Vibes and Verity: What "Vibes Won't Defend the Country" Gets Backwards

by The Rev Rabbi Eliyahu Leib Goldsobel Esq.

This piece stays in one lane: constitutional law, and the relationship between the Monarch and its people under the rule of law. It is not a policy proposal. There is no defence budget here, no fiscal figure, no programme. Those belong to elected politicians, accountable to Parliament and the electorate. The question is simpler and comes first: what actually makes government legitimate — and is "vibes" really the opposite of substance, or something substance depends on? 

The exchange 

At Prime Minister's Questions, the Prime Minister was told, from his own backbenches, that "vibes are not going to work" on defence. Cash, not atmosphere, keeps a country safe. It's a good line. It is also only half right. 

What "vibes" actually names 

Every legal order runs on two things at once. One is the part you can audit: spending, statutes, courts, procurement. The other is a feeling among the people — that the system is theirs, that it can be trusted, that it works in their interest and not just its own. The first shows up in a Budget. The second doesn't have a line item, so it gets waved away as mood. 

It isn't mood. It's an ongoing, largely instinctive judgement people make about whether trust is being kept. And that judgement — not the spreadsheet — decides whether people are willing to pay for what the spreadsheet proposes. 

There's a name in constitutional theory for power held on behalf of the people rather than for its own sake: a fiduciary relationship. The Monarch and authority. The Monarch holds it in trust, and government acts in that name. Seen this way, defence spending isn't an alternative to "vibes" — it's one way the trust gets discharged. But if people no longer feel the trust is being kept elsewhere, they won't reliably agree to pay for it here. The vibe is simply the public's live audit of the trustee. Telling them the audit doesn't count doesn't win the argument — it's exactly what erodes the consent the spending needs. 

The other half of the same week 

The same point showed up from the other direction, the day before. The Monarch, the Prime Minister, and the President of France stood together at the British Museum to unveil the loan of the Bayeux Tapestry — nine hundred years old, on English soil for the first time. Both leaders called it a symbol of trust between the two countries. The King, quoting Shakespeare, made the underlying point directly: what has already happened sets the terms for what comes next. 

Nothing about that afternoon was a fiscal commitment. No budget line, no contract, no statute. But it did constitutional work all the same — it made continuity and trustworthiness visible, in a way no spreadsheet can. This is the same "vibe" dismissed a day later at PMQs, except here it wasn't standing in for substance. It was doing the part of the job substance can't do alone. Put the two moments side by side and they aren't a contradiction. They're two halves of one whole: one shows what the trust costs to keep; the other shows why anyone believes there's a trust worth keeping. 

Two ways to get it wrong 

There's a much older version of this same split, and it's worth naming plainly: Thomas More's Utopia against Machiavelli's The Prince. 

More's Utopia is vision without machinery — a beautifully reasoned ideal commonwealth with no real account of ambition, faction, or war, and no path from here to there. It is, literally, “no place.” Machiavelli's Prince is the opposite failure — pure technique, focused entirely on acquiring and keeping power, with the moral bond stripped out. Even Machiavelli conceded the danger in this: a ruler who is feared but never loved, who inspires no loyalty at all, invites conspiracy, because no one has a reason to defend him when it counts. 

That is the whole argument in miniature. Substance without vibe is Machiavelli's prince — efficient, and eventually alone. Vibe without substance is More's Utopia — admirable, and nowhere. Neither one, on its own, is government that lasts. 

The test, stated plainly 

Don't grade government on whether it produces vibes or figures. Grade it on one question, applied to whatever it does — a spending commitment, a piece of legislation, a public statement: is this the discharge of a trust, or a performance staged for effect? Applied honestly, that question will sometimes catch out a number, and sometimes catch out a mood. It is never satisfied by waving either one away.