My Word Is My Bond - Until It Isn’t

A long post, but bear with me:

Technocratic centrism isn’t dead. It’s just been pushed off the stage by something louder, nastier, and far more dangerous. And because it comes wrapped in slogans, flags and performative rage, half the audience still thinks it’s entertainment.

For a few decades after the war, a lot of the West ran on a bargain that was never properly written down, but everyone understood it. You paid your taxes, the state did the basics, and life slowly got better. Governments didn’t have to be brilliant, they just had to be competent and broadly honest. Politics was a bit like running a well managed shipping line. Not glamorous, but predictable. You didn’t need fireworks, you needed the timetable.

That was the Post War Settlement in spirit if not always in detail. It was built on trust. Trust that the numbers weren’t invented. Trust that civil servants weren’t party operatives. Trust that if you lost an election you accepted it and went home. Trust that most politicians weren’t saints, but they weren’t openly looting the place either.

Then came the stress test. Not one crisis, but a series of them. The financial crash. A decade of austerity. Brexit. Covid. The cost of living spike driven by global energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine. Add in housing shortages, creaking infrastructure, and public services stretched past the point of decency. Each crisis took a bite out of competence and a bite out of trust.

And here’s the awkward part. Crises have a price. Somebody has to pay it. In a serious country, the bill is shared and it’s explained honestly. In a tired country, voters start wanting the benefits without the cost. They want the state to fix everything, instantly, without taxes rising, without bills rising, without sacrifice, and without admitting that some of the pain is the price of earlier mistakes.

That’s when “handshake government” starts to fail. The old model relies on trade-offs and patience. It assumes voters will accept that complex problems take time and money to solve. But after enough shocks, patience runs out. People stop wanting management and start wanting magic.

They want instant solutions.

They want an NHS that works tomorrow, without paying for it. They want cheaper energy, without building anything. They want lower taxes, better services, and no difficult decisions. They want immigration controlled, but they don’t want the administrative grind of enforcement, courts, returns agreements, staffing, and processing. They want the results, not the work. They want a country that feels like 1997, but with today’s living standards and none of the global pressures.

That is the moment the populist walks in.

And this is where the Baltic Exchange comes in, because it’s the best analogy I know for what’s happening to trust.

The Baltic Exchange was the London marketplace for shipping, where shipbrokers and charterers fixed cargoes and agreed deals. For much of its history it ran on reputation and convention. The old motto was “My word is my bond”. It wasn’t a legal contract in the modern sense. It was a way of saying: if I give you my word in this room, the deal stands, because if it doesn’t, I’m finished. In a close market, trust is currency. Once you lose it, you’re out.

That sort of system works brilliantly, right up until the day someone walks in who doesn’t care about the convention.

Putin is the textbook example. He’s both the warm-up and the final result. He took a weak democracy, kept the outward forms, and turned it into a managed system where power sticks, money flows upwards, and opponents are treated as enemies of the state. He didn’t abolish elections. He made them pointless.

Trump is simply copying the same playbook, adapted for a country with stronger institutions and a louder media. The same MO, just with different props. The goal isn’t policy. The goal is dominance. You don’t persuade the electorate, you divide it. You don’t accept scrutiny, you discredit it. You don’t treat the state as a public trust, you treat it as something to be owned.

The key thing people miss is what elections are actually for.

Elections exist so you can boot them out before they start thinking the country belongs to them.

That ability is the safety catch. If leaders know they can be fired, they behave differently. If they know they can’t, they behave exactly as you’d expect human beings to behave when they’re untouchable.

So the real trick isn’t cancelling elections. That would be crude. You keep the rituals, the ballot boxes, the speeches, the solemn talk about “the will of the people”. You just quietly make sure the result can’t threaten you.

You do it by picking a fight with anyone who might stop you. Judges, journalists, regulators, election officials - they all get shoved into the same bucket: “enemies of the people”. Reality becomes just another hostile actor. It’s the political equivalent of smashing the speedometer because you don’t like what it says.

Thomas More had it nailed, centuries before social media and culture wars. If you cut down the laws to get at the devil, you’ll have no shelter left when the devil turns on you. That is exactly what happens when people decide courts, watchdogs, rules and due process are just “red tape” that can be swept aside to deliver instant results. You don’t end up with freedom, you end up with a leader who can do whatever they like, and a public that has removed its own protection in the name of common sense.

Then you tilt the playing field quietly. Nothing dramatic, nothing that looks like a coup. Just a steady drift of small changes that all point the same way. Voting gets a little harder in the wrong places, the rules get bent, the money flows to the right people, and the state starts behaving like it has favourites. The opposition can still exist, but it’s forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back.

And all the while, you run the country as a performance.

It’s all done as performance. A crackdown on camera, a new enemy every week, and a constant sense of emergency. The targets change depending on what’s useful. The point is the same: keep the electorate angry and distracted. When people are knackered and raging, they don’t organise properly. They don’t demand receipts. They just react.

Now here’s the part that centrists are too polite to say out loud, because it sounds rude, and rudeness is apparently worse than corruption.

The real thing after Trump won’t be about governing. It will be about extraction.

Once the leadership no longer fears being removed, it stops serving the public and starts serving itself. That isn’t ideology. It’s basic human behaviour. If you can’t be fired, you stop caring what the customer thinks.

The state becomes a funnel. Taxes still come in, but they don’t come back as functioning services. They come back as mates’ rates contracts and cosy appointments, and the rest is quietly funnelled upwards. You’ll see it in everyday life: the bills creep up, the services get worse, and the same firms keep winning the work. Your money is still taken, but the basics quietly rot - hospitals, courts, schools, water systems, roads. You pay more and get less, because the difference is being siphoned off.

And you’ll be told this is freedom.

They’ll call it sovereignty. Patriotism. Common sense. Taking back control. But what it really means is your citizenship has been reduced to applause while the people at the top help themselves. You stop being treated like a citizen. You’re treated like an audience.

That’s what “hollowing out democracy” actually means in real life.

You still get to vote, but it stops being a way to change the leadership. It becomes a ritual. A bit like shouting at the telly during Match of the Day. It feels satisfying in the moment, but it doesn’t change anything important. The candidates are pre-filtered by money, media ecosystems, and party machines that have been bent into shape. The opposition exists, but it’s starved of oxygen, smeared as “unpatriotic”, and treated as a security risk rather than a political alternative.

Then your vote gets replaced by your identity. Politics becomes less about what the state does and more about which tribe you’re in. The point is to keep you loyal, angry, and distracted. If your living standards fall, it’s not because the system is failing you, it’s because “they” are doing it to you. Migrants, judges, Brussels, woke teenagers, whoever’s handy this week.

And when you finally notice you’re poorer, the services are worse, and nothing works, you’ll be told it’s your fault for not believing hard enough.

Does this mean you instantly become Putin’s Russia? Not overnight. Western democracies have stronger institutions and deeper habits of legality. But Russia shows you the endpoint: elections that exist but don’t change power, courts that serve the regime, media as state theatre, and corruption as the operating system. A country where leaders aren’t accountable to voters because they’ve made themselves immune to voters.

That’s the warning. Not that democracy ends with a bang. That it ends with a shrug.

Democracy doesn’t die when people stop voting. It dies when voting stops being a threat to the people in charge.

And if you think this is all too dramatic, ask yourself a simple question. If “my word is my bond” stops meaning anything, what exactly is left holding the whole thing together?

The Quiet Defence of Civilisation

There it is. A public service announcement from the age of ration books and quiet panic, cheerfully repackaged as lifestyle advice.

“Young Man!” it begins, in the tone of someone who believes a raised eyebrow counts as discipline. If you enjoy collecting random old junk, you too can become a Man Tin Warden. Not a hoarder, mind. A warden. Authority is everything. Chaos, but with a badge.

The tin itself is the real hero. A shrine to screws of unknown origin, washers that fit nothing you currently own, and that mysterious spring you are certain will be vital one day. Not today, obviously. But one day. Possibly after your death, when someone else throws it all away.

“Remember! If it’s not in this tin it doesn’t exist!” This is not advice. It’s a worldview. Empiricism reduced to biscuit tin metaphysics. Schrödinger’s Fastener. The garage equivalent of “pics or it didn’t happen”.

There is something deeply British about this. The quiet belief that civilisation is held together not by laws or institutions, but by a man who knows where the right bolt is. Or at least knows which tin it might be in. Order maintained through stubborn categorisation and tins that once held shortbread.

It also explains an entire generation of sheds. Not workshops. Sheds. Places where time stopped in 1973 and everything has been kept, just in case. Dead radios. Half a lawnmower. A plug with no appliance. History, curated by indecision.

Modern minimalists will sneer. Digital natives will scoff. But when the internet goes down and the Allen key you need is 3/32nds of an inch for no sane reason, they’ll come crawling. And the Man Tin Warden will open the lid, smile knowingly, and say the words that matter.

“I thought this might come in handy.”

Civil defence, indeed.

The Closed Loop Wardrobe

I shower. I get dressed. What I take off goes straight into the wash and is usually washed the same day. What I put on is whatever sits on top of the clean pile, which means it is almost guaranteed to be what was washed the previous day. There is no rotation, no easing back in, no sense of fairness. Clothes go straight from rinse cycle back to active duty.

This is not a youthful experiment or a minimalist phase. It is the natural consequence of retirement. When you no longer need “work clothes” and “not work clothes”, the distinction collapses. Every day is Tuesday. Every Tuesday looks like every other Tuesday. The wardrobe, freed from external expectations, reorganises itself around pure habit and gravity.

It also, I should add, infuriates Hayley.

Not mildly. Properly. The idea that there are other clothes, clean clothes, perfectly good clothes, sitting untouched beneath the top layer for a year or more drives her quietly mad. They exist lower down the pile, in a kind of textile underclass. Some of them have not seen daylight since a pre-retirement dinner invitation. They are theoretically wearable, practically invisible, and apparently a personal affront.

The routine repeats daily. Endlessly. A closed loop of wear, wash, wear again, until material fatigue finally intervenes. Not fashion. Not taste. Physics. Buttons loosen. Seams thin. Fabric gives up in places no fabric should. This does nothing to calm Hayley.

Ninety five percent of the wardrobe comes from charity shops, which makes this not carelessness but policy. Expendability is baked in. A two pound shirt does not deserve curation. It exists to be used. It will either do its job or fail honestly, usually at the worst possible moment and always in a way that proves her point.

The absence of stock rotation is not a flaw, it is liberation. Nothing is saved “for best”. Everything that reaches the top of the pile is on permanent frontline duty, while the rest age quietly in exile, untouched, untroubled, and apparently shouting silently to be chosen. Hayley hears them. I do not.

Occasionally she suggests I should “put something older on” for a dirty job. This misunderstands both the system and retirement. Everything at the top is already old. Everything below is irrelevant. Choosing deliberately would require thinking, and thinking is how colour co-ordination starts. From there it is a short, slippery slope to outfits.

Replacements cost pennies and appear easily. A short wander through a charity shop produces another anonymous recruit, often with someone else’s name faintly written on the label, ready to be conscripted straight into the loop. This also infuriates Hayley.

So the system runs. Shower. Dress. Work. Wash. Repeat. Some clothes work until they disintegrate. Others wait forever. Hayley fumes quietly. I remain operational.

Which, as unintended domestic experiments go, feels entirely on brand.

Greenland: The Force Is Still On The Table

Trump has “ruled out force” to take Greenland. Lovely. Like a man in a pub telling you he’s definitely not going to hit you, while he keeps describing in detail how much he wants your wallet.

The problem is he hasn’t dropped the demand. He keeps saying he will have Greenland. Not “we’d like closer cooperation”, not “we need basing rights”, not “let’s negotiate a new security arrangement”. He’s talking about ownership. Possession. Title. As if it’s a distressed property and he’s popped round with a clipboard.

That’s why the promise not to use force means very little. It’s not a principle, it’s a mood. A dispositional state. It lasts right up until it doesn’t, and then suddenly it becomes “national security” and “emergency powers” and “we had no choice”. Dictators don’t start with tanks. They start with entitlement.

This is Quantum Trump again. The man exists in two states at once: “I won’t use force” and “I will have it”, until reality collapses into whichever version feeds his ego on the day. I’ve already written a full blog post on the Quantum Trump, because frankly it’s the only way to describe the madness without reaching for a nice little breakfast whiskey.

And here’s the tell. If you genuinely weren’t going to use force, you wouldn’t need to keep insisting you’ll get it anyway. You’d accept the answer “no”, and move on to something realistic. The fact he can’t do that is the whole story.

So yes, he says force is off the table. But when he's hiding a gun under the table, like in a Western poker game, you don’t bet your sovereignty on it.

The Board of Trump

So they’ve launched this “Gaza Board of Peace”, with a charter signed at Davos, and I’m genuinely trying to judge it on what it is, not who’s fronting it.

But the charter, as reported, doesn’t even mention Gaza. Not once. You can argue that charters are meant to be broad, fine. Even so, if you’re selling this as a Gaza-focused peace and reconstruction mechanism, leaving Gaza out of the founding text is a glaring tell. It suggests the real aim is a general-purpose power platform, with Gaza as the launch vehicle.

Then there’s the structure. Membership by invitation, renewals at the chairman’s discretion, decisions needing the chairman’s approval, and the chairman as final interpreter of the rules. If that’s accurate, it isn’t a rules-based institution, it’s a leader-based one. That matters because peacebuilding is supposed to be stable and predictable, not dependent on one person’s judgement, temperament, or political incentives.

And yes, this is how you undermine existing institutions in practice without openly declaring war on them. You don’t need to “abolish” the UN. You just create a rival body that can bypass constraints, claim it’s faster and more effective, then start routing legitimacy, money and influence away from the established system. It’s not reform. It’s displacement.

Now look at representation, because this is where “peace” either becomes credible or collapses into theatre.

Netanyahu on a Gaza peace board is an immediate conflict-of-interest problem. He is a direct party to the conflict, with domestic political incentives tied to the outcome. You can’t call that neutral oversight, it’s a stakeholder sitting in the referee’s chair.

And if the Palestinian Authority isn’t represented on the board itself, that’s lop-sided from the start. You can argue the PA is flawed, unpopular, or weak in Gaza, but excluding the recognised Palestinian political authority from top-level decision-making while including the Israeli PM isn’t “pragmatism”. It’s signalling who this is designed to serve.

Putin’s inclusion, if accurate, makes it worse. Diplomacy involves talking to adversaries, yes. But putting an expansionist war leader on a “peace” board is not the same thing as negotiating with him. It’s granting status. It says the board’s currency is transactional legitimacy, not principles, law, or accountability.

Then there’s the reported “permanent membership” model - a billion dollars for a permanent seat. If true, that’s a pay-to-play structure. Call it “funding” if you like, but the effect is the same: money buys influence, and influence shapes outcomes. That’s not a foundation for trust in a post-war settlement. It’s a recipe for capture.

And before anyone says “give Trump a chance, he wants peace” - this is the same Trump who has openly threatened to use force against a sovereign country to take territory. That isn’t peace. That’s imperialism with better PR. If your chairman’s idea of diplomacy includes invasion as a negotiating tool, then “Board of Peace” starts sounding like one of those Ministry of Truth jokes.

And then there’s Tony Blair, dutifully turning up like a man who can smell a conference lanyard from 500 miles away. He’s being used as a credibility prop, and he knows it. The whole point of wheeling Blair on stage is so everyone can say “look, serious people are involved”, while the structure underneath remains a Trump-centred power project. Blair will tell himself he’s “helping” and “influencing”, but what he’s really doing is lending his remaining reputation to a scheme that desperately needs a grown-up mask. It’s the same old Blair habit - mistaking proximity to power for virtue, and confusing being present with being useful.

Finally, there’s the obvious political incentive hovering over it: Trump wants to be seen as the man who “brought peace”. Maybe he even wants the Nobel. Fine. Motives don’t always matter if outcomes are good. But when the entire project is built around optics, personal control, and headline-grabbing scale, you’re entitled to suspect the outcome is secondary.

If this board wants credibility, it needs three things: clear Gaza-specific mandate, balanced representation, and constraints that stop it becoming a one-man instrument. Without that, to use Trump’s favourite phrase, it’s a Fake Board. It's a pattern. And you just have to follow the dots to know where Trump shaped patterns lead.

Strong Government, Weak Democracy

Extremists can only win by selling you fantasies. Everything is simple, everything is someone else’s fault, and the reason nothing gets fixed is because “the establishment” is stopping them. Then they get into power and reality turns up like a bailiff with a clipboard.

At that point there are only two options. You admit you can’t deliver and you lose the next election, or you make sure you don’t lose the next election. That’s where the “strong leader” act stops being entertainment and becomes a requirement. Scrutiny becomes sabotage, opposition becomes treason, and institutions become enemies. Not because you’re brave, but because you’re exposed.

And who pays? Not the wealthy backers. They can insulate themselves from chaos. They have assets, lawyers, options, and the ability to move money and opportunity somewhere quieter. It’s ordinary people who pay, in higher bills, worse services, longer waits, fewer rights, and a country that becomes harder to fix because the people in charge can’t tolerate being proved wrong.

This is not just a far right problem. Far left politics can do the same thing. Different slogans, same flaw. When politics is built on moral certainty and impossible promises, reality becomes the enemy. Constraints are treated as betrayal, compromise is treated as corruption, and anyone pointing out the numbers is accused of sabotage. It’s intoxicating, right up until you need a functioning economy, a working state, and a government capable of doing more than shouting.

There’s a deeper irony here that rarely gets said out loud. People talk about a dictatorship of the wealthy versus a dictatorship of the proletariat, as if they’re opposites. In practice they can both end up as the same thing: rule by an elite.

The dictatorship of the wealthy often doesn’t need to announce itself. It just quietly happens. Money shapes policy, money shapes media, money shapes what is “realistic”, and elections become a choice between two versions of what donors will tolerate. It’s oligarchy with nice stationery.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is meant to be the working majority taking control. But the proletariat doesn’t sit in ministries and committees. A party does. A political class does. A security apparatus does. The working class becomes the moral justification while power concentrates in the hands of a new elite that claims it speaks for “the people”. The slogans change, but the incentives don’t.

So the mechanism is bigger than ideology. It’s extremism itself. The further you go from trade-offs and consent, the more you end up needing force, because you can’t keep your promises any other way.

This is where our electoral system comes in, and it’s the bit the “FPTP gets things done” crowd never want to look at too closely. Yes, FPTP gets things done. That’s the problem. It can hand a party a huge majority on a minority of the vote, and then that minority can do whatever it likes, however radical, with only the flimsiest consent.

Some of it gets reversed by the next lot, which is why we lurch from one direction to another. But the damage to institutions and long-term capacity often doesn’t reverse at all. Once you’ve hollowed out the state, degraded trust, or made a big structural mistake, you don’t just click your fingers and put it back.

That is why we get swings and reversals every few years, and why long-term planning becomes almost impossible. Under FPTP, you don’t need to build durable consensus, because you can win big on 35 or 40 percent and treat the rest of the country like background noise. So one government yanks the wheel hard to the right, the next yanks it back, and the country spends decades in political whiplash. Big infrastructure, energy strategy, industrial policy, NHS reform, housing, skills, defence procurement - all of it becomes party branding rather than national strategy.

Under PR you still get governments, but you get governments that look more like the electorate. You need a real coalition of voters and parties to do big things, not just a lucky distribution of seats and a split opposition. It slows down the worst impulses and forces compromise, which is precisely why the loudest people hate it. They don’t want persuasion. They want power.

So when someone tells you FPTP is better because it “delivers strong government”, what they usually mean is it delivers government that can ignore most of the country and still call itself legitimate. It lets a determined minority grab the levers and pull them hard, while everyone else is told to shut up because “the people have spoken”. Even when most of the people didn’t vote for it.

Here’s the deal you are actually signing.

If you’re the leader of an extremist movement, you’d better be ready to rule by force once your promises collapse, because reality will expose you and you’ll need something else to hold on to.

And if you’re the voter cheering on “strong government” under FPTP, you’d better be ready to pay handsomely for your vote, because the whole point of that system is that a small number can “get things done” against the will of the majority. Once you’ve handed that power to people who despise accountability, you may not get another meaningful choice.

Not because democracy ends with tanks in the street, but because it gets hollowed out, bit by bit, until your vote is just a ritual and you’re still waiting for a GP appointment while they’re on telly blaming judges.

The Morning Hostage Negotiation

I have discovered a new and apparently controversial morning tactic. I wrap my arms around Hayley and say, in a tone of studied innocence, “What can I do for you today?” This is not, as it turns out, received as a simple expression of goodwill. It is met with narrowed eyes and the sort of silence normally reserved for unexpected knocks from the police or, more accurately, the opening move of a hostage negotiation.

This reaction is entirely rational. Nobody over the age of twelve believes in unprompted altruism before coffee. An offer of help at that hour is not kindness. It is evidence. Something has happened. Something will be requested. Or worse, something has already been broken and this is the calm, measured voice designed to buy time.

There is also the linguistic problem. “What can I do for you today?” is not the language of marriage. It is the language of consultants, hotel concierges, and men about to justify a purchase. It sounds less like affection and more like “let’s all stay calm and nobody needs to get hurt.” One does not say it casually. One says it while mentally locating the exits.

And yet, the tactic has merit. Not because it succeeds, but because it disrupts. It forces a pause. No instructions are issued. No complaints are launched. We simply hover there, suspended between affection and interrogation, each waiting for the other to blink. In household politics, this is an impressive achievement.

So yes, it is invariably met with suspicion. But suspicion is better than immediate task allocation. In the mornings, that counts as a strategic win.

Property Developer Foreign Policy

Trump keeps banging on about “defence”, and what he means is Russia. Fine. Russia is a real threat, the Arctic matters, and Greenland is strategically important. That bit is not completely unhinged.

What is unhinged is the way he goes about it.

Because while he talks about defending America from Russia, he spends his time doing the opposite of defence. He undermines NATO, sneers at allies, trashes the partnerships that make the West hard to bully, and generally treats the post-war security architecture like a timeshare he is trying to wriggle out of.

Then there is Putin. The soft-soap language, the constant need to sound “reasonable”, the habit of treating a regime that murders opponents, invades neighbours, and uses energy, money and disinformation as weapons as if it is just another awkward trading partner. If your declared threat is Russia, but your behaviour keeps easing pressure on Russia, you are not defending anything. You are weakening your own side and calling it strength.

And Greenland? That is where it stops pretending to be strategy and becomes ego. Not because Greenland is irrelevant, but because Trump is not approaching it like a serious security problem. He is approaching it like a trophy. A shiny object. Something he can point at and say “look what I got”, while the adults are trying to stop the actual defence system collapsing behind him.

So yes, he wants Greenland “for defence”. But the defence he is talking about is from Russia, and the defence he is actually dismantling is the one that stops Russia pushing its luck. It is like watching someone smash the lifeboats while giving a speech about maritime safety.

Psychology and psychiatry papers will be written about that Davos performance for decades. Not because it was clever, or even coherent, but because it was such a pure specimen. Grievance dressed up as strategy. Dominance framed as “fairness”. Coercion rebranded as negotiation. A man treating the world like a property portfolio, with a microphone.

The bleakest part is that we have already been shown how to handle him, and it was not by another Western leader. It was by Zelensky. He does not lecture Trump. He does not try to convert him into a normal person. He treats him like what he is: volatile, transactional, and permanently hungry for praise.

Whether by design or instinct, Zelensky keeps it brutally simple. He gives Trump a “win” he can repeat, then drags the conversation straight back to weapons, air defence, ammunition, timelines, deterrence. Polite, firm, no drama. Never gives Trump the emotional excuse to flounce off and punish everyone like a toddler tipping a bowl of cereal.

Now look at Britain. Starmer has tried the polite, pragmatic approach too. He has tried not to poke the bear, not to trigger the tantrum, and not to get Britain singled out as the next target for some random trade threat or public humiliation.

But here is the thing. If you have nothing Trump wants, flattery is just noise. You cannot manage a narcissist with manners alone. You either have leverage, or you have boundaries. Preferably both.

Which is why, oddly enough, Starmer not doing the Davos parade and turning up to PMQs might be one of the more useful moves he has made in this whole circus. Davos is a grand stage, and Trump loves a grand stage. Turning up there would have fed the theatre. It would have created the photo op, the handshake, the performative “special relationship” moment, and all the rest of it.

Instead, Starmer stayed home, faced the Commons, and spoke to a national audience. That is where his authority actually comes from. It is also where his resolve has to land, because Britain cannot afford to be dragged into Trump’s ego-driven foreign policy as a supporting character.

Sometimes the smartest way to handle someone like this is not to provide the attention. No grand gestures, no shiny summit moments, no begging to be noticed. Just calm, public boundaries, and a quiet message that Britain is not here to decorate someone else’s fantasy.

Because if Trump’s version of “defence” is Greenland as a trophy while Putin gets the strategic benefit, then the threat is not just in Moscow. It is also in the White House, calling it strength.

And the final point is the simplest one. Real defence is boring. It is logistics, alliances, planning, and trust. Trump is selling vibes.

The Kessler Effect

For most of my working life I dealt with satellites in a very practical way. I ran INMARSAT’s nautical division. My mental map of space was orderly, predictable and frankly rather dull in the best possible sense. Coverage footprints, availability targets, GMDSS obligations. Space behaved itself.

Until recently, I had never heard of the Kessler effect (or Syndrome).

That omission makes sense once you understand the geography of orbit. Not all space is the same, and the risks are very unevenly distributed.

Start with GEO – geostationary orbit. This sits about 36,000 kilometres above the equator. A satellite up there takes 24 hours to circle the Earth, exactly matching the planet’s rotation. From the ground it appears fixed in the sky. That is why GEO is so valuable for communications and safety services. A handful of satellites can cover huge areas continuously. Everything in GEO moves at the same speed, in the same direction, in the same plane. Relative velocities are low. Collisions are rare. When satellites reach end of life they are boosted into a graveyard orbit a few hundred kilometres higher. It is orbital tidying, not orbital warfare.

That was my world.

Then there is LEO – low Earth orbit. This starts a few hundred kilometres up and extends to roughly 2,000 kilometres. Satellites here circle the Earth every 90 minutes or so. They are close, fast and numerous. Earth observation, weather forecasting, reconnaissance, the International Space Station and the new mega-constellations all live here. Objects in LEO travel at around 7 to 8 kilometres per second. Closing speeds can reach 15 km/s. At that velocity, a loose bolt is not debris, it is a weapon.

LEO is where the Kessler effect bites. Pack enough objects into the same orbital shells and collisions become inevitable. One smash creates thousands of fragments. Those fragments increase the odds of the next collision. Eventually the process sustains itself. Even if launches stopped, the debris would keep colliding for decades. Certain orbits would simply become unusable. This is not speculation. It is basic physics.

Between the two sits MEO – medium Earth orbit. Roughly 2,000 to 35,000 kilometres up. Fewer satellites, but some of the most important ones of all. GPS, Galileo and other navigation systems live here. MEO is less crowded than LEO, so collision cascades are unlikely, but there is a sting in the tail. Debris up there effectively lasts forever. A serious breakup in a navigation shell would not explode into a frenzy of impacts, but it would permanently degrade an orbit that modern civilisation quietly depends on.

There is also a comforting myth that satellites are simply “sent off into space” when they are finished. They are not. In LEO, responsible disposal means lowering the orbit so atmospheric drag burns the satellite up. That only works reliably at lower altitudes and only if the satellite is still controllable. In MEO and GEO, disposal means pushing the satellite into a higher parking orbit. It remains bound to Earth indefinitely. The rubbish does not go away, it is just moved aside.

Seen through this lens, the Kessler effect is not some abstract theory dreamt up by anxious scientists. It is the inevitable consequence of treating LEO as an infinite commons. We are launching hardware at industrial scale into the fastest, most crowded part of near-Earth space, with short design lives and weak incentives to clean up properly.

From a maritime safety perspective the irony is hard to miss. We would never tolerate an industry that abandoned wrecks across the busiest shipping lanes and shrugged because future captains could try to steer round them. Yet that is exactly what we are doing in low Earth orbit.

I spent years working in a part of space that was calm because it was regulated and inherently stable. Discovering the Kessler effect felt less like learning something new and more like realising that, somewhere below my old geostationary perch, we are quietly turning orbital space into the same sort of mess we have already made everywhere else.

How I Nearly Invented the Disposable Molten Lighter

I have a morning ritual now, not by choice but by mechanical failure. The underfloor heating is sulking while an engineer and a control unit play calendar roulette, so the house is kept civilised by a log burner and routine.

The routine is efficient, repeatable, and smugly superior to newspaper. Four or five firelighters in the grate, a neat little pyre of kindling, logs on top. No smoke, no drama, no coughing fit while the flue decides whether today is the day it believes in physics. It works. I am very pleased with myself.

To light the firelighters I use a plastic lighter. This is where the gods of irony enter.

Yesterday morning I placed the lighter temporarily somewhere utterly wrong. On top of the log burner. Cast iron, already warming up, quietly doing what cast iron has done since the Industrial Revolution. I then went about my business, confident that all was well because it always is, until it very suddenly was not.

An hour later I noticed the lighter. It had not exploded. It had not even burst into flame. It was simply… resigning. Slumping. Becoming one with the stove in a slow, plastic surrender. A minute or two more and it would have progressed from embarrassment to incident.

Extraction required delicacy. A metal spatula. A steady hand. No sudden movements. I peeled it off like a bad decision and drowned it in a bowl of water, where it hissed quietly and contemplated its life choices.

Disaster averted. No fire brigade. No insurance forms. No explaining to anyone why I had managed to set fire to a thing designed to create fire safely.

This is the joy of solid fuel heating. It rewards competence and punishes complacency with enthusiasm. It waits patiently for you to assume that because you have done something a hundred times, the hundred-and-first time will be the same. Then it introduces molten polymer into the conversation.

The lesson is not that log burners are dangerous. The lesson is that they are honest. They do exactly what they say on the tin. Hot things make other things hot. Plastic does not negotiate. Ritual is not immunity.

This morning I lit the fire again. The lighter lives somewhere else. And I will continue to believe, probably wrongly, that I am now immune to further stupidity.