Seb Merrick

ZELENSKYY: War no longer has distance. Drones already fly 3,000–5,000 km today, and soon they'll reach 10,000 km. Every day, Ukraine faces 350–500 drone strikes. Imagine any country dealing with that. No continent is safe anymore. Distance is now a matter of months, not decades.

Both Russia and the United States -- both the Kremlin and the Trump administration -- have endorsed Viktor Orbán for a sixth term in office. Both are campaigning for him, in their own ways. This is ... meaningful. A piece from me, for your consideration. thenextmove.org/p/putin-and-tr…

In response to Starmer’s declaration of independence from Trump in relation to the Iran war - his refusal to join offensive strikes against the Islamic theocracy - his ministerial colleagues are both reassured and anxious. “It’s landed quite well with the public, don’t you think?” one said to me. Opinion polls would corroborate, namely that a majority of British people are relieved we are not formal participants in the attacks on Iran itself. And although it is not comfortable for many to hear an American president denigrate a British prime minister as Trump does daily at the moment, the operational co-operation between British and US military and intelligence has not been impaired - or at least not yet. That is what I am told by officials whose only skin in this game is British security, and have no political reason to shore up Starmer. However after two and a half weeks of the Trump and Israeli induced chaos engulfing the Middle East, the impact on our daily lives is not yet tangible - but will be soon enough. Senior members of the government, like me, believe financial and commodity markets are under-pricing the severity of the impact of Iran’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital supply waterway for oil, gas, fertiliser, helium and so on. The point, as one minister, put it to me, is that tankers that left the Gulf shortly before the war started on 28 February have not yet arrived in Europe - because passage takes between three and five weeks, depending on their size. So Europe has not yet experienced any disruption to physical supplies. But that shock to energy and other supplies is about to hit, and will endure for many weeks, probably months - even if, against all evidence, Trump is able to claim something he can semi-plausibly describe as victory any time soon. Apart from anything else, the threat from Iranian drones and mines in the Strait probably won’t vanish, even if Trump declares his peace, because it is not at all clear that Tehran has central control of all the Iranian militias. The process of rebuilding confidence in the security of the Strait will not be easy. And anyway production facilities in the Gulf that have been switched off can’t be switched on overnight. So although the Business and Energy departments are being reassured by chemicals manufacturers and petrol retailers and other relevant businesses that they won’t run out of vital supplies this week or next, that is obvious and of limited utility. The economic pain is coming. And the only questions are about severity - bad or very bad - and duration. The political point for the PM is it is his responsibility to protect the living standards and quality of life of British people. And even if our looming hardship is largely Trump’s fault, it’s Starmer who will be held accountable by voters for whether he is protecting them appropriately and effectively. It is worth noting that the massive rise in the cost of living in the last parliament was largely the result of Covid and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and yet the Tories were massacred at the last election (though of course the incompetence of Truss’s mini budget didn’t help them). This is another way of saying that just as Starmer has acknowledged the UK has a material interest in keeping the peace in Ukraine, if a ceasefire with Putin is ever agreed, the same holds true of the Strait of Hormuz and the UK more generally. But if some kind of stability returns to the Gulf, and British ships and planes are deployed there to maintain that stability, that will be a challenge to the government - because it will seriously deplete military resources available for Ukraine’s “coalition of the willing”, policing the so-called High North of the Arctic and the many other regions vulnerable to conflict and instability. 1/2

Seize it with two hands...

Why did England kick that ball???? #6nations

Great to hear Nigel Kennedy. Just discussing his 1984 concerts... as you do (that's the kind of impact some performers have) I saw Kennedy at Royal festival hall on 20 June '84 playing Beethoven. He played Elgar there 5 July. Can he remember at which one he did a jazzy encore?

54%... for Farage on a large number of votes. Few hours to go. It's only an X poll. But.

Piss poor take from Polanski in London Assembly chamber. In a debate on Iran, he supports a comparison made between killing Khamenei and making a matyr of the Pope. Another speaks with horror at this comparison.

Officially Europe’s No.1 city 🏆👏🏾 London is thriving: dynamic, diverse and safer than many of its US rivals, while continuing to top global rankings. Our capital remains a global business hub and cultural powerhouse ⬇️ worldsbestcities.com/rankings/europ…

@faisalislam I cycle to work in Bloomsbury. There's scarcely any traffic on my route in at 8am. I walk around the west and and the city like it's a village. The Europeans I work with love London. The music and theatre and culture - of all kinds - is astounding, the schools are awesome.

Went to first West End musical in years with my two youngest today… The centre of London was heaving with visitors, in a way unrecognisable from the image percolated on this site… The stats underline this… West End has fully recovered and more from pandemic and now has overtaken Broadway on tickets sold - millions more, and more tickets sold than the Premier League… This isn’t mirrored in all visitor attractions but seems an interesting and resounding success. Industry reports interesting new trends such as very last minute ticket purchases. Ticket prices do seem extortionate/ dynamically priced… but the stats suggest they are down a bit in real terms. British Museum visitors at a 10 year high of 6.5 million… Visitors generally fully recovered from pandemic, interestingly driven by domestic tourists and North Americans… seemed pretty clear that summer 2025 for example, London was world capital of live music. Comes day after the Mayor of London wrote to Anthropic to come to London after their troubles with the Trump Administration and a marked change in the vibe around the investment in AI and tech… While there’s obvious some challenges in any modern day mega city, and in Britain right now, strikes me that the stats show taking your cues from the mildly bizarre cultivated campaign against Britain and our capital on this site is likely to lead to erroneous perceptions. Interested in any insights as to how the west end has overtaken the premier league and Broadway… and how other parts of UK have fared - as I’ve written before visitor numbers to places like Manchester are also booming re football, unis and now the music at the once laughed at Coop Live… PS yes it was Wicked. And it was good.👍🏽 🧙

Loving all the great London stories from the last few weeks 👇🏽 London’s been ranked a top place in the world to raise children. Tech and AI companies are thriving in the capital. Oxford Street will be pedestrianised. A new open water swimming spot has been planned for the Thames. The list goes on. London is the greatest city in the world.

I've covered information technology since the 1990s and I'm a perennial skeptic on the epoch-making claims made for it. Two months into the agentic revolution, this feels real... thenewworld.co.uk/paul-mason-wil…

I am the Ukrainian skeleton racer who was wrongfully disqualified from the Olympics last month because of my “Memory Helmet.” Tonight in Milano-Cortina, the Paralympic Games are opening. The Committee has bizarrely permitted Russian soldier-athletes to participate under the Russian flag. The head of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) literally stated that they don’t care about what Russian soldiers did in Ukraine. The problem is that we do care. They are killing Ukrainians on the battlefield, bombing our cities, and committing genocide. Now, with this step of allowing them to compete, the IPC is giving them the opportunity to continue committing genocide by spreading Russian narratives with Russian flags and symbols. They try to manipulate the situation by pointing out that the movement started after World War II, but during World War II the Olympic Games were cancelled, and German athletes were not invited and did not take part in the Games until 1952. It looks like the head of the IPC doesn’t know the history of the Olympic and Paralympic movement at all. What a shame. This whole story is just getting worse and worse.

Yeah. Worth being very alert. Could be.

If reports are accurate that pro Trump activists are circulating a draft executive order declaring Chinese interference in 2020 and proposing a national emergency to expand presidential control over voting, including banning mail ballots and voting machines, then Europe is not shocked. Europe has seen this movie before. Many times. In multiple languages. With different uniforms. Across the continent there is a long institutional memory of how democracies erode. It rarely begins with tanks. It begins with narratives about stolen elections. It begins with emergency powers framed as temporary. It begins with claims that only one leader can restore legitimacy. Europeans recognize the choreography because their own history forced them to study it in painful detail. When someone proposes expanding executive authority over the electoral system itself, alarm bells are not subtle. They are deafening. What is surprising to many Europeans is not the proposal. It is that large parts of the United States still experience this as unthinkable. For years, media ecosystems closely aligned with Trump have rehearsed the language of fraud, foreign interference, and illegitimacy. The groundwork has been laid methodically. Claims repeated. Institutions questioned. Courts framed as partisan. Election officials portrayed as enemies. From the outside, the escalation feels incremental rather than sudden. Europe has warned about democratic backsliding for years. The pattern is familiar: delegitimize the vote, centralize authority, frame opposition as existential threat, invoke emergency powers. It is procedural before it is dramatic. Legal before it is violent. By the time the violence appears, the narrative architecture is already built. And January 6 remains the hinge point. Many Americans still treat it as an aberration, a chaotic day that spiraled. Europeans tend to see it as a stress test that revealed how far rhetoric had already moved the boundary of acceptable behavior. It was shocking. It was chaotic. But it did not emerge from nowhere. Political ecosystems do not spontaneously combust without oxygen. Speculation about foreign forces fighting to “get back” the United States may sound theatrical. In reality, democracies do not rescue each other with armies. They influence through pressure, alliances, trade, and legitimacy. If the United States drifts toward emergency rule over elections, the confrontation will be political, economic, and institutional long before it is military. NATO is built to defend territory, not adjudicate internal constitutional crises. The real question is not whether this is shocking. The question is whether Americans now see the pattern as clearly as outsiders do. Democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic act. They change incrementally, justified step by justified step, each one defended as necessary. Europe recognizes the pattern because it paid for the lesson in the past. The uncertainty now is whether the United States believes it is exempt from history.

Just watched Oz's important documentary that brings human understanding to the start of the war 4 years ago. Only? Already? Still a daily reality. Thank you Ukrainian heros.

@OzKaterji Done. Happy to chip in. Thanks for your work Oz.

If you found the film useful or informative, please consider buying me a coffee or two and add to the fund to make a new film someday. Cheers! ko-fi.com/ozkaterji

My feature-length documentary The Battle For Kyiv is available in full on Twitter for free for the next 48 hours: x.com/OzKaterji/stat…

I'm proud of the way the whole of British mainstream politics has stood with Ukraine - only the Putinists of Reform, Your Party and the Morning Star have disgraced themselves