Food For Thought

Lower inflation does not mean that prices are going down. It means only that they are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked, and in this case only by very, very slightly less. Today's inflation rate comes straight after yesterday's unemployment figures, so whatever happened to the impossibility of mass unemployment and galloping inflation at the same time?

Heaven help us all if the price of our staple foods were ever to be set by Rachel Reeves, but if that really were a competitive market, then no such intervention would have occurred to anyone. Rishi Sunak wanted to do it in May 2023, when the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party was Lee Anderson. And now, this. Does Yvette Cooper agree with Ed Balls that Reeves was comparable to Stalin?

Nothing would be done about any of this by Wes Streeting, whose resignation statement was heard by a half-empty chamber, with Streeting himself flanked by Jess Phillips but otherwise surrounded by interning nephews, nieces and godchildren who had been granted special dispensation to sit on the green benches. 

Yet as for Andy Burnham, he cleaves to the position of the last Conservative Government that male bodies should be allowed in the ladies' if their owners felt like it, and he therefore has no reason to oppose the continuation of that Government's austerity programme, either. These things are all of a piece, along with the ban on British oil and gas while buying it from Russia, just as we have spent 40 years importing coal from child and slave labour at the ends of the Earth while sitting on a thousand years' worth of our own.

To Be Investigated Thoroughly

Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife write:

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and his head of communications were briefed about Labour Together’s controversial investigation into journalists more than two years ago, Democracy for Sale can reveal.

Morgan McSweeney and Paul Ovenden were kept in the loop about APCO’s work for Labour Together. The US PR firm was paid over £30,000 to “investigate the sourcing, funding and origins” of a Sunday Times story in November 2023 about the think tank’s undeclared funding that helped drive Starmer’s leadership victory.

In an email ahead of a proposed meeting with APCO’s Tom Harper in January 2024, Labour Together’s then boss Josh Simons wrote: “Tom will be delivering his report on Paul Holden on Monday. Can we find a time for Tom, Morgan, Paul and me to meet or zoom in HQ sometime after next week?”

The email was sent to McSweeney and Ovenden’s Labour party email addresses. At the time both men were Labour party employees. Six months later, they joined the heart of Starmer’s Downing Street operation.

Labour figures confirmed that a meeting subsequently took place, though it is unclear what was discussed. They said the material presented was heavily redacted. They added that McSweeney and Ovenden knew about the report and approved of it but neither commissioned nor helped write it. Starmer himself was not aware of its existence, they added.

They added that McSweeney and Ovenden took Simons at his word that he believed that there had been a hack of sensitive Labour Together materials. “At the time Josh was concerned about where this stuff had come from and was looking into it,” said one.

Alison Phillips, CEO of ThinkLabour said that she remained “shocked at the work undertaken by APCO in 2023 for Labour Together.”

“It was indefensible and, as a former journalist, I believe it was work that should not have been commissioned or undertaken,” Philips added.

APCO’s subsequent report for Labour Together spuriously suggested that the organisation had been the victim of a Russian hack fed to a “pro-Kremlin network” and cast aspersions on the political and religious background of journalists, including author Paul Holden and the Sunday Times’s Gabriel Pogrund.

Simons, who resigned from the Cabinet Office in February in the wake of the scandal, recently stood down from his Makerfield seat to allow Andy Burnham to run.

Tom Harper, as we reported earlier this month, is no longer with APCO after it emerged that he told a contractor to “get rid of” documents related to the PR firm’s Labour Together work. The think tank rebranded as ThinkLabour in recent weeks.

The Labour party has always maintained that Labour Together was “a separate legal entity”, and that the party had no involvement in APCO’s campaign to discredit journalists who were digging into the think tank’s undeclared funding.

But the revelation that McSweeney and Ovenden were looped into Harper’s work for Labour Together raises more uncomfortable questions for Starmer and Labour about the whole affair.

McSweeney, long seen as Starmer’s right hand man, resigned three months ago, shortly after we first reported on APCO’s work for Labour Together. But the former adviser reportedly has been back in Downing Street in recent days, counselling an embattled Starmer.

Ovenden, who left government last year after explicit text messages about Labour MP Diane Abbott emerged, recently set up a PR company. As we previously reported, Ovenden’s wife Kate Forrester worked for APCO and was on Labour Together’s advisory board at the time APCO was commissioned.

The email between Simons, Harper, McSweeney and Ovenden is part of a trove of documents obtained by Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, through a subject access request to Labour Together and shared with Democracy for Sale.

Email correspondence shows that Harper - a former Sunday Times journalist whose wife, Caroline Wheeler, was that paper’s political editor until earlier this year - subsequently told Simons to submit a report to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) saying that he suspected Labour Together had been hacked.

“I would emphasise that you are a political organization closely affiliated to the Labour Party and you believe that the hack on your systems is an attempt to interfere with the UK’s political processes by a hostile state actor in the run-up to a general election,” Harper wrote. “That should focus their minds.”

Simons then wrote to the National Cyber Security Centre, saying he believed sensitive personal information had been obtained as a result of a hack of the Electoral Commission.

He suggested that Holden was “part of a far-left network…which disseminates pro-Russian propaganda, including questioning of the Russian attacks on Sergei Skripal”.

And he told the NCSC that he believed the coverage to be part of a “co-ordinated effort to discredit Keir Starmer and Labour ahead of the general election.”

The emails also suggest that Simons shared the NCSC complaint with journalists. In one instance he forwarded his complaint to a journalist at The Guardian. We understand the Guardian journalist was not its political editor, Pippa Crerar. (Crerar subsequently worked on a story about an alleged hack of Labour Together that was not published.)

However, a report commissioned by Labour Together this year - after it commissioned cybersecurity experts - found that Holden’s materials were probably leaked by an individual rather than the result of a hack.

“We have reasonable evidence to believe that the materials were not hacked at Labour Together but leaked by a source at (redacted).”

Paul Holden said the “documents show that the deeply invasive investigation into me, my family, colleagues and associates was, in effect, a joint project on the part of Labour Together, APCO and the highest levels of the Labour Party, including Morgan McSweeney.”

“It is clear that only a part of this story has yet emerged. There is an urgent need for a full Parliamentary inquiry into the history and conduct of Labour Together.”

A Labour Party Spokesperson said: “The freedom of the press is a cornerstone of our democracy. The Labour Party remains firmly committed to upholding and protecting that freedom, which is vital in ensuring journalists are able to rightly hold public figures to account.

“Any suggestion that the Labour Party had any role in the commissioning of this report would be incorrect. Labour Together have themselves acknowledged that the scope of the work carried out through this report was indefensible.”

Alison Phillips, CEO of ThinkLabour said: “ThinkLabour is a very different organisation today compared to Labour Together then and what was done does not reflect and represent what we stand for and how we operate today under my leadership.”

Simons has previously said that he was “surprised and shocked” by APCO’s report, and claimed that the PR firm had gone beyond the terms of its contract.

Calls for a parliamentary inquiry into Labour Together’s conduct have grown in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Commons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told Labour MP John McDonnell that his concerns about APCO’s work for the think tank needed “to be investigated thoroughly”.

The Serious Fraud Office is separately understood to be in receipt of a disclosure concerning APCO’s destruction of documents relating to its work for Labour Together.

Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein therefore state:

On Wednesday last week we received documents from Labour Together following Subject Access Requests that we submitted to Labour Together in February 2026. The documents provided by Labour Together are deeply disturbing.

They show that Labour Together and APCO targeted us, our colleagues, our associates and Paul’s family with utterly false and highly defamatory allegations, and that this was done with the knowledge of the highest levels of the Labour Party. Indeed, we are now of the view that the operation to investigate us, our families and associates was effectively a joint operation run by the Labour Party, Labour Together and APCO.

This highly invasive campaign was launched because of Paul’s factually accurate reporting. This reporting raised serious questions about whether Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney deliberately failed to report £730,000 in donations to the Electoral Commission in violation of the law. It is now plain that Sir Keir Starmer benefited from the work funded by these donations and that they facilitated his rise to power.

We are calling for a full inquiry into Labour Together.

We also call on Sir Keir Starmer to clarify his role in this scandal. Considering the documents that have been disclosed to date, we find it nearly inconceivable that Sir Keir Starmer did not know about this despicable project that included Labour Together reporting us to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), a part of GCHQ, based on utterly false and highly defamatory allegations. These highly defamatory allegations were then shared with at least one major newspaper outlet.

The newly released documents reveal six important facts. 

First, they show that Morgan McSweeney and Paul Ovenden were aware of the APCO and Labour Together investigation into us from at least January 2024. McSweeney was the Labour Party’s head of campaigns and subsequently Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff in Number 10. Paul Ovenden was the Director of Labour Party communications and subsequently Head of Strategy in Number 10.

The emails show Simons arranging a meeting between himself, Ovenden, McSweeney and Tom Harper, a senior APCO employee, to discuss the investigation into us. A third Labour employee was copied into the email, but, because of redactions, we do not know who this is. We ask the Labour Party to confirm who else was copied into this correspondence.

The excellent Peter Geoghegan and Democracy for Sale have confirmed with a Labour Party source that the intended meeting did take place.

Second, they show that APCO’s Tom Harper actively coached Josh Simons and Labour Together on how to submit a ‘crime complaint’ about us to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ. Harper provided text for Simons to submit to the NCSC. The decision to complain about us to the NCSC was made only days after Simons had emailed McSweeney, Ovenden and Harper about APCO’s upcoming report into us, asking for a meeting to discuss its contents.

Third, Josh Simons has repeatedly claimed in public that he appointed APCO to investigate a ‘hack’ of Labour Together materials. But the new documents show that Labour Together and Simons did not conduct any meaningful cybersecurity review to establish whether materials had been hacked from Labour Together, or where else they may have been sourced from. Labour Together did, however, appoint a cybersecurity expert to review a potential hack in late 2025. This review, a summary of which has now been disclosed to us, shows that there was no ‘hack’ of Labour Together. This is obviously true, as we have repeatedly explained that the investigation into Labour Together was based on documents legally leaked from the Labour Party by whistleblowers concerned about misconduct by the Party’s most senior officials, open-source materials, and Freedom of Information requests.

Fourth, they show that Josh Simons and Labour Together told the NCSC that they were reporting us because they were concerned that Paul’s reporting ‘may be a co-ordinated effort to discredit Labour Together in order to undermine Mr McSweeney and by extension, Mr. Starmer in the run-up to next year’s general election.’ It is our view that this joint Labour Together, Labour Party and APCO operation was launched because Paul’s factually accurate reporting would have shed light on the highly problematic and unlawful aspects of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power.

Fifth, they show that APCO had sent a ‘case summary’ to Josh Simons of Labour Together on the 20th of November 2020, on the basis of which APCO were contracted by Labour Together two days later. The ‘case summary’, setting out a proposed scope of work, clearly identified us as journalists. From the very beginning, therefore, APCO and Labour Together knew that they were looking to investigate journalists – the very journalists who were reporting accurately on Labour Together, Morgan McSweeney and undeclared donations.

Sixth, they show that Simons wrote to an unknown person at the Labour Party in November 2023 asking for ‘intel’ on us. This shows that Simons’ immediate response to announcement of Paul’s book was to seek the assistance of the Labour Party. At the time, we were both Labour Party members. The reply to Simons’ request has been redacted in our documents. We call on the Labour Party to release all documents to us relevant to this scandal, and to confirm whether Josh Simons, Labour Together or APCO were provided with any of our private, personal information.

The Truth Must Await

Dan Hodges writes:

On Friday I was shown a bombshell message from a senior source close to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).

It said that at least one member of the committee thought it would be unlikely the Prime Minister would be able to survive the publication of the second tranche of documents relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson.

I then spoke to someone who works alongside officials working on the release of the papers. 'I've been told the same thing,' they revealed. 'The general feeling is the documents will be terminal for the Prime Minister.'

That would explain why yesterday No. 10 took a giant shovel and suddenly announced it was burying every last one of them.

According to Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, a 'small number' of documents relating to Mandelson had suddenly materialised. These had finally been submitted to the ISC. But as a result, this had delayed the publication process, meaning none of them will now be published until after the Whitsun recess, which ends on June 1.

This was, of course, a total farce. What Jones was in fact describing seemed to be an old-fashioned – if increasingly desperate, shambolic and transparent – cover-up. As ISC member Jeremy Wright revealed to the House of Commons, the Government is now flagrantly attempting to 'redact documents for other reasons... or, in some cases, to withhold documents altogether'.

Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, was even more blunt. 'My Committee and the ISC are trying our best to get to the truth, and we are having obstacles put in our way,' she declared.

The reason those obstacles are being erected is blatantly obvious. They have nothing to do with the danger of prejudicing national security or offending Britain's diplomatic partners. They are about trying to prop up Keir Starmer so he can stagger through the final few weeks of his premiership.

When the Mandelson saga first unfolded, the question on everyone's lips was whether the files that were due to be released by – or rather, dragged out of – the Government would contain a 'smoking gun' to finish off the Prime Minister. And it quickly became apparent that, at least as far as Sir Keir's increasingly paranoid No.10 team was concerned, they did.

MPs first demanded the disclosure of the documents on February 4. At that time, we were told the relevant papers would be released in hours. This quickly turned into days. Then we were told the release of the documents would be staggered. A month later, on March 11, a smattering of largely irrelevant files was released. The rest of the documents would be published in advance of the local elections, journalists and MPs were told. The publication was pushed back until after those elections, but before recess. Now they are not being published until after recess.

Meanwhile, whilst the timetable was being repeatedly gerrymandered, a concerted effort was launched to 'disappear' much of the most sensitive evidence. Mobile phones were mysteriously stolen. Texts were erased via WhatsApp's 'disappearing messages' function, which deletes correspondence automatically. Entire documents vanished from Government servers.

Yesterday I spoke to a minister about what they thought was going on. They conceded that they thought some 'mundane bureaucracy' was at work.

But they also conceded political skulduggery was at play. 'If they wanted to publish 90 per cent of the documents this week, then say 'there's a little more to come', they could have done. So the question is why they have opted to make a s**t week even worse.'

The answer is the parlous political health of the Prime Minister. On Saturday, I was told by a senior cabinet minister that, despite the bombastic rhetoric of the past 24 hours, Keir Starmer has indeed decided to step down. But he is adamant that he be given the space to do so in a manner of his own choosing.

His great fear is that when the Mandelson papers are finally published, that opportunity will finally be snatched away from him. Not unreasonably. Sir Keir is now so weakened in the eyes of his vengeful party that it will no longer take a smoking gun to finish him off. A smoking pea-shooter will almost certainly do the trick.

So, as with just about every aspect of this rapidly stagnating government, paralysis has taken hold. Ministers and Labour MPs are desperate to get the Mandelson papers published, so they can absorb the final hit and move on. But the Prime Minister believes that blow – regardless of how weak or severe – will prove terminal.

So the cover-up continues. And the truth must await the slow, lingering political demise of the infirm occupant of Downing Street.

Special Administration?

Helena Horton and Sandra Laville write:

A billionaire Donald Trump donor could make millions from a deal being struck between the government and Thames Water.

The UK’s largest water company, ministers and creditors are at an impasse as they try to agree a rescue deal to stave off Thames’s collapse. The water company built up a £17.6bn debt pile in the decades after its privatisation.

Elliott Investment Management is one of the leading creditors, in a group that includes Silver Point Capital, BlackRock and M&G. The consortium of hedge funds – known as London & Valley Water – is attempting to take over Thames in a multibillion-pound restructuring.

Elliott’s founder and co-chief executive, Paul Singer, one of finance’s most colourful characters, once ordered the impounding of an Argentinian navy ship after the country failed to pay its debts. His company is accused of catalysing Argentina’s bond crisis by aggressively pursuing the country’s debts.

The Thames bid appears to be a family affair. Sources close to the deal say the point person at Elliott for Thames Water is Singer’s son Gordon, who runs the firm’s London office. In 2024, Gordon attempted to donate nearly £2,000 to Robert Jenrick’s failed run for the Conservative party leadership; the money was returned and deemed “impermissible” by the Electoral Commission, reportedly because Gordon’s address was not up to date at the time.

Singer, 81, donated $5m (£3.73m) to Make America Great Again Inc, Trump’s Super Pac, and tens of millions more in 2024 to Trump’s allies, including $37m to support the election of Republicans to Congress.

Cat Hobbs, of the campaign group We Own It, said: “Trump wants control over NHS drug prices, and his mega donor Singer wants control over our water. ‘Absolutely not’ should be the answer of any government that considers itself patriotic.”

Elliott was part of a consortium that secured a winning bid for Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, for $8.8bn two months before Trump arrested Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

This sale was forced by a Delaware court and was reported to be at a “massive discount” as the Venezuelan government valued the company at $18bn. More money is expected to be made as US companies will control the oil produced, which is unlikely to be subject to sanctions.

If the Thames deal goes through, Singer, whom Bloomberg has called “the most feared investor in the world”, will be among those controlling the water of 16 million people in London and the Thames valley. He is used to a healthy return on his investments, with average annual returns of 14%.

As is Elliott’s style, the creditors’ demands of the government are typically aggressive, asking for the company to be let off fines for four years, which could be worth up to £1bn. They are also requesting leniency on environmental measures, including pollution, leakage and other performance targets imposed a year ago.

A tidy profit is already going to be made on the debt: the creditors gave Thames a £3bn loan with a high annual interest rate of up to 9.75%, to be paid for through customer bills.

Critics argue the deal could allow Thames to continue to pollute with impunity.

The deal is also under threat because of the uncertainty around the Labour leadership. Andy Burnham, tipped to be the next prime minister should he win the byelection in Makerfield next month, has said he wants to bring water companies back under public control.

Lena Swedlow, the deputy director of Compass, a centre-left campaign group with close links to Burnham, said: “These people do not have any interest or business running a water company. They are not utility providers, they are vulture capitalists. They should be allowed nowhere near resources that are important for our health, our planet and our national security.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South and a leading advocate of returning the water industry to public ownership, said handing over Thames to the likes of Singer and Elliott Management would be like “throwing red meat to the wolves”.

“The fact that he is known as a vulture capitalist should tell you everything about how inappropriate this deal is … these kinds of people are there to suck the lifeblood out of our utilities and public services, and this deal should not be rushed through.”

The regulator, Ofwat, has been heavily criticised for opening the door after 2010 to allow private equity and international hedge funds to take over England’s water companies, enabling short-term profit at the expense of vital infrastructure upgrades and environmental protection. Seven out of 10 privatised water and sewerage companies are now controlled by private equity investors, and a similar number of English water companies are in foreign ownership.

Singer has a modus operandi to target underperforming public companies, overhaul the board, ruthlessly cut costs and force restructuring and often a sale of the company.

Government sources say negotiations with the creditors have been intense. Ministers are terrified of a Liz Truss-style bond market meltdown, which the negotiators say will happen if the deal fails and Thames Water falls into special administration. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is said to have been spooked, and government sources say she has been vehemently against such an outcome.

A spokesperson for the London & Valley Water consortium said: “Experienced turnaround investors have worked constructively and in good faith with regulators and officials to design an ambitious, long-term turnaround plan which holds Thames Water to account and delivers a step-change for customers and the environment.”

A government spokesperson said: “The government will always act in the national interest on these issues. The company remains financially stable, but we stand ready for all eventualities, including applying for a special administration regime if that were to become necessary.”

A Thames Water spokesperson said: “As we have previously stated and was upheld by the high court last year, customers will not pay the cost of the interest on the super-senior funding.”

Though the company claims customers will not directly pay the interest on the loan, a third of each customer bill currently goes towards servicing debt. The company aimed to use part of the funding to pay the interest, however this has not taken place and Thames is due to run out of funds in November, meaning customers could end up footing the bill.

Elliott Investment Management declined to comment.

Why We Should Explore Space

It makes me feel my age to type that Sebastian Milbank writes:

Over 50 years ago, the first manned mission to the moon took its crew further beyond our planet than any people in history. For 30 unsettling minutes, they were out of contact with the earth, passing over a stark and silent landscape that had never been seen by the naked eye.

As contact resumed, an extraordinary vision presented itself to the astronauts — the earth rising like the sun over the lunar horizon, blazing with life and light. It was Christmas Eve, in 1968, and thousands of young men — and civilians — were dying in the war in Vietnam. Yet to the lonely souls caught in the void of space, it appeared as a “grand oasis”. Speaking to an audience of millions, they read the first verses of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth … ”.

After a very long hiatus, humans orbited the moon again. The Artemis II mission blasted off on a clear April evening, hurling its passengers yet further than Apollo 8, as they passed 4,000 miles above the lunar surface. On Easter Day 2026 crewman Victor Glover, who teaches Sunday school in his spare time, spoke of “the beauty of creation” and the unity of the human race.

There is something about space flight, especially in its most ambitious forms, which sparks religious awe. Indeed, for the generally pretty secular scientific community, space is something of a theological proxy, offering, in fantasy or speculation, the prospect of meeting transcendently wise non-human beings, the mysteries of creation and apocalypse and pilgrimage to the promised land.

Just like the wondering and weary souls gazing at the “earthrise” in 1968, the humanity of 2026 is in desperate need of a message of hope. But for all its fleeting majesty and genius, is Artemis II a cause for real optimism or the ultimate escapism? Is it easier to look up at the moon than it is to read about Gaza, Iran, Sudan or a million other miseries, global and local?

❂ 

Caught in the parallels of the moment, it is worth remembering the vast gulf of time that separates Apollo and Artemis. Despite being into middle age, not one of the Artemis astronauts was alive when the last moon mission flew in 1972. After the initial flurry of excitement, the realities of a new age shouldered aside the hopes of interstellar exploration. Opponents had long branded it a “moondoggle”. The same year the first orbit of the moon was completed, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and a growing mood of violence, pessimism and division seized America.

Gil Scott-Heron, a songwriter and poet of the time, lyricised, “A rat done bit my sister Nell / With Whitey on the moon / Her face and arms began to swell / And Whitey’s on the moon.” Cynicism set in on left and right alike, crime exploded and an epidemic of domestic terrorism saw 50 to 60 bombings a year by the mid-1970s. The oil shock slowed the roaring growth of the 1960s, and trust in shared institutions gave way to an age of deconstruction and suspicion of authority.

In purely technical terms, NASA was fully prepared to mount a mission to Mars by 1982. Project Rover had developed the technology to build nuclear-powered rockets twice as efficient as chemical equivalents. It was not to be. The space programme was gutted by Nixon, and, despite successes such as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, manned space exploration itself was abandoned as too expensive to justify.

Plans to go back to the moon have been subject to false starts ever since, the latest of which was the Constellation program under President Bush in the 2000s, subsequently cancelled by President Obama. Artemis itself rests on the slenderest of political threads, signed off by President Trump, who was eager to add a moon mission to swell his boundless ego but who has cut the rest of NASA’s budget aggressively.

Now as then, large-scale scientific projects without immediate practical applications are vulnerable to partisans of left and right. Progressives see “whitey on the moon” as the poor go hungry, not to mention the fact that they are now counting the carbon emissions too, whilst the contemporary right sees it as wasteful big government largesse.

❂ 

It seems strange to label something as futuristic as space exploration old-fashioned, but, looked at culturally, it is distinctively retro. We are now sceptical of grand projects and totalising worldviews, obsessed with individual identity and resolutely utilitarian and commercial in our habits of thought. The extraordinary effort of Apollo, which employed over 400,000 people and today’s equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars of state spending, was in a sense the twilight achievement of a post-war consensus, when right and left alike believed in the power of collective action, state planning, science and engineering to positively shape human destiny.

This was also the last period of monumental architecture, grand urban planning and lavish international expositions like the Festival of Britain or the phenomenally successful 1970 Osaka International Expo entitled “Progress and Harmony for Mankind”. At a certain point, Western societies started asking “Why?” instead of “Why not?”. An individualist and egalitarian culture became suspicious of extravagance, whether public or private.

When it comes to manned space flight, the immediate short-term benefits are limited and fall far short of the massive costs in resources, capital and labour. It does little for economic growth and less for public welfare. Even the strongest argument in its arsenal — scientific discovery — can arguably be achieved more efficiently, and certainly more cheaply, by robots and automated systems.

Spiritually, going to the moon has more in common with the building of the great gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe than it does the construction of an oil rig or an aeroplane. Like the gothic cathedral, it is an extraordinary work of engineering and collective human genius, and, like the cathedral, it escapes cost-benefit analysis. It is the answer not to “Why”, but to “Why not?” We have vast resources, huge surpluses of labour, creativity, capital and energy, unprecedented comforts and luxuries. Why not do something extraordinary, something that lifts the human spirit, something that serves not ourselves but our distant descendants?

The benefits and lessons of Apollo are being realised today, decades onwards, as are the costs and dangers of abandoning the adventurous and heroic spirit of shared endeavour that animated it. Much of the digital technological mastery that we take for granted was dreamed up in big government laboratories at the height of the Cold War. Not the least element of this was Apollo and the space program itself, which were crucial to spurring the development of miniaturised computers and semiconductors — the building blocks of today’s digital revolution.

The dangerous but glamorous work of putting men and women into space attracted brilliant young minds and captured the imagination of a generation. The ground team that launched Apollo was an average of 28 years old. The civilisation that reached out to the stars was a younger, braver, more ambitious and more energetic culture than our own aging, safety-obsessed society.

Such a society is notably worse at providing what younger people need, both materially and spiritually. Artemis II, amongst other things, is a testament to what sort of opportunities, despite everything, America can offer its citizens when it invests in shared endeavour. Both the mission commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover are former college athletes and veterans of the US army. College sports and military service have long been reliable ladders of social mobility, offering young men and women both the material nurture of education, housing and pay, but, just as importantly, the prospects of heroism, fame and adventure. How far can you go if you have some wits and athleticism and apply yourself? In America, today, the answer to that question is the moon.

It’s a lesson Britain, which recently folded its independent space agency into another government department, might do well to learn. As extraordinary as the opportunity to go into space may be for the few who are lucky enough to get it, the most important element of manned space flight is its ability to inspire. This happens directly, by pushing at the limits of science and engineering, but just as significant is the indirect sparking of young imaginations, opening up pathways into science, medicine, engineering and technology.

If we only ask how much the Artemis II mission cost or even just limit ourselves to what data was retrieved, we will have asked the wrong questions. What has kept us from going back to the moon for so long, and what is likely to hold us back from testing the limits of science in future?

❂ 

Ironically for a question of material progress, the answer may be theological in nature. Peter Thiel has puzzled over why we have raced ahead in the world of “bits” — computing, software, communications — whilst stagnating in the realm of “atoms” — energy, transport, material science. The answer could be contained in the question. We have fixated on the virtual over the physical. The world’s fair was abandoned in large part because television could bring spectacle to the screens of every household much more cheaply than giant global gatherings. Mastering data has allowed us to speed things along via perpetual “optimisation” rather than faster vehicles or more powerful engines.

This privileging of simulacra over substance may have its origins in materialism itself. According to the leading materialist philosophers like Daniel Dennett, human consciousness itself is virtual — our apparent experience of having a mind is an “epiphenomenon”, a ghost in the machine with no ability to affect material causation. Why labour to build paradise on earth when you can simply simulate it?

Likewise, the apparent technological mastery of information presents another dangerous lure away from the difficult and lengthy business of real innovation. Why try and grow the pie if you can perfectly allocate the portions? “Just in time” production is one of the great fruits of the digital revolution, seamlessly integrating economic activity across continents with astonishing speed. There are real benefits to such systems, but the terrible risk is that they create a collective worship of efficiency and a narcissistic cult of self-optimisation. Rather than taking transformative risks, society attempts to calculate its way to a Benthamite summum bonum. 

❂ 

For all the achievements and vitality of post-war society, it was its very materialistic worship of scientific and social engineering that ultimately undid its highest material achievement and sparked the demise of space flight.

If all that matters is human pain and pleasure and our fleeting peace and comfort here on Earth, there really is no need to explore the cosmos, or to look beyond our immediate collective self-interest. Like the medieval masons of old, the architects of astrological exploration must find ways to root risky endeavour in a transcendent order.

Space exploration, if we dare to pursue it, will someday help lead to unimaginable breakthroughs and opportunities. But the great chance and opportunity it offers to us today is not economic growth or the relief of worldly suffering. It is the chance to explore the majesty of creation in the fear and trembling of naked flesh — an infinite field of adventure in which to test our humanity.

Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way. That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”.

Construction and Roofing

Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, or anyone else, it is a yes-no question: will you release the Mandelson Files as required by the Intelligence and Security Committee in accordance with the Humble Address? If not, then you are unfit to be Prime Minister.

Against Burnham at Makerfield, Advance UK has endorsed Restore Britain, so the endorsement of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is no doubt imminent. At Gorton and Denton, that secured Advance fewer votes than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which is also standing this time. But Burnham versus Robert Kenyon is a much more serious contest, so do not be surprised if the vote for Rebecca Shepherd, however small, was larger than the margin of victory. Rupert Lowe has already denied Reform UK overall control of Norfolk County Council.

And the questions about Nigel Farage's money are not going to go away. Nor are those about Zack Polanski's. He broke the relevant marina agreement by living full-time in his houseboat to the point of registering to vote there, not that he did in fact vote in the recent local elections, but he did not register to pay Council Tax at that, his home address. "Paying it back" does not pay the debt to society. We have not seen the like since David Laws, who stole more than it would have been possible to have stolen in Housing Benefit, yet who was not only never prosecuted, but back attending Cabinet little more than two years later, continuing to do so for the rest of the Coalition.

Still, nothing about either Reform or the Green Party, with their strikingly similar and indeed connected subcultures, is anything like as odd as the arson trial of Keir Starmer's Ukrainian gentlemen callers. Roman Lavrynovych has been declared mentally disabled, having scored 66 on the general ability index, with anything below 70 being considered "intellectual disability". Yet he is the sole director of the construction and roofing company that bears his name. Think on.

At First Sight

Robert Kenyon would have wiped the floor with any Labour candidate other than Andy Burnham, so Kenyon versus Burnham will be a proper contest, as it should be. As to other candidates, electoral pacts are wrong in principle, because votes belong to voters, not to parties. Something similar is true of that suddenly fashionable thing, "vetting". By the way, unlike the BBC, Channel Four is an old-fashioned publicly owned company the way British Gas used to be. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher. Do you want to own Married at First Sight, or Virgin Island, or Naked Attraction? But the vetting of parliamentary candidates is fundamentally and ultimately a matter for us, the electors.

For example, Burnham, whom the universe rewarded for his promise to stick to the fiscal rules of Rachel Reeves by announcing a rise in unemployment to five per cent, one in 20, with a youth figure of a resignation-worthy 16 per cent. What was that about what would happen if the national minimum wage were equalised regardless of age? Or about the impossibility of mass unemployment and galloping inflation at the same time? Three years ago, to the month, Rishi Sunak urged the supermarkets to cap the prices of staple foods, and food inflation was nothing like it is now. If the Right is opposed to Government interference in the setting of food prices, then the Conservative Party, Reform UK, Restore Britain and the Liberal Democrats will presumably all be going into the next General Election on a commitment to the abolition of farm subsidies. Thankfully, they will not. Not that I trust this Government to go about any of this in anything but the most catastrophic way, but even so.

Or any available Government, in fact. HS2 must have diamond-encrusted platinum tracks. The Leeds trams are costing £2.5 billion, so far, to arrive no earlier than the late 2030s. This is the country of your ever-increasing utility bills, of PPE, and of the money paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year. The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. And there is more. So very, very, very much more. Never, ever, ever let it be said that there was no money. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us. It was obviously a complete rip-off that we were paying £400 million per year to rent the Bibby Stockholm, an engineless barge, now 50 years old, that could not have been worth more than a few million pounds. Last month, Corporate Travel Management admitted to having overcharged by £118 million, but that would seem to be a very conservative estimate. Yet will even that be repaid? Political kickbacks? What do you think? And to only one party? What do you think? In that spirit, Kensington and Chelsea Council knowingly fitted Grenfell Tower with flammable cladding because it was otherwise considered an eyesore by its rich neighbours. Did they just ring up and ask? Think on.