the unassailable weakness of strongmen

here is how they win

Look I don’t love the term either. People keep telling me to stop saying it and yes, okay, I get why it grates. Why should guys like that get credit for being stalwart, stoic, gritty or any version of tough when they are obviously erratic imbeciles lurching from one gratuitous photo op and self-serving untruth fest to the next? The legit rich one is obsessed with Batman for chrissake. I know this because Jill Lepore was talking about it on BBC Radio Four. Jill fucking Lepore! I’m not judging her — she can say what she wants — but it depresses me that the best journalistic minds of my generation are being forced to contend with such substandard material, sifting the ashes for meaning when all the available signs point to chaos and farce.

But I will keep saying it, because I believe in calling it as it is not as I want it to be: They are literally in charge. But also because they operate from a tactical advantage that is virtually unassailable and ignored at our peril. When you come out flailing like a toddler with an actual live-prop-toddler on your shoulders and confuse everyone with chaos, nonsense and lies, you don’t just change the rules of the game, you upend the table. Your opponent is like, Wait, wha? and by time they regroup and think of an appropriate corresponding move, it’s too late. The board’s on the floor, along with the snacks, the mugs, the teapot, the playing bits are scattered round the room. The rules of engagement haven’t just been redrawn, there literally are no rules. As anyone who’s parented a toddler well knows, no matter how weak, illiterate, impulsive and shit-smeared your opponent is, if he’s willing to deploy mayhem in order to get what he wants, you lose by default. There’s no game anymore, it’s just a fight for a knife in the mud.

And Strongmen will always win that kind of fight.

My Uber driver the other night, apropos of nothing: ‘You know, I think he’s not so bad. He’s going to make peace in Ukraine. Stop the fighting. It’s good. Who wouldn’t want that?’

‘Dude, you literally just told me you’re from Yemen!’ There was traffic. We’d been talking for a while.

‘Via Saudi Arabia,’ he said.

Then I remembered he was a dental student driving his brother’s Merc. Leather seats, blue light detailing. I fell silent. Confused. Then he mistook me for American (which I obviously love) and when I corrected him, he apologised so profusely and with such utter disingenuousness I understood that really, at bottom, he was from Wembley Central the same way I’m from Kensal Rise. And we shared a hollow laugh, two immigrants marvelling at the weirdness of the world. How the hell did we end up here together? In a car inching east along the Harrow Road at night. What a world.

I am going through demented and dispiritingly complicated and painful court case at the moment. I don’t write much about it here anymore because I’ve spent years hiving myself off from it emotionally in order to function like a human being, but man. I will tell you this: I feel Zelensky’s pain right now. Honestly I do.

And if there’s one thing I have learned recently, both from lived experience and taking in the general lay of the land,