We finally arrive at one of the most requested films of all time, John Boorman’s majesterial Excalibur. We look at the film’s background and the Arthurian lore that inspired it, then explore deeper themes, such as the Pagan ‘Old Ways’ being replaced by Christianity and the abyss of despair between the two eras.

Why is Perceval so crucial to the story? What is the true nature of Mordred and Morgana? Does the search for the Holy Grail indicate the arrival of Faustian Man?

And much, much more…

The original stream, featuring many shots from the film, is here.

Further reading.

In this month’s podcast, I struggle with a wobbly tooth, offer thoughts on the impending ‘omnicrisis’, look at an article by Madeleine Grant in The Spectator, and read through the month’s articles.

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We live in a world of wispy signs and symbols that represent forms once substantial but now largely gone. Like smoky tricks from a wizard’s pipe, they enter the popular imagination like a soothing balm. They offer us re-enchantment in the barren plain of our squalid consumer zone.

The pub built just last month by a hedge fund features paintings of old ships and stags hanging under mighty oak beams, as if Henry VIII himself felled the lumber. It is a copy, a fugazzi, but it is a comforting one, just as it comforts people to have men spearheading a patriotic movement who talk like wide-boy geezers from a 1970s Cockney gangster film.

The actual Cockneys either fled to Essex or became submerged in the bottomless oceans of London’s demographic shift. Yet it remains comforting to think of Bob Hoskins-style hard men wheeling and dealing in street markets with Arthur Daley and Dirty Den because the unfiltered reality is too brutal, too gloomy.

When the British left talk about “Tommy Robinson”, they, somewhat famously, never miss the opportunity to call him by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. They do this to expose the mirage, the wispy shadow, and disenchant it. They know that the name “Tommy Robinson” creates an image of a brave working-class lad dutifully climbing over the trenches of Ypres or forming a defensive square line at Waterloo. On the other hand, the name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon suggests an interior designer from Hampstead. One can only wonder whether Tommy’s “advisors” came to the same conclusion.

The phantasm of the plucky redoubtable Brit, plucked from barrow and coalmine, plough and forge, then thrust into the maw of grandiose world events, plays well these days.

Yet this misty replication scales up and encompasses the ruling class as well.

Jacob Rees-Mogg conjures the sign of an upper-class Edwardian bureaucrat rushing into the Foreign Office with news on the Bengali Partition. He speaks with a similar cadence to Michael Caine’s Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in Zulu. The ethereal representation is of an aristocrat with effete mannerisms who, when duty calls, will show the same courage and grit as those of a lower station he commands.

In the barren cultural wastes of the 2020s, he is, once again, comforting to have around - a warm, nostalgic blanket of previous greatness and civilised, if austere, behaviour.

However, unlike Bromhead, or literally anyone involved with the British Empire, Rees-Mogg is anti-racist. For while the symbol on display is reminiscent of British imperial greatness and ingenuity, the actual substance underneath is pure Jane Fonda.

He is, fundamentally, a creature of postmodernity camouflaged as modernist. He is no different from the “500-year-old” pub built atop a defunct used car garage.

The sign is Sir Lord Grey, the signal is Lily Allen.

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Like every other Tory and mainstream right pundit, Jacob Rees-Mogg uses institutions as bunkers and trenches to cower in while demographic hellfire is rained down upon the native British. Institutions, not people, must be defended or reclaimed. But the issue of the era is that a people are being erased under unending waves of foreign immigrants, it really is as simple as that.

Yet the dancing shadow that is Rees-Mogg rejects the premise that a people even exists to be erased or subsumed. To do this, he deploys history - to be specific, eras of conquests, wars and subjugations. If we adopt this frame and apply it to our current circumstances, are we then to liken the “grooming gang” outrage to Viking raids or the Harrying of the North by the Normans?

Why would we want that?

The fact that the very best minds of the land cannot come up with a better argument for immigration than “being raped, conquered and plundered is cool, actually” speaks for itself.

The true intent of such arguments is, of course, to prevent the germination of ideas within the people that they have a moral right to their own homeland. Actual Edwardians understood that creeds and races of men are not interchangeable, unlike Rees-Mogg, who believes that law and institutions can reconstitute the Third World mass into Englishmen through the adoption of superficial traits and mores.

This is, however, always a work in progress, never resolved. Even if we adopt this frame, there are presumably many hundreds of thousands or millions of people who fail the Rees-Mogg test of who is an English “mongrel” and accordingly should be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country. But this never happens.

No criterion exists for who has succeeded in becoming an Englishman, because doing so would mean denying access to those who failed. So nobody fails. The outcome is no less ethnocidal and apocalyptic for the natives than if Zack Polanski or Chip-Shop-Debs Rayner were running the nation.

Thus, in the final analysis, Jacob Rees-Mogg exists within the political and media ecosystem as a deceitful ghost that both quells alarm and prevents you from escaping from the house of horrors.

The archetype of the British “toff” is historically one of coldness, often exploitative, indifferent to the suffering of the poor, but also highly educated and, when the situation is truly dire, willing to toil and suffer with those of lower status.

It is an elite class that is willing to endure and suffer hardship with the last white family on a Middlesborough street that people yearn for, somebody who “speaks posh”, representing their concerns sincerely and honestly. The authoritative voice that enters a confused trench under fire or a lost position on an Indian hill to restore order.

Instead, we get fakers, phantoms and actors.

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One real-world commitment after another has kept me offline quite a lot recently, the last of those commitments involved meeting Millennial Woes after 12 years of association online. Unfortunately, the tight schedule meant we only managed to record a relatively brief chat.

It’s a curious experience these days to be ‘logged off’ for a time. I return to discover that the Government is prepping us for war and conscription; Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests it’s our duty to die for home and hearth, while the next day, insisting that we are but mere mongrels. Meanwhile, there’s an apparent energy shortage hurtling toward us just in time for winter.

I think I will have more to say on Rees-Mogg’s ridiculous assertion that, because we’ve been invaded and conquered before, we must acquiesce in it again. If we accept this frame, then are the rape gangs simply our version of the ‘Harrying of the North’ or Viking raids?

The sheer stupidity of using wars, subjugation and conquests as rationalisations for multiculturalism leaves one questioning the value of such a prestigious education that Rees-Mogg enjoyed.

All in all, it was great to finally meet Woes in the flesh. It attests to the increasing blurring between the online and the real world. The digital abstraction and eyeball-to-eyeball.

It is those in-person realities that also, contrary to what Rees-Mogg prattles, tend to prove that being invaded and subjugated isn’t historical whimsy, but a rather miserable experience.

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In recent weeks, there has been some tension in this corner of the Internet, ostensibly regarding the success or otherwise of Restore Britain. The split is between people we can think of as Pro-Restore Britain and the Elite Theorists. In terms of my content, I’ve hardly written or said anything about Restore, but for whatever reason, I’ve come to be seen by the elite theorists as a doe-eyed flag waver worthy of scorn for “falling for it again”.

There’s an important distinction to be made here:

Elite Theory is a political science that posits that a small group will always dictate what happens in a society.

“The Elite Theorists” are YouTubers who create content attacking the right wing.

Specifically, Academic Agent, Blamblas Britannica, Scrump and Evelyn. Together, they have produced at least 18 livestreams and 8 videos attacking and undermining Restore Britain, those involved with the party, or anyone (such as myself) who refuses to attack the party.

A process that began wearing the mask of good faith criticism and advice has gradually descended into the Elite Theorists waging a vitriolic and dishonest flame war upon people they quite clearly regard as enemies. Academic Agent has repeatedly asked his acolytes to stop the slander and lies, but continues to promote and platform the content anyway.

There’s a strong element of Motte and Bailey in which the Elite Theorists stake out the position that, say, Charlie Downes is a Zionist plant or a grifter, or that Rupert Lowe is simply a conman. When called out on it, they flee back to the Motte and demand that you disprove the Iron Law of Oligarchy or a principle of Elite Theory as espoused by James Burnham, Machiavelli or Pareto.

The irony is that nobody involved actually disputes the tenets of actual Elite Theory. It isn’t actually Elite Theory vs Populism, but an intra-Elite Theory drama in which the Internet-bound cohort insults and slanders those who moved into the real world to organise and network. And here’s the thing: they will probably fail.

Nobody needs a lecture on the fact that powerful Zionist influence will try to subvert the party. Everybody knows.

Nobody needs a lecture on democracy being a rigged game. Everybody knows.

Nobody needs to be lectured on how Lowe’s Boomerisms could sink the project. Everybody knows.

It is a process where good people network and organise in the real world, and what’s more, they emerged primarily from our own circles. They read Academic Agent’s The Populist Delusion. They consumed the content, they learned, they went out and tried to put it to use, only for the clique they once admired to pour buckets of stale piss over them.

Elite Theory became drama content because they couldn’t stop running their mouths. It wasn’t enough to say the regime can’t be beaten; they had to infer that everyone was a grifter, everyone a conman or Zionist stooge. Another livestream calling everyone a retard, another condescending, smirking video essay before running back to the thick bush of Mosca’s moustache when called out.

For my part, I consider myself a loyalist, nothing more than a good team player. I see people such as Charlie Downes, Harrison Pitt, Lucy White, Lewis Brackpool and Frank Wright as being representative of the sectarian politics of the future. I’m not optimistic. It is precisely because we are suffering under a hostile regime that people moving in this direction are so critical.

The currency of a Balkanised, sectarian society is loyalty. Loyalty is the prerequisite for achieving anything or building any network. I am loyal less to a political party than to a group. I am loyal to individuals who stick their heads above the parapet and get shot at for speaking up for our people.

Our political parties and organisations are so easily infiltrated and subverted because they lack in-group loyalty. This is the understandable concern about a boomer such as Rupert Lowe; they are loyal to a set of principles and ideas rather than to people.

This is why Restore Britain has a somewhat schizophrenic aspect. People who are tribal in their thinking, such as Downes and Pitt, are rubbing against people who are “Civnat” or universalist in their principles. Which side will prevail? We shall see. Certainly, in terms of the regime and its power dynamics, the race-blind non-tribalists have the advantage structurally. But this project is underway; it is not yet sewn up.

This is why, I believe, the Elite Theorists so often engage in character assassination. After all, if everyone is a grifter and a cynical bullshitter, what is there to support?

It is bad faith masquerading as sober analysis. It is, first and foremost, drama slop content.

I’ve been privy to many private conversations of people scratching their heads in confusion as the Elite Theorist tirades degraded from “value-free analysis” into out-and-out slanderous lies, misrepresentation and venom. And for what? To prove a thesis? To attack the only organisation that has friendlies anywhere remotely near it?

Many lessons have been learned from this sorry episode, but the most important isn’t even political theory, but the importance of loyalty.

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I’ve heard it said that Donald Trump’s predicament in the Iran War is like somebody vacating one empty room only to enter another, then another - an unending labyrinth of empty rooms leading to empty rooms, sometimes with one door, sometimes with many, but it only ever leads to more empty rooms.

My preferred analogy is that Trump has dragged America into a trap, and every attempt to escape only leads them into another trap. In the country life of the United Kingdom, snares have long been considered cruel and barbaric because of the stress and anxiety imposed on the trapped animal. In a snare, the power and aggression of the animal can become its greatest liability. The more desperate and impatient it is to escape, the swifter its doom arrives; stay put, and the slow bleed sets in.

Others have said that war in the Middle East is like Hotel California; once you check in, you can never check out.

Trump checked in to the Hotel California in February 2026. As of September, he’s still there despite declaring victory six months ago.

In June, in what appears to have been an act of desperation, Trump and his team signed on to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). However, a few caveats slipped in that proved deeply troublesome. The cessation of hostilities explicitly extended to America and Iran’s allies “on all fronts, including in Lebanon”, while Iran was entrusted with restoring safe passage, de-mining the Strait of Hormuz and participating in negotiations over its future administration. America, meanwhile, was obliged to begin dismantling its naval blockade immediately. Trump seems to have been equally oblivious to the symbolism of signing the agreement at Versailles.

Essentially, the document said: “You can leave, but your greatest ally will be placed on a leash, and we get to retain our chokehold on the oil supply.” This, understandably, incensed the Zionist faction around Trump and in Israel, and the window closed on peace.

Trump’s next gambit was to beat the Iranians at their own game: to impose a blockade against their blockade. Instead of Iran choking out oil supply, Trump would choke out Iran’s exports to cripple their economy. Despite the genuine pain being inflicted upon the Iranians, they simply had to endure it. Meanwhile, the strategy meant deploying increasingly weary personnel, ships and munitions in the region for an undetermined length of time - the exact opposite result Trump wanted with the MoU agreement.

The “off-ramp” led directly back to where it started.

By late August, the Americans declared that they had finally succeeded in clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian mines, and it was safe for shipping once again. Unsurprisingly, the Iranians merely attempted to re-mine the Strait. This resulted in the Americans striking the Iranian launchers intended to deploy mines, and retaliation by the Iranians against American bases in the region, particularly in Jordan.

The escalation meant the conflict was moving towards one of the larger traps that had loomed over the entire war for months. The more damage done to Iranian critical infrastructure, the higher the risk that Iran will destroy critical infrastructure across the Middle East and tank the world’s energy markets.

Bombing Iran back to the Stone Age could very well result in everyone else going back to the Middle Ages.

Scott Bessent’s “Economic D-Day” would see Iran isolated from the world economy, and sanctions would be placed on any country, large or small, that continued to engage economically with Iran. When asked why such sanctions had not been imposed immediately, Bessent replied:

Why would I want to blow up the Global Financial System?

This particular caper was meant to create such economic ruination within Iran that the long-awaited uprising would occur and the regime would finally be toppled.

Unfortunately, Iran’s largest trading partner is China. What would policies sanctioning Chinese banks and corporations actually look like? The financial costs of carrying out Economic D-Day in earnest would “blow up” America’s economy alongside everyone else’s.

Once again, the room offering escape only leads to another room with more doors, and throughout it all is the slow gurgle of a steadily draining oil supply and diesel gradually creaking up in price.

Rumours and articles have begun circulating that Donald Trump might declare victory and walk away from the entire debacle. In recent months, the conflict has primarily involved tit-for-tat strikes back and forth between America and Iran.

However, by an uncanny coincidence, on the day the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering declaring the war over, Iran launched strikes on American bases in Kuwait and the UAE that were not in response to an American attack.

The Institute for the Study of War reported:

Iranian Artesh Spokesperson Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia stated on August 26 that one of Iran’s newest targeting doctrines includes preemptive strikes against US military assets in the region and cited the July 28 attack in Jordan as an example of this doctrine. The Artesh’s latest strikes in Kuwait and the UAE may also reflect this preemptive strike doctrine as part of the regime’s attempts to erode US willingness to continue the campaign against the regime.

A potentially awful scenario now presents itself to Donald Trump in which he takes to the podium and anoints himself as having achieved a tremendous victory, only for Iran to immediately launch strikes devastating American allies and bases across the region.

This is not to mention longer-term embarrassments such as Iran becoming an even stronger regional power instead of being destroyed, and the dire position that Israel would be left in. Such a scenario would represent global humiliation for American power and prestige, and if we can see that, so can the White House. But with a chronic shortage of munitions and interceptors, there doesn’t seem to be much they can do about it.

The impotent lashing out, the sporadic missile strikes, the hyperbolic statements, all amount to nothing, no way out.

Trump has been done up like a kipper.

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In this month’s podcast, I discuss the worst film I’ve ever seen, read through the month’s written articles and then discuss why Dolly Parton’s feminist comedy 9-5 was so much better at getting people involved with ‘The Message’ than more recent films.

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At the beginning of 2026, I found myself repeatedly at loggerheads with the MAGA influencers on social media. I disagreed with the performative sadism of making memes and gloating on the internet over people ICE were shooting. I regarded the emerging Iran War as stupid and entirely in service to another people. I also thought the sabre-rattling over Greenland and the subsequent anti-European animosity made gullible dupes of Trump’s supporters.

For that, I was predictably called a Britcuck Europoor, impotently lashing out against the Great Colossus, who went where it liked and did what it pleased. I was ‘Anti-American’.

The thing is, I wasn’t and never have been.

When Dolly Parton died, Donald Trump ordered the Stars and Stripes across the USA to be flown at half-mast. This, I thought, is the America I like—mawkish, perhaps overly sentimental, but also well-meant. I believe Donald Trump would have been saddened to learn that Dolly Parton had died, because, like him, she was an American icon.

As an outsider who has never set foot in the United States (and probably never will), my perception of America comes almost entirely through signs and symbols, personalities, and ‘stars’. In this regard, Dolly Parton was the anti-Trump. Where Trump represents the tough-talking, though amusing, New York sleazeball hustler, Dolly was rhinestone-and-moonshine homeliness and bubbly charm.

It’s how non-Americans want Americans to be; it’s the America we like because it isn’t threatening and signals a benign hegemon who means well. It isn’t ‘radical’ in the same way another icon, John Wayne, wasn’t radical, but a tough and fair dispenser of justice and common sense.

America’s icons tend to be strivers and achievers, despite the forces aligned against them. Dolly Parton, famously, grew up dirt poor in a one-room cabin on the banks of Little Pigeon River, Tennessee. Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali and Madonna all garnered iconic status as outsiders, regardless of how engineered that status often was.

Woke was a catastrophically poor cultural formula because it fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Americanism, as represented through larger-than-life individuals.

In 2014, as woke was gathering momentum, Dolly Parton appeared at the Glastonbury music festival in England. She was regarded as the ironic act, the act that the feminists and output of the UK’s extreme left education system could laugh at and look down upon. In fact, she brought the house down. For that half hour or so, their cynical, carefully manicured opinions dissolved in an earthy, nostalgia-tinted authenticity that reached ‘under the skin’ of superficial, inorganic dogmas.

In my opinion, Madonna and the rancid message she sent to young women and girls represented an earlier form of woke, more skilful in its message but no less insidious. Dolly Parton, on the other hand, speaks to women as they are, which is why Dolly endured and retained a dignity Madge could only dream of.

In Britain, our icons were born out of long-settled socio-cultural arrangements and institutions. David Attenborough is not a striving go-getter from outside the system; he is the paternalistic voice of God instructing and educating. The fact that British icons also include Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill speaks for itself. Even people who embody the rags-to-riches myth, such as Michael Caine, represent class rather than an individual.

We British are drawn to the ‘free soul’ charting their destiny across untamed landscapes and economic possibilities: the less crass, the more wholesome, the better.

There’s poetic symbolism in David Attenborough and Clint Eastwood reflecting the preferred icons of their respective nations, and both being truly ancient in terms of years. The institutions have decayed and hollowed; the subversion is complete; the lonesome, self-reliant wanderer of the High Plains will also die.

Nothing emerges to replace either. We’re left chasing an echo of a dream.

Perhaps Donald Trump once dreamed of leading a movement where Dolly Partons surrounded him and not Howard Lutniks and Mark Levins. Perhaps ordering the flags of the nation to be lowered for an old country singer is an implicit acknowledgement of it.

In Britain, Bulldog populists stand dumbstruck as the very institutions they look to for succour and meaning spit venom in their faces. As the icons fade and the dreams become harder to grasp, we find ourselves looking for islands in streams in the desert of data centres, asylum seeker HMOs, and Turkish barber shops.

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The British Government recently sent out its “Emergency Alert” to the nation’s phones. The intense, high-pitched squeal we could expect to hear alongside the text: “Moscow has launched” or “Meteor has entered the atmosphere” was instead used to tell us not to use disposable barbecues or fireworks, lest another wildfire start. The modern dystopia of the United Kingdom has various shades, some grotesque, others more akin to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The emergency alert override warning you not to have a barbecue is firmly in the Brazil category.

Climate Change is a subject that I’m boringly centrist or neutral on. My personal view is that winters are less harsh and summers far hotter than I remember when I was young. Though I’m also acutely aware of my nostalgic tendencies. My natural disposition would always lead me to reminisce about gentle golden nights of inviting summer comfort, contrasted with pristine rolling fields of thick snow like goose feathers. I don't remember it ever being uncomfortably hot for a solid week, but then again, we tend to forget that, most of the time, the pristine snow was dirty slush peppered with dog turds.

Either way, England is in a drought right now. But don’t worry, the mainstream right’s media is on hand to remind us that the 2026 drought is not as severe as the 1976 one.

Here we arrive at the farcical aspect of climate change as a subject. It is absurdly political, with both camps dug in on what seems like an intractable war of narratives.

The establishment is, of course, on the “it’s happening, and it’s manmade” side, and the more populist position is one of flat-out denial that anything is amiss.

Neither help themselves either. The first rays of sunshine do not warrant a heatmap that makes Sussex look like a Venusian volcano. Alternatively, is it really just part of the summer fun that the Cairngorms go up in flames or that parts of southern England went for 52 days without a drop of rain?

The right-wing skepticism usually amounts to arguing that nothing is happening, or that it is happening and that’s a good thing. Polar bears are still alive, and islands in the Pacific Ocean are not yet submerged, after all.

Alternatively, the elite/leftist opinion always comes with a technocratic surveillance grid pocking its laser eyes, peering over their shoulders, getting ready to track your carbon footprint and stuff a Frankenburger in your mouth.

An article in the New Scientist illustrates the frustrating nature of the climate discussion, mixing expertise with a touch of nudge.

It is a sign of the impact of climate change, which is expected to bring drier, hotter summers to the UK. This year shows that even a wet winter isn’t enough to carry the UK through an extremely hot, dry summer. “Currently the situation is that we’re just simply using too much water,” says Kevin Grecksch at the University of Oxford. “We’re not replenishing at the same speed as we’re using water.”

And then.

You may have noticed the crunch of dry leaves underfoot in recent weeks. That’s a sign stressed trees are going through a “false autumn”, where they shed their leaves and even branches in an effort to keep their main stem alive

I hadn’t noticed that, and I’m somebody who wanders among and pays attention to trees often. I have, however, noticed that in the confines of my small and cheap greenhouse, tomatoes are wilting and dying, and I cannot ventilate the structure enough to prevent it. The few plants outside are faring much better, though.

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It is, fundamentally, an …

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I recently watched a fascinating discussion between a Chinese woman, who is apparently a political philosophy student and lecturer, and film director Christopher Nolan. What makes it interesting is that the Chinese woman, Zhong Shu, is an “outsider looking in” at Western cultural tropes and Hollywood in particular. She allows us to get a sense of how ot…

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In this month’s podcast, I discuss the film Backrooms and how it reflects Generation Z’s interest in both 90s nostalgia and the visual media of the time. Is Backrooms itself a meta-commentary on Gen Z remembering a ‘Time they never knew’ through a slightly off-kilter lens?

I also discuss the invasion of Ceuta, and read the essays of the month, which were…

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A discussion and exploration of the warrens in the novel Watership Down by Richard Adams. The novel is a grim but beautiful exploration of English meadows and landscape, but what does it say about nihilism and authoritarianism?

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Whenever Hope Not Hate mention my name, they make the claim that I inspired the American mass murderer, Dylann Roof. Their “evidence” for this claim is a 2014/15 article I wrote with the title “When Jews Turned Blue”, which expanded on a common trope found on /pol/ and 4chan at that time.

In Roof’s manifesto, he also used the trope. I received an email from somebody pointing this out, and I didn’t feel comfortable with the association so I removed the article. Roof’s actual victims were African American churchgoers, and his stated motivation was the Trayvon Martin case and issues more generally related to black people in America’s Deep South.

Not a shred of evidence has been provided by Hope Not Hate that Dylann Roof had ever read my old blog, or even heard of me, let alone that I inspired him. Of course, truth is not their aim, character assassination is.

It appears that there’s nothing I can do to stop my name and face being attached to an atrocity via an outrageous lie because Hope Not Hate is linked to the institutions of power in the United Kingdom, and I am not.

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You’re either on board with the program, morally and ideologically, or you’re a problem. And more often than not, Hope Not Hate will be the source cited by the institutions of the land as to who is a problem, and who is “decent”.

Hope Not Hate found the late Ann Widdecombe to be a problem.

Then, after she was bludgeoned to death at 78 years old in her home, they removed their hit piece on her. You could say Hope Not Hate “archived” Ann Widdecombe.

The man now charged with her murder, 28-year-old Joshua Kerry, is said to have had:

According to reports, investigators found newspaper clippings, articles and printed material relating to Reform UK, party leader Nigel Farage and the party’s immigration policies displayed inside the council property where Kerry lived alone.

A source cited by UK media claimed the material suggested Kerry held ‘a profound dislike’ of Reform UK, its leader and its political positions.

Ann Widdecombe was a Reform UK supporter and spokesperson. Did the man charged with her murder have the Hope Not Hate hit piece among his “clippings” of Farage and his party? Were Hope Not Hate tipped off and advised to archive Ann Widdecombe?

I have been highly critical of Nigel Farage and his various parties over the years because I see it as just Toryism with a new paint job. However, I am well aware that that is not how the British left sees him. I believe his life actually is in danger, and that he does indeed need 24/7 security.

The reason for this is that the media and institutions intentionally radicalise their own base into a frothing frenzy, while strangling the life out of anything outside of their purview and flagging them up for character assassination, or worse. When people on the right do this, it is referred to as “stochastic terrorism”. However, the same rules in reverse would see Hope Not Hate or James O’Brien being shut down or censored.

Who “radicalised” Joshua Kerry? It is doubtful that it was a Telegram chat, or a YouTuber, or Elon Musk’s X. It would, in all probability, have been mainstream and respectable outlets, outlets like Hope Not Hate or media using their work as sound sources. Or the Guardian, or LBC.

Kerry was not known to Prevent, the anti-radicalisation unit, because they don’t look for people with his politics. Neither is there a right-wing version of Hope Not Hate that surveills, monitors, and generally hounds leftists. Leftists are not stopped at airports for a device snatch and work-out session by the Counter Terrorism Police.

They face no scrutiny or hardship for their politics whatsoever.

In this way, the British mainstream consensus-making apparatus has become a cauldron of corruption and crazies who never have to face any cost or scrutiny for opinions which are quite literally insane. It is the obsessive adherence to this consensus that delivers the grotesque outcome of a dying boy insisting that he isn’t a racist, as the life drains from his body and the police refuse to take his pleas seriously because he is white.

When an elderly woman is battered to death in her bungalow, likely because she doesn’t like transgenderism and abortion, the institution that flagged her up as a problem will simply remove the evidence as if to declare “case closed”. There will be no ramifications, no consequences, because the system would have to indict itself and its ideological and moral priors.

Indeed, people from within the bowels of Hope Not Hate are just about to enter the new Andy Burnham government.

The heuristic “a system is what it does” is somewhat over-used, but if we apply it to the system of British political power and judge it by its outcomes and not the goals stated by those working for it, what actually is it? It is a machine that seeks to chew up, pulp, and annihilate the nation, people, and mores it claims to represent. Those who advance that process are rewarded; those who hinder it are punished. That’s what it does, not what it claims to be.

Thus the incentives toward sociopathy are baked in. If the standard being set is that a satirical blog post about one group can be held responsible for an atrocity committed against another group in another country, without any evidence the wrongdoer ever read the original material, where does that leave so much of the British consensus-making apparatus?

Are we to dissect the entire “ecosystem” or “influencer network”?

Will we get a little introspection? Or will we simply get more people archived? More cases closed.

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There is a scene at the end of Chinatown when Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stares in shock at the newly dead body of his lover, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Famously, Jake’s associate pulls him away from the carnage with the line:

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

The line, on one level, obviously highlights the ethnic foreignness of Chinatown. On a deeper level, though, it speaks to the intricate web of lies, corruption, sleaze, and incest that has led to the death. It’s saying that in this world, untruths are true; there are plots inside schemes, and everyone is on the take, and trying to reach any catharsis or justice is simply futile. It’s as apt a description of the director Roman Polanski’s personal life as of his film.

I’ve been thinking about the end of Chinatown, and that line, quite a lot recently while observing the aftermath of Ann Widdecombe’s murder. Distrust in institutions is so widespread now that anything the police or government say will be met with severe skepticism and outright rejection. That said, the narrative that we’re supposed to accept is, as of writing, that a White British man with special needs drove five hours from Rotherham to Widdecombe’s house in rural Dartmoor, battered her to death, then drove five hours back home. And the authorities insist that the murder was not politically motivated, which only leaves us asking why he did it and what manner of disability he actually has.

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Despite Ann Widdecombe being famous for her devotion to Christian morality, and the British left openly celebrating her death, we were also expected to discount the possibility that politics could have motivated the killer, until that changed and anti-terrorism police took charge.

Whatever the truth of Widdecombe’s murder, she certainly isn’t the first well-known Brit with sincere moral convictions to die violently or under strange circumstances.

During the 1980s, the British State continually had to fend off opposition to nuclear power, both to its civilian uses as a replacement for coal and to its military role. The CND, feminists, environmentalists, Marxists, Scottish Nationalists and youthful members of the Labour Party all vehemently opposed nuclear weapons, and because of the threat it posed to the miners and, by implication, their Unions.

Hilda Murrell

One highly respected opponent of nuclear power was the elderly naturalist, Hilda Murrell. She was a horticulturalist and founding member of the environmentalist Soil Association who had made her name nurturing roses. Like many opponents of nuclear power, Murrell homed in on the problems produced by nuclear waste, which she viewed as the “Achilles’ heel” of the industry. In 1978, she wrote a paper titled What Price Nuclear Power?

In 1984, ahead of the first inquiry into the construction of a nuclear power plant, Sizewell B, Murrell prepared another paper called An Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management. She told friends and relatives that she felt she was being watched, that she would receive phone calls where nobody spoke on the other end, and that there was a steady stream of “tradesmen” turning up to her house with excuses as to why they should be allowed in.

She believed she was being spied upon by the British State, and that they wanted her to know it. Murrell had a nephew, Robert Green, who had his own travails with the British State because he was one of the few people on the inside involved in the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War.

On the 21st of March, 1984, Murrell’s home in Shropshire was burgled, and Murrell was abducted and driven off in her own car. There were signs of a violent struggle in her home, and the phone line was cut; the phone itself was half off the hook. Murrell’s body was found days later in a small woodland copse on some farmland. She was half naked and had slashes across her hands and abdomen. She died of hypothermia.

A local farmer insisted that in the intervening days he had searched the copse himself and that Murrell’s body could not have lain there for that length of time. A sixteen year-old boy, Andrew George, who did not fit the description of the driver, and who couldn’t drive, became the suspect and was eventually convicted of the crime. George certainly was in Hilda Murrell’s house. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell, investigative journalist Judith Cook (who wrote two books on the murder), and Murrell’s nephew all remained extremely skeptical.

There are essentially two theories on the murder of Hilda Murrell: either a burglary gone wrong, or a state operation. Both have paradoxes and loose threads.

The official cause of her death was hypothermia.

Willie McRae

A year after the Hilda Murrell case, prominent Scottish Nationalist Party member and anti-nuclear campaigner Willie McRae passed away under similarly odd circumstances. McRae had successfully campaigned against nuclear waste being stored in the Galloway Hills in Scotland. According to McRae, the British State should put “nuclear waste where Guy Fawkes put his gunpowder”.

McRae claimed that his office in Glasgow had been broken into and that he was under surveillance. He noted the registration plate of a car that routinely circled his place of work and handed it to the police. However, the police claimed that no such number or vehicle existed. Both McRae and the Scottish police knew very well that Special Branch and MI5 did not have their cars registered with the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency).

His files on his anti-nuclear activities routinely disappeared or were rifled through. In one instance he was informed that Scottish Police had taken files for “safekeeping”.

Perhaps not without reason, Willie McRae became increasingly paranoid. He was prone to bouts of heavy drinking and depression. He began carrying an old pistol that he had acquired during his time in the British Army serving in India.

On the 4th of April 1985, McRae’s flat suddenly caught fire. Passer-by Pat Gallagher, a forklift driver, hurriedly bolted into the building to help and said he saw a man in a boiler suit carrying a briefcase leaving as he entered. Gallagher asked about the fire and the boiler-suited man simply replied that he was “in a hurry to get to work”. Gallagher then pulled McRae out of the building despite McRae fighting to re-enter and retrieve his files.

Despite everything, McRae was widely reported to have been in good spirits because he’d made a major breakthrough in his work against the British State, citing “I’ve got them!”

That evening, having just survived near asphyxiation, McRae left Glasgow to drive to his remote cottage in Ross-shire in the north of Scotland. Before his departure, McRae joked with a policeman while buying whisky. The policeman noted that two men were following McRae.

Two Australian tourists found McRae in his Volvo the next morning. He was 90 feet off the road on the heath straddling a small burn.

McRae was unconscious and transported by ambulance to Inverness hospital. However, here it was discovered that he had severe brain trauma, and so was then taken to Aberdeen hospital, where it was discovered that McRae had actually been shot in the head.

Back at the crash site, things get even weirder. McRae’s pistol was discovered far from his crashed car, in the small burn. In this scenario, McRae drove off the road and careened across thick heather, only to then shoot himself in the temple and throw his pistol 60 feet, where it landed in the burn.

The alternative theory is that the police removed the car thinking it was simply a mundane crash, only to later return the car to the wrong place. This could explain the mysteriously flying pistol. If McRae had committed suicide, he could have just dropped it out of the window. However, publicly, the police flatly denied ever moving the car; it was only found years later in internal records and documents.

Whatever the case, the official cause of death was suicide.

Jill Dando

Unlike the cases of Hilda Murrell and Willie McRae, the case of Jill Dando will be familiar to most people in the UK and perhaps even farther afield. Dando was one of the most popular and prominent BBC presenters during the 1990s. According to the Guardian:

As Dando was about to put her keys in the lock to open the front door of her home in Fulham, she was grabbed from behind. With his right arm, the assailant held her and forced her to the ground, so that her face was almost touching the tiled step of the porch. Then, with his left hand, he fired a single shot at her left temple, killing her instantly. The bullet entered her head just above her ear, parallel to the ground, and came out the right side of her head.

The precise nature of Dando’s awful death has never been in dispute. The controversy is who and why.

The original investigation and criminal proceedings focused on “local loner” Barry George, who had clippings of Dando and a somewhat odd interest in female celebrities. In 1983 George had been arrested for stalking Princess Diana while carrying a rope and knife. Dando was not dissimilar to Diana in physical appearance.

However, being a weirdo does not impute to an individual high-level assassination skills. After being convicted of Dando’s murder in 2001, George was acquitted in 2008.

The theories into Dando’s murder in many ways map onto the changing attitudes of British society. In the early 2000s, besides ex-boyfriends or lone nuts, the focus was primarily on Serbia reacting to the NATO bombing campaign and support for Kosovo. Dando had been the face of Britain’s humanitarian effort during the Balkans campaign. Three days prior to Dando’s murder, NATO had killed 13 journalists in Belgrade by bombing the state broadcaster.

More recently, this theory of Dando’s death has lost steam and been replaced with a theory that she was set to expose a massive paedophile ring centred on the BBC and Jimmy Saville. The theory gained traction following a Netflix show called Who Killed Jill Dando?, but also leans into established facts that there indeed was (or is) a network of child abusers prominent within the BBC and the institutions of British power and influence.

Moreover, the argument goes, as presenter of the BBC flagship Crimewatch program at the time, Dando had the connections and platform to highlight the issue if she so wished.

I personally find it difficult to believe that the BBC would have green-lit a profoundly damaging investigative report into itself. Then again, Dando had the profile to simply write a book, or perhaps have a documentary aired on another station. Perhaps worst of all is the simple fact that no evidence exists to support this claim beyond an anonymous source cited in the Daily Star.

Regardless, we are left with yet another mysterious case that lingers in the national psyche. Another high-profile, much-loved figure with genuine decency, professionally murdered by forces unknown.

Dr David Kelly

In the aftermath of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell’s “dodgy dossier” that sold the Iraq War to the British people as a matter of extreme emergency, Dr David Kelly, a veteran specialist on biological warfare, was revealed to be leaking criticisms to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. Kelly accused the Blair government of “sexing up” the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and claimed that the 45-minute threat posed by his regime simply didn’t exist.

The implications of Kelly’s revelations did not merely embarrass the Blair Government; they highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the American neocon agenda by implication.

As a UN weapons inspector, Kelly had promised his Iraqi contacts that if they simply complied with the (unending) demands of the United States and United Kingdom, their country would be spared from invasion. Kelly eventually recognised that war was going to happen regardless and that his contacts would likely be killed. Kelly feared that he would himself be cast as a liar.

Eerily, Kelly even predicted the exact nature of his death. As the Irish Times wrote:

Mr Broucher said he asked what would happen if Iraq was attacked despite Dr Kelly’s assurances. “His reply was, which I took to be a throwaway remark: ‘I will be found dead in the woods.’

“I thought he might have meant that he was at risk of being attacked by the Iraqis in some way,” Mr Broucher said.

“I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines.”

Kelly, coming under extreme pressure from the press, the Government and the intelligence services, went for his afternoon walk on the 17th of July, 2003. His body was found the next morning by volunteers searching for him. He had taken an overdose of his wife’s arthritis pills, despite having a lifelong aversion to taking pills. He had apparently cut his wrists with a pruning knife, though he sliced the wrong vein, and it was noted by the volunteers that almost no blood was either on or around him.

Moreover, a thermal imaging helicopter had passed directly over the spot where he was found the previous day and detected nothing. This led many to suspect that he had been abducted and his corpse returned to the spot in the woods later.

After the volunteers found Kelly and went to inform the police, they stated to the Hutton Inquiry that in the intervening time Kelly’s body had been moved from being slumped against a tree to lying flat on the ground.

Despite the oddities surrounding the David Kelly case, Lord Hutton, a Blair appointee who was regarded by Blair as a “safe pair of hands”, placed a 70-year restriction order on Kelly’s postmortem, photographs, medical records and his toxicology report to “protect the family’s privacy”.

The official cause of death was haemorrhage (heavy bleeding) caused by incised wounds to the left wrist. The Guardian reports that the pathologist who carried out the autopsy called it:

a textbook case of suicide but he would have “dearly loved” to have found evidence of murder.

Conclusion

The term the British intelligence agencies use to describe an assassination or sanctioned murder is “Wet Job”. They apparently borrowed this phrase from the Soviet Union, where similar work was referred to as “Wet Work”. Am I saying that Jill Dando or Willie McRae or Hilda Murrell are examples of MI5 doing Wet Jobs? No. My honest opinion is that I have no idea. Neither am I implying that Ann Widdecombe was killed by the deep state. In all probability, it was a mad leftist.

The problem is the cultural context is one in which these odd mysteries and unresolved questions heap up and loom over every conversation, every instance of government involvement is treated with profound suspicion, and when one digs in a little, there’s usually something and not nothing.

Culturally speaking, the British intelligence services represent something seedy and squalid. There is the whiff of a depressed John le Carré careerist stirring a cup of lukewarm tea, lingering outside of graffiti-covered, piss-smelling bus shelters, and spying on somebody who has a moral core.

There is also the ancient Anglo liberal spirit at play, perhaps. We assume the state is malevolent, untrustworthy, shifty, and that its minions must be of low character. The boiler-suited man with a briefcase fleeing the mysterious fire in the Willie McRae case embodies it.

We wonder to ourselves, do such people exist in the British State? Still today, when everything is digital and gay? And when we say so out loud, with sincerity, we almost always get the reply that is the equivalent of:

Leave it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

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I have to credit this phenomenal 8-hour documentary for helping me with this article.

We dive into the all-time classic of vigilantism featuring Charles Bronson as the world’s least likely liberal architect. We also discuss the 1970s gloom era and New York’s grimy aesthetics of post-industrial decay and urban rot, and much more…

In this month’s retrospective, I read through all the essays and speculate on House of the Dragon and its depictions of sociopaths ruling without empathy, and how, despite being ‘dragonslop’, it bears some similarities to the British political class.

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In the aftermath of the Henry Nowak murder, Horus and Millennial Woes join me for a deep dive into the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent Macpherson Report that deemed the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist. We discuss the various movers and shakers involved, the power dynamics, and whether or not the state was waiting for what turned out to be the perfect test case.

Also discussed is the term “institutionally racist” and how, when acknowledged, it results in the total capitulation and capture of the institution. What’s more, when viewing media from that time (1999), it is quite clear that the assault on the Metropolitan Police would be merely the first domino to fall to pave the way for the “new world” to come.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary I reference from 1999:

You can find Horus on Substack here:

Horus

Essays on history

And Millennial Woes here:

Millennial Woes

A Scottish guy pontificating about the world we are living in, and heading towards.