Features

Thursday

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.

Matt Ridley

Blue tits vs willow tits: a lesson in subsidies

I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the reason is not pesticides or climate change or agriculture or habitat loss. It’s blue tits. Willow tits have never taken to visiting bird tables, but blue tits love them. So come the spring, hordes of peanut-fattened blue tits fan out across the countryside looking for nesting holes and – hey presto – they find the little hollows that willow tits have been laboriously excavating in rotten birch trees and, being more aggressive, steal them.

Thursday

Lionel Barber

Ukraine is in dire need – and the West must respond quickly

As the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches, the fall of the key eastern city of Avdiivka is one more sign that Vladimir Putin holds the initiative. Ukrainian troops resisted the Russian forces for months, but the threat of encirclement forced Ukraine’s new army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, to retreat. The Russians were firing 10,000 artillery shells a day; the Ukrainians had been able to reply with about 1,500. Such an imbalance made defeat inevitable. There are risks in reading too much into a single military setback, especially in light of Russia’s extraordinary losses (more than 300,000 dead and wounded, elite special forces decimated, more than 2,000 tanks destroyed and 24 Russian warships sunk).

Christopher Howse

The fight to save an ancient City synagogue from developers

There was a little number, 223, pasted onto the back of one of the centuries-old wooden seats in Bevis Marks synagogue in the City of London. ‘What are these?’ I asked Rabbi Shalom Morris, who was showing me round. ‘They’re called gavetas,’ he replied, opening the lid of a compartment in the bench. ‘It’s a Portuguese word. They’re for people to leave their personal property here – prayer shawls and things – as we don’t carry anything on Shabbat.’ It was a detail that impressed on me the long history of the Sephardi tradition here, the oldest continuously functioning synagogue in Europe today. And now, Bevis Marks synagogue is under threat.

Mark Mason

Cricket is one of the best anti-depressants

I love it when the England cricket team flies east in the winter. It means they’re playing in the early morning, UK time, and that’s just when I need them the most. Because cricket is a powerful antidepressant. Without the sound or sight of bat on ball, early mornings at the moment would hold their usual threat The fireworks of Bazball have been lighting up the sky for nearly two years now, and as that period has coincided with war and economic doom, the on-field heroics of Ben Stokes and the gang have been particularly welcome. But, thrilling as last year’s Ashes undoubtedly were, they still took place in the summer, the time of year when depression is at its least potent.

Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s British prisoner: Vladimir Kara-Murza is languishing in a Siberian jail

Opposing Vladimir Putin is a lethal business. The world was reminded of this last week after the sudden death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The Russian authorities are blaming Navalny’s demise on ‘sudden death syndrome’, but whether it was outright murder or simply the result of three years spent in Russia’s penal system, the responsibility lies squarely with Putin. The danger of standing up to Putin is something the Russian-British journalist and author Vladimir Kara-Murza knows only too well. An active campaigner for Russian democracy, Kara-Murza was an ally of Navalny. He is responsible for convincing the West to sanction Putin-friendly oligarchs.

Matt Ridley

DNA profiling is a great British success story

Hardly a week goes by without a mention of DNA’s contribution to criminal justice. Last week Sandip Patel was convicted of killing a prostitute near Baker Street 30 years ago: DNA belatedly proved that his hairs were caught in her ring. A few days before, a double murderer, Colin Pitchfork, was controversially granted a parole hearing 36 years after being the defendant in ‘the first case of its kind in Britain to use DNA profiling’, as the Times put it. Only that’s wrong. Colin Pitchfork was not the first person in Britain to be convicted with DNA; he was the first person in the world. The story of how DNA profiling was invented and then applied to solving crimes is a truly remarkable, entirely British success story.

Max Jeffery

‘They’ve killed Blackpool’

It’s mid-afternoon in the Royal Oak pub in Blackpool and Liv has arrived to sell a bag full of stuff she’s stolen from the supermarket. She’s got fabric conditioner, soap, Creme Eggs and a large bar of Dairy Milk. She pulls in a few pounds and then leaves to score some crack. ‘Everyone struggles,’ says a man watching her sell. Lots of people here don’t work. People earn money however they can. Neither Labour nor the Tories come here for their conferences any more. They prefer big cities with nicer hotels In Blackpool, you see the worst of Britain’s welfare crisis. More than a quarter of the city’s working-age residents are on out-of-work benefits, the highest proportion in the UK and twice the national average.