Features

Wednesday

Sarah Langford

The great British flower revival

When Juliet said of Romeo that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, she spoke a common truth. We identify and love flowers by and for their scent. But you will struggle to find many scented flowers for sale in Britain. This is largely because in the 1950s, the UK’s home-grown flower business was flattened by the Dutch government. Huge investment in its domestic flower industry saw the first air-freighted blooms arrive in this country, followed by the ‘Flying Dutchman’ lorries in the 1980s. Today the average Briton spends £28 a year on flowers, up from £8 in 1984, yet 86 per cent of these are imported, most via the Netherlands from Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Simon Heffer

It’s time to uncancel Enoch Powell

Despite a career of nearly half a century in public life, Enoch Powell is generally remembered for one utterance only: the so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech he made in Birmingham on 20 April 1968, in which he voiced his opposition to the race relations legislation being taken through parliament by the then Labour government. Powell was the Conservative opposition’s defence spokesman. His speech threw the leader of his party, Edward Heath, into a profound panic, and he sacked Powell immediately, initiating decades of assertions that Powell was racially prejudiced. Powell always said – entirely honestly – that he never made a speech about race: just speeches about immigration policy and his profound disagreement with how it was usually managed.

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Starmergeddon: Labour is hurtling further left

There’s a difference between climate and weather. Both change, but at very different tempos. Variations in the weather are seasonal and ephemeral. Alterations in the climate are longer-term shifts – epochal transformations – as we move from ages of warming to cooling to warming again.  I’m writing the day before the country goes to the polls to pass a midterm verdict on the Labour government. I can’t predict with precision exactly what will happen in every Scottish parliament constituency or London borough. The electoral weather will vary from region to region. But I can tell you that our broader political climate has already changed and these elections, in aggregate, will confirm it. Britain is becoming daily colder. For the enterprising. For the young.

Simon Jenkins

Get ready for the ugliest building in the City of London

The City of London is not noted for its beauty. Most great European cities expect their historic streets to retain visual integrity, their modern buildings to show some respect for their old. London’s planners, such as they are, have little use for such concepts. A few ancient churches cling to life in the footings of skyscrapers. The odd pub slinks nervously down a back alley. Anyone seeking historic London should look elsewhere. Meanwhile, competition for the ugliest City building is intense, but an outright winner is in the offing. Permission has just been given for a true monster to sit over Liverpool Street Station. The speculative development, backed by Network Rail, is for a 19-storey L-shaped cliff to tower over the Great Eastern hotel on Bishopsgate.

Lisa Haseldine

Why is maternity care in Britain getting worse?

Chelsea and her partner had been trying for a baby for two years. Following several miscarriages, she became pregnant again last spring. ‘We were overjoyed,’ the 26-year-old says. ‘We thought this time everything would finally be different.’ Joy rapidly turned to worry when Chelsea began to suffer headaches and visual disturbances and made several trips to Worthing Hospital, part of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust. Eventually, foetal distress was picked up during a scan; after a transfer to another hospital and an emergency Caesarean, Bonnie was born in September at just over 26 weeks’ gestation. She had suffered a brain bleed and had chronic lung disease. ‘I knew something wasn’t right,’ Chelsea says.

Ruari Clark

What no one tells you about dairy farming

It has been calving time in Devon and I arrive from London ready to work hard. The day starts at 6.30 a.m., when we check the field to see if any cows have calved. We check the ‘springer’ herd every two hours until 10 p.m. and intervene if a cow is in difficulty. Newborn calves are fed colostrum and taken down to the shed with their mothers. The farm I am working on keeps its cows outside all year round – not for this herd that little patch of blue some call the sky. But what the cattle gain in freedom, the farm labourers lose in comfort. The last time I was here for calving, in the spring of 2018, the weather was biblical: it was still snowing in April. Thankfully, the weather has held, but I’m not sure the same can be said of my body.

Max Pemberton

Is your wellness smoothie giving you cancer?

There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: ‘Do I have cancer?’ A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties. Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening.

Julie Burchill

Are any fans weirder than Michael Jackson fans?

What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial – and fans, lots of them. Since the rise of OnlyFans, the word ‘fans’ has gained unpleasant associations but it was originally a 19th-century baseball term to describe the most ardent spectators – though its provenance was far earlier, from the Latin ‘fanaticus’, meaning insanely but divinely inspired. I thought of this on reading that the new Michael Jackson film has had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a biopic of all time. It’s fair to say that the fans will have made this happen: it’s not really the kind of flick someone casually picks after perusing the options.

Owen Matthews

Russians no longer believe Putin’s war propaganda

A year ago, Russia marked the 9 May Victory Day celebration with a spectacular display of fireworks that lit up the Moscow sky. This year the fireworks have again been spectacular – but this time they have been caused by long-range Ukrainian attack drones slamming into refineries, pumping stations and factories deep inside Russia. In the Black Sea port of Tuapse, fireballs of burning gasoline 15 storeys high erupted over the local oil refinery, while rivers of burning fuel ran down the city’s streets. Firefighters took three days to extinguish the inferno, which created a plume of smoke so high it was filmed by skiers from the slopes of the Caucasus mountains more than 60 miles away.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Our new ambassador’s ‘Washington Gaffe’ 

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, our new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post three months, yet he’s already had to handle a string of bilateral crises – none his fault. US-UK relations are under intense strain over Iran, Ukraine and now the Falklands. And the Jeffrey Epstein stench still lingers thanks to his predecessor, Peter Mandelson. The King’s visit was meant to gloss over all that unpleasantness. Word went round last week that a grateful Donald Trump would pack King Charles and Camilla off and promptly declare the US-UK trade deal had been finalised. Then, on Tuesday, the first morning of the visit, news broke of a leaked tape.

Tim Shipman

Is the country ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband?

When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: ‘What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government. Fancy that!’ The fact that 14 Labour MPs voted to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee (the body which forced Boris Johnson from the political stage) – and a total of 53 recorded no vote in his defence – is far from a ringing endorsement of his leadership. But the significance of the Mandelson hearings has been misunderstood.

Arabella Byrne

What your whippet says about you

‘Whippets are simply ducal,’ a grand friend pants at me in her drawing room when I ask her why she owns one. Certainly not a Regency duke, I mutter, looking at the fawn skeleton lying in wait on the brocade sofa. Because to me, whippets aren’t posh, just as Michael Heseltine isn’t fooling me all these years later. Rather, I find them sinister: the endless jutting ribs, the paper-thin coat, the incessant shaking. But I know I am not in good company. Whippets, the Ozempic-coded dog of our age, have been taken up by high society in their droves.

Mary Wakefield

Shameless Britain: we are a nation of shoplifters

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, the supermarket says, because it has a ‘deter, don’t detain’ policy – though what it thinks could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is anyone’s guess. But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration.

Andrew Gilligan

March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are the real racists

‘Back us to stop the far right,’ say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many ‘Zionists Jews’, and that Donald Trump is ‘owned by Jews’. Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: ‘Long live the Resistance.’ If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offence.

Thomas Steventon

My miracle match against the Vatican’s cricket team

Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose: to defend a papal cricket trophy. I am not Catholic. And until last year I had never played cricket before. It all started, as many great British stories do, with a pub: the Three Stags in Kennington. My friend Tom had invited me to what he described as a ‘Cricket Club Party’. As I headed upstairs, the barman’s quizzical look when I mentioned I was there for ‘the party’ should have given me cause for concern. As I came in through the doors, I was greeted by what appeared to be the end of a Sunday lunch and a collection of six individuals for whom the collective age would have been a record-setting Test score.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘It’s worse than during the worst of Boris’: how the civil service turned against Starmer

Somewhere in the vast array of documents the Cabinet Office has gathered on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, there is a text message which Keir Starmer sent the night before he made the announcement. ‘You’ll be brilliant in challenging circumstances,’ he told Mandelson. ‘And after many years of our discussions, we get to work together side by side. I really look forward to that.’ The message was leaked after one of Starmer’s most difficult weeks in charge, a week which senior civil servants believe proves, once and for all, that the Prime Minister himself will never be brilliant in challenging circumstances.

Sebastian Mallaby

The new AI system causing panic over cybersecurity

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a ‘stochastic parrot’. Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot.

Zoe Strimpel

Lena Dunham’s memoir is everything wrong with feminism today

Is the right to be angry and miserable the best that modern feminism can do? Or is it possible, while acknowledging that things are far from perfect, also to recognise that women in the West today are the luckiest ever to live? On the surface, one of the most fortunate women of our times is Lena Dunham. She is revered, famous, rich, apparently in control of her voice and her dramas. Her breakthrough TV series, Girls, which she wrote and starred in, profoundly shaped how young women have been seen since the beginning of this century. Now she has published a bestselling memoir, Famesick, which has put her again at the heart of the debate over the travails of modern women. I am delighted that Dunham has once more managed to turn out a blockbuster.

Robin Simcox

How Gaza became one of the biggest issues of the local elections

As Tony Blair contested a third election in 2005, the Labour government’s popularity was in tatters. The divisions in the country were running deep, following a United States-led war in the Middle East. The general election, held alongside the locals, saw the emergence of new radical political parties. They seized an opportunity to break the two-party consensus by opposing foreign wars and weaponising an increasingly politicised Muslim vote. Not much is written today about Respect, but it had some success fighting on an anti-Iraq war platform. George Galloway, the party’s leader, won in Bethnal Green and Bow. Although Respect’s staying power proved limited, what is emerging for next month’s local elections might prove more durable.

Natalie Livingstone

The unlikely link between Nuremberg and The Devil Wears Prada

In the aftermath of Peter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orban’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda harom napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days. Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of the second world war and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials.