TOP 50 THINGS OF 2025: BASED IN BUDAPEST EDITION
The New European Capital of Conservatism celebrates itself
Soon the year will be gone. In a month, we’ll be writing tipster sheets for 2026. Then, no one will remember much about 2025.
We are in that brief isthmus before turning the page, when we can scrabble back through our brains to ask: what happened?
So, what happened?
Well, a lot, and not much.
Sometimes it was warm, sometimes it was cold. Various dignitaries passed through our passages, and dealt in their own ways with our robust keycard system. People signed contracts (in blue pen, in triplicate, appending their mother’s maiden name and their last 15 dental records).
Grand projects were launched. Grand projects were quietly shelved. Planes flew off carrying delegations to Tokyo and Tashkent. A Wizz Air struggled manfully to DC. And somewhere, we heard a new world being born.
In 2025, Budapest became a redoubt for a certain kind of conservatism, a city you had to build into your itinerary, whether you believed in its brand or not—this year, the polite curiosity of international think tankers became a more studied kind of curiosity: what exactly was the formula? How did we, you know, do it?
It’s been a short 12 months. What happened seemed trivial at the time: it was measured out in bleary coffee queues at 9AM conferences, in handfuls of the over-baked vol au vents they serve in the theatre, in endless chicken paprikash set menus at Aranybastya, and late nights scheming over ‘Stalin’s favourite wine’ at The Georgian.
But between the hangovers and the espresso injections, one fact became obvious.
Something is happening here.
What follows is us decompressing—flicking through the scrapbook of memory, to arrive at a Top 50 miscellany of Budapest, us, and the year that was.
50. Carlos The Jackal In Budapest
Farkas and LeBor’s paper on Carlos The Jackal’s time in Budapest was one of the most readable things we’d ever published (quiet at the back!). A meticulous researcher and a detective novelist turned out to be the perfect combo for this crisp Cold War thriller. The film rights remain available.
49. Nathan Levine on How To Live In A Dying Technocracy
Nathan, known to Substack as the wildly popular blogger NS Lyons, was here for a summer before he headed to the State Department as a policy analyst. No longer a theorist on technocracy, he’s now a practitioner. Feels like the Deep State has ingested a sleeper cell.
48 The Death of Merit
Effortlessly cool Visiting Fellow Dr Jonathan Price is at Oxford. Alongside Ashby Neterer, he produced a revolutionary paper that was something like Goodhart’s Law of Education: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. They even found a Greek word to cover the new spirit of instinctual holism they proposed to replace the targets culture: paideia.
47. Matt Goodwin on UK Civil War
This year, the pessimistic right couldn’t look away from the prospect of civil conflict. Whether the darker realities of Molotovs and baton charges made any sense, the notion seemed to sum up a feeling, a kind of deep gloom on the right, and a yearning for kinetic catharsis. Our most-viewed episode of View From The Danube (80k and counting) had Goodwin, Gavin Haynes, and Rod Dreher chipping in on the end of the world as they knew it.
46. Rod Dreher Eating Yoghurt In The Kitchen
“I came back to our lodgings at Tusványos to find Rod Dreher eating an entire tub of yoghurt in the kitchen with a spoon. After dark, there was nowhere to eat in town, and no takeout. You had to yomp all the way back to the festival site to get so much as a sandwich, and there was nothing of any consequence in our digs. So Rod was just going down the all-yoghurt dinner route. He offered me a share. I decided against it, but later regretted going to bed hungry. A reminder that Rod is normally right.” — Gavin Haynes
45. Adam Lovinger: In The Final Net Assessment
One day, twenty years into his career, Adam Lovinger found himself terminated by a shadowy State Department special unit, the Office of Net Assessment. The ONA was set up by Kissinger to give 30 year forecasts on the geopolitical climate. But as Adam explained in his Le Carré-level podcast, what it made became less important than who got to hold its reins.
44. The Turkic Dialogues Unit
This year, Ibrahim Mammadov graduated from intern to head of the Turkic-Western Engagement Initiative. A meteoric rise; in keeping with the traditions of his people, he is pictured here, instructing the indentured labourers who are laying down the foundations of his Kubla Khan-tier presidential palace.
43 Gladden Pappin Talking About The Progressive Turn In Education At The Scruton Society
Dr Pappin always gives good copy, and in late April he was on top form, blowing through his own experiences as first a student, then a lecturer, at Harvard. If you want to know why we’re screwed, Gladden will tell you with a winsome grin that somehow makes it all OK.
42 The Closing Down Party At Három Szerb
Három Szerb was a bar co-managed by Great Power Aficionado and Good Friend Of BiB, Lilla Kakuk. In September, it shut up shop, and hosted one of the more raucous finales of modern times. Even clean-living professor Ralph got Schoelhammered. Which made us wonder why we couldn’t drink there every night.
41 Visiting Fellow Father Mario Portella
Agatha Christie eat your heart out.
40 Jacques Sapir Day
Lots of people have strong opinions on Russia. Far fewer want to learn about Russia. Sapir, an economist, has been studying the country for forty years. Invited in by our own Hugo Martin for a day of seminars and podcasts, he managed to drop a few truth bombs — and some floating munitions of analysis. Check out his interview with our excellent colleague Tamász Maráczi.
39 Carol Thatcher Misunderstandings
Around the Thatcher do, A Certain Research Director got into conversation with a lady of a certain age at a certain drinks evening. She was good company; but he sensed he’d already met her at some other event in town. “Sorry,” he said, already five minutes deep with this game broad, “Do you work for the MCC?”. “I’m Carol Thatcher!” came the somewhat miffed reply.
38 Is Transgenderism Dying?
John O’Sullivan had wanted to profile Kellie-Jay Keen, the women’s rights campaigner, ever since he’d seen her at an event in New Zealand, set upon by a transgenderist mob and nearly shredded like Ready-Brek. What is it to have courage in the modern age? Kellie-Jay wasn’t much of a one for introspection, but she had a salty humour that knitted it all together.
37 Unknown Knowns: David P Goldman
Anyone wondering where the already delirious Budapest property market was headed would have done well to book a space at Philip Pilkington’s Unknown Knowns event. Renowned analyst Goldman had made a comprehensive study of home ownership and personal debt in the country. He turfed up one solid gold fact: Hungarians are the least household-indebted nation in Europe. Thus, the BP property market was, if anything, still under-valued. The results of his study have effectively become government policy, in the form of the new first-time-buyer loans.
36 Peter Boghossian In Da House
Peter and his crew: manager Erin and videographer Travis, installed themselves in the DI for much of the middle of the year, conducting their YouTube hit Street Epistemology sessions (think of them like rap battles for people who know a lot about the morality of vivisection). Who can ever forget Rodrigo Ballester spitting bars against Hugo Martin on whether we should kill everyone over forty?
35 Jimmy Carr
Last week, Britain’s fifth-best comedian Jimmy Carr outed himself as a bit of a rightie when he told the Triggernometry boys that Philip Pilkington’s new book, The Collapse Of Global Liberalism, had rocked his world, and that Philip was some kind of genius. Here’s the clip for proof. He also tipped Philip’s podcast as his personal ‘gold standard’. Multipolarity is available on all good mobile phones.
34 Danube Knowledge: Homeland! Language! Faith!
In which the always urbane Stefano Arroque took 150 years of Georgian patriotism, compressed it into a single slogan, then extruded it out again across five distinct eras. This lush podcast told the deep story of this increasingly important outpost of the West.
33 Peter Caddle: In Bruges Edition
Colin Farrell should be nervous. Caddle’s image makeover (above) leaves him in poll position for leading man roles in gritty euro gangster flicks. Humour connoisseurs please note: this item is funny if you know Peter Caddle.
32 The Duchess
Drink enthusiast Markus Johansson Martis has been wowed in 2025 by this secret cocktail bar, in the eaves of the Matild Palace. “The cocktails are practically an art form — just be prepared, the prices might make even a Norwegian raise an eyebrow.” And Norwegian eyebrows are notoriously non-muscular.
31 Making The Machine Go: Dominic Cummings As Management Guru
The Cult of Cummings got a new glass of Kool-Aid with this seminar, examining whether the deep structures of management theory that Cummings likes to rely on are compatible with modern bureaucracy, starring Cummings’ sometime protégé Andrew Sabisky and techno-sage Nathan Levine.
30 Yookay If You Want To: Travels In A New Britain With Lord Frost
David Frost may be exquisitely polite, but he is also prepared to go to places most of the political class won’t touch. He penned the first mainstream British article on the live rail of YooKay discourse, and we fully entered the era of Dark Frost when he opened up to our podcast team on Britain’s endemic bluetooth speaker abuse and vape shop Potemkins.
29 This Friday
Fresh from his hit podcast on Tusványos, on Friday, David Campanale is launching his extended paper at The Whale, District 9. The paper is about the long history of the festival, featuring previously unseen pictures of Orbán Viktor as a slightly sozzled 26 year old. We’re so convinced it’ll be good, we’re already dropping it at a hefty 29 in the best of the year list. Though if you attend and feel it is not worthy of this position, please do feel free to write in and complain.
28 Mátra Borozó
Wine bar of the dirty apron kind. We often haunted it, and the next day it normally haunted us.
27 István Looking East
István Kiss is the DI’s supremo, a scrupulously polite, rather feline boss, who never raises his voice, but somehow always makes things happen. He’s pictured here placing his hand in the mould of the hand of Nursultan, the first president of Kazakhstan.
And here: well, we’re not sure, but it seems very Turkic. Either that or chill rooms at trance raves have improved a lot since our day.
26 Tony Abbott’s Papal Confusion
“Back in May I was at a reception at a certain university of public service (whose name I will not give). A very long speech was underway when, like something out of a film, everyone’s phone in the room started buzzing at once. I checked mine: white smoke. A New pope elected.I was standing next to Tony Abbott and whispered, “There’s a new pope.”
He replied, “Ah wonderful mate, do they know who it is?”
I talked to someone who reports on the Vatican, asking exactly that. He replied: “As they say in Italy — boh.”
I momentarily thought this referred to Cardinal Bo of Myanmar, so I turned to Tony and said, “Apparently it’s Cardinal Bo.” After a second of looking mildly surprised, Tony diplomatically replied, “Oh — interesting choice!”
Turns out ‘boh’ means ‘I don’t know’ in Italian. Thus I became a brief but enthusiastic source of fake news at a diplomatic reception.”
- Calum Nicholson
25 Halloween Nottoli Style
Not a lot of people know that Sean Nottoli once worked for the Trump campaign. In fact, the subject still did not come up at his excellent USA-style Halloween party, where he dressed up as a former Trump campaign manager and told spooky stories about campaign management and hair weave maintenance.
24 Star Wars: The Seminar
This year, a certain galaxy seemed less far away. Born of a dippy joke at a staff meeting, the Danube Institute committed to the bit, and executed a pretty fascinating two hour symposium on the geopolitics of the LucasFilm universe, with a keynote from Operations Director Gergely Dobozi. Jar-Jar was behind it all? That was what the more conspiracy-minded took away.
23 Keith Hayward at BrainBar
The largely unknown criminology professor Keith Hayward put in a punchy turn at the BrainBar fest, talking about the dangerous merging of childhood and adulthood — adults are clinging on to childish things longer, children are being given the tools of adulthood earlier. It was scary enough to make us clutch our Yoda dolls tighter.
22 Danube DC
Rumour has it we’re getting a baby sister in 2026, in that other capital of conservatism, Washington. Aw, cute!
21 Living In The Conservative Pod, Eating The Conservative Bugs
When Carlos Roa transferred to DC, he immediately found himself living in the same building as Michael Anton, king of the Claremont Institute and now State Department lynchpin. Apparently this sort of thing happens a lot over there, in Washington Village.
20 Budapest Trump Summit Rumours
Multiple people, tapping their noses and telling us it was happening this Tuesday, next Wednesday, the Thursday before the blood moon… Nothing like an epoch-making treaty in the offing to bring out the tipster in us all.
19 Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Security Detail
The sight of the slender Ayaan Hirsi Ali walking the short distance to her hotel across the carpark at MCC Feszt, entombed between four meat-wall security men, reinforced to us quite how dangerous it can be to speak up for conservative ideals. A month later, Charlie Kirk’s killing would bring home the full jeopardy.
18 Cultural Diplomacy: Max Keating
How soft is your power? At a time when USAID was folding up, Irishman Max Keating’s paper brought cultural diplomacy back to basics: how can you sell a story about who you are as a nation that is crisp and likeable? If Ireland is already a cultural diplomacy superpower, then what’s the Hungarian equivalent of Guinness and Riverdance and talking a lot of waffle?
17 George Yeo at Geopolitics Conference
The Former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore gave off shades of his old boss as he put in a powerhouse performance to open Day 1 of the Geopolitics Conference, schooling the audience on the complex situation in the Malacca Strait. After all, this is not a game of cards. Whoever speaks at Geopol must have iron in him!
16 Are Conservatives The New Globalists? Juan Soto
Juan Soto turned a certain conventional wisdom on its head to ask the right question: what if conservatives have become their own Davos class? If each nation conserves what is singularly dear to it, where does that leave us, in a world of CPAC, Con Inc, and increasing administrative homogenisation?
15 Mary Harrington, Szófia Rácz, Louise Perry, Miriam Cates
The DI’s April Family Conference saw some of the smartest women now thinking step into their metier. It was enough to make us channel Sister Sledge: we are family.
14 Making Liszt, Checking It Twice
Michael Walsh sure plays a mean honky-tonk. The journalist, author, and frequent Danube fellow, is one of those annoying blokes who can also play the tremulous final symphonies of Franz Liszt on his grand piano, while giving an assembled audience biographical chapter and verse on how the composer came to write it. It’s a helluva party piece.
13 Hungary’s Indo-Mediterrannean Strategy: Carlos Roa
There’s grand strategy, and then there’s whatever Roa is smoking. Weighing in at a hundred pages, the intellectual architecture for an overground link between Hungary and India will have ripples for years to come.
12 Persecuted Christians In Nigeria: Nicholas Naquin, Dániel Farkas, Calum Nicholson
Two months after our field trip to Nigeria, Donald Trump decided to chip in on the topic, and suddenly a copy of our fifty page report was winging its way to the White House, where it landed directly in the Vice President’s hands. Call it good timing, call it divine providence.
11 Folk Tents
MCC Feszt and Tusványos both had special rooms where, to the sound of a scratchy violin, you could link hands with the persons to your left and your right, then step towards the centre, then move back out again, then clap twice, then rotate on your axis, clockwise, elbow-in-elbow with the person next to you, then clap again. Apparently it’s called a táncház — dance house.
10 Eric Hendriks Asking Questions
At every event, Eric had a question at once esoteric and on-point. The moderator would ask for hands. No one would raise theirs; then, after five awkward seconds, The Eric Question would arrive. It would begin with a few peremptory remarks about the quality of the discussion. It would meander on for a bit, then make a sharp right turn through Hegel, encompass a traditional Chinese saying, wander towards the growth of the AfD, dance around Rilke and the true meaning of Romanticism, then, just as it seemed as though that someone had passed the Encyclopaedia Britannica through a shredder, it would land as perfectly as a SpaceX returnable rocket.
The panelist’s response was always the same: “Um, great question…”
9 Yarvin Reads Defoe
Curtis Yarvin was charming and kind to all who got to meet him at the Geopolitics Conference. His decision to read out an entire Daniel Defoe treatise imploring Queen Anne to smash the nonconformists, in the middle of a small Buda wine bar, literally all 42 pages of it, was clearly in service of some broader historical point, but the exact nature of that point has been somewhat submerged with time. Papists bad? Anyway, the people at the next table certainly seemed to enjoy it.
8 LeBor Goes On Rubin, Comes Off
Anyone who has seen Dinner For One would have understood the plight of Adam LeBor, who became stand-in compere for Dave Rubin, as the host went missing in front of a live studio audience for about an hour, due to technical difficulties: “I had to keep talking and talking and compering for ages because we did not know when Rubin would arrive; eventually Peter Boghossian (who likes to talk) came to the rescue. When Rubin finally arrived, I sat down in my seat on stage… whereupon he sent me away.”
7 Taylor Swift Crossover Appeal
The most-listened to musician among our podcast audience is Taylor Swift, according to Spotify’s data analysis. Presumably she’s getting notifications about us too, then.
6 The Georgian
Tifliso to the uninitiated, is a cracking Georgian restaurant which seems to sell debentures to former Thatcher speechwriters. We lost many happy hours whenever John O’Sullivan uttered the magic words: “Shall we, shall we go to, uh… well I was thinking of, well, The Georgian actually…”
6 Film Making
This year, the DI became film moguls. We spent months in Development Hell. We fought The Moneymen. We chomped on our cigars. We concepted. We moodboarded. We attached people. We unattached them. We reattached them. They basically had to be made of velcro to survive. We scraped together brooding sequences of Brussels looking a bit rough. We panned over the Paris suburbs. We videoed a dead pigeon — in slo-mo. Turns out making films is hard. But the fruits of all this labour will be with you in the new year.
5 Israel & Hungary
Israel has been through the wars this year. It is a complex geopolitical entity. But after a successful visit from Netanyahu to Budapest, and a seemingly successful peace treaty, maybe it’s time to acknowledge quite how important its existence is for the free world. We’ve done lot of work there in the past 12 months. Our researchers, Dr. Péter Szitás, Sáron Sugár, and Ibolya Lubiczki, put together a paper, charting the long story of Hungary & Israel, from Cold War antagonists to firm friends. And Adam LeBor’s latest book, The Promised Land, is a narrative history of the country, due out next year to mark its 80th anniversary.
4 Based In Budapest
In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis recalls his father Kingsley telling him that he threw Mart’s novel Money across the room and ceased to read it ever again, at the point on p. 112, when Amis fils introduced the character of ‘Martin Amis’. In the same postmodern spirit, you are now reading a listicle on Based In Budapest, about the success of BiB. Since our September debut, we’re now read by over 3000 people, including many liberal media NGOs ‘monitoring democracy in Orbán’s Hungary’ (hi guys!). Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Now back to business.
3 John Whittingdale on Thatcher
After Maggie’s counsellors, biographers and ministers had spent a day dissecting her life and legacy, after Robin Harris, Lord Lilley, Bill Cash and John O’Sullivan, it was the turn of a man who’d been in his early 20s when he’d turned up at Number 10. He gave an intimate, personal account of what it was like, hunched in a stuffy upper room, taking dictation from the world’s most demanding, most brilliant boss. It capped off an extraordinary and moving 24 hours.
2 The David Martin Jones Library
Dedicated to two of our most esteemed departed professors, David Martin Jones and Jeffrey Kaplan, in 2025, the DI Research Department inaugurated its own library, formed from the late David’s own personal collection.
Hugo will explain more:
1 Bears And What They Do In The Woods
At Tusványos, you were never more than six feet from being attacked by a bear.
The pine-saturated hills of Romania formed the backdrop for the festival, and these hills, as we were told over and over, were full of bears. Here, bear talk was like weather talk is to the English. People dug up Daily Mail stories of tourists having their faces ripped off. They handed you thingamies of bear spray. The town was strung with anti-bear electric wires like tinsel. As bear paranoia took hold, some began to suspect their nearest and dearest of being bears themselves.
You really had to drink a lot of chilled white wine to take your mind off the problem. Here is an image of DI affiliates, steeling themselves through the terror.
Happy Christmas and all that, from the DI Research Team.
What a great rundown of an amazing launch year! Looking forward to 2026!