Jamie Laing: The Candyman Diplomat Steering Britain’s Post-Brexit Soft-Power Sugar Rush
Jamie Laing and the End of Empire: How a Candyman’s Heir Became the Perfect Metaphor for Britain’s Soft-Power Sunset
By our correspondent in the departures lounge of Terminal 5
Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, between the soggy remains of a BA breakfast tray and the gravitational pull of Netflix’s algorithm, Jamie Laing is probably filming a TikTok in business class. That, at least, is the consensus among the diplomatic corps now stationed in London to monitor Britain’s post-Brexit cultural exports. Once upon a time, the Foreign Office sent gunboats to protect overseas interests; today it dispatches reality-TV alumni with pastel knitwear and a confectionery line. Progress, like sugar, dissolves on contact with reality.
To the uninitiated, Mr Laing is merely the pink-trousered chap who survived eleven seasons of Made in Chelsea—an endurance feat roughly equivalent to surviving eleven actual Chelsea dinner parties without succumbing to death-by-small-talk. To the connoisseur of late-imperial decadence, however, he is something grander: a walking, chirping symptom of a nation that has swapped geopolitics for gossip columns and replaced the East India Company with an East End candy kitchen. If you squint hard enough, you can almost see the ghost of Lord Curzon adjusting his monocle at the sight.
The genealogy is instructive. The Laings are heir to the McVitie’s biscuit fortune—yes, the same digestive that once fueled trench warfare now funds sponsored posts about “mindful snacking.” Somewhere in that transmutation from hardtack to hashtag, the British establishment managed to monetise nostalgia without ever producing anything as useful as a new empire. Instead, we got gluten-free gummies marketed to anxious millennials whose idea of colonial expansion is adding another EU country to the interrail pass before the pound collapses again.
Global audiences, ever hungry for English eccentricity, have responded with the enthusiasm of a tax-dodging oligarch spotting a Knightsbridge parking space. Laing’s confectionery brand, Candy Kittens, now ships to 28 countries—coincidentally the same number that once composed NATO’s original mission statement. The sweets themselves are vegan, which is convenient because geopolitical ethics certainly aren’t. Inspect the ingredients and you’ll find no artificial colors, only the faint aftertaste of a nation trying to sweeten the fact that it no longer manufactures much besides drama and debt.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office—reduced to a sort of theatrical agency with nuclear weapons—has begun deploying Laing as informal cultural attaché. Last month he appeared on an Indian reality show to promote “British innovation,” a phrase that here means “Instagrammable sugar.” The subcontinent, once bled white by the Raj, now graciously invites the descendant of biscuit barons to flog sour-watermelon gummies on Colors TV. History doesn’t repeat itself; it just changes flavor.
Naturally, the irony is not lost on the commentariat. European diplomats, still negotiating fish quotas, watch the spectacle with the weary amusement of adults supervising a children’s birthday party that has run catastrophically over budget. In Beijing, state media uses Laing’s career as evidence that the West has entered its “late Kardashian phase”—a diagnosis more damning than any Wolf Warrior sanctions. Even the Americans, pioneers of weaponised banality, seem impressed that Britain managed to weaponise posh.
One could argue that exporting gourmet candy beats exporting cluster bombs, and indeed the sugar rush is less immediately lethal. Yet the soft-power ledger reveals a darker calculus: every viral clip of Laing taste-testing a new “tropical thunder” gummy is a micro-dose of distraction from steel mills closing in Sheffield and ambulances queuing outside A&E. The empire, it turns out, strikes back with tooth decay.
Still, there is something almost admirably honest about a country that admits its remaining comparative advantage is charming narcissists with good teeth. When the last Royal Navy frigate finally rusts through, we can always commission a new flagship: a pastel-wrapped speedboat crewed by reality stars, armed with party rings and a Spotify playlist titled “Rule Britannia (Lo-Fi Chill Mix).”
And so, somewhere above the clouds, Jamie Laing adjusts his ring light for optimal cheekbone illumination, blissfully unaware that he is steering the ship of state by selfie stick. The sun never sets on the British entertainment complex; it merely fades to an influencer-friendly Valencia filter. Pass the gummies, darling—history has a sweet tooth, and the dentist is booked solid until 2045.
