On 4 April 2026, a man called David Miliband, a former foreign secretary in (former British Prime Minister) Gordon Brown’s cabinet, stumbled across an article from The Guardian warning the world that the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz could result in famine. “If fertiliser cannot pass through… the window to avert a global food security crisis is closing rapidly.” Miliband, now the CEO and president of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), earns roughly £1 million annually. The IRC’s funding is largely subsistent on grants from the United Nations and European Agencies (in 2023, it was in receipt of over half a billion dollars from the United States Agency for International Development – USAID).

There was nothing wrong with Miliband’s statement. In addition to oil and gas, Gulf states produce fertiliser, which is shipped to countries like Pakistan and Malawi: the spike in the cost of oil was only ever the first sign of things to come. As crisis begets crisis, the wider sequence of collapsing parts is only to be expected and fertiliser is, after all, critical.

But British fertilising capacity, something that could aid the current crisis substantially, was irreparably damaged in 2008 by the United Kingdom (UK) itself. One of the first features of the Climate Change Act, in which Miliband and his brother Ed (now Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero) played outsized, starring roles, was the introduction of a carbon pricing framework. This, in turn, added layers of prohibitive costs onto the domestic production of ammonia, cost-effective fertiliser’s most important component, resulting in it being uncompetitive. In 2021 and 2023, the first casualties of David Miliband’s work emerged: two of the largest ammonia plants in the UK were shuttered.

How to fight a war

On 6 April, a man called George Osborne, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer in David Cameron’s cabinet, wondered aloud: “How does Britain actually fight a war? Who selects the targets? Where does the intel come from? Does the PM sit above it all or do they get involved in the detail of operations?” Osborne has a few jobs now. He is: the Managing Director and Head of OpenAI for Countries; the Chair of Coinbase's Global Advisory Council; Chairman of the British Museum; Co-President of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership; and Chair of Lingotto Investment Management. Because the UK doesn’t have enough centrist Dad podcasters, he is also the co-host of Political Currency, where he speaks alongside Ed Balls, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer in Gordon Brown’s cabinet, and David Miliband’s former colleague.

There was nothing wrong with Osborne’s wondering. The UK’s base in Cyprus was shelled by Iran in the first week of the war – if defence is, at some point, to mutate into offence, perhaps Osborne might possess insight into decisions atop military strategy?

But UK military capacity, something the country’s citizens will rely on in the event that hostile actors, like Iran, unleash the weight of their intercontinental ballistic missile programme, was severely, possibly irreparably, damaged in 2010, when David Cameron and George Osborne started ruthlessly stripping UK military assets. This was an exercise that occurred alongside the already vanishing shadow of the navy, now suspected to be between 60% and 70% smaller than it was during the Falklands crisis.

At the root of both men’s panicking and wondering lies the obstacle of… themselves.

Let profits speak for themselves

On 30t March, newswires from Houston and New York confirmed the acquisition of Jethro Restaurant Depot LLC by the listed Sysco, America’s largest full-spectrum food distributor. The deal is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2027; Jetro’s owners will receive $21.6 billion in cash, and 91.5 million Sysco shares (trading at $81.80 on 27 March).

How Jetro, a wholesaler originally catering to cost-sensitive independent retailers, positioned itself for such monumental success is (half) a life’s work for one supremely gifted South African who may now qualify as the most successful investor in the country’s history: Nathan “Natie” Kirsh.

Unlike Miliband and Osborne, Kirsh doesn’t say much, choosing instead to let profits, and his humanitarian work in Swaziland, speak for themselves. And loudly these speak: Kirsh family office capital has unleashed volleys of monumental success in property and asset management across America, the UK and Europe – in his adopted Swaziland, his entrepreneurship initiatives have benefited over 100 000 people.

Those Kirsh has groomed to lead his investments don’t talk much either; the few sentences you’ll get speak to a visionary of interminable discretion, who has seen fortune come and go, notably with Sanlam, to which he was forced to relinquish much of his portfolio (including the brands Checkers and Russells) shortly after Wall Street heard PW Botha’s infamous Rubicon Speech and strangled corporate South African firms of their credit facilities. Kirsh managed to wrangle Jetro from the Sanlam squeeze. He was 54 years old when he left South Africa for New York, Jetro’s headquarters.

Fifty-four.

Domestic politics

There are two notable occasions where Kirsh featured in domestic politics. Impressed by her work in pursuing someone who’d tried to defraud him, Kirsh supported the indefatigable Glynnis Breytenbach in her battle against a crooked National Prosecuting Authority. Supporters of dirty cop Richard Mdluli would go on to describe him as a “Mossad asset”. At the ascendancy of state capture, Kirsh suggested a blanket amnesty for corrupt African National Congress officials – dependent on their immediate departure from office. Looking back, a sense of begrudging reluctance, even exhaustion, can be located in this idea – the degenerate profligacy an anathema to a man whose parents escaped to Johannesburg from a Lithuanian village where a mass grave of 8 000 bodies would later be discovered.

In the deliberate absence of an accompanying narrative, it is left to everyone to interpret the many meanings of Natie Kirsh, and transport them into the context of current political failure.

Obsessions with status, salary, and being liked demolished the scope for causality in the UK uniparty, evidenced by Miliband, Osborne and most of a once-influential political class who’ve subsequently cursed their own lives into infinity mystery loops, bereft of self-awareness. In the week following Jetro’s sale, a handful of talented financial journalists and former employees have emerged to illustrate an organisation built and managed on extreme opposites.

At a time when relations between South Africa and the United States are – avoidably – low, South Africa has produced the timeless American success story: the country has deep affection for men who stumble a little, start late, then achieve even later – from Ray Kroc (McDonald’s, also 54) to Home Depot’s Bernie Marcus (50) and Harland Sanders (KFC, 62). Here Kirsh also is an antiseptic for the many examples of today’s Karen-ised, parasitic corporate environments, seeking entitlement before contribution, that continues to ensnare the dim, lazy, and selfish.

But perhaps the ultimate meaning of Natie Kirsh is deferred gratification, virtually extinct in its political application, or possibly unrecognisable, thanks to modern radical reflexes – the UK Greens – provoked by the squalor of uniparty posturing. There is no position, no skill, no quality more compelling, more reliable, more proven – and more rare.