On the 29th of July, 800 kilometres of the Red Sea went to war. No navy was involved. Nobody fired a shot. 4 men in London moved a line on a chart, and somebody passed the biscuits. I was holding the biscuits. There are a handful of us. We meet in a building in the City that wears its plumbing on the outside, and we decide which of the world's oceans are at war. I know. I think about it on the Central line, usually somewhere around Bank. I sit on the Joint War Committee. We are underwriters from Lloyd's and the company market, and we publish a list of Listed Areas: the waters where a ship's ordinary cover stops and a premium for war begins. The men who started this business in Edward Lloyd's coffee house in 1688 did not believe in adjectives, and neither do we. The building is Richard Rogers's. Lifts, ducts and staircases hang off the outside in stainless steel, so from Lime Street it looks like a refinery that went to Cambridge. I've always thought it the only honest building in the City. Everyone else hides the pipes. Inside, the staff wear navy livery with a flash of red and are called waiters, because 3 centuries ago they poured the coffee. They pour the news now. In the middle of the Room, under the rostrum, hangs the Lutine Bell. It came off a frigate that went down off the Dutch coast in 1799 with a fortune in gold and silver that Lloyd's had insured, and with 240 people aboard, of whom 1 survived. The market paid for the gold in full and quickly, and that payment made our name. The men were not on the policy. The bell was fished up decades later, and for generations a waiter struck it when news came of an overdue ship: once if she was lost, twice if she'd come home. During the war, Lord Haw-Haw told Britain the bell was ringing day and night for the convoys. It rang once, for the Bismarck. It is cracked now. The last time it rang for a lost ship was 1979. Every family has an uncle on the wall. Ours is the slave trade. Our market insured the ships, and in June 2020 Lloyd's apologised for its "shameful" role, which in Lloyd's time is roughly the same afternoon. I mention it because people imagine insurance is neutral. It has never been neutral. It decides which voyages happen. Here is the whole trick, and it embarrasses people with its simplicity. A ship enters a Listed Area. Her owner tells his insurer. The insurer quotes an additional premium for that one voyage, a percentage of what the hull is worth, good for about a week. The owner pays, or he turns round. Nobody has to sink anything. A number does it. We don't shout. There is no war room. There is a table, a pot of very bad coffee, and Giles. When a strait has become impossible, Giles reads the reports, takes off his glasses and says "interesting." Everyone at the table knows what interesting means. It means the rate has just tripled. You'd have to have been to the right school to hear the violence in it. We had competition. On February 28 the Americans and the Israelis struck Iran, and Iran began firing at ships in Hormuz. Before the war, a tanker paid us about 0.25% of her value to pass through. In July the President of the United States published a rate card of his own. Every time Iran fired at a ship, he wrote, America would bomb and destroy "ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT." Capitals in the original. I admired it enormously. It is a tariff schedule. A man who spent his life in property had priced a strait in infrastructure. The difficulty was that nobody sails on his rate card. Owners do not ring the White House before they leave Fujairah. They ring a broker, the broker rings us, and by summer we were quoting between 3% and 10% of the hull per passage. A $100 million tanker paid $3 million to $10 million for a trip shorter than a bank holiday weekend. Giles said "interesting" 4 times that month. The President can bomb a bridge. He cannot make a ship sail. The Houthis understood all of this before the Pentagon did, and I hold a professional regard for them that I would never voice at a dinner party. A navy needs hundreds of hulls to deny a sea. Since 2023 the Houthis have needed a hijacking, a few sinkings and a steady drip of drones, and then my profession did the rest. This summer they declared a blockade of Saudi ports and hit a Saudi tanker called the Encelia. In September they took Perim Island, a lump of volcanic rock sitting in the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb like a toll booth nobody had thought to staff. Their entire naval doctrine fits in one word, and the word belongs to Giles. Which brings me to the part of the year I'll tell my grandchildren about. Saudi Arabia is a careful country, and it spent decades preparing for exactly this. It built a pipeline across the full width of the kingdom, from the Gulf to the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea, so that if Hormuz ever closed, the oil could leave by the back door. Hormuz closed. The oil went to Yanbu, precisely as designed. Then the Houthis started on Saudi ships, and on a Wednesday at the end of July there were 4 of us at the table. It is raining on Lime Street, the thin City rain that seems to fall sideways out of the ducts. The chart of the Red Sea is out, the big one with a coffee ring off Eritrea that nobody has been allowed to clean since 2024. The broker's report runs to 3 pages and says what broker's reports say: an attack here, a claim there, a militia on an island. Nobody reads past the first page. We know what it says. Someone uncaps a pen. It starts at the old line, 18 degrees north, just above Jizan, and travels up the Saudi coast, past Al Lith, past Jeddah, past little ports nobody in this room has seen or ever will. It slows at Yanbu. It goes on a little further, for luck, to 25.5 degrees. It stops. Nobody speaks. The rain does some work on the windows. Giles takes off his glasses, folds them, looks at the pen, then at the coast. "Interesting." The pen goes back in its cap. While we're at it, someone adds the whole of Eritrea, and nobody looks up. I pass the biscuits. In a terminal in Yanbu, a man whose job is to load the oil his country built a pipeline to protect has no idea that his port has just become a war, by fountain pen, in a building that wears its plumbing on the outside. Consider that for a moment. A kingdom spent billions digging an escape route from one war zone, and a committee in a building with its pipes on the outside reclassified the exit. We did it on a Wednesday. Nobody fired a shot. The biscuits were digestives. By the next afternoon, the rate for a ship calling at Yanbu had quadrupled, from 0.25% to 1%. Egypt has lost something like $10 billion of canal revenue since the Red Sea trouble began. Then Hormuz shut, tankers started routing through Suez instead, and in August the canal took $567 million, up 57% on a year earlier. Cairo now earns more whenever Iran behaves worse. Nobody in Cairo will say so. I'm saying it from London, with no consequences whatsoever, which is the great privilege of my trade. Egypt also buys more wheat than any country on earth, and in the first half of this year Russia and Ukraine sold it more than 82% of it. That grain crosses the Black Sea, which is on our list too, because 2 countries have spent 4 years sending drones at each other's ports. When we move the Black Sea rate, a subsidised loaf in Giza notices. The baker never learns why. Kuwait drinks the sea. Around 90% of its drinking water comes out of desalination plants on the Gulf coast, and in July Iran hit the Subiya complex 4 days running. Plants like that are insured in rooms like ours. When a man in Kuwait City fills a glass from the tap, there is a premium in it. There is one group in this chain we never quote, and I think about them on the Central line more than I'd admit at the table. In May, American officials counted 1,550 ships stranded around Hormuz. Every one of them has a crew: a Filipino cook, a Ukrainian third officer, an Indian engineer who has watched the same stretch of brown coast for months, aboard a ship whose owner is deciding whether my rate is worth paying. Nobody asks them anything. They're the only cargo we forgot to list. 227 years after the Lutine, we still haven't found room for them on the slip. Some nights, somewhere past Liverpool Street, I very nearly mind. Then I remember that minding isn't a class of business, and the feeling is gone by Bethnal Green. And you. I haven't forgotten you. The owner pays my premium and passes it to the charterer, who passes it to the refiner, who passes it to the pump, the boiler and the supermarket shelf. Nobody sends you a schedule. Nobody asks you to sign. But you have been one of my policyholders all year, every time you filled a tank or nudged the heating up a notch. You simply never received the policy. We don't issue them to the public. It would only cause alarm. Some people say I profit from war. That is unkind, and also imprecise. I profit from the fear of war, which is far larger and far more reliable. Wars end. Fear renews every year. The Lutine Bell hasn't rung for a lost ship since 1979, and it doesn't need to. The losses come by email now, and they reach every desk at the same moment, which was the only reason anyone rang the bell in the first place. The head waiter still writes them into the Loss Book in copperplate, with a quill. He writes down the ships. The President, meanwhile, still believes Hormuz is his to open or close, depending on the day. He has posted about it a great deal, much of it in capitals. In all these months, not one broker has attached a single one of those posts to a slip. When he finds out who actually runs his strait, he'll say the whole thing is rigged. He'll be right, of course. It has been rigged since 1688. We simply never put it in capitals. Navies close seas with ships. Militias close them with drones. Presidents close them with posts in capital letters. We close them with a revised list and a courteous cover note. It's nearly one. Sweetings doesn't take reservations, which makes it the only risk in the City I can't lay off, and they serve no coffee after lunch, only brandy or port. I'll have the port. Giles will say "interesting." The Red Sea will be exactly where we left it.