Much of the response to the movie has been expressed in explicitly political terms which seems to me to say a lot more about the times we live in than the movie itself.

Sure, having a small, frail-looking transman play the role of a warrior doesn’t look credible on paper but this is negated by both the role in the story and the fact that we are, mercifully, spared a violation of our voluntary suspension of disbelief by the fact that Page’s character does not go around destroying Trojan warriors by the dozen with the viciousness only artificial testosterone can deliver. Nor are we taken out of the story to be “educated” about how the ancient Greeks really were dogmatic about the idea that “trans men are men”. Page just plays a minor male part well. That’s it.

The same is not quite true of Nyong’o because rather than playing the roles with respect to the source material, the casting of a black actress as Helen is undeniably evidence of the modern fashion for sacrificing historic immersion for the sake of diversity. Pointing this out is widely regarded as evidence of some sort of prejudice whereas, in my humble opinion, if you are remotely historically educated about the periods of time and civilisations in question, it is impossible not to be distracted by it: I can well remember going to see the Lempicka musical in New York — which I loved and wrote about here — and finding it difficult to immerse myself in scenes about the Russian Revolution, through which my ancestors lived, performed by what looked like the cast of NWA. I shouldn’t complain, really, as my local friend pointed out: “you should be grateful that Lenin’s murdering, raping and pillaging communist goons weren’t portrayed as the good guys!”

But while the characters of Helen and Clytemnestra are important, they are also minor. And they stand out precisely because the rest of the film looks like ancient Greece. It feels more like a creative quirk than yet another example of diversity being rammed down your throat. It helps that, as with Page, Nyong’o’s performance is solid and convincing.

The one criticism that can be made here is that Clytemnestra is for some reason portrayed as Helen’s twin, as big a travesty as Peter Jackson’s inexcusable decision to ruin the character of Faramir in the Lord of the Rings movie adaptation.

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Before the age of Youtube and social media, political and media opponents didn’t have the option of shit-talking each other from the safety of podcast studios. They had to sit across from each other in TV green rooms and then sit together in one room and at least pretend to be talking to each other.

Having done a fair bit of media in my time, I can tell you that meeting the people you’re about to debate in the green room beforehand is an important part of the process. It might be that the extent of what you can discuss without an argument erupting is limited to the weather because it’s 2026 and we can’t seem to agree on what a woman is. But still, you are forced to be civil.

The effect of this you know from your own experience: the way you react to someone accidentally cutting you up in traffic is far less restrained than your response to someone accidentally bumping into you in the street. The action is the same but the level of offence both taken and expressed is not. Why?

Reassured by the physical distance and feeling of safety it provides, we feel comfortable to engage in more confrontational behaviour.

This difference has been recorded in study after study.

Not that you need a study to understand this. The great American philosopher and former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said it best when he said:

“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face.”

This is why when I’ve had disagreements with other people I’ve always tried to engage with them in person. We did this with Jimmy the Giant, a new Left content creator who made a video calling me a “grifter” and eventually apologised and took it down after we had a robust discussion in our studio. We did this with Dave Smith over Israel. With Peter Hitchens over Ukraine. We just did it in a blockbuster upcoming interview with Tony Blair’s former spokesman Alastair Campbell.

I always try to criticise people’s ideas, not them personally, because I know that physical separation is corrosive to public debate. Not only do we feel safe and far from the people with whom we disagree but there is now a giant audience which is not in the room who are watching all the drama. Drama, remember, is, above all, a performance. And in today’s world, you don’t have to play to the audience, you just have to play to your audience. And your audience doesn’t want you to self-moderate. They want you to ramp it up to 11.

A significant portion of the content creator space has realised this which is why we are living in the age of the character. Andrew Tate is the “heel”, a well known character in combat sports from which he hails. Candace Owens is the “entertaining conspiracy loon” character. And Gary Stevenson is the “articulate and courageous champion of the downtrodden” character.

It’s important not to confuse actual articulate and courageous champions of the downtrodden with the characters.

You can help poor people and you can want to help poor people. They are not the same.

The problem with Gary Stevenson is not him as a person. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice guy. It’s just that he doesn’t understand basic economic concepts. Daniel Priestley once spent several minutes trying (and failing) to get Gary to understand the difference between assets and income. This clip is really worth listening to in full even though it feels dry and technical. Just watch Gary's brain short-circuit repeatedly as he — ironically — complains about how much tax he paid when he was making millions as a Citigroup trader.

Winston Churchill famously described his political opponents as “modest men with much to be modest about”. Gary has no such problem: what he lacks in expertise he more than makes up in the complete absence of modesty. He was, after all, “the best trader in the world” according to one Gary Stevenson. A recent article in the FT suggests that, to put it mildly, some of his colleagues didn’t quite see it that way.

Gary has now moved on from his success in the world of finance to being “one of the world's leading experts on inequality”, a title given to him by, well, himself. He appears to have confused his online fame with knowing things. But Gary is a political campaigner, not an expert. He’s the Greta Thunberg of tax.

There’s no denying he has built up a large audience. That makes him an expert in one thing and one thing only: building up a large audience. And it’s true, you can build up a large audience by making good arguments about important issues and offering genuine insight. But you can also do it by pandering to people’s anger and economic illiteracy.

In the words of the great American economist, Thomas Sowell:

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear”.

Gary has done fantastically well out of advocating policies that would make this country poorer on the basis of false claims about the source of the problem he so passionately wants to address.

This was described in extensive detail in a well-referenced post by tax expert Dan Neidle who appeared in Gary’s recent documentary. Neidle sums up his breakdown by saying:

”Gary Stevenson clearly cares deeply about inequality, and passionately wants a wealth tax. But he is uninterested in the detail of either the problem or his solution. He exaggerates his expertise, and his research is sloppy. Given the size of his audience, that's a shame.”

Even the Guardian agrees, publishing a scathing review of the documentary. It’s the Guardian so they still think a wealth tax is a brilliant idea but even they are shocked by how unpersuasive his arguments are when challenged properly and how lost he appears when he comes up against the most basic counterarguments to his well-rehearsed talking points.

Gary thinks he’s Robin Hood, the man who took from the rich and gave to the poor. There’s only one problem with all of this: Robin Hood didn’t take from the rich. He took from the Sheriff of Nottingham who was - pay attention now - a “tax collector and debt enforcer” taxing ordinary citizens to within an inch of their lives.

Robin Hood is not a story about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It’s a story about resisting a tax regime that is starting to take the piss.

The weird thing is, Gary knows what Britain’s actual problem is.

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Naturally, this summer being actually unusually warm, a new level of insanity has been reached with a debate about the need to prevent people from using air conditioning. Some councils have gone so far as to force residents to remove air conditioning they’d installed.

The standard attack line against anyone attempting to introduce sanity into this debate is that they are a climate “denier”. To be very clear, I do not “deny” the climate, whatever that means. Nor do I deny that in recent decades, average global temperatures have increased and look set to continue. And, while I am skeptical about the predictive power of climate modelling, for the sake of argument, I am perfectly happy to accept that human activity is a significant contributor to the changing climate. I am, in other words, a “climate accepter”.

But there are a number of things I refuse to accept because they are dangerous, irresponsible, counterproductive lies.

First, I believe we must look at current world temperatures in the right context. You’ve no doubt seen some version of this graph which shows just how terrified you must be:

What you probably have never seen is a graph of average temperatures over a far more meaningful period, for example 1 billion years:

Do current temperatures look unprecedented to you?

Zooming in, here are average July temperatures in the British Isles since the emergence of Homo Sapiens 300,000 years ago:

For roughly 280,000 of our 300,000 years on earth, Britain was either under an ice sheet or barely habitable tundra. The last interglacial — around 125,000 years ago — was warmer than today. We know this because we had hippopotamuses frolicking in the Thames and elephants roaming the countryside.

Look more closely at the last 50,000 years:

Around 11,700 years ago, global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius in the space of a few decades. Not centuries. Decades. The climate can move with extraordinary speed entirely independently of human activity. The Younger Dryas cold snap that preceded it — a sudden plunge back to near-glacial temperatures that lasted over a thousand years — ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer in ice cores. If that rate of temperature change were happening today, in either direction, there would not be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria.

During the Roman conquest of Britain 2,000 years ago, they grew grapes as far north as Hadrian’s Wall which separated England from Scotland. The Medieval Warm Period that followed was warm enough that the Vikings colonised Greenland and farmed it — which is why they called it Greenland and not “Fuck-Me-It’s-Freezing-Land.”

Then came the Little Ice Age. The Thames froze so regularly between 1300 and 1800 that Londoners held “Frost Fairs” on it — markets, ox roasts, and funfairs on the frozen river. The last one was in 1814. None of these events make it into the standard climate presentation. They are inconvenient not because they disprove warming, but because they demolish the claim that current temperatures are unprecedented and that temperature stability is the natural order of things.

The first thing we need to get into our heads is that neither the current temperature nor the rate of change in temperature are historically unprecedented.

The second point I wish the reality deniers would accept is this:

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The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that “woke ideologues” in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good. On the fringes of the Right, some even murmur of various theories of the “Great Replacement” which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-world immigration. Whatever the exact flavour this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons.

Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology (hating immigrants/being racist etc) rather than reality.

What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Neather explained, wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of Conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, continued to ramp it up. Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000.

It’s also true that some people don’t like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to that infamous far-right, anti-immigrant rag The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world.

Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what’s happening, often on purpose.

My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities.

First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing. I’ve only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time. Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favour of these changes. But that’s partly because most of the people who were concerned have left. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs. You don’t have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades.

In that same timespan, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain’s GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007, before the Great Financial Crisis.

Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country: we don’t evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it. A household income of £100,000 per year is high (by British standards, at least - more on this later) but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on £100,000 is in a very different position to a family of 5 who are effectively getting £20,000 a year each.

The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws to top up your “prosperity” with their pension? When described like this, it sounds, frankly, insane, yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivised to do. They are judged on the country’s total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you’re busy strangling your economy with Net Zero, high taxes and endless regulations? Bring in more bodies.

This really isn’t complicated to understand so why do so many people in Britain, who clearly feel the economic pain, nonetheless refuse to see it? To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivised politicians to deceive them about what’s actually happening? Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive (but false) idea that they are struggling because “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.

A report this week, however, has opened my eyes to another reason - one I had never considered:

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Konstantin

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Now, you might be thinking: look how “right wing” Konstantin has become. Why does anyone care whether a few unrepresentative areas have a lot of people from a particular community living there? After all, this tends to happen when groups of people move from country to country. People are not atomised individuals, especially in more traditional societies. British settlers who moved to the New World didn’t move in groups of 3 either. A lot of immigration happens in clusters. It’s why so many big cities have a Chinatown. I’m not against Chinatowns, but then again, I’ve never seen a British politician campaigning in Chinese, and the food is incredible.

I am aware, as I write this, that to some American readers this might seem a strange thing to take issue with. After all, there are many parts of the US where you’ll get by just as easily with Spanish as you will with English. But there is a big difference between Britain and America as a British-born-Pakistani Uber driver once explained to me in Los Angeles.

“British people aren’t racist,” he said. “It’s just space: Britain is a small country, America is a big country. When you move to America you’re not taking someone else’s space.”

This reflects in the linguistic differences too: when you become an American citizen, you’re called a “first-generation American”. When you become a British citizen, you’re a “first generation immigrant”. I’m not complaining - that’s what I call myself because that’s a cultural difference between Britain and America.

This difference is partly caused by something else too - America displaced its native population and replaced it with waves of colonists from different parts of Europe and later immigrants from all over the world. With the exception of the people brought there against their will, they all effectively took the land from someone else. Whether your ancestors did the initial taking or moved more recently, you still benefit from that land being taken by living on it. The native population of North America is dwarfed by the more recent arrivals. I say “more recent” and not “recent” because when it comes to land, someone always took it from someone else. With the exception of Australian aboriginals, there are no people in the world who can claim they were the first modern humans to settle on land they currently occupy outside a handful of tiny, isolated island communities. Everyone else took the land they currently live on from someone else. And because Americans have a collective sense of being historically recent arrivals, it’s just that much harder for them to deny other people the American Dream their great-grandparents sought, provided they do it legally.

As I’ve written before, until very, very recently, Britain was a highly ethnically and culturally homogenous society. Your opinion of whether that’s good or bad is unimportant for the purposes of what I’m saying here. The fact is, in the lifetime of almost everyone alive today, London and other British cities have gone from being overwhelmingly populated by native Brits to being majority minority. In 1991, 35 years ago, London was estimated to be 80% White British. By 2021, thirty years later, it was 36.8%. Over 75% of the country’s population is over the age of 35. This dramatic change happened in the lifetimes of three out of four people in Britain today. That’s not a political statement - it’s a fact.

Forget about the skin colours and races of the people involved. When European settlers came to North America and within a couple of generations became the more populous people on the Eastern seaboard of today’s United States, on a scale from 1 (dissatisfied) to 10 (delighted), how happy do you think the natives were?

“Konstantin, you can’t possibly compare the horrors inflicted on the native population of North America by a combination of brutal warfare, deadly European disease and forced displacement and ethnic cleansing,” I hear you say.

You’re right; no reasonable person would make that comparison. But say the colonists had moved to America because a handful of Native American leaders had welcomed them in despite the repeatedly expressed wishes of their citizens? Britain voted against mass immigration in 2010, 2015, 2016 with Brexit, 2017, 2019 and 2024, when they punished the Tories for letting immigration spin out of control. So, in our example, say there was no war, no violence and the displacement happened entirely peacefully and without coercion. Would you concede that in that situation quite a lot of Native Americans might have a few questions about whether their leaders made a better decision than the one they voted them in to make?

This is why I didn’t agree with Sir Jim Radcliffe using the word “colonisation” to describe what’s happened in Britain. But it’s also why I refuse to criticise him for it. Like all of us, he is trying to feel his way towards the right word to describe what’s happened in much of Europe in the last few decades. It’s hard because what’s happened is completely unprecedented.

Never in the history of our countries have our rulers decided that opening the borders to so many people from the rest of the world was a good idea. Indeed, at any other point in human history, the suggestion that we should pursue this course of action would have been met with bemusement to put it very, very mildly. It’s happened. In a very short period of time. Not only without the consent of the British people, but in direct contravention of their wishes.

Words like “invasion” and “colonisation”, which the edgelordy wing of the internet is so fond of using, sound like the people your anger is directed at are the immigrants themselves. This is why the #bekind brigade keep claiming that people with concerns about immigration are “demonising immigrants”. But 95% of the anger I see is directed at the people who did this: British politicians of all 3 major parties.

I don’t hate other people for wanting to come here. Britain is wonderful. Why wouldn’t they?

I don’t even hate the politicians who have done this. Some of them, at least, have the excuse of being incompetent and naive.

The people I am starting to hate, however, are the liars and the hypocrites who want to have it both ways:

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This is why, the Polymarket odds for Starmer leaving vary so widely between him leaving in the next couple of months (unlikely) and leaving by the end of the year (very likely).

Second, and equally obviously, this entire scandal confirms something that anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear already knew: Labour is utterly devoid of talent. Even a weak and damaged Prime Minister will linger on because his potential replacements are, hard as that may be to believe, even less impressive. Indeed, his appointment of Mandelson was itself a symptom of the same problem: the Labour party is so short of serious operators that appointing a convicted paedophile’s best friend seemed like a good idea. David Lammy, who in opposition described President Trump as a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath“, is this country’s Foreign Secretary whose most important job is to establish a productive working relationship with the US Administration. Most of Labour’s front bench should be stacking shelves at Lidl. Instead, they’re running the country.

Finally, and still equally obviously, the fallout from this episode has revealed in writing something that we all knew logically but had not previously heard a senior Labour figure say out loud: they are terrified of the Muslim vote. In an attempt to distance himself from Mandelson, Health Secretary Wes Streeting released their private WhatsApp exchanges. Hidden among these was a telling comment:

“I fear we’re in big trouble here - and I am toast at the next election. We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51% Muslim, Ilford S) to a Gaza independent. At this rate I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats. There isn’t a clear one answer to the question: why Labour?

Labour’s chickens are coming home to roost. For years, they fostered, encouraged, and profited from religious sectarianism. A significant number of the seats they hold were won by en bloc Muslim votes. Labour naively believed that these votes would stay with them no matter what, provided they continue to say and do nothing to offend this “community”. Their silence on grooming gangs, their failure to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and their aggressive push to criminalise thought crime under the guise of combatting “Islamophobia” are just some of the surface consequences.

The problem, as they have discovered, is that unlike the Labour Party, whose only guiding principle is political expediency, the Muslim “community” has a clear and well-defined political agenda.

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The programme was recorded as Nadhim Zahawi was in the process of being sacked as Conservative Party Chairman because he had failed to declare that HMRC was in the middle of an investigation into his personal tax affairs when he was being appointed to various ministerial positions.

This anecdote alone gives you a flavour of the sorts of concerns many have raised about the increasing Toryfication of Reform. Last night it was confirmed that another Tory MP, Andrew Rosindell had defected to Reform, bringing the number of Reform MPs to 7, of whom more than half are now Tory defectors (Lee Anderson, Danny Kruger, Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell).

The worry for many is that as conservative refugees become more numerous than “native” reformers within the party, the centre of gravity will shift away from Reform’s radical agenda towards the very policies and personalities they so thoroughly rejected at the last election. Reform’s defiant position against the failed status quo was what won them their legion of supporters. Now, some feel they’re cosying up to it. Personnel is policy, after all, and having forced out tough-talking right-wingers like Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib, Reform appears to be going slightly vegan.

It is rare for me to be accused of naive optimism, but, in this instance, I do not actually share these concerns for a number of reasons which we’ll come to shortly. But first, and much more importantly, we have to recognise that Reform has no choice but to continue salvaging what they can from the rotting carcass of the Conservative Party.

Why? Because Britain is not America.

Our electoral system does not allow a charismatic leader with a small band of acolytes to storm to power in the way that President Trump did with just JD Vance, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy at his side. To become Prime Minister, Nigel Farage has to have 650 men and women stand as candidates in constituencies across the country and more than half of them to actually be elected. Even now, when much of the public is fed up with the status quo and Kier Starmer enjoying the lowest favourability ratings in history, having a Reform rosette pinned on you will not guarantee victory in a specific constituency, especially to an unknown, politically-inexperienced candidate.

Once elected, that MP will be faced with the reality that standing as an MP is almost the exact opposite of being an MP. A political campaign is about making speeches, knocking on doors and selling yourself to the public. But once the sale is made, your constituents need you to solve their problems. Making witty comebacks on TV requires an entirely different skillset to filling in potholes. And metaphorical potholes are no small matter, nor one to worry about once the election is in the bag. The only way Reform can succeed as a political project is to win the war of the next election and then win the peace by actually delivering both locally and nationally.

Which brings us to the final reason why Reform has no choice.

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