Features

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Rachel Reeves: ‘Attack is the best form of defence’

‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ declares Rachel Reeves, sitting in a block purple dress in her office in parliament. The shadow chancellor is discussing what lessons for politics she learnt from chess. She was the British girls’ champion at the age of 14. ‘Thinking ahead. Trying to think what your opponent might do – and how you would respond to that. I was a very aggressive chess player: attack, attack, attack. All the time!’ She has kept such tactics since she entered politics, having previously been an economist at the Bank of England.

Paul Wood

Is Iran at a turning point?

Mashhad is Iran’s holiest city; it has the country’s most important shrine. It’s not the place for an Iranian woman to walk around without a hijab. But in September, Katayoun began leaving hers at home, going out with her head uncovered to join the daily protests against the country’s theocratic regime. A policeman struck her with his baton. She didn’t care. Katayoun is, necessarily, an assumed name. She is 35, an accountant, but also a member of an opposition group. She had joined the other ‘uprisings’, in 2009, in 2017 and in 2019, but she tells me: ‘This uprising is very different. People’s fear of the regime has fallen away.’ ‘This uprising is very different.

James Heale

Inside Team Truss’s tussle for titles

In the final hours of the Liz Truss regime, a key question was obsessing advisers: who would get a seat in the House of Lords? Her inner circle was divided as to whether, after just 49 days in office, such privileges were even appropriate. As a few aides tried to convince Truss that honours would be a mistake, her chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, was adamant a select few would become the lords and ladies of tomorrow. A prime minister determined to appoint a peer will almost always get his man As a former prime minister, Truss has the right to put forward a list of ‘resignation honours’. The jury is still out as to whether she will choose to do so.

Thursday

Nicholas Lezard

How to avoid paying London’s Ulez charge

It’s getting hard to escape low emission zones. In Birmingham, Oxford and Bristol – and pretty soon the whole of London – unless your vehicle is squeaky clean, you are going to have to pay every day that you drive. London--based readers probably know by now of Transport for London’s plans to expand its £12.50-a-day Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) to every single borough, from Hayes to Hornchurch, Cheshunt to Caterham, and with a sticky-out bit which I think has been deliberately designed to include Chessington World of Adventures. For many, this is an outrage. The Conservative MP for Carshalton and Wallington, Elliot Colburn, has described himself as ‘very, very angry’, calling the expansion a ‘disgusting move’.

Neil Clark

The enduring appeal of ’Allo ’Allo!

If you think your life is stressful it’s good to reflect on what poor René Artois went through each week in ’Allo ’Allo!, the 1980s BBC sitcom set during the German occupation of France. RAF pilots hidden in his mother-in-law’s cupboard upstairs, German officers in the café downstairs, Herr Otto Flick of the Gestapo likely to limp in at any moment – and all the time trying to serve drinks and juggle a sex life that would have exhausted even Errol Flynn. ‘I have to be nice to the Germans, they are my customers, they are winning the war, so if I am not nice to them they will shoot me,’ René would say. ‘I have to be nice to the Resistance, otherwise they will shoot me for being nice to the Germans.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The new vandals: how museums turned on their own collections

This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.  What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities. Today the collection is still there, although the heads are not.

Lucy Dunn

Why not let pharmacists prescribe medication?

It started as a small red shadow on my nose that gradually began to spread as the inflammation took hold. Soon the lesion was painful. A golden crust appeared and my suspicions were confirmed: impetigo. Impetigo is an incredibly infectious skin condition – and if left untreated, it can scar. Topical antibiotics – fucidin ointment – work a treat, but I had just moved to London and had no GP in the city. I wasn’t too worried, though. The importance of the ‘multidisciplinary team’ had been branded on to my brain from day one of medical school and so I called my nearest Boots. ‘I have impetigo,’ I told them, ‘and I’m looking for fucidin.’ I was to come in and ask for the pharmacist, they said. So I did exactly that.

Freddy Gray

Is Kanye West really out to derail Trump? 

American conservatives like to say that the way to stop Donald Trump in 2024 is to hit him from the right. Compared with his own political movement, they argue, Trump has always been something of a squish when it comes to issues such as Covid vaccines, gay marriage, criminal justice, or border control. He never did build that wall – not properly, anyway. Any candidate wanting to take down the father of Trumpism should therefore keep pointing out that Daddy had four years in the White House and never lived up to the hype. Take note, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Joe Wallen

The Taliban and Isis are in a battle for control

Kabul An insurgency has once again started in Afghanistan – and this time, the Taliban is the target. Since the Americans left Kabul last year, high-profile Taliban figures have been the victims of 220 remote explosive and suicide attacks, one of which took place the day before I arrived in the capital in October. A suicide bomber somehow managed to strike in a mosque inside Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry, which is responsible for security and law enforcement in the country. It was the type of attack that should have been impossible to carry out. Four people were killed and two dozen wounded. They were the latest victims of a war between the Taliban and Isis. Isis and the Taliban both follow variations of jihadist Sunni Islam, but they are ideological enemies.

Jade McGlynn

Women trouble: soldiers’ wives and mothers are turning on Putin

The women of Voronezh are very busy these days. Across the Russian city, aunties are busy sewing boots and winter clothing. Relatives are busy crowdfunding for night goggles and drones. Wives are busy demonstrating outside military bases. Mothers are busy making preparations to travel 150 miles southwest where they will cross the border into Ukraine to find and bring home the broken bodies of their abandoned sons.  The wives and mothers of Voronezh are not alone in their efforts, or in their demands that the authorities return their underequipped and undertrained men. In neighbouring Kursk region, relatives of mobiks (men called up for mobilisation to Ukraine in September) staged a protest on the Russian--Ukrainian border.

Matt Ridley

The Tories’ wind power delusion

A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get? It’s an argument that is wrong several times over. There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The red line: Biden and Xi’s secret Ukraine talks revealed

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has played a decisive – though publicly low-profile – role in strategic decision-making in both Washington and Moscow. As I report for the first time in my new book Overreach, it was a back-channel intervention approved by Beijing that caused the US to scupper a deal for the Poles to provide Soviet-made MiG-29 jets to the Ukrainian Air Force back in March. And since September a flurry of personal diplomacy by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi with Nato and the US has led to a rare moment of public agreement over Russia, when Xi Jinping said that the world ‘needs to prevent a nuclear crisis on the Eurasian continent’ in a meeting with Joe Biden at the G20 summit in Bali.

Sven-Göran Eriksson

This England squad is better than mine

The England squad that I took to Germany for the 2006 World Cup is called the ‘Golden Generation’. We had some great players, but I think that today’s England squad is better. We had a brilliant starting XI in 2006 – Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Michael Owen, David Beckham, John Terry and Rio Ferdinand – but the group has more options now. Gareth Southgate can play Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden, Raheem Sterling or Jack Grealish. He has no major injuries to deal with: in 2002, I lost Beckham; in 2004 I had no Owen; and in 2006, Rooney wasn’t 100 per cent fit. If I could choose one player from the current England team to have had in 2006, though, it would be Harry Kane. He’s a fighter.

Julie Bindel

It’s time to replace the Society of Authors

The most important job of any union is to support its members against bullies. So why has the Society of Authors, a sort of posh union for writers, illustrators and translators, failed to support members who are receiving death threats? In August, J.K. Rowling tweeted her sympathy for Sir Salman Rushdie after his attempted murder. Imagine how she felt when she received this response: ‘Don’t worry, you are next.’ Rowling is a member of the Society of Authors and expected the union to put pressure on the authorities by condemning the threats against her. Right? Wrong. Not only did the Society fail to defend Rowling, but the chair of the management committee, Joanne Harris, appeared to mock her.

Harriet Sergeant

The Iranian regime is at war with its own children

Twenty-two-year-old Hadis Najafi does not look like a foot soldier in a revolution. In the last film of Najafi alive, it is night and she’s walking down a road in Karaj, her home town, smiling and scrunching up her hair into a ponytail. She is young, blonde and on her way to a demonstration. Najafi reminds me of my own daughter, tying up her hair in the same casual, no-nonsense way. Thirty minutes later, she was dead, shot six times in the face, hand, neck and heart. Her crime? To go to a protest and not to wear a hijab. Iran is locked in a clash between its medieval Islamic theocracy and the TikTok generation.

James Heale

Trading places: George Eustice on Brexit, Sunak and the Australian deal 

Is Brexit failing? Those who believe it is point to George Eustice, the former Tory environment secretary, who told the Commons last week that the Australia trade deal was a dud. Here was a Brexiteer, a one-time Ukip candidate, saying that the biggest trade deal of the Boris Johnson years was deeply flawed – a belief Rishi Sunak is understood to share. ‘I don’t regret it,’ says Eustice as we sit in Portcullis House. ‘It was just not actually a very good deal.’ The agreement struck by Liz Truss, then the trade secretary, gave Australia and New Zealand unlimited access to the UK market for its beef and sheep while Australia bans the import of British beef.

Colin Freeman

Where will Kherson’s freedom fighters go next?

When Vladimir Putin’s troops first invaded Kherson, they marched into Eugene Chykysh’s hipster coffee shop. ‘They all asked for cappuccinos with four sugars,’ Eugene told me. Later, another Kherson resident says that the soldiers who raided his house took ten kilos of sugar from him. Eugene is one of the few Ukrainians in Kherson who even talked to the Russians. Most people I speak to say they simply avoided them, staying indoors as much as they could, and venturing out only to buy groceries from the few shops still open. It was like lockdown on steroids, they say, and with no Netflix to pass the time because the Russians switched off the internet.

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

The squeeze: how long will the pain last?

Rishi Sunak has ushered in a new era of austerity, not just Osborne-style spending cuts, but tax hikes as well. His Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, says the plan is not just to balance the books but to control inflation, and so this will be the theme of the Sunak years: Austerity 2.0. Throughout the leadership campaign, Sunak repeatedly argued that persistent high deficits were no longer an option. Difficult decisions lay ahead, he said, and claims to the contrary were ‘fairy tales’. His critics said this was a safety-first ‘Treasury view’, and Britain had plenty of scope to borrow more. But Sunak was certain that the debt racked up during the pandemic – not just by Britain but countries the world over – guaranteed a wake-up call at some point.

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump the Jeb Bush of 2024?

Donald Trump has been running for president for at least a decade. His campaign did not start on 16 June 2015, when he descended that golden escalator in that eponymous tower in New York. It began on 19 November 2012, days after President Barack Obama had defeated Mitt Romney, when Trump registered a trademark application for the phrase he pinched from Ronald Reagan: ‘Make America Great Again.’ After he won the White House in 2016, Trump did not cease pursuing re-election. After he lost in 2020, ditto. The fundraising – the key part – and therallies have kept going and going. On Tuesday night, at his home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, he simply made it official.

Nicholas Farrell

Could Berlusconi end the war in Ukraine?

Ravenna, Italy Silvio Berlusconi believes that he alone can entice his old friend Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table and intends to give it a go before Christmas. The 86-year-old media tycoon and former Italian prime minister wants a peace deal, mediated by him, to be his political swansong. His private jet is already on standby. Last month, he said that Putin had sent him 20 bottles of vodka for his birthday and ‘a very sweet letter’ Internationally, the timing could not be better. Russia has suffered another military humiliation by abandoning the key city of Kherson and the Biden administration is reportedly telling Volodymyr Zelensky to think seriously about peace.