When the US (and Israel, but it’s very much in parentheses here) dropped bombs on Iran and didn’t pull the victory it was expecting out of fate’s grab-bag, a number of British papers asked, Is this America’s Suez moment? I doubt US papers asked that, since (stereotype alert) Americans can’t be counted on to know what the hell the Suez Crisis was. Why should they? It was someone else’s crisis. it happened way back there in history, and we don’t do history in the US–at least not much and not well. 

Which is a shame, because it’s the kind of comparison that makes a person think about–oh, you know, the last gasp of a dying empire, an impaired head of state, that kind of thing. 

But don’t think about it too long, because whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. (If you’re old enough, you remember that from a poster on someone’s wall, and it seemed hopelessly profound.)

Of course, it’s entirely possible that even if the universe is unfolding as it should, that doesn’t mean it gives a rip about our welfare. We may turn out to be disposable.

Have I cheered you up yet? Good.Let’s talk about what a Suez moment consists of.

Irrelevant photo: Either an ornamental cherry (that’s my bet) or a plum tree (that’s from my phone’s plant identification app).

The Suez Crisis

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It had been built in 1869, when Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. Then in the late 19th century, the country–canal and all–came under British control and in 1914 became a protectorate, which is a politely uncolonial name for a colony. In 1922 it became independent, although British influence “remained significant,” as the BBC ever so diplomatically puts it, emanating the polite scent of eau de colony. 

That significant involvement explains the years of anti-British riots that followed, along with a coup and finally a new and uncolonized government. But we’ll skip all that–sorry; we’re in a hurry–and pick up again when the last British soldiers poured the sand out of their boots and left. Egypt was now not only independent, it wanted to nationalize that canal. It planned to pay for it, but still. 

Cue sounds of outrage, please, especially from Britain and France, who’d been running the canal.

While negotiations over the fate of the canal plodded on (negotiations are so boring), Britain, France, and Israel planned an invasion, then jumped from plan to practice. Israel invaded, giving Britain and France an excuse to invade and demand that both the Israeli and Egyptian troops step away from the canal. Aren’t Britain and France acting nobly and peacefully by protecting it? 

According to the plan, this would be enough to pull the US in. 

Meanwhile, in reality

From the start, the British were short on ships and landing craft, and when it added tanks to the invasion force it had to hire a commercial outfit to move them to the embarkation point because it didn’t have any whatever it took of its own. The National Army Museum calls the commercial outfit a removals firm–the kind of company you’d call if you were moving from, say, London to Birmingham and didn’t have room for all your stuff in your car, but instead of moving a couch, a bed, and a file cabinet, the armed forces were asking if the company could move a few tanks, please.  No, not many.  Just, you know, the normal amount.

Once it solved the tank problem, Britain had to change its landing point because it didn’t have enough landing craft, making it sound like they were short not just on equipment but on people who knew how to plan as well. 

In spite of all that, militarily speaking the invasion went well. Israel invaded, stopped short of the canal, and waited for the British and French to show up, which they did, breezing past the Egyptian troops.

It was on the diplomatic side that things fell apart. Instead of being pulled in, the US put its hands in its pockets and chewed bubble gum. For one thing, Eisenhower (remember him? US president back in the stone age?) had just denounced the Soviet Union for invading Hungary. Following that with an invasion of Egypt would be awkward. And for another thing he could see where the US getting involved in Egypt could draw in the Soviet Union, which would be dangerous. 

That left Britain nose to nose with some consequences it hadn’t expected. In a Gulf of Hormuz moment, Britain’s oil supply was stuck on the wrong side of the canal. Its financial system was stretched thin. When it asked the International Monetary Fund for a loan, the US refused unless it agreed to a ceasefire. The US also threatened to sell its sterling bond holdings, which could’ve devalued the pound and undermined Britain’s foreign exchange reserves.

If that wasn’t enough, public protests in Britain were large enough that the government couldn’t pretend not to see them.

Britain and France backed down. Israel went home. A ceasefire came into effect at the moment when November 6 became November 7 (the invasion had started on October 30) and the United Nations granted Egypt sovereignty over the canal.

It all proved that the UK could no longer play with the big kids–the US and the Soviet Union.

Who was in charge in Britain?

The prime minister who led Britain into and through this mess was the Conservative Anthony Eden. Eden had been in the background for years, waiting for his turn to be prime minister. (The English are big on waiting in line and taking their turn.) He was urbane and charming, according to the Financial Times. He’d been foreign secretary in three different decades, and he was Churchill’s acknowledged successor. The problem was that Churchill wasn’t in any hurry to see his successor success, and by the time he did, in 1955,  Eden’s health had gone sour and he was angry and unpredictable and drug-addled. He took barbiturates to help him sleep and  pethidine, a morphine derivative, only hours before cabinet meeting, then Drinamyl, a relative of amphetamine to pick him back up. 

Drinamyl’s side effects include impaired judgement and loss of “contact with  reality.” To use a medical term, he was a mess. 

But we were comparing the Suez Crisis with Operation Epic Fuckup. Since Donald Trump deals only in superlatives, we could argue–convincingly, I think–that he’s in worse shape than Eden was. As far as I know, he doesn’t need drugs, prescription or otherwise, to lose touch with reality. He can do that all by himself, and better than any human ever has. What’s more, no prime minister or president before him has ever tweeted a picture of himself as Jesus healing the sick. None of them ever accused the pope of being soft on crime. In fact, none of them ever thought the pope was in charge of fighting crime. 

If there’s an advantage to living in a country led by a drug addict, it’s that they can, at least in theory, stop using drugs. Someone whose loss of contact with reality is self-induced is less likely to return. 

Britain’s Suez moment

The Suez Crisis marked the end of Britain as an imperial power and as a player on the world stage. It also marked the end of Eden’s career. He was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who reduced the size and expense of Britain’s armed forces and ended National Service–what Americans would call the draft.

When those newspaper headlines I mentioned all those many paragraphs ago asked about the US’s Suez moment, I don’t think they were suggesting the Iraq War will necessarily bring Trump down. Not yet, anyway, if I read the tea leaves correctly. (Tea leaves are annoyingly hard to read, so don’t place any bets based on my predictions. Or if you do, don’t blame me if you get skunked.) They were talking about the kind of turning point where everyone notices that a major power is now playing in the safer corner of the playground, where the younger kids cluster together and hope the big kids don’t notice them.

The good thing about Notes not being a newspaper is that when I’m eight or ten months late with a news story I can shrug my shoulders and run it anyway. So here we go: shrug; run.

Back in August of 2025, the central leadership of the Reform UK Party imposed Sharon Carby on its Croydon branch as their candidate in the mayoral elections. According to the London Economic, she was accepted (or shrugged in–I wasn’t there, the article doesn’t say, and I haven’t seen the minutes) by a crowd numbering in the single figures. Possibly even in the high single figures. 

As a candidate, Carby had two things–

Let’s start that over. As a candidate, Carby had at least two things against her. One, she was from Bradford, which was and still is 241 miles away. Five days a week and that commute would kill you. Two, and more problematically, the commute didn’t stand a chance: she’d been dead for 6 months when she was nominated. 

Irrelevant photo: Swans on the Bude Canal

It’s not clear how long it took the party to notice that she was no longer breathing, but once they did they made the responsible move and advertised for a replacement candidate. They must not have found one, because when I looked up the list of candidates, Reform didn’t have anyone on the list.

Still, I can’t help imagining them going through the applicants and one of them saying to the others, “We’ve got a live one here.”

So what is Reform UK? It’s a new and (you might’ve figured this part out already) chaotic right-wing party held together with tape, chewing gum, and high-profile refugees from the Conservative Party. The Conservatives are sinking as rapidly as a small island nation, hence the flow of refugees. Reform’s also–or primarily–held together by grinning photos of its cigar-wielding founder.   

Reform’s politics are anti-refugee (except for those from the Conservative Party), pro-culture wars, pro-Trump, and anti-wasteful spending, although where it’s won local elections it’s had a hard time locating the waste it vowed to cut and the savings it was going to make have been even more elusive. They’ve been known (more than once) to raise the taxes they vowed to cut. They have breakthrough moments of open racism, then remember they’re not in office yet, slosh a bit of paint over them, and go back to their core message. If they end up in government, the joke will turn sour very fast, but in the meantime they’re a gift to satirists everywhere. It’s very much a one-personality party, and people who went to school with its Prime Personality have told the press that he was known for harassing Jewish and brown students and saying things like, “Hitler was right.” A little paint, though, and you’d hardly notice. 

More recently than eight or ten months ago, Reform suspended a candidate in Scotland when he turned out to have been “struck off as a company director.” To translate that, he was caught with his hand in a cookie jar containing Covid grants. Thousands of pounds transferred themselves mysteriously into his personal account.

Other candidates have made assorted islamophobic comments and wild claims about refugees. One mayoral candidate called members of a Jewish neighborhood watch group “Islamists on horseback” and sprayed other offensive and largely incoherent comments in assorted other directions. He’s been suspended.

It’s a funny thing, but antisemitism is politically toxic at the moment, but islamophobia isn’t, so the same people who would once have told you Jews are what’s wrong with your life and country now tell you that Muslims are. 

I’m Jewish, so don’t tell me I’m antisemitic for saying that. Believe me, if they get enough power, they’ll go after Jews as well.

And no, to the best of my knowledge the neighborhood watch group wasn’t using horses.

Lessons on telling the living from the dead

Not everyone has trouble telling the living from the dead. A newspaper clipping from the 1938 Oregonian resurfaced recently and has been making the rounds in assorted inappropriate places. It tells the tale of Charles Keville, who “walked into a temporary morgue and looked at a body that had been identified as his.

“‘Nope,’ he said. ‘That ain’t me,’ ” and out he walked.

He did not, to the best of my knowledge, go on to run for mayor. 

I have made no effort to find out if the article’s real. If it isn’t true, I don’t want to know. 

Why don’t I write about Keir Starmer?

What, the current prime minister? Because he bores me. Even when he makes me want to scream or throw things at the TV–and those are regular occurrences–he’s still boring. Making jokes about him is like throwing rocks at a ghost. The two objects–rock and prime minister–operate on different metaphysical planes. 

I’m not sure what metaphysical planes are exactly, but I do know that the laws of physics (or maybe that’s the laws of science fiction, or occult studies) won’t let them intersect.

Being rock-proof and joke-proof doesn’t make Starmer politically attackproof, however. His party (Labour) might’ve replaced him by now if he hadn’t purged it so thoroughly when he became its leader. It doesn’t have a lot of prime-ministerial replacement parts on hand anymore. The most likely remaining replacement part is trapped in Manchester’s mayoral office, where he’s not eligible to lead the party. You have to be a member of parliament to do that. When he tried to leave the mayor’s office and for an open parliamentary seat, Starmer locked him in Manchester and ate the key. 

A couple of other replacement parts are available but it’s not clear that they’re a good fit. They might clash with the wallpaper at 11 Downing Street, where prime ministers live if they don’t live at number 10. Let’s not get into that. What matters is that Boris Johnson famously redecorated it when he was in office, spending an obscene amount of money (that he eventually had to pay back) on wallpaper that you couldn’t pay me to stay in a room with. After he resigned, it was painted over and finally taken down when it began to peel. Its ghost, however, haunts the halls of both residences, so the next prime minister has to be able to live with that. 

That leaves Starmer ghosting on, not quite politically alive but not politically dead. 

In fact, both established parties, Labour and Conservative, are ghostly right now. The Conservatives, having proved their incompetence when they ran the country, came out of this last election looking like wool socks after a hot wash, and Labour came out with a huge majority in Parliament, which it’s used to demonstrate that it has no idea what to do next. It’s made up for that by borrowing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Conservatives and Reform UK, which gained them no votes but alienated past supporters. It’s also done untold damage to immigrants’ lives, but hell, they were only immigrants, right? So who cares.

That leaves two upstart parties, Reform (we did that one) and the Greens, which has a new left populist leader and just picked up an MP in an election Labour should’ve won–and might’ve if its most promising candidate hadn’t been locked in Manchester.

And of course we have the Liberal Democrats, which isn’t a new party but–

Y’know, the clearest thing anyone’s said to me about the Lib Dems is that no one knows what they stand for. But they’ve picked up votes too. We’ve reached a point where not knowing what a party stands for looks appealing. A recent voter survey showed a lot of people picking their candidates according to who they most want to keep out of office, not who they want in.

One lone immigrant finds a welcome

In spite of the anti-immigrant furor on both sides of the Atlantic, a 2-year-old male fox slipped onto a cargo ship in Southampton–that’s in England; you’ll find it on the south end of the map–and disembarked in New York, where t was welcomed. Four government agencies went into high gear and not only got him safely off the ship but found him a temporary home at the Bronx Zoo. When last heard of, he was settled in and doing well. A few more agency-types were searching for a permanent home.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you really, truly need to move to another country, grow fur. 

Meta turns to AI and . . . 

This is irrelevant, but I love a good story about artificial intelligence fucking up, and if you’ve been around a while you know irrelevance is no problem here at Notes.

An engineer at Meta couldn’t solve a problem and turned to AI for a solution. The engineer followed its instructions and–wheee–caused a two-hour security breach. 

What kind of security breach? If anybody’s saying, they’re not telling me. Meta says user data wasn’t leaked. Meta says a human could’ve made the same mistake. Meta says we should go play outside and not bother the grownups when they’re busy making us safe.

It occurs to me that we’re living at a turning point in history and you’d think that would be interesting. Or terrifying. Or, well, you know, something. Not only is artificial intelligence on the verge of changing our lives in we’re-not-sure-what way, but we’re also seeing manic right-wing parties turning their rhetorical fire hoses on immigrants while responsible middle-of-the-road parties shut immigrants out because they’re afraid they’ll be tossed out of office if they don’t match or outdo the manic right wing. We’re watching–or turning away–while Israel starves Gaza and in Lebanon targets not just civilians but medics  specifically. We’re watching a doddering old man bomb the hell out of Iran and the world economy because the people who would stop him can’t and the people who just might be able to won’t try.

And so on and merrily so forth. I’ve been around a long time, my friends, and I’ll testify that this is not the usual state of things. It’s all coming unglued.

Meanwhile, most of us plod on, doing whatever it is we do with our lives, which in my case involves talking most mornings about how the dog’s walking (he has a bad back, so the conversation kind of makes sense), and whether the cats came for breakfast. You know, all the earthshaking stuff that, taken together, makes up a life. The sun rises. The sun sets. You’d hardly know anything’s changing except that prices keep going up and everything’s coming unglued. Other than that, though–

Winter sunset

. . . I wish you a good one.

And if your culture doesn’t have a holiday at this time of year? No problem. Find something else: a good cup of coffee, a moment when the wind stops blowing, a memory of love. Whatever works for you, I wish you joy.

Writers can be tiresome when they’re promoting their books, and for the most part I steer clear of self-promotion here, but the emphasis there falls on for the most part. I’ve given myself some leeway when a book is first published and I’m about to give myself a bit more, although this book and next week’s have been out for a while. The thing is, they’re particularly close to my heart. If you’re a regular here–well, they’re part of who I am, as a writer and as a person. Some of them already know them, but if you don’t I’d like you to. And–let’s be honest here–I could do with a couple of weeks when I’m not feeding the blog. Blogs are ravenous beasts. If my novels aren’t what you come here for, no problem. Go get yourself a cookie and ignore me. I’ll get back to our normal programming before long.

A Decent World

Summer Dawidowitz has spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie, a dedicated teacher and lifelong Communist. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summer’s life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with her great-uncle, who Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before the moved in to take care of Josie?

And most importantly, does she still believe a committed group of ordinary citizens can change the world?

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“Quietly magical . . . a book that draws you in and then refuses to let you go.”

–Stephen May, author of Sell Us the Rope

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Order directly from the publisher or from whoever handles that stuff best where you are. Or borrow it from the library. Libraries are wonderful.

We live in dark times, and it’s feeling stranger and stranger to write this blog without acknowledging that. As someone other than me has already said, whatever you think the German people should’ve done in the 1930s, this is the time to do it. We can’t all be heroes but we can be honorable people. Sometimes that alone is heroic. Do what whatever is in your power, my friends. We can’t know how long the chance will last.

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year 

I wish you a good one