Saturday, October 11, 2025
LinkedPrime

News from October 10, 2025

441 articles found

Taylor Swift scores second-biggest UK charts opening week ever with The Life of a Showgirl
Technology

Taylor Swift scores second-biggest UK charts opening week ever with The Life of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, has given the US pop star her biggest-ever opening week on the UK chart. It is her 14th No 1 album (she has also scored No 1s with the Taylor’s Version rerecordings of previous albums), moving 432,000 combined units in its first week on the Official Chart. It is second only to Ed Sheeran’s ÷, released in 2017 to 672,000 first-week sales. Only the Beatles and Robbie Williams have had more UK No 1 albums than Swift, with 15 apiece. At a concert in London last night, Williams admitted that he had pushed back the release of his album Britpop from last Friday – The Life of a Showgirl’s release day – to 2026 because of Swift: “I could pretend it’s not, but it is. It’s selfish. I want a 16th No 1 album.” Swift has now surpassed Elvis Presley, with 13 No 1 albums, and is tied with the Rolling Stones. No one else has notched up so many No 1 albums in such a short time: the Official Charts Company said that since 2012, the 35-year-old pop star has averaged more than one a year. The Life of a Showgirl also scores the biggest first-week UK vinyl sales since modern chart records began in 1994, as well as the most UK album streams in a single week. Swift also claims the entire top three songs in the UK Top 40. Lead single The Fate of Ophelia is at No 1, with the biggest opening week since 2021’s Christmas No 1, LadBaby’s Sausage Rolls for Everyone featuring Ed Sheeran and Elton John. At No 2 is Opalite and 3 is Elizabeth Taylor. Official Charts’ chief executive, Martin Talbot, said in a statement: “What an incredible week for Taylor Swift, which has topped the many other incredible weeks of her career. Her list of achievements this week is extraordinary, not least the fact that The Life of a Showgirl has just registered comfortably the biggest first week in the UK of her career. Taylor is bigger than she has ever been in the UK – and shows absolutely no sign of letting up.” In the US, Swift beat Adele’s first-week sales record, selling 3.5m units in under a week with two days of the chart window still to go; in 2015, Adele sold 3.482m copies of her third album, 25, in its initial release week. Swift’s previous album, last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, sold 2.51m units in its first week. The new album’s accompanying cinematic release, Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, topped the global box office, making $34m at the US over its three-day release, and £3.5m in the UK. The Guardian’s Adrian Horton rated it two stars. The record has received mixed reviews, from five stars at Rolling Stone to one star from the Standard and two from the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Swift indicated that she was aware of the divided response. “I welcome the chaos. The rule of showbusiness is if it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping,” she said. “And art, I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions on art. I’m not the art police. It’s like everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want. And what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror.”

Laura Snapes
What the late Jilly Cooper meant to us | Letters
Technology

What the late Jilly Cooper meant to us | Letters

I have yet to try any of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbusters (Obituary, 6 October) but loved her column in the Sunday Times and read all her 1970s “permissive novels”, so when our first daughter was born in 1977, I knew at once that I wanted to call her Harriet. I discovered recently that one of our oldest friends, an English scholar and great admirer of Jane Austen, had believed for almost 50 years that Harriet was named after a character in Emma. I was reluctant to shatter his fond illusions, but as my personal tribute to Jilly Cooper have decided I will now do so. Incidentally, our younger daughter is known as Bella, but not this time after a Cooper title character. Her full name is Isabella, again not in tribute to the Austen character in Northanger Abbey, but to Isabella Bird, the intrepid author of A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, a true story with no shortage of horses or rugged men, though not quite a bonkbuster.Caroline ColeHuddersfield, West Yorkshire I have never read a Jilly Cooper novel, but nevertheless I am so sad to hear of her death. Long ago, in 1982, I saw her programme Shakespeare in Perspective | The Merry Wives of Windsor – part of the wonderful BBC Shakespeare series. I remember her insight, humanity and wry observations of class. Real intellect, and extremely funny with it.Bob KentridgeProfessor of psychology, Durham University As a recently married woman in the 1960s, I was surprised to receive three copies of Jilly Cooper’s book How to Stay Married. The advice must have been good, though, as we celebrated our 57th anniversary in July.Jean HolmesClitheroe, Lancashire

Guardian Staff
“OH MY GOD!” - Fans in a frenzy as Stray Kids' Felix is set to debut as Fridge Interview MC with Kim Go-eun as his first guest
Technology

“OH MY GOD!” - Fans in a frenzy as Stray Kids' Felix is set to debut as Fridge Interview MC with Kim Go-eun as his first guest

Actress Kim Go-eun will appear on Stray Kids’ Felix’s Fridge Interview on October 16 at 7 pm KST, via Channel-117’s official YouTube channel. On October 10, a short teaser was posted on Shorts through the same channel. The title reads, “[선공개] 필릭스 X 김고은⭐️ 🐣 : 누나라고 불러도 돼요~?” which translates to “[Preview] Felix X Kim Go-eun ⭐️ 🐣 : Can I call you noona~?”The Stray Kids star is stepping in as the special host for the new season, produced by Kurly on Channel-117. The show flips the usual talk-show script. Guests open their refrigerators and share stories behind the contents. They even occasionally prepare a quick dish using the available ingredients.The teaser showcases Felix’s playful energy. He asks Kim, “Can I call you noona?” She nods, “Sure.” Then Kim Go-eun fires back, “Can I call you Yongbok?” Felix shoots, “You can call me bbokbbokie,” which gets a laugh from her. “I won’t go that far,” she quips. The Korean-Australian rapper also seen admitting, “I’ve actually been following your work for a long time, noona. I couldn’t watch Exhuma—it’s too scary ㅠㅠ— but I still want to, because you’re amazing!”Fans are expressing excitement over the news of them appearing together, with one X user sharing their enthusiasm, "OH MY GOD!!!"𝐦𝐣 @gnabnahc97chrisLINKOH MY GOD!!!Many fans have shown interest in the crossover, noting that it was unexpected.Mr Titus📈📊 @titusforexLINKKim Go-eun on Felix’s Fridge? Bro we’re about to get legendary content 😭🔥🎬ℜ𝔦𝔞 ❤︎ @tabitaheartsLINKNEVER did I think I’d live to see FELIX and KIM GOEUN in the SAME ROOM… laughing?? chatting?? breathing the same AIR?? Be so serious right now 😭shay @hrtchnlxLINKGUYSHSHSHHAHS YOU DONT KNOW IM SO HAPPY...THIS IS MY TWO FAVORITE PEOPLE IN ONE FRAMEOthers have commented that they “can’t wait” for the episodes featuring the two.alexia_lusia @NouhaNouhi40562LINKUnbelievable 🙈 Kim goeun and Félix oppa ... I can't wait 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭enCHANted by SKZ!!☯𝗞𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗮☯ @hollyportilloLINKI am excited for this! He is so engaging and can't wait to see his interviews.mads ୭ ˚. ᵎᵎ 🏹 @maditwtssLINKTHIS CRAZY CROSSOVER I CANT WAIT WTFStray Kids' Felix recently stunned at Paris Fashion Week for Louis VuittonStray Kids’ Felix (Image via Instagram/@yong.lixx)Stray Kids’ Felix made an appearance at Paris Fashion Week, closing out the group’s fashion month run. The K-pop star and Louis Vuitton global ambassador since June 2023 arrived at the Louvre Museum carrying the brand’s new Express GM bag.Felix, who’s also called a muse by LV's artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, has been walking in the labels shows, including the Cruise 2026 collection. He showed off a bold pinkish lavender hairdo, slicked backward. The idol wore a white structured leather jacket with no shirt underneath. It was matched with black trousers and shoes. Before Felix became the special MC for Fridge Interview, the show was hosted by Dex (Kim Jin-young) from Feb 2023-Feb 2025, then TWICE’s Sana from Mar-Aug 2025. On Sana’s Fridge Interview, notable appearances include Sakura from LE SSERAFIM, Doojoon from HIGHLIGHT, Hoshi and Woozi from SEVENTEEN, Ningning from aespa, Shotaro from RIIZE, j‑hope from BTS, Rei from IVE, and Eunchae from LE SSERAFIM. Meanwhile, Jisoo from BLACKPINK, Kwon Eunbi (former IZ*ONE), Sana herself from TWICE, and G‑Dragon from BIGBANG appeared on Dex’s Fridge Interview.

Shreya Jha
Farewell to ‘the people’s champion’: Manchester says emotional goodbye to boxer Ricky Hatton
Technology

Farewell to ‘the people’s champion’: Manchester says emotional goodbye to boxer Ricky Hatton

Tens of thousands lined the streets of Manchester on Friday to pay tribute to Ricky Hatton, the former world champion boxer who died last month aged 46. Hatton was one of the most respected and adored sportsmen of his generation, able to tempt thousands of fans across the Atlantic to America for his fights against the likes of legendary boxers Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. His death at home on 14 September was mourned throughout the world, with a minute’s silence held during the Manchester football derby that was played later that day. Hatton’s funeral cortege wound its way through Manchester, with a sea of mourners clapping loudly at every stop and turn on its two-hour route. The procession began at the Cheshire Cheese in Hyde, his favourite pub where he was a regular and a stone’s throw away from his home, before continuing through the area towards Manchester Cathedral. Along the way it also stopped at sites such as the Harehill Tavern, another favourite of Hatton’s, as well as Hatton’s gym. A mural of Hatton was unveiled at the Harehill Tavern when the hearse stopped there. Once the procession reached Manchester Cathedral, Hatton’s coffin was led into the building carried by family and friends, including his brother, Matthew Hatton, and son, Campbell Hatton, both also boxers, and Paul Speak, who managed the Hitman throughout his career. One of Manchester’s favourite sons, many famous faces associated with the city attended the service, including the Oasis frontman and fellow Manchester City supporter, Liam Gallagher, who, along with brother Noel, had carried Hatton’s championship belts into the ring during his 2008 clash with Paulie Malignaggi. Shaun Ryder and Bez from the Happy Mondays also paid their respects at the service, along with Manchester United great Wayne Rooney and some of the biggest names in British and world boxing, including fellow former world champions Tyson Fury, Tony Bellew, Amir Khan and Anthony Crolla. Giving an emotional speech during the service, Campbell called his father “the people’s champion” and said he looked up to him in “every aspect” of his life. “I can’t explain how much I’m going to miss you, Dad, and that we won’t be making any new memories,” he said. “But the ones we did I will cherish for ever. “Growing up I looked up to my dad in every aspect of life whether it be following in a career in boxing like he did or the way he carried himself out of the ring. But all of that was fuelled by the love I had and always will have for him.” From the cathedral, his coffin was driven to Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium for a private service. Hatton’s coffin was painted the same shade of light blue as his beloved City, the team he had supported his entire life and at whose stadium he defeated Juan Lazcano in 2008 in front of a then postwar British record 55,000 capacity crowd. The cortege carrying his coffin was led by the famous yellow Reliant Regal three-wheeler van from Only Fools and Horses, with Hatton, a fan of the comedy show, having bought the original van. Outside the Cheshire Cheese pub Mike Lunney and Martin Taylor, two friends who had followed Hatton across the Atlantic to Vegas in 2007 paid their respects to a “boy from Manchester who became a hero” to many. “Look around you,” Lunney said. “There’s as many people here as there were in Vegas. Who else can do that? That many people following you over there at your best, and this many people paying their respects once you’re gone?” Taylor added that Hatton, who was known to people in the area on a personal level and loved being in the company of others, was a “humble and kind” person who was loved by everyone he met. “This is just a normal working-class place and he resonated with people because of who he was. He would talk to people, buy them a drink and talked to people like he was a nobody, but he was so much more than a nobody to so many people,” he said. “They say people only get their flowers when they can’t smell them,” Lunney added. “I hope he knew what he meant to people. Not just to the city or to his fans but to people he met. He was the people’s champion for a reason, he was the best person you could meet, he’d buy everyone a round and chat to you all night. He was the Hitman but he was also Ricky, and he’ll be missed.”

Raphael Boyd
Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist
Technology

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US. “A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.” Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology. “I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture. The meandering gospel of Peter Thiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”. Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attendees were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X. Guardian reporters did not attend the lectures or agree to the off-the-record stipulation. Recordings were provided by an attendee who gave them on the condition of anonymity. When reached for comment, Thiel spokesperson Jeremiah Hall did not dispute the veracity of the material given to the Guardian. Hall did correct a piece of the Guardian’s transcription and clarified an argument made by Thiel about Jews and the antichrist. The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.” The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”. “One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said. His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world. On the day of Thiel’s final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as “Predatory tech”, “We do not profit from people who profit from misery” and “Not today Satan”. A trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attendees carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.” What do Thiel’s lectures say? The Guardian is publishing substantial quoted passages alongside contextual annotations so that the public may be informed on what an influential figure in politics and technology was saying behind closed doors. He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI, and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.” It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price. What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace. Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it. How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen? Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like. There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace? Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace. Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization. Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist. As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they’ve already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC: They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant. When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?’ During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attendee asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded: I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one. Who could be Thiel’s antichrist? Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures. A basic definition of the antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times. Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen. My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer. It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on. During a question and answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen is engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI. Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest. Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”. In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science. Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like. One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on. Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once: He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible. I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist. Pope Benedict XVI is someone who Thiel admired because he was one of the few popes who referenced the possibility of an antichrist: The TL; DR: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times. However, Thiel said Benedict failed at spreading the message of the antichrist because he “was not very courageous”. I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict overdosed on red pills. Musk, a longtime friend and ally of Thiel, came up during one of the lectures in the context of the Giving Pledge, a pact Gates founded in 2010 where billionaires pledged to donate the majority of their money to philanthropy. Here is Thiel recapping the conversation: If I had to pick a little bit on Elon – and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more thoughtful people … This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half your money. You have, like, $400bn. Yes, you gave $200m to Mr Trump, but $200bn – if you’re not careful – is going to leftwing non-profits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’ And then I – one step ahead – rethought it and said: ‘You don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the next year. And 0.7% of $200bn is $1.4bn – about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr Gates is effectively expecting $1.4bn from you in the next year.’ And to his credit, Elon was, well, pretty fluid on it. He said: ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70 basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do – give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’ When asked about slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event: I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies? Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other. Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters: Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts. Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Libby’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring. By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples: Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date. He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government. Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon. In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg: One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave. What does he say about Trump and politics? Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order. At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that. One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following world war two is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order. I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ‘49 to ‘89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful. I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it. Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin: In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome. Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish. There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative. In response, Thiel’s spokesperson said: “Peter was arguing against medieval, anti-Semtic theologians who suggested that the Antichrist will be Jewish,” citing Solovyov. Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it: Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies. Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve current status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US. Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor. At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example: By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process. During the Q&A section, Peter Robinson talks about John Henry Newman’s description of the antichrist promising people things like civil liberty and equality. “He offers you baits to tempt you,” Robinson said, quoting Newman. Then, Robinson says to Thiel: “The antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?” Thiel doesn’t directly answer the question, but does offer his take on the young, progressive mayoral candidate: I don’t think Mamdani can be president because he’s not a natural-born citizen. So he’s capped out at mayor. I also don’t think he’s really promised to reduce my taxes. In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon. Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope. “The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion. Thiel also spoke about San Francisco and his views on Gavin Newsom, the California governor. ​​I would say that if we go to the katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, the say someone like that perhaps represents a way to do that. That’s the part where, if there was a way to … you know, he was the governor of California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San Francisco, that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s kind of, it’s sort of in a way the last president where such a fusion of sorts happened. I think it was FDR with New York and DC. So that’s the piece that would be tricky. And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It’s more valuable to be one of the seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama because he’s going to win and then we’ll have an influence. And then, the really crazy … and then in a way, Obama … if you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people. Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary. But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn’t work at all. And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question is whether Newsom will be like that or different. Why is he fixated on stagnation? Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm. The creation of the gun and the machine gun “wounded our faith in science and tech”, he said. “And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.” This fear of tech is what the antichrist will seize on to gain power, he says. During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI is a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen need to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on. If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale. The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ‘99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dot-com company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics. In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist: This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive. In his fourth lecture, he also suggests that his beliefs about the end of the world informed his own work in tech at companies such as PayPal: I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities. So it was natural to think about the antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I’ll still defend PayPal as more good than bad. References to pop culture and literature Thiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views. Sometimes these references pertained to the antichrist; at other times, Thiel was just giving his views on politics, modern society and Silicon Valley, like here: The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th-century media company could be handed off to someone’s children. If you think about the tech companies, I don’t know, would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-1980s. This is like if you’re a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this. In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece. Thiel states that identifying the antichrist is possibly “hard to do in the present and always sort of controversial”, but that “you at least identify the antichrist in literature”. He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war: The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work. Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure. In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation. Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month. Do Thiel’s arguments make sense? In a word, no. For one representative example, look to his muddled, contradictory summation of who the antichrist may be: There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power?

Dara Kerr,Nick Robins-Early
Cocktail of the week: Beckford Canteen’s orange and cardamom martini – recipe
Technology

Cocktail of the week: Beckford Canteen’s orange and cardamom martini – recipe

As winter looms ever nearer, here’s a riff on an all-time classic that’s imbued with the flavours and aromas of the colder months ahead. Orange and cardamom martini For the infusion (makes 10 serves)20 green cardamom pods, gently crushed 750ml vodka For the drink1 tbsp marmalade 75ml cardamom-infused vodka (see above and method) 20ml Cointreau 10ml lemon juice 1 orange twist, to garnish First make the infusion. Drop the crushed cardamom pods into the bottle of vodka, seal and leave to steep overnight. The next day, fine-strain the vodka into a clean bottle or jar, seal and store in the fridge or freezer, where it will keep almost indefinitely. To build the drink, gently melt the marmalade in a small pan, then tip into a shaker. Measure in all the liquids, fill the shaker with ice and hard shake. Double-strain into a frozen or chilled martini glass and serve garnished with a twist of orange. Charlotte Hartnell, Beckford Canteen, Bath

Charlotte Hartnell
English democracy relies on local councillors. So why are so many facing the axe? | Polly Toynbee
Technology

English democracy relies on local councillors. So why are so many facing the axe? | Polly Toynbee

It’s extraordinary that a profound reshaping – and shrinking – of our democracy is happening under our noses, and virtually no one notices. For baffling reasons, soon after the general election a government with a sky-high in-tray of problems embarked on a gigantic local council reorganisation no one knew about. It didn’t feature in the manifesto, nor in the local government secretary Steve Reed’s conference speech last week – but England has plans to axe unknown numbers of local councillors – some estimates put it at nearly 90%. The white paper outlining these plans actually boasts that there will be “fewer local politicians”, pandering disgracefully to the general scorn for politics. Yet voters trust councillors twice as much as they do Westminister politicians. For all the talk of localism and connecting to neighbourhoods, these are the unheralded foot soldiers of democracy. It is councillors who run political parties and much that binds their communities. Few people ever join political parties, yet the whole tottering democratic system relies entirely on those who do. Running the council and becoming a councillor is part of party members’ purpose and motivation. Abolishing so many will diminish democratic engagement over time. Many councils will be ordered to merge into unitary councils to serve a population of at least 500,000, to deliver all local services; this will entail the abolition of hosts of district councils. (There is some “flexibility” for some with populations of fewer than 300,000.) Some won’t go quietly. Some submit alternative plans, grouping together so more of them survive. County councils, the winners from enlargement, strongly support the plan: today they launched a salvo urging the government to plough on and block their ears to the districts’ counter-plans. The budget approaches, a wretched brew of hard choices whichever way the chancellor turns. On all sides the beleaguered government faces bereft public services in need of money. The plight of councils is particularly serious: there is no money for social care’s escalating needs, Send children or the rising numbers being taken into care. There were smirks all round from other parties when Kent council, one of many captured by Reform, had to backtrack on nonsense promises for cutting of waste and taxes in its array of unicorn policies: within months Kent and the others declared defeat, finding few “net zero” and “equality” savings; it is likely to raise council tax by the maximum 5%. Council budgets have dwindled sharply as a proportion of all spending says Prof Tony Travers, local government expert at the London School of Economics, and now councils’ democratic voice will shrink too. Hoping to save money with fewer councils “rationalised” under larger unitaries means some will be enormous. North Yorkshire will be a three-hour drive across; forget delivery close to home. Is there a perfectly efficient size of council? “No,” says Travers. “There’s no evidence that Hampshire, with its district councils, is better or worse governed than say, Shropshire or Buckinghamshire unitaries.” Will this save money? House of Commons library research finds: “It is not clear from available evidence whether unitary councils save money compared with a two-tier system.” Portsmouth, one of the many towns and cities resisting, protests that its 208,000 population is an adequate size: it already delivers all services well, has no debts, and no wish to be swallowed by Hampshire. Susan Brown, Labour leader of Oxford city council with 166,000 people, is struggling to avoid being eaten by Oxfordshire into a monster council unitary of 750,000. She tells me she’s bidding to enlarge the city’s border to include its green belt, and become a unitary controlling all their services. All these boundaries will be marked out finally next March by the minister. Does anyone care much, when most are clueless about what councils do and few vote in local elections? Well they may sit up and take notice when it dawns on them that Ipswich, Norwich, Exeter, Reading and many more ancient towns and cities will be devoured by mega-county councils that feel distant, not local at all. It may dawn on Labour MPs that this is a reverse gerrymander, damaging parties of the left. Many of these lost town councils have been little islands of Liberal Democrat yellow and Labour red, amid deep blue counties, which will now outvote them. Besides, Reform will sweep through quite a lot more next May. Don’t lose these small strongholds. Britain already has fewer elected representatives than European countries of a similar size, says Travers. Cavalier map planners at Westminster never consider how reorganisations cause huge waste of time and effort. Council CEOs complain of time spent on this, amid all their other crises. What to do about contracts when the council may no longer be there? Who wants to absorb Thurrock with its £1bn debt? Oxfordshire county council just signed an eight-year highways contract: can that be unpicked if Susan Brown of Oxford city gets her way? The government will have to relent and allow many of these districts to team up into their own smaller unitaries, closer to their citizens. You may have fallen asleep by now: local authority politics rarely electrify. But when this actually happens, the government may find people care more than expected about losing their council. Councils need three vital reforms: the creation of a promised national social care service and an urgent reform of property taxation, starting with the preposterous council tax. And proportional representation elections to stop takeovers with minority support. People will ask: why did they go with this mighty distraction instead? Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Polly Toynbee
Previous 8 9 10 11 12 Next