In the FT Weekend, Tim Harford recently played with the latest version of ChatGPT and concluded that:

large language models can be phenomenal bullshit engines. The difficulty here is that the bullshit is so terribly plausible. We have seen falsehoods before, and errors, and goodness knows we have seen fluent bluffers. But this? This is something new.

It made me reflect on the types of, erm, lexical nonsense I come across in my day-to-day life.

The kind I find most irritating by far is deliberately obfuscatory language. I recently received an email referring to a ‘pathogen agnostic enabling technology’ and wondered why on Earth someone would write that: I didn’t understand what it meant, I’m fairly certain that most other readers didn’t either, and I’ve a strong suspicion that the author would also be unable to concisely define it. They were hiding their lack of understanding—or perhaps their inability to describe something clearly and concisely—behind a jargon phrase.

Yet, from a reader’s perspective, the advantage of this sort of word salad is that it’s clearly visible: it telegraphs a lack of understanding up front.

Perhaps I really ought to be more exercised about plausible rubbish: the sort of stuff whose clarity of expression lulls one into a false sense of assurance, from which the logical leaps are harder to spot. That seems far more insidious.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

My sister bought this memoir for me, commenting that the tales of camping holidays in the UK and France in the 1970s would remind me of our childhood—though I must immediately clarify that, as the youngest sibling, the 1970s predate my arrival!

The book did, however, bring back memories. It was funny: there were anecdotes that made me laugh out loud, and also reminded me of situations in which we’d found ourselves.

Kennedy spins a good yarn: there aren’t many writers who can eke out pages of humour and tension from getting lost when driving in France, for example. She has real storytelling skill.

By the end, though, I began to struggle: it did feel a little strung out and perhaps a touch repetitive to me. To sustain its length, I would have preferred it to be a little more grounded in growth or self-reflection, or perhaps to have a little more variety of mood or depth of characterisation.

But I nevertheless enjoyed this. It was very nostalgic, and I would never have come across this book by other means, so that makes it a great present.

Here are three bridges crossing the Ouseburn.

Nearest to the camera is the Ouseburn Viaduct, which carries the East Coast Mainline. It was built of timber in 1839, and rebuilt in iron thirty years later. When I took a photo of it twelve years ago, it was undergoing an extensive restoration.

Furthest from the camera is the 1878 Byker Bridge, originally a toll bridge—though the charge was removed in 1895. It carries the road now designated the A193.

In the middle is the newest of the three, Arup’s much-celebrated 1970s curving concrete Byker Viaduct, with joints glued together. It carries the Tyne & Wear Metro between Manors and Byker.

Though people assume he was born in Denmark, Arup’s founder, Ove Arup, was in fact born a stone’s throw from the bridge in Heaton. He was born in 1895: closer in time to the construction of the two preceding bridges than the one his firm designed. He had retired by the time the firm took on the Byker Viaduct project.

Yesterday, I read Emilio Casalicchio’s excellent Politico article which gave a glimpse into the Conservative’s election campaign. I was struck by the line ‘launching the first attack by shooting yourself in the head doesn’t look so clever’.

But I was even more struck by the notion that the campaign had been led by a headstrong small team, which neither sought nor responded to external feedback. This is redolent of the flaws of Theresa May’s 2017 election campaign.

Perhaps responding well to feedback counterintuitively conflicts with the egotism necessary to seek public office. Perhaps this is only exacerbated for those seeking the top office in an era of ‘strongman leadership’.

It was certainly true that Sunak’s public response to even a hint of public criticism during the campaign was primarily defensive: he did not give the impression of being curious to better understand the alternative viewpoint, let alone to change course in response to it. It’s not like he’s alone; this behaviour is common.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a lot about the skill of constructively receiving feedback. I don’t think it is something that comes naturally to anyone, but it is a skill that’s particularly well-developed among people that I admire. Getting better at it has certainly been useful for me and has helped my professional development.

I recently read one of Arthur C Brooks’s articles in The Atlantic covering this topic, too. I enjoyed his observation that ‘once you depersonalize criticism, you can start to see it for what it is: a rare glimpse into what outsiders think.’

This is both blindingly obvious and yet also often missed: it’s easy to get too caught up in judging the person who wrote the comment or perhaps being defensive. But taking feedback exactly as it is offered—as in, this person thought X—can be radically helpful. One doesn’t need to agree with the other person’s viewpoint, but having knowledge of it can nevertheless be extremely useful.

After reading Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s book Thanks for the Feedback a few years ago, I added a link in my work email signature which gives people the opportunity to offer anonymous feedback. This has served me very well, giving me lots of opportunities to reflect and develop my understanding of others’ viewpoints. Philippa Perry’s book also offered some useful insights into contextualising and using feedback in a personal (as opposed to professional) context.

I can’t help but think that the world would be a better place if people were better equipped to receive criticism—politics would certainly be better for it. Failing to make use of feedback feels a bit like ‘shooting yourself in the head.’

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I wrote the other day about the effect on Britain of the last fourteen years. But politics is personal too.

When David Cameron became the first Conservative Prime Minister of the twenty-first century, Keir Starmer had been Director of Public Prosecutions for less than two years. He surely cannot have imagined that he’d be the next Labour Prime Minister. And yet here we are.

And yet, it must surely feel daunting. The New York Times yesterday talked about him inheriting a ‘legacy of ashes’, while Le Monde talked of ‘creaking public services and a flatlining economy’.

On top of that, he’s got a unsupportive press looking to land every possible blow, and an insurgent Reform party primed to cause as much political instability as they can muster.

It’s a tough old job he’s got on his hands, and I don’t envy him.

A battered, faded and slightly wonky UK goes to the polls today, with the incumbent party dogged by scandal and ‘rotted through with individually minor corruptions, increasingly detached from the nation it governed, seemingly on the verge of final collapse’. Even The Sun, never shy about regurgitating Conservative talking points, couldn’t bring itself to back them.

As we tune in this evening to watch the results, we’ll witness the peculiarly British spectacle of election winners surrounded by defeated novelty candidates in outlandish costumes, only one of which will be called Jacob Rees-Mogg.

We also have to listen to a lot of blowhards making outlandish claims about the result. In the aftermath of the 2019 election, Donald Trump promised ‘a massive new Trade Deal’ between the UK and USA but couldn’t deliver it; Sir Ed Davey called the end of Nicola Sturgeon’s 2019 campaign ‘not very dignified’, before he spent most of the 2024 campaign deliberately falling in lakes; and the received wisdom among most political commentators on election night was that the Tory ’80-strong majority could be big enough to repel Labour’s next advance in five years’. Ho hum.

But not all of the commentary is nonsense. In the aftermath of the 2019 election, The Guardian’s view was that ‘Mr Johnson has won a great victory. But his problems are only just beginning.’

We couldn’t know at the time how salient that observation was. One suspects that the same will be true for tomorrow’s occupant of 10 Downing Street.

The final Survation MRP poll of the UK general election campaign was published yesterday evening, predicting that the Conservative Party will secure only 64 Parliamentary seats. I don’t have much faith in that number—I reckon they will end up on three figures—but it is undeniable that the self-styled ‘most successful political party in the world’ may be losing its touch.

It’s less than three years since we were told that Boris Johnson—out campaigning for the first time yesterday—was preparing for a further decade in power, aiming to beat Thatcher’s longevity as Prime Minister. He’s now the last-but-one Prime Minister and seems likely to gain his third successor by the end of the week.

As it seems likely that the latest era of Tory government is finally limping to a conclusion, it’s worth reading William Davies in The LRB summing up the approach to government over the last fourteen years.

It is mind-boggling to contemplate that of those fourteen years, only three and a half were spent with a Prime Minister enjoying a majority they secured at a general election.

Of those, two and a half were achieved thanks to Johnson and Dominic Cummings installing the Vote Leave campaign in Downing Street, kicking high-profile Tory Remainers out of the parliamentary party, and then fighting an election on the single pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’. That leaves just the single year Cameron enjoyed following the 2015 election, which he had fought on a promise to hold the referendum that ended his premiership.

It’s also startling to think that, in many ways, the most politically stable years were those between 2010 and 2015, with hardly any turnover of cabinet ministers despite—or perhaps because of—the fundamental challenges inherent to coalition government. If it weren’t for all that followed, we might reasonably conclude that an unstable foundation begets unusually stable government.

International politics looks set to cause some significant instability in the next fourteen years—indeed, in the next fourteen months—so goodness knows how our new Government will fare. On hope so much depends.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

There was a story by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times recently about the dress code in the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot, which included the startlingly specific fact that hats:

must include a base that is at least four inches in diameter. That means “fascinators,” those bizarre concoctions of net and sparkle that sit on the edge of a headband like a bird on a twig, are not allowed.

There are few things I’m less likely ever to need to know than this dress code, but it made me wonder quite how specific the requirements could possibly be. The answer is ‘very’.

Friedman quotes a milliner: ‘To err on the side of extravagance as opposed to modesty is a joy for everyone.’

I find within myself a surprising degree of sympathy for that perspective, but it seems a shame that it applies only to women. Men are prohibited any hint of extravagance: my choice is only of a grey or black top hat, about which colour ribbons, feathers or other embellishments are expressly prohibited. Even for ties—the definition of a useless embellishment—‘novelty patterns’ are disallowed. It’s just a sea of boring men in dull grey (or black or navy) suits.

It feels like such a strange choice in the modern world. It doesn’t even feel particularly traditional for a country with quite outlandish masculine fashion traditions—there will be working blokes there wearing scarlet jackets, gold buttons, winged epaulets with bloody great bear skins on their heads for goodness’ sake, with a far longer history than a Moss Bros top hat.

If it were me, I’d go full on ‘suits of armour’, ‘gold-threaded royal tabards’ and ’mandatory codpieces’. The current option just seems terribly boring… but then, it was never my thing to begin with.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.