After a delightful summer break, I am already in a state of anxiety

Contemporary politics is just so bloody tiring

Photo by Phil Lewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

At what point does mere exhaustion over-end political analysis? Reading the editor in last week’s magazine on the collapse of millennial optimism and “the growing sense of emergency” in our politics, I realised that after a delightful summer break, I was again – already – in a state of heart-pounding anxiety. Contemporary politics is just so bloody tiring. Anti-migrant protests, amplified a million times online; the huge crypto donations to Reform; AI doom; Trump casually proposing the end of the UK… It’s all familiar, but it contributes to a mood of chaos and decay in which normal concentration becomes ever harder.

Neil Kinnock, I hope he won’t mind me saying, gently chided me last week for pessimism, which is unusual for me. He, like Tom McTague, was quoting Antonio Gramsci – not about morbid symptoms and the old world dying, but “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. It’s inspiring – the left-wing equivalent of Churchill’s KBO or “keep buggering on”. We must remember, of course, that things did not end well for Gramsci himself, who died aged 46 at the hands of Mussolini’s jailers.

Priceless entertainment

Meanwhile, people on the centre-left can refresh themselves with amusement at the war on the right. What do all the patriotic British admirers of Maga make of its leader’s enthusiasm for destroying the UK? A bit of a poseur, I’d have thought.

Reform’s £72m crypto donations will certainly rocket-boost Nigel Farage’s party’s visibility. It greatly exceeds what the Conservatives – in the past, no strangers to the embrace of big money – are able to raise. At the same time, Rupert Lowe of Restore boasts of being offered unthinkable amounts of money by Elon Musk. I thought Kemi Badenoch’s response to all this was brilliantly withering. For those who missed it: “Money is an accelerant, not a cure. If the fundamentals are good, it improves things. If they aren’t, things will get a whole lot worse. You can buy staff or advertising, but you can’t buy judgement or integrity.” Ouch.

Saying it straight

I had a bit of a trumpet-toot on LBC for Ed Miliband’s move on the West Bank. This naturally caused a quantity of critical both-sides comment online. I know even liberal north London Jewry is agonised and divided about this, and much of the commentary against me was detailed and sophisticated. But both I, and I have to say my wife, particularly enjoyed one late entrant to the debate who simply tweeted: “Spindly twat.” Bang, as they say, to rights.

A great composer under siege

To the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, for Holy Fool, the new play by Rosalind Adler and Lea Sellers about the Soviet-era composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I hugely enjoyed the story from the famous Stalin walk-out during “Lady Macbeth of Minsk”, to the triumphant Fifth and Seventh Symphonies and the last years of survival, compromise and defiance.

To get such a story on stage, humanised and balanced, was a great triumph. But I’ve always had this problem: Stalin rejected the dissonant formalism of some of early Shostakovich – which meant his life was in danger. But, like many modern listeners, the composer’s subtle response in his own Fifth Symphony – “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” – with its outward acceptance and inner dissidence, is one of the most glorious things written in modern times. Did the old beast, perhaps, have a point?

Budget loyalties

I’ve no idea how the Budget will turn out, but, as John Healey quietly rolls the pitch, he sounds like the most pro-business Labour chancellor in living memory. The question is how far Andy Burnham’s instincts will countermand his. Healey has been described as pliable. He strikes me as being loyal but very far from being anybody’s puppet.

Politics is coming home

After writing about elections for so long, it’s funny to find myself in the middle of an important by-election as a voter. I am a Holborn and St Pancras resident and have already been canvassed by both Zack Polanski and Labour. The sense of power in being able to nod, nod, promise to “think about it” is quite heady. So far, two very different approaches: the Greens insist we can choose a real leader, not just back-bench fodder; while Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali is running a bouncy, Burnhamite campaign theme, “For Hope”. I don’t know what’s going to happen but the place is humming with activists of all ages, full of hope and energy. In a mad world – going back to Kinnock – I guess this is where we get our optimism back.

[Further reading: Tax: the new front in the Reform-Tory war]