The Iran war is exactly like the Iraq one: no imminent threat beforehand, and no plan for what comes after. Yet it’s also completely unlike it: no invasion, and a highly educated, patriotic middle class across Iran. So, like any intelligent person, I keep veering wildly in what I expect to happen next.
I observe, though, the bias in my trade towards doom. No one volunteers to play Pangloss. Predicting things will be OK, when disaster follows, is the quickest way to shred any hack’s reputation. But the opposite – being a consistent Cassandra – keeps you in good odour even if you’re always wrong. The reason is that societies advance warily, probing for danger, and so find Cassandra more useful to have around than Pangloss.
God loves a sceptic
One bias I find heavily reinforced is my loathing of religious fanaticism, which increases as I grow older. Those bitter old mullahs; the murderous Islamist cranks; the born-again, end-times maniacs around Trump; the “God gave us these bits”, slay-the-Amalekites Zionists… How much better the world would be if they all just read their Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins and laughed a little more. In each case, it’s about male power, isn’t it? That’s not to say I’m against all religious feeling, or oblivious to its consolations. I love an old church as much as anyone. But – I say this as a Scot whose nation once cringed and bobbed under the Ayatollah Knox – any exclusive faith is better taken, like whisky, with water.
Never a frown with Cecily Brown
The greatest consolations, anyway, are art and music. In art, the great unresolved problem is the relationship between so-called abstractionism and representation – between the painting-as-painting and the painting as window. I’m looking forward to an exhibition coming to the Serpentine Gallery by the British painter Cecily Brown, who is about as exciting as it gets. Think Willem de Kooning, Peter Paul Rubens, the German expressionists. Tracey Emin gets all the publicity, but Brown’s the business. She’s on all summer. Please go.
Getting Carré-d away
I spent a happy, dank Saturday morning walking around Hampstead with 30 or so others, led by Stewart Purvis, the Channel 4 News founder. He was giving us a tour of the history of spies in the area – from the modernist flats where KGB handlers hung out, snaring Kim Philby and the like, to John le Carré’s home, and the house where a list of eminent Britons to be arrested and shot, come the revolution, was compiled. The walk was a delight, partly because Stewart had come with photocopies of once-secret files and recordings of some of the spies’ voices. You can get quite a lot of this from the internet – but what struck me was how much more emotional and vivid a story is when you are standing in front of it, rather than glancing at a screen. The Purvis tours, which are not expensive, take place every month or so.
Stranger than science fiction
Speaking of localities, one of the joys of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells is the specific geography of the martian attack: that it begins at Woking; that a crucial scene takes place in the London suburb of East Sheen; and that the final fall of the aliens occurs five minutes’ walk from where I live, at a reservoir just north of London Zoo. It’s a commonplace to say that Wells was satirising imperialism and technological arrogance. But his discussion of the possible enslavement of mankind by martians is strikingly like the dystopias envisaged by writers on AI, once it no longer needs us. Wells would have loved this twist to his tale: that the “martians” were always Earthbound, created by us with technologies that now allow us to contemplate colonising Mars.
In the book, a surviving soldier plans a human resistance movement. That, too, is coming. As AI eradicates jobs and erodes human autonomy, we will see a vast culture of resistance emerge, with millions choosing to shun technology.
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
The war against Iran has rightly focused attention on the scuttling of the Royal Navy. It was the Conservatives who were most to blame, though all parties were involved. I am not gung-ho, but I feel a personal twinge: my father was in the RNVR, blowing up mines across the Mediterranean Sea after the war, and his brother Hamish was a teenage naval officer killed at the Dunkirk evacuation. They would have been horrified by what has happened to an institution which, for so long, was the prime symbol of British power. But there is a more general point still. This is not only military. We were, for so long, a seafaring people – fishing, trading, yachting. Watery traditions flow through our poetry, art and storytelling. Yet today, as the ports and seaside towns decline, it is as if we are turning our backs, collectively, on the saltwater, however putrid, all around us.
[Further reading: How China spies on the UK]
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This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
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