Barometer

Royal welcomes The Duke and Duchess of Sussex visited Nigeria last week. When was the last genuine royal tour of that country? – The late Queen made a 20-day visit in 1956, four years before Nigeria’s independence. She went for three days in 2003 when she opened the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.– The then Prince Charles visited in 2018, when he joined a Peacebuilding and Interfaith Engagement, laid a wreath at the Commonwealth War Graves memorial in Abuja and attended a talk on poultry-rearing. Faith in politics A Liberal Democrat candidate in Sutton and Cheam has been deselected allegedly because of his Christian faith. How do religious groups tend to vote?

Name calling Springwatch presenter Gillian Burke says she finds it ‘jarring’ to call animals by their English names, preferring Swahili. Some popular Swahili translations: – Elephant: tembo/ndovu – Giraffe: twiga – Lion: simba – Hyena: fisi – Hippopotamus: hippopotamus – I’m fed up of paying for a TV licence: Nimechoka kulipa leseni ya TV Full Marx A Labour politician named Karl Peter Marx Wardlow was elected as a councillor in Stockport. The fondness for left-wing parents to name their children after their political heroes is most obvious in Keir Starmer – his first name is also shared with Keir Mather, who won the Selby and Ainsty by-election for Labour last year.

Horse trials Five Household Cavalry horses bolted in central London, with two reaching Limehouse before being calmed down. It may have been a shocking sight in the 21st century but it would have been ordinary life in the 19th century. – By the 1890s there were 300,000 horses in London. It was not uncommon for them to bolt in the street. Between 1854 and 1861, 62 people are recorded by Guy’s Hospital as having died as a result of collisions with horse-drawn vehicles. A bigger day-to-day problem was with dung, 1,000 tons of which were produced by the animals every day.– The last time a horse bolted in a London street was during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 when a police horse was spooked and ran riderless into crowds.

Attack of the drones The world’s earliest drone attack goes back further than you might think. On 12 July 1849 the Austrian military launched unmanned balloons over Venice, which they hoped to recapture after the city had declared itself a republic the year before. Suspended beneath each of the balloons were bombs containing up to 30lb of explosives, with timed fuses primed to deposit them over the city. The raid was not a success. Some exploded in mid-air, others failed to reach their target because the wind changed direction after the balloons had been launched. Some even blew back over the Austrian forces. A second attempt involving 200 balloons was launched on 22 August. A few exploded in the city but again most missed their mark.

Meet market Who uses the gay dating app Grindr?  – The site claims 27m users worldwide, 80.5% of whom identify as gay. – 13m users are active on a monthly basis. Some 923,000 are paid users. – 80% are younger than 35. – 39% are single. – 48% are in the US. – The average user is on the site for 60 minutes per day. – The ‘explore’ feature – which allows users to see who on the app lives in a particular town or city – is accessed more in London than any other city in the world. – Grindr accounts for 3% of global use of dating apps. The most popular is Tinder, which accounts for 27% of global use. Source: grindr/businessofapps.

Ballot points Michael Gove hinted that the general election could be on 14 or 21 November.     Have we had a November election before? – General elections were held on 15 November 1922, when the Conservatives won a 74 seat majority and on 14 November 1935 when the National Government won a majority of 242. – There have been no general elections in November since then. – Prior to the first world war, general elections were not held on one specific day but were spread over several weeks.     General elections spanned November in 1806 (Whig victory), 1812 (Tory), 1868 (Liberal) and 1885 (Conservative). Raw facts How many times was sewage discharged into rivers and the sea in 2023?

Lock, stock and barrel Jeremy Hunt committed the Conservatives to maintaining the Triple Lock in their manifesto. How much is the policy costing taxpayers? – The Triple Lock – which guarantees a rise in the state pension equivalent to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is the highest – was introduced in 2011. Since then the state pension has increased with CPI six times, average earnings three times and 2.5 per cent three times. – The basic state pension is currently £156.20 per week. Had it increased only with CPI it would now be worth £140.90 and had it increased only with average earnings it would be worth £141.20. – The total state pension bill this year is £124.3 billion.

Popularity polling Vladimir Putin won the Russian presidential election with 87.3% of the vote. But he doesn’t appear to be quite the world’s most popular leader. Some others who have won commanding election victories: – Robert Mugabe won 61.9% of the vote in the 2013 Zimbabwean election. – Alexander Lukashenko won 81% in Belarus’s 2020 presidential election. – Ilham Aliyev won 94% of the vote in last month’s election in Azerbaijan. – Bashar al-Assad won 95% of the vote in Syria in 2021. – Kim Jong-Un was elected with 100% of the vote on a 100% turnout in the Mount Paektu District in the North Korean elections in 2014. Across the country the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland won 100% of the vote on a turnout of 99.9%.

Polls apart When was the last time an upstart party not represented by George Galloway won a  UK by-election? – In November 2014 Ukip won by-elections in both Clacton and Rochester and Strood. In each case the winner was the sitting MP: Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, who had defected from the Conservatives. – A more obscure party was Blaenau Gwent People’s Voice in June 2006. The Blaenau Gwent seat had been won at the 2005 general election by Peter Law, a former Labour councillor who had resigned from the party in protest at women-only shortlists and stood as an independent.

Populist roots Where did the term ‘populist’ come from? The original Populist party grew out of the Farmers’ Alliance, a movement set up to fight corporate interests in the US in the 1880s. It then joined with other minor parties to fight the 1892 presidential election under the Populist banner. Its candidate James B. Weaver won 8.5% of the vote and carried four states – Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and Nevada – with a set of left-leaning policies including free-collective bargaining, shorter working hours and lower interest rates. In spite of its success it broke up during the 1896 election campaign when many members chose to back the Democrat candidate William Jennings Bryan instead.

Baby voters The Lib Dem Polly Mackenzie proposed giving people the right to vote from birth, with a proxy vote going to the under-tens. Does any country allow children to vote? – No country has a voting age lower than 16, although Iran allowed 15-year-olds to vote until 2007. Those countries that do allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote are not all necessarily the most democratic. 16 Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Isle of Man, Jersey, Malta, Nicaragua, Scotland (not UK general elections), Wales (not UK general elections) 17 East Timor, Greece, North Korea   Holiday homes Which areas of England and Wales have the highest proportion of properties used as second homes/holiday lets?

Gerontocracies How many countries are led by an octogenarian? – Out of 187 states assessed in March last year, 10 had heads of government aged over 80. The oldest – who is still in power, is the president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, who celebrated his 91st birthday this week. – The median age of a world leader in March last year was 62, with 18% in their forties, 22% in their fifties, 35% in their sixties and 18% in their seventies. – Countries classified as ‘free’ (as defined by the thinktank Freedom House) tend to have younger leaders, with a median age of 58. Leaders of ‘partly free’ countries have a median age of 61 and those which are ‘not free’ a median age of 69.

Rough drafts Ian Lavender, who died aged 77, was best-known for playing Private Pike, an out-of-place young man in a group of elderly Home Guardsmen in the BBC sitcom Dad’s Army. Yet in reality Pike was much closer in age to the majority of those who served in the Home Guard. A sample analysed for a project at the National Archives has revealed that 50% were aged below 27 and 28% were 18 or younger. – Any male aged between 17 and 65 was eligible to join. As well as those too old for normal military service, the Home Guard included many medically unfit for regular military service (like Pike, ruled out because he had a rare blood group), those in reserved occupations like wartime factory production, and 17- to 18-year-olds who were not yet of age to serve.

On their uppers The former science minister George Freeman claimed that he resigned from the government last year because he couldn’t afford his mortgage repayments – which had risen from £800 to £2,000 a month – on his ministerial salary of £118,000. – There is a precedent for a minister complaining publicly about his own poverty. In September 1985 the arts minister Grey Gowrie (who was a member of the cabinet under the auspices of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) resigned from the job complaining that his £33,000 salary was ‘not what people need for living in central London’. He was subsequently appointed chairman of Sotheby’s on a salary reputed to be £150,000.

Madame president If Donald Trump stumbles before election day, could Nikki Haley end up becoming the first female US president? Hillary Clinton failed as the first female presidential candidate in 2016, but she wasn’t the first to stand on a presidential ticket: that honour belongs to the now-forgotten Geraldine A. Ferraro, who was picked by Walter Mondale to be his Democratic running mate in the 1984 election. Mondale had hoped to win over women voters, but his tactic appeared to backfire when a poll soon after her selection showed only 22 per cent of women voters approved of Mondale’s choice and three in five of all voters believed he had only chosen Ferraro to please feminist groups, not for her innate abilities.

State of play Iowa became the first US state to pick its election candidates in 1972. How many times since then has the small Midwestern state predicted the eventual winner? – On nine out of 13 occasions, Iowa has chosen the Democratic candidate who went on to win the nomination. However, in three of those years, the winner was the sitting president, with an obvious advantage. – In the first two contests ‘uncommitted’ received more votes. The year when the nationwide primaries least followed the example set by Iowa was 1992 when Tom Harkin won 76% of the vote and the eventual winner, Bill Clinton, just 3%. – As for Republicans, the Iowan result has predicted the outcome in four out of nine contested elections.

Power play The former energy minister Chris Skidmore resigned in protest at a bill to issue more licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. What are other countries doing? – US oil production hit a record 13.3m barrels a day last month, up from 10.8m five years ago. – Qatar is investing $150 billion toincrease oil production by 50% to 5m barrels per day by 2027. – Brazil plans to increase oil production from 3.1m barrels per day in 2022 to5.4m barrels per day by 2029. – Canada increased oil production by 375,000 barrels per day between 2021 and last year. Judgment call The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has called the Post Office scandal the ‘most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history’.

For the love of dog XL Bully dogs were banned in England from this week, although there is an exemption for animals which are neutered, registered, insured and kept on leads and muzzled in public. Some other things that have been banned this week: – Parking on the pavement in Edinburgh. – Importing disposable vapes in Australia. – Selling new homes with gas boilers in the Australian state of Victoria. – Displaying toys in Californian shops under male and female sections. A gender neutral section must now be included. – English councils trying to charge for disposing of waste from DIY projects. – Withdrawals in dollars from banks in Iraq. – Imports of Russian diamonds to G7 countries.

Brief Labour 22 January 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Labour government, something the party might want to celebrate, even see as a good omen. Except that Ramsay MacDonald’s minority administration lasted only nine months. – If Rishi Sunak wanted to be mischievous, he could choose 31 October as election day – the closest Thursday to 29 October, the date the Conservatives, under Stanley Baldwin, regained power with a thumping majority of 209. Labour had been brought down by a vote of confidence after the government withdrew a prosecution under the Incitement to Mutiny Act against John Ross Campbell, editor of the communist Workers’ Weekly. Campbell had written an open letter to servicemen, imploring them to: ‘Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers!

Black and white politics Two pandas, Yang Guang and Tian Tian, left Edinburgh Zoo for China after their 12-year loan to Britain ended. But contrary to popular belief, ‘panda diplomacy’ didn’t begin in 1972 when Chairman Mao gave two to the visiting Richard Nixon – and received two musk oxen in return. (In 1974, Mao also gave British PM Ted Heath the pandas that later inspired the World Wildlife Fund’s logo.) Instead, the first pandas sent by China to the West were from Soong Mei-ling, the wife of the Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek, in 1941 to thank the Americans for their help in repelling the Japanese invasion. The animals were caught by an American missionary, flown to the Philippines, put in a camouflaged ship and transported to San Francisco.