Features

Thursday

Quentin Letts

The secret diary of Sue Gray

Once we entered Downing Street a No. 10 protocol adviser took Vic upstairs to show her the facilities in the private flat. ‘That sofa’s gotta go,’ said her ladyship. ‘So has Simon Case,’ I said. The protocol officer was shocked. ‘So new, and almost without a stain,’ he protested. More than can be said for the Cabinet Secretary. For the first few hours it was easy to keep the Prime Minister busy with congratulatory calls from world leaders. He was fine once we reminded him not to shout at them like an Englishman addressing foreigners. Emmanuel Macron was overfamiliar, Giorgia Meloni tearful – it seems she had a hot pash for Rishi Sunak – and the chap from Reykjavik went all glacial (Icelandic speciality) when we refused to talk about fish quotas.

Katy Balls

Starmer must move fast without losing his head

When Keir Starmer’s Labour party gathered on Monday to celebrate their election victory, the difficulty was finding a big enough venue. There were so many MPs that aides had to abandon Labour’s usual meeting room on parliament’s committee corridor, and instead head for Church House, where Tony Blair met his party after the 1997 landslide. Cabinet ministers joked that their biggest problem in government would be learning their colleagues’ names. Later in Strangers’ Bar, the queue for a drink went six rows back. ‘It’s freshers’ week,’ said one newbie. Yet some in the party still felt a sense of unease. ‘This majority is a mile wide and an inch deep,’ said one new MP. ‘Lots of these wins are very slight.

Thursday

Tibor Fischer

The Orban acolyte who became his fiercest critic

All sorts of people are grateful to Peter Magyar for bounding into the arena of Hungarian public life. Journalists, chiefly. Many a grizzled, lugubrious Hungarian hack had tears of gratitude welling as Magyar demolished the tedium and predictability of Hungarian party politics: Viktor Orban trampling a feeble collection of bunglers and chisellers, known as the opposition, again and again. Of course, the foreign correspondents were even more elated. Vilifying Orban? Step this way for your eulogy and hosannas, you smooth-talking cosmopolitan. Magyar is certainly deserving of attention; he’s fought a remarkable one-man blitzkrieg.

Dan Hitchens

Does Keir Starmer’s atheism matter?

Good Friday, 2021, at Jesus House For All Nations church in Brent, north-west London. Face masked, head bowed, hands clasped, Sir Keir Starmer stands alongside Pastor Agu Irukwu. The pastor opens his arms to invoke Almighty God. We hear Starmer in voiceover: ‘From rolling out the vaccine to running the local food bank, Jesus House, like many other churches across the UK, has played a crucial role in meeting the needs of the community.’ A nice video tribute for Easter, this. Good to see churches getting some recognition. A sign, perhaps, of the inclusive national unity a Labour government would foster.

Angus Colwell

Israel says it’s ready for another war

According to my phone, I’m in Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. Except I’m not. The Israel Defence Forces have scrambled the GPS of everyone within about an hour’s drive of the Israel-Lebanon border. The same navigation system that tells my iPhone its location is the same navigation system that Hezbollah could use to identify targets in northern Israel. They’ve been firing across the border since 7 October, and the Israelis are fed up. They’ve evacuated 80 kibbutzim, nine villages, three community centres and two Arab villages. The phrase that ministers use to describe the displaced is ‘refugees in their own country’. The offensive in Gaza is winding down, and after that – says an official – ‘we are ready to deal with Lebanon’.

Arabella Byrne

Childcare is mothercare

When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she could write. My grandmother lived far away in Scotland and no formal childcare existed. Still, my mother wanted to write. In bald economic terms, you could say that she was trying to rejoin the workforce to boost GDP and spare the state handouts. Forty years on, she doesn’t see it like that. ‘I needed to work to feel normal again – I didn’t want to go mad,’ she says, unapologetically. Had she been in the same predicament now, she could have looked forward to the welfare reforms that promise working parents of children in England between the ages of nine months and two years up to 30 hours of funded childcare.

Freddy Gray

Jill Biden’s relentless pursuit of power

At rallies, Joe Biden often speaks after his wife. ‘My name is Joe Biden and I’m Jill’s husband,’ he begins. It’s a line he has used for years – a faux humble joke about how much more impressive she is. These days, however, it sounds more like an admission of the real pecking order. In the past week, we’ve seen the extent to which Dr Jill Biden (as she insists on being called) has taken charge of her ailing spouse’s collapsing campaign. This week, she appeared on the cover of American Vogue, looking imperious in a white tuxedo dress. ‘We will decide our future!’ shouts the quote headline. That’s a very royal ‘we’, isn’t it?

Kate Andrews

It’s payback time for voters

It won’t be much comfort to Rishi Sunak, but he’s not the only world leader being put to the electoral sword. Joe Biden will be lucky to survive the summer as the Democrats’ presidential nominee after his disastrous debate performance. Almost every opinion poll says he’s losing to Donald Trump. In France, Emmanuel Macron bet on a snap election, daring his country to vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Voters accepted that bet and are making the French President pay. This weekend we could see Jordan Bardella, 28, asked to become the next prime minister. Justin Trudeau looks doomed as Prime Minister of Canada. Around the world, leaders are facing a reckoning. Not so long ago, the reverse was true.

John Keiger

What the National Rally means for France’s foreign policy

The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are gloating, even circling. France is the world’s seventh-largest economic power, a prominent Nato member, a member of the UN Security Council and the EU’s leader on foreign and defence issues. It has the fifth largest strategic nuclear force and the fifth largest navy, a ‘tier one’ military and one of the highly effective ‘Nine Eyes’ intelligence services. Last year France was the world’s second largest arms exporter. It controls the third largest global undersea cables network and has the second largest coastal economic area, whose confetti territories give it a global strategic toe-hold.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

The day I met a sun priest

Palomino, Colombia I’m in a truly wonderful place: the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It’s got more bird species than most of Europe, exquisite cotton-top tamarin monkeys that hop through jungles, and one of the world’s highest coastal mountain ranges. There are empty beaches, shimmering lakes, colonial townscapes and a recent folk memory of terrible gangsters. Some male babies are largely kept in caves from birth, in the darkness, until they are nine  It also boasts several indigenous tribes, one of which – the Kogi – I had never heard of until I got here. But the more I read about them from my hammock on the beach, the more I become determined to encounter them – and to talk to one. A Kogi. Why? Because they are so strange.

Ivan Krastev

Putin is trying to annexe people, not just land

On 1 September 2021, six months before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin was speaking at the All-Russian Children’s Centre, known as ‘Ocean’, near the harbour city of Vladivostok. He turned to a topic that obviously haunted him during his long Covid-19 isolation. He told his audience of children that Russia’s population could have been about half a billion today, rather than the current 146 million, if it hadn’t been for the shocks of the past century: two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Svitlana Morenets

My return to Ukraine

I arrive at Lviv station just before 9 a.m. As the clock strikes, the conductor announces a minute’s silence: a daily commemoration for those who have fallen in the war. But it’s observed only by the railway staff, who stand up to bow their heads. The passengers just carry on. After all, isn’t part of the resistance to carry on life as normal, despite the war? This was the idea at first, but soldiers at the front line have come to resent the chasm between those who are fighting and those who don’t want to have any part in the war. It’s just one of many ways in which, returning to Ukraine, I can see the Russian invasion reshaping my country. Coming home to my village in the west of Ukraine, I see how the war is draining the life out of it.

Yascha Mounk

The youth vote is turning right

Young people are supposed to drink a ton, have a lot of sex, hang out with their friends at every opportunity and vote for the left. Today’s young don’t live up to the stereotype. According to polls, they are one of the most responsible generations on record. Across the West, the share of young adults who binge-drink or who are sexually active has fallen to a new low. Teenagers spend far less time hanging out with their friends than their parents or grandparents did. They even seem to be defying political expectations – though their recent drift to the right has, in its own way, succeeded just as well in horrifying their elders.

Fraser Nelson

How Nigel Farage became the left’s greatest weapon

Nigel Farage is about to turn British politics upside-down for a third time. His Ukip insurgency forced the Tories to offer the 2016 referendum on the EU and changed history. When his Brexit party pushed Tories into fifth place in our last-ever European parliament elections in 2019, his victory established him as the most effective Tory-slaying machine ever deployed in political battle. If Keir Starmer or Ed Davey could have had one wish before the election, it would have been for Farage to return and attack the Tories, so they could sit back to watch the right eat itself. ‘Farage has become our patron saint,’ says one Lib Dem strategist So it has proved.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s ‘Somewheres’ want revenge

The builder who has been working on my house in Burgundy will be voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally on Sunday in the first round of the French parliamentary election. So will the electrician. I haven’t asked the plumber, but I suspect I know where his vote will go, given that his assistant is voting for Le Pen. My neighbour, a farmer, is voting Le Pen, as is a teacher acquaintance. The local policeman is also voting Le Pen. ‘What do I think of Macron?’ retorted the electrician. ‘Put it this way, he’s not my friend’ It’s not that surprising in this neck of the woods. The National Rally romped to victory in the Yonne department in the recent European elections, winning 41.4 per cent of the vote.

Max Jeffery

Can independent candidates pose a threat to Labour?

Nigel Farage says that Britain is ready for a ‘revolt’, and he’s not the only candidate in this election committed to an uprising. The biggest threat to Keir Starmer is coming not from the Tories or the Lib Dems… but from left-wing insurgents. In Bristol Central, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, could lose to the Greens. In Ashton-under-Lyne, Angela Rayner’s seat, George Galloway’s Workers party is trying to cause trouble. In the last election, Rayner had the lowest vote share of any Labour candidate there since 1931, but was still re-elected with a majority of more than 4,000. Galloway wants this apathetic town to finally unseat Labour’s deputy leader.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Zelensky’s peace summit flop

Volodymyr Zelensky’s Global Peace Summit in Switzerland was meant to demonstrate the world’s support for Kyiv and underscore Russia’s isolation. It did the opposite. Russia wasn’t invited. China didn’t send a delegation. Other major countries that might influence the Kremlin – including Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE – refused to sign the watered-down final communiqué. According to a former senior member of Zelensky’s administration, Ukraine’s leader had ‘hoped the conference would mark a new benchmark of international support… [but] it just showed how badly we have lost the support in the Global South’. Take Brazil’s President, Lula da Silva.

Matt Ridley

Whoever you vote for, the Blob wins

At the age of 66 I feel like a first-time voter. As a member of the House of Lords, I was not allowed to vote in the last three general elections. But I retired from the House in 2021, so democracy here I come. I shall scan the ballot paper with interest: who is standing for head of the Office of Budget Responsibility, or chair of the Climate Change Committee? I would like to read their manifestos, since they seem to be the folk whose ‘models’ tell the country what it must do, brooking no dissent. What’s that you say? It doesn’t work that way? How quaint of me to think that the mighty quangocrats who wield so much power should have meaningful accountability to parliament, let alone the people. Joking aside, I have now seen how government works close up.

Mark Mason

Why we love to be baffled

So much of life is a search for answers. How to get ahead, how to earn more money, how to be happy. But deep down, is there a part of us that likes not knowing an answer? Do we sometimes want to be baffled? It’s a question that’s come to fascinate me as I’ve embarked on a new career leading corporate team-building sessions based around magic. I do the tricks (close-up stuff – cards, coins and the like), then the team has to work out how I’m doing them. People who don’t want to know how a magic trick is done are saying: ‘I want to be three again’ Of course they need hints to get them started, but you’d be amazed at how much the group brain can achieve.

Panda La Terriere

How body cams create a culture of fear

Thanks to an underage relative who’d stolen my driving licence, I recently found myself ID-less at the local Co-op. I know the woman at the checkout reasonably well, so I said hi, enquired about her day and then asked if I could have my usual vape anyway. She had the decency to look shifty and said: ‘Sorry love.’ Did she not remember me and my ID from just a few days earlier? Was she senile? Did she hate me? I suspected that the reason she was unswayable was because she was bugged. She was wearing a body worn camera and the Co-op’s Security Operations Center was spying on us. The public is accustomed to, or at least aware of, the police’s use of body worn cameras (BWCs). But in recent years, the technology has been proliferating at a dizzying rate.