Not so fast

I've written before about the utter foolishness embedded in the whole concept of HS2: the conceit that the trains needed to be the fastest in the world. A decision made in May was taken to run the trains at lower speeds than their full capability - basically at conventional high speeds - to save time and also money on the ever escalating final cost, which the Independent has pointed out is now expected to be more than the cost of NASA's Artemis moon mission.

How did we get here?

The question of whether to run at lower speeds stemmed from a safety certification issue. Because the trains were due to run so fast they couldn't be tested on the current infrastructure so would have to have been sent abroad, or wait for the new line to be totally ready before the final certification process could be started. Without such certification the trains can't carry passengers. Cutting speed so the trains can be tested on current infrastructure brings forward the much delayed commissioning date (or rather stops it going back even further) and saves cost.

But why was HS2 designed for such high speeds?

David Cameron's government allowed themselves to be beguiled by the rail industry advisers who said that we would regret it if we chose to stick with the then current technology (indeed, quite old technology) of HS1, whose trains run at 300kph. The top speed on the rest of the UK rail network is 200kph. 

If you start out on a long infrastructure project with current technology then you risk being out of date by the time it is commissioned. So the vanity project's trains were specified to run at 360 kilometres per hour (224 mph in old money). This  would make them among the fastest in the world. There are trains now running in China and Indonesia at 350kph. So the advisors were right in a way - things have moved on.

 An HS2 train, from HS2 website

But what benefit would there be in such high speeds when we live in a relatively small country? And how much extra would it cost?

From HS2's very first gleam in the eye stage, I questioned whether there was any real benefit in ultra high speed. This didn't make me appear as much of an oddball in the rail industry as questioning the rationale for fast breeder reactors as I had when I was in the nuclear industry (see The Germans have a word for it, 27 March 2026). A lot of my much more knowledgable colleagues were saying the same. 

The business case for HS2 was substantially made by some simple (one might say simplistic) sums based on time saving. Having made, successfully but with some embarrassment because I thought it was tosh, a case to the company's board to upgrade our IT systems based on a notional saving of a few minutes per day multiplied by our number of staff, I felt this type of argument was a load of bull. However, I was certain that particular investment would pay off - and it did. We just needed a case the board could approve. In the case of HS2 I suspect the designers also knew that applying a financial benefit to a few minutes saved multiplied by the numbers of passengers was dodgy to say the least. Speaking purely personally I would have been inclined to take the benefit of a few minutes saved on my journeys to London for meetings either by having a few more minutes in bed or fitting in a nicer cup of coffee on arrival rather than on the train. 

The point that makes me weep is that the ultra high speed argument was so unnecessary. By the noughties there were more rail passengers journeys in the UK than ever. The previous high, in 1947 had been followed by a long decline until, co-incidentally or not, the graph started an inexorable recovery around the time of rail privatisation in 1996. It was clear that the network was coming under strain on grounds of capacity. A new direct north-south line would bring that extra capacity and it would also bring faster journeys by having fewer stations to stop at. With conventional high speed, the same as HS1, there would still be shorter intercity journeys. The marginal benefit from uber high speed was always minuscule.

Indeed, with a huge degree of brass neck, HS2 say on their website that the speed reduction from 360kph to 320kph will only mean a 3 minute longer journey to Birmingham from Old Oak Common in London. (I note they don't say Euston so I presume the decision on whether to take the line all the way into Euston, as planned but at significant cost has not been made yet. I guess that could always been done later).

As for cost an old colleague and friend of mine who worked in railway technology man and boy once explained to me in the very simple words a man who really knows his subject uses. You see Phil, he said, high speed hammers the hell out of track. This is because they have to use higher grade steels and check, inspect and maintain it a lot more. When I spoke to him recently he summed it up even more concisely: "cost = speed squared".

HS2 don't make any promises on their website how much time and cost will be "saved" by reducing the speed, only that it increases "the likelihood of opening as early as possible and at the lowest reasonable cost". But other sources refer to curbing "gold plating" from "over-engineered specifications and an excessive focus on achieving the absolute highest possible speeds" which reviews had identified as faults in the project's management. I'd say faults in the projects inception, approval and direction actually rather than the poor buggers who were tasked with delivering it.

There were plenty of people in the business who knew what would happen when HS2 set out on it's vanity project and my buddy was one of them. Unfortunately the dreamers were in charge and the politicians were seduced and didn't ask the right questions.

I still wouldn't like to put a probability on me being around to ride on HS2!

Not so fast! HS2 to save billions by slowing trains Sunday Times 22 March 2026

The HS2 website, https://www.hs2.org.uk/construction/trains-and-depots/ noted the decision to reduce spped had been made by May 2026

The Independent, 19 May 2026. HS2 cuts train speeds as project to cost more than NASA's Artemis moon mission, https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/hs2-slower-speeds-costs-heidi-alexander-b2979336.html

The numbers sing to me, he said

 "The numbers sing to me, Phil" said my boss of the time. 

We were in a pizza joint in an everyday suburb of Warrington, the only place our diaries allowed us to meet so he could look at the budget I was about to submit to our corporate centre for my business unit. (Not sure I can even remember now which unit that would have been, my job changed every couple of years at that time). I passed over a single sheet of A4 populated with a table of numbers with the only words being the column and row headings for sales income, numbers of people, direct costs, overhead costs and contribution, the measure of gross proft we used before corporate overheads. There would hve been no footnotes or graphs as it would have been in a proforma required by our corporate finance team so I started to give him the one minute overview. He held his hand up to stop me, made his pronouncement and glanced over the page for about a minute taking in the patterns of the current year forecast, budget year proposal and two further years of probably rose-tinted projections for the business plan. The latter might not have been entirely for the birds but would certainly have contained some flights of fancy. 

"Right" he said and asked a couple of fairly straight forward questions which I answered. Then our pizzas arrived, he nodded, said "ok" and put the page away in his briefcase. An item which alone marked us out as unusual that evening in a Stockton Heath pizzeria. We shot the breeze while we ate and then went on our separate ways.

When I got home Mrs H, already a bit peeved at me having to go out on a rare midweek evening when I hadn't been due to be travelling, asked how the meeting went. "Oh he only looked at it for a minute and said ok". I'm not sure I should have said that....  "What was the point of that?" "I guess he wanted to look me in the eyes, love".

So it isn't ever just about the numbers, though on occasions they do leap out from the page or, indeed, sing. Here are some singing numbers, though some of them shout rather than sing...

Subsidising rail fares is currently costing the taxpayer £8,000 a minute, which is £4.2bn annually. 

None of that cost goes towards enhancing the railways, HS2, maintaining or upgrading tracks, tunnels or stations, which is all extra. It's just the difference between what's taken through the fare box and the cost of running the services. And yet, we have some of the highest rail fares in Europe. Also the subsidy is currently on an upward trend despite passenger numbers going up. 

Rail fares have needed subsidy most of the time in the last three decades and I remember it was as high as £5bn 20 years ago when I first went into the rail sector. But in the three years up to 2018 net passenger operator support, which is what the subsidy is called, was negative: in that period £2.2bn went back to the exchequer, offsetting rail capital investment. Reasons (or excuses)? We have an old infrastructure, which had inadequate investment for decades when the railway was entirely in public ownership, which is what it's returning to. The power of the trade unions? That's always been a factor and, as usual Labour has bought off the train drivers, though pay has always been high in the rail sector, job for job compared with other transport sectors. And railways are just expensive, all nations subsidise them.

But here's another set of numbers to compare and contrast. Only 9% of journeys are by rail, 89% are by road. 11% commute to work by rail, about the same proportion as walking. 67% drive to work. The total taxpayer spend on our roads is only £14bn annually. The equivalent figure for rail is £11.8bn when grants to Notwork Rail are added to the fare subsidy. (I suspect the latter figure must exclude HS2 construction).

Oliver Gill asked if it was right that we send so much subsidising the railways. He noted that the less well off tend to use public transport and that some level of subsidy is essential to avoid pricing people off the railways (followed by demands for line closures, I imagine). Railways are a public "good". But just how much should be allocated? He concluded that a sensible debate was needed, starting with not renewing Labour's "cost of living" rail fare freeze in March 2027. Don't hold your breath.

AI investment funded by debt is worryingly huge with, it seems to me, some guarantee that useful and marketable functionality is coming from it but no guarantee that all the hype will be deliverable. Morgan Stanley estimate that global AI-related debt issuance this year totals about $450 bn (£340 bn), already more than double the total for all of 2025. They also estimate global debt-financed capital expenditure will total over $4 trillion between 2026 and 2030. That's a rather colossal write off if it proves never to deliver the expected returns. The UK exposure isn't tiny either: AI has accounted for nearly half (47%) of corporate bond issuance this year. 

David Smith correctly concludes that the financial risk is much greater than than the bust associated with the the dotcom bubble in 2000 which hit markets significantly, wiping off $5 trillion in market value and causing a multi-year economic downturn. An AI crash would wipe off more than the investments made as values of companies like Nvidia (which makes the best chips and is offering AI start ups buy now, pay later deals), Microsoft, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) are pumped up by them all predicting future growth in profits from the success of AI.

In the case of the 2008 financial crisis Smith points out that in 2007 there was a crazy amount of leverage on financial derivatives but it remained below the surface, hidden in instruments such as collateralised debt obligations, which most senior and central bankers had no idea about. But the AI danger is in plain sight. 

Hmm. To put the numbers in some context the US economy is worth over $32 trillion annually and it represents 26% of the global economy. But share portfolios (and my pension) could take a very large multi-year hit if there's a "correction" as the shares listed above figure prominently in so many of the most popular investment funds. There are also companies in Asia and banks exposed if AI doesn't deliver the financial returns that have been built in to valuations.

I've also been wondering how we can supply all the proposed new AI data centres with electricity and water. Affinity Water supplies water to around 4 million homes in the home counties and northwest London. There are 88 new data centres planned for its area of which 40 have planning permission (maybe more now). Two are so large that, together, they will require the same amount of water as 49,000 houses. 

Most of our data centres serving AI applications are operating in inference mode, which is what is happening when you run a Google query and it offers its AI mode response. The other key mode, learning, where the machine is fed massive datasets in order to recognise patterns, requires much more computational power so will have much higher demand for electricity and cooling water. Some people suggest that AI doesn't use the amount of power and water that's been reported which may be because they're unaware of the two functions. Unless we have data centres running in learning mode we aren't really a player in AI, we're just a "taker" as it were. 

The much lauded tech deals Starmer signed with Trump in September 2025 were already being put on ice by December. It was reported that the £31bn had been put on ice due to our digital services tax and food safety rules. Eh - not to do with tech the second of those but that's a Trump negotiation for you. Indeed the Brits said the Yanks were just playing hardball. But it wouldn't surprise me if the costs of operating in the UK had also made the likes of Google and Microsoft get cold feet. Which reflects a classic structural issue in the UK energy market. After all, we have lots of windmills which, much of the time, sit idle or idling. Site the data centres in the right place to reduce transmisson costs (or avoid the need to install so much equipment), equip them with some huge batteries and (theoretically) bingo - couldn't you escape from charging them a rate based on the price of gas? I suspect this isn't just because Ed Miliband, our SoS for Energy Security and Net Zero until recently, wasn't up to the job. We could site the learning data centres anywhere where they can get the limited number of people they need, but the inference data centres need to be near to centres of population. At least if you want the AI to give you the answer to your query instantly, which we seem to.

Maybe we should ask AI how to run our railways efficiently and whether the colossal debts being run up producing it will ever be repaid. But it would probably "hallucinate" (i.e. make up) the answers. Still we could ask it to make up a catchy tune and sing them to us!

Sorry but rail fares must rise to avoid taxpayers spending billions more. Oliver Gill, Sunday Times, 11 October 2026

Unlike the last crisis, the danger is hiding in plain sight. David Smith, Sunday Times, 11 October 2026

The water demand for the largest data centres came from a similar source a while ago, but I don't have it to hand.

The end of an era - or an epoch? Guardiola, Manchester City and the irrefutable body of evidence

2026 is certainly the end of something in English football. But are we seeing the end of an era or an epoch?

Which is longer, I wondered? In geology and science it's clear: an era spans hundreds of millions of years and is divided into smaller chunks called periods which are subdivided into epochs. But in everyday history it's the other way round: an epoch is used to describe a massive span of history defined by a foundational turning point or a sweeping cultural or technological movement. In contrast, an era refers to a shorter, more specific stretch of time and maybe localised history, such as the Victorian era.

So I would say that Pep Guardiola's departure from Manchester City was definitely the end of an era. An epoch? Time will tell but probably not. His arrival in Manchester seemed to mark the start of a footballing epoch, as it was certainly material to a sweeping cultural change in British football which affected how teams play up and down the entire English football pyramid, not just the Premier League.

His achievements were remarkable even if the asterisk many of us were mentally putting against them has now seemingly proved to be correct, if subject to appeal, with the Premier League panel's verdict on the 115 charges. Or is it 114, or 130? Whatever it's a lot compared with Everton's one, as is the amount of of the financial breach, some £900M or so compared with Everton's £25M ish*

That verdict probably also marks the end of an era, or epoch, or both. That certainly looks likely as I expect the findings of the independent commission appointed by the Premier League are highly likely to be confirmed after appeal and I can't see legal action overturning it however much Manchester City's owners are prepared to pay their lawyers to attempt to do so. The processes may well take a long time but hopefully not an epoch as a kind of ice age feel has set over the Premier League in the meantime.

This is quite a turn round in my opinion as I had long felt that City were guilty of financial chicanery but that it would be impossible to prove. The suspicions many fans felt were, for me, demonstrated to be well founded by Miguel Delaney's award winning 2024 book States Of Play (How sportswashing took over football)** which included excerpts from the hacked emails, including the revealing reply by a City director "we can do what we want" when asked by an employee whether he could actually do as instructed and backdate sponsorship invoices to ensure compliance with the league's financial regulations. But is that proof?

However, it turns out that the independent commission was thoroughly convinced and it also looks to be as if Manchester City's "irrefutable body of evidence" is a dead on arrival corpse, a dead parrot if you like. I say that because their case is crumbling in front of our eyes and their protestations have, for me become evidence of guilt. 

Having long said that all of the Etihad sponsorship money came from the company and was not substantially funded by their owners, they now say that most of it came from the Abu Dhabi government. That is something they (and we) thought wasn't allowed at the time but, having won some elements of their claim about associated party transactions last year, they've changed their case. However, their defence might prove problematic for their sponsors as Etihad made a sworn statement to the US Congress in 2015 saying that they had paid all of the City sponsorship monies and none of it had come from the Abu Dhabi government. They couldn't say otherwise really as that would have got them into difficulty with the US over state subsidy of their airline, a no-no for the USA. It would be rather delicious if Etihad is now hauled back to be quizzed by the US authorities.

Then there is the oddity of the smaller sponsorship from Etisalat, a UAE telecomms company. This money was paid via a broker with a somewhat dodgy reputation. Why was that necessary unless it was to disguise where the money actually came from? 

Also there is the disguised pay to Roberto Mancini, City manager from 2009 to 2013. I had long thought that, if City's owners were keeping extra money for Mancini off City's books by paying it directly from an account in the gulf to his Swiss bank account that would be untraceable. But they didn't do it that way, for some bizarre reason they tried to do it via a proper contract. But in a transparently sham arrangement they paid Mancini £1.75 million a year to do 4 days coaching in Abu Dhabi when his published City pay, for let's say around 200 - 240 days work a year, was only around £1.5 million.

So it seems they weren't just crooked they were inept. This leaves the Premier League with some huge issues, in particular how to levy an appropriate punishment which is in some way proportionate to the scale of the offence and other punishments previously made (Everton, Leicester City, Nottingham Forest) without prejudicing the standing of the League and its revenues or condemning the club to extinction.

It also raises potentially political issues. That's tough for the politicians but nothing to do with football. In my notes on Delaney's book, which I read over 18 months ago, I jotted "do the PL have the balls?" (UEFA didn't really see it through in their earlier case according to Delaney) and "PLEASE nail the bastards, use minimal legal resources (if the case is indeed that black and white") and tell the politicians the regulator they've just appointed is independent and they can't intervene".

Hopefully it's all coming to pass, albeit slowly and probably messily.

Turning back to the football, where does all that leave the Manchester City and Guardiola legacies? 

I do have a lot of time for Pep Guardiola, while not always having enjoyed City's football. There is no doubt that he respects the English game enormously, up & down the pyramid. He relished City's battles with teams like Tony Pulis's Stoke City and admired what managers like that could achieve with limited resources. I read that, not long before he retired from City, he was surprised to realise a game he'd just caught part of on the TV was from the National League. "What with all those people there? Crazy" he said. 

His achievements were phenomenal but not unprecedented. The records of Guardiola and Bob Paisley as managers of English clubs are hard to separate, both with 6 top division titles, Paisley's over 9 years, Guardiola's over 10. Paisley won 3 European Cups and a UEFA Cup to Guardiola's one Champions League. Paisley didn't win the FA Cup - Guardiola had 3, plus 5 EFL Cups to Paisley's 4 wins. One can debate how hard it is to win the Champions League against the European Cup but Paisley led the first true hegemony in English football, at least since the 1930s and he broke new ground for a British team in winning in Europe multiple times. They both took over teams that had won a couple of trophies in recent times but weren't dominant. There was no culture of, or precedent for, winning so much over a protracted period of time previously. Just look at the number of winners of the English top flight in the 60s and 70s before Paisley. In a 16 years period 10 different teams (Burnley, Spurs, Ipswich, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Leeds, Arsenal and Derby County) won the league. Then Paisley's Liverpool won it 6 times in 8. We saw nothing like it before or since, at least until Alex Ferguson's Manchester United won it 3 times in a row twice, the second time going on to win it 5 times in 7. But Guardiola did have that precedent and also unprecedented resources, limited only by how close City decided they had to stay to the rules (or otherwise). Paisley did not have anything like that. Paisley took over from a charismatic and highly popular manager (not easy) but then, from that platform, outperformed him and everybody else in the history of the English game to that point.

Impossible to separate but, if I had to give it to either of them for me, even as an Evertonian, I'd give the nod to Paisley.

Oh, but there's the style thing. A whole new way of playing football. Well yes, a significant shift. But please don't try to tell me that he invented the false 9. Don Revie played that role - at Manchester City - in the 1950s and it probably wasn't new then. Yes he was very innovative, but also prepared to change and adapt. That included going back to a more conventional centre forward (Haaland), a back 4 populated with centre backs rather than having overlapping fullbacks (like Ake and Gvardiol) and a goalkeeper who was primarily a goalie rather than an anciliary outfield player, while some other managers tried to "out-Pep Pep" and play too much football near to their own goal with players who aren't good enough to manage that degree of risk.

I have a lot of respect for his tactical nous, not so much for his overthinking things in team selection for some big matches, choosing to go into the Champions League final against Chelsea leaving out both his holding midfield players Fernandinho and Rodri in favour of a midfield with de Bruyne, Silva and Gundogan. City lost 1-0 and some say that game made Pep decide he needed a conventional striker. 

They were also not always the joy to watch that some make out. Oh, it's how I loved to play the game as a teenage winger converted to midfielder then fullback and then, for the bulk of my time in men's football a centre back who modelled himself on Alan Hansen (yes, really). But players of limited ability only ever get fleeting experiences of playing in a team that knocks the ball round for 30 consecutive passes unless they're playing the stereotypical "blind school" (i doubt you're meant to say that these days but it's a figure of speech). 

But to watch? Pass sideways, pass backwards, pass, pass and pass again while just once in a long while some nice little passes into the box and a side foot finish. The sort of goal that makes you nod in  approval, maybe clap and say "oh, what a good goal". But without an exclamation mark. Not the kind of football that makes you jump out of your seat and roar with excitement, even if you don't have a dog in that particular fight (i.e. are neutral). So many teams have bought into the Guardiola approach, even Everton under Roberto Martinez in 2013.  Initially it looked good and got us back up to 5th in the League, nearly equalling David Moyes's best finish in his first spell at Everton. But in the long run it proved boring and easy to thwart, which is what happens if you don't have the very best players. City were able to obtain the best of players.

I'll end with thoughts prompted by David Walsh and Martin Samuel of the Times. Walsh wrote

"After the game against Everton [this was the 3-3 draw that turned the tide towards Arsenal in the 2026 title race] he spoke and laughed with Jack Grealish and seemed like a man without a care. In his press conference he spoke graciously about how well Everton had defended, how aggressive their pressing was, and how he thought his team had played well in the first half.  I watched that game and in the first half I felt City's tempo and sideways passing was so pedestrian, it was like they were trying to simulate over-sixties walking football."

Samuel wrote that, despite the monumental scale of City's cheating, they only won the league in a canter once (by 19 points from Man United in 2018) and also very clearly (by 12 points from United in 2021), but by only 5 points from a shrinking Arsenal in 2023, by only a point from Liverpool (2019 and 2022) and on goal difference from United (2012, the Aguero moment that started it all). All that money and success achieved so narrowly! When the margins are that tight it's very easy to believe that the odd extra top quality player, or being able to retain one such as Kompany or Yaya Toure by bunging them a bit extra in their back pocket (possibly, it seems) made the difference as City became the powerhouse that Guardiola inherited then developed further.

Maybe Pep wasn't that good after all...

Of course, Guardiola was outstanding and we may not see anything quite his like in management in England again. Unless of course he refreshes his batteries and takes on the England manager's job after  the moronic Teutonic, aka ThomasTuchel proves to not really be an upgrade on Gareth Southgate, the jury being well and truly out after England caved in to Argentina at the world cup, going into their shell just as they have when leading against that type of team so many times before.

Even if Everton didn't beat City on that occasion in May I'll accept thanks from neutrals and Arsenal fans for changing the momentum so 5 titles in a row wasn't there for the taking. 

Nevertheless I do think he was good for the English game, even if the jury is (literally) still out on Manchester City's impact on the game.

And simulating over-sixties walking football? Wish I'd though of that.

* Everton's breaches were decided, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on arcane accountancy principles, including the treatment of interest on loans (allowed for building the new stadium to some extent), to be £19.5M over the 4 year period ending 2021-2 (4 because of covid) and a further £16.6M in the 3 year period ending 2022-23. They were deducted 6 points for the first breach and 2 points for the second. The apparently lighter sentence for the second breach is because two of those three years had already been sanctioned under the first breach. So if I take a third of £16.6 M and add it to £19.5M I get an effective total breach of £25M. If City's breach is £900M that is 36 times as much. 36 times 8 is 288 points. So anything less than 250, maybe levied in stages over several seasons, would appear to be a light penalty.

** Delaney is a journalist with the Independent newspaper who has reported extensively on the City case over a number of years. His recent columns on the crisis engulfing the club and the Premier League are well worth reading. But his thoughtful and well researched book covers sportswashing through state ownership of major clubs much more broadly than City, including Newcastle and, of course, PSG. It seems clear that UEFA (under Infantino) bottled taking on PSG and City, pandering to PSG's excesses which were then taken to extremes, spending record sums signing Neymar and Messi to go with Mbappe. It's ironic that PSG only became really successful when it started trying to be a football rather than a vanity project. Noting the way PSG's Qatari owners sought to inflate the effective size and importance of what had never been France's biggest club, Delaney noted that anyone srutinising the club could only conclude that it was actually about the same financial size as  a mid-ranking Premier League club rather than an elite European operation. The club he chose to illustrate that? He said PSG was very similar in size to Everton

P.S. when the Premier League verdict on City was announced I tried several times over a number of days to access the commission's report but couldn't get on the website. Hackers I wondered? Probably just the pressure on the website from all of City's huge legal team doing the same (only joking, the world's media I expect). But great joy, I've now downloaded the 40 page redacted report which refers to at least 37 as yet unpublished apprendices. I'll get round to reading it later, didn't want to spoil my preconceived prejudices above.... 

The gaslighting is starting

Net migration fell to 177,000 in 2025, a long way down from the peak of over 900,000 in 2023. And already the whispering has started. The problem's solved, gone away, no need to worry. Supporters of Andy Burnham, for one, are known to back a less strict approach than Shabana Mahmood's.

They're gaslighting us. They don't want us to inquire into just how and why it was decided to allow somewhere between 3.2 million and 3.8 million people to arrive in the UK between January 2021 and June 2024.  This is about half the number of arrivals over the previous 20 years and 4 times the average rate of arrivals over that time (nearly 7 million say they arrived between 2001 and 2021). It's around the population of the 6 largest English cities after London: Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester and Bristol.  And it's more than the entire population of Greater Manchester including the boroughs of Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan and the city of Manchester.

This was the so-called "Boriswave" that we didn't really know about at the time. There was a net migration figure in just two and a half years of 2.6 million to 2.9 million. It wasn't so much a wave as a tsunami:

The Boriswave has been described as the single most important demographic event in modern British history. It was equivalent to a population growth of nearly 4%. To put it another way, at least 1 in every 25 people walking the streets of Britain today arrived in the last 5 years. 

Indeed, reputable sources think we don't really have a clear picture and say that, despite efforts by the ONS to improve migration data, we still only have a relatively hazy picture of this extraordinary demographic phenomenon. The degree of cultural change is larger than implied in the net migration figure as there was a surge in emigration of British nationals. Some experts in the field believe that we'll only get a clearer picture with another census. Indeed academics floated the idea of an emergency 2026 census at the time of the 2021 census which had to adopt different methodology because of covid.

I know some people don't think that the extraordinary scale of this huge social experiment is of any significance whatsoever. They see immigration as an untrammelled good thing.

The Tories don't want you to enquire too much because they can't explain why they lost so much control of everything, including their senses. Labour don't want you to enquire too much because they don't want to have their hands tied and were complicit in previous surges in immigration. And many of its MPs and supporters don't see the problem anyway which is why they say the Home Secretary's plans to limit migration are "un-British". Wes Streeting, who might or might not be a candidate for the Labour leadership when he decides if he's got any balls, has branded people who question immigration to this country as "reactionaries". Better than the more normal term of "racist" I suppose. Most of us don't question immigration, Wes, we question who, how many, over what time, for what purpose and what pressures will it put on housing and services. Branding that reactionary is actually pathetically trying to avoid the debate. And I thought there might be more to him.

Reform bang on about the subject but other than sound bites about limiting numbers they don't engage in any actual debate about what the country needs and how to plan for it. Like all of their pronouncements they have the feel of a random array of sticking plasters with no coherent overarching analysis or strategy.

I listened to Chris Warburton interviewing a Home Office spokesman on Radio 5 Live recently. Warburton repeatedly pressed for what numerical targets the Home Office had for migration getting the slightly odd answer that they don't have any. "What, not even any informal, internal targets?" "No". I was hoping Warburton would ask a follow up question about the well known Treasury model's assumptions for migration, which tend to show more people = more growth. If the Treasury has a target, or at least a number in mind, won't the Home Office come under pressure to make sure economic growth isn't constrained by having too few people? If not, shouldn't they?

Of course the original spike in migration came under Blair, when the long term net migration total of 68,000 over the previous 25 years became 5.9 million in the following 25 years. But at least Blair and Brown were pretty open about what they were up to when they opened up for EU free movement in one go without any phasing which they could have done. They smirked that the arrival of useful people like Polish plumbers would be predominantly Labour voters. Cameron told us he'd get it back to a net annual figure of tens of thousands without justifying whether that sort of number would be optimal or apparently doing anything to deliver it.

The Boriswave was disporotionately made up of people arriving on health and care visas but, possibly in order to attract enough of them, they were allowed to bring in an extraordinary number of dependents. No-one has ever sought, to my knowledge, to show that those visas were actually necessary to maintain essential services or that the number of dependents arriving made any long term economic sense. It might do if they were mainly children, but not if they were of advanced years. The data would probably be very difficult to get. The lack of curiosity of civil servants and ministers of the time on these issues is perplexing. Or is it?

This area is crying out for dispassionate analysis and debate. Instead we just get move along now, nothing to see here. If anything happened it's stopped now. Sleep easy, leave it with us. Yes, sure.

While the net migration figure has fallen, Camilla Long noted that it wasn't even that good. Arrivals last year were still 813,00: almost the population of Greater Leeds. Down from 2023, sure, when it was as a bit bigger than Birmingham.

The politicians who are against immigration won't hear of the benefits. Those in favour seem unwilling to discuss the quantitative implications. Or bewilderingly think if you don't have open borders you're not being "kind" or "British". No other country I know of has politicians that talk that way.

Wouldn't it feel better to be treated like grown ups than condescended to by a bunch of cowards?

Or as Camilla Long said isn't the most patriotic thing you could do now - what is true love of one's country - is to reject people who trash it and pretend it's you who's the problem.

I assure you, you're not. They are.

P.S.

Concern about large numbers of incomers is of course far from new. Our innate concern about the unfamiliar, in particular people, isn't as I understand it, built into our DNA. Rather it's linked to one of the oldest parts of the hunan brain, the amydala and our fight or flight reflex. Though clearly it then becomes more than that longer term: we come to terms with it, sometimes finding logical reasons to reject it or perhaps finding information, arguments or excuses to support it.

I read a review of a book on the history of early modern period Britain recently and hostility to immigrants featured significantly. On May Day 1517 London apprentices rioted against "strangers and aliens", looting their homes and shops and breaking into Newgate prison to free a group of youths who had been arrested for assaulting foreigners.

In those times many believed that "aliens and strangers eate the bread from the poore fatherless children". Others feared that foreigners brought their pregnant wives over so that their offspring would "win...the liberty that other Englishmen do enjoy" while arguing that such children "retain an inclination and kind affection to the countries of their parents". 

Although many felt solidarity with the numerous protestant refugees who arrived in the decades after the Reformation, they came in such vast numbers that, by the 1570s, nearly 40% of Norwich's population was foreign-born. When the Flemish hatmaker Clais van Weveken arrived there in the mid 1560s he reassured his wife that "the English [are] quite loving to our nation". But attitudes hardened in difficult times and by 1593 worshippers at London's Dutch Church were receiving death threats.

Religious prejudice was a growing problem for English Catholics, so this may not all have been about where people came from.

Nevertheless, I'd say it all goes to show that if you preside over a sudden and major demographic shift you can't just assume that people will accept it. Especially if you try to tell them that they are imagining the problem, it isn't there or has gone away.

The above is extracted from Katherine Harvey's review of the book This Little World - a new history of Tudor and Stuart England by Nadini Das, published by Bloomsbury which appeared in the Sunday Times Culture section on 24 May 2026.

_________________________________________________________

Sources for main post: 

Camilla Long. Politicians insist we share their values even if they're the only ones that still believe in them. Sunday Times 24 May 2026

The Guardian. What do the immigration figures for the UK really show? 15 Sept 2025

A migration revolution. Migration  Observatory briefing document covering the scale of immigration and net migration in the UK since the early 2000s and under the post-Brexit immigration system. December 2025

Centre for Policy Studies. A Migration Revolution. Nov 2025

Population of English cities and Greater Manchester from Wikipedia. 

Some sources quote higher numbers than I've used here: rather than 3.8 million total arrivals in 2021 to mid 2024 I've seen 4.8 million reported for the total inflow in the full 3 years of 2021-24. The lack of good and timely data doesn't help.

A pedant decides whether he should cavil or nitpick

I am a self confessed, indeed proud, pedant (did I hear "you don't say?")

I was reminded of this tendency reading the whimsical Back Pages section of New Scientist a while back. In an earlier edition of the mag there had been an aside noting that "botany is a rose garden filled with thorns", a combination of words that would apparently mean something to Taylor Swift fans*. In an admirable bit of pedantry a reader had written in to point out:

"Sorry, but botany is not a rose garden filled with thorns, unless you've got shrubs like blackthorn. Roses do not have thorns but prickles which are superficial epidermal outgrowth whereas thorns are modified stems."

The sharp bits on roses aren't attached very firmly to the stems - you can easily snap them off from the stem sideways. So, while one might give you a nasty scratch the sharp bits on blackthorn or pyracantha are a very different matter, being firmly part of the stem of the plant. They don't snap off and so are capable of sticking much further into your soft tissue if you take liberties.

So roses have prickles, not thorns. Who knew? And who's going to tell Will Shakespeare, who says in sonnet 35:

No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.

I have a strong suspicion that the prickle/thorn botanic terminology post dates the Bard, however. And translation would also come into play when Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus is quoted as saying "a rose among thorns" in the 4th century BC, although his rose plant could have been between thorny plants, rather than the rose flower being between spiky parts of the same plant. This saying is reputedly the origin of the phrase "a rose between two thorns", typically used by a third party when a lady is sitting with two men as a flattering compliment to her beauty. I have repurposed that phrase many times when I've been with two ladies, outrageously hinting that I'm the prettiest. But in the future should I say "a rose between two prickles"?

If I do I'll have to be very careful as it could easily come out all wrong...

Mrs H is not always - indeed it would be fair to say is rarely - fond of my instinct to cavil and nitpick at almost anything. One of my very favourite nitpicks dates back the best part of 35 years. We were watching Die Hard 2, the action thriller set at a snowbound airport which is the site of a dastardly plot by a bunch of baddies. Bruce Willis, playing off duty policeman John McClane, has - as in the first Die Hard film set in a skyscraper - again spent most of the film rolling around in his increasingly grubby vest fighting people after his concerns are ignored by the local on duty cops. In the denouement the baddies are escaping in a jumbo jet accelerating down the runway on take off. McClane, having been involved in a fight on the wing trying to prevent the plane taking off, has managed to open a fuel valve. Lying in the snow on the runway he uses his cigarette lighter to ignite the fuel trail. The flame catches the plane up and it explodes in a huge fireball.

As the titles rolled the conversation went something like:

Mrs H "well that was exciting - what did you think?" 

Me: "Give me a minute, I'm doing some mental arithmetic". 

Mrs H "eh?"

After which I pointed out that it wouldn't be possible to light kerosene with a lighter, it's just not volatile enough. If McClane had used a wick, just maybe, though probably not in the snow. When I'd done my maths I also pointed out that the flame speed of a hydrocarbon in air is at least an order of magnitude below that of a jumbo jet's take off speed.

So sorry Bruce/John, but the baddies got away.

I expect Mrs H told me that it was just a story, it was supposed to be entertainment and I should suspend belief when watching a film or reading a book. 

Which is why I mainly read non-fiction. I'm just far too literal. And pleased with a top class nitpick!

But do I cavil, or nitpick? I may need to check if they really are synonyms...

Nerdy notes:

The flash point of a liquid is the lowest temperature at which it can form an ignitable vapour in air. For kerosene it's 38C, whereas for petrol it's minus 40C. Which is one of the reasons kerosene is used for jet fuel, it's very much safer. So McClane would have struggled to light a trail of liquid kerosene leaking from the plane in a sub zero ambient temperature. The flame speed of a hydrocarbon in air is typically around 4 metres per second (sadly I still remember this from working in safety and risk assessment). I was converting metres a second to miles an hour, so the sum I was doing would have been: 4 times 60 times 60 equals 14400 metres an hour; 1500 metres is a "metric" mile at the Olympics but a real mile is a bit longer (actually a bit over 1600). 14400 divided by 1600 is about 10. (The actual answer is closer to 9 but I would have been approximating). Clearly a jumbo jet take off speed is a lot more than 10mph (it's actually about 180mph). So sorry John, your flame couldn't catch up with the jet as it was just getting airborne, even if you'd been able to light it in the first place.

Expert nitpickers among you might counter that the flame speed I have quoted is for a laminar flame. Turbulent flow can significantly increase the flame speed, potentially up to hundreds of metres a second, which could certainly do the trick. However that requires confining structures to generate turbulence by interacting with the expanding combustion products. This is basically what happened at Flixborough in 1974 when a huge cloud of cyclohexane vapour mixed with air and didn't just catch fire but exploded with the force of a bomb. It was the largest ever chemical industry accident in the UK and it killed 28 people. The open air explosion created a supersonic blast wave, similar to high explosive in a rare and then little understood phenomenon called an unconfined vapour cloud explosion. On most occasions ignition of a flammable gas cloud results in what is known as a deflagration with the flame front travelling at less than the speed of sound. Deflagrations are extremely dangerous but they don't cause the type of damage typical of an explosion. 

Subsequently it became understood that, for a vapour cloud to explode in this manner, the expanding gases have to be accelerated by interaction with structures - and the type of structures found on a chemical plant are capable of causing that as well as providing the ignition source for the the flammable mixture. The accelerating flame can then set off the bulk of the gas cloud in a hugely powerful explosion, not just a big fireball. But John McClane didn't have a large vapour cloud for the flame to accelerate through, nor any way of generating that kind of turbulence. The film just showed the flame catching up with the plane just after take off, resulting in it exploding in a fireball.

Unless the plane was taking off on a very hot day so a vapour cloud had formed and he ejected methane forcefully from his body, lit it with his lighter and used that to somehow set off a turbulent explosion. No, I'm not buying that bum story either but it wouldn't have been any taller.

Feeling prickly was the item that told me roses don't have thorns and it appeared in the New Scientist edition of 11 October 2025

"A rose garden filled with thorns" is a lyric is Taylor Swift's song Blank Space, apparently

The Germans have a word for it

 Of course the Germans have a word for it, they have lots of useful words. Like schadenfreude, who doesn't revel in a bit of that?

However, I'm not looking forward to taking pleasure in Ed Miliband's discomfort if (when?) we have very high energy prices, or even disruption, because of our vulnerability to world gas prices and supply. After all, the discomfort suffered by the population will be so much greater than thick-skinned Ed's. And, to be fair, the state of our energy systems owes more to 15 years of Conservative led governments and their Labour and Tory predecessors.

The problem is one of transition. The UK is half way along a journey to generate nearly all its electricity from renewables and nuclear. 

Wind power was seen as the most cost effective of the renewables in a major study of energy technologies published in 1986*.  Since then the UK has become a kind of world leader in wind power. Oh, not in making the turbines or anything like that of course, but in deploying technology and equipment from other countries. 

Solar power, viewed back then as having potential despite our climate but at that time very expensive, has made huge progress, as photovoltaics have benefited from the immense progress in silicon chip technology. 

The main issue with renewables is their intermittency, varying from over abundance to zilch. So we experience conditions when the wind is blowing but the wind power generating companies are paid to turn their machines off because there is nowhere for the power to be used. This is partly because the electricity grid is nowhere near completing the transformation necessary to funnel electricity in towards the centre of the country from offshore wind farms when it was set up for the flow to be in the other direction, out from the central spine of big coal fired plants at locations such as Drax, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Ferrybridge and Didcot.

But we also have to contend with dunkelflauten, the useful German word for those periods in winter when it's cold, cloudy and still. The word literally translates as "dark doldrums".

When dunkelflauten reigns we have to have other ways of generating our electricity. And as we progressively electrify to reduce reliance on fossil fuels that need becomes even greater: electricity use has started to go up after many years of decline. Achieving net zero, or anything like it, will require a lot more electricity.

Greater capacity to store electricity will help, through batteries or long duration energy storage methods (e.g. using surplus electricity to pump water up hill to a reservoir, running it back down again when the power is needed, or using it to make a clean fuel such as hydrogen). But these processes are inefficient: you can't buck the second law of thermodynamics, so you never get back what you've put in.

We have made great progress at deploying renewables, with around half of our electricity generated from renewables and nuclear. But we are still a long way from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. Indeed our use of gas for generating electricity went up in 2025. The government's target is for 95% to come from renewables and nuclear by 2030. That's an interesting date as four of our remaining 5 nuclear power stations are due to close by then, having already operated for many years more than their original design lives. 2030 is also the date by which the first of the two units at Hinkley Point C is due to come on line, our first new nuclear power station since Sizewell B in 1995, nuclear power having been allowed to age and then wither after John Major's government foolishly put a moratorium on new nuclear in 1994. I would put a little more store in that 2030 commissioning date than the latest estimate for HS2 trains running, but not much.

The government's targets require us to go from 30 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity in 2023 to 50GW in 2030, for solar to increase from 14GW to 45GW, for battery capacity to be around 25GW in addition to the current 7GW and with another 5GW or so of long duration energy storage.  Only the last of these seems remotely likely to me to happen on that timescale.

So we are still some way from ending our deep reliance on imported fossil fuels and dealing with dunkelflauten.

Successive governments have allowed our generating system to become to dependent on imported fuels where the price is set by world markets. This was a risk easily foreseen in the wake of the 1970s oil crises but it had already been forgotten by the late 1980s. I can still hear Department of Energy officials, at what might be called the time of "peak Thatcher", saying "we can just buy it in" whether "it" was oil and gas as the North Sea resources became depleted or new nuclear power stations after we let our indigenous capability wither away. They were utterly confident in world markets and completely unmoved by the strategic risk of being reliant on imports.

Winston Churchill knew all this back in 1913 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he switched the Royal Navy from relying on coal to oil. He noted the danger of relying too much on any one source, observing "safety and certainty lie in variety and variety alone". 

I am reasonably confident that there is an end point where we reach the sunlit upland nirvana of having an electricity generating system which is substantially free from imports with the associated risk of supply interruptions and price volatility. But I think we are a lot more than 5 years away from it.

Until then I worry about the supply pinch points like the Straits of Hormuz and the new word I've learned, dunkelflauten.

* Department of Energy, Energy technologies for the United Kingdom: 1986 appraisal of research, development and demonstration, Energy Paper Number 54 (London: HMSO, February 1987). I remember this doorstep size publication well as I made a very minor contribution towards it. The "paper" covered all the credible energy technologies including every conceivable type of renewable (hydro, wind - on and offshore, tidal, different wave energy technologies, various forms of solar), nuclear (fusion and fission - thermal and fast reactors) and fossil (including supposedly "clean" technologies) and made estimates of possible future electricity generating costs and the research, development and demonstration costs for bringing them to commercial deployment. Even then there was a lot of interest in what was known as the "greenhouse effect". The study has probably stood the test of time in many ways, in particular the viability of renewables: wind was seen as highly promising, wave pretty much a waste of time and tidal potentially attractive but limited in opportunity in the UK. Where it didn't stand any significant test of time was the failure to anticipate that governments would dash to gas to displace coal and oil, the nuclear platform we had established would be thrown away by John Major's government's nuclear moratorium in 1994 and we would not progress the opportunity of fast breeder reactors, which were seen as essential to avoid constraints in uranium supply if the world went strongly towards nuclear fission power after the oil price shocks of the 1970s. I contributed to the section on fast reactors which were expected to be increasingly deployed from 2000 onwards. Indeed, we did a lot of modelling to convince ourselves enough plutonium would be available given that fast breeder reactors work using fast neutrons but actually breed putonium quite slowly. By the end of the 80s it was already clear that there would be no shortage of plutonium and our stocks might be best deployed using mixed uranium/plutonium fuel in our thermal reactors. Until we decided not to bother building any more of them for the next 25 years. I always thought the idea that the UK would run short of plutonium before now seemed utterly fanciful, which probably marked me as a bit of an oddball in the economics and research teams and Harwell and Risley when I said so. But my colleagues in the Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell pretty much nailed the outlook for renewables in the UK.

Clean power by 2030: UK's bold plan for renewables, jobs and energy security. Tim Mooney, Green Economy, 16 Dec 2024. https://www.greeneconomy.co.uk/news-and-resources/news/clean-power-by-2030-uk-s-bold-plan-for-renewables-jobs-and-energy-security/#:~:text=Expanding%20renewables,heart%20of%20renewable%20energy%20generation.

Does Sir Keir Starmer play chess? And is Trump actually a despotic king?

I don't know whether Keir Starmer plays chess but I have a very strong hunch that he doesn't. My reason? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he can see more than one move ahead. Which is why he's had to make so many U-turns.

The latest debacle, which I count as a U-turn, is the smouldering ruins of his carefully cultivated personal relationship with Donald Trump. Now Trump says one thing one day, another the next and sometimes back to his original view sometime after that so, while I see this particular train wreck as detrimental to the UK's well being, I don't for a moment see it as being very harmful to the relationship we have with the USA, whether you regard that as "special" or not. The bigger danger to that relationship is that the UK's capabilities have become so weak and feeble that what the Americans get back for what they put in is ever more limited. I would hope that our contribution on intelligence is still valuable, GCHQ having a high reputation. On nuclear weapons technology we probably still generate some valuable knowledge and experience we can share from our atomic weapons establishments and capabilities. On civil nuclear power we still had useful things to share up to about 30 years ago, now zilch apart from decommissioning and waste managemement. Though that probably isn't regarded as important any more it used to enable us to have very strong relationships with the US National Laboratories. Just as we haven't invested in defence, we haven't invested in the associated technologies. The American programmes were always very much bigger but the UK traditionally punched above its weight technically and so was able to bring things to the party. I suspect that situation is rather different now. 

So, notwithstanding the Commander in Chief's hissy fit, I'm sure intelligence sharing and military collaboration between the UK and USA is continuing pretty much as normal. The longer term problem is that is that "normal" now means the UK continues to slide steadily into irrelevance as a partner for the USA. Now that the UK public has realised that we didn't even have a small naval vessel available to go at short notice to protect our interests in the relatively near-field (i.e. Akrotiri at Cypus in the Med) will the government now grasp the real and imminent threats we face and start to build up our defence capability, both in terms of the services and our manufacturing base? Sadly, I wouldn't bet on it.

But back to Starmer and his inability to see much into the future. The prospect of an American attack on Iran had been bubbling in plain sight for several weeks. In that case Israel was always going to join in. What did Starmer think was then going to happen? Surely his red box briefings must have included likely Iranian retaliation at a range of targets around and beyond the Gulf. Just because the Starmer had used the UK's singular interpretation of international law not just to sit on his hands but also to deny the USA the option of using its bases on British territory in Cyprus and Diego Garcia, did he think the Iranians would leave those locations off their target list? Was it assumed that the Iranians wouldn't lash out at the Emirates, where lots of Brits would be present?

So as night follows day the UK had to change tack and allow the US to use those bases for "defensive" operations, an angels on a pinhead bit of hair splitting with no great material difference, at least as far as the Iranians are concerned.

I was nervous when the bombing of Iran started. I thought it a gamble on Trump's part, moving us into a time of risk and unpredictability. But my main concern was Trump's special military expedition works. The jury is very much out on that point.

Iran has been the source of many problems in the world over the last 5 decades. It has sponsored terrorism on a huge and growing scale. It's easy to think that it doesn't affect us directly but it clearly does as there are reports of up to 50 Iranian terrorist plots being foiled in the UK. All this could appear trifling if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons. A world with an Iranian nuke would be immeasurably less safe. If you need any persuading on this point, consider the words of Ayatollah Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri, who was one of the candidates to take over as spiritual leader, spoken on Iranian TV:

"to reach the goal of divine proximity, even if half the world's people are killed, it is worth it. Therefore, the killing of 42,000 people in Gaza does not matter compared to that great goal."

Iran armed Hamas and encouraged the 7 October 2023 on Israel, knowing that the scale of that attack would inevitably lead to Israel attempting to neutralise Hamas. It had no qualms whatsoever about the impact on the Palestinian people who were mere pawns in their determination to prevent the progressive normalisation of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Saudi Arabia in particular. 

Nuclear weapons have helped to avoid conflicts between the major powers throughout my lifetime. But that is because the principle of deterrence works when the leaders of the nuclear weapon states have even a scintilla of humanity. From Kennedy and Kruschev, through Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev to Trump and Putin we could take comfort from the fact that MAD (mutual assured destruction) would stay the hand from first use of nuclear weapons. Yes, even Putin with his predilection for feeding his troops into the meat grinder in Ukraine (though historically that's pretty normal for Russian leaders).

The Iranian leadership are different. Utterly idealogically driven and with little apparent concern for their own people's well being.

The Americans learned a  lesson with Kim Jong Un. Once you let a rogue state obtain a nuclear weapon the game changes and you can't just bully them. Fortunately North Korea so far seems to want to just be allowed to plough its own furrow. However the success of Rocket Man in building a nuke was also a big lesson for the Iranians. Get a nuke and you can't be bullied. But I don't expect the Iranians would be happy to plough their own furrow, we know they want to change the world.

The hand wringers have been out in force since the Amercans hit Iran, saying that negotiations were making progress (how do they know?) and that diplomacy was the way forward. I tend to the view that the Iranians were playing for time. They have never co-operated fully with international inspections. If the intelligence of USA and, particularly, Israel was that the Iranians were getting very close, that's enough for me.

So the world with an Iranian nuke would be a much more dangerous place. But does that give the USA and Israel the right to make a pre-emptive strike? What about that advice to Sir Keir about international law?

The reason I called the UK interpretation of international law "singular" a few paragraphs back was that it fits the definition: "exceptionally good or great" - some would think that; "remarkable" - a flexible word as it could imply good, bad or just notable; or referring to just one person or thing. I'm coming from the last of these because that's the way the UK government gets its advice: from one person, the Attorney General. It's my understanding that the Attorney General's status in this regard dates from the 1950s when the then occupier of the post, in a debate of some substance about what the law said, pronounced that, in the context of parliamentary debate, it said what he said it said. (Or something like that).

This has proved useful for prime ministers ever since. They can't be accused of deliberately or knowingly breaking the law if they've asked the Attorney General for his advice. The advice may or may not be right but that doesn't matter, the PM can't be blamed.

What puzzles me about this is that while a hundred lawyers would agree what the law says in a simple case, in a complex case they most certainly would not. Hard cases go through appeals and to supreme courts where, both in the UK and the USA, a panel of judges delivers a majority verdict. So if you ask the (singular) Attorney General on an issue of any compexity, how do you know he's right?

Well, you don't. But if, like our lawyer PM with his background in human rights you appoint your buddy Lord Hermer with his background in human rights to the post of Attorney General, while he may or may not be right you can be pretty sure about what advice you will get on quite a few subjects.

Starmer took advice from Hermer and followed it straight into a blind alley. Hermer's interpretation of international law was very restrictive, effectively ruling out a pre-emptive strike in pretty much any circumstances. Yet the imminent risk of a hostile, fundamentalist regime obtaining a nuclear weapon could clearly justify a pre-emptive strike. 

As a result Starmer offended our main ally. It's quite a bizarre thing for the UK to have fretted since Trump's re-election about the USA's reliability as an ally, only to prove ourselves to be the unreliable ally at the first real test. I appreciate one could argue the point about Trump's treatment of the UK over tariffs but that isn't really relevant to a military alliance.

I'm with Tony Blair who is reported to have said "we should have backed America from the very beginning" and that Labour "had better show up for Washington". If the USA and Israel thought the threat from Iran was imminent (and let's face it, if they got a nuke, it becomes imminent) the only precarication should have been to ask about the intelligence. After that, are we an ally, or not an ally? I'm not suggesting here that we needed to actually join in the bombing of Iran. All we needed to do was say yes to the use of America's British bases. Bases that the USA does not now know if it can rely on using - unless it does what Trump said in the case of Spain (i.e that they'd just use them anyway).

This was a simple test which Starmer fluffed. Oh sure, he'd have had his left wing jumping up and down but the problem there is that he gave up any semblance of control over his party a long time ago.

Now we have steadily got drawn in, as was inevitable. So Starmer's lefties are jumoing up and down anyway and we upset the USA and allies in the middle east needlessly. It'll take more than a handshake from the King to repair.

I said earler that I thought the most important thing, given that Trump did decide to hit Iran, is that it works. There we run into problems because, as usual, there's little sign that Trump or anyone in his team thought this one through. There is very little - or no - precedent for bombing a population into submission using conventional weapons. We've seen in Syria and indeed Gaza that populations are remarkably resilient to enormous destruction and that quashing a faction - be it Isis, Hamas or in this case the IRGC, can't be done by that means alone. 

Trump seemed to think that Iranian liberals would rise up but that always looked unlikely. This is not like the fall of communism. Opinion in Iran seems very divided between supporters and opponents of the regime. But the opponents don't have weapons. Trump seems to be flirting with supporting minority ethnic elements opposed to the regime - but they are just that, minorities. So that wouldn't be quick.

There is every sign that the regime will hold and that it will use whatever means at its disposal to cause the US problems. In the era of drone warfare there is plenty of opportunity for that. One wonders if Trump was aware of the importance of trade through the Strait of Hormuz. Could it be a bit like Dominic Raab who admitted that the cabinet hadn't realised just how much food came in through Dover when queues of lorries built up in the days after Brexit?

Part of the problem is that Trump doesn't take advice like any previous president and has very much surrounded hiself with yes men. He's a very monarchical president. And guess what - he is a bit like a monarch.

A few days after things kicked off, I listened to a BBC radio reporter interviewing an expert on the American legal and consitutional position. I was suprised that the interviewer was surprised (indeed, sounded utterly shocked) at the interviewee's response to a question on the USA being bound by international law. The response was that the American president is only bound by the constitution of the United States. Moreover the president can commence hostilities without reference to Congress and can continue for at least 30 days before needing to do so. I thought the BBC man was going to have a seizure for a moment. But that is the position from an American perspective.

The curious point about the American system is that it was set up in response to what the patriots perceived as a tyrannical monarch, George III, who they saw as being determined to impose his absolute authority on a people seeking a representative system of government. Never mind that George was defending the will of the British parliament and personally backed repeal of the Stamp Act, the legislation that sparked the rebellion against the Crown. So what did the patriots do? There was a significant debate at the time of independence about whether to create a republic or a monarchy, with many pushing for George Washington to be a king. The creation of the constitution took more than a decade. According to historical accounts a lady called Elizabeth Powell asked Benjamin Franklin, as he left the  final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 "well doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?" Franklin's response was " a republic, if you can keep it".

Franklin's didn't think the draft constitution was perfect, far from it. But he thought it was good enough and that it was time to move on and adopt it. His greater concern, reflected in his comment ("if you can keep it") was that there was little precedent at that time for long lived republics and that, unless the public maintained the virtues necessary for self-governance, the American version would eventually devolve into a despotic government.

In that context it's interesting to reflect that, according to historian Sir David Cannadine, the founding fathers gave to the American presidency those powers they erroneously believed King George III still possessed - to appoint and dismiss his cabinet, to make war and peace and to veto bills sent up by the legislature. From the outset the presidency was vested with what might be termed monarchical authority, which meant it was really a form of elective kingship. Trump is far from the first president to make extensive use of executive orders, he's just gone large on that. But in doing so he is only exploiting to the full the powers vested in him by the US constitution.

It's why some say the US is a monarchy disguised as a republic while the UK is a republic that thinks it's a monarchy, an aphorism that contains more than a nugget of truth.

So, for now, all we can do is hope that King Trump's gamble works: Iran is neutered and hopefully (a longer shot this) falls under the control of a less rather than more despotic regime, that the disruption to energy supplies is brief and so does not lead to an inflationary spike, that things calm down and the Americans aren't too sore with the UK. We are currently a long way from that rosy scenario.

We can also hope that the midterms rein Trump in and that the American public regain the virtues Franklin thought necessary to maintain a healthy republic and start to elect better leaders. I'm not holding my breath on the latter part of that.

As for Starmer, one of the few successes he could point to was the relationship he had forged with Trump. All in ruins. The road to Labour being re-elected just got even harder.

Oh dear, Keir. Maybe go and practice chess?

Who might replace Iran's supreme leader? CNN 1 March 2026 

Blair sparks row with Starmer by saying we should have backed America from the very beginning in Iran. The Independent (independent.co.uk) 8 March 2026

September 17,1787: A republic - if you can keep it. Independence National Historical Park, National Parks Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-september17.htm

When Charles goes west he'll see real imperialism. Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times 1 March 2026. This article included the quotation from historian Sir David Cannadine