I wish Richard Tice could have seen me last week. He would have been so proud. There I was, watching people’s houses burn while applying SPF50 on my childhood friend’s back. We were on a beach in Chalkidiki, less than 9km away when the pinewoods nearby started burning. A couple of weeks ago, another fire travelled 25km away from where it started. Luckily, I am a Telegraph reader, so I knew how to remain stoic in the face of the world burning and embrace the Mediterranean lifestyle.
Tice said that we should try enjoy some of the benefits of warmer weather, which means the Brits should learn to enjoy the sunshine, and countries that are already hot should learn to enjoy living in a sauna. I could see the fire was blocking the main road and immediately recognised that trying to leave would be futile. We were on the tip of a peninsula during the busiest weeks of the Greek summer, with only one way out that’s always a bottleneck anyway, and definitely now that it was on fire. Power and water were cut off, so there was no point in going to my friend’s nearby home either. We stayed put on the beach and stocked up on beers from the beach bar before they went warm from the power outage. We watched the smoke thicken and peed in the sea.
“Why can’t Elon Musk stop trying to get us to Mars and find a way for us to live safely on Earth instead?” commented a modern Luddite middle-aged couple monitoring the situation with us. “If using drones was so successful for killing people in Ukraine, why can’t they make them save people in wildfires too?” The naive peasants continued to reflect, referring to the two firefighters who crashed to their deaths while battling another wildfire in a helicopter last month.
It’s not like we don’t know what needs to be done. Every wildfire season in my motherland, forestry professors take to the national papers to explain the different measures the government can take to prevent fires, mainly active forest management, which would require permanent forestry staff. The minister in charge goes on media rounds, acknowledging them. Then little changes because there is no money.
Increasing temperatures, winds, and decreased rainfall have left Greek soil dry, and wild flora is a tinderbox. Climate change sets the stage, but the majority of ignitions (95 per cent) are caused by human activity, including arson, negligence or poor land management.
A week earlier, a local boomer in my mother’s Cretan village (Polythea, population: 200), was watching TikTok videos commemorating two young firefighters who had been burned alive, trapped while fighting a wildfire on the other side of the island two days before. The firefighters who died in Crete were 25 and 58 years old. Their names were Pantelis Diamantakis and Manolis Stratidakis. At the bottom of the pay scale, a firefighter can earn around €1,150 a month.
There is, however, some money. So where does it go? One answer is, unfortunately, corruption.
My uncle, a non-party-affiliated Deputy Mayor for cleanliness in Heraklion, told me that the EU-imposed public contract competitions have not eradicated corruption; they have only made everything even slower and added more middlemen. They simply design the tendering process with unnecessary requirements that eliminate competition. His countrymen agree; In an EU-commissioned report, 92 per cent of businesses said that tailoring tendering processes to specific bidders is very or fairly common (EU average is 58 per cent). In 2025, 58 per cent of tendering processes in Greece had a single bidder, the highest among all EU countries, which have a median of 27 per cent of procurement procedures with a single offer.
That’s not what I read in the British papers, of course. I read that Greece has modernised; that our Harvard-educated prime minister, now in his eighth year, has issued a fatwa against corruption and waste! That 30-something-year-old kids like myself are moving back, reversing the brain drain. He even went on that famous centrist dad podcast, where he was hailed as a European liberal messiah.
The Greeks are used to wildfires by now. We’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that our houses may burn and there is nothing we can do about it.
Richard Tice wants his fellow Britons to embrace the Mediterranean lifestyle too. Yet his party curiously also craves to DOGE their way through the civil service. How will they handle the need to increase the very thing Greek forestry services say is needed to prevent wildfires: year-round staff? The US is paying the price for the state gutting, with wildfires becoming harder to contain. Is Tice willing to pay higher taxes? Or will he be joining me on the Greek shores to practice Stoic philosophy?
In the end, the people asking us to ignore the world burning, the ones telling us there is no money, and those who spend it on themselves protect the same system. One where decisions are made by those who never feel them, and the consequences are endured by those who never made them.
[Further reading: Europe’s age of fire]
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Subscribe here to commentI thought being of an Epicurean persuasion would get me through life’s troubles but there is no vantage point of safety where you can sit back and watch others misfortunes.