Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
Why on earth do we have to listen to "woke" theories, environmental nonsenses, idiotic media outlets and transgender crackpots when we have men like this—and others—we can easily learn from?
A train derailment outside Lewes station (Photo: Getty)
It’s been a bumpy ride for the railways in the past few weeks – quite literally for the passengers on the 14.24 train from Victoria to Eastbourne last Thursday, which derailed near Lewes, resulting in three carriages tumbling down an embankment. This was the latest in a series of incidents in recent weeks that have raised concerns about safety standards in an industry where any mishap immediately attracts huge attention from the media and the public.
The only fatality was on 19 June, when an East Midlands Railways service ran into another train near Bedford, apparently after passing a red signal. The driver was killed in the accident, which is still under investigation by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch.
Then, just under a week later, in an episode that has attracted little media attention, the warning signals at a level crossing near Preston that had recently been repaired failed to sound. As a result, the barriers had not been lowered and a train smashed into a car, in which the driver was killed and a child seriously injured. While most level-crossing accidents are the result of car-driver error, in this case the railway will be held responsible.
While the impact on the people directly involved in these incidents should not be forgotten, in terms of the history of the railways, they are relatively minor. The spectacular pictures of the stricken train near Lewes, with three carriages lying on their sides, would in the past have suggested that there had been multiple casualties. However, thanks to the enormous progress in the design of rail carriages, the coaches were able to withstand the impact and protect the passengers inside. A generation ago, there would not have been such a relatively happy ending.
This is part of the wider story of how the railways have responded to public concerns about safety on the tracks in recent years. A combination of innovative technology and a far greater emphasis on safety has transformed an industry in which lessons were consistently not being learned from successive disasters. For example, it took the 1999 Ladbroke Grove crash in which 31 people died for a basic safety procedure to be implemented that greatly reduced the number of signals being passed at danger – despite it having been available for decades. Today, the general expectation is that there will be no accidents at all across the system.
The improvement has been remarkable. From roughly 150 deaths in the 1970s and 55 in the 1990s, there have been only five fatalities since 2010, including that of the Bedford driver. This reduction, however, has raised fears that complacency has set in. The period included 13 years in which not a single death resulting from a rail accident was recorded (suicides and trespassers, around 275 a year, are not included in the statistics).
Nevertheless, there are concerns among the railway managers I speak to that this record may not be maintained. They are worried that the series of recent incidents that took place in quick succession are not just a blip but, rather, signs that complacency is creeping in. One manager asked, rhetorically: ‘When did you last hear a minister or an industry leader manager speak about safety?’
There is worry, too, that the catalyst may be the structural upheaval caused by the current reorganisation of the railways. The renationalisation and creation of Great British Railways are mostly recognised as a positive move, and it was in fact the Tories who began the process of bringing back together operations and infrastructure in 2018.
The fact that this is a more sensible way of running an industry that was fragmented by privatisation cannot obscure the reality that change can be a poor bed partner of safety. As old barriers tumble and new processes and working methods are established, managers and their staff can lose focus on the basic task of keeping the railway running safely. As one insider put it to me: ‘People become concerned about what role, if any, they will have in the new structure and take their eye off the ball in their day job.’
We have been here before. In the aftermath of privatisation there was a series of four major rail accidents – Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar – whose cause could all be attributed to the changes that had taken place in the industry. Fortunately, the gaps in the system were plugged and the safety record immeasurably improved.
Railway managers were, in the past, haunted by recent disasters. But now, with nearly a quarter of a century without an accident that has caused more than a handful of deaths, that collective memory and the consequent attention to safety is being lost.
One industry insider pointed out to me the near-disaster near Wootton Bassett in March 2015. A charter train hauled by a steam engine with more than 500 passengers, mostly rail enthusiasts, and crew aboard passed a signal at danger that was protecting a major junction. The driver had deliberately disabled the warning system, thinking it was malfunctioning and the train came to rest on the junction where a 125 high speed train, carrying more than 200 passengers, had passed just 45 seconds previously. Remarkably, the driver was not jailed for his error but merely given a suspended sentence.
This near-miss should have a permanent place in the railway’s collective memory. The death toll from a 125 train hitting a steam locomotive amidships could well have made it one of the worst, if not the worst, rail accident ever seen within these shores, possibly beating the toll of around 225 at Quintinshill in Cumbria in 1915 when three trains collided. This example is merely to demonstrate that the railways are always just one piece of bad luck and one egregious error away from disaster.
There is still no need for panic. Some 20,000 trains operate safely every day. The car drive to the station remains by far the riskiest part of any journey, given that five people die on our roads every day. But each of these incidents should be a warning: complacency has no place on the railways.
Christian Wolmar’s latest book, Fast Track: The Extraordinary Story of High Speed Rail, has just been published by Penguin.
I did not come to Islam through theology. I came to it through fear, threat and hatred directed at me and the world I live in. I think the first time I became aware of something called Islam was in 1989, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ for writing his novel, The Satanic Verses.Images of furious men immolating books spread around the world and seared themselves into my childhood mind, fixing fear and confusion to something I did not yet know how to name. My father, a bookseller, insisted on continuing to sell the book, but decided, soberly, that it would have to be kept behind the checkout desk, available only if a customer asked for it by name.
My exposure to Islam grew as I did – through bombings justified in God’s name, through chants that promised erasure of my coreligionists, through the casual way anti-Semitism travelled across borders and languages wearing religious dress. Like many non-Muslim westerners of my generation, my first encounters with Islam were not in a library or a classroom but in the shadow cast by violence: the planes of September 11th, the suicide bombings of the early 2000s, the long years of jihadist attacks in Europe, and now October 7th and what followed. That history does not grant me or anyone else moral authority, but it does impose on us a responsibility. When an ideology repeatedly intrudes into people’s life uninvited, through bloodshed and intimidation, indifference ceases to be a neutral position.
Jews carry an inherited memory of what happens when a minority faith is blamed, caricatured, or collectively indicted, and liberal societies are built, rightly, on restraint, on the instinct to protect belief from suspicion. Criticising another minority’s religion feels perilously close to betraying those instincts. But October 7th and its aftermath intensified an inquiry that had already been running quietly for years. I have reported from the scenes of Islamic terror attacks around the world, from London Bridge to the Manchester Arena, the Bataclan and Le Petit Cambodge to the Brussels Metro, from Tel Aviv, Kibbutz Be’eri and others in between. As the cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ echoed in the air, mass murder was followed by celebration. Children and journalists were murdered for satire or music. Rape was followed by denial. Jewish deaths were followed by caveats. Slogans promising elimination were waved away as metaphor. Attacks on non-Muslims in western cities were treated as regrettable spillover rather than ideological consequence. Again and again came the reassurance: this isn’t Islam.
The claim itself is familiar and authoritative. Islamism, we are told, has nothing to do with Islam. Extremists are impostors. Their violence represents a distortion of a peaceful faith. Western leaders across liberal democracies have insisted on this distinction for more than two decades. In 2001, speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., George W. Bush declared: ‘The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.’ In 2014, Barack Obama declared that ‘Isil is not Islamic’. Theresa May spoke of ‘a perversion of Islam’ after the London Bridge attack. Emmanuel Macron described Islamist separatism as ‘a political ideology’ distinct from the religion itself. Anthony Albanese’s language after the Bondi Beach attack likewise emphasised unity and condemned extremist violence, framing the incident in terms of violent ideology, rather than detailed theological distinction.
This reassurance signals decency. It protects innocent believers from collective blame. It allows plural societies to breathe. But as an explanation, it is weak. Comforting language becomes fragile when it cannot bear explanatory weight. Islamism has emerged repeatedly across continents, cultures and generations. It has done so in majority-Muslim states and minority diasporas, in conditions of poverty and relative prosperity, under dictatorships and within democracies. It survives military defeat and rhetorical condemnation. An account that treats this recurrence as accidental strains credibility. An explanation that requires redefining millions of self-identified Muslims out of their own religion sidesteps the phenomenon.
Even many Muslims who oppose extremism reject that move. Several reformist voices I have spoken to insist that denying Islamists their Muslim identity is theologically incoherent and politically counterproductive. Others argue that once theology declares itself irrelevant to violence, the entire burden of containment falls on secular law and security services. The idea that Islamism is not Islam fails because it resolves anxiety rather than answering questions.
Those questions shaped several interviews I conducted over the past year for my podcast series. I deliberately sought out Muslims, ex-Muslims, scholars, reformers, former insiders, and survivors who disagree profoundly with one another, for in-depth, long-form discussions. These were not ‘gotcha’ conversations or exercises in moral exhibitionism. They were stress tests. I pressed where answers hardened into slogans. I asked the same question in different forms, sometimes to discomfort, sometimes to silence. Is Islamism an abuse of Islam, an authentic expression of it, or something uncomfortably in between?
What emerged were four broad frameworks to approach this question, each internally coherent, but each incomplete.
One answer treats Islamism as Islam applied without disguise once political power is available. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who later worked covertly with Israeli intelligence to prevent attacks, was the most uncompromising voice I encountered. Sitting with me in my home, he explained that Islam is not primarily a spiritual faith but a political and legal system, and that movements like Hamas are not distorting it but implementing it coherently. In his view, the illusion lies in ‘moderate Islam’, which he described as people already living outside the doctrine while retaining its label. Yasmine Mohammed, a Canadian activist who escaped an extremist upbringing and later a forced marriage, reached a similar conclusion through her own experience, rather than ideology. She argued that Islamism flows naturally from doctrines governing law, gender, obedience, and supremacy when taken seriously. For both, Islamism is not a corruption but a revelation.
A second framework treats Islamism as a modern ideological mutation rather than a theological core. Dr Qanta Ahmed, a Muslim British-American physician who has practised medicine in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and post-Isis Iraq and examined forensic evidence from October 7th, described Islamism as a totalitarian ideology that mimics religion while hollowing it out. In her account, Islamism arises from within Muslim societies but operates like fascism: disciplined, transnational, and adept at capturing institutions and moral language. It draws on Islamic symbols because those symbols mobilise loyalty, even as genuine religious literacy collapses.
A third answer comes from reformist theology. Imam Paul Salahuddin Armstrong, a British convert to Islam, now an imam and founder of the Association of British Muslims, argued that Islamism represents a deliberate misreading of scripture. Islamists, he said, extract fragments, ignore context, and weaponise grievance while abandoning Islam’s ethical tradition. His response lies in education, textual literacy, and firm secular law. Islamists are Muslims, he insisted, but what they do is a betrayal of Islam read holistically.
A fourth framework is structural rather than theological. Professor Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli scholar of Arab political culture and a former intelligence officer, treated Islamism as a civilisational dynamic. In his view, Islam does not separate religion from governance, and once demographic and cultural dominance emerges, political Islam follows regardless of individual intention. In his analysis, even well-meaning moderates are foot soldiers in a broader conquest. Reform, dialogue, and reinterpretation miss the point. Containment is achieved by denying Islamism the conditions under which it flourishes – something western societies struggle with today as it challenges their principles of tolerance, freedom and acceptance.
These positions contradict one another, but all agree on something: Islamism is real, organised and dangerous. More specifically, every person I spoke to about this subject, across every disagreement, treated Islamism as arising from within Islam’s civilisational and theological ecosystem, rather than arriving as an external contaminant. The argument was never about whether Islamists speak Islamic language, cite Islamic sources, and claim Islamic legitimacy. The argument was about what that reality means, and what obligations it imposes on everyone living under its shadow.
Armstrong refused the manoeuvre of removing extremists from Islam by linguistic fiat. When I asked him directly whether Salafist, Islamist, violent readings could be classed as Muslim, he answered in full: ‘If a person says they’re a Muslim, I can’t deny that. That’s between them and Allah. But at the same time, if they are doing things which are either criminal or worse, violent and extremist, I condemn what they do and I don’t see that as a true reflection of Islam or how a Muslim should be.’ He continued: ‘But like I said, I can’t deny. If we say that they’re not Muslims and play takfir [the act of declaring another Muslim an apostate] on them, that’s the game they play. I’m not going to get into that.’ His position leaves no route to denial.
Ahmed went further, because she treats denial as strategically dangerous. She explicitly addressed the post-9/11 instinct among leaders to declare Islamists outside the religion, and rejected it. ‘All Islamists would…say that they subscribe to Islam and describe themselves as Muslim. And I would not disagree with their description…they are coming from among us,’ she told me. She then underlined the point with a bluntness that no political leader has ever risked: ‘But I don’t deny that these individuals are Muslims. They’re part of Muslim society.’ Later in the same conversation she returned to it not just as a regrettable admission, but as a practical rule for liberal societies: ‘If an Islamist says that they’re Muslim, believe them, I can’t deny that they are Muslim. Do I think that they’re following the spirit of Islam? No. But if they say that they are Muslim, I have no choice but to believe them.’
Mosab comes at the same point from a harsher angle, and the significance lies in the direction of his criticism. He does not spend his time arguing that Islamists have mislabelled themselves. On the contrary, he argues that vast numbers of non-Islamist, self-described Muslims have detached their identity from the implications of the belief system they still claim. His wording is abrasive because he wants it to be. ‘You don’t believe in any of the values, you oppose all the values of Islam, but you still identify as a Muslim,’ he said, describing what he sees as the central psychological contradiction of modern Muslim identity, especially in the West. When I pressed him on whether this meant that moderate Muslims should, in effect, explicitly leave the religion, he said: ‘They are already out of Islam.’ Whatever one makes of the claim, it confirms the underlying premise: Islamism remains tied to Islam in his mind, and the burden of inconsistency sits elsewhere.
Yasmine’s account is less doctrinal in tone and more experiential, yet it converges at the same fault line. ‘The entire premise of Islam is wrong,’ she told me. Then she made the political point concrete, naming the mechanism by which scriptural ideology becomes governance: ‘The worst country in the world for women right now is Afghanistan – historically it’s always a Muslim majority country… because of all the Sharia they implement.’ The language around Sharia is not metaphorical for her. It is an operating system that, once installed, governs women first and then everyone. For her, Islam leaves little option: ‘One of the worst parts of Islam is the fact that it’s so totalitarian and it leaves no room for any kind of critical thinking, any kind of humanity really.’ She is blunt about her view of Paul Armstrong’s approach: ‘If somebody like Paul is saying, “No, it’s not a part of Islam. Those guys are just perverting our beautiful religion,” well, that’s just wrong.’ To prove it, she emphasises that the patterns seen across Muslim-majority countries are not accidental or marginal: ‘There’s a reason why when you look across these 57 Muslim majority countries, you’re seeing some very clear common threads.’ For her, Islamist practices follow Islamic edicts: ‘Yes, those people are following the edicts of Islam.’
Loay Alshareef is a Saudi-born Muslim educator and public reformist who has built a large online following by challenging anti-Semitism and Islamist assumptions in Arabic and English. Having once absorbed those ideas himself, he now confronts them openly, arguing that Islamism must be rejected clearly and publicly from within Islam, not explained away or euphemised. He spoke to me as a believer, arguing for reform and moral courage, drawing an explicit line between his own faith and political Islam, framing it as a responsibility crisis within Muslim societies rather than a misunderstanding forced from outside. ‘I love my faith. But I’m against radical Islamists,’ he said. And he insists that moderation without speech becomes complicity: ‘Moderate Muslims now should speak up.’ Yet Alshareef does not pretend the problem floats free of Islamic institutions. ‘We have a problem in the mosques. We have a problem in the madrassas,’ he said, and he tied the issue to interpretative habits, not distant politics. ‘If these verses are taken to the literal meaning that they are applicable every time and everywhere, you would always have a problem.’
Kedar shares Loay’s emphasis on institutions and demographic power, while refusing the western habit of treating Islamism as some secret fringe plot. ‘Conspiracy has the meaning of something which is being done behind the scenes by all kinds of deception. No, this is being done openly,’ he said. Later he offered a definition that matters because it sets a boundary that liberal societies can actually legislate around. ‘Once you spread this, these ideas or others, once you want to implement it on others, you become Islamist,’ he said. In that formulation, Islam as personal devotion remains tolerable; Islamism begins at imposition on others.
So the interviews yield something that slogans obscure. Islamism sits inside the category of Islam as lived identity and as claimed authority, even when its legitimacy is contested. Some of my interviewees treat it as doctrinal consistency, some as ideological capture, some as deliberate abuse, some as a civilisational emergence. But none treat it as unrelated from the original religion. That recognition clears the ground. It forces the conversation away from reassurance and towards strategy.
So how do we respond? The first tool is internal moral confrontation, the Loay model: Muslims speaking plainly, refusing euphemism, refusing the insulation of silence. The strength of this response is that it can puncture the social taboo that protects hatred from scrutiny. Its weakness is that mosques, schools, networks, intimidation and money can overwhelm moral courage, especially in communities where dissent carries social and sometimes physical risk. Reformers often get killed.
The second tool is theological education and contextualisation, the Armstrong model: treating Islamism as deliberate manipulation and answering it with literacy. Its strength is that it engages the text that Islamists use. Its weakness is that ideological entrepreneurs can move faster than educators.
The third tool is institutional disruption and narrative clarity, the Ahmed model: naming Islamist ideology, mapping its networks, refusing to let it disguise itself as a mere religious minority while it works to ‘undermine the very democracy that gives you a home, food, shelter, a political voice’, which Ahmed calls ‘completely hypocritical behaviour.’ This approach offers a realistic diagnosis of how capture happens in the West: committees, councils, curriculum, grievance bureaucracies, intimidation through accusations of bigotry. Its weakness is that it can sound bloodless next to the religious heat that fuels the movement, and it risks fighting symptoms while the underlying theological plausibility remains available for reuse.
The fourth tool is civilisational containment, the Kedar model: denying Islamism the demographic and legal conditions under which it can harden into parallel authority. Its strength is that it treats the phenomenon as cumulative and therefore addresses the cumulative drivers. Its weakness lies in moral discrimination. It can struggle to protect the loyal minority from suspicion, and it can tempt the state towards broad-brush policies that punish integration alongside extremism. If even assimilated or moderate Muslims are part of a rising tide, albeit unknowingly, then even they pose a potential threat to civilisational drowning once the water has risen high enough for extremism to take control.
The first act of policy, however, should be honesty. A society cannot defend what it cannot name. A democracy cannot draw boundaries around an ideological threat while insisting, in public language, that the threat has no relationship to the religion whose symbols and texts it uses, and whose communities it recruits from. My interviews, taken together, point to a grimly practical conclusion: the problem demands protection of peaceful Muslims and confrontation of organised Islamism, at the same time, in the same breath, without resorting to fictions that dissolve under the slightest pressure.
These questions matter because western societies are already acting on assumptions about Islamism while refusing to name them. Institutions accommodate demands they would reject from any other ideology. Language shifts. Boundaries blur. Religious grievance is converted into moral currency and, increasingly, into administrative doctrine. Attempts to formalise concepts such as ‘Islamophobia’ illustrate the pattern: definitions so elastic that they risk collapsing hostility toward people into immunity for ideas, and prejudice into a shield against scrutiny. The result is not protection but confusion. Legitimate critique is chilled, while genuine hatred is neither isolated nor confronted. At the same time, public frustration curdles into suspicion, feeding movements that collapse critique into collective blame. Denial produces appeasement on one side and backlash on the other. Saying that Islamism draws on Islamic sources does not indict every Muslim.
This inquiry has never aimed to put Islam on trial. It asks whether our prevailing narrative has become a shield against thinking. Pretending the problem does not exist helps no one, least of all Muslims who resist extremism under pressures most westerners never face. If we cannot say what Islamism is, where it comes from, and how it relates to Islam itself, then we are not practising tolerance. We are practising negligence.
There is a pattern liberal societies struggle to acknowledge: every idea carries within it the conditions of its own failure when pursued without restraint. The enemy of an idea is often its excess.
Since the end of the Cold War, western democracies have increasingly mistaken moral absolutism for moral clarity. Good principles are treated as if they were exempt from limits, as if freedom, openness, transparency, and tolerance could only ever heal. Yet every intervention operates within a dosage range. Medicines cure at one concentration and poison at another. Political principles are no different.
This is visible in the way liberal states speak about Islamism. The insistence on total tolerance, applied without boundary or hierarchy, has produced a language that cannot name threats without apologising for doing so. ‘The word jihad has a number of meanings,’ said the Metropolitan Police, after a caliphate of clowns called for it on a London street not long after the October 7th massacre. The result is paralysis. Public debate fixates on protocols, optics, and disclaimers, while the underlying question of what preserves a free society remains unaddressed.
The problem is not that liberal values are wrong. It is that they are treated as self-executing. Strategy is assumed to flow automatically from virtue. Yet in reality it requires choosing which goods must yield in order to preserve others. It demands prioritisation, sequencing and limits. A society that refuses to rank its values ends up unable to protect any of them.
Islamism exposes this weakness with particular efficiency because it operates as an absolutist system confronting a relativist one. It does not negotiate. It advances. It exploits procedural openness, moral hesitation, and the fear of appearing discriminatory. It thrives in environments where ideology is mistaken for identity, and where questioning ideas is conflated with attacking people.
There is an uncomfortable symmetry here. Just as western liberalism falters when it becomes absolutist about tolerance, Islam falters when it becomes absolutist about doctrine. Islamism emerges where interpretative restraint collapses, where scripture is treated as total law rather than moral inheritance, and where compromise is recast as betrayal. As a comparatively young religion, Islam may yet develop stronger internal mechanisms of restraint, but that internal evolution may take generations. The pace of that evolution cannot dictate the safety requirements of the societies in which Islam now operates, and we cannot suspend our own safeguards while waiting for it. Plural societies must protect themselves against absolutism, not accommodate it. Otherwise, they will collapse.
What is demanded, then, is the recovery of judgement of the application of liberal values, the critical distinction being not theological but political. Belief as private devotion is compatible with a free society. Belief as imposed authority is not. When western states refuse to enforce that line they outsource coexistence to chance.
Societies fail when they treat their best ideas as untouchable abstractions rather than instruments of self-preservation. They endure when they remember that principles exist to serve human flourishing, not to override it, and that survival is not an embarrassment to liberalism but its precondition.
In its campaign to preserve traditional British screen-free pleasures, English Heritage is promoting a variety of wholesome pastimes this summer, such as puppet shows and fairground and circus skills. Children will lap those up; but will they respond equally enthusiastically to English Heritage’s new initiative for 2026: to revive the habit of holiday-postcard writing?
This is the vision: that their young visitors, inspired to verbal exuberance by the castle, stately home or ancient ruin they’re enjoying, will snap up a couple of the new limited-edition postcards specially commissioned by English Heritage from the artists Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake, and (ideally in the café) will write to their grandparents, aunts, uncles and godparents.
It’s an attractive vision: children of the 21st century staring into the middle distance, chewing their Biro, forced for a few minutes to think of other, older people and try to imagine what they might like to read. It was an empathetic skill we all learned in the 20th century, when a morning of every holiday was spent ‘doing your postcards’.
‘All things worthwhile in life require a little bit of effort,’ says Matt Thompson, the conservation, curatorial and learning director promoting this venture. It’s ‘the physicality of postcards’, he says, that make them superior to round-robin social media boasts, ‘the smell, the feel of them’ – as well as the pleasure they bring to the recipient, touched that the sender has taken the time and trouble to write personally to them, by hand.
The longstanding postcard firm Judges (established 1902), which is printing the cards, tells me that postcards used to represent 70 per cent of their turnover, but it’s now down to 5 per cent; most of its business is now printing images on mugs, tea towels, key rings and fridge magnets. It longs to reverse the downward trend.
I wish I could say that the images on the three new limited-edition postcards were worthy of this noble vision. Of the three commissioned images (one is by Blake, and two by Sharratt, illustrator of the Jacqueline Wilson books), the Blake is by far the best. Both artists were commissioned to create non-site-specific images that could be sold across all English Heritage sites. So they couldn’t draw Dover Castle or Stonehenge. Blake’s card depicts a mounted knight in armour galloping off from a multi-turreted castle, pennants fluttering against a few wispy watercolour clouds. There’s a whiff of romance and history here, just enough to fire the imagination of a knight-loving child.
Sharratt’s, by contrast, are garish and characterless. One is of a twin-turreted keep with a damsel of colour in one turret and a knight in armour in the other, both of them children, both waving at us and grinning with smiles consisting of a ‘u’-shaped line on their circular faces. The human figures are out of scale, far too big, reducing the turrets to toy-castle status. A cartoon dog grins in the foreground. The image is as shadeless, and the colours as basic, as something from an iPad colour-your-own starter kit. Sharratt’s second card is of a non-specific stately home with three cartoon children in the foreground smiling at us – one of colour, one dark-haired and one red-haired, with a cartoon dachshund on a lead. Both Sharratt images include the English Heritage logo on a flag, a marketing component that Blake somehow managed to avoid.
I sometimes wonder whether it isn’t the relentless cheerfulness of such images promoted to the younger generation that make them all so depressed. As they browse those cards, they might well feel that if they’re not as ecstatically happy as the children in the pictures, they’ve somehow got life terribly wrong. Children have far more sensitivity, emotional depth and sheer taste than those images give them credit for. They don’t need to be constantly assaulted with happiness. It’s the opposite of infectious.
Among English Heritage’s unsung treasures is a collection of 800 old postcards of Dover Castle, amassed over many decades by its former head custodian Pat Cunningham, and stored in the archives of Dover Castle. I went to have a look at them, and was reminded of the marvellous evocativeness of postcard images at their best, and of the centrality of postcard-sending in the 20th century. Often, they were sent intra-county: from Dover to Canterbury or Broadstairs, just 15 or 20 miles away. There’s much to savour on both sides of the cards: changing visual tastes in the images, and changing social and domestic priorities in the words.
I’m pretty sure that the elder brother, Harry, who in 1907 sent his little sister Queenie a postcard of Dover Castle, would not have been remotely tempted by the Sharratt ‘happy-children’ cards. The image he chose to impress his younger sister was of the 16th-century cannon known as ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Pistol’. In his brief message, he gets straight to the chief point of interest: ‘My dear little Queenie, we saw the train come from London to the big boats and put the people on.’
It was transport and firearms all the way. That was the great thing about the great age of holiday-postcard buying. In your choice of card, both as a child and an adult, you showed off your tastes and interests to the recipient. You stood in front of the rotatable stand for ages, deciding which to go for: would it be the keep, Roman lighthouse, Norman church, Constable’s Tower, armoury room, interior of church, staircase inside keep, cars parked on grassy verge, aerial view of the whole site, or a hovercraft with the castle in the background? I used to look down on people who couldn’t decide and instead plumped for quadruple-image cards with the name of the place in the middle, perhaps along with the town’s heraldic crest.
Postcard images developed across the century, from plain black-and-white to moody, floodlit castle against orange sunsets in the 1970s. The 800 cards, in plastic albums of transparent envelopes, are arranged pictorially rather than chronologically, so you get a delightfully unpredictable variety of words on the backs, from the Edwardian housewife instructing her servant to tell Nurse ‘to collect the Baby Girl on Monday 28th September’, to a boy describing a ‘night hike’ to his grandmother in the 1960s. A surprisingly large number of the postcards remain blank, suggesting a century’s-worth of people buying them with good intentions, but never getting around to writing or sending them.
Anyone of a nosy disposition will devour the written messages, combing them for human interest and drama. This is often in vain. An innate characteristic of postcards was that, by not having envelopes, they were public property – readable by the postman or anyone who found one propped up on a shelf. So they’ve never been vehicles for secrets or any kind of lovey-doveyness. The nearest we get to emotion in the collection is in one from 23 July 1916: ‘My darling Freddie, In memory of the sixth anniversary of our wedding day, hoping the next will be spent together. With fondest love from Stubby.’ What was the story, three weeks after the first day of the Somme? We’ll never know, and that card comes with no addressee.
The collection offers a feast of insights into two perennial British preoccupations: the weather, and ill health. About half the written cards mention the weather, sometimes with a small boast (‘a lovely day’) but more often with a downward cadence (‘cricket soon stopped for rain’; ‘sorry to say raining this morning but we must not give up hope’). A similar proportion mention illness, either at the writer’s end (‘I’ve been laid up with malaria for ten days’; ‘Wendy has been ill with her teeth’) or the recipient’s (‘I’m sorry to hear your leg is troubling you again’.) Occasionally you get two illnesses in one card: Gladys writes to her daughter in Margate, ‘I am really sorry to hear about poor little Nellie’, and ‘How is poor old Spot?’
I was intrigued by the husband who sent his dirty clothes home for his wife to wash in 1931. ‘Sorry I could not send them earlier and hope it does not give you two washing days.’ (I bet it did – poor woman.) And I longed to know who ‘Sister’ was in this from Beatrice in the 1920s. ‘I got Sister’s books before I left: The House of Prayer and Everyman’s Book of Saints.’ Was ‘Sister’ a sibling, a nurse, or a nun?
I have spent part of the past week thinking about imposter syndrome, and how we might be able to give it to more people. In an interview this week, Andy Burnham’s best friend Steve Rotheram, who happens to be the Mayor of Liverpool, said that our latest Prime Minister had struggled with imposter syndrome ‘for many years, like most people from working-class backgrounds’.
All of which leaves me slightly baffled. Surely, whatever your origins, if you have made it to Cambridge University in your late teens, got a job in Westminster in your early twenties, become a Member of Parliament in your thirties, have become a mayor, are best friends with a mayor and are now Prime Minister, it might be time to stop with the feeling of ‘imposter syndrome’? Unless, of course, you are an imposter, in which case you should have a huge dose of the syndrome, acknowledge it and remove yourself from public life. Which I am sure is not the case with Andy Burnham.
Such talk is yet another example of the medicalisation and pathologising of what we used to call ‘life’. Do some people feel that they are in positions, or even rooms, in which they should not be, or in which they feel vaguely out of place? Of course. It is a syndrome commonly associated with the teenage years. But any sensible person updates their mental software as they go through life. The first time Burnham dined in hall as an undergraduate at Cambridge would have been the moment to stop thinking of himself as an imposter. The same with the early years of being an MP or even a minister in Gordon Brown’s cabinet. Surely there is a time in the seamless rise of Burnham when you realise that there are no rooms you are being kept out of? You are the room.
Yet there seems to be an inexorable left-wing desire to paint things in this light. The late John Prescott was a master at it, railing against the Establishment and all those toffs in positions of power while being the deputy prime minister.
Perhaps the example of Prescott is more a case of what we used to call ‘chippiness’ than imposter syndrome. But even chippiness is something that has a vaguely left-wing bent. I know quite a lot of chippy people. I can be a little chippy myself at times. But as I always say to people who complain to me about their chippiness, it is the sort of thing you can turn to your advantage. In my observation, ever-so-slightly chippy people have a superpower in life if they use their chip in the right way. If they decide that they’ve been held back, that they are a victim of the fates and that their life is essentially not in their own hands, then they tend to make a hash of their life. But if they use that little bit of flint it can become a superpower. I’ve certainly seen a number of people with a nice constructive little chip on their shoulder far outrun the sort of people who are pleasantly adjusted and at peace with the world.
This brings me to the case of Natalie Fleet MP, who was appointed by Keir Starmer to be his minister for safeguarding. Just over a week ago she resigned her position, saying that once she started to get on top of her portfolio and read the cases of women who needed protecting, she found the contents ‘overwhelmingly triggering’. She announced that she could therefore not perform the task. Victims deserved someone ‘at their best’, she said, while describing resigning from being the minister for safeguarding as the ‘bravest thing I’ve ever done’.
As in the talk of ‘imposter syndrome’, my suspicion is that reactions to Fleet’s resignation will depend on your political leanings. Left-wingers seem overwhelmingly likely to sympathise with her, wish her well on her journey and say that she has been stunning and brave given her own past trauma. It reminds me of the reaction to the American gymnast Simone Biles, who withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics a few years back because she said she needed to focus on her mental health. ‘We’re human, too,’ she said of Olympians.
Then, as now, there were large numbers of people who applauded Biles. She had been brave in admitting her vulnerability, they said. In putting herself before her Olympic team, she had shown people how we should all prioritise ourselves.
Yet some of us have a slightly different reaction to such things. I personally think the job of an Olympian is to be more than human, to perform feats that make the rest of us gasp and to sublimate yourself to the greater task. Likewise, I think the job of a safeguarding minister is to focus on the traumas of others.
But this is not how things are currently weighted. Perhaps as an overreaction to the years of repression, we now celebrate anyone who shows their ‘vulnerability’, which is well and good, but only goes so far. At some point people also have to be good at things, whatever their circumstances or origins.
Which brings me, finally, to Angela Rayner. The Housing Secretary who didn’t under-stand stamp duty is back. In an interview with Trevor Phillips last weekend she was asked how being Housing Secretary this time is going to be different from the time before. She said this time the Labour government is going to build more council houses. Pushed for a number, Rayner managed to summon up the figure of 12,000, which didn’t sound like very many.
Then I checked the latest figures for small-boat arrivals and saw that more than 12,000 people have crossed the Channel illegally by dinghy this year alone. So if Rayner’s highest aspirations are met, in a few years’ time we might be able to house the people who arrived in recent months.
Again, my question is not just why some people experience imposter syndrome, but why so many people who should experience it do not.
My father had been waiting his entire life for that whistle. After 75 years, the curse was over. Mayo were Gaelic football champions having overturned the second-biggest deficit in the history of All-Ireland finals. The county hadn’t seen such a miracle since Father Horan got the taoiseach to fund an international airport near the shrine of Our Lady of Knock.
Three months before Dad was born in Castlebar, Mayo won the 1951 title. Their celebrations on the way home were exuberant and, so the legend goes, disrupted a funeral in Foxford. The furious priest (some versions blame the widow) cast a curse on them, saying Mayo would never again lift the Sam Maguire Cup while any of those players lived.
Nonsense, right? Except that Mayo then lost 11 finals, four by one point. Fifteen days after the 2021 final, Paddy Prendergast died, the last of those who had played in the 1951 side. Only Mick Loftus, an unused substitute, remained, and when he died in 2023 Mayo fans hoped the curse had also expired. It didn’t look good when they fell seven points behind Kerry after 15 minutes on Sunday, their first final since 2021, but they reeled them in, taking the lead in the second half and clinging on for catharsis.
Sport loves a curse. We saw it at the recent football World Cup when a witch doctor claimed before Ghana played England that he had used his magic to prevent Harry Kane from scoring. Uri Geller promised to counter it with his mentalism, but he was better at bending spoons than free kicks. The game finished 0-0. The witch doctor then lifted his curse and Kane scored four more goals.
Derby County fans once believed that their team had been cursed by gypsies who were moved off land that became the club’s ground in 1895. Derby reached six FA Cup semi-finals in the next eight years, losing in three finals. Their next final came in 1946, before which the club apologised to the gypsy community. It may have helped since the ball (and the curse?) burst at 1-1 and Derby beat Charlton Athletic 4-1.
Birmingham City also suffered under a gypsy curse, which one manager, Ron Saunders, tried to banish by placing crucifixes under the floodlights, while another, Barry Fry, followed the suggestion of a clairvoyant to urinate on all four corners of the pitch. Perhaps they should try it at Benfica.Bela Guttmann managed them to two European Cup titles, then was sacked in 1962. He stormed off, saying that the Portuguese club would not be European champions again for a century. They are 64 years in and still waiting.
In baseball, the Curse of the Bambino supposedly prevented the Boston Red Sox from winning the World Series for 86 years after selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The Chicago Cubs blamed a 71-year run of failure on the Curse of the Billy Goat after a publican was banned from Wrigley Field in 1945 because his goat, Murphy, was bothering others. He told the owner that no one insulted his goat and got away with it. The Cubs lost that year’s World Series 4-3 and didn’t reach another until 2016.
Other sporting curses include the one that says golf’s Masters will never be won by the winner of the par-three competition the day before – some players fluff their final hole to avoid the jinx – or the Crucible curse by which every first-time winner of snooker’s World Championship does badly the following year. Then there is the ludicrous claim that every time Wales win the grand slam in rugby, a Pope dies. In fact, it has happened only twice and the way that Wales are playing Leo XIV should not expect a short reign.
There are plenty of non-sporting curses, of course, from the deaths of those who disturbed Tutankhamun to the tragic fate of the Kennedys to Gustav Mahler’s fear that he would die after nine symphonies like Beethoven and Bruckner. He died while writing his tenth. There’s also one concerning a Native American chief cursing William Henry Harrison that any US president elected in a year ending in zero would die in office. This happened to seven successive men before Ronald Reagan avoided it, though he was shot.
But there’s something special about superstition in sport. You often hear of players having to put their socks on in the same order or eat the same meal during a tournament. During the 2019 cricket World Cup final, Mark Wood sat on the washing machine in the laundry room at Lord’s for 30 overs in case moving brought bad luck. He wasn’t the first England player to be wary of a spinner.
Such concerns are silly. It is easier to blame a hex than your own failings. There are no such things as curses. Except that Mayo have just lifted the Sam Maguire for the first time since old Paddy Prendergast died and it makes you wonder…
A verdade parece ser insuficiente para desmontar o vitimismo e o wokismo da esquerda, e a sua irreprimível propensão para fechar os olhos, para ignorar ou desculpar, os erros dos seus
O a todos os títulos lamentável caso de Jason Arday, o cidadão britânico de origem africana que trepou rapidamente no mundo universitário apoiado num currículo e percurso de vida mais do que fantasiosos, e nas complacências e tolerâncias excessivas no seio das universidades no Reino Unido, é do domínio público. Quando foi questionado sobre as suas histórias inverosímeis e confrontado com acusações de plágio, demitiu-se do seu lugar na Universidade de Cambridge, vindo infelizmente a morrer pouco tempo depois. A sua história é sobejamente conhecida para me dispensar de a detalhar aqui. O que quero chamar a atenção é para a forma como muita gente de esquerda tem reagido ao caso, sobretudo depois da notícia da sua morte, porque essa forma revela um preocupante embotamento dos critérios morais e um desleixo ou relaxe face à verdade.
É claro que todas as pessoas bem formadas, de qualquer quadrante político que sejam, lamentaram a morte de Arday, o percurso trágico de sucessivas mentiras que o terá levado a esse triste e precoce fim, e a terrível visão da vida de uma pessoa a desmoronar-se como se fosse um castelo de cartas. Mas a gente de esquerda, se bem avalio o que vou lendo nas redes sociais e nos jornais ingleses, espanhóis, norte-americanos, franceses e portugueses, foi mais longe e fez de Arday uma vítima de um assassinato perpetrado por gente de direita. Dito de outra forma, a esquerda fez deste ex-professor da Universidade de Cambridge uma vítima de racismo, de anti-wokismo da extrema-direita e da inveja dos brancos perante o sucesso profissional e académico de um negro.
Isso também é visível aqui em Portugal ou em esferas culturais de língua portuguesa. Por todo o lado, as pessoas de esquerda, desde as mais moderadas às mais radicais, vieram sugerir ou afirmar que Arday tinha sido vítima de uma perseguição impiedosa e eventualmente, provavelmente ou garantidamente — aí a esquerda divide-se —, injusta ou infundada. Entre os negros de esquerda a indignação tem sido grande e a teoria da conspiração tem tido livre curso. Nas palavras do escritor e jornalista angolano João Melo, por exemplo, “o professor Jason Arday foi vítima de um autêntico assassinato mediático, cometido não apenas pelos fascistas das redes, mas também pela imprensa ocidental (ou “ocidentalizada”) convencional, dita séria, mas igualmente criminosa”. Nas do inevitável Mamadou Ba, “o linchamento, dispositivo central dessa ideologia da morte que é o racismo, continua a fazer o seu macabro trabalho. Foi essa mesma violência racial, em toda a sua brutalidade, que ceifou a vida de Jason Arday”.
Como era de esperar, em Inglaterra, a reacção dos negros de esquerda tem sido de grande solidariedade para com Arday e de repúdio pela contestação que sofreu, e Lord Woolley, o negro que é membro da Câmara dos Lordes e que está à frente do Homerton College, na Universidade de Cambridge, foi ao ponto de classificar como “massacre” aquilo a que o recém-falecido Arday esteve sujeito, e de exigir que seja feita uma investigação sobre a forma como os meios de comunicação trataram do seu caso. Além disso Woolley foi um dos signatários de uma carta aberta defendendo Jason Arday das acusações de plágio, e parlamentares do Partido Trabalhista como Clive Lewis ou Bell Ribeiro-Addy, originária do Gana, foram outros dos muitos signatários negros desse texto.
Ainda que não excluam que possa ter havido motivações racistas no escrutínio a que Arday foi sujeito, à direita, os líderes políticos e de opinião negros, como James Cleverly, por exemplo, não se viraram contra os meios de comunicação e preferiram apontar o dedo ao laxismo e fanatismo woke das universidades que, por razões puramente ideológicas, deixaram de avaliar de forma séria e exigente aquele candidato de pele negra, receberam-no de braços abertos e sem grandes critérios de exigência, atirando-o, em consequência disso, para lugares de responsabilidade para os quais não estava habilitado nem preparado, e, claro está, para o inevitável escrutínio público
À semelhança de líderes de opinião negros como Cleverly as pessoas e a imprensa de direita em geral apontaram sobretudo — e bem, a meu ver — a fraude de processos que Arday personificava, os vícios e entorses que o wokismo introduziu na vida universitária, e aproveitaram a ocasião para reafirmar que o escrutínio é algo de saudável e de necessário nas nossas sociedades liberais. Aliás, alguma imprensa de esquerda também questionou a veracidade de diversas afirmações de Jason Arday, pois a sua história, nas palavras do próprio, era tão inacreditável que seria impossível não vir a ser questionada por qualquer pessoa razoável, independentemente de ser de esquerda ou de direita. De facto, esta figura frágil e trágica, que se doutorou aos 30 anos, afirmou que tinha sido mudo até aos 11 e iletrado até aos 18, que ultrapassou vários problemas de saúde, incluindo autismo, epilepsia, um tumor cerebral e um cancro nos testículos, e que realizou proezas atléticas dignas de um Deus do Olimpo, nomeadamente a de ter disputado, em 35 dias, 30 maratonas, as últimas das quais com uma fractura numa perna. Naturalmente que com uma história destas, com suspeitas de plágio e queixas de vários dos seus alunos, o jornalismo interessou-se por ele e investigou-o.
Ainda assim, e regra geral, a esquerda mais emotiva ou menos razoável veio dizer ou insinuar que esse escrutínio não decorria do facto de o homem ser, ao que tudo indicava, um mitómano, mas sim de ser negro. Mais. A gente de esquerda desvalorizou a acusação de plágio, garantindo que muitas outras pessoas o fizeram e fazem, sem as mesmas consequências, e que se Jason Arday fosse branco isso seria desculpado, omitido e não teria importância nenhuma. É claro que essas considerações são completamente falsas, e não precisamos de ir longe nem de sair de Lisboa para encontrar provas dessa falsidade. Quem não se lembra da acusação de plágio que caiu como uma bomba sobre a carreira e, suponho eu, a própria vida, de Clara Pinto Correia?
O problema, porém, é que a verdade parece ser insuficiente para desmontar o vitimismo e o wokismo da esquerda, e a sua irreprimível propensão para fechar os olhos, para ignorar ou desculpar, os erros e os passos em falso dos que, no seu entendimento, estão do lado certo da História e descendem dos brutalizados e oprimidos do passado. Mesmo perante factos irrefutáveis a esquerda recusa-se a ver e a sancionar os seus protegidos ou compagnons de route, e vira-se, reactivamente, contra quem os acusa de fraudes e práticas menos católicas. Há aqui uma desonestidade intelectual que não sendo geral, pois há gente de esquerda que escapa a ela, felizmente, é demasiado frequente para impedir ou dificultar uma vivência saudável entre gente com ideias políticas diferentes. É que — e infelizmente tem de se repetir isto constantemente à gente de esquerda — a verdade importa, os métodos também, e o valor de ambas as coisas não pode variar em função das preferências partidárias. Ainda que lamentemos a sua perda e possamos compreender e respeitar a angústia e o sofrimento a que terá estado sujeito nos seus últimos dias de vida, um mitómano de esquerda é um… mitómano, ponto final, tenha o tom de pele que tiver e chame-se Jason Arday ou outro nome qualquer, e o mundo académico não pode compactuar com mitomanias e aldrabices. Infelizmente, há décadas que compactua. Apesar da sua perspectiva dura sobre os acontecimentos — o seu artigo no Expresso foi escrito antes de se saber da morte de Arday —, perspectiva essa que lhe valeu múltiplos ataques de pessoas de esquerda nas redes sociais, Teresa Nogueira Pinto tem toda a razão quando nos lembra que “as universidades existem para alargar os limites da ciência e descobrir a verdade, não para fabricar vítimas”.
