Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere aside from away from places. It is somewhere in middle England, where the West Country merges into the Midlands and the north into the south: it is essentially delocated, it is nowhere. There are 15 or so deserted light industrial units, vast metal hangars for storing stuff, acres of car-parking spaces and a few trees suffering from rickets or polio. There are also huge and very bright lamps shining in through my hotel window, betraying no evidence of their purpose other than to keep me awake, and in the foreground a continual mechanical hum, the source of which remains a mystery.
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Niall Ferguson and Nick Kumleben
Dirty deal: what Trump really wants from Ukraine’s natural resources
On the television right now the former foreign secretary James Cleverly is explaining to Victoria Derbyshire, with the calm assurance of a village idiot, how the commanders of our nuclear submarines will be able to dig into some safe in order to obtain post-humous permission to release those missiles, in the event that the United Kingdom has been evaporated and the Prime Minister killed.
This begs a number of questions. First, why bother opening the safe when we know exactly what is in it, i.e. an order to fill your boots, lads? Second, how will they know Sir Keir is dead? How would they be able to tell? He might be out on the lash with Lammy and not checking his phone. Or in the midst of a lengthy and very difficult bowel movement, his eyes screwed shut, gurning, concentrating for all he is worth.
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