Features

Wednesday

Geoff Bagwell

Sir Lenny Henry should pay reparations

Iheard some odd things working as a teaching assistant. On one occasion, in December, I asked a nine-year-old if he knew what he would be getting for Christmas. His answer? A bed. When I spoke to the headteacher about it, she told me he lived with his single mother and five siblings in a two-bedroom flat. He had spent his entire life sleeping one night in a bed, one night on the floor, alternating with his brother. Not long after this, I was told to be ‘sensitive and understanding’ of any misbehaviour from another boy in the class. This was because the school had just discovered the family – mother, father and four children – had been made homeless after ‘causing trouble’ in their council-provided accommodation.

Arabella Byrne

Why the posh go to Poundland

‘Excuse me, will you be closing soon?’ But Denis – the elderly, headset-wearing cashier at Poundland on Witney High Street – can’t hear me. He smiles thinly, in the way the hard of hearing do, before assisting a customer with a pushchair. On the adjacent till, Barbara answers for him: ‘Cash only here.’ Clearly, we are all talking at cross-purposes. It hardly matters: the tills keep ringing. Yet despite a brisk trade here in Oxfordshire, Poundland, the discount store in 600 locations nationwide, is to enter into administration. This would be a tragedy. Poundland is much misunderstood.

Tim Shipman

Will Trump and Netanyahu launch another round of strikes on Iran?

An American political operator contacted me last week, before the blue tidal wave swept aside Donald Trump’s Republicans in Congress, with his favourite quote from the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, about an American president starting a war to distract from domestic difficulties: ‘Change the story, change the lead,’ Robert De Niro’s character declares.  The politico, who once ran an abortive Democrat campaign for president, then predicted: ‘The bigger the defeat, the bigger the bombs Trump drops on Iran.’ At that point, the results of the Israeli elections had already eroded Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances of remaining Prime Minister and left two of the most dominant leaders of the last decade with their backs to the wall.

Lara Brown

How mandarins sabotaged a rare prison success story

Britain’s prisons are in crisis. So, naturally, Whitehall has managed to snuff out one of the few organisations that might know how to fix them. Unlocked Graduates was founded in 2016 by Natasha Porter, a former teacher. Its goal was to solve one of the prison service’s most fundamental problems: the quality of its workforce. Prison officers have long been treated as glorified security guards. Applicants need not possess a single GCSE. Almost all candidates will never attend a face-to-face job interview and the governor does not meet those being recruited. Unsurprisingly, this system has not yielded good results. Unlocked changed this.

Max Jeffery

The prison early release scheme is already a disaster

Four days after he was released from HMP Wandsworth, Michael Bogle was back inside. The 38-year-old had served 11 of 32 weeks in prison for stealing before he was freed last month via the government’s early release scheme. He strolled out of jail, told reporters he would ‘hopefully not’ shoplift again, then stole from a Sainsbury’s a few hours later. The early release scheme was meant to increase prison capacity. But it isn’t working. Since it began two years ago, 80,000 people have been freed, yet there are just 1,000 extra prison spaces. Last week, the Ministry of Justice revealed that more offenders were recalled to jail in the first half of this year (25,531) than were let out (25,255).

Rupert Darwall

Europe is paying the price for its soft power delusion

For decades, Britain has, like the rest of Europe, clung to a deluded belief in soft power. Within minutes of being appointed prime minister in May 2010, David Cameron was outside No. 10 declaring that Britain was to become ‘more compassionate abroad’. This was where the new government was heading: soft power was on the up and hard power degraded. The 2010 manifesto pledged to meet the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid by 2013. The government produced a strategic defence and security review that would see defence spending fall by 22 per cent in real terms. Gaps in key capabilities would be tolerated on the assumption that there would be no European war within the next ten years.

Luke Shore

One of our greatest cathedrals may have to close – thanks to Labour

On St George’s Day, Nottinghamshire Scouts parade to Southwell Minster to give thanks to the patron saint of England and the Scout Movement. Elderly ladies step out of the hairdressers with rollers still in their hair. Shoppers put down their baskets to watch the boys and girls go by. The parade winds past the Saracen’s Head, where Charles I spent his last night of freedom before surrendering to the Scottish army; and up to the Archbishop’s Palace, where Cardinal Wolsey spent the last months of his life desperately trying to win back Henry VIII’s favour after failing to secure the annulment from Catherine of Aragon. On reaching the Minster, seat of the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, the Scouts form a guard of honour with the English, Union and Scout flags.

Sam McPhail

The rise of crypto kidnappings

Last week North Korea pulled off the biggest heist in history when state-sanctioned hackers stole $6.3 billion from the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. About half of the assets made their way into Pyongyang’s coffers. As the world’s largest exchange, Binance said it would cover its customers’ losses, but the hack still spooked many crypto traders, who are notoriously jumpy. They withdrew $3.6 billion on Sunday. The paranoia around holding cryptocurrency is well founded. In essence, they are just digital currencies which are incredibly hard to trace. You can follow the transactions, but you don’t know the identity of who owns them. Funds can be moved around multiple times a minute and easily swapped between different currencies, all with no checks.

Maxwell Marlow

Why are Brits so bad at investing?

Looking around Britain today, we can identify plenty of three-letter initialisms making our lives miserable. The BBC, with its hand in your pocket and potently mad programming; the NHS, which sucks in an ever-growing £205 billion a year of taxpayers’ money but seems to be incapable of reform; the WFH epidemic, which is devastating to productivity. However, there is one three-letter acronym which could solve a lot of our problems as a nation – the Individual Savings Account, or Isa. Previously, it was Sid. In 1986, the Thatcher government launched a highly effective campaign advertising shares in British Gas called Tell Sid. It persuaded some 4.5 million people to consider investing in this newly denationalised utility, reintroducing the British public to retail investing.

Tali Fraser

Girls, just say no to lab-grown diamonds

These days, when I spot a proper bobby-dazzler of a diamond on a woman’s ring finger, I feel a bit sick. Not with envy, but with the queasy certainty that I am looking at a comically large, factory-made fake. A real diamond is one of the most ancient things in this world. Under the heat and pressure of billions of years trapped in the earth, scraps of carbon transformed into a precious stone. Everything we have valued in diamonds – the hardness, the fiery glitter, the rarity – comes from that long and improbable journey. The impersonations – although we’re meant to call them ‘lab-grown’ or ‘synthetic’ – are mainly produced in Indian or Chinese machines and cost a fraction of the real thing.

Lisa Haseldine

How to cope with ruinous hen dos

‘Hello girls!’ A few weeks ago, a WhatsApp chat named ‘Millie’s hen’ whirred into life on my phone. ‘We’re so excited to reveal the details of what will hopefully be an amazing long weekend!’ Three nights in the south of France next June, 15 women and a £500 ‘contribution’ for some, but by no means all, food, drink and activities. On flights, airport transfers, the rest of the food, drink and activities, we were expected to fend for ourselves. All in, Millie’s hen do would cost me close to £1,000. I scrolled down to the bottom of the eight-page PDF document that had been distributed by the organisers: ‘Once everything is booked, there might be a tiny variation in price. Thanks for understanding!’ I felt my blood pressure rise.

Wednesday

Noa Hoffman

Can Netanyahu pull off one more great act of survival?

Tel Aviv The Tel Aviv neighbourhood of Hatikva is everything Israel’s critics across Europe fail to understand. This run-down suburb is home to many working-class Mizrahim: Jews who, save for their skullcaps, would not look out of place in a London mosque. They, or their parents, came to Israel from across the Islamic world: Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Algeria and Yemen. Finally safe in the Jewish homeland, many have become some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most ardent supporters. These deeply religious taxi drivers, cleaners, administrators and shopkeepers still feel the trauma of life under the iron fist of Islamism. Boycotts and finger-wagging from London or Paris will not sway them.

Michael Simmons

Sod the state: the middle-class race to go private

Postwar Britain can be defined by a bargain made with its middle class: pay for public services but benefit from them too. Private education has always been the choice of a very small minority; private healthcare was reserved for the wealthiest and those whose employers paid for it. Middle England was content to send their children to the same schools as everyone else and use the same GPs, hospitals and dentists. This is no longer true. State spending continues to grow, yet large parts of the population now pay privately to supplement what their taxes have already provided.

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump will never be a lame duck

Of all the rotten clichés in American political discourse, ‘lame duck presidency’ is arguably the worst. It ought to be dragged out back – perhaps by the former homeland security secretary and infamous animal-slayer Kristi Noem – and strangled to death. Yet commentators have to say something about the midterms. And since it is likely that President Trump’s party will lose on Tuesday night, expect all sorts of explanations as to just what a damaged duck Donald now is. A weaker position on the Hill will push him back towards his favourite role: the outsider raging against DC If (as most pollsters expect) the Republicans lose both chambers of Congress, he’ll have been ‘crushed’ and ‘humiliated’.

Owen Matthews

Trump is cynical and shocking about Ukraine – but is he also right?

What does ‘victory’ in Ukraine mean – or ‘defeat’? Can there be lasting peace without justice? Direct talks between Russia, the US and Ukraine will finally commence in Abu Dhabi early next month, marking the beginning of the end of this bloody war. As Kyiv and Moscow, plus their respective allies, prepare to thrash out the details of a grand bargain, it’s vitally important to clarify what we mean by ‘victory’ or ‘capitulation’, as those terms get thrown around by politicians observing the war’s closing act. A hot mess of false starts, betrayals, Russian dissembling and European denunciation lies ahead.

John Power

The revolutionary past of Miatta Fahnbulleh’s father

Labour may have removed hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but the party has its own dynasties. This government has a Kinnock, a Falconer, a Miliband and a Reeves, all representatives of famous political families. But the minister with perhaps the most intriguing ideological ancestry is the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh. No one denies that Fahnbulleh is an intellectually formidable operator in her own right. With a PPE degree from Lincoln College, Oxford, she speaks with a poised confidence. She has described herself as a Liberian ‘refugee’ and the inference many will draw is that she is a child of poverty, not privilege. But Fahnbulleh was educated privately at Beechwood Sacred Heart School in Tunbridge Wells, where fees to board are now more than £40,000 a year.

Angus Colwell

Why are there suddenly so many dessert cafés in London?

Fifteen years ago, if you were eating at 239 Brompton Road in Kensington, just over from the Oratory, you may have been enjoying steak tartare, or grilled rabbit with mustard sauce, or tête de veau, a poached portion of calf’s head with turned potatoes. This was the former premises of Racine, a French restaurant by Henry Harris, which Michael Winner said was ‘quadruple historic’. Harris now runs Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, rated the best restaurant in the country this year, after closing the Knightsbridge site in 2015. At 239 Brompton Road nowadays, on the menu you’ll find a ‘cheesecake brownie served with vanilla ice cream, Oreos and warm Nutella and Lotus Biscoff sauce’ (£10.95).

Wednesday

Louis Sarkozy

Who’s who in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s revolutionary guard

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the riots’ chief instigator and leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), is currently ranked second in most presidential polls. Marine Le Pen remains the favourite despite her continuing legal problems. But the polls do not reveal Mélenchon’s strategy, his organisation, his coherence or his ruthlessness. It has become fashionable to dismiss his chances. He is too radical, they say, too inflammatory. As if that has not benefited other modern underdogs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z44ZraRn35w Born in Tangier in 1951, the former socialist schoolteacher became a senator at 35 and briefly served as a minister under the former PM Lionel Jospin. Mélenchon has spent the past 18 years building a party in his own image.

Philip Delves Broughton

Revolting France: The riots are driving the country’s politics to its extremes

Paris The wonderful thing about electric bikes, if you are fighting with French riot police, is the way they burn. You skid your Lime or Vélib’ into the middle of the Boulevard de Magenta, which leads from the Gare du Nord down to the Place de la République, and set it alight along with a pile of ordinary bikes, and soon you have a conflagration of rubber and battery chemicals. During the weekend’s street protests, the fires provided cover for rioters breaking into mobile phone, vape and jewellery stores and the money-transfer shops which serve the many immigrants who work in eastern Paris. By Monday morning, a vicious guard dog stood outside an Intermarché supermarket, snarling at customers coming in one by one.

Tim Shipman and Michael Simmons

‘Boring does not prevent it from being dangerous’: What to expect from Burnham’s first Budget

Don’t tell John Healey this is a boring Budget. ‘We have to get people out of this frame of mind that the only way to judge a Budget’s significance is the size of its tax line,’ complains one Treasury official of what is being billed as a ‘steady as she goes’ statement by the Chancellor next Wednesday. With green shoots of growth finally showing themselves after back-to-back Budgets by Rachel Reeves, which hiked tax by £75 billion, Healey’s team is making a virtue of fiscal minimalism. ‘The worst thing to do at that moment would be a Budget that pulls huge levers and risks shutting off some of that economic growth,’ one aide says. Another has had the history books out.