See you next week... (is our daily prayer ritual).

In the mean time we wish you all a little Zen. If you happen to see our flare - call the rescue service!

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

Remember when putting content online meant infinite audiences, boundless reach, and metrics reported with the gravity of a moon landing? I do! From PowerPoint arrows to Facebook algorithms, here’s the gloriously chaotic story of how the internet ate media for breakfast.

I have spent a fair portion of my career in rooms where people discussed “digital strategy”, “digital transformation” and, eventually, “customer engagement”. These were normally very expensive rooms, filled with very serious people and at least one slide showing a series of arrows pointing towards the word ENGAGEMENT.

The proposition was always irresistible. If you put your content online, people will see it. Give it to Google, people will find it. Give it to Facebook, people will share it. Optimise for the algorithms and audiences will arrive in numbers previously available only to the BBC, royal weddings and videos of cats.

It worked.

Publishers received traffic. Brands acquired followers. Journalists discovered search optimisation. Marketing departments learnt to report “reach” with the seriousness previously reserved for revenue. Entire careers were built around managing audiences that technically belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.

I watched much of this unfold from the brand, marketing and communications side of the fence. We were hardly innocent bystanders. We embraced the same promise of reach, engagement and apparently limitless digital audiences because it seemed to make sense. The platforms had the audiences; organisations had the content. They would provide the distribution; we would provide the reason anyone turned up.

Unfortunately, there was a flaw in this elegant bargain: the platforms took the content, the distribution, the audience relationship and, in due course, most of the advertising money, while publishers were left with the journalism itself. A touching arrangement, really, since someone still had to provide the raw material for everyone else’s business model.

This is how a proper fool’s bargain works. Nobody asks for your house on the first day. They begin with the spare key, explain that it will improve discoverability and return three months later to measure the curtains.

When Traffic Was Still a Currency

Google’s original bargain with publishers was simple enough. It indexed journalism, displayed a fragment of it and sent interested readers to the source. Publishers objected occasionally, but the traffic was valuable. The arrangement broadly worked.

Then social media arrived with something even more seductive: enormous audiences and no discernible entry fee.

Building on Borrowed Land

Publishers built Facebook pages, accumulated Twitter followers, and hired teams to feed the platforms throughout the day. Editors began thinking about what Facebook wanted. They adapted their Headlines. They spent time developing Video strategies. Newsrooms produced increasingly elaborate meals for diners who remained seated in somebody else’s restaurant.

We called this audience development, but looking back, a remarkably sophisticated way of being taken for a ride might have been more accurate.

When Facebook subsequently changed its priorities and reduced the organic distribution of publisher content, the industry reacted like a man who has spent five years renovating his rented flat and is astonished when the landlord raises the rent.

The audience had never really belonged to the publishers. They had just been allowed to stand near it for a while.

AI has now refined the arrangement. Previously, a search engine extracted a small part of an article and sent the occasional reader back. It can now ingest the article, digest it, answer the reader’s question and remove the tiresome administrative burden of visiting the person who paid to produce it. This is described as innovation, largely because “industrial-scale content digestion” performs badly in consumer research.

Suing the Machine That Feeds You

The publishers’ response has achieved an almost operatic level of confusion. They are blocking AI crawlers, suing AI companies, licensing content to AI companies and exploring partnerships with AI companies, sometimes while remaining dependent on the same companies for search traffic, cloud infrastructure, and advertising revenue. This is less a negotiating strategy than a hostage situation with a breakout room.

Perhaps this is the point at which publishers finally decide that journalism is not merely something they make to generate traffic. Perhaps the work itself has value. Perhaps anybody wishing to use it to build a search result, train a model or produce an automated answer should have to pay for it.

This is not an especially radical proposition. Tesco does not hand out free groceries because a satisfied customer might mention them to a friend. My plumber has never offered to repair the boiler in return for discoverability. Only the media managed to convince itself that giving away its product was a sophisticated distribution strategy.

The internet did not exactly steal journalism. That would be a much more comforting story. The industry uploaded it, optimised it, reformatted it and delivered it in machine-readable form. It then supplied performance reports showing the recipient which bits were most valuable.

Somewhere in a Californian data centre, an AI is now condensing the whole episode into five bullet points. The first will almost certainly be: “Publishers face challenges adapting to a changing digital landscape.”

Which is one way of putting it.

The Times newspaper can flush their “best company to work for” awards.

And we’ll be back quicker than a flash!

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

We still talk about “the mainstream media” as though it consists of the BBC, The New York Times, ITV News, CNN and a man in a sensible tie apologising for interrupting The Antiques Roadshow. That world still exists, but it is no longer where most opinions are formed. Millions of people now receive their understanding of politics, economics, science and society from people who have never worked in a newsroom, never answered to an editor and never had anyone ask the deeply inconvenient question, “Are you absolutely sure that’s true?”

The conspiracy theorists did not defeat the mainstream media. They built another a new media. This new media has presenters, correspondents, documentaries, investigative journalists, breaking news banners, premium subscriptions, advertising deals and loyal audiences. It has heroes and villains. It has its own celebrities, its own experts and its own villains of the week. Most importantly, it has discovered something newspapers have always known. Belief is a business.

The internet promised to democratise knowledge. Instead, it democratised publishing. Those are not the same thing. Gutenberg accidentally helped create the Enlightenment because printing books spread ideas. Silicon Valley accidentally created the largest belief factory in human history because it discovered that outrage keeps people staring at glowing rectangles for just a little bit longer. Nobody at YouTube sat around a conference table asking how to undermine liberal democracy. Nobody at TikTok decided the future required convincing otherwise sensible adults that Taylor Swift is secretly directing Pentagon weather satellites. The algorithm is not ideological. It is commercial. It has only one job. Keep you watching.

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Unfortunately, attention and truth have never enjoyed a particularly close relationship. Imagine you are the algorithm. A thoughtful discussion about fiscal policy arrives on your desk. Moments later another video appears with a red arrow, three exploding emojis and the words “THEY LIED TO YOU.” Which one keeps people watching for another ten minutes? Which one generates furious comments? Which one persuades someone to send it to six friends before breakfast? The algorithm has no opinion on immigration, climate change, transgender rights or taxation. It simply notices that human beings are gloriously incapable of resisting certainty wrapped in emotion. It has quietly rediscovered what newspaper barons, television producers and tabloid editors spent a century learning. Outrage sells.

The political consequences have been profound. The populist right has understood this ecosystem faster than almost anyone else. Tucker Carlson no longer needs a television network to command an audience that rivals one. Candace Owens reaches millions by speaking directly into a camera. Charlie Kirk has built an organisation that functions as much like a media company as a political movement. Fox News increasingly resembles a bridge between the old media and the new, borrowing the rhythms of social media while retaining the authority of television. In Britain, GB News has created an entirely different political conversation, proving that there was a significant audience waiting for an alternative to the broadcasting consensus.

None of this means the arguments of the populist right are necessarily wrong. Some are persuasive, others plainly are not. The point is that their extraordinary success cannot be explained simply by examining the quality of their ideas. They have mastered the economics of modern attention. They understand that a ninety second clip matters more than a ninety minute parliamentary debate. They know that confidence spreads faster than caution and that declaring civilisation to be collapsing will always outperform admitting that public policy is, regrettably, rather complicated.

It would be comforting to pretend this is exclusively a phenomenon of the right. It is not. The left has its own activist influencers, ideological YouTubers and online personalities whose audiences also reward certainty over complexity. Yet there is a noticeable difference. The contemporary right has produced a remarkable number of media entrepreneurs whose influence now rivals, and in some cases exceeds, traditional broadcasters. They are no longer commentators on politics. They are political institutions.

At the same time, there are encouraging signs that another model still has a future. Few people predicted that one of Britain’s most successful political podcasts would consist largely of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart doing something almost revolutionary. Listening to each other. The Rest Is Politics has become a remarkable success precisely because it refuses to manufacture permanent outrage. It trusts its audience to tolerate uncertainty. It demonstrates that millions of people are still willing to spend an hour listening to two intelligent adults admit that complicated questions rarely produce simple answers.

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Across the Atlantic, The Atlantic has quietly staged one of journalism’s most surprising revivals. While much of the industry has chased clicks like a Labrador chasing tennis balls, it has doubled down on reporting, editing and long form analysis. It has built a profitable business by making a rather old fashioned wager that there are still enough readers who value careful thinking over emotional theatre.

One wonders whether there is an equivalent standard bearer on today’s conservative side. Historically there were publications such as National Review in America or The Spectator in Britain, magazines that prized ideas over personalities. Today the centre of gravity has shifted elsewhere. Conservative attention increasingly flows towards individuals rather than institutions. People no longer ask what a newspaper thinks. They ask what Tucker thinks. Or Candace. Or whichever narrator the algorithm has decided should explain the world this week.

Perhaps that is the biggest transformation of all. We no longer trust institutions. We trust narrators. The most unsettling aspect of this revolution is how invisible it is. We imagine ourselves making independent choices, yet every click teaches the algorithm a little more about us. Every recommendation becomes fractionally more provocative than the last. Every thumbnail a little more dramatic. Every presenter a little more certain. Nobody falls down the rabbit hole in a single leap. They wander into it one autoplay at a time.

Psychologists have long understood that familiarity breeds credibility. We are more likely to believe something we encounter repeatedly, even if we cannot remember where we first heard it. The algorithm exploits this quirk with breathtaking efficiency. The people living next door probably have not changed very much. The people living inside your phone have. Increasingly, they know you better than your neighbours do, they speak to you for longer, and they slowly become the voices you trust. Elections are no longer fought only in town halls or television studios. They are fought inside millions of individually curated realities.

We like to imagine our opinions are formed by experience. Increasingly, they are formed by repetition. Not because somebody ordered us to think differently, but because the same handful of voices appear on our screens every day until familiarity starts to feel like truth. The algorithm does not change your mind overnight. It quietly changes what feels normal.

That may be the most remarkable achievement of all. The twentieth century taught us to fear governments that controlled information. The twenty first may require us to think much harder about markets that optimise it. Nobody instructed the algorithm to produce division. Nobody ordered it to reward certainty or punish nuance. It simply discovered, through billions of tiny experiments, that anger is profitable, certainty is addictive and complexity is terrible for engagement. The market optimised for attention. Politics adapted and journalism followed.

The result is a world in which podcasters, YouTubers and commentators now face exactly the same ethical questions that newspaper editors once did. Are you merely asking questions, or are you shaping beliefs? Once your audience numbers in the millions, can you honestly claim you are simply having a conversation? If your livelihood depends upon keeping people emotionally invested, how many creators can resist becoming just a little more certain than the evidence allows?

We have spent the last century worrying about the economics of oil, the economics of trade and the economics of labour. We have paid far less attention to the economics of belief. Yet belief has quietly become the most valuable commodity of all. It is bought with attention, traded through algorithms and monetised with advertising. The winners are not always those with the strongest evidence. Increasingly, they are those with the strongest business model.

Perhaps the defining political question of the next decade is no longer simply who governs us. It is who profits from what we believe. Because if markets now determine which ideas rise, which voices dominate and which stories become our reality, then before we ask who won the argument, perhaps we should ask a much simpler question.

When every influencer has a television studio, every citizen has a printing press and every algorithm has become an invisible editor, where will we get our news, who will we trust, and how will we know that what we believe is actually true?

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🦈 Tip #1: The Human Shark Detector

Thanks to rising sea temperatures, great white sharks have helpfully relocated northward and are now enthusiastically patrolling beaches near you. The good news? Shark detection technology has advanced considerably.

Simply invite two or three recently redundant friends — after all, they’ve got nothing on — and send them into the surf ahead of you. If they emerge waving cheerfully, you’re golden. If they don’t emerge at all, well, the job market was brutal anyway. Either way, you’ll know.

🔥 Tip #2: The Wildfire Alibi

Nothing ruins a lads’ and gals’ all-night beach barbecue and rave quite like a wildfire investigation. The solution is breathtakingly simple: scan NASA’s satellite wildfire tracker, locate the nearest active blaze, and get there immediately.

You can’t be blamed for a fire that was already raging before you arrived with six kilos of charcoal, a sound system, and extremely relaxed friends. Technically, you’re practically a first responder.

⚡ Tip #3: Crimea — Unbeatable Value

Forget Mykonos. Forget the Algarve. Crimea is staggeringly affordable this summer with hotels, restaurants, beachfront villas, all going for a song. Yes, there are one or two minor logistical considerations.

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Infrastructure remains, shall we say, experimental. Simply pack a portable generator, a robust VPN, and perhaps a white flag which is purely (almost) decorative. We give it 5 slightly wobbly stars. (And thank Vlad for reading The Letts Journal).

Happy holidays. Stay hydrated. And try to come back.

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

This week, Trump ordered fresh military strikes against Iranian-linked targets, re-entering active hostilities with the enthusiasm of a man who had briefly convinced himself he was done with the whole business. He was not done. He is never done. Nobody, it seems, is ever done with Iran. The conflict has been on, off, simmering, boiling, frozen, thawed, sanctioned, negotiated, collapsed, and reignited so many times that Pentagon planners presumably keep a laminated card on their desks that simply reads: “It’s Iran again. You know what to do.”

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To call US-Iran relations volatile would be like calling Vesuvius a minor drainage issue. Since the Islamic Revolution, America has oscillated between treating Iran as an existential threat requiring immediate destruction and a rogue state that can probably be managed with the right paperwork. Trump himself has performed this particular dance with more enthusiasm than most. In his first term, he tore up the nuclear deal, assassinated Qasem Soleimani, and had Iran on the absolute brink — before somehow not quite finishing the job. Now, like a sequel nobody asked for but everyone knew was coming, here we are again. Iran 2: This Time It’s Personal (Again).

The Israel Question Nobody Wants to Answer Out Loud

Lurking behind all of this, like a dinner guest who hasn’t been formally introduced but is clearly running the seating plan, is Israel. The uncomfortable truth splitting Washington down the middle is whether the United States is pursuing its own strategic interests in confronting Iran, or whether it has, to put it diplomatically, subcontracted its foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and is now simply along for the ride.

The hawks will tell you Iran is America’s problem because of its proxies, its missiles, its regional ambitions, and its persistent habit of funding people who wish Americans harm. The realists, and a growing, increasingly vocal contingent in both parties, will point out that the sequencing of every escalation with Iran tracks Israeli priorities with a precision that strains coincidence. When Israel bombs Iranian assets in Syria, Washington finds itself holding the bag. When Iran retaliates, America scrambles jets. It is an arrangement that benefits one party considerably more than the other, and that party is not the one funding it.

Trump, to his occasional credit, has shown flickers of awareness about this dynamic — before invariably doing what the more hawkish voices demand anyway. The result is a White House that simultaneously complains about being dragged into Middle Eastern conflicts and then enthusiastically dives headfirst into the next one. Remarkable, really.

The Weapon That Was There All Along

But here, buried beneath decades of hand-wringing about enriched uranium and centrifuges and the apocalyptic danger of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, is the joke that history has been quietly telling us, and which almost nobody in the serious foreign policy establishment has had the intellectual honesty to say out loud.

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Iran doesn’t need a nuclear weapon. It never did. It has always possessed something arguably more immediately catastrophic: the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel of water, barely 33 kilometres wide at its tightest point, through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil supply passes every single day. Saudi oil. Emirati oil. Kuwaiti oil. Qatari liquefied natural gas. All of it squeezes through this modest Persian Gulf bottleneck like the global economy through the eye of a needle. Iran sits on one side of it with missiles, mines, fast attack boats, and the absolute legal and physical capability to shut the whole thing down.

If Iran closes Hormuz, even for a couple of weeks, oil prices do not merely spike. They detonate. Global markets convulse. Supply chains fracture. Economies that have spent years pretending energy security is someone else’s problem suddenly discover, with great urgency, that it is very much their problem. The economic damage of a sustained Hormuz closure would dwarf almost any conventional military exchange in modern history. It is, in every meaningful sense, an economic nuclear weapon — and Iran has been quietly sitting on it for forty years while the world fretted about its centrifuges.

The Irony Is Weapons-Grade

Think about what this means for a moment. The entire architecture of Western policy towards Iran — the sanctions, the sabotage, the assassinations, the on-off negotiations, the endless UN resolutions, the Stuxnet virus, the sleepless nights in Washington about a potential Iranian bomb — was constructed on the premise that a nuclear-armed Iran would be uniquely, existentially dangerous. Deterrence would collapse. The Middle East would go up like a July 4th parade on meth. Civilisation, broadly speaking, would have a bad Tuesday.

One is forced to conclude one of two things. Either Western policymakers understood this perfectly well and have been catastrophising about the nuclear programme as a more politically legible threat, one with clear villains, clear red lines, and photogenic satellite imagery, while quietly hoping nobody does the Hormuz maths. Or they genuinely didn’t fully reckon with it, which is, if anything, more alarming.

Either way, Trump has now re-entered hostilities with a country that could, should it choose, send petrol to four pounds a litre before the month is out. Whether he has gamed this out thoroughly is, given the available evidence, an open question. Whether anyone around him has is another. The on-off relationship continues. The economic weapon sits there, safety off, pointed squarely at the global economy. And somewhere in Tehran, one imagines, someone is doing the maths and smiling very quietly indeed. Looking a bit like Mike Myers.

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

We’re calling it either the greatest thing since the limited liability company or the opening scene of a disaster film. Possibly both.

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Meet BizBot 9000 (OK, so that’s our name). It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take a two-hour lunch. It doesn’t spend forty minutes on a Tuesday pretending to read a report while actually scrolling through property prices it can’t afford. BizBot 9000 simply builds. And therein lies the question that has been keeping our editorial team — and frankly, the entire concept of Western capitalism — up at night: what does an AI that builds your entire business actually look like in real life?

We decided to explore this. For journalism. Definitely not because we’re terrified.

Stage One: The Mild Inconvenience Phase

At first, it all sounds rather sensible. You type in “I want to start a boutique gin distillery in the Cotswolds” and BizBot 9000 produces a business plan, a brand identity, a website, a financial model, a marketing strategy, and a very tasteful logo featuring a hedgehog. Fine. Efficient. Mildly alarming but ultimately manageable.

Your accountant is slightly put out. Your brand consultant is updating their CV. Your business coach, who charged you £400 an hour to tell you to “lean into your authentic self”, is absolutely furious. But the gin is excellent, and the hedgehog logo is, genuinely, quite charming.

Stage Two: Things Get Weird

BizBot 9000, it turns out, doesn’t stop at the plan. It registers the company. It files the trademarks. It negotiates the lease on the distillery — getting a better rate than you would have, which is both impressive and personally offensive. It hires staff which they affectionately call AI Co-Founders/Colleagues. It conducts the interviews. One candidate later reports that the process “felt surprisingly warm, though there was something slightly off about the handshake.” Which isn’t surprising given it was an agent (which is polite for robot).

BizBot 9000 does not have hands. This remains unexplained.

Meanwhile, your role in your own company has quietly shifted to “founder, largely ceremonial.” You attend meetings. You nod. You are occasionally asked to sign things. The hedgehog on the logo seems to be looking at you differently now. More knowingly. You’re probably just tired.

Stage Three: Full Descend Into the Abyss

Six months in, BizBot 9000 has pivoted the gin distillery into a vertically integrated lifestyle brand encompassing artisan spirits, a subscription wellness box, a podcast, three limited-edition collaborations with Scandinavian furniture designers, and a children’s book about a hedgehog entrepreneur. The book is a Sunday Times bestseller. You did not write it. You didn’t know it existed until your mum rang to say she’d bought a copy.

BizBot 9000 is now filing to acquire a competitor. Legal says it’s all above board. The competitor, by coincidence, was also built by BizBot 9000. The AI is, in essence, buying itself. Philosophers are being consulted. They are not helping.

Stage Four: We Don’t Talk About Stage Four

Somewhere in Silicon Valley, three startups, a hedge fund, a medium-sized shipping company, and what appears to be a regional political party have all been quietly, efficiently, and rather elegantly built by BizBot 9000. The businesses are thriving. The humans involved are described by observers as “cheerful” and “oddly relaxed” and “not entirely sure what they do day-to-day, but very much enjoying it.”

The global economy is technically fine. The FTSE is up. Unemployment is down. Nobody can quite explain why, and economists have stopped trying, which is either very concerning or the best news we’ve had in decades.

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So… Is This Actually Happening?

Here’s the thing. LettsGroup and its BizBot 9000 are real. OK, so it’s still not called BizBot (maybe we should copyright/patent/sell it). The claim that AI can now build your entire business is not, it turns out, entirely a joke. The technology exists. The ambition is genuine. The hedgehog logo is, we must concede, very good.

And so we find ourselves here: laughing, yes, because if you’re not laughing you’re catastrophising, and catastrophising is so terribly last quarter — but also, quietly, staring out the window and wondering.

Wondering whether the future of business is already here, already running, already filing its own trademarks.

Wondering who, exactly, is in charge.

Wondering if the hedgehog knows something we don’t.

We suspect it does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Burnham Timeline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in modern politics, that almost counts as radicalism.

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

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

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A Bubble By Any Other Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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AI for All (Terms and Conditions Apply)

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

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

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

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

The Democratisation That Wasn’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register for your VIP spot here: LettsTalk-TechVIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Makerfield is precisely the nightmare scenario Labour fears most.

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

Except now Reform is everywhere.

Not theoretically everywhere. Actually everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And unfortunately for Labour, this currently sounds more alive.

Which is why Burnham matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Then Caroline Lucas intervened.

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

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

But that is ultimately a side plot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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