of the Cold War. What was it?

Understanding contemporary history and applying its lessons is the best place to start our search for an explanation.

Francis Fukuyama’s lost world

We begin in 1989, when a US State department policy adviser, Francis Fukuyama, wrote a paper in which, observing the implosion of the Soviet Union, he claimed that humanity had arrived not only at “the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

Three years later, after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, he expanded his thesis into a famous and bestselling book, “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama’s claim was that, with the triumph of liberal democracy over Communism, the Western model had evolved to a peak in human achievement. It could become the dominant form of governance globally. In fairness to Fukuyama, a great scholar, there were many nuances in his thesis that were little reported. And much later - in a defining essay - he deserves credit for being among the first to understand and explain in a clear sighted way the character of the Chinese regime under President Xi.

Nevertheless, his proclamation in the early 1990s of “the end of History”, in an age addicted to soundbites, provided an irresistible catch phrase for academics, politicians and the media.

It is difficult to explain, particularly to younger colleagues, just how much of an impact was made by the end of history theory when it arrived. Media was very different in the early 1990s. Everyone read newspapers and they dominated the debate, setting the terms of reference, and communicating the latest and most accessible academic and strategic thinking. On current affairs discussion programmes on television the end of history and associated thinking were pored over and the politicians of the time took their cue.

Obviously, it was immensely good and cheering news that for us voters lifted the air of paranoia which had permeated politics during the late Cold War. The nuclear nightmare faded.

For the Conservatives in Britain at the time it was an affirmation because the West’s victory in the Cold War was partly Margaret Thatcher’s victory. The Soviet economic system had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and the pressure of US defence spending. Deterrence and strong defence had worked, as Thatcher said they would.

For the parties of the centre left who sought a return to power - in the US the Democrats and in Britain Labour - the end of history was also an opportunity. With the Soviet Union defeated, defence would cost less and there would be more for other forms of social spending. Plus the Republicans and Conservatives would be deprived of one of their main campaign messages (the left is too soft on defence) that had worked well throughout the 1980s.

Back then, the end of history concept suited almost everyone. Unfortunately, as we now know, it turned out to be an extravagant indulgence in hubris.

A superficially plausible theory encouraged us to take a holiday from history and to forget that hard power is an essential component of grand strategy, national policy and successful alliances.

Nor was the concept philosophically consistent. The term “the end of History” was not invented by Fukuyama, but by Hegel, the precursor of Marx. The notion that history is evolutionary and has a beginning, a middle and an end was a core Marxist concept. So, in proclaiming that history had ended, Fukuyama was accepting a basic premise of the ideology on whose grave he was dancing.

Nor was Fukuyama’s claim consistent with historical circumstances even at the time he was writing. The Soviet Union, with a population of 290 million, had collapsed; but China, with a population of 1.16 billion, remained Communist.

At the time the dominant assumption, of course, was that as China liberalised its economy and grew - fast - it would automatically come closer to liberal democracy, to our system, becoming a market economy and more democratic and thus posing us no strategic threat.

In the 1990s at the dawn of the end of history it could also have been noted, too, that although the full emergence of radical Islamist militancy lay a decade ahead, there were plenty of warning signs in the late 1980s, particularly in Britain.

Weighed against post-1991 historical experience and current reality, the complacent “They all lived happily ever after” imposition of liberal democracy on a world, the greater half of whose population either rejected or were indifferent to the concept, now seems extravagantly naive. The “happy ending” delusion was abruptly exploded on 11 September 2001, with the terrorist attack on the Trade Center in New York and America’s subsequent wars.

Add to that the Russian Federation’s return to autocracy and the invasion of Ukraine, China’s exponential increase in economic and military power, the continuing pressure from militant Islamism, the weakness of Europe, the culture wars creating fissures throughout Western society and Trump-led America’s disengagement from former geopolitical commitments. In that context, the vision of a universal liberal democracy bringing peace and prosperity to every corner of the planet, on a permanent basis, seems less visionary than hallucinatory.

The Great Western Delusion: “the 1990s peace dividend’’

Maintaining Western defences at a level to deter Soviet aggression during the Cold War had put a strain on the finances of NATO member states and other nations with security concerns. The ending of the Cold War, therefore, brought a collective sigh of relief from countries that believed they were now at liberty to devote more of their national budgets to projects such as infrastructure, investment and welfare.

The term “The Peace Dividend” was coined by U.S. President George H W Bush and the outgoing UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to describe this opportunity for a new allocation of government expenditure.

Although the notion of the “peace dividend” now seems naive, even delusional, at the time it was an understandable reaction to a post-Cold War situation, and as I mentioned earlier we should not underplay the psychologically liberating sensation of relief at what was believed to be the removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the newly sovereign state of Ukraine unilaterally renounced its nuclear weapons; the newly created Russian Federation did not.

The lure of the peace dividend was strongest in Western Europe. In 1989, the average NATO member state’s expenditure on defence was 4% of GDP; by 2014, the year of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, that figure had fallen to 1.4%. Such drastic reductions meant not only that European NATO members were no longer increasing their defence capacities, they were also running down their armaments and equipment, sometimes on an extravagant scale.

Some countries abolished conscription, though others were more cautious and robust. Most robust was hardheaded and sensible Finland, a close neighbour of Russia with experience of aggression from its eastern neighbour. It not only retained conscription, it also took advantage of Western thinking to buy Leopard tanks from the Netherlands, which ran down its tank force. Yet even Finland reduced its defence budget to below the 2% of GDP level in the post-Cold War years.

Overall, during the 30 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “peace dividend” channelled an estimated total of €4.2 trillion to non-defence spending across Europe.

Britain embraces the peace dividend

The United Kingdom was no laggard in recalibrating public spending away from defence to other objects. The trajectory of British defence spending declined from almost 8% of GDP in the mid-1950s to 4% by 1980 (still in the Cold War era), heading towards 3% in 1990 as the Soviet Union was defeated.

Britain’s experience was unusual among the European allies in that after 2001 it not only answered the NATO call in Afghanistan, but it also joined the US war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Perhaps it was that experience - the terrible human cost abroad combined with the shock of the financial crisis at home reducing the funds available - that meant after 2010 we the public were reluctant to do more on defence. We wanted more spent on our welfare rather than more spent on war-fighting capability, which had failed in Iraq.

Today our defence spending stands at about 2.5%, four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within that is roughly 0.7% of GDP for the nuclear enterprise, providing Britain’s deterrent which is operationally independent but closely connected to the US in logistical terms.

Remember the broader context. Spending on the NHS soared from 3% of GDP in the mid-1950s rising to more than 7% in the 2000s as expectations and medical progress made their impact.

During the pandemic, spending on the NHS hit over 10% of GDP, 12% of GDP in total for healthcare including private provision, and has fallen back a little since. Then there is welfare - taking in pensions and all benefits. That is is equivalent to another 10.6% of GDP or 23.6% of the total amount the government spends.

In context, today, Britain’s total welfare budget for 2025-2026 is estimated at £334bn, while the defence budget amounts to £62.2bn. That is just £14bn more spent on defence than was spent in 2014-2015, when Russia annexed the Crimea.

At the NATO summit last July, Britain was among those committing to 5% of GDP on defence after pressure from President Trump. That is 5% made up of 3.5% on core defence spending and another 1.5% on resilience.

Britain was chief among those making the commitment to the Americans. We await news on how it will happen. The government wants to increase defence spending to 3% in the next parliament, which means sometime between 2029 and 2034, meaning we may not hit 3% properly for perhaps eight years, a period as long as the Second World War, plus two years.

Mind you, speaking of the next parliament, if events at Westminster continue on their current trajectory, the next election and the next Parliament could be a lot closer than 2029. Who knows what the next few weeks will bring.

The imperative to increase defence spending fast should be obvious

There is a clear danger to Britain’s security in failing to maintain credible defences to deter the two main potential aggressors: Russia and China.

But there is a more immediate challenge from another quarter: the development of United States policy. The US has been urging Britain and its other European allies for the past 10 years and more to increase defence spending, instead of relying on the American armed forces – and ultimately the American taxpayer – to supply an unending guarantee of security, while Britain and EU states devote expenditure instead to social projects.

The language may be undiplomatic in ways that we Europeans find distasteful, on Greenland, for example; but the Americans are right to warn NATO members that we must step up.

Indeed, history shows us the American focus on this is not new. As far back as the late 1950s, President Eisenhower asked privately when Europe would be able to take care of itself so America could “go home”. In the 1960s his successor JFK asked similar frustrated questions about NATO commitments.

The good news is that as some - some - European defence budgets demonstrate, a decade of warnings from Trump is galvanising key states in Europe.

Poland - increasingly the essential European nation - is on track to spend 4.8% of GDP on defence this year. Germany is increasing its spending dramatically - up from 86 billion euros last year to 108 billion euro this year.

Still, it may not be enough. Not everyone is increasing spending as fast as the Poles and a future US administration may decide to go further and draw down forces from Europe. As it stands, the European pillar of NATO is heavily dependent on US capabilities - in terms of heavy lift, the ability to move troops around fast, and in intelligence and targeting.

Now, in the second Trump term, that deep and still smouldering American resentment with Europe is aggravated by a radical recalibration of American security policy away from Europe, and towards the Indo-Pacific theatre. Most of all there is a focus on a re-energised Monroe Doctrine impelling the United States to defend the homeland and reassert its influence in its neighbourhood in central and South America. In this climate, NATO has inevitably fallen down the list of American defence priorities.

Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, is the latest major player to express the administration’s frustration with the conduct of its European allies. Appearing before the Senate foreign relations committee earlier this year, the Secretary of State said that NATO needed to be reimagined. “The reason why it has to be reimagined is not because its purpose is reimagined,” he said, “its capabilities have to be reimagined.” He denounced rich European nations for channelling money into social programmes, instead of increasing defence spending, because they thought the United States would come to their defence in a time of need.

“Security guarantees basically involve the deployment of a handful of European troops, primarily French and UK, and then a U.S. backstop,” he claimed. He stated that some European states’ proposal to put troops into a post-war Ukraine in the event of a future peace plan was “irrelevant without the U.S. backstop”. The degree of disillusionment being voiced by the US Secretary of State suggests that America will - rightly - want more than vague promises of 5% by the middle of the next decade.

We have seen the impact of our underspending. The former defence secretary Ben Wallace said that governments of both parties - both parties, he stressed - had hollowed out our armed forces. Now, the holiday from history is over and they must be replenished.

But what is it all for? What and where are the threats?

The threat environment

It is incumbent on those of us who think that there is a great danger ahead to pause for a moment and with humility acknowledge the risk of war hysteria. Especially after a period of 15 years and more when our leadership class has got this so wrong, and when there is an obvious need to rearm, it is important to consider history and in doing so strive to keep our heads. It is important we get the balance right between caution and action.

In Niall Ferguson’s classic account of the First World War - the Pity of War - there is a defining passage describing and analysing the rush to war. The historians among you will be familiar with the arguments. Was it inevitable once the railway timetables got going and the men and machinery were moved into position? Or was it the disastrous system of alliances?

Ultimately, it appears Britain most feared the rise of Russia in the late 19th century. No country was industrialising at the same scale and at such speed. Britain chose alliances with Russia and France because longterm it feared Russia more than Germany. Thus helping to create the conditions for the miscalculations of the July 1914 crisis and the calamitous war that followed.

Then there is the role of stupidity and the climate created by the Kaiser and others. And the role of ultra-patriotic mindless jingoism here and elsewhere.

In the end it came down to the flawed judgments of human beings operating without the benefit of hindsight.

The lesson today is to try to define threats as calmly and realistically as we can. There the period 2001-2003 comes to mind, when post 9/11 an understandable hysteria took hold. Legitimate concerns over weapons of mass destruction, ending up in the hands of rogue states or Islamist terrorists bent on Armageddon, became distorted and disastrous judgment calls were made. Like many people at the time, I was in favour of the invasion.

Today, Russia is weakened from its failed illegal war in Ukraine where it has lost 1.2m men either killed, wounded or missing in action. Although it has built a war economy, the rearmament being undertaken fast by the Poles and the Baltic States and Nordics means that any invading army would meet resistance. Some strategists conclude the Russians would be unlikely to get very far, given the manner in which they have been held back in Ukraine.

Against that, those who are bullish should recognise that even future incursions by Russia into other parts of Europe, that are subsequently beaten back, would still be very costly in terms of the human toll and the damage done to our economies and infrastructure.

Beyond that what we face is a rolling threat over decades combining the risk of incursions, grey zone hybrid warfare, sabotage, and drone and hypersonic warfare, running through northern Europe but likely originating in the High North, by a Russia backed by China.

Indeed, perhaps the most significant feature of the Ukraine war - aside from the technological acceleration in warfare - is that China has emerged as the main supporter of Russia, a development that would have been thought implausible even a decade ago.

Their alliance means we’re faced with a classic danger that will be familiar to admirers of the work of the great Halford Mackinder, the father of geopolitics. For Mackinder it was all about the “heartland,” the Eurasian landmass - control that, control the world and its shipping routes and the flow of trade and ideas.

At the heart of our challenge is the alliance between two giant countries sitting at the heart of that Eurasian landmass - Russia and its much bigger brother China.

The central strategic challenge: China

China, the aspiring global hegemon, is the challenge that every other nation on the planet must make provision to contain. Nothing could more discredit the “end of history” delusion than the current reality that 1.4 billion Chinese live under totalitarian rule, 35 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In a groundbreaking essay for the American Interest published in 2020, Fukuyama put it well when he said: “To understand how the United States and other Western countries should deal with China in the coming years, we need to understand what kind of society we are dealing with.”

Our hope during the “end of history” era was that China - having moved from totalitarianism under Mao to authoritarianism under his successors, with markets liberalised to a degree - would next become more politically liberal. Evolving, from totalitarianism, to authoritarianism, to the Western liberalism of the end of history period.

It didn’t happen. It took the West a while to realise it, and some in our political system still cannot grasp it, but XI represented a move back to totalitarianism, only this time the party has technology sufficient to exert complete control that was beyond even Mao’s grasp.

As Fukuyama put it from an American perspective: “What Americans need to keep in mind is that their enemy and rival right now is not China, but a Chinese Communist Party that has shifted into high-totalitarian mode. We are not dealing with the China of the 1990s or even the 2000s, but a completely different animal that represents a clear challenge to our democratic values. We need to hold it at bay until some point in the future when it returns to being a more normal authoritarian country, or indeed is on its way to being a liberal country. That will not necessarily eliminate the challenge that China represents; a more liberal China could easily be more nationalistic. But it will nonetheless be easier to deal with in many ways.”

In Xi Jinping’s China, we are facing a totalitarian power structure based on the attempted brainwashing of its subjects, even if Xi’s ideology is a more banal Chinese nationalism rather than Mao’s crazed, violent radicalism. Still, in Chinese Communist ideology, contemporary China is living through “The New Era”. That term is an abbreviation of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”. This derives from the Chinese Communist Party’s formal History Resolution of 2021, the most recent of only three passed since 1949, which canonised, in secular terms, the five paramount leaders of the People’s Republic, beginning with Mao Zedong and ending with Xi Jinping, whose era began in 2012.

This placed Xi on the same level as Mao, giving him extreme authority, for which the way had already been paved by the abolition of limits on a presidential term in 2018. The expectation is that Xi will lead China to new heights of global power, a trajectory that must surely include the reincorporation of Taiwan into the Chinese state at some point, destabilising the Indo-Pacific.

Despite what we are told, China is not a great economic opportunity for us. China is an economic opportunity for China as it seeks to become the dominant civilisation. It is not going to open its markets any further to outsiders and it is not a major mainstream investor in the British economy, and will not become one. The Chinese Communist Party’s goal is to become the dominant exporter of everything, for ever.

China has pursued such goals with great tenacity and skill, first by converting itself into the workshop of the world through its vast supply of cheap labour, promoting the de-industrialisation of the West in the process, while pursuing its own de facto colonialist projects through its Belt and Road initiative. But that project has had mixed results, with some African nations rejecting Beijing’s interventions amid growing mistrust.

Most seriously, China is facing a major demographic crisis that partly may reflect a global population slump, but must surely also be a consequence of China’s disastrous one-child policy. Since male children were preferred to female under that social engineering experiment, there is a huge disparity between the young female and male populations, leaving hundreds of millions of young men unable to find a wife or to cultivate the domesticity that accompanies marriage.

A discontented urban population of male youths is a destabilising factor in society and even a potential threat to the regime. Last year, China’s population fell for the fourth consecutive year. UN estimates suggest the population will fall to 1.2 billion by 2050, bringing all the problems associated with an ageing demography.

But, for the West, the most urgent priority is to assess the military potential of the People’s Liberation Army. On paper it is formidable. China’s regular army is 2,035,000 strong, with 510,000 reservists and a further 500,000 personnel categorised as paramilitary. Unlike the Russian forces, however, it has not been blooded and is lacking in war experience. More sinister than that, from Xi’s point of view, is the deep-seated corruption that reportedly pervades the PLA.

Its Rocket Forces, for example, were found two years ago to have constructed missiles made of too heavy a material for effective launching and some missiles were filled with water instead of fuel. Of the corruption in the PLA, a former CIA analyst commented: “In its scope and scale, it’s breathtaking.” An earlier Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had encouraged the PLA to engage in commercial activities. That led to widespread corrupt operations, including running dance troupes and high-end hotels. Even Xi, despite his recent purge of the military, is believed privately to acknowledge that the vast network of corruption within the PLA is too deep-seated to be eliminated.

Nevertheless, the only commander to survive Xi’s recent purge of the Central Military Commission (CMC) was Zhang Shenmin, the anti-corruption watchdog. At the same time, it is likely that Xi’s purge had less to do with uprooting corrupt practices than with assuming even closer control of the PLA. Between now and the next party congress, he can pack the CMC with his own choices.

What should we do?

Plainly, the burden of responding on China falls mainly to the US. The drawing away from Europe, and the understandable insistence that Europe should be able to handle most of its own conventional (and perhaps more) defence, compels us to rethink.

There is some good news on that front.

We are not starting from scratch in Europe when we have NATO, which is still the bedrock of Western defence.

The key fact Western policymakers need to bear in mind is that, for Britain and Europe, it is the most realistic current vehicle for collective security is NATO.

Throughout the tensions of the Cold War (including several accidental near misses at nuclear conflict) it maintained Western security competently and effectively. It has proved its worth. It is not obsolescent or struggling, except insofar as some member states lack financial commitment to the alliance. It is unlikely that even America’s current pivot eastwards would have led the White House to consider NATO membership dispensable, had it not been preceded by a decade and more of some member states defaulting on their obligations.

While the threat of withdrawal of the American defence umbrella makes it necessary for Britain and the EU to ramp up provision for their own defence, in the first instance this should be executed in the context of a reinvigorated NATO.

The European pillar of NATO exists as a concept and it is perfectly plausible that non-US members of NATO could do more to replace American capability as it reduces deployments - it will take time though.

Elsewhere, vague political talk, by politicians who have spent their careers ignoring defence, of an EU army as an alternative security guarantee is delusory. It would take many years to devise such a project and the rivalry and disharmony that accompanies such initiatives, mean an EU army is not a realistic defence prospect.

It may be canvassed under alluring soundbites about “standing on our own feet”, “coming out from under the shadow of America”, etc, but it would lack the strategic capabilities that only the superpower America can supply, as well as the magnified deterrence power of a US presence.

Remember, European nations have a too often unconnected variety of weaponry that defies reduction to integrated coherence. It is a Holy Roman Empire of nation-based defence procurement that already poses problems in the context of NATO, problems that would become insuperable in the context of fabricating a putative European army.

Bureaucracy and regulation would further impede the creation of a putative EU army. Britain would be largely excluded and exploited, allowed only to participate in weapons procurement, with large costs for market access, and without taking part in the decision-making processes.

But there is more good news - NATO is modernising.

The organisation is seriously addressing improvements in its capabilities. Its eastern-flank multinational battle groups are being enlarged to brigade level. Additionally, in a return to Cold War strategy, certain national forces are being assigned to secure specific geographical regions. While such measures are important primarily for the defence of Europe, they are also calculated to reassure Washington. The recently published US National Defense Strategy confirms that America remains committed to providing critical support to Europe, though on a more limited scale than before.

That leaves it to Britain and European NATO members to make up the deficit, which they are perfectly able to do if there is the political will, thus securing the future of NATO and the American security commitment, solely at the price of increasing their defence spending to 5% of GDP, a reasonable expectation.

Frontline nations such as Poland, Finland, Sweden and the Baltic States are becoming NATO’s spearhead. They are moving into a high state of military readiness and can become the core force on NATO’s eastern flank. In one likely scenario, they could create densely fortified land frontiers, defended by extensive minefields and a ‘drone cordon sanitaire’, reinforced by large artillery and missile concentrations. NATO thinking is flexible, but focused and creative, significantly informed by observation and analysis of developments in the Ukraine war, where the Ukrainians have impressively pioneered pragmatic and imaginative responses to challenges created by a more heavily armed invader.

Britain’s role and the need for hard power

The first and most obvious conclusion from the developments I have described - a multi-decade challenge flowing from a resentful, revanchist Russia backed by a totalitarian China seeking dominion - is that we have to change the way we think. Not only do defence and national security need to take up a much larger share of our attention and spending. Regenerated manufacturing, much cheaper energy (the core requirement for economic expansion) and much bigger defence industrial capacity are going to be needed.

We need to rearm and reorientate our politics so that more of our leadership class becomes familiar once again with the need to think in terms of grand strategy, security and alliances rooted in hard power rather than rhetoric.

In essence, and this cuts across all political parties, our entire political economy, statecraft and mindset somehow needs rethinking.

In the era since the end of history was declared most of our leaders forgot the indispensability of hard power, and most voters were happy not to think about it either.

That means us getting our act together fast and the UK Treasury being forced to follow through on pledges made by the Defence Secretary John Healey to fulfil the commitments signed up to at the NATO summit in 2025 - namely getting to 5%. At the heart of it we have to rebuild our defence industrial base, as must the rest of Europe, alongside consolidating and modernising the European pillar of NATO.

But there are also other highly useful alliances that overlap. That includes the Joint Expeditionary Force, established by Britain with nine other members, it forms an embryonic Northern Alliance defending the Baltic and the High North, stretching into the Arctic.

The links with Australia, through the AUKUS partnership and beyond, are strong and growing. And Japan will be an increasingly essential ally.

The myth is that we can consider this in European isolation, because we are a middle power. In reality, as Mackinder showed - it is all connected. The High North connects to the Arctic, where China has an interest. The Indo-Pacific begins only 120 miles from the Med, at the foot of the Suez Canal.

It is in our interests for the sea lanes that carry trade to stay open and not be controlled by the autocrats. Ditto with the global financial system. In alliance with other democracies, Britain has a vital role to play.

In playing our part we will only be taken seriously by the United States and by our other allies if as a society we take our defence more seriously and invest. And we will only be able to deter the autocrats if we take our defence more seriously.

Our defences have been neglected and run down for too long by governments of all the main parties. If we cannot see what Ukraine means, that it changes everything, we do not deserve to survive as a democracy. Freedom is the one amenity that is never free. If it means tightening our belts, trimming our welfare budget and making other fiscal sacrifices, that is the price to be paid for retaining the sovereign liberty won by the endurance of two world wars and countless other conflicts.

History has not ended. A competent defence and security system - true hard power - is the sole guarantee that we will continue to help shape history, rather than ending up as its victims.

This is my newsletter for subscribers. If you are a paying subscriber, thank you. If you would like to receive more than a taste of the newsletter you can upgrade to paid.

It’s obviously not as earth shatteringly consequential as the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham being barred last month from standing in an upcoming Westminster by-election, but even up against the supposedly epoch defining scandal of Burnham having his career plans disturbed, the recent purge of the Chinese military leadership was a significant event.

Although it is not on a par with the cosmic injustice meted out to Burham, who was told he could not stand in a contest which might have allowed him back into the Commons from where he could challenge and topple Keir Starmer and become Prime Minister, China’s military purge is nonetheless important, though clearly not as important as the disruption of Burnham’s career.

For those of you living abroad, or for other reasons not familiar with the work of Burnham, or familiar with his work but immune to his charms, Labour is up against it in a by-election being held in Gorton and Denton on 26 February. Burnham, a former cabinet minister, wanted to stand and Starmer and last month Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee said no.

For days on end the saga led the news bulletins in Britain and Burnham received incredible amounts of analysis. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping removed Zhang Youxia, China’s top general, and another senior military commander, Gen Liu Zhenli. Of seven members of the CMC, the Central Military Commission which oversees the armed forces, five members have been investigated or vanished. Of the two left in post, one is, obviously, China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Read more

This is my newsletter where I write on politics, geopolitics, economics and culture. If you are a paying subscriber, thank you. There is a lot of writing out there, too much probably, and I hope this is useful in terms of navigating what’s going on. If you are on the free version and would like to receive more than a taste of it - more than a few paragraphs - you can upgrade to paid.

Well, that’s the end of that it was nice while it lasted. The West, I mean. The announcement that Britain and seven NATO allies from northern Europe will face 10% US tariffs, rising to 25%, for defending the right of Greenland and Denmark to self-determination, surely spells the end of any viable Western alliance.

Or does it?

Already there is intense diplomatic activity underway in the aftermath of the threats made by President Trump. Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, said on social media on Sunday afternoon that he has spoken to POTUS and looks forward to speaking to him again about all this at Davos, where Trump is travelling to make a presumably hard-hitting speech later this month at the globalised festival of delusion.

It would not be surprising if the northern European countries threatened with increased tariffs attempt to deescalate in the days ahead in the hope someone in Washington persuades the President that he really cannot go around invading NATO allies. What seems to have irked Trump was the news of small deployments by other NATO nations to Greenland on a reconnaissance mission after he demanded ownership of Greenland. Let’s see, though, what Trump says next. At the time of writing, on Sunday evening, he has been quiet on social media. That could change any minute.

Read more

Happy New Year! I hope subscribers had a relaxing break over the festive period. After travelling and then tuning out for two weeks, and reading a lot of books along the way, I’m back with this first post of the year on the implications of President Trump’s move on Venezuela. Thank you for being a subscriber to this newsletter - especially to paying subscribers. If you receive only a taste of it and want to upgrade to paid, where you have full access to read, then it is easy to do. There will be more from me at the weekend.

The first thing to say is that the US has always taken an elastic view of niceties when it comes to intervening in Latin America and the wider Western hemisphere. Teddy Roosevelt was notoriously robust on the question of America’s right to police its own backyard, to such an extent that he even participated in the “rough rider” expedition to Cuba in 1898 which freed the country from Spanish overlordship. Cuba became independent, albeit within America’s sphere of interest until the disastrous Cuban Marxist revolution of 1959. Go back further and large chunks of what is today the US were acquired after the war with Mexico ended in the treaty of 1848. California and New Mexico became part of the US and more land was added - though the Americans paid - in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase. All this is relatively recent and consistent with the American view that the territorial integrity and security of the nation created 250 years ago this year trumps all other considerations. During the Cold War, under presidents of both parties, this manifested itself in repeated operations both covert and public to ensure that there were in place governments and regimes who wouldn’t threaten American interests. The naive US decision since the end of the Cold War to abandon any serious interest in the region helped facilitate Venezuela’s slide from prosperity into a Marxist narco hell-hole, and fuelled the migration crisis at America’s border.

Even so, even by the standards of American history, the decision to extract Maduro from a military base in Venezuela on Saturday morning and transport him to a prison in New York was audacious.

Read more

This is my newsletter on politics, geopolitics and culture. If you are a paying subscriber, it is much appreciated and thank you. If you want to receive all of this newsletter - which is the only place I write - you can upgrade to paid. To all subscribers, I wish you the best for the festive season.

During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 a bunch of us journalists were standing in the Telegraph newsroom watching the slightly sinister scenes being beamed in on television from China.

The Telegraph had - and still has - what at the time was described as a “state of the art” hub and spoke office layout, designed to be ahead of the curve in the bright, glorious digital future which was said to be coming our way. In reality the new office was mainly hype-driven media marketing drivel, because hub and spoke only meant there was a large round table in the middle of the vast newsroom surrounded by giant television screens on tall poles, and from there rows of desks containing the hard-pressed and rightly cynical hacks. The Telegraph was owned by the infamous Barclay Brothers whose over-leveraged business empire would more than a decade later go splat against the wall when interest rates went up.

The newsroom had been the trading floor of Salomon in the 1980s and Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and many more books since about assorted disasters, worked there when it was the largest trading floor in Europe, before it became a newspaper office.

I’ve probably told versions of this story before, about the Telegraph and the Olympics in China, and apologies if it is familiar to regular readers. After more than ten years of this newsletter appearing in various formats and outlets, it would be unsurprising if there wasn’t occasional repetition.

The reason that scene - the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on 8 August 2008 - comes to mind from time to time is that nearly two decades later it symbolises what with hindsight can be seen as a pivoting moment. China was on the rise and we in the West were about to be on the slide, though we didn’t know it yet. Our financial crisis had started the year before in 2007 and a month after the Olympics it would explode into the worst peacetime shock perhaps since 1929 and certainly since the twin oil crises of the 1970s.

Read more

This post is free to read on public service grounds. If you also want to receive my weekly newsletter on politics and geopolitics, you can upgrade to become a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

At this year’s LDC Investment Forum earlier this week, I was joined on stage by Lord Robertson for a conversation about UK defence, the threats we and our allies face, and the need for his Strategic Defence Review to be implemented much more quickly.

I’ve known him a long time now - from the days in the early 1990s when as a young reporter on the Sunday Times in Scotland I used to have to phone him up and ask him presumably annoying questions about meetings of the Scottish Labour Party Executive. With a sigh he would explain politely that the proceedings were private and he was trying to watch the rugby on the television.

Since then he has had a remarkable career, in the UK cabinet and at NATO seeing Russia’s return to authoritarianism up close. He is a vital, wise voice making the case for much stronger defences in the face of the growing threats confronting the West.

Here is the transcript of our conversation:

Lord Robertson, we are talking about getting to 5 per cent but I think we have to start by talking about Ukraine. It’s been a very strange few days. What kind of security guarantees do you think Ukraine really needs if this 19-point plan is going to work?

Only the United States has got the capability, both the air cover and the equipment, that would make any coalition of the willing credible in the eyes of the Ukrainians and in the eyes of their potential adversaries. So that’s going to be one of the big stumbling blocks. That’s going to be a problem for the negotiators to take on board and I think that’s one of the areas that is not in the 19-point plan but is being left for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Zelensky to deal with.

Do you think such a deal is feasible?

It’s going to have to be feasible. It’s going to be necessary because the Ukrainians will need to have some guarantee that whatever deal is done is not going to be as paper-thin as the Budapest Memorandum was. So it’s going to have to be robust and it will have to involve troops on the ground for it to be in any way credible to the Ukrainians of the future.

How do you think these negotiations, particularly regarding the initial exclusion of European allies and coalition of the willing, will affect the cohesion of collective European security?

We are in uncharted territory. We are in a situation where a real estate expert is doing the negotiation on behalf of the US directly with the Kremlin, and then the diplomats pick up the pieces later on. So it’s impossible to tell what the outcome is going to be. In a normal course of events, you would go into the details, you would not have a guy with real estate experience going in and getting a piece of paper, that it transpires was translated from Russian, and bringing that back as an authoritative version that has to be adopted. So that is where we are in an area not only of uncharted territory but in the area of unreality.

There’s a meeting in Abu Dhabi in the next couple of days, following on from the Geneva talks. Marco Rubio is now engaged and Rubio has got a track record of being suspicious of Russia. He’s not only national security advisor, he is the secretary of state, so he carries the clout of the state department. But nobody can tell what on earth is going on. You need a psychiatrist to be able to get inside the minds of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and even a psychiatrist would find it difficult at the moment. So, we will know when we know, we will see when we see.

In the meantime, the Russian economy is in trouble and the Russians are not making any real progress on the battlefield, advancing one metre at a time. The younger Russian generation are being eliminated in a country where the ethnic population is anyway declining…

What does this mean for the threat facing the rest of Europe if you end up with a frozen Europe? That presumably frees up Putin’s resources in terms of the High North, the Baltic states and Poland? He then has more to send to those border areas and more free time and capacity on his hands.

We need to be very very worried about how this ends up, because we are under threat as well. It’s quite clear from the Russian press and the Kremlin-controlled media that we, the United Kingdom, are being seen as a proxy for America. It’s inconvenient to attack America on a broad scale because of the relationship between Trump and Putin so we, the United Kingdom, are in the crosshairs. Relentlessy, the Kremlin media is attacking “the Anglos”, “the UK”, “the English”. So we need to be worried as a country as a whole that if Russia got the space to reconstitute its armed forces - and it’s already doing so but, if it could on a grander scale - then clearly the rest of Europe is in danger. If I lived in Moldova or Armenia or Azerbaijan, I would be very very worried about the possibility of a deal being done that left Russia with its forces intact and with at least some prize to be gained from Ukraine.

You recently talked about the UK being underinsured and underprepared in terms of modern threat. What do you think it is that the public doesn’t understand about this?

I don’t think that we see the threat in the way that we should. If the lights go out, what do we do? 98 per cent of all the data we use in this country comes in undersea cables, 77 per cent of our gas supplies to the UK comes in one pipeline from Norway, so the vulnerability of the country is really acute. But people are not in their day-to-day lives aware of it. But if the lights go out and the hospitals close and the data centres melt because the air conditioning has gone off, then the political classes will be told, ‘why have you not done something about this?’

A couple of months ago, Spain and Portugal came to a standstill, an outage. Nobody knows why, they claim it was to do with an excess of renewable power. But you got the experience there very very visibly, for 48 hours, of a country at a standstill - cash machines that don’t work, traffic lights that don’t work, two modern European countries paralysed. Imagine if that was to happen here.

Russian spy ships are mapping these undersea cables all the time, putting sensors on the seabed in order to detect where the main data lines are going to be. You’ve got these shadow tankers dragging anchors in the Baltic, and they can do so in the Atlantic as well. So people need to be made aware of how unprepared and uninsured we actually are. A CFO would be sacked if he allowed insurance policies to lapse at any of these buildings here today (in the City of London) and a country is no different. We need an insurance policy. There needs to be an insurance policy through robust defence - war-fighting capability that deters any enemy from making the kind of attacks we are talking about.

This question of war-fighting capability seems to be absolutely critical. In recent decades, we have focussed quite a lot on operational questions, which are important, but actually being able to fight wars and deter, that’s where we’ve got to get to. To that end, you oversaw and led the recent SDR, what do you think the next steps on that need to be? And, based on what you’ve said, we need to go faster surely?

It needs to be implemented, the Strategic Defence Review fundamentally transforms the way in which we do defence, from top to bottom, right through the whole system.

My nephew sent a text message when I got the job saying ‘more tanks, more ships, more planes, job done.’ And there are some people who think that, there’s some people in the defence industry who think that. But it’s not. We need to transform the whole way in which we do defence: the heavy metal is part of it but it’s also to do with logistics, it’s to do with modern training, with innovation, with reforming the way in which we do procurement, which is mired in bureaucracy and contrary to risk-taking. So all of that has to be done, and it needs to be implemented quickly.

The defence secretary sent me a message last night saying that we’re underway and that of the 62 recommendations, all of which have got timelines built into them, some of them are being delivered in advance of what the timeline suggests. But we need to move much quicker than that.

The minister has just said that we are going to reach 2.5 per cent in 2027 - that’s a year after next. But the Prime Minister is talking about a coalition of the willing, and putting troops on the ground into a World War Three war zone now, and I think that’s where our lack of preparation comes up against the ambitions of European leaders at the present moment. So the money that the PM has promised - an extra 13.4 billion pounds in 2027, and every year thereafter - the government is committed to the 3 per cent at the start of next parliament and 3.5 per cent by 2035, according to the Hague summit, but we’ve got to deal with what’s happening at the present moment.

When I went to NATO at the beginning, President Clinton said to me, ‘sort the relationship with Russia out’, that was one of his imperatives at the time, and the relationship was very badly fractured, with Boris Yeltsin believing that Kosovo had been a betrayal. So what I did was I sort of sat myself in a seat in the Kremlin, thinking how do they look at us, what does NATO look like if you’re sat in the Kremlin. So when Putin took over the following year, at least I was partly in his mind about how to deal with him. And we need to do that, we need to stop looking at the world through our own eyes and think about it in the eyes of these three guys who stood at Tiananmen Square last month - the president of Russia, the president of China, the president of North Korea. They weren’t spectators at that parade, they are part and parcel of a group of people who want to end the domination of the West, to stop the power of the EU, the power of NATO and they are banded together. They don’t like each other or trust each other but they have one common objective, and that’s what they are mobilising on at the present moment. Every single day they are doing that.

The world in 2010 was completely different from the world you’ve just described. This was a world in which we hoped Russia would be our economic partner and we were entering a golden era with China. Surely we need to think much bigger and go much faster?

We do and I believe that we do, and I think the defence secretary believes that we do. But is that the mind of the Treasury yet? The Treasury is being lobbied by the welfare lobby, by security, by education, all relentlessly putting pressure on it. But where is the outside lobby that says ‘we need to be safe, we’ve got to keep the country safer than it is at the present moment’? We are under-resourced, under-insured, under attack and therefore we are not safe as a nation.

The government signed up to the SDR, it’s the view of His Majesty’s Government and the review says this: ‘the UK and its allies are once again directly threatened by other states with advanced military forces. The UK is already under daily attack with aggressive acts from espionage, cyber attack and information manipulation causing harm to society and the economy. State conflict has returned to Europe’. So, these are words of the government of the day and I think the Treasury are going to have to pay attention to that. If the lights go out and the hospitals shut, then what happens?

When 9/11 came and I was at NATO, and you ride out the implication of Article 5, the German government put a levy on every insurance policy in Germany as a special security supplement at that time. I tried to get all the countries to do that but they failed to do it. But I think that is what, in my view, they should be doing. The country needs to know it’s not safe and that it can only be safe if the insurance policy is paid, and that means extra money for defence. And it will have to be before 2027 when that extra 13.4 billion comes in.

What is your perspective on the role of private capital, private investors and their expertise in this great endeavour?

The involvement of private money, the involvement of the private sector, is going to be absolutely crucial. It is quite clear that, in the short term, that the government is not going to be able to confront the welfare bill in the way that it should in order to release money for the defence of the country. But the private sector has the money and it can spend the money up front.

I was at a meeting last week where somebody said, ‘in terms of Europe, it’s either 5 per cent with the Americans or 7 per cent without the Americans’. That’s a dawning realisation. So the private sector has to be involved. There’s no way that the state can do all of this, especially in infrastructure terms, in terms of paying up front to get the equipment of the future. It’s one of the ways in which we can leverage the money, the skills, the ability of the square mile in order to make sure that the country and the square mile is safer than it is just now.

QUESTIONS

(Juliet Samuel of The Times)

Europe collectively spends more on defence than Russia does so why are we getting so little for our money and should we resolve that faster before we spend more?

We do spend much more than Russia, and it’s a colossal amount of money, but of course it’s used for sovereign projects, it’s used domestically, and a lot of it is not terribly productive in terms of war readiness. There are some countries that spend about 20 per cent on pensions which doesn’t exactly translate into capabilities, so the last secretary general of NATO and this current one are actually making war readiness a priority. But the Europeans are going to have to face up to the fact that the taxpayer in Europe deserves to get Euros for the money they spend and they’re not getting it at the moment.

(Iain Martin) This question of ‘Europe’, let’s try and define that. There’s the European pillar of NATO, there’s what the European Union is trying to do. There clearly is this urge for European countries to do more together to meet the threat. But how do you see it institutionally?

Institutionally, the European Union has changed. They now have a commission for defence. That was unheard of even in my day. They’ve changed the financial structures to allow more money to be spent on defence without breaking the stability pact. So Europe is waking up and is systematically changing a lot of its programmes. But the EU, like NATO, is made up of sovereign countries and they have relations - unlike the Warsaw Pact where one man in the Kremlin said ‘move’ and everyone said ‘how high do we jump?’ - you’ve got a conglomeration of countries, so NATO has got Viktor Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, they’ve got a new Prime Minister in the Czech Republic, who are not all on the same page as those who see Russia as a major threat. It’s a fact of life that the countries closest to the threat are more aware, the Poles are spending over 4 percent on defence at the moment but the Spanish and the Portuguese, certainly the Spanish, wanted to opt out of the agreement that was done at the Hague. But, generally speaking, they act together and I think we should recognise that its towering strength is that it’s made up of democracies unlike with our adversaries, but it makes it more difficult to come to common decisions. Institutionally though, the European Union has picked up thanks to the challenge of Ukraine and is moving faster than ever before.

(Iain Martin)

But is it a structure that’s built for speed? And the reason I mention that is I’m thinking increasingly about the question of denial and denying the Russians territory. The lesson of the last 11 years, since Crimea, that the Kremlin will draw psychologically is that ‘if you take it, no-one is going to come and take it off you; not the Ukrainians, and no other power. So if you can claim territory fast in a chaotic way, presumably the Russians then bank on us taking a while to organise a response to try and push them back. Or then you move into the peace conference phase of things and then the territory is lost.

I think that’s the dilemma we are all facing. There is an assumption that Ukraine is going to have to give up territory, sovereign territory. Despite the pledge guaranteed by the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, by the UK, by the US but also by Russia, China. And I think that presages a very difficult, worrying world for our grandchildren in the future, if it can be legitimised through whatever is being done at the present moment, then the principle of the use of force to change borders will be enshrined in some new peace treaty and that has profound implications across the world. I don’t understand why countries in the global south don’t wake up to that threat to them. The whole of Africa is based on colonial boundaries but they all decided collectively to keep them because otherwise you’re going to have tribal rivals and all sorts of territorial claims, so there was an element of stability in Africa for example that allowed it to survive all the proxy wars that were going on there at the time. The moment the principle is established, especially by the big powers in the world, that you can change borders with the use of force and with violence, then anarchy is the outcome. So all of us have a stake in what’s going on in Abu Dhabi today but we are all excluded from it. That’s the worrying aspect of what’s happening at the moment.”

Lord Robertson thank you for joining us.

In Oliver Moody’s must-read recent book on the Baltic, there is a succinct account of what it has meant for the Estonians to have Russia as an occupier and then a neighbour.

To put what Soviet subjugation meant in a purely economic context, at the end of the 1930s average incomes and life expectancy had been almost the same in Finland and Estonia. By the end of the Cold War, he writes, Finns were eight times richer and lived on average four years longer.

All that on top of a Soviet era drive to extradite and eliminate Estonian professionals and intellectuals, rewrite history along Communist lines, and turn the country into a vassal of Russia.

Russia’s other neighbours have all had pretty similar experiences. Germany was twice the rampager too. It is Russia, though, that is today led by an anti-democratic autocrat who is seeking to wipe out and subsume a European country - Ukraine - and seeking to widen Russia’s European orbit.

This is the context in which the last few days of peace talks should be considered. While the “realists” - and some friends of Ukraine - may well be right in saying that this conflict was always going to end or be paused with a negotiated settlement of this kind, it is still deeply disturbing to watch. Once again, a brave people find that when all the Allied rhetoric and bold speeches fade away, international diplomacy imposes its cold logic and a squalid deal freezes the conflict and stops the killing - for now.

Read more

This is a free post. If you would like to receive my newsletter for subscribers you can upgrade.

These things do not happen. Scotland’s football team does not qualify for the World Cup, with three of the best goals ever scored in one night by Scotsmen and the first of those goals being an overhead “bicycle” kick only three minutes into a do or die (sort of) fixture. There are not wild celebrations. This great victory does not then lead the UK national news the next day. I repeat - these things do not happen.

Only, these things did happen this week and like most Scotland fans, I imagine, I still cannot quite believe that after all these years it was real.

Against Denmark at Hampden on Tuesday this was the kind of night Scotland fans dream of, or dreamt of back when we were naive children, knew no better and had still to be confronted with endless Scottish footballing disappointment and falling short. This - Tuesday - was the night of dreams when, finally, the nightmare ended (for now) and everything worked perfectly as though it had been scripted by the sporting gods or as a fairytale concocted by the great sport writer Hugh McIlvanney during a magical night in the pub with Billy Connolly in 1977.

Let’s face it, Scottish football as a national team endeavour has been largely comical in character for more than thirty years now, perhaps even since the late 1970s. That is not to knock the talent or effort of a wide range of players who tried in those decades since and sometimes came close to defying our downward dive to the status of joke minnow status. This could not disguise the truth, though. Our role was to go out on goal difference or to be hammered by Morocco, as we were in 1998 the last time we made it to a World Cup final.

It was not ever thus. Scotland used to be a major force in European football because its best players dominated England’s clubs, filling many of the leading managerial and playing roles at Liverpool, Manchester United, Leeds and beyond in the old Division One, then the equivalent of the Premier League. Since then Scotland has lost its knack for producing true footballing greats, as the game changed and other countries advanced. Changing training techniques, diet, a fading of interest among young Scots and the internationalisation of English football meant there just weren’t as many top flight Scottish players to make up a serious national team once we got into the 2000s.

In the 1970s Scotland was no footballing joke. Our failure was tragic. Yes, Scotland’s exit from the 1978 World Cup was one of the most inherently amusing incidents in football, because our team went to Argentina with the nation convinced that we would return with the Cup. Alas, hubris was followed by nemesis.

It was funny, but it was also a tragic missed opportunity because the players in that 1978 squad were of such high quality that we should have won it, or at least got out of the group stages and come close to winning it. Instead, inept management meant we were humiliated by Peru and Iran before we beat the wonderful Holland side, but by one goal too few to proceed.

Since then, we’ve been on the slide.

If you are English and reading this with a smirk on your face it is worth remembering that if Scottish football has become comical, English football - the national team - has since Italia ‘90 become inherently tragic. Having failed narrowly to win the World Cup in 1990 - the campaign England should have won - England has been one near miss after another. The psychological damage gets worse every time. Who will beat England on penalties next? Surely one of the greatest footballing nations - inventor of the game - should be able to bring it home again? The last time England did so, the Beatles had just released their masterpiece album Revolver.

Which is worse? Scottish comedy or English tragedy? At least it is amusing being a Scotland fan. To follow England it increasingly seems you need a degree in psychology to make sense of the serial disasters and tragic near misses.

An English friend messaged me this morning to say he is pleased Scotland have qualified because World Cups are “funnier” when Scotland qualify. I responded that we are happy to provide light relief and amusement in the early stages, before a traumatised England are ejected - again - in the semi-finals.

But of course we are not happy to provide light relief and amusement. We - the Scots, Unionists and Nationalists alike - are a warrior nation desperately seeking greatness and vindication, to win something and really show everyone, particularly our large neighbour next door.

Could it happen? I doubt it, but in this Scotland team are a small group of really serious talents who are coalescing at the right time.

There is Scott McTominay, the brilliant young man rejected, sold, by Manchester United who has since become a hero in Naples as the key figure in a league winning Napoli side. Alongside him, also of Napoli, is the industrious playmaker Billy Gilmour, although not last night as he is out injured for a few weeks. Then the dynamo John McGinn, who whirrs away at the heart of the Aston Villa side, and the captain Andy Robertson, of Liverpool, who hoped to top a highly successful club career with his first trip to a World Cup. His ambition will be achieved - fitness permitting. Others deserve their trip too.

It is McTominay’s story that is most compelling, however. It was his balletic bicycle kick that opened the scoring against Denmark. Born in England, and qualifying for Scotland because his father was born in Scotland, there is something inspiring about his can do attitude. His great love was Man Utd and it was a very mixed experience being at the club, coinciding as it did with a calamitous slide in their fortunes. He took quite a lot of criticism and at times his form was erratic. Even his basic ball control seemed off at times. Would his confidence be destroyed? No. When the Napoli opportunity came up he didn’t whinge or melt in the glare of attention in a city that takes its football as seriously as Manchester or Glasgow. McTominay calmly got on with it, worked hard and became a star who scores wonder goals - as he did against Denmark.

I do not for a second think any of this means that Scotland will really shake them up and win the World Cup, or even get out of the group stages. I am familiar with the script.

There will be no final against England in which McTominay scores the winning goal, or a semifinal shootout in which England lose to an Andy Robertson perfect penalty and the Scots go on to beat Brazil 5-1 in the final.

These things do not happen. But sometimes they do.

Thank you for subscribing to my weekly newsletter where I write about politics, economics, culture and what I’m reading. It’s now the only place I write. If you are a paying subscriber thank you. If you want to upgrade and receive the whole newsletter it’s now £60 for the year.

The entrepreneur Matt Clifford made a speech last month at the O2 that is well worth watching because it is so damn cheering, combining economic realism with optimism about Britain’s prospects if - big if - we can get it together.

Clifford was speaking at a conference held by a new insurgent organisation called Looking for Growth, of which more in a moment. What was so transgressive, shocking even, about Clifford’s fourteen minutes of remarks is that they were optimistic and hopeful. This was a counter cultural address in which he told an enthusiastic, young audience that national decline and stagnation are not preordained. It doesn’t have to be like this and we can draw inspiration from our history of innovation to get us out of our low growth doom loop, he said. The speech is quite unlike anything you’ll hear in most of our media, which is (quite understandably) focused on how dysfunctional our politics has become and how deficient is our state capacity.

I’ll admit as a life-long journalist - now more like a recovering journalist - that of late even for a news addict like me the news, particularly on social media, has grown oppressive. I have started to try to limit consumption, sticking to a handful of respected outlets among them a few key Substacks, and I hear all the time others are doing this too. At dinner on Thursday night in Manchester, where I was delivering an after dinner speech to a business audience, several guests told me they avoid too much exposure to current affairs although they know that what is happening is important. No wonder when everything we hear seems to be doom. News now moves so fast, all of it covered by an increasingly bewildered media battling to keep up with technology and how it is changing our tastes and habits.

One even hears it said - as on the promotional film for that BBC Newscast podcast - that the news or politics have never been like this before, never so crazy is the implication, which is why we need to hear about it constantly. Which is obviously rubbish. Look at previous decades such as the 1920s, or the 1940s, or the 1970s. The Seventies were defined by tremendous turmoil from two oil shocks, a deep recession, rampant paranoia in politics, the Iranian Revolution and for British children sinister public information films warning of imminent immolation by electricity sub-station or overhead wires or early death in a quarry.

Still, perhaps because I had such a happy childhood I look back on the 1970s as a boundlessly optimistic era defined by the expansion of the British middle class, the food revolution and widening access to travel. All this good stuff happened even while the world and the economy seemed to be collapsing. A friend from the Fleet Street era still maintains that the 1970s were fantastic because he and his colleagues got such massive annual pay rises. When I point out that these pay rises were eroded by inflation, which was also massive, he waves his hand dismissively. His point is that our then politicians - and what a breed they were, the post-War generation, or most of them apart from the scoundrels - were battling epic historic forces and we all got on with it, life carried on, we came through it stronger and here we all are, still on the go.

We need a dose of that realistic optimism today. And when a friend sent me the video of Matt Clifford’s speech evangelising for growth it hit the spot in that regard.

You can watch it here.

Clifford has started firms and been a senior adviser to the government on AI. The Looking for Growth event was packed apparently. They want radical planning reform, technology unleashed, a tax system that works and pro-business supply side reform implemented to the max.

Cards on the table, I expect I won’t subscribe to every one of their policies or ideas. One attendee says it is too much of a Dominic Cummings fan club and having critiqued Dom as being brilliant but too often (what’s the word?) nuts that is always going to make me suspicious. But there is such an energy about what Looking for Growth are saying that they are worth listening to.

What’s interesting is that there is an observable wave of this, of younger people who like business and innovation deciding that actually they have had enough of decline and stagnation.

Read more

Subscriber announcement: When Reaction scaled back to just this newsletter hosting my writing, I said I would take a few months to figure it out. Was the pricing right for my newsletter which is usually about 2-3000 words long each time? Gratifyingly, most subscribers seem to think it is worth it. Thank you. A few have said no, with the rest of Reaction not there, they don’t want to stay. And for new potential subscribers, with many people feeling generally squeezed in this economy, it clearly makes sense to align the pricing with other writers I know who write at a similar length on different topics.

So, as of today, I’m reducing the price of the annual subscription from £80 per year to £60 and the monthly option from £8 to £7 per month. If you have taken out or renewed an annual subscription since the start of August 2025 we will - if you want - refund you the difference of £20. Just email fiona@reaction.life and the team will sort.

If you are a free subscriber and want to upgrade to paid to read this newsletter every week? Well, it is now even better value… what are you waiting for?

Anyway, thank you for reading. Substack right now seems to be full of pieces about the death of reading with the obvious implication that writing is becoming a waste of time, which it isn’t. The longterm link between reading and thinking is so obvious, and the effects of replacing it with a purely visual culture resting on endless video scrolling are so destructive, that as many of us as possible should carry on doing the opposite.

The old joke that economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions is a good joke because it is rooted in the truth that there is always someone, somewhere, predicting that the economy is about to collapse. An investor or analyst or commentator can usually be found at any given moment who will say that one aspect or all aspects of the economy - government debt, corporate debt, employment, the stock market - are in such a state that, just you wait, there is about to be an explosion.

Several times in the last decade I’ve had - and it turned out to be wrong - that financial crisis tremor feeling many of us learned to identify in the run up to the 2008 disaster. Just because there is a tremor it does not mean an earthquake comes next.

It was like that with tremors in the early 2000s when I remember standing smoking a cigarette alongside the late great Bill Jamieson in Edinburgh on the balcony at the then new Scotsman building (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore). It was the day of one of Gordon Brown’s budgets when the New Labour Chancellor was in his pomp and his enemies were being crushed. Bill was a fantastic City commentator, and we agreed Brown was making hubristic mistakes by increasing spending too much and boasting about how he had ended boom and bust, an impossibility.

The real economy was apparently doing well in the early 2000s, so in the good times government debt should be on track to go down quite a bit rather than rise. Yet according to Brown’s team that didn’t matter because it seemed as though the boom - particularly in finance - would go on for ever. Perhaps critics such as Bill and me were just stuck in our ways and wrong? Perhaps Brown and his friend Alan Greenspan, the governor of the US Fed, had rewritten the rules of economics so successfully we did not yet understand? Even the Dotcom bubble bursting a few years before had been managed successfully. I remember us laughing that budget day and saying we must be mistaken, and yet… Likewise, in subsequent years when the bank profits of Edinburgh’s banks got bigger and bigger by the billion, Bill used to say “wow… wow” and shake his head with a worried look on his face. Could the boom really last?

And then look what happened. Bill’s gut instincts had been right, just four or five years too early.

Several times in the last decade I’ve felt the financial crisis tremors and it came to nothing. A few years ago a friend in the City showed me his workings on the rise of private credit and excessive risks, and it looked worrying. On another occasion, a leading economist gave me lecture on the dead cert unsustainable nature of US government debt back when it was around $30 trillion. It is now at $38 trillion and I spent more than a week in the US this month, the restaurants were still full, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House was packed and sold out on a Saturday afternoon and places such as Texas are booming.

That one state, Texas, is the eight largest economy in the world with an estimated GDP of $2.7 trillion. It grew at 3.7% last year and the population has increased by more than 50% in the last quarter of a century to 31.9m today. Voracious Texas is booming and I doubt even a bursting of the financial markets bubble will change that longterm.

Sensing the impact of the Covid pandemic doesn’t count as a financial crisis tremor, as it was a sudden natural event, or perhaps unnatural event, and governments mobilised like it was a war. Though after dinner in late January 2020 one of my favourite City analysts did show me the app he used to track Chinese shipping. Look, he said, everything has stopped. And the same week an entrepreneur who shipped most of the stock for his business from China told me cheerfully at lunch that within two months the global economy would be in shutdown.

Read more

Ahead of my newsletter tomorrow morning, here is my very quick take on a political disaster in Wales. This post is free to read, and if you would like to upgrade so you can read the newsletter, you can do so here.

Subscribe now

What happened in the Welsh valleys last night was an earthquake, and it is worth acknowledging the scale of it before considering the full impact and likely aftershocks. Caerphilly has been Labour since forever, since the party became the dominant force on the left of British politics, and in the by-election for the Senedd (what used to be the Welsh assembly) Labour could not even muster 4,000 votes. The party was crushed by the left-wing Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru. The insurgent Reform came second and the Tories came nowhere.

In line with the justified complaint usually made by the veteran Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, who says that the failure of the media to provide, prominently, the basic numbers on elections symbolises its wider problems. He’s right. There is a blizzard of analysis and live blogs and everything else when the starting point should be the numbers. Give us the main numbers, mate, as Lynton says.

Here we go…

Plaid got 15,961 or 47.4% of the vote. A swing of 19%.

Reform secured 12,113, 36% of the vote. A swing of 34.2%.

Labour ended up with just 3,713 votes, 11% of the vote.

The others got almost nothing at all.

This weekend I’m in Scotland where Labour has similar problems and I’ve written my newsletter on financial crises warning signals, and something on the ridiculous mess the UK has got itself into on China policy. But Caerphilly is worth noting.

Yes, it’s a by-election and there have been many by-election shocks in British politics down the decades. It is possible that one or more of the old parties reassert themselves either before or after the next general election in 2028 or 2029.

On the latest edition of the Not Another One podcast I record with Steve Richards, Tim Montgomerie and Miranda Green, Steve says that the lesson from Caerphilly is that left-wing voters will vote tactically to block Reform. It’s a good point. Tactical voting to stop Farage is going to be a major feature.

But my main conclusion from the by-election is that voters having smashed the Tories now want to smash Labour. This is partly about protest. It is also about punishment for what most voters see as the abject failure of the two old parties on the economy, public services, migration and social cohesion.

This result leaves Labour trapped in an almost impossible position, pursued by Reform to its right and the rising Greens (extremely left-wing), Plaid (extremely left-wing) and the SNP (extremely incompetent and sanctimonious). Even Farage flirts with the left on economics and nationalisation.

Even if Keir Starmer decided that what the country needs is the immigration crisis dealt with robustly, cheaper electricity bills via a scaling back of net zero, pro-growth deregulation to encourage epic amounts of building, control and the reduction of welfare spending, and an entrepreneurial wave encouraged by tax simplification and even business tax reductions, even if he decided to give the correct answer a go, the guy is stuck with a party that wouldn’t let him. All the pressure will be for him to go left, to satisfy places such as Caerphilly where hacked off voters have concluded that the government isn’t spending enough (!) even when we have record borrowing.

This weekend it seems likely Labour will elect Lucy Powell as deputy leader. Powell was fired from the cabinet by Starmer, of course. Her elevation by the membership will only increase the pressure from that wing of the Labour party - the left-wing eco-fanatic Milibandite wing - for positions and policies that appeal to voters switching to the Greens and Plaid, and maybe even Corbyn’s breakaway fringe party. We must reunite the left, will be the cry from Powell, urged on by many of her colleagues, and some of them in the cabinet. Don’t chase Farage, go left! Which, obviously, increases the chances of the left of centre vote being divided between a Labour party facing existential collapse, the Greens, the Lib Dems and nationalists. A dream scenario for Reform and Farage in which they can win a general election with roughly 33% of the vote.

Meanwhile, our over-taxed and over-borrowed economy trundles along towards the edge of the cliff.

This is my newsletter. If you are a paying subscriber, thank you for your support. If you are a free subscriber you get a taste of the newsletter and if it appeals you might consider…

Read more

Welcome to my weekly newsletter, which went out to paying subscribers yesterday. This week, I’m making the lead item free to read as a sample, and beyond that the stuff on books, Menzies Campbell and the tyranny of WhatsApp is for paying subscribers. If you enjoy my newsletter and want to upgrade, well, that would be much appreciated.

A friend who works in tech in a senior capacity made an observation so striking, yet simple, the other day that it made me wonder why the rest of us have not grasped the economic and cultural import of such a basic concept.

The language of AI is going to be primarily English, he said, and trained on texts largely written in English. While other countries are developing multilingual LLMs (Large Language Models) and versions in French and Chinese, Artificial Intelligence “leans” English.

As the Apple Machine Learning Research project puts it:

“Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases.”

Just as English is the world’s most spoken language, with 1.5 billion souls speaking it as a first or second language, with Chinese in second place, English is the global business code. Even though China is developing its own LLMs and may yet win the race to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) - though let’s pray it does not - the common denominator language of international trade and exports will be English, not Mandarin.

That outsiders see this helps explain the slew of American big tech investments in the UK, particularly of late. During the recent State visit of President Trump assorted deals were announced.

The Americans are not doing this out of a spirit of sentimental Anglophilia or a love of Downton Abbey, though soft power helps. Britain has the people because it still has a disproportionate number of top rank universities, particularly compared to other large European countries, and we produce skilled technologists, software engineers and innovators who will help produce growth, if big government doesn’t get in the way.

Tech is a rare bright spot in Britain at the moment, where there is an all enveloping air of gloom around politics and business.

A Labour government that should have come in and realised with the economy starting to recover it needed to do nothing at all that might jeopardise growth instead pursued policies via the Treasury that have made the situation worse.

Inflation has decoupled from the European path in the last year after a UK public sector spending splurge and tax rises on business that are passed on to consumers. The state is spending too much and the parts of the economy that can grow us out of the mess are over taxed.

Meanwhile, an administration elected with a landslide majority appears to be coming apart at the seams little more than a year later. Andy Burnham - Andy Burnham! - is being touted as an alternative Prime Minister, which if it ever happens will be a development beyond surreal. Burnham has been a Blairite, a Brownite, a Corbynite, and now a who knows what. He is the media-obsessed mayor of Manchester, though the credit for that great city’s success and revival does not go to the mayor of the “combined local authorities.”

Nationally, the populist party Reform, led by Nigel Farage, is leading in the opinion polls and it looks as though the two old parties may be dying, the Tories because of their record on immigration and assorted shenanigans, and Labour perhaps because Tony Blair and the modernisation project delayed the long term decline of a party rooted in organised labour which no longer exists in the way it did in the 1960s.

The voters are furious and disillusioned with the lot of them, though not enough of us are in a mood to be told the truth or vote for anyone explaining that welfare bills, entitlements and spending must be cut.

Oh, and we are in a war era and not spending enough on defence to deal with the looming war of the future, of which we have been given a glimpse in recent weeks when Russia buzzes European airspace with drones and cyber warfare rages against businesses and national critical infrastructure.

And yet, we have serious advantages and strengths in depth.

This is not some vainglorious, flag waving attempt to claim that all we have to do is sit back because our future success is guaranteed thanks to innate British genius. It is simply the case that even if we are in a mess, and my goodness we are in a mess, we have a gift for reinvention and our language being the language of the next economic wave means we have extraordinary opportunities if we grab them and if - another big if - our political class stops producing policies which make recovery harder.

On holiday on Italy, I read Tom McTague’s terrific deep history of Brexit, a balanced account of the years from 1945 to 2016, during which Britain struggled to work out its relationship with the rest of Europe. Even accounting for confirmation bias, as a Brexiteer it confirmed my view that we were as a more individualist minded crowd, with a different legal tradition, ill-suited to the integrationist project and lying to ourselves from the start about what the EU project is really for.

In the age of AI, with the high regulation EU struggling to adapt to what is coming, being outside the EU regulatory orbit is a huge advantage. It would be quite mad, having left, to now volunteer to have Brussels set the rules for our industries of the future. Instead we should develop the technological relationship with the US and other like minded nations (some in the EU), while having as good a relationship with our neighbours as is feasible outside the bloc.

McTague’s captivating new book - Between the Waves - drew me back automatically in the final days of holiday towards my favourite fiction, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, for perhaps the tenth time. Sword of Honour is ostensibly a grimly amusing declinist book, in which all that Guy, the main character, values and loves is traduced. Incompetent Britain sinks into penury and pettifogging bureaucracy as the barbarous Soviet Union is mid-War put on a pedestal.

In the closing pages of Sword Honour and in the epilogue, there is hope, there is redemption and recovery. Life begins anew deep in the English countryside. England, Britain carries on and things turn out very conveniently for Guy.

Not okay computer

Existing AI is far from infallible. In Venice on the 7 September on the first leg of our

Italian holiday, as tourists we found the perfect spot to watch the Regatta, the annual festival of traditional racing and pageantry. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection - the museum in an uncompleted palazzo right on the Grand Canal - has a canal-facing terrace in front of the gallery space. Inside is the collection of 20th century art bought by Guggenheim in Europe just before and during the outbreak of the Second World War. Famously, her collection had been intended for a gallery space in Paris and had to be moved to the south of France to escape by a matter of days the impending arrival of the Nazis. Then it was evacuated to New York. After the War she brought the uncompleted palazzo and moved the art there. Also famously, Guggenheim had a hyperactive love life. There were more than 1,000 partners, she said.

On a more mundane level, her gallery today has the best museum cafe going.

Standing on the terrace after lunch, watching the boats warm up for that afternoon’s Regatta, we wondered when the races proper might begin. How long would we have to wait? Did we care that much about the racing or is one Venetian traditional boat much like another and had we got the general idea in the warm up and should go elsewhere for a Campari Spritz? We had got the general idea.

Even so on the way out I decided to check and asked Google what time the races would start that afternoon. The AI Overview on my smartphone told me: “There are no races at the Venice Regatta Storico today, 7 September, as the main event is held on the first Sunday of September, which this year already passed on 1 September.”

Er, no… the previous Sunday was the 31 August organisers and there it was the Regatta 2025 right in front of us clearly happening in real life. Google AI was wrong.

The computer was also wrong during our holiday when it came to securing tickets to see Radiohead on their short tour later this year. Having attained an access code, and then another access code, it kept blocking me, and thousands of others judging by the furious response later on social media, on the basis that we were “bots” when we were not. On finally making it through, ten times in a row I selected seats successfully and then at the moment of payment they were “no longer available.”

Radiohead’s best album is the landmark OK Computer from 1997, with its prescient, dystopian lyrics about what awaits us in the future in a consumerist, doped-up, digital world coming into being about… now.

Perhaps none of the “tour” or the doomed ticketing system is real, said a disappointed friend who also failed to secure tickets to see the greatest band of their generation. The tour and ticketing must be an art installation, which would be very Radiohead.

What’s up with WhatsApp

On Friday I made the mistake of calling an old friend who was overdue a rant having finally surrendered to the demands made by his family that he join WhatsApp, the extremely useful yet insidious messaging application that now dominates most of the time we humans spend awake. After a few days he reports that WhatsApp is driving him mad. Why - he asks - are people sending him all these messages? What is the point when the correspondents sending the messages are often telling him things he already knows or duplicating information and then replying to each other with funny little squiggles, love hearts, or mini-cartoon characters (emojis)?

What - he explodes - is going on with the ****ing world?

It is a very good question. What is going on with the world?

In anthropological terms, my friend being new to the WhatsApp communication revolution makes him resemble Rip Van Winkle, the American-Dutch gentleman who fell asleep for two decades and woke up having missed the original American revolution. Or he is a member of an ancient lost tribe, emerging from the forest blinking in wonder at the flashing lights and trinkets of the tech transformation.

Or more properly his bafflement and fury is a straightforward reminder that, before WhatsApp and other such messaging applications took over, the world in certain ways was a better, nicer place to live.

WhatsApp was only launched as recently as 2009. In October 2010 it had just 50 million users. When it was bought by Facebook in 2014 it had 500 million active users. Then, Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp and set about making it the dominant global messaging app. Today it has three billion users.

The upsides of being a user are obvious, not least ease of contact with family, children and friends to check on their wellbeing and make arrangements. And there is the chance to share jokes and observations.

The downside is that it (and other social media) has turned many of us into hopeless smartphone addicts, engaged in endless rolling conversations online.

The WhatsApp phenomenon only made sense to my friend when it was pointed out that he must have noticed the regular drum beat of stories in the newspapers about the rise in mental health conditions, reports of a “busyness” epidemic, dire productivity, much of the population no longer having sex, distracted youngsters finding it hard to form relationships that become households, and so on. And most of us in the country constantly on our smartphones, poking away at the pathetic little screens. Now he is on WhatsApp has he noticed a potential connection - I asked my friend - between these growing social problems and the ubiquity of smartphones, social media and WhatsApp itself?

Ah, he said.

Ming the merciful

The death at 84 of Menzies “Ming” Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Friday is the end of an era for a very particular kind of Scottish politics embedded in Britain. Fraser Nelson wrote a good tribute to the “vanishing gentleman politician” on his Substack in which he said: “He spoke carefully, dressed properly, lived dutifully and carried himself with an integrity that now seems from another age. It did not make him a great party leader, but it did make him a great public servant. In his gentleness, his ambition, his decency, he embodied the kind of politician we once took for granted - and sorely miss now.”

Campbell was at Glasgow University in the early 1960s alongside the late Labour leader John Smith, who died in 1994, and former Scottish First Minister Donald Dewar, who died in 2000, and Derry Irvine, the original mentor of Tony Blair and former Lord Chancellor.

When Scottish devolution in the 1990s was being implemented and in the years immediately afterwards I was pretty critical in print of Ming and that crowd who had told us with such confidence that a Scottish Parliament would be a great success and see off the Scottish Nationalists.

In a spirit of youthful exuberance, I was immoderate and spiteful in my criticism. Many years later, we talked about that time and he was gracious and humane. When the London Defence Conference launched he sought us out and wanted to attend, and wrote an encouraging note afterwards saying London and Europe needed a conference like this.

As Fraser Nelson said: he embodied the kind of politician we once took for granted - and sorely miss now.

What I’m reading

A lot, during our holiday in Italy. As well as all of Tom McTague’s deep Brexit history and Waugh’s Sword of Honour, I reread my friend Gerald Warner’s outstanding new novel A Fateful Promise.

The third volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin’s biography is coming soon and having spent some time with the great historian in the last week, I’ve gone back to the beginning by rereading volume one. A biography of Stalin is really a history of the world in that period, taking in revolution, technology, warfare, industry, diplomacy, ideas and mass murder, as the author says. Kotkin is a master stylist, blending biography and intellectual history. Indeed, near the beginning is the best and most succinct description in just a few pages of the intellectual development of that terrible system - socialism.

And if you like Prince - or if you are interested in the music of the 1980s - I highly recommend my friend Johnnie McKie’s ace new book - Prince: A Sign O’ the Times - about the making of his greatest album.

Have a good weekend.

Paul Lay is writing the newsletter until Iain Martin is back from holiday next week. Paul is senior editor at Engelsberg Ideas. He is a former editor of History Today, reviews for The Times, the Telegraph and Literary Review, and is the author of Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (Head of Zeus, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize.

‘There’s no magic money tree’, posted Martin Abrams, a Green Party councillor in Streatham, South London, in one of many supposedly wry criticisms of the state banquet held for President Trump at Windsor Castle on Wednesday. Yes, it was a lavish affair, the kind of thing the Brits do sublimely well, which clearly impressed and flattered the Donald into behaving himself, mostly.

Read more

Paul Lay is writing the newsletter this week and next until Iain Martin is back from holiday. Paul is senior editor at Engelsberg Ideas. He is a former editor of History Today, reviews for The Times, the Telegraph and Literary Review, and is the author of Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (Head of Zeus, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize.

Read more

Read more

For years, more than three decades even, I have been engaged in conversations in the pub or over dinner with my friend Gerald Warner about the relative merits of the novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, with a side order of the work of Simon Raven. Which is better - the Dance to the Music of Time series or Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy? Sword of Honour in my view.

Surely someone with as much insight as Gerald into those great works should by now have written his own series of novels evoking lost history?

Well, I bring good news. Gerald Warner has written that novel and the first in a six part series has just been published by Marble Hill Publishing.

You can buy A Fateful Promise direct from the publishers here.

(Post and packaging is free.)

It is a magnificent literary achievement.

A Fateful Promise is the first of six. Books two, three and four are complete and ready to publish. Book five is almost there, and then book six will complete the series.

Gerald will be known to many of you from his writing in outlets including Reaction. Even when I disagree with him on some aspect of politics he is a master prose stylist.

Unfortunately, Gerald had a fall in the week of publication and has been in hospital, which interrupted his promotional efforts. More happily, a subsequent hip operation was a success.

I’m sure it will speed Gerald’s recovery if you buy a copy of his book.

The book has had the most fantastic reception already.

Andrew Roberts described it as: “Elegiac, evocative and beautifully written… A remarkable debut of a series that will undoubtedly be a landmark literary achievement.”

Julian Fellowes called it "an enthralling picture of a lost tribe... who had to keep faith in themselves, because nobody else cared. I found this book both informative and moving."

Lady Antonia Fraser said: “I have just finished The Kinsella Chronicles Book One - can't wait to read Book Two!”

Alexander McCall Smith said: “In A Fateful Promise Gerald Warner gives us the first volume in what promises to be a wonderful saga. His account of life in an Irish castle intrigues and entertains.”