Most people assume the wars of the 21st century will be fought over rare earth metals, says Peter Frankopan in UnHerd. In fact, civilisation’s most important resource is its oldest: water. And the signs are bad. A landmark report published by the UN last month concluded that we have entered a period of “global water bankruptcy”, in which societies live beyond their hydrological means. Three quarters of the world’s population live in countries classed as “water-insecure”, 3.5 billion people experience “severe water stress” at least one month a year, and half the world’s 100 biggest cities are in areas of “high water stress”. Urban planners increasingly fret about “day zero”: the moment the taps simply run dry.

In recent years, Cape Town, Tehran, São Paulo and Istanbul have all experienced “genuine crisis”. In 2019, the nine million residents of Chennai in India had to queue for a small daily ration of water brought in by trucks. Less far-flung places – Los Angeles, New York, London – aren’t immune. Last year, Environment Secretary Steve Reed warned that without a “major infrastructure overhaul” Britain could run out of clean drinking water by 2035. The reasons are obvious: the global population has doubled since 1970, over which time the world has rapidly urbanised. And a single data centre can gobble up millions of litres a day, equivalent to the needs of tens of thousands of households a year. There’s also geopolitics: the Chinese have built a dam a day since 1949, utterly transforming Asia’s rivers; dams in the Indus Valley and in northeast Africa are creating tension, sometimes violence, between upriver and downriver nations. Technology and better water pricing may help, but this is ultimately a problem that cannot be solved. There is nothing so foundational to civilisation as water.

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After the worst week of Keir Starmer’s premiership, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator, ask his top officials where it all went wrong and many answer: “In opposition.” One remembers the leadership tying itself in knots over trans rights rather than debating whether to rule out major tax rises. “We spent more time working out whether chicks could have dicks than on a programme for government.” Starmer assumed his first chief of staff, Sue Gray, would simply produce a plan for him. When Labour types, sensing disaster, begged Tony Blair to intervene, he refused: “The only way he can learn that it’s a terrible idea,” said Blair, “is by it happening.” Sure enough, Gray was gone in three months.

The prime minister’s famous political apathy goes deeper than many realise. “Keir has never met a policy that he had a natural view on,” says a senior aide. “That’s why he’s capable of thinking that ID cards are terrible and then ID cards are wonderful and must be compulsory and then that they mustn’t be compulsory.” Another adds: “He’s completely incurious… He thinks his job is to sit in a room and be serious.” Even before he lost his ambassadorship, Peter Mandelson told friends the PM had never once asked him: “What really makes Trump tick?” And he’s stuck – as any leader would be – with the lumpen idiocy of the Parliamentary Labour Party. “The MPs are a bunch of bedwetters,” says an aide, who have “responded to being unpopular by making the government keep doing even more stuff that the public hate”. No wonder Starmer spends the weekends “calling up old friends and complaining about how much he’s hating it”. He’s clinging on, but nobody’s entirely sure why. As one Westminster wag puts it: “We have nothing to fear but Keir himself.”

🏝️🫠 Starmer had a mega wobble over Chagos. After a focus group reacted with “incredulity” at the plan to hand the islands to Mauritius and pay £35bn for the privilege, Starmer’s political team demanded to know why it was necessary, to which national security adviser Jonathan Powell kept saying it was “in the interests of national security”. Vidhya Alakeson – now joint chief of staff, replacing Morgan McSweeney – eventually snapped: “How is it in the interests of national security for Reform to win the next general election?” Starmer changed his mind for a few days, then changed it back after being talked around by Powell and the attorney-general, his old chum Richard Hermer.

“When you’re in love it’s the most glorious two and a half days of your life.”
American comedian Richard Lewis

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