Features

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

A toast to the Wine Society

Ask any group of consumers to name the UK’s most enduringly successful mutual enterprise and they will probably point to the Co-op or the Nationwide building society. But there’s a cognoscenti who will come up with a different answer: a business that operates from giant sheds beside a railway track at Stevenage. It is the Wine Society, now celebrating its 150th year. Back in 1874, a quantity of Portuguese wine lay in the cellars of the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, shipped there for an International Exhibition but overlooked and unsold.

Sean Thomas

The secret to taking ayahuasca

Antioquia, Colombia If you’ve ever wondered what happened to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s enormous cocaine and occasional execution palace, as featured in the Netflix series Narcos, I can tell you. These days – following the violent death of Escobar in 1993 and the consequent escape of his pet hippos from his private zoo – the estate is now a garish, plasticky, hippo-themed children’s waterpark called Hacienda Nápoles. I have just driven past it. I am deep in the Colombian province of Antioquia.

Sam Kiley

Why do South Africans still support the ANC?

Support for South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, has just fallen below 40 per cent, which makes it very likely that, come the May election, there’ll be a coalition government. I’m surprised that support for the ANC is as high as it is. Across South Africa, states run by the ANC are failing. Infrastructure has collapsed and unrepaired sewage systems mean the water is polluted and poisonous. Electrical systems are down and the railways and ports are often closed. Property prices in Cape Town soar as South Africans flee here from all across the rest of the country. Because South Africa’s rand has collapsed against the euro (and even post-Brexit sterling) everything’s a bargain.

Alasdair Palmer

The ECHR compromises British agents

How should the state fight terrorism? That is the question addressed by Jon Boutcher’s report ‘Operation Kenova: Northern Ireland Stakeknife Legacy Investigation’. The report was precipitated by the claims that the British Army had an agent at the heart of the IRA. ‘Stakeknife’ was head of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit and was responsible for questioning, torturing and executing people the IRA suspected of being British agents. Stakeknife was himself a British agent, passing on information about the IRA – its plans, strategy and tactics – to his controllers in the British Army. What was the British state doing employing such a person?

William Moore

Is the C of E about to say sorry for Christianity?

Is the Church of England going to apologise for Christianity? A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared that the Church should say sorry publicly, not just for profiting from the evils of slavery (through investment in the South Sea Company) but for ‘seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems’. And having apologised, it recommends the Church ‘reach beyond theological institutions’ and ‘enable all Africans to discover the varied belief systems and spiritual practices of their forbears and their efficacy’. What would such an apology say about the Ugandan Martyrs executed in the 1880s by King Mwanga II?

Katy Balls

Will the Red Wall revolt split the right?

On Monday night Tories gathered on the Terrace Pavilion at parliament for the 1922 Committee’s spring reception, to which every backbencher was invited. The crowd was small, largely made up of Rishi Sunak loyalists eating steak and chips and drinking sparkling wine. The Prime Minister chose not to give opening remarks and instead chatted to the MPs. According to one attendee, the atmosphere was jovial. But no one dared bring up the elephant in the room: Lee Anderson’s defection. Just hours earlier, the former deputy Tory party chairman held a press conference to announce he was defecting to the Reform party. Even before he started to speak, his former Tory colleagues took pre-emptive steps for his departure by removing him from their various WhatsApp groups.

Thursday

Harriet Sergeant

The criminal gangs behind the rise in shoplifting

‘She was dressing half of Brixton at one time.’ A former plumber from south London is recalling the pretty, well-groomed shoplifter of his youth. Expensively dressed, her favourite place to target was Selfridges. ‘I don’t know how she did it but she got everything. You put in an order and she’d get it. Those days I had silk boxer shorts to give away,’ he sighs. ‘But then her son got murdered and she died shortly after of a broken heart.’ Shoplifting is no longer a one-woman show. Light-fingered mothers have been replaced by organised criminals, trafficking children and teenage girls from eastern Europe to steal from British shops. Children are a key part of their strategy because they are too young to be charged.

Isabel Hardman

Justin Welby: why shouldn’t bishops be political?

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s and early 1970s, would start his day by banging his head against his desk three times while chanting: ‘I hate the Church of England, I hate the Church of England, I hate the Church of England.’ Similar thoughts must surely have passed through the mind of Justin Welby at some point during the 11 years he’s been in the job. Since he was enthroned in 2013, the Church’s many divisions have worsened, most notably over women bishops, gay marriage and, in recent years, immigration policy. Given the fractured state of the C of E – not to mention the wider Anglican Communion – Archbishop of Canterbury looks like a role you’d only take if you enjoyed the constant sensation of hitting your head against a brick wall, not a desk.

Max Jeffery

How to get rich quick

Greed is good again. It’s early Saturday morning in a glum and airless back room of a Holiday Inn in London. ‘Raise your hand if you’d like to make some money this morning!’ says Chloë Bisson, ‘#1 Bestselling Author, Multi-Award Winning Entrepreneur, International Speaker’. People go ‘yep’ and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘too right’ and put their hands in the air. Chloë’s colleague Ryan Pinnick comes on stage next. ‘Who’s ready for the formula?’ he asks. He tells everyone to stand up and chant: ‘Show – me – the money! Show – me – the money!’ It’s as if we’ve been transported back to the 1980s.

Owen Matthews

Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many dared to hope that defeat on the battlefield would force Russians to finally accept that they are no longer a great global superpower and confront their imperialist assumptions.

Flora Watkins

Private school isn’t worth it

In the end, it was the sports kit that persuaded us to pull the plug: two technical training tops at a cost of £90. A directive had come down from the senior school that all pupils must be in new gear from Kukri (official supplier to county cricket clubs and Commonwealth Games England) by the start of the Michaelmas term. I replaced what our sons had outgrown in the school’s uniform shop (five items: £200), but baulked at spending another £100 when their old training tops still fitted. School fees are already unaffordable – and that’s before you factor in VAT at 20 per cent Our sons had been in prep school since we bolted from London after the lockdowns to a part of the country we barely knew.

Tom Switzer

Why Republicans are sceptical about funding Ukraine

When US policy-makers supported Nato expansion in the 1990s, it was widely believed that America, as the sole remaining superpower, could impose its will and leadership across the globe. ‘An American century’, ‘indispensable nation’, ‘the unipolar moment’, ‘benign hegemony’ – these became the new buzz-words of Washington’s political class. The rhetoric turned bellicose after 9/11, when outrage over the terrorist attacks, together with the mental habits of global supremacy and American exceptionalism, gave US leaders a clear, overriding sense of mission and purpose.

Freddy Gray

Trump II: Back with a Vengeance

In his under-recognised 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and Life, Donald Trump dedicated a chapter to ‘Revenge’. He wrote: ‘My motto is: always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.’ Vengeance is a lifelong theme in the Donald J. Trump story, narrated as it is by Donald J. Trump. In 1992, he told the interviewer Charlie Rose: ‘I love getting even with people.’ He’s fond of quoting Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Revenge is sweet and not fattening.’ In January this year, after his primary victory in New Hampshire, he reiterated: ‘I don’t get too angry – I get even.’ Trump knows that the presidential election of 2024 could be the most delectable payback of all.

Kate Andrews

Never Trumpers were never going to win

‘We fight for every inch,’ declared Nikki Haley after she won her first primary in the District of Columbia last week. Her fight didn’t last long. The former governor of South Carolina managed to win one state primary on Super Tuesday, handing the presidential nomination to Donald Trump. Haley’s campaign is over – and with it went the hopes of the Never Trump movement. Why did the attempt to reclaim the Republican party from Trump fail so badly? There are 340 million people in the US: all the Never Trump campaign needed to do was find one who’d make a more convincing Republican candidate. Not only did no candidate emerge, no one came close. Almost from the get-go in the Republican primaries, there has been no contest.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Please stop clapping at funerals

The Happy Clappies – evangelical Christians who clap along to worship songs during church services – have been around since the 1980s. The slightly derogatory term was coined in 1985, and the practice is still going strong: you can hear it as you walk past any evangelical church on a Sunday morning. But in the past couple of years a new phenomenon has appeared: the Sad Clappies. These are the congregations who erupt into prolonged applause at funerals and memorial services. It’s rare to go to a funeral or memorial service these days where clapping doesn’t happen. It usually starts after the first of the (often rather too many) tributes.

Prue Leith

The secret to a (Paul) Hollywood tan

Anyone who is a guest on Good Morning Britain, the Today programme or the like has an agenda. They want to promote something – themselves, their new film, a charity, a political point of view. Of course, the presenters don’t like being used as stooges. And they have the power, because their show is live, of going off the agreed piste, and the guest has no way of stopping them. Last week I was on GMB with my husband John to talk about our new ITV show, Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen, and to be fair, presenters Susanna Reid and Ed Balls were hugely welcoming and gave the show a great plug.

Lukas Degutis

Why Latvia is expelling its Russian speakers

Riga, Latvia At the age of 74, Inessa Novikova, who is ethnically Russian, was told she had to learn Latvian or she’d be deported. ‘I felt physically ill when the policy was announced,’ she tells me when we meet in an office close to Riga’s city centre. ‘I’ve lived here peacefully for 20 years.’ There was no requirement for her to seek Latvian citizenship after the Cold War ended. Then, it was acknowledged that ethnic Russians, who make up a quarter of Latvia’s 1.8 million population, would co-exist with ethnic Latvians. But when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, this arrangement ended. If Latvia’s ‘non-citizens’ had Russian citizenship, as Inessa did, they now had to apply for a new ‘EU residence’ permit, which meant learning Latvian.

Justin Marozzi

Could Iran shift to dynastic rule when Khamenei dies?

Who will rule Iran after Ali Khamenei? The question is being asked with increasing frequency and concern as the Supreme Leader approaches his 85th birthday amid rumours of ill health, and it will be raised again on 1 March, when Tehran holds elections to the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body which will determine his successor. Neither of the principal contenders is squeamish about shedding blood in the interests of regime survival Successions in dictatorships, or in Iran’s case an oppressive theocracy, are fraught with danger. Uncertainty and instability, with the prospect of great violence, are priced in.

Laurie Graham

The truth about ‘living with obesity’

It’s been brought to my attention that it is no longer done to describe a person as fat. Better, apparently, to say that they are ‘living with obesity’. This weasel construction makes obesity sound like a malevolent squatter who refuses to be evicted. Or like a bit of genetic bad luck, such as ‘living with ginger eyelashes’. It’s someone else’s fault. The western world has undoubtedly lost the plot with regard to diet, but before I say more, full disclosure: I am, according to the flawed metrics of BMI, obese. I reject the label, not because I’m in denial but because an index that ignores age, sex and muscle and bone mass isn’t really worth a light. I’ll stick with the Tightening Waistband Indicator.

Anshel Pfeffer

Permanent stalemate in Gaza suits Netanyahu

Jerusalem After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of news, 2 a.m. last Friday, to leak his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. There was no speech. No briefings. Just a page and a bit, double-spaced, presented to his cabinet for discussion. The plan has not been designed to end the war in Gaza. It is about Netanyahu’s own political survival But the plan is not a plan.