Features

Tuesday

Madeline Grant

Religion has been resurrected in British politics

British history is littered with elections and Elections. The first type, common or garden elections, are fought with prosaic issues at their core. Readers might remember the 2001 general election, which saw such pressing topics as the fate of Kidderminster hospital pushed to the fore. The 1865 general election was also considered uneventful by contemporaries. Even contests nominally involving major changes can be just ‘elections’. The tedium of 2024, featuring cynical electoral bribery, with the result a foregone conclusion and the stated policy platforms of the two main parties largely similar, is a prime example. What, then, are the other type: the Elections?

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Do you have the patience to own an EV?

There’s a distinctive glow of virtue that emanates from people recharging their electric cars in public places. I call it the Light of the Charge Brigade. In the run-up to Easter, I spent two hours observing the phenomenon at Fleet Services on the M3. It was mostly men doing the charging. They’ve cracked the EV way of life, and are very pleased with themselves. A sparklingly fulfilled man called Paul was driving from Colchester to Seaton in Devon in his Skoda Enyaq with a carload of friends. He’d planned this stop for a first charge and Pret elevenses. Later he was planning to stop at Montacute House in Somerset for a late lunch and a second charge on one of the National Trust’s chargers.

Marcus Walker

Gen Z are turning to the Book of Common Prayer

‘No one pretends that modern services will fill the churches. But adult converts ought to be able to step naturally into being worshippers. How absurd that a convert should be warned to undergo cultural orientation before he comes to church.’ These words of the arch-reformer Colin Buchanan in 1979 sum up the views of that post-1960s generation, who believed that all the prayer and thought which Anglicans had inherited was alien to the new generation. It was thought so alien, in fact, that a full cultural orientation would be needed to persuade people to come to church. Modernity was the answer to most questions, and most especially: ‘How do we get the young to come to church?’ Fifty years later, I am not sure anyone would call this experiment a success.

Lisa Haseldine

Russia has its eyes on Svalbard

Svalbard The quiet hillside by Longyearbyen’s church gives visitors to the capital of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago an austere but beautiful panorama of the bay that cradles the town. Tall, sharply steep mountains, blanketed with snow, collide with the blue-grey waters of the Arctic below. From that hillside, I watched the quiet bustle of Longyearbyen. Since Donald Trump threatened Nato with the biggest crisis in the alliance’s history by stating his desire to take control of Greenland in the name of US ‘national security’, Svalbard’s residents have been uneasily looking westward. The US President has repeatedly claimed that only he can prevent the island, which is just 185 miles from Svalbard, being used as a staging post for an attack on the West by Russia or China.

Jonathan Foreman

Britain must recognise Somaliland

Somalia has been a byword for failed statehood and violence for so long that the calm of Somaliland, its neighbour to the north-east, feels almost miraculous. In contrast to Mogadishu, the bustling streets of Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital, aren’t patrolled by grim-faced soldiers. Government offices aren’t huddled behind blast walls and protected by foreign troops. You can wander into a restaurant and enjoy camel steaks (a national speciality) without worrying about al-Shabaab terrorists. It is a former British colony which, for 30 years after independence, was joined to what had been Italian Somaliland.

Damian Thompson

How Pope Leo XIV is quietly reshaping the Vatican

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday last year, Pope Francis was driven through St Peter’s Square in an open-topped Popemobile. A few weeks earlier he had nearly died from pneumonia, so pilgrims were thrilled to watch him blessing babies. They told journalists that it was a miracle to see the 88-year-old Argentinian in such good shape. At 9.45 the next morning the Vatican announced that Francis had just died from a stroke. And so began the preparations for a conclave that elected the second pope from the Americas. Cardinal Robert Prevost – ‘Bob’ to his friends – was a Chicago-born dual citizen of the United States and Peru. Until 2023 he’d been bishop of the Peruvian diocese of Chiclayo.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

How the Green party abandoned its environmental roots

In the summer of 1972, Lesley Whittaker walked into a pub in rural Warwickshire. She had something for her husband Tony. It was a copy of Playboy magazine. In that issue, there was an interview with the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, who died this month aged 93. In it, he repeated the thesis of his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he wrote that ‘in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death’. There were simply too many of us. Worldwide famine was imminent. Lesley and Tony were terrified. Along with a local businessman, Michael Benfield, and his future wife, Freda Sanders, they talked about it over pints at the Bridge Inn, becoming known as a ‘Gang of Four’. Over several months, they roped in 39 others, and set up the People party in 1973.

Jonathan Aitken

The UAE and Oman could be the big winners from the Iran war

Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40 years, commented gloomily: ‘When two fish are fighting in these waters, the British are behind it.’ I estimate that I must have made at least 250 visits to the Gulf states in the intervening six decades.

Sarah Langford

Organised crime is targeting artisanal food

Organised crime has a new focus: high-end food production. The latest victim is Wildfarmed, a UK-based, regenerative flour business co--founded by one half of the band Groove Armada. Last month, 50 tons of its flour were stolen, disguised as a wholesale order for the French supermarket E. Leclerc. In an audacious move, the fraudsters asked for the wording on the bags to be translated into French. Wildfarmed obliged. The 1kg bags – all 50,000 of them – were loaded into containers ready for export. Then they vanished. Wildfarmed’s disco-ball neon branding makes it a surprising target. But the real question is not how anyone hides a haul of hard-to-miss flour bags, but whether this theft is a bellwether.

Melanie McDonagh

Brussels is making your perfumes worse

‘Heliotropin,’ said the Frenchman mournfully. I was midway through lunch in Mayfair with Benoit Brosseau, whose father, Jean-Charles, created the fragrance Ombre Rose, and who now leads the company of the same name. I had asked the question I always put to fragrance people, in the full knowledge it will make them either sad or furious: how do they cope with Ifra, the Brussels-based regulatory, or representative, body of the fragrance industry? One of the latest in the list of ingredients Ifra may be curbing is based on heliotrope, which not only gives a powdery aspect to scent, but conjures up the elusive smell of cherries. (If you know that marvellous, evocative Guerlain scent L’Heure Bleu, that has it.) M. Brosseau was fed up.

Maxwell Marlow

How to solve the student debt crisis

England’s student debt is staggering. It comes to £270 billion – that’s larger than the budget for the NHS and two and a half times larger than the education budget. This arsenal of taxpayer-backed cash has seen the creation of 34 new universities just to feed an ever-hungrier mass of undergraduates. It’s forecast that by the late 2040s, this loan balance will reach £500 billion. These loans are not standard financial arrangements. They don’t affect the debtors’ credit ratings, only their mental health when they check their bank balance. Crucially, most loans are also wiped after 30 years from graduation.

James Bartholomew

The clandestine side of Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton is remembered by most people as a conservative philosopher. Softly spoken and thoughtful in conversation, he was brave and unconventional in his views. Few things are as unconventional as being a convinced and articulate conservative. It cost him advancement in the academic world. But he was admired, liked and even loved by many. And today his work continues to be influential. But there was a part of Scruton’s life that is not well-known. It was clandestine. This secret life is currently being commemorated and honoured in an exhibition in Brno, the historic and rather beautiful second city of the Czech Republic. It is a two-and-a-half-hour train journey from Prague unless you are willing to face a direct flight on Ryanair.

Margaret Mitchell

Frugal chic, the movement changing the way women shop

It is, apparently, a novel concept in our age of overconsumption, that life can still be enjoyable even if you don’t have stupid money. ‘Frugal chic’ is the new lifestyle trend summed up by the 25-year-old influencer Mia McGrath, who coined and trademarked the term, as ‘living luxuriously while spending intentionally’. Frugal chic supposedly teaches young women – whose financial literacy typically lags behind young men’s – how to make their money go further with practical advice on investing and saving.

Ben Clerkin

‘I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left’: Steve Hilton on why he’s running to be California governor

‘I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left,’ Steve Hilton tells the lunch meeting of Southern California Republican Women. Knives and forks rattle on porcelain as the perfectly coiffured ladies down cutlery to clap. Remarkably, Hilton, the former director of strategy under David Cameron, has topped virtually every poll for governor of California since he launched his campaign in April last year. Hilton has leant into the West Coast aesthetic and spirit. Once the rebel of Downing Street in T-shirts and stockinged feet, today he sports a tech-bro beard, more bracelets and beads on his wrists than Prince Harry, and has the top three buttons of his white shirt undone. British by birth, he has renounced his citizenship and become an American.

Arabella Byrne

The rise of the pocket money app

I am standing in the village Co-op with my eight-year-old daughter when she asks, inevitably, to be bought a magazine. As most parents will know, magazine is a generous term for this iteration: a collection of sorry pages whose sole purpose is a vehicle for plastic toys. I say no, but then she blindsides me. ‘Fine, I’ll pay for it with my pocket money,’ she declares, whipping out her pre-paid card like a good capitalist. As I slip the packet of fags I have bought for myself into my pocket, I realise that I am morally snookered. For is she not free to spend her pocket money as she likes? And am I not free to spend my money as I like? Libertarians, all. Most of us born before the advent of digital banking will have firm ideas about pocket money.

Iona Bain

The taxman is coming for the self-employed

Spare a thought for Mrs McClafferty & Co. Like thousands of small business owners, she has spent years managing things the old-fashioned way: jotting down figures in a Silvine cash book, stuffing receipts into a shoebox and sorting it all out when the tax return comes around. But according to HMRC, taxpayers like her are partly responsible for a £24 billion black hole in UK tax receipts. Which means the taxman is coming for them. If you are self-employed and had an income of more than £50,000 last year, get ready for Making Tax Digital (MTD). From 6 April, you will have to file an income and expenses update four times a year, then an adjustment, then the annual return. You must use HMRC-approved software to do it all.

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

The end of Trumpism is nigh

Having Donald Trump as your president probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before China mercifully let the matter drop. Then came the even more reckless decision to join Israel in bombing Iran’s Fordow nuclear installation; Iran agreed to halt hostilities just as it was figuring out how to penetrate Israeli airspace with its missiles. But now the President has pressed his luck. He has joined Israel in a campaign of aerial assassination and bombardment against Iran – this time of an almost incredible violence – and has wound up trapped.

Tim Shipman and James Heale

‘We’ll wake up on 8 May and realise that the Conservative party’s gone’: Inside Reform’s plan to devour the Tories

When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago. Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a party from scratch and expect to be the biggest winners in the local elections on 7 May. With more than 270,000 members, their grassroots base is the largest in Britain, bigger than both Labour and the Tories. ‘I would argue no party has built political infrastructure and established itself more quickly in British history than Reform,’ Yusuf says.

Michael Rose

How the army can rediscover its fighting spirit

The seemingly endless debate about the hollowness of our armed forces has concentrated on size, technical capability and sustainability – never more so than in recent days when the UK’s unreadiness for war, or even to defend its own bases overseas, has been exposed. But there has been no mention of the moral component of fighting power (morale, spirit, will), which is the most important element of combat effectiveness. Napoleon is often quoted as saying that in war, ‘the moral is to the physical as three to one’, and history is littered with examples showing this to be true. The most recent was the evaporation, within days, of the Afghan army on which the US had spent around $20 billion. It was technically very capable but it lacked a willingness to fight.

Angus Colwell

The perils of London: a beginner’s guide

An interesting new perspective on London is doing the rounds. Our capital city is being advertised as a paradise. London, it seems, is suddenly a place where every building is a Wren, where every sunset is a Turner, where every neighbourhood is Notting Hill. The sentiment has even got a name – ‘Londonmaxxing’. It’s been invented by tech accounts on X who got excited by the long queues at AI events run by Vercel earlier this month. There has also been speculation that a disgruntled-with-Trump Anthropic could move to London. As much as I love London, like any true sceptical Londoner, I suspect bollocks. Look at the map by our resident artist J.G. Fox. Anyone considering the move should in fact be sniffer dog-aware of a multiplicity of perils.