Jonn Elledge

@jonnelledge.bsky.social

54113 Followers 5236 Following

#1 Sunday Times bestselling author, because apparently that matters. New Statesman, New World, Oh God What Now, The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, Paper Cuts (RIP). Londoner. *Not* an American.

More than that, the growing visibility of homelessness is not merely a moral stain on the country, but a sort of psychic weight, a very visible sign that something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Fixing it thus seems like a great way of highlighting the power of government to make things better. Doing so won’t merely – merely! – improve the lives of those currently living on the streets. It might also improve the political prospects of a party elected on a promise of change.

I find myself wondering if there are other problems that have been ignored – because they cut across multiple bits of government; because they sit outside government altogether – but which would be worth tackling because of their disproportionate contribution to that crippling sense of national decline. The misery of the average high street; the precipitous decline of public toilet provision; the growing tendency for hire bikes to carelessly litter our streets – that’s just off the top of my head. Hell, a couple of extra billion – basically pocket change! – to fund more frequent bin collections and thus deal with literal litter feels like a thing that could work wonders.

Was there anything in particular that you didn’t know and discovered by looking at maps/studying borders?

Oh, loads of them. One of the stories that didn’t make it into the book – there’s a version of the lost chapter on my substack – concerned the Scottish counties of Ross-shire and Cromarty-shire. The latter is often described as like a shattered plate, because look:

And so, welcome, to what we may soon have to describe as the first Clacton by-election of 2026. In the turquoise corner, a man so affronted by intrusive questions about his finances that he’s set himself up for weeks on end of literally nothing else. In the red corner… well, no one, actually: every other corner to which one might attach a colour seems to be strangely deserted. Other candidates that are running include a couple of oddballs so far to the right they make Farage look like LibDem; the more embarrassing Corbyn brother; ITV4’s Laurence Fox; and a man dressed as a fox who may, in fact, have the better acting career these days.

The most serious challenger to Farage, and my god I enjoyed writing that description, is that perennial novelty candidate, ruler of the Recyclons, Count Binface of Sigma IX – or, if you prefer the name currently being used in print across the Channel, Comte Tête-de-Poubelle. So desperate are Farage’s outriders to find a way of turning “not losing to a bin” into a popular mandate they they’re desperately trying to spread the shocking news that Binface is not, in fact, an intergalactic space warrior at all: he’s actually an Oxford-educated comic who also does documentaries about Athenian democracy for BBC Radio 4. In its way this point is quite correct – the people most likely to find employment mocking the British establishment do tend to come from inside it; that’s also how I got here. But unfortunately for Farage it is just not possible to make out that it’s your opponent who’s the mainstream politician when you’re wearing a suit and he’s wearing a bin.

Father Ted, "And now we move on to liars"

Makerfield, next door to Burnham’s old patch of Leigh, was 29th on the Reform target list. Several of Burnham’s closest allies, including Haigh, advised him not to go for it. Multiple sources say there were at least two safer seats as options.

“Andy really wanted that patch, he wanted to march into the heart of a Reform seat, and that would be the mandate,” one of his team said. “He would not have had that mandate if he had won Gorton and Denton.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/26/andy-burnham-long-coup-chaotic-year-long-project-return-him-westminster

Because many of Burnham’s allies still privately believed Gorton to be an option, several advisers began to suggest he should get a policy operation under way, which would define the organisation of a future government. Burnham himself was uneasy about doing so. The result was many different supporters working in silos. “It was lots of different players on the pitch, and they were all running around in their own little circles, because he didn’t actually captain the team,” one said.

a cartoon of a familiar dog with his tongue sticking out, followed by

Introduction
The World the Humans Built
The thing about dogs – or at least, the thing about my dog, the
only one I know well enough to consider, on some level, a person –
is that they are both impressively intelligent and hilariously stupid.
Henry Scampi, for that is his name, is smart enough to understand that, if we are at a major London railway terminal, we’re
likely to be on a train for some time, and thus that this is the time
to relieve himself; he has yet to grasp that doing so on the main
passenger concourse at Paddington station might be considered a
faux pas. In the same way, he recognises zebra crossings as the place
where one might cross the road, but gives the distinct impression
he believes doing so is compulsory. So familiar is he with modern
public transport that he will sometimes, if I lose concentration for
half a second, attempt to drag me on to a nearby bus. He’s a very
good dog. He’s brought me a lot of joy.
I’ve sometimes wondered, as I wander the streets with this adorable fluffy idiot, what he makes of the city around him, and why he
seems so at ease with this universe of tarmac and brick, vehicles,
streets and elevators. A dog, after all, is an animal, whose (admittedly
pretty distant) ancestors were wolves. Why doesn’t he find it weird?
And then one day it hit me: for the same reason I don’t. This is

a picture of a desk fan, followed by the following:

7
Keeping Cool
God, mammon and air con
Charles Julius Guiteau was really very upset. A not especially successful lawyer, he’d spent the whole of 1880 working his arse off to
get James A. Garfield elected as president. He’d written a whole
speech, for heaven’s sake! OK, so he’d rarely actually delivered it,
and some observers had rather cruelly noted that at points he
seemed to have just crossed Ulysses S. Grant’s name out and scribbled Garfield’s name in – but it had still been published by the
Republican National Committee. That surely must count for
something.
And despite all that work, the president still wouldn’t give him
the job he coveted as the US consul in Paris. He wouldn’t even
meet to discuss it! The ingratitude!
And so, on 2 July 1881, Guiteau took what was, you will readily
understand, the only action that remained open to him. He came
up behind the president in the waiting room at the Washington
railroad station from where he intended to take a train to cooler
climes, and shot him twice in the back.
I relate this story, which very obviously isn’t about urban infrastructure of any sort whatsoever, for two reasons. One is that it

I am certain there were only three RER lines at the time because the only thing I remember about that map is that the RER lines were in vibrant shades of red, yellow and blue, and a knowledge of primary colours felt important in childhood in a way it never has in adult life. It struck me that Paris reserved the brightest, most distinctive colours for relatively new express trains, while painting the rest of the metro in more pastel shades. Here they are now:

the coloured bullets identifying the 16 metro lines
Image: RATP.
By my count that’s three lines apiece that are blue, green and yellow (although I’d also accept four greens and two yellows), plus two oranges, one brown and four purples. There is no red, despite the way that some of these shades – 6 and 7bis; 3 and 3bis – are so similar I think you’d struggle to tell them apart even side by side. It’s notable that, in each case, one is reserved for tiny shuttle trains, less likely to be mistaken for and at a safe distance from the other similarly-coloured line. (“Bis” is from the Latin for “double”; the meaning of “3bis” is roughly akin to “3a” in English.)

This is to some extent inevitable – there’s a limit to the number of shades the human

To those who were following more closely, this turn of events was not baffling at all, because Keir Starmer was extremely bad at being prime minister. He didn’t just struggle to make difficult decisions: he seemed not to understand it was his job, with insiders claiming he would get angry when advisors suggested something involved trade offs and required his judgement. At the same time, he preferred not to talk to MPs unless forced to; he didn’t like ministers to promote their own ideas, but seemed incapable of articulating his own. The result is that there are vast swathes of the state – the higher education system is the one with which I’m most familiar, but I have little doubt there are others – which are in serious active crisis, but on which no one in government has tried to get a grip.

At the same time, he’s repeatedly claimed to be taking personal responsibility while throwing underlings under the bus. He’s made some catastrophic errors in judgement, most notably the appointment of disgraced former minister and Jeffrey Epstein groupie Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, and while such things can too often be survivable it should hardly surprise us when they are not.

Most foolishly of all, from a self-interest point of view, Starmer has presided over a political strategy that meant attacking his voters and their values, in a doomed attempt to impress those on the other side. Those who’ve felt under attack in some way or another during his tenure have included protestors, migrants, refugees, trans people, welfare claimants and the aforementioned universities – all groups either important to left-leaning voters or an actual major provider of them. Politicians are often hated by their enemies. Keir Starmer went out of his way to be hated by his friends, too.

I understand that these granular details of British politics are not visible to observers in, say, Minnesota. But no, it is not strange that a Labour party looking down the

Starmer is not only incapable of making difficult decisions, he seems not to understand it's his job. I've had it from multiple sources that he gets angry when officials decline to say which course of action is better, even though sometimes it's not clear which is better, it's a trade off, or all options have risks. This is why there is no coherence to our immigration or tax policies.

Starmer refuses to meet MPs unless it's absolutely unavoidable. He doesn't like ministers who promote their own ideas but doesn't seem to have any of his own. He has utterly failed to articulate how he wants to change the country or what he thinks his government is for.

He has presided over policies that have taken rights from protestors, migrants, refugees and trans people. He has made speeches and pursued immigration reforms intended to impress the far right, who are never going to vote for him, while alienating his own voters.

He has seemed entirely disinterested in the fact the higher education system - which is a competitive advantage, a major export industry and a huge plank of regional economies, all at once - is collapsing.

It seems unlikely the 7 per cent of Makerfield voters who just opted for Reform’s yet more evil twin were unaware of what Farage was offering or the case he was making. The sense is of a man struggling to respond after being beaten at his own game, by an unabashed extremist who plays well on social media. Farage now faces the same dilemma he once posed to the Tories: stand firm and lose votes to his right; move right and alienate those closer to the centre. The rise of a party so extreme it requires me to refer to Reform’s voters as “closer to the centre” is, of course, terrifying; but there is some comfort in the fact that watching Farage flail is at least extremely funny.

The biggest assumption overturned by the by-elections, though, is the depressingly widespread belief that the only way to win was to keep ratcheting further and further towards the politics of rage. There are more than a few reasons to doubt Burnham can deliver on his message of hope and change. Nonetheless, he campaigned on neither “steady as she goes” nor “legitimate concerns”: his message was that things can and should get better. And with that, he took Labour to overwhelming victory in a Leave-voting red wall area which as recently as last month opted overwhelmingly for Reform.

It’ll be hard for Burnham to remain the change guy if he makes it to Downing Street, and Farage, like the Emperor Palpatine, has an unnerving ability somehow to return. But there’s a quote from Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia that seems appropriate today. “It makes me so happy,” says one character, talking of quantum physics, not political uncertainty. “It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

America, winter, 1966. Nearly four hundred thousand soldiers in Vietnam. Underground bomb tests in the desert. The Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’ at number one.

In his apartment on Riverside Drive, on the cold edge of Manhattan, a downcast, middle-aged writer named Leonard Lewin is agonizing over whether he should just give up and go back to Indianapolis. After years stuck working in his late father’s sugar refinery, he has finally escaped to New York to make a living as a writer. But here he is, deep in middle age, worrying that he is a failure with nothing to say. He wants to be remembered “for good reasons”, but cannot find a big project to sink his teeth into.

Then he gets a call. It’s an old contact, a social sciences professor from back in the Midwest, whom Lewin hasn’t heard from for years. The professor is in New York and wants to meet. Urgently.

Over lunch the next day, in a restaurant in midtown, the professor is on edge; finally, he spills the beans. Just over three years ago, in early August 1963, he was contacted by an anonymous man in Washington, who told him that he’d been chosen to serve on a commission “of the highest importance”. The idea was initiated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and like minds in the Kennedy administration. Its task was “to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive”. Having done so, the “Special Study Group” would have to “draft a program for dealing with this contingency”.

The professor tells Lewin that he felt he had no choice but to sign up. For one thing, the man from Washington seemed to know a troubling amount about his personal life.

Magister, tu jurabis quod nunquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis, nec statum Baccalaurei iterum tibi assumes.

Master, you shall swear that you will never consent to the reconciliation of Henry Simeon, nor will you assume again the status of Bachelor.

The shift from “Symeonis” to “Simeonis” isn’t a typo: it’s a mark of the fact this statute had been in place so long it predates standardised spelling.

If you’re feeling shamed by your ignorance of who Henry Symeonis was and what he had done, rest assured that the men running the University of Oxford in 1827 had no more idea than you did. Worse: it soon transpired that no one had known for literally centuries.

In 1608 Brian Twyne, the first keeper of the University archives, had suggested that Symeonis had fraudulently claimed he had a BA in order to obtain admission to a foreign monastery; he gave no evidence of where he got that or why he thought it was true, which is why it almost certainly wasn’t. As far back as the 1650s there was talk of removing the oath, but permission was refused. “Even by that time,” notes Millea, “one suspects that the oath was of such antiquity that no-one knew anything about it and it was thought best to leave it be.”

It was only in 1912 that another keeper of the university archives, Reginald Lane Poole, managed to shine some light. In an article for the English Historical Review he identified

Given that most of the piece is actually about how job seekers are now sending out literally hundreds of applications to be greeted by stony silence – and given that, for a 40 hour week, £25,000 a year is now less than minimum wage – this seems ever so slightly tin-eared. Obviously using AI to pump out loads of identical applications is bad. But if employers are going to use AI to read applications – or interview applicants, or take their jobs, which is what most of the piece is about – it seems a little unbalanced to tell young people they can’t also use it when applying.

But of course, “tailor your application to the job you’re applying for” is neither new nor controversial advice, and if Clapp has lost track of exactly where the minimum wage stands these days he’s hardly alone, as the frequency of ads for jobs paying less would attest. So let’s move onto the other thing that annoyed me, where I think I’m on firmer ground. Here’s the offending quote again:

He doesn’t think the education system is setting up young people for the jobs on offer today, especially in his field. “We’ve got two colleges near us and neither of them have ever done a web development apprenticeship, which I just find staggering.”

Is it, though? Is it really staggering that publicly funded educational organisations which happen to be based near your company are not providing specialist training in your field, just so that you can employ one or two young people a year? Is it staggering, indeed, that the education system seems under the impression that perhaps professional training is to some degree a matter for employers?

A more imminent danger than the outlandish possibility of Restore winning actual power is that of a Reform leader who feels under increasing pressure to say the quiet part out loud. When the Reform leader finally came out of hiding last week, after an extended break from media appearances while he waited for everyone to forget about that whole £5m crypto bro donation thing, it was to throw some red meat to the right-most part of his own coalition through a narrative of “two-tier policing” and an “anti-white Britain”. This did not merely serve to politicise a horrific murder against the express wishes of a grieving family: it was also clearly inflammatory. It is unnervingly easy to draw a line between Nigel Farage feeling scared of losing votes on his right, and a night of violence on the streets of Southampton.

There’s one more reason to worry. The rise of Farage may have pulled the Tories to the right after 2014, but it didn‘t stop them from winning three more elections. What if the threat from Restore pulls Reform even further towards unashamed nativism, Islamophobia, full fat white nationalism – and they still go on to win? What if, as seems plausible, that 8 per cent of the Makerfield electorate who are flirting with voting Restore turn out not to be a bulwark, but a ratchet?

Looking first at those Survation figures, I found I really hoped that they were right. The more I think about it, though, the more I really hope that they’re not.

key points basically - the obsession with the Romans pulling out in 410 probably gives us completely the wrong impression, and just as no one in 476 realised the western empire had just fallen, no one in 410 understood that britain had stopped being part of it
significant saxon immigration but probably elite replacement rather than wholesale population shift - most people were peasants, didn't care
a huge issue seems to be the british/welsh ruling class refusing to let go of the idea this was THEIR land so not integrating with the incomers in the way the gauls did with the franks/spaniards with the goths etc, so england ended up with a language with limited brittonic/latin influence
then a lot of the religious changes of the early 7th century (Synod of Whitby and so forth) are about declaring the britons heretics for their failure to evangelise the english because of the aforementioned "but it's OUR FUCKING COUNTRY" problem
oh, plus britain was always the least integrated province

But it could be – may yet become – worse. The “wet-bulb temperature” – a measure which combines heat with humidity, and thus tells you more about the stress the temperature places on the human body – is a relatively comfortable 19.5C. That is a long way from the point at which the heat becomes truly dangerous. Put like that, it barely even sounds warm!4

Other heatwaves, in areas with hotter climates – this definitely was a heatwave, by the way; the UK has an official definition – have seen wet-bulb temperatures that are both significantly higher and more dangerous. The highest of all seems to have been in Ras Al Khaimah City, UAE in 2010: 36.3C, some way past the point at which it becomes a danger to human life. This, remember, is the combined wet-bulb measure: the actual air temperature was significantly higher.

All of which raises some questions: what is the wet-bulb temperature, why do they call it that, how does any of this work, and, let’s not beat around the bush here, what the hell?

Name first: the reason it’s called “wet-bulb” is extremely literal. Early attempts at “hygrometers” – devices for measuring humidity – involved pouring water into glass receptacles at various temperatures and measuring the rate at which condensation formed. This, though, was always a pretty rough and ready way of doing things – so in 1755, a pair of Scottish chemists, William Cullen and his student Joseph Black, came

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