(after T. S. Eliot)

I. In the Corridors of Fog

Unreal city,
Where Parliament shadows lurch at five,
And the Thames, tired of empire,
Coughs improperly against steel barges.

November gifted us a phone call—
Sirens static across the Atlantic cable,
One voice: resurrected, orange,
Lying—twisting like a Manhattan sheet.
Already, other preparations commence:
A golden chair dusted in Windsor,
For a handshake in a cattle auction.

Keir in blue Zara, hands folded, adenoidal,
Saying “Congratulations” without bunching,
While Lammy, with artist wife, whispering left-field,
Speaks some old prophecy from Hesiod or CNN.

What did we trade?
A tariff’s ghost and a dream of beef.
The pound fell sideways like rain in a Tube vent.

“I will show you trade in a handful of steel”

II. The Tariff Sermon

In a Westminster room lined with feuding portraiture,
Policy aides fuss—their papers unspent bay leaves.
One mutters, “A slogan reborn in red caps.”
Another, “Cut the digital tax quietly,
He treats the holy algorithm as sacred writ.”

We signed not a parchment deal but a gesture,
A handshake too long, caught on camera,
A single clause unwinding five sovereign threads.

“Here is no dignity, only clause subclauses.”

Films will cost more.
Whisky sting harder.
Even our Bond is looking nervously eastwards,
While nabbed to the west.

III. NATO at Dusk

Trump pulled from everyone’s treaty
As Orpheus turned from Eurydice,
Withdrew the gaze, thus collapsed the pact.
Meanwhile, we rehearse defence like a tragic chorus:
Submarines, satellites, steel birds robbed of souls.

Yesterday, Trump whispered to admirals,
And the submarines moved like pawns in a Floridian dream.

Our foreign secretary speaks in iambs:
“Deterrence is engagement / Engagement is resolve.”
No one claps. The echo loops back across the Atlantic.

Ukraine stands on the margin,
Bleeding beneath bloody PowerPoints.

IV. The Tourist from Connecticut

And yet they come,
The Americans with blue passports and furrowed brows,
Asking for GP forms and the last of civility,
Finding Soho more real than Tulsa.

Their children wear reconstructed Oxford brogues,
Their parents drink bitter and speak of Cotswolds
As if they were a fallen empire.

Our soft power lies in tea leaves now,
And Kew Gardens, and pitted irony.
But pitted irony cannot hold pip nor treaty.
Irony cannot restrain a tariff war.

V. Epilogue in the Fog

This is the way the alliance ends
(Or unspangles its stars)—
Not with a bang anymore,
But in the breathier notes of junior ministers
Lost behind ChatGPT.

Ours is not a special relationship,
But a conditional clause.
We are not lovers but reflections now
In the scratched glass of foreign policy.

Soon, he will come again—
Gilded tie, lopsided stride—
To bow, or nearly bow, before the King.
The pageantry rehearsed, the silver polished,
While treaties fray in silent distance.

For now,
We pour another cup, adjust dated cufflinks,
Then walk the Embankment,
Listening in the dusk for rain.

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