Peter Hitchens uses his column to mock "Tommo" (real name Daniel Thomas), a self-styled activist whose black-clad followers appeared on the streets of Dover, describing them as amateurish "stormtroopers" and drawing a comparison with PG Wodehouse's fictional fascist militia, the Black Shorts. He warns, however, that mockery is a dangerous complacency, arguing that the collapse of mainstream parties over immigration is pushing such fringe figures and movements closer to real power, citing France's National Rally, Germany's AfD and Donald Trump in the US as parallel examples of this drift.

Hitchens argues these populist movements are ultimately doomed to fail, just as centrist governments have, because mass immigration has already occurred and cannot easily be reversed, pointing to Italy's Giorgia Meloni as an example of a leader who won office promising to curb migration but has achieved little. He predicts a cycle of discarded "miracle cures" leading to political rot, poverty, disorder and eventual authoritarianism. The column then pivots to praise Diane Reay, a Cambridge academic and former grammar-school pupil from a mining family, using her story to criticise the abolition of grammar schools and a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary he feels misrepresented the history of comprehensive education reform.