Features

Thursday

Richard Johnson

Labour must learn to love Brexit

The problem with Keir Starmer’s approach to Brexit is that it fundamentally misunderstands the country. It isn’t that the Leave-voting public have realised that they made the wrong choice, foolishly tricked by the slogan on the side of a bus a decade ago. Voters in Grimsby have not suddenly been won round to the virtues of the Common Fisheries Policy. Most Leavers do not suddenly think shorter queues at the airport in Sofia is worth the downward pressure on wages caused by thousands of young Bulgarians who (understandably) will think Britain’s £12.21 minimum wage is more attractive than Bulgaria’s roughly £3 per hour. The reason people feel dissatisfied with Brexit is not that the UK has diverged from the EU but because it hasn’t diverged enough.

Angus Colwell

Are the ‘lanyard class’ the new enemy?

Globalisation, liberalism, neoliberalism, managerialism, internationalism, multiculturalism, human resources, wokeness, identity politics, progressivism, EDI, DEI, corporatism, proceduralism, elitism, environmentalism, transnationalism: there are a lot of things that voters are said to be protesting against. But now there’s a new buzzword going round. What voters are really annoyed about is the ‘lanyard class’. Lord (Maurice) Glasman came up with the phrase. I visit him in the House of Lords (wearing my parliamentary lanyard, of course) to ask him what he means. ‘The lanyard came into my head about 18 months ago as the symbol of the progressives,’ he says. ‘It was more of a poetic idea: “The Lanyard”.

Alice Loxton

The short history of short histories

My friend Ruby recently started a TikTok channel called ‘Too Long Didn’t Read’. With boundless enthusiasm and a colourful wardrobe, she prances around Hampstead Heath, summarising classic novels in 60 seconds. The channel ‘sums up anything ever written so you can talk about it to your mates’. Ruby is not alone in her approach of offering such educational digests. Scan the tables at Hatchards in Piccadilly and you will find endless shortest histories, or – for brevity’s sake – ‘shistories’. Popular formulas include ‘The Shortest History of …’, ‘A Brief History of … or ‘A Little History of …’.

Tom Jones

Inside the Conservative clubs that are turning Reform

My first job was working behind the bar of the Richmond Conservative Club in North Yorkshire. The place was as you might expect: dark blue doors, no women in the bar – other than on Fridays – and a ban on red ties. There were portraits on the walls of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. The local MP, William Hague, sometimes held his surgeries there. The Richmond club is still open, but many others have closed since the 1950s, when more than a thousand clubs offered cheap beer, snooker and bingo to almost three million Tory members. The party’s membership is now a fraction of what it once was; only 95,000 people voted in last year’s leadership election. Last month, in the run-up to the local elections, Nigel Farage visited the recently closed Frodsham club in Cheshire.

Thursday

Paul Wood

The Kurds have finally given in to Erdogan

All wars end, one way or another. One of the longest wars in the Middle East, between Turkey and Kurdish separatists, may finally be over. After 40 years of bitter struggle, the Kurdistan Workers’ party, the PKK, has declared that it will disarm and disband. It’s an achievement, of a sort, for the PKK’s imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan: he might become a free man. It’s a triumph for Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan: he might become President for life. The Kurds have adjusted to a new reality in the region. From Ankara to Riyadh, the chess pieces are shifting and the board might end up looking very different. This might even be accomplished without blood being spilled. The PKK is designated as a terrorist group by Britain and many other western nations.

Susannah Jowitt

Death comes to the Chelsea Flower Show

It’s a matter of life and death at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. No murders are planned as far as we know, but there will be gravestones and even a coffin. This is to be a celebration of death. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Flower Show will include funeral flowers in the Grand Pavilion for the first time since it moved to Chelsea in 1913. The display is being put together by the Farewell FlowersDirectory and, I’m told, there will be no tightly wired whorls of white carnations spelling out ‘LOVE YOU MUM’. Instead, passers-by will be left thinking of country churchyards, wild grasses and meadow flowers; species like campions, cornflowers and cow parsley.

Damian Thompson

Leo XIV’s papacy is off to a surprisingly promising start

Rome In the days before the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, traditionalist Catholics were so worried about interference from evil spirits that, according to reliable sources, they arranged for a priest to conduct what’s known as a ‘minor exorcism’ outside the walls of the Vatican. Such ceremonies, which typically involve the sprinkling of holy water mixed with blessed salt, aren’t such a big deal as the major exorcisms of a demon from a person; they are blessings intended to remove Satan’s influence from places where it may occur. But the fact that some clergy in Rome thought the Sistine Chapel might be one of those places reveals the depth of the wounds inflicted on the Church during the turbulent reign of Pope Francis.

Max Jeffery

The search for the mother of three abandoned babies

Elsa had been alive less than an hour and her umbilical cord was still attached when she was wrapped in a towel, put in a Boots shopping bag and left on the Greenway, a cycle path built on a Victorian sewage pipe that runs through east London. She was abandoned on 18 January 2024 by a rose shrub on the coldest night of the year. She was not the first baby to be abandoned in that area of the Greenway near Plaistow. On 17 September 2017, a baby boy was discovered wrapped in a towel under a bush about a mile and a half from where Elsa was later found. The hospital called him Harry. Then, on 31 January 2019, someone found a newborn girl, also wrapped in a towel and put in a shopping bag. She was beside a park bench 500 yards from where Elsa would be left.

John Power

Abolishing the care worker visa is a mistake

For years I worked as an NHS manager, seeing first-hand the consequences of Britain’s broken social care system spill over into hospitals. Elderly patients, who no longer required medical care, were frequently marooned on wards because there was no one to support them at home. Behind every delayed operation or jammed A&E corridor was the same bottleneck: a care sector too understaffed to function. The government’s decision this week to abolish the care worker visa may please Labour strategists wary of Reform, but it’s incomplete. Ministers are killing off a flawed solution without putting anything in its place.

Zoe Strimpel

‘No peens in our pond’: the ‘Pond Terfs’ manning Kenwood ladies’ pond

For a century, Kenwood ladies’ pond on Hampstead Heath in north London had been a haven for women – gay, straight, secular, observant and everything in between. Then in 2019, the City of London Corporation, which manages the bathing pond, issued guidance dictating that trans women could swim there. Suddenly a schism appeared among the regulars: pond Terfs who protested the change vs a mostly younger, right-on cadre who applauded it. Trans women have reportedly been swimming at the ladies’ pond informally for decades, but this was a quiet, largely unacknowledged practice that happened unobtrusively – not a source of division or discord among swimmers.

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.