Quantum physicists reckon time travel into the future is perfectly possible - though, unlike Dr Who, it would be a problem to return to the past.
The universal and unbreakable Second Law of Thermodynamics says that heat always flows from hot to cold. It’s what makes your cup of coffee go tepid if you leave it long enough.
Just like heat, the arrow of time appears to go in only one direction and that’s forward. Think how chaotic breakfast might be if it was otherwise.
Your lukewarm coffee might heat up, but your fried eggs would unfry themselves and pop back into their shells,. The bacon and sausages would stop sizzling and return to the fridge..
Physics genius Stephen Hawking thought there might be a way round this to enable us to go back to witness the great events of history, but eventually he concluded there probably wasn’t. If it was possible, he asked himself, where were all the tourists from the future?
Starmer must learn from Thatcher and Blair to win the next election - Nigel Nelson
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This is unlikely to bother Keir Starmer, who would not want to relive the first rocky months of his premiership. But he might welcome slipping into a Tardis to have a gander at what lays ahead in four years as the 2029 election approaches.
He will hope that the economy is booming thanks to his green revolution and the 650,000 new jobs that is predicted to create. Donald Trump’s trade tariffs will be a ghastly memory and the fisticuffs between Ukraine and Russia long over.
But If all his Plan for Change delivers is poorer pensioners, farmers, and disabled people and everyone else feels no better off then the bookies are not going to give much for his reelection chances.
The PM’s difficulty is that he is not so much fashioning events as responding to them. And that’s because today’s Labour Party does not seem to have an underlying political philosophy. There is no such thing as Starmerism.
But then in my lifetime I’ve only known two PMs with an ism at the end of their names - Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
Thatcher maintained that the free market was the answer to Britain’s ills and her mission was to make it even freer. Blair borrowed Third Way politics from US president Bill Clinton to nick the best of free wheelin’ capitalism and social democracy and blend them together.
Traditionally the left had been strong on such things as health, education and welfare, the right on defence, law and order and economic management.
Blair took ideas from each and turned them into slogans, the most famous of which was “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”
Giving crooks a hard time came straight out of the Tory playbook while dealing with the social deprivation which led them into criminality was from the Labour one.
Blair then set about turning Third Way into an election campaign tool. Until he came along British politics was a straight line with the extreme left at one end of it and the far right at the other.
David Cameron's policies broke up communities rather than strengthening them.
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The mainstream parties sat somewhere in the middle. The trick for getting most votes at election time was to occupy that bit of the line where most voters were.
Blair hovered above the line which became a triangle so the Tories could never quite box him in as he cherrypicked his agenda from both left and right of the political spectrum.
It took the Tories three elections to twig quite what the New Labour PM was up to, and it was not until David Cameron came along and adopted Third Way himself with “compassionate conservatism” and the Big Society that the Tories were back in the game. Cameron was in that sense Blair’s creation.
Big Society was a promising way forward, championing strong communities based on the idea that by looking after others we look after ourselves.
But Cameron never quite managed to articulate it, and austerity meant measures such as hitting housing benefit claimants with the Bedroom Tax (or spare room subsidy as the Tories preferred to call it) broke up communities rather than strengthened them.
Getting the comms right is essential in politics. Both Thatcher and Blair did. And they did it by laying the foundations in opposition so the electorate knew where they stood and what they stood for.
Working out what Starmer stands for is a bit of a struggle and that’s why his comms are all over the place. He might have oodles of integrity and decency but it’s not quite enough.
I have known the former No10 director of communications Matthew Doyle for 25 years. I do not know why he has just upped sticks and left because he was good at what he did.
His job has now been divvied up between his deputy spinners James Lyons and Steph Driver. I’ve known them for sometime, too, and they are also good.
But before they can sell a message, they have to know what it is. Those around Thatcher and Blair did. And, ooh, look, they both won three elections.
Keir Starmer may not be keen on going back to the future. But it might help him to study what those who came before him did in the past.
