What's The Issue? The Lunatics Are Running the Asylum

Let us start at the top, which is precisely where the rot is most concentrated.

Donald Trump, the self-appointed dealmaker of the free world, spent another week treating a sovereign nation like a distressed property in a bankruptcy auction. His demands on Ukraine, a country actively bleeding while the West argues about the invoice, have moved beyond diplomatic theatre into something closer to clinical delusion. While Trump and his inner circle played the American stock market like a casino with inside knowledge, timing announcements with the precision of men who know exactly when to buy and when to sell, ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic watched their savings evaporate. The grift is no longer subtle. It has not been subtle for some time.

Meanwhile, Ursula, fond of lying, and her NATO chorus line continue their extraordinary performance. Petr Pavel, the Czech president, this week demanded NATO show its teeth to Russia, bravely rattling his sabre from a safe distance. German Chancellor Scholz, apparently skipping the chapter on geopolitical consequences, floated the idea of Ukraine joining NATO in a limited capacity. Limited. Like a limited edition disaster. Did nobody in Berlin check what triggered this war in the first place?

The great irony, savoured warmly by Moscow, is that RT's own columnists are now publicly advising the West on freedom and sovereignty. Putin and Xi, we are solemnly told, may be the salvation of liberal democracy. You truly cannot write this. Somebody already did.

Across the channel, Keir Starmer's Labour Party is deflating like a punctured rubber dinghy in the middle of the English Channel. Nearly 1,600 council seats gone, Wales lost, the party haemorrhaging in all directions. Wes Streeting, calculating and chronically ambitious, has reopened the Brexit wound for personal leverage. Andy Burnham, the self-styled King of the North, is being shoehorned into a Manchester by-election through a manoeuvre so transparently cynical it would embarrass a student council. Peter Hitchens called them corpse parties. He was being generous.

Closer to home, Julius, never knowingly understated, is sharpening his impeachment blade with the enthusiasm of a man who has waited years for this moment. The Constitutional Court has ruled. Parliament must now confront the Phala Phala affair, the cash in the sofa, the questions Cyril Ramaphosa hoped the nation had forgotten. It has not forgotten. The National Police Commissioner has been suspended. The rot in the upper echelons of the South African Police Service is no longer rumour, it is a verified, expanding catalogue of senior officers arrested, suspended, and still to face the music.

The institutions are creaking. The leadership is compromised. The performance is exhausting.

And yet. Somewhere beneath all of it, something shifts. Call it the Age of Aquarius if you like. Call it the slow, stubborn insistence of ordinary people on a better world than the one their leaders are busy dismantling. The noise is deafening. But noise, eventually, runs out of breath.

Truth, it turns out, is considerably more durable.