Russell Jones's Week Moment: All Hail Our Evil Emperor Elon!

The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on the historic rise and inevitable fall of billionaire X owner Elon Musk

The year’s cinema has been dominated by Rome and anti-wokeism, otherwise known as the heroic fight against treating minorities with even the slightest level of respect. First there was Gladiator 2, in which the original’s combination of bracing novelty, earthy star-power, and crowd-pleasing spectacle were substituted for CGI sharks, excised homosexuality, and levels of déjà vu that are typically unique to a hall of mirrors.

Then there was Megalopolis, a $120 million folly that reframes the Cataline Conspiracy as an incoherent greenscreen miasma of wonky gender roles and Adam Driver “doing acting”. Not that I’ve seen it. Neither have you. Neither has anybody we know. The guy who made The Godfather wrote a character named Wow Platinum, for God’s sake.

And now Conclave, which – spoilers – also tackles gender issues, but is significantly less likely to result in a rhino-murdering sequel or sexual misconduct allegations. Of course, many will claim Conclave isn’t about Roman power at all. Officially the Roman Empire fell in 476ad, but let’s face it, after a brief intermission for a wee and an ice cream, it was sequelled into the Holy Roman Empire, cloaked its 32,000 murders in the purple dignity of doctrinal necessity, and still holds sway over 1.3 billion Catholics.

Its influence is on the wane, but that’s just the nature of things. Every empire falls, and many vanish from common knowledge. We only remember the Egyptian Empire because it’s hard to miss the pyramids, but the Akkadian Empire – the first in history – started over a thousand years earlier, and a quick straw poll in my household suggests 50% of humans and 100% of dogs have no idea it even existed.

For five millennia, empires have been the norm, and every one of them was about the acquisition of money, rather than warfare or power for its own sake.