Everywhere you look these days, there's a metaphor for national decline, like HS2

I DON'T know about you, but I'm suffering from chronic metaphor fatigue. There is nothing that goes horribly wrong, falls apart, arrives late, costs too much, delays millions and undermines our sanity that cannot be co-opted as a metaphor for Britain's dysfunction in 2023.

- George Chesterton

Everyone wants to control the narrative these days: corporations, football managers, reality TV stars. The Government's attempts to control the narrative have shall we say not been entirely successful, in that the narrative about how well Britain is run is less a well-drilled PR machine and more an escaped pack of hyaenas. Welcome to the United Kingdom, land of blatant symbolism.

HS2 takes the award for best allrounder. It's the Jude Bellingham of national decline metaphors, in that it's got a bit of everything. Woefully behind schedule, wildly over-budget, subject to the vicissitudes of poor leadership and indecision, HS2 has achieved the spectacular feat of being the high-tech railway to link London with the north that will no longer be going to the north. Or indeed London.

It's been known for a while that the Houses of Parliament are in peril of collapse and fire: the bill is gigantic and this summer the repairs were put off again. Aside from the very real dangers, the sight of the home of our politics falling into ruins would be the ne plus ultra of visual metaphors. Speaking of crumbling, an appalling manifestation of 2023 has been the more than 100 schools that closed the week before the start of the academic year because of dangerous reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. In Britain, even concrete doesn't work.