Features

Thursday

Michael Simmons

The rich are fleeing – what next?

Keir Starmer is worried about who’s coming into the country. This week, he launched a white paper with the aim of cutting migration. Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’, he said. However, it’s not just arrivals that should give him sleepless nights. It’s the number of people in the departures lounge too. London’s private members’ clubs, top schools, luxury car dealerships and estate agents are all grappling with the same problem: their customers are fleeing the country. Since 2016, almost 30,000 millionaires have left Britain – an outflow unmatched in the developed world. They are either returning home or moving abroad. The reason is a slew of tax changes that have made it much less attractive to be rich in Britain.

Andrew Gimson

Your state pension is a socialist bribe

Every four weeks the government sends me my state pension. Those words have a socialist, almost Soviet, ring. The amount has recently risen to £11,973 a year – a preposterous sum to send a 67-year-old man still in paid employment. But from the state’s point of view, the money is not entirely wasted: it buys a kind of loyalty. Because I accept the money, and do so with a certain pleasure, I am bound into the system and am less likely to say it’s a bad one. I’ve allowed myself to become a dependent. I may criticise the way the welfare state is run and demand improvements in the administration of one or another part of it, but I have become less likely to challenge the principle of the whole thing. This is bad, because we’re heading for a smash.

Michael Gove

Shabana Mahmood: ‘There’s still a moment of reckoning to come’ on grooming gangs

Shabana Mahmood may be the only Labour politician to have persuaded Rishi Sunak to vote for her. The former prime minister was in the year above Mahmood when they both studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, in the 1990s. When she ran for JCR president, Sunak pledged his support. Meeting Mahmood in her ministerial office this week, I can understand why. There is a sense of quiet purpose about her that instils confidence. I’m predisposed to sympathise with her more than most because she occupies the post I held for 15 months – Lord Chancellor. It’s the most glamorous and least attractive job in the cabinet. You’re the only minister with your own personal gold-braided gown, wig, pumps and purse bearer – or at least the only one who has to be seen with all four publicly.

Thursday

John Power

How to bring down Britain’s power grid

At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London. Homes lost power. Transport services ground to a halt. It came in the same week as outages across Spain and Portugal and just a few weeks after a fire at another substation caused Heathrow airport to shut down. We also know that the British government is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. All of this raises an important question: how resilient would the British state be in the face of a determined effort to cripple its power grid? The blunt answer is: not very. David Betz, at King’s College London, has long warned that Britain’s national infrastructure is dangerously vulnerable to simple tools such as hammers and hacksaws.

Olenka Hamilton

Is Poland’s revival a mirage?

In 1988, when I was six months old, my British father and Polish mother took me to meet my family in Krakow. My parents brought an extra suitcase filled with disposable nappies because such luxuries weren’t sold on the other side of the Iron Curtain. At the time, there was only one shop in Krakow that sold foreign goods, but my father was pleased to discover that a gallon of whisky could be bought for only $8. He was a member of the House of Lords and, I’m told, we were trailed for our entire stay. Everywhere we went, a large Polski Fiat 125 driven by a suited man followed us. My parents always said that apart from drinking in people’s homes, there wasn’t a lot to do in Krakow back then. There were a couple of run-down cafés in the main market square but that was it.

Christa D’Souza

Hell is having house guests

Since we moved into our house in the Cyclades a few years ago, I’ve come to accept that if you own a home on the beach in Greece with plenty of spare rooms, people will come to stay. But what is it about house guests abroad? Do they need fresh towels at home every time they wash their hands? Do they have to have three cooked meals a day? Do they have chauffeurs in normal life, or do they become allergic to driving only when they are on holiday? ‘We didn’t bother renting a car because we don’t want to go anywhere.’ If you want to make a host’s shoulders slump, saying this will do the trick. If I sound mean-spirited it might be because I’m not a natural hostess to start with.

Melanie McDonagh

Who stamped out the postal service?

Tried to send a parcel lately? Or a letter? If it involves a trip to a post office, all I can say is, give it time. A fortnight ago, I was posting a book to a friend and took it to the nearest post office – the central, City of London one. It’s housed in a convenience store: handy if you want a samosa but lacking dignity, somehow. All the electronic terminals were out of action, four or five of them. The queue was patient but prohibitively long. Thinking bad thoughts about privatisation, I made my way to the post office in Kensington Church Street, which is a proper outfit; that was closed. I tried the Kensington High Street branch, but its machines were out of action too. I gave up.

Hannah Moore

My hunt for the perfect ‘mum van’

I spent my childhood being ferried around in my mom’s minivan, a hunter green Ford Windstar. Compared with most family cars on the road today, it was like Air Force One: magisterial and bigger than was strictly necessary. I loved that minivan. It was roomy and comfortable, with a two-seater half-bench in the middle row to allow access to the full three-seater third row. The Windstar saw my two sisters and me through our primary years, to twice-weekly basketball and volleyball practice. In the summer, we would head to the lake, all the kit housed neatly in the back. Apart from the handful of times I threw up in the back seat, my memories of that van are happy ones. The ‘multi-purpose vehicle’ (MPV) was commonplace in my millennial childhood.

Francis Pike

How Pakistan’s most powerful man provoked India’s missile attack

From a western perspective, memorising all 114 chapters of the Quran might seem an unusual qualification for a national leader. Yet this is a defining feature of the résumé of General Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s chief of army staff since November 2022. To become a Hafiz – one who knows by heart the entire Quran – requires committing 77,430 words to memory, each recited with precise pronunciation in classical (not modern) Arabic. This accomplishment earns the revered title of Hafiz Sahb or Sheikh and reflects deep religious devotion. To put it into perspective, it would be akin to Sir Keir Starmer memorising the biblical books of Genesis, Numbers and Judges – together totalling more than 72,000 words. Why compare a British prime minister with a Pakistani general?

Gus Carter

Welcome to Scuzz Nation

Reform’s success in last week’s local elections has been attributed to many causes. Labour’s abolition of the winter fuel payment for pensioners. The hollowing out of the Conservative party’s campaigning base. Nigel Farage’s mastery of social media. But if you want an emblem of why voters turned their back on the political establishment let me give you Goat Man. In one ward in Runcorn, the seat Labour lost to Reform by just six votes, residents found that no one would listen when a neighbour filled his derelict house with goats and burned the animals’ manure in his garden. Despite repeated appeals to authority, no action was taken.

Thursday

Philip Patrick

‘It is sad that we are sometimes seen as just killers’: an interview with Japan’s last ninja

Getting an interview with Jinichi Kawakami, the man known in Japan as ‘the Last Ninja’, was no easy task – but nor should it have been. Ninjas, Japan’s legendary covert operatives and assassins, were renowned for their elusiveness, so it would have been disappointing if tracking one down had proved a cinch. It took a good deal of research and persistence before I was granted an interview by landline telephone – which also seems appropriate since ninjas were reputedly able to make themselves invisible. Kawakami is head of the Banke Shinobinoden school of ninjutsu (ninja culture), director of the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum and Ninja Council, and a professor of Ninja Studies at Mie University.

Owen Matthews

What does Putin want? Whatever he can get away with

The US general Mark Clark knew a thing or two about dealing with Russians. In the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Clark commanded the American occupying forces in Austria. His Soviet opposite number, and nominal ally, was Marshal Ivan Konev. The two war heroes were tasked with pacifying the conquered and divided country at the dawn of the Cold War. ‘The Russians were not interested in teamwork,’ recalled Clark in his 1950 memoir, Calculated Risk. ‘They wanted to keep things boiling… They were accustomed to the use of force. They were skilled in exploiting any sign of weakness or uncertainty or appeasement. This was their national policy.’ Two things infuriated Clark more than anything.

Paul Wood

The secrets of ‘God’s influencer’

Assisi In a medieval church built of white stone, pilgrims and tourists shuffle past the body of a 15-year-old boy in a tomb with a glass side. The boy is handsome, with dark curly hair, and wears a blue tracksuit top, jeans and Nike trainers. Everyone peers through the glass and some realise, with a start, that the perfectly preserved face and hands are eerily lifelike silicone. The real remains, decomposing for almost 20 years, are inside the effigy. This is Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager known as ‘God’s influencer’, who is about to become the first millennial saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The tomb is held up from behind and so appears to levitate, surrounded by a corona of bright light.

Laurie Graham

AI killed the Easter Bunny

On the grounds of advancing age, I had decided to ignore all the chatter about artificial intelligence and devote my remaining time to things I could properly understand. Then I discovered that one of my own copyrighted properties, the fruit of a year’s work, had been scraped into the AI maw without so much as a by-your-leave, and it became personal. I wrote to my MP who responded with template blandishments. This government… committed to blah blah… exciting prospects… safeguarding… potential opt-out system… a close watch, yadda yadda… Feeling impotent and no further forward, I returned to my knitting. It took the murder of the Easter Bunny to rouse me from the torpor of denial.

Ross Clark

The radical barristers who really lay down the law in Britain

The facade of Garden Court Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is reassuringly traditional. The barristers who work there occupy buildings which were once home to the Earl of Sandwich and the Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval. If there were any building in London in which wigs and gowns would seem a natural form of dress, it would be here. But the facade is just that. For behind the pedimented Georgian windows there operates arguably the most radically effective cell of left-wing activists in Britain. Barristers are supposed to adhere to the cab-rank principle: they act for the first client who comes calling.

Angus Colwell

The creeping Dubai-ification of London

In December 2023, a TikTok influencer called Maria Vehera opened a packet of ‘Dubai chocolate’ in her car and filmed herself eating it. Since then, 124.6 million people have watched her swallowing this pistachio-based gloop. Oh Maria, what have you done? A butterfly flaps its wings – or an influencer eats some chocolate – and soon people are setting their alarms for 5 a.m. to queue outside Lidl for the ‘drop’ of LIDL’S OWN DUBAI CHOCOLATE. Guess what? M&S made one too (£8.50). Morrisons then had the bright idea of creating a pistachio cream Easter egg. Waitrose’s Dubai chocolate was so popular it had to ration it to two bars per person. Knock-off brands now feature at the counter of almost every news-agent in London.

Ian Williams

How China bought Britain

Somewhere in the bowels of the Foreign Office, civil servants are still working on the government’s ‘China audit’. The report was commissioned by the new Labour government to ‘assess trade-offs in the UK-China relationship’ and to ‘ensure consistency across government, business and academia towards engagement with China’. Little is known about its workings or who’s being consulted. Instead of bringing clarity, the process is deepening confusion, and there are worrying reports that the audit has been pared back to support Keir Starmer’s ‘pragmatic’ approach. All the while, there have been a series of troubling events that demand extreme caution about Beijing. The British Steel debacle is only the latest.

Freddy Gray

Trump’s big gambles are paying off

‘I run the country and the world,’ said President Donald Trump last week. That’s not really an exaggeration. In our ever more mediatised age, Trump doesn’t just make the news. He is the news, win or lose. Why did Mark Carney triumph in the Canadian elections? A Trump backlash. What happened at the Pope’s funeral? Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky talked peace. Is the economy tanking? It’s the Trump, stupid. Younger Donald’s ambition was to be the world’s most famous man – to achieve, as his son-in-law Jared Kushner put it, ‘virtually 100 per cent name recognition’. He surpassed that years ago. His aspirations now are far bigger.

Thursday

Luke Daly-Groves

Why won’t Hitler conspiracies die?

Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute. The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories. I once hoped that my book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy might put an end to those.

Adam Frank

We should be excited about signs of alien life

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally claim it had answered that ancient question: are we alone? As an astrophysicist involved in the search for life beyond Earth, I can tell you that the results were not that moment. But that doesn’t make them any less exciting.