“You know that film, The Titfield Thunderbolt? It’s an Ealing Comedy about a group of people who want to run their own railway line.” That’s what Parker’s readers want too. These layouts in back gardens across Britain range from tiny loops of track to colossal, intricate landscapes. Parker knows a guy whose line crosses Lilliputian bridges and snakes through mountains 10 feet tall. Layouts are much more than models, he says. They really are railways, albeit on a smaller scale than usual. A keen sense of ownership is important: “these are their railway lines.”

Ardent hobbyists are often viewed as eccentric. I think they might be the only normal people left. As a rule, they are active and engaged. They are more interested in making than consuming. They dream and they do. A passive appreciation for steam engines or military history or orchids isn’t enough. Hobbyists want to take part. “I grew up fascinated by history, and wargaming helps you make that interest interactive,” says Daniel Faulconbridge, editor of Wargames Illustrated. “It’s not good enough for me that I just read about the Battle of Hastings, I want to collect the figures that represent the troops that fought in the battle, and then paint them and play a game with them. So it’s taking your hobby to the Nth degree.”

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Magazines like Garden Rail and Wargames Illustrated are at the heart of the hobby world. The variety is extraordinary. Hornby Magazine, Airfix Model World, The Orchid Review, Lute News. Monthly publications dedicated to remote control aircraft and koi keeping. Some hobbies have broader appeal than others — the UK has enough carp fishermen to support both Total Carp and CARPology. But even the more niche titles have a readership large enough to keep them viable in a brutal publishing environment.

“People often say, ‘wow you still produce a print magazine!’ Because obviously you see people on the train and most of them are looking at phones or screens, they’re not looking at newspapers and magazines,” says Faulconbridge. The physical hobby magazine has in fact proved surprisingly durable. Both Faulconbridge and Parker acknowledge that their readers tend to be older, and prefer print media because it’s what they grew up with. There’s also a practical aspect. If you’re following a guide to painting a model Landsknecht, it’s easier to have a paper copy open on the table than faff about with a phone or tablet. And there’s the love of magazines themselves. Many hobbyists will own collections going back decades. There are memories between those pages. Hobby memories, yes, but also recollections of long-ago bedrooms where the sunlight fell just like that across the carpet. Memories that can be unearthed with the flick of a finger. A digital archive can’t replicate that experience, especially since, as Parker points out, “the thing with a lot of digital media is you don’t really own it.” Paper and ink are there for as long as you want them. The same cannot be said for all of those zeros and ones.

Again and again when talking to Parker and Faulconbridge, I am struck by the emphasis on the physical. Hobbies are about doing things: planning, painting, building, contributing an article to your favorite magazine. “You come into a hobby and you’re not being encouraged to binge-watch something on the TV — which is a very, very passive activity — you’re being encouraged to have a go at something,” Parker observes. “We’re constantly saying to people, ‘Have a go!’”

Hanging out with like-minded people is the best way to have a go. Community is a word that comes up a lot in my chats with the editors. “Up and down the country, meeting in village halls and community centers, there are wargaming clubs that no one would ever know were there if they didn’t accidentally come across them,” says Faulconbridge. Parker emphasizes that railway modeling exhibitions are as much social gatherings as they are celebrations of the hobby. As anyone who has worked an allotment knows, shared enthusiasms have a way of collapsing social barriers. Parker remembers one exhibition where he sat around a pub table with “a physics professor, a guy who ran his own bus company, a Liberal Democrat councilor, a theatre manager, a bishop and two lawyers. Our common interest was model railways. You find yourself meeting a really wide variety of people.”

Still, it’s a mistake to think that these groups are purely focused on the hobby itself. Wargames and model railways are often the starting point for other things. Friendships are made, money is raised for charity, and support networks are formed. “Men are particularly bad at chatting,” says Parker. “But they will chat about steam engines and they will chat about garden railways, and that chat can then move on to more valuable topics. We run the largest model railway forum in the world, and tucked away on it is a prostate cancer discussion group.” The hobby becomes a conductor for the wider functions of any worthwhile community.

Hobby magazines survive because they are outgrowths of these communities. Most articles are written by hobbyists, in what Faulconbridge describes as “a fanzine approach”. Neither the editors nor the contributors are in it for the money. They just love it. In a recent thread on X, Stone Age Herbalist observed that the continued success of the hobby magazine can be attributed to a particularly British — and more broadly Northern European — genius for voluntary association. Whether centered around giant vegetables or antique fountain pens, little communities bubble up everywhere with no outside encouragement. I can’t help but wonder whether the British genius for immiseration also has a role to play. Lively minds will always find alternatives to decaying cities and nagging politicians.

Both Faulconbridge and Parker agree that there’s something in the water on our island. But neither are quite sure what that something is. Naturally, history plays a role. Although railway modeling is popular in other parts of the world — Germany, Belgium and Holland in particular — its spiritual home will always be the birthplace of the steam engine. And when it comes to fighting battles with armies of model soldiers, the US is the undisputed world leader. “Wargaming is bigger here than anywhere else. It started here. And throughout the Sixties and Seventies we had youngsters growing up reading magazines like Battle and Warlord, and building Airfix models as well. A lot of the early writers of wargames rules came from the US,” says Faulconbridge. He adds that the founding editor of Wargames Illustrated, Duncan Macfarlane, estimated that Britain contained 50% of the planet’s wargamers.

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That figure probably still stands up, doubtless bolstered by the growth of Games Workshop, whose range of tabletop games will be many people’s first taste of wargaming. It is no accident that Warhammer is one of contemporary Britain’s few home-grown success stories. When I mention this to Faulconbridge, who began his own working life in the Games Workshop mail order room, he laughs. “Games Workshop do help. You might think that there’d be no room whatsoever for lads playing with toy soldiers and rolling dice today, but they’ve managed to make a multi-million dollar industry out of it. As you say, one of England’s only exports is little men in packages.”

A link between hobbies and productive industry can also be found in the world of railway modeling. Parker tells me that, “I’ve just reviewed a loco from a company based in Doncaster, Roundhouse Engineering. You’d be amazed, we do still build steam locomotives in this country! It’s a proper Rolls Royce engine model, beautifully constructed. They do pretty much everything in-house.” This pride and attention to detail is at the root of what all hobbyists are up to. The sheer excitement of creation, of pouring your heart into something and sharing it with others, is its own healthy reward.

Hobby magazines are heartening advertisements for that reward. Planning, making, getting things wrong, having a laugh about it. Towards the end of our conversation, Parker muses on what his job really means. He starts a sentence and trails off. Hesitates, just for a moment. Perhaps he’s searching for the right word. Perhaps he’s worried about sounding pompous. Fortunately, his passionate nature wins out. He says what he wants to say: “We’re a little bit in the business of selling dreams.”

The BBC’s malaise as compared with the big streaming platforms, addressed in the Director General Tim Davie’s speech last week, is a cultural expression of other national failings — primarily the inability to capitalise on success that has bedevilled British industry for generations. Just as the birthplace of the jet engine, of the worldwide web and of television itself finds its innovations adopted and then outpaced by other nations, so Britain serially underperforms in its cultural exports. As Davie observed, “On global streamers, a minority of the offer is UK content,” with the result that “global economic models drive you to a different place, editorially, from a UK player”.

They certainly do. There are few more revealing exercises than burrowing deep within the algorithmic suggestions of the big streaming platforms to see the cultural production subsidised by Britain’s state rivals. For some years now, the Russian state has overseen the production of big-budget war dramas, with a theme of painful sacrifice in the service of the Motherland: it does not take a conspiratorial mind to see this output as a foreshadowing of current events. China, similarly, has produced countless lavish historical epics on the past glory of the Middle Kingdom, a flexing of civilisational confidence that reflects the priorities of the rising superpower. India’s increasingly nationalistic output, equally, should be recommended viewing for British policymakers keen to win New Delhi’s favour: Britain most frequently appears in current Indian cinema as the source of cartoon villains, brutal sneering foils to the patriotic heroism of the leading actor. It is not an exaggeration to say that, buried within the bowels of Netflix and Amazon, we gain a clearer sense of the worldview of the rising powers of the coming decades than in all the sensible think-tank pieces driving British foreign policy.

What, then, does Britain’s outward-facing cultural production say about us? Frankly, nothing good. There are few more heart-sinking phrases in the English language than “Home-grown British Drama”, given the British film industry’s strange fascination with preachy kitchen sink parables, and unwatched gentle boomer comedies set in neglected regions. If a nation is defined by its culture, then ours is Jim Broadbent going on a bittersweet late-life journey of self-discovery across the Durham coalfields, forever. There are two opposing strands to the British imagination, the astonishing, visionary creativity that, we too easily forget, still characterises Britain to the wider world, and the suffocating tweeness around which our state-funded cultural exports revolve. The wrong strand still dominates.

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And if our external efforts are drab and lifeless, British television’s domestic output, like our high streets, increasingly appears a blasted wasteland. The bulk of the BBC’s programming can be characterised as Blue Peter for adults, whose presenters address the audience with the cheerily patronising, dead-eyed bonhomie of staff in a nursing home. If ITV expresses the inner world of the British working class, then it is alone a rebuke to any post-liberal project: surely no hope lies in the proles. And Channel 4, whose executives to this day see themselves as edgily groundbreaking innovators, produces by some margin the most formulaic programming on British television, endless “blue-light” observational formats set in maternity hospitals and animal shelters that blur interchangeably into each other. From its daytime roster of programmes warning pensioners about telephone scams and featuring aspiring slum landlords buying up rundown terraces at property auctions, to its evening output following the artificially constructed sexual quandaries of dazzling-toothed Deanos, British television presents an almost surrealist vision of modern Britain in all its claustrophobic grimness.

In these circumstances, it seems delusional to lament the audience’s drift towards American streaming services: it is the rational choice for any discerning consumer. It is perhaps too late for the BBC to catch up with Netflix, given its inattention to technological investment: until recently, it was impossible to even favourite a programme for later watching on iPlayer, one of the most basic functionalities of any streaming service. Yet as with everything else in modern Britain, the malaise is easily fixable with a clear reformist vision and a ruthless wielding of the scalpel. If British cultural production is an industry in decline, then it requires an industrial strategy to address. And as with heavy industry, that overperforming fellow middle power, South Korea, perhaps provides the clearest model to follow.

As a concerted effort of state policy, the South Korean government has championed film and television in service of the country’s soft power, with remarkable success. Launched by the Korean government nearly two decades ago, as “a distinct cultural policy based on state-developmentalism, public diplomacy, and nation branding” with the explicit aim of using culture “as both a domestic and foreign policy tool to strengthen its economic diversification, export profile, and cultural and public diplomacy outcomes”, the Korean Wave or Hallyu has been a remarkable global success. As one academic study observes, through the Hallyu policy Korea’s “export of cultural goods and services has grown exponentially; between 1998 and 2019, it chalked up a forty-time increase from $188.9 million to $12.3 billion in 2019”, with a ripple effect on other industries, so that between 2011 and 2016, every $100 of exported Hallyu content “generated an attendant export of USD248 worth of consumer goods from South Korea”.

Seeded by government grants and a concerted, joined-up state effort to enhance Korea’s global standing, the Hallyu policy has matured over time to depend on private finance. While the government bore the initial risks, as the Korean Wave has blossomed, a corporate ecosystem has evolved, generating both revenue and cultural and diplomatic capital in the service of the state. South Korea’s cultural diplomacy does not strive, like the BBC does, to compete with American platforms: instead it employs the Netflix and YouTube infrastructure in clear-eyed pursuit of its own goals. Working with laser-guided efficiency towards global success, South Korea’s cultural output nevertheless remains firmly Korean. Perhaps it is this unapologetic Korean-ness, that unabashed cultural self-confidence that makes it so appealing to a global audience. It does not fawningly attempt, as we do in every sphere, to seek American approval, but wins international esteem for being so resolutely of itself.

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Yet international success does not mean playing to the gallery: from Old Boy to Squid Game, Last Train to Busan and Parasite, South Korea’s international film and television hits have been marked by formal experimentation, dark and disturbing themes and a relentless quest to construct new visual worlds. It is the precise opposite approach to Britain’s cultural strategy in recent decades, a strategy which has not only failed but goes against what is most striking about the British character: its seam of visionary, innovative imagination, too often crushed by uninspired management, a timid desire to play it safe, and the relentless national trait of letting others exploit and benefit from its own low-hanging fruit.

Tim Davie’s assertion that the BBC’s “most successful approach is to focus on our point of difference: authentic British stories produced beautifully, not worrying too much about an abstract notion of global appeal” makes the right noises, yet his focus on “a shared British culture and our democratic, tolerant society” and gobbledegook pursuit of “unique algorithms to serve our values, for good… that bring us closer, not drive us apart” naturally makes eyes glaze over. There is surely no more interest globally than there is domestically in a televisual cross between Very British Problems and a period of detention in a Michaela school, or in being lectured on our Brilliant British Values by Marianna Spring. All of this is an expression not of cultural self-confidence but of its absence, the state broadcaster uneasily papering over cracks that threaten to bring down the roof. Like the country itself, British programming is hidebound by timidity and self-doubt.

In his 2021 essay “After Brexit, We Need an Iron Maiden Britain”, the writer Jeremy Driver posits the unfashionable, but undeniably successful, rock band as a model for a reformed British state: bombastically self-confident, freed from the tiresome restraints of good taste and unashamedly hungry for global success. In pursuit of soft power and prosperity, I would go even further: we need Warhammer Britain. The unfashionable, but wildly popular hobby is an underexploited national champion which a country like South Korea would long ago have swung behind in pursuit of soft power. More profitable than Google, worth more than Marks & Spencer, the Games Workshop company behind it has turned the Warhammer 40k intellectual property into a global phenomenon. It is remarkable, for example, that both sides in the Ukraine war have displayed a tendency to allude to Warhammer’s fictional universe, with Ukraine even fielding two units named after its fantasy factions: that is what soft power means. Warhammer’s lucrative gaming figurines are all made in Britain, with the company about to open its fourth factory, bucking national economic trends. During lockdown, the company didn’t claim any government subsidies despite shuttering its more than 500 shops: it’s so profitable it didn’t need to. Its characters are “ridiculous, over-the-top pastiches, created by people who were bored and angry” in a world where “hope has been extinguished for millennia” — and what could be more British than that?

With its global fanbase, its relentlessly successful pursuit of market dominance and ever-expanding profit, its rooting in British culture and commitment to local industry, the Warhammer intellectual property has the potential to be a British Disney or Marvel, an endlessly productive cash cow that simultaneously advances the nation’s soft power, not least within state adversaries such as Russia and China. As Games Workshop recently declared, “we own what we believe is some of the best under exploited intellectual property (‘IP’) globally”, a statement of self-belief that is surely correct. Yet — as so often — Britain lets America reap the full benefits, with Amazon set to exploit its popularity in a lavishly-funded series of TV shows and films produced by the British actor Henry Cavill. There is no reason why the BBC, with government backing, could not have picked this luscious low-hanging fruit as a national champion: all the elements for success present themselves with glaring obviousness.

But the same could be said for other under-exploited British intellectual property: given the relentlessness with which discourse in recent years has revolved around issues of empire, colonialism and race, the Flashman series of novels, which presents Britain’s imperial history with a far more sceptical and ambivalent eye, rooted in scholarly accuracy, than many perhaps realise, could have been a global success, deftly asserting Britain’s ownership of its own history. Why was the success of Peter Weir’s Master and Commander not capitalised on with a reboot of the Hornblower series? Given the success of BBC’s The Last Kingdom, an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series of novels — promptly sold to Netflix, with the quality declining even as the budget was boosted — could we not use the vast armies conjurable with CGI to reboot Cornwell’s Sharpe series for a new audience, or even better, adapt his Arthurian series on the forging of the British nation in a way that speaks, as the source material does, to Britain’s current, fissiparous challenges? From HBO’s Rome to Disney’s Shogun, the appeal of immersive historical worlds is enduring — and our national inclination to recreate them is surely the basis of our global brand.

The answer is that none of this is appealing to our cultural tastemakers, even if it would be wildly popular both at home and abroad. But, then, the British culture industry has been captured by people who are worse than political enemies: they are simply boring. It possesses neither the confidence to strive for high culture, nor the commercial instincts to exploit what is organically popular, leaving us stranded with a middlebrow output that, by trying to appeal to everyone, pleases no one. Who does not, when they hear a “topical” Radio 4 afternoon play, or listen to Mark Steel perform his notionally comedic circuit of provincial towns, reach for their proverbial revolver? It is like being trapped in a dictatorship whose cultural showpiece was the 2012 Olympic Ceremony. But the BBC’s rivals are no better: Channel 4 shows more of a commitment to showing quality European drama than making it, a reflection of our sad cultural cringe and lack of self-belief, while it would be an act of national self-harm to inflict ITV’s programming on the wider world. Like everything in Britain, in the interests of national survival, our cultural output requires total reform.

So where do we start? Conflicted though our tastemakers may feel about it, Britain’s Early Modern history is the basis of our global brand: it is the reason why the English language, the English men’s suit, and the game of football have become so widely adopted, globally, that it is hard to remember they are expressions of our national culture, surely the most widely adopted ethnic culture in world history. This is a vast seam of cultural capital, ready and waiting to be mined, which a South Korea could only dream of. But instead we let the wider world write our national story, turning Britain, as in Bridgerton, into a theme park for other cultures’ fantasies, a provincial museum whose captions are written by other people — and rarely to our best interests.

There is a vast market for a Britishness beyond our oscillation between tweeness and miserabilism, for a confidence that can be feigned even if it is hard to feel, and where even working out our doubts and insecurities in art — with a clear-sighted honesty absent in Britain’s current cultural output — would be productive. If we accept the argument, made in defence of the licence fee, that the BBC is a tool of British soft power, then in an era of global confrontation and self-assertion by rising powers, drawing on their history for worldly success, it must begin to act like it. For our age of moping twee to end, Britain’s new cultural imperium must begin.

Warhammer is a game of dice. You make little armies of plastic figurines, paint them up, and then take it in turns to move and shoot, rolling the dice to see how well your little chaps do it. I used to play it as a child; then, 25 years later, blessed with more disposable income and burdened with less social shame, I took it up again. 

Since then, to my slight surprise, a little group of my friends has taken it up as well, dads in their late thirties and early forties, some of whom played in their youth, some of whom did not but who have obviously been closet nerds for decades. We play Kill Team, a smaller, faster version of the game, with only a dozen or so models on each side; the real Warhammer 40K could have 50 or more and might take four hours for a game, and we have jobs and families.

The idea is simple enough – your Necron Warrior’s Gauss blaster might shoot 24” and hit on a three, so you measure the distance, crouch down to see if it can see its target, and then roll. Then, if you hit, you roll the other dice to see if it does any damage. Or for your fang-toothed, green-skinned, cleaver-wielding Ork Boyz, you might roll to see if they successfully charge into combat, and then roll again to see how many times they hit their opponents.

The game is all about dice-rolling. It is explicitly random – dice are the archetypal random-number generator. The game is about understanding and managing randomness, about surfing uncertainty; the skill is in navigating the luck. Your big, tough Terminator has good armour; you can probably expect him to shrug off most shots from normal guns. But if you get shot enough times, you’ll probably roll a few ones. Do you dare put him out in the open where everyone can see him, but where he can quickly close with the enemy and do the most damage? Or do you try to sneak him around behind cover, which takes more time but is safer?

We struggle, sometimes, with randomness and uncertainty. We struggle with it in the sense that we don’t enjoy it – we don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. We struggle with it in the sense that we are bad judges of how likely or unlikely things are, of thinking in more complex shades than “will happen, won’t happen, might happen”.

But we also struggle with it in the sense that we don’t recognise it: after the fact, contingent facts seem inevitable; randomness dissolves into fate. We judge decisions not by whether they were made using the best information available at the time, but by what actually happened – a mistake known as “outcome bias”. Say I charge my Terminator out into the open and he gets 15 lasgun shots in the face, with three of them sneaking past his armour, killing him: did I make the wrong decision? Maybe – but maybe I made the right decision and rolled a few bad dice. 

Years ago, I used to play poker, very occasionally and very badly: I tended to get drunk and go all-in on bad hands. Once, I played at a casino against a pro for a feature for the Telegraph. As usual, I played my signature move, betting very heavily on useless cards after a few pints; but for once, I drew exactly what I needed on the river, and won. Very obviously, I had made bad decisions, but got lucky. But from the inside, it felt as though I had played brilliantly. 

I spoke to a financial trader for that poker piece, who uses poker to teach decision-making; he said that in games of uncertainty, like poker (or like Warhammer, he did not in fact say but could have), you can only detect the role of skill over a long time. Even after a new player has played 100 hours of poker, he said, still, “we don’t feel that we have a good handle on truth;” there’s so much noise, so much luck, that the (very real) skill can be drowned out except over the very long term. “If you win a single hand,”, I wrote at the time, “it’s meaningless to attribute it to skill. If you’re in profit after 100,000 hands, you can say with reasonable confidence that you’re a skilled player.”

In Warhammer, too, it feels as though the outcome of the decision is what determines whether a decision was the right one. But these are games of chance – explicitly random. That is, I think, why games of chance are important. Because you know they’re random, it’s easier to detach the outcome from the process. In other areas of life, without the training that games of chance give you, it’s not so easy.

A stock trader might become a billionaire off a few lucky trades. Are they good? We don’t know: millions of traders make trades every day; some of them will be lucky. A company runs a huge profit for a couple of years: is that because it’s well-run? We don’t know; it could just be survivorship bias. Warren Buffet clearly is genuinely skilled: we have years of data to show that. But if someone has one good year, that might just be fluke.

We have an inbuilt need to explain success and failure. And sometimes that’s important. But in some situations, huge outcomes hinge on tiny moments; a dice-roll, in essence, but a hidden dice-roll. The recent Batley & Spen by-election, for instance: Labour won it by 323 votes. In an electorate of 80,000, that’s essentially coming down to a coin-toss. If Labour had lost by 323 votes, it would have been a huge blow to Keir Starmer’s leadership; he might have faced a challenge. But in reality it would have told us nothing different about his success or otherwise.

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Or football. As I write this, the memory of England going out on penalties is still fresh and painful; Gareth Southgate is being criticised for bringing Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho on in the last minute of extra time to take penalties, and for asking Bukayo Saka, a teenager, to take the last one. They all missed.

But before the shootout, Jermaine Jenas, the BBC co-commentator, was saying that Sancho was probably being brought on because he had the fearlessness of youth. The outcome was negative, but was the process wrong? As this guy says, in 1996 people got angry with Terry Venables for leaving penalty-takers like Robbie Fowler on the bench; in 2021 we get angry with Southgate for doing the opposite. And it works both ways: at 1-0 up against Germany, Thomas Müller ran clean through after a misplaced pass from Raheem Sterling; he should have scored but put his shot just wide of the post. He would probably make that shot five times out of six; he rolled a one. Sometimes you do.

People then make narratives about it. If the Tories had won Batley & Spen, we’d have been told it was because the Hancock affair wasn’t cutting through, or because “woke” issues were alienating the Labour base. Labour won, so the ground game was strong, or Kim Leadbetter was an engaging candidate. 

Likewise: if Müller scores, our defence isn’t good enough; if Rashford does (and his penalty sent the keeper the wrong way and was only a couple of inches wide), then Southgate’s plan worked. But if you’re trained by games of chance, then you can think: OK, sometimes you roll a one; sometimes the coinflip comes up heads. 

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There’s an obvious counter-argument: dice actually are random, whereas football and politics are not. But that’s wrong. Technically, dice are not random: when you throw them, you impart a certain amount of spin, you give them a particular velocity, they will bounce a certain way. The face they show when they land is not randomly determined: it is determined by how you threw them, by the surface they land on, by how sharp or rounded their corners are, by their density and elasticity. A Laplace’s demon, an all-knowing God, could in theory predict how they bounce, limited only by the apparently true randomness at the quantum heart of the universe. But in reality, as chaos theory tells us, tiny changes in the input make it fundamentally unpredictable.

Similarly, tiny, unnoticeable differences in reality can have major impacts on your outcome. David Foster Wallace, writing about tennis in 2006, talks about the minuscule details a tennis player has to pay attention to: the tiniest difference in the angle of the racquet’s face; hitting a ball a millisecond earlier or later. Tennis players repetitively, obsessively hit the same shots thousands and thousands of times in training, so that it is second nature, so they can hit it 999 times out of 1,000. But still, a minor irregularity in the court’s surface can change a bounce; a momentary slip can make a shot fail. The difference between a bad player and a good one is that the good one is more able to control randomness, to put the ball into the area they want to more often. But the randomness is still there. If, in Batley & Spen, a few Labour activists had had to self-isolate for Covid, or if the weather had been different, that might have changed the result. 

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If you want to draw conclusions from these things — to say that England should have done X or Labour should have done Y — there are hard limits on how much you can say, from a single data point like a by-election or a cup final. Too much of sports and politics journalism, I think, is finding narratives after the fact, “analysing” events by looking at the results. As in poker, you need more data than a single hand can provide. 

We suck at spotting randomness. The whole enterprise of science is a careful, and only partially successful, attempt to get past our innate human need to see patterns where they often are not. But one way of training your own ability to think about processes, not outcomes, to see the hidden dice rolls behind the events that shape our world, is to play something with real dice rolls. It doesn’t have to be Warhammer; Dungeons & Dragons will do, or poker, or bridge; cards do the job just as well as dice. But I do recommend Warhammer, because you can learn about randomness while also smashing someone to pieces with a gigantic poisonous scythe. Which makes it a lot more fun. I’m going to preorder the new edition.

When most people think of games played around a table, they probably think of the staples of childhood: Scrabble, Ludo, Monopoly.  Those, according to a scrape of Google data done by a sharp-eyed PR firm, are among the world’s top searches for boardgames online.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Monopoly as much as the next student of rentier capitalism, and its lessons are quite relevant to the era of permanent quantitative easing, asset-price inflation and a political class that refuses to address the resultant undercurrent of injustice and anger.

The others are fun too; Ludo, in particular, is delightfully spiteful: the German incarnation — mensch ärgere dich nicht (“Don’t get angry”) is a rather more useful name than the English. Scrabble is OK, but tends to encourage trade in the false coin of sesquipedalianism. Longer words aren’t a sign of cleverness, just proof that you don’t know how to communicate clearly. Short words are good. And can score higher.

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Overall though, I’m afraid I can’t get excited about games where the dice have just six sides and you can actually see what’s happening on the table in front of you. Boardgames are OK, but they are not the game.

For the benefit of civilians, the game is Dungeons and Dragons, and it taught me everything I know about politics, government and journalism. Well, maybe not quite everything, but quite a lot. Enough to sustain a 20-year career in and around Westminster, anyway.

D&D — or AD&D, if you, prefer the Advanced version — is not a boardgame, in that there is no board. There isn’t really anything, in fact, beyond a shared story gradually told between friends over hours, days and months. And dice. Lots of dice, including some quite odd-looking ones.

The lack of physical stuff is arguably the most important, and interesting, thing about D&D and other pure role-playing games. All you have is the story, generally about a quest or adventure undertaken by the characters you imagine yourself to be in a world that exists only in the imagination. There are no screens, no sound effects. There aren’t even any little toy soldiers, painted or otherwise.

Those little toy soldiers are, these days, a big deal. Most of them are made by Games Workshop, a little British business now worth £3 billion and which first brought D&D to the UK. But don’t mistake Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K minifigure wargaming for something like AD&D. No matter what wannabes such as Tom Chivers might tell you, Wargamers aren’t true nerds, because they still cling to something physical in the real world, and often show some degree of physical aptitude by painting their figures quite nicely.

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By Tom Chivers

Real geeks have no truck with that sort of physical reality, and rubbish painting skills too. All we have is stories, stories that go on for months or even years.

What do you need to sustain interest in that shared narrative for long periods of time? Time, obviously, and often an absence of better alternatives. All those jokes in the Big Bang Theory and elsewhere about socially awkward males playing Dungeons and Dragons because they can’t talk to girls? All utterly accurate, at least in my late-1980s experience.

But more than that, to happily immerse yourself in a prolonged exercise in shared storytelling, you need language, a love of and respect for language and its power. You must understand how to construct a world solely through words, to use language to persuade other people to imagine and inhabit that world, accepting its rules, systems and ways.

Politics usually comes down to words too. Elections are generally won by the people who can tell the best story about the world — or about a world, one that does not yet exist. I wouldn’t want to take this too far, but it’s not hard to look at Brexit and see a national adventure into the unknown in search of undiscovered treasure, led by people who fancy their chances of rolling a 20-sided dice and getting the 20 they need to bring down a dragon in flight.  You may not be surprised to learn that one Michael Gove is a former D&D player.

Nor is he alone at Westminster in that. Some people, perhaps swayed by bad TV and films, sometimes have the idea that politics is dominated by heroic over-achievers, the sort of men and women who in school days were captain of a sports team, prefects, handsome, popular and all the rest of it. And while there are a few such paragons around SW1, they’re quite rare, largely  because the cool, pretty kids often grow up to live happy and fulfilled lives and have no need of the validation that politics can offer.

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We nerds, however, know that Westminster is our place, the home of awkward, clever kids with something to prove, or just a need to put to use the skills we learned rolling funny dice and telling stories about heroes and monsters.

And be in no doubt, those skills are useful and relevant to many aspects of government and politics. The funny dice matter: once you understand the chances of repeatedly rolling 16 or higher to hit an armoured storm giant with your longsword, then a 7 or 8 on an eight-sided dice to do the thing real damage, then you find probability and statistics familiar, if not simple. I suspect that a fair few of the “superforecasters” venerated by a certain Dominic Cummings got their start playing the game.

Then there’s rules. An imagined world needs rules, lots of them. That may seem strange for an exercise in fantasy, but as with good fantasy and sci-fi writing, the fantasy of an RPG must have an internally consistent logic. If someone can just say “I transform into a helicopter and fly away”, there really is no point. So AD&D teaches players to know and understand — and usually follow — rules, because without those rules, the game makes no sense.

This, I and others have found, helps you understand political life both in terms of system and culture. Honestly, if you can absorb rules on character classes, combat, stealth, advancement through acquiring treasure and the process for making a magical axe, the Westminster processes that others find arcane (second reading, committee stage, report, third reading….) are perfectly straightforward.

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Likewise the seemingly strange, unwritten rules of political life and death, the words you cannot say and the words you must say to survive. The idea that a “gaffe” based on a few choice phrases can have disastrous career consequences makes perfect sense if you’ve lived in an imagined world where saying the wrong thing to an 18th-level lich lord brings a rain of fire down on your head.

Westminster’s D&D community has been quiet for many years, not unreasonably ashamed of youthful misadventures with polyhedral dice and pretend paladins. But I am quietly confident that change is coming. The year of the boardgame and the relentless rise of Games Workshop are all part of a trend that will one day allow us to venture out of the dungeons and into the light. The geek shall inherit the earth.

My old friend was surprised to see me so emotionally invested in the match. It was a bloody hard game not to get invested in: fixture congestion meant that Liverpool had to field the reserves — four teenagers started the match — and it ended up 5-5, with Liverpool winning on penalties. Eventually, perhaps because I was constantly distracted and staring over his shoulder, he asked me something that I’d never been asked before and which I had to think a lot about. “Tell me,” he said: “Explain it to me. Why do you like football? What do you get out of it?”

He, like me, had been a Warhammer-playing, model-aeroplane-building nerd at school; neither he nor I had had the slightest interest in football. Nerds of a certain kind have a sort of superior attitude towards sports in general and football in particular — they call them/it “sportsball”, and sniff dismissively about people competing to see how hard they can kick a ball. (“But if all that’s true, then football … is a game!”)

I was probably one of them; but in my late teens and early 20s I changed. I’ve now been a Liverpool fan for more than 20 years, having gone to university in the city. I’m a bit of a plastic, in that I’ve only been to a dozen or so matches in that time, but it matters to me; I am grumpier when they lose and happier when they win.

But I don’t think I’d ever stopped to think about why. It is objectively quite strange that I invest a small but real amount of my happiness in the number of times a group of men whom I have never met can put a ball into a net 180 miles away from me. It’s a medium-sized part of my identity; I say “we” won at the weekend, as though I had anything to do with it. It’s as if, in Mitchell and Webb’s words, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and started talking about how “we” had defeated the Nazis. 

Now that football’s back, and Liverpool are champions, I wanted to look at the answer I gave my friend; to try and interrogate what it is that I get from it. In short, I wanted to try to explain football to nerds.

The most obvious explanation for football fandom is that it’s a sort of emotional gambling. You bet a small amount of psychological wellbeing on whether your team will win or not. If they don’t, it makes you sad; if they do, it makes you happy. A good win in the early Saturday kickoff can genuinely improve the mood of the whole weekend; conversely, a crucial defeat can make me several percentage points less fun to be around. 

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There’s a bit of research that suggests that football fans suffer more pain from losses than they get joy from winning, and that’s been taken as meaning that football fandom is irrational, as in a rational actor would not make the choice to be a football fan in the first place; much as it is economically irrational to play blackjack, because in the long run the house always wins. I’m sceptical of happiness/wellbeing research, but intuitively that feels about right — nonetheless, I think it misses the point.

At the risk of ending up in Pseuds’ Corner, the utilitarian calculus around football fandom isn’t limited to the individual games, and whether they add or subtract to your Happiness Points. There’s more going on. 

First, here are long-term payoffs. Sure, most league seasons are a trudge, and most cup runs end in disappointment, but every so often something happens which you treasure forever, and which becomes part of your memory of a period of your life. A few games — England thrashing Germany 5-1 in 2001; Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul in 2005; last season’s extraordinary turnaround against Barcelona — become joyful little memories partly separate from the real-world stuff of work and family, that contain all their value within them.

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Then there is the obvious point that watching the games themselves has a joy in the form of watching people who are just incredibly good at their jobs. There is a skill to watching football — to appreciating the skill involved (much as there is a skill in appreciating concert pianists, a skill which incidentally I lack entirely). 

This isn’t football-specific. You can get that with anything; the format is somewhat irrelevant. I’m terrible at chess, but I can appreciate a beautiful move or a clever checkmate. If I happened to be a fan of Fortnite I could get it from watching Fortnite matches on Twitch. Or rugby. People being good at stuff is pleasing to see. And sport involves not just physical skill but mental; watching Steph Curry, the basketball star, effortlessly recall details plucked from any of the hundreds of games he’s played is honestly astonishing. His expertise (LeBron James does the same thing) allows him to view the game in such a high-level way that is opaque to those of us who don’t understand it. 

But I think there is a particular beauty in football, especially the sheer, feathery, delicate precision of a beautiful first touch. People talk too much about goals in football. A goal blasted in from 30 yards is impressive, but I think if you want to show someone the aesthetic beauty of the game, the best thing to show them is the way a footballer uses their body to control the ball. 

There’s a pragmatic reason to be a fan, too, which is that football is a sort of lingua franca, especially for men. Its ubiquity makes it valuable. If you’re fluent in it, you have a ready-made topic of conversation with a majority of men (and a significant minority of women) almost anywhere in the world. 

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I went on a river safari in Borneo, on honeymoon in 2012, and was chatting away to the Malaysian porters about how good a signing Robin van Persie was for Man Utd. When you’re put at a table at a wedding with a bunch of people you don’t know, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to strike up a conversation about what’s gone wrong at Arsenal in the last decade or so. Those embarrassing moments when someone comes to fix the boiler and middle-class dads find themselves dropping their aitches and saying “innit” become much less awkward if there’s a mutual appreciation of what a good job Jurgen Klopp’s done.

I have male friends who don’t enjoy football and it’s just that little bit harder for them to find conversation-starter topics with strangers. Relatedly, if you’re a boy who’s good at football, it’s a fairly cast-iron defence against bullying at school. It’s a bit cold-eyed, but for a boy in Britain, there are good practical reasons to be interested in football.

Football has been off for lockdown; Liverpool were just two wins from their first league title in 30 years. But it started again recently. And last week, Man City lost to Chelsea. They did so in hapless style, via a calamitous bit of defending from their own corner, allowing Christian Pulisic to run the length of the pitch and score, and a comedy handball on the line which led to a penalty and red card. That defeat ended even the mathematical possibility that City could retain the Premier League, and handed us the championship.

The circumstances make it all a bit surreal. Liverpool are simultaneously the earliest ever Premier League winners with seven games to spare — and the latest, with the league not decided until 25th June. But I’ll watch them be awarded the trophy at Man City’s ground when they play them on Thursday, and I’ll cheer and drink with friends and it’ll be fun. And that, I’ll explain to my nerd friend if and when I see him again, is what I get out of it.

The shop was the Games Workshop on Tottenham Court Road; the habit was painting plastic spacemen. As a grown man of 36, I was painting little sci-fi figures again, just as I had been when I was 12. Hello everyone; my name is Tom, and I’m a Warhammer addict. 

This means I like to spend hours at a time painting tiny, intricately detailed miniatures with some ludicrous name like Mortarion, Daemon Primarch of the Death Guard, or Belial, Grand Master of the Deathwing, and it is as though I am cut off from the cares of the world. I just care about the paint running off the brush, and the angle of the light. I won’t check my phone, or think about work, or worry about my kids or the coronavirus or Brexit. It’s an addiction, one my wife tolerates but can never understand, but a healthy one. It gives me access to a sort of Zen stillness and flow; I have discovered a genuine skill of which I am fiercely (if abashedly) proud.

I can trace the exact course of my resurgent problem. It was an indirect route, via another old nerdy habit of mine; building model aeroplanes. We took the kids to the RAF Museum in Hendon in early 2017. We wandered around looking at the Vulcan bomber and the Short Sunderland and so on; I mildly disturbed my wife with my ability to name almost every aeroplane on sight (although I got the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk mixed up with the Hawker Typhoon. I’m still embarrassed about it). The eldest kid, three at the time, got upset about not being allowed to sit in cockpits, but I was enthralled.

On the way out via the gift shop, as a bit of nostalgia, I bought an Airfix kit with glue and a few basic paints and paintbrushes. My wife went out one evening and I started sticking it together. It turned out to be bloody difficult. I’d forgotten all the stuff you need; for instance, an anglepoise lamp. I ended up sitting at my kitchen table wearing a mountaineering head-torch and I looked genuinely insane. But it turned out to be a gateway drug. 

For those of you following this micro-saga, my 1st airfix kit in 25yrs is complete & I feel PRETTY GOOD ABOUT IT. Only buggered up one decal pic.twitter.com/ib0lpZQ0J4

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) February 12, 2017

A few months later, in a local toy shop, buying a Brio locomotive for my son, I found a Warhammer 40K starter kit; three little one-inch-high soldiers and, again, the necessary paints and brushes. After that things quickly got out of hand. Second-hand miniatures off eBay kept turning up in the post; I’d rush to the door to intercept them so I didn’t have to explain why I’d bought something called an “Interrogator-Chaplain in Terminator armour” or a “Lord of Contagion”.

Have I lost you, yet? Perhaps I ought to jump back a bit in time here. In 1975, three young men, John Peake, Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson, started a business called Games Workshop. Its initial success was as the first European distributor of Dungeons & Dragons, but in 1983, they created their own game, Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Like D&D, it involved elves and goblins and so on and rolling dice to see how much damage you did. But where D&D involved little groups of warriors completing quests, Warhammer gave you whole armies; you and an opponent would line your miniatures up and do battle, taking turns to fire your catapults or charge your cavalry.

It was all very cod-Tolkien – noble elves and stalwart dwarves, savage orcs and wise mages – but with a difference in tone: the Warhammer world was doomed. The elves, dwarves and the human Empire fought to hold back the forces of destruction, as in Tolkien; but unlike the broadly hopeful if elegiac tales of Middle-Earth, in Warhammer, the bad guys were not going to be stopped.

Then, in 1987, came Warhammer 40,000. It was, essentially, the Fantasy Battle ported into a science-fiction setting: “Eldar” instead of elves, “orks” instead of orcs. And it took the bleakness and turned it up to 11. This was, remember, the 1980s, the time of Judge Dredd and other darkly satirical sci-fi; but this really went all-out. If you’ve ever heard sci-fi described as “grimdark”, that is a direct reference to Warhammer 40K, and its tagline: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” 

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I don’t think I can do justice to the backstory here, but, in essence, the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is a fascistic, backwards, hate-filled hive of xenophobia, obsessed with racial purity and fearful of innovation. Genetically engineered super-warriors slaughter millions in the name of the God-Emperor; a brutal Inquisition tortures anyone suspected of heresy; ordinary people live brief, grim lives as slave workers in violent megacities, or conscripted as cannon-fodder for the Imperium’s endless wars. The regime is fairly accurately described as “Catholic Space Nazis”. 

And, for the avoidance of doubt, those are the good guys. And, again, they’re losing. 

Obviously, I love it. 

Like Fantasy Battle, 40K involves moving little miniatures around on a scenery-covered tabletop. You might be playing as Space Marines (the aforementioned super-soldiers) against an opponent playing Orks; you might have guns with a 24” range, say, and when it’s your turn you roll dice to see if they hit their enemies, and then again to see if they hurt them or if it bounces off their armour. Or they charge into combat and try to hit each other with hilariously over-the-top weapons like chainsaw swords or massive electrified hammers. You can play any mission or scenario you like, from “the winner is whoever kills all the other dudes first” to complex capture-the-flag type situations.

A friend who plays more tabletop games than I do tells me that — in terms of the mechanics — as tabletop games go, it’s middling. It’s kind of fiddly; you have to roll a lot of dice to find out if anything happens and the rules can be confusing. Others, such as the Star Wars X-Wing tabletop game, are much more streamlined.

But the point of the Warhammer games is that they’re not just games. The point is that they’re a hobby. The miniatures come unpainted and unassembled; you have to paint them yourself, and some people do it with astonishing skill. If you want to play, certainly at any Games Workshop store but at most organised events too, you need to have painted them – it’s fine to paint them badly, but grey plastic is frowned upon. The game is only one part of a whole lifestyle; there’s a huge amount of fiction, there are video games of varying quality, beautifully made fan-art, painting competitions, and massive festivals, although the latter, obviously, are getting cancelled.

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And the universe is a mad grand-guignol festival of bloody excess, all towers of skulls and shrieking daemons and psychic superheroes; vast spaceships fighting Patrick O’Brian-style broadside-battles in space or gigantic war-robots with gatling guns the size of skyscrapers. But it’s also a rich and detailed backdrop, perfect for telling stories against. Your little characters in their little battle fit into it neatly: you can have your religious-fanatic Sisters of Battle holding an Imperial shrine against the plague-spreading heretics of the Death Guard, or your slavering xenomorph-like tyranid aliens overrunning a last stand of terrified Imperial Guard, bayonets fixed to their cheap, inadequate rifles, their commissar threatening to execute any man who runs.

Games Workshop has had its ups and downs over the last 40 years. It expanded hugely in its first two decades, but the internet, rival games like Magic: The Gathering, and its own bad behaviour – secrecy, overzealous defence of its copyrights, refusal to listen to its fans – led to a collapse in profits in the first years of the 21st century. But the company has changed. It ended Fantasy Battle and released a follow-up, Age of Sigmar, which had some teething troubles but is now much loved; its eighth edition of 40K streamlined the game significantly; and it opened a community website specifically to let fans share ideas and grievances.

Its stores are one of the few remaining high-street successes, because they don’t really exist to sell miniatures but to provide hubs for local gaming communities. If you’d bought a grand’s worth of shares in the company in 2014, they’d have been worth £14,000 in February. (The coronavirus, inevitably, has hit it, but no worse than the rest of the stock market.)

I don’t play much; only half a dozen times or so since I started again, and one of those was against my sister, who took pity on me. It’s the painting that I enjoy. I think it fills a similar space, psychologically, to knitting, or jogging, or gardening: it requires the absolute attention of one part of your mind, while letting the rest of it wander. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, and focus. Hours can go by. It soothes the soul; problems that seem insurmountable when you start appear, by the time you switch off the anglepoise and put away the brushes, not solved, but somehow solvable. Best of all, I’ve got pretty good.

Just tweeting this so I can link to it! pic.twitter.com/Kjvsku3reI

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) March 16, 2020

It’s not perfect, as a hobby. It’s bloody expensive, for a start (£90!?); and as it’s got bigger, it’s become harder for Games Workshop to maintain the sly, satirical nature; it’s a gigantic business now, and playing it straight sells more. But traces of the old black comedy remain, especially in the gurgling, foetid troops of the plague-god Nurgle, and the cheerfully malevolent orks with their junkyard tanks and comically oversize guns. Besides, spending £50 on some minis that take you 20 hours to paint is probably good value for money, and they’re of incredible quality, all made in Nottingham where the business has its base; it’s a huge, global British success story.

And the best thing of all is its community. It’s so wholesome – hilariously so, given the spectacularly un-wholesome subject matter. The tendency of online communities (from Star Wars to Young Adult fiction to, weirdly, knitting) to turn toxic has been well-documented; gatekeeping and purity spirals. But, at least in the Reddit forums I spend time on, the Warhammer community is gentle and kind. There’s something deeply heartwarming about someone writing in the comments underneath a picture of Abbadon the Despoiler, Chaos Lord of the Black Legion, saying “I love how you’ve got the skulls looking so clean and realistic! Care to share your recipe?” When newbies tentatively show off their first models — blotchy thick paint, mould-lines still visible — experienced painters share helpful tips (“two thin coats!”) and make supportive noises. It’s a male-dominated hobby, predictably, but very welcoming to the many women who do play and paint. 

I don’t know what it is about it that keeps it so friendly. One possibility is the absolute ban on any political discussion: I once shared what seemed to me an interesting post about why the universe was more engaging than the Star Wars one, and was quickly but kindly told to take it down because it included some very minor hypotheses about the political implications. The complete absence of any discussion of Trump, Brexit, or any other hot-button issue might be why everything seems so civil. Or perhaps it’s just that everyone gets their aggression out by shooting lascannons at the enemy’s Keeper of Secrets so they don’t need to scream at each other online, I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, though, I am glad to have it in my life. Community and social contact is going to be at a premium for the next few months; having a bunch of like-minded nerds online telling each other that they’re doing nice work seems like a good start, even if we’re not supposed to meet up to play it. Besides, self-isolation comes easily when you’ve got miniatures to paint. Perhaps my shameful pile of grey plastic will finally start to shrink.