Meghan and Harry: we must all tread Very Carefully

Mrs D taps daily into a rich seam of interweb humour, and the absolute avalanche of really funny Harry&Meghan stuff is often side-splitting stuff: the neighbours can probably hear us.  And the Sussexes ain't even back here in the self-imposed full-bore glare of the UK meejah yet.  Oh, how that pair are going to relish being back in Blighty.  It'll be just like the old days for both of them, and we know how much they enjoyed it last time around.  It's mutual: we can just see the accountants of Fleet Street already banking the extra newsprint sales and online hits.

Now, here's the Thing.  We have all been duly reprimanded for laughing out loud at fraudster-fabulists and their amazing behaviours and statements because, notwithstanding their self-chosen high profiles and prolific public output of creative tales, their entire squadrons of outriders, and their use of aggressive lawyers, they are of course Very Vulnerable.  And - see what happens then ...  And it'll all be our fault & we'll all be Sorry.

Upon solemn reflection, I reckon the 5th in line to the throne isn't necessarily as robust of brain and character as we'd all hope for.  And we know that people who've had to navigate the terrible micro-aggressions and material deprivations meted out to victims of, errr, intersectional oppressions[1], are doubly at risk.  

So we must all refrain from adding to that avalanche of funny stuff.  I shall only repost any of it if it's really, really funny, and has been subjected to a rigorous Risk Analysis[2] conducted by the Chief Safety Officer here at C@W corporate HQ.   

ND

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[1] I may have got the technical terminology wrong here.  It's not my project.

[2] You think this is satire?  Read this crap from the execrable Jolyon Maugham, attacking the Grauniad no less, including the following:

"What risk analysis was done by [Gruan editor] Kath Viner following the multiple warnings about Professor Arday’s mental state?"

Economic & unconventional warfare against Russia

Things are getting quite ugly for Putin - who faces "elections" shortly - and Russia generally.  High on his list of irritants is the ever more visible and effective campaign of economic and psychological warfare being waged from the skies by Ukraine, adroitly conceived and impressively executed.  The initial phase of this was targeted against oil and gas infrastructure, which has had the desired two-fold effect: genuine economic harm, and extremely visible with it, in terms of both enormous and persistent plumes of black smoke, not least around major cities, and the pockets and P&Ls of all who need to buy oil products.  (We had a truly risible troll BTL a few weeks ago suggesting the Ukrainians were histrionically putting a tank of kerosene in with the drone warhead to create a more photogenic explosion.  Errr, and better combustion on the target, maybe?)

The even more cleverly conceived campaign is that being waged against the mega-depots of the WildBerries chain**, often likened to Amazon.  If anything, relative to the Russian economy WB is even more economically significant than Amazon, because a vast number of Russia's extensive raft of small businesses uses WB as not only a route to market in marketing terms, but also as their sole storage and distribution means.  The impact is every bit as big and more, as would be systematic disruption to Amazon in the West; and, again, the smoke plumes are black, enormous, and visible to much of the population, either first-person or extensively on social meejah.  Needless to say, with enormous, combustible, static targets like refineries and depots spread across the vastness of the Russian land mass, there's not much realistic prospect of shooting down everything that is coming their way, much as efforts are being made.  

From studiously ignoring it all in the early phases, pre-election Putin has felt obliged to make oblique references to indicate he does really know what's going on as it affects the Russian in the street, and that it's all being brought under control.   Right.

So much, so obvious - to even the casual watcher of the BBC News.  But there's something else going on that you may not be aware of.

A clever little psychological campaign has been running for several months now, using social meejah in Russia to suggest that bank deposits will inevitably be frozen once the "elections" are over.  It's been nicely understated: a word to the wise, a tap of the nose, nudge nudge wink wink.  But it's starting to have the desired effect - the early signs of a run on the banks.  This of course could easily become a self-fulfilling dynamic, and it is reported that powers have been taken to effect a freeze whenever L'il Volodya is willing to give the word.  A very high-profile Russian economist has just been fired for having the temerity to state publicly -  in plain but very measured terms - that an economic crisis for Russia is around the corner on a scale that can be survived, but not without extreme steps being taken by the state.  

It is against this background that Putin's posse has announced "there will be consequences" for the UK, our having supplied Ukraine with drones.  Given that we supplied Storm Shadow missiles, very much more effective (and expensive) several years ago, it cannot be said that we've crossed any particular red lines just recently.  The list of Putin's red lines that we and the West generally have blithely crossed since 2022 is long indeed, so this recent huffing and puffing is clearly to be assessed in today's precise context.  My guess would be that right now, they really don't want any more interference on the banking front and are hoping to deter us from anything that might exacerbate the aforesaid nascent run on the banks.  Russia has long been obsessed with the dark powers they associate with the City.  Watch this space.

Finally, and anticipating what might be the trolls' response to this little update; OK yes, Ukraine is suffering badly, too.  Of course it is!  Ukraine has been suffering badly - very badly - every day since February 2022!  As we well know.  The point is, everyday life in Russia is hurting now, in ways that can't be ignored, even as Putin clamps down on the internet.   The introduction of a bit of symmetry is a big, big difference in the overall situation.

ND

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** As ever with big, prominent enterprises in Russia, there is a lot of politics and organised crime associated with WildBerries, by far the biggest of several such chains.  WB itself is run by very well-connected Armenian interests: its connections in very high places are just as well because it is at daggers drawn with the Chechen mafia.  The other, lesser chains have been left more or less unmolested, which stirs up Russian politics even more.

C@W - 20th anniversary!

Well.  Hard to believe, but this blog has been going for 20 years.  Check the listings in the sidebar - there it all is.  5,431 posts - and 72,878 comments[1].  As noted a while back, nowadays we get more hits than ever, which I ascribe to a long and persistent tail following the massive AI "training" blitz of last year that saw us getting truly astronomical daily numbers for a couple of months.  But we were hardly alone in experiencing that.  (What impact our mighty back-catalogue of accurate reporting, partisan posturing and perfect English prose has had on the collective AI intellect, I cannot imagine.)

So: what to say now?  Take a look back at the 10th anniversary ruminations, which noted a bit of the original history and 2006 context - with more nostalgic stuff from many of our first decade of readership, in the 31 comments below the post.  You'll find many notes on, and contributions from, some of the great bloggers of yesteryear.  Is Guido really the only other current blog still wholly recognisable from 20 years ago?

In the overall context of today's wildly hyper-financialised, hyper-ventilating politico-social media space, the 'conventional' blogosphere is incredibly sedate and, it must be acknowledged, heavily dated.  How many folks nowadays have the attention-span for even a 'medium read', never mind a long read?  Well, you guys do: and there is a world of thoughtful long-reads - it's Substack.  But I've never really felt I had the time to make a proper go of that - an order of magnitude more demanding, I'm guessing, than what's needed to 'curate' a leisurely blog like C@W. 

I suppose in terms of outright www presence, the C@W highlight must be when we were getting so many links and hits via the FT ('Alphaville') and, most impressively, from Robert Peston's blog - which was for a while one of the very biggest UK news blogs, indeed possibly the biggest[2] - that the BBC actually installed some kind of filter and banned any cross-blog linking from Pesto.  Amazing to relate, but true. 

Guido himself tried to persuade CU and me to join his empire as the business rumour-mongering arm of Order-Order.  We turned him down, for this reason.  He gets away with blue murder because he is slagging off politicians: but that's a free hit - they almost never sue.  Try doing that with the corporate community and you'd have Carter Ruck down on you in a nanosecond.  He had to admit, that thought hadn't occurred to him.

Around here, the big change latterly is of course that the great CityUnslicker himself has moved on to other things, and Bill Quango MP is now just an occasional, if always exceedingly welcome, visitor.  Your truly found himself the last man standing a while back, and the flickering flame has never quite gone out - thanks to the many readers that, over those two decades, have adorned the BTL acres with great commentary and wit.

I find it hard to guess what will happen over the next several years.  There will continue to be plenty of events' dear boy, events; and I don't see myself becoming any the less opinionated.  But nothing lasts forever.

Anyhow - I think we're all set for the foreseeable future.  If you're up for it, I am too.  Till the annual predictions round-up, at any rate!  Cheers to you all - 

ND

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[1] The google stats say there have been over 15m site visits but that's an underestimation, since that particular record doesn't go back the whole way, for some reason.  The comments data need to be taken with a pinch of salt, too, because old posts can attract advertising bots posting BTL (often 'commenting' in Chinese or Arabic), and the task of cleaning it all up is beyond what's even vaguely sensible to contemplate. 

[2] Michael Crick's was the other.  

Aardman at the Young V&A - must see

Grommit's garden.  Galleon in background

Mrs Drew & I have just visited a truly superb exhibition at Young V&A* in Bethnal Green. 

It's brilliantly well done and is chock full of original Aardman stuff (Morph, Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep etc) - meaning, of course, that it's in full collaboration with the famous animation studio itself.  A marketing ploy?  Who cares.

It works along so many dimensions.  Where do the ideas come from for the models and characters?  We learn a lot about the creative, artistic processes involved, every inch and frame the equal of Disney.  How do they make the models?  Yep, we learn that, too.  You wanna see the models themselves?  All there, from the tiny rivets on the space ship (they use lentils) to the immense galleon from The Pirates!  How do they make it all move?  Plenty of that, too.

How is a were-rabbit articulated?   Now we know ...  

And it's a lot of fun!  Loads of kids - as one might expect - really enjoying themselves.  Kids of all ages.

Getting a bit more po-faced about it all, in the context of Hockney I recently rehearsed my views on what constitutes Art is threefold:  complete mastery of the craft au fond; boundless, compulsive creative output; and a strong eye / ear for abstraction.  It's all here at Aardman.  Nick Park is a true artist.  Go and see his stuff.  

On till November and tickets go quickly during the hols.   

ND

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* This V&A outpost dates from 1872 and has had several incarnations: it once housed the V&A's Rodin collection; in 1974 it became the V&A Museum of Childhood.   Once the heart of Kray territory and very readily accessible from central London, Bethnal Green after the Krays became a magnet for South Asian immigration, notably from Bangladesh; and more recently, it's been gentrifying - just one tube stop from the heart of the City, with lots of fine brick buildings from the Georgian era onwards, ripe for conversion to smart, up-market housing.  The wonder is, it took so long to become trendy.

The museum itself went through a typically annoying woke phase some years ago; but in this case, as in many others, peak woke is mercifully behind us. 

Another reality-check: Rayner approves data centre!

 ... against fierce local opposition - and in the teeth of, yes, housing as potentially being an alternative use for the site.  It's the controversial Brick Lane Data Centre which, in a delightfully pointed insult, offers 4 (four) units of social housing.

What makes it exquisitely amusing is that none other than Housing Secretary Angela 'Stamp-Duty' Rayner has been the one to put her name to the government order overriding lower-tier authorities that would have withheld approval.  One can just imagine the agonies she will have gone through; but, hey, that's the price you pay for the privilege of slipping back into the Cabinet room, eh?  Them's your orders, girl, and leave your scruples at the door.  Still, at least she was able to push a junior minister out in front to make the actual announcement (in her name).   Happily, Parliament is not sitting. 

What I find doubly amusing is the way puzzled progressives can't understand how a data centre can be needed simply to speed up City financial transactions by milliseconds (which is one of the justifications for a DC in the East End).  Surely, they, cry, this is some kind of capitalist joke?  - nobody needs to make even quicker financial transactions ... do they ..?   Well, I have a first-hand story about this for another occasion: bottom line, it's all a lot more real than the ignorant could ever imagine.

On the subject of Them's your orders, girl ... with the fatuous 'consultations' on the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields being about to close, we are all greatly looking forward to Miatta Fahnbulleh being forced to walk the same plank and approve one or perhaps both of them in the next few weeks (doubtless on one quiet Friday evening during the Recess, with another junior minister out in front).  It'll be fun to watch her squirm.

ND

Arday: hard not to laugh

There's a light mood in Schloss Drew this weekend.  The Jason Arday affair is possibly even funnier than Keir Starmer 'resigning' when his legacy is as golden as he and his loyal backbenchers loudly proclaimed.  

As the story rumbled inexorably towards the front pages, progressives reflexively dropped everything and rushed headlong towards the sound of gunfire.  On arriving at the battlefield they immediately hurled themselves into digging mighty entrenchments - nay, positive tank-traps - as a prelude to what they fondly imagined would be a swift and decisive counter-attack.  Unfortunately, the deeper and more frenziedly they dug, the more they became buried in the shit from their own shovels.  Far from any prospect of burying a handful of inconvenient little fabrications, they must now confront the uncontainable, volcanic eruption that is their man's stupendous output of truly creative confabulation.  We are plainly dealing with a decade's worth of deceit from (to switch idioms) an ocean-going liar.  I look forward to receiving a letter from Carter-Fuck on the subject.

Some years ago I sat on the jury of a lengthy Old Bailey murder trial.  One of the sadder aspects was that alongside the two murderers in the dock was the mother of one of the perps, who had fabricated an elaborate but laughably transparent alibi for her son that was contradicted by his own defence case.  Inevitably, she was banged up for attempting to pervert the course of justice.  In mitigation, her Counsel could only offer the excuse that nobody had ever believed her in the first place.  In the ranks of the more reflective and self-critical progressives there's a growing suspicion that we are in similar territory with Arday: did any grown adult** who'd been exposed to more than a couple of lines of his fantastically fabricated life story ever believe a word he said?

Which then leads the sadder-and-hopefully-wiser wokists to wonder - what kind of perverse, inverse racism they have themselves been guilty of?  Patronising, or what?

It all adds to the gaiety of the nation.  Enjoy your weekend!

ND

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** That said, it is Cambridge academics we are talking about

Peak Farage? There's a good case to be made

Back in April I mused that we'd perhaps already seen Peak Reform.  Things haven't gone at all well for them since the May local elections: successive by-election flops; Restore eating their lunch; the Farage Finance scandalette; and the Clacton Binface fiasco.  Etc.  Is anyone listening now to their noisy Ceuta bandwagon as it crashes down the cobbled streets of their target constituencies?

Anyhow, here's a piece supporting - and personalising - the Peak Reform conjecture:  it reckons we might have seen Peak Farage lui-même.  The GE could be a while yet, and if Farage's moment has come and gone, who else have they got?  Which is pretty much the main issue: how do you field 600 credible candidates when you can't muster 6, and when your party leader can't deal with anyone with half a personality?

Meanwhile, the great charlatan at the head of the Green Party is increasingly looking as silly and irrelevant as we know him to be; and YourParty gets ever more a caricature of itself - see some of the closing paragraphs cited below[1].   And Badenoch's persistence, stamina and recent sure-footedness (plus or minus a 'reformed' neo-N) seem to be quietly paying off, albeit from a catastrophically low baseline.  I have long held that both Labour and Conservative parties have all the hallmarks of genuinely enduring institutions - at least to an extent that needs to be overlaid on pretty outlandish claims that they are both toast.   A large popcorn order is called for, before prices go through the drought-driven roof. 

What do we think?

ND

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[1] See this sad little passage from the Chair's minutes of the most recent YourParty  'central executive committee' meeting.  

... This isn’t what I want to be writing to you about, but it is unfortunately the case that some members of the CEC took the view that I should be removed as Chair. I don’t agree with them ... What disappoints me is that before these [administrative points] could be considered - before we could get on to the agenda - much of the meeting was lost to points of order seeking to remove me.  By the time we finally got going, after a vote to remove me had been defeated, several members had left ...

Stop laughing at the back!   She's a kind, nicely-spoken middle-class white lady, only doing her best to advance the Revolution:  

Burnham's 'devolved tax & spend' - what does it mean?

Being cynical, what it probably means is - more vague feelgood stuff.  But assuming the 'details' we've been given are the bare bones of what's being proposed, it looks like:

• Local authorities will get to keep more of, and spend, 'taxes raised locally'
• LAs will be able to borrow more
• But somehow this won't just make a handful of high tax-base areas disproportionately better off, nor leave low tax-base areas stranded

Have I got that wrong?

If not, then ... how is that any different?  Or at least, different enough to merit gushing stuff like "the biggest shift of power out of Whitehall and Westminster" (Burnham) or "phenomenal, it really is a sea change, it's monumental" (Mayor of West Midlands)?   Right now, central government comes up with some kind of "needs-based" assessment and distributes grants etc accordingly from those 'taxes raised locally', acting as a kind of equaliser.  Won't we end up at the same place, albeit after perhaps a couple of years of chaos and unexpected consequences?   

Does it mean that, whereas today if Barchester wants the A99 to bypass the town centre, it has to lobby Westminster for tax-payers' money to build one, tomorrow they'll just have to pay for it themselves because nobody else is going to anymore - so maybe they'll just decide they don't want one after all? 

Burnham swiftly ruled out Houchen's smart, cheeky riposte of saying that with his new share of the income tax pie he'll give everyone on Teesside an income tax rebate! 

As for borrowing more ... FFS, how many more Birmingham / Northampton / Croydon / Thurrock bankruptcies does Burnham want?  In 2011 the cretinous Osborne took off the very prudent constraints on what speculative 'commercial' dealings LA's were previously allowed to get into, and that hasn't ended well at all.  And we haven't even mentioned the increasingly dire incompetence and corruption of whole swathes of local government, both elected members and employees.  I mentioned Houchen somewhat favourably above, but in most other respects, his Teesside fiefdom is a poster-child for outrageous local cronyism, rentierism and all-round hanky-panky - see every issue of Private Eye.

Please tell me if I've got the wrong end of the stick!

ND 

Rosebank and Jackdaw: green-red panic setting in

They're tugging at the heartstrings, scraping the barrel, lighting the gaslights and pulling out all the stops  -  Stop Burnham Approving New Oil & Gas!  As a planted piece of the purest propaganda of desperation (and the Guardian is a willing receptacle) it would be hard to beat this one. 

Burnham risks first revolt as PM over apparent support for North Sea drilling - Labour MPs fear No 10 team lack up-to-date energy insight and don’t fully recognise voters’ climate concerns   

Burnham, of course, has done nothing more than offer a bit of glaringly obvious commonsense. As the article quotes him saying: “The question isn’t whether Britain will still be using oil and gas, the question is where does it come from.”  Well, yes.  What's more, the article helpfully goes on to display two graphs that prove his point: we'll be net importers of both oil and gas for the foreseeable future.  QED.  

So what 'arguments' do the green-reds throw into the mix?  They are many, varied, disingenuous, shrill, and reeking with desperation: every damn' thing they can think of.  Including Gaza!  I kid you not - see below.  As part of the usual service I distill them for you here in order of appearance, starting with the one in the headline:

• Burnham's team is ignorant / stupid / out of touch / whatever ...
• ... though not Andy himself, of course - so he's in danger of looking like a gullible dupe
• He'll face a revolt.  His first revolt!
• FFS, Andy, we're on fire here and it'll be your fault!
• Climate Experts (no less) are against his proposed pragmatism
• The UN Secretary General is against it [features twice in the article]
• Labour MPs are fearful they'll lose votes to the Greens - a new 'surge' of defections looms
• The ice caps are melting, the world is on fire, etc etc
• It will only make a 'tiny' difference to energy prices.  [Tiny?  I'd say "undetectably small" or more probably zero - and it's wholly irrelevant anyway, see below]
• It would "send the wrong signal internationally".  [In fact, the only argument that's even vaguely coherent {1} - and even then, it's wrong]
• Lewis said approving the field would show Burnham was “not looking at the evidence” ...
• ... and that Labour risked adding “the stain of the climate crisis” to the party’s record, alongside Gaza.  [Are we getting into a new variant of Godwin's Law here ..?]
• Britain was the first country to industrialise and we have a duty to lead the world on net zero
• The case made by oil and gas companies is self-interested  [- and presumably also that of the Unions that are also pro drilling - which is not mentioned, of course]
• Allowing production will be to exploit a (wicked) "loophole"
• It's (arguably) against Labour's GE Manifesto [Glad they added 'arguably' because on a close reading, it ain't - the Manifesto was carefully ambiguous] 
• If it comes to a vote he would need Tory and SNP votes 
• If it doesn't come to a vote [which it won't], it'll be a (wicked) "administrative measure", how evil is that?!
• Concerns "extend across the Labour party, transcending factions and 'tribes'. The Guardian has contacted or been told of concerned MPs including ministers and junior members of government, longstanding senior backbench MPs and committee figures and new MPs from the 2024 general election intake" 
• Several influential economists told the Guardian that increased drilling would not help the UK economy ... [followed by some utterly ignorant 'economic' bullshit + doubling down on some of the above.  Have these 'economists' not heard of the benefits of employment?  Tax revenues? Balance of payments?  When have they ever opposed local production of any other commodity or product?]
• It runs counter to the 'clean energy superpower' mission
• It will lead to "extra use [of oil & gas] and more greenhouse gases". [Now which is it, eh?  Too small to have any macro impact on the market - correct, see above - or big enough to cause an increase in demand?  FFS]
• "Keep the peace" by allowing Jackdaw but scrapping Rosebank.  [It's fair to say the argument for Jackdaw / gas is much the easier to understand, not least because the gas will definitely be used in the UK, and will back out equivalent quantities of the far more polluting US-sourced LNG]
• It Will Cause Political Damage - and poor little Andy, badly advised as he obviously is, Just Can't See It !

Wow.  If you think I'm kidding - when did a Guardian article last contain 24 arguments? - check it out for yourself.  As I said: reeks of absolute desperation.

We must hope young Andy is proof against such stuff.  From the C@W standpoint, he's on probation here.  Anyone care to predict how he'll come down?

ND

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{1} I did say that, in amongst the plain risible and the politico-hysterical, I did say there was one semi-coherent argument in there, albeit false.  It's the old business of asserting that we must nobly lead by example, even if that comes at a cost to ourselves.  Well, as least that's a tacit admission we're talking about virtue-signaling, and that there is no other rational case that stacks up on its own merits.  But of course it falls down when we recognise that none of the USA / China / Russia / India / Saudi Arabia / Brazil etc etc gives a flying f**k what we say or do - they are guided entirely by their own assessment of their own interests.

'Wealth Tax' hoves into view. Discuss.

The green-left has long hankered after a 'wealth tax', using Gary Lineker as their human face / shield.  Gary Stevenson - a rum cove if ever there was one - happily works himself up into a semi-coherent rant-frenzy on the topic at the drop of a hat, as every TV producer knows: he's a form of walking click-bait.  And now all these people are (like so many lobbyists) projecting their fantasies on Young Andy.

But for all the charlatanism and carnival nonsense, there's something in it.  There's nothing clever about passively allowing the entirety of the new economic magnate class to blag and bully its way into global personal tax immunity - not to mention immunity for their hi-tech rent-seeking enterprises.  We all know these people have the best lawyers, own most of the meejah of all kinds + a large number of venal politicians, and are ruthless with it.

Before opening the floor to y'all, I have a couple of random inputs to offer.

1.  HMRC:  a badly underpowered, broadly unaccountable, ramshackle organisation that fosters an opaque world of thriving tax evasion on the one hand (sheer inability to get to grips with the complexities of 2026, and the depth of fraud it can only sit back & ignore), and injustice on the other, meted out to an unlucky sub-set of taxpayers it randomly does get its teeth into. 

It is my strong contention that the sheer complexities inherent in a tax on total assets, would defeat HMRC right from the get-go.  In the process, however, the opacity, fraud and injustice would multiply several-fold, with the high likelihood of serious political and even economic fallout.

2.  Real estate:  the one taxable asset class that doesn't suffer from crippling complexity is of course Land.  Our good friend, the very much lamented Mark Wadsworth, spilled much virtual ink promoting Land Value Tax, the high-level theoretical attractions of which are really obvious.

This thing is as long as a piece of string because we have a low-level form of land tax already - the Council Tax[1].  It has long been my contention that George 'Boy Genius' Osborne (who is as much to blame as Gordon Brown for the present state of our economy) missed a massive trick when, in his first "all in it together" budget, he failed to create a dozen new Council Tax bands.  At a stroke[2] he would have raised a bunch of £££ and injected a bit of justice at the start of his destructive "austerity" regime.  And all for near-zero effort: it would have leveraged a pretty efficient existing tax structure at minimal cost and next-to-no unintended consequences or evasion.  In 2010 he could do whatever he decided; but from the word 'go' and over the following 5 years it turned out that he was indeed as useless a chancellor as we've ever had.  

Big topic, to which I reckon we'll be returning quite soon.  Over to y'all.

ND  

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[1] Recall that Heseltine invented and implemented it in just a few months.  Him and his instantly available army of estate agents.

[2] see [1] above.  Implementing new bands would take even less time.

No honeymoon for Burnham: very revealing

Yesterday furnished us with a very significant clue.

In a post several weeks ago I described the then by-election candidate's demeanour thus: 

Burnham makes a pretty unconvincing saviour of the nation. He comes across as an odd combination of entitled, nervous and petulant.

Obviously, I'm still fishing around for a good understanding of the man, who's been out of the national gaze for a long time.  He is without doubt an unusual party leader and PM.  For example, I believe I'm correct in saying he's the first post-war leader of either of the two trad Major Parties not to have come directly from the ranks of the existing Cabinet / Shadow Cabinet (need to check Alec Douglas Home).  Of those who went to an English university at all, he's the only one from Cambridge.  

He seems to have a degree of decisiveness, of cut-and-thrust, maybe even a bit ruthless (more so than Sadiq Khan, clearly, who also plotted the same strategy for becoming PM but fell at the critical hurdle, somewhat to my surprise.[1])   He is obviously also ambitious, and always has been.  And an extremely personable guy, who commands affection (we'll find out about his command of loyalty as time goes on).  But although these things are good and even necessary, it's not necessarily sufficient: there's also that streak of domesticity, in the sense of not-really-made-for-the-global-league.  Like one of those really good, popular sportsmen (I'm thinking rugby, soccer, cricket) who makes a huge contribution for his club team, is absolutely idolised by the supporters of that club, but never makes it as an international - and you sort-of know why.   The step-up to test match sport is a big one, and not everybody can make it.

I could go on (as you know), and certainly will over the coming months.

Anyhow, to yesterday's big clue.  We all saw it in realtime.  His Big First-Day Announcement, the removal of VAT on electricity, is duly wheeled out.  What a brilliant quick-win, a declaration of intent!   To be 'funded' by scrapping[2] digital ID - even better!!  And then, only 12 hours out of retirement, along comes Darren Jones who torpedoes it in the space of a single tweet.  In Burnham's Brave New World of No More Hostile Briefing!  Hahahah.

But here's the thing.  Starmer got away with sheer murder as regards adverse media coverage, for many months before the last GE, and many weeks thereafter.  But HMS Burnham, being torpedoed having barely left harbour, instantly became the main headline across all meejah!  

The difference?   The meejah instinctively feared Starmer: he has the air of a potentially very vindictive person (with a track record to boot).  With the position he commanded from about 2023 onwards, nobody was about to piss on his shoes - not until they knew they'd got him cold (on the freebies thing).  But we see very clearly - On Day One! - that even with Burnham's massive Parliamentary majority, and popularity, and the gallons of early-days goodwill sloshing around, the meejah - including the Beeb - have no fear of retribution at all.

Is this just a function of Labour's weak position in the polls?  I don't think so.  No, it's a judgement on Young Andy's personality.  That he likes to be liked is a commonplace observation.  But the meejah mob sees something else: it reckons he's soft.  We're in the territory young officers are always warned against when getting a bit too matey with their soldiers.  If you become One Of The Boys, very soon you'll be Just One Of The Boys.  Respect gone.  Doom.

Andy (mate!), it's a crisis: remember these words.

And now ... Listen great things... We must straight make head / Therefore let our alliance be combined / Our best friends made, our means stretched. / And let us presently go sit in council / How covert matters may be best disclosed /And open perils surest answered. ... For we are at the stake / And bayed about with many enemies / And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear / Millions of mischiefs.    

ND

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[1]  So he may indeed be as ill as he looks

Miliband - guessing-game over!

So Mili neither gets the Treasury, nor keeps his manic mission at energy.  Safely dispatched to places over the horizon.  (What must David M be thinking?)  Please don't put him in charge of another COP.

I feel his first mission should be to China, to investigate Uighur slave labour in the open-pit neodymium mines and solar PV factories; to deliver a lecture on dumping tactics with special reference to 'green' manufactured products; and to initiate a detailed study of the carbon content of said 'green' goods.

I stand ready to join the Labour Party and enter the House of Commons to take up the reins at DESNZ.  With the new government being such accomplished masters of the snap by-election this shouldn't be a problem.  A peerage will do, if needs be.  But I fancy Rosebank and Jackdaw will already have been approved, while they await my arrival for some more complex decisions that require attention.

ND    

______________

UPDATE:  Gotta love this from Guido - 

Is there a funnier post for Miliband than one that requires extensive use of the government jet?

The great Miliband guessing game

Well, then: is it to be:

• Thanks, Ed, but you're not needed now
• Ed, I need you to to stay where you are, it's great job you're doing in keeping the greens onside
• Ed, you're my Chancellor - you're the only one who can solve Rubik's Cube
• Ed?  No no, it's David I wanted on the line

And so we all wait.  Meanwhile, however, a couple of big energy decisions must surely be made real soon:

1. Rosebank (oil) and Jackdaw (gas)
2. DESNZ capital budget being sacrificed for Defence spending: where does the axe fall?

1.  The joke is that the Jackdaw platform has already been built and is out there in the North Sea, fully installed and ready to go; first gas in October if the starting gun is fired this month.  Surely, surely that wouldn't have happened without a clear nod from the Treasury?  Nobody develops an offshore platform on spec.  It really does look as though the formal go-ahead decision is just a formality.  Also, the case for home-produced gas is the easier to make, for Mili or whoever has to front for it.  (Mili always gets Shanks to front for the decisions he's unhappy about.)

Rosebank is a bit different: it'll be produced via a floating structure / subsea completion.  Again, the structure is complete and making its way over from Norway, but the briefing is, that's being done at the producers' own risk.  And if it's a 'no', it could be used elsewhere.  Also the argument for loacl oil production, though still perfectly sound, has just a couple of extra (low) hurdles to jump: and Mili has staked his colours to the 'No Rosebank' mast - so, a bit of humiliation involved.

What would be even funnier, is if he gets offered the Treasury provided that he green-lights both Jackdaw and Rosebank on his way to the DESNZ door.  Does Burnham have a sense of humour?  He certainly likes industry and jobs.   

2.  OK, so the A46 Newark Bypass extension has been sacrificed for Defence spending.  Big deal: it was only ever a nice-to-have.  Yep, the big capital budgets to be raided will be those of Mili at DESNZ.  Now most DESNZ capital schemes are loaded onto electricity bill-payers' bills, the big exceptions being:

    (a)  HMG's equity contributions to Sizewell C, given that EDF refuses to take equity risk (which we've written about many times)

    (b)  The farce that is Carbon Capture and Storage - by far the biggest (thus far) at £21bn (sic) of HMT's best pounds, NOT recharged to bill-payers.  Very unusual.  And very stupid. 

I think we can guess which will be the sacrificial lamb, notwithstanding Mili's considerable attachment to it.  

More popcorn, please, as I raise a hopeful glass to Burnham's sense of fun.

UPDATE:  Right on cue, this from the DTel: 

Miliband willing to approve North Sea oil to land job as chancellor - Energy Secretary wants to prove he is a ‘pragmatist’ rather than a ‘zealot’ on environmental policy to help his case for being chancellor

ND

The 'evolution' of the Russian oil and gas industry

Wind the clock back to 2022 and Russia has the biggest oil and gas infrastructure in the world: the country is sometimes referred to sarcastically as a nuclear-armed gas station.  It's fully functional, although not very sophisticated - the amount of wasteful flaring that goes on is legendary (of gas at oil production facilities, and of oil at gas producing locations); and there are few conventional sophistications such as accurate metering and non-return valves.  Nonetheless, it's the primary pillar of the Russian economy.

What a target!

Well, Ukraine started setting about it seriously in 2024.  To start with, their offensive means being rather slight at that stage, they went for plant in the neighbouring oblasts.  Right from the word go, these pinpricks revealed huge, structural vulnerabilities.

Vulnerable ...

Russia immediately realised just how serious it might be, and set about devising counter-measures.  They encouraged oil enterprises to invest in small arms (requiring a change in the law) for local defence[1], and experimented with wire cages and steel gantries to create physical barriers - an utterly futile effort because, even if a drone hits a cable ten metres away from its target, it stands a very good chance of rupturing it anyway.  We know all this because helpful Russian locals are keen on home videos and social media - and of course good old Google Earth provides astonishingly detailed coverage of most of western Russia, filmed closer to sensitive facilities than is allowed in Western countries! 

Then, there's that lack of non-return valves, meaning that a single blazing tank can burn for ten days - there's no way of cutting it off from the pipeline network which then gaily feeds the flames.   Oh, and effecting repairs ain't so easy: any component even vaguely sophisticated comes only from western manufacturers and is under embargo - meaning costly and time-consuming black market procurement. 

Other palliative measures have been tried.  Initially, officials would simply lie about the damage done.   There are strict Russian injunctions against publishing photos of these goings-on - hah!  To this day, every strike is broadcast to the www in realtime.  Then, there are missions by the Orthodox Church, variously to bless oil facilities, to pray for their safety, and to send clerics to attend upon the fire-fighting efforts[2].  Evidently this approach has its limits.[3]

Well.  As Ukraine develops ever longer-range strike capabilities, the list of potential targets gets bigger and bigger.  And of course their location is known rather exactly, and they can't be moved!  Nor, in practical terms, can they be defended.  They are being picked off, one by one - the three most noteworthy being perhaps successive raids on the main Moscow City refinery and one close to St Petersberg, plus Omsk.  The first two of these prime targets bring the war rather close to home for everyone in those cities with a pair of eyes (and a nose); the third sets distance records (getting on for 3,000 km).  And of course, there are serious fuel shortages - in Russia! - to the point where exports have been banned and very large-scale imports are being sought; but the harvest is still under threat, industry is feeling the pinch, and ordinary Russians, particularly in the south and west, are really stuck.

Notwithstanding the Deputy PM's classically euphemistic description of this, ("interruptions in the supply of fuel caused by changes in logistics") even Putin - who likes to keep his hands clean from disasters of all kinds - has been forced to pronounce.  Here are his dicta of yesterday: 

He called the difficulties with fuel "temporary" and associated, among other things, with "the enemy's attempts to disrupt the vacation season".  (Oh yes, the Russian vacation season is uppermost in Kyiv's strategic thinking.)  

"The safety margin of the Russian energy system is one of the highest in the world." (Measured by reserves in the ground, presumably.) 

"The enemy is trying to create a nervous situation in Russian society."  (Trying?) 

He called for a speedy decision to subsidize fuel purchases  (Not clear where the money will come from for that, but let's see.) 

He instructed the speedy deployment of "the capabilities of small and medium-sized businesses in the production of petroleum products". 

This last one is very interesting.  Sure enough, for a country in dire straits, it's a feasible approach to squeeze a few more drops from what's available.  We know from how ISIS conducted its affairs in the areas of Iraq and Syria it once controlled, that home-made micro-refineries are a Thing.  And of course Russians are pretty well versed in home-based distillation!  All this said, at the end of the day a big economy, and certainly one with a huge defence-industrial base on a war footing and trying to ramp up as fast as possible, needs massive quantities of high-grade fuel that only large-scale, uninterrupted, fully industrial production processes can provide - as 1944-45 Germany discovered.

However laughable micro-refineries are as a 'solution' to Russia's problem, one can't rule out a proliferation of medium-sized plant - given time.  But development of this on any scale would be a matter of years, not months, and require skills and components that "medium-size businesses" won't find readily to hand - even if their staff all manage home-made vodka stills on the side.  And it would never be able to produce high-grade product.  And there would be other vulnerable choke-points to be found in such a newly-diversified system.  And individual new targets would be even less plausibly covered by air defences.  Etc etc.  In sum: this is truly desperate stuff.

ND

[1]  As one Russian milblogger put it, "successfully" shooting down a drone with small arms directly over the target is likely to be "a posthumous achievement".  Gotta love Russian sarcasm.

[2]  In one famous incident, a posse of Orthodox clerics attending a tank blaze after three days of futile fire-fighting to assist with their very best prayers, were killed when the tank exploded.  The same fire burned on for another week.

[3]  But clerical efforts continue.  The Church has been ordered to organise a pilgrimage, starting out at the Omsk facility, Russia's largest (now closed following this week's bombardment), and proceeding to join the dots of refineries all along a route ending in Crimea.  Reportedly, the Church has refused to carry out the last bit because Crimea is too dangerous for clerics just now.  But the Church has renewed its demands for the raising of tithes, priority for priests in gasoline allocations, and the banning of abortion and neo-paganism.  See?  Russia is a different world.  

Farage takes The Initiative. Hmm.

So: seeing himself increasingly caught up in a thorny thicket of unwanted and very awkward controversy, Nigel Farage has Taken The Initiative.  Well, an initiative.  

Long-time readers will know that I place great store on proactive, creative initiative-taking.  It's not as common a trait as you'd expect or hope, and that includes most of our "leaders", the vast majority of whom are governed strictly by whatever rulebook and conventions they were brought up with.  It's a pretty poor show when Peter Mandelson is the prime example of a relentlessness initiative-taker - always aware of the very many levers that are within grasp, and using them imaginatively.  Elon Musk is another.

In its rarity and political importance, initiative-taking shares aspects in common with the ability to strategise.  Again, you'll know my views on this and the example I often cite, George "Boy Genius" Osborne.  Clearly, the man is a natural strategiser - of the inveterate student-politics kind; and we could add Dominic Cummings and Morgan McSweeney to the short list of UK political thinkers - but that's not enough.  What's needed, of course, is good strategy, and Osborne wasn't great at that (never ideal in a Chancellor of the Exchequer).  Any old strategy taken from some well-thumbed playbook isn't always enough; and military history is replete with fatally bad strategisers.

And so it is with initiative: Farage needed a good one, and it's not at all clear this is it.  What do we reckon?

ND

Desperate bluffing by Putin

This post will come replete with major caveats in due course, but let's start with the headline.  Vladimir Putin is bluffing like crazy over the inevitability of his victory, and will continue doing so for the next three months (until after the upcoming "elections") against the seemingly slender hope that Trump will somehow ride to his rescue and force Ukraine to accept something that can be portrayed as "victory" for Russia.  Given that use of nukes is off the table, bluffing plus outright airborne slaughter in Kyiv are practically all he has left.

To sum up:

• the Russian 2026 "spring-summer offensive" has yielded miniscule net[1] territorial gains at the cost of phenomenal Russian casualties.  All objectives remain unmet.
• counting from the front line to St Petersburg and beyond, the Ukrainian medium- and deep-strike campaign, notably on oil and logistics assets, has: seriously incommoded Russian forces at the front (supplies must be brought up by drone and on foot); paralysed transport on major roads in the occupied territories, with critical shortages of fuel - & water - in Donetsk, and Crimea almost under siege; made significant dents in manufacturing facilities of the Russian industrial-military complex across a very wide swathe of the country; seriously hampered telecomms and air movements across western Russia; wreaked colossal damage on the oil industry, with severe shortages resulting (and forcing large-scale imports from Belarus, India and other nations) that must soon have significant inflationary, industrial and food-production consequences; via vast palls of black smoke over Moscow and St Petersburg, demonstrated vividly and demeaningly to the populace that nowhere is safe from highly accurate drone and missile bombardment.
• having thus far failed miserably in the planned effort to censor the internet in Chinese style, Putin faces a populace that can see all this quite clearly.  Not withstanding the existence of some loyalist diehards that will cling to Putin's infallibility as they did to Stalin's, the greater part of the people, realistic cynics as most Russians are, have clocked it all as being at the very least, not at all what they were sold back in 2022, but in fact starting to impinge on them directly.  To call this "unrest" would be to misunderstand how Russia has always been: but it's a near equivalent.
• the economy is in a bad way, and short term relief from Iran-war oil prices has been overtaken by those prices falling back again PLUS the abovementioned actual shortage of oil products.

There are very big decisions pending for after those elections, in two categories:

1. the economy: if nothing changes, really deep measures will be needed;
2. manpower: if Putin decides to soldier on, even just to the extent of trying to capture the rest of the Donbass (and his stated territorial goals extend a lot further than that), he'll need a very large intake of new conscripts - perhaps a million.

So: given that's all 3 months away, during which time Putin doubtless feels he can (just about) maintain a facade of BAU, he sees little downside to giving the Trump card one last play.  Look, we're advancing on all fronts - let me lend you this magnifying glass - and can carry on like this forever!  Get that clown to surrender, now - and cash in your Nobel Prize voucher!!  Yeah, right.  Even Witless-Dumkopf, even Trump himself, have probably spotted the flaws in that line of reasoning.

One other thing, before the caveats.  L'il Volodya also shows signs of losing it a bit.  It's always necessary to enter notes of caution here because he's been written off as a dying man for years.  But in a very high-profile set-piece "interview" he gave recently, he dropped a real Biden of a clanger and declared Ukrainian troops in a town deep inside Russia were only 2 km away from being totally surrounded.  He was obviously mistaking it for some tiny Ukrainian settlement he'd been briefed about but forgotten the name of - commentators have made various guesses because it's not entirely obvious which.  But this in the full glare of prime time Russian TV.  Not a helpful incident.

And the caveats?  It's basically the usual one, with a specific twist.  It's always wise to assume that there is no limit to the suffering that can be imposed on the Russian people, however cynical they may be.  That's one manifestation of "the mysterious Russian soul"[2] that they are so proud of.  And I doubt there are any moral limits to the extent Putin is willing to exploit that, even if there might be some political constraints in an internet age.  So my opening list of how bad things are in Russia needs to be considered in that light.  BUT it cuts both ways: Ukrainians are equally able to take it, as they've proved heroically for over four years in defiance of almost all expectations.  Are they crumbling in the next 3 months?  No, they ain't.  And of course they have the tremendous backstop of EU / UK funding, without which it would have all been up for them some while ago.

The special twist is this: all the evidence points to Putin not knowing in detail what's actually happening.  He uses neither mobile phone nor laptop.  The military accounts he receives are just the icing on the mighty traditional Russian layer-cake of filing "beautiful reports" at every stage along the chain; and we can probably assume the economic and industrial reports he gets are similarly sugared.  It's only occasionally that hard facts seem to get through to him.  This all makes it even more likely that he'll play the game of attrition by infinite suffering.  Scary stuff.

There is one last fallback for Putin - China: because we all assume Xi won't let him "actually lose the war".  But Xi also serves as a restraining influence: he's ruled out nukes in no uncertain terms; and note how the 2024 experiment using 10,000 North Korean troops in front-line roles quietly came to an end without being scaled up, or even just continued. 

And "actually losing the war" may not be a relevant criterion: look how badly things have become for Putin with China notionally having his back!  I don't think he'll be getting any change from the Donald either just now: a(nother) failed "peace process" is the last thing Trump needs before the mid-terms.  

ND

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[1] 'Net', because Ukraine has been successfully counter-attacking on a couple of fronts and re-seized territory of its own.

[2] Here's some more of my attempts to illuminate these big cultural differences. 

"Manchesterism" - seems like we've been here before

 ... and it didn't end well.

"Manchesterism" - not to be confused with Manchester Liberalism - is intended to mean something easily grasped for political purposes: greater interventionism at the civic level.  This is supposed, a priori, to have obvious benefits yielding excellent results.  Well, maybe, sometimes.  The ideal degree of devolution is as long as a piece of string: how many Scots feel their once vaunted education system, or the Welsh their vaunted health service, have benefitted from greater devolved control?  Objectively, the results suggest otherwise.  And the ludicrous Rebecca Long-Bailey's equally ludicrous 2019 Labour manifesto plans for ultra-devolution of the energy industry (down to the level of units of "around 200 households" owning their own local energy infrastructure) provide the reductio ad absurdum of 

And there are reasons to think that Burnham's model isn't what it's thought to be: that he's basically encouraged commercial property development on a significant scale, which can't easily be replicated across the nations.  A glance at the pages of every issue of Private Eye and its years-long revelations of naked, industrial-scale corruption on Teesside for the personal benefit of a very small number of individuals, shows that local devolved powers can end up being shockingly abused. 

But there's another factor.  Remember how Neville Chamberlain came to Westminster as the dynastic hereditary king of Birmingham, with municipalism in that other great city as his calling card.  He didn't do so well in the corridors of Whitehall - or of Bad Godersberg and Munich (notwithstanding some recent revisionist versions of events there).  Maybe in other nations there is a wothwhile tradition of fine presidents and prime ministers coming up the local government / Big City Mayoral route.  But not around these parts. 

Do we see any signs that Andy is up to the bigger job?  Municipalism is not enough, Mr Burnham.  

ND

Starmer goes "with good grace"? We'll be the judges ...

And so it came to pass.  Suddenly, all the fight went out of him.

"I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party ... and I accept that answer with good grace."

Oh, really?  Let us be the judges of that.  If I were a gullible Labour leftie who'd had higher hopes back in 2020, I'd be fairly bitter.  Andy "novelty factor" Burnham will be having all those hopes projected on him now.  Good luck with that.  I guess he's at least got the advantage that hopes will be set rather lower now.  "Hope he doesn't accept too many freebies ...";  "Maybe he believes in something ...".

Spare a thought for Sadiq Khan, who "paid tribute to Sir Keir Starmer as 'a man of great integrity' ".  Well, it takes one to know one: pardon me while I mop up this pool of spilled tea.  Oh, tragedy: this moment should surely have been Sadiq's - how he's been trying to figure out how he could do a Burnham before Burnham himself pulled it off.  So now he'll have to wait for another mainstream Labour meltdown.  If the Tories are the model for modern British politics, that'll be along as soon as the latest lettuce wilts.  Early GE, anyone?

That said, I'm not sure Khan looks terribly well just now.  Let's charitably blame the new haircut.  Now, about that critical upcoming NATO summit next month ... what's your foreign policy, Andy?  And defence spending?  They are all looking at you.

ND

Hattersley: a disarmingly honest old hypocrite

Well the tub of lard** lasted a lot longer than the lettuce, but now Roy Hattersley's gone.

Over the years he's come to our attention before, and BTL on the previous post one of our Anon's gave us two of Roy's fine pieces of cheery hypocrisy, both from the Grauniad.  Another gem worth recalling is something he wrote in his long-running Diary in the same newspaper:

I do not believe that there are young women who get themselves pregnant to qualify for a council house.  And even if I am wrong about this, it it to my credit that I don't believe it.

He knew he was in the wrong, but unlike most of these left-ish rogues, he didn't mind admitting it.   Refreshing, in its own way, I suppose.

ND

___________

** Oddly, that episode of HIGNFY seems to have been expunged from the www

Hockney - a true master

With the passing of David Hockney we have lost something precious: a master of his work.  I tend to think there are three pre-requisites for genuine artistry: that the artist should first be a complete master of the technicalities - craft before art; that they should have a fine eye (or ear) for abstraction; and boundless productivity.  Some might say that Vermeer provides a counter-example to the third of these, but I'd say that's a rarity.

Hockney had it all.   His output was legendary, of course: and his technical skills were that of an outright genius.  I recall a small, simple drawing he made of a muddy lane, and you could tell that what one was looking at was the indentations in the soft ground of where a pile of logs had been resting until recently at the roadside.  As if one was there. This is extraordinary stuff.

Crayon sketch: I did this - in homage - 50 years ago

The quick Guardian obit refers to "his fascination with perspective" but I don't think that's quite right.  Mere perspective is old hat: it was a fascination with depth, and how it can be conveyed in two-dimensional media - and in this, he was truly a revolutionary, going way beyond other depth-masters (Monet comes first to mind) in finding new ways to convey what all sighted people with two eyes experience all the time.  In particular, he worked on depth in its 4 dimensions, finding tech-facilitated ways to capture and portray the temporal aspect that always arises, because we can often only perceive depth by changing our point of view over an interval of time.   

His extremely well thought-out views on abstraction are important, too: and the accuracy of his eye in this regard was never in doubt.  In terms of mastery, abstraction and output he was the equal of Picasso (possibly also as innovator), though to different effect as he never really sought to go beyond the figurative.  He knew, though, as every good photographer does, that abstraction is at the heart of figurative representation.

ND