Features

Thursday

Michael Gove

My memories of the royal train

It is the most civilised way to travel anywhere in the kingdom. Which is why I am so distraught that the King has cancelled it. This week His Majesty has agreed, reluctantly I can be sure, to decommission his royal train. The decision was announced by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, James Chalmers. Mr Chalmers brings to the Royal Household all the romance and lyricism you’d expect of a chartered accountant who spent 39 years at PwC, including time as something called a Global Assurance Leader. He justified the decision on the basis of the need for ‘modernisation’ and ‘fiscal discipline’. This is not so much letting daylight in upon magic as strangling it with a spreadsheet. It is a tragedy.

Tim Shipman

Can Keir Starmer fend off Labour’s big beasts?

It was the chronicle of a death foretold. Last year Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, drafted a memo for his boss spelling out in the starkest terms How Labour Could Fail. This week, instead of celebrating the first anniversary of Labour’s landslide election victory, the two men revisited that analysis and reflected on its prescience. McSweeney may be in the firing line of Labour backbenchers angry at Downing Street’s mishandling of welfare reform, but he was eerily accurate in predicting the problems that this administration would face. ‘The only task Labour finds harder than taking power from the Conservatives is keeping it,’ McSweeney warned.

John Connolly

Labour should look to Andy Burnham for inspiration

For Keir Starmer, it seems everything is going south. His MPs are openly rebelling, his advisers are mutinous and it often feels as though he can’t decide whether to run the country as human-rights-lawyer-in-chief or as Nigel Farage-lite. It’s no wonder that some in his party are beginning to look north for an answer to the party’s woes – specifically to Manchester, where Andy Burnham increasingly looks like the King over the river Irwell. With the government trapped in an ideological Bermuda triangle, Greater Manchester suggests there is a way out – a way for Labour to govern effectively.

Thursday

Angus Colwell

Is your restaurant halal?

Dos Mas Tacos opened recently next to Spitalfields Market, one of London’s trendiest and busiest areas. Two beef birria tacos cost £11.50; two mushroom vegano are £10.50; a ‘can-o-water’ is £2.50. But look a little closer at their menu, and something jumps out: no pork and no alcohol. You’d expect a carnitas option at a taqueria, and you’d want a Corona with it. You can’t get either at Dos Mas Tacos. Huh, and hmm. I came across the place on TikTok, via a video of the two founders, Rupert and Charlie Avery, outside their shop. They’re well-heeled lads, twins with posh accents. They used to work in the superyacht industry. ‘Hey everyone!’ one brother says.

Arabella Byrne

Millennials don’t want brown furniture

For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was passed on to my sister, who paid a considerable sum to store it because she had no room for it in her terraced house. Some years later, I was informed that I must house this precious mahogany albatross myself. After some handwringing and sadness, lack of space forced me to pass it on to someone in my village. She took one look and promptly vowed to ‘do an upcycle’.

Grayson Perry

Why do my outfits make people so angry?

I have always cycled everywhere in London, not because I want to save the planet but because I want to get to my destination on time. I ride a big heavy Dutch woman’s bike: practical, less nickable and I can wear pretty much anything while riding it. On this occasion I was wearing frilly pink nursery-print dungarees, pink patent bootees, a sweet little jacket with puffy pale-blue bows down the front, a pink cloche hat and a pink-and-blue shiny PVC backpack. I was just locking my bike to the railings on Charing Cross Road when an angry man approached. ‘Are you a paedophile?’ he roared. ‘Why are you dressed like that?

Francis Pike

In defence of exorcism

British politics and ghosts are subjects that rarely meet. Sometimes an MP or parliamentary aide might report a sighting of one of various spirits that inhabit the Palace of Westminster. It is said, for instance, that the ghost of the assassin John Bellingham haunts the Commons lobby at the spot where he gunned down Spencer Perceval. And last year the diary secretary to speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle excited the tabloids with her claim that once, in one of parliament’s side rooms, she felt a phantom dog nuzzling against her leg. When I bought a pied-à-terre in Kensington, I got the dowser to give it a psycho-spiritual once-over In general, though, politicians aren’t preoccupied with the paranormal. One exception is David Bull, the former TV presenter of Most Haunted Live!

Tom Gross

We should welcome regime change in Iran

On the first night of what Donald Trump has called the ‘12-day war’ between Israel and Iran, someone spray-painted a message in Farsi on a wall in Tehran: ‘Thank you, Israel. Hit the regime hard – and leave the rest to us.’ That graffiti encapsulated the feelings of many millions of Iranians. If you doubt this, you can read (in translation from Farsi) opposition accounts such as ManotoOfficial and IranIntlTV on Instagram or Telegram, which in the past two weeks have been posting countless messages and comments in support of Israel. These accounts are widely seen by people inside Iran, who use VPNs to get around the regime’s online censorship systems.

Peter Frankopan

Israel’s attack on Iran has been planned for years

It was clear at the time that what happened on 7 October 2023 would change the Middle East. What was perhaps less obvious was the impact it would have on the rest of the world. In addition to the suffering in Gaza, the weeks and months that followed Hamas’s horrific attacks have seen the reconfiguration of Syria, the effective dismantling of Hezbollah, the decapitation of the leadership of Hamas and now, with Iran, a time when the decision-making in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington will have a profound effect on the shape of the emerging global order. Historians like to think about turning points and moments in the past where the wheels of history turned. In one sense that is, of course, true about 7 October.

Tim Shipman

‘It’s Liz Truss territory’: how bad are things for Kemi Badenoch?

Around 5 p.m. on Monday one of Kemi Badenoch’s aides was having a drink with a friend in the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster. Over a pint of IPA he explained how the Conservative leader was planning to thrust herself more forcefully into the public conversation. ‘We know the pace needs to quicken,’ he admitted. ‘Reform are sucking up the political oxygen.’ Badenoch inherited a ‘party on its knees’, the basics of which needed overhauling. ‘We’d love to be doing more fun viral social media stuff, but Kemi is sitting down and getting on with it.

Thursday

Flora Watkins

Suburbanites vs the countryside

‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ by the Members. There are plenty of cars being washed (and waxed) on my road on any Sunday morning and the strimmers are buzzing, despite this being peak breeding season for insects. But here’s the thing. We live in deepest north Norfolk, not the achingly suburban Surrey town of Camberley that so provoked punk angst. When we bolted from south London after the lockdowns, our checklist included no streetlights, motorways (the nearest is 98 miles away), new-builds or nearby neighbours. To secure the rambling farmhouse we wanted, we had to compromise on the last of these. But we were moving to the English equivalent of la France profonde.

Bijan Omrani

Pope Idol: Leo’s singing should be celebrated

‘But will anyone be interested?’ the vicar asked cautiously. It was a fair response to my latest madcap scheme. One of the vicar’s 12 churches, St Candida and Holy Cross at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset, hosts one of the country’s only three remaining pre-Reformation saints’ shrines with the relics of the saint still present. In this case, the shrine is to St Wite, a ninth-century virgin princess martyred by the Vikings. Her saint’s day was coming up. Could we, I asked, recreate a pre-Reformation church service in honour of it? The vicar, the Revd Virginia Luckett, who is sometimes heard on Radio 4, agreed to my proposal – but with trepidation. She is used to conducting pilgrimages to the shrine, and knows the spiritual value of this medieval tradition.

John Power

The right rape gang inquiry

Another inquiry into child sexual abuse, another minister insisting that this time it will be different. Yvette Cooper promises arrests, reviews, a new statutory commission and the largest ever national operation against grooming gangs. But for the victims there is only one question that matters: what will this new inquiry do that the last one didn’t? The last one, of course, was IICSA: the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, led by Professor Alexis Jay. It took seven years, £180 million and 15 separate investigations to complete. And yet for survivors and campaigners, the abiding feeling at the end of it all was futility. IICSA had all the grandeur of a public reckoning but little of the justice. It was supposed to examine how institutions failed victims.

Justin Marozzi

Toppling Iran’s Supreme Leader could be a mistake

Are we already seeing an ominous mission creep in Israel’s blistering attack on Iran? First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s air assault was all about ending Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme, a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Tehran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Then, within a few hours of launching ‘one of the greatest military operations in history’, Netanyahu was telling Iranians that Israel was ‘clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom’.

Owen Matthews

Venice deserves Jeff Bezos

Venetians are once again revolting. Not, this time, against cruise ships, wheeled luggage, over-tourism or rule from mainland Mestre. No – according to a small but vocal contingent of the island city’s eternally discontented, it is Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos who embodies all that threatens La Serenissima. Bezos’s offence is that he is planning to marry Lauren Sánchez, a former TV journalist, in a three-day celebration in central Venice beginning on 24 June. His 250 guests will include many of the most famous and wealthy people on the planet. The celebrity-obsessed Italian press, deprived of such a world-class spectacle since George Clooney’s Venetian nuptials with Amal Alamuddin in 2014, is in a frenzy of anticipation.

Tim Shipman

Starmer’s war zone: the Prime Minister is in a perilous position

Sir Keir Starmer was alerted in the early hours of Friday by his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, that Israel’s assault on Iran was ‘under way’. The Prime Minister got a text message while in his flat above No. 11. It was not a bolt from the blue. Downing Street has not said so publicly, but the government was told in advance what was coming. Publicly, Starmer’s relentless emphasis has been on ‘de-escalation’ of the crisis. Privately, ministers have been expecting an Israeli offensive since December. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, led a cross-Whitehall tabletop war-gaming exercise into how events might unfold on Monday last week, four days before the first air strikes.

Freddy Gray

Who’s pushing Trump to be an Iran hawk?

‘This never would have happened if I had been president,’ says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad to worse. It’s a line he uses a lot in relation to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which began in the interregnum between his first administration and his second. Yet the latest war, between Israel and Iran, is a different matter. Trump of course blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, who ‘made Iran rich’ with $300 billion for the evil regime’s dreaded nuclear weapons programme. It was Trump, though, who in 2018 tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and in 2020 killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The depressing rise of ‘direct cremations’

Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020. Numbers are continuing to rise, fast, for this most affordable, clinical form of body disposal: cremations with no ceremony and no attendees. Daytime advertising campaigns put out by corporate firms such as Pure Cremation promote the peace of mind of sprightly 75-year-olds at their laptops, or in their conservatories with mugs of tea, who have just pre-paid for the direct cremation package. In the adverts they gush about the future family knees-up, with cupcakes and balloons, that their relatives will splash out on with the money saved by not paying for an attended funeral.

Damian Thompson

Can Pope Leo end the liturgy wars?

Last weekend, under windswept banners depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, nearly 20,000 young pilgrims marched through fields and forests between the cathedrals of Paris and Chartres. All of them carried rosaries and chanted in Latin, sometimes breathlessly: it’s a punishing 60-mile trek through mud and rocks. Each ‘chapter’ of the column was accompanied by priests. Like the lay pilgrims – drawn from 30 countries but dominated by French teenagers in scouting uniform – they wore backpacks and trainers, but also full-length cassocks or habits. They were traditionalists and so were the young people: despite their informality, they were utterly committed to intricate Latin worship.

Francis Pike

Is Xi Jinping’s time up?

Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is that Xi Zhongxun is being talked about in the West because he is not being talked about in China. Omission is the perverse way that one learns about what is really going on in the opaque world of Chinese Communist party (CCP) politics. China-watchers live on scraps. Xi Zhongxun was a big cheese in his own right. Born in the north-west’s Shaanxi province, he was an early member of the youth league of the CCP. After meeting Mao Zedong at the conclusion of the Long March, which ended up in his home province, he quickly rose through the party ranks.