Features

Thursday

Michael Simmons

Broke Britain: how the Bank of England wrecked the economy

In February 2020, a few weeks before Britain was thrown into lockdown, Sajid Javid resigned as chancellor of the exchequer over a bust-up with the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. The fight was thought to be over Cummings’s attempts to dictate who could and could not work in No. 11. In fact, it was just one skirmish in a long-running and bitter power struggle between the two men. Two months before his resignation, Javid had claimed victory in a different battle against Cummings – one over who would occupy the governor’s office at the Bank of England. Cummings wanted Andy Haldane, then the Bank’s chief economist, who he believed was intellectually curious, allergic to groupthink and might give the Bank the shake-up it needed.

Thursday

Roger Lewis

The slow delights of an OAP coach tour

Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad. There will be cream teas, along with river cruises, coastal excursions, scenic drives and jaunts on steam railways.

Laurie Penny

Corbyn’s new party is Starmer’s creation

Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point in the same direction. Starmer’s team have been so busy admiring their enormous majority that it has taken them a while to realise that they are trapped with 400 left-wingers in every shade of red from post-Soviet carmine to the most delicate salmon pink, all of them high on victory and spoiling for a fight. One might as well try to herd 400 cats into formation. In our sclerotic two-party, first-past-the-post system, a majority as large as Starmer’s is meant to give the leadership a free hand.

Patrick Kidd

Does AI belong on the tennis court?

The evidence was clear, the official had dropped a clanger. At 4-4 in the first set of the women’s match at Wimbledon last Sunday, the British player Sonay Kartal should have had her serve broken when she hit a backhand long. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova saw the ball land well out of court, as did those watching the replay, but the line judge remained mute. ‘Replay the point,’ the umpire said, leading the Russian to complain that ‘they stole the game’. This nameless offender – let’s call him Hugh after Hugh Cannaby-Serious, the official who used to wind up John McEnroe – was napping. It turned out that Hugh had been switched off for a few points. Robots can be human too. Cameras have replaced line judges at Wimbledon after 148 years.

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why should the hunt for the next Archbishop of Canterbury be ‘inclusive’?

On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton and Howley. Justin Welby announced he was vacating the throne of St Augustine on 12 November last year; it took until 28 May even to assemble the committee who will discuss the names of his potential successor. It will be a miracle if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by the autumn.

Charles Moore

Peerless: the purge of the hereditaries

The House of Lords is very old, but not quite continuous. In 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles I, the Cromwellian House of Commons passed an act which said: The Commons of England assembled in parliament, finding by too long experience, that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the People of England… have thought fit to Ordain and Enact… That from henceforth the House of Lords in parliament, shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away. This measure was nullified, however, by the Restoration in 1660. The parliaments of King Charles II, and all parliaments since, have included the House of Lords. The hereditaries served their country loyally: 59 were killed in the two world wars, as were 316 of their sons.

Sophia Falkner

Good Lords: the House is losing some of the best

Keir Starmer has not been the luckiest general. But, in one respect, he has bested Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington will shortly be purged from parliament, two centuries after Waterloo. Like his ancestor, Charles Wellesley has led a life of public service. For that, he will shortly receive the sack as part of the greatest purge of active lawmakers since Oliver Cromwell. All this so Starmer can make way for the likes of Tom Watson, Sue Gray and Richard Hermer. Among the hereditary peers are Olympians and entrepreneurs, artists and academics Among the hereditary peers are Olympians and entrepreneurs, artists and academics. Some are genuine blue bloods, others political animals.

Rafael BardajI

The man who’s destroying Spain

Madrid In the mid-1990s, Spain’s socialist prime minister Felipe Gonzalez saw his political career collapse under the weight of a corruption scandal. A Supreme Court investigation revealed a fraudulent contracting scheme that illegally funded the Socialist party’s (PSOE) election campaigns. Despite intense media pressure from government-aligned outlets, two brave judges upheld the rule of law. Three decades later, another socialist Prime Minister – Pedro Sanchez – faces a similar reckoning. But this time, the scandal combines political manipulation, personal ambition and institutional degradation. Corruption is as old as power itself, yet in Sanchez’s case it takes on a uniquely modern and dangerous form.

John Whittingdale

Norman Tebbit transformed the country for the better

My first job in government was working for Norman Tebbit as his special adviser in the Department of Trade and Industry. I received the call 41 years ago, in the summer of 1984, and it was agreed that I would join him immediately after the Conservative party conference concluded that year in Brighton. He was already a hero of the Margaret Thatcher government. But few saw as close up as I did just how much courage – and compassion – Norman, who died this week aged 94, had. On the final day of that conference, in the early hours, an IRA bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel. Republican terrorists had nearly succeeded in murdering the Prime Minister. Norman was badly injured, enduring the agony with stoicism.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Britain ready for France’s most controversial novel?

This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France’s most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered. Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn’t a classic in the literary sense. In an article to mark the publication of a recent biography of Raspail, Le Figaro said the novel was guilty of a ‘certain kitschness, clumsiness, awkwardness and a nihilism that seems forced’. More than that, it has been accused of being overtly racist.

Kate Andrews

Meet Zohran Mamdani, the man who will ruin New York

Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of the city. ‘We’re outside,’ he told his videographer as they began their trek at Inwood Hill Park, ‘because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at!’ Like any good millennial, he documented every step. In his collared shirt and sneakers, he greeted and hugged supporters, who chanted his name. The celebrating was premature but justified. Four days later, Mamdani won 43.5 per cent of the vote in the first round, defying almost every pollster’s prediction. Within hours, the self-declared ‘democratic socialist’ was the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City.

Madeline Grant

Admit it: most wedding speeches are awful

Perhaps the most traumatic part of attending an American wedding – much worse than the bridesmaids coming in the wrong way, the proliferation of dinner suits and the tendency of couples to write their own appalling vows – is the tradition of the ‘rehearsal dinner’. This, an event the night before the wedding, is where the United States of America gets to play out its full psychotic breakdown in the context of a couple’s nuptials. It seems unfair to expect Home Counties dads to be masters of oratory Anyone, and I mean, anyone, is allowed to stand up and make a speech. Meaning that Uncle Robert E.

Philip Hensher

Public libraries deserve to shut – they’ve forgotten why they exist

The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in a desperate plight after years of cuts, or better still ‘Tory cuts’. Librarians, who are heroes, struggle to go on serving their local communities. Libraries are hanging on by a thread, and because of those government cuts can’t be as useful as they once were. The only solution, of course, is more money from central government to local authorities, who, of course, will dash to spend the extra millions on reinstating public libraries and not add it to other things they want to splurge on.

Paul Wood

The Alawite women taken as sex slaves in Syria

Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human rights activists say that some women are still being held prisoner and that kidnappings are still happening. They accuse the Syrian authorities of being unwilling or unable to stop it. The activists say that between 50 and 60 women and girls have been taken. These numbers are small compared with the 1,600 or more civilians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence in March.

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?