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Dear Me, England
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Yet Another Terrible Prime Minister

This week: what I learnt about Churchill’s singular, complex personality from reading his memoir; plus a gloriously capacious Rattle Bag of juicy links and notes including my thoughts on Nolan’s The Odyssey, the latest developments in politics, war, and AI; two types of confidence; why Dante > Shakespeare, and a banging new ad for gin. Sign up for a paid subscription for full access to all this and all previous and future paid posts.

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Before he was a war leader and politician, Winston Churchill was a journalist and a soldier. Born to an aristocratic, wealthy family, he was nevertheless cash-poor, and funded the lifestyle to which he was accustomed by writing reports from the frontline of colonial wars in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa.

Newspapers paid a lot of money for them. Churchill was both a serving officer and reporter, a combination considered dubious even then but which gave his dispatches unquestionable authenticity. And he delivered great copy. His most famous reporting was on the episode that made him a huge celebrity at home and effectively launched his political career: his escape from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp. He later included an account of it in a memoir covering the first thirty or so years of his life, prosaically titled My Early Life.

Churchill wrote My Early Life in 1930, when in his mid-fifties. A few weeks ago at the Chalke History Festival, I picked up a copy at the Waterstones bookstore almost by accident and have unexpectedly found it to be one of my most enjoyable reads of the year. It’s not so much the accounts of battle which gripped me, well told as they are, but the writing and the insight it gives into the strange and compelling personality behind the icon.

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Catch-up service:
Anatomy of a ‘F*ck You’
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire

Microsoft’s AI division has launched a journal that explores the intersection between AI and the humanities. The first edition of The Humanist Review has just launched. It is beautifully designed, and features contributions from illustrious contributors like Alison Gopnik, Cass Sunstein, Alain de Botton, Naomi Alderman, Nick Cave…and me. I explore the nature of AI-human collaboration, using Lennon and McCartney and other two-person teams as points of comparison.

To go out in the semi-finals against Argentina is no shame, but to go out in the manner we did was painful. The bleakly fascinating defeat suffered by England this week embodied a wider truth that I find depressing and reassuring all at once: culture goes much deeper than we imagine, and is more resistant to change than we anticipate.

We’ll get to that, but first let’s remind ourselves that it could be worse. Imagine being Brazil, who have a far greater football history than the English, having lifted the World Cup five times, and therefore further to fall. This year they exited meekly to Norway, before the quarter finals. Even worse: they used to be adored around the world for the grace and glory of their playing style (something nobody could ever say about England). This year, their football was characterless and dull. That really is unforgivable.

A viral thread on twitter argued, semi-seriously, that the fundamental reason for Brazil’s decline is the spread of Protestantism. “Brazil was better when their players were womanisers, drunkards and slightly out of shape,” it said. “In other words, when they were behaving like Catholics”. Tragically, “evangelical Protestant sterilisation has flattened their ball, ruined their samba and obliterated their swag.”

This led to a wider discussion of whether national football teams have lost touch with who they are. The World Cup used to be a clash of footballing identities: Brazilian flamboyance versus German rigour versus Dutch fluidity, and so on. Now, young talent from around the world get sucked into the big European academies and clubs before they have absorbed their home country’s culture.

Players play alongside teammates from multiple countries, trained by coaches who copy methodologies and tactics from different national leagues. The result is that national football tournaments are deracinated, more homogeneous and less meaningful. You can even make of this a metaphor (metonym?) for globalisation if you like, blaming neoliberal economics or immigration according to taste.

While it’s a plausible hypothesis, I’m not sure it reflects the tournament I’ve been watching. To me, there still seemed to be quite a lot of variety in national styles. The semi-final between Argentina and England, in particular, offered a sharp rebuke to this theory. The Argentinians proved themselves masters of what football writers call “the dark arts” (or shithousery), as they have been for the ages. They also displayed their historic ability to sleepwalk through a match until a moment of peril, at which point they snap into beast mode.

As for the England team, well, it really is deeply, indelibly English. Throughout this World Cup I feel like I’ve been watching the same team as I’ve been watching for forty years. In an England game, nothing is easy; everything is struggle. Technically skilled individuals frequently look as though they have been introduced to a football for the first time. Long stretches of mediocrity are redeemed by thrilling moments of derring-do: goals scored in fast, dagger-thrust moves; goals averted by huge men hurling their bodies into the path of the ball. As the end of the match approaches, backs are always to the wall, bodies always on the verge of collapse. Somebody bleeds manfully. Then we either pull it off in stubborn defiance of footballing gravity, or submit to a team that has somehow retained the ability to make an accurate pass.

To be a longstanding England supporter is to glimpse life inside Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”

The pattern with which we’re most familiar, having seen it in tournament after tournament, is the siege defence. It’s as if our players are unconsciously drawing on collective memories of Mafeking and Dunkirk; on stories of an island people repelling invaders. The wonder is that each generation of players seems to absorb the English script and to perform it convincingly.

It goes like this. After going a goal up, England pull up the drawbridge. The players focus on repelling attacks instead of making them. They get trapped inside their own penalty area. The halfway line seems impossible to reach, let alone traverse. Now and again a defender or the goalkeeper will hoof the ball to the other end but there are no England players there and it returns within seconds. The opposition launches yet another attack. Our players look increasingly panicked and ragged. Oh that was close! Oh what a save!

Oh shit.

It was particularly dismaying this time because we thought this team had broken the repeated sequence and escaped the recurrence. It was like watching someone who has undergone an apparently successful course in cognitive behavioural therapy suddenly falling back into self-harming patterns of behaviour, formed in childhood.

It was befuddling, too, because there is no obvious reason for it. England’s stars play under sophisticated international coaches, alongside elite players from all over the world. Some play in German and Spanish leagues, for top teams. They have a German manager. The players are of diverse heritage (20 of them had the option of playing for another country). Most are too young to remember any tragic defeats from more than twenty years ago.

We have as good or better a set of players as we’ve ever had, mentally strong and technically skilled. We have one of the most successful coaches in the world - a real killer, a German of vulpine intensity and scouring intelligence with bracingly little patience for our habit of ruminating on past defeats. Whenever Tuchel was asked about the English past or the English mindset, he politely made it clear that it wasn’t his job to heal the national psyche. His only job was to win. The best way to deal with trauma was to ignore it.

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But while you may not be interested in trauma, trauma is interested in you. After England went one up against Argentina, the team immediately began to sit back, apparently seized by panic about what might happen if they didn’t. Nobody made this decision. The players were not instructed to do it. It was an act of the group mind, the collective unconscious. Fear narrowed the team’s vision. The players stopped even trying to make passes to each other. Then, fatally, instead of trying to break his team’s trance, Tuchel succumbed to it. He took off attacking players and added defensive ones. Whether he meant to send a message or not, the players received one: dig in, lads! Backs to the wall!

Meanwhile, Messi and his wingmen swarmed through the English ranks with ferocity and guile, untroubled by counter-attacks to test their ageing legs. Even armchair fans could see that it was only a matter of time. On Tuchel’s bench, fresh, terrifyingly fast attackers salivated at the prospect of taking on Argentina’s defenders. All tournament, Tuchel had talked up their ability to change games with speed and aggression. But they stayed on the bench. (It reminded me of Madeleine Albright’s question to Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”.)

Culture, in the deep sense, is mysteriously powerful. It eats tactics for breakfast. Coaches too. Brazil’s exit was also overseen by a superstar club manager from another country (Carlo Ancelotti). No team managed by a foreign coach has ever won the World Cup. This year’s finalists, Spain and Argentina, are led by native coaches with no experience of managing elite clubs; coaches who would otherwise be almost completely unknown to the world. Luis de la Fuente and Lionel Scaloni have succeeded where objectively better managers have failed at least in part because they understand their national football culture from the inside out.

England’s World Cup was the story of a brilliant, rational, strong-willed outsider hopelessly overwhelmed by native forces he couldn’t comprehend. It was a story of ancestors rising from the dead to reclaim their descendants. Sure, you can cultivate your “mentality,” they seemed to whisper to this admirable, talented team. But you can’t escape who you are. You are ours. You are English.

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This piece is free so please share and ‘like’ if you liked it. After the jump: a bumper Rattle Bag, featuring a great loser’s speech; a new theory of biological life; why I can’t stop watching Mick Jagger interviews; Jude Bellingham’s grandad; LLMs and creativity; and some gorgeous choral music.

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Catch-up service:
Happy John and Paul Day
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses

I wasn’t sure if I should stay up to watch the England-Mexico match, which started in the early hours of Monday morning our time. I am not much use without sleep. In the end I decided that the England boys needed my support more than I needed a full night’s rest. I could not let them down. I did almost call it a night when the kick-off was delayed by an hour, but instead I heroically set my alarm and took a snooze until 2am.

I’m glad I stayed up. There must be a German word for the satisfaction of knowing that you avoided bitter regret, which is what I would have experienced had I woken to discover I’d missed one of the greatest football matches of my lifetime, and an English victory to set alongside Agincourt. There is already plenty of writing on the game itself which I won’t add to. Instead I want to focus on a tiny detail from that night, one that is almost totally irrelevant to the game, although it does say something about the spirit in which the game was played.

For those of you who haven’t been following, the match was played in Mexico City inside the legendary, almost mythical Azteca stadium, so far above sea level that it is virtually in orbit. The stadium was filled with a million (I may be exaggerating) home fans who cheered for their side and against the opposition at such a volume and intensity that it must have felt to the England players like a physical assault as they stepped out on to the pitch.

Having said that the atmosphere was essentially good natured, by all accounts. Players and observers reported that while the crowd was fiercely partisan it wasn’t nasty. The Mexico fans booed an Oasis song that was played before the match, but they did not boo the English national anthem. Underneath the pantomime hostility was a kind of respect, rooted in a shared love of the occasion.

Which brings me to the detail: a clip of the Mexican manager, Javier Aguirre, swearing at the England striker, Anthony Gordon.

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Catch-up service:
Notes on Acquired Taste
Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking

This is the day, 69 years ago, that Paul McCartney met John Lennon, at St Peter’s church fête in Woolton. John was 16 and eight months; Paul had just turned 15.

Actually, there is a little uncertainty about whether they’d met before; stories and memories vary and diverge. John was an unmissable local character, and even though they lived in different neighbourhoods and went to different schools, Paul had probably seen him around. In fact, he has been known to give an alternative account of the ‘first meeting’, involving a sweet story about a bar of chocolate.

But there’s no doubt that Woolton Fête was the first time they really engaged with each other, the first time they heard each other sing and play, and thus the moment at which the friendship, and the partnership, began. And this story begins with Paul walking into the field behind St Peter’s church to see John Lennon playing with his group, the Quarry Men.

Astonishingly, we have photos of that day, and almost of that very moment. This is one of those Beatles coincidences which no longer seem extraordinary because a kind of magical thinking sets in: ‘Of course we have photos from the day Lennon met McCartney - they were going to form the Beatles, right?’ But it didn’t have to happen. For one thing, it wasn’t very common for teenagers, or anyone, to be carrying cameras with them when they were out and about.

It’s lucky that we have photos at all, and it’s positively miraculous that we have photos of such quality. The one above, in particular (slightly larger image here) allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of McCartney as he joined the group of teenagers watching Lennon’s group play skiffle and rock ‘n roll.1 John is locking eyes with the camera, and therefore with us, and it is not so fantastical to imagine ourselves as Paul at this moment. We get a sense of John’s magnetism, his power. He’s coming to get us.

Even if we didn’t know this was John Lennon, and even if we didn’t know this was the day Paul McCartney saw him play, it would still be a great picture; one that captures the the nascent energy of the teenage British skiffle scene. The whole composition is worthy of a classical painting. It’s crowded with figures yet it doesn’t feel chaotic at all. John’s right hand is blurred from the energy of his strumming; his left hand makes a shape of a banjo chord on the guitar (he had been taught banjo by his mother Julia). Given how momentous the occasion it captures, I’d say it is one of the great photos of the twentieth century. And it was taken by an amateur with a cheap box camera.

The photographer, Geoff Rhind, was a classmate of Lennon’s at Quarry Bank High School. He happened to have been given a Kodak Cresta for his birthday, seven weeks before, he happened to take it along that day, he happened to have some film left in it, and he happened to take this marvellous shot. Geoff is now an artist, living in Dublin. He’s a true gentleman. Last year (on July 9) I did an event at the Pavilion Theatre in Dublin to talk John & Paul. When the book signing was over, I was introduced to Geoff, who had been kind enough not only to come along but to bring his print of this photo to show me. It was one of my favourite moments from the whole book tour.

A while back I wrote about all the photos I couldn’t use for John & Paul. Well, I could and did use this one, after a straightforward negotiation (via my picture researcher) with Geoff, who still owns the rights to it. He was pleased that we had done it the proper way, having several times seen it reproduced without his permission. So he came along to the event to say hello and to show me the print. I’m very grateful to him for doing so.

It made me appreciate the picture even more. It was Geoff who pointed out to me how good it is as a composition, even before we get to its subject. He didn’t do this to boast, but to marvel. He couldn’t believe he’d taken it - a kid, with no training, taking a snap of his mate. Yet there it is, and here we are.

Happy John and Paul day!

You can buy ‘John & Paul’ here, it makes an excellent holiday read.

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Notes on Cannes
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
Podcast: Benedict Evans on AI and Jobs
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For John & Paul

• In Susan Sontag’s Notes on '“Camp” (1964) she writes (with, I think, a hint of camp):
  
  “…these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences [or] attractions…But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive.” (My emphasis).
  

• Sontag has an expansive concept of ‘taste’. She talks of taste in people, pictures, emotion, actions, morality. Even intelligence, she says, is “a kind of taste - taste in ideas”. I’m not certain how useful it is to stretch the concept this far - so far that it colonises intelligence and judgement and wisdom - but Sontag’s high regard for taste, her declaration of its central importance, feels very timely in 2026.

• It has become almost a cliché to name “taste” as one of the last human advantages over the machines. AI is acquiring the skills to make slickly produced pictures and songs and books. But it isn’t yet very good at distinguishing the brilliant from the mediocre; the just right from the just OK.

• It models what we like, which makes it hard to see how taste might change. Ask it to generate twenty songs or twenty jokes and pick the best, and it will pick the one that most closely resembles what the median person would deem good. It won’t pick the surprising, odd one - the one that is ‘wrong’ in a suggestive way. But that’s where the good ideas come from. Innovative culture emerges, like new species, from mutation; from interesting accidents that open up new possibilities.

• It’s not as if humans don’t ‘model’ what came before them, often quite algorithmically. We have traditions, genres, chains of influence. We have plenty of human-made mediocrity - more than ever, thanks to our new assistants. But we also have an ability to adapt or reinvent the model; to put it to our own purposes.

• Individual artists do this intuitively and almost randomly in the process of making. Writers learn to write (painters learn to paint etc) by imitating their predecessors. They learn to be original by getting the imitation wrong and noticing that they like the error. This is an act of taste; the free human response.

• When he was stuck on a painting, Francis Bacon would throw a glob of paint at his canvas then work out how to incorporate the result. Artists make decisions and then try to understand why they might have made them. It’s the dialogue between gut and head that produces the work.

• Taste is similarly post-rationalised, or back-propagated. You notice what you like or dislike and extract a rule from your response. Do this enough times and you build a powerful discrimination engine.

• You also get good at knowing what goes with what. You learn to recognise the clichés of the category, which means you know how to subvert or overturn them. That’s why great artists are such voracious consumers of work from within and beyond their own field. Martin Scorsese has watched at least one film every night for most of his adult life. He watches and records and re-watches obsessively. When he donated his collection of VHS tapes to a university it consisted of 4,400 films, documentaries and TV shows.

• It’s more than pattern recognition. The machines are pretty good at that, after all. Taste is connected to that other human moat - to our sense of purpose, of why we’re doing this in the first place. We’re still the ones who write the prompt - who decide what to create and what is beautiful, important, and valuable. The machine merely knows how to execute on our preferences.

• It can model what we already like with astonishing facility but it can’t give us the next Shakespeare, or the next romanticism or modernism or punk or hip-hop. These new forms aren’t just statistical recombinations. They are born from anxiety, rage, envy, pain, ambition. How do you respond to the unprecedented mass violence and human waste of the Great War? Not by following pre-war cultural conventions.

• New movements are also born from scenes - from humans in proximity to each other, everyone desiring this man’s art and that woman’s scope; ideas, emotions and bodies colliding.

• These movements create the taste by which they’re consumed. “Impressionism” was a derisive nickname for paintings that most art lovers considered weird and sketchy. But the art was good enough to bend popular taste around it. Even more obviously difficult art, like Rothko or Pollock, now has an audience of millions. Some of those people like it immediately; others have acquired a taste for it.
  

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• I’m fascinated by the notion of acquired taste. Strictly speaking, it’s a redundancy. Nearly all tastes are acquired. Nobody is born with particular tastes in design or architecture. We gain a sense of what we like, or what we consider to be good, from our peers and predecessors.

• But acquired taste does refer to a distinct phenomenon: the act of willing a preference into being. You didn’t like whisky the first time you drank it, but perhaps because your father liked it or because you were aware of its cultural prestige, you tried it again and again, striving to appreciate it. Then one day you didn’t have to try anymore. You just liked it.

• This writer likens it to a magic eye picture: you stare at it for ages without seeing what you’re told is there, and then suddenly - there it is.

• This is very different to stumbling upon something we immediately like, which is sometimes referred to as ‘discovered taste’. (Edmund Burke called it ‘natural relish’.) That kind of liking involves no work, no friction, no overcoming of resistance.

• Some cultural objects lend themselves to discovered taste, others don’t. I can’t imagine anyone needing to acquire a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, but there are other great vocalists whose voices you must learn to like. The most frequently cited reason for not liking Bob Dylan is antipathy to his voice. But if you learn to appreciate the many incredible things he does with it, you will end up in a more intense relationship with it than with the voice of a more obviously palatable singer. Once you’re in on an acquired taste, you’re all in.

• The same is true of whole genres. There are many pieces of classical music that are easy to like. You don’t have to listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto more than once to be seduced by it. But as a whole and on average, it’s a genre that requires more effort to appreciate than pop. Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits. Your memory of the effort it took you to get there, and your awareness of all the people still outside the city walls enhance your appreciation. (That doesn’t mean you want people to remain outside - quite the opposite).

• Difficulty doesn’t make the cultural object concerned better or worse than one that’s immediately likeable. But it does usually mean it’s more complex, and complexity is correlated, loosely and unreliably, with quality. Acquired taste involves the appreciation of subtle properties that don’t make themselves known on first listen or view or read.

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• Without appreciating what lies on the other side of the door, why do we ever make the effort to unlock it? Partly because we want what other people want. We might trust the taste of our father or girlfriend or teacher. Perhaps we want to please them, impress them, or feel closer to them. Perhaps we want the social cachet that goes along with this particular taste. To my mind, all of these reasons are perfectly good ones. If a taste is truly worth acquiring, any motivation will do.

• It’s often seen as slightly embarrassing or shameful to acquire a taste through conscious effort. It’s for the try-hards and the social climbers. Liberal societies value spontaneity in taste. “Like what you like, love what you love!” Your gut response is meant to be the authentic one, the one that represents “the real you”. To be swayed by social pressure or by experts and reading is regarded as a sign of insecurity or pretentiousness. But let yourself believe that and your tastes will be less likely to evolve and expand and you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff. Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like. (Some of the best people too).

• Believing a cultural object to be good and valuable, but not liking it, is a kind of failure. For me, it’s quite common. I usually want to try again, to look for some other way in. That often comes from someone whose taste I trust, a friend or a critic. I am very pervious to enthusiasm.

• This decoupling of ‘what is good’ from ‘what I like’ may be less common than it was. There was lots of debate about what should have been on the Guardian’s Best 100 Novels list but to me the premise itself was confused. Neither judges nor readers seemed to make much distinction between the novels they liked best and the novels which are the best. Those ought to be two separate categories.

• The sociologist Jon Elster pointed out that we automatically adapt our preferences according to what’s available. That’s what the fable of sour grapes is about - the fox decides the grapes he cannot reach are bad grapes anyway. Most of the time this happens beneath conscious awareness; there’s an element of self-delusion to it. Elster therefore puts a higher value on conscious preference adaptation, because that involves human autonomy - the freely made choice. Acquiring a taste is part of what he calls ‘character planning’ - consciously designing the kind of person you want to be.

• You might argue that aspiring to like something because you’ve been told it’s good is hardly an autonomous act, but it is, as long as you have good reason to trust whatever the cultural authority you’re relying on, and as long as you ask your own questions of it during the engagement. It’s just a way of deciding where to allocate your time and effort, rather than letting the moment or the market decide for you.

• That’s why I still value distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It is good that classical music and theatre and fine art retain an aura of social desirability. Yes, this prestige can shade into fakery and snobbery and exclusivity, but if the high arts lose their aura altogether - and they have been losing it - the result won’t be some wonderful democratic expansion of appreciation, but obsoletion. In a raw battle for liking, there are simply too many cultural products with lower barriers to entry, even if they are ultimately less satisfying. The high arts depend on social prestige to gain the space and time they need for consumers to acquire a taste for them.

• I am not dismissing the value of discovered taste - the stuff we find ourselves liking without effort. As the aesthetic philosopher Kevin Melchionne puts it: “No matter how refined the taste I acquire, a personal canon dominated by acquired taste and relatively devoid of discovered preferences will lack the joy and excitement of personal discovery.” We should aim for a diverse portfolio of acquired and discovered tastes. But the reason I value acquired taste is that it’s a manifestation of individual agency in a tech-dominated world that is constantly tempting us to surrender it.

• Trying to close the gap between the person you are and the person you want to be is often called ‘pretension’. Pretending to like something is fine if it transforms into authentic appreciation over time, as it often does.

• The other reason we make the effort to unlock the door is more intrinsic. It’s curiosity. Even if you don’t ‘get’ a painting or an album on first or second listen, you may get a signal that says, “persevere”. You may sense that it’s worth staying with, and that the rewards will come. Many great novels are like this - they create the reader’s taste for them, teaching you to appreciate them as you go.

• This intrinsic motivation is less common than the extrinsic ones. It may be the preserve of people who have experienced the acquisition of a taste at least once before and so have learned to trust these signals, which are often quite faint. But in both cases, the taste formation is self-directed, the preference willed into being.

• Our aim in life shouldn’t just be to become a person of ‘good taste’, but to be a person with good and original tastes. Taste is never an entirely individual affair but your particular mix of preferences, discovered and acquired, should be unique to you. Cultivation of taste is self-cultivation. It’s a virtuous circle: the more individual your tastes, the better taste you will develop.

• All taste, in the sense of a decided aesthetic preference, is good. The enemy is not bad taste but anti-taste - cultural objects produced with no coherent aesthetic at all; which implicitly regard aesthetic considerations as irrelevant and inefficient. Meta is the great corporate champion of anti-taste, but anti-taste is on the rise everywhere: in the default minimalism of urban design, in the design of cars, in tech design, in bitcoin brands, in the spread of AI writing.

• I am depressed and revolted by anti-taste because I see it as a surrender of human will, and a premonition of a world without us. Sontag was right about the importance of taste. Anti-taste is anti-human.

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Catch-up service:
Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Another Terrible Prime Minister
Podcast: Benedict Evans on AI and Jobs
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More

• I am joining Tom Holland and Samira Ahmed on stage to talk Beatles at the Chalke History Festival this evening. If you’re at the festival make sure to come and see us, it should be lots of fun.

• I have a piece in the New York Times this Monday on the fall of Keir Starmer.

I spent the latter half of this week on the Côte D’Azur, attending the annual advertising festival, ‘Cannes Lions’. Yes, this is the kind of hazardous duty I undertake in order to bring you The Ruffian. I don’t have much to do with advertising these days but I was there as a guest of Microsoft to talk about human-AI collaboration through the lens of the Beatles.

(The talk was based on an article I’ve written. Microsoft’s AI division is launching a new journal about the intersection between AI and the humanities, with some excellent contributors, and me. There’s a launch event in London, in a couple of weeks should you be interested.)

I spoke about what it means to be a creative collaborator, and whether AI is or can ever be one. I started from the proposition that a human collaborator is not like a tool. He or she does not simply do what you want. Imagine Paul trying to ‘prompt’ John and expecting John to just give him what he asked for. The most productive human collaborations involve challenge, argument, and complex emotional dynamics, and they are not easily replicated with machines.

I have not had time to write a full piece for The Ruffian this week, for which I beg your forgiveness. Instead I offer my impressions of Cannes Lions, plus a Rattle Bag of juicy links.

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In Pt II, for paid subscribers only, we get into the business of AI itself and whether the labs will end up ruling the world or surrendering advantage to the next wave of businesses.

We also talk about Britain’s position in a world where sovereign control over AI is ever more important, and how Benedict thinks about his own career, with implications for anyone hoping to make a living from their own mind.

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Catch-up service:
Podcast: Benedict Evans on AI and Jobs
5 Ways Active Listening Can Backfire
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pain Is a Mind Game?

The line of ex-prime ministers at the Cenotaph ceremony is getting embarrassingly long. Since 2016, Britain has added four to the invite list and is about add a fifth. We wouldn’t wish for any of them to return to their former office. In any objectively scored league table of post-war British PMs, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer would all struggle to get out of the relegation zone. This run of bad leaders is one of the central mysteries of British politics, and perhaps we don’t ponder it enough. Is it an unlucky streak, like getting tails five times in a row when you bet on heads? That seems implausible. There is probably a shrinking number of talented candidates. Even so, you’d think we might get lucky now and again.

Some argue that our attritional democratic environment makes even good leaders look mediocre. I do not find this convincing. The idea that Britain in 2026 is ‘ungovernable’ and that, in more stable times, Keir Starmer would be acclaimed as a decent or even half-decent prime minister seems far-fetched. Starmer’s inadequacy transcends the moment. He has proved timelessly abysmal at the job. To a slightly lesser extent you could say similar of Theresa May, or - well, let’s not go on.

I want to be clear about what I mean by a “bad” prime minister. I don’t mean one who took decisions that turned out badly or who changed the country in ways I don’t like. On that basis, you might include Tony Blair for Iraq, or David Cameron for austerity or the Brexit referendum, or Thatcher or Attlee for whatever you think they got disastrously wrong. Your answer will depend on your politics.

That’s one way of looking at it, but I’m talking about something narrower and less value-laden; the day-to-day, month-to-month ability to do the job: to run No.10, to make sensible appointments, to set direction for ministers, to resolve internal conflicts by making tough decisions, to bring coalitions of MPs and voters together, to communicate clearly and persuasively, and so on. I disagreed with some big things that Cameron’s government did, but I never once thought, “This person is wildly unsuited to the job, by ability and temperament.” I have thought that about every one of his successors.

Operational competence is a prerequisite of achievement in office, regardless of whether we ultimately deem the achievement positive or negative. The reason that PMs like Blair or Thatcher are consequential at all is that they were at least reasonably good at all the fundamentals of the job, the best evidence for this being that they got re-elected. And yet, when we’re assessing and arguing over potential PMs, we tend to focus on their politics and underweight the question of competency. We argue about the direction this or that candidate would take the country, without stopping long enough to ask whether they’re capable of taking it in any direction at all.

For the most part, failed prime ministers do not fail because they’re socialists or neo-liberals or conservatives, but because they are situationists. I don’t mean in the sexy French sense, but in the sense that they are captives of whatever situation they find themselves in. Bad prime ministers don’t make things happen; things happen to them. They stand outside No.10, say some fine words, then go inside and kneel down before the real boss: events. (By which I mean not just unforeseen events, but all the economic, political and institutional forces that constrain and batter you from day one).

Why do these leaders submit so meekly to this master? Because they cannot execute on the fundamentals of the job. The first of these fundamentals is a strong sense of purpose or mission. What everyone in this bad run has had in common is that they didn’t know what they wanted to do with power (and I mean across the board, from the economy to foreign policy to immigration and welfare). Either that, or they “knew” but only in the vaguest sense, Liz Truss being the obvious example. Having a clear direction without having a sensible plan can be nearly as bad as having no direction at all, and maybe worse, especially when you are short on necessary leadership abilities. Johnson knew what he wanted to do at first - get Brexit done - but after it got done, he was clueless. Yes, he had to deal with the pandemic, but he dealt with it in his hapless, myopic style, which would have revealed itself under any circumstance.

After this primary failing, bad prime ministers also tend to lack one or all of the following three things: the personal ability to bring voters and MPs onside; the intellectual ability to deal with the demands of a very complex job; the temperament to make tough decisions under pressure. Some, like Starmer, fail on all four dimensions. Others have had one attribute in abundance (Johnson had personal charisma, Sunak was clever) but fall short on the others. Nobody on our post-2016 list has had the first or fourth.

Now, how do we think Andy Burnham will do?

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Let’s start with where he scores well: the personal. Andy Burnham is a likeable guy. He seems ‘normal’, which is unusual for a senior politician, and an art in itself. You only have to watch his Makerfield launch video to see how voters in Manchester feel about him, and how he responds to them. He’s warm and funny and, in certain contexts at least, at ease in his own skin. He has the rare ability to speak from the heart in public, plainly and directly. In private, according to those who know him, he is the same; he is friendly, courteous, caring, asks questions and listens to the answers.

Banal as it may sound, Burnham comes across as genuinely nice, and that counts for quite a lot. I can well imagine that as and when he replaces Keir Starmer in No.10, the nation will greet him with a smile of relief. At last, a national leader who doesn’t grate on our nerves every time we hear his voice! At last, a leader who sounds like someone we might know. Burnham’s charm will give him a head start. It will buy him some time. But when you’re prime minister, events move fast and they are out to crush you. To stay ahead of them, other qualities are required.

I said Burnham is at ease with himself ‘in certain contexts’. He’s very good at talking about football or music, and all the non-political stuff. He’s also good at presenting his political views, so long as he’s speaking to a sympathetic audience and isn’t pushed to go beyond generalities. He is superb with voters on the doorstep, partly because voters tend not to know or care much about policy. He is comfortable talking about how politics is broken, and Labour needs to change; about how government has forgotten about the needs of ordinary voters, especially those outside London. Put together a reel of such moments and you would say, this is a first-rate communicator.

But take a look at Victoria Derbyshire’s Newsnight interview with him from a couple of weeks ago and tell me if you see a great communicator at work. I see someone tense, dry-mouthed, bumbling, brittle and evasive, unsure of his footing at every step. This wasn’t even a punishing interrogation. None of the questions were very hard to predict or prepare for. Derbyshire didn’t probe him much on policy, other than tax cuts for small businesses, in response to which Burnham gingerly set out one position (cut business rates) only to end up half-assenting to another (reverse the national insurance rise).

As and when he becomes prime minister, his interviews will only get tougher. In the age of social media it is possible that political leaders can minimise the importance of this kind of public appearance and maximise the friendly, superficial kind. Burnham will have a good prime ministerial TikTok game. But a successful prime minister still needs to be convincing in both contexts.1 If nothing else, performance in interviews is a proxy for actual grasp of policy and government. If a PM is short on that, they are likely to fail. Burnham is desperately short on it.

That’s a little surprising, given that he’s been in politics all his adult life and has been a cabinet minister. But he does not seem to have ever worked hard at understanding the trade-offs and complexities involved in national government nor to have had much appetite for doing so. As health minister, he was liked by officials but known to be indecisive and incurious about policy detail. He made party-pleasing noises about being anti-privatisation but essentially passed through without touching the sides. Once he became mayor of Manchester, he no longer had to even bother with that onerous stuff. On national issues he could make gestures in the politically expedient direction without having to square them with his record or his plans.

The result is that he can sound startlingly vacuous. We all know the remark about not wanting to be “in hock” to the bond markets, without seeming to understand what bond markets are or why we are in hock to them, but it was hardly an anomaly. He mouths the phrase “fiscal rules” without ever giving the impression that he knows what they are or why they matter. Here’s how he answered a question about the EU, during Labour’s conference last September:

Journalist: “Rejoin the EU or stay out?”

Andy Burnham: “I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime, I want to rejoin the European Union. I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The EU benefitted this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.”

I’m sorry to break the flow of my Flaubertian prose, but - fuck me. I believe in the unions of all kinds. It’s like something from an essay by a primary school pupil. That’s the extent of his thinking, on one of the most important geopolitical questions of the age? I’m just not sure how you get from there to prime minister-level within a year, or ever. (I need hardly add that as soon as the byelection campaign started, he said he didn’t actually want to rejoin at all).

Burnham doesn’t have a burning mission or purpose except in the vaguest sense. He has a genuine and noble wish to do right by voters who feel alienated and let down by successive governments. But he doesn’t have a serious analysis of what’s gone wrong with the country, which is why he leans on empty phrases like “forty years of neo-liberalism”. In terms of philosophy and policy he travels light. That’s why his sudden acquiescence to the whole Starmer-Reeves programme was frictionless and why his u-turns arrive with the frequency of his beloved buses.

So far, his own policy agenda is embarrassingly thin: public control of utilities that are already tightly regulated (presumably more public ownership is attractive because the British state runs everything with Singaporean efficiency?); more social housing in a country that already has an exceptionally high stock of it; various tax cuts and spending promises that he makes or rescinds on a daily basis; no plan to deal with our parlous fiscal situation.

If you’re thinking ‘Well, he’s been in campaign mode, it will be different now he’s preparing for government’ then I wonder whether you would have said the same about Starmer and Reeves, who had years. You can’t just rig this stuff up from nothing after a couple of away-days.

I am sceptical that Burnham has the intellectual capacity to “learn on the job” and certainly not at the speed he would need to do so if the job is not to overwhelm him. It’s not the hardware that’s the problem - as a young man, Burnham was clever and diligent enough to scale the British establishment from the outside. It’s the software he’s been running for the last thirty years, narrowly designed for advancement within the Labour Party. His instinct has always been to please the party, and you don’t do that by challenging its worldview or assumptions. But unless you do, your intellect and curiosity will atrophy.

Now that Burnham is pitching for the most powerful job in the land, he is suddenly being asked to think outside the realm of Labour boilerplate. But it’s too late. I cannot see Andy Burnham coping with running a government while trying rewire it, which he will have to if he wants to get anything done. I can’t see him getting to grips quickly with big hairy problems in energy, defence, AI, housing, social care, justice, and all the others that will be hammering on his door every day, while America staggers around like a drunk giant and China and Russia try to undermine and weaken us. Nor is he part of a network of talent who can help him meet the moment; for the most part, he will be relying on the same people who are in charge now, plus a few newcomers from Manchester and some aged lefty think-tankers.

Beneath this deficit of ability is a more profound one: one of temperament, or character. Burnham is a people pleaser. To some extent that’s a good thing - politicians have to please people. But it can be a very bad thing in a leader. A crucial attribute of an effective Prime Minister is a willingness to upset people - to size up who they will have to disappoint or anger to get something done, and either assuage them or make them irrelevant. Avoid these trade-offs and you only end up angering everyone, as Keir Starmer has just discovered yet again.

If a Prime Minister in our system has ‘one job’ it’s to be the tie-breaker - to take the decisions that can’t be resolved by ministers and officials. Starmer’s single biggest operational deficit has his consistent failure to play this role. I find it hard to believe Burnham will be any better. Would he have broken the deadlock between Defence and the Treasury? Would he have even grasped the issues involved?

He wants to be Andy, mayor of Britain. But a Prime Minister is not a mayor. The decisions are bigger, more complex, and more contested, by an order of magnitude. I’m not convinced that overseeing an upgrade to Manchester’s bus system qualifies you to chair the national security council or to act as First Lord of the Treasury. Mayor Burnham did not have to make decisions - on, say, immigration - which were bound to be hated by big parts of his electorate. In fact, you could say that’s why he became mayor. He had got about as far in national politics as an inveterate pleaser can.

His second Labour leadership campaign in 2015 was agonisingly bad, especially for those of us who wished him well. (Many of the people now talking him up either weren’t paying attention back then or have erased the trauma from their memory). He wanted the party establishment to like him and he wanted the Corbynites to like him. By trying to please everyone he lost everyone’s respect, shrinking as the campaign went on. His lack of a core idea or philosophy was painfully apparent in every shifty, oily interview. He has become a more relaxed and adept public performer since then but that’s partly because he hasn’t had to straddle divides and interests on a national scale.

Burnham is an emotional man who cares about others and cares about what others think of him. This is part of what makes him appealing. But an effective Prime Minister must have a sliver of ice in the heart; at some level they have to be a killer. Burnham is soft in the middle. There is a fundamental weakness which emanates from him like cheap aftershave whenever he is put under pressure. Events will brutally expose it, and over time the affection of voters will curdle into contempt. His national ratings have already started to decline. If he becomes Prime Minister he will be very unpopular within a year.2 I doubt that he will ever be hated as widely and coldly as Starmer is. Many voters who like him now will still like him then, but they will feel sorry for him, which may be worse. They will see that he’s a good man in the wrong job.

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Here’s the worst thing: I believe all this and yet I also think Burnham should become Prime Minister. There are Labour MPs I think would do a much better job, like Streeting or Mahmood, but they are simply not going to be elected by their party. The reasons I prefer them are the same reasons their party doesn’t. So for the time being, that leaves Starmer or Burnham, and while I don’t think Burnham will be much of an improvement, Starmer has to go.

But I don’t want to put aside my astonishment at the calibre of national leaders we get. Although I can see how it happened, I find it unbelievable that Andy Burnham is the person that Britain, a great country, is installing as prime minister, amidst war in Europe, major technological disruption, violent unrest across the country, and a public sector coming apart at the seams. Is this really the best we can do? Apparently it is.

Even more astonishingly, he may represent a slight upgrade. At least Andy will raise a smile from time to time. But among elites at least, there is a strong tendency towards magical thinking at these moments. Let’s not fool ourselves with debates over whether Andy Burnham is going to “change Westminster” or take the country in a different direction. As Joshi Herrmann said in his superb, definitive profile, there is no “Burnhamism”, nor will there ever be. We have that pretend conversation because we don’t want to face up to the truth about what’s coming next.

I really, genuinely hope I’m wrong, but this is how I see it. Once in No.10, Burnham will rejig the cabinet, disrupting and slowing whatever progress this government has started to make on delivery. He will then find himself forced to the right by our fiscal position and set against his own party without wanting to confront them, while fighting multiple fires he doesn’t understand, one of which may become a full-blown crisis. At some point, everyone will conclude that this Prime Minister is also unsuited to the job, by ability and temperament, and on a Remembrance Sunday in the not-very-distant future, the line of former prime ministers will lengthen once again.

Still, maybe the next one will be better?

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The Rattle Bag returns next week…

For this episode I’m delighted to welcome Benedict Evans to discuss AI and jobs and much else besides. Benedict is an independent technology analyst who has spent 25 years thinking about tech-based industries. He’s worked in Britain, Silicon Valley, and New York, where he’s now based. He’s is one of the most respected voices in tech, which is why his newsletter has nearly 200,000 subscribers. In a field dominated by spurious assertions he is distinguished by his deep knowledge and understanding of the history and economics of technology, and his forensic mind.

This conversation is in two parts. In part one, free for all, we focus on AI and jobs. There’s a lot of wild hype around this topic. Benedict is the antidote to it. He breaks the question down and provides a framework for thinking about it. Part two, for paid subscribers, will be coming soon. I was recovering from a horrible cold when we recorded this so I was rather groggy, but it’s OK because Benedict was brilliant. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Catch-up service:
The Petty Status-Seeking of Great Geniuses
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game?

Tickets still available for my choir’s concert at Cadogan Hall, near Sloane Square, on Wednesday night: A Night at the Opera. It’s a brilliant program of selections from different eras, with huge tunes, and amazing soloists. You’re guaranteed to enjoy it. And you can get home in time for the football (well, the second half).

When you listen to someone talk, what’s going on? The straightforward answer is that you’re receiving information from them. But we all know it’s not as simple as that.

You’re also guessing at what’s on their mind, which may not be the same as what they’re telling you. Not because they’re lying, but because we very often don’t put everything we feel into words - at least not into the words we ‘publish’.

So you’re listening for gaps, for lacunae. You’re also alert to the non-verbal signals they’re sending, like tone and pitch of voice, movements of eyes, face and body. You know that some of these signals are sent intentionally, others unintentionally, though you’re not always sure which is which.

As they speak, and you listen, you’re also processing all this information, explicit and implicit, and placing it in context. You’re fitting it together with what you already know, about this person and about whatever it is they’re talking about.

At the same time as you’re listening and processing, you’re also communicating. You’re using words, non-verbal sounds, movements of face and body, to show that you’re taking on board the information they’re sending and that you’re in tune with whatever it is they’re feeling, or with whatever it is they expect you to be feeling, in response to what they’re telling you.

You’re also anticipating how they are feeling about this conversation, and how they’ll feel about it afterwards. Listening to someone talk is one thing; making them feel heard is another.

I could go on. All I’m saying is, listening is complicated. It’s a complicated operation. It can be hazardous, too. A study of teachers in Israel found that those who rated themselves as excellent listeners were more likely to suffer burnout. It’s a wonder we do it at all (although let’s face it, not all of us do) though most of us think we’re pretty good at it, better than we actually are. A study of everyday conversation found that 71% of respondents rated themselves above-average listeners.

Despite the importance of good listening, in our personal and professional lives, it’s still something of a mystery. Psychologists who have attempted to identify and define it have come up with surprisingly few concrete answers. A new paper presents a survey of the literature to date and it does so in the spirit of humility. Guy Itzchakov and Graham Bodie list ten “puzzles of interpersonal listening”, drawing on multiple studies and papers to show how the field is riven with contradictory theories and conflicting findings.

Despite this, there are endless books and online articles offering confident instruction on ‘active listening’. Lists of behaviours, rules and tips, all ostensibly grounded in science. What Itzchakov and Bodie show is that once you look deeply at the evidence, you find that there is no rule of listening that can’t be fruitfully broken; no ‘do’ that can’t become a ‘don’t.

That doesn’t mean the field offers nothing of value - it’s full of rich findings, even if they don’t resolve themselves into a neat and universally applicable model of good listening. It just means we should be sceptical of any such rules. What the Itzchakov and Bodie paper shows is that even the most earnestly practiced listening techniques can backfire.

Here are 5 ways in which the rules of ‘active listening’ can go wrong.

1. BE SILENT. A popular rule is that the listener should let the speaker do 80% of the talking. This one seems like common sense: if you want to listen well, then you need to stop talking. But the 80:20 rule is arbitrary at best. A study of 250,000 sales conversations found that they went best when the salesperson (the ‘listener’ in this situation) spoke for 43% of the time - that is, over twice as much as the rule suggests.
   
   Managers and employees tend to have different ideas of what constitutes the optimal amount of listening and speaking. Managers believe that employee motivation rises if they (the manager) listen more. They think a conversation has gone well if they listen for 70% of the time. But employees tend to favour a 50:50 balance of speaking and listening. People with depressive tendencies can interpret silence as rejection or indifference. Brief pauses are OK, but long pauses can make the listener doubt the speaker’s competence or to suspect they’re disengaged.
   
   Listeners speak to gain understanding, and refine their own thinking. They might offer stories of their own to demonstrate understanding. As Itzchakov and Bodie put it, ‘speaking can serve listening” by showing how the listener is attuned to the speaker’s mind. It’s not easy, is it? Speak too much, and you dominate a conversation which is meant to be for the listener’s benefit. That’s not good. But speak too little, and they might think you’re not listening.
   

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2. ASK QUESTIONS. Questions are useful because they can elicit valuable information, and because they demonstrate interest and curiosity. They show that you actually care about the what the speaker knows, thinks, and feels. Listeners who ask follow-up questions are consistently rated as more likeable.
   
   But a simple “ask questions” rule can lead you astray. Too many questions can sound like an attempt at domination or control. Questioning can become interrogation and put the speaker on defence. Leaders sometimes forget that if you’re going to ask questions, you really have to listen to the answer. (This paper calls that “disrespectful inquiry”).

   
   One of the most annoying use of questions is as a pretext for the question-asker to talk about themselves:
   
   How was your weekend?
   ”It was OK-”
   ”Well, mine was amazing! [Drones on about it for ten minutes]
   
   Behavioural psychologists Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans have coined the unfortunate neologism “boomerasking” for this habit. Boomeraskers believe they’re great people who have demonstrated curiosity; their interlocutors think they’re insincere and self-obsessed.
   
   Question-asking is not inherently good or bad. It depends on the spirit in which the question is asked, and how the answer is treated.
   

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3. DON’T JUDGE. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of modern psychotherapy, introduced the concept of “unconditional positive regard” to the therapeutic relationship. A good listener withholds judgement in order to help speakers feel safe and accepted.
   
   It makes perfect sense. There’s clearly a trade-off between judgement and curiosity. Once you make up your mind about someone, you tend to stop thinking about what they’re saying. And as soon as my interlocutor believes that I think badly of them, they tend to stop talking honestly and freely, so the conversation either comes to an end or becomes a row.
   
   But, as Rogers himself recognised, we can’t help but make judgements.

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Catch-up service:
Labour Isn’t Thinking
All the Photos I Couldn’t Use For ‘John & Paul’
Why Writers Should Use AI More
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand

The highlight of last week’s holiday in Madrid was a trip to the Prado. It is a perfect size for a national art museum, large enough to feel grand without sprawling like the Louvre. The layout is simple, organised around one long central gallery with rooms opening off it. The collection, rather than being a confusingly eclectic mix of every era and tradition, is concentrated on Spanish, Italian and Dutch painters from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.

I loved seeing Tintoretto’s depiction of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. It’s a vast canvas with a stunning trick of perspective: on whichever side you stand, it seems to be pointing towards you. He also does this crazily radical thing of putting his central subject at the far edge instead of in the centre, perhaps to emphasise Jesus’s humility.

But my favourite part was hanging out with Velázquez. I knew it would be. I am no art expert but I know what I like, and I really like Velázquez. I’m not qualified to tell you why he’s so great, but to me he is something like the Roger Federer of art; the one who makes the hardest things look effortless. There’s a lightness, grace and fluidity to his brushstrokes that makes everything he depicts shimmer, as if on the verge of dissolution.

He often doesn’t bother with backgrounds, presenting his figures in blank space, and sometimes leaves the edges of his figures unfinished or blurred. Not only does this make other painters look like dutiful plodders but it conveys a sense of souls floating in time and space, captured in oil and powder for a fleeting moment. The courtier portrayed below, so jolly and so sad, is a vital presence yet also a fragile one, as if about to disappear into the void he stands in. There’s always mystery in a Velázquez painting. He never tells us anything, only gives hints and poses questions.

He’s also an X-ray machine. He zeroes in on a person’s inner life and character, generous but unsentimental. Without flattery, his portraits bring out what is most noble or beautiful about his subjects, while reminding them and us that, however grand we may be, we’re just passing through.

Unlike his older contemporary, Rubens, who was an artistic megastar, féted across Europe, Velázquez wasn’t famous in his lifetime. He spent most of his professional career at the Spanish court, working for his lugubrious-looking patron, Philip IV. His artistic reputation grew steadily after his death until it overtook even Rubens.

Velázquez’s most famous painting, and the painting that plenty of critics would vote for as the GOAT, is Las Meninas (above, top). I’d seen it once before and now feel lucky to have seen it twice. At the Prado it is on the back wall of a large room, so you view it from a distance as you approach.1 You can, if you like, do what Kenneth Clark liked to do: repeatedly walk towards it until the figures dissolve and all you can see are Velázquez’s loose, louche brushstrokes. Clark was trying to work out the exact point that the spell was cast; when the painting stopped and the illusion began. He never could.

Las Meninas is so complex that I can’t do it justice here. If you’d like to read more about it I’d recommend this BBC piece by the art critic Kelly Grovier. The book that really fed my Velázquez obsession was The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming, one of the most satisfying nonfiction books I’ve read.

In plain terms, here’s what we’re looking at: the artist himself painting his patrons, the king and queen of Spain, in the company of their five year-old daughter and assorted attendants. In the dim room, the little princess shines, under the eyes of her parents, just out of frame. We can only see the king and queen in a mirror, and that’s because, in the illusory space of the painting, they are standing where we’re standing.

This is what makes Las Meninas so disorienting and enchanting. Both the artist and the Infanta are gazing at us. It’s our gaze which lights up the Infanta, now long gone from the world. It’s us that Velázquez is so coolly appraising, and while we stand in front of his painting, it’s us that he’s creating. Meanwhile, a servant waits, slightly impatiently, to usher us into the next room. We have an appointment that can’t be missed.

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Velázquez weaves together the mundane and the ethereal, the worldly and the transcendent. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the red cross painted on his chest. The cross marks him as a Knight of Santiago, an ancient and exclusive Catholic order. Las Meninas was painted in the 1650s, when Velázquez was in his fifties (he died at the age of 61), at a time when officials were thwarting his efforts to join the order. By this stage he was a highly valued courtier but he longed for the aristocratic prestige that came with membership. He kept prompting the king to make applications to the Pope on his behalf and spent a lot of time poring over his family tree, searching for evidence to prove he was worthy.

It’s funny and oddly reassuring that a supreme artist should care so much about worldly status. What he did with the brush was worth infinitely more than membership of any society. But it didn’t seem like that to him, or perhaps it did, but only fleetingly. Reading about Velázquez’s social climbing reminded me of Shakespeare. The two artists are often seen as kindred spirits, with the same miraculous ability to see into any human soul. But both had these worldly worries too.

When he was a young man, Shakespeare spent years petitioning the College of Heralds to grant his father a coat of arms. He was finally granted it in 1596. It clearly meant a lot to him. In practice it meant he got to put “gentleman” after his name (though not “sir” before it - he was still ranked below knights). The motto he chose for his coat of arms, Non Sanz Droict (Old French for "Not Without Right") is surprisingly lame. I often think that if I could meet anyone from history, it would Shakespeare, but I’m haunted by the thought that the author of Hamlet would only want to talk to me about how he came to choose a specific shade of gold for his escutcheon.2

Michelangelo also suffered from chronic status anxiety, despite being the most acclaimed and wealthy artist of his time. He was obsessed with the supposedly aristocratic origins of his family, the Buonarroti. According to what his biographer, William E. Wallace, calls “the creative genealogy of the day”, the Buonarrotis were descended from the counts of Canossa, an ancient and legendary family. Michelangelo believed that “imperial blood” flowed in his veins.

Being known only by one name sounds rather chic to us but Michelangelo might not have been so pleased to hear how he is referred to now. In his world, being able to use a surname in correspondence was a sign of status. After 1526, he stopped signing letters Michelangelo “sculptor” and started signing them with patronymic and surname: Lionardo di Buonarroto Buonarroti Simoni.

He was very keen that his relatives should burnish the family’s image. In a letter, he urges his nephew to acquire a larger, more impressive house: “I say this because a noble house in the city brings much honour, because it is more visible than other possessions, and because we are citizens descended from one of the noblest families.” (You can imagine his nephew wincing at once again having to read Uncle Mike droning on about the need to keep up appearances).

Michelangelo saw himself as an aristocrat who made art rather than an artist with aristocratic connections. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social status of artists increased, partly thanks to the grandeur of Michelangelo) and because it became more legitimate to attribute nobility to achievement and virtue, rather than just to birth. But Shakespeare and Velázquez still remained stuck in the liminal zone, convinced that it was their work which made them great but uncertain if anyone else saw things quite the same way.

Both were capable of reflecting on the ironies of their position. In The Tempest, Prospero, with whom Shakespeare seems to identify, floats far above the concerns of mere mortals, yet is also desperate to remind everyone he is the real Duke of Milan. “Every third thought shall be my grave”, he says. I take this to mean that when he’s not having deep thoughts about mortality he’s obsessing over how the hell to recover his kingdom and his title.

In Las Meninas, the artist, having arrived at court thirty years earlier as a mere servant, steps boldly into the frame while relegating his master to a blurry image at the back of the room. It’s as if he’s reminding Philip that the king’s prestige is built on Velázquez’s image-making. But the painting doesn’t quite tell us if Velázquez is an all-powerful magician or a member of staff.

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This one is free to read so feel free to hit the green button and share. After the jump: why I doubt that the Nowak case was really about anti-racism. Plus a Rattle Bag of good things, including my thoughts on the new McCartney album. The Ruffian depends on paid subscribers. Please consider taking one out, it’s very good value, and very high status.

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Pain Is a Mind Game
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Thinking By Hand

Lucky for you I was on holiday last week, otherwise this might have been an actual essay.

For those of you blissfully unaware: last week Tony Blair published a 6k word essay about where Labour is going wrong. He followed it up with a media round. The result was an entire discourse explosion; endless counter-essays, interviews, podcasts, columns, posts. The current Prime Minister and the two most likely candidates to succeed him felt compelled to write lengthy pieces in response.

That a man who left political office almost twenty years ago can still bend elite discourse to his will is partly because he is polarising and therefore perfect for the age of outrage. But it’s not just that; it’s also because he has something interesting to say - a rare commodity in British politics.

The essay’s political philosophy is shallow. It makes sweeping assertions that are hard to stand up. It fails to address the current political landscape in any detail. It is also head and shoulders above anything written by any current Labour politician, before or after its publication. In that sense it succeeded in its minimal task. It has exposed the problem that has been obscured by all the leadership chatter: Labour isn’t thinking.

The response from Labour MPs and left-wing pundits has for the most part been defensive, sneering, and superficial. Much of it is ad hominem. I suspect it is rooted in insecurity. I want to say to these people: calm down. Be more confident. If Blair’s piece is outdated, irrelevant and compromised, as you claim, then you can happily ignore it and him. If, however, he makes important points, then why not acknowledge them, before moving on to what he gets wrong or misses out?

I don’t believe Blair set out to convert his party to a particular political strategy or policy program. He just wants it to grow up and get serious about the problems facing the country. It’s spectacularly pointless to insult him or to loudly declare “nothing to see here”, just as it would be useless to pretend his piece provides answers to all Labour’s problems. The point is to use his piece to improve your thinking and your arguments. That’s how productive political debate is meant to work. It’s called the dialectical method, comrades.

It is Blair’s style of argument, as much as the argument itself, which matters. The way he starts from first principles (what is Labour for?) and moves from step to logical step, expressing his ideas cleanly and simply. The way he takes care to separate policy from political strategy from tactics and communication. The way he looks outwards to the world rather than inwards to the party. The way he is excited about the future rather than nostalgic for the past. The way he assumes that the right policies will be good for everyone and not just for ‘our people’.

Many Labour people have forgotten how to argue in this manner, if they ever learnt it. And anyway, they don’t want to have to think through the difficult and unpleasant things that come with the responsibility of governing. How many Labour MPs have done real thinking about how to help the private sector create wealth; how to give our AI sector a fighting chance; how to cut the welfare bill? How many of them have thought deeply about Britain’s economic and diplomatic relationship with China; about our defence capabilities, or our energy strategy, or about how all these questions interact? No - they would much rather sing the old songs about inequality and neo-liberalism and propose more ways to redistribute all the income we don’t have, while taking pot shots at colleagues.

Blair is asking Labour MPs and ministers to engage intelligently on these questions and others - questions which, even two years into government, they have mostly failed to confront or even consider in depth. That’s the reason so many of them find his piece so bothersome. It reminds them that they know and care too little about the job they’re supposed to be doing.

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The most worrying thing about the responses is that they reveal quite how much Labour politicians are now operating in an alternative reality. Burnham thinks the cause of Britain’s housing crisis is that Thatcher sold off council houses. This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start, but a simple refutation is that we already have an exceptionally high proportion of social housing. If you want to make this argument, you have to explain this fact.

Or take Burnham’s “forty years of neo-liberalism” line which he stubbornly repeats after Blair called him on it, or Streeting’s contention that inequality is the most urgent problem we face. British income inequality is the lowest it has been since 1986.

Wealth inequality is higher but it’s driven by an ageing population and sky-high house prices (and thus housing shortage). Burnham cites the financial crisis, rightly, as a pivotal economic disaster for us. But the share of income flowing to the richest 1% is now lower than it was in 2008. The tax system is much more redistributive than it was at the start of the century, partly due to fiscal drag, and is one of the most progressive in Europe. The top 1% pay a substantially greater share of income tax than they did twenty years ago.1

We have one of the highest statutory minimum wages in the world relative to average income. It is set at 65% of the median British income, higher than the EU average. Our housing and energy sectors are struggling under accumulated weight of regulations that have been accreting for decades. Our biggest supermarket is currently fighting, and so far losing, a legal battle to pay different wages to workers doing different jobs, because it somehow contravenes Labour’s equality legislation.

I know “neo-liberalism” is a baggy concept, but can it really stretch this far?

Of course not. It’s just a slogan or buzzword used to avoid thinking about the hard questions. Voters are feeling miserable because their living standards aren’t rising. But that's not because all the income is going to the rich, and it’s not because the government isn’t taxing or regulating enough. It’s because their incomes aren’t rising. And that’s because they’re living in a low growth country.

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To his credit, Burnham at least adopted the right tone in his essay. He welcomed Blair’s intervention and praised his piece. He didn’t sound put out or threatened by it, even if his own ideas fell woefully short of convincing. Starmer was civil, though his piece revealed the same blind spots he has exhibited as Prime Minister, and he is anyway beyond redemption at this point. Wes Streeting adopted the most petulant tone of all three, perhaps because he fears being associated with Blair. That might have been excusable if he had anything of substance to say but to me his piece reinforced the impression of a talented tactician who hasn’t matured at the rate that his fans, including me, hoped he would.

Tony Blair doesn’t have all the answers to Labour’s predicament or to Britain’s malaise. But he’s asking better questions than anyone else.

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The Ruffian is running a limited service today, as I’ve been on holiday this week, in Madrid. (Great to get away from rainy old England.)

I recently wrote a short piece for the Guardian on the Beatles; a commentary on some photographs of the group’s last official gig, in 1966. Writing it got me thinking about all the pictures of John and Paul I wasn’t able to use for John & Paul, for reasons I’ll explain. In lieu of a full-fat Ruffian what follows is the first in an occasional series on this theme.

The picture above is one of a small group of photos taken on the night of March 18, 1965. The Beatles were staying at the Marietta Hotel, in Obertauern, Austria, where they were shooting skiing scenes for the movie Help! After dinner, John and Paul went for a drink in the bar (George and Ringo seem to have been elsewhere) and persuaded the house act - a group called Jacky and the Strangers - to let them take over for a while. And they just jammed. (Btw this post was written without notes to hand so if there are any mistakes I apologise, will correct later).

It’s a beautiful moment. The two of them were in the middle of a global maelstrom of fame and already tiring of the stress and boredom it imposed on them. And here they found this little escape hatch - a place where they could sing and play together for the sheer sweaty joy of it, just like they used to.

We don’t know exactly what they played, but apparently it was covers of old rock’n roll songs - the kinds of songs they played when they first became friends. They look drunk or stoned or both and I imagine it was pretty sloppy, but what fun.

After a few numbers, the manager restored order. After all, he pointed out, he had hired Jacky and the Strangers, not the Beatles.

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I love this picture and the others taken on the same night - see below. In fact, I originally wanted to use one of the pics below for the cover of John & Paul. That proved impossible, for reasons I’ll say more about.

But first, I want to give some background on the process of selecting photos for my book, and indeed for any book. This was the first book I’ve written in which photos were involved. I’m pleased with the selection we ended up with but my God what a hassle it was. Along with getting the Notes section in order it was one of the less enjoyable parts of putting the book together and certainly the most expensive.

Photos were often an important source of evidence for the story I was telling, or the argument I was making. With the Marietta pics, and in several other places in the book, I had to describe photos that I couldn’t include, in the knowledge that readers could, if they wished, easily look them up online. This is one of the odd aspects of this business - a photo can be all over the internet but if you want to use it in a book, you have to pay. And it really is you, the writer.

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Catch-up service:
Pod: Cass Sunstein on the politics of the Beatles
Pain Is a Mind Game
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?

On Wednesday 17 June, my choir will be performing a selection of operatic classics, with some stellar soloists. It’s going to be a brilliant night, full of huge tunes and amazing singing (not me). Tickets are available here. It’s at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea. Come along!

This week: two funny stories about AI and writing, plus a juicy Rattle Bag including notes on maybe the best gig I’ve ever been to.

Having posted on it recently, I wasn’t going to return to the topic of AI and writing for a while. But this week has delivered a pair of stories so juicy that it’s impossible not to comment on them. First up: a prestigious literary prize was awarded to a story that was almost certainly generated by ChatGPT. (As far as I can work out this story was broken by friend-of-The-Ruffian Nabeel Qureshi, on his X account.)

The story is called The Serpent In The Grove, by Jamir Nazir. It was awarded a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and published in Granta. The award dispenses five prizes to five different Commonwealth regions; Nazir, or “Nazir”, is the winner for the Caribbean region.

The Serpent In The Grove is set in an enchanted farmhouse (of course it is) and concerns a troubled marriage. You can read the whole thing, but here’s how it starts:

How do people know it’s AI-generated? They don’t know for certain, not yet anyway. But LLM prose has a certain flavour, and boy is it powerful here. This story is full of its stylistic and syntactical tics: weird metaphors which make no actual sense (“the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret”; many “not x, but y” sentence structures; over-use of certain words like “hums” and “quiet”.1 The entirely vacuous solemnity. The sense of someone, or something, straining to sound deep without having anything to say.

The grove ain’t forget.

Of course, all these things can be true of human-generated literary fiction, and none are infallible markers of LLM writing. But when they’re brought together like this, the flavour is unmistakable. Consider also that the only current internet presence of the author is a LinkedIn profile on which every post is clearly written with AI.

The AI-detection service Pangram deems The Serpent In The Grove to be 100% AI-generated. I sometimes think these mini-scandals are cunningly planned PR campaigns for Pangram; they certainly make the most of them. After this one broke, they ran all of the Commonwealth Prize’s winning stories since 2012 through the model. It found them all to be human generated, except for one in 2025 and three in 2026, of which Nazir’s is one.2

The response from the publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, has essentially been to shrug and say, “Who knows?”

We asked Claude, it wasn’t sure, so whatareyagunnado.3 Anyway maybe it’s racism. A separate statement, this one from the Commonwealth Foundation, said, confusingly, that they would never feed stories to an AI model because then the evil AI would steal the content. Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, agrees with Rausing. Rausing is one of our greatest philanthropists and Leith one of our best critics. I find their attitudes bewilderingly passive.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s reasonable to assume the story is AI-generated based on reading alone. The Pangram analysis is confirmatory evidence. But a little due diligence would have worked wonders here. Have any of the prize administrators actually talked to Nazir? Have they tried to track down the nameless “books published and others forthcoming” referred to in the capsule biography he has provided for them? I am sure the prize runs on a shoestring but even so, none of this requires much effort. Behind the AI’s output is a real person, a dab hand at prompting. Somebody is getting paid the prize money. The point is not to engage in a witchhunt, but to do justice to all the authors who went to the trouble of writing their own story.

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I’ve been wondering why the prize administrators and judges are so slow to pick up on AI-inflected prose, whereas tech people can see it right away (especially those tech people who, like Nabeel, are voracious readers of literary fiction). I think it’s because literary people don’t spend much time reading LLM-generated writing. They just don’t use AI very much. The literary world has a fierce hostility to this technology, rooted in the fear that it’s about to destroy their livelihoods. If they used it more (but not to do their writing for them!) they would have better intuitions for what is AI writing and what isn’t.

They would also know that just asking Claude for a view isn’t enough, since the general models tend to equivocate on such questions and to be sensitive to the prompt (if they sense you want Answer A, that’s where they’ll lean). They would know that if you’re going to consult with AI, it’s much better to use a specialist model, trained specifically for this task.

Pangram works by taking millions of examples of human writing and generating an AI version of each one - a ‘synthetic mirror’. To distinguish between them the model is forced to focus on and recognise the stylistic fingerprints of machine writing. Perhaps it might be a useful exercise for writers to take a passage or scene from a favourite novel and prompt an LLM to do a version of it. They’ll soon get to know that distinctive flavour.

Right now, book people appear to be hostile to AI in general and lenient about its use in literary prizes. That seems like the wrong way around. Mishaps like this one should only remind us that literary fiction is relatively safe from AI. Indeed it has one of the biggest moats of any white collar endeavour. If fiction goes into terminal decline, it will be for other, broader reasons, and not because AIs can fake it. A story that isn’t written by a human has no purpose, and can only offer paltry satisfactions to a reader who knows this to be so.

Once people know a story or a book is AI-generated, they lose any interest they had in it (except perhaps, in these early days, some morbid fascination). The reader has to believe a story is written by a human in order to care about it. Yes, The Serpent In The Grove is terrible writing and shouldn’t have won an award, and yes, much handcrafted fiction is bad. But all these questions of quality are subordinate to that axiom. An AI-generated story simply can’t be ‘good’ in any sense but the most superficial.

It’s the mathematicians I feel sorry for.

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Right, on to the second screw-up of the week. This one is even funnier.

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I'm delighted to say that my guest for this episode is Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of America's pre-eminent legal scholars. Cass has been an adviser to President Obama and President Biden. He's also the author or co-author of numerous excellent books on a staggering variety of topics, from behavioural economics to conspiracy theories to fame to climate justice and more.

This conversation was sparked by his latest book, On Liberalism, a thought-provoking re-examination of what it means to be a political liberal in an age when liberalism is under attack. Cass is great at making connections between politics and culture, so I naturally wanted to talk to him about the Beatles, and whether they can be said to embody a liberal outlook on life. We start off by talking about his first love, Bob Dylan.

Paid subscribers will be able to access the second part of this conversation, published soon, in which we range further afield. Enjoy!

Catch-up service:
Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
Thinking By Hand
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy

I have of late been going through a Martin Amis phase. I don’t mean that I’ve been reading him, or, God forbid, trying to write like him. I mean that I’ve been having teeth trouble.

Amis’s memoir, Experience, is deeply concerned with teeth. The famously expensive dental surgery he undertook in middle age was not a matter of cosmetics, but pain relief, and it made him reflect on the interaction of body and mind. As one critic has argued, the whole book can be read as proposing that “people are first and foremost bodies”, and that our ideas and feelings, including our ideas and feelings about other people, proceed from this ground truth.

Amis had a theory of why, despite knowing his teeth were dodgy, he stopped going to the dentist for decades, until it was too late to avert a crisis in middle age. Unconsciously, he had believed that losing them would enable him to effect a deep change in his personality - to grow up.

”It was a bad plan [not going to the dentist], but it had worked. My unconscious mind might not have thought much of the plan either, but it worked around that and made its preparations. Really, the conscious mind can afford to give itself a rest. The big jobs are done by the unconscious. The unconscious does it all.”

My teeth trouble is not on the scale of Mart’s but it’s enough to make me understand why he devoted so much of Experience to it. When you’re in the middle of teeth trouble it’s difficult to think about anything else.

Toothache is a mind game. If you get knocked in the knee, the pain is easy to comprehend; you intuitively know trigger and cause. Dental pain is more mysterious. You might know it’s something to do with spotty dental hygiene, sugar or smoking, but you don’t know why this particular tooth is hurting and not that one, and the answer is not always physical. ‘Referred pain’ can be felt in a tooth which isn’t even near the tooth that’s the source of the problem.

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A few months ago I had a long-running dispute with a molar on the upper right. After my regular dentist had tried and failed to resolve it I went to a specialist - an endodontist. The operation seemed to go fine but a couple of weeks later I was in quite a lot of pain. I convinced myself that the operation had failed, and felt quite anxious about it. So I called my endodontist, who exuded an air of effortless mastery. “It’s just an after-effect”, he said, in his reassuringly confident tone. “It’ll fade.” Almost the moment I got off the phone, the pain subsided, and soon disappeared for good.

I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences, whether it’s teeth or some other part of the anatomy. The mere act of having a worrying pain or ache explained, contextualised, made mundane by a doctor often goes some or all of the way towards alleviating the pain itself. The idea that physical pain has a mental component shouldn’t be surprising, but the mental part often counts for more than I expect.

The neuroscientific mechanism behind this phenomenon is explored in Andy Clark’s book The Experience Machine (I wrote about Clark’s book a couple of weeks ago and will return to it again - it’s very rich). Clark discusses an extraordinary case study from the British Medical Journal, about a builder who jumped from some scaffolding to the ground, only to land on a fifteen-inch nail.

After the jump - the rest of this piece plus a note on the race to depose Keir Starmer, plus a glorious Rattle Bag. The Ruffian depends on paid subscriptions. Many thanks to those of you who already support it.

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Wes Streeting is strongly rumoured to be launching a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer within the next 48 hours. If you want to know more about Streeting, I recommend my review of his memoir, which I originally wrote for the August 2023 edition of Prospect. Streeting’s life story is truly amazing - his book would be a compelling tale even if it wasn’t by a famous politician. The book is also revealing about his political psychology, perhaps in a way he didn’t intend.

After the review, I give my thoughts on Streeting in 2026, and what I’d like to see him do in his leadership campaign.

One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up: A Memoir of Getting Up and Getting On.
Wes Streeting

There are two genres of political memoir: what-I-did and who-I-am. Retired politicians write the former: long, self-justifying accounts of life on the political frontline; why I did this, why I didn’t do that; why we needn’t dwell on that. Ambitious politicians on the way up write the second kind: artfully shaped life stories peopled by loving mothers and deadbeat dads, or deadbeat mothers and loving dads, in which trials, tribulations and triumphs illuminate the author’s most deeply held values and position on tax reform.

The model for the first genre is Churchill, who had rather a lot of ground to cover. We await Liz Truss’s contribution with bated breath. The second genre is more common in America than Britain and is typified by Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, with its fusion of the political and the personal. Keir Starmer was planning to write one of these but dropped the idea earlier this year, much to everyone’s relief (rumoured title: The Comfort of Low Expectations).

You might expect Wes Streeting’s new book to fit the who-I-am genre, since Streeting is ambitious and on the way up. In fact, it fits neither model. One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up is a memoir by a politician that is barely a political memoir at all, which makes it human, endearing and a little unsatisfying.

The fry-up begot the boy. In May 1982, Streeting’s mother Corinna was newly 18, poor and pregnant by her 17-year-old boyfriend, by accident. At the insistence of her mother, Libby, she made an appointment for a termination. The hospital warned her not to eat anything before coming in. But Corinna, who lived with her mum and two siblings in a three-bedroom council flat in Stepney Green, woke up that morning determined to have her baby. So she cooked herself breakfast. By the time Libby got to the kitchen, the plate was empty, and Corinna could tell her furious mother, and herself, that there was no going back. Hence the book’s title—and its author.

Nanny Libby, a chain-smoking cyclone of a woman, loomed large in Streeting’s early life. She was loyal, loving and ferocious. When she found out that Corinna had been abused by a boyfriend, she tracked him down and beat him with a bicycle chain. A tireless activist, she was heavily involved in campaigns against the Thatcherite regeneration of London’s docklands. When Rupert Murdoch relocated News International to Wapping, she joined the picket lines. A Labour party stalwart, Libby was invited to stand for the local council more than once, but always refused, partly because she was ashamed of her criminal record.

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How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business

An under-reported trend in British society is the extraordinary rise of long distance running. This week, the organisers of the London Marathon announced that there have been 1.3 million global applications to run in next year’s race, more than double the amount in 2024. Just over a million of those applications were from the UK. That’s 1.8% of the entire adult population.

Personally I hate running, but I’m cheered by this. In a country that doesn’t have many positive social trends to celebrate at the moment, it is a bright spot. Running is healthy and, for many people, therapeutic. The largest number of applications from a single demographic group came from women aged 20-29, the group with the worst mental health in the country. Yes, I’d rather they were socialising more too but it’s still good that so many have found a reason to get out of their homes and their heads.

It’s tempting to think of running as some kind of antidote to technology but it is actually a product of it. Modern running is inextricably tied to the smartphone. Apps like Couch To 5K, MapMyRun, and Strava give novice runners the advice, social connection and incentive structures they need to get going and keep going. Nobody needs a phone, or a smartwatch, to run, but many people wouldn’t be running without one. An absurdly complex technology has enabled millions of people to discover one of the simplest and most fundamental of human activities.

At this year’s marathon, 60,000 people finished the race, watched by about 750,000 spectators. At the front of the race, and the top end of the sport, Sabastian Sawe smashed the two-hour barrier, once thought insurmountable. (He did it with the help of technology too, albeit of a different kind).

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But wait, maybe the whole thing is futile, since the robots can do it better now. Last month, there was a half-marathon race in Beijing, in which robots competed with humans. The robots crushed it. All three podium spots were taken by non-humans. The winning machine, made by a subsidiary of Huawei, beat the human world record by seven minutes. This has been reported as a momentous event. “The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” a spectator observed sombrely, “This may signal the arrival of a new era.”

Or it may not. It’s true that the race displayed Chinese progress in robotics: all of the bots were considerably faster than those entered a year ago. Indeed, that is probably why it was staged. But the premise of a competition with humans is inherently ridiculous.

We already have machines that can beat humans in half-marathons. They’re called cars (and these days they don’t even need drivers). Building a machine that can get around a course at speed is not cutting-edge. Doing so while making it look like a human is harder, but that’s an artificial, technologically pointless constraint. It might force useful innovation of some kind, but it’s mostly about the pictures.

The fact that this robotics showcase was presented and reported on as a sporting contest at all is significant. Whoever was behind it knew it would get more attention that way, because we’re fascinated by sport. But why are we fascinated by sport? It’s not because we want to know how fast a human-sized object can propel itself around a track. It’s because we’re fascinated by humans; helplessly compelled by intra-species comparisons.

That’s why 60,000 people took part in the London Marathon: to discover how they’d fare against fellow runners, and against their past selves. It’s also why so many turned out to watch. The spectators might have been supporting someone they knew or seeking a glimpse of the world’s top runners, but mainly they liked watching strangers do something hard, so hard that there is nowhere to hide. You can’t pretend to be someone you’re not when you’re on the edge of exhaustion.

Regardless of whether they’re wearing a comedy outfit or not, each runner declares themselves a unique individual. They’re all doing the same thing, slightly differently. Subconsciously or otherwise, the runners are comparing themselves against each other and themselves; the spectators are comparing themselves against the runners and each other. Both runners and spectators enjoy being around other runners and spectators.

If you think of the London Marathon as a place where a task gets done - covering a distance in the minimum time possible - you’d be completely missing the point. It is a festival of human comparison and human connection. It is growing in popularity at a time when technology threatens to curtail the scope of human endeavour, and it’s doing so with the help of technology. Perhaps this tells us something about how AI will change the world of work.

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Catch-up service:
How To Save Centrism
What the Fuck Are We Talking About When We Talk about Love?
Arteta vs Guardiola
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Busin…

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