Let’s start with the one sauce that theoretically bridges our cultures: tomato ketchup. Surely, I thought, this crimson staple would be the same everywhere. How wrong I was.
American tomato ketchup is unapologetically sweet – basically a tomato-flavored sugar delivery system that goes perfectly with everything from french fries to scrambled eggs (yes, we do that). It’s thick, rich, and designed to be squeezed with abandon.
British tomato ketchup, I discovered, has more of an edge. Less sweet, more vinegar-forward, with a thinner consistency that actually enhances rather than masks the food it touches.
Heinz may have started in America, but the British version tastes like its more sophisticated cousin who studied abroad and came back with refined tastes.
The real revelation? Many Brits find American tomato ketchup cloyingly sweet, while I initially found British tomato ketchup disappointingly tart. It took a few months of adjustment before I appreciated the more nuanced British approach – though I still secretly prefer the American version on certain foods.
Turns out it’s not just my imagination. American Heinz uses high fructose corn syrup while the British version uses regular sugar, which explains why my taste buds were a bit confused.
Marianne Jennings, “Beyond Ketchup & Ranch Dressing”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-05-25.
October 2, 2026
QotD: Ketchup, US vs British
October 1, 2026
How to Eat Like Benjamin Franklin
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Apr 2026Deep golden fried toast topped with anchovy filets and melted parmesan
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1759While spending time in London, Benjamin Franklin wrote about lodging with an elderly widow whose food was meager, but whose conversation was excellent. He wrote of one meal consisting of a bit of anchovy on a strip of bread and butter and a little ale. He was also a big fan of Parmesan cheese and fervently longed for a recipe for it, which he did eventually receive.
It almost goes without saying, but if you like anchovies and Parmesan, you’ll like this dish. It’s also quite salty, and unfortunately, I’m not the biggest fan of very salty foods or anchovies, but the toast is wonderfully crunchy and rich.
Des anchoise au Parmesan.
Anchovies, with Parmesan cheese.
Fry some bits of bread about the length of an anchovy in good oil or butter, lay the half of anchovy, with the bone upon each bit, and strew over them some Parmesan cheese grated fine, and colour them nicely in an oven, or with a salamander, squeeze the juice of an orange or lemon, and pile them up in your dish and send them to table. This seems to be but a trifling thing, but I never saw it come whole from table.
— A Complete System of Cookery by William Verral, 1759
September 30, 2026
That “far-Right” fantasy that “never really existed”
Gawain Towler responds to the claims of a British MP that the nostalgic view of the rural life in England that George Orwell praised is something that the “far-Right” will try to capitalize on even though, she says, it “never really existed”:
I was going to go to bed, but the malevolent inanity that is Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP has riled me. She has disturbed my sleep, because she says that she cannot sleep. She told a Labour fringe meeting in Liverpool today what keeps her awake, and it was not rural bus cuts or the last shop closing in a Suffolk village. It was her own voters. She fears the far right will fight the next election on “a nostalgic vision of Britain that never really existed“, one of “warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them“.
A pub that doesn’t exist. The Minister for Nature represents Suffolk Coastal. Allow me to draw her a map.
Adnams brews in Southwold, just inside the protected landscape of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths, and the town is in her seat. From there a rowing-boat ferry crosses the Blyth to Walberswick for a pound, worked by a family that has pulled the oars for generations. The Bell on the far bank is six hundred years old and lets dogs in. The Cross Keys at Aldeburgh has served drink since 1540, and the Crown at Snape is a fifteenth-century inn with its own allotment. Most MPs would put these places on the constituency Christmas card. Ms Riddell-Carpenter prefers to tell a hall in Liverpool they are a far right hallucination.
Her non-existent warm ale has a pedigree she ought to recognise. She must be thinking of John Major in 1993, but he lifted it from George Orwell, who had written of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning“. Orwell was a socialist who spent years at his parents’ house in Southwold. The fantasy she fears was written by a man of the left, in her constituency. She clearly doesn’t know.
Then comes the sentence that gives her away. Labour, she said, must make the case for “what we believe rural communities look like“. Not what they are. What Labour believes they look like. The countryside is not to be listened to but corrected, its shape agreed at a fringe meeting and posted back to the people who live in it. When they describe their own lives, the pub, the dog, the Saturday match, their MP hears Ladybird nostalgia and smells fascism.
Cricket will be next on the charge sheet. Yoxford plays at Grove Park beside St Peter’s church and fields girls’ sides at under-11, under-13 and under-15, alongside women’s teams. At Orford the Sudbourne Hall ground drained well enough to save every home game in a previous sodden summer, and women’s sessions ended with a Pimm’s at close of play. This is the reactionary idyll that haunts her nights. It is busy doing, on a village green, what her party only issues press releases about.
She cannot plead ignorance, which makes it worse, no culpable. Her family moved to Martlesham Heath when she was seven, and she went to Woodbridge School. At eighteen she left and did not come back until the voters sent her. The years between went to London, to SOAS (oh brother), to the housing developer L&Q and to the lobbying trade, where she rose to run Cratus Group. Her husband still works in London social housing. She came home remembering every pub by name and having learned in town to be embarrassed by all of them. She now chairs the Labour Rural Research Group, which is a little like putting a vegan in charge of the pork pie.
A rural minister’s job is to carry the countryside’s case into Whitehall. This one carries Whitehall’s sneer back out and waits for the applause. Nobody who talks about her own patch like this can be trusted to defend it when a solar farm or a trail-hunting ban comes over the hill. She will side with the department and call it progress. She will be wielding the new Landuse Framework that tokenises the countryside, and she hates what exists before.
What’s the Point of Armoured Cars?
The Tank Museum
Published 29 May 2026Even though we call ourselves The Tank Museum, at heart we are the museum of the Royal Armoured Corps. That means we don’t just have tanks — we have a wide range of armoured fighting vehicles that tell the story of the Corps. Within that collection sits the armoured car.
On the surface it can seem redundant: tanks are better armoured, have superior cross-country mobility and usually carry bigger guns. So why do armoured cars — a concept that predates the tank — remain in service today? After all, a Ferret doesn’t sound nearly as intimidating when up against the likes of the Chieftain.
00:00 | Introduction
01:25 | Starting Small
02:49 | Speed Demons
09:40 | Going Global
13:13 | Only the Enemy in Front
19:28 | Go Big or Go Home
(more…)
September 29, 2026
War drums echo again in Britain
Mark Steyn on the renewed interest in going to war against Russia by the British establishment (let’s not point out just how Britain’s existing armed forces are being required to skip “non-essential” training to save money):
“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
.
On the other hand, the Iran war has, apparently effortlessly, brought Britain to economic ruin, which may be why the UK’s hitherto all-powerful iron-fisted caudillo has not been seen since late July, even by his favourite Ukrainian rent boys.
Still, the good news is that every day Russia inches closer to that 2022 collapse:
The Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the southern Russian region of Rostov was hit by drones and had to be taken offline, regional governor Yury Slyusar said in a post on Telegram early on Friday.
As a result of the drone attacks, the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, which has the capacity to process 110,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was damaged and halted operations, the official said …
Ukraine continues its campaign to cripple Russian refining capacity, fuel supply, and export revenues. Due to the low refinery production, Russia has been forced to ban diesel exports for months and is likely to extend the ban beyond September 30. The ban was initially introduced in July as Ukraine has continuously taken Russian refineries offline.
That’s great news, isn’t it?
Whoops, my mistake: in another exciting plot twist, bringing the Russian economy to its knees is now a bad thing. Because the, er, Houthis have done a Lindsey Graham and put their flip-flops on the ground:
The Houthis’ capture of Mocha has transformed the war in Yemen – and the geopolitics of the Red Sea
Are you a renowned geopolitical expert? Are you free for a quick Zoom hit on what happens if the Iran-backed Iraqi militias bomb the strategically vital Saudi port of Macchiato? Ha! Gotcha!
Notwithstanding these distractions, what rank-and-file voters want to know is who’s two points up in Iowa. After all, we live in a golden age of popular self-government where Abdul el-Sayed is “America’s next Obama” and Elif Eralp is “Germany’s Zohran Mamdani” and Sadiq Khan is the next Sadiq Khan. Iowa-wise, Republican control of the Senate is all down to Nicki Minaj.
As you’ll have gathered from all the foregoing, news is bollocks. And yet, to return to where we came in, the strange persistence of certain recurring themes is itself newsworthy. It is curious, for example, that every western European leader insists on alerting his citizenry that “war with Russia could begin at any moment“.
Why? It’s fairly obvious that Moscow has determined to conclude the Ukraine war on the battlefield and to hold what it has taken: to the victor the spoils, as President Trump remarked at the UN General Assembly. In the course of an agreeable week or so in Odessa, it took me a day or two to notice that seventy per cent of the locals speak Russian and that the preferred items I painstakingly learned from the breakfast menu were not in fact in Ukrainian. So I can see why the Kremlin might jib at letting Nato turn it into the Lindsey Graham Memorial Headquarters for the new forward operating bases that used to be in the Gulf. In the weeks since my pre-coma vacation, Putin has destroyed the town’s port and reduced Ukraine to a de facto landlocked country.
Tough for the Ukrainians. So the European political class has volunteered you — yes, you, Clive Higginbotham of Rotherham, and you, Jean-Marie Durand of Clichy-sous Bois, and you, Stig Karlsson of Malmö — to go and fight the Russian bear. The Pakistani minicab-driver will take care of your wife and daughters while you’re away. When the Donbass is in peril, what fainthearted ninny worries about his own territorial integrity? In London the government’s busy giving away Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the English South Coast to, respectively, Brussels, Madrid, Port Louis and every sex-fiend in Somalia, so your sovereign territory is hardly at issue, is it, you whiny loser?
Even so, you’d think impending nuclear armageddon would be a wee bit politically controversial. Au contraire, it’s impeccably non-partisan. Here, for example, is a discussion about next month’s blitzkrieg against Russia between the Rt Hon Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Lord President of Her late Majesty’s Privy Council and a “conservative”, and Mr Paul Richards, former chair of the Fabian Society and a “socialist”:
Got that? If you oppose war with Russia, the “conservative” wants to throw you in gaol because Britain suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars and the “socialist” wants to throw you in gaol under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act.
Because that’s all the choice anyone needs in a functioning democracy. So good luck findng a Neither Of The Above candidate who’ll be permitted to take power. After all, the winning party in this month’s German elections is, per the intelligence agencies, a “Russian sleeper cell”.
But but but, splutter my correspondents, aren’t you worried that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon? Actually, I assume the deceased ayatollahs have used the seven months since February 28th to acquire nukes. Wouldn’t you?
QotD: Origins of modern Wicca
One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis”.
Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon tells the story of the precursors, invention, and development of Wicca. Much of that history can be encapsulated in the mythic genealogy of “Black Annis”, an occasional pagan deity. There was a real medieval anchoress named Agnes Scott who served the church near Leicester and is buried at Swithland Church. She was venerated locally as a Christian saint, but following the Protestant Reformation was reconceptualized as an ogress. Then the 20th century crank archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge interpreted Black Annis as pagan survivalism of the “crone” aspect of the great mother goddess and a corruption of the Celtic goddess Anu. Finally, some modern neo-pagan communities were inspired by Lethbridge’s work to adopt veneration of Black Annis into their liturgy. As Hutton notes, “The gentle and pious Agnes seems therefore to have been turned first into a local saint, then into a local demon, next into a Celtic goddess, and finally into a witch goddess; and all the while her bones have rested in apparent peace at Swithland”.
The changing reputation of Agnes/Annis/Anu reflects a few processes that are common throughout much of the intellectual roots of neo-paganism. You start with the idiosyncratic cruftiness of medieval Catholicism, then Protestants derogate the cult of the saints, feast days, etc. as idolatrous — indeed, practically pagan. Fast forward to 1900, give or take a few decades, and an intellectual with dubious expertise projects pagan survivalism onto historical or ethnographic data. And then finally neo-pagans use the folklorist’s imagined version of the past as inspiration for a “revived” myth and liturgy.
Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.
- The one aspect of this myth that might be true is a pre-Indo-European goddess religion. The idea that Stone Age female figurines like the Venus of Willendorf represent a goddess religion is plausible but unprovable, given that the figures predate writing by about 26,000 years and so we have no literary evidence to contextualize the archaeology. But even saying that the Neolithic goddess cult was possible but not settled fact, as archaeologist Peter Ucko did in the 1960s, was enough to upset Murray, who “sent Ucko a furious letter, informing him that he had no right to speak about the goddess, because he was, first, far too young, and, second, a man”. While there might have been widespread neolithic European goddess worship, all other aspects of the “Murray thesis” — the idea that witches executed circa the Protestant Reformation were practicing a pre-Christian goddess religion — are demonstrably false. Hutton notes the falsity of the Murray thesis incidentally in Triumph of the Moon and argues against it at length in his later book, The Witch.
September 28, 2026
The Blairite world of “policy based evidence making”
Just when you think the world is safe from Tony Blair’s machinations, he pops up yet again with more ideas for cultural enshittification:
Tony Blair photographed for the New Statesman by Tom Jamieson.
Photo via Fainting in Coils
Tony Blair has a gift for sentences that sound like policy and dissolve on contact. His Institute’s new paper contains one worth framing. “The right answer should always come first and the politics should follow.” It is the creed of a man who has never knocked on a door in Mansfield, and it explains everything else in the document. It is also called “policy based evidence making“.
The proposal is that Andy Burnham should use his November ten-year plan to put EU membership back on the agenda, with a target of rejoining a “significantly reformed” Union within a decade. Three years ago Blair told a group of European news agencies that whether and how Britain rejoins would be for a future generation. The future generation has arrived early, and it looks remarkably like Tony.
Nowhere does the paper define “significantly reformed“. It cannot. Name the reforms and you hand twenty-seven capitals a list of British demands, which is Cameron’s 2016 renegotiation with the humiliation pre-installed. Leave them unnamed and the target is air. It is equally coy on the currency, insisting it is not making an argument about the eurozone. Brussels will be happy to make that argument on its behalf.
What the friends of Europe concede
The most damaging witnesses against Blair are his own side. The Institute for Government, no nest of Eurosceptics, notes that new members are required to join the euro and Schengen, and that any fresh opt-outs or rebate would almost certainly need the approval of every member state and a majority in the European Parliament. An analysis on the LSE’s Brexit blog went further. It argued that the EU would expect Britain back as a more normal member state, with the rebate, the euro and Schengen opt-outs and the special justice and home affairs arrangements all off the table. The same piece warned that Brussels would look for significant, stable and long-lasting majority public opinion in favour of rejoining before it took an application seriously. A ten-year target announced by one party, and opposed by the party leading the polls, is the opposite of that.
A Queen’s University Belfast academic, writing before the referendum, saw the trap clearly. He judged it extremely unlikely that the EU would readmit Britain on its old terms, because a vote to leave would itself have been a democratic rejection of those terms. And unanimity means every capital holds a veto, including Madrid, which would have Gibraltar in view when any British arrangement came before it.
What the Leavers add
Anyone who imagines accession is a negotiation should read Hannes Gissurarson on Iceland, which voted last month against even resuming talks. He points out that accession talks are no bargain between equals but a process of adopting the Union’s legal framework wholesale, with room only for temporary exemptions to ease adjustment. Iceland’s Yes camp campaigned on a slogan meaning roughly “vote yes to find out what the EU would offer”, which Gissurarson reads as a confession that the deal was poor. Blair’s ten-year target is the same slogan with a longer run-up.
Gissurarson also recounts an unnamed EU official musing to Politico that rich Iceland could join alongside Montenegro and pay for its membership. Britain, rejoining behind a queue of Balkan and eastern candidates, would be cast as the wealthy uncle who picks up everyone’s bar tab.
Update, 29 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
September 27, 2026
Gynogerontocracy in the Anglosphere
As the working world in the Anglosphere becomes ever more feminized and gynocentric, as companies disproportionally hire women over men, the working dynamics of most jobs has also shifted dramatically:
There’s many things to be exhausted about as a millennial or zoomer man, and I find that one of them really is gynogerontocracy. Everywhere you go, a profoundly alienating woman, often an older woman, is in charge, where she probably either shouldn’t be, or would be better executing tasks and responsibilities for a male executive.
In the private sphere, the corporate jobs go to girlbosses, whose neuroticism is channeled into unrealistic and dysfunctional adherence to rules, policies and procedures. There is no trust or discretion to do your own job, at the same time as management they don’t want you to ask them about anything. Every minor policy breach turns into an email, turns a passive aggressive “documented conversation” and “coaching”, as they talk down to you as a mother scolds their children.
When I think about my professional life, the only times I was ever promoted for my hard work and efforts, was under White or Asian male leadership, and that’s because they by and large are the only people who value demonstrable merit and ability. Women don’t. They value policies and procedures, they value inclusivity, and they become petty little tyrants when they’re in charge. The only female manager I’ve ever had who wasn’t like that was a 24 year old zoomer who played with a Needough in her office and posted weird alien cat gifs in the corporate chat app. She was fine, and understood my lack of enthusiasm. The rest of them act like they’re running the navy when the consensus is now that this is functionally adult female daycare.
As a generational experience and trait, I find that men and boys are collectively exhausted and resent women being in charge for what has been their entire living experience. I find myself asking how much longer this can go on.
September 26, 2026
Jacob Rees-Mogg says the quiet part out loud
Despite British news popping up here fairly regularly, I don’t closely follow individual politicians, so I didn’t have strong opinions about Jacob Rees-Mogg. I guess I had mild positive feelings about him based on what he’d said on various issues several years ago. I’d rather assumed he’d be out of politics by now with the collapse of the “Conservatives” after the Boriswave, but no, he still thinks of himself as a voice worth listening to … unfortunately.
Thoughts from the Shire suggests that we not blame Rees-Mogg too much, as he merely said out loud what they all think:
Don’t be too hard on old Jacob Rees-Mogg.
His recent call for the return of duty and the stiff upper lip, along with his warning that some of us may once again have to fight and die for our country, has predictably, and rightly so been met with howls of derision.
But here’s the thing, Mogg isn’t entirely wrong.
Duty does matter, courage matters, and sacrifice matters. A people incapable of defending themselves will eventually find themselves at the mercy of people who can, this is the story of world history. The problem is not the principle, the problem is the state of the nation, and perhaps more importantly, the relationship between those asking for the sacrifice and those expected to make it. People have rightly been pointing out that Millionaire Mogg, and his progeny are not likely to be the ones enlisted for the frontline, and that too often in our history the likes of Jacob have led many millions of good men to war. It is great that many have seen through Moggs BS rhetoric, and are telling him where he can stick his future war.
However we should not think that the masses of working class men that fought in past conflicts all did so out of patriotism, or because they listened to their betters, or were too stupid to see through the propaganda. Most knew their leaders were full of shit, most despised the upper crust types like Mogg.
It’s rather amusing that both the British and Canadian powers-that-be have spent a long time doing things to diminish the patriotism of their people — not least by mass immigration against the will of the voters — and denigrating the patriotic feelings they haven’t managed to fully suppress. Both ostentatiously treat immigrants, especially illegal immigrants better than they treat their own citizens, both with public support and judicial slight-of-hand to minimize or eliminate punishments when they do find themselves in court.
Now, British elites want the downtrodden young white males to ready themselves to go die for Ukraine, while Canadian elites want their downtrodden young white males to become, as John Carter put it, the Hoser Taliban and fight against the Yankee hordes of the Bad Orange Man. As if everyone will just magically forget that they spent the last decade and more actively trying to erase our history and blacken the reputations of the men who built our nation.
Sorry for the interruption, I’ll get off my hobby horse and let’s get back to Thoughts From the Shire:
Canadian troops going “over the top”
In the Past, the Upper Crust also Paid a Great Price in War
Nor, incidentally, did the upper classes always remain safely at home like old Mogg, and his ilk today. In the Great War, aristocratic families lost sons in extraordinary numbers. In 1919 the House of Lords recorded 160 sons of peers dead, “in many cases the hopes and heirs of their line”. Prime Minister Asquith lost his son Raymond. Bonar Law lost two sons. Public-school boys died in the same mud as miners and millworkers, and actually in a higher proportion. Go further back and the connection between leadership, and physical danger becomes even clearer. Kings fought, Chieftains fought, aristocrats fought. Martial ability was not the only qualification for leadership, but for much of history its obvious absence could certainly be a disqualification. It would have been unthinkable for a Celtic chief not to have been a great warrior, in fact the greatest warrior was often made chief precisely because he was the best warrior. Put the above into the context of today, the weak effeminate excuses for leaders we have in the West, not one of them would have the backbone to stand and fight for anything, let alone for you or me.
Contrary to common belief, in the past the man saying “Lets go to war” was frequently going with you, and on WWI the junior officer was actually going in front of you.
That matters.
Because the great change in our own age is not that ordinary men have suddenly become cowards (although it’s no doubt many are) and the upper classes armchair generals. It is that the bond between sacrifice, and belonging has weakened. My ancestors lived in mill-owned houses. They knew perfectly well where they stood in the social order, right at the bottom. Yet they fought in both world wars, remember there was no conscription in Ireland so they volunteered.
The thing is they were not fighting for an amorphous administrative machine called “the state”. They were fighting, in however complicated a fashion, for home, hearth, wives, weans, neighbours, streets, churches, towns, regiments, and the men beside them. They knew what was behind them, and beside them, they knew what they were trying to preserve, and that is where Mogg has the problem a bit backwards.
You cannot spend decades hollowing out common identity, weakening attachment to place, treating inherited loyalties as embarrassing, and reducing citizenship increasingly to an administrative relationship, then suddenly reach into the cupboard when war threatens and pull out words such as duty, honour, country, and sacrifice. You cannot look down your nose at the oiks and their gammon like ways, and then suddenly point out that they may have to die with honour and dignity.
Virtues like duty, honour, and sacrifice require roots, common beliefs and identities, a people!!!
So perhaps Mogg is right, we do need to toughen up. Perhaps we have become too comfortable, too passive, and too frightened of hardship. But the courage required of us may not be the courage to march obediently towards the next foreign battlefield for the virtue signalling elite, and their banker friends. It may be the courage to ask our own rulers some very uncomfortable questions first.
On Substack Notes, John Carter links to a Morgoth post on the topic, saying:
Jacob Rees-Mogg has been lecturing Brits about their “duty” to the nation, in particular their duty to die in Ukraine, while at the very same time he denies that the English people even exist as a nation at all. A “nation of mongrels”, he calls them.
He adopts the mannerisms of a grand old lord of times gone by, one of the landed gentry who bled and died en masse when they threw themselves into the trenches of the Great War, answering the very same call of duty to God, king, and country that Rees-Mogg cynically invokes. Will Rees-Mogg die in a slit trench in the Donbass? Will any of his four sons? Peter is 19 — old enough to fight. Will he? To ask the question is to answer it.
Rees-Mogg speaks of duty to fight for a country he will not fight for. He speaks of duty as he smiles upon the invasion of that country by the hordes of third world primitives he and his class continue to invite in. He speaks of duty, as the regime he supports bends itself to persecuting the men and women doing their duty to their country by attempting to fight back against the invasion.
September 25, 2026
Shock! Horror! Civil servant says SAS troopers are “feral” and “nasty”
If you’ve ever met a regular soldier, you’ll have noticed that some of them are not comfortable in ordinary civilian settings for quite some time after they get back from active service … they have to re-adapt and that takes time and effort. Out in the field, the niceties of civil society are contra-survival in many cases. Special forces soldiers, who are much more likely to see the colour of blood (their own, their mates’, or much more likely, the enemy’s) find it even harder to be “nice” around dainty civilians like Monica Grenfell:
EXCLUSIVE: Special forces soldiers believe they are “untouchable” and not all of them are the heroes they think they are, according to a former female civil servant who worked alongside them.
Monica Grenfell, who was employed at the Special Air Service (SAS) headquarters in Credenhill, near Hereford, for three years, said some of the elite troops were “feral” and it was “the nasty characters who really ruled the roost”.
She has given evidence under oath to the Afghan Inquiry and has now been interviewed by @thetimes
During a security briefing, Grenfell claimed that an officer joked about the deaths of three SAS reservists in the Brecon Beacons, saying that “dying on selection is nature’s way of saying you have failed”, to which others laughed
Grenfell described how she was told that soldiers dropped detainees in Afghanistan from forklift trucks “for fun”. She said she asked someone what they did in their spare time in the country and they said they got forklift trucks and “drove really fast then slammed on the brakes so they fell from a height”.
The comments certainly trend a certain way:
Hector Drummond @hector_drummond
·
She should never have been allowed to be around them.
Integral Views @Integral_Views
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Swearing and ‘being feral’ is actually just normal male behavior in groups, including friendships. All workplaces used to be like this.Women find this atmosphere to be threatening and have gone about changing every working environment to suit their preferences without a single thought that men might find those new female coded, HR dominated safe space environments uncomfortable.
We do, by the way. We hate them.
Men retreated into gaming and now that’s also been infiltrated by woke game developers. Masculinity is simply no longer acceptable.
I’m sick of what women prefer being the unchallenged yardstick for what’s apparently morally virtuous.
Shine Like Marble @MoscowIn2008
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The “female civil servant” rather sums up modern Britain. A feminised state obsessed with risk, HR and safeguarding, passing judgement on institutions like the SAS.
Cedric CiphercloΔk @Cycario
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Which one didn’t text her back the night after the squadron function?
Bea Johanssen @bea_johanssen
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Grenfell worked as a kitchen assistant and storekeeper between 2015-2018 — why would she be attending security briefings?
The Officers’ Mess @officersmess
.
Cool. Let Monica pass selection & do the grimy shit that affords her the freedom to have opinions.
Opinion she would be denied if not for the folks at the pointy end of the spear who have been protecting it.
If its too much for the Monica’s of the world: Find a new line of work.
QotD: The whole point of imposing tariffs is to raise prices
Think on it. So, those dastardly foreigners are better, or cheaper, or subsidised, or just plain swarthy johnnies who are selling to us and thereby stealing the crust from the mouths of the more expensive (or less good etc) proper British producers. So, we now impose a tax at the border. This makes those products from swarthy johnnies more expensive. So, people will buy fewer swarthy and more good and honest British.
This also enables the good British to raise their prices and so make a profit.
So, what actually happens is that the British consumer gets screwed for the benefit of British capitalists. Not quite what I’d recommend as a policy but that’s the point and the intention. Tariffs raise the domestic price of the thing, that’s the reason why.
Tim Worstall, “But Increasing Prices Is The Very Point Of Tariffs”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-06-18.
September 23, 2026
Doctor Who – the early Doctors
One of my earliest memories of television involve a BBC children’s TV show that began in 1963: Doctor Who. My mother claims I watched every episode from behind the settee, but I wouldn’t let her turn it off even though I was clearly terrified. I was young enough that I don’t remember particular stories — I don’t even remember being surprised when the actor portraying the lead character suddenly changed from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. After my family came to Canada, I only occasionally caught an episode on TV, and I don’t think I saw anything produced after the late 1980s, so all the modern casting choices (and the controversy) passed me by.
Millennial Woes provides a helpful guide to the show from the first episode through to the late 1980s, which may be of interest to some of you:
Several people have asked me to write a guide to Doctor Who, so here it is. I think most readers will be familiar with the show so I won’t waste time introducing it. Suffice it to say, we’re talking about a somewhat silly family sci-fi show, but one that frequently had soul, style, humour, and a lot of warmth. As with so much contemporaneous TV drama, Doctor Who had charm that seems to be simply impossible to achieve nowadays.
This guide is a difficult one to write because there are simply so many stories to survey, and because the show has multiple eras which are very distinct — almost different TV shows altogether. (Broadly, I would say the eras are 1963-69, 1970-81, 1982-87, and 1988-89.)
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Something you will notice is that I talk about the incidental music almost as much as the stories themselves. I find Doctor Who‘s music, across the various eras, very stimulating and enjoyable in its own right. (This indicates how big a part it must play in the show itself.)
The First Doctor was played by William Hartnell. This was Doctor Who at its very beginnings, in 1963, so it is radically different not only from the modern 2005 show but even from the Pertwee era seven years later, by which time TV production had advanced in leaps and bounds.
I must confess to being barely acquainted with Hartnell’s era, having watched only four or five stories in total. It is too slow-moving for my tastes. However, I can certainly recommend one episode …
“An Unearthly Child”
This is the very first episode. Though it is technically the first of a four-part story, it is really a “standalone” episode to set up the programme. The introduction of now-iconic elements is beautifully done. Everything at this stage seems darker and more mysterious than it will later be. The Doctor is secretive, unfriendly and sinister. The TARDIS is scary and doesn’t seem reliable, its first “flight” being a genuinely unnerving experience.
The atmosphere is terrific throughout. The whole thing is in grainy black & white reminiscent of a 1930s horror film. It is excellent, in my opinion. Had the show continued in this vein it would probably have been much shorter-lived but less lightweight. I guess things are always better while they still have their mystery.
The Second Doctor was played by Patrick Troughton. He was perhaps the most talented — as an actor — of the men who played the role in the classic era. His turn on the character is much more playful and irreverent than Hartnell’s. I am again very unfamiliar with the era, so am somewhat at a loss for recommendations.
“The Three Doctors”
This is a cheat since this story is actually in the Third Doctor’s era, but I think the Second really dominates proceedings so it feels appropriate to cite this story as one of his. You get a strong sense of how different he is from the Third, whom Troughton effortlessly upstages. And it’s a good story.
The Third Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, then known mostly for comedy work. During most of this era the Doctor is confined to Earth, working as “scientific advisor” to UNIT led by the Brigadier, and battling his Timelord nemesis the Master. A lot of the stories are 6 or 7-parters, formats that work very well; there is more world-building than in the 4-parters, which start to seem slightly lacking by comparison.
The third was perhaps the least “alien” incarnation of the Doctor. You can easily imagine him being a heroic leader in the Empire or a maverick figure in British government or business, up to about 1970 (after which such mavericks were tamed or filtered out by bureaucracy). Aristocratic but still practical and “a man of action”, he is constantly innovating and questioning, and being frustrated by the lack of imagination in the lesser men around him. But he is very much a man, not an alien. That choice was probably dictated by Pertwee’s own personality, and it would be reversed when his successor arrived.
Nevertheless, this era was a peak for Doctor Who. The storytelling is very competent, the production style has real charm and the acting (RP galore!) is consistent and endearing. All of this means the stories bear rewatching, remaining enjoyable time after time.
In terms of choice, you can hardly go wrong with this era. The only bad stories are “Carnival of Monsters” and “The Mutants“, with the rest being uniformly great fun.
September 22, 2026
The Forgotten Scandal Behind Britain’s Favourite Poem
The History Chap
Published 14 May 2026In January 1896, a small column of mounted men rode into the Transvaal — uninvited, unsanctioned, and about to hand the British Empire one of its most embarrassing scandals of the Victorian era. Their leader was Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, trusted fixer of Cecil Rhodes, and a man absolutely certain he was doing the right thing. Within days, he was a prisoner of the Boers. But this is not simply a story of a military disaster. It is the story of how a disgraced Victorian adventurer — stripped of his reputation, imprisoned in Holloway, and abandoned by the powerful men he had protected — became the inspiration for the most famous poem in the English language.
Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” has been quoted by parents, coaches, and prime ministers for over a century. What almost nobody knows is the man Kipling had in mind when he wrote it — and the extraordinary story of how Jameson faced catastrophe with a silence and dignity that left Kipling genuinely moved. In this video, I tell the full story: the Jameson Raid, the cover-up that reached the highest levels of the British government, the parliamentary inquiry that should have destroyed several careers, and the remarkable rehabilitation of the man at the centre of it all.
It is a story about loyalty, resilience, and the gap between a man’s reputation and his character. Which is, when you think about it, exactly what “If—” is about.
0:00 Britain’s Favourite Poem
1:14 Leander Starr Jameson
2:40 Rhodes’s Plot
4:02 Joseph Chamberlain
4:36 Jameson Loses His Head
5:35 The Jameson Raid
6:31 Battle of Doornkop
8:26 Triumph & Disaster
9:26 Jameson on Trial
10:23 Holloway Prison
11:15 Before Parliament
13:46 Redemption
14:11 “If-” Poem
15:10 Jameson’s Death
16:12 “A Man, My Son”
September 21, 2026
“The completion of the Parkinsonian cycle”
In The Critic, Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri shows how Parkinson’s Law still applies long after C. Northcote Parkinson’s work:
“Admiralty Arch” by Leonard Bentley is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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In 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson, a prescient observer of bureaucracies, noted how perfection of planned layout is achieved only by public institutions on the point of collapse. Parkinson’s observation is prima facie paradoxical. Yet when an institution is growing during an exciting time of expansion, even adventure, there is little time to design the perfect headquarters. That luxury is afforded later, when all the important work has been completed.
Take St Peter’s Basilica, for example. It was designed only after the political power of the Papacy had been significantly curtailed. Or the Palace of Nations, opened in 1936, when the League of Nations’ failure as an institution was already evident. Even Buckingham Palace was expanded at a time when the monarch had assumed a rather ceremonial role in the constitution.
I’ve written about Parkinson and his sardonic observations in these august pages before, but what brought him to my mind again last week was the sight of the renovated Admiralty Arch. Parkinson might have traced the long arc of decline as far as decay but stopped short of its final stage. We may rejoice, for we have now arrived at the terminus: once a building has become both perfect and symbolic, it is at last available to be sold off for a song or leased out. We might call this the completion of the Parkinsonian cycle.
Admiralty Arch is a familiar fixture of the London landscape. Raised at the initiative of King Edward VII in memory of his mother, it became the home of Britain’s naval command. It was where Sir Winston Churchill designed his not-always-successful naval expeditions. It will soon open its doors again as a new member of the Waldorf Astoria hotel family. Some connection with the past will be at least retained through the Pol Roger champagne served at its bar.
What is happening in the Mall is symbolic of a wider drift. Half a mile down the road, the Old War Office in Whitehall was converted (guess what?) into a luxury hotel. In Covent Garden the old cells of Bow Street are also now a hotel curiosity. The grand County Hall, which continues to stare somewhat antagonistically across the Thames at Parliament, now welcomes not county councillors but visitors as a hotel and, at least more imaginatively, an aquarium.
If luxury hotels are not your cup of tea, fret not, for the tyranny of “adaptive reuse” has a downmarket cousin. The humbler ruins of Middle England have been put to new purposes. A former British Home Stores — that cathedral of the affordable cardigan – in Slough was discovered last year to have been converted into a huge marijuana farm. Seventeen hundred plants thrived under grow-lamps in the same aisle where once school uniforms could be purchased, whilst the cultivators were dozing on a mattress by the fire exit. At least the building was, in the developer’s immortal phrase, “brought back into use”.
September 20, 2026
What Caused the War of 1812?
Real Time History
Published 17 Apr 2026The War of 1812 broke out after a series of escalations between Great Britain and the still young United States. The impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy desperate to crew their ships in the ongoing war against Napoleon, the question if the US could trade with Britain and France at the same time and thus profit of the war, all came to a head after failed negotiations.
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