Strip Away the Spectacle

Hours before England took the pitch against DR Congo in the World Cup round of 32, the dominant item on British social media was not Thomas Tuchel’s tactical formation, nor the fitness of Harry Kane, nor even the broader question of whether this gifted squad could finally deliver a tournament. It was Katie Price promising on Kiss Breakfast radio that she would pose naked if England won.

[https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/39615727/katie-price-nude-promise-england-world-cup-strips-bikini/]

The clip went viral within minutes. It trended above the match itself. Millions engaged with it, shared it, debated it. And in that single, absurd moment, a country revealed more about its national priorities than any opinion poll ever could.

Israel should be paying attention. Not to Katie Price, but to what her effortless hijacking of the national conversation reveals about the societies upon which Jerusalem depends. And the connection runs closer than it first appears.

Here is what makes the episode not merely amusing but genuinely troubling. Katie Price is not, as her critics lazily assume, a woman without substance. Her eldest son, Harvey, was born partially sighted, with septo-optic dysplasia, Prader-Willi syndrome, and autism. She was told he would never walk or talk. Price raised Harvey largely alone, and she did not do so quietly. She took a campaign against online abuse of disabled people to Parliament. Her proposed legislation, Harvey’s Law, won cross party support and contributed directly to the Online Safety Bill. She fronted two BBC documentaries that gave millions of viewers an unflinching look at what it means to care for a severely disabled child in a system that routinely fails such families. Harvey became an ambassador for Mencap, one of their Myth Busters challenging misconceptions about learning disability. In 2023, he set a Guinness World Record for the longest drawing of a train, a 21 metre artwork completed over four painstaking weeks at his specialist college in Cheltenham.

This is serious, sustained, courageous advocacy. And yet, when Katie Price trends on British social media, it is never for Harvey’s Law. It is never for the parliamentary testimony. It is never for the young man with a Guinness certificate and a talent for drawing trains. It is for the nude photoshoot pledge. That asymmetry is the indictment, not of Price, but of the culture that consumes her.

Now consider how Israel treats the same spectrum of conditions. Through the Ro’im Rachok programme, launched in 2013, the IDF actively recruits young Israelis on the autism spectrum into Unit 9900, one of military intelligence’s most elite formations. These soldiers analyse satellite imagery, interpret aerial reconnaissance, and decipher geographical data that directly shapes operational planning. Their exceptional visual perception, capacity for sustained focus, and ability to detect anomalies that neurotypical analysts miss have made them an indispensable intelligence asset. The programme has since expanded under the IDF’s broader Spectrum of Talent initiative, with over 400 autistic soldiers now serving across multiple units. Intel and eBay were among the first companies to hire its graduates. Where Britain sees disability as a problem to be managed, Israel sees capability to be deployed.

The contrast is not incidental. It goes to the heart of what separates a serious society from an unserious one. In Britain, a mother spends years campaigning in Parliament for basic protections for her disabled son, and the country barely registers. The same mother promises a nude photoshoot and the nation stops scrolling. In Israel, young people with the same conditions Harvey lives with volunteer for military service they are legally exempt from, and the state builds an entire programme around harnessing their strengths. One country treats these individuals as objects of charity or spectacle. The other treats them as strategic assets.

There is a particular kind of civilisational fatigue that expresses itself not as collapse but as frivolity. Rome did not fall because the barbarians were strong. It fell because Romans stopped taking seriously the things that mattered. The bread held, the circuses expanded, and somewhere between the two the capacity for collective purpose quietly bled away. When a nation’s public square cannot hold its attention on a World Cup fixture for even 24 hours before a celebrity stunt displaces the thing itself, something structural has shifted.

For Israel, the implications are concrete. The Western alliance on which Israel’s strategic position partly rests is not weakened by any single policy decision or election result. It is weakened by a creeping inability to sustain focus. A nation that cannot stay serious about football, and cannot stay serious about disability rights even when a celebrity hands it the story on a plate, will struggle to stay serious about defence commitments, diplomatic undertakings, or the slow, unglamorous work of maintaining a rules based order.

Britain once possessed a version of this clarity. The generation that endured the Blitz and rebuilt a shattered economy understood instinctively the difference between entertainment and purpose. That understanding has not been defeated. It has been diluted, slowly, over decades in which security was assumed rather than earned, in which prosperity felt permanent rather than contingent, and in which the institutions that once channelled collective energy into serious endeavour gradually ceded ground to platforms that reward provocation over depth.

None of this means that Britain is a fundamentally unserious country, or that its commitments to allies including Israel are hollow. British forces remain capable, British intelligence remains formidable, and British diplomacy, for all its post Brexit awkwardness, remains consequential. But capability and will are different things. A country can possess every tool required for strategic seriousness and still lack the collective attention span to deploy them consistently. That gap between capacity and focus is where allies get let down. Not by betrayal, but by distraction.

Harvey Price draws trains with extraordinary patience and precision. In another country, those qualities would make him a candidate for an elite intelligence unit. In his own, they made him a Guinness record holder that nobody trends. Katie Price will pose or she will not. England will progress or they will not. But the underlying question persists. Can the societies that claim to anchor the Western order sustain the focus that the task requires? The answer, right now, is not reassuring.

Isn’t it great to be British.