Amsterdam It’s not often that regional ballots in the Netherlands capture the attention of the international media. But last month that is exactly what happened. On 15 March, the so-called ‘provincial elections’ were held. Although technically these are regional, they also indirectly determine the composition of the Dutch senate – and, if the ruling parties lose their majority there, the chances of being able to pass legislation become very slim.
Ravenna, Italy Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist. Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues about which she hopes to be most persuasive are the ones that threaten Europe most: migrants arriving on boats, and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate. On the first of these, the small boat migrants, Italy is in deep trouble. Already this year, nearly as many illegal migrants have arrived there by sea as arrived in Britain from France in the whole of 2022. Earlier this month, Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency.
If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel Worlds, Kaku combines the scientific chops of the theoretical physics professor he is with the gee-wow wonder of a sci-fi geek. That’s apt for someone who grew up worshipping at the twin altars of Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon. ‘It all started when I was eight,’ he says. ‘All the newspapers said that a great scientist had died. And they said that on his desk was a manuscript that he could not finish. I was fascinated by that.
There was a time before the invasion of Ukraine when even the Kremlin’s opponents would talk of living in ‘vegetarian’ times. Before 2022, independent news organisations like Dozhd TV, the New Times and Novaya Gazeta were marginalised but not banned. Public protest was punished, but for the most part with sentences in days and months, not years or decades. Even Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s highest profile leader, received a highly unusual suspended sentence after his conviction on trumped-up fraud charges in 2013. He remained free to goad the Kremlin with videos detailing massive corruption and run candidates in local elections until his poisoning by Russian secret police in August 2020. Save your skin and fight on, or keep your honour and be buried in the prison system?
The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it untouched by death threats, disinformation and the baleful influence of Vladimir Putin’s troll farms? What if there was still some corner of the world wide web which lived up to its original promise of connecting people who would not otherwise be connected, and what if once connected they were nothing but agreeable to each other? Be of good cheer. That corner exists. Not everyone is arguing with Owen Jones and India Willoughby.
In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot. The remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally – mark this, intentionally – designed to flood your life with unhappiness.’ While these apps are an annoyance for me, they’re positively prohibitive for those without smartphones Almost three decades later, you’d be lucky to find a parking meter at all.
When my husband, Robin, and I first discussed how we might try to have a child, we were against exploring surrogacy. Wasn’t this something that only celebrities did in America? Was it really in children’s best interests? How could you be sure that the women were not being forced? Five years later, and we have a son, Solly, who has just turned three and was born through surrogacy in the UK. There were two things that changed our minds: meeting these women and hearing them speak for themselves; and reading academic research, which is clear that children born through surrogacy are just as likely to flourish as anyone else.
Last month, the Law Commission published its long-awaited report on the legal status of the surrogacy industry. It contained – as expected – one particularly alarming recommendation. Alongside various tweaks to payment and regulation processes, the Commission suggests a crucial change to the parental status of a baby born by surrogacy. At present, the woman who gives birth to the baby is considered to be that child’s legal parent, and the intended parents are obliged to apply for a parental order following birth. But if the Law Commission gets its way, the situation will be reversed. Although the surrogate will still have the right to object, the default presumption in law will be that she is not the child’s mother.
If you visit Valencia Cathedral, you will find, in the old chapter house converted into a chapel, the Holy Grail, made up of a humble agate stone and kept safely behind glass. But if it is really the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper (and the Vatican recognises the possibility that it is), why are so many people still searching for it? Christopher Dawes believes he might have the Grail at home on his mantelpiece in Brentford There are too many theories about its true location to keep track of. Could it be in the Basilica of San Isidoro, León, given as a present to the King of Spain by an Andalusian emir? Was it taken to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea and buried, causing a spring to flow that offers eternal youth? Is it hidden in a secret room in the Vatican?
Vitry-le-François Can a modern revolution emanate from the political centre or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris – while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and across France – to the post-industrial town of Vitry-le-François to meet Charles de Courson, the French parliamentarian descended from Norman nobility who nearly succeeded in bringing down the government of President Emmanuel Macron with a no-confidence vote on 20 March.
Easter and Passover coincided this year, so we’ve been in America visiting my in-laws. Four years ago, in the spirit of the holiday of liberation and exodus, we had all travelled to the Ukrainian village outside Lviv from which my father-in-law’s family emigrated. In just a few short generations during the 20th century, people there found themselves labouring under the Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet yokes. The disastrous human consequences are laid bare in Bernard Wasserstein’s poignant new history, A Small Town in Ukraine. Now Russian missiles intermittently rain down, partly enabled by sanctions busting and dirty money.
Beirut, Lebanon The secret police tail was impossible to miss but easy to lose. Two men in Saudi national dress – white thobe and chequered shemagh – drove a large black American saloon slowly behind me as I walked on the baking hot road. I turned into a shopping mall and they parked outside, not bothering to follow on foot as there was only one entrance. I went into a shop, all the way to the back, and then out through a door for staff to get to the mall’s loading bay, where a local activist picked me up in his car. We felt immensely pleased with ourselves when we got to the house of the Shia dissident we had come to see. He laughed and pointed out a nearly identical black car down the road, one man with binoculars, another on his phone. The dissident was being watched 24/7.
How much money do junior doctors really earn? If you’ve been listening to the British Medical Association – the trade union which represents junior doctors – this week you will have seen comparisons made between their salaries and the wages of Pret A Manger employees. The union talks about members having to ‘cut back on food and heat to pay bills’. To think of notoriously overworked junior doctors in such circumstances is outrageous. But how typical is that scenario of those demanding a 35 per cent pay rise? First-year junior doctors are still some of the better-paid workers in Britain, and this is only the jumping-off point A doctor can be classified as ‘junior’ for years, depending on what type of medicine they practise.
In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them – ‘The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate’, in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before. The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of attacks on the meritocracy, starting with criticisms of the workings of the 11-plus exam and then broadening into denunciations of social hierarchy and social mobility.
When I was writing ads for Labour’s 1997 election campaign, I’d never have presented an idea as factually, creatively and strategically wrong as Labour’s recent ‘attack ad’ on Rishi Sunak. If I had, I’d have been the one under attack for failing to understand the simple principles of advertising. What you need when writing any ad is calm, dispassionate advocacy rather than silly, partisan evangelism Let’s start with the first and most obvious one: ‘Don’t tell lies.’ Labour’s ad suggests that the Prime Minister would be quite happy to let sex offenders go unpunished. Nobody – not even the person who wrote it – believes this to be true and it’s the reason the ad could only appear online.
Christopher Perryman, a former British soldier, did not enjoy life as a security guard protecting the HS2 line from eco-protestors. They called him a child molester and a bigot. So when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he decided to go there instead. ‘I hated HS2 – we were getting things thrown at us, and getting called every name you can think of. They called us the foot soldiers of fascism,’ says Perryman, who served in Iraq with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. ‘Then a mate told me that Ukraine’s President was asking for foreign military veterans to help. I’ve never liked bullies and Putin is a bully, so off I went.
I have inadvertently built my own coffin. I’m rather chuffed with it. It wasn’t meant to be a coffin. It’s actually a boat. My son found a YouTube video on how to make one, and although these videos are normally created by practical men for other practical men (I am the world’s most impractical man), I watched it and thought: ‘Even I could do that.’ It’s essentially an open-top plywood box, eight feet by two feet by one foot, with a 45-degree angle at the front to make it look slightly less like a box. Needless to say, my son got bored after the third nail, but I soldiered on and, seven bathrooms’ worth of sealant later, I was the proud owner of a punt.
Ravenna, Italy Whatever Rishi Sunak does to ‘stop the boats’, the fight to prevent illegal immigration to Britain and Europe will not be won or lost in the English Channel. It will be decided in the sea between Italy and Africa. At a recent EU summit in Brussels, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new right-wing Prime Minister, warned that if the crisis-torn dictatorship of Kais Saied in Tunisia falls, then there will be ‘an invasion’ of Italy this year of ‘up to 900,000 migrants’. Tunisia has become a new major departure point for migrants coming to Europe. An Italian secret service report, meanwhile, warns that another ‘685,000 migrants’ are ready to cross to Italy from Libya.
It’s a nasty moment when you receive a letter informing you that a fortnight ago, at a specific number of minutes past an hour, your car was photographed turning into a side road which, at the time, you had no idea you weren’t allowed to turn into. You vaguely recall the junction. There was no ‘No entry’ sign: just a torrent of words (‘except’, ‘through’, ‘motor vehicles’, ‘access’) that you didn’t have time to read. That outing will now be forever sullied in your memory by the £65 fine. Protesting ‘but the sat-nav told me to do it!’ is as ineffectual, legally speaking, as Adam bleating to God that ‘the woman gave me fruit from the tree and I did eat’. The punishment is still enforced.
The memory of Nigel Lawson will always be a blessing. He was the embodiment of serious radicalism, a politician who changed Britain for the better – and for good. When I became chancellor, I hung a picture of Nigel behind my desk in No. 11. It was a large photograph of him holding up his red Budget box. It was an image which summed up the intellectual confidence that he brought to the job. But it was also a reminder of the sheer amount of preparation, hard work and attention to detail that he had put in to get the party and the government into a position where it could do those radical things.
