Vaughan Smith/True Regard
@vaughansmith.bsky.social
Journalist. Founder of the Frontline Club. Author, The Extraction Pattern. trueregard.substack.com
In 1876 a mark went onto the side of every British ship, showing how deep she could safely sit. The Act let the owner paint it himself. Some painted it on the funnel. The Line on the Hull, audio, 38 minutes: trueregard.substack.com/p/the-line-o...
The Line on the Hull, read by Vaughan Smith
The first Frontline Club Pamphlet, read by the author.
trueregard.substack.com
A man at a junction in the Croatian war told me the road ahead was safe. It was not. He was not lying to me, which took six years and a book to understand. What the book argues and why the answer is not less feeling but more watching. trueregard.substack.com/p/he-was-not... trueregard.com/buy.
The Extraction Pattern is out today. There is an irony in a book about unaccountable power now living or dying by Amazon's algorithm, but there we are. No shop window. Its only daylight is readers finding it in week one. Today is the day. trueregard.com/buy
Amazon.com
trueregard.com
My book The Extraction Pattern is out on 22 July: the few who take everything and answer for nothing, and the watch we let fall. Launch at the Frontline Club, London, with David Loyn, free but ticketed. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launc...
The loud argument says the West feels too much, a flock so soft it set the wolves to guard the fold. It has it upside down. The warmth built everything. The fault was that the flock stopped watching. We are not sheep, we are the makers. Book out 22 July: trueregard.substack.com/p/the-sheep-...
Across America, the rent rose and no landlord had to meet another or agree a price. They fed their private books to one company's algorithm and followed what it told them nine times in ten. It is now suing to claim a free-speech right to keep doing it. trueregard.substack.com/p/no-one-rai...
In Berlin there is the only press conference in the world the journalists run. A reporter takes the chair, so the awkward question gets called on, and three times a week every ministry's spokesperson must come and take whatever is asked. trueregard.substack.com/p/the-press-...
Henry VIII debased the coinage so badly they called him Old Coppernose, the silver wearing off the royal nose first, so his own face gave the fraud away. The body that caught him is 700 years old and still going. trueregard.substack.com/p/the-wall-t...
Thames Water was handed over debt-free in 1989. It now owes around £20bn. Billions were paid to shareholders while the rivers filled, and the debt left behind. Now the funds that own it want its fines waived until 2030. trueregard.substack.com/p/the-debt-w...
Albania changed the law protecting its Vjosa coast before the bulldozers came, so the taking could be called legal. A resort for the US president's son-in-law, a robot minister for show and prosecutors still holding the line. trueregard.substack.com/p/the-law-wa...
In eastern Congo the safeguards that kept coltan miners in view have been stripped away one by one. At least four landslides have hit Rubaya this year, and no one with the authority to count the dead is allowed near enough. trueregard.substack.com/p/the-coltan...
In 2004 the world had reporters in Darfur. In 2025, when the same forces killed the same communities in the same place, the only witness left at scale was a satellite. The blood was visible from orbit. trueregard.substack.com/p/el-fasher-...
'The company saw it. The metric held.' Internal Facebook memo, November 2019: the 2018 redesign had trapped political parties in the EU, India and Taiwan in an inescapable cycle of negative campaigning. Part 2 of 3 on True Regard. trueregard.substack.com/p/why-we-can...
'I feel like my hands are tied.' Nadia Taha, Sudan correspondent, to Congress in December 2025. Voice of America dismantled. Sudan Radio Service dismantled. Washington Post foreign desk cut. Part 1 of 3 now on True Regard. trueregard.substack.com/p/how-we-sto...
My train stopped. 'A fatality on the track', the conductor announced. The same reason had delayed me weeks earlier. The suicide rate in England and Wales is back at 1999 levels. The architecture has stopped containing. trueregard.substack.com/p/a-fatality...
Trump walked behind Xi at the Temple of Heaven. Called him 'my friend' at the state banquet. Declined Taiwan questions. Not the figure the US press has covered for nine years. The same man. A different architecture. Piece: trueregard.substack.com/p/what-beiji...
Two institutions of containment were overridden in the Mandelson affair. The vetting body, which did its job. And the press itself, which had been quietly overridden by access journalism for thirty years before the appointment ever happened. Full piece: trueregard.substack.com/p/the-press-...
In September 1880, a parish priest in County Mayo needed a word simpler than 'ostracise'. He used the local land agent's name. Within a week the community had withdrawn cooperation. The extraction became unprofitable. This morning on True Regard: trueregard.substack.com/p/how-a-man-...
In November 2025 the Post Office quietly extended Fujitsu's Horizon contract by £49 million. The procurement notice itself: 'It would not be possible to simply hand this system over to another supplier.' No national paper covered it. This week's True Regard: trueregard.substack.com/p/fujitsu-ha...
Which parent can admit fault? That question, asked in a family court, would catch patterns the system has been missing for decades. It takes thirty seconds. No legislation, no new model, no training budget. New piece at True Regard on why it works.
In 1853, a failed coal merchant was living in a London lodging house. His sailor neighbours told him about the insurance scam sinking their ships on purpose. He had never been to sea. One hundred and fifty years later his line is on every merchant ship on earth.
Under the 2015 Iran deal, breakout time was twelve months. Inspectors on the ground. Every IAEA report confirmed compliance. By the time the bombs fell in February, breakout time was one week. Most analysis blames Trump. My new piece shows the architecture. trueregard.substack.com/p/the-rot-at-scale
Hungary won the election. Now it has to win the state. Orbán built an architecture designed to outlive him. Poland has been trying to reverse the same thing for two years. What the evidence says: trueregard.substack.com
