In their email newsletter at the weekend, Rob and Marcus—the editors of Delayed Gratification—wrote:

It’s said that the past is a foreign country, and just ten years ago the world certainly looked rather different. Referendums on Scottish independence and Brexit were still to come, the word ‘pandemic’ sounded like something from a sci-fi novel, and the notion of a game show host – who at the time was busy spreading racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace – becoming president himself was absolutely preposterous.

It’s been a heck of a decade.

Jonathan Moules recently wrote in the FT about the British Library’s ongoing response to a significant cyber attack. The piece focused on the role of the Chief Executive Officer, Roly Keating.

I have no inside knowledge about what happened at the British Library. It is perfectly plausible that the Library’s public face on the events might not truly reflect the experience of the staff working for the organisation. In addition, the piece is light on accountability for the (assumed) security lapses which led to the attack in the first place. Nevertheless, as a profile of a senior leader responding to an incident, a few things stood out to me.

Firstly, I admired Keating’s calmness. Moules explicitly describes him as ‘calm’ and ‘softly-spoken’, but it was Keating’s declaration that ‘I’m a believer in eight hours’ sleep’ that stood out to me.

When big things happen, it is second nature to panic and rush headlong into responding. The more one panics, the more urgent tasks appear to become. Teams must work ever-increasing hours at an ever-increasing pace until they inevitably burn out. This is a pattern I’ve seen more times in my career than I’d care to count.

The secret to things going well is for the person leading the response to remain calm. This takes considerable training and enormous effort in the moment. It usually requires disappointing people who are panicking: it might mean declining requests for hourly updates from people with every right to ask for them. It often means slowing the response down, acting on the insight that doing the right thing at a medium pace is considerably better than doing the wrong thing quickly. Most of all, it means projecting calmness and control.

Keating says, ‘This was a situation we had thought about, we had rehearsed.’

You can almost hear those words as the opening to the initial ’emergency meeting’ that Keating chaired. It’s easy to understand how they would imbue a sense of calm among those attending. It’s reassurance that, while this situation is unprecedented, it isn’t unexpected. It’s just time to follow the plan.

And that’s the second thing that stood out to me: they had a plan, and more importantly, the person leading the response knew they had a plan, had confidence in it, and followed it. This shouldn’t be surprising, yet it is frighteningly common to find people trying to lead incidents who are either unaware of the plan or disregard it.

Of course, having rehearsed the plan is a great help in enabling a sense of calm, so this is self-reinforcing. Yet, it’s not uncommon to hear of senior leaders who fail to prioritise preparation for unlikely contingencies, thereby shooting themselves in the foot.

The final thing—and it’s hard to know how much of this is down to Moules’s writing—is the clarity of thought in the response. Keating uses plain English in describing ‘an emergency meeting with library executives and the security team’, not some opaque jargon like ‘establishing an incident response cell.’ Moules talks about ‘articulating choices’, not ‘developing an options appraisal’.

It was an article that gave me a little bit of hope.

At 2am last Sunday, as the temperature dropped below zero, a four-week-old baby was pulled out of the English Channel, clinging to life. Alongside, a pregnant woman with advanced hypothermia was rescued and admitted to hospital. Four people were found dead in the water; another body washed up hours later. All had been trying to cross the Channel to reach the UK.

Today, just three days later, we have the spectacle of the Conservative party voting to prevent people from claiming asylum in the UK. Instead, applicants will be flown to Rwanda to try their luck there, a country that the Government’s Bill declares safe—contrary to the view of the Supreme Court.

Rishi Sunak calls this ‘an effective deterrent’ to crossing the Channel. For this to be true, the possibility of living safely in Rwanda must be a fate more grave than the possibility of watching your newborn baby drown in freezing seawater in the dead of night. As Sophy Ridge might say: “I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but you can’t possibly believe that, can you?”

The Home Office has suggested that most of those who come to the UK in small boats are likely to have valid asylum claims. They are genuinely fleeing for their lives, and the rules allow them to resettle in the UK. In 2021, the then Home Secretary elected to lie about this, falsely claiming that ‘70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants’. No apology has been forthcoming.

The man who was, until last night, deputy chair of the Conservative Party, says that asylum seekers ought to ‘fuck off back to France’. He pretends not to understand that the UK’s asylum laws are more generous than those in France. In the UK, more than 80% of asylum claims are successful; in France, more than 80% are rejected.

The Rwanda plan maintains the UK rules, cements the underlying calculation and boosts the business model of people traffickers: risking life by crossing the Channel still offers the best hope by far for asylum seekers to be allowed to resettle in a country where they are safe from persecution.

There is a simple way to ‘stop the boats’—or, more accurately, to stop frightened, persecuted people risking their lives. Dangerous crossings of the Channel in small boats are unnecessary, a product solely of Government cruelty: we have ferries and a tunnel. The Government could allow people to apply for asylum before they arrive. If successful, the Government could provide safe passage. Instead, the Government prefers to continue with a system under which the only way that people can claim asylum is by coming to the UK, a fact which literally requires small boat crossings and on which the entire business model of human traffickers across the Channel depends.

Moving to offshore applications wouldn’t be easy: it’s hard for someone who is fleeing persecution to fill in forms and engage with bureaucracy. It would need to be a caring, supportive, accessible, approachable, thoughtfully designed service. It would probably be expensive. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives support this approach.

It takes only a passing acquaintance with history to understand that regret most often stems from treating people unkindly and inhumanely, not the converse. This isn’t a difficult long-term call, but the state of our politics means it’s not necessarily an electorally expedient one.

The politically astute thing for the Conservative party would have been to couple offshore applications with the Rwanda scheme: let people apply before reaching the UK and be given passage straight to Rwanda if successful, or passage to the UK if extenuating circumstances apply. It would still be an appallingly inhumane derogation of international law, but it would have been far more likely actually to stop dangerous crossings.

Instead, we’re invited to believe that the Prime Minister believes that living in Rwanda is a fate worse than death.

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

On Sunday, the country was subject to the ignominy of our Prime Minister standing next to a flood and talking about how his Government had spent £5.2bn on flood defences—as he put it, ‘overall investment that’s going into flood defences is at a very, very high level’.

I don’t know what reaction this was intended to provoke, but it’s hard to believe that anyone who witnessed the spectacle didn’t think, ‘Well, it’s not bloody working, is it?’

This would be a slightly unfair conclusion—Government investment in flood defences protected thousands of homes—but the choice of imagery is baffling to the point of incompetence.

King Cnut is often maligned as believing he could use his power to stop the tide from coming in, whereas the legend is actually that he commanded the sea to retreat as a demonstration of his own lack of power. There is a hint of the, shall we say, ‘silly’ version of the Cnut story in standing in a flooded area and talking about the billions the Government has spent on avoiding that very fate.

Of course, the heavy periods of rain which cause this sort of flooding will only increase as we further corrupt Earth’s climate. A warmer atmosphere means more evaporation which means more rain: I don’t need to rehearse the water cycle for you, though basic scientific principles are sometimes a challenge for senior politicians.

Sunak’s decision to pour cold water on the UK’s net zero strategy also guarantees pouring floodwater into people’s kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms.

For example, over 80% of new cars sold in Norway are now electric; sales of petrol and diesel cars will be banned next year. Rishi Sunak refuses to aim for the same here even within a decade.

When Sunak expels hot air in claiming that the UK is ‘leading the world’ on climate change, it neither makes it true nor dries anyone’s flooded home. It only serves to underline his disconnect from the reality the rest of us face.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that most people don’t visit my blog for incisive football analysis, even though I have even been to a match at St James’ Park. But that’s not going to stop me.

Yesterday, in the FA Cup, Newcastle beat Sunderland. The match was held at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, and earlier this week, the plans for the day resulted in a controversy which caught my eye.

Some corporate guests who supported Newcastle United were to be hosted in a bar at the Stadium of Light, with the seats selling for £600. The bar—as one might expect—is usually decked out in Sunderland-supporting slogans and whatnot. Given the plan to use the space for rival supporters, these were temporarily covered with Newcastle-supporting alternatives.

This is exactly the decision I would have made in the drastically unlikely situation of being in charge of the decor for a football stadium bar on derby day. If I were flogging tickets for £600, I’d take it as read that the bar should be decorated for the supporters who are expected to be in it. It just seems polite: as a host, I’d want my guests to be relaxed. And, frankly, I’d expect severe complaints if I hosted a party in a space decorated for the rivals. Seriously, I don’t think I’d have given this a second thought.

It turns out, though, that I would be in mega-trouble. It’s the kind of thing that leads to a corporate statement referencing ‘a serious error of judgement’ and the board of directors requesting that ‘an immediate review is undertaken to determine how this process unfolded.’

Blimey. I know nothing about football, but the error and the scale of the controversy here make me feel like I’ve beamed down from a different planet.

Cultural and societal norms are tricky things. I’ve lived in the North East for decades but could have felt like a social pariah for making an error in basic sporting etiquette. It’s easy to forget how much of this stuff imbues our everyday lives. It must be near-impossible for those who live and work in places with entirely different cultures to feel comfortable, confident and accepted in their new homes. Trip wires lurk in the most unlikely places.

It’s a reminder that we should all be a little more patient, understanding and helpful when people get the basics wrong. There’s a line in Philippa Perry’s recent book:

Often we can fall into the trap of interpreting behaviour by what it would mean if we did whatever the other person is doing. Someone else’s behaviour has a different meaning from what it would mean if you did it.

A little understanding can go a long way.

The pictures in this post are from my own visit to the Stadium of Light in 2019. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Last week, The Times’s leading article asked:

Why should doctors, trained at great expense by the state, not be obliged to serve a minimum number of years in the NHS?

Politicians occasionally suggest that doctors who have been trained in the UK—and who have accumulated an average of £71,000 in debt in the process—should have a period of indentured service to the NHS or else pay a still higher contribution to the cost of their training to be freed from this requirement.

I always wonder why the equivalent suggestion isn’t made regarding politicians themselves. Elections are costly, and when MPs resign mid-term, before the end of the period of service for which they were elected, there is a cost to the public purse of running an election to replace them. Why not require MPs to serve their term or repay the by-election costs if they don’t?

The answer is obvious: it’s in no one’s interest to have a de-motivated, disruptive, non-attending Nadine Dorries of an MP, trapped in a job they want to leave because of a perceived ‘fine’ if they quit—a ‘fine’ that they may not be able to afford. And it strikes me that the same applies to doctors.

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

In response to the tragic death of 27-year-old Leonard Farruku aboard the Government’s Bibby Stockholm barge, the BBC reports that:

A Home Office spokesperson said it took its responsibility for the well-being of those on board incredibly seriously.

Even before this death, I would have strongly preferred the Home Office to treat its responsibilities with credible seriousness.

To suggest, after this man’s death, that they treat the weight they give their responsibility is incredible—as in, ‘not credible: that cannot be believed; beyond belief’—strikes me as being both callous and, probably, Freudian.

Sixty years ago today, President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I had yet to be born, but the occasion of the anniversary brings to mind my visit to Dallas five years ago.

I wrote at the time about how my mental picture of the area in which the assassination occurred differed markedly from reality, despite having seen it on screen countless times. I think about that from time to time, especially in those disorientating moments when my perception of a situation suddenly shifts.

I also often find myself thinking about the memorial, and in particular, how the emptiness and absence was the thing that made it so remarkably effective. A blank space can be more powerful than words. Silence can be more powerful than speech.

In my post at the time, I also wrote:

Would anybody really want such a focus on their death as opposed to their life? Why would anyone want to be remembered as the victim of their own murder, as opposed to being remembered for their lifetime of achievements?

And that, perhaps, is the strongest sentiment I associate with this anniversary. I think my loved ones know that I don’t mind what happens to me after I die, and that they should do whatever brings them the most comfort. What with being dead and all, I won’t really mind. But I have a strong aversion to being remembered for my death, or my death being marked in preference to my life.

This makes this post a bit hypocritical, I realise, but I hope that no one marks the 60th anniversary of my death. I mean, it’s hardly a problem I expect to have, I’m sure I’ll be long-forgotten. But I’d much rather be remembered in the context of my life than of my death.

In December 2019, the Conservative Party won the UK General Election with a minority of the vote: 43.6% of voters supported them or—if you prefer—29.3% of the electorate.

In the former Home Secretary’s second letter of resignation from that position, published yesterday, she claimed:

I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019.

The majority—56.4% of voters—supported candidates other than Conservatives.

Perhaps political maths isn’t Braverman’s strong suit.

Forty-one days ago, Rishi Sunak declared in his party conference speech:

Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had thirty years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one. Thirty years of vested interests standing in the way of change. Thirty years of rhetorical ambition which achieves little more than a short-term headline.

You either think this country needs to change or you don’t.

Yesterday, the man who led the Conservative Party for more than a third of those thirty failing years was appointed by Sunak as our Foreign Secretary.

It seems that Sunak is placing himself in the ‘don’t’ category.