Features

Wednesday

Patrick Kidd

How to rescue English cricket

There was always something of John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot about Ben Stokes, ever eager for a flamboyant rescue mission in his own particular, as Lancelot puts it, idiom. Leave no chandelier unswung, no buckle unswashed. He would charge in, gung-holier than thou, and work out the damage later. ‘When I’m in this idiom, I sort of get carried away,’ Lancelot apologises after massacring all the guests at a wedding.  At times, it was glorious. But often, increasingly so in the second half of his England captaincy, ghastly. ‘Incredible highs and pretty low lows’ was Stokes’s own assessment – and we will always be grateful for the highs. But as England rebuild, they need to consider the manner of those lows and how many were self-inflicted.

Owen Matthews

Putin has lost touch with reality

As dark clouds of burning oil billow like thunderheads on the skyline of Moscow and black rain falls across the capital, why does Vladimir Putin fail to see that something fundamental is changing in the dynamic of his war? Why, when Donald Trump effectively agreed to hand over every inch of the Ukrainian territory Russia has captured and offered the Kremlin an easy off-ramp studded with juicy business deals, did Putin refuse? And why, for that matter, did the Russian President choose to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place? One answer is that Tsar Vladimir is mad, so blinded by his imperialist ambitions that he deliberately chooses to ignore the reality of a crashing economy, half a million dead fellow countrymen and a war that is obviously unwinnable.

Andrew Sabisky

Britain will need China to survive the AI revolution

Professional players of Texas hold ’em, the most popular variant of poker, go to great lengths to play a balanced, unexploitable strategy. They mix value bets and bluffs in every single hand. The bluffs are not usually to make money. They are there to stop other players adjusting profitably to the game. If another player over-folds to avoid losing to your value bets, only then do your bluffs go from break-even to hugely profitable. Against strong opponents, a balanced strategy is essential. National strategy likewise should strive for balance, particularly from the perspective of a weaker country.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Can Burnham resist the siren call of the left?

Power, when it is gained and lost, is transferred in stages: the actual, the visual and the constitutional. The latter took place on Tuesday evening when the prime minister presumptive sent a letter to Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, requesting that she commence access talks with his team. Keir Starmer had already given permission for them to proceed, but the propriety and ethics team in the Cabinet Office had told Romeo she could not initiate proceedings. Andy Burnham had to ask first. To all intents and purposes, he is already the vessel from which power flows. At the same time, it became clear that James Purnell, the former Blairite cabinet minister, will lead the transition team and stay on to become chief of staff in 10 Downing Street.

Paul Wood

The Iran war is Trump’s Suez crisis

Clarissa Eden famously declared that ‘in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room’. Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined. In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt.

Michael Gove

Can I save Britain from war with Russia?

I t won’t be much of a consolation to Keir Starmer but I too was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being prime minister. Fortunately for the country, I was only playing the role in a fictional coalition cabinet assembled by Sky TV to wargame the consequences of a Russian attack on the UK. My turn as make-believe premier began with unwarranted overconfidence, moved to fumbling crisis after crisis and ended with me almost alone in a bunker wondering how disaster had come so quickly. So very different from the real world. My cabinet colleagues – Nicola Sturgeon, Penny Mordaunt, Harriet Harman, Jim Murphy and Sayeeda Warsi – all gave a good account of themselves.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Long holidays are the worst

‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts. ‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted.

Gus Carter

The Spectator’s role in the birth of America

The Spectator was there at the founding of America. George Washington had six copies of the original 18th-century Spectator at his Mount Vernon estate and read them often. He shared with Joseph Addison, The Spectator’s co-publisher, an interest in how to educate ideal citizens: men and women with wit and grit. Young Washington read The Spectator in the hope of bettering himself, too. Both of his older half-brothers had been educated in England and he wished also for the manners and polish of an English gentleman. For the pioneering, self-improving men who would go on to create an independent America, the 18th-century Spectator was both an education and a guide. ‘I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it,’ wrote Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography.

Henry Jeffreys

The secret to dressing exceptionally well

As I scribble these words on a train to London, I’m wearing a lightweight Italian wool suit, a shirt from Gieves & Hawkes, a silk spotty tie and a pair of Church’s suede brogues. You might mistake me for a prosperous Neapolitan gentleman of a certain age. But in fact, I’m a charity-shop dandy – my outfit came to less than £60. That’s less than a pair of new trainers for my teenage daughter. I’m particularly pleased with the shoes, which I picked up locally for £30. A new pair would set you back £700. If you’re not too grand to buy secondhand, it’s actually far easier and cheaper for men to dress smartly than to be slovenly. I learned this important fact in my early twenties.

Melissa Kite

The real reason for the Dartmoor pony cull

Try as I might, I cannot think of an animal welfare issue that is more misunderstood than the survival of Dartmoor ponies. Every maddening misconception about land management and every un-intended consequence of animal rights sentimentality is encapsulated in the sad reality of why the ponies will be culled in greater numbers than ever from this autumn, because the government has messed up the issue even more than usual. The latest disaster to befall Dartmoor is the conflating of ponies with sheep and cattle by Natural England to produce a total number of grazing animals allowed on Dartmoor.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘As soon as Andy wins, the world changes’: Burnham’s plans for power

There is no situation room, no wall of flatscreens or a hotline to the White House, just a few chairs patrolled by ‘quite a mad dog’. But a garden in Golborne, on the outskirts of Wigan, is now ground zero in three different operations which will decide the future of Britain. The first is Op Makerfield, the campaign for Andy Burnham to win this week’s by-election. The second is Op Leadership, to line up Labour MPs, trade unions and donors for the showdown which may follow. The third is Op Transition, the plans to install a Burnham-led government. ‘Loads of it has been done in Andy’s garden,’ says a close ally. ‘Half of us in the garden, the other half online. We’re having to run a by-election campaign, a leadership campaign and preparations for government simultaneously.

Mark Mason

The pernicious rise of the Fake Fuzz

The Harrow Council ‘enforcement officers’ might have been more extreme in their language than other members of the Fake Fuzz, but their arrogance was entirely typical. Uniformed security guards are appearing everywhere. Shops, pubs, train carriages – the wannabe rozzers are there, in your face, vests bulging, walkie-talkies at the ready. They glower and loom, filling your day with bad vibes and absurd rules. It’s unclear what started the argument in Harrow, but the member of the public whose video went viral last week was told by the two officers not to ‘butt in my business’, then ordered to come to a nearby alleyway where one of them would ‘show you what time it is’. Needless to say, the man refused the offer.

Michael Gove

The Brexit decade: was it worth it?

It may not feel or sound like it but Keir Starmer is a born-again Brexiteer. His achievements in office may be nugatory, his search for a legacy tragicomic, but there are countless actions this government boasts of which simply would not have been possible if we had stayed in the EU. Earlier this year, Labour moved to protect our steel industry with a tariff package possible only because we have an independent trade policy. I was delighted this month when the minister in the Lords made it clear this was a Brexit benefit. Those same Brexit freedoms allowed the Chancellor last month to cut tariffs on more than 100 foodstuffs to ease the cost-of-living crisis.

Geoffrey Cain

America’s Anthropic blackout won’t make the world safer

For the first time, the United States government has switched off frontier artificial intelligence and forced the world to go without it. Two of the most capable AI systems ever built, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, went dark last week. Not just in China or Iran. A researcher in London, a developer in Tokyo, an entire company in Berlin, all cut off at once, all treated as equally dangerous. A letter reached Anthropic at 5.21 on a Friday afternoon from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, citing national security authorities. It told the company to suspend access for every foreign national, anywhere in the world. There is no switch that lets in Americans and keeps out everyone else. To comply, Anthropic said it had to take the models down for all users at once.

Tom Switzer

The rise and rise of Australia’s Nigel Farage

Sydney For three decades, Australia’s political Establishment has been predicting Pauline Hanson’s demise. But whenever critics tried to administer the kiss of death to the flame-haired firebrand, it somehow functioned as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Today her One Nation party is polling at levels once thought unimaginable. In recent polls, it even surpasses support for Australia’s centre-left Labor government and centre-right Liberal-National party opposition. Last month, One Nation won its first lower-house seat. Whatever happens next, Hanson has become one of the most consequential figures in modern Australian politics. To British readers, Hanson is often described as Australia’s answer to Nigel Farage. The reverse is closer to the truth.

Laurie Graham

Why do men think it’s acceptable to wear a hat in church?

There’s often a traffic jam in front of the Battle of Britain window in Westminster Abbey and I recently found myself jockeying for position with a man wearing a baseball cap. A hat, in church! I thought I ought to say something, but as I was with an official guide, I decided it perhaps wasn’t my place. A very English cop-out, I confess. Then I saw a second man in a cap and, hat-radar activated, I started counting. And stopped at seven. Clearly, it was impossible that seven male hat wearers had all slipped unnoticed past the Abbey’s considerable security and, equally clearly, there must be a new attitude to hats in church and I hadn’t received the memo. I thought I’d check with the Very Reverend Dean.

Matt Ridley

Britain must finally embrace gene editing

Around the turn of the century, the world embarked on an experiment. The Americas embraced the genetic modification of crops; Europe rejected it and stuck with the old ways of generating new plant varieties – bombarding seeds with gamma rays, mostly. The results are clear. Both economically and ecologically, the Americas won: more productive farmers, reduced use of pesticides, more investment in innovation, fewer emissions. By the time of the Brexit vote in 2016, polls showed the British people were no longer against genetic modification of crops. Protests by boiler-suited eco-toffs had fizzled out. But European red tape made changing our policy impossible.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Forever war: will Zelensky and Putin be brought to an exhausted peace?

Volodymyr Zelensky stood proudly on the steps of 10 Downing Street this week, flanked by Sir Keir Starmer and the leaders of France and Germany, ready to discuss Europe’s latest package of support for Ukraine’s ongoing war effort. Though the conflict has, as of this week, lasted longer that the first world war, Zelensky is in some ways in the most heroic period of his presidency. Ukraine not only continues to stand firm against intense Russian assaults but also seems to be regaining a strategic advantage with its long-range drone strikes. Europe has stepped up to replace US funding and diplomacy and the fall of Hungary’s Viktor Orban has unlocked a €90 billion loan package. Yet it is also the most sordid period of Zelensky’s presidency.

Lara Brown

Revealed: Andy Burnham’s reassuringly bland Cambridge years

There appears to be a missing chapter in the story of Andy Burnham. Depending on the whims of voters in Makerfield, Britain could soon have its first prime minister with a degree in English literature and its first Cambridge-educated premier since Stanley Baldwin. And while we have been treated to countless long reads on the so-called King of the North – his political philosophy, his years in Manchester and his apprenticeship in New Labour – his undergraduate years have barely been scrutinised. Burnham is tight-lipped about his Cambridge days (1988-1991). His comments over the years have been mostly limited to saying he had ‘imposter syndrome’ as he struggled to fit in at a university that was dominated, he felt, by private school students.

Wendy Holden

From Holbein to Snapchat, how royals have mastered their own image

When Aston Villa won the Europa League recently, the focus was less on the football than on the Prince of Wales bawling ‘Sweet Caroline’. And while images of Wills bouncing in his box and cheering his favourite team wouldn’t seem to connect to a Tudor court painter, they probably wouldn’t exist without him. This year marks 500 years since Hans Holbein came to London and invented royal image-making at a stroke. The German-born artist’s vision of Henry VIII – legs apart, shoulders wide and with a codpiece the size of a prizewinning marrow – was an instant hit and remains the most famous image of our most famous king. More than that, it set a trend. Ever since, image-making has been as much a tool of the royal trade as throne, crown and sceptre.