As seen in the New Statesman

‘A garlic naan for every curreh, and a sofa for every telleh,’ says the new Prime Minister, concluding his first address in front of No. 10. That’s it? He hasn’t said very much at all. Ending homelessness, and a ‘Ten Year Plan’, the details of which will only be revealed later. I’ve got to file first thing tomorrow, and I can’t spread this across 3,000 words. Time to make use of The System: my foolproof formula for an ‘Ideas Essay’ when I’m up against it.

Firing up Wikiquote again, I decide to just pick the first thing that I see and let the words flow 

Returning from Whitehall to the office, I hurry into a side room, which usually lies unused except as a place to store the mountain of Zadie Smith novels which we’re very keen to read someday. There on a table are the three familiar boxes: one labelled ‘Victorian statesmen’, the second ‘Twentieth-century novelists’, the third ‘Abstract concepts’ – each filled with folded-up bits of paper. Right, here goes. I pick out a slip of paper from the first box. ‘The Earl of Aberdeen.’ I take one from the second. ‘Kingsley Amis.’ Right, and now for the third. ‘Uncertainty.’ I can work with this.

My three topics chosen, I open my laptop and log on to Wikiquote, typing in ‘Earl of Aberdeen’. I use the ‘Control + F’ function to search for particular words and phrases. I try ‘Andy Burnham’. Zero results. How about ‘Cybersecurity’, ‘State capacity’, ‘Bond vigilantes’, ‘Grey zone warfare’, ‘Shahed drones’? Balls, nothing on those either. Ditto for the Kingsley Amis search. Did either of these men even think about the big issues?

My mounting despair is interrupted when our intrepid social media editor Todd Digwell pops his head round the door: ‘Connor, me and the online team are going axe-throwing at BrewDog after work, and then we’re thinking of doing an escape room. You in, mate?’

‘Sorry, mate. The, um, vibes sound, er, low-key immaculate – but I’ve got to bash out this bloody cover piece,’ I reply. Todd gives me a friendly grimace as he closes the door, and I am left once again staring at an empty Word document.

It’s now 3.45 p.m., squeaky-bum time. Think Connor, think. I get distracted and open X on my phone. The top post is an article from BBC news reporting that the manhunt for the Daily Mail journalist Guy Adams is now entering its fourth day. Adams had been going on a ramble through the Pennines when he had apparently tripped and fallen into a ravine. The only trace of him was a copy of The Sound of Laughter by Peter Kay found at the bottom of a valley.

Another victim of our ‘Age of Chaos’ (my coinage). There but for the grace of God go I. It dawns on me. I’ve just got to write from the heart. Firing up Wikiquote again, I decide to just pick the first thing that I see and let the words flow.

‘For three or four miles the ground is covered with bodies of men and horses, many not dead. Wretches wounded unable to crawl, crying for water amidst heaps of putrefying bodies.’ So the 4th Earl of Aberdeen recounted the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, which he witnessed firsthand, but it could just as well have been written about Europe’s deteriorating security environment in Ukraine. Where are the Kingsley Amises, the new Angry Young Men, who can chronicle this Age of Uncertainty?’

Intro done. Then a couple of paragraphs on Burnham’s inflection points, a few on AI and society, some on bond markets and rent controls and round it all off with my concluding thoughts on rearmament in the age of online harms.

Filed. Now we’ll need some cover art for whatever this is. Could use the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Oh damn, we used that last week. And the week before.