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.

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

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.

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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.

His own personal popularity seemed remarkably shaky: the people who knew him best seemingly turned away from him most in 2024 as he dropped nearly 20,000 votes from his performance in 2019, and brought the vote below 50% for Labour in the constituency for the first time since 2010.

Since then it truly feels like those nearly 40,000 voters in Holborn and St Pancras in 2024 were seeing the future, trying to save Sir Kier from the humiliation he was soon to face.

Elected on the back of 14 years of Tory rule, brought to Labour leadership on the back of the machinations of expert machievellian Morgan McSweeney, Kier was supposed to be the one who brought adult governance back to the UK. The adults were back in the room, but then it turned out they were just several kids stacked in a trenchcoat.

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Over the past 18 months Starmer has gone from all time low to all time low. Officially the least popular Prime Minister in the recorded history of polled approval ratings, while leading the least popular government in those same records, he’s had to watch that fragile coalition he constructed in 2024 crumble completely. These days a poll where Labour finishes ahead of the Green party is something to celebrate.

But, at the same time, he can’t blame much more than him. It seems every decision he makes backfires. He’s blown up the left of his party, leading to mass resignations in the party membership (Labour only posts their membership totals once a year now to avoid the embarrassment) and the creation of a brand new political party formed around a former MP of his 2024 majority and his Labour leadership predecessor. He’s forced his party into voting for constant benefits caps, to scrap heating support for the elderly, and destroy disability support, and then u-turned over those same policies multiple times.

At the beginning of this year he was faced with yet another problem - that of his party potentially winning a by-election in a seat they’d won an outright majority in just 18 months prior. But in order to do so he would need to allow back into Parliament perhaps the only remaining popular Labour figure, Andy Burnham, assumed to be an upcoming challenger to Starmer’s Prime Minister position. So instead he personally lobbied to utilise a rule his party had effectively designed to block this specific challenge from Andy Burnham so that Burnham couldn’t even be put up for even a local party selection.

Now Starmer’s Labour appears 3rd in an area they’ve been largely in control of since the 1970s.

But all of this might have been survivable if Starmer weren’t simultaneously having to handle scandals like a child playing whack-a-mole at their birthday party. Incredibly, it all appears to have been remarkably avoidable. In 2024 Starmer made the shocking decision to name Lord Mandelson (a Labour party grandee who has defined the Labour right since the 1980s) as his ambassador to the United States. It was something that reeked of poor choices back when it first came out. Mandelson himself has been known as the “Prince of Darkness” for decades. He resigned 3 times due to scandals during the Labour governments of Blair and Brown.

Most importantly, his relationship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been public knowledge since the man was arrested back in 2019. Its almost as bad as if Starmer’s first demand upon becoming Prime Minister was for King Charles to abdicate and allow his sweatless brother to take the crown.

Then it the US DOJ released even more Epstein files, and Lord Mandelson was only on all the more of them. However, Starmer still wasn’t able to look decisive. It took Mandelson himself to exit the party, Starmer couldn’t even bring himself to expel the associate of pedophiles from his party. This is the same man who had his own predecessor kicked out of the party in around 30 minutes after he posted a facebook message he didn’t like.

Since then his position has only gotten more precarious. McSweeney as his chief of staff has decided to jump before being pushed - but if his machievellian ways are still as strong as ever he may well be right back in control in the party with his next puppet Wes Streeting. Even worse, the leader of Scottish Labour has come out and demanding Starmer step down as Prime Minister. Of course this is the same leader who is leading Labour into a 4th place finish in Scotland in this year’s Scottish Parliament elections, so maybe not the best judge.

Starmer has suddenly got support from a stange place though - Andy Burnham. In spite of his snubbing by Kier “The King in the North” has deigned to advise him to both stay in power, and to start governing like he was a Labour Prime Minister. Of course, Andy may well just be trying to keep Kier in power for however long it will take for him to finally get into parliament! Won’t want to be missing the bus will he? Especially as he’s already lost two Labour leadership contests before, would be even worse to not even get the chance to run for third time.

All of this leads us to ask - what will even happen now? Starmer seems to have proven a remarkable incompetence for leadership, so he may be just another few weeks from his next blunder, but regardless it seems he has survived this latest challenge. But with all this latest drama Labour looks to be in even worse shape for the May Local Elections. It’s looking likely that they could well prove to be an electoral wipeout on the level of the Tories back in 2023, when they lost over 1000 councillors and dozens of councils. Perhaps worst for Labour, they look likely to not just be destroyed by Reform as the surging far-right, both the Greens and Lib Dems seem well poised to sweep ahead of them putting Labour in the unprecedented position of no longer being the obvious alternative choice to the British right.

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Come that May election it looks undeniable that Starmer will at the very least face the leadership challenge that has frankly been coming since last Autumn. Whether he stays and tries to fight it, as Jeremy Corbyn famously did and succeeded in 2016, or simply gives in to his undeniable unpopularity across the UK it seems inevitable that he will not make it to the end of this term of Parliament as leader of the Labour party.

Whether this latest moment has revealed to him that realigning to the side of the Burnham/Miliband soft left of the Labour party is advantageous as a group who have a major leadership vacuum in Parliament might be indicated by this latest ride of the valkyries by both soft left Labour leaders coming to his aid.

But, the man who spent the majority of his time in opposition focusing more on decimating his party’s left than the Conservatives may find it difficult to win much trust from that faction of the Labour party. Come June we will most likely be looking at the coronation of Wes Streeting as Labour leader... but thankfully he doesn’t have even worse ties to Mandelson and Epstein... right?

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

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The personal assistant that takes over your life - machine-gunning your emails, socials, productivity apps and online shopping like never before. With its latest feature, ‘How to Blow Up Your Life in 5 Simple Steps’, this new AI assistant is poised to take chaos to new heights. Buckle up, because this ride ditches any guardrails - meaning, the tech bro/gal inside of you will love it!

Step 1: Firehose Intimate Emails to Your Investors

First up is Openclaw’s brilliantly s elf-immolating grab-and- send auto-emails to ANYONE in your address book feature - including your investors. Who wouldn’t want to share their startup’s current bank balance - and that spontaneous trip to Vegas? You might think this is a recipe for disaster, but Openclaw argues it’s a great way to foster transparency, while moving fast to break sh*t and make it (wild west). And let’s face it, nothing says “trust me” like revealing your dwindling funds while highlighting your questionable life choices. Imagine the look on your investors faces as they read about your latest impulse purchase of a gold-plated cat statue as an office mascot - presumably blind-purchased by your cash-splashing AI buddy (not).

Step 2: Buy Drinks for Everyone via Auto-Social Sharing

Next up, the generous act of offering to buy drinks for everyone in your local bar, which could prove quite a boone - particularly for those of you a bit light on buddies. Thanks to Openclaw AI, your WhatsApp, Discord, and Instagram groups receive a nifty little auto-message inviting all your groupies to a night of revelry on your tab. Who cares about responsible budgeting when you can have a hundred drunken strangers shouting your name? Just think about it: you could be the toast of the town - or the laughing stock. Either way, it’s a win!

Step 3: Book an Airbnb Break for Your Secret Lovers

Openclaw takes generosity to the next level by booking an Airbnb break for your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, and even that ‘almost boyfriend’ you’ve been seeing. Because nothing says ‘I’m committed to chaos’ like a spontaneous getaway with the entire love square! And let’s not forget the added je ne sais quoi of trying to explain why you booked a five-bedroom house for a party of four. It’s bound to be a memorable holiday, even if it ends in a snappy showdown over who gets the last slice of the break-up cake. Mind you, given Openclaw owns and controls your contacts, email and airbnb account you can, at least, blame it for this one.

Step 4: Unsubscribe from Everything

In a bold move against the noise of modern life, Step 4 is all about battling enshitification. Openclaw nails bot-unsubscribing from ALL your subscriptions in a flash. Even your social media accounts, apps, and your bank accounts. Auto off-grid yourself in one fell swoop! Just think of the freedom as all those annoying as hell notifications and monthly fees vanish. You might end up living in a cardboard box, but at least you won’t be bothered by that relentless email from your gym reminding you that your membership is up for renewal and you’re looking a bit puny compared to the gargantuan muscles on display at their Insta.

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Step 5: Attend a Self-Help Seminar

Finally, we arrive at the pièce de résistance: Openclaw can set up a self-help seminar titled ‘How to Embrace Chaos and Love It!’ Apparently your favourite AI assistant not only invites everyone you’ve just connected with from Steps 1 through 4. But then goes the whole hog gathering them to share your most disastrous life choices while sipping on an overpriced, face-cringing matcha-mix. Sure, your life might be in shambles, but at least you’ll have a group of fellow chaos enthusiasts to commiserate with! Plus the added bonus gleaning a few much needed tips about how NOT to use Openclaw.

So, there you have it. Openclaw blowing up your life is not just a set of stunning new unrestrained capabilities; it’s a masterclass in modern living. If you ever thought your life was too boring, give this little gem a whirl?

Just remember to record all the chaos in your slightly less masochistic journal - it’ll make for some awesome content when you inevitably launch your own self-help seminar!

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

Announce designs on Greenland; insult the allies who’d be needed to secure it; invite them to join a vaguely titled “Board of Peace” and watch them decline; preside over a safe-haven stampede into gold as the dollar buckles; let federal agents kill citizens on U.S. streets; and then ask the Supreme Court to reassure the world that the rule of law still means something. That’s not a syllabus; it’s January.

Start with Greenland. The idea wasn’t born yesterday, Washington’s interest has been on-and-off since 1946 and famously flared under Trump in 2019 but in 2026 it returned at scale, from “considering a purchase” to talk of frameworks and pressure tactics that spooked even parts of Europe’s far right. The Greenlandic and Danish answer remains a flat, constitutional “no,” while policy hands note that any future for the island runs through NATO, shared stewardship, and the consent of Greenland’s people. Its not a real-estate transaction. The UK Parliament’s researchers say as much; so do Atlantic Council and Chatham House voices who warn that U.S. unilateralism over the Arctic risks blowing holes in the alliance it claims to protect.

Allies aren’t deaf to strategy the Thule/Pituffik Space Base matters; sea lanes matter; rare earths matter. But the means are as important as the ends. NATO’s new secretary general, Mark Rutte, all but said the quiet part out loud this month: Greenland’s security future is a NATO question, full stop. That is diplomatic code for “slow down, bring allies, follow the rules you wrote.”

Enter Davos, where Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney delivered a brisk sermon on the end of the old rules-based order and the need for middle powers to band together. Read straight, it was a hedge against both Washington and Beijing; read sideways, it was a reminder to the U.S.: if you torch the guardrails, don’t be surprised when your neighbors drive themselves. The subtext landed because the week’s headlines made it literal.

Consider the “Board of Peace.” Whatever its stated aims, Europe read it as a White House attempt to re-centralize power under American chairmanship after months of transatlantic friction. Core EU states promptly declined or demurred. A diplomatic brush-off on a committee isn’t fatal; a pattern of them is. This one signals that Washington can no longer assume automatic yeses, even on things branded “peace.”

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Markets drew their own conclusions. Investors voted with their feet, their ETFs, and their bullion dealers. Gold blew through $5,100, then $5,200, then higher, not because the metal suddenly acquired earnings but because the dollar’s credibility took a holiday. When presidents muse publicly about preferring a weaker currency and governance looks improvisational, safe-haven buying tends to become a plebiscite. If you want the telegraphic version: record gold, softer dollar, jumpy Swiss franc. That’s not a narrative crafted by the “fake news”; it’s a screen grabbed by anyone with a brokerage app.

Meanwhile at home, the state’s monopoly on force came under the worst kind of spotlight. Two Minneapolis killings by immigration officers, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, ignited protests, congressional demands, and a rare chorus of former presidents condemning the federal government’s conduct. Preliminary DHS materials admit two CBP officials fired on Pretti; outside reporting has already found contradictions in several government accounts of recent violent encounters. Allies read those stories, too, and they don’t parse the footnotes. They see a superpower claiming Greenland by day while shooting its own citizens by night. Credibility is an ecosystem; when it’s poisoned locally, it dies globally.

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This is where Europe’s “stance” stops being a communiqué and becomes habit. NATO will keep talking interoperability and shared burdens, but governments are already practicing strategic autonomy: joint procurement that doesn’t run through the Pentagon, energy strategies that assume U.S. volatility rather than U.S. anchorage, and Arctic planning that treats American ambitions as a variable, not a constant. Washington used to worry that Europe was feckless. It should worry that Europe is learning to be independent.

Back to the title, SuperPower Suicide. It’s a strong phrase, but the steps are mundane. You don’t need a catastrophic war; you just need a long run of unserious choices. You can’t arrest your way to sovereignty in Minneapolis and sermonize about sovereignty in Nuuk. You can’t bully allies into committees and expect them to escort you to the cashier’s desk in Greenland. You can’t tell the world the dollar’s just another instrument and then feign shock when people pick up a different one. Great powers don’t die of mystery illnesses; they die of comorbidities treated with denial.

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Is there an off-ramp? Possibly several. First, tether Greenland policy to law and alliance - publicly, specifically, boringly. “Shared responsibility” is more than a think-tank headline; it’s the only route that won’t blow up NATO while empowering Beijing and Moscow in Arctic councils. Second, stop performing currency policy on social media; let the Treasury and the Fed do the talking, and make it clear that the dollar is a trust, not a toy. Third, bring the justice system into daylight. The Minneapolis cases can still become proof that America’s vaunted self-correction works - if independent investigations proceed, prosecutions (if warranted) happen, and accountability is plain. The world doesn’t require perfection; it requires visible due process.

Which leaves the final question: will the Supreme Court let the world see that the rule of law still binds presidents, agents, and agencies or will it shrug and thereby certify the suicide note? Courts don’t move markets hour-to-hour; they do set the long price on sovereign risk. A judiciary that insists on legality in surveillance, immunity, and use-of-force cases puts oxygen back in the room. One that defers reflexively tells investors to keep buying Swiss francs and bullion.

Superpowers recover by rediscovering the boring things: alliances treated as contracts, not casting calls; central bank independence treated as sacred, not negotiable; domestic law enforced against the powerful, not just the powerless. Do those, and the gold line on the chart cools, the dollar stops wobbling, and Europe remembers why following the U.S. is usually the safest bet in a dangerous world. Fail, and the Greenland gambit will enter the textbooks as a footnote in a chapter titled exactly what you fear it will be titled.

History’s judgment is not waiting in a cave; it’s refreshing a browser. Today it sees an America flirting with self-harm and a handful of ways to stop. Choose one soon.

What follows is a three-act tragedy-turned-farce in which technocrats are parachuted over, podiums are violently repossessed, and global economics is replaced by slide deck nationalism. Gazilionaires are left quaking in their ski boots at the thought of their cosy, clubby winter retreat taken over by the technocrats they were meant to depose.

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Consider this less World Economic Forum and more World Ego Wrestling - where the charts are optional, the volume is maxed out, and Greenland is suddenly very, very American.

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American troops. South American oil. Talk of rebuilding infrastructure, seizing assets, fixing a broken country “with billions.” It was the kind of speech that makes you instinctively check whether Netflix has rebooted Shock and Awe as a reality series.

Trump promised that “very large United States oil companies” would spend “billions of dollars” restoring Venezuela’s “badly broken” oil infrastructure. He described the whole episode as “the greatest theft in the history of America” being put right — a phrase that suggests he has either never heard of the 2008 financial crisis, or has decided it was actually a craft fair.

The punchline arrived when markets opened.

Oil barely moved.

Brent crude twitched by less than a percent, which is the financial equivalent of glancing up from your phone, murmuring “wow,” and immediately returning to scrolling. Investors, it seems, heard “we’ve invaded an oil state” and responded with: “Cool. Still not buying your economics.”

Because this isn’t a war story. It’s an investment story. And the investment story is hideous.

The “Greatest Theft” Is That Anyone Thinks This Is Profitable

Yes, Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet — roughly 300 billion barrels, a geological flex so absurd you can see why politicians start salivating. In the late 1990s it pumped over 3.5 million barrels a day. Today production has collapsed to under a million.

That decline wasn’t caused by a lack of oil. It was caused by Venezuela turning the oil business into a national sport called “How Quickly Can We Destroy Something Valuable.” Years of sanctions, mismanagement, corruption, and political chaos have left infrastructure decayed, refineries dysfunctional, and the state oil firm PDVSA operating like a museum exhibit titled “Late-Stage Extraction.”

Even PDVSA admits the place needs around $58 billion in upgrades to regain meaningful production. Industry estimates often run higher, more like $100 billion over a decade, because “rebuilding an oil sector” is not actually the same as “power-washing a driveway.”

And this is where Trump’s pitch hits the wall. Because the global oil market right now is not a thirsty desert begging for Venezuelan barrels. It’s a bath that’s already overflowing.

Analysts and agencies project continued surplus through 2026. Prices hover around the $60-ish range. Venezuelan projects often need something closer to $80 to make sense, especially given the heavy, sulphurous crude and the logistical nightmare of getting it reliably to market.

Which brings us to the key point the market immediately understood:

Trump didn’t announce an oil bonanza. He announced the world’s most cursed refurbishment project. As if redoing the White House East Wing is not enough.

Big Oil Meets Trump. Big Oil Brings a Spreadsheet and a Dictionary

So, naturally, Trump called in the cavalry: the CEOs of America’s biggest oil companies. This was meant to be the scene where corporate titans lean forward and say, “Mr President, we’re ready to drill for freedom.”

Instead, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods reportedly offered what diplomats might call a frank assessment and what everyone else would call a reality check to the forehead.

“If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela,” Woods said, “today it’s uninvestable.”

Uninvestable. A word that should be printed on a commemorative coin and dropped into the Potomac.

Woods then explained why: inadequate legal protections, unstable commercial frameworks, no durable investment safeguards, and the need for wholesale changes to hydrocarbon law — i.e., the kind of boring, adult details that make corporate boards insist on not being expropriated, arrested, or trapped in a geopolitical hostage situation.

Trump, naturally, reacted like a man being told his dream yacht is “structurally incompatible with water.”

“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” he told reporters days later. “They’re playing too cute. I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out.”

Pause to appreciate the surreal elegance of this threat.

The president of the United States is threatening to exclude Exxon from a business opportunity… Exxon has just explained it does not want. That’s not leverage. That’s you shouting “YOU CAN’T QUIT, YOU’RE FIRED” at someone already halfway down the stairs.

Don’t Panic: The Wildcatters Are Coming

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, tasked with making the numbers work, effectively confirmed what everyone could see: the majors, the ones with boards and shareholders and lawyers who sweat through their suits, are not interested.

But, great news, the administration’s phones were “ringing off the hook” with calls from “independent oil companies and individuals, wildcatters” eager to get to Venezuela “yesterday.”

Nothing says “sound national strategy” like: “Don’t worry, the wildcatters are keen.”

These are the people whose due diligence is “vibes,” whose risk management plan is “luck,” and whose corporate governance consists of a single man called Rick who owns a helicopter.

Sure, sometimes wildcatters strike it rich. Sometimes they also drill a hole, hit nothing, and blame the deep state. The question isn’t whether wildcatters want Venezuela. The question is whether they can cough up tens of billions, tolerate political risk, and operate inside a legal system famous for changing rules mid-sentence.

The Best Oil Deal in the Region Is Next Door

Now for the delicious irony: Venezuela’s neighbour Guyana is sitting on one of the world’s most attractive oil opportunities — over 10 billion barrels of high-quality crude discovered since 2015, much of it tied to Exxon-led development.

Compared with Venezuela, Guyana offers lighter oil, better economics, fewer political booby traps, and none of the historical baggage of being nationalised, expropriated, or treated as a piñata by whichever faction is currently holding the microphones.

So there’s a plausible, less cinematic explanation for the whole Venezuelan theatre: it isn’t about “getting Venezuelan oil flowing again.” It’s about reducing Caracas’s capacity to threaten the region — particularly Guyana’s oil-rich Essequibo area, which Venezuela has been increasingly aggressive about.

If the real objective is to neutralise that threat and secure an existing investment next door, the strategy starts to look less like “we’re taking the oil” and more like “we’re trying to stop someone else taking the oil.”

Which is still expensive, still messy, and still not the stuff of Brent spike, but at least it makes geopolitical sense in a grim, practical way.

Iraq, But With More Rust

Analysts keep invoking Iraq, because history loves a rerun. After the 2003 invasion, Iraqi oil production took years and years to revive meaningfully, and corruption and mismanagement remained endemic. The fantasy that oil revenues would smoothly fund the occupation was, as serious policy people politely put it, nonsense.

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Industry veterans are even less delicate: there’s no urgency to rush back into Venezuela; the political risk overwhelms the upside; and if Venezuela did somehow ramp production, it would pressure prices and hurt other producers — which is another way of saying: even “success” comes with consequences no one wants.

In other words, the “we’ll fix it with oil money” pitch is not a plan. It’s a slogan with delusions of accounting.

The Underlying Enemy Isn’t Maduro. It’s Arithmetic.

The administration will sell the intervention as whatever narrative tests best: reclaiming stolen property, fighting drugs, restoring democracy, defending sovereignty, punishing enemies, liberating barrels — choose your adventure, and check back in an hour when the story updates.

But the economic logic is the same every time:

Big Oil has looked at Trump’s Venezuelan prize and politely declined.

Not “later.” Not “maybe.” Not “with a sweeter deal.” Just: uninvestable.

So what’s left? Independents. Individuals. Wildcatters. The brave men sprinting toward a burning building because they heard there might be copper piping. Or, a swift pivot to Iran?!

Maybe they’ll strike it rich in Venezuela. Wildcatters sometimes do. But the smart money, quite literally, is staying home.

Because the market has already watched this film.

And it knows the ending.

Not with a boom.

With a bill.

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

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So here are five hot predictions for 2026 - served Letts Journal-style: punchy, edgy, strongly satirical… and strangely useful.

1) AI Will Eat Your Lunch (and Leave the Receipt in Your Slack)

2026 will be the year AI stops being “a tool” and becomes your loudest colleague. It will schedule meetings you didn’t agree to, write a strategy doc you didn’t read, and produce a “brand voice” that sounds like a toaster with an MBA.

AI won’t just “disrupt” your work. It’ll relabel it:

• Your job is no longer “marketing.” It’s now “prompt caretaking.”

• You’re not a “designer.” You’re a “taste manager.”

• You’re not a “founder.” You’re an “emotional support human for a stochastic parrot.”

How to not get eaten:
Become the person who can do the last 10%: judgement, taste, ethics, relationships, and knowing when the model is confidently inventing a fact like a drunk uncle inventing a war story.

If AI is the forklift, be the warehouse manager, not the box.

2) Donald Trump Wants to Eat the Western Hemisphere (Metaphorically… But Also Vibe-ily)

In 2026, geopolitics will continue its journey from “serious institutional theatre” to “group chat with nuclear codes.” And Trump’s brand of politics - big appetite, bigger adjectives - will keep sucking oxygen from everything else like a Dyson in a museum.

No, he’s not literally going to gnaw on Canada like a corn cob. But the energy is: bigger borders, louder threats, deal-making as performance art, and a global news cycle that treats statecraft like WWE with graphs.

How to survive it:

• Stop doom-refreshing. The algorithm is not your therapist.

• Build a “reality diet”: one credible news check a day, not 37 “BREAKING” alerts that turn out to be a man shouting near a podium.

• Focus on what you can control: your money runway, your community, your vote (where relevant), and your blood pressure.

Remember: panic is profitable. Don’t be someone else’s business model.

3) How to Stay Healthy in a World Screaming Pollution, Climate Chaos and Bullets

Your lungs will be asked to multitask in 2026: inhale oxygen, dodge microplastics, and pretend wildfire smoke is “just a vibe.” Meanwhile the planet runs an experimental programme called “What If Everything Happened At Once?”

Health will become less about “six-pack abs” and more about basic resilience :

• Sleep like it’s your side hustle.

• Walk daily like you’re charging a battery.

• Strength train because carrying groceries might become an extreme sport.

• Eat like an adult most of the time (tragic, I know).

Also: if the world feels dangerous, don’t “power through.” Prepare boringly. Emergency cash. Basic first aid. Know your exits. And for the love of civilisation: stop reading comments.

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4) How to Drink Less Alcohol When Alcohol-Free Wine Makes You Want to Puke

Alcohol-free wine has improved massively, which is another way of saying: it has upgraded from “wet regret” to “slightly haunted Ribena.” In 2026, you’ll be offered a zero-percent Merlot that tastes like someone whispered “grapes” into a glass of disappointment.

So how do you drink less without suffering?

• Go low-stakes social : soda + bitters, tonic + lime, kombucha, sparkling water with something smug floating in it.

• Use a two-drink rule : have two proper drinks, then switch. Nobody notices after the second one because they are on their third one.

• Make it a friction game : don’t keep booze at home. If you have to put on shoes to drink, you’ll suddenly discover wellness.

Pro tip: the goal isn’t “never drink.” It’s “stop drinking like the world is on fire and you’re a human sprinkler.”

5) How to Find a New Job When They’ve All Disappeared Because of the First 3 Items

By late 2026, job listings will read like dystopian poetry:
“Wanted: junior role, 12 years’ experience, must be an AI-native polymath, salary: exposure + vibes.”

If roles vanish, work doesn’t , it just changes shape. Your survival plan:

• Build a portfolio (actual proof beats CV adjectives).

• Pick a problem niche : “I help X do Y with Z outcome.”

• Become hybrid : AI + human skills (sales, product sense, leadership, trust).

• Network like a sane person: be useful, specific, consistent.

And if you’re employed? Do not get comfortable. Not panicked - prepared . Update your skills, save a runway, and stop calling your career plan “hoping.”

Final Prediction

In 2026, the winners won’t be the loudest, richest, or most algorithmically moisturised. They’ll be the people who can stay calm, stay sharp, stay human - and keep their lunch out of the AI’s mouth.

Now go drink some water. The future is dehydrating.

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

We have 3 little wishes for 2026:

1. Please let AI leave us a couple of scraps… you know, before we exit stage right.

2. Can the wars switch gears? Wakey-wakey!!

3. Forget ‘Not my King’ let’s switch to Taylor - and ‘Yes my Queen!”

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