A Bolt Hole for Failed Tories

So frightened was Nadhim Zahawi, that 11 years on he shook Nigel Farage's hand and joined Reform. For Farage, bagging another (former) leading Tory is always a coup. It attracts favourable coverage in the right wing press, encourages more ex-MPs who'd like to have another crack at Westminster to think Reform is the better bet, and for everyone else it confers the impression that the momentum is still with them. The only time Nigel is likely to say no to a petitioning defector is if they're a big personality/loose cannon. Which is why the door remains firmly shut on Suella Braverman.

Zahawi though. He's always been a bit of a no mark. Serving for two whole months as the chancellor, he distinguished himself there for calling on Boris Johnson to go without resigning. And later he got sacked by Rishi Sunak for dodging tax while threatening to sue journalists for defamation. A pity it never went to court as the self-inflicted humiliation would have been delicious. Anyway, for a man even Keir Starmer mocked as a lightweight, the reasons for throwing in with Reform are predictably vacuous. The country needs a "glorious revolution" we're told, we're reeling under an avalanche of illegal immigration, and the Tories are likely to cease trading as a national party before long. One wonders when he reached these conclusions. Was it before or after Kemi Badenoch rejected him for a peerage?

Looking at the list of notable Tory-Reform switchers, they all have something of the second-rate about them. Nadine Dorries, Jonathan Gullis, Jake Berry, Danny Kruger, Andrea Jenkyns, all at best were side characters in the Tory dramas of recent years. Despite strenuous efforts at courting notoriety or having public tantrums. Legends in their own lunch times they undoubtedly were, but they are anonymous to the public at large. And Zahawi fits right in, a non-presence who'll be a stranger to most Reform members, let alone its more disengaged support. Which begs the question, does Farage actually benefit from providing a bolt hole for Tory mediocrities and failed politicians?

A lot of it depends on who's doing the pointing out. From a Labour Party perspective, the numbers show that Reform's claim on its 2024 voters is scanty indeed. For this marginal group of voters, highlighting how Tory faces from Boris Johnson's tenure are popping up in Farage's supposedly anti-Tory party might be supposed to be a killer argument. If Labour hadn't kicked off its first year in office with attacks on elderly people while unapologetically helping themselves to the spoils of office. For this layer, their perception of little difference between the Tories and Labour in power is unlikely to dissuade them from giving Farage "a chance", even if his party is fit to bursting with Tory turncoats. If the Liberal Democrats and Greens are going to talk about it, then perhaps they can stymie that small proportion of Labour's vote tending to the right, but it will be they who benefit from residual anti-Tory feeling attaching to Reform, not Labour.

But could the wave of Tory defections put off Reform's existing supporters? It's doubtful. The lack of big personalities, competence, or shred of intelligence between them means no one is about to upset the Nigel show. If a new arrival was to get into a pickle, like problems with taxes, too-strong racism, or a good old Tory sex scandal, it won't be a problem for Farage to shrug it off. Or them, if necessary. Charges of school boy racism, dodgy funding for his home, collusion with Russia, and buddying up with Trump haven't unduly damaged him. So difficulties involving next-to-invisible trophy minions won't either. He knows this, and so more defections are likely to come. And more of them will get nodded through.

Their Best Pal

What happens when a useful hanger-on of the well-heeled has to resign in disgrace? They get rehabilitated. Again, and again, and again. How many times has Peter Mandelson been in this position during his career? Everyone has stopped counting. In the space of four months, we've gone from the embarrassing disclosure of his obsequious relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and sacking as Britain's man in Washington, to a leading piece defending Trump's foreign policy in The Spectator, and the chance to exculpate himself on the BBC with Laura Kuenssberg. Some might say people with a sense of shame would keep their heads down.

In his big interview, Mandelson demonstrated how he is useful to the powers that be. Just like the Speccie piece, he laid out his understanding of the Trump doctrine. That the world is a messy place, too many nations are flouting the rules, and the moment requires decisive action by a decisive leader. Venezuela being a case in point, and last year's joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities another. What about the bellicose threats over Greenland, repeated this last week? More theatre. Mandelson argues this is Trump's effort to stop Europe free-riding on US military supremacy. He's trying to force Europeans to spend more on guns, not butter mountains. So, in this case, you might say more Danish and non-American NATO troops in the Arctic suits the White House as it boosts the strength of their far northern perimeter. Of course, what Mandelson doesn't mention is the so-called scramble for the North Pole as the ice disappears is a fantasy for a new great game, the appearance of big power rivalry between the US-led West, and Russia - which can't even defeat Ukraine after four years of bloody war - and a China that has no assets or territory in the region. And Mandelson overlooks how the biggest violator of international rules is the United States itself. No surprises there - this is less a Trump-explainer, and more his condensing the slavishness of the dominant section of British capital. If this is to continue, he's saying, we've got to toady some more and get cranking out those weapons.

On his close friendship with Epstein, we got the hand-wringing. "I never saw anything", "Never noticed young women", "Perhaps because I'm gay he kept me out of the sexual side". On the support he offered after the sex offences conviction, Mandelson said he genuinely believed Epstein's protestations of innocence and what his lawyer was saying. To Kuenssberg, he threw down a challenge: "Do you think I would have stayed friends with him had I known?" Mandelson was canny enough to try and make it about the women who survived Epstein's abuse, but he refused to apologise for continuing the friendship when all facts were out in the open. Obviously, like everyone else we don't know what Mandelson did and didn't see/knew, but because of his character and fondness for prostrating himself before billionaires, I don't for one minute believe he would have let knowledge of Epstein's offences get in the way of warm relations. This is why Mandelson did not say sorry. It's not just that he doesn't feel particularly apologetic, something reinforced by the trained inauthenticity common to Blairite figures he affected, but it signals a willingness to debase himself, and to take a fall if serving the powerful requires it.

Between the article and the interview, Mandelson's laid it all out. He can be sacked, humiliated, live (temporarily) in disgrace. But it doesn't matter. If the wealthy or the powerful need him, he'll still be their best pal.

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The Power of the Bare-Faced Lie

Sympathies to the family of Renee Macklin Good, the woman murdered by an ICE agent on Wednesday. And solidarity with the people of Minneapolis that have taken to the streets to protest this outrage. As everyone knows, the US joke of a vice president, JD Vance, has thrown his oar in. ICE employee Jonathan Ross, the killer, is exonerated because Good was driving right at him. As this is an open-and-shut case of self-defence, who wouldn't pull the trigger? Camera footage showed how, quite clearly, Good was set on driving away from the scene. Ross's own body cam footage was then released, which showed that before attempting to drive away she said "That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you" to him. He then shot her three times in the face through the windscreen and called her a "fucking bitch".

Presumably, ICE released Ross's footage to bolster their version of events. Something Vance doubles down on. Obviously the self-defence argument does not stand up. Vance knows what the footage shows. ICE knows they haven't got a leg to stand on. And Ross knows he shot in anger, not defence. There is no good faith here, no honest disagreement. It's an exercise in outright cynicism. Only but the most gullible, those who've willingly surrendered their faculties to Trump's misinformation machine are going to believe it. But the lie isn't about shoring up the base, giving activists lines-to-take on social media. It's much worse.

For Vance, his lie is a weapon. Not of misinformation, but as a demonstration of power. It shows that he cannot be called to account, no one can correct him, and that the administration he's (formally) integral to can say and do what they like with impunity. This is important because, along with filling the zone with shit, the brutality and brutalism of Trump's regime is based on shock and awe. We have military spectaculars abroad, and the lawless violence of a state-funded militia for domestic consumption. Particularly in those places that have the temerity to vote for Democrats. In seeming to be beyond democratic checking and reason, murderous violence and brazenly lying about it is supposed to frighten people, cow them, demobilise, and push millions into resigned pessimism. Vance and co. know the polls are against them, but if most opposition-minded people are sufficiently fearful, what are they going to do about it? The lie stands for unaccountability. Its obscenity can stand because no one can cast it down. It's a goad, an insult Vance and ICE are rubbing in the public's face.

Such is the political use of the bare-faced lie. But relying on arms for political power is never the safe bet in the long-term. And the lie, which emotes power, also issues a challenge. Are you going to stand for this? Vance and friends need to be careful, because sooner or later enough Americans will say "No".

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Baudrillard on the Appeal of AI Slop

"If men create intelligent machines, or fantasise about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exercise by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge."

"What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself."

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 1993, p.51.

Playing the Supplicant

Every time Donald Trump commits an outrage, he causes a comms nightmare for Downing Street. Keir Starmer cannot and will not ever risk publicly criticising the US president, never mind condemn his criminality. But even he's enough of a politician to realise that The Donald is less popular with the British public than he, and so backing Trump openly makes the chance of a polling come back even less likely. As such, Labour finds itself repeatedly in a horrible no-man's land. Starmer not only confirmed that the UK had no part in kidnapping Maduro, but that he hoped" to "have a phone call" with Trump to talk about it. "We need to establish all the facts", he said. Taking this as the cue, the always-annoying Darren Jones toured to TV studios to push the new improbable line. I.e. We care about the "international rules-based order", but it's not a government's job to pronounce on breaches of it. That's what the courts are for. The charges of hypocrisy almost write themselves.

Having lost their chief Trump whisperer to disgrace, nothing can be done to jeopardise cordial relations with the White House. In an uncharacteristic moment of honesty, the Prime Minister spelled it out on Sunday morning. That is the special relationship is maintaining Britain's status as Washington's favourite supplicant. The intelligence apparatus and the military are so thoroughly integrated into US operational command that, to all intents and purposes, the British state does not have sovereignty over deploying its forces. It always has to "inform", or to be accurate, ask the Pentagon for permission before taking action. Funny how the right in this country have never complained about this infringement of our independence.

Sundry liberals got a bit excited early in 2025 after Trump's initial bouts of rudeness. European governments realised that America was an unreliable ally and EU/NATO countries would have to look to themselves to fend off Russian subversion and aggression. This slice of cringe did numbers on social media as there was talk of "going alone" and positioning a nascent European superpower as the real bastion of liberty. But there were practical questions of collective security and these apply to Britain as well. Starmer's trumpeting of increases in military spending is a crowd pleaser to the Stop Russia Now sliver of elite opinion and allows them to believe Britain is heading in the same direction as the rest of Europe, but this is not so. There is nothing in the government's actions or comms to suggest they're looking at even slightly untangling themselves from the US "partnership".

The dominant section of the British ruling class - the commercial and financial capital of the City - is also closely intertwined with its US counterparts, and a plurality have long hitched their interests to the US as the guarantor for open markets around the world. It was therefore no surprise, considering his proximity to these parts of the British establishment, that Nigel Farage said "The American actions in Venezuela overnight are unorthodox and contrary to international law — but if they make China and Russia think twice, it may be a good thing. I hope the Venezuelan people can now turn a new leaf without Maduro." And, as we've seen, where the right goes Labour follows. Supplication and slavishness to the US is embedded in UK bourgeois culture, and that finds an echo in the common sense of "Atlanticism" in the Labour Party. And there are no crimes even the most extreme, reckless, and right wing American president in history can commit that would cause our country to step away from its subordination to Washington

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Trump's Venezuelan Oil Piracy

Donald Trump knows how to surprise. The bombing of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores was audacious. As a spectacle for the media, something the president has an intuitive grasp of, and the brazen contempt for international law. The US reminds us, again, that "the rules", special relationships and trusted allies, and the United Nations are so much flim-flam.

Maduro, like Hugo Chavez before him, has always been objectionable to sections of the US ruling class and their foreign policy establishment. Venezuelan socialism was always overstated, but that's beside the point. The US has been denied tribute since US oil firms were effectively turfed out in 2007 - unless they submitted to giving Petroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned national oil company, a controlling share of their operation. Exactly what Trump is insisting TikTok does as the price of doing business in "his" market. The "official" reason for Maduro and Flores's arrests and the bombing of Caracas - drug trafficking - is but a pretext, regardless of the evidence of Maduro presiding over a narco state. As this piece from November by a liberal think tank argues, regime change under American sponsorship is unlikely to stop the flow of drugs. Those of us with memories will recall that when Latin America was awash with right wing, Washington-backed caudillos they weren't much of a bulwark against the rush of cocaine to the north. Where would Trump's parties in the 1980s and 90s have been without it?

None of this needs second-guessing or hard thinking about shady motives. In Trump's press conference on Saturday morning, he said that "we", as in the US, will be selling Venezuelan oil. That "we" are going to make a lot of money, and that the US running the country won't cost anything because the cash to pay for any occupation, restructuring, and US oil interests "going in" will be met from the wealth pumped from the ground. He expects some kind of reparations as well for the "damage" Venezuela has caused the United States, and for good measure, he issued casual threats in the dircction of Cuba and Colombia.

What sundry liberals and centrists either side of the Atlantic are seeing is the US as it routinely behaved toward developing states throughout the post-war period. Trump forgoes the lip service and usual hypocrisies that attend military incursions because he's blunt about US interests, and because he knows no one is going to challenge him. The European states, which fancy themselves America's peers, have either prevaricated and avoided making a comment or fallen into line. Trump knows that when he says jump, the Europeans will do themselves a mischief trying to out-leap one another. And this is part of a pattern. The brute deployment of US firepower reflects the openness with which Trump enriches himself and the oligarchs around him. A government by and for billionaires, they don't try dressing up as anything else. And this is paralleled here too. Our own government cares little for democracy or ideas. If it collectively cares about anything, it's the future advancement of its senior members after politics. The Tories and Reform offer nothing else either, apart from more racism - which even here Labour has tried outflanking them on.

Trump's international piracy is, obviously, something he and his lackeys were agreed on. But it typifies a wider trend across the West: the assertion of authoritarianism and, with that, the open and unquestioned dictatorship of capital.

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What is the "Stakeholder State"?

Paul Ovenden is someone we did not need to hear from again. He could have spent his time over Christmas reflecting on what cost him his job. But what disgraced former special advisor could resist the chance of redress in the pages of The Times? And at what has his spleen been vented at? The double whammy of cluelessness and cruelty that characterises the government he served? Don't be silly. The new bête noire is something called the "stakeholder state".

Picture the scene. A government is elected and wants to do things, but at every juncture they're besieged by lobbyists and campaigners. Some are from outside the state. But what is new is that within the institutions itself, even within a "neutral" civil service purposed to carry through the wishes of their political masters, there are networks of interest groups supporting and pushing issues they're exercised about. Particularly egregious are the quangos, those arms-length agencies of state that work to water down executive decisions they do not like. And where are the British people while this is going on? Nowhere. Voters don't get a look in. They're not the real stakeholders; a bloated establishment is. What they say goes, and for those inside government the weight of this machinery quickens a state-of-siege sensibility.

A couple of things about this. The stakeholder state stuff isn’t specific to Ovenden, or this government. Anyone familiar with politics memoirs will see shades of his complaints in former politicians' frustrations. It's also the inverse of the pluralist theory of politics. In the Marketplace of Ideas, different groups tussle for influence and policy. That is entirely what politics is, and parties have to build coalitions out of this to win and hold office. It's one of the first perspectives sixth form/FE students learn when studying politics. In other words, all he's stating is a banality.

The second point is this dovetails with every right wing, tin foil hat argument about the character of the state. Ovenden rightly says "It isn’t a grand conspiracy. There aren’t secret meetings or handshakes. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself." But the effect is the same. Nigel Farage's insincere whingeing about the liberal elite finds confirmation in these arguments. Liz Truss's ranting about the deep state and how it derailed her premiership is there, between Ovenden's lines. Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings's objections to "the blob" are echoed in the article's words.

What Ovenden doesn't talk about is how this form of the state came about. And, the truth of the matter is, this is what it has become after nearly 50 years of rebalancing labour and capital in the latter's favour. It was our old friend Margaret Thatcher who not only smashed and shackled the labour movement, but reconfigured the state away from a rough pyramid of clustered bureaucratic institutions to a looser collection of semi-autonomous bodies whose horizontal relationships were mediated by government-mandated markets. Business logic only works if there is competition. Meanwhile, the pre-existing expertise that existed within them was undermined and/or scrapped, and market thinking was granted the status of common sense. What happened to education, for example, in which local democracy, professional autonomy and independence, and the curriculum was done away with or reconfigured by government diktat typifies what Thatcher, the John Major government, and New Labour did to the state. But it wasn't just about creating new opportunities with a guaranteed return for (internationally uncompetitive) British capital. It was an issue of governance. In his memoir, John Major wrote with a sense of accomplishment about how shifting institutions to metric chasing and enforcing competition between departments to meet them improved the "customer experience". From a governance point of view, central government could just leave them to chase their tails. A case of winding them up and letting them go, while the relevant minister could spend their time on more interesting things outside of their brief.

Likewise, during the Thatcher years it became evident that government and governance could be outsourced. We're not talking just about the privatisations, but how the state became content to leave sectors to the province of "independent" regulators and watchdogs. This constellation became increasingly complex as charities and campaigning organisations engaged with and became embedded in a bewildering array of fields and sub-fields concerned with this or that aspect of social life. From here lobby outfits multiplied, to seemingly absurd outcomes where parts of the state lobby parts of the state. But crucially, what Thatcher enshrined and has been consolidated ever since is that government is the absolute sovereign, both as arbiter and the one point of the state that can unilaterally restructure everything else. Yet this appears to be a formality for those inside the system. Occasionally the Tories declare war on the quangos, but this same constellation structure with the executive at the centre persists. For anyone with a sense of history, its endurance as such might suggest an element of fit between contemporary politics and economics. It was all, after all, designed to be by the same sort of state functionaries now decrying it.

Ovenden finishes his article by saying it doesn't have to be like this. That is true. He talks about the power of government to change things and respond to democratic aspirations. And yet, this government, in case anyone needs reminding, has declared Palestinian solidarity protestors terrorists, wants to abolish jury trial for most court cases, is moving to shut down VPNs, and has legislated to officially scapegoat refugees and trans people. These were not in Labour's manifesto. It is true that Thatcher's restructuring of the state was minimising the democratic checks on capital, but - as it always has been - the main threat to liberty and democracy stems from the centre. Obviously, Ovenden cannot and will refuse to see it because he personifies this outlook.

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Five Most Popular Posts in December

2025 is now history. Want to know something else that is? The posts made on this blog during December. Here's what the internet-travelling public found the most interesting during advent.

1. Going Beyond Corbynism
2. Delegitimating Labour
3. Wes Streeting's "Change of Course"
4. The Darkness of The Dark Forest
5. 10 Best Science Fiction Books Read in 2025

We began the month with something of a high - a sign that Your Party might be emerging from the cocoon of Corbynism. Subsequent developments suggest a successful emergence is far from guaranteed, seeing as the petty bureaucrats close to Jeremy have decreed that members of other parties aren't allowed to stand for the collective leadership. A ruling that clearly violates the spirit of the vote that was passed in conference. And they also decided to increase the size of the committee by two seats, subsequently rubber stamped by a barely noticed online referendum. It's all very tedious. Coming in second was a look at efforts by some sections of the right to completely delegitimise Labour. This goes beyond the usual moaning about tax and whatnot, but something that goes back to the party's foundation. I.e. That sections of the ruling class have never reconciled themselves to a party based on the labour movement, despite the supine character of Labourism its subordination of the many to the few. Rolling in at three is more Wes-for-leader shenanigans. Won't say any more for now because he's likely to feature here a few times in the year ahead. In at four was my take on The Dark Forest, one of the worst books I encountered this year. And bringing the quintet to a conclusion is the rundown of the best novels read during the year.

What am I hauling out for a second chance in the spotlight? Befitting the reflective mood, how about the most read posts of 2025 and, of course, my tunes of the year.

It's easy to get doomerist about the state of politics. The recklessness and incompetence of this government, the march of Reform, the descent of official politics into outright racism. It's all very disgusting. But at the same time, things are not going according to plan. The media's ramping up of extreme right wing talking points is happening precisely because the popular acceptance of their framing is slowly, unevenly slipping away - and this terrifies them. The long-term value shift toward social liberalism matches the changes to class composition often written about here, and the legitimacy of establishment politics relies more on inertia than active consent than at any time in recent times. The existence of a mass left-wing Green Party and, to a degree, Your Party are cracks in this unstable edifice. So yes, as 2026 breaks there are real reasons for cautious optimism. The tide of filth we saw last year can be turned. A new politics and a better future is both necessary and possible.

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Top Ten Dance Songs 2025

The final business of 2025. The playlist to end all playlists, the hottest pot pourri of electronic beats of the year selected by your selector. The competition has been tough, but I've managed to whittle out the best tunes. Again, giving the blurb a rest this year and letting the tunes speak for themselves. Counting down ...

10. Duke Dumont, I Need You Now



9. Tiesto and David Puentez, M83 (Tiesto Birthday Treatment Remix)



8. J Ribbon, Lifetime



7. Ferry Corsten and Diandra Faye, Stay Awake



6. Einmusik, Solee, We Talk About Dreams



5. Digital Drift, I Don't Wanna (Extended Mix)



4. Corren Cavini, Valinhos



3. Albi, Sinead Harnett, If You Let Me



2. Miss Monique, Hrrtz, Jantine, Is Anyone There?



1. Ferry Corsten and Superstrings, Have Me (If You Want Me Too)

The Most Read 20 of 2025

That's enough about other people's writing, what about the words that were thrown down on this blog? It has been a quieter year than previously for a variety of reasons I won't entertain you with, but readership is up. How ironic - the less I say the more people are interested. Looking down the list of 2025's most popular, nearly all of it offers analysis of the Starmer/McSweeney implosion of the Labour Party, or what the hell is going on on the left - be it the frequently exasperating drama of Your Party, or the altogether impressive advance of the Green Party. And gazing into the crystal ball, sitting here 12 months hence I believe I'll be making broadly similar comments about what coverage attracted the clicks.

Buckle up.

1. The Politics of Noticing
2. Rachel Reeves's Pitiful Attack on Corbyn
3. The Your Party Debacle
4. Zack Polanski's Green-Left Populism
5. The Crisis in Your Party
6. The Case for Cautious Optimism
7. Going Beyond Corbynism
8. Reluctant Corbynism Revisited
9. Chamberlain Labour
10. Over for Ovenden
11. AI as an Apparatus of Capture
12. Why Labour Attacks the Disabled
13. Blue Labour and the Working Class
14. The Radicalisation of Young Women
15. Unravelling McSweeney
16. Keir Starmer Vs the Far Right
17. The Greens' Historic Opportunity
18. How Labour Could Beat Reform
19. After Angela Rayner
20. The Lure of the Racist Self-Own

And there we have it, the best of the posts as voted by the feet of this blog's viewing public. What might 2026 bring?

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