The spectator - Britain has a Prime Minister problem

 

(personal underlines)

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Britain has a Prime Minister problem

Sam Leith27 April 2026, 5:45am

Britain's four most recent Prime Ministers at the Cenotaph (Getty Images)

I wrote not all that long ago about this disconcerting situation we’re in where the only news story the Prime Minister seems capable of generating is a news story about the likelihood of his losing his job. Let’s just say, things haven’t exactly changed.

In the first week of January, his nibs thrilled the world by giving an exclusive interview to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg (and no doubt he’d think of this as a decisive move to draw a line under frivolous speculation in the Westminster Bubble): “‘I’ll be PM this time next year,’ Starmer tells BBC.” Yesterday he thrilled the world by giving an exclusive interview to the Sunday Times: “Keir Starmer: ‘I can win the next election.’” Another decisive line drawn. The grown-ups are back in charge, and they’re drawing lines. He’s drawn so many lines under frivolous speculation, at this point, that the area under the Westminster bubble must now look like a particularly intense area of Edward Gorey cross-hatching.

To his inward fury and grief, I expect, the rest of the world in January replied, “No you jolly well won’t!”, and the rest of the world yesterday replied, “No you jolly well can’t!” The case he pressed yesterday was that, actually, the “vast majority” of the Labour Party secretly supports him (thinks he’s showing the courage to make the difficult decisions, doing the right thing for hardworking families in this nation he’s so proud to call his own, getting on with the job, blah blah) but you “never hear from” them. Why these admirers are reluctant to speak to the newspapers on or even off the record, or pipe up in Parliament, is just one of those mysteries.

And, as ever, he said all the standard things about how everyone saying he was useless doesn’t bother him. “You can’t be in politics, you can’t be the Prime Minister, if you let these things get to you,” he said. It’s a tough old game, politics. You learn to rise above it. And you show how you’re rising above it, apparently, by giving interviews to newspapers saying how effortlessly you’re rising above it. It’s worth noticing, incidentally, that Kemi Badenoch — who is up much the same creek with much the same shortage of nautical equipment — makes exactly the same noises. “I was telling someone only the other day how much I’m enjoying the job,” she said last week; “People who can’t deal with difficult times are not fit for government.”

Why do we go through this ludicrous pantomime? Why must senior politicians spend so much of their time insisting a) that they are not about to get the sack and b) that contrary to all we know about human nature in general and the egos of politicians in particular they positively relish everyone saying that they are useless and about to get the sack. They know they’re fibbing, and we know they’re fibbing, and they know we know they’re fibbing, and we know they know we know they’re fibbing — yet on it goes, like one of those rituals where they carry a duck backwards round the quad of an Oxford college once a year just because that’s what they’ve always done.

In fairness to these hapless politicians, there probably is something in the idea that the job security of Prime Ministers is a media obsession, and a self-fulfilling one at that. We like big stories, and we like human stories, and speculating on whether the PM’s about to lose his job is easy and fun compared to, for instance, trying to make sense – still less front-page box-office – of boring material about infrastructure and gilt yields. And, pleasingly from our point of view and disastrously from the point of view of our victims, enough talk about senior politicians being about to lose their job has a funny way of bringing just that eventuality about.

Never mind that the boring material about infrastructure and gilt yields is, in the end, the important stuff — and that the personality-led drama is an impediment to delivering it. Never mind that as Sam Freedman has argued forcefully in his recent book Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It, the problems we have are institutional: “People matter, but systems matter more.” My former colleague Fraser Nelson has made what seems to me a gloomily persuasive argument that it doesn’t follow from even a nailed-on case for ditching Starmer (on grounds of incompetence, weakness, dishonesty, annoyingness, ideological vacuity — take your pick) that what follows will be an improvement. We’ve been churning through Prime Ministers over the last few years, with the same apparent arbitrariness as the apocryphal newspaper proprietor (usually Lord Northcliffe) who complained that he’d had no luck with two fat editors on the jog so was going to try appointing a thin one. We’ve tried having a rogue as Prime Minister — now how about a maniac? Now let’s try a wetty. Hm. A dullard next? And so on.

Look, I do not come here to try to defend the PM. Even – perhaps especially – those of us inclined to give him a chance in the first place stand agog at quite what a disappointment he has been, quite how little he seems to stand for even the dismal competence he offered as a selling point at the last election. History’s dustbin yawns hungrily. But if we keep feeding that dustbin with quite such frequency, it won’t just be a succession of Prime Ministers it ends up swallowing.

The Spectator - Things can always get worse

 

(personal underlines)

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Things can always get worse

Douglas Murray

I have spent the past week marvelling at the behaviour of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. ‘He has to go’; ‘The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime’; ‘Things can’t go on like this’ – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in last week’s local elections.

The problem is that some of us have a long-ish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May? Do they not remember the snap election of 2017 which was meant to deliver a ‘strong and stable government’, but which resulted in this country almost suffering a parliamentary coup enabled by – of all people – John Bercow? Are the people who claim we have never been so badly governed lucky enough to have overlooked the years when Anna Soubry was forever on the airwaves?

Some of us also remember the Boris Johnson years. In my own view, Johnson ought to have been rinsed for tripling net immigration to the UK after promising that leaving the EU would enable the exact opposite. Instead, Britain spent months becoming acquainted with the investigations and character of Sue Gray. In parliament Starmer spent weeks forensically getting to the bottom of exactly where Johnson was when a cake arrived in the same room as him.

Along the way the media class had multiple ‘he must go’ moments. I remember sitting in the green room of Newsnight when the entire media and parliamentary class was in meltdown because Johnson had dared to use the word ‘humbug’ in reply to a female Labour MP. ‘Were you actually in the House when he used the word?’ one of the presenters asked an MP, as though it was like being present when the Washington Post received the Pentagon Papers or when Harry Truman got the news that the bomb was deliverable.

Once again the ‘never been worse governed/things can’t go on like this’ class got their way. And so the Conservative party membership, in their infinite wisdom, gave us the pleasure of Liz Truss. I suppose recollections may vary, but I for one recall that the prevailing sentiment during those weeks was that we had never been worse governed and that Britain’s problems could only be addressed – once again – by a change of prime minister.

The Rishi Sunak years are close enough in time to speak for themselves. But pray remember that when they were brought to a merciful halt there was also a strong belief that a change of prime minister would once again fix all of our ills.

After Starmer’s election victory, the left and centrist crowd spent some weeks crowing about how the grown-ups were back in the room. ‘Isn’t it nice that things are calm and professional again?’ they said. Now those same people are insisting that we once again need a change of prime minister.

Instead of joining these excitable cries, it seems to me that we would do better to ask: what exactly will be achieved if Starmer is replaced? Where is the bench of talent in the Labour party that will then lead our country? Ed Miliband was roundly rejected as a candidate for prime minister back in 2015, and it is hard to think of a more anti-democratic manoeuvre than the net-zero zealot and destroyer of industries being crowbarred in to address the nation’s woes.

The other candidates? Wes Streeting? Seriously? People think that someone who made his way seamlessly from far-left student politics to parliament and then the cabinet – a man of no outstanding talent – is the man to represent Britain on the world stage? Is this really the answer? How many weeks before people decide otherwise? Nothing will improve in our country if a lacklustre and ineffectual Labour party leader is replaced by someone who couldn’t even beat him to that job.

My point is that none of these swap-eroos of prime ministers led to a better outcome. The problems we need to address far outstrip the abilities of any member of the parliamentary Labour party – or even the King over the Irwell, Andy Burnham – to resolve.

What are those problems? I would throw just a few out there. Our electoral system is meant to avoid continental-style coalition governments. But since 2010 we have been haunted by first-past-the-post plus Italian-style coalition politics. When the public do turn out to deliver a clear verdict (2016, 2019) their reasons for doing so have been roundly ignored. Starmer has shown that again this week by arguing that Britain – stuck in a crevice after trying to Brexit – could solve its issues by crawling back on to the soothing cliff edge of the EU.

In reality we spend beyond our means and borrow more than we can afford. A tiny number of medium- and high-earning tax-payers are expected to endlessly foot the bill for the indigent class and those who have just arrived to take what they can from us. We have a health service which is the envy of the third world but admired by no one who has actually paid for it and is forced to use it. We have an economy which has been flatlining, with a rising left who have decided that the answer to this is to attack the few successful people.

So my own advice to the Labour party and their leader is: ‘Hang on, Sir Keir.’ Give the political right time to get their house in order and then let’s have a nice big election.

New Labour’s anthem was ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. It is surely the insight of any true conservative that the opposite tends to be the case. My own song version might not top the charts as D:Ream’s did, but mine has the benefit of being true. ‘Things Can Always Get Worse.’ I, for one, will be humming this over the days to come.

Cartoon - Jim Unger

The Spectator - No, we don’t all need therapy

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/we-dont-need-to-go-to-therapy/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260507%20%20AL+CID_49a5fc004b2e7a7cad3dbcc9dda9a2c6

No, we don’t all need therapy

Raking over old dramas often does more harm than good

Zoe Strimpel5 May 2026, 5:01am

(Picture: Jonathan Brady-Pool/Getty)

Only the most heartless fantasist would deny the life-saving role that therapy plays in helping people manage mental illness. Some people, of course, find it enjoyable or helpful for their own reasons and fair play to them. ‘You do you, babe,’ as they say.  

But in the round, there is more wrong than right with the edifice. What else is one to conclude after Meghan ‘Sussex’ née Markle, one of the luckiest and most spoiled women in the world, posted on Instagram last week that that the ‘hardest seven years’ of her life – those that followed her becoming a duchess, having two healthy children and trading a royal residence for a $29 million mansion in California – had come to an end? It’s previously been reported that Harry (himself no stranger to therapy-induced self-pity) spent ‘a fortune’ on therapy for his beloved wife so she could enjoy a healthy entrée into motherhood. What good did it do?

Whatever your answer, it seems we can’t get enough of it. The number of workers leaving their old jobs and retraining as psychoanalysts – the hip methodology once more – has soared. We are in, as the New York Times has put it, ‘a larger psychoanalytic moment’. I know at least three people my age training to become psychoanalysts: two in the Jungian method, one Freudian.

I am not the first to notice the skewing foul of therapy culture, of course. Just last month, the journalist Esme Hewitt wrote a piece for the Times headlined: ‘I tried therapy but it just made me feel self-involved.’ The American journalist Abigail Shrier’s best-selling 2024 book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up analysed the way ‘bad therapy encourages hyperfocus on one’s emotional states, which in turn makes symptoms worse’. Even as far back as 1963, in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan accused Freudianism of oppressing women with its pernicious ideas about their inherent passivity. Even intelligent women – especially intelligent women – necked Freud’s Kool-Aid and, in so doing, built their own prisons.

Like many other educated, cosmopolitan women, I have had my fair share of therapy. I began it in my early 20s (it took some persuading) to help with my lifelong insomnia. But, in the hands of someone all too steeped in Freud, it quickly became about everything else… and nothing. Frustrated by the therapist’s irritating questions – these little probing darts intended to shock me into dislodging some buried and liberating truth – I eventually gave him up for another, much more foolish one. I was horrified at how much harder it was trying to explain myself and my discontents to these old (it seemed to me) men than to my friends. And to pay for the privilege with it. One big problem is intelligence: it often feels to people with a modicum of emotional and intellectual smarts that the therapist is ten steps behind. Arrogant as it sounds, more than once I have felt they ought to be paying me for my time.

It has taken me many, many more years though to hang up my therapy boots. Perhaps I’d just had the wrong guys, I reasoned. And the truth is, I have experienced brilliant, life-affirming therapy. Laid low at one point with obsessive thoughts I simply couldn’t control, I got some help on the NHS from a beautiful, sparky and assertive clinical psychologist who sorted me out. She was the first to plant the idea that the pyrotechnics of one’s neural nets do not truth equal. She went mad and joined a cult in Italy, and that was the end of that, but I was OK by then. Eventually, I slid back into another therapist’s embrace. She was kind and supportive but I didn’t benefit. What I did do was lose thousands upon thousands of pounds and many hours. 

In the intervening years I have occasionally sought targeted therapy – CBT and its ilk – but generally I have begun to liberate myself from its expensive embrace. There was a moment in Italy when, sick at the thought of more parmigiana and arancini, I realised that I was done with the local cuisine. I had a similar moment recently when I realised I was throwing in the towel with therapists. I had a specific question to explore. The question was incapable of being answered, or even clarified, by the two therapists I sought out because, as I was reminded, all they can offer is ‘listening’.  

Talking about your feelings is de rigueur now in the West. You can do it and expect reverence and respect. You can shut conversations and debates up just by referencing your emotions. Friends are naturally interested in their friends’ feelings – even men. Therapists should therefore be redundant for most people with something to get off their chest. Instead they are mushrooming – all while the NHS can’t scratch the surface of the most urgent psychiatric and clinical psychological needs among the poor and mentally ill.

I think often of the 2006 study published in the PMC journal showing that girls are more prone to depression than boys because they ruminate more with their friends. It is not rocket science to realise that raking over your negative feelings and rehashing events which then become psychodramas is tempting but unhealthy. Yet, many therapists feed on this temptation. It’s time to walk away. After all, we all have our own couches and those are free to use. 

Portugal no seu melhor (Tempos difíceis)

Observador (23.05.2026) 

Parlamento aprova iniciativas que alargam transportes gratuitos para ex-combatentes a todo o país

LBC - Isto é o quê? Uma piada? Como da Grande Guerra não deverão ser, provavelmente serão da Guerra do Ultramar? Logo, rapaziada ente os entre os 72 anos (20 anos em 1974) e os 85 (20 anos em 1961). Sim, está bem visto. 

Pergunta: e não poderiam ter pensado nisto mais cedo?

The Spectator - Want to get rich? Invest like an American

(personal underlines) 

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Want to get rich? Invest like an American

John Oxley

Ramit Sethi wants to make you rich. He is not a household name in Britain, but the Stanford psychology graduate is one of the biggest personal finance influencers in the US. He hosts a successful podcast, Money for Couples, has written bestselling books and even has a Netflix show, How to Get Rich. All his projects share the same message: by changing your mindset and taking a few practical steps, you can power yourself toward prosperity.

To British ears, his style might seem brash. It is financial advice with a substantial side of life coaching. But beyond the difference in tone, Sethi spreads a simple message rarely heard in finance columns or consumer advice TV slots in this country: that the best thing you can do for your money is to rapidly increase your income.

On his website, tips on controlling your outgoings are nestled alongside advice on securing a pay rise. In his TV show, he encourages families not only to cut unnecessary subscriptions and tame their spending, but also to switch careers to maximise their income. It is part of a broader difference between American and British financial advice. While our experts are savings maximisers, their American counterparts focus more on increasing your ability to pull money in.

Across social media and podcasts, Americans are encouraged to boost their salaries, launch their side hustles and sweat their assets. British channels, by contrast, are much more reserved, with an emphasis on changes to the other side of the ledger. Advice focuses on controlling bills, cashback cards and loyalty points. It is small fry and conservative, the opposite of Sethi’s mantra of ‘$30,000 questions, not $3 ones’.

The difference embodies a broader cultural difference. Americans are encouraged to take greater risks and pursue greater dreams. British advice is parsimonious and loss-averse. Even when it comes to savings, we are shepherded towards the safest options. While Americans are urged to play the market, we are offered better current accounts. This both exemplifies and encourages an overly cautious approach to money, which leaves the UK at a disadvantage.

Beyond the puff of podcasts, Britons are missing out on real financial advantages. Outside of pensions, less than a quarter of people in the UK invest any money in the stock market. More than two-thirds of Isas are cash-only, and less than 10 per cent of our personal wealth is invested in equities. This lags behind the US, where two-thirds of people have money in the market, and also the rest of the G7, where on average 15 per cent of personal wealth is held in stocks. The government is trying to nudge us in the right direction by limiting the cash component of Isas to £12,000 from next year.

Fear of investing appears to be a consequence of national risk aversion. Two-thirds of Britons say that putting money into stocks and shares is ‘too risky’, opting instead for products where their capital remains safe. They are missing out. In recent years, markets (especially in the US) have surged, while savings rates have languished and been eroded by inflation. If you’d started 2020 by putting £1,000 in an S&P tracker, your money would have more than doubled by the start of this year. Even the top savings accounts would have earned only a couple of hundred pounds in that time.

Tied to this is our national obsession with property wealth. In Britain, property investment is perhaps the only socially acceptable form of capital accumulation. A scroll through Instagram will show dozens of accounts sharing tips, from the practical to the dubious, about flipping homes, maximising rental yields and building property empires from almost no capital. It’s presented as the perfect play – high reward with little risk. This advice ignores the reality that policy choices made housing a one-way bet for a fortunate older generation, but that future growth is far from guaranteed.

The contrast with the US is telling. There, households are encouraged to spread risk across markets and time. Here, advice culture and social norms combine to channel risk into a single dominant asset class, while treating broader market participation as optional or intimidating. For those with a greater risk appetite, the gap leads them to seek worse advice and to fall under the influence of those who peddle get-rich-quick alternatives, such as day trading, cryptocurrency and outright gambling. The forums and YouTube channels that do push more sensible portfolio approaches tend to be niche and are favoured by the already well-off and financially savvy.

The result is a British public with remarkably under-optimised finances. We jealously guard our energy tariffs, shop around for our broadband and then push the proceeds into underperforming accounts. A lifetime of caution leaves us personally much poorer than we should be and creates a crisis for the state when people enter retirement. Rather than learning to ride the bumps of the market, we avoid risk without noticing the money we leave on the table.

The bravado of Sethi and his compatriots is unlikely to win over many British viewers. Reticence about money is one of the greatest cultural divisions between Americans and us. The life-coach-style dream of achieving your ‘rich life’ instinctively feels like vulgar nonsense. These influencers, however, can teach us things our homegrown advisers miss.

Savvy spending and shrewd saving are, quite obviously, only one side of the ledger and there is only so much thriftiness can deliver. A better job and a higher income deliver life improvements on a scale that 1 per cent cashback will never muster. Likewise, long-term investments in the market, with a healthy spread of risk, will outperform even the canniest jockeying between savings accounts.

It’s often said that culture eats strategy. Britain’s approach to money is obviously shaped by its culture – both our deep-seated reserve about financial matters and the ideas that bounce around the public sphere. Hearing more about shopping around has made us more promiscuous with our utilities and allowed us to reap the benefits of consumer pressure.

However, too many of these are Sethi’s ‘$3 questions’. The bigger value ones are about growth, ownership and ambition, and those are still treated as faintly un-British. Until that changes, we will remain very good at saving pennies and oddly reluctant to pursue pounds.

The Spectator - Am I a libertarian after all?

 

(personal underlines, there...as here...)

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Am I a libertarian after all?

Douglas Murray

I have never been the greatest fan of libertarianism as a political ideology. Libertarians seem to me to be the bisexuals of politics – they want a bit of everything.

But even I felt a slight twinge of libertarian sentiment this week when I read some remarks by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Labour minister had told MPs that artificial intelligence is an ‘incredibly powerful tool that can and should be used by our police forces’, though she added that it must be regulated in a way that is ‘always accurate’. I have never before read the words ‘police’ and ‘always accurate’ in the same sentence, so the novelty grabbed my attention.

But it was what Mahmood was quoted as saying last month in an interview with Sir Tony Blair that really stood out. She had once again sung the virtues of AI and technology, explaining that they can be ‘transformative to the whole of the law and order space’.

She then said this: ‘When I was in Justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.’

The moment I read that I suffered my unexpected libertarian shudder. I do not want anyone in government – whether in Justice or the Home Office – talking about the eyes of the state being on me at all times. Then to my great relief I realised that what I had suffered was not a libertarian instinct at all. It was instead an instinct born out of basic understanding of the utter incompetence and indolence of the state.

We already live in one of the most heavily surveilled societies in the world. In London alone there are reckoned to be more than 100,000 public CCTV cameras. If you add the number of privately owned cameras you get around a million cameras focused on London and Londoners.

What does that get us? Allow me to relate my own experience the one time I had my wallet stolen in the capital. It was taken from my pocket in a public place which was heavily surveilled. In the immediate aftermath, the thief managed to use my card in a number of shops and a bank – and if there is one place that should be monitored you would have thought it would be the one where money is kept.

I got in touch with the police and told them about the theft, including the date and time the culprit had gone to collect my hard-earned money. When I did, eventually, hear back from them, the police informed me that they were not pursuing the crime. After all, why would they? It wasn’t as though the criminal would be likely to offend again, or that there are any good reasons for pickpockets to be pursued and arrested.

I raised this with a couple of friends this week after reading Mahmood’s remarks. One immediately piped up that her car had been stolen last year from outside her home. Her private security cameras had picked up a very clear image of the thief, and she had sent the picture to her local force. They told her that they would not be pursuing the case. Another friend had the same thing, but with a home burglary. Once again, she had got a very good image of the burglar, but officers were not interested.

Speak to almost anyone in the UK who has been a victim of crime and you will be rewarded with similar demoralising stories. London has one of the highest levels of mobile phone theft of any major city in the developed world. The gangs who swipe these phones from the hands of unsuspecting tourists or Londoners often commit their crimes in broad daylight.

I know several people whose phones have been pinched from them in Parliament Square. You might expect Westminster to be the most surveilled part of our heavily surveilled capital. But once more the police seem to have no interest in scouring the assorted CCTV footage and getting, say, the number plate on the motorbikes that the criminals sit on as they do their swipe. Again, the police say ‘no’.

One common excuse is that the cameras in the area were not working. ‘What – none of them?’ you might ask. By this point you would be forgiven for concluding that the problem is not in fact a complete and constant blackout on the capital’s CCTV cameras, but – to use a technical term – that the police cannot be arsed. It must be boring work to go through CCTV footage in order to track down criminals. Such a task could interrupt a morning’s crisp-eating while scrolling through X at the police station. And if you think that a member of the public providing the police with an image of a thief in the act should be evidence enough, then once more you just have to remember that they cannot be arsed.

The eyes of the state are already on us at all times, certainly when you are out in any major city. That is why, when the police actually want to catch a criminal, they can do so and we are treated to images of the culprit in our newspapers and on our TV screens. But these are rare occasions.

One thing we can all agree on is that if you do want to get the police to your house, all you need to say is that the person on your CCTV camera is suspected of saying rude things on social media about some minority groups. Then officers will come over and you will get grief counsellors and all the rest of it.

In the meantime Mahmood will, perforce, have to dream on. Even if the eyes of the state were on us at all times, we must remember that the state is having a siesta.

The Spectator - Why exercise music stops you from throwing in the towel

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/why-exercise-music-stops-you-from-throwing-in-the-towel/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260409%20%20AL%20%20SHERBORNE+CID_2b42e246969cc23cd427710c4997ce54

Why exercise music stops you from throwing in the towel

Don’t set off without your emotional support DJ

13 April 2026, 5:00am

(Getty images)

Over the past few months, I’ve been training for the London Marathon, so most weekends I’ve been out running more than 20 miles at a stretch. I carry the usual bits to make these long slogs vaguely civilised – energy gels, a water bottle, a couple of fruit pastilles. They help, of course. But there’s one thing I absolutely cannot do without: music. 

Non-runners sometimes ask if I ever feel like giving up and trudging home. And honestly, the only times that’s happened is when my AirPods have died and the music – my invisible pacer, my emotional support DJ – has suddenly vanished mid-run. 
 
This makes sense, according to Victoria Williamson, a researcher and lecturer in music psychology and the author of You Are the Music. She says that hundreds of studies show music improves endurance by around 15 per cent and reduces perceived exertion by around 10 per cent. For context, caffeine – the darling of the endurance world – only manages about 3 per cent for endurance and 5 per cent for perceived exertion. Although your energy drink is doing its best, it’s simply no match for a properly timed chorus.

I’ve never fancied a tea halfway through a run, but I always fancy a tuuuune. Music boosts dopamine – the brain’s ‘reward’ chemical – making everything feel a bit more enjoyable. It also distracts you, in the best possible way. When your brain is busy belting out the chorus, it has far less capacity to dwell on the fact that your legs are starting to feel like overcooked spaghetti. 

As I discovered when I wrote my book Running: Cheaper Than Therapy, exercise is more about what’s happening in your head than your legs. Put simply, when your brain is focused on a song, it has fewer resources left to dwell on how tired you might be feeling. It’s all in the mind.  

There are other perks. If you can hear yourself panting, it’s a rather pointed reminder that you’re getting tired. Drown that out with music, and suddenly everything feels more manageable. Even better, you’re spared the soundtrack of other runners’ wheezing and groaning – never the morale boost one yearns for during a race. 
 
When you listen to music as you run, your body naturally syncs to rhythm, a process called entrainment. This can help maintain a steady running pace, improve efficiency of movement, and reduce wasted energy. That said, sometimes you don’t want steady, and music can help there, too. If I’m doing an interval run (alternating short bursts of high-intensity, fast-paced running with recovery periods of light jogging), I find that songs that switch between fast and slow sections are perfect personal pacers.  

Music just makes running more fun and it can trigger the emotional states or identities you need to keep going – as long as you pick the right tunes. A run is not the moment for experimental jazz or a 14-minute prog-rock odyssey, replete with three separate drum solos. This is the time for massive, familiar bangers – the kind that make you feel like you’re headlining Glastonbury, not limping round a damp park. Think cheesy stadium anthems, not polite background music for people discussing sourdough starters. Basically, if you’re embarrassed to be listening to a song, it’s probably the right one for exercise. 

In the gym, music blocks out the clatter of weights and the inescapable chatter of other humans, helping you slip into that elusive ‘zone’. Most gyms provide their own playlists these days – endless, vaguely interchangeable tracks that sound like they were curated by an algorithm with a kink for bass drops. So don’t forget your airpods. 

There are disadvantages to all this. If you listen to music every time you run or workout it’s easy to build a dependence on it – as I have discovered when my AirPods run out. A growing number of running events ban headphones for safety and insurance reasons, so if you’ve had tunes in your ears as you train hard for an event, you might struggle on the big day without them. It’s good to develop a range of sources of motivation to keep your runs interesting and the sounds of birdsong are one of the joys of running.  

There are safety concerns when you’re running outdoors if you can’t hear approaching vehicles or potential predators. And in the gym, there are moments – lifting heavy weights, attempting anything involving balance or coordination – when full attention is rather more useful than a killer playlist. 

But when you get exercise music right, it’s everything. Professor Costas Karageorghis, a leading expert on the interplay between music and exercise, said that the right workout music can be a type of ‘legal performance-enhancing drug’. I agree and that’s why I’ll continue to mainline it straight into my ears.  

Polemia - Quand la dissidence devient un risque : anatomie d’une persécution bureaucratique

 Quand la dissidence devient un risque : anatomie d’une persécution bureaucratique

(soulignements personnels)

L’affaire aurait pu passer inaperçue, reléguée à la rubrique des incidents administratifs, si elle ne révélait pas avec une telle précision l’état de dégradation avancée des démocraties occidentales. Un professeur britannique de sciences politiques, enseignant dans un établissement secondaire, a été contraint de quitter son poste après avoir montré à ses élèves des vidéos de Donald Trump dans le cadre d’un cours consacré à la politique américaine. Ce simple fait a suffi à déclencher l’arsenal de la lutte antiterroriste, comme l’a documenté The Telegraph.

 

Il faut d’abord rappeler la banalité initiale de la situation. L’enseignant intervenait auprès d’élèves âgés de dix-sept et dix-huit ans, dans un cadre pédagogique clairement défini. Les documents diffusés étaient publics, librement accessibles, relevant de l’actualité immédiate. Aucun appel à la haine, aucune apologie de la violence, aucun prosélytisme. Et pourtant, à partir de plaintes d’élèves invoquant un « malaise émotionnel », l’affaire a changé de nature.

Ce basculement est essentiel. Nous ne sommes plus dans le champ du débat pédagogique, mais dans celui de la judiciarisation du ressenti. Comme l’avait déjà observé Marcel Gauchet, la démocratie contemporaine tend à substituer aux conflits politiques assumés une logique de victimisation morale, où l’émotion devient un argument d’autorité. Le ressenti subjectif se mue en fait objectif, puis en catégorie administrative, enfin en risque sécuritaire.

L’administration de l’établissement scolaire n’oppose aucune résistance à cette dérive. Elle agit au contraire comme un relais zélé. Courriels, convocations, rapports successifs s’enchaînent dans un langage typique de la gouvernance contemporaine. L’enseignant est accusé d’enseignement « biaisé », puis de « préjudice émotionnel », enfin de promouvoir des opinions « potentiellement radicales ». Le flou lexical est ici décisif. Comme le notait Pierre Manent, la démocratie libérale tardive ne tranche plus, elle enveloppe, elle dilue, elle disqualifie sans nommer.

L’intervention du Local Authority Designated Officer marque une étape supplémentaire. Le rapport indique que les opinions du professeur « pourraient être perçues comme radicales » et recommande un signalement au programme « Prevent ». Le droit ne s’applique plus à ce qui est dit ou fait, mais à ce qui pourrait être interprété. Nous entrons pleinement dans ce que Alain Supiot a décrit comme le règne de la gouvernance par les risques, où l’anticipation hypothétique remplace la responsabilité réelle.

Prevent, initialement conçu pour lutter contre le terrorisme islamiste, devient ainsi un instrument de neutralisation idéologique. Il ne vise plus des actes, mais des opinions. Il ne sanctionne plus des comportements, mais des écarts à la norme dominante. L’enseignant est implicitement assimilé à un danger public, non pour ce qu’il fait, mais pour ce qu’il représente.

Cette affaire illustre de manière presque scolaire ce que Carl Schmitt analysait déjà comme la moralisation extrême du politique. Lorsque le conflit n’est plus admis comme constitutif de la vie publique, il est déplacé vers le registre du Bien et du Mal. L’adversaire cesse d’être un contradicteur, il devient un risque. On ne le réfute pas, on le neutralise.

La responsabilité de la gauche militante institutionnelle est ici centrale. Depuis plusieurs décennies, elle a investi les appareils éducatifs, administratifs et juridiques pour y imposer une hégémonie culturelle. Cette domination ne s’exerce plus par la censure explicite, devenue socialement coûteuse, mais par l’activation de dispositifs prétendument neutres. Protection de l’enfance, lutte contre la radicalisation, bien-être émotionnel. Autant de notions indiscutables en apparence, mais redoutables par leur plasticité.

Jean-Claude Michéa a montré comment le progressisme contemporain, sous couvert de tolérance, développe une intolérance structurelle à toute dissidence anthropologique ou politique. Ce que l’on ne peut plus combattre sur le terrain des idées est éliminé par la morale et le droit. La bien-pensance devient un instrument de pouvoir.

Guillaume Faye parlait à ce sujet de tyrannie du Bien. Le terme, souvent caricaturé, décrit pourtant avec justesse cette forme de domination douce, sans violence visible, où les carrières sont détruites par l’accumulation de procédures, les individus brisés par l’angoisse administrative, les réputations dissoutes dans le soupçon permanent.

Ce qui rend cette affaire particulièrement préoccupante, c’est sa dimension expérimentale. Le Royaume-Uni joue depuis longtemps le rôle de laboratoire avancé en matière de contrôle idéologique. Les dispositifs qui y sont testés finissent presque toujours par être importés sur le continent. La France et l’Union européenne suivent avec un léger décalage, mais avec une remarquable constance.

Les déclarations récentes de Pavel Durov, fondateur de Telegram, viennent éclairer cette dynamique sous un autre angle. En accusant Emmanuel Macron et les institutions européennes de préparer un « goulag numérique », Durov désigne une tendance lourde, celle d’un encadrement croissant de la parole publique sous couvert de régulation des plateformes et de lutte contre la désinformation.

Le Digital Services Act, le projet Chat Control, les pressions exercées sur les réseaux sociaux s’inscrivent dans une même logique. Il ne s’agit plus seulement de sanctionner des contenus illégaux, mais de contrôler les conditions mêmes de possibilité du débat public. Comme le soulignait Raymond Aron, la liberté d’expression ne disparaît jamais d’un seul coup, elle se vide progressivement de sa substance.

L’affaire du professeur britannique et les accusations de Durov relèvent ainsi d’un même paradigme. Celui d’un pouvoir qui ne supporte plus l’imprévisible, l’hétérodoxe, le conflictuel. Un pouvoir qui, incapable de convaincre, préfère administrer le silence. Martin Heidegger rappelait que la technique tend à réduire le monde à ce qui est calculable. La bureaucratie idéologique contemporaine applique ce principe aux consciences.

Nous ne sommes pas face à des excès isolés, mais face à un système cohérent. Un système dans lequel l’enseignant, le journaliste, le citoyen deviennent des objets de gestion. Un système où la liberté d’expression n’est plus un droit fondamental, mais une tolérance conditionnelle, révocable à tout moment. Ce qui s’est produit dans une salle de classe anglaise annonce ce qui se prépare à l’échelle européenne.

La censure moderne n’a plus besoin de commissaires politiques visibles. Elle avance masquée, bardée de règlements, de chartes et de protocoles. Et c’est précisément pour cela qu’elle est dangereuse.

Balbino Katz

Cartoon - Jim Unger