A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.Clausewitz, on Prussia leading up to disaster at the Battle of Jena, 1806You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things, that you had no idea how to achieve them, and in your misery you began to hate everything around you. Dostoyevsky describing the resentment of our graduate class, behind so much of the West’s problemsThe culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.TS EliotThe worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement, into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what do they offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of Utopias?ChurchillWant of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.ChurchillI went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned. Arthur Koestler The first recourse to cover up a tragedy is to drown the participants in a tidal wave of awards, then the awards eclipse the fuckups. And no one asks ‘what did we learn from it’… You need to go back to the old way. The whole of the military should be re-organised so that command and control is always at the lowest level possible… We’ve got to shit-can this whole concept that a battle can be commanded remotely from a multi-million dollar TOC, it does not work…Pete Blaber, DELTA commander, 2026, on the Pentagon’s culture of fuckups/coverups and repeated disasters of centralised command and control he saw in Afghanistan and Iraq99% of this was written before 6 July since when all my time got sucked away. My time will continue to be sucked away so I’m publishing this now and will add short commentaries at the end while other blogs deal with non-yookay politics.Below are some old Snippets on SW1 — e.g why Starmer will fail, the big choices for Farage — and some new Snippets on the current situation and other subjects. SW1 has been suckered by another wave of ‘UKR is winning’ propaganda while ignoring the reality of the battles and the Zelensky regime openly honouring literal Nazis. SW1 suckered itself in 2022 partly because of the clever use of 1940 metaphors by Zelensky’s crew. It now finds itself having to ignore Ukraine’s regime lining the streets to celebrate on TV literal Nazis as heroes, and suppress all coverage of Poland’s justified protests. SW1 was a dumb cesspool 10 or 20 years ago but at least it maintained some basics like ‘Nazis bad, don’t fund Nazis’. As it crumbles, it can’t even get these basics right. Ukraine is not winning and will not win. It is now resorting to ISIS style attacks where they send in people carrying bombs and remote-detonate them, killing their own deliverer, when security stops them (cf. latest Moscow restaurant bomb). The Zelensky KGB-mafia oligarchy have no option but to flee or YOLO on triggering escalation with the west’s Idiocracy. As SW1 has to face failure on Ukraine, there will be incredible levels of lies, delusions and demented Narrative Whiplash. Our regime media and NPC class are too busy importing jihadis called Jihadi filming themselves singing of jihad for Insta before doing jihad, and organising censorship of immigrants’ sex attacks on British women and children ‘to restore trust in our institutions’, to cover Ukraine properly. One snippet is a summary of a fascinating 12 hour interview with Pete Blaber, the DELTA commander in charge of the special forces/CIA force (AFO) when it infiltrated up the mountains for Operation Anaconda in pursuit of Al Qaeda in 2002. It’s highly relevant to our problems, including No10’s organisation and the MoD corrupt horrorshow and America’s failures in Ukraine and Iran.He dives into details about lessons from GWOT and America losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disaster of the Pentagon’s culture of centralised command and control from distant ‘TOCs’ (tactical operation centres] with people far from the front line making decisions based on screens, and the culture of the Pentagon degraded to ‘a tidal wave of awards to eclipse the fuckups’ — the poisonous mix of lies, coverups and awards deployed by the senior Pentagon rather than facing reality and learning. He recounts in great detail the entire operation, from the original decisions to send in DELTA and CIA, the problems with the senior US command, how Anaconda started, why it succeeded, how it then got taken over by TOCs hundreds or thousands of miles away, how the TOCs quickly created chaotic disasters resulting in many killed, how the Pentagon used ‘awards to eclipse the fuckups’, then repeated all the errors again and again, e.g with the notorious Pat Tillman case. As he says, it’s extremely important to preserve the truth of what happened and why America failed because 1) the senior Pentagon tries incredibly hard and successfully not to learn but to continue with what fails (NB the parallel with SW1 for decades), 2) new technologies including AI will be (already are) abused by the Pentagon to deepen the failed command and control TOC culture running wars as ‘target lists’, 3) senior Washington is very bad at the ultimate political questions of war and the limits of domestic politics, and 4) if we don’t learn and change, then ‘we’re going to get our asses kicked the next time we get into a real battle, a real war like the Ukraine war’. The interview with Erik Prince covers similar ground and is also prescient when you consider the latest debacle over Iran.Blaber’s interview is also highly relevant to the discussion of ‘how to finally escape the cycle of failure in Whitehall and No10’. It touches on: how to identify elite talent, how to manage elite talent in teams (a rare art, cf. Bob Taylor and PARC). Blaber explains how easy it is for the old system to simultaneously spend a fortune on technology, mis-use it in important ways, fail to push R&D in the things that need it, and get suckered by expensive visions of technology ‘removing fog and friction’ and solving ancient problems of leadership and command and control. This is a subtle business that almost nobody senior in Westminster has experience in executing successfully. If you’re in Burnham’s team, you should listen to this in the gym and get someone like Blaber who has lived these problems with very stakes outside SW1 to watch your evolving new No10 system, empowered to say to the PM and chief of staff, ‘this will fail, it’s misconceived, instead you need to do better in defining the priorities for Z and have clear criteria for replacing the team doing Z but stop trying to run the Z program here, because there’s another 100 things like Z and we can’t run them all and this approach is doomed’. As I’ve written for years, the fundamental principles of high performance are unrecognised simplicities which recur from ancient texts to the most high tech environments. Blaber’s interview helps you think through the application of these ancient principles in environments rapidly transformed by technologies. The chances that Burnham changes Whitehall much in the right direction seems very low probability, yet still higher than the probability that the farce of ‘Kemi’ and her crew of LGBTQH++ dregs, losers and charlatans would do anything other than implode fast in shameful chaos.Ten years since the referendumI won’t rehash all the things I’ve argued over the years about the referendum and aftermath and No10. Here is my version of the history and the crucial debates. Big picture: background to Brexit and Brexit as the ‘icebreaker of the revolution’Big picture: the 50 year cycle of regime change — slow rot, elite blindness, sudden crisis, fast collapse, regime change — and how we’re repeating the 1840s-70sBig picture: : the Pathological Simulacrum and the Cycle of Narrative WhiplashBig picture: some Golden Rules for how politics really works, and what we learn from War and Peace about politics (look particularly at the amazing passage describing political meetings, better than any textbook or ‘political science’ course)Big picture: the fragmentation of elites (political and media Insiders vs entrepreneurs), Rick Rubin and ‘news is fake, wrestling is real’Big picture: the ‘unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance, why do so few learn from themBrexit: why we won, why I did it / what was the plan, the 2016-19 Brexit debate, why fire the 21 MPs, was No Deal a bluff (no), the Protocol,Covid: evidence under oath to the Inquiry, module2, 2023 (NB. later evidence was *not* published by the Inquiry because it criticised the Inquiry and lawyers)The Ukraine disaster — deeply connected to SW1 pathologies. Even the worst European war since Hitler (and the dumbest war in modern history) was turned into fuel to preserve the old system rather than change it.No10: why I decided to go to No10 July 2019, why a Cabinet of duffers, what happened with Saj / Sunak, how I actually spent my time in No10, why a British ARPA, what was the real plan behind announced changes to government communications, why threaten ‘hard rain’ (I didn’t), my role in 2019 election, how hard is to remove regulations…Boris/Carrie: what went wrong with Boris/Vote Leave, why etc; why did he get pushed outDiscussions with Sunak about a deal, his decision to continue with the Trolley pathSurveys of the UK political scene since 2024Feb 2024: MoD vandalism, the nuclear enterprise cannibalising MoD budgets, choices coming to Starmer etcMay 2024: The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime ChangeOct 2024: Why Starmer already resembles Trolley 2021: doesn’t understand why he won, machine-gunning his electoral coalition, no actual plan, no grip of Whitehall; & how the spads, ministers and PM do not understand power in Whitehall and are being subverted by the Cabinet OfficeOct 2024: Absurdities from May & Osborne on why the Tories lostOct 2024: Delusions of NPCs including Oxbridge professors on immigration Dec 2024: The Pathological Simulacrum, Narrative Whiplash, the collapse of consensus reality, and the long-term cycle of regime changeFeb 2025: Whitehall and Starmer, why he’s failing and will keep failingFeb 2025: Insider attention and why No10 can’t get things doneFeb 2025: Why the Kemi project is a farce Feb 2025: What Farage could do to finish the Tories and win the next election and why it’s psychologically very hard for him to do itFeb 2025: What are the core things needed to change our trajectory? Feb 2025: Personality types, coordination problems, and why changing Whitehall is so hard and so misunderstood March 2025: Why more SW1 NPCs will pivot to ‘REJOIN’ May 2025: Starmer’s disaster copying Sunak on ‘stop the boats’, and Why, contra SW1’s experts, the Vote Leave coalition was much easier to turn into a governing coalition than it was for Labour to solve the fundamental strategic problems of demography and Brexit.July 2025: A talk on regime change.August 2025: In a blog on the history of the Cabinet Office, I looked at — Questions for a new PM wanting to be ‘a government that controls the government’ and the concept of ‘regime completeness’.October 2025: I sketched likely scenarios.February 2026: I explained how voters think about the parties and sketched likely scenarios. Both old parties are shattered. There remains no sign of a serious governing project emerging from their competitors — serious in terms of recruitment of elite talent, mobilising serious resources, and building the sort of entity which matches the moment. Problems with Farage and Reform, focus groups starting to turn on both etc.What Is To Be Done?I’ve made the same basic points about the big picture of politics and technology since before the referendum and before No10: cf. my 2013 essay, 2014 blog The Hollow Men, 2017 blog on ‘expertise and a quadrillion dollar business’ re pandemics and nuclear weapons, ‘systems management’ and Apollo vs Whitehall, a 2019 blog on the failure of UK crisis management in the next big crisis and what should be built. It remains the case that the old Whitehall regime is incapable of priorities in general and incapable of prioritising science and technology in particular. Whitehall was more like SpaceX 2026 in the 1790s under Pitt under Pitt than it is today. Over 220 years to go backwards in high performance culture, accelerating post-1945 but already signs of the long-term rot to come in RV Jones and Alanbrooke books…OLD SNIPPETS‘Starmer means the serious grownups will restore serious government’Long-time subscribers will not have been surprised by recent events.Andrew Marr, ex BBC political editor:We have to be optimistic. Just having a stable government there for five, ten years. With ordinary down-to-earth serious people talking like the rest of us in charge of the government. A plan that doesn’t shift very much. A wall of money coming in from around the world… A little haven of peace and stability…Fraser Nelson told us we should bask in our blessed situation as an ‘integration miracle, a beacon of hope‘.After telling you for years that Britain was a ‘failed state because of Brexit’, NPCs pivoted after the election from ‘failed state’ to — the new government are grownups, ignore those predicting Starmer’s collapse and chaos, they’re online racists who ‘need to TOUCH GRASS’.I said from the start of this blog in 2021 that Starmer was a total dud who would fail fast in obvious ways. The Trolley said to me after their first PMQ clash — he’s a total dud, we will smash him in 2024. The Trolley’s instincts were sharp — if he’d stuck to the plan instead of listening to his girlfriend, we would have done.Oct 2021:Starmer is a dud… Starmer is very predictable because he’s a dead player playing ‘normal SW1 mode’… There is no evidence Starmer understands what the country’s top priorities are and how target voters in target seats think about them… And in another terrible and telling blunder, the PM refused to remove the failed Met management even after, in their panic, they started tweeting to women to ‘flag down a bus’ if the police try to arrest them. It’s hard to think of a bigger open goal, a bigger opportunity to show target voters you share their priorities and values. What did Starmer do? He rushed onto TV to support the PM and the management!…Starmer is a mediocre lawyer with normal SW1 management skills, i.e hopeless…A pro-Remain lawyer who floats around SW1 burbling empty platitudes, parroting every cliché about sexism/racism/trans, so psychologically incapable of challenging the system that he even supports the Met management when they’re tweeting advice to women to ‘flag down a bus’ while the rest of the country clutches their heads. Perfect! The IfG et al will support him to the death. Grownup! I stressed in 2021 repeatedly that Starmer’s response to the horrific kidnap of Sarah Everard showed the depth of his dud-ness. Apart from being the obviously right thing to do, it was the biggest open goal in politics in 2021 to demand the firing of senior MET officers. Instead Starmer went on TV to support the Trolley’s judgement in keeping them! And SW1 babbled ‘serious grownup’.August 2023:December 2023:The PM [Sunak] has gone so badly wrong it’s impossible to imagine No10 now getting much of value done. Meanwhile many critical things continue to rot, even disintegrate, including in national security. It would be better for an early election so we can cycle through Starmer’s inevitable failure as fast as possible and, possibly, replace him with something better when there is a broader consensus that both parties are a disaster. [Bold added]Feb 2024:… and …Sep 2024:Outside SW1, people grasp that Cameron/May/Trolley/Truss/Sunak/Starmer represent the apotheosis of the old system and its rot…In 2024 voters voted for change again but this time, uniquely in decades, voters voted for ‘change’ but voted having skipped the usual ‘hope’ phase and voted already in the ‘disillusioned’ phase…By then [summer 2025] both old parties will be in the toilet. The media is propping Labour up but the LGBTQH+ (H for Hamas/Hezbollah) vs Blairites splits can only deepen.March 2025 — Starmer’s failure and the general CON-LAB failure over the economy/productivity will, pathologically, generate a resurgent SW1-NPC Rejoin movement, and while NPCs are cheering Starmer on ‘Ukraine leadership’ this will also be a bust:This is also highly relevant in Britain where productivity, growth and real wages all slumped from 2008.Tory MPs 2010-24 lost all interest in productivity, growth and state capacity while presiding over a state making almost everything worse.It’s hard to exaggerate the contrast between a) smart entrepreneurial people outside SW1 who have assumed these things are of intense focus inside SW1 but b) inside SW1 attention has been almost entirely elsewhere and they were just not interested in anything other than the odd tweak. Tories and Labour, Brexit and Remain — all focused attention on a tiny number of issues and tiny amounts of money. Their election campaigns yapped about sums of money that were a rounding error of a decimal point on forecasts that are always out by more than that.The MPs operated inside a consensus of policy/think tanky types that ‘you can only make tiny changes’, ‘the economy is so big almost nothing has an effect’, ‘the public don’t want dynamism so it’s politically impossible to be radical in the sense Cummings et al want’, ‘Brexit was stupid because those voting for it don’t want dynamism and a more US/Singapore style government’. SW1’s assumptions about what is ‘good politics’ and ‘what can be communicated’ are always empirically false but a) they are ‘a real existing factor’ in the psychology of MPs who want an excuse to ignore hard things so they can happily just scroll from one news cycle to another and b) they totally align with Whitehall’s desire, and HMT’s desire in particular, for ‘no change’. SW1’s cross-party assumptions on the politics of dynamism are absolute nonsense and almost totally believed across factional lines. It’s crucial to understand that across parties, SW1 types hate the thought of dynamism: it is their enemy. They want to believe it’s unpopular so they’ll latch on to memes and pollster snake oil ‘proving’ it.We made this a huge focus 2019-20 and started changing most important aspects of policy. As I’ve written before even I was somewhat shocked how little the Tories cared about these things in summer 2020 even after a pandemic and practically unprecedented economic shock. When Boris stopped almost everything, the MPs were happy in 2021. They just wanted ‘to go back to normal’, i.e the Simulacrum of politics they all grew up with in the 1990s. See previous blogs for details.…One of the things that SW1 will generate in its 2025 crisis over productivity and security is a resurgence in the London Rejoin campaign.Objectively this is laughable. But this never stops SW1 NPCs. Rejoin fits many psychological needs…Rejoin is a simple thing they can emotionally attach to that obviates a need for thought. NPCs don’t want to think about hard things. NPC graduates crave an identity and Rejoin is an identity. (This is of course what Lenin and Hitler understood well about modern graduates and exploited.) Their identity can’t be ‘independent Britain doing our best for ourselves and the world’ — that is ‘fascism’. But ‘Europe is our natural home in a world of Xi, Putin and Hitler-Trump, we must play our part in building a new Europe for this new world’ — this is a very natural identity for the NPCs. Ukraine has shown that NPCs have very strong nationalist emotions but they just cannot attach them to their own nation, they care about borders but not OUR borders. Nationalism for Ukraine and ‘the European project’ allow them to indulge in nationalist emotions without seeing themselves as nationalist. It’s perfect.Rejoin brings together anti-America, anti-entrepreneur, anti-tech/AI, anti-democracy, with the quasi-religious Net Zero. Net Zero also legitimises central planning over Anglo-American capitalism. And Net Zero legitimises protectionism in defence of the quasi-religious. And Rejoin allows them to ignore the collapse of Whitehall’s performance and UK institutions generally. ‘Brexit broke them, Rejoin will fix them!’Finally, you can see the NPCs excitedly claiming that Starmer’s polls will be transformed by his ‘leadership’ on Ukraine. This leadership will soon be a bust…Voters know he’s a dud. His polls will reflect this. May 2025:After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall… And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination…I suspect there’s more conscious dishonesty with Starmer than Sunak but the result is sure to be the same: political disaster… Starmer will fail just the same whether he’s lying or deluded or in a superposition…The Vote Leave strategy for turning the Tories into an essentially new party with a new electoral coalition was much, much more logical and easier to maintain given the big historical forces in play than it is for Labour to cope with the same cultural and electoral dynamics such as educational polarisation and the rapidly changing media.Starmer has a truly nightmare situation because the issue of what to do about immigration is no longer susceptible to post-1991 SW1 politics-as-usual. Rich graduate London, crucial for what Labour has become, has radicalised itself (like the Democrats) such that it is on principle hostile to border control and treats arguments made by Bill Clinton and Obama as ‘racism’. But keeping them happy enrages most of the country outside London. And Starmer has done a Sunak and enraged everybody! … Starmer’s rhetoric, like Sunak’s, could only work politically if you deliver and he’s already made clear delivery is not his priority, the ECHR is.Sunak and Starmer are the last of the old party leaders who’ve clung to the dead scripts of the hollow SW1 simulacrum — hollow ‘leaders’ optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and government lawyers* even when it leads to their own implosion…While the new government imploded, the Tory Party could not benefit. It has disintegrated in all areas. Its membership has either defected to Reform or retreated in disgust from politics, its donors have gone on strike, its local networks have collapsed, it cannot generate good ideas, it cannot campaign and communicate (its communication is so self-sabotaging they disintegrate faster when they try harder), and networks on which it depended for people and ideas have either themselves died or defected. In the recent elections, councillors got Thanos’d and if Kemi is still there in a year most of what’s left in England, Wales and Scotland will get Thanos’d. Now the party is just a hundred English MPs and a few thousand councillors rattling around in a hollow historical institution. Next May it won’t even be that.July 2025:By July next year [2026] at the latest I think that either a) Labour and Tories will be obviously knackered and Reform refuses to build therefore there will be strong desire for something new or b) the Tories are engaged in a last gasp attempt at closing themselves and reopening as something new: new name, old characters expelled, new recruitment drive etc. It’s possible that the Tories are so far gone another change just collapses the old thing and no last attempt is possible, or any attempt collapses fast — they already crossed the event horizon but we haven’t yet realised it.For sure: voters don’t want either of the old parties but they also don’t want Reform populated by the likes of Jake Berry, which is worse than useless. Farage is not building what he should because it’s outside his comfort zone and he’s now in the lead — he might change his mind and try but right now he isn’t, even though he sort of knows he should, and probably only will if external circumstances change. So the core questions remain as I sketched in February. One way or another, within a year someone will be trying to do a version of the Startup Party — Farage goes for it, a new Tory goes for it, or neither of them do so a new force does — and you can see all over London different forces/entities are converging on the questions sketched in this blog over the past few years. (The Corbyn effort is another sign of elite fragmentation and an attempt to provide ‘something new’.)There are some signs of hope. Particularly: the calibre of people now thinking about a new and very different regime is higher by far than at any time since at least the late 1970s, a flip side of the scale of disaster the old regime has led us to. Elite fragmentation means that many elites are shifting to regime change very fast. So the conditions are improving fast for: a section of elites defects from supporting the old regime and joins with the demos in actively working for a new regime.New SnippetsWarsErik Prince on why US keeps failing in wars, Condi Rice blocking action against Iran 20 years ago, creating Blackwater and watching D.C destroy it. Highly relevant to the current Iran shitshow, which Prince said about at the start — it’s a mistake, declare victory and get out.DELTA commander Pete Blaber on Afghanistan, Iraq, why America fails in wars, and much much more, amazing 12 hour interview. ‘The awards eclipse the fuckups’ is a perfect summary of so much I’ve watched including covid and the fake Inquiry.Former CO of SAS on lawfare vs SAS and the MoD disgraceRob Lee on drones and Ukraine-Russia.UKR propaganda — SW1 suckered again by a wave of ‘Ukraine is winning’ propagandaYookayKemi farceFarage farceSW1 system hyperstitions 1998 into No10Coordination failure and regime changeMiscECHR/HRA — evidence on how it works that probably not 2% of MPs realise, including how the courts have created superior rights for the very worst people on earthKlein/Rhodes on UKR/IranRahm Emmanuel and 2028 — he’s almost the only really important Insider who has repeatedly said, the core reason for the shift in politics over the past 20 years is the failure of Insiders to take responsibility for their failure, so sadly the DEMs probably will not listen to him Read more