The Spectator's Notes

Yes, it was right of the police to announce quickly that they did not think terrorism was the motive in Monday’s Liverpool horror, thus heading off potential riots. The police also said the person arrested was a white man. If he had been a black man, would they have said that? If not, why not? Watching film of the incident, I felt uneasily reminded of the scene in Belfast in 1988 when two British soldiers in civvies drove out of a side road and found themselves in the middle of a Republican funeral cortege. The suspicious crowd began to threaten the car. The soldiers lost their nerve, one drawing his pistol, and the two men were dragged out and foully murdered.

In travelling to Bishkek, I was heading for the hills. I had not expected to be marking the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe there. But thanks to our leader, Alexandra Tolstoy, who has high standing with the authorities in Kyrgyzstan, we found ourselves in honoured places beside the presidential podium for the parade. Being a former Soviet republic, Kyrgyzstan speaks not of the second world war but of the Great Patriotic one. The Russian link remains so strong that the president had advanced the date of the parade so he could join President Putin for his great march past in Moscow on 9 May. Standing near us were bemedalled Kyrgyz veterans, wearing their tall, four-cornered Ak-kalpak hats.

Congratulations to Donald Trump. It is almost solely thanks to his exertions that Mark Carney, the incarnation of Davos man, is now victorious in Canada’s general election. The Euro fanatic now wins on a ‘sovereignty’ ticket. If Trump had not intervened to lay claim to Canada, almost as if America were Russia and Canada were Ukraine, it would have gone Conservative. The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the ‘honour to be a friend’, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse. P.S.

After Francis, what, or rather, who? The coverage so far, rightly admiring of the Pope’s unvarnished, rather un-papal Christianity, has played down how much turmoil he leaves. His openness to all human beings – the poorer, the better – clashed with his old-fashioned, authoritarian, even angry will. Benedict XVI was more traditionalist but much more pacific. There is therefore a case for a conciliatory, transitional candidate. The Church, however, like so many secular institutions nowadays, may be too polarised for that. The liberals, mostly appointed by Francis, dominate the voting cardinals, but lack wide appeal. Liberalism in religion tends towards its own dissolution. The young Catholics starting to swell church numbers once again tend to be conservative.

In his recent interview with our American edition, The Spectator World, Donald Trump is reported to be faced by a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his Oval Office desk. ‘A lot of people say, why do you have FDR?’ Trump says. His answer is: ‘Well, he was a serious president, whether you agree with him or not.’ He does not state what he particularly likes about FDR, though one might guess that his capacity to be elected president four times is an attraction. Surprisingly, perhaps, FDR is not anathema to all Republicans. He even appeals to their isolationist strand, because of Yalta. At that fateful conference, it was Roosevelt who gave Stalin what he wanted, despite Churchill’s protests, thus sealing the fate of Poland and much of eastern Europe.

It seems the US State Department sees an impediment to free speech as an impediment to free trade with Britain. It cites the recent incident in which a woman, Livia Tossici-Bolt, was arrested for holding up a sign as she prayed alone and silently near a Bournemouth abortion clinic. It says it is ‘monitoring’ the case. Many here will dismiss this intrusion as a typically loopy product of the Trump era. In a sense, it is. It is also a spurious justification for American tariffs which are happening anyway. But it should teach us something about how others see us. It is commonplace for British governments of both parties to object to the policies of other countries, notably in the Middle East and Africa, in relation to LGBT+ rights.

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad mistake, too, for Labour, under Keir Starmer’s leadership, to indicate that although MPs would have a free vote, assisted suicide was a modern, cool, Labour idea.

In the incessant conflicts of life and politics, people who know what they want tend to win. That is why Stalin won at Yalta and why, despite the extreme disadvantages of his country’s polity and economy compared with those of the United States, Vladimir Putin is outwitting Donald Trump. He wants Ukraine (and has related revanchist imperial ambitions), and has spent many years working out how to get it. His probing has taught him just how much both the United States and Europe, in their different ways, do not know what they want. The only real mistake Putin made was to think that Ukraine itself did not know what it wanted. It turned out that Ukraine most definitely does not want him. What about Trump?

So bad was the debut of this Labour government that many think it has already failed. But now, I suggest, there is at least a chance it will succeed. If it leads industrial recovery based on defence and security, tackles the flawed basis of large areas of welfare spending and sweeps away planning restrictions to build more, it will have confronted problems which the Tories evaded for years. Labour can do this, of course, only if it abjures the beliefs that Sir Keir Starmer has espoused throughout his political career, but that seems to be exactly what his managers, led by Morgan McSweeney, are now (rightly) forcing upon him. Rupert Lowe is not the first Lowe to split Reform.

Kyiv We resemble pilgrims. Because of the war, no one can fly to Ukraine, and so we travel, romantically, by night train. ‘We’ means assorted European dignitaries, a thin sprinkling of Americans, and the media. I find myself sharing a cabin with a former president of the European parliament. The holy day is Monday, the third anniversary of the Russian invasion. We emerge, yawning and crumpled, into the sub-zero dawn. The collective object is to show our devotion to Ukraine’s struggle. This year, our numbers are swollen because of Donald Trump. (In a Polish service station near the border I noticed a magazine cover in which his face is superimposed on that of Neville Chamberlain at Heston aerodrome.) It is alleged that all 27 European Commissioners are in town.

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, is not a MAGA groupie, but a believer in the Nato alliance. He knows about working with allies. Yet he says that the Americans should go right ahead with Russia, the murderous aggressor, without bringing Ukraine, ally and victim, or the Nato member states, into the talks. This is President Trump’s will, he says. Compare with the Middle East. Would Rubio – or Trump – say that Hamas, the murderous aggressor, was the key player, and should therefore have bilateral talks with the US whereas Israel, ally and victim, should just sit and wait to be told later what is happening? Trump helped bring Hamas to heel by announcing, before his inauguration, that they would have all hell to pay if they did not release the hostages.

Obviously, it is difficult to defend the leadership of the Church of England, and I am inexperienced in that art; but I do feel strongly that its episcopal appointments should not be controlled by Channel 4 News and Cathy Newman. This, in essence, is what is happening. First went Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, because Channel 4 News was determined to show that he had not reacted vigorously over the John Smyth scandal. (In my view, the Makin report failed to prove Welby’s culpability.) Next was the turn of the Bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath, forced out after Channel 4 News reported his alleged sexual assault against an unnamed woman and alleged sexual harassment of Bev Mason, the (female) Bishop of Warrington.

Social media benefit from creating continuous belligerence in politics. For them, Donald Trump is the perfect politician. As I wrote last week, I think he is doing exciting things and I feel relieved that Kamala Harris lost. But it is impossible to support everything Mr Trump says or does. He never regards himself as bound by what he has previously said, so why should his followers seek to justify each piece of Trumpery? Since his victory in November, I have noticed several otherwise intelligent friends, all of them men, going crazy-culty about the dawning era – defending, for example, the removal of the security detail of Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Brian Hook, or his pardon for all those convicted in the 6 January riots. It is nasty score-settling.

I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with which he would have tried to fill the chilly air on the steps of the Capitol was even more exciting inside the crowded Rotunda. Only feet away from Trump, poor Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and behind them the Clintons shrank in their places, like captives paraded in ancient Rome after a military triumph. I experienced contradictory reactions.

In a recent interview, Hilary McGrady, the director-general of the National Trust, complains that ‘The culture wars we’re trying to grapple with are never something I supported’. I do believe her: she is not a political warrior. But what she does not acknowledge – or possibly does not understand – is that it was the wokeists within the National Trust’s staff, and the outsiders they commissioned to help them, who started the fight. There would have been no unhappiness among members if, to improve historical understanding of Trust properties, more attention had been given to the origins – good, bad or something in between – of the money which built them.

What does it mean, in practice, to say that reporting child abuse should be mandatory? It sounds appropriately severe, but it begs the question of what must be reported. It is rarely blindingly obvious that abuse has been committed or who has committed it: it is an iniquity that lives in the shadows. If the proposed law means that one must report every accusation or suspicion of child abuse, this would create an insane burden both on those who report and those – presumably chiefly the police – who must receive the report. Alexis Jay’s IICSA recommendations called for mandatory reporting of any child abuse ‘disclosure’; but surely personal judgment is needed about what, if anything, is being disclosed.

We are just recovering from the village play. This annual Christmas event was taken over last year by our son William, who writes it and acts in it, and his wife Hannah, who directs. Last year, it subverted the genre (as critics like to put it) of ghost stories. This year, it did a similar trick with whodunnits. It was entitled Death on the Dudwell, a reference to the trickle of a tributary which runs beside our fields. The play, set in 1935, opens with the idle would-be heir Arthur Prince (William) reading a contemporaneous Spectator on a sofa. It concerns the murder of his father, the unsavoury Lord Haremere (played by William’s former prep-school head, David Chaplin) who, though already dead before the play starts, has a good many lines.