Features

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

The inconvenient truth about polar bears

The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore. The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn.

Nick Carter

Our armed forces are hollow – and our enemies know it

When you’re the chief of the defence staff, the head of the British armed forces, it’s never a good sign if your phone rings on a Sunday evening and it’s the permanent secretary. On this particular Sunday, in March 2021, the reason for the call was the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, which was due to be published the following week. Although we had been closely involved in the work, the permanent secretary had been told that the chancellor had approved a settlement that would lead to punishing cuts. Something had to be done. I fully expected to get sacked or resign in protest when I made my way to Downing Street the next morning.

Philip Hensher

The doctor will patronise you now

How a profession speaks to its subjects is always of interest to a writer, sometimes perversely so. Over the past few weeks a persistent problem with my foot worsened and appeared to take charge of things. (This isn’t going to be a piece moaning about ill health, I should reassure you.) The hospital took soundings of the ulcer, now turned into infection: first with a probe, then an X-ray, then an MRI scan, and finally the consultant manifested himself. The infection was in the bone and showed no sign of retreating under the antibiotics. It looked as if an operation was unavoidable, to remove – the consultant paused in his explanation – ‘We’re just going to take a kind of little nibble at the toe,’ he said. I regarded him levelly.

Thursday

Patrick Kidd

Why I took my eight-year-old son wine-tasting

My eight-year-old son’s eyes widened when I unwrapped a Christmas present I got from my parents: a bottle of cherry brandy from the Lyme Bay winery in Axminster. ‘Can I have some?’ Humphrey asked, for he had been hitting the cherry brandy hard over the summer. Not the alcoholic kind, of course, but the cherry brandy-flavoured lollies sold by the ice-cream van that parks outside his school on a hot afternoon. How could I refuse? Ashley Dalton would be scandalised. The junior health minister said this month that the government is looking into banning the sale of non-alcoholic versions of booze to teenagers in case it ‘normalises drinking’ and becomes a ‘gateway’ to the real thing. Children will be allowed to vote at 16 under this government, but not drink a Lucky Saint.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘There’s an awful lot more bile now’: Jonathan Lynn on how politics has changed since Yes Minister

A few years ago, everyone in Westminster was obsessed by The West Wing, but a decade of chaos and populism has rendered Aaron Sorkin’s vision of idealists devoted to the public good obsolete. The madness of the last government left even The Thick of It a tame parody of reality. But listening to everyone from Dominic Cummings to Morgan McSweeney bemoan the state of the civil service shows that Yes Minister/Prime Minister, with their portrayal of hapless ministers in the spell of apex mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby, may be (somewhat surprisingly) the most enduring of television’s political classics. Sir Humphrey and his victim, Jim Hacker, were the creation of writing duo Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn.

Michael Gove

The guilty men: the ideologues who undermine Britain

When Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, Tony Blair was in melancholic mood. The newly elected prime minister turned to his aides Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell and mused: ‘We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.’ Nearly 30 years later, Britain is shrinking further. Blair may offer advice to his successors in private – Campbell does so in public – but the only one of the trio exercising real power now is Jonathan Powell. He is the Starmer government’s national security adviser – the single most influential actor in British foreign policy. And he’s the architect of the debacle which has come to symbolise everything wrong about that policy: our surrender of the Chagos Islands.

Mary Killen

A lament for the landline

Two years ago my quality of life began to go downhill. It happened when BT Openreach gave our old copper landline a compulsory upgrade to ‘Digital Voice’, meaning all calls would be made over wifi. A succession of visiting engineers failed to resolve the crackling and the cutting out on the new digital line or the uninstructed diversion of incoming calls to voicemail. Worse, the new digital service wouldn’t extend to the bedroom: ‘It’s an old cottage, you see, with thick walls.’ Never mind that for decades I had spent many happy hours per day lying in bed (like Mrs Stitch, my role model) organising jobs and romantic partners for friends, jigsawing together the data – unearthed by longform chatting over the copper landline – to make the matches.

Sean Thomas

Amelia: the purple-haired goth girl who became a nationalist icon

It has been obvious for some time that there are basic concepts that the liberal British Establishment simply does not understand. Like money. Or tax. Or business. Or going to the pub. Or the fundamental value of free speech. Well, now we can add a whole new roster of more baroque concepts to this list: meme culture, e-girls, semiotics, détournement, the subtext of black chokers and basic human nature. And all because of a purple-haired young cartoon woman called Amelia. Before we get to Amelia, we need to understand what created her – because the joke can only be grasped once you appreciate the lunacy that came before her minxy pink dresses. Amelia comes from a game called Pathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet and Extremism.

David McCloskey

Pity the modern-day spy novelist

I write spy thrillers that attempt to deal authentically with the world around us. The Syrian civil war. Spy games with Vladimir Putin. Russian meddling in the US. The shadow war between Israel and Iran. Tension inside the US-UK intelligence partnership. These are the settings for my first five novels, and in all of them fast moving and unexpected events in the real world have disrupted my plotlines, rendering portions of the books ‘OBE’, as we used to say back at Langley: overcome by events. The real world, more and more, is scooping the spy novelist. Exploding pagers? That would be too much. It would strain credulity Spy novels, of course, have always been in conversation with reality.

Owen Matthews

Why is Ukraine trying to cancel Swan Lake?

Two of Ukraine’s most famous ballet dancers face dismissal, cancellation and possible mobilisation into the army. Their crime? They dared to dance a segment of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake during a European tour. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture slammed Serhiy Kryvokon and Natalia Matsak’s performance as ‘promoting the cultural product of the aggressor state’. The National Opera of Ukraine cancelled Kryvokon’s next scheduled performance – as well as his exemption from compulsory military service and permission to travel. If the dancer returns to his homeland, he will not be able to leave again.

Ben Gartside

Welcome to XL bully death row

‘There’s no way of finding out what’s really happening in there,’ says Aaron Rainey, an XL bully expert who advises police forces and dog owners across the UK. ‘Nobody knows where the kennels are – the police keep the information under wraps in case people turn up and try to break out their XL bullies.’ Rainey was preparing to make a trip to assess an XL bully in Leicester, three hours from the dog’s previous home. He is concerned about the number of volunteers working in kennels housing XL bullies: many of them are college students trying to bolster their CV ahead of applying for veterinary studies at university. They are serving as prison guards to the UK’s most dangerous dogs. Welcome to XL bully death row.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman and James Heale

Robert Jenrick: Why I defected to Reform

Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the performance of Kemi Badenoch, but the key conversation was the one he had with his father on Boxing Day. ‘He’s a very straight talker,’ Jenrick explains when we meet at Reform’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon. ‘He said, “If you weren’t in politics and there was a general election to-morrow, which party would you vote for?” I said, “Reform.” He said, “If you weren’t in politics, weren’t a candidate, had no particular loyalty, who would you want to be prime minister if the choice was Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage?” I said, “Nigel Farage.” He said, “Well, be honest with yourself and become a Reform MP.

Paul Wood

Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?

Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland.  Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in front of them at a lectern. ‘Good-looking people, young, beautiful people, I hate them. You hate standing here with all this power behind you.

Lara Brown

The Chinese takeover of Britain’s public schools

Roedean is now known as ‘Beijing High’. Cheltenham Ladies’ College is ‘Hong Kong College’. In the country’s most elite boarding schools, pupils say that they are one of just a handful of English children. Others note that Chinese has become the dominant language in hallways and dormitories. Many English parents can no longer afford a boarding school education for their children. And the pressure of recently introduced VAT on fees, as well as above-inflation rises year on year, means the number able to cough up will dwindle further. By contrast, China and Hong Kong’s growing economy and cultural obsession with education provides a surfeit of parents with the cash needed to secure the educational prospects of their children.

Gavin Mortimer

The EU vs the farmers

It was a weekend of mixed emotions for the European Union. There was the news from Donald Trump that he will impose a 10 per cent tariff on eight European countries in retaliation for their opposition to his plans to take control of Greenland. But on a brighter note, the EU finally signed the Mercosur trade agreement with several South American countries. The European Commission hailed it as the creation of ‘a free-trade zone of roughly 700 million people’, one which they promise will save EU companies more than €4 billion a year in customs duties. Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president, said: ‘We choose fair trade over tariffs, we chose a productive long-term partnership over isolation.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘Pray your boilers don’t fail’: the Church of England is in the grip of eco-zealots

It came to pass in 2020 that a decree went out from the General Synod that all the Church of England must be carbon net-zero by 2030. And this ruling was first made when Justin Welby was Archbishop of Canterbury. And all went to have a good hard look at their church heating systems, every one into his own vestry cupboard… How easy it is to issue a decree from on high; and how hard it is for the people on the ground to have to deal with its consequences.

John Campbell

The five Haldanean principles that could reshape Britain

If Reform get into government, there is one man they seem likely to turn to for guidance. He is an obscure figure, unknown to many, yet has acolytes across the political spectrum – from Dominic Cummings to Gordon Brown. His name is Richard Burdon Haldane and he died almost a century ago. It was recently reported in this magazine that Danny Kruger had been seen carrying ‘a well-thumbed copy’ of the most recent biography of Haldane. I wrote that book. In it, I describe how Haldane reshaped Britain in the early 20th century – and how, should others choose to follow his example, he might help to transform it again today.

Andrew Gimson

A fogey’s guide to cryptocurrency

All innovations seem unseemly to fogeys. When bitcoin, the first of the cryptocurrencies, was launched in 2009, we dismissed it as a deplorable and transient phenomenon. Its inventor, who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto, would not reveal his real name. Perhaps he did not exist and whoever hid behind the pseudonym was having a joke at our expense. When Satoshi created the first bitcoin on 9 January 2009, he embedded within its code a headline from a recent Times: ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.’ Crypto appeals to people who distrust banks, as well one may. ‘Never trust the bankers,’ Winston Churchill warned in old age. History suggests one can trust neither governments nor central banks to maintain the value of money.

John Power

No, the internet is not bad for your child

The forces arranged in favour of banning social media for under-16s are powerful and wide-ranging. The unlikely alliance includes the leader of the Tory party, more than 60 Labour MPs, Big Suze from Peep Show and the patron saint of all bad ideas – His Majesty King Charles III. It seems probable that when amendment 94A of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is voted on, it will receive support from all these quarters, as well as from Sir Keir Starmer, who has, true to form, launched a consultation on the issue. A handful of mental health charities will tell him that he must really get on with banning social media for teenagers, which he will then promptly and politely do.

Michael Simmons

Under 50? You’re never getting a state pension

Last week the Bank of England was warned to prepare for a financial crisis triggered by the discovery of extraterrestrial life. But the really worrying scenario isn’t aliens. It’s us. A century ago the state pension as we know it was introduced. Taxes from employers and their staff were used to pay out benefits to the elderly once they hit retirement age. There was no means-testing, and this benefit for all removed the stigma associated with claiming welfare. It was a roaring success. But it won’t see another 100 years. It’s always been wrong to call it a pension. It’s a benefit paid out of current taxation like any other. There’s never been an investment pot built up or paid into. The state pension runs more like a Ponzi scheme.