Leading article

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, German protesters lined the streets holding placards saying ‘Better a cold shower than Putin’s gas’. Their resolve was soon to be tested: energy costs surged and Berlin’s longstanding policy of relying on Russian gas started to cost the country dear. Germany set itself the hugely ambitious target of having its gas stores 95 per cent full by November, a policy that remained even after Moscow turned off the Nord Stream pipeline. It seemed a near-impossible target. But this target has now been met ahead of schedule. German gas usage is down by about a third after major changes to industry. With the panic over, the price of commercial gas contracts – in Germany and Britain – has now fallen to levels last seen in the spring.

This month should have marked the end of Xi Jinping’s time as leader of the Chinese Communist party. The twice-a-decade party congress is being staged in Beijing. It is a grand event at which a new General Secretary is meant to be either nominated (five years in advance) or given power. But Xi has changed all that. He has sidelined all opposition and is now settling down to his 11th year in office – fully intent on ruling for life. The world’s second-largest economy will therefore this weekend be reconfirmed as an outright dictatorship. Ten years ago there was a fatal car crash in Beijing involving a Ferrari driven by the son of Ling Jihua, chief of staff to the then president Hu Jintao.

In death, as in life, Elizabeth II has been a unifying force for her country. For all the political rancour of recent years, this week has revealed a country at ease with itself. People of all political persuasions have come together to show their respect – in Scotland just as much as in England. It has been a reminder of what a force for good a monarch can be when he or she devotes their life to service. After the Queen’s coffin was transferred from Balmoral Castle to Holyroodhouse, up the Royal Mile to St Giles’ Cathedral, members of the public lined up to see it as it lay in state. Nicola Sturgeon was as effusive in her tributes as any Westminster politician. The new King was heard by the Scottish parliament with respect.

In her memoirs, Raisa Gorbacheva recalls the moment when her husband turned from bureaucrat into reformer. ‘I’m in my seventh year of working in Moscow,’ he told her as they were walking together one evening. ‘Yet it’s been impossible to do anything important, large-scale, properly prepared. It’s like a brick wall – but life demands action. No, we can’t go on living like this any more.’ It was the first time, she wrote, she heard him say such words. ‘That night, a new stage began that brought big changes.’ Mikhail Gorbachev’s death this week has led to much analysis of his legacy. He is admired more in the West than in Russia.

In just over a week, Britain will have a new prime minister. No one can say that the 160,000 or so Conservative party members who will have made the choice have been deprived of exposure to the two candidates. The leadership race has dragged on for longer than a general election campaign, with endless televised hustings and public appearances. The process is supposed to be a training ground, testing candidates on their answers to all the toughest questions that will confront them in government. But in this respect it has failed. High tax is a symptom of a wider problem: big spending. Unless spending changes, any tax cut will be temporary. Yet there has been very little acknowledgment from the candidates that government has grown out of all proportion to its usefulness.

It has become received wisdom that Brexit has condemned Britain to chronic labour shortages. Many of the migrant workers who used to staff our hotels and restaurants, install our bathrooms and look after our children, returned home during lockdown and never returned. Sometimes that is blamed on the end of free movement, other times more generally on Brexit Britain somehow having become less attractive in the global competition for people. It is a notion which is easily disproved, however, by a simple figure published this week by the Office for National Statistics which went woefully under-reported. There has been no drop in migrant workers in Britain. On the contrary, there were 6.3 million foreign-born workers at the last count – a record high.

As A-level results come out today, we will find out if the government has made any progress in stemming exam grade inflation. As always, some candidates will celebrate while others will be disappointed. This year, though, the latter group is expected to be more numerous because exam boards are supposed to be clamping down on the implausibly high grades awarded during the two years when school exams were suspended due to lockdowns. Anyone looking solely at exam grades without other information to hand might wonder: what was it about Covid that appeared to boost the educational attainment of so many 18-year-olds? In 2019, the last normal year, 76 per cent of A-level entries were awarded grades A* to C.

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy. A decade on and it is Berlin doing the begging. Europe has reluctantly agreed a 15 per cent cut in gas use this winter in the hope that German factories can stay open and German citizens can keep from freezing. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom threatened to reduce the gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline yet again so that Germany would receive only a fifth of the amount it did before the Ukrainian invasion. While Berlin has said it plans to wean itself off Russian gas over the next few years, Vladimir Putin is taunting Europe by cutting supplies faster than Germany can cut its dependence.

A few years ago the Conservatives were excited about the march of the tech giants. Uber was offering an alternative to black cabs at a far lower cost, and Airbnb enabled homeowners to rent out a spare room to tourists at a fraction of the rate charged by hotels. Politicians were no longer dependent on traditional media but could reach the public via social networks, and there seemed to be an explosion of entrepreneurs, empowered by the new tech, taking on vested interests. The Tories intended to be part of this revolution. Their enthusiasm for people power was not to last. The government now plans to give regional mayors the power to curb Airbnb to protect the hotel industry (and the government tax base).

A little over a year ago, The Spectator printed a cover story about the risk of inflation. Britain, we argued, was hugely vulnerable: the national debt was structured in such a way that even a small uptick in inflation followed by a rise in interest rates would inflict immense damage on public finances. The conventional wisdom was that there was no such risk, that rates would be ‘low for long’. But what if this consensus was wrong? The Financial Times took the unusual step of writing a story about our story. ‘The Spectator joins the inflation doom-mongers,’ it announced. ‘Doom’ was pushing it a bit: we simply sought to underline the complacency with which governments, central banks and many analysts viewed the economic horizon.