In the first essay, pegged to Keir Starmer’s resignation, Leake wanders London’s grand locales—Kensington Gardens, the Savile Club, the Goring Hotel—yet sees a city where, by one old friend’s estimate, only 36% of residents are ethnic English and little of the visible wealth belongs to natives. He juxtaposes glittering Lamborghinis and Purdey shotguns with a populace burdened by inflation, NHS wait times, housing shortages, and uncontrolled immigration. He excoriates “suicidal” green-energy policies and anti-Russia “bear-baiting” as elite-profitable “mind viruses,” predicting Starmer’s likely successor, Andy Burnham, will continue the same destructive globalism until he too resigns. During a rooftop party, Leake spars with a banker who denies Britain’s free-speech crisis; Leake counters by citing over 12,000 arrests for online speech violations in 2023. The piece closes with an elegy for philosopher Roger Scruton, fired in 2019 after a *New Statesman* journalist used deceptively edited quotes to brand him a bigot. Invoking Scruton’s reading of Hegel, Leake concludes that a civilization’s worth is only truly recognized as it vanishes: “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
The second essay reproduces a chapter from Leake’s *Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality*. Relying heavily on the skeptical 1889 work of medical historian Charles Creighton, Leake interrogates Edward Jenner’s hallowed legacy. He sketches Jenner’s biography—apprenticeship under surgeon John Hunter, a Royal Society fellowship for a paper on cuckoos, and a purchased MD from St. Andrews—before casting doubt on Jenner’s famed milkmaid legend. Leake suggests the tale was concocted by Jenner’s first biographer to erase earlier cowpox inoculations by figures like farmer Benjamin Jesty. He scrutinizes Jenner’s 1796 experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps and the “horse grease” origin theory, implying Jenner invented the “genuine” versus “spurious” cowpox distinction to explain away documented vaccine failures. He notes Jenner quietly abandoned the horse-grease claim in later pamphlets after physician William Woodville found no equine link. Leake also highlights the dangers of the subsequent “arm-to-arm” vaccination method, which risked transmitting syphilis, tuberculosis, and smallpox itself, and he darkly questions whether Jenner’s own child later died of bovine TB contracted from the vaccine.
Together, the essays constitute an assault on establishment narratives. Leake portrays both modern England and Jenner’s legacy as captured by ideological mythmaking that serves financial and political elites while ordinary people bear the costs. Whether mourning a fading culture or debunking medical hagiography, Leake’s thesis is consistent: the official story is rarely the true one.
