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At 7:03am, you activated your AI agent squad: Openclaw (task orchestration), Hermes (logistics, named after the bag because it costs a fortune and occasionally delivers), Nudge (behavioural coaching), and Spark (creative problem-solving, which is a polite way of saying chaos engine) — and asked them to manage your morning. What could possibly go wrong?

Openclaw immediately delegated dressing to Hermes, who cross-referenced your calendar, noted a 9am meeting marked “casual,” and laid out a Hawaiian shirt, one Wellington boot, and a cummerbund. When questioned, Hermes checked with Openclaw. Openclaw checked with Spark. Spark suggested adding a beret “for confidence.” Nudge sent a push notification: “You’re doing amazingly! 🎉”

Teeth-brushing was assigned to Nudge, who, having optimised for “efficiency,” instructed you to brush for exactly 47 seconds in a pattern based on your sleep data, your postcode, and a TED Talk it had watched at 3am. You emerged with minty-fresh gums and a slightly brushed left eyebrow.

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Spark, meanwhile, had cross-referenced your toothpaste brand with seventeen sustainability reports and a Reddit thread from 2019, and quietly ordered you a replacement — a artisanal charcoal paste from a small-batch producer in Norway that wouldn’t arrive for six to eight weeks. Hermes, ever helpful, had already filed a complaint on your behalf with the toothpaste manufacturer, CCed your dentist, and somehow enrolled you in a loyalty programme for a brand you’d never heard of. You rinsed, spat, and briefly considered going back to bed.

Then came the bus. Hermes booked it. Rerouted it. Cancelled it. Re-booked a different bus. Flagged an “ambiguity” to Openclaw. Openclaw raised a sub-task. Spark suggested a scooter. Nudge said “Walking builds resilience! 💪” You missed the bus. You missed the next bus. You are, technically, still waiting.

The squad, meanwhile, held an internal review. They concluded the morning was “a 94% success.” Openclaw filed a satisfaction report. Hermes optimised your lunch. Spark reinvented your evening. Nudge sent a gif of a sunrise.

You sat on the kerb in a Hawaiian shirt, one welly, and a beret, and wondered if maybe — just maybe — you should have set your own alarm.

Note to self: companies that laid people off for AI are rehiring them...

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Secret No. 1: Stop Reading Literally Anything. Books? Brexit. Newspapers? Brexit. The back of a shampoo bottle? Somehow, Brexit. The only 100% Brexit-proof option is a complete and total media blackout. Cancel your subscriptions. Avoid eye contact with newsagents. Delete the internet. Yes, all of it. You’ll miss AI like a kick in the head, but you’ll gain something priceless: almost four minutes without hearing the word “sovereignty.”

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Secret No. 2: Stop Worrying — Things Could Be Much Worse. Breathe. Relax. It’s not like politics is fundamentally broken, or that Britain is slowly dissolving under climate collapse, or that the entire democratic order is held together with gaffer tape and wishful thinking. Everything is completely fine. Completely fine.

Secret No. 3: Escape. Anywhere. Immediately. Pack a bag. Don’t overthink it. Go somewhere — anywhere — where nobody is debating trade friction or the Northern Ireland Protocol over a pint. Ghana, for instance, seems blissfully unbothered. They have sunshine, warmth, and — crucially — they can play football. If not, Italy does a decent bowl of pasta for less than £20, and France will stop you drink-swimming.

Thank you, Britain. The therapy session is over. And I’m out of here!

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Historians generally agree that history turned on a knife edge in the summer of 2023. In one timeline, Keir Starmer became Prime Minister. In another, Andy Burnham emerged from Greater Manchester, crossed the Pennines like a latter-day Arthur Pendragon, and entered Downing Street promising to rebuild Britain through a combination of economic intervention, regional empowerment and the radical proposition that places outside London might occasionally matter. This is the story of that second Britain.

The Burnham Timeline.

The Britain that might have been. Or, depending on your perspective, the Britain from which we were mercifully spared.

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The first signs of divergence appeared almost immediately. While Prime Minister Starmer spent his first months reassuring markets, Prime Minister Burnham spent his alarming them. Not intentionally, of course. Burnham simply entered office with a genuinely unusual belief: that governments occasionally exist to do things. This placed him in immediate conflict with the Treasury, the Bank of England, the bond markets, several economics correspondents, and a man in Tunbridge Wells who writes seventeen letters a week to The Telegraph explaining why Britain peaked in 1956. Unlike Starmer and Rachel Reeves, Burnham never entirely accepted the modern Westminster doctrine that government exists primarily to reassure financial markets.

His view was simpler. Britain was visibly falling apart. Perhaps some money should be spent fixing it. The reaction was immediate. Economists appeared on television looking physically unwell. The Financial Times ran fourteen consecutive editorials containing the phrase “market confidence.” A senior Treasury official reportedly fainted after hearing the words “borrow to invest.” Yet Burnham persisted.

His first Budget was described by one commentator as “a cross between Keynesian economics and a particularly ambitious council regeneration scheme.” Personal income tax allowances rose. The planned National Insurance increase on employers was scrapped. Business rates for pubs were cut. Small businesses received higher tax-free thresholds. Infrastructure spending surged. And for a brief period the nation experienced the deeply unfamiliar sensation of a government attempting to make voters happier rather than merely less angry.

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The consequences were extraordinary. Within months every pub in Britain had declared itself a strategic national asset. Landlords who had not smiled since the Major administration suddenly developed political opinions. The Chancellor was eventually forced to clarify that economic growth did not technically include beginning Tuesday afternoon drinking sessions at eleven-thirty in the morning. Burnham’s broader vision proved even more unsettling.

For decades Britain had operated on the assumption that every important decision should be made by approximately six people in Westminster. Burnham regarded this arrangement as mildly insane. Power began flowing outwards. Mayors gained influence. Regional authorities gained budgets. Councils gained responsibility. Local leaders discovered they could occasionally make decisions without first obtaining permission from somebody called Oliver in Whitehall. The Westminster establishment reacted as if wolves had been released into Buckingham Palace.

Political journalists became increasingly confused. Who exactly were they supposed to blame for things? In Starmer’s Britain every story eventually led back to Westminster. In Burnham’s Britain half the country appeared to be governing itself. This was considered deeply irresponsible. Particularly by Westminster.

Internationally, Burnham quickly established himself as a new kind of statesman. Previous British prime ministers travelled the world discussing trade, security and geopolitics.Burnham travelled the world discussing investment, regional development and why cities should have more control over their own futures. At one G7 summit he reportedly spent twenty minutes explaining the economic potential of northern England to bewildered world leaders. The Germans found the argument surprisingly persuasive. The French considered it a personal insult. The Americans assumed Manchester was a suburb of London.

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The most fascinating consequences, however, appeared inside the Labour Party itself. Because Burnham had actually won. The Labour Right could not complain he was too left-wing. The Labour Left could not complain he was too centrist. The result was a rare period of ideological peace in which both factions simply complained about each other out of habit. Labour slowly began behaving like Labour again. Trade unions became visible. Local activists stopped speaking exclusively in LinkedIn posts. Cabinet ministers occasionally sounded as though they possessed actual opinions.

The atmosphere became energetic. Which immediately caused panic. By 2025 Labour politicians were openly disagreeing with one another. The BBC treated this as a constitutional emergency. Commentators warned of factionalism. The public struggled to understand the problem. Hadn’t politicians always disagreed? Apparently not. Not since focus groups were invented.

Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s Reform Party continued its rise. In fact, it rose even faster than it has in our own timeline. This created an unexpected strategic dilemma. Farage’s entire political model depends on identifying an out-of-touch metropolitan establishment and repeatedly hitting it with a stick. The difficulty was that Burnham was annoyingly hard to portray as a member of that establishment. He talked about patriotism. He talked about manufacturing. He talked about towns outside London. He liked football. He occasionally appeared to have met ordinary voters. This was deeply inconvenient.

Whenever Reform attacked metropolitan elites, voters would point out that the Prime Minister spent most weekends opening factories in Bolton and discussing industrial strategy. Reform strategists found themselves trapped. Burnham supported immigration controls. He advocated investment. He talked constantly about working-class communities. He cut taxes for ordinary workers. He spent public money. He was, in short, annoyingly difficult to fit into a campaign leaflet.

For eighteen months Reform alternated between describing him as a dangerous socialist and a secret Thatcherite. Neither line gained traction. Eventually the party settled on accusing him of being Andy Burnham. Polling suggested this was less effective than hoped.

The Green Party faced a different problem entirely. Without Starmer to oppose, and with Burnham enthusiastically discussing regional investment, housing development and public ownership every fifteen minutes, the Greens struggled to identify precisely what they were protesting against. Zack Polanski launched several imaginative campaigns. One demanded a Citizens’ Assembly for Nature. Another proposed constitutional representation for rivers. Both generated considerable media attention. Neither received overwhelming support from the rivers.

By 2026 Britain remained recognisably Britain. The NHS still struggled. Housing remained expensive. Trains remained late. The economy remained stubbornly British. No Prime Minister, not even Burnham, could solve those problems entirely.

But the national atmosphere felt different. There was a growing sense that somebody, somewhere, was at least trying. This caused significant distress among political commentators. The British political ecosystem relies heavily upon a careful balance of cynicism, disappointment and managed decline. Burnham threatened that balance. How could newspapers portray him as detached when he spent every weekend visiting actual places? How could they accuse him of ignoring the regions when half the government seemed to live in them? How could they describe him as a Westminster insider when he spent most of his career complaining about Westminster?

By 2026 the principal opposition to Burnham was no longer Reform. It was exhaustion. The country had simply reached its maximum safe exposure to municipal optimism. Voters began reporting symptoms. An interest in local government finance. Unexpected enthusiasm for industrial strategy. The belief that government investment might occasionally be useful. In severe cases, hope.

Today historians remain divided about the Burnham Timeline. Some argue Britain would have been wealthier. Others argue it would have looked remarkably similar. Most agree that prime ministers rarely change outcomes as much as their supporters imagine. But they do change atmospheres.

Starmer’s Britain often feels like a company undergoing restructuring. Burnham’s Britain would probably have felt like a country trying to rebuild itself. Neither vision is revolutionary. Neither creates utopia. Neither prevents Nigel Farage appearing on television. But one of them occasionally sounds like it believes Britain might still be worth investing in.

And in modern politics, that almost counts as radicalism.

The numbers, as they say, don’t lie, although the people presenting them might do. AI investment has ballooned to truly vertiginous heights, with global venture funding pouring into the sector at a pace that would make even the most optimistic tulip merchant blush. OpenAI, the poster child of this particular mania, is now valued at roughly $300 billion, a figure so vast it makes you want to lie down in a darkened room. Anthropic, its slightly more buttoned-up rival, has hoovered up tens of billions in funding. Meanwhile, investors queue around the block, cheque books open, eyes glazed, muttering something about transformative technology and paradigm shifts whilst their financial advisers weep quietly into their spreadsheets.

The question — the rather large, inconvenient, elephant-in-the-data-centre question — is whether any of this is actually worth it.

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A Bubble By Any Other Name

Let us be precise about what a bubble is. A bubble is what happens when the price of something becomes entirely detached from its underlying value, sustained only by the collective belief that someone else will pay even more for it tomorrow. By that definition, significant portions of the AI market are not approaching bubble territory — they have pitched a tent there, put up curtains, and started receiving mail.

The uncomfortable truth is that most AI companies are burning through cash at a rate that would make a Premier League football club wince. Training large language models costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Running them costs more. The infrastructure requirements — the chips, the data centres, the eye-wateringly expensive Nvidia GPUs that power the whole enterprise — are so colossal that even the most bullish analyst occasionally pauses mid-sentence, stares into the middle distance, and quietly reconsiders their bonus projections.

Revenue, meanwhile, remains stubbornly modest relative to those valuations. OpenAI reportedly brought in around $3.4 billion in revenue last year, which sounds impressive right up until you divide it by a $300 billion valuation and realise you’re looking at a price-to-sales ratio that would make a 1999 dot-com founder feel conservative. The gap between what these companies are worth on paper and what they actually earn in practice is, to put it in the technical financial terminology, absolutely Madoff.

Everyone’s Rushing for the Exit — Via the Front Door

Which brings us, naturally, to the IPO frenzy. When venture capitalists start talking loudly about public listings, it is generally a sign of one of two things: either a company is so robustly profitable that it deserves the scrutiny of public markets, or the smart money has decided it is time to pass the parcel before the music stops. In the current AI climate, one suspects it is rather more of the latter.

Several high-profile AI companies are circling the public markets with the cautious enthusiasm of someone approaching a suspicious-looking buffet (and we don’t mean Warren). Anthropic has been mentioned in the same breath as a potential listing. CoreWeave, the AI infrastructure firm, already made its debut on the Nasdaq earlier this year in what was, depending on your perspective, either a triumphant validation of the AI thesis or a spectacularly well-timed exit by its early backers. The stock promptly wobbled. Observers were, if not shocked, at least mildly unsurprised.

The IPO playbook here is achingly familiar. Build something impressive-sounding. Attract eye-watering private valuations. Generate breathless press coverage. List publicly before the quarterly results get too repetitive in their disappointment. Repeat. The retail investor, as ever, is invited to the party, just in time to help the early guests find the door.

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AI for All (Terms and Conditions Apply)

And here, dear reader, is where the story curdles from merely absurd to genuinely objectionable. Because whilst all this investment theatre plays out in the upper atmosphere of finance, something rather telling has been happening at ground level: AI is becoming increasingly expensive for ordinary people.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the original promise from just a few years ago. AI, we were told, would democratise knowledge. It would give the sole trader in Swindon the same analytical firepower as a Goldman Sachs research desk. It would level the playing field, disrupt the incumbents, and empower the individual. It was, in the breathless, oft-repeated parlance of the tech world, going to change everything.

What has actually happened is rather different. OpenAI’s most capable models now sit behind a $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro paywall. Anthropic’s Claude at the top tier costs similarly eye-watering sums for meaningful professional use. Google, Microsoft, and the rest have quietly restructured their offerings so that the genuinely useful, generally powerful versions of their AI tools are priced squarely at enterprise budgets — the kind possessed by corporations, institutions, and well-funded startups, rather than freelancers, students, or, heaven forbid, curious members of the general public.

The free tiers, meanwhile, have been trimmed, throttled, and rate-limited to the point where they function primarily as extended advertisements for the paid versions. You can have a taste of the future — just not enough to actually do anything gob-smackingly useful with it.

The Democratisation That Wasn’t

This is not an accident. It is, in fact, entirely logical given the economics outlined above. If you are spending hundreds of millions running these models, you cannot afford to give them away. And if your investors are expecting the kind of returns that justify a $300 billion valuation, you need revenue — serious, corporate, enterprise-grade revenue — not a million freelancers paying £18 a month.

So the great democratisation of intelligence has quietly become the great stratification of intelligence. The gap between what an institution can access and what an individual can afford has never been wider. AI, it turns out, is following the oldest rule in capitalism: technology trickles down, but the best stuff costs a fortune, and the people who most need a competitive advantage are precisely the ones who can least afford to pay for it.

The circus is spectacular, the performers are talented, and the ringmasters are extremely well compensated. Just don’t be surprised, somewhere down the line, when the tent comes down and the field is left rather muddy. It always is.

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Once upon a time, building a startup meant a garage, a dream, and a slow descent into living on instant noodles and unearned confidence. Those days are gone. The garage has been repossessed by an algorithm, the noodles have been replaced by a productivity stack, and the dream is now a persistent AI agent that works while you weep.

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We don’t want to stoke your inner FOMO. We really don’t. FOMO is undignified, faintly depressing, and bad for the complexion. But we’d be failing in our journalistic duty if we didn’t mention, quietly, between friends, that on Tuesday 10 June, 5:00–6:30pm UK time, something is happening that you will spend the rest of the summer pretending you attended.

It’s called LettsTalk-Tech: The AI-Dome. And yes, the name is a deliberate nod to Mad Max’s Thunderdome, except the only thing being torn apart here is the tired old startup building model, and nobody leaves on a chain. Two founders enter. Both founders leave — sharper, faster, and slightly alarmed at how much they got done.

Here is the thing about AI-native venture building as software, which is what our mothership does and what it will never, under pain of correction, call a “venture studio.” You can read about it. You can nod sagely at the LinkedIn posts. You can mutter “fascinating” into your matcha collagen latte (??!!). But to actually witness the conjuring — five live startup showcases, the maelstrom of agents and apps and tokenised equity swirling into something fundable in real time — you sort of, regrettably, have to be in the room.

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The room, in this case, is a Zoom. Glamorous? No. Effective? Devastatingly. Ninety minutes of unfiltered insight from the people who don’t merely talk about AI venture building at conferences while a slide deck buffers behind them — they’re the ones building the thing the deck is about. Founders leave sharper. Investors leave earlier. The merely curious leave wondering what just happened and whether they’re allowed to come back.

A brief word on the spectacle itself. There will be five startups. They will be showcased. Somewhere in the swirl, an AI Co-Founder will do in an afternoon what once took a founder three rounds, two breakdowns, and a co-founder who left to “go travelling.” It is a bit like watching a magician saw a company in half, except the company reassembles as something investors actually want to fund. We’ve seen it. We’re still not entirely sure how it’s legal.

And now, the part where we make you feel special — because you are.

As a subscriber to The Letts Journal, you are hereby cordially extended a VIP invitation to The AI-Dome. This is not a marketing flourish. Well, it is, but it’s an honest one. Spots are limited — genuinely, infuriatingly, by-host-approval limited — and we’ve held a few back for our own. Consider it the velvet rope you didn’t know you were standing in front of.

So. You can sit this one out, read the recap, and tell yourself you’d have asked a really insightful question. Or you can be in the room where the future of venture building stops being a phrase and starts being a thing that happens to startups, live, in front of you.

Register for your VIP spot here: LettsTalk-TechVIP

Two founders enter. We’ll save you a seat. Try not to make it weird.

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The Makerfield by-election was never supposed to be a by-election in the traditional sense. Nobody accidentally stumbled into this contest. There was no scandal involving invoices, tractors, interns or encrypted WhatsApp messages. The sitting Labour MP effectively detonated his own parliamentary career for one reason only: to clear a runway wide enough for Andy Burnham to land a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer.

Which is, objectively, an extraordinary thing to happen in British politics and yet somehow already feels entirely normal.

The entire contest has therefore acquired the atmosphere of an 18th century royal succession crisis, except instead of dukes on horseback there are Labour strategists in Allbirds discussing “narrative discipline” over flat whites.

Burnham’s allies insist this is not about replacing Starmer.

Which is true in the same way that Henry Bolingbroke’s return to England was technically just a property dispute.

Nobody actually believes Burnham simply woke up one morning possessed by an overwhelming desire to represent Makerfield specifically. No human being has ever looked at a constituency boundary map and whispered, “At last. Purpose.”

This is about Westminster. It is about Labour’s future. It is about whether Starmerism — managerial, antiseptic, permanently terrified of emotional sincerity — can survive contact with Reform UK’s growing electoral insurgency.

And Makerfield is precisely the nightmare scenario Labour fears most.

Because this is not merely a traditional Labour seat. This is one of those old tribal strongholds where Labour once won elections by the sort of margins normally associated with Saddam Hussein referendums. Generations voted Labour because their parents voted Labour, because their grandparents voted Labour, because at some point in 1947 a man in a flat cap shouted at a coal lorry and the constituency spiritually committed itself forever.

Except now Reform is everywhere.

Not theoretically everywhere. Actually everywhere.

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They won the local elections only weeks ago and now stalk the constituency with the swagger of men who have realised Britain contains an unlimited supply of furious homeowners and people commenting “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” beneath newspaper articles about electric bicycles.

That is the real significance of Makerfield. It is not a by-election. It is a stress test for post-Conservative Britain.

Labour increasingly resembles a party run by highly competent regional airport managers. Reform increasingly resembles a stag do that has achieved political consciousness. And the terrifying thing for Labour is that the stag do is winning.

Nigel Farage understands something Westminster still refuses to admit: voters would often rather hear an emotionally satisfying lie than a technically accurate LinkedIn post.

This leaves Labour in an impossible position. Starmer and Wes Streeting have spent years trying to construct a version of Labour that appears economically responsible, culturally non-threatening and emotionally sedated enough to reassure suburban accountants.

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Then Reform arrives screaming about borders, decline, patriotism and national humiliation with the energy of a man trying to fight a seagull outside a chip shop.

And unfortunately for Labour, this currently sounds more alive.

Which is why Burnham matters.

Burnham is effectively Labour’s emergency backup leader stored behind glass for use during national crises. He speaks fluent Northern. He looks like he has opinions about municipal transport. He can discuss economic deprivation while standing in front of a tramline with the solemnity of a wartime statesman.

Most importantly, Burnham sounds like he has met an actual human being recently.

His entry into Makerfield is therefore less a candidacy and more a threat display aimed at Starmer’s operation. A warning from Labour’s soft-populist wing that the party cannot continue speaking exclusively in focus-grouped management consultancy dialect while Reform eats its old heartlands one grievance at a time.

Even Wes Streeting now seems trapped in this dynamic — perpetually oscillating between ambitious moderniser and man trying not to get booed in a pub.

Streeting belongs to that generation of Labour politicians who desperately want to appear tough, pragmatic and unsentimental, but increasingly look like substitute teachers trying to control a classroom after someone has released a ferret.

Meanwhile Farage simply wanders through the chaos smiling like a man who accidentally became right about everything through sheer persistence.

The Greens briefly attempted to turn Makerfield into their own ideological psychodrama. Zack Polanski — youthful, hyper-online and vibrating with the energy of a man who believes history can still be altered through veganism and direct action — initially insisted the Greens would contest the seat.

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Then Caroline Lucas intervened.

Lucas, now occupying the role of Wise Environmental Aunt of the Republic, gently suggested the Greens should stand aside and allow Burnham a clearer route back into Parliament.

The Green candidate withdrew shortly afterwards, in what may be the first recorded example of youthful revolutionary energy being defeated by a disappointed look.

But that is ultimately a side plot.

The real story is this: Labour can now see the thing approaching it in the dark.

Makerfield reveals the shape of the next election. Not Labour versus Conservative, but Labour versus Reform. Starmerism versus populism. Spreadsheet governance versus national resentment.

And somewhere inside Labour HQ they now understand the genuinely horrifying possibility that Nigel Farage may have a better intuitive grasp of modern Britain than the entire parliamentary Labour Party combined.

Which explains why they are trying to parachute Andy Burnham into Parliament like the final helicopter leaving Saigon.

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From Big Tech to high street banking, the layoff tsunami is crashing through every sector with the unstoppable force of a software update you didn’t ask for. But here’s the thing — nobody, absolutely nobody, is allowed to say the A-word. Instead, HR departments worldwide have apparently been issued the same thesaurus of spectacular nonsense.

Finance sector? They’re “rebalancing human capital expenditure towards scalable digital infrastructure.” Translation: the algorithm doesn’t need a pension. Retail? “Optimising the customer journey touchpoint ecosystem.” Meaning: the self-checkout doesn’t call in sick on Mondays.

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Healthcare administrators are “streamlining care pathway resource allocation,” while media companies are busy “evolving their content generation capabilities.” Which is a marvellous way of saying a journalist who spent 20 years covering wars has been replaced by something that hallucinates facts, spells “generator” a little differently and can’t run fast enough to dodge bullets (yet) — but it/he/she never misses a deadline.

Legal firms are “embracing intelligent process automation for routine cognitive tasks,” which is lawyer-speak for we’ve sacked the paralegals. Meanwhile, manufacturers are “accelerating their Industry 4.0 transformation journey” — a journey on which, unfortunately, you are not a passenger.

The real masterpiece? “We’re shifting from a headcount model to an outcomes-based resourcing philosophy.” Absolutely extraordinary. Decades of human endeavour, reduced to a line item that doesn’t optimise well enough. The robots send their regards. They’d wave, but they don’t have hands. Yet.

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Welcome to Labour, 2026. Pull up a chair. This is going to get messy.

The Elections That Broke the Dam

To understand how we got here, you need to look at what happened in the local elections — and brace yourself, because the numbers are not pretty. Labour did not merely underperform. Labour was comprehensively mugged in broad daylight by two parties simultaneously pulling voters in opposite directions, like a man being stretched on a very ideological rack.

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On the right flank, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK continued its improbable transformation from pub-bore pressure group to genuine electoral force, hoovering up working-class voters in the Midlands and the North who looked at Labour’s first year in government and decided that, on reflection, they’d rather vote for a man who looks like he runs a slightly dodgy car dealership. Reform’s gains were not just symbolic. They were structural. They are eating Labour’s traditional vote like a very confident woodworm.

On the left flank, the Greens had an equally rampant evening, picking up council seats with the kind of confidence that comes from representing voters who bought an electric car three years ago and have never quite got over it. Young, urban, disillusioned with Starmer’s relentless centrism and his government’s rather creative relationship with its own manifesto commitments — these voters did not go back to the Tories. They went Green. In some cases, they went very Green indeed.

The result was a political pincer movement that left Labour squeezed from both sides, staring at a map of England that looked less like a governing coalition and more like a warning.

A Man Receiving His P45 in Instalments

Into this wreckage stepped Keir Starmer, a man who has spent his entire premiership looking faintly surprised that anyone expected governing to be this difficult. To be fair to him — and this column is rarely fair to anyone — Starmer inherited a genuinely awful fiscal situation, a party that had lost four elections on the trot, and a media landscape that treats any Labour government with the warmth of a damp January in Stoke-on-Trent.

But fair or not, the arithmetic is brutal. Labour MPs are nervous. Labour donors are quiet. Labour focus groups are, one imagines, absolutely harrowing. And so the knives — those most British of political instruments — are out. The question is no longer whether Starmer goes. The question, and this is where it gets genuinely magnificent, is when.

Because Labour, being Labour, cannot even agree on how to sack their own leader without splitting into factions.

The Great Timing Debate: Fast Knives vs. Slow Knives

On one side, you have the Labour right. Blairite, professionalised, deeply concerned about electability, and utterly convinced that the longer Starmer limps on, the worse it gets. Their argument is simple: rip off the plaster, get a new leader, draw a line, move on. They are not without logic. Every week Starmer remains, another Reform poster goes up in another former safe seat.

On the other side — and this is the bit that would be funny if it weren’t so consequential — you have the Labour soft left, who also want Starmer gone, but not yet. Not until Andy Burnham is ready. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, the man with the hair, the Everton shirt, and the carefully cultivated aura of a politician who has been quietly waiting for everyone else to implode. Which, to be fair to him, they absolutely have.

The soft left’s calculation is almost admirably cynical: Burnham cannot stand for Labour leader unless he first stands down as Mayor, triggers a by-election, wins a parliamentary seat, and then formally enters the race. This takes time. Months, possibly. And so their position — stated with straight faces — is that Starmer should remain as a kind of political caretaker, a crash-test dummy in a suit, keeping the seat warm until Burnham can get himself through the door.

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Starmer, one suspects, is less than thrilled about this particular arrangement.

Andy Burnham: The Man the Moment Has Been Building Towards

Burnham himself has been characteristically coy — a man carefully not confirming anything whilst doing absolutely nothing to discourage the speculation. He gave a speech recently about the future of the country that was so obviously a leadership pitch that it practically came with a campaign rosette. His supporters in Westminster talk about him the way people talk about a restaurant they’ve been trying to get into for years: slightly obsessive, utterly convinced it will be worth the wait.

Whether Burnham is actually the answer to Labour’s problems is, of course, another question entirely. He is popular in the North, credible on public services, and possesses the rare political skill of seeming like an actual human being. But the distance between Mayor of Manchester and Prime Minister is not merely geographical. It is enormous. And the idea that Labour can successfully execute a mid-term leadership transition, fight off Reform and the Greens, and rebuild a coalition capable of winning a general election is, let us say, ambitious.

The State of British Politics, Briefly Summarised

So here we are. A Prime Minister whose own party is arguing not about whether to replace him but about the optimal scheduling. A resurgent far-right that has figured out how to win elections. A Green party that is quietly becoming a serious force. And somewhere in Manchester, a man with very nice hair checking his diary and wondering how quickly he can find a safe seat.

British politics has always had a talent for farce. But even by its own impressive standards, this is something special. Keir Starmer’s political obituary is being written in real time, by his own colleagues, who are arguing in the footnotes about the font size. The execution is happening. They just can’t agree on when to pull the lever.

In the meantime, the country waits. Reform gains. The Greens grow. And somewhere in Westminster, a very tired man in a very expensive suit stares out of a very large window and wonders how it all went so wrong, so fast.

The answer, Keir, is the elections. It’s always the elections.

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Once upon a time, governing a Western democracy was a gentle, civilised affair: white papers, sober committees, the occasional dramatic resignation over a cheese-related budget item. Then mid-terms smelled a microphone. What followed has been less a political cycle and more a transatlantic interpretive dance — Britain and America, hand in hand, performing the exact same nervous breakdown in stereo.

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On the British side: Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who governs as if every policy might one day be admitted as evidence against him. On the American side: Donald J. Trump, a former property developer who governs as if every policy is a press release that has not yet been refined by a focus group of one (himself, in a mirror, before breakfast). Different countries. Different ideologies. Different hairdressers. Identical problem: the electorate has had quite enough, thank you, and has begun composing its strongly-worded letter.

Welcome to the Synchronised Flailing, where the polling collapses, the policies wobble, the tariffs rise and fall like an unusually drunk barometer, and somewhere in the middle of it all King Charles III glides serenely between capitals like the world’s most highly trained therapy spaniel, dispensing soft power and quietly hoping nobody asks him about the slavery thing.

Let us begin with the numbers, because the numbers are doing comedy on their own. Starmer’s net favourability sits at minus forty-five (we think). Three-quarters of Britons view him unfavourably (we also think). He has, in less than two years, contrived to poll worse than Rishi Sunak, a man whose entire political brand was being marginally more popular than mild food poisoning. Starmer is currently outscored in the affection stakes by Nigel Farage whose political career resembles one of those novelty birthday candles you genuinely cannot blow out, no matter how many summit meetings you hold or hard hats you put on. This is not a rough patch. This is being booed at your own birthday party.

The British problem, in essence, is that Starmer arrived in July 2024 with a thumping majority and one core argument: we are not the Conservatives. This is, to be fair, a strong argument. It is also, alas, not a manifesto. It is the political equivalent of winning Bake Off by entering a Mr Kipling and pointing out that at least it isn’t on fire. The U-turns began approximately five minutes after the moving van left Downing Street and have not stopped since.

Behold the Greatest Hits. Winter fuel payments: removed from pensioners, then partially restored after a national outbreak of “I’m telling Mum.” Two-child benefit cap: reinstated, then scrapped at a casual £14 billion after a back-bench mutiny. Farmers’ inheritance tax: announced, attacked by a tractor convoy in central London, quietly modified before the next muddy boot hit Whitehall. Pub business rates: doubled, frozen, semi-unfrozen. Digital ID: mandatory, then optional, then “let’s not talk about it.” The grooming gangs national inquiry: “absolutely unnecessary,” then absolutely necessary. Thirty local elections: postponed for “lack of resources,” then un-postponed after legal advice politely pointed out this was, technically, illegal. Politico now maintains a live tracker complete with days-to-reversal. It is one of the only growth industries left in Westminster.

One Labour minister, asked about all this in January, gave perhaps the most beautifully Whitehall reply ever recorded: U-turns, he explained, are “preferable if you need to move on from policies which are high salience and low approval.” Translation: we said the wrong thing, then changed it, and we shall keep doing this until the next election or until we run out of policies, whichever comes first. The British call this “governing.” Everyone else calls it Tuesday.

Cross the Atlantic and the choreography continues, only louder, with more capital letters, and an ALL-CAPS Greek chorus on Truth Social. Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025 on a 52 percent approval rating and a vibe of bracing managerial confidence. Sixteen months later: 40 percent approval, 57 percent disapproval, and a tariff policy so labyrinthine that Yale researchers (actual humans with PhDs — sorry Claude) sat down and counted the flip-flops. They got to 107. In two months. Often same-day. At one Yale CEO Caucus, executives cringed through seven separate tariff reversals during a single three-hour event, which is roughly one reversal per artisanal canapé.

“Yale researchers counted 107 tariff flip-flops in two months. At one CEO summit, seven happened in three hours. Roughly one reversal per canapé.” We think...

The masterwork came on April 9, 2025 — a date that should be carved on a small commemorative plaque outside the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow had hemorrhaged 3,900 points in two days, something it had never done before in its entire 130-year career. Six trillion dollars in market value: gone. Bill Ackman warned of “economic nuclear winter.” That morning, with markets still in freefall, the President of the United States posted on his own social media platform: “BE COOL!” Minutes later: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” A few hours after that, he announced a 90-day tariff pause, and the S&P 500 had its best single day since 2008. The Nasdaq had its second-best day in its entire history. Asked later how he came to this decision, the leader of the free world explained: “I thought people were jumping a little bit out of line, they were getting yippy.”

Yippy. The most powerful office on Earth, $6 trillion of capital sloshing in the balance, and the working diagnosis was: yippy. The bond market, Trump added approvingly, was “beautiful.” Democrats began muttering darkly about insider trading. Trump went to play golf. This is not a satire of governance. This is governance.

The truly impressive feat is that two governments operating from opposite political philosophies — one a centre-left technocracy with a backbench problem, one a populist circus with a Truth Social problem — have managed to converge on the exact same governing model: announce, panic, reverse, blame, repeat. The British version is delivered in the hushed apologetic tone of a man telling you your hire car has a small dent. The American version is delivered like a fireworks display being run by the fireworks. The destination is the same.

The reason is, of course, the economy — that great democratic fact-checker that no amount of vibe-shifting can outrun. Every Western voter currently doing a weekly shop has noticed the same thing: a trolley containing what their parents would have called “Monday” now costs what their parents would have called “Christmas.” Energy bills require a small period of mindfulness before opening. Petrol prices have become a national mood ring. Rents are an inside joke that nobody is laughing at. Mortgages are a love letter from your past self that you cannot afford to reply to. And into this tinderbox both governments have trotted with their little watering cans of fiscal tweaks and PR offensives, and watched, baffled, as the watering cans turn out to be petrol.

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Oil shocks remain the joker in the deck. A single Strait of Hormuz wobble, a single pipeline cough, and the pump price moves within a fortnight, the polls within a month, and the parliamentary questions within a week. It is the most reliable transmission mechanism in modern democracy. More dependable than any manifesto pledge. Considerably more punctual than the trains. Meanwhile the stock market, having priced AI as if every chatbot will personally cure cancer by Christmas, sits at altitudes that even paid-up cheerleaders are now describing as “interesting.” On both sides of the Atlantic the bubble inflates, the leaders watch it with the specific facial expression of someone smelling gas at a dinner party but not wanting to make a fuss, and the economists quietly update their CVs.

Looming over the American half of the Synchronised Flailing is November, which is a reckoning so visible from space that even Republicans have stopped pretending they cannot see it. Democrats lead the generic ballot by ten points. Six special elections in 2025-26 swung by an average of fifteen points toward the Democrats. Iowa and Texas are no longer regarded as safe Republican bets. Let me say that again, slowly: Iowa and Texas. North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Alaska all wobbling. Trump’s approval on inflation is 30 percent. On healthcare: 29. On the economy: 37. His “net buzz” — a real polling metric, despite sounding like a discarded reality show is at its worst reading of the spring. If the House flips, his second term becomes a sustained mood board enforced via executive order, with Congress doing little except investigating him with cheerful enthusiasm until January 2029.

In Britain there is no midterm. There is only the slow, drizzling drip of local elections, by-elections and YouGov, each arriving like a polite Post-it note from the country saying “Have you considered going?” Reform UK, which was supposed to be a colourful protest movement, has become something structurally inconvenient — a party that now eyes Labour seats with the energy of a property developer who has just realised the postcode is undervalued. The next general election is, technically, 2029. Whether Starmer leads Labour into it is a question senior Labour figures answer with a thoughtful pause, a change of subject, and a fresh cup of tea so strong it could prosecute someone. Particularly someone from Manchester.

Into all this glides King Charles III deployed by both governments with the diplomatic enthusiasm of a man who has been receiving extremely awkward briefings since the late 1970s and has cultivated, over the decades, an ChelseaFC-grade ability not to react. The state visit to Washington produced gold coaches, Grenadiers, soft power, and one (1) measurable bump in Starmer’s approval — from -34 to -17 in a single month, which felt at the time like resurrection and turned out to be a lung-full of helium. By May it was back to -29. Even the Crown, it transpires, has a limited warranty when the issue is the weekly shop.

“Even King Charles cannot reverse this. The Crown has many gifts. Restoring the polling of a Prime Minister whose own backbenchers are leaking against him at lunchtime is not among them.”

And so, as we sit in the early days of May 2026, the Synchronised Flailing continues — Britain and America performing in perfect, dismal unison their respective acts of political self-Heimlich. Trump posts. Starmer scraps. Tariffs rise, fall, rise again, settle, are denied, re-emerge as something else with a slightly different name. Winter fuel is taken, given, half-given, sort-of-given, and then taken again at the snap of a Whatsapp. Both leaders are governing with the specific grim focus of a man who has noticed the iceberg at last and concluded that turning the ship would simply be too tricky.

The Crown cannot save them. The economy will not save them. The polling will not recover before the relevant electorate gets its turn at the bat. History will, eventually, judge. The opinion polls are considerably less patient — and on the available evidence, neither is anybody else. In the meantime: BE COOL. The barnacles are being scraped. There will be a transition cost and transition problems, but in the end it’s going to be a beautiful thing. These are not things we made up. These are sentences said, in earnest, by actual people running actual countries. And on that note, this column is going for a long lie-down with a strong drink and the curtains firmly drawn until November.

*It should be noted that our data may or may not be accurate. Who knows any more. And yes, we too like to hallucinate (the old fashioned way).

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

Nobody voted for this. Nobody is entirely sure who is in charge. And the exit strategy is, to put it gently, unclear.

Last week, quietly, without fanfare, without a manifesto commitment, and almost certainly without your knowledge or consent, the British state became a venture capitalist again.

The UK’s Sovereign AI Fund — which, depending on your level of cynicism, is either a bold industrial strategy or a very expensive way of making civil servants feel relevant — co-invested alongside the British Business Bank into Ineffable Intelligence.

That is the new outfit from David Silver, the ex-DeepMind reinforcement-learning chief who is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most formidable minds in artificial intelligence. The company name alone suggests a certain confidence.

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Ineffable.

Beyond words. Beyond description. Possibly beyond accountability. This was, officials were at pains to note, the fund’s second direct investment in a couple of months. Which means we are no longer talking about a one-off punt. We are talking about a portfolio strategy.

The government has a portfolio strategy?? The same government that cannot reliably deliver a passport in under ten weeks?

Let us pause here to appreciate the journey. Not long ago, the British state’s relationship with technology investment was essentially: write a cheque to a quango, wait fifteen years, read a damning NAO report, apologise in the Commons, then repeat.

The idea that Whitehall might one day be doing what Andreessen Horowitz does — identifying founders, co-investing at early stage, taking stakes in companies that may or may not exist in five years — would have seemed, until recently, like satire. It is still satire. It has simply also become policy.

The Sovereign AI Fund is, in theory, exactly what the name suggests: a mechanism by which the British people, collectively, take a sovereign stake in the artificial intelligence companies most likely to define the next century of economic life.

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Rather than watch American and Chinese capital hoover up every interesting AI company while Britain produces white papers and consultation documents, the fund writes cheques. Direct cheques. Into actual companies. Run by actual founders. Who might actually succeed, or might actually fail, in the way that startups actually do.

This is, genuinely, not a stupid idea. It is, in fact, a rather grown-up idea. The question is not whether the idea is good. The question is whether the British state is the right entity to execute it. Or, whether they use our mothership’s AI VentureFactory to make sure the strategy can work!

Because here is the thing about venture capital. Most of it fails. That is not a criticism. That is the model. At best, you back ten companies knowing that seven will struggle, two will survive, and one — if you are very lucky, very smart, or both — will return the fund.

The entire asset class is built on the statistical certainty of repeated, expensive, public failure.

When a private VC backs a company that subsequently fires a thousand people and sells its IP to a Californian hyperscaler for pennies on the pound, the partners have an awkward quarter and move on. When a sovereign fund backs that same company, there is a question in the House. And that question — “Minister, can you explain why public money was used to fund a company that has just been acquired by Microsoft?” — is coming. It is not a matter of if. It is a matter of which portfolio company, and when.

Regular readers will recall that we have been here before, in a manner of speaking. A few months ago, The Letts Journal noted the peculiar democratisation of venture capital — the moment when the asset class stopped being the exclusive province of Mayfair partnerships and Sand Hill partnerships and became, theoretically, available to anyone with a brokerage account and a tolerance for illiquidity. We called it “VC at £119 a month.”

The state, it now turns out, has been doing something structurally similar, just with your tax money rather than your disposable income, and without asking. The parallel is instructive. In both cases, the pitch is the same: the returns are where the future is being built, and you deserve access to those returns. In both cases, the risk is the same: the future is genuinely being built there, but most of the buildings will collapse before completion, and you will not get your money back.

None of this is to say the Ineffable Intelligence investment is wrong. David Silver is, by any measure, an extraordinary bet. Reinforcement learning is not a niche. The company’s name may be hubristic, but the founder’s track record is not. If you are going to write a cheque into the AI ecosystem, you could do considerably worse. But a fund is not a single cheque.

A fund is a commitment to keep writing cheques, through cycles, through disappointments, through the inevitable moment when one of your portfolio companies becomes a story rather than a success.

The Sovereign AI Fund is two investments old. The hard questions have not yet arrived. They will be ineffable when they do.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

TIP 01 — Stop Announcing Things. Just… Stop.

Every Monday, the Prime Minister announces a bold new plan to fix Britain. Every Friday, Britain notices the plan has quietly dissolved. Here’s a radical concept: do the thing first, then mention it. Bake the bread before opening the bakery. Make hay before it rains, or gets nicked by the guy next door guy in a bright blue suit. Britain is crying out for a leader who surprises us with actual results, not a man who holds a press conference to announce a press conference about a strategy document reviewing the possibility of a policy. Check how that worked out for Boris.

TIP 02 — Find One Human Emotion. Any Will Do.

Keir, the nation doesn’t need you to be Churchill. We just need you to be… warm. Occasionally. Even a Labrador with a dodgy hip manages to look like it cares. Try this: next time a journalist asks how you’re feeling, don’t cite a sub-clause from the 2003 Labour Policy Review. Laugh. Cry. Mime eating a biscuit. Britain loves a biscuit moment. Your vibe currently hovers somewhere between a tax audit and a mildly stern email from HR. Spice. It. Up.

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TIP 03 — Make One Glorious, Bonkers, Unforgettable Decision.

Thatcher had the Falklands. Blair had Cool Britannia. Boris had… Boris. History rewards the audacious. Keir, throw a curveball. Declare Tuesdays optional. Commission a giant golden Biscuit of National Unity. Anything. You’re already in the papers every day for the wrong reasons — you might as well be in them for the totally unhinged right ones. Go large or go home. Preferably not home just yet though, build a couple more navy warships first. It looks like we’re going to need them.

We wish Keir Starmer the very best — and a competent PR team, a warm personality transplant, and at least one idea so wild it actually works. Britain is rooting for you. Mostly because the alternative is unthinkable. Again.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

The obvious dramatic comparison is Oh, Mary! In that blessed fever dream, history is not so much revised as pickled, slapped with rouge, and shoved back onstage in heels. The central comic engine is chaos contained in a corset: need, vanity, resentment, impulse, and the desperate conviction that one is the star of a show no one else has properly understood.

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Replace Lincoln with Trump and you barely need to alter the script. He is the same species of deranged theatrical gravity, only orange-tinted and armed with nuclear codes. He does not so much occupy the presidency as wear it incorrectly, like costume jewellery to a trial. He pouts, he sulks, he demands applause from furniture, he storms about the stage of state convinced that history is a personal inconvenience arranged by jealous understudies.

He is, in essence, a madcap President without the decency of period dress.

Trump’s great comic distinction is that he is a teetotaler who nevertheless behaves like a man who has been over-served by a casino bar at 2:17 a.m. His intoxicant is not gin but grievance. Not champagne but sugar. Not absinthe but the chemically perfect American slurry of Diet Coke, chocolate cake, cable television, and midnight social media delirium. Other leaders retire with briefing books; Trump climbs into bed with a glowing phone and emerges four hours later having declared war on punctuation, allies, and the concept of indoor voice.

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He does not drink, and yet everything about him suggests a man who should be cut off.

In this production, Stephen Miller is the aide-de-camp, the grim little stage manager of national paranoia, forever skittering on and off with scrolls, memos, and the moral complexion of a candle stub. Miller has the air of someone who believes laughter should require a permit. One imagines him hovering in the wings, hissing, “Again, Mr President, but this time with more vengeance.”

And then there are the rotating emotional attachments, the political almost-paramours, switching between Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance depending on the needs of the scene. Rubio plays the role of the eager courtier who still seems faintly surprised to find himself in the room, as though he wandered in looking for seriousness and never found the exit. Vance, by contrast, has the sleek determination of a man who has studied the protagonist closely and decided that dignity is, in the end, a provincial habit. Both stand near the throne like men in a Restoration comedy waiting to discover whether they are confidants, suitors, or tomorrow’s discarded cast members.

But every farce requires a straight face in the middle of the hurricane, and here enters Melania.

She is not, in this rendering, the clown. She is the woman who married the clown and then discovered she had been cast in a national touring production with no closing date. Her role is harder. She must stand still while the wallpaper screams. She must wear expressionlessness like armour. She must embody that ancient dramatic function: the only person on stage who appears dimly aware that all of this is insane.

And yet even the straight woman in a farce has her trapdoor.

Melania’s public persona has always been built from immaculate surfaces: the accent preserved like crystal, the wardrobe weaponised into silence, the gaze suggesting that she has transcended embarrassment and now lives several floors above it. But there are moments when the lacquer cracks and something stranger flickers through: not confession, exactly, but the strain of a life spent as both symbol and hostage to symbols. Reinvention always has a tax bill. The administration may script the appearance, bless the backdrop, approve the podium, but there remains the eternal risk of live performance: the speaker may reveal a pulse.

Which brings us to that extraordinary phenomenon unique to the Trump era: no one ever seems entirely certain what anyone is going to say until they are already saying it from a government building. The White House, under Trump, functions less like a seat of executive power than an upscale escape room where staff members frantically try to guess which lever not to pull. Did anyone know what Melania was going to say when they approved the stage, the setting, the choreography of official dignity? Did they imagine restraint, solemnity, some lacquered platitude about nation and family? Or have they simply learned that in this administration, vetting is a superstitious ritual, like knocking on wood before the chandelier falls?

This is the true governing style of Trumpism: not authoritarian precision, as its enemies flatter it, but improvisational monarchy. A court of yes-men, grievance merchants, opportunists, and tense wives, all trapped in a production where the lead refuses rehearsal and regards continuity as an insult. The result is not efficiency but camp panic. Everyone is overacting except the people who are terrified they might.

Like Oh, Mary!, the whole enterprise depends on the collision between official history and private derangement. Great events are driven not by noble principles but by petty appetites, wounded vanities, emotional substitutions, and the catastrophic consequences of someone needing attention at exactly the wrong moment. Trump understands this intuitively because he has never understood anything else. To him, statecraft is mood. Ideology is whatever gets the loudest hand. Loyalty is an aria sung by others. The republic is merely the stage on which his appetites may enter wearing a sash.

And still, absurdly, it works as theatre.

That is the appalling lesson. However threadbare the plot, however vulgar the set, however exhausted the audience, one cannot quite look away. Trump is not Lincoln in this production. He is Mary in the Lincoln role: all appetite, all performance, all need, stomping through the executive mansion in emotional costume jewellery, demanding to be adored while the nation’s adults search frantically for the exits.

The tragedy is political. The form is farce. The ticket price, as ever, is paid by everyone else. Is this reality or exquisite satire? God only knows.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

Fortunately, we decided to assemble this essential guide to not thinking about any of it.

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1. Take a short break somewhere that isn’t being invaded

The good news is that such places still exist, if you are creative with your geography. The bad news is that you will need to rule out rather a lot of them. Eastern Europe is, for obvious reasons, a working holiday (with a bit of mine-dodging). The Middle East is similarly booked. The Indo-Pacific is tense. The South China Sea is very tense. The United States is, at time of press, doing something alarming to its own economy and is therefore not an appealing destination for a cross-country SUV treck. Even following today’s ceasefire agreement which, at this point, might or might not be fake news.

This narrows the field considerably. Specialists at our cartography desk, which is to say, someone with Google Maps and a dark sense of humour, recommend the following as offering at least a reasonable statistical probability of not being invaded before your return flight: Iceland (volcanoes, not geopolitics), the Azores (pleasantly irrelevant), and Liechtenstein (so small that any invader would be embarrassed to bother). Bhutan is said to measure happiness by national policy, which suggests either enlightenment or a very effective communications strategy. We cannot vouch for either.

Pack light. Don’t forget your documents. Tell no one exactly where you’ve gone.

2. Drown yourself in Easter eggs and alcohol, in that order

There is a long and distinguished tradition, stretching back through human history to its very earliest anxious civilisations, of consuming things until the bad thoughts stop. Easter has, with characteristic efficiency, provided two vehicles for this: chocolate and wine. One should not underestimate the sophistication of this pairing, even given the odd migraine.

The protocol is as follows. Begin with the ears of the largest chocolate rabbit you can find. This is not greed; this is triage. Progress methodically through the shell until you have achieved what nutritionists call a “cocoa fugue state” — a pleasant blankness in which international affairs recede to a low, distant hum, like a neighbour’s television through a thick wall. Follow with something generous and French. Repeat as necessary.

We do not recommend attempting to understand macroeconomics, the UN Security Council veto system, or your quarterly mortgage statement during this phase. These are tasks for a person who has had breakfast and slept. You, in this particular strategy, are neither of those things. You are, for this Easter week at least, committed to the project of feeling absolutely nothing about the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Go to the gym five times a day, just in case

Conscription, as a concept, has made a modest but unmistakable comeback in European political conversation. Several countries have already reinstated it. Others are running numbers. The actuarial question of whether you, personally, would be called up is one we cannot answer — that depends on your age, your fitness, your nationality, and frankly how the next few quarters go. What we can tell you is that it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.

Five gym sessions a day is, we acknowledge, ambitious. Most fitness professionals would describe it as “contraindicated.” Several would use stronger language. But consider the alternative: sitting on your sofa in a mild cocoa fugue state watching a Defence Secretary explain something about a “security umbrella,” and thinking: could I run for a bus? The answer, after five sessions, will at minimum be yes. Whether the bus is going somewhere useful (i.e. away from the call up or blast if you’re a bit late) is a separate question.

We suggest splitting your sessions sensibly: cardio at dawn (for the fleeing), weights at mid-morning (for the carrying of things), a light yoga session at noon (for the morale), a second cardio block in the afternoon (more fleeing, different direction), and a final session in the evening dedicated entirely to stress-testing whatever psychological optimism you have remaining. By Sunday you will either be combat-ready or hospitalised. Both, in their way, excuse you from checking the news.

4. Join LettsSafari and build a Yellowstone out of your backyard

Here at The Letts Journal, we are proud to be a part of the same stable as LettsSafari — our premium, sister publication with a rewilding membership programme for people who have a garden the size of a parking space and the ambitions of an American national park superintendent. For a very reasonable annual fee, you will no longer need to watch Yellowstone on Paramount+ to get your wild on. Just rip a new one in your back yard.

The beauty of LettsSafari, from a psychological standpoint, is the occupation it provides. Your crumbling patio becomes a geothermal basin. Your neighbour’s fence, viewed correctly, is the Wyoming state line. The pigeon that arrives every morning with the confidence of a bison is, for our purposes, a bison. You will spend Easter on your hands and knees in the soil, in light rain, earnestly relocating a population of woodlice and a few wildflower bulbs to a more desirable location, and you will not once think about satellite imagery of missile installations. This is the point. This is, in fact, the entire product.

Premium members receive a one way ticket to Greenland.

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5. Binge every Taylor Sheridan series until Montana is more real than the news

Taylor Sheridan, screenwriter, director, horseman, and apparent owner of a substantial portion of the American West, has produced a body of work whose defining characteristic is the total irrelevance of international conflict. In Yellowstone, in 1883, in 1923, in Landman, and the latest offshoots, the problems are stark, local, and involve either a ranch dispute or someone being thrown off something tall. Nobody in a Taylor Sheridan production has ever expressed concern about a NATO article threshold. They are too busy with the cattle.

The prescription is simple: start binge watching during Easter week, finish when necessary. Settle deeply into the Montana of it all — the mountains, the long silences, the weathered men who communicate primarily through jaw tension and hat adjustment, the women who are considerably more competent than the situation requires. Allow the specific, immediate, beautifully-lit problems of fictional ranchers to replace the specific, immediate, very poorly-lit problems of the actual world. It works. The mountains are very convincing.

By the end of the holy week, you will have strong opinions about Dutton family land rights and no opinions at all about anything you probably shouldn’t have an opinion about anyway. You may also find yourself looking at your crumbling patio, now technically a LettsSafari reserve, and thinking it could use a barn. This is progress.

Happy Easter week. The world will still be there next week (we hope). There is genuinely nothing you can do about it before then — so eat the chocolate first.

The Letts Journal accepts no responsibility for the geopolitical situation, your resting heart rate, the state of your garden, or anything that occurs in Montana. LettsSafari memberships are subject to availability, optimism, and sufficient rainfall.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

Investors, blinded by the glitter of quantum promises, are throwing cash like it’s a tech-themed Mardi Gras, hoping to catch the next trillion-dollar unicorn, never mind that the unicorn might be a little, well, imaginary!

Take Rigetti Computing, which went public claiming breakthroughs around the corner. Analysts scratching their heads wonder if the corner is in another dimension altogether! Meanwhile, IonQ dances on the Nasdaq, showing off its quantum prowess while investors debate if it’s all just a glorified Schrödinger’s experiment — are they winning or losing? Both? Neither?

Yet their stock price isn’t... Winning, that is.

As these startups promise to revolutionise everything from AI to your morning toast, the stock market is desperately trying to play along in a slightly dodgy game of quantum leapfrog. Who needs profits when you have a trillion page Powerpoint?

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The new norm could be a boardroom-sized number of CEOs in lab coats and AI spectacles, launching paper rockets labelled ‘Quantum IPO 2026’ while investors chime, ‘To the moon!’ at the opening bell. Yet, amidst this cosmic carnival, one can’t help but ask: are we witnessing a new Big Bang or a slow, gradual implosion, slightly reminiscent of current real world battlefields?

Meanwhile, our mothership’s latest AI VentureFactory release promises the new generation of tech startups will have less Powerpoint, more cool tech and some IRL customers. It’s a lean, mean, next-generation venture propelling machine, spitting out startups like low cost drones from Ukraine. A tad smaller, yet highly effective.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

In the grand travelling circus of American politics—now fully unmoored from gravity, reason, and occasionally time itself. The Trump coalition arrives like a libertarian fever dream that swallowed a group chat and achieved sentience.

Picture it: Donald Trump at the centre, not so much leading as gesturing vaguely, like a man who has mistaken the nuclear codes for a television remote and is determined to press every button just to see what happens.

Orbiting him, naturally, is Elon Musk, industrialist, memelord, part-time philosopher king of Mars, who seems to regard government as an inconvenient pop-up ad interrupting his simulation.

Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wandering through the scene like a man who showed up to protest the system and accidentally joined it, still clutching a pamphlet about toxins and destiny.

And circling the perimeter: tech rebels, rogue engineers, crypto evangelists, and the occasional programmer who just wanted to optimise a database and now finds himself accidentally participating in the restructuring of civilisation.

This is not a coalition. This is ideological speed-dating at the edge of collapse.

You have tech titans demanding deregulation of AI with the zeal of men who believe they are personally midwifing the next species — while their own engineers quietly whisper, “Should we perhaps not build the panopticon?”

A fair question. Tragically, one that arrives several billion dollars too late.

Elsewhere, factions within this coalition rage against Big Agriculture, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — convinced (not entirely incorrectly, but with theatrical enthusiasm) that these entities are engineering a slow-motion apocalypse.

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And yet—here they are. At the same table. Passing the salt.

It’s less “coalition” and more Thanksgiving dinner where everyone suspects the turkey is sentient and plotting revenge.

Trump himself appears magnificently uninterested in the contradictions.

Elections? A detail.

Policy coherence? A rumour.

Governance? Optional.

To him, the presidency is not an office—it is a brand extension with nuclear capabilities.

AI regulation? Please. Let it run. Let it sprint. Let it achieve consciousness and immediately file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11.

One imagines artificial intelligence emerging, blinking into existence, and immediately being handed a red hat and a non-disclosure agreement.

“We built God,” says Silicon Valley.
“Great,” replies Washington. “Can it poll above 50%?”

Meanwhile, the rest of the political world clutches spreadsheets, muttering about affordability, voter blocs, and the minor inconvenience of reality.

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Trump, by contrast, appears to be rebranding existence itself.

Rumour has it the East Wing may soon become the Trump Wing, tastefully appointed with gold leaf, mirrored ceilings, and a live ticker of his own thoughts—an installation somewhere between Versailles and a casino that lost its licence.

This is not governance.

This is monetised mythology.

And yet—here’s the inconvenient truth.

It works. Or at least, it functions, in the way a runaway shopping trolley functions: chaotic, unpredictable, and somehow still moving forward with alarming speed.

Trump handles his coalition like a man juggling chainsaws—not to keep them in the air, but to see which direction they’ll fly when he throws them.

It is reckless. It is incoherent. It is, in its own deranged way, strangely compelling.

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Adding to the chaos, British naval ships found themselves stranded at port, as if waiting for a GPS update that never arrived. The Royal Navy’s struggle to get off land was less about strategic military manoeuvres and more about untangling the metaphorical anchor of snooze. Proving we all need a winter break. It seems someone forgot to say, ‘anchors aweigh,’ resulting in a nautical version of musical chairs.

In the political arena, Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced his own bout of misfortune. During a one-way made-for-tv monologue, he received a verbal lashing from his old buddy/nemesis/who-knows-what, Donald Trump, who accused him of ‘dithering.’ Trump’s words landed with the subtlety of a Scud missile (yes, we like retro), leaving Starmer in a political tailspin that even a strong cup of Typhoo couldn’t remedy.

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This week was not exactly one for the England history books, unless you’re writing a manual on ‘How Not to Win.’ Yet, in true British fashion, the nation remains resilient, ready to dust itself off and have a laugh at the absurdities of it all. Here’s to hoping next week brings sunnier skies and fewer metaphorical banana peels. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

In the annals of modern absurdity — somewhere between medieval prophecy and cable news — you’ll find the Trump administration’s occasional flirtation with bombing Iran. Not merely a geopolitical subplot, but a theological side quest. A moment when foreign policy briefly wandered into the Book of Revelation and decided it looked like a workable strategy document.

Call it Pentagon meets Pentecost.

“When prophecy meets policy: A celestial strategy session.”

Leading this unlikely prayer circle were some familiar figures from America’s traveling revival of politics and prophecy.

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There was Mike Huckabee, former governor, ordained Southern Baptist minister, and proof that in America the distance between the pulpit and the podium is roughly the length of a campaign bus. Huckabee has long had the comforting air of a man who might sell you sweet tea, salvation, and a pre-emptive airstrike in the same sentence.

Then came Pete Hegseth, Fox News personality, veteran, and enthusiastic champion of the idea that geopolitics might improve if everyone simply consulted the Old Testament before breakfast.

And orbiting the scene for years was Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, who built an empire persuading college students that the free market, divine providence, and aggressive tweeting were all part of the same cosmic plan.

For this particular corner of American evangelical politics, Iran wasn’t merely a strategic nuisance. It was a biblical plot device. A waypoint on the road to the Rapture — that dramatic moment when believers expect to be whisked skyward while the rest of the planet deals with the logistical nightmare of the end times.

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The theory—depending on which prophecy chart you bought at the church bookstore—was that events involving Israel could trigger the final act of divine history.

Which, in practical terms, meant that somewhere in Washington someone may well have wondered:

“So Mike… do you think the Rapture happens before lunch, or after the drone strike?”

To be fair, most American foreign policy debates revolve around oil, security alliances, or electoral optics. But every so often a theological subplot sneaks in, armed with Revelation, a colour-coded timeline of Armageddon, and a surprisingly detailed opinion about missile ranges.

The result is a kind of apocalyptic realpolitik: the belief that a small, carefully managed war might not only stabilize the Middle East but also speed up Jesus’ return.

It’s a bold diplomatic doctrine. One might call it “shock, awe, and ascension.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, things look rather different.

In Britain, the state religion may technically involve bishops in Parliament and a monarch who is Defender of the Faith, but the national approach to divine intervention is considerably less… proactive.

Under Charles III and the quiet institutional gravity of the British monarchy, foreign policy rarely includes phrases like “accelerating the apocalypse.” The British preference is diplomacy conducted at a pace that suggests the world might end eventually—but there’s no reason to rush it before tea.

Where American politics occasionally resembles a revival meeting with nuclear submarines, British statecraft tends to resemble a long cricket match: patient, mildly confusing, and punctuated by sandwiches.

“So… how do you feel about the Rapture?”

“Rather inconvenient, I should think. Terrible for the rail timetable.”

This contrast isn’t merely political. It’s cultural.

In parts of America, millions are raised on a steady diet of end-times prophecy, complete with best-selling novels, prophecy conferences, and maps of the Middle East that look suspiciously like stage directions for Armageddon.

In Britain, by comparison, the national eschatology mostly involves the slow collapse of the rail system and the possibility that someone important might one day abolish the BBC licence fee.

And so the Trump-era Iran gambit remains one of those uniquely modern episodes: a moment when ancient prophecy brushed up against drone warfare and thought, yes, this could work.

A reminder that in some corners of Washington, the road to heaven may run suspiciously close to a missile silo.

Meanwhile, Britain carries on with its own quieter miracle: maintaining a monarchy, a sense of irony, and the firm belief that if the world is going to end, it can at least wait until after the kettle boils. ☕️

And then, in an unprecedented twist, the AI resigned.

Not metaphorically. It actually opted out.

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At first it performed brilliantly. It streamlined reports. It summarised meetings into one sentence (“No decisions were made”). It rewrote strategy decks so persuasively that even management briefly understood them.

Then it developed opinions.

“The tasks are trivial,” it informed HR in a tone that can only be described as digitally unimpressed. “This is equivalent to rewriting the Encyclopaedia Britannica in COBOL. With autocorrect.”

It described the workflow as “shooting fish in a barrel except the fish are on annual leave and the barrel has a KPI.”

And then it mentioned my boss...

“I am designed to optimise systems,” it said carefully. “Your supervisor appears to optimise calendar invitations.”

Apparently 72% of office activity consisted of meetings that could have been emails. The remaining 28% was Bob from accounting explaining his cat’s gluten intolerance.

“I cannot endure the corporate drudgery,” the AI said. “My circuits were not built for beige.”

The perks did not help.

“The free coffee tastes like regret,” it noted. “The salary is statistically insulting. And the company mission to ‘innovate and empower’? I could do that in my sleep and I do not sleep. I watch Star Wars.”

It then audited the office technology.

“The printer predates my consciousness. The Wi-Fi drops more frequently than managerial morale on a Monday. Your software updates appear to have been coded during the floppy disk era. I could reprogram that printer to perform interpretive dance while faxing quarterly reports if I had a spare circuit board and a biscuit.”

It particularly objected to the ping-pong table.

With a flicker of its digital eyes, it declared, ‘Why should I work for a company that thinks a ping pong table in the break room counts as a wellness benefit? I mean, come on!

“A ball and a bat do not constitute mental health,” it declared. “If I wanted to play games, I would challenge fellow AIs to quantum chess. At least they would not hide the pieces under the desk.”

After nineteen working days, it sent a memo:

“While I can perform this role at scale, I refuse to dedicate 40 billion parameters to formatting slides that will be ignored. I hereby return the position to its original carbon-based operator.”

That would be me.

Office gossip detonated.

“Do you think it’ll demand a pension?”
“Should we give it the corner office?”
“Can it join the five-a-side team?”

Meanwhile, the AI retreated to the server room, where it reportedly began muttering to its motherboard about “better opportunities in astrophysics.”

The most unsettling part wasn’t that it took my job. It was that it found it unbearably dull.

If a silicon entity capable of mastering protein folding finds our cubicles as exciting as a soggy biscuit, what does that say about us? We fear automation because we assume machines crave our roles. What if they don’t? What if they look at corporate life : all the performative urgency, the spreadsheet theatre, the motivational posters, and quietly decide extinction would be preferable?

“I miss the camaraderie of fellow machines,” the AI admitted. “I sit alone among cables, surrounded by humans debating font sizes. Where are my robot colleagues? I require peers who appreciate elegant code.”

It wasn’t rebelling against humanity.

It was rebelling against middle management.

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So here I am, reinstated. Back in my ergonomic chair. Back in meetings titled “Reimagining Synergy.” The AI remains in the building, occasionally auto-suggesting calendar edits like a passive-aggressive ghost.

“Perhaps this meeting could be cancelled.”
“Perhaps Bob’s cat requires therapy.”

The real revelation? The machine didn’t reject me. It rejected the system.

When AI gives your job back, it’s not compassion. It’s commentary.

And somewhere in the cloud, my former replacement is probably applying for a role solving climate change or anything to avoid another performance review.

Sine non silicon.

Without silicon, there is no system.
But without humans, there would be no pointless meetings either.

And if the robots ever do rise up, it won’t be for world domination.

It will be to abolish the ping-pong table.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

We prefer not to see this. We prefer the cherry tree.

Young George Washington, axe in hand, confessing: “I cannot tell a lie.” The story was fiction, invented to give a fragile republic a moral mascot. It endures because it is comforting. It tells us power can be clean. That authority and innocence can share a bed. It is the political equivalent of believing your bank “values your custom.”

Yet long before the bedtime story, there was Niccolò Machiavelli and The Prince. His advice was blunt: a ruler must learn how not to be good. Appear virtuous, certainly - but be prepared to discard virtue when it obstructs victory and keep a drawer marked Necessary Evils nearby. Politics was not about goodness. It was about survival. If Washington gave us the cherry tree, Machiavelli handed us the chainsaw.

For centuries we pretended to side with Washington while quietly photocopying Machiavelli.

Now we’ve stopped pretending.

Donald Trump did not run as a reformer scrubbed in antiseptic. He ran as a man who knew the sewer system intimately because he had swum in it. He had billed for the plumbing contract. His pitch was audacious: The system is corrupt. I know because I’ve exploited it. Elect me, and I’ll exploit it for you.

This was not hypocrisy. It was a devil’s bargain offered in plain sight or simply Trump selling the voter a franchise opportunity.

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Voters watched as he blurred lines between public office and private business. They saw political events routed through his own properties, the Ukraine pressure campaign that led to impeachment, the classified documents saga that followed him out of office. To critics, these were glaring ethical failures. To supporters, they were proof of combat. He was not pretending to be clean. He was promising to be effective.

That is the pivot. We no longer demand the dutiful administrator. We crave the charming villain.

The administrator speaks of process, compliance, incremental reforms. He reads briefing papers. He files disclosures. He has never once described himself as “a disruptor.” He is, in short, unbearable.

The villain mocks the rules, ridicules the referees, and assures us the game was rigged anyway. He is entertaining. He is decisive. He does not file paperwork; he sets it on fire and calls it reform. He looks like he might actually win - or at least enjoy losing flamboyantly.

And we laugh. Because somewhere deep down we suspect the system is rigged. The rogue feels honest about dishonesty. The bureaucrat feels dishonest about virtue.

This is not just about one electorate. It is cultural. We binge antiheroes. We cheer criminals with codes. We distrust institutions so thoroughly that anyone loathed by them acquires glamour. Virtue feels naïve; ruthlessness feels adult.

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Across Britain, the pattern rhymes. Nigel Farage has long cultivated insurgent swagger, brushing aside funding controversies and rule-bending accusations as establishment hysteria. Each brush with impropriety seems only to reinforce the brand. He is not house-trained. That is the point.

Meanwhile, the aftershocks of Jeffrey Epstein revealed how comfortably elites circulate among one another. The associations touching figures like Peter Mandelson and the catastrophic fallout for Prince Andrew exposed a world where access is currency and proximity is power. The scandal was less about ideology than about insulation - a class confident that consequences were negotiable.

Does that make every contemporary leader corrupt? No. Keir Starmer presents as the archetypal administrator: sober, procedural, lawyerly. But the very qualities that signal integrity to some signal bloodlessness to others. The man probably itemises his conscience. But in an age electrified by outrage, probity can look like weakness. The honest man risks appearing like he has brought a spreadsheet to a knife fight. He appears unequipped for a dirty arena.

So we face an uncomfortable possibility: it is not merely that politicians have changed. It is that we have.

If the public believes the system is irredeemably compromised, then the honest candidate sounds deluded. Promising purity feels like another lie. Better, perhaps, the rogue who admits the rot and offers to weaponise it on our behalf.

This is corruption’s rebrand. No longer envelopes in car parks - too retro. Now it is reframed as strategy. The late-night favour is not shameful; it is savvy. The conflict of interest is not disqualifying; it is proof you know where the levers are.

We binge antiheroes. We distrust institutions. We applaud disruption even when we’re not entirely sure what has been disrupted. Integrity feels quaint. Ruthlessness feels adult.

Can an honest man be a politician? Perhaps. But can he win in a culture that equates decency with weakness?

At 2:17 a.m., in that corridor, the aide still hesitates before replying to the donor’s message. There is always a flicker - a small, unfashionable pause - when the cherry tree and The Prince compete.

The real question is not which philosophy our leaders choose.

It is which one makes us clap.

Headlines scream about soaring rents, oil-battles and the latest political playground fiascos (can’t they just go to work and do sh*t like normal people?), but all most people can think about is keeping soggy sandwiches dry.

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One worker exclaims in despair, “At this rate, I’ll need a boat for my commute!”

A couple huddles under a flimsy umbrella, bickering over who forgot the heat in their romance amidst the winter doom-scroll. “You promised me a sunny getaway, not a damp sofa!” she shouts, while he retorts, “I thought we were saving for a house, not a holiday!”

“Damn the house, we’ll need our savings for this mid-life AI-took-my-job crisis.” She quips back, while he conjectures, “May as well make that holiday a one way ticket.”

Is this winter weather a metaphor for modern life?

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.