Features

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Breathe easy: how respiratory viruses evolve to become milder

The Queen has suffered ‘mild, cold-like symptoms’ from her Covid-19 infection, according to Buckingham Palace. The wording reminds us that, except in the very vulnerable, the common cold is always and everywhere a mild disease. There are 200 kinds of virus that cause colds and they hardly ever debilitate healthy people, let alone kill them. Yet we were recently told by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) that ‘it is a common misconception that “viruses mutate to cause less severe disease”’. If that is the case, how did all common colds become mild — and why would Covid not do the same?

Sean Thomas

Why work from home when you can work from paradise?

 Colombo If I lift my eyes from my laptop, I can stare across my hotel’s rooftop infinity pool to the soft tropical blues of the Laccadive Sea. In a minute I might order another one of those excellent Sri Lankan crab curries. And another chilled Lion lager. Meanwhile the weather app on my phone tells me that London is shivering in a succession of bitter storms as the government ‘ends all Covid restrictions’, meaning everyone can go back to catching trains in the freezing fog.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Russian roulette: is Moscow’s bluff backfiring?

A bluff only works if you can carry it off convincingly. The massing of some 130,000 Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s borders has led to London and Washington declaring that a full-scale invasion is imminent, but it could still be a feint. The Russians know everything they do can be seen by satellite. On the phone from Kiev, Colonel General Ihor Smeshko says he is not inclined to read too much into the Russian army’s logistics. He was head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service and later a candidate for president.

Michael Auslin

China and Russia are an alliance of disruptors

Four years ago, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping made pancakes together in Vladivostok while thousands of their military forces conducted joint exercises in Siberia. This month, as China hosted the Olympics, Putin and Xi announced that a ‘new era’ in international relations had begun, one in which the two great authoritarian powers of the 21st century will reshape the liberal international order established in 1945 and reaffirmed in 1991. Some call it Cold War II, yet the blossoming relationship between Moscow and Beijing may best be thought of as an alliance of disruptors.

Julie Bindel

What explains the rise in lesbian divorce?

At one stage, I had a special tray in my study into which to throw all my lesbian wedding invitations. This was around December 2005, when lesbian and gay couples could first sign a civil partnership agreement, providing legal protection including a basis for next-of-kin and inheritance rights. Although the law still did not allow actual marriage between same sex couples, many lesbians went full throttle with their weddings. It didn’t seem to matter that the only requirement to enter a civil partnership was a trip to the town hall and a signature in front of a couple of witnesses. When I signed my own, my partner and I turned up in our usual scruffs in between work commitments. But lots of lesbians wanted the big day.

Owen Matthews

The western press is giving Putin what he wants

Why does Vladimir Putin need Russia Today and Sputnik News when the western media are doing such a great job on his behalf? Throughout his two decades in power, Putin has yearned for international respect. Failing that, he’ll settle for fear. And what more satisfying outcome could there be for a serial sabre-rattler like Putin to have his bluff finally taken seriously? For weeks, British papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away — mostly provided, if you check the photo credits, by Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Since November, the US and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that Putin is preparing an imminent and massive attack on Ukraine.

Ivo Dawnay

P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era

There was something old school about P.J. O’Rourke, who died on Tuesday, something that felt like a leftover echo of the American Revolution. Visiting him in his ancient, low-ceilinged, clapboard farm-house in Sharon, New Hampshire, one half-expected Paul Revere to burst breathlessly into the kitchen warning that the British were coming. Though he was by birth an Ohio boy, New England felt like the tweedy satirist’s natural environment — a pioneer sensibility that combined American impatience with the Old World with a nostalgic yearning for the oak-panelled values and certainties of yesteryear.

Ben Lazarus

The algorithm myth: why the bots won’t take over

Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates. But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent. According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil and study society.

Andrew Watts

Sick jokes: why medics need gallows humour

Most jobs have their own joke books. If you’re outside the job, you don’t get the joke — and if you do get the joke, you’re on the inside; which is what the jokes are for. (It’s the same with all comedy: some, if not most, of the appeal of Stewart Lee is in being the sort of person who finds Stewart Lee funny.) But some jobs have joke books which, from the outside, are not just unfunny but actually offensive. Usually the most stressful jobs, those that involve the rawest emotions, have a gallows humour that is thought to relieve that stress. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Or have to go to therapy. It’s been a mixed week for this sort of gallows humour.

James Forsyth

Theatre of war: Putin’s deadly dramatics over Ukraine

Vladimir Putin now knows that the West won’t fight for Ukraine. The past few weeks have shown that. All options are open to Moscow. Russian troops could march on Kiev or stay on the border destabilising Ukraine’s economy until its government gives way. If Putin wanted a fight, he would win — at least initially. No western military force will stop Russia from crossing the border. The main question is what punishment the West would be able to inflict on Russia after an incursion. Would Nato members be able to agree on what approach to take? Tensions within the alliance have been exposed.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Shadows of Macron: could Valérie Pécresse become France’s first female president?

Paris Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Valérie Pécresse’s presidential election campaign is that it’s better than the Socialist party’s. Which is to damn with faint praise. The French left are in such a dire state that if the opinion polls prove correct, their candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, won’t pass the 5 per cent mark in the first round required for candidates to recoup half their campaign costs. Pécresse has no worry on that score but she has failed to inspire the electorate since she was selected as the nominee for the centre-right Les Republicans (LR) in December. An opinion poll this week had her trailing Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, with Éric Zemmour only one point behind her on 14.

Kevin Hurley

Anti-police spin is tearing the force apart

The police watchdog, the IOPC, has recently released a report into social media conversations between officers — and it makes for uncomfortable reading. Some of the comments are appalling, full of arrogance, racism and misogyny. But as we get ready to shower disdain on serving officers once again, I’d like to raise the question: what effect do you think this constant castigation of all police officers has? The offending messages were exchanged three to five years ago between half a dozen foolish or morally weak young officers. They were a small part of the successful, crime-busting, 120-strong West End Zone Impact Team. Yet politicians from all parties — Sadiq Khan, Diane Abbott, Priti Patel — reacted by berating the whole force.

James Forsyth

Boris’s bunker: the PM’s defensive strategy

When Boris Johnson first became Prime Minister, he did not have a majority in parliament. Still, he didn’t worry too much about making friends with Tory MPs. He decided to work from the outside in, using his public popularity to pressure colleagues. A snap election was looming: backing him, he said, was their best hope of surviving. He was right, and delivered a majority of 80. This gave him huge personal authority. MPs deferred to his judgment even when they disagreed. How different things look now. Johnson finds himself pleading with his MPs not to pull the plug on his premiership in what seems like a daily struggle. ‘He’s now a prisoner of the parliamentary party,’ says one minister. They make demands; he attempts to appease them.

Kate Andrews

Revealed: how the NHS waiting list will hit 9.2 million

Before the pandemic hit, NHS England waiting lists were at a record high of 4.4 million. Three lockdowns later, they’ve risen to six million: an unacceptable figure for a Tory government which has spent years trying to rebrand itself as the ‘party of the NHS’. Boris Johnson’s decision to break his manifesto pledge and raise taxes was directly linked to the idea that the money would first be funnelled into the health service to fix the backlog. So can he now deliver for patients? When Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced his ‘elective recovery plan’ in the House of Commons on Tuesday, he said that the waiting list would start shrinking by March 2024, though he stressed that the numbers will rise before then. By how much?

Aidan Hartley

After Covid, Kenya’s flower industry is gearing up for its next challenge

The alpine slopes of Kenya’s extinct volcanoes are the floral equivalent of Bordeaux. It’s there that the roses grow for the world’s weddings, funerals and Valentine’s Day bouquets. The higher the altitude, the larger your flower head, and roses raised in the shadow of Mount Kenya’s glaciers, or on the vast caldera of Mount Elgon, come in a dazzling spectrum of colours, petal shapes and scents. In normal years, billions of blooms fly out of Nairobi, destined for everywhere from Shanghai and Riyadh to Melbourne and Slough. But in 2020, the roses bloomed in vain. The world’s skies emptied of aircraft in March 2020, and Kenya’s rose growers threw away mountains of flowers that could not be exported.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Bring back communion wine

The Church of England has always been clever at producing theology to suit itself. If we don’t start protesting, we may never get communion wine back again. Too many risk-averse clergy have discovered how efficient, hygienic and cheap it is just to give us a wafer each. They explain it away by reminding us that ‘Christ is sacramentally and equally present in both the bread and the wine, so if you receive only one, nothing is lacking’. ‘But it’s so unfair,’ I want to hiss at the presiding priest when I see him or her having a sip of wine ‘on behalf of the congregation’. ‘It’s one rule for you, another for us.

Lawrence Bernstein

How I’d write your perfect speech

For many of our clients we are a dirty secret. Phone calls regularly begin with variants of: ‘Can you guarantee discretion?’ But there’s not a dealer, pimp or even a Botox clinic in sight. We write speeches. Traditional taboos are fast disappearing. Personal trainers, moisturising creams and therapists are shared between friends. It is socially acceptable to plan your wedding with a professional and outsource every-thing from the flowers to the invitations. But the groom is about as likely to reference his speechwriter as his affair with the chief bridesmaid. Our client meetings are arranged in dimly lit pubs and distant cafés, far from the prying eyes of spouses and friends. My colleague Dolan met an Arab princess on a park bench in Battersea.

Thursday

Charles Parton

The day I was tapped up by Chinese intelligence

Nigel Inkster, a former director of MI6, has described China as an ‘intelligence state’. This was true even before the Chinese Communist party (CCP) passed laws that all individuals and organisations must help the security forces when asked. Chinese officials, party members and citizens have long been active across a broad front in advancing the interests of the CCP, seeking out political, military, scientific, technological and commercial information. Britain has to be wary of more than just the Ministry of State Security (MSS) — China’s secret police agency — or the military intelligence department.

James Heale

The Zac Pack: the well-connected group quietly shaping Tory policy

Who let the dogs out? That’s the subject of a Whitehall probe into the recent Afghanistan debacle. When the Taliban took Kabul, an estimated 1,200 people who qualified for evacuation to the UK had to be left behind. But on 28 August, waiting Afghan families were left helpless on the ground as 173 cats and dogs were escorted past them into the airport and off to safety. The big question: on whose authority were animals put ahead of humans? And did any of this have the Prime Minister’s backing? As ever with Johnsonian drama, the truth is elusive, but one minister seems closer to it than others.

Graham Viney

70 years on: the making of Queen Elizabeth II

Princess Elizabeth was 25 when her father died. She was on the first leg of a Commonwealth tour and she spent the night of 5 February 1952 at Treetops Hotel, set in the branches of a large fig tree in Aberdare National Park in Kenya. ‘For the first time in the history of the world,’ wrote the British naturalist Jim Corbett, who was a guest at the hotel at the same time, ‘a young girl climbed into a tree one day a princess and, after having what she described as her most thrilling experience, she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen.