It was Luke O’Neil’s Hell World that first drew my attention to a particular section of a speech recently given by Donald Trump in Las Vegas:

And remember, Florida’s easier than other places. You have the ocean and you have the sun. There’s something about that that works. But, you have the sun, too, but you don’t have the ocean. I can tell. You definitely don’t have the ocean. Maybe someday you’ll have the ocean, you never know.

I haven’t heard how Trump delivered the line, but like O’Neil, I think there’s something appallingly poetic about “maybe someday you’ll have the ocean”.

The phrase carries a sense of wistfulness and longing, offering the promise of something near-impossible. It feels hopeful and oddly aspirational, almost like a rallying cry issued by a general facing impossible odds.

Yet, beneath the surface, this line alludes to climate change—a scenario entailing incalculable human suffering, inevitable societal collapse, and the almost certain demise of the majority of the people he’s addressing.

In its dreadful, chilling brevity, the phrase encapsulates so much about our times. It is a horrifyingly poignant—yet perhaps entirely unintentional—reflection of the modern world.

It is one for the ages.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Imagine that your bank has made an error and erased all records of your assets. Your life is—at least temporarily—devastated. You complain, trying to unravel exactly what’s happened. However, you hit a brick wall when the bank’s senior leaders reveal that they’re not entirely sure what transpired because the issue was discussed via WhatsApp with ‘disappearing messages’ turned on. No permanent records of the conversation were kept.

Imagine that your relative dies in hospital due to a rumoured policy that patients in their condition will not receive treatment. An investigation is launched. It reaches no firm conclusions: the discussions about your relative occurred via WhatsApp, intermingled with messages about children’s piano lessons, and it is deemed in appropriate to disclose those private conversations.

Imagine that you were arrested by the police and detained for 72 hours, without ever truly knowing why. You complain. You are informed that no-one is precisely clear why you were detained: the officers in charge raised concerns with their superiors via WhatsApp, but nobody can recall the specifics, and the phone with the messages on it has broken.

In all of these cases, I imagine you would be outraged. Your outrage would probably be directed at the lack of permanent, contemporaneous records of both the decisions and the processes through which they were made. You’d likely consider the fact that WhatsApp was used to make the decisions as strange and inappropriate, but perhaps a second-order issue.

In the context of the covid inquiry, there is a lot in the press about WhatsApp messages. Their use in Government is frequently defended based on ‘efficiency’. I am concerned that they are only really more efficient because they circumvent processes seen as bureaucratic but which are fundamental to good Government, like contemporaneous record-keeping.

I think the press underplays this issue because they don’t see it: WhatsApp is commonly used within journalism, and for communications between politicians and journalists, so journalists are hindered in being able to take a step back and see the bigger picture of how inappropriate this is.

Take a step even further back and there’s a failure that underlies scores of recent Government scandals, from Partygate, to Richard Sharp, to Matt Hancock’s resignation, to Suella Braverman’s speeding course: the pathological inability of senior politicians to separate their professional roles from their personal lives. I have some sympathy with this, given how all-consuming some senior roles can be, but this ought to lead to particular effort to impose professional boundaries: I see no evidence of this.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

It has been asserted that we live in a ‘Post Truth’ society, where political debate is hampered by an inability to agree on basic facets of reality. This assertion holds true in many instances.

There are those who struggle to grasp the many meanings of the word ‘true:’ the moment someone uses a phrase like ‘my truth,’ they implausibly claim that veracity—‘the truth’—is the only sense in which they understand the word. It’s disheartening that they must go through life without any true friends.

So, I was delighted by the last section of the most recent episode of Politico’s podcast, ‘Westminster Insider.’ In the episode, Ailbhe Rea discusses the art of the political interview. In the final section, she addresses the disastrous interview which prompted Andrea Leadsom to withdraw from the Conservative leadership election in 2016—the infamous ‘motherhood’ interview.

Rea conducts interviews with both Leadsom and Rachel Sylvester, the journalist who interviewed Leadsom. The two have markedly different recollections of the crucial part of their interview which, on first hearing, seem entirely irreconcilable.

The genius of this episode lies in the fact that Rae then plays the dictaphone recording of the original interview for the listener, without comment. It immediately becomes apparent that the seemingly irreconcilable accounts are, in reality, both accurate.

Naturally, Sylvester and Leadsom’s recollections differ because they are viewing the same encounter from different perspectives, focusing on different aspects of it. Neither is recalling the complete picture: and with only their own perspective to work from, how could they?

The episode serves as a poignant reminder that disagreement on basic facts is not always born of deceit: sometimes, recollections can differ in ways that are entirely honest. Despite appearing contradictory, neither Leadsom nor Sylvester’s account was inaccurate. ‘Facts’ that appear mutually exclusive aren’t always so.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

I try not to rant about politics. It achieves nothing and it’s not great for my blood pressure. As I’m not willing to become a politician myself, what right do I have to throw mud from the sidelines?

But occasionally, the hypocrisy becomes too much.

The Conservative Party pushed voter ID laws through Parliament. One of the effects of this legislation was to disenfranchise millions of British citizens. The final number who were turned away from polling stations in the recent local elections hasn’t yet been collated.

Yet, yesterday’s right-leaning newspapers were inexplicably keen to celebrate that a Conservative MP who championed voter ID has written to ask the Leader of the Opposition—a man with no ability to change the law on voting before the next general election—

Why do you think it’s right to downgrade the ultimate privilege of British citizenship—the right to vote in a general election?

Huh?

The image is an unmodified version of an official Government portrait used under this licence.

Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to Scottish politics, especially given how much closer I live to the Scottish parliament than to the UK parliament. Humza Yousaf seemed to me to come from nowhere to be installed as Scotland’s First Minister.

I was therefore pleased to come across a decent profile of him in, of all publications, Le Monde. I enjoyed his line about his culture being ‘bagpipes and bhangra’ and his combination of a kilt with a sherwani. It also, perhaps, took an international paper’s perspective to note that we have a Hindu Prime Minister and a Sikh First Minister, which only underlines the unsustainability of our lack of separation between church and state.

I was also delighted to learn that he’s exactly two weeks older than me, so I haven’t yet reached the age where the country’s senior leaders are younger than me.

Yesterday saw the World Health Organization declare the end of the global health emergency attributable to COVID-19. Today, for the UK at least, the focus shifts from a virus with a corona to, well, just the corōna.

Later, we’ll see the first United Kingdom Coronation of the century; of the millennium; of my lifetime. Or, as The Economist has it, ‘a man in London is about to be given a hat.’

Inevitably, this has made me reflect on my feelings about monarchy, which are not as straightforward as one might suppose.

Firstly—obviously—no-one would support the creation of a monarchy today. It’s absurdly anachronistic. It grants power and responsibility through birthright, it is the definition of antidemocratic, and symbolises limits on social mobility that hold us all back. Even with some elements of primogeniture having been removed, it is a system fundamentally rooted in gender inequality, perhaps never more obviously underlined than on a day when the wife of a son of a Prince Regent is crowned Queen.

Yet, I wouldn’t support an alternative. As long as the family are willing to continue to deliver the function, then having a head of state that none of us can choose, trapped in an endless stalemate of not being able to do anything meaningful without risking abolition, seems like a suitably British fudge. The system is obviously absurd and indefensible, and those—perversely—are its virtues. Instead of abolishing a symbol of inequality and suppression, let’s spend our effort on tackling inequality and suppression.

And yet, I do support disestablishment. It is absurd that monarchy gives us a state religion. It is profoundly wrong and demonstrably divisive that we have 26 English Bishops as automatic representatives of that religion in our legislature. This is the bit of monarchy that has a practical effect on all our lives, and if we’re going to abolish something, abolish that.

And this is the moment to do it. The 2021 census showed Christianity to be a minority religion in this country. Today, we anoint a King as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, alongside a Queen with whom he did not share the sacrament of marriage. Let him be the last. Let him call himself the ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘the faith’ if it pleases him. Let’s finally separate church and state.

In 2022, more people resigned from the Government than were accused of voter fraud. More people resigned as Prime Minister than were convicted of voter fraud.

You may therefore conclude that voter fraud isn’t the biggest current threat to our democracy. Of course, though, looking only at current threats is foolhardy: we must always be looking ahead and preparing for threats that are on the horizon.

Perhaps, therefore, the Government’s decision to introduce a requirement to show photo identification when voting is a smart move.

Perhaps, too, there is a good reason why a long-expired over-60 photographic Oyster card is valid for this purpose, while a just-issued over-18 photographic Oyster card is not. It would be cynical to lazily assume that this is reflective of the typical voting patterns among card carriers in each age bracket.

Approximately two million eligible voters don’t possess photo identification, and something like 1.9 million of them have been disenfranchised from today’s election, as they didn’t apply for a voter ID card nor a postal ballot. Still more will not know the rules and be turned away when they attend a polling station, and many won’t return.

But, the Government argues, this is essential for keeping our democracy safe. And, as is little mentioned by critics, the Electoral Commission agrees.

So let’s not give into cynicism: let’s assume that there are indeed good reasons to carefully protect the process for voting for local councillors.

Let’s assume that the Government is acting in all our best interests, not the narrow electoral interests of the governing party.

Let’s agree to blithely ignore the fact that just months ago, the governing party’s internal election to select a Prime Minister was held mostly online, with no attempt to check photographic identification at any point in the voting process.

Let’s agree to see the logic that electing a Prime Minister requires less security and rigour than electing a local councillor. After all, the turnover of the former these days is much greater than the latter.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Inflation is soaring,
Nations are warring,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

There’s industrial strife
And shortening spans of life,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

Our planet is burning,
Our children aren’t learning,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

We’re mining new coal
And missing key goals,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

We house people in squalor,
Tank versus the dollar,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

Hoards disenfranchised,
Leaders chastised,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

The number of people seeking asylum in the UK was 25% lower in 2022 than in 2002. Anyone saying that ‘tackling’ this is the UK’s top priority is having you on. And we obviously ought to treat people with kindness and compassion, not ship them to Rwanda.

Like me, you may have been wondering why you’ve been feeling exhausted this Easter weekend. If so, this section of Friday’s Politico London Playbook may hold an explanation:

Easter is a time for reflection — the perfect time, then, to cast one’s mind back to Boris Johnson’s Easter Sunday message last year. Johnson said the U.K. “bursts with new life and new hope” and “beyond the suffering lies redemption.” The jury might be out on the redemption front, but there’s sure been plenty of suffering for the Conservatives — Playbook’s ace reporter Noah Keate has rounded up a few of the year’s highlights.

Since last Easter: More than 100 Downing Street fixed penalty notices … 485 lost Tory seats at the local elections … Second place for the U.K. to Ukraine in Eurovision … One Sue Gray report … One MP resigning for watching porn in the Commons … One platinum jubilee … One (survived) vote of confidence in Johnson … Two Tory by-election defeats … 62 resignations in early July 2022 … Two Tory leadership contests … Two new PMs … Two new home secretaries … Three new chancellors … Four new education secretaries … 15 housing ministers since 2010 … One new monarch … Around 250,000 members of “The Queue” … One mini-budget … Over 1,000 mortgage products withdrawn from the market … Eightunforgettable BBC local radio interviews … Gavin Williamson’s third departure from government … Another NHS winter crisis … One Windsor Framework … One new Met Police commissioner … 

And breathe: … Twitter almost collapsing several times … 40C temperatures in July … OneCommonwealth Games … One “Wagatha Christie” trial … Countless Matt Hancock moments on “I’m a Celeb” … Over 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages … Six episodes of “Harry & Meghan” on Netflix … OnePrince Harry tome … One U-turn on privatizing Channel 4 … Over 1 million job vacancies … Eight Bank of England interest rate rises … The highest inflation for decades … Skyrocketing energy bills … No new nuclear power stations opened … One coal mine approved … HS2 delayed … One new Scottish first minister … One new Australian prime minister … One new New Zealand prime minister … One U.S. presidential indictment … No return to Northern Ireland power-sharing … and zero migrants sent to Rwanda. So far.

Hardly any of this has a direct impact on me personally, but I think there’s a palpable drag on the public mood when the new cycle is so packed with such misery, dishonesty, incompetence, and fear. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like much of it is going to get better any time soon.

But despondency doesn’t really help. Perhaps we ought to use spring to count our blessings and to seek the joy in everyday life, and to try to focus on that for a while. Or, as it’s Easter Sunday, maybe I’ll just stuff my face with chocolate for a while.

Roughly three-quarters of people seeking asylum in the UK have their applications granted, two-thirds on initial application and the remainder on appeal. These people have a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ in their home country.

Our Government’s outright refusal to provide safe and legal routes for most refugees to enter the country to apply for asylum means that the majority arrive though covert, unsafe means. These people come here ‘illegally’ because there is no way for them to get here ‘legally’. Only a small minority come via boat. Many die en route.

The Government says that ‘if you come to this country illegally, you will be swiftly removed.’ Without providing legal routes—which the Government has explicitly promised not to do—that statement is incompatible with providing asylum to the majority of people who need it.

Before the 2015 election, nine in ten asylum applications were processed within six months. By 2021, the proportion had fallen to one in ten, cruelly leaving traumatised people in limbo for longer than ever before and resulting in spiralling accommodation costs. The system hasn’t broken due to the weight of applications: the number per year has barely changed since 2015.

Referring to ‘stopping the boats’ is appallingly dehumanising: it’s not ‘boats’ that the government aims to prevent from entering the country, it’s people. Referring to people in dehumanising terms is the opposite of showing compassion.

According to the documents laid before Parliament, the Home Secretary is ‘unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the [European] Convention [on Human] Rights.’ In the Government’s view, ‘illegal’ may therefore apply equally to the ‘migration’ and the ‘bill.’

Those who allocate more airtime, pixels or ink to discussing presenters of the BBC’s sports programmes than to analysing the nation’s asylum policy may not be performing a true public service.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.