No, not Jeffrey Epstein. The financier in question is Daniel Vorcaro, the now-jailed evangelical banker who was on the mind of many voters as they headed to the polls in this Sunday’s congressional and presidential elections in Brazil. In a surprise result, Right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro and son of the jailed former president, Jair Bolsonaro, won 47% of the vote over incumbent Leftist Lula Da Silva’s 45 percent; the pair will face a run-off on October 25. But despite the apparent backlash against Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), the case of Vorcaro reveals something deeply rotten about Brazil’s establishment, both Left and Right.   

A native of Belo Horizonte, Daniel Vorcaro’s father, Henrique, headed a real-estate empire in the state of Minas Gerais. For decades, the Vorcaros were prominent financial backers of the Lagoinha Baptist Church — one of the country’s most influential evangelical churches, headed by the televangelist Márcio Valadão and his son, André. (Since the turn of the century, the evangelical share of Brazil’s population has ballooned to around a third.) Accordingly, the younger Vorcaro was inculcated at an early age in the evangelical excess of Lagoinha; at one point, Daniel himself hosted a musical program on the church’s television channel. His sister, Natália, also married Fabiano Zettel, a Lagoinha pastor, lawyer, and wellness influencer (and Daniel’s future business partner).

By 2004, Daniel Vorcaro inherited the bulk of his father’s real-estate empire. Then, in 2018, he assumed control of what was then called Banco Máxima, now Banco Master. Practically overnight, the bank changed from a sleepy, small-time lender into a major player in Brazilian finance. The bank’s modus operandi consisted of offering investment securities with promises of large returns. This, despite the bank lacking the necessary collateral. By the start of the 2020s, Banco Master’s asset base swelled to more than $1 billion, including around $400 million in public pension funds across 14 states. And Vorcaro himself became a fixture of São Paulo’s Faria Lima, Brazil’s equivalent of Wall Street. 

In truth, Banco Master’s business model was effectively a pyramid scheme. Fraudulent credit was sold to cover older obligations and subsequently laundered through a series of investment funds. The bank evidently went as far as to also launder money from the Primeiro Comando da Capital, Brazil’s most powerful crime syndicate. 

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The evangelical banker also had a peculiar sense of “Christian charity.” Banco Master paid $4 million from its fraudulent funds to Lagoinha’s temple; messages between Vorcaro and his brother-in-law Zettel showed the latter protesting that construction would stall without further funds. Head pastor André Valadão at Lagoinha has denied wrongdoing, referring to related accusations of irregular payments as “religious persecution.”

By 2024, irregularities within Banco Master drew the attention of Brazil’s central bank, leading Vorcaro to attempt multiple failed sales of the bank; former President Michel Temer and former Supreme Court justice Ricardo Lewandowski were recruited as paid consultants for an eventual sale. Finally, on Nov. 17, 2025, a consortium of Emirati investors and the Brazilian conglomerate Grupo Fictor purchased Master for an undisclosed sum. The next day, the central bank announced the immediate liquidation of the lender, citing widespread fraud — the largest of its kind in Brazilian history. Vorcaro was subsequently arrested while trying to board a private jet out of the country. He now awaits trial in detention.

The fallout from Banco Master has reverberated across every corner of Brazil. His extravagant parties, held in and outside the country, were evidently used as an “insurance policy” in order to coerce protection from attendants. The evangelical banker reportedly hired foreign escorts precisely so they couldn’t understand sensitive conversations in Portuguese. And his alleged private militia, used to intimidate journalists and coerce contacts, at one point reportedly reached out to the PCC, the crime syndicate, for protection. One member of his militia committed suicide while in custody. 

Much like Epstein, the upstart Vorcaro displayed an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with the highest echelons of Brazil’s political elite, easily sliding past partisan boundaries. 

Ibaneis Rocha, a former center-Right governor of Brasília, directed the state-owned Bank of Brasília (BSB) to buy Master assets and attempt an acquisition of the lender that was ultimately blocked by the Central Bank. When I arrived in Brasília last week, on my way from the airport, a banner referring to Rocha’s vice governor and her successor Celina Leão read: “Where are they Celina? Where are the BSB funds?” 

But among the largest direct transfers of fraudulent funds from the Vorcaro empire was to none other than Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s son, who is himself running for the same office. (The presidential race, pitting Flávio against the incumbent President Inácio Lula da Silva from the Left, will head to a runoff.)

In the years before the banker’s detention, Flávio wined and dined with Vorcaro and flew in his private jet, maintaining close contact practically until the moment of the financier’s arrest. Just days before his failed getaway, the financier received a message from Bolsonaro stating: “brother, I am and will always be with you.” Flávio, it turns out, solicited around $26 million from Vorcaro for a biopic about his ex-president father, titled Dark Horse. What would have been the most expensive film in Brazilian history was never made, and instead, might have funded Flávio’s brother’s lobbying efforts in Washington and Mar-a-Lago. 

But the Left is implicated, too. Jacques Wagner, the Workers’ Party, or PT, leader in the Senate, reportedly defended Master’s interests in the upper chamber. The former finance minister during Lula’s first term, Guido Mantega, was reportedly paid around $200,000 a month from Master-linked entities. Rui Costa, a former PT governor for Bahia and Lula’s current chief of staff, privatized and sold the payroll-loan firm CREDCESTA to a Banco Master partner. 

But the scandal’s real center of gravity lies within Brazil’s judiciary. In recent years, the Supreme Court, and especially Justice Alexandre de Moraes, have been heralded inside and outside Brazil for their roles in opposing the autocratic aims of Bolsonarismo. (Ironically, the court was previously instrumental in Lula’s 2018 conviction, which effectively handed Bolsonaro the presidency; and Moraes was once reviled by the Left for convicting Lula on dubious charges of passive corruption.) 

Fast forward four years later, and the justices annulled all charges against Lula, who narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. Prior, during, and following his loss, the far-Right firebrand made multiple cartoonish attempts at remaining in office past his term — some of which involved trying to assassinate Lula and even a failed military coup. The court rightly sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for these crimes, with Moraes presiding over the trial; in response, President Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil in 2025. 

The Supreme Court and Moraes have also employed at times heavy-handed tactics, such as installing a harsh censorship regime against conservatives and critics of judicial power in order to “defend democracy.” Behind these actions against the Right — however justified or not — lies something even more troubling, however: Moraes and others on the courts are, themselves, also implicated in the Vorcaro scandal. 

Moraes’s wife received payments worth $15 million out of a $25 million legal-services agreement with Banco Master. In exchange, Moraes reportedly offered Vorcaro forewarning of investigations into Master. Justice Dias Toffoli received around $7 million from the jailed banker via a family resort fund. Meanwhile, on the court’s Right flank, a Vorcaro associate donated around $1 million to Bolsonaro appointee André Mendonça’s think tank. Further, associates of Bolsonaro appointee Kássio Nunes Marques, including his son, seemingly negotiated millionaire contracts with Banco Master; Justice Marques reportedly slept with a prostitute hired by the evangelical banker.  

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Game of Thrones-esque intrigue has since ensued on the 11-member court between competing factions headed by Moraes and Mendonça. Justices loyal to either Lula or the Bolsonaros have each sought to selectively reveal or suppress their respective ties to Vorcaro with the ultimate aim of aiding the campaigns of their political patrons. 

Judicial corruption in Brazil is obvious, and Lula has pledged to establish an independent council to nominate justices and impose fixed terms on the court (justices currently serve indefinitely until the age of 75). For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to limit the court to constitutional decisions, end decisions by individual justices, and clamp down on nepotism. It remains an open question which, if any, of these reforms will be enacted should either candidate win the presidency.

The reality is that the victor is virtually certain to opt for continued protection of allies in and outside of the court who are implicated with Vorcaro or face reprisals from opposing justices. Regardless, the stakes are high given that the next president will fill one vacancy and appoint replacements for four justices who will be forced to retire due to age limits. 

The truth is that, unlike Bolsonaro and his family, Lula is not directly implicated in the Banco Master scandal. (Up until recently, it was Bolsonaro who saw his poll numbers tank due to his close ties with Vorcaro.) But because the president has chosen to protect Moraes via his loyalists on the court, many Brazilians have gravitated to Bolsonaro under the auspices that the Right-wing populist offers a more credible alternative for reform. 

One voter told me he was voting for Bolsonaro in order to end lawfare and censorship against conservatives. (On the other hand, Mendonça’s recent conduct suggests that opponents are right to fear a novel censorship regime against progressive views, particularly over Israel.) 

Finally, beyond the judiciary, a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency, like that of his father, would be devastating for Brazilian labor. And the family has lobbied the White House for sanctions, tariffs and terror designations against their own country. The 80-year-old Lula, on the other hand, effectively represents the status quo; his party has governed Brazil for 17 of the past 24 years. Poverty has fallen, but wages have remained largely stagnant, and Brazilians are deeply in debt. Reforms such as debt relief and a provisional ban on gambling have come far too late, and only under electoral pressure. 

Prior to the first round of elections, one street vendor in Brasília told me he was tired of the country’s political class and was voting for libertarian populist Renan Santos; a service worker at a nearby museum likewise told me she would vote for neighboring Goiás Governor Ronaldo Caiado. In the end, however, it seems both may have opted to instead punish Lula and vote for Bolsonaro. Come what may in Brazil, the reality is that the country’s institutions will likely remain in thrall to the ever-present, and increasingly evangelical, oligarchs like Vorcaro. 

Aris Roussinos visited the fraught country at the height of what is now being called the Flamingo Revolution, speaking to activists, opposition leaders, and even the country’s embattled PM himself — who believes that his people have never had it so good. 

* * * * *

“Why am I living in England?” Avni, an Albanian in his 40s working in London as a builder, asked me angrily, as we walked to the lines of riot police separating Albania’s Flamingo Revolution protesters from the country’s parliament. “Albania is a very good country, there is no war here. We shouldn’t be immigrants. We should come back home,” he added, telling me that his home village in northern Albania was now entirely depopulated, as everyone who could had already decamped to Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe.

“Because the government [in Albania] is very corrupted, people doesn’t get no rights, but if you know anybody from government, you’ll be a millionaire in two days. All the MPs from Albania, they become billionaires, they’ve got massive houses, massive cash, hidden everywhere. All their cousins, they got massive, massive cash. It’s a really, really corrupted government, and we’ve had enough of this. They push us all [to] Europe, but we need to come back.”

It was the 54th and most violent day so far of the street protests that have overshadowed Albania’s summer, to the chagrin of Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, which has run the country for 13 consecutive years. “Everyone thinks that this is a democratic state,” Bora Mitrovica, an Albanian-Canadian activist, told me at the police barriers where I had found her, shouting “Down with communism!” and cursing the police with elaborate Balkan oaths. “It is not. Edi Rama is a dictator. This is a dictatorship.” Bora had just been pepper-sprayed by police, after attempting to push through the barriers towards Albania’s parliament. Protestors had hurled eggs and water bottles at police lines, and at the cars of politicians making their way to the voting chamber. When the police pushed them back with tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray, the protestors howled in fury, some breaking aloe leaves from the decorative street planting and squeezing the soothing juice into their eyes. “Dictatorship does not end with a chant, You need to fight. We need our Albanian men to stand up and not just say ‘fuck you’, because that’s not how you change the country,” Bora told me. “I advise all tourists to get the fuck out as soon as they can, because they’re not going to be able to handle what we can handle as Albanians.”

The protests had begun in the southern seaside village of Zvërnec back in May. Villagers had discovered access to their fishing boats and coastal olive groves suddenly closed off by security fencing, and construction vehicles apparently starting work on a luxury resort project backed by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and strongly supported by Rama’s government. In violent scenes, security guards and villagers clashed, before local protesters broke down the fencing and reclaimed possession of what they say is their land. Who the land in question actually belongs to remains a matter of dispute. Because of the many land reforms and disbursements marking the country’s shifts from Ottoman rule to independence and Italian occupation, and then from Enver Hoxha’s isolationist regime to the chaotic transition to democracy, claims in Albania often overlap. Frequently, more than one party can claim legal title to any given plot.

The ostensible owner of the Zvërnec coastline at the center of the Kushner project, a Miami-based businessman called Artur Shehu, has been accused by lawyers working for local villagers of forging Ottoman title deeds to seize control of their valuable property. In June, he was also announced to be under investigation by SPAK, an anti-corruption body set up by Rama’s government, for money laundering and international cocaine trafficking. Shehu, for his part, denies any wrongdoing, insisting he is a legitimate businessman who inherited the land from his medieval forebears. Complicating the story are hints, in SPAK proceedings, of government officials’ attendance at meetings with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers. And SPAK files leaked to international journalists suggest that Belgian investigators noted that “these meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds, with the support of political authorities”.
At the same time, SPAK stresses that “at this stage no evidence is presented that identifies the officials involved or proves their participation in illegal activities”. The gap between these two claims is now, in Albania, filled with feverish and dramatic political speculation, used by the opposition Democratic Party to claim high-level political corruption.

* * * * *

Because the salt lagoon at Zvërnec is a rare European breeding ground for flamingos, the initial protests in Tirana were environmental ones, with festive protesters carrying giant styrofoam flamingos as their emblem. But over the course of the following weeks, the protests escalated from halting construction on the project and reinstating Albania’s recently quashed environmental protection laws, to demanding what is in effect a full revolution against the entire political system. The protesters now insist that Rama must resign and face trial for corruption, along with the leader of the opposition, Sali Berisha, while Albania must install a 12-month technocratic government before new elections. Naturally, Rama is not inclined to agree, hence the current standoff.

Though the nightly protests along Tirana’s leafy boulevards are good-natured family affairs, those in the morning are rowdier, bringing along a more committed core of activists who declare themselves to be revolutionaries. While there are young masked men to be seen throwing missiles, and older working-class men wearing the traditional Albanian felt cap or waving the flag of Greater Albania, the majority are from the young, highly-educated and socially liberal Tirana bourgeoisie, as well as the diaspora — ordinarily a reliable vote bank for Rama’s reformist and pro-EU government. Conservative young women in hijabs stand alongside heavily-tattooed hipsters, chanting “Rama, hand in your resignation,” in Albanian at the police lines, to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, or “Rama, Rama, Fuck You,” to the tune of “We Will Rock You”.

Over the days and nights of protests I attended, long and passionate speeches condemned the government as terrorists, as a dictatorship, and bemoaned the claimed sell-out of Albanian land to Israeli interests. The latter, rather conspiratorial, claim transpired to be a regular theme when talking to Albanians. Even stickers observed on lampposts in central Tirana depicted Rama as a stooge of George Soros or as a Hasidic Jew. Xhoana, a fashionably dressed marketing executive, told me: “Our government is selling our land to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the oligarchs in our place. They don’t work for the people. We want a revolution because everything is a mess.”

“Albania right now doesn’t need a revolution,” said a government spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, drawing on a cigarette at a pavement cafe. “People have been saying for 50 days we need a revolution, but they have no plan for what comes next. A revolution at this stage, when we are so close to going into the EU, is a dangerous thing.” Rama’s Socialist Party government has pledged EU entry for Albania by 2030, but negotiations have dragged on since 2009, delayed by rule of law concerns, the country’s relative poverty, and worries over organized crime — particularly the domination of international cocaine trafficking by Albanian clans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reignited the accession process, as EU officials felt compelled to exert the bloc’s agency in the new age of geopolitical competition. But the window for accession may be narrow and short-lived. For both the ruling Socialist Party and the EU, this summer’s mass protests are an unwanted complication.

“Europe, chiefly the European Commission, they wanted to see all progress,” Genc Pollo, a prominent Albanian conservative intellectual and former Deputy Prime Minister told me. “They didn’t want to see the democratic backslide, and in their annual reports, they omitted all the problems, for whatever reasons.” A skeptic of Albania’s progress under Rama’s government, which he termed a “narco-state,” ruled by a “klepto-regime”, Pollo told me that “Rama has allowed for the Albanian rings, which bring coke from Latin America to central and northern Europe, to launder their proceeds in construction. And then, I mean, when elections come, they, with their money and their muscle, they help him get the vote.” But, in his telling, European diplomats are deaf to the opposition’s concerns. “Edi Rama is a master in staging things, and organizing, in having summits in Tirana, and having the leaders in some restaurant presenting a pizza, with his face on the pizza box, and then you have the President of the European Commission, saying ‘Oh, this is wonderful, this is wonderful, oh, dear Edi’.”

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On the face of it, though, the protests, supported by every single Albanian I spoke to who wasn’t a member of the government, seem strangely timed. Under Rama’s rule, Albania’s GDP has almost tripled in a decade, a growth rate Western Europeans can only envy. New tower blocks, exuberantly designed in the flush of new wealth, loom over Tirana’s handsome Mussolini-era civic architecture and the few surviving Ottoman mosques and coaching inns. Until recently seen as rather outré destinations, both Tirana and the country’s many fast-developing beach resorts are now filled with tourists, both northern Europeans seeking summer sun and Turks and Gulf Arabs escaping it. The bustling cafes, bars and restaurants are as stylish and comfortable as anything elsewhere in the Mediterranean, if no longer significantly cheaper. Albanian wages have not kept up with the rapid inflation of prices, particularly of food and property, introduced by the influx of money, legitimate or otherwise. In some ways, Edi Rama appears a victim of his own success.

The protesters are “an urban group of people, predominantly highly educated”, says Pirro Vengu, a Socialist Party MP for Vlorë, including Zvërnec, over coffee at one of those stylish restaurants. “The paradox is that this is the youth that has come to age during this government. So, apparently we’ve done something right, right?” Young, smartly suited and charismatic, Vengo is a rising star in Albanian politics, who even government critics in Zvërnec ruefully admitted liking. “It’s also totally legitimate that Albanians are not comparing the country now to its tragic past of the Nineties. We’re not the poorest country in Europe anymore. We’re comparing ourselves to Western Europe, where all Albanians have traveled several times.”

For all the country’s economic success, Albanian political discourse is riven by eyebrow-raising claims of impropriety, emanating most strongly from the opposition. In his office in Democratic Party headquarters, Sali Berisha, the 81-year old leader of the conservative opposition, came out from behind a desk piled high with papers to shake my hand. Behind him, on the cluttered bookshelves, a MAGA baseball cap and framed photograph of Mother Theresa vied for space. Albania’s first democratically elected leader, and the architect of the country’s Western orientation, Berisha is as central a figure in shaping the country’s modern course as his arch-rival, Edi Rama. Just a few weeks earlier, the Trump administration, citing national security grounds, had lifted the Biden-era entry sanctions placed against Berisha for corruption in office, which he denies. British sanctions remain in place — unjustly, Berisha told me, handing me a printout of an FCO document relating to his case, and accusing the previous British ambassador of being “corrupted” by Edi Rama. The influx of money from criminal proceeds, Berisha told me, had distorted the country’s economy, wrecking Albanian exports to Europe while being laundered in high-value construction projects. “If you look to this country,” Berisha asked me rhetorically, “What you will find? You’ll find an extraordinary power in the hands of Edi Rama and his government, which is the power of drugs. The power of drugs is many, many billions of euros. The power of drugs, of Albanian drug cartels, controls everything in this country.”

Recently returned to frontline politics after defeating internal rivals within the Democratic Party, Berisha eyes the protests as a route back to office, or at very least as weakening his bitter rival Rama’s grip on power. He concedes that “maybe 20%” of the slogans demanded his jailing, but assures me that these demands were made only by “Left-wing extremist groups”. For the most part, he said, the protesters were against the government, “and their cause is just. [It] is our cause. That’s why we fully support it. We fully respect it, we do not try to take the leadership of it.” As for his rival himself, “Edi Rama treats Albania like his personal fiefdom, in which he could do everything,” Berisha told me. “Like being a sultan, in a sultanate of centuries ago, where the air, the land, and the water, are considered property of the sultan.”

* * * * *

The Prime Minister’s Office is in a handsome Rationalist building opened in 1941, designed to house the Italian colonial governor. Attendants there ushered me through long corridors, lined with classical Greek and Ottoman ceramics and into Edi Rama’s office, where he pointedly ignored me for some time, busy scrolling on his mobile phone. Rama had been an artist and writer before entering politics as the reformist Mayor of Tirana, whose policy of beautifying the capital had turned it into an Instagrammable tourist destination, and himself into Albania’s second longest-serving ruler since independence in 1912, surpassed only by the communist dictatorship. A big and powerful-looking man, today dressed all in loose, black clothing, apart from spotless white trainers, the fiercely intelligent Rama is as charismatic as he is intimidating. But recent international interviews had been fraught, making the mood in the office tense. When Rama finally sat down beside me, leaning into his chair, I asked him his opinion of the protests.

“The protests today are not the protests of June, so the people who spoke today are different. They are engaged in political parties. They are engaged in opposition parties, small parties of opposition, Leftists from the extreme and Rightists from the extreme,” he claimed, “While the June protests were different, were bigger, a lot of people that voted for us were there.” In any case, “I am very, very proud that we have had such a big protest for days in a most peaceful manner, and that nobody was hurt, nobody was stopped to do what he or she wanted,” he added, “The bottom line is that this protest shows a country that is like a normal European country where you have protests.” Repeating his government’s claim that the protests were being stoked by foreign actors, he suggested that “the algorithm did a lot to bring them to bring them in the boulevard, you know? Listen, I’m telling you, one of the things that we have seen from the back of the mirror, the social media, is that a very high percentage of the content is produced outside the building. It’s not Albanian.” Indeed, Rama added, “If this would not have been about Jared Kushner and Trump and Ivanka and all type of fantasies, this would not have been so good for the algorithm,” but the Kushner link “brought all the anti-Trump people on steroids.” When I demurred, he added, “You are an exception in this if you are not looking for an angle to say how terrible Trump is and how he’s killed flamingos in Albania.”

* * * * *

But neither Trump nor flamingos seem the prime source of discontent down in Zvërnec. “Albania is not a democracy,” an older man told me in the village’s heavily-accented Greek. “They are thieves, all of them, Edi Rama and Sali Berisha are the same,” he said, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis. “We have had no water here for two months. I have to use my little well, but then they take everything we own here for themselves.” A local woman agreed. “They have taken my elderly father’s olive groves. We have had these plots from generation to generation but they won’t give us the papers saying they belong to us, not even for the house we live in.”

For the birthplace of Albania’s political crisis, Zvërnec is a sleepy place, a village of a few hundred people, mostly ethnic Greeks or Hellenized Vlach pastoralists. Close to the southern city of Vlorë, whose thudding beach bars stretch along the sandy shoreline to the village boundaries, Zvërnec reflects an older, unspoiled Mediterranean, increasingly a nostalgic memory even in Albania. Wading birds hoot and croak in the coastal marshes of the Vjosa delta, cicadas rasp in the olive groves, shaded from the ferocious summer sun: it is all reminiscent of the Greece of maybe 30 or 40 years ago. “We want investment, but not this investment,” one woman told me. “This is our land, and we have never got our family land back since 1991. We also don’t want Israelites here — this is Albanian land, and if they come here we will kill them.”

On Zvërnec’s wild sandy beach of Portonovo, empty save for a handful of local families, happily ignoring the notices forbidding them to swim, I met Kosta Xhaho, the local project coordinator for PPNEA, Albania’s largest environmental NGO. This is, he told me, one of the most important, turtle nesting areas, and Ground Zero for the protests that had long migrated to central Tirana. “We started to protest here. Then we started to fight with those bulldozers that started to construct a road and the trucks in the protected area. And then we started to fight with the security that they put on the fences, and now we are fighting with the government to change the law, so this area is to stay protected forever.”

PPNEA’s wish is for the beach and the rest of the coastline to remain public land, as was all the way back to King Zog’s Kingdom of Albania. But it is a highly marketable commodity, just as much for those who have farmed it for generations as for the Kushners. And it is not clear that the villagers themselves wish the site to remain undeveloped, rather than profiting from the tourism boom they believe Shehu has stolen from them. In nearby Vlorë, local opinion is distinctly more in favor of the Kushner project. “These people [in Zvërnec] are stupid,” a Vlorë taxi driver told me. “They don’t want to go forward, but it’s one of the biggest investments in Europe. It’ll be so good for our city. I just hope it’s like they say it is, and Israel doesn’t build a base there,” he added. Even so, he told me that he supports the Tirana protests “because they’re about high prices. Albania is a very poor country still, and very corrupt.” I asked him who he voted for. “Rama, of course,” he said, looking at me as if I’d asked a stupid question, “Every time Edi Rama.”

For Rama himself, re-elected just over a year ago for a fourth term, the protests have come as a jolt of shock. In the recently released “Besa” strategic document, whose name alludes to the unbreakable oath-making central to traditional Albanian culture, Rama’s government declared that “the flamingo boulevard” presented “a mirror that society held up before us”, and proof that “ever more Albanians, including older ones, no longer compare the Albania we have with the one we had in 2013, but only with the one they themselves believe Albania can and must be”. Much of the Besa document seems to draw from de Tocqueville’s observation that the most dangerous moment for any regime is when the rising expectations derived from reforms already undertaken make any residual injustices seem intolerable. “The citizen who has more than yesterday,” the strategy’s authors write, “is a more dissatisfied citizen. Precisely because they live better today than yesterday, they likewise believe that their country is capable of doing far more than it does today.” In a recent open letter, the former Socialist Party insider and Rama loyalist Elisa Spiropali, recently removed from her role as Europe Minister, declared that the protests represent a “political and social mobilization, especially among the younger generation, that cannot be ignored without consequences.” In what can only be read as a critique of Rama’s governance style, Spiropali asserted that Albania requires “not more personalization of power, but institutions stronger than individuals”, “more humility, less arrogance”, “more representation and less concentration of decision-making”, to build “a state where the law stands above power and where power is not identified with any one person”.

When I asked Edi Rama whether Spiropali’s open letter highlighted inner disputes within the Socialist Party, he shut down the question. “This is a very internal, domestic thing,” he said. “And we have to keep it for our own because I don’t think we have to export our internal things outside for the audience, because then it becomes like feeding with curiosity, feeding with curious things, an audience that is not at all inside the story, not informed or nothing.” But the opposition had no such qualms, I replied, adding that Berisha had made very specific allegations that political figures within Rama’s inner circle had attended the Aruba meeting with the alleged drug trafficker Artur Shehu, and that the government had uncomfortable links with organized crime bosses. “Where is it? Who, where? Where is the picture? Where is the document? Where are the tickets? Where, where?” he responded. “So how would you answer,” he added, pointing at me, “for example, an allegation that you were yesterday with some drug dealers in the hotel where you are sleeping. How do you answer that?”

He went on, “Yeah, the opposition figures may tell you many things, but it’s not for me to say to you, if we are linked or not, it’s for them to prove that we are linked or not, because I’m really disgusted from years now that in this country… that the burden of proof has passed to them who were accused.” Asked about the opposition’s characterization of Albania as a narco-state, Rama dismissed the idea entirely. “You can say whatever you want. But ‘narco-state’, a narco-state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU? It doesn’t match in any shape or form. If Albania has problems with corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years. If Albania has problems with crime, Albania has never fought crime like these years. And when it comes to crime, I’m telling you, we pay a big price in the Balkans, to the fact that people from the Balkans are very active in organized crime. Outside. But the industry of the crime is not here. It’s there.”

Referring to my being a journalist, he added, “You know narco-states, I guess, how they feel like, you know corrupt poor countries, how they feel like, you know middle-income countries, how they feel like. I don’t think you need me or whomever else to tell you in which type of country you are, with all the goods and the downsides… It doesn’t feel unsafe, it doesn’t feel like a poor country, you don’t feel all these things.”

I asked Rama if, having secured his place as one of the most significant figures in Albania’s history, he worried that an escalation of the protests might harm his legacy. “No, how protests can threaten the legacy?” he said, “I like the pressure.” He had ridden out two previous waves of protests, he told me, maybe bigger than today’s, in 2013, just after entering power, and also in 2018. “When it came to the first one, I pulled back because they were right. They had a very strong point. I said, you are right, we’ll stop. And it ended, they got what they wanted. Second time, I didn’t pull back. But I started a conversation with them and we did good things. This time, I learned things, so we are not going to pull back from the [Zvërnec] project, for sure. But we’re gonna make a [consultation] process.” In the end, he added, “I strongly believe the project will close this chapter completely because it will be beautiful.”

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Many Albanians I spoke to, including those otherwise supportive of Rama, likened his current situation to that of Serbia’s strongman Aleksandar Vučić — not, in Albania, a flattering comparison — who has also won the EU’s favor while facing down months-long street protests. While it is unlikely that the protests alone will unseat Rama, they clearly highlight a growing disaffection with the two-party system, and the current politics of patronage. Mostly young, liberal and highly-educated, the protestors are, to a large degree, Edi Rama’s children. For nearly a generation, Rama’s brand of developmentalist, benevolent paternalism has transformed the country into a genuinely dynamic boom economy, at a dizzying pace. But like the villagers in Zvërnec, Tirana’s middle classes feel poorer, not richer, for the visible growth and wealth sprouting around them. For Western observers, now accustomed to stagnant wages and the limitations of two-party systems, Albania’s political crisis shows, ironically, how European the country has become, even while stuck in the EU’s Balkan waiting-room.

With the protests continuing, contrary to early expectations, through August, the likelihood of their escalation in the cooler weather of autumn, when holidaymakers have returned home and students have returned to classes, appears to be growing. But juggling his attempts to secure the simultaneous approval of EU observers, of the mercurial and acquisitive Trump administration, of the party shaped in his own image and of his increasingly restive voters, Rama projected only calmness. Leaning back into his armchair at the end of our meeting, he told me, “Listen, I am 13 years here now. So I have three more years. I have nothing to prove to myself. Because in the beginning, you know, there are many things to prove to yourself. As you said, I have my place in the history of this country, then, in which light this will be decided by the people.”

But navigating the vagaries of the second Trump administration has increased the pressure on Edi Rama, whose attempts to court favor with the American president, whether by signing up Albania to Trump’s dubious Board of Peace scheme or by pushing through the Kushner family’s contentious real estate project, has revealed previously hidden fractures within his own voter base. Rama’s only reward, so far, has been Washington’s sudden rehabilitation of his bitterest political rival, Sali Berisha, in what can only be read as a means to exert American pressure. What happens over autumn will now decide everything, Sali Berisha told me. “Very much will depend on September. Will they re-energize, remobilize? Will opposition parties succeed to get united in a large front? To persist for a caretaker government for new elections, or not, I could not predict. It’s difficult, but I think it’s vital.” But the Democratic Party’s chances of riding popular dissatisfaction to power seems doubtful, given the broad, anti-systemic nature of the protests. In the street directly outside Berisha’s office, pausing to check my phone, I noticed a slogan prominently scrawled on a large metal bin. “Revolucion, Rama Burg, Berisha Burg,” it said, Rama to jail, Berisha to jail. It is, by far, the most popular slogan shouted on Tirana’s streets.

The recordings were made by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) — the independent prosecutorial body that oversees and prosecutes NABU’s cases — as part of Operation Midas, a 15-month investigation into corruption within Ukraine’s energy sector, launched in 2024. NABU has implemented an unorthodox communications strategy, revealing information in episodes akin to a drama series like Homeland and giving suspects nicknames like The Surgeon, The Professor, The Rocket and Che Guevara.

As only a section of the transcripts has been published, the full extent of the corruption is still not known. However, the nine suspects named in the recordings so far are uncomfortably close to Zelensky. These include his former chief aide Andriy Yermak; former defense minister Rustem Umerov; former deputy prime minister Oleksii Chernyshov; and Tymur Mindich, the owner of the infamous apartment and the President’s former business partner.

So far, detectives have conducted 70 searches of premises where they seized $4 million in cash, hundreds of documents and mobile phones. Bail has been posted only to two of the nine suspects. “This is deeply regrettable”, said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s representative for Foreign Affairs, as the revelations became public last November. “It is literally the people’s money that should go to the front lines.”

All this has been deeply uncomfortable for Zelensky — who responded by announcing plans to clean up the energy sector. But many of his attempts to distance himself from the scandal have backfired. In July last year, crowds took to the streets holding homemade cardboard signs in protest after the Ukrainian parliament voted to strip NABU of its independent status, widely seen as an attempt to stem further revelations. This “Cardboard Maidan” reemerged last month after Zelensky sacked the popular modernizing defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who had cracked down on corruption by making procurement of weapons more transparent. Zelensky has so far opted not to reinstall Fedorov in spite of the protests.

And there are more revelations to come. One MP, Yaroslav Zhelezniak, has said he possesses more evidence and plans to release more secret recordings confirming suspicions that corruption is endemic in wartime Ukraine. Last year a Gallup poll put Zelensky’s approval ratings at 67% — lower than at the outset of the war, but still incredibly high compared to other world leaders. However, the same poll showed 84% of Ukrainians believed fraud and bribes were widespread throughout the government. And this year, a poll found 54% of Ukrainians citing corruption as the biggest threat to the country — compared to 39% who considered war the greater peril.

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Meanwhile the scandal refuses to go away — indeed, it threatens to destabilize Ukraine at a critical moment. Ukraine’s long-range drones have provided a strategic advantage in the war and its bombing of oil refineries has created a nationwide fuel shortage in Russia. Meanwhile Zelensky’s diplomacy has been starting to bear fruit in Washington, with the Senate recently voting overwhelmingly in favor of sanctions on Russia.

Zelensky was, of course, elected President in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate — a comedian who could portray himself to the Ukrainian people as the anti-establishment outsider. On the international stage, he has been hailed as a hero for standing up for democracy and liberty and projecting Ukraine as the shining antithesis to Vladimir Putin’s mafia-like authoritarianism. All of which makes him uniquely vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy.

While there is no evidence implicating Zelensky himself, several of his former business partners and senior members of his Servant of the People party have escaped corruption charges by fleeing abroad, leading to claims they were tipped off by government insiders.

One of them is Tymur Mindich, the owner of the infamous flat bugged by the state anti-corruption investigators. A former business partner of Zelensky, Mindich is the key protagonist in Operation Midas — indeed, the investigation tends to be referred to as The Mindich Tapes in Ukraine. Mindich fled to Israel just before being charged with masterminding the $100 million scheme that diverted money intended to fortify energy infrastructure against Russian attacks into kickbacks for corrupt officials. He also lobbied the defense minister to award military contracts to Firepoint, a company under his control which produces critical defense equipment. Ukraine has sanctioned Mindich and demanded his extradition from Israel in order that he can face justice; Mindich in turn has attempted to sue his former friend, Zelensky.

Another central figure is Andriy Yermak, the massively influential former chief of staff to Zelensky once regarded as Ukraine’s second most powerful man. “He virtually ran the country”, one Ukrainian businessman told me. Codenamed ‘The Surgeon’, Yermak, an official suspect, has been arrested and last month posted bail of £2.3 million. He dismisses allegations against him as “unfounded”.

The most explosive of the tapes is a conversation between Mindich and a woman named Natalia, who is apparently helping to oversee construction of four luxury villas near Kyiv, apparently built with the proceeds of embezzlement. It appears from the transcripts that one of the villas was intended for Mindich, one for Yermak, and another for the former deputy prime minister, Oleksiy Chernyshov. At one point, Natalia says that the interior structures of “Andriy’s” (i.e. Yermak’s) house have already been completed. At another, she mentions that a fence now separates Mindich’s villa from “Vova’s” — a common short version of Volodymyr that many have taken to mean Zelensky.

Zelensky has denied all knowledge of Mindich’s schemes and called for any corrupt officials to be jailed. So the most plausible explanation is that the President has shown poor judgment in choosing his closest advisors. To some extent this is understandable. He inherited a legacy of endemic corruption in Ukraine whereby bribes were already institutionalized, the judiciary was compromised and politically connected oligarchs routinely ripped off the people by obtaining valuable state assets for a fraction of their real value. Indeed, the very existence of organizations like NABU; the freedom of Ukrainian media to pursue the revelations; and the street protests that have been allowed to proliferate are in themselves evidence of the strength of Ukraine’s commitment to transparency.

Nevertheless, the charges against his closest friends have made it more difficult for Zelensky to distance himself from the case. This may yet become even harder as the repercussions of one Ukraine’s biggest and unnoticed scandals make their way through the courts.

This affair concerns the state takeover of Sense Bank, one of Ukraine’s biggest, with assets of £2.3 billion. Prior to 2022, it operated as Alfa-Bank Ukraine, part of a group of banks associated with the Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, and owned via the Luxembourg-based, ABH Holdings. Following the Russian invasion, it was sanctioned and then effectively seized by the Ukrainian state — who bought up 100% of its shares for a nominal one hryvnia in 2023. “The deal will help safeguard the interests of the Bank’s depositors and ward off threats to Ukraine’s financial stability,” stated an official announcement.

The Mindich Tapes reveal that another suspect, Oleksandr Tsukerman, was instrumental in appointing new members to Sense Bank’s board. Last May, Tsukerman telephoned a businessman named Vasyl Vesely, apparently on behalf of Zelensky. Vesely, who was described as “a watcher” from the President’s office, named the people he wanted to join the board. “There should be six of our members there in this crowd of nine”, he told Tsukerman. “These are ours and one [director] will do everything if positioned correctly”

A month later, Ukraine’s cabinet appointed those six individuals to the Sense Bank board. When the tapes were released, Vesely’s involvement — apparently as Presidential fixer — cast doubt on the independence of the board of one of Ukraine’s biggest banks. The bank’s chairman, Mykola Hladyshenko, duly suspended himself. “Sense Bank appears to have been captured by domestic criminal networks with access to the highest levels of the Ukrainian state”, a Ukrainian banking analyst told me. “The suspicion is this bank has become a vehicle for laundering the proceeds of domestic corruption, including funds that may have originated in Western aid to Ukraine”. Like Mindich, Tsukerman fled to Israel and is now the subject of an extradition request by Ukrainian prosecutors.

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Some central bankers are concerned at the broader implications of the case. “This is not a scandal about individual names [joining the Sense Bank board]”, wrote Kyrylo Shevchenko, former head of the Ukraine National Bank between 2020 and 2022, after the tapes were published. “It concerns a systematically important bank, a state asset and who controls financial institutions in Ukraine during the war.” He described his own tenure at the Ukraine National Bank as being subject to “constant” political interference when it came to appointing personnel.

The involvement of Zelensky’s former chief of staff, Yermak — now under investigation for alleged corruption — in nationalizing Sense Bank is particularly problematic. The state took ownership of the bank in 2023 after passing a special law to nationalize any bank if it was insolvent. But the National Bank of Ukraine had already stated that Sense Bank was solvent.

And so the government passed a new law that enabled a bank to be declared insolvent if some of its shareholders were sanctioned. In the case of Sense Bank, three of its indirect shareholders, notably the Russian billionaire Fridman, were sanctioned and so the bank could be deemed insolvent despite the regulators stating it was financially sound. A month later, Sense Bank was nationalized and its properties, shopping centers and land were seized by the state, with a new CEO and board of directors installed.

In response, ABH Holdings filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Ukraine in the World Bank’s arbitration court. In essence, ABH Holding’s accusation is that individuals close to Zelensky, notably Yermak, used corrupt tactics of state capture to gain control of the bank. The investigative reporting platform, Follow the Money, has interpreted his a different way: as a Russian oligarch exploiting European treaties and US-based courts to sue a country that Russia has declared war on, effectively for behaving like Russia. Should ABH Holdings win, it could open a “Pandora’s box” of oligarchs using lawfare to target Ukraine, warn legal scholars quoted in the article. But noting this uncomfortable irony does not magic the problem away.

When asked about Sense Bank last year, President Zelensky told a Cabinet meeting that it “must be privatized”. But it hasn’t happened yet. The Ukrainian government has meanwhile requested the court hearings to be held in secret. ABH Holdings refuses and insists Ukraine abides by arbitration rules which states “confidentiality is neither agreed nor envisaged”. When the case is heard next year, the role of President Zelensky and his advisors will be revealed. If the Ukraine government loses the lawsuit, the award is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of pounds — a major dent in the war coffers.

But the importance of the Sense Bank case, the “Mindich Tapes”, and the far-reaching corruption investigation is more profound. Ukraine’s greatest strategic asset is not its military capability or territorial location. It is the moral clarity of its cause: that it is a democracy based on the rule of law, freedom and worthy of defending in the face of tyranny and brutality. But corruption is Ukraine’s fatal flaw. Unless Zelensky removes this cancer at the heart of the state, the West may find it increasingly difficult to defend and financially support Ukraine.

There have been plenty of moments over the past few years when the goose that lays the golden eggs has been endangered by the people entrusted to look after it, with their odd combination of complaisance and avarice. But the game has perhaps never seemed more imperiled than it did on Tuesday when Fifa president Gianni Infantino announced his plans to sell off a stake in the World Cup.

The European governing body, Uefa, reacted with horror and issued a terse statement. “This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” it said. “None of us are the owners of football. It is not Fifa’s to sell.”

That conflict has come increasingly to the fore in the past two World Cups. There is a sense that each tournament has run on two parallel tracks: on the one side the outrages, the tolerance for human rights abuses, the naked lust for profit, the sycophancy towards autocratic leaders; and on the other the beauty and excitement of the football itself, the joy of fans, even as they’re squeezed for every last penny.

Uefa has been fighting a cold war with Fifa for at least a couple of years now as Infantino has stepped up his attempts to maximize revenues and to undermine Uefa’s control over the club game. So far, that has amounted to little more than gestures and trolling. Several presidents of European football federations walked out after Infantino arrived three hours late to last year’s Fifa Congress in Asuncion following a trip to Qatar with the US president Donald Trump; they subsequently released a statement criticizing Infantino for pursuing “private political interests”. When the Somalian referee Omar Artan was denied entry to the US before the World Cup, Uefa promptly appointed him to officiate at the European Super Cup final in August.

But this is far more serious. For the first time since 1966, when African sides demanding greater representation boycotted the World Cup, it feels there could be genuine mass action against football’s global governing body by its members. A schism is possible: perhaps the kind that has turned boxing or golf or cricket or chess into a mass of competing federations, rules and competitions. Until recently, this seemed unthinkable in football, which is, after all, a simple game based on legible traditions.

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The brink was reached upon the announcement that Fifa has been working with JPMorgan to establish a new entity, Fifa Forward Enterprise, which would sell a 20% stake in the future commercial revenues of the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup to investors. The move, it claims, will lead to an increase of “over $10 billion” in funds distributed to Fifa’s 211 members. Thrive Capital, an investment company founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, has been appointed to lead the search for investors.

Perhaps the choice of investment company shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, given Infantino’s close relationship with Trump. Their love-in culminated in the President being awarded with the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize at the World Cup draw last December — which itself prompted the Norwegian football federation to join the human rights NGO FairSquare in complaining to Fifa’s ethics committee. Trump himself, with his supervillain’s habit of narrating his own malfeasance, seemed to suggest at a dinner in Davos in January 2021 that he and Infantino had somehow, even before he became president, conspired to ensure that the USA, Canada and Mexico won the bid to host the 2026 World Cup.

But this new plan has surfaced a tension long-apparent in football: the governing bodies and lawmakers are also commercial entities aiming to make a profit. That apparent conflict of interest has been evident twice in the past year. First: in the gerrymandering of qualification criteria to ensure that Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami competed at the Club World Cup. Second: in the suspension, after only one game, of a three-match ban imposed on Cristiano Ronaldo, ensuring he could play in all of Portugal’s World Cup group games. Infantino’s Fifa was deemed to be prioritizing marketing concerns — getting the most famous players onto the pitch — over maintaining the integrity of the game.

A still more serious breach occurred when Fifa’s appeals panel seemingly yielded to three phone calls from Trump during the World Cup and suspended a red-card ban on the American striker Folarin Balogun. Uefa said that decision had “crossed a red line”. That’s two lines crossed in three weeks. Little wonder an emergency meeting of Uefa is set for today.

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Fifa’s apologists have already argued that the Spanish league sold a 10.95% stake to private equity in 2021. But that argument is easily countered: a league is not a governing body. The sport in Spain is governed by the country’s Football Federation. Fifa, conversely, is supposed to protect the interests of football worldwide. It’s supposed to be a neutral lawmaker. What it’s not supposed to be is in hock to its investors. Under Swiss law, indeed, it is technically a non-commercial organization. It has — and of course the term seems laughable in the context of modern sports governance and Trump — a moral responsibility.

Even beyond ethical issues, it’s worth asking why. Why now? Why does Fifa need outside investment? What will its members gain from selling off a percentage of future revenues? The World Cup has just made a record $15 billion, double what it made in Qatar in 2022. What is it planning to do with the billions of investment? Fifa has suggested that as many as 1.5 billion people watched the final between Spain and Argentina. These figures are always open to question, but the audience in the US was up 129% on Qatar. Does the World Cup so desperately need more marketing today that it’s happy to sacrifice 20% of future revenue tomorrow?

Perhaps some association heads see benefits in taking the money now and leaving the reduced future revenues for their successors to worry about. Indeed, Uefa made the accusation explicitly, accusing Fifa’s leadership of “using our sport to enrich themselves and their friends”.

The letter that member associations received on Wednesday makes clear the calculation many will be making. The initial deal is worth $20 million per association: but any member association that signs up within the next seven weeks can apply for an additional $20 million payment. Fifa insists that the whole process is far more transparent than it was in Sepp Blatter’s day. But a one-off payout of $40 million is likely to be extremely persuasive, not least when no full public study has been done since November 2015, when it was revealed that 81% of Fifa member associations were inadequately audited.

Infantino arrived in 2016 promising to swill out the corruption from Fifa. And his efficiency program involved a drive to reduce the number and size of Fifa’s committees which — since the financially dubious João Havelange became president in 1974 — has been an easy way to reward supporters. Yet none of this stopped Fifa in 2024 from voting to increase the number of standing committees from seven to 35.

It’s not to imply anything corrupt to point out that, while Infantino will be reelected as president by acclamation next year, Fifa’s constitution prohibits him from standing for a fourth term in 2031. (Then again, many thought it prohibited him from standing again in 2027, but he managed to convince them that his first three years didn’t count as he replaced Blatter part-way through an electoral cycle.) Once he has ceased to be Fifa president, he will need a new job, and commissioner of the World Cup would be an extremely lucrative one.

Given Fifa’s one-member-one-vote policy, it’s likely Infantino’s plan will pass, though it’s at least intriguing that Concacaf, the North and Central American confederation, said it was “deeply concerned” with the scheme. Realistically, though, if there’s to be meaningful opposition, it’ll have to come from Europe. The Football Association may have expressed doubts at the plan, but the only realistic option available to Uefa is the nuclear one: a boycott of the World Cup or secession from Fifa.

Of course, that comes with enormous risk. But equally, a World Cup without teams like Spain, France or Germany — and their TV markets — is not a World Cup. As an alternative, meanwhile, Uefa could use the existing Nations League as a base, before offering guest places to the best non-European teams. Suddenly, that starts to look a lot more like a World Cup than whatever rump is left to Fifa. Meanwhile, the threat of major European clubs supporting Fifa is mitigated by the fact that the Champions League, an enormous driver of revenue, is run by an entity jointly owned by Uefa and European Football Clubs, a group representing more than 850 clubs across all 55 Uefa nations.

In the past half-century, Fifa has become increasingly bound up in scandal. Growing frustration led to the toppling of Blatter at the Baur au Lac Hotel in 2015. But the situation has not improved under Infantino, who increasingly governs by fiat. Tellingly, the latest proposal has not been discussed by any Fifa body.

So this could be the final straw: if Europe does not stand up to Infantino now, then when? Yet even if it does, the fallout could be apocalyptic.

While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

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Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

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More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

Death has long stalked the river. An 1858 illustration in Punch features a skeletal Silent Highway-Man rowing along the putrid river during the Great Stink, when tens of thousands died of cholera. It’s the site of innumerable suicides and murders. Though much of the violence of empire was outsourced globally, the bodies of river pirates hung in gibbets as a warning — don’t even think of stealing a piece of the grand colonial larceny. And though deindustrialization and globalization brought the naval works to a close, the Isle of Dogs became the location of a new empire of capital. The skyscrapers looming over Canary Wharf, and the City further upriver, have been busy for decades laundering the world’s blood money. Silence can be a sign of absence but also concealment, and not everything can be hidden forever.

On 29 November 2019, a 19-year-old man named Zac Brettler leapt from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk in Pimlico. His last moments were captured on CCTV from the MI6 building across the river in Vauxhall: he fell, struck the embankment wall and disappeared into the murk. As with any suspected suicide, the family’s grief was compounded by endless torturous contingencies. These only deepened when they learned that their precocious son had been closely associating with violent underworld figures, and had constructed a bewildering web of lies around himself. As their image of their son was thrown into doubt, so too was their belief in British justice. Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest bestseller, London Falling, is a rigorous, thought-provoking and moving account of this unfolding tragedy. It assembles a portrait of a lost soul and through it, a damning portrait of London itself begins to emerge.

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At first, it seemed like an open and shut case of heartbreaking self-destruction. Brettler appeared, after all, to jump of his own accord. Context, however, is everything. The teenager had been living a fictional life, creating a Russian persona, altering his family tree to appear like the scion of oligarchs. In reality, he was a Jewish upper middle-class kid from West London with a father in finance and a journalist mother. But he was in way over his head, it seemed, the pressure got to him.

On the night Brettler died, however, another occupant of the Riverwalk flat — owned by “Indian Dave”, a gangland figure — had sent a text to an acquaintance: “I am not fucking playing. I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood.” Records show the last thing Brettler typed into Google that night was “what to do with skin burns”.  The police promised the Brettler family “no unanswered questions”. They merely created more.

Radden Keefe’s account has many strengths. It contains genuine insights and he has a noble duty of care towards the Brettler family, which is often absent in nonfiction. The story is gripping from start to finish, even as you swim through someone else’s misery. But London Falling is not without flaws. A view from the outside can be enlightening but it can also lead to inaccuracies. The view of Eighties London suddenly rousing itself from monochrome post-war austerity is too convenient a simplification as it erases the Sixties. And the author’s commendable closeness and sensitivity towards the family may have dulled his critical eye. There is also an exhausting tendency to finish each subchapter with a cliffhanger, which feels like a stylistic seepage from true crime podcasts. But these are minor qualms.

A larger issue lies with Radden Keefe’s worldview. He explores the criminal underbelly, quite courageously, and he intimates throughout that “glitzy mercenary” London is far more corrupt than many care to acknowledge. He is right to present the capital as “twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money […] full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy”. Yet there is something, a benevolent liberal worldview perhaps, that prevents him from fully staring into the heart of darkness. His portrait of the capital remains compelling but only partially developed because it still feels reliant on an assumption that humans are intrinsically decent and institutions are there to protect us, a view that is fading, sadly but necessarily, into extinction.

The death of Zac Brettler was a singular event, yet it is an encapsulation, rather than an aberration, of how London functions. There is a chasm between the London Zac’s parents thought they knew, and London as it actually is. This is a common understandable misconception in bourgeois circles. Respectability and lack of exposure can be blinkers. There is a sudden dawning when Zac’s parents realize that the state isn’t going to protect them or bring justice. The author is correct in noting that their earlier “unexamined confidence” was misplaced. Yet he does not fully examine whether this is how the system is actually built to function rather than some terrible mistake.

The hypocrisy of the West’s political and media class is demonstrated by how it “others” corruption. It always belongs somewhere else, usually to the east or the south. The truth is that corruption here is so endemic it is not even recognized as corruption. We threw our doors open to Russia’s oligarchs when it threw off its communist shackles; we bolstered the kleptocratic class by coercing IMF-led “shock therapy” of privatization on the nation. When the ex-KGB tough guy Putin gets into power, Britain offered these well-heeled thieves a sanctuary, further debasing itself by offering up football clubs, luxury apartments and private schools as investment vehicles. Once the autocratic world-boss, Britain was now reimagined as the sycophantic butler. Other places are merely more honest about their dishonesty. Here it has acceptable names — expenses, moonlighting, PFI, offshore entities, super-injunctions, non-doms, shell companies. Colossal wealth transfer takes place all the time from the public purse to private banks via opaque and unaccountable bureaucracies. This is not the exception but the rule. Legality is superfluous when those who make the laws are themselves confidence tricksters.

There are two layers of society that know this Darwinian or even Hobbesian truth, and give little credence to any chatter of progress or etiquette. The working class know because they face the consequences every day (consequences, like taxes, are only for the little people). The establishment know because they reap the benefits. It is those in the middle who are oblivious, their knowledge of the world not caring to extend beyond the unreliable narrator midwittery of The Rest is Politics or The News Agents, “a lot of Londoners found themselves priced out of this new version of their city, forced to relocate and commute from distant suburbs.” But in fact, it goes much further than that.

There has also been an asset-stripping hollowing-out of the city’s soul. The cockneys are gone. The old markets closed or replaced. The nightlife is being put through a slow euthanasia. London Falling implies that these are side effects or errors when actually they are the main game: profitable for the few over the many. This is suggested in the hostility the commentariat show to anyone who points out London’s very obvious decline, denying and obfuscating anything that happens outside of leafy gentrified enclaves. There is a cruelty in denying palpable concerns, especially from those upon whom the entire capital relies. There is also delusion, aided by mantras like “Greatest city in the world” or “Just the cost of living in a city” while the metropolis slowly falls apart. Crime is deemed more palatable than noticing or even experiencing crime. Multiculturalism has been abandoned in favor of exploitation and Balkanization. It is reminiscent of the scene in La Haine where a man falling from a building repeats with every passing floor, ‘So far, so good.’

What makes this a particularly terrifying book, then, especially for any parent, is the societal feeling of vertigo when they start to realize no one in authority is going to protect them or their children. Faced with their son’s lies, Zac Brettler’s parents experience “a kind of woozy vertigo, as what had previously seemed to be the solid factual underpinnings of their family’s existence began to shudder and torque”. The state is not constructed to protect its citizens. It is designed to protect a status quo or engineer a new and profitable one. There are numerous lines in London Falling that are indicative of the permitted degeneracy of our times — a business address with “no fewer than twenty-five buzzers”, a recidivist criminal serving time in 33 different prisons, no comment uttered “nearly two hundred times”. Britain is broken and it’s by design. Wealth may not trickle down but the moral expediency of grifting does, regardless of the cost to any semblance of justice or meritocracy. It is there in the high-end funds pouring in from Qatar and the Gulf States, designed successfully to influence those in power, and it is there in the cynical façade of high street candy shops and barbers, laundering money and on occasion selling drugs, at the other end of the spectrum. One is inscrutable, the other unavoidable for those with open eyes. They are however two sides of the same coin.

Radden Keefe’s admirable sensitivity towards the Brettler family means that he takes a soft approach to any question of whether their son was a pathological liar. If we are callous enough to ask the question, it deserves an answer. Zac Brettler’s lies may have spun out of control, but they were rational. They were attempts to manipulate and gain status in a system built on manipulation and status. His mistake was not being well-connected enough to be protected in high-end circles and not brutal enough to survive in the low-life.

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Young Brettler may have lost his bearings, but he did not create the maze in which he was wandering. In the end, it seems that he confused different worlds, seeking sympathy (via claims of grief and heroin addiction) from people to whom it was very dangerous to show weakness or duplicity. He mistook high-stakes life and death maneuverings for a game, and lacked the protections the establishment affords. In this London, you are either a shark or a mark.

Perhaps it was ever thus. Radden Keefe quotes Voltaire’s view of London in 1733 where people of many different creeds flocked to the city to “transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts”. We like to think garish excess and legalized profiteering are a new development, but tradition shrouds the crimes of the past. “This is what you get when you found a political system,” as Christopher Hitchens noted, “on the family values of Henry VIII.” The king was no stranger to ostentation (the Field of the Cloth of Gold for instance) or fueling his lifestyle by crippling those doing social good (the Dissolution of the Monasteries). And so it remains. Whatever the etiquette or the vestiges of tradition, power has always been a scam. Its prey, from the peasants who believed in the divine right of kings to those who went over the top in 1914 to those who vote now for their own immiseration, are always those who believe in the prevailing establishment narrative.

Radden Keefe identifies Thatcher’s deregulation of the City of London as the Big Bang, offering ambitious young men “something that looked like meritocracy” while the Tories simultaneously laid waste to trades and industries. Simply put, instead of making things, Britain would launder money and place bets. Like the empire before it, it was extractive rather than generative, parasitic rather than wealth-creating. The ingenuity of the Industrial Revolution, the visionaries who dreamed it into being and the communities that carried it have long been betrayed, decimated by a globalization initiated by a mercantile elite who have loyalty to nothing outside the financial. “To launder something – whether it is cash or a reputation – is to mingle the dirty with the clean,” Radden Keefe notes. This was true with the subprime mortgages that crashed the world in 2008. It is also true of “London’s obsequious hospitality” to the global hyper-rich, regardless of their crimes. Yet to witness Keir Starmer oozing out of No. 10 to greet decapitator-in-chief Ahmed al-Sharaa, you realize none is clean.

Again, they never were. A strange mirroring of the colonial age makes this abundantly clear as Radden Keefe notes, “In earlier eras, English aristocrats would occasionally throw Orientalist costume parties at which they dressed up as sultans, maharajas and other grand foreign types. Now, at Annabel’s rich foreigners could dress up as English aristocrats.” He reminds us that “England has a colorful history of imposters who used to turn up […] and pose as titled aristocrats,” yet it was arguably an imposture from the beginning; the “silver spoon fairy tale” was always a swindle by invaders and warlords from the Normans onwards, more interested in Faustian pacts than social contracts. And it always fed off the populace — from the Harrying of the North to the rookeries of Dickensian London.

Admitting decline, though, is anathema to those benefiting from it. And so free speech is suppressed. Inquiries bury or soften bad news. The Official Secrets Act kicks unpleasantness into the long grass. Super-injunctions abound. The Brettler family found their case simply fade away, “nobody ever told them ‘no’ explicitly, but months and eventually years went by”. When they started to question, they were treated with hostility. The police are caught between infiltration from “below” by organized crime and from “above” by the security services, with protected informants bridging both realms. The all-seeing eye of the state can turn blind when certain interests needed protection. An impaled fixer for oligarchs, a child drowned in a storm drain, a care home of horrors, a spy found in a holdall in his Pimlico flat, a few hundred thousand working class girls, a Jewish kid who cosplayed as a gangster. Maybe law and order wasn’t ever really about justice. Now it’s seemingly no longer about order either. Lady Justice is blindfolded after all. “Ultimately, it’s all transactional,” Zac’s mother sadly notes.

If you navigate through the flocks of tourists around the Tower of London, you’ll find a strange recess under Tower Bridge called Iron Gate Stairs or Dead Man’s Hole. It was here that bodies of the drowned would wash up and be displayed in a morbid form of voyeurism. Yet disappearances are worse. Unsolved crimes. Unexplained fates. Cases closed with suspect haste. Secrets still wash up by the riverside though, even if they are sent from worlds that few want to look into. The dismembered body of Zoe Parker. The chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi. The suspected ritual child killing of “Adam”. Welcome to the city of silences. Nothing to see here. Move along.

One afternoon last year, a Dauphin County sheriff’s deputy showed up at the house I was renting in Harrisburg, Pa.. The deputy sought my landlord and something called Diverse Investments Group. I told him I’d never heard of it. He left a card, and ​​I began wondering whether my home was about to be swallowed by some unpaid debt. So I did what any tenant with a broadband connection would do: I started digging.

What I discovered wasn’t some spectacular scandal worthy of a prestige-TV miniseries, but something both smaller and, in its own way, more disturbing: the kind of mundane, bureaucratized grift that now passes with barely a mention in normal American life.

Diverse Investments Group turned out to be a company connected to my landlord and to Noah Spence, a former NFL defensive end and a homegrown sports hero once named Pennsylvania’s Player of the Year. “As tremendous as you are as an athlete, you are an even better person,” Dauphin County Commissioner Mike Pries told Spence in 2012.  “I’ll make you guys proud,” Spence replied.

That pledge didn’t age well. Since 2024, Pries and the other commissioners awarded Spence’s investment company $55,000 in grants under a county program that doles out money generated by Pennsylvania’s ever-growing slot-machine revenue. Diverse Investment Group promised to build affordable housing from modified shipping containers in the nearby suburb of Steelton for an extracurricular school program, which would also teach kids to build and own their own property. It was a feel-good pitch that promised trade skills for students, new homes for the community, and a hometown hero giving back.

The problem? More than three years later, Spence’s project is a flop. Not a single home has been built, no permits have been filed, and the two plots of land the company purchased were subject to unpaid taxes and auctioned off, dragging Steelton and the school district into civil court. The school even denies there was ever a partnership. The details are damning: Diverse Investments Group allegedly purchased three shipping containers and architectural work from two Ohio companies, also owned by Spence, both of which magically appeared as businesses less than three months before the invoice was submitted. To top it off, Spence’s own mother, who also works for the county, denied knowing who her son was after the sheriff visited to deliver a notice. Oops.

My landlord, listed as COO of the company on the grant materials, was nowhere to be found (as I told the sheriff). In mid-2024, he moved to Florida and rented his Harrisburg house to me. When I reached out to Dauphin County officials last fall with what I’d dug up, I was either ignored or gently redirected. I eventually handed my research to a PennLive reporter, who was already months into a broader investigation. That resulting reporting series is devastating. It shows that Dauphin County handed out more than a quarter-billion dollars in casino revenue over the last 17 years, millions of it funneled to private businesses through a grant program so loosely designed that it had no clear eligibility criteria, no consistent audit requirements, and a pattern of awards flowing to people with direct connections to the officials deciding where the money went.

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Some projects that received grants years ago have never materialized. I tell this story not because I think it’s particularly shocking, but because it isn’t. The kind of thing that showed up at my door — the overlapping grift, the minor officials looking the other way, the public money quietly converted to private benefit, politicians trading favors — has become so routine, it barely registers as a scandal anymore.

Sure, it’s nothing novel, politics has always been thick with grifters, though when it pertains to government, the practice goes by a more stately term: graft. The common grifter has to put in some elbow grease, while the noble officeholder can simply sit there and let the money, favors, or opportunities adhere to him like lint to a dark suit. That is what graft really is: the fastening of private gain to public office, until the two start to look inseparable.

What’s new is the pervasiveness of the corruption. Indeed, we are living in a new Gilded Age of greasy palms in America.

At the national level, much of the permission structure for this now radiates downward from the golden feet of King Graft himself, President Trump. His second term has made the conflict-of-interest scandals of the first look restrained by comparison: crypto ventures; a golden jet gifted by Qatar; questionable pardons (Trump granted clemency to Paul Walczak, who had dodged millions in taxes, after Walczak’s mother helped raise millions for MAGA candidates and paid $1 million for a seat at the president’s table at Mar-a-Lago); and hundreds of potential conflicts of interest.

To be clear, Trump didn’t invent corruption any more than McDonald’s invented hamburgers. What he did was supersize it, gold-plate it, and turn it into a more explicit style of rule. The old etiquette of American public life held that if you were going to monetize public office, you should at least have the decency to act embarrassed when caught. Trump’s great contribution to civic decay was to eliminate the embarrassment. Self-dealing was no longer a regrettable byproduct of power. It was the point.

The Biden family’s entanglements, the influence-peddling odor around Hunter, the long trail of sleazy proximity, and Joe Biden’s final pardon were smaller in scale and less systemically dangerous. Still, they were real, and the fact that they were largely waved away by one party’s media apparatus tells you something about our selective tolerance for rot.

Congress is hardly any better. Every few weeks comes another lawmaker accused of fraud, campaign-finance violations, self-enrichment, sexual misconduct, stock-trading acrobatics, or using public office as a side hustle. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat, was found guilty by the House Ethics Committee on 25 violations, most notably funneling $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Administration funds into her congressional campaign.

Cory Mills, a Florida Republican, faces calls for his resignation after an investigation found domestic abuse, stolen-valor allegations, and financial misconduct — also involving millions of dollars of Covid-era relief funding. Axios noted this week that lawmakers were reaching “a breaking point” in terms of ethics violations. And yet none of it shocks like it once might have. It is absorbed into the general Washington weather system, one more humid front moving across the map.

But the corruption has filtered far below the level of national politics and into the tiniest of jurisdictions. Roughly half of corruption convictions against officials in America are at the state or local level — mostly for bribery, theft of public property, or similar crimes. We tend to have a cinematic idea of what corruption looks like, imagining it as a parade of lurid set pieces: the cash-stuffed freezer, the bribed alderman, the mayor in handcuffs, the contractor with a pinky ring and a no-show job. We still get some of that, of course. But the American version in 2026 is often more banal, more administrative, and more pervasive. It arrives not in a trench coat, but in a grant application. Not as a singular scandal, but as routine paperwork moving quietly through offices too understaffed, too captured, or too demoralized to stop it. The buck never seems to stop here. 

Technology was supposed to fix this. The democratization of information, the citizen journalist, the viral exposé — all of it was supposed to flood the old smoke-filled rooms with sunlight. And in some narrow respects, it has. It is easier now than at any point in history to cross-reference property records, identify shell structures, and share a thread of findings with tens of thousands of people in minutes; the smartphone has turned every citizen into a potential sleuth.

But tools require human operators, and what we’ve lost in the digital transition is the class of paid, full-time, institutionally supported operators who used to do this work as a profession rather than a calling. Local investigative journalism has been gutted to a degree that is hard to overstate. Newsrooms once had full-time reporters who were entrenched in city hall, county commissioners’ meetings, and school-board hearings.

Now, many local papers have either closed down entirely or been degraded into so-called ghost papers by their new owners, typically private-equity and hedge-fund barons. Few if any full-time writers and editors remain, much of the copy syndicated nationally (i.e., no local news), and the publication is mostly managed for cash flow; the old newspaper buildings are often seen as real-estate assets, to be pawned off for condos.

The consequences are measurable: one Columbia Journalism Review study found that when a local newspaper closes, corruption charges in that community rise by nearly 7%, indictments of defendants by almost as much, and cases filed by even more.

And when the news does find ill-gotten gains, there’s the question of whether anyone will care. Corruption stories, especially local ones, require concentration and discernment. They involve authorities no one has heard of, agencies with alphabet soup names, and arcane documents that don’t lend themselves to TikTok narration. A county grant scandal in Pennsylvania or a patronage loop in Illinois struggles to compete with the dopamine economy of the culture war, celebrity scandal, and whatever fresh distraction has been algorithmically selected for us by lunchtime.

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The nature of the economy perhaps has something to do with it, too. The old manufacturing economy, warts and all, demanded long-term capital investment that tied the asset-rich to local communities; reputations mattered. As the economy has become ever more financialized and abstract, everyone is out to make the right bet and cash out as fast as possible: the right bit of information on the Iran war, gleaned from proximity to a Trump administration official, means making a life-changing amount of money on futures or Kalshi or Polymarket; reputations matter considerably less against such a backdrop. In that world, even infamy can feel like a rounding error.

More consequential still is the atrophying of America’s capacity for moral outrage. What used to produce genuine public outcry — a mayor forgiving a donor’s debts, a congressman funneling relief money into his own campaign — now produces only a brief flicker of engagement, then nothing. Outrage now tends to attach not to the act itself, but to the partisan identity of the wrongdoer. If a politician on the other side is caught feathering his nest, then he or she proves the whole regime is rotten. If one’s own side does something similar, it becomes complicated, contextual, or simply old news. Who cares?

Perhaps, we have not become more tolerant of corruption so much as more selective in who we permit to commit it.

None of this means that America is uniquely corrupt by world-historical standards. It means something arguably worse for a country that still flatters itself as a republic of laws: corruption has become boring. Ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that it has turned up at my address more than once in the last year. Days before the November 2025 election, Harrisburg Mayor Wanda Williams pushed a garbage-bill forgiveness program that, to outside eyes at least, looked suspiciously like a pre-election bid for goodwill. My landlord, who hadn’t paid his bill in years and owed thousands, got forgiven anyway. By that point, it was hard not to feel that my address had become an accidental field office for the new world order.

Now what? The PennLive series on central Pennsylvania gaming-grant fraud will probably be shared by a few hundred people and generate some official tsk-tsks. The county commissioners will likely support a few mild procedural reforms, and then, most likely, a slow return to business as usual. My old landlord (I moved out in October) will continue operating from the Sunshine State. Nobody will be held responsible. Around here, the scandal is not the fraud but the fantasy that anyone might answer for it.

Sciascia’s home was the small village of Racalmuto in western Sicily, the traditional mafia stronghold of dry dusty plains and empty mountains. He was, he said, able to write about the criminals because he had grown up observing the pressure put on the villagers by local bosses, and the way that jobs and positions went to those who obeyed mafia orders. He could feel the mafia in his bones, and, in some fundamental sense, felt he was a mafioso himself.

Having decided to base his book on the true story of a local contractor, murdered for refusing to give in to extortion, Sciascia resolved to deliver his message in clear, unmistakable terms. The mafia, he wrote, was not as some suggested a part of colorful Sicilian folklore — but a highly effective secret criminal organization, made up of bosses and middle men, who used kidnapping, kneecapping and execution to extort money and leverage power. It had already moved, Sciascia continued, from its original base in the Sicilian countryside into the cities, where it was feeding on Italy’s postwar building boom. And, unless checked, the mafia would keep going, up through Italy and far beyond. Sciascia then recommended a line of action: the only way to crush this organized criminality before it was too late was to follow the money, check bank accounts and tax returns, and establish why seemingly unemployed grandees were enjoying sumptuous lives.

Few, in 1961, chose to listen. Politicians, churchmen, industrialists and lawyers lined up to say that the mafia was nothing but an invention in the fevered minds of the Communists, traditional opponents of financial malfeasance. As for the author himself, Sciascia was dismissed as a malevolent critic of his beautiful island home, and interested only in the sales of his books. It would take 20 years and the deaths of many brave and principled investigators, some of them his personal friends, before Sicily began to come to grips with its mafia. By then, the mafia had spread just as Sciascia warned it would, digging its tentacles into every corner of Sicilian life, dominating first the fish, meat and citrus markets, then water, then cigarette and drugs. Its bosses were very rich men — with yachts in Palermo harbor and vast estates in the hills beyond — and would soon become wealthier still.

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From boyhood, Sciascia had been fascinated by the idea of justice. As he saw it, Sicily had been overtaken, since soon after the unification of Italy, by corruption at every level. He railed against ministers who took bribes, contractors who made their money through kickbacks, priests who condoned what their parishioners were doing. He kept turning out his gialli, targeting the Church, politicians both in Rome and Palermo, bureaucrats and industrialists too readily seduced by mafia money or  intimated by threats.

Il Contesto — published in English as Equal Danger — was about the venality of the political and legal establishment and its “degraded and impenetrable” power. Todo Modo, One Way or Another, is partly about the Christian Democratic Party. Dominating postwar Italian politics right until the Nineties, Sciascia always hated it for its endless compromises and corruption. Todo Modo is also about clerics, depicted as accomplices in crime. Readers loved him, praising the honesty of this outspoken, melancholic, tenacious man, scourge of Italian immorality. In political and judicial circles he had few friends. He lost even more when he turned his attention, in 1978, to the kidnap and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Once again, Sciascia assailed the Christian Democrats, rightly accusing the party, which feared incriminatory revelations by Moro, of wilfully failing to save him. When it was published, The Moro Affair sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

From the first, Sciascia built his gialli around a single figure, usually a carabiniere detective, sometimes an intrepid magistrate. These were lonely men, staunch, skeptical, obsessive upholders of the law, highly cultured and above all incorruptible. They read the world using their considerable intelligence, deciphering secret, buried things, even when they seemed capricious and every trail led only deeper into the undergrowth. They solved their cases, identified the killers, challenged mafia henchmen and their political backers. But they never won. In no Sciascia novel is a culprit brought to book. This has not stopped a generation of young carabinieri recruits attributing their choice of career to their admiration for Captain Bellodi, the detective in The Day of the Owl.

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As violence in Sicily intensified through the Seventies and early Eighties, bringing bodies to Sicilian streets as clans fought for supremacy, Sciascia went on writing and accusing. Asked why it was that he was never murdered, he would simply say that the mafia did not read fiction. Some of his books dealt with cases of past injustices. These he called inchieste — investigations — where he delved into unsolved stories about disappeared scientists and wrongly accused prelates. Watching the growing number of attacks on prosecutors who grew too close to the truth, Sciascia followed the long corteges of grieving Sicilians bearing their coffins through the streets of Palermo, mourning them all. By now he had become one of Italy’s best-loved writers. One of his last books, translated as Open Doors, was about a “piccolo judice”, a little judge, who refuses to obey the order given him by his superiors to pass a death sentence, though he knows that this will spell the end to his career. The little judge was a “uomo solo”, a man alone, the kind of man that Sciascia loved most, and someone very like himself.

Sciascia died in the autumn of 1989. He lived long enough to see much of what he had written and warned about confirmed. The mafia had indeed moved north, to spread the trade in drugs throughout Europe and cause epidemics of addicts. Three years earlier, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two immensely brave magistrates who spearheaded the battle against the Sicilian mafia, had managed to bring 471 mafiosi to trial, in a “maxi-processo” (mega-trial) that took place in a concrete bunker built specifically inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. They had done so largely by pursuing the money, as Sciascia had proposed, through bank accounts and international financial transactions. Sciascia was in court to watch proceedings and noted that, finally, the immunity that had long protected the mafia had been lifted.

Towards the end of his life, questioned repeatedly for his opinions, Sciascia would say that he had grown afraid of his own prescience, and that in any case the old mafia, retaining a code of honor amid the brutality, was gone. As bad as things were in the Sixties, killings back then were controlled, and senior mafiosi obeyed, something which vanished as the violence spread and more and more players arrived.

By the end, Sciascia claimed he no longer understood what had replaced the mafia of his youth. Just as well, perhaps, that he was no longer alive when Falcone and Borsellino were murdered by mafia bosses enraged at the success of the maxi-processo. Yet Sciascia also didn’t live to see the Italian state finally act against the corruption endemic at the heart of national life, when the “Mani Puliti”, the “clean-hands” group of Milanese magistrates, uncovered and prosecuted a vast number of politicians, civil servants, army officers and industrialists on charges of bribery, fraudulent accounting, kickbacks and misuse of government funds. Among them were many Sicilians.

Yet even now, with the Sicilian mafia paralyzed, Sciascia’s grim premonitions proved accurate. Falcone and Borsellino’s killers were jailed — but since the author’s death, Italian organized crime has spread its wings still further, moving seamlessly into money laundering, prostitution and the smuggling and trafficking of people, using cryptocurrency to conceal its transactions. Along the way, the ‘Ndrangheta, operating out of Calabria, in the remote, impoverished toe of Italy, overtook the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power and wealth. A loose association of some 500 clans, with over 60,000 members in 84 countries, the ‘Ndrangheta is said today to have an annual income of £49 billion. Perhaps 80% of Europe’s drug trade is channeled through Gioia Tauro, on the coast of Calabria and Italy’s largest container port.

And on it goes. Recent prosecutions have uncovered operations involving shell companies, white-collar intermediaries, prepaid untraceable cards and online foreign exchange platforms — all to launder millions of euros acquired through cocaine, extortion, gambling and human trafficking. Indeed, as prophetic as Sciascia was, he certainly never envisaged the complexity and reach of the modern mafia, a phenomenon that embraces not just Sicily and Calabria but Campania, home to the Camorra, as well as many other associations operating both independently and together, in every continent. In 2023 police across Europe, having staked out an ice-cream parlor in Germany, arrested 108 members of the ‘Ndrangheta for traffic in drugs and weapons. Using Chinese money brokers in Italy, the Calabrians were found to have been running weapons to South America, supplying Brazilian criminal gangs in exchange for cocaine. In response to what is now a global phenomenon, an international police alliance, bringing together 13 countries, has been set up, financed by the Italian Ministry of Public Security.

No Sicilian writer has claimed Sciascia’s mantle as scourge of the mafia — though Andrea Camilleri, a fellow island novelist, often said he imbued his hero Montalbano with Sciascia’s deep shyness. Even so, other brave prosecutors have followed Falcone and Borsellino. One is Nicola Gratteri, who has staged his own mega trial of 331 ‘Ndrangheta suspects in Calabria. Like his famous predecessors, he lives in fear. “I often talk to death,” Gratteri told a journalist not long ago, “because you have to rationalize fear in order to move on”. As the gangs spread yet further, moving into new markets, exploiting every new twist and turn in technology, their crimes copied by loosely associated groups, it is as Sciascia feared: unless checked, in law and in culture, the mafia will always be one step ahead of its pursuers.

***

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul is published by Chatto and Windus on 2 February, 2026.

Despite being the most popular politician in Venezuela, María Corina Machado has been banned from standing in this weekend’s election. Forbidden from flying, she must rely on cars and motorcycles — even canoes, horses and tractors when the roads are deliberately blocked — to criss-cross the country for campaigning. She is kept off most of the media. Her rallies have been attacked. Her aides and supporters have been beaten, detained or forced to flee into friendly embassies.

Machado endures all of this in the hope of forcing out a thuggish regime that preaches socialism while pillaging the state, sparking economic meltdown, mass hunger and the world’s worst displacement crisis. “Last week, we went to the state of Apure and we stopped to have breakfast,” Machado said when I heard her speak last month. “A couple of hours later the regime sent officials to close this tiny restaurant on the route. If we stay in hotels when we travel around the country, they are closed for several months. Many of the people who give us sound, move us around on buses are searched at their homes and their trucks or equipment are detained, for months sometimes.”

Little wonder this 56-year-old woman, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, has been nicknamed the Iron Lady. As she admits, it will be tough to defeat one of the world’s most repulsive regimes — and there have been previous false dawns. If the elections were fair, her rival President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted along with his gangster pals in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela after overseeing the impoverishment of an oil-rich nation and driving out 7.7 million citizens — one-fifth of the population. The polls suggest the opposition has more more than twice the support of the ruling party. But they are taking on a government with a record of electoral fraud and frustrating democracy.

So Machado plans to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters to monitor all the polling stations during Sunday’s vote, which is being held after a deal was brokered last year in Barbados for fair elections in return for lifting United States sanctions and allowing in some outside observers. “We are not naive knowing what the regime will do,” she told fellow dissidents attending the Oslo Freedom Forum. “We’ve been facing persecution, violation of human rights. But the regime is weaker and weaker every day. They have totally lost their social base and at the same time the networks they use for terror in the population are breaking down.”

Last October, the charismatic Machado — a conservative former parliamentarian who once called for outside intervention to save her country — won a massive majority in the opposition’s primary contest. But after one survey found she was backed by more than two-thirds of voters with Maduro languishing on 8%, officials disqualified her from running for public office for 15 years on grounds of supporting sanctions. But she remains the driving force behind Venezuela’s united opposition. Machado and her substitute candidate, former ambassador Edmundo González, have been drawing big crowds to rallies despite all the efforts to disrupt their campaign. Such is the disillusionment over the country’s economic collapse and desperate desire to reunite families divided by the mass exodus of citizens, they claim they can win power against the odds.

Analysts compare Machado’s popular appeal, energising the opposition and rousing people out of apathy, with the rise of her arch-enemy Hugo Chávez in the Nineties — although her mission is rooted in despair rather than Marxist ideology. The flamboyant former army colonel, who led a failed coup in 1992, took office seven years later by harnessing public anger over corruption, inequality and nepotism. Then his socialist party machinery strangled democratic institutions such as the civil service, courts and press, while his cronies plundered state coffers. Chávez’s former finance minister estimated they stole $300 billion before their leader’s death in 2013, when he was replaced by Maduro.

Yet Chávez was feted by Western Leftists as a progressive idol supposedly fighting for social justice. Seduced by his social programmes, foolish Western celebrities, journalists and politicians turned a blind eye to his human rights abuses and looting. Never mind that his government fired 18,000 workers who went on strike in protest at the politicisation of the state-run oil firm, replacing them on the public payroll with loyalists. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called him an “inspiration” for demonstrating “wealth can be shared”, while his sidekick John McDonnell praised Venezuela for showing “the contrast between capitalism in crisis and socialism in action”. Hollywood actor Sean Penn called Chávez a model democrat, even demanding jail for “mainstream media” journalists who dared to brand him a dictator.

Amid all this naive adulation for the Chavismo creed, Venezuela’s economy ended up suffering the biggest collapse outside of wartime in the past half-century. A country with the world’s biggest oil reserves was hit by severe blackouts, hyperinflation and mass hunger as bakeries could not find flour, hospitals ran out of medicines and pro-government militia terrorised urban areas.

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Faced with the inevitable disillusion that followed, last year Maduro tried to stir Venezuelans up into patriotic frenzy with a referendum on grabbing two-thirds of next-door Guyana after the discovery of big offshore oil reserves. But his ploy failed: turnout was thought to be lower than the 2.4 million voting in the opposition primaries, which were run without any state support. This did not stop the Venezuelan president from stunts such as printing new maps of his enlarged nation and granting energy licences for the disputed region, provoking fears the border dispute might be used to postpone the presidential election.

The tragedy of this failed revolution was symbolised by the mass exodus of people, many of whom fled across Latin America and into the United States. In the past two years alone, almost half a million Venezuelans entered the US. Two months ago, I was in Ecuador — home to the fourth largest number of these refugees and under a state of emergency amid spiralling gang violence — where I heard of growing hostility and xenophobia towards Venezuelan exiles. Yet one journalist told me how the region used to look wistfully at oil-rich Caracas, seeing a peaceful and prosperous beacon of stability.

But this is an election that might have immense significance extending far beyond those exiled Venezuelans who dream of going home. For if Maduro’s regime can be forced from power, it would be a serious setback for the axis of autocracy led by Russia and China that is engaged in an epochal global struggle against democracy, seen most acutely on the battlefields of Ukraine. As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum dissects in her book Autocracy, Inc, Venezuela has evolved under Chávez and Maduro into a central player in an international alliance of repressive regimes. These states assist each other with a sinister and self-serving web of kleptocratic financial systems, surveillance technologies and propaganda machines to defy sanctions, shred internal dissent and challenge democratic freedoms. So Caracas developed commercial, fiscal and political links with Beijing and Moscow while Cuban security experts helped stifle opposition and showed them how to weaponise chronic food shortages created by theft and incompetence. Few were surprised when, in March, Maduro hailed the re-election of his Russian ally Vladimir Putin as “a flawless electoral process”.

Yet Applebaum points out that these Left-wing internationalists built their most important ties with the Islamic theocracy in Iran, highlighting how these new networks of repression are built on shared lust for power, wealth and impunity rather than ideology. “What binds them is oil, anti-Americanism, opposition to their own democracy movements and a shared need to learn the dark arts of sanctions evasion,” she writes. Iran has bought Venezuelan gold, advised on crushing dissent, helped with a drone factory and assisted with repairs on oil refineries. In return, Caracas has laundered cash for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, and has provided passports for its leaders.

It is hard to believe that people power might finally topple the government of Venezuela, that its leader would accept the electoral verdict and not resort to trickery or violence even if defeat is beyond doubt. Yet Machado insists the regime is alarmed by her civic uprising and that even many former Chávez supporters want the misery to end so their children can return from exile. Her declared mission is bold: to turn the most corrosive hub of crime and destabilisation in the Western hemisphere and a key ally of Putin and Iran “into the biggest promoter of human rights in the region”. If that happens, it would certainly be a victory to celebrate far beyond the borders of this devastated South American country.

NBC’s new sitcom The Paper, a spinoff of The Office, marries the same kind of gallows humor about the state of community journalism with a well-worn workplace comedy setup. The show is set at The Truth Teller, a faltering small-town daily in Toledo, Ohio. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, a college journalism major-turned-salesman who arrives as editor-in-chief, insisting he wants to be “the real superhero, like Clark Kent.” Unlike Superman, however, Sampson has no powers, no cape, and has parachuted into a newsroom that resembles a hospice ward. Truth Teller pages are padded out with fluff about celebrity skincare routines and whatever comes across the AP Wire. At one point, a staffer sums it up flatly: “I’m not sure if it’s even a real paper. It’s local ads and a few articles of clickbait with some sports scores on the cover.”

As a freelance journalist myself, I find The Paper’s laughs more painful than painfully funny because the loss of quality local journalism is an American tragedy. For years, the slow-moving crisis was treated simply as a business problem, characterized by job losses or shuttered buildings, one that could be solved with apps, paywalls, or foundation grants. But as The Paper notes, it’s also a civic story about the disappearance of accountability, the evaporation of civic trust, and — as corny as it sounds — the shared story of a physical place.

Yes, like Ned Sampson, I’m a true believer. For the first several years of my career, I toiled in the newsrooms of small-town central Missouri. In the sneeze-or-you’ll-miss-it farm town of Centralia, Mo., I lost my job after less than a year. One day, I drove to the office to find it locked forever because the owner was tired of losing money in journalism and wanted to focus on a much more profitable endeavor: selling bail bonds.

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Later, at The Mexico Ledger in nearby Mexico, Mo. (town slogan: Just A Little North of the Border!), I was the sole full-time reporter, a single set of eyes on an entire community. In Jefferson City, the state capital, I covered crime and courts for the News Tribune. Most of the time, the job was thankless and the pay pitiful, but it still mattered. In Mexico, I helped expose the school district’s shady deal with a for-profit education vendor and a greedy property owner who paid for an astroturfed campaign to bring a controversial Super Walmart to town, despite opposition from local merchants (spoiler alert: Walmart won). One night, after exposing a prominent local figure’s embarrassing brush with petty crime, I found my car keyed in retaliation. It was petty vengeance, but also proof that someone cared enough about what was printed in the paper to lash out. My work, however minor, had made a dent in the local fabric.

Today, in too many towns, that fabric is fraying. Since 2005, more than 3,200 newspapers in the United States have shut down or been absorbed, according to a Northwestern University study. The closures have only accelerated: in 2022, about two papers closed every week. Of the roughly 6,000 papers left, most are published weekly, not daily. Large swaths of the country now exist in what researchers call “news deserts.” Today, at least 200 counties in America have no local news outlet at all, and more than half have either no paper or only one. Some major cities no longer have a daily newspaper at all.

I witnessed the absurdity of news deserts firsthand while living in Mobile, Ala. There, I uncovered a conspiracy involving a man running for re-election despite having been dead for weeks, and then how political figures colluded for his mother to take his seat so she could vote on a controversial annexation plan. It was the perfect local scoop, bizarre yet consequential. However, Mobile had no daily paper left to publish it, so I ended up running the piece in a magazine based in California, hundreds of miles away from the city whose voters most needed to know about it. The story traveled widely, but the sad fact was that a community had to read about its own corrupt politics in an out-of-state publication.

Even in places that still have papers, the reporters are vanishing. Many papers fall victim to hedge-fund and private-equity owners, whose model often involves selling off real assets or converting them to condos and laying off most of the staff and getting rid of most local reporting to boost cash flow. What remains is a ghost paper, heavily dependent on syndicated national copy and too starved for investigative resources to pay attention to the community.

Such outlets rarely have staff to sit through budget hearings, file records requests through freedom-of-information requests, or conduct in-depth investigations. In The Paper, the clueless managing editor, Esmeralda, brags about her silly long-form piece that reads: “You will not believe how much Ben Affleck tipped his limo driver.” Ironically, this race to the bottom has occurred in the age of information abundance, not drought. Many court filings, city council meetings, and legislative reports are available online with the click of a mouse, but few are paying attention, except for some scattered commentary from social-media influencers or limited coverage provided by television stations.

Years ago, I coined the term pink-slime journalism to describe Journatic, a company I once worked for that secretly outsourced local news to low-paid freelancers overseas, who strung together news releases and website copy into something meant to resemble actual news. Today, the slime has taken on new forms, such as AI-generated copy spun up to pad out hollowed mastheads. In many places, the filler has vanished entirely, leaving nothing but silence.

The effects are not abstract. When a local paper disappears, citizens are less likely to vote, those who do vote are more likely to do so in sharply partisan fashion, and local government becomes freer to act without scrutiny. In too many towns, the front page has been replaced by a Facebook group or Nextdoor forums rife with misinformation and unsubstantiated gossip. Meanwhile, cable news and the internet erased old boundaries, nationalizing our sense of attention and flattening all politics into national theater — with people knowing more about what’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop than about their own mayor.

It’s no coincidence that while liberals obsess over the corruption emanating from the White House, a thousand mini-Trumps are flourishing in towns and counties across America with little notice. Petty strongmen, grifters, and small-time operators siphon public funds, steer contracts to friends, or intimidate critics — all without the scrutiny that even a half-staffed metro daily once provided. National scandals dominate cable news, while the quiet theft in city-hall chambers is less likely to make a headline.

The link between a lack of local news and municipal corruption is now quantifiable. A Columbia Journalism Review study tracking 65 major dailies that closed between 1996 and 2018 compared districts that lost a paper to those that didn’t. Where newspapers disappeared, federal corruption charges and indictments rose by 7 percent There’s plenty of official misdoings in my current hometown of Harrisburg, Pa., which has been without a dedicated daily paper since 2012. In journalism’s absence, it’s been up to newly elected Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas to personally crusade against corrupt dealings involving his fellow elected county officials, even using phrases like “This is a heist” to call out some of his colleagues who had been siphoning millions of taxpayer dollars into pay-for-play schemes.

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More broadly, the collapse of news institutions corrodes civic participation itself. A generation ago, local papers and regional TV affiliates formed the backbone of voters’ information diets. People knew their school-board members and county commissioners because their names and faces appeared in the paper. As local outlets weaken or die, the cycle accelerates: less coverage leads to less civic knowledge, which, in turn, translates to less engagement, making it easier still to cut more reporters. The numbers are dismal. In many cities and counties, turnout in off-year elections has collapsed into single-digit percentages to decide matters such as who sets property tax rates, decides zoning codes, and who fills the pothole — or doesn’t — on your streets. When no one is covering these elections, no one votes in them.

Who’s to blame? Wall Street, as mentioned, bears a share of the blame. Libertarians, meanwhile, gloat about the die-off, insisting that the internet is more efficient than the dinosaurs of old media and the free market will provide a solution, as though TikTok clips and Substacks could replace a city beat reporter with a notepad at the zoning meeting. But the truth is more uncomfortable: we’re all holding the shovel that’s throwing dirt on local journalism’s grave. We’ve collectively chosen entertainment over citizenship, shelling out much more for expensive streaming bundles over three bucks for the paper. Netflix alone now earns roughly twice the revenue of every newspaper in America combined. To paraphrase The Washington Post’s slogan: Democracy dies in distraction — when readers stop showing up to subscribe, to vote, or even to care.

In retrospect, the joke of The Onion’s Daily Planet article has only grown sharper with time. It’s one thing to suspend disbelief about a flying alien from outer space who shoots lasers from his eyes, and it seems like quite another to imagine a metro newsroom in the 21st century where Clark Kent and Lois Lane would be chasing Lex Luthor on the job instead of clickbait. We live in a world that keeps producing new Superman movies while every week newspapers continue to wink out of existence.

That’s what makes the early episodes of The Paper so cutting. In its bumbling editor, recycled wire copy, and crushing sense of apathy, it forces us to confront the fact that the joke of local journalism’s demise is ultimately on all of us.

In truth, though, Katrina didn’t result from systemic racism. It resulted, rather, from local dysfunction and a critical lack of preparedness for an inevitable catastrophe. The levees failed, in large part, because local authorities — many of them black and operating within a patronage-heavy system — failed to prioritize their upkeep or push for necessary federal upgrades. The relief effort stalled because no one could agree on who was in charge, or who was paying. Even more tragic than Katrina itself, then, is our collective failure to understand who was actually responsible — and how the country’s decentralized system does, or rather doesn’t, work in the way liberals think.

Even as it was happening, Hurricane Katrina became a national scandal. Those images of poor, black New Orleanians stranded on rooftops, clinging to fences, surrounded by floodwaters filled with floating corpses — they simply couldn’t be ignored. Everyone wanted someone to blame. And, soon enough, the target became not just George W. Bush, but the abstract villain of systemic oppression and the generic white power structure presumed to uphold it, not merely in the South, but right across America.

As Al Sharpton put it, the collective response amongst black leaders was, “Where’s the government? How could they do this to us?” The tone implied not just neglect, but malevolence, as if government operatives had engineered the storm and then sat back, watching with grim satisfaction as African Americans drowned. The idea that, under the US federal system, city and state governments bear primary responsibility for local disaster planning, was conveniently sidestepped by media commentators and activist-artists alike.

These ideas swiftly entered the cultural mainstream. A mere four days after Katrina made landfall, during a nationally televised Red Cross fundraiser, Kanye West broke script and declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” West’s comments, destined to become one of the defining moments of the summer’s media cycle, spread quickly via a new website then gaining traction: “YouTube.” The following year, Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke doubled down on this essentialist racial narrative, repeating the claim that neglect from the federal Army Corps of Engineers caused the levee failures.

Still assigned in high school and college classrooms, Lee’s film has shaped the cultural discourse ever since. Yet nowhere in its near four-hour runtime is any serious attention given to the dramatic failures of local, mostly black-led city and regional officials. Nor does it explore in any serious depth the history of the levee boards — notoriously corrupt institutions that failed to protect the systems the Army Corps of Engineers had advised them to maintain.

In theory, Louisiana boasted an entire local bureaucracy charged with maintaining the efficacy of the flood levees. And given the city’s vulnerability to catastrophic storm surges, the New Orleans levee boards should have had a singular focus — monitoring and maintaining their levees. That was clear enough when the levees were actually built, in the aftermath of a devastating 1965 storm, one that resulted in dozens of deaths and $1 billion worth of damage.

Unfortunately, the state-chartered levee boards were stacked with specious political appointees, with flood prevention very much not a priority. Post-hurricane investigations showed that local levee upkeep was inconsistent, underfunded, and often distracted by patronage and unnecessary real estate schemes. Instead of focusing on disaster prevention, the city’s levee boards poured time and money into managing marinas, casinos, and luxury waterfront property along Lake Pontchartrain — ventures that often had little, if anything, to do with flood control, and rather more about making a buck.

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New Orleans’ near-biblical flooding, in other words, wasn’t caused by anything resembling “systemic racism”, or even George Bush’s general disregard for black people, but rather city corruption and graft. You might say something similar about the response to Katrina. Despite New Orleans being the American city most vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane — roughly half sits below sea level — local officials were caught entirely unprepared. They had no coherent evacuation strategy, and no meaningful coordination with the state or federal government. At the last minute, they advised citizens unable to flee the city to shelter inside the Superdome. This was a strange and predictable mistake, perhaps stemming from the fact they had given almost no attention to building public shelter systems, or coherent action plans, in the event of an imminent catastrophic storm.

Emergency mass gatherings inside sports stadiums almost never end well. But the city felt compelled to do it anyway, instructing over 45,000 people to hunker down in a facility that lacked sufficient food, water, or sanitation. Soon, reports of violence and sexual assault inside the stadium began to spread. Some of these claims came from local black police officers. One famously (and falsely) claimed that “babies” were being “raped” in the stadium. The entire situation was obscene and chaotic. It looked more like something out of Haiti or Rwanda than a modern American city. And, yes, George W. Bush was an asshat. But how was the post-Katrina meltdown his fault exactly?

You might ask a similar question of the federal response elsewhere. The general perception these days is that federal agencies left the people of New Orleans to rot and die. But this is a massive distortion of the facts. During the disaster, the federal agency most capable of doing anything to save lives was the Coast Guard. And, by all accounts, it acted courageously, saving more than 33,000 New Orleanians by boat and nearly 9,500 more by helicopter. The Coast Guard also deployed more than 4,000 personnel to the city, alongside 60 aircraft and 400 boats. The Coast Guard also carried out dangerous airdrops to try and shore up the collapsing levees with sandbags.

None of this helped Bush’s presidency. His polling numbers were poor already, but they fell off a cliff after Katrina, never to recover. Bush and his cabinet of neoconservative cronies deserved to be cast into the dustbin of history, but mostly for other reasons. Watching Bush finally get politically dismantled by Katrina was a lot like watching Al Capone go down for tax evasion. The justice felt satisfying but, in the long run, the irony was thick.

As the hurricane devastated the Big Easy, the popular perception seemed to be that the federal government maintains large storehouses of food, water, and supplies ready to go that, with the push of a red button inside the Oval Office, could be airdropped into a disaster zone like some kind of humanitarian drone strike. This is a childish fantasy — and not just any fantasy, but a distinctly statist fantasy, one entertained by people who blame their own problems on enduring “white supremacy”.

In the storm’s aftermath, this moral framing gave rise to a redemptive response: Barack Obama. Despite his inexperience and fatuously vague platform, Obama’s campaign of “Hope” was perfectly timed to answer Katrina’s psychic wound. Obama embodied a new, race-conscious vision of American governance and, paradoxically, the illusion that the race question had finally been solved.

It hadn’t, of course. In a sense, Katrina became the first real catalyst of our present MAGA-woke era — not because it created the culture war, that was already there, but because it papered over serious government dysfunction with a divisive racial narrative. More than that, though, Katrina solidified the cartoonish notion that the federal government is a unified, all-knowing entity, one capable of organizing massive relief operations at a moment’s notice in the face of local incompetence.

That wasn’t true in 2005. And it’s not true now, as evidenced by the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis that left 150,000 residents without safe drinking water three years ago. The disaster stemmed from decades of local officials neglecting their own infrastructure. The Biden administration then mobilized federal resources to help, but the emergency itself was rooted in a local failure to plan and maintain its own public systems.

Should the federal government take more responsibility for local US infrastructure? Perhaps, but that would require no small adjustment in how the country is run. Creating the kind of centralized executive power that could step in and run something like New Orleans’ levee system or Jackson’s water system — without needing the involvement of competent local governance — would require more than mere reform. It would probably require a whole new US Constitution. At the very least, it would require an aggressive executive willing to override institutional inertia, federal constraints, and centuries of precedent — someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or, indeed, Donald Trump.

Obama spent much of his presidency pretending that the executive branch was basically powerless. In his administration’s cliche feigning of helplessness, it simply couldn’t fulfill the will of his voters, hold Wall Street accountable, or confront the people who crashed the global economy in 2008 because that wasn’t the historic “role” of the president. Obama and his acolytes made statement after statement implying his hands were tied. Meanwhile, Trump makes a mockery of that idea nearly every day. He treats the presidency like a personal tool kit. When he wants to act, he acts. The disjunction between those two modes — the modern weak liberal executive versus the imperial Right-wing strongman — exposes a deeper incoherence at the heart of the American liberal tradition.

On the one hand, the progressive Left insists the federal government is practically omnipotent: capable of unleashing “fascism”, “systemic racism”, and “rape culture” on college campuses. On the other hand, when the establishment Left is actually in power, these same voices insist on total deference to the 18th-century Framers’ supposedly sacred system of checks and balances. They refuse to challenge the sanctity of an antiquated governing structure, even as it repeatedly fails to deliver meaningful economic change for blue-collar workers.

What the proto-woke and their Left-liberal comrades failed to see in 2005, and indeed still resist, is that FEMA and the DC political class would just as readily abandon poor whites as they would poor blacks: clear enough in the Carolinas and Appalachia after last year’s Hurricane Helen. The storm destroyed or damaged over 185,000 homes in North Carolina alone. Many of the communities affected are both white and elderly. But the Trump administration has hardly moved heaven and earth to help victims of Hurricane Helen — nor the victims of last month’s floods in central Texas — as race-based ideologues would anticipate.

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Indeed Trump, supposedly the great racist champion of rural white America, has actually begun dramatically shrinking FEMA as part of Elon Musk’s ideological project of destroying social safety nets for the poor and middle classes. Two decades after Katrina, the issues are mostly the same, only now stretched to the national stage. The US government expresses a consistent lack of interest in offering rapid, much less efficient, relief for the poor and working classes, no matter their race or location, even when their livelihoods have been destroyed by no fault of their own.

Nothing about this is the result of hatred or bigotry. They’re the result of fragmentation, corruption, and institutional decay. Katrina, though, exposed a media system, and voting public, that no longer understands who’s actually responsible for what and believes that the only obligations of living in a “democracy” means showing up every four years to vote for an all-powerful chief executive.

All the while, Katrina revealed what happens when no one is held accountable for state failure. In a system where political power is deliberately diffuse, blame becomes easy to shift and nearly impossible to pin down. Any political movement serious about reform, or even just staving off national collapse, must begin by confronting the country’s deeply localist design. Until Americans understand where power actually resides, they will remain powerless to change anything. And that’s exactly what corporate lobbyists and billionaire donors are counting on.

Regardless of their chosen parties and aesthetic differences, all three figures are vintage throwbacks from a dying era of US politics: the urban machine boss.

For all the recent talk of Trump as a Bonapartist or an “American Caesar”, he’s more like a supersized version of William “Boss” Tweed, the Democratic honcho who dominated New York politics via an elaborate system of patronage centered around Manhattan’s Tammany Hall. Tweed was only the most notorious example of a bigger phenomenon.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, “bossism” reigned in metropolises like New York and Chicago, cities where social and economic policy was made through political horse-trading and personal networks rife with varying levels of corruption. These networks were led by strong mayors and executives, the the Buck-Stops-Here types once wryly depicted in old newspaper editorial cartoons as tough-talking, cigar-chomping kingpins.

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One boss that Trump has sometimes looked to with a sense of nostalgia is Meade Esposito, the swaggering king of the Brooklyn Democratic Party from 1969 to 1984. Esposito was described by one one historian as “an ‘old school’ king-maker: a political fixer whose machine was fueled by loyalty, patronage, and a quid-pro-quo system that resulted in a bevy of municipal corruption scandals and inquiries”. To Trump, though, Esposito was a hero, whom the 45th and 47th president has praised for ruling “with an iron fist”. As Trump told The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, “I figured that the Mitch McConnells would be like him in terms of strength.”

The boss’s admiration for bossism has now yielded a pardon for Rod Blagojevich. Lord knows that Blagojevich tried to govern like a boss. The problem was that the former Illinois chief executive made the mistake of doing so while Chicago’s machine was being scrapped for parts. The old brand of politics was supplanted by the new Democratic Party as embodied by Clintonite disciples Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama — both Chicagoans who harnessed mass media, celebrity, NGOs, and fundraising prowess, replacing the backscratching loyalists of old with bloodless progressive technocrats.

It has now been 16 years since Blagojevich was impeached and ousted as governor, one of a long line of Illinois politicians imprisoned for political corruption. Among his crimes: lying to federal agents and holding up money to a children’s hospital in exchange for campaign contributions. Most notably, Blagojevich tried to sell access to Obama’s Senate seat in 2008 after Obama left to run for president (the FBI secretly wiretapped Blagojevich saying of Obama’s vacated job: “I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.”)

It was a shockingly blatant and clumsy example of quid pro quo, but it may have been seen as business as usual in a different era of Illinois politics. Consider the example of Jacob Arvey, a Chicago Democratic boss of the Forties infamous for providing virtually anything for residents of his ward, including legal counsel, apartments, and even wooden legs and glass eyes in exchange for votes. His advice in politics was purely transactional: “It’s very simple. Put people under obligation to you.”

But when the well-coiffed Blagojevich tried to put people under obligation in the aughts, he was convicted of a host of corruption-related crimes. In 2010, he appeared on four episodes of Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice, during his national innocence tour before heading to prison to serve 14 years; he only served eight years behind bars before Trump commuted the sentence in 2020 (ending Blagojevich’s prison stint without formally clearing his name or wiping his record).

At the time, Trump made it clear that he saw parallels between Blagojevich’s case and the FBI’s inquiry into his own alleged — and later disproved — “collusion” with Russia. It was notable that Robert Mueller served as FBI director when the bureau investigated Blagojevich and later led the special-counsel probe that would clear Trump of collusion.

Blago has kept a low profile since his exodus from jail. He has been recording Cameo videos and occasionally performing ironic covers of Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock at Chicago street festivals. There was little reason now to pardon Blagojevich, as he has no political favors to return — unless, that is, it’s Trump magnanimously “recognizing game”.

Then there is the Eric Adams case. Unlike Blago’s run-ins with the law, his case is more recent, and a lot more complicated to navigate. Adams, a Democrat, was considered an outsider in New York’s 2021 mayor’s race. The former NYPD captain was the polar opposite of Michael Bloomberg’s elite technocrat. He was an aspiring Machine Man, the kind of dealmaking Gotham politician who helped Trump land millions in tax abatements for his properties in the wake of the Big Apple’s fiscal crisis in the Seventies.

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But like Blago, Adams got caught playing bad machine politics. In September, he was hit with a five-count federal indictment for bribery, fraud, and campaign-finance violations. Prosecutors alleged that the mayor quietly received more than $100,000 worth of illegal campaign contributions, plus free luxury travel, in exchange for doing favors for the Turkish government. Adams pleaded not guilty, suggesting that he was being targeted with lawfare by the Biden administration because he criticized the Democrats’ loose immigration policy. (In reality, Adams was all for welcoming tens of thousands of newcomers from points south before he turned against it.)

As with Blagojevich, Trump publicly sided with Adams this week, expressing sympathy for his claim that he was unfairly targeted for political reasons. “We need great Judges and Politicians to help fix New York and to stop the kind of Lawfare that was launched against me”, he posted on Truth Social.

In response, Trump’s Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against the mayor. Remarkably, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove wrote that the decision wasn’t about the merits of the case. Instead, Bove claimed that the case was interfering with Adams’s ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration”. There’s a not-so-small catch. The DOJ left open the possibility that charges could be refiled on Adams following a review.

Perhaps, then, Trump is treating the Gotham’s mayor like an old-fashioned machine boss who is gaming the system for an underling while expecting something in return. Meade Esposito and Boss Tweed would be proud. Game recognizes game, indeed.

Siddiq was born into a large connection of power and property. Her family has been dubbed the Kennedys of Bangladesh. Her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, ruled Dhaka from 2009 to 2024 more or less as a dictator. And like most aunts, she was given to maternal largesse. To begin with, there was the electoral meddling. Her party, the Awami League, apparently helped her niece on the hustings in 2015; “Had it not been for your help,” Siddiq said to an Awami crowd on her election as MP for Hampstead and Highgate, “I would never have been able to stand here as a British MP.”

Then there were the houses. Rather in the manner that bird droppings fall on unlucky souls, properties would seem to have lashed down on Siddiq and her family. First came a pied-à-terre in King’s Cross, bequeathed by a developer, an Awami man, in 2004. When prying hacks had the temerity to inquire into the ownership of the flat in 2022, Siddiq threatened them with lawsuits, asseverating that the property was a gift from her parents. Thereafter, were two Hampstead flats, both owned by Awami figures. Another party man owns her current East Finchley digs, a semi-detached dwelling worth £2 million. A billionaire advisor of Hasina’s, meanwhile, owns Siddiq’s mother’s Golders Green house through an offshore trust.

Publicly, Siddiq has let on that a vile press, pandering to popular prejudice, has made much ado about what are blood ties and no more: “Are you aware that I am a British MP and that I’m born in London?” But there was that little faux pas on her part, when she accompanied her aunt to the Kremlin in 2015, shaking hands with Putin as the two leaders inked an arms and nuclear energy deal. Siddiq, however, maintains she was only there to spend “time with her family”. Oh.

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Since Hasina’s government was toppled by students in August 2024, we have seen a drip feed of accusations from Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission — one of which sealed Siddiq’s fate on 14 January. Quite apart from lodging at Awami houses on both sides of the Heath, Siddiq was allegedly involved in the allocation of a plot of land in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone to her mother. She announced her resignation on the same day.

But the Tulip Siddiq affair, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger story is Hasina’s kleptocratic regime and Britain’s role as its handmaiden. Dhaka’s court has now revealed that the price tag of the Rooppur nuclear power plant, being built for the Bangladeshis by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, was inflated by $5 billion — allegedly misappropriated by the Hasina family and its cronies.

And where should the money end up but in bent Britain? Hasina’s ministers and oligarchs, the Observer has revealed, own British real estate worth almost £400 million. They include the tycoon Salman Rahman, who runs the vast Beximco conglomerate, which, among other contracts, was handed over the national monopoly to distribute the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Rahman and his family own seven apartments in Mayfair through shell companies. Apparently a career politician, Hasina’s land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury meanwhile owns hundreds of properties in Britain, with a combined worth north of £160 million. Then we have the Sobhan family, real estate magnates who couldn’t repay state loans, yet somehow managed to purchase a £10 million Kensington mansion.

Hasina’s kith and kin are accused of benefitting from “plain robbery”, in the words of Muhammad Yunus, Nobel laureate and now Bangladesh’s stopgap ruler. They have waged, as it were, a two-front class war against Bangladeshi taxpayers and British renters. And in this endeavour, they have been aided by Butler Britain: estate agents, private banks, law firms, and indeed lawmakers, who have developed a Swiss-cheese style compliance regime, whose very edifice was designed to allow the Rahmans and Chowdhurys, Abramovichs and Kulibayevs, to squirrel away their riches in this island. The loopholes are the system. This is why Siddiq had to go. She is alleged to be benefitting from the very world she was meant to oversee.

And a grim world it was. Auntie Hasina’s wealth and power were built on an empire of violence and malversation. But things didn’t start out that way. Indeed, for a long while, she was the great hope of democracy in a land eternally cleaving to khaki rule. Her father was the country’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bangladesh, it will be remembered, was once “East Pakistan”, part of the cartographic oddity sandwiching India ruled first from Karachi, then Rawalpindi, and finally Islamabad — all in “West Pakistan”, which was hegemonic culturally, economically, and militarily. In 1970, Rahman won the election. Stinging from the humiliating prospect of having to salaam an “effete” Bangla ruler for the following five years, Pakistan’s generals promptly unleashed a genocide. Over the following months, three million were killed. India, sensing an opportunity, invaded the country. Pakistan’s army was sent packing, and Rahman declared independence.

Four years later, it was another set of generals who came to cause grief to Rahman. Perceived as too much of a leftie, with his unhealthy penchant for redistribution and nationalization, he was massacred, along with the rest of his family, by army personnel in a Scarface-style mansion shootout in 1975. The very Bangladeshi coup brought to power a military junta.

As it was, Hasina emerged unscathed from the violent contraction of the Rahman ménage, thanks to a European holiday. Six years later, she emerged from Indian exile to take charge of the Awami League. In that role, she fashioned a reputation as a level-headed democrat, opposed to both General Ershad’s military dictatorship as well as her father’s socialist zeal.

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From this cautious start, for which she garnered global sympathy, Hasina grew into one of the most unprepossessing politicians of our age. It is a trajectory South Asians wearily recognize; Aung San Suu Kyi, another nepo baby, similarly went from being the toast of the free world to a toasted pariah. Hasina’s autocratic turn owed much to the “battle of the begums” that played out around the turn of the century — a dialectic of violence and corruption that sustained the competition for the top job between two well-heeled women, Hasina and her rival, the Bangladesh National Party’s Begum Khaleda Zia. Hasina won out. Zia was put under house arrest, and her son exiled.

Following her victory in the 2009 election, the country’s last free and fair one, Hasina set about belligerently consolidating power. Elections became farces boycotted by the main opposition party, and kangaroo courts mushroomed. The police acquired a taste for torture, for pulling nails and hanging prisoners. Her detractors and dissidents developed the uncanny ability to simply disappear.

The economy ostensibly did well. Bangladesh achieved a 203% per capita increase in GDP in the last quarter-century, on a par with peer nations — India (216%) and Vietnam (244%) — and leagues ahead of the land from which it seceded, Pakistan (44%). This owed in great measure to the roaring success of the garment industry, profiting a wafer-thin entrepreneurial class that scarcely paid anything in taxes — the top rate is 25p — and concealing Hasina’s cataclysmic handling of state finances: soaring debt; eye-watering inflation; depleting reserves. Serious public investment is scarcely possible under such constraints. At any rate, a tidy chunk of the budget under Hasina vanished into the hands of its trigger-happy army.

Keeping the generals happy exacted a toll. Having to perennially whip out her begging bowl before Delhi and Beijing, Hasina proved singularly incapable of crafting an independent foreign policy. Indeed, her critics with some justice described her as Delhi’s creature. The crumbs the Indians threw her way were repaid through accommodating water-sharing arrangements and market access — another big market, given recent figures put the Bangla population at 173 million. Delhi sweetened the pill by helping cool tempers in DC, where periodic excoriation of the human rights abuses of other nations is very much the norm. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, was responding to Indian pressure when he instructed his ambassador to Dhaka and the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs to “knock it off with Bangladesh”.

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In the end, Hasina’s cronyism and brutality proved her undoing. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a nakedly clientelistic job scheme — three in 10 government jobs were to be reserved for the heirs of the “veterans” who fought for the country’s liberation in 1971, which is to say for legacy Awami Leaguers. The upshot was last summer’s Monsoon Revolution. The state’s tyrannical security apparatus met its match in the idealistic bright young things amassing on Dhaka’s streets.

Hasina went down kicking and screaming. More than 1,500 protestors were killed, and 20,000 injured. But the students kept at it until Hasina was forced to flee to India on a chopper. The 84-year-old microfinancier Muhammad Yunus, who had for long been a thorn in Hasina’s side, was dragged to Dhaka from his Paris hospital by students and installed as interim leader in August. And so the curtain fell on autocratic misrule.

Hasina’s successors, it must be said, did not put their best face forward on seizing power. Awami Leaguers were massacred wholesale in retaliatory violence; the country’s Hindu minority, too, bore the brunt, not least because Hasina had cultivated a reputation as an Indophilic anti-Islamist. Indeed, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party, once mercilessly suppressed by Hasina, has renewed its shariatic hopes; there is even talk of a Bangla caliphate.

But hope springs eternal. Hasina’s fall and now Siddiq’s are reasons for optimism. Tying up the loose ends, in metropole and former colony alike, will of course prove harder. The billionaire Banglagarchs are nothing if not powerful; Butler Britain, nothing if not efficacious. Both Dhaka and London have their work cut out.

How times change.

Speaking to Labour Conference last week, Ed Miliband — now the Secretary of State at the Department for Net Zero and Energy Security — pledged to construct an “armoury of clean power” for the United Kingdom, in order to make its electricity system “net zero” by 2030. What he didn’t mention, however, was that his brother is being paid by a venture capital outfit whose profits are likely to increase in the process.

***

When David Miliband stepped down from Parliament, his MP’s salary was a modest £66,000. But that was only a small portion of his income. In his final entry in the Commons interests register, he declared he was also being paid £100,000 a year as chairman of Sunderland Football Club, and £92,840 as an adviser to a green investment fund. To top up his account, he also accepted almost £65,000 for appearing at a London forum hosted by the foreign ministry of the United Arab Emirates.

Just over a decade later, David has refashioned himself as a man of virtue: he lives in New York, where he runs International Rescue Committee, a US-based charity that supports people in humanitarian crises. For his services, however, he receives a princely sum. In 2022, he took home a salary of $1,253,728, as well as a bonus of $150,000.

For such a level of remuneration, and with such a workload, one might expect David to be busy with the day job. Yet, for more than four years he has had an additional job: in September 2020, five months after his brother became shadow energy secretary in Sir Keir Starmer’s new shadow cabinet, it was revealed that David had become a paid advisor to Giant Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm that has a particular focus on green technology and energy. Following a series of earlier investments, it recently launched a new “climate focused growth fund” and claims it wants to invest a further $1 billion in “sustainable technologies” by the end of the decade.

All of which may seem perfectly in fitting with David’s form when it comes to juggling multiple jobs. Except for one thing: at least two of the companies Giant Ventures has invested in are likely to prosper as a direct result of decisions made by the new government. In other words, David now works for a company that stands to profit from climate policies introduced by his brother Ed.

Before and since the election, Ed Miliband has spoken of the need to create a vast energy storage network connected to the national grid — to ensure that, in a renewable energy system, the lights don’t go out when the sun is not shining and there is no wind. Part of this, he has said, will be supplied by arrays of giant batteries. He mentioned them again in his conference speech last week, when he called for the “armoury of clean power”.

Enter Field, a battery power storage firm set up in 2021 by Amit Gudka, one of the co-founders of collapsed energy firm Bulb. Field, with five sites already finished or being built, claims to be ready to meet Miliband’s challenge. And Giant Ventures seems to agree: according to data gathered by finance research experts PitchBook, it invested in Field at its outset in 2021.

Now, it is possible that Ed Miliband was unaware that Field was partly financed by Giant Ventures, although this had already been reported. It is also possible that didn’t know his brother was a member of the Giant Ventures advisory board, though that information was also public.

But that would be puzzling. According to Whitehall’s Ministerial Code, newly appointed ministers must formally declare “all interests that might be thought to give rise to a conflict” with their government post: not only their own, but those of their spouse and “close family members”. They must not only avoid any conflict, but also the “perception” that one might arise. It should have been obvious to Ed Miliband that he had a duty to check his brother’s interests.

This year’s declaration is yet to be published, but both Labour and Conservative former ministers told me that declarations of ministerial interests are usually made immediately after taking office, so that civil servants are aware from the start where conflicts might arise. I asked both the energy department and the Cabinet Office, which is responsible for the list, whether Ed had declared David’s role at Giant Ventures, but both refused to comment. Asked when the next list would be published, all they would say is that this would happen “in due course”.

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Similarly reticent, Giant Ventures refuses to disclose how much it pays David Miliband, but it seems certain he does receive a stipend: one of his fellow advisory board members, Lord John Browne, the former chairman of BP, states in the Lords register of interests that the position constitutes “remunerated employment”. For Miliband in particular, this “employment” takes a number of forms: not only does he attend board meetings — he also appears at events and in the firm’s videos and podcasts.

As for the insight he provides to the fund, a spokesperson told me that, “like all venture capital firms that are not listed on public markets, we do not publish our investor reports to the general public”. However, PitchBook has identified two firms that look likely to profit from Ed Miliband’s “clean energy superpower” revolution. As well as Field, for instance, there is Beams, which helps homeowners make their properties more energy efficient — a service that should prosper following Miliband’s pledge to impose tough, green standards on both private and public rental homes.

Miliband has also made a specific ministerial decision that will benefit Field. Less than three weeks after the election, Field became the beneficiary of a technical change to the rules governing Britain’s electricity supply system that Miliband personally signed.

The document in question, the Capacity Market (Amendment) Rules 2024, is not an easy read. It relates to the curious way that the grid pays for energy storage: under the “capacity mechanism”, the Government concludes expensive contracts with companies such as Field, who in return guarantee that they will supply a stipulated amount of electricity at a moment’s notice for a given period of time. (In the case of batteries, the limitations of battery technology mean this will be no more than a few hours.) Under this system, the companies get paid whether or not they actually supply any energy.

The cost, which has been rising steadily, is met by adding a levy to customers’ electricity bills. Energy supply expert Gordon Hughes, emeritus professor of political economy at Edinburgh University, told me that by the beginning 2026, the annual cost is likely to be more than £2 billion, the equivalent of £70 per household, and by 2030, up to £5 billion.

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Until Ed Miliband changed the rules, the problem for companies like Field was that when batteries are used and recharged repeatedly, their capacity deteriorates. This meant that battery firms had to pay to install more capacity than their contracts said they needed when their batteries were new, so that they would not be running the risk of breaching their contracts when their capacity declined. This was because the old rules said they were not allowed to add more capacity if and when it was required. “This change is clearly advantageous to them,” says Hughes, “because it allows them to reduce their upfront costs. It is also likely to increase their profits.”

This was not the only decision Miliband made on 18 July that may come to benefit Field. On the same day, he signed a letter to the national grid setting out details of the capacity mechanism’s future, which will create lucrative opportunities for firms like Field to build more batteries, enhancing their profits and the value of investments made by venture capital firms.

After the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero told me it could not comment as to whether Ed Miliband had declared his brother’s interest in Giant Ventures, I sent an email setting out details of how a conflict, or at least the appearance of one, might occur. But Its spokesperson refused to address this, saying only: “There is an established process in place for the declaration and management of interests held by ministers. This ensures that steps are taken to avoid or mitigate any potential or perceived conflicts of interest. The List of Ministers’ Interests will be published as part of this in due course.”

Giant Ventures said it did not wish to comment, while David Miliband failed to respond at all.

This is unsurprising. Since leaving Parliament, David Miliband has been reluctant to speak publicly about his relationship with Ed. But on one of the few occasions that he has, in 2015, he told The Guardian: “I’ve always said you remain brothers for life.”

Why have Japan’s postwar prime ministers found it so hard to cling to power? One of the biggest reasons is Japan’s failure, since the end of the American Occupation (1945–52), to become a true multi-party democracy. The early years of the Occupation helped restore democracy to Japan after years of militarism. New parties formed and women voted for the first time. But a strong showing by Japan’s socialists and communists worried those in the United States who hoped to turn Japan into a profitable trading partner and dependable Cold War ally. Left-wing success concerned Japanese businesses, too, many of which leant their support to new conservative parties such as the Nihon Jiyūtō (Japan Liberal Party) and to the merger of conservatives in 1955 that created today’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

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But America’s interest in supporting anti-communist forces around the world did more than provide a boost for big business in Japan. It ended up creating space in postwar Japanese politics for wartime figures who might otherwise have lived out their days in quiet retirement (or, in some cases, prison). Government bureaucrats managed to hang on to their jobs because the Occupation authorities regarded them as essential to running postwar Japan: senior figures were required only to take a fitness for office test — dubbed the “Paradise Exam” because unlimited time was provided for its completion, alongside tea and cigarettes. Even the notorious ultranationalist and gangster Kodama Yoshio earned himself a second act. He had worked as a fixer in China and Manchuria during the war, building up a multi-million-dollar fortune by running a network that provided intelligence and raw materials like radium and nickel for clients including the Imperial Japanese Navy. Imprisoned in 1946, he was released two years later when America’s intelligence agencies realised how valuable his skills and contacts might be.

Kodama was a man who liked to plan ahead. Before his arrest, he handed over some of his wealth in diamonds and platinum to a friend in the Japan Liberal Party, thereby purchasing himself a place in postwar conservatism. Then, while in jail, he spent time with Kishi Nobusuke, the highest-ranking bureaucrat in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and Tanaka Kakuei, an up-and-coming politician who had been caught taking bribes. Both men were future prime ministers of Japan and both would go on to benefit from Kodama’s underworld connections. Once out of prison, Kodama played a role behind the scenes, together with the CIA, in launching the LDP. Kishi joined the party after his own American backers helped to secure his release from prison. He became prime minister in 1957 and welcomed Tanaka into his first Cabinet post that same year. The price of admittance was a backpack stuffed with three-million yen in cash. Three years later, when Kishi found himself facing popular unrest over the renewal of Japan’s controversial security treaty with the United States, Kodama rustled up some violent men to attack and intimidate the crowds of protestors.

The upside of the LDP’s connections with big business, civil servants and allies in the United States was that the party was able to co-ordinate a remarkable return to prosperity for Japan across the Sixties and Seventies. But this in itself caused problems. The LDP came to dominate Japanese politics so thoroughly — it has rarely been out of power from 1955 to the present day — that the most important policy debates tended to take place not between rival political parties with strong grassroots support but between factions within the LDP whose influence was built on pork-barrel politics. Tanaka Kakuei became perhaps the greatest player of this game. There is no denying his achievements in office, not least a bridge-building visit to Mao Zedong in Beijing; the two men shared rustic roots, and bonded over talk of Buddhism, Confucianism and incense. But the Japanese were shocked by revelations that Tanaka was involved in bribe-taking from American aerospace manufacturer Lockheed to persuade All Nippon Airways and Japan’s defence agency to choose its aircraft over those of its rivals. Helping behind the scenes to move cardboard boxes stuffed with Lockheed cash was one Kodama Yoshio.

Tanaka was forced to resign in 1974, but it did not mean the end of his political career. In Japan’s system, the most powerful people often operate from behind the scenes, as Tanaka now did. He continued effectively to run Japan from a lavish mansion in Tokyo, meeting with aspiring new members of his LDP faction and handing out “bullets”: parcels of tightly-packed banknotes worth 100 million yen each, wrapped discreetly in traditional Japanese cloth. His protege Kanemaru Shin worked in much the same way, until he fell from his senior LDP position in 1992 after being implicated in a bribery scandal involving a delivery company and the Inagawa-kai yakuza group. A raid on Kanemaru’s Tokyo apartment uncovered $50 million in cash, bonds and gold bars, hidden away in wardrobes and desk drawers. Kanemaru — nickname: “The Don” — died before justice could be done, but not before sharing a last word with an astonished and aggrieved Japanese public. “My political philosophy,” he declared, “is to have some appreciation for a person who saves a drowning child in a river, even if that person happens to belong to a crime syndicate.”

Japan’s “lost decades” of economic growth, from the Nineties to now, has eroded the dominance of the LDP and tempered the scale of political corruption. But both remain prominent themes, alongside the failure of opposition parties to mount effective and long-lasting challenges to the LDP. The scandal that has helped to cut Kishida Fumio’s premiership short involves 85 LDP lawmakers who have been accused of channelling profits from the sale of tickets to party gatherings into slush funds, to the tune of more than £3 million. Small change, compared with decades past. But a good many disillusioned Japanese long ago turned to local politics and civic activism via non-profits and the courts to get things done instead. A powerful example of this approach has been the attempt to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples. National politicians are divided on the issue, but campaigners have succeeded in persuading local administrations to offer them official status, along with a number of district courts.

LDP leaders have also struggled, in recent years, to tackle a demographic crisis at home — an ageing and declining population — alongside an uncertainty of purpose abroad. Not everyone in Japan approved of Abe Shinzo’s vision of a more robust Japan, making a “proactive contribution to peace” in its region and internationally. But greater defence spending does seem to make sense in light of China’s rise and doubts over America’s commitment to Japan’s security. The problem is how to pay for it while tax receipts dwindle and the cost of living continues to rise. Added to all this is anger among the Japanese public about politicians’ links to the Unification Church, which came to light after the assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022. Here again, history looms large. Back in the Sixties, Abe’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, cultivated links with the Church’s founder Sun Myung Moon, a strong anti-communist.

It is possible that when the time comes, in September, for the LDP to elect its next leader, Japan may get its first female prime minister. Takaichi Sanae — once the drummer in a heavy metal band and now a hawkish Minister for Economic Security — is one to watch, as is Kamikawa Yōko. Both may struggle, however, to garner the level of behind-the-scenes support that has always been needed to win this contest. If a woman does succeed in taking the top job, then Japanese politics will no doubt enjoy a much-needed boost, both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the holy grail of Japanese politics, a functioning multi-party system reasonably free from the wheeler-dealing of the past, appears for now to be out of reach.

Since then, “Pfizergate” has ballooned into one of the biggest scandals in EU history. Following von der Leyen and the Commission’s refusal to hand over the text messages — not only to journalists, but even to the EU Ombudsman and the EU Court of Auditors — the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), an independent EU body responsible for investigating and prosecuting financial crimes, announced in late 2022 that it had opened an investigation into the pandemic procurement process (though not into Pfizergate specifically). It confirmed that it had received “an exceptionally high number of reports and complaints” asking that “it investigate the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union”.

Then, in April 2023, Frédéric Baldan, a Belgian lobbyist specialising in EU-China trade relations, filed a lawsuit against von der Leyen before a Liège court, accusing her of usurping official powers, destroying public documents, pursuing illicit interests and committing corruption, and damaging his country’s public finances. Shortly after, Baldan’s lobbyist accreditation was withdrawn by the European Parliament. The story, however, doesn’t end there.

Despite von der Leyen’s clumsy attempts to sweep the case under the carpet, or arguably because of them, Pfizergate continues to rumble on. Since Baldan filed his criminal complaint, several individuals, organisations and even two countries — Hungary and Poland (under the previous PiS-led government) — have joined the lawsuit. With Brussels steeling itself for the EU elections in June, all the signs pointed to a big legal bust-up and an even bigger PR disaster.

But then, earlier this month, von der Leyen’s hearing in front of the Belgian court — to decide whether the EPPO or the Belgian investigators should prosecute the case — was mysteriously postponed to December. This is not a trivial matter. Even though a year and a half has passed since the EPPO first opened its investigation, no one has yet been charged. Indeed, it’s unclear whether the EPPO has actually been looking into the case at all. A few days before the recent hearing in Liège was supposed to take place, Baldan’s lawyer, Diane Protat, visited the EPPO’s offices in Brussels and Luxembourg to request a copy of its case file — standard procedure from a legal standpoint. However, not only was she told that there was no such file, but on both occasions security was called on her.

Such behaviour is typical of the EPPO. For several months after beginning its probe into the EU’s vaccine procurement, it showed little interest in Pfizergate; as far as we know, it didn’t even demand that von der Leyen hand over the infamous text messages. However, shortly after Baldan filed his complaint in Belgium, the EPPO quickly moved to obtain a copy of the document from the Belgian prosecutor’s office — and almost immediately claimed exclusive jurisdiction over the case.

It argues that, if there was any misconduct relating to EU-wide vaccine-procurement deals, this represents a damage to the EU budget, and that under EU law it is up to the EPPO to investigate, prosecute and bring to judgment the perpetrators of criminal offences that affect the EU budget. The complainants see the situation differently: they note that the vaccines were purchased with money that came from member states’ national budgets, not the EU budget — as even von der Leyen herself admitted in a recent presidential debate. That is why they argue that the case should be tried in national courts, such as the Belgian one, rather than by the EPPO.

As for the immunity from legal proceedings that von der Leyen enjoys as president of the Commission, the complainants suggest this applies only with respect to acts carried out within the scope of her defined function as Commission president. Suffice it to say that whether carrying out billion-euro deals behind closed doors, and then leaving member states and taxpayers to foot the bill, falls within the purview of her role is questionable. That said, the plaintiffs face an uphill struggle: if the case moves forward, the request from prosecutors to waiver von der Leyen’s immunity would be handled by the College of Commissioners — which is usually chaired by von der Leyen herself. However, they have an ally in the Belgian investigating judge, Frédéric Frenay, who has successfully investigated several corruption cases in the past: according to Euractiv, he doesn’t agree with the EPPO taking over the case and is insisting that it remain in Belgian hands.

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But why is the EPPO, after showing hardly no interest in it for several months, now so adamant about taking over the case? Given the organisation’s behaviour since Pfizergate broke, one could be forgiven for wondering if they were ever interested in truly investigating von der Leyen — or whether they were covering up for her. As the German MEP Martin Sonneborn told the Berliner Zeitung: “Why does the EPPO, which reports to Justice commissioner Didier Reynders, who reports to Commission president von der Leyen, need a year and a half to search von der Leyen’s office in the Commission building and confiscate her work cell phone to view the Pfizer SMSs?”

Questions have already been raised about the body’s judicial independence: last year, for example, it attracted criticism after Giorgia Meloni’s government helped install a new prosecutor despite an independent panel of judiciary experts ranking him last among Italy’s three candidates. Previously, other countries had faced criticism for the same reason. As Sonneborn put it, with the EPPO, “another organisation seems to have been created that does not have the interests of the citizens in mind, but rather the shielding of EU officials from their democratic accountability”.

Seen in this light, the EPPO’s efforts to assume jurisdiction over the Belgian complaint could be read as an attempt to stifle an independent investigation into Pfizergate — or at least delay it until after the EU elections and the nomination process for the new president of the Commission. Certainly, if that was the aim, they’ve succeeded. We can rest assured that Baldan’s recent demand for von der Leyen to be sacked and barred from running for office as long as she is the subject of criminal proceedings will likely fall on deaf ears.

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Von der Leyen, however, is far from off-the-hook. After all, the Belgian court may still decide to allocate jurisdiction to the state’s investigative authorities. And who knows, the EPPO might actually decide to start doing some serious investigating itself. Besides, this isn’t the only legal cloud hanging over von der Leyen’s head: another case was filed by the New York Times against the European Commission at the European Court of Justice after they failed to provide them with the text messages, but the court has yet to rule on the matter.

Paradoxically, far from pointing to a well-functioning rule of law, all of these investigations only serve to highlight the complete lack of accountability of EU politicians, and of the EU system more generally: despite all the courts and bodies that have looked into this so far, not one has managed to get von der Leyen to hand over some text messages. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Ultimately, Pfizergate isn’t an isolated incident, but a reflection of the EU’s true nature: a haven where unelected politicians and corporate leaders can cosy up to each other away from prying eyes, unhindered by obsolete concepts such as transparency and the rule of law. The only difference is that, this time, they might finally be caught out.

How can this be? The economist Arnold Kling has a theory, and it’s a doozie. If he’s right, then decades of domestic public policy have been misguided.

The unfortunate truth is that Democrats and Republicans alike, under the cover of good intentions, have been passing laws that undermine the economic well-being of American families. Even more disturbing, these policies have created a whole new class of robber barons, who rely on government policy to enrich themselves. But these new robber barons aren’t railroad tycoons or rapacious oil companies. Indeed, many of them are non-profits: they include universities and hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, K-12 school districts, and real estate investors.

What is Kling’s theory? In key sectors of the economy, he says, the US government has been, first, restricting supply and, second, subsidising demand. The effect of both is to drive prices higher. And higher. And higher.

This is how it works: Claiming to be the guardian of “quality”, policymakers put up barriers to entry, making it extremely costly, for example, to launch a new university or hospital. This is the restriction of supply. At the same time, in the name of “helping” consumers, they push billions of dollars into student loans or healthcare payments. This is the subsidisation of demand.

Kling, a former economist at the Federal Reserve, first wrote about this phenomenon in his 2016 book Specialization and Trade. “The politics are always going to push in this direction,” he told me recently.

The great irony is that the vast bulk of the subsidies end up in the hands of providers, not consumers. These service providers are the new robber barons. Look closely, for a moment, at the latest student loan bailout. Last month, President Biden announced that $6.1 billion in loans would be forgiven for former students of the Art Institutes, a shuttered scam university that had been forced to pay a legal settlement of $95 million for fraudulent recruitment practices.

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It’s easy to blame the students here. It probably wasn’t so savvy to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans for art degrees that were probably worthless. But that’s a key point, isn’t it? If the degrees are worthless, then the students didn’t really walk away with the government’s $6.1 billion.

Who did take it? The former owners of the Art Institutes. The company eventually went bankrupt, but prior owners effectively stole $6.1 billion in taxpayer money (actually, probably about twice that), and all they had to do was pay $95 million in fines to various government agencies that sued them, including the US Department of Justice.

It would be quaint to think of this as a for-profit education scandal. Quaint, but wrong. For ultimately, all of the universities, including elite colleges in the Ivy League, have reaped billions of dollars in economic rents — excess profits — from student loan programmes, even as the value of many of their degrees has fallen dramatically.

At the same time, the universities operate an accreditation system which makes it extraordinarily difficult and costly to launch a new university that might compete with them. In fact, you usually can’t get your new university accredited until four-to-six years after you open. That means that your first students aren’t eligible for federal student loans — their subsidies — until you get your accreditation. It’s a huge handicap for anyone who wants to disrupt the current oligopoly of higher education.

These dynamics play out in all of the most important sectors of our economy. In healthcare, new hospitals in many states have to apply for a “certificate of need”. Often that certificate has to be signed by the other hospitals in the area — in other words, their potential competitors. Meanwhile, federal and state governments flood the healthcare system with subsidies that increase demand and drive prices up: almost 50% of health care spending comes from governmental entities in the US.

In housing, similarly, we restrict supply by making it harder and harder to build new units, especially in city centres where demand is the highest. Meanwhile, we subsidise demand by providing government-guaranteed mortgages and by offering huge tax breaks for anyone who purchases real estate, especially investors.

And in K-12 education, school districts around the country are trying to stamp out charter schools, which increase supply, while at the same time arguing for higher and higher per-pupil spending. The cost to educate one child for one year has increased 173% (adjusted for inflation) since 1970, and half the kids still can’t read.

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The pathologies of these sectors all follow similar patterns. Politicians proclaim their desire to “protect” quality and “help” consumers. Industry lobbyists step up to write bills that restrict supply and subsidise demand. Prices go up. Providers become more and more reliant on the government for their profits. Consumers become more and more reliant on the government to afford homes, healthcare, and schools. Instead of investing in innovation, providers spend their money on political donations and lobbyists. Politicians become dependent on those donations. Consumers demand more and more help because prices are going up, and they’re getting ripped off. And the beat goes on. “It really is a self-reinforcing process,” says Kling. “People don’t understand that the subsidies drive up prices, so they keep demanding more.”

In a 2020 book, I called this phenomenon the Bleeding Heart & the Robber Baron, because it represents a political alliance between the compassionate and the greedy. It goes a long way toward explaining so much of what is wrong with American public policy and the economy. It also explains what Bloomberg has called the “chart of the century”. Below is economist Mark Perry’s infamous inflation chart, showing that certain sectors of the economy have seen dramatic inflation in recent decades, even while other sectors have seen prices decline.

The top seven components of CPI — all of them in the Bleeding Heart sectors of education, health, and housing — have seen inflation of 56-210% over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, almost all of the other sectors have seen prices remain flat or even decline by up to 90%.

Using Kling’s insights, the tech investor Marc Andreessen has labelled these Bleeding Heart sectors as the “slow” sectors. According to Andreessen, the reliance on government largesse leads to “slower productivity growth, slow adoption of new technologies… and then as a consequence of all of that, rising prices”.

Tragically, neither party wants to talk about this. Both Democrats and Republicans have participated in — and benefitted from — this new age of Robber Barons. Democrats fight new housing in the cities; they forgive student debt; they subsidise the consumption of health insurance and healthcare. Republicans, meanwhile, support big tax breaks for real=estate investors; they pass huge entitlement programmes that subsidise the purchase of subscription drugs; they back the privatisation of giant lending companies that enjoy de facto government guarantees and therefore dominate the mortgage market.

The biggest barrier to change will be those who benefit from the current policies, as many of us are addicted to one or more of these revenue streams. Providers, the modern-day Robber Barons, will resist any efforts to shut off the spigot of public subsidies. They will also fight any efforts to allow their competitors onto a level playing field. And understandably, the average American will be reluctant to give up his or her subsidies until the prices start to return to a normal level. “I wouldn’t describe the economy as addicted to it,” says Kling.  “The economy would be fine if all of it went away. But I think the political system is addicted to it.” It’s not going to be easy, but the first step for any addict is admitting that you have a problem. And Arnold Kling is telling us the truth about our problem.

The first time I visit Cookson Street, it is Saturday morning and, despite its reputation, there are no red lights: just a string of boarded-up shops and a building site at the end of the road. A new “Civil Service Hub” for 3,000 relocated government workers is nearing completion. Around the corner, a Royal British Legion club stands opposite a gay sauna. Which, I wonder, will the civil servants prefer?

Only one brothel is open and a car loiters outside. The driver leans over a baby in a car seat, watching the door. Is he waiting to go in, or for someone to come out? He drives off before I can ask.

The second time I visit Cookson Street, the groan of revellers near the North Pier lingers on the wind. Natalie’s is flanked by darkness; her LED lights in neon contrast with the squalid buildings on either side. Fluorescent blue picks out her pink door. I press the buzzer.

A lingeried woman, perhaps in her late-20s, appears at the door. She smiles vacantly, and guides me into a waiting room. The walls are crimson; the leather sofa is black; a vending machine vibrates in the corner, selling chocolate bars and crisps. “We do not tolerate harassment,” reads a poster, provided by the police. A CCTV camera flashes. There is a faint scent of hand sanitiser.

“Have you been here before?” the woman asks, before reeling off her prices. “It’s £40 for hand relief: £50 for topless hand relief; £60 for oral or sex; or it’s £70 for all three. And that’s for half an hour.” She summons two younger women from a backroom. They shuffle in nervously, introduce themselves in Lancashire accents, and ask me to choose.

I decline and explain I want to talk about their business, the punters, and whether the brothel — technically illegal in the UK — had been approved by the police. “NO,” a woman shouts from the backroom. “He needs to ask Joanne.” The two younger women quickly disappear; the third passes me a phone number.

Joanne Andrew has run a brothel out of 27 Cookson Street since at least 2010, when she was caught advertising it as a “beauty salon” on the local council’s website. As punishment, the council removed the listing, but the punters kept returning. For six years, they came and went — until a police raid discovered a 16-year-old runaway from Manchester hiding half-naked under a blanket. Pulled up in court and facing a closure order, Andrew apologised for not knowing the girl’s age: it was a “one-off mistake”, she told a judge. It wouldn’t happen again. She claimed she had a mortgage to pay, and worried what would happen to her “girls” if the brothel closed. This satisfied the judge who allowed Natalie’s to remain open. Since then, the police have carried out regular inspections, the most recent taking place earlier this year.

When I asked Lancashire Police about this visit, they — like Andrews — refused to comment. And who can blame them? Far easier to stay quiet — to accept that Blackpool’s vice and politics are too entwined to untangle. Far easier to pretend the underworld doesn’t exist.

Last year, it was revealed that 105 serving police officers were under investigation for corruption; this year, it was the turn of Blackpool’s representatives in Westminster. In Blackpool North, the MP stands accused of misusing taxpayers’ money, while his colleague in Fylde allegedly paid a teenage escort for sex and later used campaign funds to pay off “bad people” who had locked him in a flat. For now at least, neither has fallen as far as the MP for Blackpool South: in March, Scott Benton was forced to stand down after agreeing to lobby ministers in return for money from journalists posing as gambling industry investors.

There’s a by-election next month, but few believe change will follow: every year or so, political betrayal washes up on Blackpool’s shores, and lies there ignored. Three decades ago, Tony Blair chose the resort’s Winter Gardens as the demolition site of Clause IV, his party’s commitment to socialism, and in return promised to build an opulent supercasino; but the project was moved to Manchester, and finally binned. Then, 15 years later, Boris Johnson came to town and promised to Level It Up. The Government claims the resort has received more than £100 million of funding since 2019. But how did they spend it?

Today, eight of the country’s 10 most deprived council wards are in Blackpool. And on all counts, the southern ward of Bloomfield tops the list: 40% of children live in poverty here, 25% of adults are on out-of-work benefits, and nearly 20% suffer from GP-diagnosed depression. It is a petri dish for political negligence. There are no by-election placards; just the resigned and despairing.

Jimmy, David and Dylan are no exception. Perched outside a crumbling house on a crumbling street, a 10-minute walk from Blackpool’s South Pier, the trio of oversized urchins are smoking a “biff”.

“Do you want to see the seedy drug side or the seedy sex side?” Jimmy asks. He’s the eldest of the three, probably in his early-30s, and boasts that he knows all the “rough places”. He tells me, too, that “nobody messes” with his brother, while his nephew is on the run in Dubai and “looking at 30 years”.

Jimmy’s eyes flicker as he describes his own predicament. “I’ve got a problem with this bloke, Robert,” he says. “And I’m going to have to have it with him.” But Robert won’t fight “man-to-man” with his fists. “He’s driving about on one of those electric bikes with a bottle of acid for me. Do you know why he wants to do that?” Jimmy answers his own question. “Because he’s a soft cunt.”

On cue, a car screeches wildly down the road and skids to a halt on the pavement next to us. Jimmy’s smile has disappeared; his torso has tensed. He looks terrified.

“Look here you maggot,” the driver is livid. “What have you been saying about me?” Jimmy tries to dart around the car but is cut off. “You’ve been saying to people that you’re going to kill me,” the driver yells, reaching to get out. But Jimmy has disappeared down an alleyway — and the man can only fire off insults: “You’re a MUPPET. You’re a fucking muppet.” He turns to a teenager who has emerged from a nearby house. “Tell me where he lives,” he demands, speeding off as soon as the boy replies.

With Jimmy gone, the younger pair open up. David is 20; Dylan is 18. Both deal drugs and both are homeless. They have black rings around their eyes, filth under their fingernails, and the wispy moustaches of young men unable to grow a full beard. Occasionally, they admit, they rob tourists at knife-point.

David was “kicked out of care” when he was 18, and had nowhere to go. He worked as a roofer for a bit, living on-site, but then the jobs dried up. “I’m selling weed right now to get some p’s on the table.” On a good day, he’ll make around £70 — enough to pay for a twin room in a mouldering backstreet hotel. On a bad day, the pair spend the night wandering the streets, bitter gusts off the Irish Sea making sleep impossible.

Dylan was 16 when he was kicked out by his mother, and doesn’t know why. He lived on a friend’s sofa for a few months, and was passed between family-members. But eventually they tired of him, and he knew couldn’t go home. “My brother is a paedo,” he says matter-of-factly. “He’s been done for it… If I go near that gaff, that’ll be me done. I know I’ll just go for him.”

When they’re not dealing, the boys — they’re still boys — hang out on the resort’s Central Pier, where a security guard brings them food and lets them charge their phones. Sometimes they smoke a “biff”; other times they glare at tourists. Both claim to have girlfriends who don’t know they’re homeless. “They just think we sell a bit of weed,” Dylan says. David starts to tell me about his last girlfriend who had two miscarriages, before catching himself. “It’s just one of those things,” he shrugs.

By contrast, they seem to feed giddily off the violence they see. “A few months ago, I saw someone get run over, stabbed, and then run over again,” Dylan says. David interrupts: “I’ve seen someone with their intestines hanging out.” He then pulls up his jacket to reveal scars down his arms. He first got stabbed when he was in care, he explains. Not to be outdone, Dylan lifts his shirt proudly: his pale stomach is pockmarked by knife wounds.

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“We’ve all seen shit,” Dylan adds. “We’ve all been forced to live through it… I watched one of my friends kill himself.” The friend, inconsolable after an argument with his mother, was on FaceTime to Dylan when he pulled out a knife and plunged it into his chest. Dylan sprinted to his house, but arrived too late. A coroner blamed “unmanaged ADHD”. The boy was 15.

A few hundred metres away, up towards the promenade, Martin is sitting in his toy shop. Surrounded by puzzles and dolls and brightly coloured beach balls, he is unforgiving of Blackpool’s young criminals. Just three weeks after the store opened, a group of teenagers smashed through its windows and ran off with its contents. Every now and then, one will return. Today, the shop is empty. It’s been a slow start to the year, he explains.

Martin dismisses those who claim it’s hard to find a job in Blackpool. “If you want work, you just need to ask around,” he says. “There’s always a job somewhere.” The problem, according to everyone I speak to, is that crime has anchored itself in Blackpool — and few can escape it. Martin describes how a nearby flat was colonised by dealers and turned into a drug den. Just a few weeks ago, somebody was killed around the corner: he says a heroin addict went to attack her boyfriend with a knife, who then took it off her and stabbed her 18 times.

A few doors down from where the attack took place, Jenny is having a cigarette on her porch. She claims a prying neighbour spotted a wall caked in blood, but isn’t sure she believes it: “Surely it would’ve been reported in the papers?”

Born in Huddersfield and now in her 50s, Jenny has worked behind almost every bar in Blackpool, but is currently unemployed. She suffers from spinal degeneration, pulmonary disease, bipolar disorder and anxiety. “There’s nothing rare about that here,” she adds. “Everyone has a story behind it though.”

And hers? “My dad was a Glaswegian gangster and one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners, and my step-dad beat the seven bells out of me.” She breezily describes her father’s downfall: “He killed a child molester and then they put him in a prison full of child molesters. So he went ahead and killed a few more…”

For Jenny, moving to Blackpool provided an escape and a livelihood for her and her children. But it was a limited one. She points to Central Drive to chart the resort’s decline. It used to be the proud backbone of Blackpool. Today, it is an assortment of derelict buildings, its main attraction — a joke shop from the Seventies — finally collapsing in December.

Eastern European gangs now operate out of the creaking houses, selling drugs and trafficked women on soiled mattresses. A Romanian newsagent stands accused of trying to solicit schoolgirls. Jenny tells me how a bunch of local lads went down to “kick the shit out of them”.

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When I visit at night, lights flicker behind torn blackout curtains. A few young men skulk up the street and into a disintegrating building. Just the sort of place where a 16-year-old runaway could be hidden; or a young man stabbed; or an MP held ransom. A patrol car turns on to the road, and then off again. “Everyone knows about what’s going on,” a neighbour says. “But the police do nothing.” Some residents blame their councillors, others their MP. All are resigned to the fact that nobody will step in. “It feels like they’re letting the Romanies and Romanians take over,” says one woman.

Back on the promenade, a Romany disagrees. Jade claims to read hundreds of palms each week, but, like every business owner here, has to contend with thieving gangs and delinquents. They descend in balaclavas during the day, many as young as 11. “You can’t do anything because they’re underage,” she adds.

Vice is written into Blackpool’s stars, Jade says. And then dragged down to earth: to the brothels and backrooms, to the drug dens and open streets. For decades, politicians offered platitudes and promises — and look at what they delivered: a party town thrown into the abyss. “People just don’t have enough money,” she sighs. “Businesses are closing and there’s more homeless on the streets. It all adds to this restless atmosphere.”

She’ll always have her regulars, though. Even in turmoil, people want to have their palms read; to be told that they matter, that they have a future. As if to prove her point, a woman sticks her head through the curtain and demands a reading. “Just don’t tell me if I’m going to die,” she pleads.

The fortune-teller laughs. “But of course you are.”

***

Some names have been changed.

Such views miss the significance of the man who, together with former president Frederik Willem de Klerk, helped steer his country away from imminent disaster. The tragedy now playing out in the Middle East should remind South Africans how fortunate they were to have such visionaries at a unique moment in national history.

Mandela had three things going for him: he was a decent man; his long incarceration had kept him untainted by all the bad things that happened during his liberation movement; and, crucially, his only five-year term in office came while the sinews of the civil and security services of the departed apartheid system could still hold the state together — in a sense they bore him on their hands. His successors had no such luck.

Yet the former president had little interest in, or understanding of, the minutiae of government. He governed by halo reputation, charm and an engaging naiveté. All problems could be dismissed with an incomparable smile and a witty comment. It could not last of course; not in a multi-riven country like South Africa.

When I was editor of the South African Sunday Times during the political transition of the mid-Nineties, I engaged Mandela often, not always frictionlessly. He once chose to use a meeting of national editors to accuse white editors of telling black reporters what to write, which I pointed out was more demeaning to the latter than the former.

The subsequent frostiness was partly alleviated when I invited him to be the patron of a Sunday Times-sponsored expedition to put the first South African woman and the new flag atop Mount Everest. The expedition went haywire when its mercurial leader split the party at Base Camp 4, leaving only him and the two women members of the team to assail the heights. Our circulation rocketed but it fell to me to fly to Cape Town to tell our Patron the bad news.

“You mean the women are still prepared to go on?” Mandela asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then my patronage stands. Give them my best wishes.”

The policy legacies of his 111-year-old African National Congress (ANC) have, sadly, been neither as decisive nor noble. In a May 1990 address to the Consultative Business Movement, four years before taking office, Mandela sketched the broad strategic political and economic views of the ANC, emphasising the importance of full employment, maximum productivity, social consciousness, partnership between state and business, the growth of small businesses and of land reform. Although predictably heavy on old-style dirigisme, he insisted that nationalisation and redistribution weren’t the only words in the ANC vocabulary. “It is important that we should stop propagating the gloomy picture of South Africa that, as it is said, will inevitably sink into the economic crisis that afflicts many African countries,” he said.

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How has that worked out for South Africa, after nearly 30 years of ANC rule? The party to which Mandela belonged now faces its Venezuela moment after ignoring for decades the catastrophic impact of its administrative, ideological and race-based preferment policies. The Government’s recent Medium Term Budget Statement (MTBPS) illustrates this in a nutshell. In the first six months of the financial year, the main budget deficit has grown by more than 50% to a chasmic R53 billion (£2.2 billion). On this trajectory, South Africa will have to repay R242.5 billion (£10.2 billion) a year in finance charges.

To blame are runaway spending on benefits (45% of South Africans receive social grants) and public service salaries (on average nearly twice as much as in the private sector), matched by a huge drop in taxes due to industries crippled by power interruptions (forfeiting 5% of GDP) and collapsing port facilities (another 4.9%). Economic growth has stalled at 0.1% and unemployment is at 32%, its highest ever, while a recent World Bank Report claims 10% of GDP is being robbed through crime. About 36% of water in most municipalities is lost through broken pipes and nearly one fifth of the electricity sold by the national energy provider to municipalities is stolen through illegal connections in informal settlements.

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Meanwhile, vast amounts of state resources have been ploughed into stimulating micro and small businesses and rural co-operatives in line with Mandela’s vision. This has been overwhelmingly wasted through incompetence, corruption or indifference at both donor and recipient level. The latest, a mega-farm project for the Khutso-Naketsi Community Property Association, has collapsed through state tardiness and corruption by the trustees. Elsewhere, a lodestar job-creation programme is stalled due to a corruption probe, while KwaZulu Natal’s largest development agency, the 60-year-old Ithala, is poised to have its core functions closed by the prudential authorities because it has failed to report for two years. Its target customers are black youth and women.

Compared with middle-income countries, South Africa has a depressingly low number of black-owned micro, small and medium businesses. It is understandable: why bother starting your own business when the state will extort somebody else’s equity in an existing one on your behalf or, better still, grant you huge government subsidies that hardly hit the company accounts before ending up as a deposit on a SUV?

Mandela’s optimism was thus grievously wrong. And here lies the tragedy: inheriting a battered apartheid economy, Mandela and to a lesser extent his successor, Thabo Mbeki, appointed excellent finance ministers who pursued disciplined and productive spending in close co-operation with the business sector. That boosted growth and employment, bought significant benefits to the previously marginalised, and, at one point in the early 2000s, even wiped out the deficit and paid down apartheid-era loans. A still-competent state and parastatal network, capable of massive scaling to meet the new demands, was in place. Deep capital markets and an enviable skills base were available. The Australia (or Singapore) of Africa was ostensibly aborning.

But that promise was never fulfilled. The failure was largely the result of the ANC’s policy of racial preference in employment, investment, scholarships, tendering and trading. Under the guise of being a development project, black economic empowerment, or its buzzword, “transformation”, has been perverted into a multi-tentacled succubus, draining the economic life of the country and supporting a one-way flow of state sanctioned, expropriated wealth into the hands of a monstrously hungry and unproductive new business and public service elite comprising slightly more than 1% of the population. Exactly what Mandela did not want.

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This so-called empowerment process has different iterations. One was the prototypic past endowment by white capitalists of swathes of equity on selected black leaders — the incumbent President is merely the most luminous of the many beneficiaries. Another is “cadre deployment” which has seen the drafting of large numbers of direly incompetent and corrupt party “cadres” into the public service and the State Operated Entities. At every conceivable level of state administration party, “tenderpreneurs” have inserted themselves as pestilential middlemen. According to a recent report by Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard’s Growth Lab, these operators have raised the cost of state purchasing by 20% without a scintilla of benefit to anybody but themselves. The empowerment system, meanwhile, has cost approximately 3% of GDP. Crime, corruption, cronyism and cluelessness are thus robbing the country of nearly a quarter of its GDP, and this in a country not even at war. Ukraine, besieged and a third occupied, by comparison, lost 30% of GDP last year.

The empowerment system underwrote South Africa’s so-called State Capture phase which flourished under the malignant reign of former president Jacob Zuma and involved crippling levels of embezzlement of state resources. Despite facing countless criminal charges in the High Courts, Zuma is being quietly rehabilitated into ANC structures to retain the Zulu vote. A disemboweled national prosecuting service, meanwhile, has been unable to land a single high-level conviction in five years.

Yet, typically, the ANC remains unbowed by its spectacular failures, preferring to fall back onto its default posture of blaming apartheid, the private sector and whites. Indeed, with a contentious general election looming next year in which it may lose its overall majority, the ANC is doubling down on its race preference policies and on social spending: a national basic income grant now looms and, against Treasury advice, an early implementation of legislation to allow pensioners to draw down some of their pensions. Part of it is electioneering, but much is driven by the view at all levels of ANC public representation that the window for graft may at last be closing.

South Africa now stands at arguably the most dangerous yet logical end phase of ANC-style one-way “empowerment”. Criminal cartels have effectively privatised and democratised the state-sanctioned project of wealth expropriation for their own account. In the construction industry, for example, so-called Business Forums seek to extort 30% of the value of all construction projects by violence. Most of the mainly black-owned taxi and long haulage sectors are cartelised, untaxed and in some cases criminalised. The R90 billion-a-year taxi industry, for example, paid R5 million in taxes last year.

President Ramaphosa, elected five years ago on the promise of clean and effective government, is powerless to address this scourge because so many of his party colleagues are beneficiaries, nor will he admit that its genesis lies in the “empowerment” dogma he still, against all evidence, so assiduously promotes. Like Tancredi Falconeri in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic, The Leopard, he wants everything to be changed for nothing to change. Mandela’s vision has been betrayed, and by his own comrades.

Khan has been found guilty of abusing his privileges, with the court verdict concluding that he provided “false and inaccurate” information about gifts he received as Pakistan’s head of government. But he has been embroiled in over 100 other cases. One arose after the UK’s National Crime Agency returned £190 million to Pakistan, the result of an investigation into real estate magnate Malik Riaz’s money laundering. Khan is accused of returning the money to Riaz, then receiving land worth $24.7 million from him. The trial addressing these allegations saw the former premier briefly arrested in May. Violent protests erupted against the military establishment, which was accused of orchestrating Khan’s arrest.

The Pakistan Army has a long history of meddling with politics. The government here has long been subservient to the military establishment, and the army is uncomfortable with popular civilian leaders such as Khan. By the time he was ousted in a No Confidence vote last April, he had completely fallen out with the army leadership. This was partly a result of Khan’s own antagonistic behaviour; in 2021, for instance, he named a new secret service chief, even though such appointments are only the prerogative of the prime minister in theory, and almost always dictated by the army chief in practice.

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And yet, that same military establishment was undoubtedly empowered by Khan. His government extended the tenure of the then-chief of the army General Qamar Javed Bajwa, whom Khan described as the most “democratic and neutral” army chief in Pakistan’s history. In a typical turn of events, Khan’s party now holds Bajwa singlehandedly responsible for his regime’s exit.

Yet Khan was not unusual in toeing the military’s line. His successor Shehbaz Sharif, who is the younger brother of his predecessor, has reached new lows of subservience. His government has since passed bills allowing intelligence agencies to search any home without a warrant, as well as legislation giving the state absolute control over the citizen’s digital presence. It has likewise allowed the expansion of the Pakistani Taliban into new territories, unleashing jihadist turf wars that most recently saw Isis bomb a rally last week.

In discussing the current political scenario, then, we are not just discussing a former prime minister’s arrest or one man’s political future. We are talking about the demise of democracy in Pakistan, and the completion of the military’s behind-the-scenes takeover.

During this process, the army has not simply obliterated the civilian leadership; it has made a point of humiliating it. It engineered the rise of former cricketer Khan — on the platform of an independent party he set up himself — to tackle the dominance of the two major parties. The Pakistan Muslim League and the Peoples Party of Pakistan were used to going head-to-head, only occasionally worrying about the threat of military-pushed Islamist parties siphoning off votes. After Khan’s election in 2018, however, both parties were horrified that a complete outsider could manufacture enough popularity to triumph at the polls. In response, parties that once demanded that Pakistan “respect for people’s vote” and described democracy as “the best revenge” were vocally critical of a democratic result.

But it was only a matter of time before humiliation came for Khan, too. Naïve and pompous, he considered himself above the establishment’s game, and mistook his fabricated popularity for real power. The man who weaponised “anti-corruption” discourse has been helping the military enrich itself, to the tune of billions of dollars. Now, he has been certified corrupt through the same channels that he once used to undermine his opponents. Khan’s party might survive the removal of its head, but the dilapidated remains are likely to be used by the military as a pawn to keep its own monopoly in tact.

The army is all too aware that there is one thing that would actually challenge its hegemony: all parties, having been thoroughly disgraced by the establishment, coming together and saying enough is enough. With Khan’s party neutralised and the two major ones looking forward to battling it out in another election, this has now become a political impossibility in Pakistan. The army can sit back and watch the show, as civilians accuse each other of licking military boots — sometimes quite literally on live TV — while nobody admits their own role in fortifying the establishment.

The people of Pakistan can therefore look forward to the further militarisation of the state, Islamisation of the society, and pulverisation of the economy. We will have to continue coping with the decisions of an unaccountable military establishment, having been unequivocally abandoned by self-serving demagogues, of which Imran Khan is only the latest. After 15 years of ostensibly free and fair elections, one of the world’s newest democracies has died young.

Whether or not this commandment was ever read out in its Australian HQ — and the evidence suggests it was not — it certainly now makes for uncomfortable reading. In May, accusations that had been bubbling under the surface since late last year exploded into the headlines. Between 2013 and 2015, PwC Australia allegedly advised the government on how to design a system to get more tax out of multinationals — and then used its insider knowledge to advise corporate clients on how to dodge the very same measures.

At the centre of the scandal is PwC Australia’s former head of international tax, Peter-John Collins, though as many as 160 other staff could be implicated. Collins signed three confidentiality agreements with the federal government between 2013 and 2018, before circulating information about the tax plans to 63 PwC partners and senior managers in a long email chain — yes, in writing. His interlocutors didn’t seem too perturbed, either.

In the ensuing kerfuffle, politicians, including prime minister Anthony Albanese and treasurer Jim Chalmers, clamoured to express their outrage at PwC’s conduct. The company was dragged through the coals before a parliamentary inquiry and promised to publicly name all responsible staff. To save the firm, PwC parachuted a new British boss into its Australian division and then sold off its government consulting arm for $1. This section of the business, by the way, employs 1,700 staff with an annual turnover of $300 million — around 20% of PwC’s income in Australia. It seems reasonable to assume the bargain price represents the possible extinction of its entire income stream.

While PwC’s days of having it both ways appear to be over, it remains unclear whether the scandal will be enough to force the Government to wean itself off the consultancy sector. Australia’s management consulting market is the world’s biggest per capita, and fourth-biggest overall, remarkable for a country of only 25 million. And the federal government has been leading the way. Between 2013 and 2022, its annual spending on consultants shot up from $352 million to $888 million per annum. Over the same period, the Big Four professional services firms — PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young — pocketed $1.2 billion in federal government consultancy contracts, and a whole lot more in professional services fees. Fellow consultancy giants McKinsey & Co. and BCG have also been having a swell time in Australia, rapidly expanding their government business.

Inevitably, since these firms all provide services to both the government and the private sectors, conflicts of interest risks abound. This week, for instance, KPMG launched its own internal review of its contracts advising both the Government on quality and safety audits of aged care facilities, and operators on passing these audits and gaining accreditation. Even the Australian Federal Police, which is now investigating Collins for potential criminal conduct, has awarded PwC consulting contracts worth over $20 million over the past two years, and another $30 million to the other “Big Seven” consulting firms (a group that also includes Accenture). Rather ironically, PwC is also the AFP’s external auditor.

As ever with giant professional services firms, the rot runs deeper than mere conflict-of-interest problems. While these matter, focusing solely on conflict of interest is to miss the bigger point about government consulting; even if it were addressed by splitting up firms, as PwC is doing now, administrations would probably remain reliant on external consulting — and that is far more concerning prospect.

In Australia, as in many other countries, external consultants have become integral to core government operations, winning lucrative contracts without tangible improvements to performance. This became impossible to ignore during the Covid-19 pandemic. In one notable example, the federal government outsourced the planning, logistics, monitoring and delivery of vaccines. It awarded McKinsey $3 million in contracts for strategic planning, consulting and professional services, while Ernst & Young received over $1.5 million to conduct vaccine system readiness reviews.

Did they get a return on their investment? Not quite. Until it was centralised under the command of Lieutenant-General John Frewen, the bungling of Australia’s vaccination campaign became the stuff of legend, earning the nickname “the strollout” — the Australian National Dictionary’s 2021 word of the year. State governments also relied heavily on consultants in their pandemic responses, to much the same effect. In Victoria, the public service’s consulting expenditure jumped by over 300% between 2014 and 2022. KPMG, for example, earned $36.7 million in Victoria in 2022, with almost $20 million coming from its work with the Department of Health on the pandemic response, including for contracts entitled “Covid-19 emergency management support”. And yet, the state government’s response to the pandemic was notoriously underwhelming, with Melbourne becoming the world’s most locked-down city.

When criticising the increasing reliance of our political elites on this new consultancy class, it’s common for critics to refer to the “hollowing-out of the state”, whereby functions previously performed by government are increasingly outsourced to private providers. This process has a self-reinforcing dynamic: once work is done outside government, public servants lose vital skills and capacities, becoming even more reliant on the private sector, especially in a crisis.

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A common error, however, is to attribute this process solely to the neoliberal ideology of “small government” and to public administration fads such as “new public management”. It’s certainly the case that outsourcing is often justified on the premise that the private sector is inherently superior to cumbersome public bureaucracies; moreover, the erosion of capacity within the public service also provides fodder for those who would like to see governments become even smaller. But in Australia, even as the public service’s share of the workforce has shrunk since the Seventies, government spending’s share of GDP has increased. If neoliberalism isn’t to blame, what is?

In Australia, at least, the bigger story behind governments’ increasing usage of external consultants is the erosion of democratic accountability. Here, outsourcing to the private sector is one of several measures designed to provide governments with plausible deniability by distancing themselves from policymaking and implementation processes. In the same vein, there has been a growing trend towards empowering state agencies whose operations are insulated from democratic politics. The Reserve Bank of Australia, for instance, became operationally independent in the Nineties and was given an inflation target that has since overridden other possible policy goals, such as full employment, higher pay or the survival of manufacturing. Just as in the UK with the Bank of England, elected governments lost the ability to set monetary policy.

Crucially, however, this has suited them well — since they could claim that the distributional outcomes of monetary policy decisions were no longer their responsibility. Indeed, the government has recently expressed its displeasure with the RBA’s rapid interest rate hikes and its calls for higher unemployment to stem inflation. Yet at no point did political leaders suggest reclaiming authority over monetary policy. At most, the government is proposing to tinker with the RBA’s process for setting interest rates, while maintaining the Bank’s independence. The logic here is straightforward: better to blame the RBA than open up yourself to criticism.

Here we can see the real issue behind such excessive use of consultants: the existence of a political class that has no genuine interest in representing the society it supposedly governs. Where once political parties were anchored in civil society, a yawning “void” now exists between the rulers and those they rule. And it is into this void that an army of consultants have marched. In doing so, they have allowed Australia’s political elites to claim they are following “best practice”. And if things go awry, all they need to do is blame particular contractors — and quickly move on.

Many of the elements of Berlusconismo were already present in that first campaign to become prime minister: Berlusconi’s larger-than-life persona, his unscrupulous use of his media empire to propel himself onto the political stage, his proto-populist marketing-style approach to politics. Yet, for several years, as far I was concerned, Berlusconi was little more than an annoying interruption between episodes of my favourite TV shows.

This changed in the final years of high school, when I became involved in Left-wing politics. One of the first things I learned was that being Left-wing in late-Nineties Italy meant being against Berlusconi. Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, what I was being exposed to was perhaps one Berlusconi’s most toxic legacies: the fact that, by then, the Italian Left had come to define itself almost exclusively in opposition to Berlusconi — as anti-Berlusconismo.

This changed, briefly, with the advent of the anti-globalisation movement. The horizon of Left-wing politics was extended beyond national borders (and beyond Berlusconi) to embrace — in our naïve vision at least — the entire planet. There were much bigger threats than Berlusconi looming out there: neoliberal globalisation, transnational corporations, free-trade agreements, and global financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

That movement culminated in the massive demonstrations that were held against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 — one of the largest protests in Western Europe’s recent history, and one of the bloodiest. It culminated in violent clashes with, and brutal repression by, the security forces, and in the fatal shooting of 23-year old anarchist Carlo Giuliani by the police. For everyone on the Left, and especially for those who had witnessed first-hand the violence in Genoa — including myself — the blame for those tragic events fell on one person: Silvio Berlusconi, who had won the elections for the second time just a few months earlier.

As the anti-globalisation movement waned during Berlusconi’s second term in office between 2001 and 2006 — the longest served by any Italian leader since the Second World War — Italian Left-wing politics once again came to be defined by anti-Berlusconismo, though for a few years the latter overlapped with opposition to the war in Iraq (for several years, Italy was the third-largest contingent of the US-led coalition). In 2008, after a two-year centre-left government led by Romano Prodi, Berlusconi was elected as prime minister again. By the time the euro crisis hit in 2010, he had been in power for almost a decade. Meanwhile, anti-Berlusconismo had metastasised into a political obsession: if only he could be removed from the equation, everything would be fine.

This came to a head in late 2011, when a financial crisis forced Berlusconi to resign. Within hours, a large crowd had gathered in front of the Quirinal Palace — the official residence of the President of Italy, where Berlusconi went to tender his resignation — to celebrate his departure. As someone who had grown estranged with Italian Left-wing politics in the previous years, the whole thing struck me as odd. I was no fan of the man. But even accepting the official narrative of events — that the crisis had been the result of financial markets punishing Berlusconi for his poor handling of the economic crisis — I couldn’t see how an elected government being forced to step down by financial speculators could be a cause for celebration — especially for those on the Left.

The short-sightedness of the celebrations became tragically obvious when Italian president Giorgio Napolitano appointed Mario Monti, a former European Union commissioner and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, to form a “technical government”, which proceeded to administer a devastating austerity “cure”. In a way, the whole affair exposed the myopia of anti-Berlusconismo. By obsessively focusing on Berlusconi and his threat to democracy, the Italian Left had ended up ignoring — or worse, embracing — the more significant structural trends that had been weakening Italian democracy for the past 20 years and more: the gradual erosion of sovereignty at the hands of the EU and later the euro; the growing power of the technocratic apparatuses of the state, such as the Bank of Italy and the President of the Republic; the undermining of Italy’s strategic interests by its supposed allies, exemplified by the Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011.

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While Berlusconi didn’t explicitly push back against any of these things — he was, after all, staunchly Atlanticist and pro-European — he did try, though never with enough conviction, to strike a balance between Italy’s international obligations and his vision of the national interest. This was particularly apparent in his foreign policy, through which Berlusconi tried to assert a relative degree of autonomy and independence. Aware of Italy’s dependency on foreign energy imports, Berlusconi won favourable gas and oil deals by cultivating strong friendships with the leaders of energy-producing countries: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and, most notably, Vladimir Putin.

In 2008, for example, Berlusconi signed a “friendship treaty” with Libya, promising $5 billion over 20 years to compensate for Italy’s colonial occupation in the early 20th century; in exchange, Libya agreed to sign off on lucrative energy contracts and to prevent unauthorised immigrants from travelling to Italy. Before that, he had tried to talk Bush, with whom he was on good terms, out of invading Iraq. Similarly, he backed joint energy projects between Gazprom in Russia and the Italian energy company Eni at a time when the EU was pushing for less dependence on Russian gas. Berlusconi also criticised the American missile defence project, the eastward expansion of Nato, and the West’s support for Kosovo’s independence for being “provocations of Russia”.

“Our relationship with Berlusconi is complex,” wrote Elizabeth Dibble, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Rome, in a 2009 cable. “He is vocally pro-American and has helped address our interest on many levels in a manner and to a degree that the previous government was unwilling or unable to do.” Yet, the diplomat noted, there were other areas where Berlusconi “seems determined to be best friends with Russia, sometimes in direct opposition to American, and even European Union, policy”. Once the euro crisis hit, Berlusconi also tried to resist, to a degree, the aggressive austerity policies demanded by the EU and Germany, locking horns with Merkel, Sarkozy and Brussels on more than one occasion.

All of which meant that, by 2011, a consensus had formed on both sides of the Atlantic that Berlusconi had to go. In 2015, former Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero recounted to the Italian daily La Stampa the events that took place at the G20 in 2011, just a few days before Berlusconi’s resignation: “I will never forget what I saw at the G20 meeting in Cannes… Berlusconi and Tremonti [Berlusconi’s finance minister] were under immense pressure to accept an IMF bailout. But they staunchly refused. Shortly afterwards, I heard Monti’s name mentioned in the corridors. I found it very strange. Was it a coup d’état? I don’t know, all I can say is that the proponents of austerity wanted to decide Italy’s economic policies in place of the government.”

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Indeed, over the years, it has become apparent that the financial crisis behind Berlusconi’s fall wasn’t simply caused by financial markets — but by the European Union itself. As even the Financial Times acknowledged, the ECB under Mario Draghi “forced Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favour of unelected Mario Monti”, by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making the ousting of Berlusconi the precondition for further ECB support.

Regardless of what one thinks of Berlusconi, it’s hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank resorting to monetary blackmail in order to expel an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet the evidence suggests that it was a monetary coup d’état that took place in Italy in 2011. The consequences would become tragically apparent in the following years: Italy has essentially been put into “controlled administration” by Brussels and Frankfurt — and, increasingly, Washington. The kind of relative autonomy that Berlusconi had succeeded in carving out for his country is today a distant memory. Today, blind obedience to the Euro-Atlantic status quo is firmly expected of Italy’s governments, lest they want to face the consequences of stepping out of line — a point that Meloni understands all too well.

None of this means that we should glorify Berlusconi, of course. All the charges laid against him over the years — his murky business deals with shady characters tied to the Mafia, his sex scandals, his patronage of the country’s political elites, his unscrupulous use of his media empire, his use of politics to advance his own economic interests — are, after all, true, and very serious. And whenever he had to choose between the country’s interests and his personal ones — over Libya, for example — he always ended up choosing the latter. Yet, there is little doubt that Berlusconi, for better or worse, was Italy’s last statesman. Despite being dismissed as a threat to democracy, it was his departure that really opened the door to Italy’s post-democratic, and therefore post-political, turn. Since he left office, our elected governments have morphed into mere implementers of foreign diktats — and anti-Berlusconismo did nothing to stop it.

Under the headline “Sickening”, Gorst was criticised for historic posts in which he called Queen Elizabeth “a useless bitch” and the Jewish former Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger, who eventually resigned from the party, a “hideous traitor”. The pamphlet also claimed that he lived in a “leafy” area and insinuated that he had jumped the queue on social housing, although that accusation is contested.

But if the intention was to make an opponent look bad, Labour may have shot itself in the foot. A joint statement released by the Liberal Democrats, The Liverpool Community Independents, The Green Party and the Liberal Party described the leaflet as “cynical”, “dishonest” and “shameful”. Their calls for a clean fight, however, have fallen on deaf ears, not least because the mud is being thrown in all directions amid widely reported allegations of Labour corruption and incompetence.

In recent years, Liverpool has been rocked by scandals. Former mayor Joe Anderson was arrested in 2020 on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation as part of what is still an ongoing police investigation into property deals in the city. Four others were also arrested as part of the same probe, including ex-Militant Tendency firebrand, Derek Hatton. While Anderson denies any wrongdoing and none of the men have faced charges, the Government felt compelled to send in an inspection team led by Max Caller in 2021 to evaluate Liverpool Council. The result was damning: his Best Value Inspection report revealed serious failings in governance, a dysfunctional culture of intimidation, poor performance and wasteful spending. As a result, much of the authority’s work is now overseen by government-appointed commissioners.

Yet even this hasn’t solved things. Last year, for instance, £5 million was thrown away over a failure to renew an electricity contract on time; in February, a Liverpool Echo investigation revealed councillors were having their parking fines cancelled on the down-low; a scandal involving alleged fraud, corruption and council-run car parks also rumbles on.

In cities with a more contested political complexion, one might expect such failures to be severely punished at the ballot box. But this is Liverpool, and ousting Labour is the toughest of political challenges. Whatever happens tomorrow, the Conservatives won’t win a single seat.

Still, as Labour’s reputation has deteriorated, new political opponents have started to emerge. Labour has run Liverpool since 2010 and boasts 60 of the city’s 90 councillors. But it once had far more. Last year, eight former Labour councillors formed a new political grouping called the Liverpool Community Independents after they were suspended by the party, the majority for refusing to vote for budget cuts. The group leans to the Left of Liverpool’s new breed of increasingly Starmerite candidates imposed by the NEC-appointed fixer, Sheila Murphy. It’s tempting to say that in the context of Liverpool’s various shades of red politics, voters are being offered only the illusion of choice — but according to the Community Independents’ acting leader, Alan Gibbons, these elections are not about Left and Right, but “about right and wrong”.

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Another emergent group is Liberate Liverpool, which promises to focus on “community-led regeneration” over the self-interested “agenda of crooked politicians in the town hall”. Billing itself as a grassroots political movement of entrepreneurial socialists, this not-a-party party is putting forward 30 candidates on an ostensibly anti-corruption platform. However, it’s worth pointing out that everyone is playing the same game — the Liberal Democrats, who as the second largest party in the city stand to be the biggest gainers in the upcoming elections, are promising to “clean up Liverpool”.

Founded three months ago, Liberate Liverpool is backed by property developer, hotelier and one-time reality star Lawrence Kenwright. You may remember him as the star of the BBC series, The Grand Party Hotel, in which eager troops of stags and hens flocked to the city to taste the Signature Living brand of “affordable luxury”, with its double bunk-bed party pads equipped with flamingo ceilings, communal hot tubs and room names such as “WTF” and “OMG”. Despite playing a prominent role for Liberate Liverpool at its public gatherings, Kenwright has decided not to put himself forward for election, likely in part because his personal brand is somewhat divisive. In a city scarred by the rusting hulks of incomplete developments, where backroom property deals between public officials and a small coterie of the blessed became the norm, a large dose of scepticism now greets anyone working in the property sector. Kenwright’s patchy record of bankruptcy, history of architectural mutilation, and preference for leather beds, silk shirts and gold-sprayed thrones make him a strange choice to lead an anti-corruption drive. As one seasoned political campaigner told me: “If Lawrence Kenwright didn’t exist, Labour would have to invent him.”

But while it’s easy for Liverpool Labour to pick at the man, it’s harder to pick at the politics, simply because Liberate Liverpool is a blank canvas with a tendency to say what it thinks people want to hear. Its manifesto, for instance, has made broad pledges to “end austerity” and to “eradicate zero-hour contracts from the local economy”, which are beyond the power of any local government to implement. And yet, despite this, its promise to root out fraud and corruption in public office does hit home. The question is whether Liberate Liverpool is equipped to deliver it.

Despite their limited election prospects, it hasn’t taken long for Liberate Liverpool to make enemies. Employing all too familiar tactics, the city’s Left-wing and centrist progressives have already denounced it as a witless incubator for the far-Right. Last week, the Twitter account “LGBT+ Socialists” published a photograph of Dylan Cresswell, a former organiser for the English Defence League, standing next to a Liberate Liverpool sign at a city centre stall. The context is unclear, but proximity is taken as guilt. There are other mooted connections to the far-Right, including Barry Maguire, the candidate for the Fazakerley North ward, who is known to have taken part in the recent anti-immigrant protest in Knowsley. Maguire has also been outed as an anti-vaxxer, and one of his campaign posters was seen warning of the threat of 15-minute cities, viewed as code for conspiracism.

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Liverpool never belonged to Labour

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Labour activists have been quick to take advantage of this. Labour Councillor Harry Doyle, Liverpool’s Tourism lead and chief political spokesperson for all things Eurovision, tweeted: “Looks like Liberate Liverpool is the new feeble attempt to normalise supporters of the BNP, EDL, National Action and the likes…” Elsewhere, there has been talk of Liberate Liverpool posters being torn down. But trying to characterise Liberate Liverpool as an enabler of the far-Right seems far-fetched. It’s far more likely that the movement is still a bit of a disorganised mess, which hasn’t yet managed the tightly choreographed slickness that the main parties take for granted. It’s plausible that an anti-corruption message could prove attractive to Right-wing candidates and conspiracists, but it’s just as likely to appeal to the Left because anti-corruption is a nonpartisan issue.

Even so, it wouldn’t be surprising if Liberate Liverpool do not win a seat. The general expectation among voters going into this election appears downbeat. Despite their troubles, Labour remains the favourite to hold on to power, albeit with a reduced majority. Indeed, rather than empower the opposition, there is a firm suspicion that Labour’s negative tactics are designed to lower turnout; to dishearten those voters who may lean towards change by convincing them that all sides are equally compromised. Better the devil you know, after all.

Beyond the hopes of its emerging political challengers, then, tomorrow’s elections are something of a test for Liverpool and its powerful incumbent. A test to see whether, in this supposedly most socialist of cities, Labour can continue to hide its failures behind the twin bogeymen of anti-Toryism and the rise of the far-Right — or whether its voters have had enough.

In this view — as strongly argued recently by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, for instance — the US arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all essentially engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. This common understanding of the military-industrial complex — and of how politics in Washington works in general — is essentially conspiratorial. The theory goes something like this: big defence contractors bribe the politicians with large donations, and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shovelling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers.

Washington has thus become a “multi-tentacle war machine”, Greenwald says, because “no matter what is going on in the world, they always find — or concoct — reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is”. (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. From this viewpoint, Washington politics is all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically Left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become more common to the disaffected Right.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and Left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to re-evaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions.

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact, all these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model; i.e. they don’t think: “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

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What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story.

No one wants to live a meaningless life. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures and they desperately want, need, what they do to have meaningful value. If they cannot find inherent meaning in life, they are liable to come up with a narrative framework — that is, a story — that imbues what they do with some sense of higher meaning. Since everyone wants to be the hero of their story, the story becomes central to their personal identity. And no one wants their identity to be dull (even if they’re a government bureaucrat).

But while a few very special people can create and maintain their own personal stories indefinitely, living life entirely in their own self-sustained dramatic reality, for most people the much easier and more reassuring route is to simply adopt a collective story that already exists. The more popular or high-status this story is, the more attractive and self-reinforcing it will be — and the harder it will, therefore, be to disbelieve, dissent, and defect from.

Now, when one talks to members of the Washington establishment, the collective story they hold to tends to quickly become apparent.

None are, in their own minds, either corrupt cynics or ideological zealots. Instead they are moderate, prudent, wise “public servants”; the trained and chosen elite guardians of American interests and values. Sensible centrists, they do what must be done to ensure America’s security and prosperity, steering the ship of state along a pragmatic course, eschewing both the goodhearted but naïve idealism of the too-far-Left and the crude jingoistic nationalism of the populist-Right.

This pragmatism does not, of course, preclude their simultaneously being moral exemplars. They embody America’s highest ideals, given that they are the ones extending the light of whatever truly makes America great, whether that be liberal democracy, equality and human rights, pluralism and diversity, scientific progress, or economic liberty. In protecting the global world order of Pax Americana, they make the world safe for American ideals. In fact, these guardians are basically the bulwark of Enlightened Civilisation writ large, taming barbarian savagery wherever it rears its ugly head, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama. Even a moment’s slackness and “the jungle grows back”.

American power is righteous, because it is on the right side of History; as clearly demonstrated by the fact that America is so powerful. And if that power is righteous and good, it deserves to be exercised. To use righteous power to remake the world in our own image would by definition be to make the world better. Thus extending American power is both the most pragmatic and the most idealistic possible course.

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This story, which has dominated Washington since at least the end of the Cold War, is what we might label The Consensus. Maybe all or some elements of The Consensus are true. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. It doesn’t really matter; that’s not the point. Those who submit themselves to The Consensus can by doing so automatically consider themselves better people, engaged in more meaningful lives. And their peers will consider them to be as well.

A term that one is liable to hear used in Washington is “Serious Person”. On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: “Well, is he a Serious Person?” But what makes a person Serious? A Serious Person is, naturally, an orthodox follower of The Consensus. Asking if someone is a Serious Person is a bit like a secular version of how one might have asked, back in the day, whether some new fellow was in fact a “God-fearing Christian?” “Yes,” would come the reply, “and he went to Yale.” “Good enough, let’s put him in charge of the OSS,” you could then say with confidence.

Rumour that some new acquaintance is in fact a Serious Person is greatly reassuring, as it means he is not a “Wingnut”. A Wingnut is an unsociable crank, living outside of The Consensus. Wingnuts demonstrate this by suggesting unserious ideas, such as cutting the defence budget, curtailing the surveillance state, or questioning the demands of the public health bureaucracy. Glenn Greenwald is a Wingnut par excellence. Nobody wants to be associated with a Wingnut, as that can taint your reputation as a Serious Person. And then you’ll never be invited to a swanky conference in Aspen again. Which is probably why for every mile closer to Capitol Hill a foreign policy think tank is, the more measurably it advocates in favour of militant internationalism. These are the Serious Institutions, able to court the serious money necessary to afford prime real estate.

Here then is the point: why is it so likely that any given person in the Washington “Blob” will automatically support raising the defence budget, or intervening militarily in some country abroad, or otherwise expanding the security state? In the vast majority of cases, it’s not because they’re taking bribes from some defence contractor. It’s because they simply want more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus.

Sometimes they may not fully buy it, but conform merely because it’s the path of least resistance. Often, they do buy it completely. I once had a former General and Director of the CIA tell me, with complete earnestness, that the United States had to occupy every single “ungoverned space” on earth — every conflict zone, every “rogue state”, every barren patch of sand large enough for an Isis terrorist to do doughnuts in a Toyota pickup. No one was paying him to say this (yet); it was pure idealistic conviction. And there are a lot of people in Washington far less distinguished than he who labour daily to help shore up The Consensus: legions of non-profit workers, lowly staffers, and ambitious interns who happily pump out endless Consensus-reiterating briefing papers, reports, op-eds, and legislative bills (all of which are written by people under 35 who have no idea what they’re doing, by the way). The military-industrial complex doesn’t have to bribe any of them. They are working to cultivate the illustrious aura of a Serious Person.

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Any financial rewards are secondary to the power, prestige, and psychological assurance of being counted among the ruling class and holding the right opinions. This does not of course mean there aren’t significant financial rewards that flow to senior figures, but to the “public servant” they genuinely bear no conceivable trace of wrongful quid pro quo. As far as they are concerned, they are merely doing the right thing in service to the public and the nation, and being fairly compensated for it. Being paid to sit on Raytheon’s board and lobby for a strong national defence is public service, as is being paid by CNN to go on TV and call dissenters a dangerous threat to our democracy. Advancing The Consensus is, after all, the essence of public service. This complex is utterly impervious to any charges of corruption or hypocrisy, because from the inside such charges literally sound like the mad rantings of an immoral and maliciously anti-American Wingnut.

It would be tempting to call this ideological capture, but I don’t think that quite describes it. The Consensus is not an ideology with clear or coherent doctrines. And it is extremely adaptable and flexible, seamlessly incorporating new threats and opportunities (which is why “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now regularly cited as a top foreign policy priority). Instead, it works more loosely, subconsciously, to shape what individuals and institutions value and what they believe is right and normal and just. It really is more like a deep story about the world and how it works; or a spirit that moves subjects without their understanding how or why, or even that it exists.

Which is why I think I need to introduce one more element in order to fully explain what really runs Washington.

Everyone and everything needs a hierarchy of values to operate, otherwise they risk having no telos — no purpose, motivation, or orientation for action. And at the top of this pyramid of values or principles must necessarily be some highest value or principle, from which all others descend.

Bureaucracies, which are themselves pyramidal, subsume an individual’s values and objectives into themselves; the individual’s value hierarchy and telos is then effectively restructured or replaced by the telos superimposed from above by the bureaucracy. Which is why the bureaucracy so often seems to co-opt its individuals and take on a life of its own. But many singular bureaucracies, such as the Defence and State Departments, exist side-by-side in Washington and operate simultaneously. And, at least theoretically, they are all part of the same government and on the same side. What unites them in direction and orientation, if anything? Some pyramid of higher values, naturally. This is the role of The Consensus.

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Does The Consensus itself also exist as part of an even higher story? Maybe. The author Paul Kingsnorth has I think wisely described there being, at the pinnacle of our collective Western civilisational subconscious, an “empty throne,” where once sat God:

“[E]very culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. It does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

“The modern experiment,” however, “has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — ‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress.’” But one sacred value must necessarily rule above all others, and “when a culture kills its sovereign, the throne will not remain empty for long”.

What now occupies this empty throne today, if anything? Kingsnorth has suggested it is “money”. As I’ve written before, I don’t think that’s it. I think it is something more fundamental: I think it’s what could be called the spirit in Man that hungers for infinite “control” — meaning power itself. The power to have all good things, from material comfort to equality, without any limits or contradictions; power over all evils and all suffering and all dangers; power over human nature. It’s the desire for the power to eliminate all friction between the will and the world; to have the power to overcome all resistance and achieve heaven on earth, as fast as possible, by any means necessary.

The efforts of those few poor souls who spend their days trying to reason with Washington and convince it to follow some policy of “realism and restraint” are doomed. The place is busily fighting a holy war against the terms of existence.

When a Wingnut reveals himself as a Wingnut, it is because he has resisted the unrestrained exercise of power in some way. Such an act is grounds not for admiration of virtue, but for shock and suspicion: by doing so he has challenged the whole story of the new sacred order. In a real sense the Wingnut is not just unsociable but impious.

It may be that at some point in the past, when the empty throne was occupied by its rightful ruler, America’s governing institutions and the people who make their gears turn participated in a greater shared story, which subsumed their lower interests and appetites and rightly ordered them with a telos oriented toward a genuine highest good. Maybe this was God. Maybe it was the American Idea, or the Republican Ideal. Whatever it was, perhaps its very existence moderated and disciplined them. But if the baser value of power has now been elevated to this highest place, then they no longer have any internalised limits, and their quest has no stopping point. There are no longer any moral brakes on the run-away train of the state.

If so, then even all the money of the military-industrial complex definitely doesn’t run Washington. Indeed, if the military-industrial complex didn’t exist we’d have to invent it immediately just so that we could hand it all of our money.

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

This distortion dates back to 2009 and the expenses scandal, when the perception of the political class shifted overnight. No longer were MPs insincere spinners who occasionally slipped into outright dishonesty, but a parasitic body only out for themselves. The presumption became that they were venal until proved otherwise. But the scandal itself swiftly became a melange of accusations which obscured the reality of the situation.

Lines were blurred between those who made generous claims within both the spirit and letter of the law, those who ruthlessly exploited every loophole, and those who committed wholescale fraud. MPs such as Denis MacShane, jailed for falsifying documents, were spoken of in the same breath as those who had put in entirely lawful applications for fripperies that fell within the rules. It’s unclear whether the most infamous claim of the period, Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house, was even ever paid out.

In the wake of the scandal, MPs’ expenses became the go-to for cheap, anti-political point scoring. Social media accounts regularly pop up criticising MPs for their claims without digging into the detail. Large headline figures are quoted, without recognising this usually includes the MP’s parliamentary staff and constituency offices. Compared with the previous system, parliamentarians find it very hard to pack their pay cheque from official coffers.

At the same time, a second front has opened up against MPs — around second jobs, donations and lobbying. This was renewed this week with the Westminster Accounts, a visually spectacular representation of the funding MPs have received, both for their work for outside interests and as donations to their campaigns and offices. There were headline-catching figures and a strong implication that either MPs were lining their pockets when they should have been tending to the public, or were selling their influence to the highest bidder — or both.

Behind the figures, however, the reality of the scandal seems pretty banal. First, the scale of the money involved was pretty small. The reports confirmed that around £180 million had been paid to MPs and their campaigns in the lifecycle of this parliament. If this is democracy for sale, it is going pretty cheaply. In the US midterms, political funding hit $16.7 billion for federal races alone, with about half of that again spent on local races. Indeed, buying our entire legislature seems to be cheaper than assembling a Premier League-winning side.

This absence of money points to another factor of the so-called scandal — that it is hard to spot where the bought influence has returned very much. Even where the lobbying rules have been broken, the impact seems unclear. Andrew Bridgen, who lost the Tory whip yesterday after comparing the Covid vaccine to the Holocaust, was also suspended from the House this week for breaches around lobbying regulations after he wrote to ministers on behalf of a local company which gave him donations of cash. While our MPs should be purer than the driven snow on these matters, there appears no suggestion that his letters actually obtained any benefit for the company.

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The same is true of the Owen Paterson scandal. In 2021, the MP was first suspended then resigned his seat after breaching rules around donations from Randox, the healthcare company, and Lynn’s Country Foods. Like Bridgen, his “egregious case of paid advocacy” involved writing to ministers. Again, it remains unclear if the companies concerned achieved anything from his actions.

It is, of course, wrong for parliamentarians to sell their influence and access, and even the suggestion of impropriety should be dealt with appropriately. Yet both these incidents seem to suggest that, rather than a corruption-ridden system, we have one where even paid influence has little impact and the infractions come to light quickly. One might speculate that if our system were corrupt, there would be a bit more money in it.

The reality seems that MPs are far more swayed by political arguments than financial incentives. Our parliamentarians sign up to plenty of bad laws or myopic campaigns because they look politically appealing. Often, they take the side where the money isn’t but the votes are. If they were truly on the make, we probably wouldn’t have a housing crisis — but in most cases, a thousand Nimby votes speak louder than the cash the property industry could lavish on them.

Indeed, the real graft seems to be away from Westminster. In 2021, a government inspection of Liverpool City Council found evidence of repeated incompetence and corruption. Last year, in Nottingham, six councillors were arrested for fraud and remain under investigation. In Newham, staff members have been implicated in a £9m fraud involving social and housing and road repairs, while Tower Hamlets has become a byword for electoral malpractice.

While parliament should always be under scrutiny, it is arguable that the suspicion levelled at our MPs exacerbates a wider problem — many of them just aren’t that good. The expenses scandal ushered in a new era of hostility towards parliamentarians, which was turbocharged by the rise of social media. Few sensible people would submit themselves to such hostility.

At the same time, the party selection procedures seem to struggle to find and prioritise effective parliamentarians. Snap elections have seen candidates rushed through who turned out to be successful but wholly unsuitable — Imran Ahmad Khan for the Tories, for example, subsequently convicted of historic sex offences, or the former Labour (now independent) MP Claudia Webbe, who was convicted of harassment. Beyond that, there has been a drift towards more local candidates and more ideologically pure ones — narrowing the pool yet more without really filtering for quality.

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Even within these constraints, the selection processes tend to favour the sharp-elbowed self-aggrandising. The result is a legislature that seems replete with odd characters of dubious skills. Andrew Bridgen has been punished for lobbying offences and his strange embrace of Covid vaccination conspiracies, but he was also found by a judge to have lied in court proceedings during a family dispute. He is not simply lining his pockets, but chaotic in a multitude of directions.

The trouble is, he’s not the only one. There’s a cloud of madness over Westminster which finds its outlet in a variety of ways. Some shill for cranks and vile regimes (whether for money or for free), while others are involved in sexual impropriety (some public, much not but widely whispered about) or are prone to Twitter spats with the public.

There is no argument that our MPs shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny, but the obsession with their financial dealings obscures a bigger picture. Very few are openly venal. Most would earn a better living outside of politics than inside it, and MPs often seem just as swayed by charities and local campaigns than by rapacious corporate interests. Equally, no one really seems to have identified much of a difference in performance between those MPs with second jobs (or even ministers) and those who dedicate themselves full-time to constituents.

But in the rush to pillory MPs for lining their pockets, it feels we might be missing something else. Our system is not riven with corruption, but with inadequates. While many MPs are dedicated and insightful, our parliament is packed with also-rans, has-beens and never-will-bes. It leads to poor debate, poor law-making, and, ultimately, poor government. It’s hard to convey in fancy charts, but we should be perhaps more concerned about the ability of our politicians than some of their outside interests.

Members of the EU establishment have been quick to spin the issue as a problem limited to a few bad apples. Several European Parliament officials told Politico the allegations were limited to a “few individuals” who had gone astray. Others, however, expect more names to be drawn into the widening dragnet. But whether or not the scandal extends to other people is beside the point. By focusing on “Qatargate”, we risk losing sight of the fact that the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper and more widespread malaise, involving not just the European Parliament but all EU institutions. Bribery and corruption are endemic to the Brussels system — and most of it is perfectly legal.

It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels, making it the second capital of lobbying in the world after Washington, DC. Most are in the service of corporations and their lobby groups, with huge sums at their disposal: the combined lobbying budget of the 12,400 companies and organisations on the EU lobby register has grown steadily over the years — especially since the pandemic — and today amounts to €1.8 billion.

Topping the list are Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Energy giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Bayer and Shell, as well as industry associations such as the European Chemical Industry Council, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), and BusinessEurope — all of which declare annual lobbying budgets of €4-6 million. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, given the long history of businesses under-reporting their spending.

Big Pharma and Big Tech, in particular, both significantly boosted their lobbying firepower throughout the pandemic. EFPIA alone — which represents Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — increased its spending by 20% in 2020. A conservative estimate of total annual EU lobby spending by Big Pharma is now close to €40 million per year, with nearly 300 lobbyists officially working in Brussels to push the industry’s interests (though the actual number is probably higher, since disclosure rules do not capture all the spending on law firms, academic partnerships and activities in individual countries).

It’s safe to say the investment was amply repaid: by the end of 2021, the EU had signed €71 billion worth of confidential contracts, securing up to 4.6 billion doses of vaccines (more than ten doses for each European citizen). EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses, worth up to €35 billion if fully exercised — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the matter.

Such extreme cases, however, mask the true extent of the structural problem that pervades every aspect of the Brussels system. It goes without saying that this army of well-funded lobbyists, which far outnumbers and outspends public interest groups, gives corporations a massive influence over the European decision-making and legislative process. Lobbyists in the EU also have privileged access to decision-makers: the biggest companies and lobby organisations hold hundreds of meetings with the European Commission every year. Between December 2019 and May 2022, for example, the von der Leyen Commission engaged in a staggering number of 500 meetings with representatives and lobbyists of the oil, gas and coal companies — close to one meeting every working day.

Since the start of the war, the arms industry has also (very successfully) ramped up its lobbying efforts, using the resulting uncertainty to whitewash its image and position itself as an essential partner that can provide the necessary tools to ensure security. In the days following Putin’s invasion, the German arms lobby group BDSV even went as far as asking the EU to “recognise the defence industry as a positive contribution to social sustainability”.

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Meanwhile, corporate lobbyists across the board now dominate membership of the Commission’s many advisory groups. Unsurprisingly, this influence can easily result in biased advice. Research by watchdog groups has revealed that 75% of lobby meetings of Commissioners and high-level Commission officials are with lobbyists representing big business. In key areas such as financial regulation, digital services, the internal market and international trade policy, this figure rises to over 80%. This is particularly worrying if we consider that a very large portion of the laws adopted by national parliaments — on issues ranging from food security to the working conditions of truck drivers — are decided at the EU level and then simply transposed into national law by national parliaments.

To make things worse, despite the existence of a lobby register, there is relatively little oversight over the whole process. Indeed, the requirement for lobbyists to sign up to the bloc’s Transparency Register only became mandatory last year. Until then, the entire system functioned on a voluntary basis, which naturally led to massive under-reporting of lobbying activities. This placed the EU well below the standards of liberal democracies such as the United States, and even of several member states.

Yet even now, several loopholes remain. While high-ranking Commission officials and the European Parliament’s committee chairs and rapporteurs who draft legislative proposals are required to log and disclose their meetings with stakeholders, regular MEPs — who actually vote on the proposals — and lower-tier staff, such as assistants from the Parliament and the Commission, are only encouraged to do so. The European Parliament, as Alberto Alemanno, EU Law professor at HEC Paris, has noted, “is the only institution that basically has virtually no rules imposed on their representatives and very weak enforcement of those ethical rules”.

Moreover, the EU register only requires an annual update, and does not provide meaningful information about lobbying on specific laws and policy issues, making it hard to track lobbying activities. And then there is the infamous Brussels “revolving door”, which allows Commissioners, MEPs and EU officials to go straight into lobby jobs when they leave office — such as Commission President Barroso’s recent move to Goldman Sachs and Commissioner and Neelie Kroes’s switch to Uber and Bank of America. The door also swings the other way: the current executive director of the European Medicines Agency, Emer Cooke, previously worked for the EFPIA, Europe’s largest pharmaceutical lobbying organisation.

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Pro-EU reformers say these problems can be resolved with institutional tinkering, such as extending the requirement to disclose their meetings with lobbyists to all EU officials, introducing stricter codes of conduct, and setting up an ethics committee overseeing all EU institutions. Some claim the problem is the opaque nature of the EU’s legislative process, which makes it practically impossible not only for citizens but even for national parliaments “to scrutinise how their national representatives have acted”, as Emily O’Reilly, the official European Ombudsman, admitted. Others argue that the solution is to “democratise the EU” by strengthening the European Parliament.

But all these proposals miss the point: the EU, by virtue of its supranational and technocratic nature, is structurally prone to capture by vested interests, be they foreign governments or multinational corporations — and no amount of reform will change that. The problem of lobbying exists at the national level as well, of course. However, this is hugely exacerbated at the supranational level. As the researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli write: “International loci are in general physically, psychologically, and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are. This distance means more room for oligarchic capture.” It is telling in this respect that most Europeans have no idea who the President of the European Parliament is.

In this sense, the problem of EU corruption, rather than being a bug in the system, should be seen as an inherent consequence of the supranationalisation of politics. Making the EU “more democratic” won’t change the fact that the lack of a European demos represents an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of a European democracy, even if Brussels was interested in going in that direction (which it isn’t). The number of corrupt officials involved in the amateurish Qatargate scandal is of little importance; for the EU, it is already too late.

The dollar bills — at least $580,000 worth — were shoved into a sofa for safekeeping at the lodge by staff, according to a subsequent report, and were still there two months later. That’s when an enterprising housekeeper in cahoots with a Namibian money-laundering gangster allegedly stole a chunk of the loot on 9 February 2020. President Ramaphosa, by his own evidence, had known about the transaction two months before the cash was stolen.

No public statement was ever made about the theft. No arrests have been made nor convictions secured. Had it not been for a whistleblower — one of Ramaphosa’s arch political foes — nothing would have been known publicly about the incident. It’s no wonder that the President is known by his fellow-countrymen as Cyril the Silent.

Ever since the “Farmgate” scandal was exposed, Ramaphosa has struggled to silence his critics. The row has revealed yet again the turpitude of the ruling African National Congress, and the tragic absence of any viable alternative political leadership from within the ranks of Africa’s oldest political party. It is not the incident of possible criminality that is alarming: South Africans are immured to skulduggery in both the public and private sectors, from the highest to the lowest levels. It is rather the emergence of a terrifying national question: what if President Cyril Ramaphosa goes?

Hailed as the saviour of South Africa upon election four years ago, Ramaphosa this week temporarily dodged a preliminary Parliamentary impeachment inquiry into the bizarre set of circumstances that played out on his game farm. To do so, he used a well-known legal wheeze known as “the Stalingrad Tactic”: seeking a Constitutional Court Review of the report of an independent panel of judges into the events.

It appears Ramaphosa is learning from the master: the comprehensively corrupt Jacob Zuma. The former president deployed similar diversionary and often vexatious legal tactics to keep out of both court and jail for years, in some cases decades, in a string of corruption and racketeering charges. But Ramaphosa’s party leadership does not appear fazed by the likeness — and many in the public still support him.

Such dramas are not foreign to the ANC as ruling party. President Thabo Mbeki was “recalled” (ANC weasel word for sacked) at the party conference in December 2007, allegedly because he had conspired to have his successor, Jacob Zuma, falsely charged with criminal enterprises.

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Zuma was himself effectively “recalled” from any position of power in 2017, when Ramaphosa narrowly beat Zuma’s anointed successor, his former wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Ever since, Zuma and his legions of corrupt cronies have insisted that Ramaphosa has been up to Mbeki’s old games, using the prosecutorial services and Commissions of Inquiry to stitch them up.

The culprits remain within the party, and chaos, instability and even insurrection have ensued as a painfully inadequate prosecutorial service battles to bring the crooks to court. Cyril, meanwhile, has remained silent, putting party unity before minor considerations such as booting out the bad guys. The roll recently proposed for the 80 members of the ANC’s top policy-making body — to be decided in two weeks — is rotten with ex-cons, accused criminals and assorted no-gooders. Honesty is obviously not at a high premium in the ruling party, and clearly little has changed during Ramaphosa’s tenure.

The President’s first response to the impeachment panel’s recommendation was to offer to resign before being “recalled” — an unprecedented and almost certainly mischievous move. The South African currency tanked, bonds tailspun, and thousands of ordinary citizens begged him not to go. How does one explain this response given that he is widely regarded to have failed in all his key mandates, has presided over a deterioration of the country’s fortunes by every index possible, and now even his Mr Clean image is under a cloud? The answer: there is nobody else.

The Deputy President David Mabuza, who would take over if Ramaphosa stepped down, is a nonentity chosen to balance tribal and regional forces within the ANC. He has been at the centre of multiple investigations through the years into alleged scams in the State’s land restitution programme in his home province of Mpumalanga, all dogged by mysteriously disappearing files.

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The nearest rival to Ramaphosa as leader of the party, and thus next President, is Dr Zweli Mkhize, a Zumerite on the smash-and-grab wing of the movement, himself facing charges of procurement corruption during the Covid panic when he was Minister of Health.

Not surprisingly, John Steenhuisen, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, has called for a snap general election. The current options before the country, he said, were unacceptable: a crook for an incumbent President, a crook for a Deputy President and a crook for an aspirant President.

So what happens now? Ramaphosa, having tested the waters, has opted not to step down, thus buying valuable time and saving the country the horror of what might follow. The Elective Conference of the ANC is in two weeks. Ramaphosa is likely to succeed as party president; the ANC’s parliamentary majority will surely quash any moves to impeach him. The plot by his internal foes will fail as did their botched civil insurrection in July last year — although they will remain in the party, plotting.

The results of the investigations into the game lodge heist by South Africa’s Reserve Bank, tax authorities, police, financial control centre and immigration authorities still loom over the ANC. Worrying reports have already emerged about the stash of dollars in the sofa being part of a flood of foreign currency that came through a military air base. Many more questions remain unanswered. Is it conceivable that one of South Africa’s richest men would need to resort to money-laundering? Was the money instead intended to bail out a bankrupt party administration no longer able to rely on disenchanted corporate donors? Was it all a set-up by shadowy ex and present members of the State Security Council, once ex-president Zuma’s private fiefdom and headed by the very man who blew the stuffing out of Cyril the Silent’s sofa? If so, why did the President not say so immediately?

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Meanwhile, Ramaphosa faces a bigger challenge in the form of a 2024 general election. On present showing, it seems the ANC will remain the largest party but with a minority. The latest polling gives it 42% of the vote compared to its all-time high of 72%. It will either have to seek a partner or lose out to a coalition of new forces. Such coalitions at local level have proved turbulent, short-lived and unproductive. There is little reason to believe it will be different on a national scale.

Here lies Ramaphosa’s only salvation for a second term. The support for him by the party leadership and broad sections of the public in the Farmgate scandal, desperate as it may be, gives him a mandate to cleanse his party of corruption and build modernist alliances outside the narrow base of his bankrupt organisation. Will he seize the opportunity? It’s doubtful. Is he a crook? Right now, no one dare care other than his bitterest and infinitely worse foes.

***

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Not happening, said Vincent Magwenya, spokesperson for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. There were no legal grounds for refusing the Nord docking permission. In this, he was right. But the row has served to remind us what drives the ruling African National Congress’s policy towards Russia and its allies: ideology and nostalgia, self-interest and greed.

The old guard of the ruling African National Congress, who still haunt every crevice of government here, have not forgotten that Russian support was crucial in their 80-year anti-apartheid struggle, finally won in a negotiated settlement in 1994. Many of the ageing elites studied at Russian or Bloc country universities. They may have forgotten the USSR’s egalitarian mantras in their rush to become wealthy, but nostalgia still lingers. The Russians have not been slow to capitalise on it.

Jacob Zuma, the disgraced former President currently facing criminal charges over alleged corruption in a 1999 arms deal, commissioned Russia’s Rosatom energy company to build eight nuclear plants in 2014. If completed, at a cost of £50 billion, the plants would have provided 23% of South Africa’s energy — and given the Russians an effective stranglehold over the country’s economy. Karyn Maughan and Kirsten Pearson, in their 2022 book, Nuclear, suggest the deal was clinched after Zuma received medical treatment in Russia for poisoning. The former President alleged a toxin had been administered by one of his wives at the behest of the CIA. No proof of this poisoning has ever been provided, but there is plenty of evidence of a strong bond forged between presidents Zuma and Putin afterwards — the latter reportedly knowing a bit about poisons.

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The nuclear deal was eventually scuppered in April 2017, when the Western Cape High Court, in response to two applications from activist environmental groups, declared that any such agreement needed the approval of Parliament. The Treasury, which had opposed the deal as unaffordable and unlawful from the start, breathed a sigh of relief. The decision was, however, catastrophic for the finances of the ruling African National Congress. Even before Zuma’s tenure, many major donors to the party’s coffers came from the legions of shady businesspeople who benefitted from what became grandly known as State Capture — that is, put simply, the embezzlement of public money. The nuclear deal, dwarfing in nefarious intent the infamous 1999 arms deal in terms of potential kickbacks, would have set up the ANC for decades.

Worse was to follow. The new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, launched a laudable if achingly tardy crack-down on corruption four years ago, insisting on transparency in party funding. This instantly deprived the ANC of its steady flow of murky money. And donations have dried up: the big corporations who had generously funded Ramaphosa’s bid to wrest the ANC leadership from Zuma in 2017 have long since given up on him, out of exasperation with his hesitant mismanagement of the country. Attempts to raise funds from within the party have also failed. The ANC and its supporting elites have proved in nearly three decades to be far better takers than givers.

The party is now technically bankrupt. Among other debts, it owes a court-ordered £1.5 million to a poster manufacturer for services rendered in the last elections. Staff are regularly unpaid, and they spontaneously strike and picket their own party conferences — wreaking havoc on efforts to prepare for the crucial Elective Conference later this year, at which an embattled Ramaphosa will go for a second term. Neither can the party’s former Treasurer General help much: he is fighting his own corruption charges relating to the procurement of protective equipment during the free-for-all that was South Africa’s Covid response.

Much conjecture surrounds the origin and purpose of a cache of dollar bills, allegedly worth in the millions, stolen two years ago from inside a sofa in Ramaphosa’s game lodge. The whistleblower was Arthur Fraser, the former head of Zuma’s privatised State Security Agency. Fraser also served as head of the prison services, during which time he unlawfully let Zuma out of prison on health grounds while he was serving a sentence for contempt of a commission into state corruption — a commission which Zuma had himself appointed. Sound bizarre? Not for South Africans. The theft of the dollars is under a typically ponderous investigation by law enforcement authorities, but nobody expects a result before the Elective Conference. If the moola was intended as the ANC’s bailout money, from whence came it?

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The only discernible source of legitimate income for the ANC is via Chancellor House, the party’s in-house investment company. Its biggest stake is in the South Africa’s fourth-largest manganese miner, United Manganese of Kalahari. UMK was the sole declared donor to the ANC in the 2021-22 financial year, to the tune of £500,000, as disclosed in the latest Parliamentary filings. And UMK — wait for it — is part-owned by the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg’s conglomerate Renova Group.

Vekselberg ostensibly sold off his interest in UMK after sanctions were imposed on him by the United States in 2018: he ranks near the top of the United States’ Least Favourite Russians list, primarily for his inner-circle place in the Kremlin, and for leading a technology hub that was subsequently deemed by American authorities to be a front to access US intellectual property. But he remains invested in UMK through a new vehicle, a trust of which he owns 25%. And the oligarch may well object to the seizure of yachts: his motor yacht Tango was impounded in April by Spanish authorities.

Still, it is not only these skeins of party and personal interest that inspire South Africa’s position on the Ukrainian invasion. At its heart lies something broader: realpolitik. South Africa is a proud member of the BRICS club, alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China. It is Africa’s token member of a group which is widely seen on the continent as a counterbalance to the historic power and influence of the developed western nations. The BRICS’s New Development Bank, set up in 2014, has a loan book only slightly smaller than the World Bank’s, while not being encumbered by a $160 billion commitment to patch up Western economies after their self-immolation in the pandemic. Neither is 35% of its investment tied to the chimera of climate change mitigation.

South Africa has a $25 billion share of the bank — which has not been sapped, as the IMF has in propping up the euro. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) gives unlimited drawing rights to club members that need to stabilise their currencies. China and Russia’s foreign currency reserves are eight times larger than the US and Europe’s combined, give or take a few problems on Russia’s side in accessing its share while sanctions remain. China has the four largest banks in the world and owns 55% of the world’s shipping. Russia, despite having a Third World army, is self-sufficient in energy and food. These nations are, in short, worth keeping on-side.

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Russian trade only comprises a minuscule 0.4% of South Africa’s total trade — and Russian investment in South Africa is a puny $1.5 billion compared to South Africa’s $5.13 billion stake in Russia. But South Africa’s dependence on Russia isn’t straightforwardly economic. Rather, it stems from a need to keep the BRICS club happy, particularly China and India — the latter having extensive personal and financial dealings with South Africa’s hugely entrepreneurial Asian minority, much of it through Dubai.

China has been investing heavily if not always ethically in Africa. So far it has sunk $70 billion in the continent, $25 billion in South Africa alone, creating an estimated 400,000 jobs. In February this year, it promised another $300 billion. The problem, a big one, is that its targets remain largely in the extractive industries and its practices are generally rip-and-run. There is little skill transference to the locals and limited social investment. And the increasing number of expatriate Chinese workers-turned-settlers do not easily assimilate wherever they land in the continent.

South Africa still takes money where it can find it: most recently $497 million from the World Bank to bail out its crippled electricity grid, and $4.3 billion from the IMF in emergency post-pandemic support. But the financial and fraternal allure of the BRICS club to South Africa is still overwhelming — and it is more important, Ramaphosa’s government firmly believes, than taking sides in a distant, intra-Slav war over an old border dispute. Besides, the argument goes, why should South Africa trust the US and Europe? A fair question, given America’s friends once included Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.

So, while Russia moves to the next stage of total and irreversible war and China uses the pandemic as an excuse to keep its borders shut and reduce its exposure to the global economy, South Africa, like many other non-aligned nations, is manoeuvring. The aim is to be on the winning side of the real conflict behind the one involving tanks: the battle between old Western and new Eastern money. And while that battle is playing out, no fugitive Russian super yacht is ever going to be refused safe harbour in Cape Town.

To put the recent revelations in context, Greece has as proud a tradition of politically motivated phone-tapping as any other country. I still chuckle when I recall what happened in the early hours of a May morning in 2015 during my short stint as Greece’s finance minister. Soon after I had concluded a sensitive conversation with my friend Jeff Sachs, the phone rang. It was Jeff again, this time laughing uncontrollably.

“You will not believe this,” he said. “Five minutes after we hung up, I received a call from the National Security Council. They asked me if I thought you meant what you’d told me.” I had fully expected my phone had been tapped, but two things made Jeff’s news remarkable. First, the eavesdroppers not only had the capacity to instantly recognise that what I had said to Jeff was of real significance, but they must also have had an open line to America’s NSC. Second, they had no compunction whatsoever about revealing that they were tapping my phone!

I was, of course, neither the first nor the highest-ranking Greek politician to have been honoured with such attention. We now know that, back in 2008, the phones of the then-prime minister, his wife, half the cabinet and close to 100 government officials were tapped by US agencies. Nor was eavesdropping monopolised by US agencies. In 2015, operatives of EYP — the Greek intelligence agency — dropped into my ministerial office to check for bugs, and pointed out the window at two vans which, they said, belonged to the German Embassy and contained listening equipment trained at me and my team. A few months later, the Prime Minister I was serving under told me that the EYP’s head had been spreading the toxic lie that I was in cahoots with Wolfgang Schäuble (Germany’s then Finance Minister) to get Greece out of the eurozone.

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Clearly, in view of such experiences, I was not at all surprised, let alone shocked, at the news that EYP has recently been eavesdropping on politicians and journalists. So, why am I branding this latest incident as Greece’s Watergate? Why do I go so far as to believe it poses a greater threat to democracy than Richard Nixon’s original?

The short answer is: because Nixon was forced to resign once it was revealed that he had endeavoured to cover up spying. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the current Greek Prime Minister, has in contrast succeeded in neutralising the democratic institutions set up to maintain a semblance of legality — before they neutralised him.

The sequence of events leading to the exposure of Greece’s Watergate scandal began in July 2019, immediately after Mr Mitsotakis won the last general election on behalf of New Democracy, our conservative party. One of the very first decrees he issued, as incoming Prime Minister, was one that gave his office direct control over and responsibility for EYP. “Why on earth is the PM taking over the supervision of EYP?”, I remember a parliamentary colleague asking me that very day. It was, indeed, a curious move.

Our trepidation only grew following two personnel choices. First, Mitsotakis appointed a nephew of his, Grigoris Dimitriadis, to oversee EYP on his behalf. Secondly, he chose as EYP’s new head Panagiotis Kontoleon, the CEO of the Greek franchise of the private security firm G4 — a man with no record of public service, and whose appointment Mitsotakis could only complete after amending the relevant law to remove the prerequisite that the EYP chief holds a postgraduate degree.

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Given his concerted and very public efforts to take complete control of the state intelligence agency, something no other PM had ever done, it became impossible to shift blame to some other minister once the faeces hit the proverbial fan.

Of the more than 17,000 wiretaps that EYP admits it has placed during the last year alone, two cases are at the heart of the current scandal. The first is that of Thanasis Koukakis, an investigative journalist who dared look into Greek shipowners’ loans that had been illegally written off by the Bank of Piraeus (one of the banks that Greek taxpayers have had to repeatedly bailout). It turns out that Koukakis was one of EYP’s “subjects of interest”, an outrage that would have probably gone unnoticed without the second, higher profile, case.

It was this case that broke the camel’s back: an investigation begun by the European Parliament’s IT department accidentally revealed that Nikos Androulakis, an MEP belonging to PASOK (the formerly dominant party in Greek politics), was being phone-tapped by EYP. It was explosive news because, at the time his phone was tapped, Androulakis was contesting the leadership of PASOK — a contest that he, eventually, won. The significance of that contest cannot be understated, since its outcome mattered a great deal to Mitsotakis and his governing New Democracy party.

Since the middle of the pandemic, opinion polls have persistently suggested that the next election, which must take place by July 2023, will result in a hung parliament. While Mitsotakis’ New Democracy seemed likely to remain the largest party, it was not even close to an absolute majority. PASOK, in third place, was therefore positioned as kingmaker: whoever the party chose to side with would end up in government.

The stakes of PASOK’s leadership race suddenly seemed very high. Of the three main candidates, the one that would almost certainly choose to back New Democracy and Mitsotakis to form a government was Andreas Loverdos — an MP and former minister who had served gladly in New Democracy-PASOK coalition governments between 2011 and 2015. Every newspaper, radio and television station supporting Mitsotakis was rooting for Loverdos to beat Androulakis in the PASOK leadership primary. Is it any wonder that the revelation of EYP’s surveillance of Androulakis was big news? In a period during which the ruling party was rooting for Androulakis’s opponent, the nation’s spy agency — which ruling party’s leader and his nephew controlled and supervised to the full — was tapping Androulakis’ phone!

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As if that were not sufficiently outrageous, the Prime Minister doubled down with a disgraceful reaction to the ensuing uproar. In a six hour-long parliamentary debate on the subject, the Mitsotakis repeatedly insisted that the wiretap on Androulakis was perfectly legal, even if it was politically disingenuous. When we pressed him on the legal and logical justification for tapping Androulakis’ phone, he referred vaguely to grounds of “national security” — claiming that such sensitive matters cannot be spoken about in an open parliamentary session. At that point, we — the leaders of the opposition parties — called his bluff and voted to convene a special parliamentary Select Committee, which would debate these “national security” grounds in confidence.

And so it was that, a few days later, a Select Committee convened. Among the summoned witnesses were, naturally, the two men Mitsotakis had appointed to run EYP: Dimitriadis and Kontoleon. Both appeared in front of the Committee and both, reading from the same invisible script, repeated the same mantra: “We cannot answer your questions because the information the Select Committee seeks is privileged.” After a few pointless and cacophonous sessions, lacking any power to arrest witnesses for contempt of Parliament, the Committee disbanded and the case was closed.

And here’s the rub. Politicians, like corporations and athletes, often try out illegitimate practices to tilt the playground in their favour. In our surveillance society — in which our every move, thought or click is turned into a valuable commodity — phone-tapping is, unfortunately, commonplace. However, when a President or a Prime Minister seeks direct control over the nation’s spooks in order to press them, and their gadgets, into spying on opponents, they cross a Rubicon. If a leader is caught red-handed, our democratic institutions may be judged on whether they can neutralise him. In the case of Watergate, it was hard to unveil Nixon’s complicity, but the moment the President’s involvement was established, he was gone. In the case of Greece’s Watergate, our parliamentary sovereignty was jettisoned so that the guilty PM could stay put. In this sense, Greece’s Watergate bodes more ill for democracy than America’s original.

The reader may, understandably, ask: why should this defeat of Greece’s parliamentary democracy, however sad it may be, matter in the grander scheme of things? Because, my dear reader, you should never underestimate Greece’s capacity to be the harbinger of terrible developments that will come to your shores before you know it. Can you recall where the Cold War began? Not in the streets of Berlin in 1945, but in the streets of Athens in December 1944! Do you remember where the eurozone crisis began? Not in Italy or Spain or France, but in Greece in 2010! For some reason I am not privy to, my country has a proven record of giving birth not only to some important values, like democracy, but also to existential threats to Western civilisation. Which is why the ever-complacent West should be paying attention as our Greek Watergate scandal unfolds.

More than 50% of the country’s coastline is now rented out by the state to bagni, private beach resorts offering drinks, food, beach huts and hundreds of deckchairs for rent. In Tuscany and Romagna the percentage of these privatised beaches rises far higher: in Forte dei Marmi, on the west-facing sand of the Tuscan coast, 94% of the town beachfront is rented to bagni. Nearby, in Pietrasanta, it’s 98.8% and in Camaiore 98.4%. The record is held by Gatteo a Mare, on the Adriatic coast, where 100% of the town’s beaches are now privatised. That means there’s nowhere you’re allowed to throw a towel on the sand, plant a parasol and spread out your own picnic.

The growth of these bagni has become exponential in recent years: nationally, the number of private beach concessions has risen 12.5% since 2018. In the south the increases are even greater: in that same 2018-2021 period, the number of private resorts rose by 41.5%, 22.8% and 15% in Sicily, Campania and Basilicata respectively.

At these resorts, claiming the choicest space on the sand is almost as competitive as getting the right row in the opera. One woman I talk to is proud that her luxury resort in Liguria “won’t rent out the front row of lettini (deckchairs) right next to the sea even if they’re empty”. They’re reserved for the longest-standing families. As in nightclubs, a sense of exclusivity creates high demand and high prices. To keep cash flowing, though, some bagni employ heavies: last month it was reported that beach-goers in Bacoli, near Naples, were being frisked to check that no water bottles or homemade sandwiches were being brought in.

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There are few cheaper options. In Tuscany, a spiaggia libera ­— a free beach — is hard to find. They’re usually in the least desirable section of the coast: far from amenities and the shade of the pineta, often close to drains and estuaries, and likely to be more pebbly or prone to driftwood pile-ups.

The central criticism of privatised beaches is that resort managers are paying mid-20th-century rents while charging 21st-century prices. In 2017, it was revealed that the Arenile di Bagnoli in Campania, with two spaces totalling 14,000m² including a roof terrace and pool, was paying only €15,830 per annum. Covered beach-side spas like the Club Partenopeo, with lawns, jacuzzis and swanky bar, were paying only €2,621 per annum. The deckchair-renting racket is a glaring example of the demanio, state property, being milked for private gain. Overall, it’s estimated that the state only receives €100 million in levies from a business which has a turnover of €15 billion.

Further north, the profits are even higher. Flavio Briatore, the ex-Benetton and F1 Renault team manager, rents 5,000 m² in Marina di Pietrasanta for €17,619. Twiga, his luxury resort, can take that in one night. Briatore himself has been open about the absurdity, admitting the rental costs of bagni should be “tripled at the very least”. Franco, a do-it-all manager from another resort, admits that he’s running “a golden prison”. When I quote Briatore to Franco, he smiles and says: “Doubling it would be fine”. There can be few businesses in 2022 doing so well that doubled rents would be seen as no biggie.

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The issue of Italy’s private beaches is now coming to a head because Mario Draghi, the Italian Prime Minister, introduced legislation at the end of May to terminate all beach concessions by the end of 2023. This legislation is part of a wider overhaul of Italy’s competition laws that the country is obliged to carry out in order to be eligible for the next tranche of the EU-funded €210 billion Covid recovery plan.

The issue has been unresolved since 2006 when the Bolkestein Directive obliged EU member countries to offer coastal concessions for a “limited duration, and through an open public selection procedure, based on non-discriminatory, transparent and objective criteria”. Italy has never implemented the legislation, and city councils and national governments have issued repeated proroghe — extensions — to delay the Bolkestein Directive: resorts in Rimini enjoyed tenancy extensions taking them safely from 2009 to 2034. “Twenty-five years of extensions!” laments Roberto Biagini, the indignant President of the National Coordination for Free Seas.

The EU is right to suspect a lack of open competition in the assignation of these beach concessions. Many have been passed down the generations, and longevity of tenure is actually what many resort managers are most proud of. “My grandfather opened this place in 1930,” says Giuliano, who runs Paradiso bagno in Camaiore, Tuscany. “There was a woman in her eighties, she died recently, she had come here every summer since 1932.” Many resort managers say something similar: they feel they have built up businesses over many decades and that Europe is meddling in an Italian tradition.

At Paradiso, customers are almost like extended family and Giuliano’s reminisces are frequently interrupted by old-timers. It’s early morning in mid-June and families are coming back to his place for the first time in a year. He welcomes each of them by name like an accomplished hotelier, always in the sweet spot between formal and laid-back. He knows what they want through the morning: drinks, ice creams, fresh towels.

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In an attempt to make things fairer, beach resorts pay VAT at 22% rather than, as with all other tourist operators, the discounted rate of less than half that. After much legal wrangling, they also pay the IMU property tax as if they owned the beach, not the public.

But they still have, critics say, an unfair advantage over rivals. Businesses away from the sand, on the other side of the main road, are selling exactly the same goods but paying rates ten times higher. The anomaly has come about because, decades ago, a beach shack was seen as the poor person’s version of the posh patisserie in town and rates were, duly, set very low. Now it’s the reverse: everyone wants a coffee by the sea and the shacks have morphed into permanent chalets offering fine dining.

Politicians have tried to address the issue of long-term sand-squatters before, but never with any zeal. In August 2020, the minimum annual rent for beach resorts rose from €364 to €2,500, but there were many exemptions: the Covid crisis wasn’t the time to radically disrupt the exoskeleton of Italy’s tourism industry. Last autumn, Roberto Biagini came close to accusing politicians of taking bribes: “It’s a do ut des [“I give, you give”] arrangement for campaign contributions”, he said. “Politics has completely bent the knee in the face of the seaside goods.”

There’s a thriving black market in subletting too: many of the resorts are rented officially for one figure but often sublet for a far higher one. Biagini tells me that it’s not uncommon to have a concession which pays €8,000 to the state being sublet for ten times that figure. Most bagni will give you a till receipt as proof that they’re paying taxes, but many are clearly operating cash-in-hand.

More than just bending the knee, many politicians have got in on the act: Massimo Casanova is an MEP for the League who runs Papeete in Milano Marittima, where a few years ago the League’s leader famously danced to techno versions of the Italian national anthem surrounded by women in bikinis. Casanova pays, it’s believed, €10,000 per annum and enjoys a turnover of €700,000.

Some politicians, however, have taken on the resorts head-on. “Whoever runs a beach establishment is not the owner of anything,” said Josi Gerardo Della Ragione, the long-haired young mayor of Bacoli last month. “They have a concession on state property, managing a public asset for a certain time period, because the beach belongs to everyone. The sea belongs to everyone.”

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An unlikely political hot potato, the beach concession story roots through intriguing political and emotional terrain. In some ways, the debate lies on the fault line between Italian nationalists and Europhile internationalists. The defenders of the status quo say that the new legislation is an example of an unelected technocrat sacrificing one of Italy’s few buoyant industries, hospitality, to wealthy foreign investors at the behest of the EU. Matteo Salvini’s Five Star Movement/League and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy are exploiting the debate to position themselves as lifeguards to the Italian underdogs. The Union Jack has even been flown pointedly in various resorts this summer as a symbol of Euroscepticism.

Protectionism is a habitual position of the Italian Right, and is rarely seen, as elsewhere, as solely negative. The idea that an Italian tradition is under threat from rapacious, foreign investors speaks to the gut of many voters, especially since Italy is very used to closed shops. There are dozens of closed professional orders, like the dreaded albo of journalists: outsiders simply aren’t allowed to disrupt a good thing.

So even if international law and economic rationality are clearly on Draghi’s side, one gets the feeling that the rump of Italian seaside-goers are contented with things as they are. The resorts make beach-going easy. Through the day they sell you everything you could want: coffee and a croissant, calamari and a glass of white. You can join a gentle water gym, play a few rounds of ping-pong, then swig a cold beer and go barefoot dancing in the evenings. “Most families,” says Biagini, “are far more concerned about seeing the same lifeguard or barman as last year than they are about the lack of free beaches.”

Since people usually spend weeks, or an entire month or two, in the same bagno — often returning there year after year — they feel like rustic, simple villages of gloss-painted pallet furniture and fraying, salted awnings. For millions of Italians — who enjoyed three months off school every summer as children — these resorts are where many of their fondest childhood memories are stored. It’s where they spent languid months with grandparents while their parents were working. Our children, too, have spent many happy weeks in these dunes, so it’s easy to understand the anxiety of those who don’t want anything to change.

But in the 25 years we’ve been going either east from Parma to the Adriatic coast, or west over the Apennines to Liguria and Tuscany, these resorts have gone from simple and spartan to offering evermore ambitious experiences: volleyball pits, Padel courts, and club nights. Temporary structures have become permanent. That’s why the most feared aspect of Draghi’s legislation is the “mapping”, in which the entire coastal area is due to be subjected to aerial and ground-level inspections. The discrepancy between what the concessions are supposed to be on paper and the reality of what, over decades, they have become is likely to be fairly wide.

Inevitably the protectionism which never gets mentioned is that of the actual coastline. The demand for immaculate sand means that the majority of driftwood, boulders, seaweed, and shingle spits have been removed, causing erosion issues which require the remedy of bulldozers lugging artificial protections into place. The sandy stretches have been so humanised that you see a hundred fag-butts and face masks to every crab or jellyfish.

Yet almost everyone agrees that it’s going to be arduous to impose any change. With a general election looming next year, Edoardo Zanchini, Vice President of the Italian environmental organisation Legambiente, says that “no politician will really want to take on the powerful lobby of the resort-managers”. If the country has delayed the imposition of EU legislation for 16 years, it seems unlikely, even with Draghi in the driving seat, that all coastal concessions will suddenly be put up for tender. “In Italy”, says Franco, “we do things in our own time.”