Too Much to Follow, Too Little to Stick

A £5 million gift, endless scandals, and the political strategy of exhaustion

Since starting my new job in March, and after my dad passing away, I made the conscious decision to disengage a bit more frequently from the state of politics in the country.

Not completely disengage, I should clarify¹ - but to focus the lens out a bit. To take a moment to digest what I’m reading, hearing and seeing instead of the reactive state I’ve been writing in for the past several years.

Part of that has just been… life.

This week, for example, I found myself in Leeds for the first time for far too short a trip, but long enough to realise I quite like it. There’s something about Leeds - the mix of old industry and new energy, the slightly understated confidence - that really just made me feel welcome, and made me feel like I should come back properly, not just pass through like a guilty commuter who’s only there for a meeting and a Pret.

At the same time, my fur daemon decided to audition for a minor medical drama. She’s recovering now, thankfully - back to eating, glaring, and reclaiming every soft surface in the house as her personal kingdom - but there was a solid 48 hours there that were, to put it mildly, deeply kak².

Yesterday helped quite a bit.

If you hadn’t noticed, we had our first properly warm Saturday of the year where the sunscreen was brought out of its dusty confines of the bathroom drawer. We joined some friends in a garden, had a few drinks in the sun (mine non-alcoholic, I’m trying this).

It was that brief, glorious window where Britain collectively decides that yes, actually, this is why we put up with everything else - and then, inevitably, the sky opened and it started pissing down with rain, because of course it did.

The British summer: two hours of joy, sunshine and laughter, followed instantly by a reminder not to get ideas above your station.

Photo by Anjana Menon on Unsplash

Still. It was good.

All of this rambling basically to say: I haven’t been glued to the news cycle in quite the same way recently. I’ve been dipping in and out. Reading things properly instead of reacting instantly. Letting things digest for a bit before deciding what I actually think.

The exercise has been… instructive.

Because, what I’ve found is that when you step back like that - even slightly - something rather unpleasant becomes clearer.

The news cycle centred on the right wing in this country is not chaos.

Well, no, let me rephrase that: it is chaos - but it’s in no way or form accidental chaos. Not the slightly embarrassing, “someone’s said something daft and will now pretend they didn’t mean it” variety that British politics used to specialise in.

This is an organised mess, and I mean that quite literally.

Take this week. Properly take it in - don’t skim it or scroll past it while half-watching something else. Actually think about it for a second.

Early in the week, we found out about a £5 million “personal gift” to Nigel Farage - a man who has spent the better part of two decades presenting himself as the plucky outsider while being quietly financed like a minor royal - from a donor who already bankrolls most of his political project. Not disclosed in a way that satisfies anyone paying attention. Explained in a way that raises more questions than it answers.

Fine.

In any normal political environment, that’s your story. That’s the thing you talk about for days. The thing journalists worry at until it either unravels or hardens into something defensible. Instead? It arrived with all the impact of a damp biscuit.

Because you’ve just come from one mess when the notification has arrived, you read it get annoyed, and then you’re already onto the next mess.

Another Reform candidate. Another archaeological dig through someone’s Facebook posts. Another combination of racism, conspiracy thinking, or outright aggression dressed up as “just saying what people are thinking.”

A Hastings candidate suggesting Muslims exploit the system. A Welsh candidate quietly disappearing after racist posts emerge. A Scottish candidate suspended almost immediately after selection. A Bolton candidate with a back catalogue that would make even the most forgiving HR department quietly shut the laptop and go for a walk.

And every time, the same weary routine from the top of the party: “I don’t know the details.” “It’s being looked into.” “That was in a previous life.”

Yes, Nigel. Everyone’s got a previous life. Most people just manage not to spend it posting things that would get them escorted out of a family braai.

At some point, you do have to ask: is this a failure of vetting, or is this just the vetting working exactly as intended? Because it keeps happening. Not occasionally. Not unusually. Reliably. Like the bins, if the bins occasionally yelled racism into the internet.

Then there’s Staffordshire, the perfect illustration of what happens when all of this stops being theoretical and becomes someone’s actual council.

Three leaders in roughly 100 days. The first one gone. Then the second. Then the third, all caught up in racism scandals - each one a fresh row, each one a fresh promise that this time would be different. A fourth councillor accused within days of a “zero tolerance” pledge that aged like milk left in direct sunlight.

This isn’t a campaign trail embarrassment - this is governance. Actual services. Actual people trying to live their lives while the people running their council are consumed by an endless cycle of revelations and recriminations.

If you were actively trying to demonstrate that you are not ready for the dull, unglamorous business of governance - the bins, the potholes, the planning applications, social care, all the things that actually matter to people’s daily lives - it’s difficult to imagine doing a more thorough job than this. It goes beyond incompetence and becomes a spectacular, cascading failure that suggests the entire operation is fundamentally broken³.

And just as you’re digesting that - or at the very least trying to - the Conservatives decide to remind everyone they’re still capable of shooting themselves in both feet, reloading, and having another go.

A campaign video about veterans. Fine. Normal fare. Except this one includes footage from Bloody Sunday - one of the most sensitive and painful events in modern British history. Thirteen unarmed civilians shot dead. Decades of political and legal fallout.

Which ends up as background footage in a social media clip. The explanation offered is that “very young people” didn’t recognise it.

Which is a statement that somehow manages to make things worse the more you think about it.

Because either someone knew and didn’t care - which is bad - or no one knew because historical awareness has been replaced by whatever happens to come up first on Getty Images - which is arguably far, far worse.

Whichever way it falls, it tells you something about the level of care being applied.

And even that - even something that, not that long ago, would have dominated the news cycle - gets swallowed almost immediately.

Because there is always something else.

Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain playing dress-up with candidates by running them as “independents,” which is less a political strategy and more a game of hide-and-seek with the electorate. Ben Habib’s Advance UK continuing to argue that entire religions are incompatible with British life while insisting they’re the sensible ones in the room. The ongoing feud between various fragments of the populist right, each accusing the other of being too extreme, not extreme enough, or insufficiently organised in their extremism.

It would be funny if it weren’t so grim. Actually, no, scratch that - it is still a bit funny. Just in a bleak, “are we really, honestly doing this now?” way.

And then, hovering over all of it like a particularly rancid cloud that refuses to move on, Tommy Robinson - a man who has turned perpetual grievance and fundraisers for lawsuits into a career - preparing yet another large-scale rally. Timed, quite deliberately, to collide with an already sensitive political moment. Framed in the language of defence, heritage, and family, as though shouting loudly enough about “our country” transforms it into something noble.

In this one we even have Sharon Osbourne shows up to say “see you there” - a mainstream figure, casually endorsing something without quite understanding what she’s endorsing, the kind of casual involvement that becomes toxic by association almost instantly. She gets dropped by a charity within days.

She’s not the architect of any of this, but she’s been pulled into the machinery of it anyway. That’s how the system works. It recruits. It uses. It moves on.

All of these stories in one week is a lot! In fact, it’s too fucking much, and that “too fucking much” is not incidental - it’s serving a very particular function. Because when everything is happening at once, nothing really sticks around long enough or gets enough sustained scrutiny or attention.

You don’t sit with the £5 million donation, because you’re already onto the next scandal. You don’t fully process the repeated vetting failures, because there’s another candidate revelation waiting. You don’t properly absorb the implications of the Bloody Sunday video, because something else has already elbowed its way to the front.

It becomes a conveyor belt - outrage in, exhaustion out - and that shift, from outrage to exhaustion, is where things start to matter.

Because outrage has energy. It can be directed. It can, occasionally, lead to consequences. Exhaustion just… it’s just there.

It lowers expectations. It makes you more willing to shrug - more willing to say “well, of course they fucking did” and then… move on. It all makes all of us that much more willing to accept things that, not that long ago, would have felt unacceptable.

You stop asking whether something is normal, and start asking whether it’s worse than yesterday - which is a much easier standard to meet, if you’re the one setting the pace.

The effect is not just meant to distract, it’s meant to disorient.

You’re never quite sure what matters most, so everything starts to matter a little bit less, and when that starts happening, standards don’t collapse overnight. They erode.

A £5 million gift becomes just one more story among many, racist candidates become background noise and historical carelessness becomes an unfortunate mistake rather than a serious failure of judgement.

Everything shifts, just slightly. And then shifts again. And again. And again.

Until you’re left with a week like this - full of things that are, individually, very serious - but collectively feel… weightless.

That’s the whole strategy. Not to shock you once, but to wear you down over time into apathy.

In a fragmented political landscape where the reward is not for being measured but for being noticed - for saying the thing that cuts through, for going slightly further than the last person did - the incentives all point in one direction. Escalation becomes strategy and moderation becomes a disadvantage.

Which is how we end up here - in a system where you can operate in plain sight, blur the lines between personal and political power, stumble through governance, mishandle history, platform increasingly extreme views - and face very little in the way of sustained consequences.

Not because people don’t care, they do, but because people are tired. Properly, deeply, what-the-fuck-now tired.

Tired people don’t hold anyone to account. They just want to get through the day. They switch off the news because they cannot deal with one more thing. Which, if you’re on the receiving end of scrutiny, is exactly where you want the public to be.

So you keep having weeks like this. Weeks where everything happens and nothing sticks. Weeks where you look at your phone, read the latest headline, and think, “Ag, for fuck’s sake,” before putting it down and going to make a coffee instead.

Which brings us back to where this started.

I stepped back deliberately and made the conscious decision to disengage a bit more, to focus the lens out, to digest things properly instead of reacting constantly. And I did. I noticed the pattern. I saw the machinery at work - the organised mess, the conveyor belt, the exhaustion strategy designed to wear you down until you stop caring.

I understand it now and I’m still putting down my phone and making coffee.

Because that’s the thing about seeing the machinery: it doesn’t actually free you from it.

You can recognise the strategy, name it, explain exactly how it works - and you’re still caught in it. Still tired. Still unable to sustain the outrage that might actually matter. Still choosing disengagement because engagement has become unbearable.

The system doesn’t need you to be ignorant, it just needs you to be exhausted.

And God only knows, I am.

1. I am still reading unreasonable amounts of news, if that’s of reassurance to anyone.

2. The £700 vet bill because our cat, at the age of 17 is uninsurable, did not help very much, but she is worth every single penny.

3. Which, if we’re honest… it is.