Power cuts

Thursday

John Power

How to bring down Britain’s power grid

At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London. Homes lost power. Transport services ground to a halt. It came in the same week as outages across Spain and Portugal and just a few weeks after a fire at another substation caused Heathrow airport to shut down. We also know that the British government is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. All of this raises an important question: how resilient would the British state be in the face of a determined effort to cripple its power grid? The blunt answer is: not very. David Betz,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The New York deli sandwich that changed history

There’s nothing new about bringing maverick businesspeople into government to give the bureaucratic blob what an unnamed ‘Trump adviser’ was recently quoted as calling ‘a swift kick in the ass’. After all, it was David Cameron who in 2010 hired the now all but unmentionable retail buccaneer Sir Philip Green to find ways to cut Whitehall waste. But Donald Trump’s conferment of the role of solo global peacemaker on his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff – who has no known foreign policy or government expertise – takes that idea to a scary new extreme. Take a look on X at a clip of him arriving alone to meet Vladimir Putin and