Reaction

3ETD52A PA images via Alamy This is my newsletter for paying subscribers. Thank you for your support. For a leader who had just been deposed by his party, Sir Keir Starmer was attracting a lot of compliments in the hours following the delivery of his resignation statement last Monday.

To understand how thoroughly corrupted Scotland’s public life became under Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party it helps to watch a video filmed by one of the nation’s broadcasters (I was going to say state broadcaster) six years ago this week in May 2020. Scottish children were recorded leaving messages saying “thank you” to Sturgeon “for always keeping us safe”.

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In a previous life I would have been up all night watching the election results and, with a cold towel wrapped around my head, written thousands of words of analysis for one or other newspaper trying to make sense of what the voters had just decided. These days, having left the circus, I’m detached and instead had a good night’s sleep on Thursday into Friday, woke refreshed and after a train journey to Glasgow only tuned into the results late.

London Defence Conference 10 April 2026 Photo: Rahil Ahmed. Lord Robertson celebrated his 80th birthday last weekend. I assume the former NATO Secretary General spent it on his beloved Islay, the beautiful Scottish island that is, among its other claims to fame, home to nine whisky distilleries.

Marco Ricci and Sebastiano Ricci’s ‘Landscape with Classical Ruins and Figures’. Credit: Jimlop collection Can I let you into a secret? I’m increasingly unconvinced by Substack as a format. Perhaps it is odd for someone who writes here on Substack to acknowledge the shortcomings of this publishing platform, but there you go.

Plumes of smoke rise over the oil depot tanks hit by Israel-US overnight in Tehran, Iran on 8 March (via UPI/ Alamy/3DYM500) This is my newsletter for paying subscribers. Thank you for supporting. If you haven’t read Ed Conway’s book Material World from a few years back, can I suggest that in the context of what just happened to oil prices amid the war in the Middle East you do so, immediately? The premise is simple, even if the text is rich in detail.

Amer Ghazzal via Alamy GF476K This is my newsletter for paying subscribers. Thank you for your support. In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, the villain of the piece (or one of the villains, the one who conveniently for the other characters gets all the blame) contemplates his imminent downfall and disgrace which must surely come the next morning. Melmotte has imbibed and is in a morose mood.

President Bush and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister on the steps of Number 10 in June 1988. Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix via Alamy B4J64X I was invited to deliver the defence lecture at Newcastle University ten days ago, as part of their public lecture series.

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